Another conversion story...

Spent some time this morning reading the conversion story of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in this case from a generic and secularized Christianity to Catholicism. A good read and a story that is repeating over and over as well educated participants in all the best of secular culture leave that world for historic Christianity.

The reasons, of course, vary but the general thrust seems to be the same. At its heart a secular life is counter human, meaningless, and an endless journey of personal indulgences that destory the very soul they claim to liberate. Freed from history and its wisdom there is only spiritual, intellectual, and social chaos and those who embrace this liberated life find that for society, and their own lives, to work there must be either a veneer of the old ways to provide cohesion or an increasingly rigorous set of authoritarian principles designed, ironically, to enforce this relativism on those whose very instincts detect its emptiness.

Enter the Church as She was meant to be, a counter movement to the brokenness of the world, and radically transforming what we consider to be normal. And yet in Her life is to be found a kind of wholeness, humanity, and life that is deep and true and meaningful. Within Her people become truly alive, many for the first time, and only to the extent the Church embraces the values she was meant to confront does it become a partaker of their death. Wise people willing to ask questions and desperate people who have bought everything, slept with everyone, embraced each fad, and in doing so come to the end of themselves discover the value of this Faith, this life, and this hope.

And perhaps the greatest irony of all is that it takes incredible faith to live a life disconnected from something transcendent, where all is as you interpret it, and where your thoughts, your emotions, your will, and this moment is all there is. To do so you must ignore a lifetime of evidence, the pain of the world around you, and the screaming emptiness inside in the hope that just one more freedom, one more liberation, one more technique, or one more philosophy will finally make everything right. Certainly more faith then it takes to believe in Jesus and be well.