Crisis Pregnancy Sets Detroit-area Woman on Path to Church Membership
By Robert Delaney
WARREN, Mich.-- Amanda Marendt's early initiation as a Catholic never went beyond being baptized during her childhood years, but she will be coming into full communion with the Church on Holy Saturday, at age 29.
When Marendt is confirmed and takes Communion for the first time during the Easter Vigil Mass at St. Martin de Porres Church in Warren, Mich. . a Detroit suburb . it will be the culmination of a process that began three years ago.
That was when a shaken Marendt went into a Catholic church to pray after learning she was pregnant. She had done that a couple of times wondering what she should do, when she happened upon a newspaper ad for an adoption agency.
"I'd had no qualms about abortion up until that time, and always figured that was what I would do if I got pregnant, but just seeing that ad gave me a sense that God was telling me what to do," Marendt said.
Other circumstances also led her to believe "something was happening I wasn't in control of," especially when her baby daughter was born on the adoptive mother's birthday, she said.
As scant as was her prior association with the Catholic Church, Marendt said that her baptism, at age 5, in St. Mary Magdalen Church in nearby Hazel Park, is among her early memories.
"I clearly remember kneeling at the rail in the church, and I remember the party afterwards, with a cake with little praying hands on it," she said.
But Marendt's father was not a Catholic, and her mother "had kind of fallen out of her faith over the years, so she didn't take us to church." While Marendt was in high school, her mother started going to Mass again.
"I lost my father when I was 18, and I think that played a part in her getting back involved with her religion,( she said. (I accompanied her a few times, but nothing really came of that."
In fact, Marendt says her own life went "in a totally different direction -. running around, a lot of craziness, a lot of drinking and drugs." Because of the alcohol and drugs, her ex.husband was granted custody of their son when their marriage ended in divorce. She said she had already managed to kick those habits, and was embarked on a new life, when the unwanted pregnancy set her on the road to reconnecting with the faith into which she had been baptized.
Then, last year, after losing what had been a very stressful job, she experienced the loss of a well.loved aunt who had been for her a model of a faithful Catholic. When she drove by St. Martin de Porres Church not long after that, she saw its sign about faith formation classes starting soon, and that got her thinking.
She started a new job at a Warren coffee house last fall, and it turned out the manager had just signed up for classes on becoming a Catholic at nearby Ascension Parish. Marendt made up her mind to do the same at St. Martin de Porres. Now, she said, she enjoys the classes and looks forward to them every week.
"I get a sense of belonging, and that it's a place I know I fit in - where everybody fits in," she said.
The classes have made a difference in her life. "I just find, even in my car, driving down the road, I'll start praying," Marandt says. And also a difference in how she interacts with others. "I look at everybody differently now. Sometimes we get customers who are not happy people, but I realize there must be something going on in their lives that is causing it -. that they have a story to tell, it's not just what's on the surface."
It has deepened her relationship with her son, Cameron, now 5, who spends alternate weekends with her. On those Sundays he accompanies her to Mass and to her Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults class, occupying himself with a coloring book while Marendt learns what it means to be a Catholic.
The instruction may not be at his age level, but he "picks stuff up," she said. "The other day he asked me, 'Mom, did Jesus die for us?' And when I kneel down to pray, he kneels beside me. His father won't let me have him baptized, but I'm letting him know that God loves him as much as I love him," Marendt says.
"I feel honestly happy, and it's been a while since I could say that," she added.
Robert Delaney writes for
The Michigan Catholic in Detroit.