CWC speaker Patty Schneier asked God to ‘prove it’ — and he did

Schneier

SAN ANTONIO • When Patty Schneier asked God to “prove it,” he did in ways she never expected. Schneier, a housewife and mother of three from the Archdiocese of St. Louis, shared her personal testimony with attendees at the Catholic Women’s Conference on Sept. 20 at St. George Maronite Center in a dynamic presentation, underscored at times by breaking into sacred song. (Schneier has been a cantor for 14 years at her parish’s 7 a.m. Mass.)

It all began when the Schneier family decided to attend a week-long parish mission, given by the sisters of the Apostles of the Interior Life. That first night, Sister Susan spoke on “A Call to Holiness,” asking her audience if they truly desired holiness, searching for it like a mother would for a lost child. “Who has time to search for holiness?” thought Schneier ruefully, knowing full well her days consisted of searching for missing homework and socks in the laundry and a “to do” list a mile long.

The sister then elaborated on the meaning of holiness, defining it as being what God intends you to be in your everyday life — including that of a wife and stay-at-home mom. Her final words were a challenge, stating that “holiness begins right here, right now.” Leaving the mission that night, Schneier, thought perhaps searching for holiness was something she should look into.

The second night, Sister Tiziana emphatically told the group that without reflective, meditative prayer daily, they would die spiritually. Finding time for this sounded impossible at first to Schneier, but she decided to follow the sister’s advice to simply find a quiet place and read the church’s daily reading for the day, getting a guide book to assist with interpreting it, and thus uniting her prayer time with Catholics all over the world. After doing this, the sister said, she was to ask God what he wanted to say to her that day as well as picking one thing to pray about and making a resolution regarding it.

The first morning Schneier set aside time to pray as prescribed, she was startled to find the first reading for the day was the one on love that she and her husband had chosen for their wedding years before — and which she had not looked at since.

She was so struck by the “coincidence” of this she decided to write it down in a journal, which she would continue to keep during this “journey” God was leading her on. The day’s Gospel was of Jesus calming the waters for his disciples in their storm-tossed boat.

Schneier made three resolutions that morning: to ask for perseverance in her prayer time, to trust Jesus was “sitting next to me in the boat” and to renew her love and commitment to her husband. “God heard my three resolutions loud and clear,” she related.

The next evening at the mission, Sister Tiziana asked the listeners to reflect if they truly hated sin or even had a sense of sin, perhaps tolerating it in their lives. At Schneier’s prayer time the following morning, the reading was 1 John 5:3 — “This is love for God, to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome.” Smugly, Schneier thought of an area that proved the Scripture false here — the church’s teachings on sex and marriage, which she perceived as a huge burden. “I knew 90 percent of modern married Catholics used some form of contraception,” she said. “I was one of them.”

In her journal she penned her beliefs — that contraception was not a sin, as it was not really a teaching of God but a man-made law by “a celibate old man in Rome” who knew nothing about marriage and raising a family. “It’s OK for the church to be pro-life,” she said, “but, for goodness sake, it should at least embrace the means of preventing all those aborted pregnancies in the first place!” The church, she thought, should “get with the times.” After all, it was a private, personal decision between her, her husband and God.

Basically, Schneier issued a challenge to God at this point: “Prove that it isn’t a burden to follow the church’s teachings on sex and marriage.”

The next day’s reading told of Jesus asking Simon and Andrew to drop their nets and follow him, leading her to contemplate if birth control should turn out to be a law of God after all, could she leave it behind to follow Jesus. The following day’s Scripture told of Hannah praying for a child, and Schneier was aware that, ironically, she prayed for the opposite — not wanting more children.

Turning to her reflection book on this reading, she read of Satan seeking to destroy the church by undermining an entire generation, with its sins of neglecting and abusing children and abortion. This led her to ponder what she would tell her own children of sexuality when they were older. Would they mock her for telling them to follow the church’s teachings when she was not completely following them herself? “It’s every Catholic parent’s dilemma,” she said.

Eventually God would send the answer to her question. One day’s Scripture spoke of following all God’s laws, neither adding nor subtracting from them. Another told of Samuel being enjoined to “listen and obey,” the words she used with her children.

“Day by day by day,” Schneier said, “I felt like God was hitting me over the head.” And she was furious about it. After all, she had always been a “good” Catholic, heavily involved in church activities from a young age, cantoring at Mass, sending her children to Catholic school. She had never rebelled, even as a teenager, always doing what she was told was right growing up — no alcohol, no drugs, no sex before marriage. “God,” she told him, “you’ve got a whole world of people out there knee-deep in serious sin. Go pick on them!”

God, as she put, was “coming after me” and he did not let up. By the time she came to Psalm 50, she knew God was talking directly to her when the Scripture spoke of those professing God’s words in name only, seeing in this her own use of contraceptives. “I had cast out God’s words regarding sex in my marriage,” she said, “and he was disciplining me.”

The next day she spoke with her husband about her conclusions, fearing that he would not understand. After reading him the pages of her daily journal, however, he agreed they should look into Natural Family Planning (NFP). They immediately attended an initial training seminar and were pleased with what they heard, but afterward Schneier was assailed with doubts of following through. Again the daily Scriptures came to the rescue, with God using other means as well.

There was the homily at Mass about a loving father repeatedly asking his little girl to give up a fake set of pearls she loved and, when she tearfully finally surrendered them, giving her a set of real pearls in return. Then a friend gave her a copy of Christopher West’s, Good News About Sex and Marriage. After reading it, she was in tears, vowing she wanted the beautiful marriage in its pages.

Realizing how far short her previous views of sex and marriage had fallen from this ideal, she was nearly inconsolable. Again, the daily reading pointed the way. It was on the conversion of Paul and ultimately led to Schneier and her husband seeking the sacrament of reconciliation.

They set about following NFP and were elated with the results, finding it not the “burden” Schneier had at first feared.
Instead, she said, “God opened the floodgates of our hearts to relearn how to love, cherish and nurture each other like never before — without intercourse.” The couple, married 13 years at the time, felt like teenagers again, becoming more affectionate with each other and with their children, who were now drawn into family hugs and kisses.

God, related Schneier, had surpassed every challenge she had given him at the beginning of her prayer journey. “God,” she said, “has given us a huge blessing, for something I thought would only be a burden ... and it continues to be the greatest blessing of our marriage.”

“It feels so good,” she added, “to be in total communion with my husband, with the church and with God. Those seeds that the sisters of the Apostles of the Interior Life planted have blossomed — a call to holiness in my everyday life, a call to prayer and to seek God every morning and a call to conversion, daily conversion.”