My Conversion

I sometimes think of my conversion and wonder how I would ever explain it to another human being. Would I stress love or would I talk of my soul. My conversion is incomplete. The journey continues. The itinerary changes each day, the destination remains the same. There is great charm in my conversion, endlessly reminding me of the need to be good, to be devout, to love others and myself. My baptism was remarkable. Over a period of a few weeks I learned the grace, delicacy, and confidence of faith, of believing in the Mystery of God. There are endless books on the philosophy and metaphysics of religion. I heard many conversations on those subjects and others. But, the most important idea which I learned and which I retained is that I am not insignificant in the eyes of God. I am loved by God. I have to respect God every second of my life. I have to be humble before God. I have to be obedient to God’s will. My conversion is more expansive than history or philosophy, in many ways is a movement orchestrated and influenced by God. There is always a desire to be like Christ. There is always a desire to love, to show mercy to all, to experience a grand universal love filled with an infinite awareness of the details of goodness and holiness. It is the experience of this love which teaches me how to be Christian, which keeps my mind aware of my strengths and weaknesses. Loving and serving God is an acquired taste, an acquired desire to be loyal, obedient, reverent, and loving. The psychology of a life with Jesus Christ begins in the sphere of love and continues to sphere of social justice; a life with Christ revolves around ideas of simplicity, sacrifice, and fairness. Oh, true hope, true faith are delicacies waiting to guide each one of us. A life with Christ is filled with many subtleties of emotion and awareness; I learned to close my eyes and to feel the presence of Christ Jesus in my life. My conversion is often in direct conflict with my personal affectations, my personal preoccupations. My conversion is a renewal of my social and educational interests, directed outward, searching for ways to serve God. My imagination finds new ways to serve him, new desires for goodness and holiness within my life. My conversion is the search for a pure and clean ingenuity and sagacity, created with a foundation of compassion, obedience, and love. Serving God faithfully with my entire heart, soul, and mind is my goal. There is something very exquisite in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. How fine the prayers are, how they tug at my heart, encourage me to desire to live a priestly life of love, obedience, and sacrifice. Each word teases my ears, plunders my imagination, leads me closer and closer to God. There is a gentleness, something very soothing, very renewing in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. And there is a bold rush, a zephyr pushing me toward goodness, holiness, serenity, pushing anxiety and thoughts of the secular world aside.

There is great beauty in my conversion. It is hopeful and peaceful. There is admiration, tenderness, gratitude.

My character now feels like that of a child filled with wonder and possibility.

Oh, I am dreamy at times. I am learning to pray.

This Season

During this season of Lent our conversion can never be to far from our minds. Our sins are in our minds. We ask God for pity, mercy. This is the season of the little critics reminding us of original sin, reminding us that we are made of dust, reminding us of our weaknesses. The little critics reside somewhere within us and encourage us to examine our conscience.

Lent asks us to take a moment and examine our lives, to examine our reality. We live in an era of computer generated images. It is often difficult separating truth from fiction. This liturgical season helps us learn how to express our faith and love in God, to encourage faith and love in God to others, to encounter God.

Distractions and diversions attack us all the type. We must learn how to avoid them. This season provides a way for us to learn about goodness.

We must remember Christ in the desert; remember that our lives contain tests, moral, ethical, spiritual.

As Christians, our conversion teaches us the necessity and relevance of having God in our lives, guiding us, teaching us to do good. Our conversion teaches us to always have reverence for God. This reverence will help us move closer to God.

You do learn how to love by experiencing your failure in love. You do learn how to pray by being silent, by listening, by finally saying “Father,” the emotion in your heart shall guide you to God.

Secular forces encourage us to approach each day feeling a little vague, tentative, inconclusive. Uncertainty waits for us in the secular world. Beauty and serenity can be created with all types of algorithms and generated by super computers. Our senses might be seduced by the superficial appearances.

This season asks us to look beneath superficial, to uncover the truth.

I have enjoyed the homilies that I have heard during this season. In each there has been something which has made me question myself, my status quo.

My life does contain some failures, but also moments of fine humility, charity, and hope. My conversion is leading me in the right direction. I am working to follow. First I want to learn humility and then live it daily from the moment when I wake up till I go to sleep. For once I learn humility then that practice will help me with charity and obedience.

Each day I do examine my moral and physical state; I acknowledge that it is impossible to conquer sin but I can learn how to avoid it.

True life begins with love, begins with prayer; when our hopes and prayers are for the well-being and peace of everyone, unconditionally, freely then we are following in the footsteps of Christ.

Above all I want my life to reflect and inspire a love in Jesus Christ that will never perish.

I frequently think about God, helping others. I am developing a spiritual point of view which is in contrast to my intellectual point of view. The atmosphere of Lent creates compassion within me, moving and changing my thoughts and actions. My confidence in God grows when I pray, when I am quiet in front of the Blessed Sacrament, when I hear the Eucharist prayers.

Lent inspires a perpetually recurring hope for love, for goodness in myself, in others.

Being

I enjoyed the languor of this Sunday morning as I prepared for Mass. How peaceful this day began. I remained in bed trying to make sense of a dream. Then, I tried to formulate an answer to a question about how I feel about life after baptism, how I feel about the Church after one year. The question had been asked halfway through a telephone conversation.

When I reached for an answer, initially, I immediately responded with a short list of current actions and deeds. My response was a few sentences and then the conversation turned to something else. This morning, I paused and reflected on the emptiness of my response. I had created a mist of polite babble instead of shining a light directly onto my feelings.

The Church is very important to me. My Baptism on March 22, 2008 is my life's most cherished event. I had thought about it off and on for years. Actually, going through the RCIA process provided me with some very important answers about the essential, vulnerable me. The RCIA process, also, simultaneously, revived and nurtured a desire to do service for the Lord.

There is nothing unique about my conversion. I am pleased that my fervor is still growing. My heart is filled with hope and praise. Being baptized presented more responsibilities, more things and people to pray for and about. There is a greater need to practice social justice, to live simply.

I have been exposed to such goodness and compassion which encourages me to act similarly. Being Baptized is the best thing that has happened to me. I am learning to love, universally and unconditionally. That is a great thing.

I feel more youthful, more alert, more alive, more happy. There have been one or two moments of frustration but even that has led to a little more knowledge.

I like being Catholic.