This Is Not a Conversion Story

In the spirit of the Christmas season I post my story to LRC.

I was born into a Jewish family, and I am now a practicing Roman Catholic Christian; but this is not a conversion story.

My family did not practice the Jewish religion at all. For example, I never had, nor was even prepared, for a bar mitzvah. Like many Jewish families of that era we certainly still identified as being Jewish. Though I personally felt much more culturally American than Jewish; i.e., baseball and bacon versus Hebrew school and kosher food.

My father died the day before I turned nine years old. My mother took it very hard, in my estimation too hard. That is, her grief was often debilitating. Now I am sure that much of her suffering was exacerbated by clinical depression. Witnessing this suffering moved me towards God and stoicism because I thought my mother’s reaction to be mistaken or unhealthy (though I had not understood her psychiatric condition).

I knew nothing about Christianity beyond popular culture as we lived in a Jewish neighborhood. Most of the Christian friends I had were African Americans. I don’t recall a single word among my friends about religion. Thus, I cannot explain today what my motivation and reasoning was, but by the time I was a young adult I was attending church regularly. While at Duke University for graduate school I attended services at the Methodist and ecumenical Duke Chapel. I felt at home in its neo-gothic architecture, wonderful music, and erudite sermons.

I read Pascal, Aquinas, Dante, Chesterton, and much, much more.  Also important, I sat in on a medieval history course while in graduate school. For many years I had been considering getting baptized; but into which denomination?  I came to believe in the Truth of the Catholic Church. At 35 years old I completed the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, and was baptized and confirmed into the Church.

My feelings then were that from my study of history, from everything else that I read, I had an “intellectual conviction without emotion.” This phraseology comes from the description of the conversion of the writer Evelyn Waugh by his spiritual director, the English Jesuit Martin D’Arcy.

Thirty years on from my baptism I now do not  think I became intellectually convinced of anything from what I read. More precisely, what I chose to read and found convincing was to give words to what I already felt. I thought I took an intellectual approach, reading, but the materialistic scientism that makes reality flat with no purpose was obviously not coherent with my experienced reality. It would be as if gravity was ignored because it also could not be seen or felt directly. I certainly did not have a specific spiritual or mystical moment, in fact, I simply accepted the spiritual reality of existence like a peasant. So recognizing the existence of God did not make life meaningful, but life being meaningful predicated the presence of God.

This process can be understood as akin to intuition. Consider the Harvard and Oxford philosopher Hao Wang as quoted by Iain McGilchrist in his magistral book The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World: “More generally, we often have perfectly reasonable beliefs but cannot give good reasons for the beliefs … I agree that we should try hard to see whether our deeply held beliefs can be disproved, especially when we make crucial decisions on the basis of such beliefs. But for me a more fruitful approach to philosophy than systematic doubt would seem to be to search for reasons to support our basic beliefs, which may be somewhat indefinite …”

So you see, I did not convert from anything to be a Chrisitan. I didn’t make an intellectual choice. I was given a great gift. I just realized I was a Christian by the grace of God.

In this Christmas season, the most difficult one of my life, my daughter has fallen very ill and my prayers have become focused and urgent. And it is this gift of faith that is my harbor in the storm.

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