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PAGE 5—April 7,1977
BY FATHER ALFRED MCBRIDE, 0. PRAEM.
To many Catholics the word conversion
means bringing others into the Church.
Missionaries make converts in Asia and Africa.
Famed convert makers such as Fulton Sheen
bring into the Church such luminaries as Clare
Booth Luce and Hey wood Broun. Chesterton
and Belloc are remembered as converts from
Protestantism. But what about religious
conversion within the Catholic fold? Can we be
converted too? If conversion is to apply to
Catholics, what does it mean?
Since for so long the term religious
conversion has been used to mean the move
from paganism to Christianity or the move
from Protestantism to Catholicism, the idea has
arisen that religious conversion within the
Church has little or no significance. But this
should hardly be the case. This is thinking
about conversion in Church terms only.
Whereas the basic meaning of conversion has to
do with turning one’s heart to God.
When John the Baptist mounted the pulpit
at the Jordan river, he preached conversion
from a life of sin to a life with God. He wasn’t
preaching to pagans and urging them to become
Jews. Nor was he preaching to Jews and asking
them to belong to some other religion. He was
asking Jews to live up to the religion they were
professing already so that they would be open
to the kingdom of God which was at hand.
The same is true when Jesus comes to
Jordan’s banks. He does not view his audience
as pagans or Jews, so much as sinners who need
forgiveness and conversion. Over and over
again, Jesus says, “Repent, for the kingdom of
God is at hand.” The English word repent has
lost its original meaning of conversion. It tends
now to mean, “Do some penance for the sins
you have committed.”
But that was not the original idea. Repent
meant convert. The Baptist and Jesus call for a
change of heart, a religious conversion in which
the person moves from a life of sin, a life
without God to a life of grace and friendship
with God. Every Advent and Lent this message
of conversion is heard in the liturgy. This is
both an historical memory of the first calls to
conversion in Christianity and the relevance of
that call for today.
This is the first correction that must be
made about the idea of conversion. The second
one is this, namely, that conversion is more
than a one-time event. The presumption is that
once one is converted there is no more
converting to do. This misleading idea of
conversion is due to the biographies and
autobiographies of people who have had
religious conversions in which they detail the
high drama of their change, the intense
emotional experience that accompanied it and
the finality of their new commitment. They
give the impression that conversion is a
one-time mountain top experience, never to be
repeated. They seem to say that once one is
converted, that’s it.
Catholics may obtain such religious
conversion experiences during a retreat, a
charismatic renewal, a cursillo weekend or in
hearing an inspiring teacher or reading a stirring
book such as Thomas Merton’s “Seven Storey
Mountain” or St. Augustine’s “Confessions.”
The sheer intensity of the religious experience
at such times may falsely convince the receiver
that this conversion is absolute and that the rest
of their lives is a mere spinning out of the
original moment.
In reality this is far from the case.
Conversion is a life-long experience. Perhaps it
is better to say that one should look forward to
a series of mini-conversions as life goes on.
Personal maturing implies moving to ever
deeper moments of love of God and more
profound steps in understanding Him. Each of
these times of opening new doors of love and
truth is a moment of new conversion.
Negatively, one may speak of falls from
grace, times of sin requiring new conversions
and affirmations of faith in God. Human
weakness being what it is, there is every chance
that one will grow cold in one’s fiery
commitment to Christ. Hence the need for a
new conversion. Think over this matter of
conversion. It is a way of seeing your Christian
life as a dynamic adventure in which there is no
standing still. Falls, advances, slippings, rises.
And ever the friendly, loving welcome of
Christ, “Convert, change. You can come back
to Me!”
Our Hide And Seek Game With God
BY FATHER JOHN SPICER, C.SS.R.
Recently a priest acquaintance wrote to me
sharing his deep inward searching: “For many
years I’ve been struggling with the mystery of
the cross, and the mystery of doing God’s
work, and yet feeling there must be more to it
than I was experiencing.”
Two recent articles which Father read stirred
him anew and light came. He wrote, “I went
jogging and it came together. I prayed to God
differently — I gave up and told him it was too
hard, that I couldn’t do it. The load was lifted.
