The Gift

"Tell me your testimony."

I am a Catholic Christian because of family, friendship, and the power of grace. Throughout the various stages of my life and the multiple parishes I’ve called home, each of these factors has contributed immensely to my spiritual and intellectual growth and my personal relationship with Christ. 

Starting with my baptism and continuing throughout the rest of my childhood, family has continued to be the primary context for my faith journey. I am a product of my parents’ individual faith stories – my father’s cradle Catholicism and deep love for the sacraments and my mother’s Protestant upbringing and passion for sacred scripture made their way into my own understanding of the Faith and of God. Due to our frequent moves, I ended up being homeschooled by my mom for seven years of my childhood, receiving a cocktail of various Catholic and Christian homeschooling programs which instilled in me a voracious appetite for reading and a lasting affinity for apologetics and defense of the faith. Being the eldest in a big family also had its effects on the way I perceived God and related to the Catholic faith– in both healthy and harmful ways. On one hand, having younger siblings looking up to me made me more responsible and more faithful. On the other hand, that pressure also made it easier for me to slide into spiritual perfectionism – I had created this warped image in my head of a God who based his love for me on my behavior, an insecurity that lay buried under all the exterior trappings of a faithful life and one that would take years for me to reckon with. 

In eighth grade, however, I was preoccupied with trying to translate my seven years of homeschool experience (and a hybrid third grade in Catholic and public school) into a socially vibrant and academically successful year at a brand-new public charter school in Norfolk, Virginia. The transition was exceptionally smooth, and I made friends who I stayed close to throughout high school (and even college!) and laid a solid academic foundation for the rest of high school. Moving from eighth grade into ninth, my involvement in our parish’s youth group exploded, and I was blessed to attend retreats, youth camps, and conferences in the Richmond diocese and throughout the rest of the country, deepening my own spiritual life and, for the first time, giving me an external community of believers to live alongside and draw on for support. This leap from a faith walk lived primarily as an individual to one lived in the context of a community of faith was a massive milestone in my spiritual development and one that persisted throughout the rest of high school. Even in the next three years of high school, where I really had no youth group to speak of, I was able to create my own opportunities for friendship and fellowship. Although my sister and I were the only Catholics in our grades at the American international school we attended in Portugal, we started a discussion group at our house on Friday nights for a Theology of the Body program – with 20 of our classmates coming on the first night and several of them returning for every session! That said, going from a school where none of my peers shared my faith to a college where I had upwards of thirty Catholic friends in my class was a total breath of fresh air. At UVA, I have been able to see and experience firsthand the fruits of a community of faith – one that never stops trying to better challenge, encourage, and love its members. 

Even with a network of faith on this scale throughout high school and in the months leading up to my first year of college, I still hadn’t begun to deal with some of the blind spots in my relationship with God. I was living as if my salvation depended on me instead of resting upon the infinite goodness of the creator of the universe. To be sure, I was going through the motions of being a faithful Christian – going to Sunday and daily Mass, going to confession, and praying with my family, but I struggled with a lingering sense of resentment towards my parents whenever they would take the initiative to do devotional activities; it was like I was somehow threatened by them striving towards holiness! This hardness of heart continued to be the single greatest obstacle to growth, even as I was surrounded by a fantastic family and wonderful new friends. One day, I opened my bible to the book of Romans and was blown away by a truth that I had heard my entire life but had never known: 

James. You can’t earn my love. Nothing you do could possibly make me love you more or less than I already do. All you can do is freely choose to accept the gift of grace I am unconditionally extending to you.

In the words of St. Paul, “For there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption, which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Romans 3:22). This message hit me like a freight train. At that moment, and in reading the rest of Romans, something broke within me. All those years of striving to be “good enough” for God, of despairing under the weight of my failures and sin, of hardening my heart and closing myself off from grace – they were exposed as hollow and futile, frail and powerless against the tidal wave of God’s grace and mercy. In their place, I found an interior peace that I had never known and the realization that I could pursue virtue without making that the foundation for my salvation, throwing myself instead into the arms of Christ and ultimately relying on his grace as justification. I found myself yearning for the same promise God made to his people Israel: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). 

In addition to dramatically reframing the way I saw justification, this shift reignited a deep desire for scripture within me, a desire that was further stoked in the bible studies I was a part of in the summer, fall, and spring of my first year at UVA. My love and appreciation for the sacraments as conduits for grace were also deepened – my friends and I challenged each other to take advantage of the incredible frequency of daily Mass, confession, and adoration at St. Thomas Aquinas Parish, even amidst the global pandemic which had made access to those graces so difficult for so long. This radical reality of God’s grace is at the heart of why I am still Catholic, even in the face of my own human failings and those of others within the Church. 

The central truth in my faith walk, as in the spiritual journeys of so many others, has been that God has never stopped pursuing my soul. Through the family he blessed me with, the friends he has placed in my life, and scripture and the sacraments, God has actively participated in my life at every single moment – freely bestowing the saving power of his grace, the greatest gift the world has ever known.


Hey y’all! My name is James de Marcellus and I’m a rising second year originally from San Diego, CA. Some of my favorite hobbies are playing piano and hyping up Portugal to anyone who will listen :)