Conversion

Describe how you have experienced conversion as an event and a process.

If you had asked me in the year 2000 to describe how I experienced conversion as an event and a process, I would have told you in all sincerity that the process by which I experienced the event of my conversion was fourfold: I went on an Alpha weekend in mid-February, I got up out of my chair and went forward for prayer on the Saturday night (12 February, around 19:30) just after the Holy Spirit talk, I stood there looking and feeling stupid for some minutes, and then I went back to my seat. And there it was; a done deal. I had fought long and hard with my demons, but I had taken the big scary step that would change my life forever: I had given my life to Christ, I was converted.

Ten years later, my answer to this question is much more complex.

Being a converted Christian was wonderful, for the first few months. But it took all of the energy that I could muster to be nice to everyone all of the time and restrain my darker impulses, the way I knew a good Christian should. I poured all of my energy into reading the Bible and other spiritual writing, and into prayer groups and a variety of church activities. This kept me busy and out of the way of mischief. In my quest for perfection, I signed myself up for far too many activities and pushed myself to a point of exhaustion. And that’s when it happened. A helper on a church course did something stupid and irritating: they stood idly by and made critical comments while they watched me wear myself out trying to do the million things I had voluntarily taken on, instead of making themselves useful by helping me, the way a proper Christian should. I lost my temper.

And so the spell was broken: clearly I was not the holy converted Christian I thought I was, instead I was the same old devil I had always been. I was gutted.

I was not ready to throw in the towel. Not just yet. But the harder I tried, the more slip-ups I made. I lamented: can a mean girl change her tongue? The leopard her spots? As easily would I be able to do good, accustomed to evil as I was. Realising this, I could hardly believe it took as long as it did to get to that first watershed temper tantrum! This posed a dilemma indeed: if I was a new creation in Christ, why had the old things not passed away? Why was it so hard to cease to do evil and learn to do good? If it takes a caterpillar two weeks to be metamorphosed into a Monarch butterfly, how long would it take me to be conformed to the image of Christ? I was not the least bit consoled by Paul’s irremovable thorn theory. Why would God give a person a weakness just to keep them humble? That hardly seemed fair: keeping holy perfection of out of someone’s reach was akin to holding an ice-cream cone over a child’s head where they could see it but couldn’t grab it. Cruel.

Nobody has ever justly accused me of being a highly disciplined person, so it was against the odds that I decided to persevere with my quest for Christ even though I was becoming increasingly convinced that I was never going to succeed at becoming Christ-like in this lifetime. Something resilient in the depths of my stubborn soul decided to stick to the commitment I had made on that Alpha weekend in early 2000. Maybe it was because of the amount of flak I had taken from people who were unimpressed that I had ‘gone all Christian on them’, maybe it was because conceding defeat would be tantamount to denying the truth of a very deep spiritual experience, and doing that would mean refuting my grasp on reality along with my affinity for Christ. I could not explain the spirit of what had happened to me on that all-important Saturday when I’d gone away on a Christian weekend instead of going out clubbing with my so-called friends, but it had profound meaning for me, and it had changed my life by making me more open to real – and not just superficial – relationships with other people. And that was why turning around and going back to how things had been Before Christ was just not an option! My spirit had grown too much for it to fit back into the hole it had crawled out of.

So, since going back was not an option, and given that my inclination towards sin was coupled to my inclination to finding and holding onto God, what were my options? The way I saw it, I couldn’t afford to step off the gas with attending talks and courses and reading and reading and reading everything I could get my hands on that would help me to see how other people had gone about achieving enlightenment. I also frequented the cinema more and more regularly: most of the material screened at Cinema Nouveau offered food for thought about people and relationships, and these forays into the darkness of the movie theatre presented me with glimpses of light and transcendent beauty that proclaimed God’s real presence in this broken world and offered me hope. It might not be easy for characters to change and grow and become something quite different by the time the credits roll at the end of the movie, but every fleeting frame of celluloid whispers the promise that transformation is possible.

Somewhere in amongst all of this, I found myself more at home in the Catholic Church again. As a youth I had forsworn my mother’s hypocritical religion, but as I became more and more sincere about my own flaws and failings, there was something about the faith of my childhood that appealed to me and offered me reassurance. If I was prepared to acknowledge and confess my sins, I could be sure of receiving forgiveness. This wasn’t available in the other churches I had attended: you said sorry in the silence of your heart, but how did you know for sure that you had been forgiven? There is something liberating, even healing, about hearing an authoritative human voice confidently speaking the words in God’s name: “Go in peace, your sins have been forgiven”.

I even got to a point where I felt that I was ready to be confirmed in the Catholic Church. This was a pity for me, because I had already been confirmed when I was in high school, and Church law is quite clear that Confirmation is a sacrament that can be administered only once. I had some regrets about that: it would have been so nice to have received the sacrament now that I was really ready to belong to the believing community. To get over my disappointment, and to affirm my uncelebrated intention of becoming properly Catholic, I decided to attend Monsignor Borello’s theology course.

Borello’s teaching about the Sacraments opened my eyes and I began to understand what Baptism and Confirmation and Eucharist are about. I was baptised when I was nine and I had been reverently taking communion since the day after my baptism, and I’d even kept going after I was confirmed under duress in order to do what was required of a Catholic daughter, but I honestly had no idea what God had been doing in me through those sacraments of Christian initiation! Luckily for me, being clueless was no barrier to receiving God’s grace, and it seemed that I must have received enough grace in my early years to preserve my life in Christ through the days when I had no intention of taking refuge in God. With no knowledge of the meaning of the words ‘proper disposition’ in receiving the Sacraments, and without conscious knowledge of Church teaching about man’s capacity for God, the desire for God was written in my heart; and God never ceased to draw me to himself. God’s grace was enough to inspire, revivify and advance my innermost quest for God. From the moment I came into being, God never withdrew the invitation to converse. It took one Andrew Ivo Borello to read that invitation to me in a translation I could appreciate!

While I was doing theology every Wednesday night for four years, I was also becoming more active in ministry at Archdiocesan level, where I was being pushed out of my middle-class white comfort zone and discovering how much I don’t know about other South Africans: from language, to culture, to Auntie Abrahamse’s koesisters (not the twisted plaas variety, the ones with aniseed and coconut!)

This past decade has seen me being radically transformed. An interlocking series of changes and developments are flowing out of this: my psychological, educational, sociological and cultural horizons are shifting. My basic stance towards reality is being fundamentally altered: what had once gone unnoticed is becoming present and vivid, what had once been of no concern is now of the highest importance; my direction is altered, my eyes are open and I perceive the world in a new way. Indeed, I perceive a new world. I am shifting from the level of thought to the level of action: I am recognising myself as free and responsible, able to make decisions that are based not on personal satisfaction but on value, not just on what gives pleasure but on what is truly good and worthwhile. My emotions, decisions and actions are all being shaped and directed anew – because I find myself being-in-love with God: heart, soul, mind and strength*. In this new world, I talk to total strangers in public as though they were my friends and family. If I keep this up, I might even start loving my neighbours! The more I am converted, the more I realise how much I need to be converted.

* Concluding paragraph borrows much from McBrien, Richard P. 1981 Catholicism New York, Harper & Row, pg 961-963 (on conversion, explaining Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology)