The Good Example: A Convert's Perspective on Evangelization By JAMES BEMIS While I've always enjoyed hearing conversion stories, I've never endeavored before to tell mine. Perhaps that's because it is not as sudden and dramatic as St. Paul being knocked off a horse, as strange and beautiful as St. Augustine taking and reading a Bible, or as full of modern Sturm und Drang as St. Michael and Satan fighting it out over Oscar Wilde's soul on the great writer's deathbed. No, my conversion resulted from that oldest, subtlest - but most effective - form of witness: the Good Example. My wife is a "cradle Catholic" and one of those lucky souls who has never entertained a doubt about whether the Catholic faith is true. She lives her life completely indifferent to the seductive trivialities of our age. Her knowledge, insights and perspectives - all her instincts about people and things - are wholly (no pun intended) Catholic, the natural result of a thorough grounding in the Faith. When I started dating Lynn seriously, we were both college graduates. Raised Episcopalian, I had lapsed into a fashionable nihilism. (Can there be such a thing as a "lapsed Episcopalian"?) During our courtship, her outlook was often perplexing to me - a young, callow know-it-all, who found later he knew nothing at all - because it was so markedly different from that of others around me. She didn't believe abortion should be legal, as the rest of us did. She didn't believe in divorce, as the rest of us did. She did believe people had free will, something the rest of us didn't. For her, these weren't issues, but truths to be recognized. Little did I know the time would come when I would believe these truths too - and plenty of others that in my many years of "education" had never been brought to my attention, much less debated. However much we argued about them, though, it was utterly refreshing to find somebody who knew where they stood and why they believed in something. (One other thing: I noticed her chums from Catholic school days all believed the same things. Those were the days!) Conversely, my college friends were part of the herd's Cause-Of-The-Month Club: Native American oppression, children's reproductive rights, whether trees should have standing in court, etc. We held the standard faddish views on feminism, socialism, racism, pacifism, liberty, equality and fraternity - you get the idea. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, our opinions were not propagated by reason, but caught by contagion. Needless to say, our "truths" changed rather frequently. In getting to know Lynn's family, it was obvious where her faith was formed. The first thing seen when entering her parent's home is a picture of Our Lord and a statue of Our Lady. There is no question: This is a Catholic home. As her mother told me when I asked for Lynn's hand, "You know, my daughter lives, eats and breathes her religion." I knew she was speaking for herself as well. Although I was - as they say - unchurched at the time, I happily agreed to be married in the Church and raise our children as Catholics, believing it would be "good for the kids until they can make up their own minds." It was not something for me, of course, but helpful for others. How superficial that all seems now! It was only in our married life, though, that I observed the faith in daily action. Lynn's virtues revealed themselves not only in words, but also in deeds. Month after month on Sunday mornings, when I was too tired or hung over to do anything but watch football or other sports on TV, she got up and went to Mass alone. Only now, after years of going to Church together, has it dawned on me how lonely that must have been. To this day, whenever I see a wife at church by herself, I envision a husband alone, lying on the couch watching a game with an aching head, and I wince. When life's inevitable storms rocked the waves, Lynn sailed through them like an ocean liner with perfect ballast. I could see she possessed a calmness, peace and serenity whose source I couldn't quite put my finger on. I admired it, though, and knew I wanted it for myself. But my own day of recognition of that source was not far off. In 1982, a confluence of events hit nearly simultaneously. First, a beloved boss dropped dead of a heart attack only hours after I had seen him. Then, my father-in-law underwent an open-heart, triple by-pass operation. Finally, my first child, Marisa, was born. Suddenly, I was forced to ask myself some pretty serious questions about life generally and - gasp - my own life in particular. At the same time, I returned to reading one of my old favorites, the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I had loved Solzhenitsyn for years (his Gulag Archipelago is, in my view, the greatest book of the twentieth century) but now his books took on new importance and urgency. Having fallen overboard and bobbing in a sea of relativism, Solzhenitsyn provided me a lifeline to the truth. His memoir, The Oak and the Calf, hit me like a heavyweight's roundhouse. Here was a real man: honest, truthful, courageous, living as if his existence mattered. This was a serious person who, at great personal risk, was doing something significant. And what important work occupied my days? Partying with the boys, playing basketball and watching Sunday football on TV with a headache. I had a hole in my soul but didn't know how to fill it. My friends were no help - they were as muddleheaded as me. We scurried around with no more sense of purpose than atoms in Brownian motion. Only one person I knew seemed to have answers to the unanswerable. So, struggling to reevaluate what life was about, I again noticed my Good Example. Lynn was able to cope with these grave matters without collapsing or falling into a life crisis, like me. In the face of trial, she was unruffled as a swan on a lake. She was serious about life without losing a sense of proportion, trusting in God-knows-who. Hmmm…That must be it: God. I suddenly