Conversion: a heart-changing experience

By Patricia Kasten
Compass Associate Editor

Have you met Jesus?

Sounds like a question from someone knocking on your door, doesn't it?

Yet this week we celebrate one example of just that - the Conversion of St. Paul on Jan. 26. (Pope Benedict XVI has named 2008-09 as a special Pauline year of events marking the anniversary of the saint's birth.)

This January feast celebrates the time when the great Apostle to the Gentiles and author of so many of the epistles in the New Testament first met Jesus - and was changed.

Paul was a Jew of the strictest training, a Pharisee who claimed to be a student of one of the greatest Jewish doctors of the Law, Gamaliel.

Paul, or Saul as he was named at birth, was an ardent persecutor of the followers of Christ. So ardent was he that he, by his own admission, stood by in assent as the first Christian martyr, Stephen, was stoned. And this event only seems to have enflamed Saul even more against Christians. Acts of the Apostles describes him as "breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord" (2:1).

This man became one of Christianity's most famous converts.

Conversion comes from the Latin convertere, which means "to turn around." In modern church teaching, we often call this a change of heart, because our hearts - like Paul's later - become filled with love for the Lord. This idea of "conversion" goes back further than Roman times and can be found in Hebrew and Greek words in the Old and New Testaments.

To the ancient Israelites, the word shub meant repentance, a turning away from injustice and sin in order to return to God. Many prophets called upon Israel to return to God. One example is in the upcoming first reading for Ash Wednesday (Feb. 6): "Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, weeping and mourning. Rend your hearts and not your garments and return to the Lord" (Jl 2:12-13).

In the New Testament, the Greek word for returning to God is metanoia. Yet, to early Christians, metanoia meant a bit more than its literal translation of "to change thinking." Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, a former Greek teacher, explains metanoia as "a change of mind and heart, altering one's mindset toward whole new ways of thinking and acting."

We see this metanoia vividly in Paul. While still breathing fury on the road to Damascus, he is knocked to the ground by a flash of light. (Art often depicts him as thrown from his horse, but no horse appears in the Bible.) Blinded, he hears the Lord asking, "why do you persecute me?"

In that moment, Paul met Jesus and learned the entire Gospel message: "the Gospel preached by me is not of human origin. ... it came (to me) through a revelation of Jesus Christ" (Gal 1:11). From then on - his sight was restored after his baptism by Ananias - Saul (who took the Greco-Roman version of his name, Paul, to preach to non-Jews) became an ardent follower of Jesus.

While conversion can be viewed as a single moment in life - as was Paul's - most theologians today would call conversion a process. James Walter of Loyola University says, "(C)onversion is the gradual, if not arduous, turning away and withdrawal from sin and selfishness and the turning towards God, who is the source of all goodness."

In looking at conversion as a way of changing our hearts and returning to God, we see three main parts to this process. Fr. Richard McBrien defines these as a call to:

• repentance and belief,
  
  
• a change of mind and of heart, and
  
  
• a new way of life - that of discipleship.

Jesus' public ministry offered the same call, which we see from the first words of the earliest Gospel, when we hear Jesus proclaim, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the Gospel" (Mk 1:15).

While we have a lot of work - as Paul did for the rest of his life - in order to live the Gospel message and the process of conversion, we alone cannot bring this about; God can, and will. The Catechism says that "God must give man a new heart. Conversion is first of all a work of the grace of God who makes our hearts return to him ... God gives us the strength to begin anew" (no. 1432).

Paul himself revealed this lesson in his letter to the Philippians: "I can do all things in him who strengthens me" (4:13).

Paul's was a life of authentic conversion. He experienced a moment that led to a lifetime of living in, and for, Christ. That lesson of conversion is one that we should always be seeking and the upcoming Lenten season gives us a special time to focus on that.

(Sources: Catechism of the Catholic Church; Catholicism; Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Catholic History; the New Dictionary of Theology; Modern Catholic Encyclopedia; The Harper Collins Encyclopedia; and Lenten Lunches: Reflections on the Weekday Readings for Lent and Easter Week.)