Lent is almost here, and Father Dave welcomes Colleen Reiss Vermeulen to discuss her new book, “Simply Scripture for Lent and Easter: A Daily Guide to Reading the Bible.” Colleen is the co-founder of CatholicBiblicalSchool.org and a teacher and director with the Catholic Biblical School of Michigan.
Colleen is also an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, and discusses first listening to Busted Halo’s podcasts while serving in active duty. “I discovered it almost 20 years ago, when I was a young adult fresh out of college. I was in the military, so [I was] moving around and didn’t necessarily have something solid to grip onto,” she says. “I knew that I believed in God and Jesus, and that I was a Christian. At the time, my dog tag said ‘Christian,’ not Catholic. So I was exploring [the thought] ‘Am I really Catholic?’ I grew up Catholic, and so I was just looking for answers.”
“In the military, you don’t have parishes on bases like the way we do in the civilian world. People are moving every three years and everybody’s a young adult, so everybody’s going through that discernment of God’s will for their life,” Colleen continues. “It’s an incredibly important stage, and it really reminds us as a Church that we only form disciples person-to-person. You can’t just build an institution, because the people are going to move around; the military is a great reminder of that. Just invest in people.”
Colleen describes how the Bible helped deepen her Catholic faith. “I got interested in the Bible from an evangelical Baptist friend in high school, and I actually thought she was totally wrong in everything she was saying, so I wanted to read it to disprove her. But interestingly, once I started to read the Bible, I was like, ‘Wow, this is the Mass,’” she says. “In a way, that’s what kept me in the Church, because I fell in love with the liturgy and how the liturgy uses Scriptures.”
In addition to the Bible, words from a priest also helped Colleen on her faith journey. “During an Easter season one year, he gave a series of homilies on Acts of the Apostles. I had actually really struggled with how the Church is run, because there’s a lot of messiness in the earthly Church,” she says. “He gave a homily on Acts Chapter 15, and it opened my eyes that debate, dissension, differences of opinion, people splitting up, confusing councils – This was there in the first century. That is what encouraged me that the next time I got new dog tags, I put ‘Catholic,’ because I knew that this was God’s design and we could see it in the Bible.”
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Colleen’s new devotional is targeted for Lent and Easter, but she explains why she chose to feature all of Mark’s Gospel and Acts of the Apostles rather than the daily lectionary readings. “Our lectionary tends to skip around from excerpt to excerpt and passage to passage. When all of us think about our favorite novels, television series, or movie, we don’t usually come to love it and even understand it by skipping around…we watch the whole thing, because there’s something there’s something that hits us and that’s human,” she says. “While it might seem really hard to read a whole book [of the Bible] bit by bit, day by day – which is what ‘Simply Scripture’ does – it’s easier for us to understand because we’re getting the whole picture.”
“The key with prayer is that it’s a practice. We have to practice and find what works for us,” Colleen adds. “In the introduction, I even include a part that says, ‘When you miss a day…’ because you’re going to miss a day. The thing about prayer is the one who puts doubts into our mind – the evil one – is just an accuser and wants to make us think we’re not holy enough, or not smart enough. But we don’t need perfection. We just need to show up, and God’s already there.”
