Photo by Matthew Rogers

One of the things I’ve never gotten clarity on is whether or not it’s recommended that Christians seek answers from God through chance, e.g. opening the Bible to a random page and reading whatever you first lay your eyes on, or rolling dice and choosing a certain path depending on which number comes up.

At first I assumed that this must be a categorically bad idea because:

• It seems like it’s an attempt to boss God around somehow, like you’re demanding that he answer you at a specific time and in a specific way.
• God gave us the ability to reason, so why set it aside in favor of random chance?
• If this were an acceptable thing to do, presumably it would be acceptable all the time, in which case we could make every decision this way: what to eat for dinner, whom to marry, what types of medical treatments to use could all be decided by opening the Bible to random pages…which doesn’t sound right.

On the other hand, the 11 Apostles did cast lots to determine who would replace Judas. St. Augustine famously recounted having a transforming experience after he opened the Bible to a random page and happened across a line in Romans 13. I can see that at least such an act is done is the spirit of the renunciation of self-centered willfulness and a desire to be obedient — so maybe God would bless that?

I admit it, I’ve done it. I’ve felt stuck on some discernment issue and just opened the Bible to a random page. Sometimes there’s nothing remotely relevant there, though there have been quite a few times when I got some uncanny answer that seemed to be beyond coincidence.

But is this something I’m supposed to be doing? Is it a bad idea? A good idea? I have no clue. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

While I’m at it, I figured I might as well introduce you to her blog, since it’s one of my favorites. Abby has a great story: she was a liberal feminist lawyer from Smith College who has since become a devout Catholic housewife and Third Order Carmelite. If you’re looking for some meaty essays to linger over with a warm cup of coffee, you’ve come to the right place.

Some of her most powerful posts are about embracing life in our culture of death — especially that she did not always see things the way she does now. Her “How I became pro-life” piece was what originally inspired me to write mine, and I was fascinated by her recent post about how she receives more scorn as a housewife than she did when she was a deacon at notoriously secular Smith. One of her best posts (which is among the best blog posts I’ve ever read) was about how she and her husband dealt with the news that any children they have are at significant risk for Cystic Fibrosis:

Then came the devastating news from the genetic counselor [responding to their concern that genetic CF could impact their children's children]. “No, your baby has the 1/4 chance of having a fatal disease, not your grandchildren.” Then to ease the burden on my stricken face, “Don’t worry. This is the only baby who will have that risk. For all the other babies, we’ll do an amino, if the fetus is CF positive, we’ll take care of it. Sorry that we didn’t catch this one until it was too late.” [...]

I cried into fist after fist of tissues. I argued my way out of a same-day amino by saying “I don’t want to worry about miscarriage on Christmas. Let me go home, now.” I felt scared. I felt alone. There was all this intense medical pressure to do a test which would only tell us a basic hands up or hands down CF result a mere two weeks before my due date. [MORE]

She’s also written powerful posts on pregnancy loss that delve into the complexities of grief. She writes of losing her baby to a late miscarriage:

Each morning I would wake up and the first thought was “I’m not pregnant anymore.” My first thought, before I even registered that it was morning or that we had moved into a new apartment or even that my husband was sleeping next to me. My first thing each morning was this loud shouting sentance “I am not pregnant!” I would just realize that my stomach was fine and my muscles weren’t sore and the whole host of physical sensations that are so annoying when you are pregnant were missing. Feeling back to normal was my punch in the gut. My grieving thing would start all over again. [MORE]

But her posts aren’t all about sad stuff! I was very inspired by her tips on taking young children to daily Mass. I love all her stories about embracing poverty, like the humorous and poignant one about life on the bus after they couldn’t afford a car anymore:

Last Sunday, my husband shouted to me “I can’t believe we both have Graduate Degrees!” as we waited at a bus stop for an extremely late City bus. [...]

