For many years, I carried a sense of having been abandoned by God. This is the story of the calling, the spiritual anguish, and how Holy Communion and the Catholic Mass opened a path I had never expected to find.
The Calling in the Field
I grew up on a farm in a valley where there were no other boys my age. My family belonged to a pietistic Christian community. We were teetotalers, and throughout my childhood I accompanied my parents to church and to the local prayer house. The preaching I heard there was often radical, with a strong emphasis on conversion and holy living. I do not remember it as something distant or abstract. It took hold of me.
The first time I sensed the calling, I was not yet a teenager. I was out in the field with my siblings, spreading fertilizer and thinking about what I might become when I grew up. Almost as a joke, I thought: perhaps I should become a pastor? At that very moment, I felt a sharp pang in my heart. I quickly pushed the thought aside and carried on working.
But the thought would not stay away for good. It returned, often as a simple, insistent voice: become a pastor. I did not consider myself particularly religious at the time. I struggled with what I saw as a conflict between the creation account and what I was learning about Darwin, and I probably believed more in science than in the Bible, as I understood it then. I was also shy and thought I could never speak in public for five minutes, let alone become a pastor. I told myself that the calling was merely a psychological aftereffect of my upbringing, not something real. But those explanations did not hold. Again and again, I found myself reminded of 1 Corinthians 1, of the verses saying that God chose what is weak and despised in the world—as though the text itself refused to let me use my shyness and humble background as an excuse.
The calling followed me in this way, at irregular intervals, throughout my childhood and youth.
When the Voice Disappeared
It reached a kind of climax shortly after I received a letter telling me that I had been admitted to the Agricultural University of Norway, now NMBU. One evening, I felt the calling with particular force and experienced it as a final opportunity to answer. At last I said yes to the calling, but at the same time I asked God to allow me to begin my studies at NLH after all. I felt that I was given peace to accept the place.
The next day, the calling was gone. Not weakened—gone. I felt that I could no longer repent, turn back, or reach for what had been so insistent only the day before. I experienced myself as abandoned by God, not in some vague or poetic sense, but concretely and literally.
By then I already knew John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, especially the account of the man in the iron cage. He believed that he had grieved the Spirit, shut himself out from God’s promises, and become incapable of repentance. I recognised myself in him—not merely in a figurative sense. At the same time, I was not entirely without hope. I had also read texts claiming that the very fear of being abandoned by God was a sign that one had not been—that certainty of damnation and fear of damnation exclude one another. That gave me some comfort. But the feeling itself remained, and it was painful enough in its own right, regardless of what I understood intellectually.
It stayed with me for years.
The Years of Spiritual Anguish
I began the dairy science programme at the Agricultural University of Norway (NLH), now NMBU. My plan was to finish there and then take additional courses at the University of Oslo in order to become a biomedical laboratory scientist or something similar. I chose NLH because most of the students came from agricultural backgrounds like mine, and I thought I would feel more at home among them than among students from more urban backgrounds. Even so, my struggles with identity followed me throughout my studies, although I enjoyed the academic work and received good grades in most subjects.
After NLH, I spent a year at Fjellhaug Bible School. I had actually ended up there because of a misunderstanding about which examinations I needed for further study, but I also hoped that Bible school might help me resolve the religious questions that had troubled me for years.
If anything, my year at Fjellhaug was even more marked by struggles with identity than my time at NLH. At the same time, there was a good spirit in the class and at the school, and I learned a great deal. The teaching was firmly Lutheran, centred on law and gospel, with strong emphasis on salvation by grace alone—with nothing added. I felt that the teachers recognised that I was struggling with spiritual anguish and that they tried to help me by preaching the gospel as clearly and purely as possible. That gave me some comfort. But it did not lead to the breakthrough I had hoped for—and which I believe the teachers also hoped to see in me. I left Fjellhaug with a sense that I had not achieved what I had come for.
I set aside my plans for further study at the University of Oslo. I had already studied for many years and was reluctant to take on even more student debt. In time, I obtained a position as a consultant at a research centre for Norske Meierier, later TINE, and I remained there for the rest of my working life.
