Conversion

Lent is off to a great start for me, maybe my best ever. That's due to a lot of factors, all of them Grace.

This past Saturday I provided music for a men's retreat. The upside of serving in this way is that I get to attend the retreat, as well. This year's theme was Conversion of Life, one of the vows taken by Benedictines. The retreat master has a Benedictine background (as an oblate, not a monk), and this is the second year he's brought us a message rooted in that order's vows. While most religious orders take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the Benedictine order is old enough that their vows (conversion of life, stability, obedience, though the latter not in the traditional interpretation of the word) predate the better known "evangelical counsels."

At any rate, and without sharing Saturday's entire message, it has me reflecting further, as I suppose a good retreat tends to do. It occurs to me that the biggest obstacle to conversion in my life, and I imagine I share this with most people, is the degree to which I'm willing to be converted. And as I write, it also occurs to me that this is related to our last Why Catholic? session, at which we discussed false gods.

I think everybody has things in their lives about which we say "No, God. Not that. I'll give you anything You want, but don't ask me for that. That is too central/essential/valuable to me." Sometimes that is something that we very well know God wants removed from our lives completely - a relationship or habit that we know in our heart is not God's will for us. In other cases, that is something that might not be a bad thing, in the proper context, but we have gotten the thing out of proportion. That is often nothing more than the thing that represents our (illusion of) control over our own life. We will often have very logical sounding reasons why that is actually a good thing in my life, or rationalize that only an outdated, flawed, human church would ask me to give that up, never a loving God (as I understand God to be).

That ends up being our false god. It is the biggest obstacle to the conversion of our life, and to our becoming the person God dreams for us to become. (I choose that wording very carefully: it is God's dream for us; loving us perfectly, it is God's great vision for me, for you, for each person.)

When we begin to follow Christ, we undertake a spiritual journey which, of course, God has begun in us and nurtures in us. This journey takes us from the person we were without Christ to the person the Father dreams for us to become in the Son, when the Holy Spirit has finished transforming/converting us. All of us, by God's grace, have made progress in that journey. Yet we become enamored of the place we have reached, or of some aspect of our old homeland which we cannot bear to leave behind. This is a familiar part of our life, and the life that awaits us is hidden. We have trouble fully believing that the destination is really that much better. So we cling to that, not realizing the degree to which that keeps us from becoming who God dreams for us to be.

This Lent, I seem to be letting go of a that or two, though it could be that I'm just finding new, less obvious ways of clinging to them. If the former, it is by God's grace, for while I must participate in the process, it isn't me doing the work. I'm praying that God will continue this conversion in my life, and help me become the person He dreams for me to be.