I looked at Jon in confusion. I didn’t immediately understand the meaning of my husband’s statement. After all, it was our gigantic $200,000 joint student loan debt which necessitated us taking the City Bus to Mass in the first place. [Then] I suddenly “got” the irony of our current situation. In grad school, we’d spent hours hunched over lap tops in dimly lit libraries. We mastered courses in vague Latin terms and 18th Century Japanese Landscape Painting. We wrote term papers. We passed finals. We aced hours of job interviews. If not tons of wealth and worldly honor, there was supposed to be some sort of comfortable middle class existence that came as a reward to all of that hard work.

Never once, in all those years of study, did we consider that our future children would wander snow banks in their church clothes as we waited for a late City bus. In America, people with graduate degrees are not supposed to live lives without a car. [MORE]

In another post she wrote about the economic downturn, and offered people who may be experiencing first-time financial hardship some words of encouragement:

I’ve been hanging out in the desert of financial uncertainty for a while. Let me show you around.

It’s harsh here, but beautiful. Here’s a place to test an inner strength you never knew you had. The friends who see you in your humility, the ones who lend you diapers when your babies run out, or who whip up baked lasagna when their own husbands are unemployed, or who join their hearts in prayer when you just can’t take the collection calls anymore, those are the dear, dear friends. You can’t make a single friend like that on a singles cruise in the Aegean Sea.

It is harsh here in the desert. Yet it is still. It is the perfect place to hear the soft, tender words of God. [MORE]

Even before I knew her personally, Abigail’s blog was a source of constant inspiration for me. I hope you enjoy it as well.

One thing that’s missing from the sidebar here at the newly-designed blog is my Why I Believe in God post. I used to keep it up there to give new readers a high-level explanation of what convinced me of God’s existence, thinking that it might even offer fellow seekers insights that could help them walk their own paths of conversion. But when I re-read it in the process of transferring my files over to the new host, I realized that it doesn’t give the full picture of how I came to believe in God.

Back then, I thought of my conversion as 100% my doing: I gathered evidence for God and Christianity based on reason, facts, and experience. I concluded that it was more likely than not that this was all true, and therefore I chose to have faith in God and his Church. The end.

It sounded right. That seemed like what happened from my perspective back in late 2006. But now, a few years later, I see things that I didn’t see back then. In fact, now that I have that objectivity that only time can bring, when I compare my old, atheistic mindset to the vibrant faith I have today, I see that what has happened within me is impossible. Seriously, impossible. It’s not something I could have done on my own.

I’d heard along the way that faith is a gift. I’d even read the part of the catechism that talks about faith, and I’d always feel puzzled about that part where it says:

In faith, the human intellect and will cooperate with divine grace: “Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace.”

I didn’t get it. At the time, I thought of experiencing God’s grace as some hugely powerful event that involves lots of drama and weeping, so I figured that that last part somehow didn’t apply to me. I’d done the whole “act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will” part, but God must have forgotten to move me by grace.

It seemed to be something that only happened to other people (like in former atheist Joan Ball’s powerful experience of instant conversion, which she describes here). I chalked it up to spiritual ineptitude on my part: even if God were to try to give me some moment of grace, I’d write it off as emotional experience, analyze it to death, dissect it from every possible angle until any power it may have contained had been killed. I went the safe, boring route that was a better fit for my engineer genes: I simply read and researched and made a purely intellectual decision.

But the more I consider what has happened in my soul (including the occasional “I can’t believe I believe this…but I do!” moments), I see now is that I could never have had the level of belief that I have today without a supernatural force acting within me. Though my beliefs are still — have always been — founded on reason, I believe at a level that surpasses reason. It’s more of an awareness of God that has seeped all the way down into the innermost recesses of my subconscious, rather than a mere conclusion I drew based on analysis. And that’s not something I could have willed my way into.

In other words, just like other converts, my conversion did hinge on the direct action of God in my life — it just looked different for me.

