Sydney
23 June 2002
Home
Archive
Subscribe
Links
Contact
St Pio – newest saint
US calls in Australian archbishop
Order pays $3.6 million
Fund for ‘tragic cases’
Shame and sorrow for all in Church, says schools head
‘Humble, but delighted’
Church stands alone in war on poverty
Giving and receiving
Religious urge Govt to sign Kyoto treaty
Appointee ‘daunted’ but committed
New employment relations commission installed
Call to keep tough embryo laws
Editorial: In search of a better life
Letters: Back to the ‘bad old days’
Conversation: No platitudes – ‘all our teaching has to be real’ - Sybil Dickens, school principal
Reflections: ‘Welcome’ in a new faith family
Rosary peace plan spreads in schools
Students, teachers prepare for Youth Day pilgrimage
St Charbel’s students welcome bishop
Opinion: A role for entertainment and media in ‘new evangelisation’
A new beginning for Tampa refugees
Inspirations: Good hair day for young Maronites
Reflections: ‘Welcome’ in a new faith family
By Dr Barry Spurr
When I was reconfirmed and received into the Catholic Church earlier this year, people referred to my ‘conversion’ and I like to imagine myself, with due humility, as belonging to the long tradition, dating from the 19th Century, of Anglicans with literary backgrounds who have become Catholics.
The ideas of ‘conversion’ and being a ‘convert’, however, do not capture very accurately my own sense of this profound and joyous experience.
The words, of course, derive from the Latin for turning about or around. ‘Conversion’, also, in Evangelical Protestantism, usually refers to the life-changing embrace of Christianity after a non-Christian existence.
In my case, coming from a cradle Anglicanism which developed, in adolescence, into Anglo-Catholicism, my reception into the Church was the fulfilment of a decades-long process, rather than a Damascus-road turning-around or renunciation.
I do not sense that I have abandoned one belief system of doctrine and worship for another, but that I have arrived at the fullness of theological and liturgical life.
I remain grateful for the rich Anglo-Catholic traditions of sacramental practice, learned and literary preaching, beautiful music and reverent ceremonial in which my Christianity was nurtured. I had hoped, in the heady days of the Anglican and Roman Catholic International Commission, a generation ago, that reunion between our communions would soon be achieved.
The realisation now, that this will not happen – probably not even in my lifetime – was an important factor in my decision.
In addition to my ‘conversion’, people have spoken of my ongoing ‘journey’ of faith, now that I am a Catholic.
This is a familiar metaphor today, in spiritual life and in life at large. I think it is overused and has unfortunate implications.
T S Eliot, himself a convert to Anglo-Catholicism, once observed that everyone in the 20th Century seemed to be ‘on the move’. To sit still had become ‘contemptible.’ Yet the psalmist exhorts us: “Be still, and know that I am God.”
Certainly, we are always journeying towards a fuller and deeper understanding of the Godhead and the mystery of faith, which can never be fully comprehended in this world.
I think it is important to affirm, however, that there are also abiding certainties of belief and Christian teaching, and that the authority of the Scriptures and the Church’s tradition provide a completeness of assurance in which we should rejoice.
It is sometimes imagined today, often by older people with little ongoing contact with the young, that to claim neophytes for the faith and the Church it is necessary to present its teaching, liturgy and culture at large as constantly evolving, in a state of perpetual re-invention and adaptation to current ideas.
My experience of young adults, whom I have been privileged to teach at university for some 25 years, is quite the contrary.
What most of them yearn for, especially in the midst of the chances and changes of our frenetic world, is the security and authority of an intellectually persuasive and a spiritually profound belief-system.
These riches abide in Catholicism, sometimes obviously, other times after some searching (for what is truly valuable is often not immediately apparent and accessible) and I am pleased to be sharing them with my new family in the household of faith.
Just before my reception, Archbishop Pell was kind enough to say that I was ‘enormously welcome.’ This has certainly been my experience.
Dr Barry Spurr is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney. His study of liturgical language, The Word in the Desert (Cambridge, 1995), has been internationally acclaimed. He was received into the Church in January.