On How To Change the World

One soul at a time--starting with yourself.  And, actually, if that's as far as you go in your lifetimes, it's almost certain that's not as far as you will have gone. In other words--other people converting is between them and God.  You are responsible for your own soul. God may use you to help others, but he wants you (in this one instance) to be concerned about you first--which means putting him first:

The idea is that “the world”—the cold godless culture of death—is in sore need of conversion. This may be true; no doubt it is true. But there is little point, or honesty, in converting the world before I convert myself. Whether I’m a cradle Catholic, a convert, or a non-Catholic in discernment, what I have to do is to come myself to a conversion.

Conversion to me means turning myself completely and radically toward God, toward Jesus Christ. If I am a layperson, a husband and father, as I am, this does not mean turning away from my life commitments, from my vow of marriage, from my responsibility to provide for my family; it means to turn and open my heart continually, repeatedly, insistently to the love of God and to the presence of his Son, Jesus Christ, in my life. And to let that presence shine into my marriage, my family, my life of work.

Every serious Catholic must have a friend like my friend “Mike,” a born-Catholic guy who has turned himself away from the Church and therefore from the presence of Christ. Armed with “good reasons,” ready to take aim at every slightest failing of the Church, Mike has closed a door in his mind and will not give himself permission to open it again. What am I going to do with Mike?

My first impulse is to argue with him, to prove him wrong, to get Mike to come back, to convert. But to my continuing surprise I have found that my presence does not have the effect of, say,  St. John Vianney or Mother Teresa, and all of my frontal attacks on Mike gain nothing, except Mike’s resentment. Mike’s back, when up, is immovable.

And all the time I am assuming that there’s something wrong with Mike, that I must change Mike.

I must change myself.

I’m pretty sure that if I were St. John Vianney or Mother Teresa, Mike would melt. To be in the presence of either of these saintly people must have been like being in the company of Christ. In fact, that’s probably exactly what it was. How do you explain the conversion of much of the Mediterranean basin in the century after Christ’s death? A whole lot of souls on fire.

Why is my presence any different? Why am I lukewarm? Because I am seldom in Christ’s company. I seldom think of Him. I think of Mike, though, plenty, and how far he is from Christ.

At times like these, I find that nothing works for me better than reading the saints—turning to those men and women who turned themselves so wholly to Christ.

Christianity is, sometimes, remarkably paradoxical.  Or, as Chesterton put it: ‘Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction...For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore congenial to it.’