You read a lot of stories about conversion—St. Paul, St. Augustine, and countless others in the Christian tradition. You don’t come across that many unconversion stories. Perhaps the unconvert lacks fervor in her new non-faith. Perhaps he is embarrassed or wants to leave the gate open for a future return to the fold. Or perhaps the unconvert, by virtue of losing a formerly found faith, recognizes the uncertainty, the potential mutability, of all spiritual states.
The Conversion of St. Paul, by Michaelangelo Buonarroti, 1542-45
I certainly fit into the last category, having found and lost faith so many times over the course of my life that I might liken it to a quartan fever that seizes me in its sweaty arms every few years, only to chill, eventually, in the face of reason or my own stubbornness. When I was 14, following a year of sincere commitment to my Methodist church (after 13 years of going only when my parents took me and paying minimal attention), I woke up one day and said to myself, “If someone came along today claiming to be the son of God, I would think he was crazy.” There began ten years of atheism/agnosticism. Toward the end, it felt a little lonely, and I believed that I was Bad. I began to think about religion, began to wish that I had faith, because I expected that it would make me feel less-lonely and Good, and I wanted to be Good.
In 1996, I converted to Catholicism, and I was really-really-really into it, until the day in 2004 when I walked for miles around an indoor track, pushing my sleeping daughter in a stroller and thinking through the question “Who benefits?” from the Church’s stance on birth control (my answer: not women). There were any number of other threads I could have unraveled that day—the celibacy requirement for priests or the prohibition on the ordination of women come to mind—but the thread that was closest to me, the one binding me up so painfully, was the birth control one. With the zeal typical of some converts, I had eaten up everything the Church gave me, including the idea of not using birth control and having a large family. What a surprise, though, to find in my own life evidence that my own desires and happiness were at odds with what the Church told me I should want and should find fulfilling. With my daughter’s birth, I had two children, a boy and a girl, and it felt Just Right. I have known many women who hunger and yearn for the third child, or the fourth child, as deeply and eagerly as I had longed for my first two children. But as for me, it’s been six years, and I’ve never felt a pull to have another child. Leaving the Church would allow me to choose the number of children that felt right to me; that reason—self-interested in ways that I think are very healthy—made me ripe for unconversion, and that long, frowning walk was the defining moment of my loss of commitment to Catholicism.
Like many conversion stories (including those of Paul and Augustine mentioned earlier), these unconversion stories happened in a flash, in a moment in which an entire system of thought was replaced by an opposing system. In that regard, then, surely unconversion can be as firmly outside the realm of reason as conversion can. Whereas conversion stories often depend quite explicitly upon leaps of intuition, chance encounters, and deep emotional responses to spiritual or religious experiences, the unconvert is more likely to speak in terms of reason banishing a superstition, and yet the suddenness with which these flashes of insight might appear, and the wholehearted embrace of them that the unconvert makes, bear striking resemblance to the experience of the convert. Both the convert and the unconvert tend to cling to the belief that the change from one state to another—faithful to non-faithful, non-faithful to faithful—represents a journey to an immutable truth.
St. Augustine Reading the Epistle of St. Paul, by Benozzo Gozzoli, 1464-65
Whatever may or may not be true metaphysically—and I make no speculation here—certainly in addition to whatever immutable truths may be in play, the choice to adhere or to stop adhering to a particular faith is just that, a choice. It reminds me of pop-psychological dicta that love is a “decision” or an “action” or a “choice,” rather than a feeling. I heard a similar concept many times during my Catholic years—one should go to mass, pray, or whatever whether or not one feels the inclination to do so: one can live faith without feeling faith. The underlying assumption in both cases is that one should live based on ideas rather than feelings.