It was over, and I knew that something was
different. No longer do I pray ‘Lord show me
how to love.’ That’s not enough. So now I pray
‘Lord, I cannot love this person the way you
want me to. But you can. So come in me, it’s
impossible for me, you love him through me.’ ”
This is a true story of a conversion. Not a
conversion in the sense of turning from unbelief
to belief, or changing from one religious
denomination to another, but a conversion
nevertheless. This is the kind of conversion to
which all of us are called over and over again
throughout our lives.
We are good at playing games with God. We
intermittently hide from Him, then seek Him.
But are we really the seekers? Is it not rather
God?
Surely God initiates the seeking. How could
it be otherwise? For who knows God? Who
knows where to find Him? Certainly not we
sinners, backturners, hesitant ones! Yet God in
His great love seeks us out. He sought our first
parents as they hid from Him in the shadows of
Eden. He seeks us out, too, as we cower in the
cracks and the crannies, the shadows and
depths, of earthly life. And having found us, He
takes us to His heart.
Unfortunately, if but rarely, we try hiding
from God completely. We occupy ourselves
totally with selfish concerns. We push Him out.
But God will not go. He seeks us out even in
our mortal sin. When we yield to Him, we
experience a radical conversion. Assuredly this
is a miracle of grace — a new creation.
But not everyone needs radical conversion.
Many make serious slips, but not mortal ones.
Nevertheless, they too need conversion. We are
all called to continual growth. There is no such
point as absolute maturity. We must keep
growing if we wish to be fully human. This is
what continual conversion is all about.
What is this hide and seek game we play with
God?
The “intellectual” excuse is a fairly common
door to hide behind. Behind it we simply refuse
to “change our minds.” Ignorance is alright,
thank you! It’s so much less threatening. Were
we to look up and do some hard inquiring, we
might have to change intellectual gears. We
might catch a glimpse of broader horizons and
have to get on our way and pilgrimage further.
That’s a forbidding thought. So we keep hiding.
We need a bit of Christian mind-blowing!
“Emotional” doors are hiding places too. We
allow emotions, formed in the past, to impede
our present acceptance of grace. We are
emotionally attached to former ways of
thinking, doing, feeling, expressing, as well as to
past external forms of Church existence. This
may be alright but sometimes the past has been
outlived and we refuse to let it go. Our
emotions won’t let us. Such emotional
insecurity hinders the conversion process.
Then there are “psychic” doors to hide
behind. We are often reluctant to break out of
yesterday’s selfimage. We remain encased in our
hard and brittle ego. Yet “unless the grain of
wheat dies, it remains alone . . .” We must die
to self in order to grow. This calls for “psychic”
conversion.
Now we can sum up our findings.
Conversion is a turning to God and is always
initiated by God, not by ourselves. It can be
both radical and continuing, depending upon
whether we have turned completely from God
or are struggling to love Him more. And there
are many obstacles to our conversion, obstacles
from the world as well as those of our own
making. But God’s grace is constant and strong,
leading us ever onward to a greater
participation in Christ’s body, the Christian
community, and to greater love for Him and
our neighbor. Thus we experience
ever-deepening conversion.
So conversion is an ever-present challenge. It
will remain so as long as we are pilgrims on
earth. For every new conversion experience
invites a further one. And as we grow and
become more and more “converted” our joy
will increase proportionately. Even when we
come face-to-face with our God at the end of
our conversion process, might we not continue
to grow wildly, joyfully at a pace and depth
beyond our present imagining?
I like to think so.
