IN THE AUTUMN twilight, Audrey Schencman steered her car into the parish parking lot, turned off the ignition and began to struggle with powerfully opposing impulses.

She got out of the car and started toward the Father Schaefer Parish Center, a former convent that housed the offices of St. Brigid's parish in Westbury. After a few steps, she succumbed to her fears, reversed direction, climbed back into the car, turned on the radio and sat there -- undecided.

The journey to that indecision in 1993 had begun in another parking lot, nearly three years earlier. Driving home to Wantagh from her boyfriend's Westbury house, Schencman had fallen asleep at the wheel and awakened when the car slammed into a concrete divider in a shopping center parking lot. That accident, in December, 1990, totalled her car and jolted her, forcing her to think about her attitude toward religion. Her father told her: "It's God's way of telling you to wake up."

Schencman's father is Jewish and her mother is Catholic, but they hadn't raised her in either religion. As an adult, she had tried various churches and a temple. "None of them touched me, including the Catholic Church," she said. But after the accident, she began attending mass, usually with her boyfriend, Nick Viscardi, who lived a short walk from St. Brigid's. Still, she couldn't fully participate. "I didn't know any of the prayers," she said. "I couldn't receive communion."

Then, in August, 1993, Schencman received a letter from Msgr. Francis X. Gaeta, the pastor of St. Brigid's, inviting her to an introductory meeting of a program for adults who want to become Catholics -- the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). "I couldn't figure out how he got my name," she said. At the time, she felt he must be "this spiritual, powerful being." (Only months later did her boyfriend admit he had submitted an application to the program for her.)

So she decided at least to try the program. But as she began to leave her car that first night, second thoughts overwhelmed her. "I never had a really great comfort level with clergy," she said. "I was terrified." On the third try, she persuaded herself to cross the street and go upstairs to Gaeta's meeting in the former convent chapel.

When the pastor offered his bear-like handshake, she recoiled, fearful that the warm welcome implied a commitment that she wasn't ready to make. "I said, `Look, I'm just here to check this out,' " she recalled. A few minutes later, it was her turn to introduce herself to the others. "I thought I was going to pass out," she said.

Another source of disorientation and mystery at the meeting was the presence of people who called themselves members of the RCIA team. "I couldn't figure out why the people who were already Catholic would want to just sit there and watch other people become Catholic," she said.

Impelled as much by curiosity as anything else, Schencman kept attending the meetings. "I thought, `I'll just learn about the Catholic religion, and I can drop this at any time,'" she said. "In the very beginning, I had absolutely no intention of becoming Catholic." Months later, she heard a homily urging people to trust Jesus and let him act in their lives. Those words galvanized her. "At that point, everything changed."

On the evening of Holy Saturday, 1994, at the long Easter Vigil services, Gaeta anointed Schencman with oil, administering the sacrament of confirmation. "I felt like the happiest, cleanest, most wonderful person in the world," she recalled. "My life hasn't been the same since."

A few months later, she made a commitment that she could not have imagined. The lay leader of the 1994-1995 RCIA program, Jack Graham, wrote to ask if she would be one of the sponsors for a new group. "I jumped all over it," she said. "This is my chance to give back to someone what the team gave to me."

At the start of her own conversion, she had not understood what RCIA team members were about. But then she began to develop strong ties to the other candidates and catechumens, as well as to the team. Her initial desire to make her confirmation and then melt into the background had turned into a need to remain part of the process and the community.

In fact, community is a key element in RCIA. Only 25 years ago, a person who wanted to become a Catholic would usually go through weeks or months of instruction by a parish priest, in private. That provided information, but not a sense of community. But after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the church adopted a new rite for receiving adults, emphasizing community. "It's not just father and me," said Sister Sheila Browne, who coordinates the RCIA program for the Diocese of Rockville Centre. "It's father and me and all of us."

The year-long RCIA process is designed to prepare people to receive at Easter the sacraments that they need to enter into full communion with the church. Those who need to receive baptism and confirmation are called catechumens. Those who have already been baptized and need only confirmation are called candidates. They meet weekly throughout the year, to study scripture and life, to learn about spreading the gospel and building Christian community, rather than focusing primarily on dogma, as in the past. Often, a priest supervises the process, but they receive significant support from the lay members of the team, who are already Catholics -- either from birth or after going through the program themselves.

