(LifeSiteNews.com) - “I was an atheist for as
long as I could remember,” recalled Brigitte Bedard, a young-looking
41-year-old journalist and stay at home mother of six.
Bedard had a typical childhood in a non-religious household,
and went to the notoriously leftist Université du Québec à Montréal, where she
studied literature, eventually graduating with an MA. “I filled my mind with
all the radical feminist literature — I drank it all up,” she said.
She began a series of heterosexual relationships, which all
ended badly. “Prodded along by what I was reading, I began thinking that since
all my heterosexual relationships were failures, that I might be a lesbian.”
And in fact she dove into the lesbian lifestyle, and admitted that she revelled
in it for quite some time. “It was actually a very good time, in a way, being
with a big gang of girls, tearing up the town, chain-smoking like there was no
tomorrow. I was also very sexually active.”
Despite the fun and the excitement of the lifestyle, she
felt broken, she recalls. “I was a mental wreck. I just felt that I was
spinning out of control, that I was keeping appearances but I was miserable
inside.” Things came to a head when, inexplicably, she broke into tears one
night at 3 a.m. and began shouting in her empty apartment in a trendy district
of Montreal, imploring God to “take her away.”“Here I was, a militant feminist
lesbian atheist lying on my apartment floor crying my head off imploring God. I
wasn’t in my right mind, but I was desperate for help.”
She began seeking help, meandering in and out of countless
12-step type programs, in the hopes of finding some kind of solution for her
anxiety and “messed-up life.” To make matters worse, she had just quit smoking:
“I was suddenly forced to face life in the raw, without any protection or
buffer.”
At wit’s end, she recounted how someone she knew talked
about visiting “the monks” at the famous Saint-Benoît Abbey in
Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, Quebec. The idea, as bizarre as it seemed to her,
intrigued her, and she went, but not without reservations. “I went to the
monastery armed with all the contempt and hatred for the patriarchal Church
that I had stored up from years of radical feminist studies. For radical
feminists the Church is basically enemy #1.”
She entered the convent and was assigned a room and a monk
with whom she could converse twice a day. “For three days in a row, two hours a
day, I badgered, screamed at, practically foamed at the mouth in the face of
this monk, dredging up basically every insult, cliché, dirty thing that I could
think of, or invent about Christianity. I was so mad, so hurt and angry, and I
was dishing it all out to this monk, who never said a word the whole time, but
instead just looked at me, nodding his head.”
Then, at the end of those three days, something happened
that changed her life forever. “It was the third day, the sixth hour of
screaming. We were about to wrap up yet again. I was basically done screaming,
there was a pause, and then the monk looked up and said to me: 'you have no
idea, absolutely no idea how much God loves you; He made you out of nothing, he
knows you, you have no idea how much he loves you, His daughter. So don’t feel
ashamed, let it all go. Give it up, give it all up, give your life up to Him …
He loves you so much.'”
Those simple words at that crucial time “absolutely floored
her,” she recalled. From that moment on, her life had utterly changed. “I am
His daughter, there are no two ways about it, and I can’t explain it.” She
admits she is at pains to explain exactly what it was that caused her
conversion: “I just say that God floored me, staggered me; I didn’t convert
myself, he brought me to Him.”
She now works as an independent journalist and
happily-married stay-at-home mother of six. Life for her now is not all peaches
and cream, however. “When I need quiet, there’s nothing I can do except for one
thing: get up at 4 a.m. Which I do, pretty often, just to get some peace.”
Remarking on the differences between her life now and in her lesbian days, she
quipped: “Living with a man is definitely a pain, but living with a woman all
the time was a living hell.”