I should probably add the tune of chirping crickets to this sleeping blog of mine, and I don't have much of an excuse. It’s been a summer of decision-making, friends’ decision-making, and deciding to talk about decision-making. Work and play.More specifically, this summer has been a hotbed of faith transitions and deliberated faith transitions among many old friends and new friends. I am questioned here and there about acquaintances recently deciding to enter the Roman Catholic Church. I can only say so much about fellow students and friends entering and wanting to join Rome. I run the risk of trivializing their experience when I do that. Conversions of friends are not subjects of commentary for me. I’m not a spectator. I’m involved, and I am partially responsible for their decisions (as everyone else is). I am very enthusiastic about anyone willing to become Catholic.
As I seep myself more and more in the devout culture of Catholicism, everyday it seems I hear a new story about some friend or friend of some other friend running to the front doors of Rome. It’s really not uncommon. When I was a non-Catholic this was, at best, befuddling, and nothing much more than that. It’s not that non-Catholics don’t care or they don’t even talk about these conversions for a very long time. They do. It just doesn’t grab them in an enthusiastic way. They are interested and fundamentally detached, while feeling some things in between. And that is what I’ve learned about westerners in most every intercultural confrontation. In previous centuries, someone who deserted our culture for another would be ostracized to the point of ceased interaction. Nowadays, instead of criticizing a conversion, we project it as a comedic move (not necessarily comedic in a “haha” way). We place ourselves above a convert’s experience by treating it as a subject of interesting, sentimental, and trivial talk rather than a stimulant for reflection. We are much like a Jane Austen character in one of her drawing rooms. Instead of reflecting, we talk around it, chat about it, pleasantly misrepresent it, and thereby steal the same sort of pleasure we might gain from reading an entire book. It makes us feel as if we’ve confronted a conversion experience without genuinely confronting it. That is why it is interesting, at best, sentimental, and not disturbing, frustrating, mesmerizing, or gripping.
I avoid lengthy conversations about my friends’ conversions. I do care, and I have not lost my zeal for the drama of Catholic conversions. I only fear the comedy routine. I want friends and family to truly share in the silent drama of giving up everything. Non-Catholics need to understand that this is not, at bottom, a change of beliefs or ideas. It is a dramatic and heart-breaking cultural change. It is a conversion that converts the whole person: spirit, soul, and body. After all the tiring explanations are finished and these Catholic candidates are finally confirmed in the Sacraments, they feel different and start acting in dramatically new and different ways. It is sometimes painful and sometimes exhilarating and sometimes depends on the day.
My new Catholic friends know I wholeheartedly support their decisions and know what it means to leave behind Protestant America. I left my background because I wanted to complete it, not reject it. It’s not that the Protestant sect of Christianity didn’t have what I found here, it just didn’t have everything that I have found here. Catholicism is a colossal Yes to works, to sacraments, to family, to sacred teaching, to more mothers and fathers, to more community, and to every belief and activity a human needs to fulfill their humanity. It is big in every possible way to explain it.
To speak from experience, recovering from the loss of family (biological and religious) involves stress and sacrifice, and it’s not a true conversion without stress and sacrifice. At the end, however, it is truly exhilarating and even rehabilitating. You have to push and push and push, and it takes determination. There is nothing more heart-breaking than feeling misunderstood and also disappointing those siblings, parents, and closest friends. It is devastating and makes you want to squirm in your pew if you think about it too much. There is no complete apologetic for this decision, and that is why Catholic converts must always hold themselves responsible for their family’s sadness and expressed disapproval. At the bottom of all this is a movement that is sometimes paradoxical in theory but, at the very least, respectable. It is taxing to take responsibility and keep silent, but no one can take away the work you put into it. Silencing your heart while others demean it, degrade it, and demoralize it is more than a sweat. It is emotionally tormenting. And, unfortunately, you humbly learn to bear it, without puffing yourself up as a hero.
An older Catholic once wrote me a letter for my Confirmation. In a brief and pointed part of the letter, he wrote: “win souls, not arguments”. I continue to learn that every time I engage someone in an argument without the intent of showing them the Body of our Lord, I have given them ugliness. Mother Teresa puts it this way, “This is what we have to learn right from the beginning: to listen to the voice of God in our heart, and then in the silence of the heart God speaks. Then from the fullness of our hearts, your mouth will have to speak…. Then in the fullness of your heart, because it is full of God, full of love, full of compassion, full of faith, your mouth will speak.” When we take in the Body and Blood of our Lord, we are first silencing our rambling mouths. We are trying to find Christ’s voice before we find our own. That is the particular burden of every Catholic convert. We must learn sincere, genuine, and charitable silence. We can’t win or win souls without it.
There is no full-fledged defense for our decision, because this is not an experience comprehensively defined by a conversion of thought or interpretation of Scripture or Scriptural principle. It is in essence, as it is defined by its end, a movement. We are no longer struggling through a theoretical maze. We are, rather, moving to our home, even though theorizing showed us where that home is. Because this is a movement and not an apologetic defense at the end of the day, it is foolery to everyone else. We can not propositionally define a movement. We can only give ground, provide space for it, and pray that others will make sense of everything else. We can give probable reasoning, but, after probability, come virtues of a non-rational force: faith and charity. John Newman, in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, wrote, “…It is faith and love which give to probability a force which it has not in itself. Faith and love are directed towards an Object; in vision of that Object they live; it is that Object, received in faith and love, which renders it reasonable to take probability as sufficient for internal conviction.” When they see that reason must stop short, when we make a decision out of sheer dutiful love, they will learn that, at the end of all these spats, we had to give ourselves up. That is always what the world must see. Such is sacrifice. When we have explained ourselves, our mouths must shut, and there is nothing left but love.
“… in certain instances it is, undeniably, more worthy of respect to give oneself up to an enthusiasm, even though it be an irrational one, which none the less proceeds from a great love, than not to give oneself up to it at all.” – Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