The small RCIA community connects with the larger community of the parish by attending parish events and being visible at liturgies. "It's in the community where they come to see and know and understand a living faith," Graham said.

During Lent, as they near their reception into the church, they are the center of attentionat a series of liturgies. That begins with the rite of election, the first Sunday in Lent, when they declare formally to a bishop their intention to acknowledge God's call and join the church. This year, in the Diocese of Rockville Centre, 681 people declared that intention.

The current class donned their white robes at an exuberant, richly textured, four-hour Easter Vigil liturgy. By then, they had developed a real unity with each other and with their mentors on the RCIA team, but they had all come to the process with their own stories and sharply contrasting personalities. The parish had sown the seeds of that unity last summer with the annual bulletin item about the start of a new RCIA group.

In past summers, Michael Lynch had regularly shown that item to his wife. Lily had grown up in Taiwan, with a Buddhist father and a Christian mother, but she was not actively religious. In 1980, she and her family immigrated to America and soon moved to Westbury. There, a neighbor introduced her to Michael, then an import-export clerk, now a postal worker. He was Catholic from infancy, but at the time they were married in 1981, he was not a frequent churchgoer.

Their lives had begun to change when their daughter, Christina, entered St. Brigid's school in the second grade, asked to be baptized a Catholic and joined the children's choir. She is now in seventh grade and a regular soloist. Over those years, her singing has drawn her parents more and more often to St. Brigid's. Lily didn't feel quite right going to mass, but a Catholic friend of hers told her: "Don't feel awkward going to church. Maybe some day when the time is right, Jesus will call you and you'll become Catholic.' "

Something about St. Brigid's and its pastor appealed to Lily. "A couple of times, Father Frank's sermon really touched me," she said. Still, when Michael annually raised the subject of her studying to become a Catholic, she hesitated. She was attending mass often and becoming more interested, but even last summer, she didn't jump at the idea. "I filled out the application anyway," Michael said. "She went along with it. I think deep down in her heart she felt that she was ready." THE PARISH had also worked its charm on Jennifer Dowden Stokes, a banking consultant originally from Tennessee, who came to Long Island more than two years ago on a contract, and the assignment has just kept on going. During the week, she lives in a hotel. Most weekends, she has left the island -- first to her home in Phoenix and more recently, after selling the home, to Syracuse, where her boyfriend lives. But some weekends, she stays here to entertain out-of-town friends, many of them Catholic. She takes them to mass at St. Brigid's.

"The first time I went there, I said, this place is great," Stokes said. But she was still a Methodist, still not eligible to receive communion. "The last couple of years, I've been thinking about converting." So she joined the RCIA at St. Brigid's, despite the uncertainties of her nomadic career. "I just thought I'd take a chance that I would be here long enough to complete it."

For them and the others, the primary guide for the journey was Jack Graham, a lay leader with master's degrees in both business administration and theology, whose personality blends the silver-haired self-assurance of a Central Casting corporate executive and the uninhibited, speaking-in-tongues spirituality of the charismatic renewal movement.

Unlike the candidates and catechumens, Graham is a cradle Catholic. In high school, he attended a preparatory seminary briefly, but decided against the priesthood. After earning an MBA at Hofstra, he launched a business career, specializing in marketing. He and his wife, Marilyn, moved to the parish in 1958, becoming heavily involved in its life.

Marilyn was among the founders of the charismatic prayer group in 1974, and she continued going even after Graham decided that its worship style was too demonstrative for him. But he soon saw how the group's spirituality seemed to make her even more warm and caring. "I said, `I don't know, I've gotta get some of what she's got.'" Since then, he has rarely missed a Tuesday night prayer meeting.

The former pastor, Msgr. Frederick Schaefer, later nudged Graham to get a theology degree. In 1987, he persuaded the Grahams to run the RCIA. For years, the Grahams led the weekly sessions together in their Westbury Gardens home -- a non-threatening environment for catechumens who might still be uncomfortable meeting in a church setting. Some of them would come early to ask questions and some would stay past midnight. With his training, Graham handled the theological questions. "Marilyn focused on welcoming them into the church community," Graham said. "It was a good mix."

