Conversion 

“A personal encounter with the real mystery of a personal God is at the heart of every conversion,” writes Fr. Donald Haggarty in his book Conversion. Years ago, as a deacon, I was responsible for a Bible study at a local parish, and we usually had about 5-6 people attend each week. About four months into the study, we were discussing something, and one of the men interrupted me, saying: “Wait a minute. It seems like you’re saying that we can somehow have a personal relationship with God.” I looked at him, a little confused, and said: “Well, yes.” The man leaned back in his chair with a distant look in his eyes and quietly said, “Huh.” It was as though his whole understanding of God had opened up in a radically new way, leaving him stunned. 

Sometimes, when we think of conversion, we have in mind those who grew up having a different religion and who decide later in life for various reasons to become Catholic. But it’s more than that. Conversion also takes the form of a deepening of our Catholic faith. It is something that, please God, happens to all of us at some point in our lives.  The Irish writer, John Waters, in his spiritual memoir Lapsed Agnostic, writes of his experience of (in his mind) the dry, joyless, and irrelevant Catholic faith he had inherited from his parents, and from which he quickly drifted away as a young man. He would discover the reality of God later in life, however, when he began to recognize as religious experiences the many moments of his lifetime in which he had been vividly aware of the beauty of nature, of friendship, and of fatherhood. He came to realize that it was through life in the very Church he had abandoned that he was offered the most intimate relationship with the Source of all life and beauty and mercy, to Whom he could say thank you and Whom he could love in return. “Nobody ever told me… that religion was anything to do with the taste of reality and the awe I felt at being alive in a world full of wonder.” This is an expression of the experience of authentic conversion, which is always a response to the discovery of God who ever calls us to know Him and enjoy relationship with Him. 

The question is whether we are open to conversion. We must be on guard against a certain feeling of satisfaction in our current relationship with God. In its worst form, such satisfaction can lead us to a merely superficial faith that has no real effect on the way we construct our daily lives. In such a case we might profess faith in God and identify as Catholics, but live as though He did not exist and as though the teachings of the Church were practically irrelevant. From the perspective of the converted heart, this is a tragically impoverished approach to life, for it holds at arm’s length the One who infuses everything with wonder. From the perspective of the evangelical mission of the Church, this is a complete disaster, for it empties the gospel of what has made it so compelling to converts over the ages, who were willing to take enormous risks and make enormous sacrifices for the sake of their relationship with Christ.  

Authentic conversion is a great gift. It is an experience that all of us must ask for, even if we’ve been Catholic all our lives. To pray for it requires courage, however, for it is to express a willingness to be disturbed by the reality of God, who ever exceeds our expectations, leaving us stunned. 

posted 8/12/23