For most of her life, Molly Curtis was looking everywhere for answers, but the truth seemed to be just out of grasp.

She was baptized in the Catholic Church, but as her family grew away from the faith when she was around eight, she too fell away.

“It wasn’t until I was 19 that my mom returned, but my dad didn’t,” Curtis said. “My dad definitely took a more Protestant bent at first, but then we explored New Age spirituality and practices. I actually made a career out of it, studying different religions and then opening an astrology business.”

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Curtis would do her own astrology consulting sessions for clients, relying on the movement of the planets and stars to give people direction and help them answer the same type of questions she had: Who were we? Why are we here? What is the purpose of life?

“You’re always looking to the future to interpret the next movement and what that means for the world or your client,” said Curtis. “You’re constantly looking for how these signs out there affect you, but you never necessarily get resolution; you don’t get a sense of peace. It’s just interpreting the signs, but then OK, now what?”

Curtis was always a spiritual person, reading the Bible, studying other religious texts, finding wisdom in Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies. But while she found wisdom, she didn’t find peace. Last year, it all came to a head. With national news stories of political violence, social unrest and a constant bombardment of social media, Curtis was being overwhelmed with what she called a “darkness” in society. She added that the fallout from the assassination of political commentator Charlie Kirk was a particular pressure breaker.

“So much was going on in the world, and my heart just really broke open,” Curtis said. “It was on one hand the violence and madness of it all, but on a different level, it was the reaction to the violence. I saw so many people who reacted to it with indifference and cruelty, and it made me stop for a second and really think about where we are heading collectively.”

Curtis wanted to find a way to get beyond the darkness she was seeing in the world, and she found it in the Christians who were in her life.

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“When I would tune into those who were walking in a faith, specifically the Christian faith, I saw a different perspective,” Curtis said. “And that to me really stood out as an answer to all I was looking for. What I saw was a community that stayed connected, while the rest of us were indifferent. I saw people who were living for one another, while everything else was more divisive and indifferent.

“I then just felt this call to stop focusing all on myself and putting myself as the centre and to put God in the centre of my life.” 

Curtis called the nearby St. Joseph Parish in Lake Orion, Mich., where providence would have it, the parish was about to start OCIA classes (Order of Christian Initiation of Adults).

“It happened very quickly, but it felt so right.” Curtis said. “The moment that I got there and started consuming everything, I was thinking, this is something I finally understood. This has been what I was looking for in my life.”

Curtis recalled her prior attempts at reading the Bible by herself and struggling, but under the direction of Deacon John Manera, she grasped the faith in a more complete, mature way.

“The OCIA classes are very organized and really break things down to digestible material,” Curtis said. “Whether he uses videos or he uses his own slides, he has a sense of humour about things where he can just bring it down into layman’s terms, but at the same time, still holding the sacredness of the material. He’s just very relatable being a man in the world but still guiding us through this sacred space.”

Since starting her OCIA journey, Curtis has learned to shift from an inward, self-focused worldview to one oriented toward Christ.

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“In allowing myself to expand outward in following Christ versus falling inward to myself, I draw closer to others,” Curtis said. “I think that is what brought me back to the faith. I could just feel the reactions of those who are close to the Lord, the Lord living in their lives, and they weren’t calling for violence. They weren’t calling for indifference. And that is what I wanted. I wanted to have that love of God to draw upon.”

Curtis is looking forward to receiving her first Communion this Easter. Her daughter, Elwood, 14, is set to be baptized this May and is in confirmation class. Her husband is “not quite ready” to take the next step, Curtis said, but as a family they have brought up God more in conversations, and Molly and Elwood regularly pray the Rosary together.