Even when Marilyn was diagnosed with cancer, she continued with the RCIA. But by her 59th birthday, in September, 1992, it was clear that she was dying. For her birthday, Gaeta showed up at their home with his brother priests -- Malcolm Burns, Michael Maffeo and John White - carrying a dozen roses and a pan of baked ziti. "She just cried tears of joy," Graham said. That December, she died. Gaeta promptly proclaimed her an uncanonized saint, installed her photo and a plaque in the chapel at St. Brigid's school, and declared: "She did ordinary things with extraordinary love, and that's what we're called to."

Graham took a leave of absence from RCIA during the 1992-1993 class -- a time when he suffered not only the death of his wife but the loss of his position as a corporate president, when a member of the firm's controlling family took the job. In 1993-1994, Gaeta asked him to fill in occasionally. Then, last summer, Gaeta asked him to take RCIA over again.

One of his tasks, even as he continued his search for employment, was to assemble a team of sponsors. "Each candidate has a spiritual friend," he said. "It's easier for a catechumen or a candidate to relate to someone who made the journey a year or two ago." Some had just received the Easter sacraments, such as Schencman, Tracey Tiberia and Floyd Rosenberg, an intense bundle of energy who had come to the church from Judaism and told his life story in a powerful, moving testimony at Pentecost.

Rosenberg grew up in the East Bronx, taught English in the city and later became an accountant. Though he had grown up in a non-religious family, when he moved to Long Island in 1969, he eventually became a lay leader at Suburban Temple in Wantagh.

His journey toward the joy of the Easter Vigil began in years of misery and brokenness. "There is none of the ten commandments I haven't shattered," Rosenberg said. After a particularly difficult divorce, he dated a woman who had problems with drugs and alcohol. He put her through a rehab program, but when it was over, she left him for a 20-year-old man she met in the program.

Stunned, Rosenberg went into a deep slide. "I would go to a bar and pick the three biggest guys in the bar and pick a fight with them," he said. One of his accounting clients bought him a boat, and Rosenberg dropped out of society, living on the boat for almost two years, reading the Bible and the Koran. "I was searching for why I had been deserted by the Lord."

Then, suddenly, at the end of 1992, his fortunes reversed. Invited to a wedding, he found himself sitting with a divorced woman who is very active in St. Brigid's -- the incarnation of stability and steady virtue. "All I saw was a glow around her," Rosenberg said. "We spoke for hours that day."

They began dating, Rosenberg attended mass with her regularly at St. Brigid's, and he thought more and more about conversion. The humanity of Jesus, portrayed in the film, "The Last Temptation of Christ," had attracted him, and the goodness of his girlfriend, plus the spirit of St. Brigid's drew him in. "Every day in this place to me is like a fairy tale," he said. "There is something that's going on here. When you walk past those big doors, every bit of hate just doesn't get in."

So Rosenberg joined the RCIA, formed close bonds with the others, became calmer, more in control of his temper, and channeled immense energy into parish activities such as the parish newspaper, RCIA, a men's prayer group, and the family mass. After his time of alienation, he has found a home, something that became clear after his recent heart attack. While he was in the hospital, a stream of parishioners visited him. His first day back in church, Father Mike Maffeo offered him the host and didn't simply say "Body of Christ," as he would for anyone. "He smiled and said, `Floyd, it's great having you back.' I never felt as at home as I did then."

Along with the newly accepted Catholics, Rosenberg, Schencman and Tiberia, the team had a mix of others. The recent converts included Linda Schoenberg and Liz Hegarty. Schoenberg had come from the same temple as Rosenberg and was entering her third year on the team. The cradle Catholics were Maria Sarra, a friend of Schoenberg; Arthur Solar, whose wife had been through RCIA, and Mary Teddy-Freedman, who had joined the team in 1993, after her husband Eliot's baptism.