The way I think of it now is that every conversion follows the same basic process: you use your free will to seek God. The way you seek will be totally different than the way someone else seeks: a naturally spiritual person may have only a five-second “seeking” process consisting only of beholding a glorious sunset; a more analytical person might take years to read up on reason-based arguments about God. Whatever the process, at some point you’ve seen enough data that you become open to God. As time goes on you become more and more sincerely open to his presence, and, at some point, you reach a tipping point: a level of openness where you can finally receive an abundance of the grace that God has been trying to give you all along. And only then will you be filled with that deepness of belief that simply would not have been possible through human intellect alone.

I think of it as reaching gracepoint, a word I made up to pinpoint that first moment when a person has opened the doors of their mind and heart enough to have deep communion with God.

Different people will get there different ways, but the two things that I’ve noticed that everyone seems to need in order to reach this “gracepoint” are:

1. Some reason to consider believing (anything from an unusual experience, inner feeling, compelling data, etc.)
2. Humility

In my case, for example, my reason to believe came from all my research. After that, I considered myself a “believer” in the sense that I thought it probable that God existed. I figured I’d stay in that lukewarm state forever. But that’s when factor #2 (humility) came in: everything blew up. Our business started failing, our finances tanked, I developed a life-threatening blood clot during pregnancy, then had another (unexpected) pregnancy right after that. It was humbling, to say the least.

I wasn’t so flip about everything. My questions about God and the meaning of life got a lot less petulant and a lot more sincere. My ego was down for the count, and I was able to seek truth without the spiritual racket of pride blaring in the background. And it was there, in one of those moments during that difficult time, that I reached gracepoint — I finally opened my soul to a point that the presence of God could flood in. And that is when I began to believe — I mean to really know that God is real down to the core of my being.

And that’s what my old piece about coming to belief in God was missing: I made it sound like it can be all intellectual. I implied that the solid faith I have now came from me alone. The truth, I see now, is that all my research, effort and experiences simply got me to gracepoint. And the rest was up to God.

————-

UPDATE: Some readers rightly pointed out that conversion is all grace, including the seeking part. I should have clarified that better in the post. Perhaps a better explanation would be to say that the “gracepoint” moment was when the scales tipped for me to actively cooperate with grace at a much bigger level than I had before and, after that, I no longer had to put so much of my own effort into it.

I think I made the mistake in the way I phrased it because, to be honest, I did not feel God’s grace in the slightest in the seeking process. It was there, of course, but it sure didn’t feel like it. But after that tipping point, I was as aware of God as I am of the sun. Faith was just a given after gracepoint, whereas I’d had to struggle through it up to that point.

Dum Transisset Sabbatum (After the Sabbath Was Past)

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When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?”

And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back — it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here.”

Mark 16:1-6

Welcome to my newly-redesigned blog! Take a look around and tell me what you think. (If you’re receiving this via email or on a feed reader, come on by!) I still have some finishing touches to put on the site (e.g. I haven’t finished updating the blogroll, there are still some broken links, etc.), and there may be a few glitches as I get used to this new host, but most of the work is done.

Meanwhile, here’s a virtual toast to blogging, new designs, and many more great discussions to come!

You may notice things look different over here at Chez Conversion Diary; unfortunately this is not the new site. It’s still the Blogger 2.0 upgrade I had to do in order to transfer to WordPress. I hope to have the new look go live this weekend. Can’t wait to see what you think!

UPDATE: If you see this note, then you ARE seeing the new site. Welcome!

A few people have asked why I’m going through all the effort to switch from Blogger to WordPress. Two main reasons:

1. Because I want improved interaction with readers: WordPress has threaded comment feeds to make discussions more clear (important to me since we have a lot of discussions around here), and it’ll allow me to ask for email addresses with comments so that I can respond to folks privately. Also, I can’t wait to install CommentLuv to facilitate commenters discovering one another’s blogs.
2. Because I’m a nerd: I’d probably stick with Blogger if it weren’t for the fact that I’m a web developer by background. Writing code is what I do for fun. I once created my own rudimentary blogging platform using PHP and MySQL just for kicks. Blogger isn’t really set up for people whose idea of a good time is staring at lines of code, so I’m really anxious to get the developer control that comes with WordPress.