Yet both these pieces of advice assume the knowledge of Truth: it is wrong to give up on faith and leave a community; it is wrong to give up on love and leave a relationship. The similarities between them—finding faith and losing it, falling in and out of love—remind me of the mutability of both as emotional states. One can keep these emotions under the control of reason and belief (and indeed, thousands of years of religion, philosophy, and culture have argued for the absolute necessity of doing so), but they have a life of their own, developing and shifting silently, hidden under the proper governance of reason, until, sometimes, a person decides to choose what has become emotionally true—loss of faith, loss of love—over what the community believes to be true: “this is the right religion”; “love (or at least marriage) is forever.” And after that moment, the unconvert will choose new ideas to align with, new ways of connecting reason with emotion.
If we can fairly apply the metaphor of falling in love to the way one comes to a particular religion, then we could say that I fell in love with Catholicism on Maundy Thursday, 1995, when at the end of the service they darkened the chapel for the ceremony in which the Eucharist is paraded around the chapel while “Pange Lingua Gloriosi,” a sixth-century chant, is sung. On that night, I experienced all of those qualities that became for me the “spiritual signature” of Catholicism—something about the tone or mood that I associate with the Church that involves darkness, quietness, water, suffering, mystery, and mysticism. That was my first conversion to Catholicism. There were others, my relationship with the Catholic Church like a marriage, with high and low points of getting along, a cycle of conversion and unconversion that ended (I thought) with the big breakup in 2005 (when I stopped attending mass), a brief reconciliation this past fall, followed now by continued separation.
Pange Lingua Gloriosi
That brief reconciliation arose from another conversion story a couple of months ago—one night I read an essay by a (liberal) priest that called to my mind everything I like about Catholicism. The genre of conversion stories primes one to take seriously these chance encounters with a speaking text—Augustine heard a voice telling him to take up the Bible and read, and the words he randomly turned to were compelling enough to change his life. I myself had snapped back to obedience to the Catholic Church in 1998 (after flirting with the idea of returning to Protestantism) after hearing a reading from the Letter to the Galatians in which Paul warns the Galatians, “If any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed.”
Beginning of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians
So for that reason, I was prepared to take seriously my emotional response to that essay, to find in it a sign that it was time to return to the Church. Typically earnest, I immediately went to confession, began the process of seeking an annulment for my marriage that had ended in divorce, and began attending mass. I was undaunted, even when the ultraconservative priest at my parish delivered a long, long homily about the evil of divorce, how much better it is for people to stay unhappily married, and so forth.
Fine, I said to myself, there are all kinds of people in the Catholic Church, and some of them, like this priest, are uncompassionate. But that’s not all that there is to Catholicism. I will find a different parish, where the priest is more compassionate.
But it didn’t work out that way. Not for lack of compassionate priests, not for lack of a beautiful history of saints and mystics, but because a thing is what it is. While struggling to figure out how to reconcile myself to this church, I tried to understand my emotional connection to the Catholic Church and how it could coexist with my deeply entrenched intellectual disagreement with the Church on just about everything. I had a flash of understanding by thinking about it in terms of metaphors of love and relationships. I wrote in late October, “We could say that in falling in love with the Catholic Church, I fell in love with ‘someone’ that I disagree with on everything important, someone who doesn’t respect women, someone who won’t accept me as I am, someone who won’t honor gay and lesbian people, someone who lies, someone who uses theology to win every argument . . . . From this perspective, if this were someone I was dating, surely my friends and family would be correct to advise me to get over my love, to break up, instead of giving up everything else I value to make the relationship work.” So I ended up choosing that notion that one should live based on ideas rather than feelings, but with the twist that the ideas I chose were not those of the Catholic Church.
So that was the end . . . again . . . of my life as a Catholic. As in the hymn “Amazing Grace,” I was “found” again two months ago, only to lose myself a month later back into the quiet comfort of uncertainty, mutability, and humility.
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The Conversion of St. Paul, from The United Episcopal Church Of North America.
St. Augustine Reading the Epistle of St. Paul, from Dalhousie University.
Pange Lingua Gloriosi from Joseph Kenny.
Beginning of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, from The Wikimedia Commons.