The feeling that I had been abandoned by God and was incapable of repentance still followed me. For a time, I received pastoral counselling from a pastor in Ganddal parish. He strongly advised me to receive Holy Communion regularly. I did not follow his advice immediately. I did not feel ready, and I preferred to avoid services at which Communion was celebrated. Some years later, I began attending Hana parish regularly, where Holy Communion was celebrated every other Sunday. It then became more difficult to avoid. And I noticed even then that Communion gave me something—not that the spiritual anguish disappeared completely, but something real, something beyond what I had received through preaching alone.
The Longing at the Altar
I married a Filipina woman who was Catholic, and we began attending the Catholic Church in Stavanger together. At first, I was fairly indifferent to the Catholic Church. I was not looking for anything there, and I had no expectation that it would come to mean anything to me.
In the beginning, I received Communion with her at every Mass. Eventually, I learned that, as a Protestant, I was not ordinarily supposed to receive Communion according to the discipline of the Catholic Church. I therefore stopped going forward. But I missed it deeply. I was left with the feeling that I was missing the very climax of the Mass—something that, although I did not yet have words for it, I had already glimpsed through Holy Communion in Hana parish.
It was this concrete longing that led me to begin reading Catholic apologetics. The arguments did not create the longing, but they helped me understand and test what I had already begun to sense.
Experience Before Arguments
It took time before I could put into words what had actually happened. But somewhere along the way—through Holy Communion in Hana parish, through the longing I felt at the Catholic Mass, and through the years after I became Catholic—I came to realise that I had been looking in the wrong place all those years. I had been searching for an inner state: a feeling of repentance, a certainty I could detect within myself and trust. And whenever I searched for it, I did not find it. This was precisely what had tormented me—the sense that I ought to feel something I did not feel, and that the absence of that feeling was proof of my own lost condition.
What finally gave me peace was not a stronger feeling. It was something outside myself—something given to me, regardless of whether I felt ready for it. The promise of Holy Communion was not created by my feelings. It rested on the action of Christ, not on my ability to produce the right inner state. This promise did not depend on my first having the right breakthrough. And this was exactly what I had lacked the language to express during all those years of preaching about law and gospel: not a doubt that salvation was by grace alone, but a deep uncertainty about how I, as a human being, could ever know that grace had truly reached me. In the sacrament, the promise of the gospel took on a concrete and bodily form to which I could cling when my feelings failed me.
Over time, the feeling of having been abandoned by God disappeared completely. Not because I found a better argument proving that I had not been abandoned, but because I found something that did not ask whether I felt abandoned before giving me what I needed.
The Questions I Carry Forward
It is tempting to tell a conversion story as an intellectual journey: that I reasoned my way to the truth of the Catholic Church and then joined it. That was not how it happened for me. It was the longing at the altar—not an argument—that led me to open my first Catholic books. The apologetics came as confirmation of a movement that had already begun, not as its cause. I believe this is a more honest account than the one often found in convert literature, where the arguments are allowed to appear as the driving force. For me, it was the other way around: experience came first, and reason followed in order to investigate whether that experience could be defended. It could, and in 2008 I became Catholic.
I have not written this in order to explain why the lay revival movement was wrong. It sustained me for years and gave me genuine comfort through the writings of Christian authors such as Øivind Andersen, Ludvig Hope, Carl Fredrik Wisløff, Alfred Hauge, Ole Hallesby, and others, as well as through pastors and teachers who sincerely wanted to help me. I still believe that Norwegian revival Christianity has done, and continues to do, much good for individuals and for society. But I found something in which, for me, it ultimately fell short—not in doctrine, but in the sacramental life.
This is what I want to explore further on this blog: Must the low-church heritage be rejected when one becomes Catholic? Can it be purified, deepened, and integrated? Is there something in Norwegian revival Christianity that the Catholic Church needs more of? And are there weaknesses in low-church Christianity that Catholic theology and sacramental life can address, as they addressed them in me? I do not have finished answers. But I have my own story as a starting point, and I hope it may help others who carry similar questions.