Conversion

I am witnessing the miracle of spiritual conversion in some who are close to me and pondering again what that is about. I am thinking the most powerful miracle of new faith is the liberation from the prison of yourself. It takes hardship and difficulty, bumping up against your own limits, to bring you to the point where you are willing to call on the higher power because what else is there to do? And then you discover the infinite resources of Spirit.

I was raised in a strong religious tradition and never left it,  so I don’t often think about my own turning points—there have been a number; multiple conversions may happen throughout a lifetime.

When I was in college, faith seemed irrelevant on a personal level but interesting on an intellectual level. In my 20s it was background music—a frame for my years teaching as a Mennonite volunteer in Japan, my choice of husband, and our years teaching as volunteers again in Zaire.

I could not bring myself to proselytize in Japan, even to invite people to church. I didn’t see what I—or the church--had to offer to the smart, grounded friends I made there. The needier ones, the followers, were already in the church. In Zaire we were not connected closely to any church and were comfortable doing the Lord’s work in an entirely secular way, as if we were with the Peace Corps rather than the Mennonites.

It wasn’t until I was a stay-at-home mom of two young children, living in Iowa, overworked and lonely, that I experience my first real spiritual awakening. I remember the desperation of young motherhood. One day my landlady, who lived in the other half of the townhouse we rented from her, came into my kitchen and began lecturing me on the state of my floors and how to properly care for a stainless steel sink. After that I felt her critical eye on my housekeeping and child-rearing standards and the situation became unbearable. We got out as quickly as we could. We bought our first house as an escape. We didn’t even have the money for the $2,500 down payment, which we borrowed from one set of parents, I’m not sure which, or if we ever paid them back.

A friend who had done yoga for many years offered to pass on what she knew—there was no yoga studio in this small Iowa town in the 1970s. Yoga became my door into personal spirituality, my discovery that faith could be personal, sustaining, not just an intellectual exercise of assent. Yoga woke up my body and revealed the pain, the blockages. Tears and joy began to flow in equal measure. I learned that spirituality was not only, or not even mainly, or not even at all, about belief but about experience. Belief without experience was a sounding gong, a tinkling cymbal. I could actually experience the presence and power of Spirit.

Still, the church was important. It was not only about individual experience. Without the framework of a religious tradition I believe my spiritual awakening could have led me to greater individualism, back into the prison of self. Thank God for the church, a constant reminder that we are not alone, we are not on our own, it is not all up to us, and we can’t figure everything out for ourselves. It is not all up to them, either—our fellow believers, the leaders, the authorities. There is the constant conversation of Divine and human, the invitation to attention, surrender, conversion.