View
Anatomy of a Conversion
Paula Huston on Becoming a New Kind of Human Being
During Thanksgiving dinner at our house, eaten outside in the sharp, rain-washed, brilliant air you can only find in California on a perfect fall day, I had a conversation with someone I barely knew, a young man of thirty, a husband and father of two, handsome, out of work, very likely despairing but hiding it under a practiced if weary smile (years in the “hospitality industry,” as he put it). The only thing I knew about him prior to our talk was that his three-year-old son and baby daughter had just been baptized into the Roman Catholic Church—this, despite his not being Catholic or even able to say whether he was a believer.
I told him I found that both admirable and puzzling. Why had he agreed to do it? He admitted he never would have thought of it on his own—he’d been raised like most of his generation, without religion—but he himself had at least been baptized as an infant and it seemed important for him not to stand in the way of his wife’s desire that their children should be, too. “But the whole thing was nice,” he assured me, still sounding surprised though the event had taken place some days ago. “Really nice. I’m glad I was there.”
Nice, perhaps, but getting to this point could not have been easy for him. When he and his then-girlfriend began living together, she was far from the faith in which she’d grown up. But then they had married, had their son and daughter, and somewhere in the midst of becoming responsible for the formation of two young human beings, she’d rediscovered her Catholic roots. Now she went to Mass each Sunday and oftener if she could, taking their little son with her while he stayed home with the baby.
I asked him if that was hard, having her so dramatically embrace this religion he knew almost nothing about. He admitted it was a bit scary at first—he wasn’t sure what it all meant, and, more importantly, what it would mean for the two of them as a couple—but slowly he began to realize that what she had found was vastly superior to anything else on offer, at least anything he’d ever experienced. It lent meaning to her life, the kind of meaning he’d almost but not quite written off as illusory.
He described the endemic rootlessness of the hospitality-industry culture. It’s so easy, he told me, to let your time slip by you. To think that drifting means you’re free. And then one day you wake up and you’re fifty and still waiting tables. No family, even if you used to want one. Nothing to look forward to except the next paycheck. So maybe you buy a new car. Or maybe you move to a new city. Maybe that’ll help it all make sense.
For a moment we sat staring into the abyss together. Then he sighed, raking back his hair. “That could have been me. I was so lucky.”
I nodded. It was true.
He gave me a grave, determined look. “So now that this has happened, I don’t want to be left out. I don’t want to be the dad who never goes to church with his kids. I need to learn about this stuff.”
A Crisis
When I first read Thomas Merton’s spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, I hadn’t pondered the question of meaning since my early teens. And not because I’d been drifting, either. Instead, I’d been busy getting married, having kids, getting a divorce, getting remarried, getting my degree, getting a job, getting a real career going at last. Now I was forty and, contrary to all my expectations—after all, look at how hard I’d worked to find happiness—I was suffering from a case of self-hatred so severe I could hardly look at myself in the mirror. More frightening even than this was the sense of futility that was dogging my days. What did it mean, all this effort and struggle? What was the point? And then one night I read Merton’s account of the breakdown he went through while still in college:
Paula Huston is the author of two novels, short fiction, and seven works of spiritual non-fiction, her most recent title being One Ordinary Sunday: A Meditation on the Mystery of the Mass (Ave Maria). She is also an NEA Fellow in Creative Writing, the president of the Chrysostom Society, and a Camaldolese Benedictine oblate.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Subscribe (Print + Online) 
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Subscribe (Online Only) 
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on conversion from the online archives
more from the online archives
32.1—January/February 2019
Divine Love & the Love of Man & Woman Surpass Mere Consent by Anthony Esolen
29.3—May/June 2016
A Deathbed Reflection on Catholic Social Teaching & Our Future Prospects by Karl D. Stephan
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
Support Touchstone
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
