How a psychic, New Age hippie led me to Catholicism

In 1993, I moved to an industrial city north of Prague, about 30 miles from the Czech/German border. Usti nad Labem had been around for almost a thousand years, but after half a century of socialist dictatorship, anything old had been replaced with hideous prefab housing estates and pollution-spewing chemical plants. It did have an old church from the 14th century, but I never went inside. It was just a relic of a time when being stupid and superstitious was the only option.

I had gotten a job teaching English to engineers at a local natural gas distribution company. I was a 22-year-old Ivy League liberal arts graduate. I had no experience or knowledge worth sharing, of course, and my students were older, with careers