Laura Mascaró: «A voice told me: ‘pray and talk about me'».»

Laura Mascaró, mother homeschooler and digital entrepreneur since 2008, she has written books, directed documentaries, counseled hundreds of families and led a multi-level marketing team. Although she grew up in a Catholic family and received the sacraments at a young age, she always lived far away from the Church. An illness and the search for answers led her to listen to the voice of the Lord.

In an interview with Omnes, Laura tells how her view of God and the Church has changed since she encountered Him.

What marked the before and after of your conversion?

-The turning point was an illness I had between 2015 and 2019, supposedly chronic and incurable. The medication had no effect on me and, even if it wasn't going to cure me, I wanted something that would at least alleviate the symptoms. I was practically living in bed, had a baby I couldn't care for, a 10 year old and a business. My life was “on pause” and I was determined to find solutions, no matter what the doctors said.

One day, in 2019, exhausted and desperate, I fell to my knees on the floor, crying, and asked God, “What do you want from me?” It was the first time I prayed without reproaches or requests, which is what we often do: we remember God to ask him for things or to blame him. But we almost never ask him what he wants from us.

I have no idea how much time passed, if it was seconds or minutes, but I heard a deep voice, firm and loving at the same time, very difficult to describe, saying: “you have to pray and you have to talk about me”. At that moment it was as if my head split in two: one told me I was crazy. The other was certain that it was the voice of God”.

That same week I found a natural protocol for my disease. I decided to try it and in four months the symptoms disappeared, I stopped the medication and the tests were perfect. I went back to living normally and almost completely forgot about that experience with the voice of God.

Until a couple of years later, when I was very close to the movement. New Age, I started to look for a psychologist to do therapy to recover my memories. I heard the same voice again. He told me: “you don't need a psychologist, you need a priest”. 24 hours later I was talking to a priest who became my spiritual father and there was no turning back. 

When God speaks to you, nothing is ever the same again. How has your life changed since you met Him?

-Now I have that peace and joy that I saw in others. I know that I don't have to do everything by myself, that not everything depends on me, and it's a great relief. At the beginning, I even felt irresponsible, because I was brought up to think, make decisions and act. And now, many times, my only action is to pray.

Many times, when I have a task or a project ahead of me that seems too big or too difficult, I ask myself, “What are my five loaves?” Because I only have to put in the five loaves. He does the rest.

After your conversion and taking sides in this “spiritual war” of which you speak, what would you say to a person who says he believes in God and not in the Church? 

-I would tell them, first of all, that if they consider themselves Christians, not even remotely, to look in the Bible for the institution of the sacraments and the Church, starting there. Let them also read Acts 8:30-31 (“How am I to understand what I read if no one guides me?”). 

I also thought a lot about an image that was circulating on the Internet with a list of different Christian denominations, with the name of their founder and the year and place of their institution. Only one of them said “Jesus Christ, year 33, Jerusalem”. So I pulled that thread.

And then, let them go into a church, look for the tabernacle (the little box with the little red candle), and ask Him directly. There are many good questions to ask Him: “what do you want from me”, “where do you want me”, “where are you”. Let them remain silent for a while and then leave and go on with their lives with an open heart, ready to receive an answer.

You talk about how you saw neither goodness nor beauty in Christians and therefore did not believe there was truth in them. In a way you saw the apparent hypocrisy of the Christian. Many non-believers have the same perception. How did your perception of Christians and faith change throughout your conversion process?

-I still see a lot of hypocrisy, a lot of moral superiority and a lot of posturing, because there is some. But now, I also see that we are all created and loved by God. That Christ also went to the cross for that hypocrite, for the one I don't like, for the one who says one thing and does another, for the one who gets his priorities wrong. And who am I to label them? We are all equally wounded by sin and we all have, until the last second of our lives, the possibility of accepting Christ as savior.

A monk friend of mine told me: never judge and never criticize, because you don't know the heart or the circumstances of those people. Since then I started to add the phrase “what if...” every time I started to criticize. Does that person, whom I consider a bad person, go to Mass? Instead of criticizing, I think: “What if Mass is the only good thing in his life? It would be better not to go! I learned to see and think about things in a different way, with more love.

And then I met some Catholics who were pure peace and joy. I would see them and think: “I want what they have”.

When you came out of the “Catholic closet” some people unfollowed you on Instagram. How do you interpret that? Do you consider that this reflects the culture woke or cancellation?

-I think a lot of people are the same as me. We all seek the truth, we want to understand the meaning of life, we have wounds to heal... and we look everywhere but in one place. In my case, because I had already been in the Church (theoretically) and it had not “served” me for anything. We consider that we have already been there and that it has brought us nothing good, so we accept and respect the one who adopts an Eastern, syncretistic or invented philosophy of life. Everything is fine, except the Catholic Church, which has a very bad press. Admittedly, a lot of things have been done very badly. I myself went to a Catholic school where we never had a Mass at the beginning of the school year, nor were there times for prayer, nor did we ever see a rosary up close, nor were we initiated into confession.

For me, that 60 people stopped following me in a single day was a lot of people. But it is also true that many other people wrote to me to welcome me home, to tell me that they had prayed for me or to ask me to tell them about my experience, because they were on the threshold and needed a push to get in. I know that God has used me to give that push to many people and I hope He will continue to use me for many years to come.

You speak of a black spot in your heart because of not being able to forgive, how has God made it possible for you to forgive? 

-The priest I spoke to the next day told me something very simple. He said, “When God gives you his grace, you will forgive without realizing it.” And I, coming from the New Age, where everything is on your back, where you always “have to work”, where there is always something to heal in you, I couldn't believe it.

When my husband went through the catechumenate for confirmation, before we were married, I accompanied him to all the sessions. We used to comment that we were very struck by the number of times the expression “let him do it” was repeated. We did not understand it.

Talking about forgiveness, for example, my approach was: someone tell me what to do. But it's not about what we have to “do”. All we have to do is put ourselves in their hands, tell them “you're the boss”. And so it was. I didn't “do” anything. And one day, I saw that I had forgiven without realizing it.

There is one very important thing that we sometimes have a hard time understanding: we need to pray more and we need to learn to pray. It is all very well to pray that you do well in that exam or that you find a house to buy and that you can pay for it. But we have to pray more, asking for more faith, more humility and more discernment to know what God's will is. You have to surrender, stop trying to control everything and tell him “you are in charge”. That's why my YouTube channel is called In the hands of the Scriptwriter. Because the scriptwriter of your life is not you, it is God.