Is Conversion Still Possible?

We live in unique times, or so we hear. Technocrats would have us believe that the effusion of data, screens, and information bring the "human community"—a bit of Cold War gibberish spoken by those tomfools on 1st Avenue—to the boundary of new possibilities. Reactionaries, not unreasonably, read our times as exceptionally corrupt, replete with normative acceptance of sexual perversion, a decline in any sort of cultural morals other than students' caterwauling, the effacement of the family as a social structure, and a general message that one's opinions become more or less important based on one's demographic features. The age post-dates Christianity, neither having the decency to kill us, as the Romans did, or to listen to us and convert, as the Romans did.

Our own Christians wear dour faces, unable to laugh at the absurdity of our age and often protective of fading institutional aspects of churches (attendance, rates of contraception, views on specific political issues). One would think that a true inner-conversion to the spiritual life must be implausible in our age, but is it really?

The Saint Paul may have been the proto-convert, but Saint Augustine remains the archetype for those who are not Pharasaical Jews blessed with a vision of Christ. Augustine converted through years of struggle, dabbling in the Manichean religion, brothels, fathering a child with a mystery woman, and holding a very reputable job as the White House Press Secretary for the fourth century. We know he prayed, "God make me good, but not yet." Do we ever ask why?

Augustine liked his pleasures, that is why. Read no other reason into it, Augustine grew very complacent in the world in which he lived and weaved for himself. This struggle persists in our day, but also visited itself upon other more complacently Christian times (late antiquity, the Renaissance, the late Baroque age, the post-War West). Compared to those days, we live in an era of unprecedented ease, even those among us who live with a modest car and house, paying bills paycheck to paycheck, do not worry that we are one ailment away from death or one bankruptcy away from a life in a debtors' prison. Alone, modern comforts hardly constitute a Siren's call away from God, but they do certainly dull our desire to go any deeper in our zeal for Christ and the Church.

No one yelled Tolle, lege in my ear and I am, perhaps, worse off for it. Our remaining option is often presented as an opportunity to be "counter-cultural." Is there anything counter-cultural about having six children? Culture more likely thinks it a statement of madness than a statement of virtue, but we should have large families regardless. In fact, we do these things not to give effrontery to our world, but out of a higher dedication. Indeed, the great saints, like Bernardino of Sienna (observed today) or Francis, were more shocking for how different they were than for how "counter-cultural" they seemed.

We are left with no choice but to embrace a higher vision than that which we are permitted in this day. The real Roman Mass seems like a fitting place to start.