By Daniel Meloy / Detroit Catholic, OSV News
LAKE ORION, Mich. (OSV News) — 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 8 years old, she too fell away.
“It wasn’t until I was 19 that my mom returned, but my dad didn’t,” Curtis told Detroit Catholic, the news outlet of the Archdiocese of Detroit. “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.”
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?
“With astrology, you’re constantly looking at planetary movements in the sky,” Curtis said. “There’s a lot of geometry and math to it, and you’re basically interpreting the stars based on planetary orbits. It dates back to the Hellenistic era; a lot of the texts I would use came from 500 B.C.
“You’re always looking to the future to interpret the next movement and what that means for the world or your client,” Curtis added. “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.
“I felt like I was on this hamster wheel where I was always projecting into the future, whether it was for me, or for a blog I was writing, or for a client who was coming in,” Curtis said. “It was like I was projecting. And there’s something calming when you drop all of that and say, ‘I don’t have control of all this, and I don’t need to know all the answers.'”
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.
“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 center and to put God in the center of my life,” Curtis added.
Curtis called the nearby St. Joseph Parish in Lake Orion, where providence would have it, the parish was about to start OCIA classes. OCIA stands for Order of Christian Initiation of Adults.
“Within a week of them forming classes, I think I had missed the first week, but Kelly (Ponce, pastoral associate and co-director of engagement at St. Joseph) was like, ‘Yep, come on in,'” Curtis said. “It happened very quickly, but it felt so right. 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, director of OCIA at St. Joseph Parish, she grasped the faith in a more complete, mature way than what she previously encountered.
“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 humor 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.
“A lot of things that I was practicing before and studying were all about putting the individual at the center,” Curtis said. “With astrology, you look at the stars and ask how it impacts you. You can practice Buddhism without Buddha. But with Christianity, you put Christ at the center of your life. Having a relationship with Christ, it draws you to a person. And when you have Christ at the center, it gives you a better outlook on the world.”
Curtis selected St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a French Visitation nun and mystic credited with spreading devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as her confirmation saint. Devotion to the Sacred Heart has allowed Curtis to draw closer to the Lord, and in turn, to others.
“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.
“I’m very happy that she wants to be baptized,” Curtis said. “She’s been asking for it for a couple of years now, and it’s weighed very heavily on me, especially in the last year. There’s nothing sweeter than when she comes in and says, ‘I want to do a decade of the rosary with you.’ That makes my heart smile, and I feel like it’s my role to let her know how much God loves her.
“It all goes back to putting God at the center and Christ in your heart,” Curtis continued. “I was doing all this research, all this reading about the stars, and when I accepted Christ, his Sacred Heart — the Sacred Heart imagery has played a big part in my conversion — I think that fire has burned off the indifference and allowed me to open my heart up to God and the people around me. It’s expelled the darkness.”
Daniel Meloy is a reporter at Detroit Catholic, the news outlet of the Archdiocese of Detroit. This story was originally published by Detroit Catholic and distributed through a partnership with OSV News.
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