I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the degree of competition that permeates social dialogue. When two people disagree about something, it seems like all anyone cares about is winning a debate by being louder or funnier or cleverer or meaner than the other person. There’s no foundation of wonder or curiosity, no desire for both sides of an argument to learn and grow by virtue of their interaction. If disagreements can only be resolved through one person changing the other’s mind by besting them in a matching of wits, then there is no truth, only a winner.
Changing minds is not the same as changing hearts. Hearts are often changed in nearly imperceptible increments, and these moments are thresholds of conversion.
Conversion is a weighty word. It’s often used to describe monumental changes of creed or practice, marked by extravagant ritual celebrations. But there’s another, much more mundane kind of conversion, and that’s the kind I’m interested in.
In my experiences as a student, as a campus minister, as a teacher, and as a chaplain, I’ve come to recognize that the “virtue” that is perhaps most valued by modernity is certainty. I often felt there was no room in the life of a talented young person for doubt: “figure out what you believe about the world, and then cling to it, because there’s nothing worse than not knowing.” I’m sure than nobody ever explicitly told me this, but it was palpable in every area of my life. No matter what realm of life—faith, relationships, careers, athletics, you name it—I’m consistently encouraged to form my worldview based on absolute certainty… which in this case is a half-step from rigidity.
The problem with such firmly held convictions is this: what happens when you come across something that doesn’t fit into them? When certainty is valued above all else, what happens to wonder? What happens when you encounter mystery?
This question seems to have been on Jesus’ mind on that mountain in Galilee, which we hear about in the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of Matthew’s Gospel. When Jesus tells his disciples to love their enemies, I think it’s a mistake to interpret that as a command to be nice to mean people. Jesus was many things—a pushover is not one of them.
It’s easy to hear the word “enemy” and imagine some sinister villain plotting our demise.1 But if all human beings are created in the Image of God, and are therefore intrinsically worthy of love, then a perfect Christian has no villainous enemies. This is especially hard to wrap my mind around, and proof that I am certainly nowhere near perfect. The human being that I may be tempted to call “enemy” is, no matter what, not my enemy, but my neighbor.
All the same, I can’t imagine that Christ used the word “enemy” flippantly. Might I suggest a different perspective about all this “enemy” business: Christ commands us to respond with love when our convictions are challenged. The moment of encounter with someone whose way of being fundamentally disagrees with my own is a moment of opportunity—but all too often, we don’t choose Jesus’ third way. We ignore this new information, pretending it doesn’t exist so I can go on living the way I did before. We attack this new information with force, belligerently insisting that either the source or the information itself is fake, until everyone is so tired that nobody will fault us for continuing to live as if it’s fake, and all are forced to live in my own rigid and unchanging concept of reality.
Jesus’ third way, the way of love, is a way of mutual conversion. It is neither fight nor flight, but engagement: I am called to encounter that which is true but does not readily resonate with my way of understanding myself and the world around me, and insist above all else upon communion with it. It is in these sorts of encounters that we are faced with a maddeningly simple problem: either this new information is false, or my convictions must evolve to incorporate it.
This is getting a little too abstract even for me, so if you’ve managed to slog through this far, let me offer an example to make it a bit more concrete. Before coming to Ireland, one of the things I firmly believed was that the “spiritual but not religious” movement was a huge problem for Christianity; people who thought they could have a relationship with God outside of the community and rituals of the visible Church had to be both wrong and lazy. Moreover, many of these “nones” were actually, according to a sociological study I had read in college, “moral therapeutic deists”2 who didn’t even know God at all, and had built a fake system of spirituality to insulate themselves from fear and uncertainty.
The vast majority of the high school students I met while teaching in Utah reinforced this way of thinking. Many of those who didn’t buy into “the whole religion thing” also happened to be lazy students, and many more talked about God as someone who wanted them to be happy and to be a good person and would be there to help when times were tough. In retrospect, I experienced confirmation bias: faith that was authentically adolescent happened to also be somewhat superficial and emotional.
But then I moved to Ireland and began working with college students, who were wrestling with many of the same problems as my high school students, but with a little bit more maturity. One student, in particular, has consistently challenged me in my way of thinking. She has had a largely negative experience of church and of family, and has therefore left traditional understandings of church and family behind in search of something better, truer, and more beautiful. She is deeply passionate about social justice, and she has a profound theological curiosity and a vibrant spiritual imagination. She’s spiritual, and not religious, but she doesn’t fit into my previously held convictions about that kind of person. Encountering her has presented me with a threshold of conversion: either I have to poke holes in her way of being until it fits into my world, or my understanding world has to change to include her.
Too often, I witness people cling to their way of being at the expense of human relationship. When you choose your own fundamental certainty over engagement with another, you choose yourself over and against them, which is destructive to human community and counter to the nature of faith.
Approaching situations like these in search of mutual conversion doesn’t mean I allow myself to be steamrolled, nor does it mean passing like ships in the night out of a misguided desire to allow each person to “do whatever makes them happy.” It means having an authentic encounter with other as other, which brings all parties deeper into relationship with goodness, truth, and beauty, and therefore with Christ. This probably sounds naive and idyllic, and that’s the point: my conviction that this is possible is rooted in hope, a belief that no person ever deserves to be left behind for any reason.
The Holy Spirit is moving in every human being, regardless of their nominal or operative religiosity. We all have a natural desire for God written on our restless hearts, and God is at work in us through an infinite number of small and boring opportunities for conversion that will bring us closer to union with Him. It’s our responsibility, as men and women with hope to bring to the world, to allow the Spirit that moves in us to make us an instrument of communion with God and with one another.
1 Editor's note: I definitely imagined this while reading Rob's post.↩
2 You can learn more about sociologist Christian Smith’s observations here.↩