“WHEN JOHN THE BAPTIST
mounted the pulpit at the Jordan
River,” Father Alfred McBride writes,
“he preached conversion from a life
with God. He wasn’t preaching to
pagans and urging them to become
Jews. Nor was he preaching to Jews and
asking them to belong to some other
religion. He was asking Jews to live up
to the religion they were professing
already so that they would be open to
the Kingdom of God which was at
hand.” John the Baptist preaches to the
people in this woodcut by Paul Gustave
Dore. (NC Photo)
“WE SELDOM IF EVER turn to God fully and completely,”
writes Father John Spicer. “More often we waver toward Him
in a hide and seek fashion. One moment we love to hear Him
call us by name, the next moment we wish to remain
anonymous. One moment we are actively engaged in His service,
the next moment we are onlookers, afraid to be caught up in
the action.” Similar to our relation with God, this child plays
hide and seek with the photographer. (NC Photo by Susan
McKinney)
Know
Your Faith
(All Articles On This Page Copyrighted 1 977 by N.C. News Service)
BY FATHER JOHN J. CASTELOT
When Jesus began preaching, His message
was essentially a call to conversion: “This is the
time of fulfillment. The reign of God is at
hand! Reform your lives and believe in the
Good News” (Mk 1,15). The exhortation to
“reform your lives” sounds like a challenge to
change one’s conduct, behavior, way of acting.
It involves this, of course, but the Greek
word which it translates signifies something
deeper, more fundamental: a radical change of
mind, of outlook. And behind this Greek word
there is a Hebrew (Aramaic) word used
frequently in the Bible. It means “to return.”
And this brings us to the heart of the matter:
our reformation, our change of outlook is
literally a conversion, a return. It is,
consequently, not something merely personal,
but interpersonal, a return to someone from
whom, in one degree or another, we have
turned away - a return to God.
Conversion, then, was at the heart of the call
which Jesus issued to mankind. Indeed, it seems
to be at the heart of humanity’s ongoing
relationship with God, if we are to judge by the
account of that relationship which we read in
the Bible. We may take as an illustration the
history of God’s people as interpreted by the
authors of those books known as the Early
Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings.
These books cover the history of the people
from the conquest of the Promised Land under
Joshua in the 13th century B.C. down to the
Babylonian Exile in the sixth century B.C.
Looking back over these centuries from the
dismal perspective of the Exile, the authors
contemplated not just what had happened but
why it had happened. They discerned a pattern
emerging from the jumble of events: When the
people were faithful to the Covenant, all went
well; when they were unfaithful, disaster
struck. But again and again God invited them to
conversion. This pattern has been called the
cycle of Call - Fall - Recall.
It is a pattern discernible in the lives of
individuals, too. They heard God’s call and
responded eagerly, joyfully. But in the course
of time, they drifted away and often fell so low
that there was only one direction in which they
could look: upward. And there was God,
stooping, so as to speak, to help them up, to
call them back to Himself, to invite them to
conversion. (Read 2 Sm. 11-12)
Conversion can take many forms. It can
involve a return to God after falling away from
Him into sin, or a turning to Him from another
form of religion, or a return to a more fervent
relationship with Him after a period of
lukewarmness and mediocrity. A good example
of the last-named type is found in the letter to
Laodicea in the Book of Revelation. Here the
Lord is pictured as admonishing this
community and calling it to conversion: “I
know your deeds; I know you are neither hot
nor cold. How I wish you were one or the other
- hot or cold! But because you are lukewarm,
neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my
mouth! ... Be earnest about it, therefore.
Repent! Here I stand, knocking at the door. If
anyone hears me calling and opens the door, I
will enter this house and have supper with him
and he with me” (Rev. 3, 15-16,19b-20).
Even Peter, the man selected by Jesus to
head his little flock - even he needed
conversion. After his tragic denial of Jesus, as
Luke tells us: “The Lord turned around and
looked at Peter, and Peter remembered the
word that the Lord had spoken to him, ‘Before
the cock crows today you will deny me three
times.’ He went out and wept bitterly” (Lk. 22,
61-62).
The career of the great St. Paul began with a
dramatic conversion, an event so important that
Luke tells the story three times (Acts 9; 22; 26)
and the Church celebrates it with a special feast
on Jan. 25. But even he felt the need for
constant conversion, as we read in Philippines
3, 7-16.
Indeed, it has been remarked that the life of
a sincere Christian is an unending series of
conversions - and the Scriptures certainly seem
to substantiate this.