By Rita McInerney

She didn't realize it but Thelma Donahue waited many years for God, perhaps since the first time she heard His name mentioned.

"I was maybe 10 years old the first time I heard the word God. It was a shock to me when another child said that you're supposed to love God more than your parents. I didn't know who this person was. I remember how outraged I was."

She and her husband Pat now live in Dunwoody. Her childhood was spent on a farm in Kentucky with her parents, brothers and sisters. For them, "Christmas was Santa Claus and toys, nothing religious at all."

"Sometime later," after first hearing the name of God, "a neighbor began taking me to Sunday school and my mother began going to the Methodist church. Then when I was about 14, I was 'sprinkled' in the Methodist church. I remember that as quite a happening. Still there was no follow-up."

As a young girl working in Louisville, she met a young woman who took her to the Church of God. "I realize now that all these encounters were searching. All of my life I was searching for something. There was this void inside. I didn't know what I was looking for. I believe all of my life God has been calling me. In the fundamentalist churches I had been on the edges but there was no meeting Him in encounter until my Cursillo experience."

She made her Cursillo weekend about a year after the Donahues moved to Atlanta from Westchester County, NY. It was "a very powerful experience. I really believe God spoke to me during that weekend. I look at my faith journey as having begun then."

Two years later, to her great joy and the joy of her friends in the Cursillo, she entered the church as an Easter Catholic at All Saints Church in Dunwoody.

Now, she reflects on the past and realizes there was another big influence. "Pat's family was the first Catholic family I ever knew. His whole family is very Catholic. Their integrity, their love of the church, the values they have. I guess my conversion experience really began when I first met them." Yet, she said, her husband's "staunch faith, never missing Mass on Sunday even when we were traveling," was beyond her ability to understand.

She looks back now on those years. "There was a long period of time when I didn't feel any faith at all, many years. I don't understand that. I've spent the last four years trying to figure things out, asking questions there really aren't any answers to. I'm sure everything is done in His time. This is the way it was supposed to be."

"I feel that I am called at this time. I'm not encumbered with a lot of the pain and suffering that cradle-Catholics have. I really feel this is the time that God wanted me to be here to do what I can."

A year after she was received into the church she was drawn back to RCIA "because I had come through it and for me it was a wonderful experience. I had two candidates that first year, one a young lady, very intelligent. Her husband was a Catholic and he had been wanted her to come in but she knew he wouldn't ask her. She had lots of questions. She wanted doctrine, she wanted theology, she wanted the whole thing. I told her I couldn't answer her questions. What I did was get her a book that compares Protestantism and Catholicism. That satisfied her. It was what she was looking for."

"She really didn't think she was coming into the church. She had tried RCIA before and it didn't work for her. I was just there for her. All I did was share my experience with her. There was a point in time, getting on to Easter, when she told me she really felt a presence that she had never felt before. That was a real thrill, to see someone who didn't think she was coming into the church reach that point."

Turning the conversation back to her own experience, she mentioned her own certainty. "Sometime during the Cursillo weekend I knew I was going to join the Catholic Church. This is where I belong. I never had a doubt. Someone said something the other day about pew Catholics. I've never been a pew Catholic. I came into this church and hit the ground running."

She feels a compelling need to help others know some of the spiritual joy she has found. "What I really want to see are those people who have no faith. I'm not looking for Baptists, Methodists, people who have a church. There are so many people out there who have no faith, who have a terrible emptiness inside and don't really know why. I would like to bring them all into RCIA."

She makes it a practice to be open to others: as sponsor coordinator for the RCIA class at All Saints; as she talks to other RCIA groups; whenever she meets people in the parish and through her work as a senior secretary specialist with IBM. Encounters, she finds, "are always there. You just need to be open to them … there are so many people in pain. People you see around you everyday. People who are walking around laughing and you think they're happy. They're hurting on the inside. I've seen this so many times. That's why I try to be open to people no matter where I am. It seems there is always somebody."

"I can look back now and see this all as something God's hand is in as I feel my faith grow. The roots just keep going down deeper and deeper. I had doubts, not about being in the church, but like 'is this all a dream?' or 'where is God?' There are times when I think I've gone backward rather than forward. It's not been all uphill, but overall, all that's happened in the past three years has been a development."

Her growth has been helped by daily prayer and spiritual reading. She tries to make the early morning her prayer time in a quiet corner of her home. She keeps three or four books on the night table beside her bed for reading at night.

She is proud of her husband's enthusiasm for RCIA. "He's very determined that everybody will be welcomed into the church. He makes it a point to remember their names," she said, and does everything he can so that parishioners "will recognize the candidates and shake their hands."

Attendance at an RCIA conference in Washington in October was an "affirming experience" for her. "Up to that point I don't really think I felt like a Catholic. To realize that I was there as a member of the team, and I was going to be one of the members implementing the rite, after being a candidate … After that I felt I am really Catholic. There is nobody who can say I'm not.' People who are born and raised Catholic know so much about the church, about the hierarchy. If you're coming from outside you feel like a different kind of Catholic. You have the beautiful experience of the RCIA."