I’m back in love with breakfast casseroles. I had stopped making them for a while, in part because I developed this superstitious worry that they attracted scorpions. (Remember that day I made my pregnant friend jump on a book with a scorpion under it? That was like the third time I made a breakfast casserole and then saw a scorpion in the house.) Anyway, I’m back at it now, and I love it. I make one and eat the leftovers for a few days, then make another one. It really helps me stick with good eating habits to have something fresh and healthy already prepared.

UPDATED to include a couple of my favorite recipes:

• This mushroom feta breakfast casserole
• I also modify this “Christmas” breakfast casserole by adding more eggs and substituting a package of spinach for the bread

Here’s a cool tip for fellow scatter-brained people: Keep a write-on/wipe-off marker in your bathroom so that you can writer reminders and notes to yourself on the bathroom mirror. I’m amazed at how often I think of something I need to do the next day just as I’m about to go to bed, and being able to dash off a note on the mirror comes in very handy.

I recently installed JungleDisk for an online backup system, and I love it. I’d had really bad experiences with other companies’ products, and I’m so happy to find one that actually works — and I love the peace of mind of knowing that I’d have easy access to recently-updated files if anything happened to my computer. It took me a fair amount of research to decide on JungleDisk, so I thought I’d throw that out there in case anyone else is looking for good backup software. (This is not an ad, just a product I like.)

Yesterday I took a casserole dinner to some friends who just adopted three children. As I drove home, it occurred to me that I get a ton of use out of my casserole carrier now that I’m part of a church community. There’s always so much going on with births and adoptions and illnesses and other times of need, and people are so good about coming together and helping one another; it seems like there’s an opportunity to cook for other families at least once a month! Honestly, next time I’m invited to a convert’s first Communion, I think the gift I’ll get them is a casserole carrier and a bunch of disposable pans — they’ll definitely get a lot of use out of them!

It’s funny how much moving a blog is like moving a house: at first it’s exciting to have a brand new place, then the move itself ends up being far more epic than you could have ever imagined. You know that moment when all the big boxes have been moved out, and you feel like surely you must almost be done, but then you walk back into the house and see piles of stuff in every corner, and you wonder why you ever got yourself into this in the first place? That’s where I am right now with the blog transfer.

Anyway, I’m going to get back to cleaning up my new “house” so that I can have you all over for a little housewarming party in a few days. Have a nice weekend, everyone!

[Linky list down again. Will re-post when their server is back up!]

Though I think I should be able to get all the pre-2008 feeds lined up with the new one after the transfer, there’s always the chance that something could go horribly awry [cue ominous music again], so I thought I’d put the new, guaranteed-to-work link out there just in case. Meanwhile, while I’m hammering out the last details of the switch, I thought I’d do an Anchoress-style list of some interesting stuff I’ve stumbled across lately for your reading pleasure:

• Ann Voskamp followed up her post about simplifying homeschooling with a beautiful photo post about organizing your homeschool classroom…
• while Simcha is getting hilariously real about why homeschooling didn’t work for them (the photo in her post is amazing too).
• Dan Lord is writing about the sinister spiritual darkness he encountered after his life as a rock star…
• and the Philosopher mom has an interesting and inspiring post about the top five women who influenced her life.
• Bestselling author Steven Pressfield is giving us a “behind the scenes” glimpse into the mind of a writer finishing up his latest book project.
• Darwin Catholic just finished up a thought-provoking series on real sex vs. the contraceptive mentality…
• and Matt Swaim killed 90% of my productivity by introducing me to literal videos. (Do NOT look at the Related Videos list at that link if you have anything else you need to get done today.)

