Re-Reading “Literary Converts”

Joseph Pearce’s collection of conversion stories, “Literary Converts,” is not only an inspirational read but also a commentary on the intellectual, spiritual, and literary struggles of the last century, which should inform and enlighten the encroaching darkness of our own times.

More than once an enthusiastic religious woman has glided up to me after a speaking engagement and cooed, “Ooh, Faaather. Have you got a book about your conversion story? I would love to read it!”

I have always been flattered, but joked, “I haven’t written it because too many of the guilty are still living.” Many a truth is spoken in jest, and I have indeed pulled back from writing my autobiography because if I tell the tale, I would want to tell it saints and sinners, warts and all. There are quite a few warts, and most of them are still living, and there is one sinner who is still living about whom I hesitate most to spill the beans… and that is myself.

Should an autobiography be a groveling public confession? Who would write such a book? A proud person would not because he does not want to be embarrassed, and a humble person would not because he would not think his story worth telling. Also, I shudder to think of revealing my past not only because it is embarrassing, but also because I am essentially a private person. I am an introvert, and have always been expert in donning a mask, playing a role, and assuming a voice. In high school I used to mimic all the teachers to the great amusement of my peers, and I’ve done my share of acting and directing plays.

The more cynical of my friends and family wonder whether being a Catholic priest has been my ultimate starring role, and it is something I often wonder about myself. All that to say that I am not an instantly open and public person. Writing an autobiography is too much like those nightmares you had as a kid when you dreamed you were at school wearing nothing but your underpants.

Another reason I have pulled back from writing my life story is that I’ve always thought it an act of amazing hubris to imagine that someone wants to plop down twenty bucks of his hard-earned money to read a book by a fellow who wants to talk about himself the whole time. Not only do I dislike the idea of such an enterprise because it’s boastful, but also because it is boring.

I did try once to write the story, but gave up after three chapters because it was so boring, pompous, pious, and overbearing that after re-reading it, I had one of those expressions on my face that you have when you realize you have just stepped in a pile of dog mess.

It was that bad. Really.

It was tiresome because quite honestly, my story is not that dramatic. I’ve always been a Christian and have usually been God’s clean-cut, middle-class, good little boy. Of course I sinned, but my sins were tepid and timid. The oats I sowed were tame, not wild. I did not wallow in depravity. I was not sinking deep in sin far from the peaceful shore. I did not dabble in witchcraft, sacrifice chickens on the altar of Baphomet, or even channel spirit beings from the planet Xophar. I was never drunk in the gutter and have never been a drug addict or a sick pervert addicted to filth. Nor have I been a great hero who turned to God. I never led a platoon through the mud and blood of Vietnam where I saw an angel, and I didn’t escape from the Gulag Archipelago with nothing but my Bible, a threadbare jacket, a tin cup, and a pair of clogs. I really don’t have a dramatic conversion story like that to tell.

Finally, I did not wish to tell my conversion story because to be perfectly honest, there are some pretty good ones out there, and I didn’t see how I could top them. Furthermore, they are such cracking good stories that I’d have to exaggerate to spice up the tale. It’s just not in me to relate breathlessly how I never did believe in the real presence until one day I sneaked into the back of a Catholic Mass and like Jake Elwood saw the light. I never kissed Elvis Presley before becoming a nun. I wasn’t a New York intellectual who gave it all up and ran off to join the Trappists before I joined the Buddhists, and I was never the millionaire owner of my own dot.com before hitting the bottle, hitting the rocks, and finding Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

However, it seems that in other ways I have had quite an adventurous life, and if I have learned anything, it is that God is real and he is involved in our lives whether we like it or not. The curious twists of providence in my own life have proven God to be not so much the Almighty Monarch enthroned in heavenly splendor as much as a whimsical Grandfather who devises complicated puzzles and curious practical jokes. It seems to me that his providence is never what we expect, and like a smooth practitioner of prestidigitation, while we are watching his left hand, he pulls off the trick with his right.

Despite these reservations, the job is done, and the book is called There and Back Again. My good friend Joseph Pearce did me the honor of reading the manuscript, and the folks at Ignatius Press think it is worth publishing, so it will fall into the hands of whoever is looking for a cure to insomnia sometime next year.

Reflecting on my own path to Rome has been helped in an extraordinary way by re-reading other conversion stories. A book from this genre which deserves to be a classic is Joseph’s own best book, Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief. First published in 1999 and the end of the century, Joseph begins at the end of the previous century with Oscar Wilde, Belloc, Baring, and Chesterton and chronicles the extraordinary flowering of Catholicism among the English literati. All the big names are there: Eliot, Waugh, Knox, Sitwell and Sassoon, Muggeridge and Greene, but adorning the big stars are a constellation of lesser-known names who, in their own way, contributed to the Catholic literary revival. There was a flood of conversions in the first half of the century, and Joseph sifts through them and explains the underlying currents and causes.

The brilliance of Joseph’s book is that it not only serves as a collection of inspirational conversion stories, but as the century unfolds, we also see how the lives and works of these men and women shed light on the decay of Western culture. Time and again as these intelligent young men and women emerge, soiled and seared from the Waste Land of the early twentieth century, we see with them the futility and sterility of their world and share their longing for a rock on which to stand in a world that is shifting like quicksand.

Joseph thus uses the lives of the literary converts to illuminate the vapidity of the culture in which they live and the depth and beauty of truth they find in a return to Christianity. One of the most remarkable stories in his collection, and the one that could stand as a symbol for them all, is that of Evelyn Waugh.

In boyhood he was drawn to the solemnity and beauty of Catholic worship, but it was at the Anglo-Catholic boarding school that he lost his faith. Sucked into the decadence of the roaring twenties, he churned out a few flippant novels satirizing the vapid bimbos and idiots who dominated the scene. Then when his own ill-advised youthful marriage ended when his wife ran off with one of those meatheads, Waugh reached the end of his wits. Friends threw him a life line, and eventually he realized that the future of Western civilization (as well as his own future) was bleak without the Catholic faith.

Defending his decision to become Catholic, Waugh wrote,

It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on the one side, and Protestantism on the other, but between Christianity and chaos…. Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that western culture has stood for. Civilization—and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe—has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state…. It is no longer possible… to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests.

In Literary Converts, Joseph Pearce picks up this theme and runs with it across the finish line, making this collection of conversion stories much more than an inspirational read. Instead, the anthology is a commentary on the intellectual, spiritual, and literary struggles of the last century, which should inform and enlighten the encroaching darkness of our own times.

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