Eliot Freedman grew up in Lakeview and went to high school in Malverne, in an observant Jewish family. He didn't contemplate conversion, but he liked what he saw of Jesus in popular films. "There was something positive about it that stayed with me," he said. In 1984, when he was working in the pathology lab at Winthrop-University Hospital, he met Mary Teddy , a social worker at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. She had grown up in a Catholic home in Westbury, but was not then a practicing Catholic. At their wedding in 1985, a rabbi and a Presbyterian minister presided, in a Unitarian church, with a Unitarian minister present. "Neither of us had any strong faith," Mary said.

Just before their marriage, Eliot's father and Mary's father died within six weeks of one another, and the young couple began going to church occasionally. But it wasn't until the arrival of their son, Andrew, in 1990 that they became more serious.

"I remember being pulled back in during Lent and being in awe of the [post-Vatican II] changes," Mary said. Then Eliot expressed an interest in attending Good Friday services, even though that has always been an uncomfortable time for Jews. He even went up to the altar with the others who were kneeling to venerate the crucifix by touching it or kissing it. "It was a new experience," he said. "I didn't have any conflict."

In 1990, they also took a suggestion from Gaeta and were married in the church. But perhaps the most dramatic event for Eliot was Andrew's baptism at the weekly family mass, when Gaeta took the boy from their arms and paraded up and down the aisle holding him, inviting the applause and welcome of the community. The family mass was getting to Eliot -- the sharing of love and the sounds of children's voices in the choir. "I remember one day saying, `This feels like it could be heaven. If there was a heaven on Earth, this could be it,' " he said. "That kind of feeling just tipped the scale."

So he joined the 1992-1993 RCIA group. Mary decided to attend the weekly sessions with him, which turned out to be almost a conversion process for her. "It was also a good bond for us," Eliot said. His baptism in 1993 was a moment of high exhilaration. "He had such an incredible look on his face as he was being baptized," Mary said. "It was just the most beautiful moment that I can remember."

At Pentecost, the end of the RCIA process, Eliot offered a public testimony about his conversion. "I can see Jesus was always there, creating a path before me," he said then. When it was all over, they were both reluctant to let go of RCIA. So they became part of the team that guided Schencman and Rosenberg's class. Mary stayed on the team for the current class, but Eliot's work prevented him from continuing.

At first, Graham worried that the new group wasn't bonding or responding to the scripture sharing. For some, such as the slight, soft-spoken Lily Lynch, the prospect of opening up before other people was intimidating. "Father Frank said, `Don't worry. Just come to the class and relax and see how you feel,' " she said. But at first, when Graham would ask the catechumens to share their views on the scripture, Lynch would routinely say: "I have nothing to add."

Normally not inclined to cry, Lynch found herself growing increasingly "sentimental." One night, she tearily expressed a sense of unworthiness, of inability to live up to Catholicism and the example of Jesus. But after the session, a group of the others soothed her and told her that Catholics make plenty of mistakes. "Everybody tried to calm me down, saying, `Don't worry. Relax. Just do whatever you can.' "

For the chatty, self-confident Jennifer Stokes, speaking out in a group comes naturally, but she surprised herself at the first meeting she attended, by tearfully recounting her pain over the suicide of a close friend. "I cried in front of them the first time out," she said. "I bared my soul to people I don't even know."

That sharing caught Stokes by surprise. "I thought I was going in for instruction, that they were going to sit down and say, `Now these are da-da-da-da-da and this is what you're supposed to do,' " she said. "All the things that are kind of easy to be seen about Catholics, I thought those would be the things that I would learn. And it turned out to be completely the opposite."

They did get factual information, but mostly in readings assigned outside of the sessions. "The key thing is not going to be how much Catholicism any of us knows, but how much of Jesus we know," Gaeta told them one night. "Ultimately, if you don't personally know and love Jesus, there's no sense in going through this." At another meeting, Mary Teddy-Freedman told of her own growth. "I never could have imagined ten years ago that I could say I have a personal relationship with Jesus," she said. "This is like the best relationship I've ever had."

