A Stonewall man is on a mission to make a difference in the lives of others.
Trent Brownlee recently embarked on a mission trip to Rome with an evangelical group called the Catholic Christian Outreach. The journey marks his second time to the Italian capital since he travelled there earlier this year for the announcement of the new pope.
For Brownlee, it wasn’t a straight path forward to find faith — which perhaps makes his testimonial all the more meaningful.
“I had been a self-declared atheist since I was about 13. I didn’t come from a particularly religious family. My mother is Lutheran and my dad would probably identify as agnostic. The church was never a part of our lives growing up,” he said.
“My atheism was fundamentally very nihilistic, very pessimistic. I was constantly afraid of time running out, of death. My every thought was always about mortality. Even at 12 or 13, when I started to become an atheist, my greatest ambition in life was to be put into a history textbook — because then when I died, I would never cease to exist.”
Over time, Brownlee’s perspective began to shift little by little.
“Throughout high school, I eventually replaced that all-consuming nihilism with a slightly more hopeful thing I like to refer to as messianic liberalism,” he said.
During that time, he became involved in the Liberal Party of Canada and the Manitoba Liberal Party.
“I believed that I could fix the world if I just tried hard enough,” he said. “I believed I could fix every problem, make everything perfect and build the utopia. It was a very ego-driven way to replace that angst and anxiety.”
Over time, he fell away from his Liberal leanings and began to see the world with new eyes once again.
“I had what I call an ego death and I re-evaluated everything I thought I new about the world,” he said.
He started branching out, making new friends and going to different types of events. He met up with someone who was a Catholic Christian Outreach missionary and felt compelled to learn more.
“As someone who had studied history, I began to admit to myself that I’ve always felt a draw to the ancient beauty and wisdom of the Catholic church,” he said.
As part of his faith exploration, he attended mass at Christ the King Catholic Church and continued to go back over the next month. After that, he pursued a Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults class to learn more about Catholic beliefs and practices.
Then on a cold fall morning, he stopped at church for a Thursday mass and opened his heart in prayer.
“I said, ‘God, I don’t know if you are real but I choose to trust that you are. I choose to believe anyway.’ In that moment, I felt this wave of the most ecstatic joy I had ever felt and I nearly laughed out loud in the church. I couldn’t stop smiling,” Brownlee said before he departed for Rome.
“So I knew in that moment that God is real and I felt my proof the minute I stopped asking for it — and that changed my life forever.”