recognized the Thing giving my wife courage, strength and composure. Her religion held the key to unlocking the door between the dark night of the outside world and the warm home and hearth that lies inside the Church. It took a long time before I realized the full implications of this, but even in the dim vision clouded by my wounded, confused state, I still could make out the difference between chaos and order. It was time to make the leap. After a somewhat startling year-long RCIA process (classes consisted mainly of watching movies and talking with neophyte classmates, with only a smidgen of doctrine thrown in - this is the Los Angeles archdiocese, after all), I was received into the Church on April 2, 1983. Was there ever a rawer recruit in the Army of God? I had no real understanding of Original Sin, Transubstantiation, Confession, the Church's Teaching Authority, the communion of saints, and most other Catholic doctrine. While officially a member of the Catholic Church, I was unofficially agnostic about a host of "issues" about which I, of course, was right and the Church was wrong: contraception, divorce, women priests, even abortion. But I figured that sooner or later the Church would catch up: Everyone else had! (Here is the absurd, presumptuous pride of the modern mind at work: Having been Catholic for less than a week, I was convinced I found contradictions in the Church's philosophy that Aquinas, Augustine, Newman and Pope John Paul II all missed.) Fortunately, my entry into the Church was only the beginning of my conversion, not the ending. It wasn't until a dear friend reproached me about supporting ordination of women priests ("Why?" he said. "Because there's a shortage of priests," I replied. "That's the wrong reason!" he thundered), was I humbled enough to try determining why the Church taught this seemingly discriminatory doctrine. After researching, it became clear that on this "issue," at least, the Church was right and I was wrong! Well, if this was true, what about my differences with the Church on abortion? Again, I prayed and studied and, lo! The Church was correct again. Then, contraception, divorce, Transubstantiation, Redemptive Suffering - right down the line, she was correct on all of them! Even a stubborn fellow like me could see a pattern developing here: On every single teaching I researched, the Church was right and the world (that is, I) was wrong. Maybe there was something to this old Teaching Authority business after all. Roughly the same time, someone whose name I can't remember recommended G. K. Chesterton to me. Oh thank you whoever you are! How ungrateful not to remember the person who gave me such a gift - I can never express my gratitude to them personally! Chesterton opened my eyes to the wild romance of orthodoxy, to the staggering beauty of the Church, to the greatness of her saints, the loveliness of her rituals, the soundness of her doctrine, and pointed out the uproarious cosmic laughter erupting at mankind's perpetual follies. What's more, Chesterton (as will any great author) led me to other brilliant writers that had a formative influence: Belloc, Knox, Newman, Waugh, Lewis and more. At a time when the Church sadly lacks the skill and the will to defend herself from her enemies, it was invigorating as an ocean plunge to read the works of these great apologists. With their help, I was gradually rising from the perpetual childishness and irresponsibility the world enforces, moving from obligatory ignorance to a first glimpse at reality. I began realizing what a boundless treasury of truth and wonder the Church possessed. It was like opening a treasure chest and discovering a king's bounty of rich, priceless gems, jewelry and objects d'arte. Mentally, I would pick up and examine some exotic item from the Church's storehouse - like her doctrine on absolution or the rites of exorcism - and marvel at its distinctiveness and beauty, so different from the gray drabness of the everyday world. In the midst of my reading, I would call out to my wife, "Honey, did you know the Church teaches this! Isn't that magnificent?" Over time, through prayer and study, I fell deeply and intensely in love with the Catholic Church, this miserable world's last stronghold of love, honor and glory. Now, none of today's usual obsessions - politics, sports, money - interests me much except as they relate to the Bride of Christ. Looking back, my entire conversion experience has been a long tug homeward toward the Church's Sacred Tradition: toward Her teachings elaborated in Papal Encyclicals; toward working for the Social Reign of Jesus Christ; toward an understanding of the Faith and a love of the Blessed Mother through the meditations of the Rosary; and, most importantly, toward an awed gratitude for the magnificence of her liturgy, a rite that reaches its pinnacle in the Traditional Latin Mass. One other lesson is apparent here: We should never underestimate the importance of our setting a good example. By living our faith with continuous courage and fidelity, we witness to the Good News of Christ. We never know who, by our model, may see something he wants to emulate or hears a word or phrase that sticks in his mind, like a mustard seed that blossoms later into something huge. In his Confessions, St. Augustine writes how impressed he was by St. Ambrose's Christian kindliness and charity and the significance that had on his conversion. If Ambrose's exemplar provided such a profound influence on a hardened sinner like Augustine, imagine the impact it can have on littler souls and lesser transgressors. My wife often observes that by bringing to her attention things about the Church she took for granted, I've helped make her a better Catholic. I accept these kind words with a wry smile. It is, as they say, the least I can do. After all, while I may have provided her this small gift, she has given me an infinitely greater one: For had it not been for her good example, I would not be a Catholic at all.