By the end of Lent, they had detected genuine growth. "I feel myself changing," Lynch said. Once, she could not express herself. "But right now, I cannot hold back the feeling I have." The process has also affected her husband and daughter. "I've been getting closer to God," said Christina, glowingly happy that her mother was joining the church. Michael said: "It's made me more open to Jesus. That's for sure."

Throughout Holy Week, the catechumens and team members were heavily involved in the liturgies. On Palm Sunday evening, for example, at the first of three nights of candlelight services called Tenebrae, Tracey Tiberia was the prayer leader and Linda Schoenberg the preacher. "Conversion is not only about changing our religion," Schoenberg said in her homily. "It is about being touched by the Holy Spirit and becoming something more and better."

On Monday evening, after Tenebrae, their last meeting before the Easter Vigil, Gaeta tried to calm them down about the prospect of making their first confession on Wednesday evening. And the team members reassured them. "That sweating and that nauseous feeling will pass," Schencman said, recalling her own nervousness. "It's not scary," Mary Teddy-Freedman said. "It's a very comforting sacrament."

Somehow, they got through that first confession and arrived, renewed and relieved, at the Mass of the Lord's Supper on Holy Thursday, followed by the solemn, day-long series of Good Friday services, the quiet of Holy Saturday and their marquee moment, the Easter Vigil.

They had been joking in advance about the length of the vigil. One year, it lasted five hours, with a break in the middle. But they found that the hours slid by lightly, in the uniquely Catholic kaleidoscope of sounds and sights: the lighting of the paschal candle from a fire on the lawn outside, the procession of the candle into the darkened church, with Deacon Phil Matheis chanting, "Lumen Christi, Christ Our Light," and the series of seven scriptural readings. Through much of the evening, the Rev. Thomas Costa translated the proceedings into sign language for Bruce Geffen, who has a hearing impairment and received his instruction from Costa.

At the end of the readings, all the lights in the church came on. Just before 10:30, two hours into the vigil, Gaeta began his homily. "The church is not asking you to reject who you are and what your traditions have been," he told the catechumens. "God has led you tonight to take another step. We hope and pray that you will always be Jewish and Protestant, that you will always keep these holy traditions living in your hearts." Then he invited the catechumens to gather around the altar for the blessing of the water to be used in the baptisms.

The catechumens knelt in a circle around the altar: 10 adults, joined by three school children who have received their instruction through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Children, led by a laywoman, Terry Patterson. One by one, members of the RCIA team went to each of the catechumens and placed hands on their heads in blessing. Then the catechumens returned to their pews and began coming forward, one at a time, with their sponsors and families, to receive the sacraments - starting with those who needed both baptism and confirmation, then those who needed only confirmation.

Costa baptized and confirmed Geffen, simultaneously saying aloud the sacramental words and signing for Geffen. Then Gaeta took over. Those to be baptized knelt at a miniature waterfall installed near the altar for Easter, and Gaeta poured the baptismal waters with a silver dish. Then, using spiced oil blessed for the occasion, he liberally anointed their heads, administering the sacrament of confirmation.

"He was holding onto our hands very tight," Jennifer Stokes said. "He's a very strong person, and you get a lot of feeling coming through his hands . . . It was just me and Father Frank and the Lord. I didn't even think about people watching or people being there."

Following the confirmation, Gaeta helped each to don a white robe, handed each a lit candle and said, "Receive the light of Christ." Accompanied by loud applause, each in turn took a place behind the altar, holding the candles.

"When I went back to standing behind the altar and the oil was dripping on my face and everything, I was just very happy," Lily Lynch recalled. "I don't know how to describe it. I felt so happy to become Catholic, like a part of the family."

After they had all received the sacraments, they took candles and spread the light among the congregation. Then, Gaeta invited people to come forward and sprinkle their faces with baptismal water. The brand-new Catholics stood there in their white robes, offering towels to members of the congregation. Only then did Jennifer Stokes realize she had already begun to spread the faith. For weeks, she had been telling her manicurist about St. Brigid's. So the young woman had showed up for the young adult community's stations of the cross on Good Friday and now for the Easter Vigil.

The vigil finally ended past 12:30. Many of the catechumens and sponsors stayed awake all night, at a coffee-and-cake reception, and went directly to the 5:30 sunrise service at Nassau Beach. But Stokes went back to the hotel with her out-of-town guests and got to sleep at about 2 a.m. She didn't set the alarm.

"I said, `God, if you wake me up at four o'clock, I'll go,' " she recalled. She woke at exactly 4. Her mother declined to stand in the cold of the beach, but her boyfriend, Jim Gavin, joined her for the two-hour liturgy. Her hair was still wet with the sacramental oil. "I didn't want to wash it, because it smelled so good, and it just reminded me of what had just happened to me," she said. Jim Gavin, the son of a devout Catholic family, stood there, with his arms around Jennifer, taking in the sunrise and the joy. And at the beginning of the week, he called her from Syracuse to say how much the weekend had meant to him.

"He was very happy for me," Stokes said. "The other thing is he was really envious, too. When he was young and confirmed, you're a child. It's so different when you're an adult and you see adults making a choice to live their lives a certain way and to join something that you've always been a part of. It kind of makes you proud that you're part of it and kind of renews your faith."

The new Catholics still have a few weeks of study left before the year ends at the Pentecost Vigil on June 3. But on the Monday following their reception of the sacraments, they celebrated mass together, spending nearly two hours sharing their reactions to RCIA. Even the quietest had a lot to say, such as Barbara Garaguso, who had been reticent in the weekly sessions, but spoke up to thank Audrey Schencman for getting her through the process. Then they adjourned to the rectory for supper, ending with a cake made by enthusiastic new Catholic Heide Cherubini. The message on the cake put a period to their year: "Catlics R Us."

A Week of Celebration

AS THE congregation surged forward toward the large, Spanish-style statue of the dead Jesus at the close of a long day of Good Friday liturgies, Estelle Peck smiled and admitted: "I can't get enough of it."

Peck is the director of liturgy at St. Brigid's, where Holy Week is almost an Olympic event -- a liturgical endurance test that offers a bracing reinforcement of faith to those who stick with it.

It is a challenge for the whole parish staff, and especially draining for the key musicians, director of music Tommy Thorell, organist Susan Porteus and children's choir director Stephanie Clagnaz. But it is Peck who coordinates it all, and the pastor, Msgr. Francis X. Gaeta, who sets the more-is-better tone. All parishes have Holy Week, but few pack as much into it.

Not every parish has three nights of candlelight services called Tenebrae. "Lay people are your leaders in prayer, Sunday, Monday and tonight," said Manuel Ramos in his Tuesday homily. "A woman, a black woman at that, with a French accent, is the celebrant. What this reflects is a profound sense of what church is all about."

Not every parish has a priest translating the readings at Holy Thursday's Mass of the Lord's Supper from English, Spanish and Creole into sign language, as the Rev. Thomas Costa did, or a candlelight procession through the streets afterward.

Not every parish has children's versions of both the Palm Sunday procession into Jerusalem and the Good Friday passion service -- with a girl, Caitlin Cassidy, playing Jesus in both.

Not every parish has Good Friday services from 9 a.m. to almost 10 p.m. The evening requires precise timing, as the Italian community's passion play winds from the church through the streets of the Breezy Hill section to the school, and the Spanish community goes from there back to the church carrying the life-sized statue of Jesus, arriving just at the end of the young adult community's stations of the cross.

And not every parish has an Easter Vigil so long that it almost runs into the Sunday sunrise mass. At 1 a.m. Sunday, after the vigil, Gaeta was heading to another event, but the Rev. Michael Maffeo was going to sleep, knowing that they'd be up at 4 a.m., and Maffeo would be walking into the cold surf at Nassau Beach to fill an urn with water to be blessed. So Maffeo, poking fun at Gaeta's inexhaustible energy, did his Gaeta impression, crowing: "I'm so excited, I could never sleep."

But Maffeo was there at 5:30 a.m., greeted by a chorus of "We came to see Mikey," and "For he's a jolly good father." Moments later, standing beside Gaeta at an outdoor fire, Maffeo started the chilly liturgy with a comment on Easter that could well be the motto of St. Brigid's: "Celebration seems to be the only thing that makes sense at this moment."