What are some good links you’ve seen lately?

[Sorry, the comments didn't make it over in the transfer!]

Beauty is one of the attributes of God, along with truth and goodness. For this reason monks are naturally attracted to it, and through the centuries have preserved it in their monasteries.

I’d read about the importance of beauty in the monastic tradition, but it wasn’t until I took a stroll through the monastery grounds that I really got it at a visceral level. Before I went out for my walk I stopped by the retreat house chapel to pray.

It’s a cozy room with a vibrant icon of The Death of Saint Benedict, created by my cousin, a monk and iconographer at Mt. Angel. After praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament for a while, I went upstairs to the retreat house lounge. Even though it had grand picture windows that boasted sweeping views of the Oregon countryside, what I always noticed was the bejeweled crucifix that stood at the entrance of the room.

Refreshed from the fresh coffee and cookies in the lounge, I stepped out of the retreat house and into the main courtyard, where I was met with a crisp breeze and a breathtaking view of the distant mountains.

(I should note that it was about 88 degrees. And, yes, that is “crisp” summer weather for us Texans.) Next I wound through the retreat house garden…

…and then spent some time at the library, which was designed by famous Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. He did it for only a nominal fee as a gift to the Benedictines for preserving Western civilization throughout the ages.

From there I walked through the halls of the seminary, which combines the best of old and new by having the latest and greatest “green” technology, like ceiling fixtures that enhance natural light…

…alongside artwork in the ancient craft of iconography.

Next I wandered over to one of the gardens, resting next to a pond overlooked by a statue of Our Lady. This one is just outside the cloister walls, so some of the monks can see it from their windows.


The sound of the enormous cast bronze bells thundered through the air to announce the start of noon prayer. Each one has a special name: for example, The Most Holy Trinity is the eight-ton bell that plays to note of A, the two-ton St. Joseph plays F. The bells have such special meaning that they’re kept as ornaments to the monastery grounds when they’re retired.

Listening to the monks’ chants echo through the halls of the church at noon prayer reminded me what it’s all about…

…a lesson that was emphasized when, after noon prayer, I took a walk through the monastery cemetery, where all the brothers who have made their home here throughout the ages lie in peace.

I sat down on a bench near the cemetery. I felt like I could explode with that unmistakable joy and all-encompassing peace that only comes from a brush with the divine. It was then that I realized, more deeply than I ever had before, that to be in the presence of beauty is to be in the presence of God.

• Things might look a little weird over here for the next few days. (For those who care about the technical details — both of you — I have to upgrade my Blogger template in order to import everything to WordPress, which means I’ll lose my current custom design. I’ll have to choose one of the basic Blogger templates.)

• For those of you who receive posts on a feed reader or via email, swing by the main site here at conversiondiary.com if you stop receiving updates. In theory the feeds should be fine and you shouldn’t notice that anything’s different, but I wanted to cover that base just in case. (Please mentally insert the sound of ominous music a la the Jaws soundtrack when you read the words “just in case.”)

If any other unforeseen craziness arises as part of all of this, know that I’m aware of it and have locked myself in the closet and am banging my head into the wall while screaming at the top of my lungs am working to resolve the issue. If you’d like to hear about my previous experience dealing with a major blogging technical endeavor, and how I handled it with the spiritual maturity of an amoeba when everything went horribly awry, you can read all about that here.

Other than that, I’m all set. I have all my essential web development tools prepared and ready. I have the support pages up in my browser:

My Dreamweaver screen that separates code elements by color in case I need to hand-code anything:

My spiffy new WordPress console:

The email address of my WordPress guru on hand:

And a vodka cranberry:

And that should be everything I need. Here we go!

BE PREPARED FOR THE AWESOMENESS. I’m working with Kickstart Media to do an unbelievably cool blog upgrade that includes a breathtaking new design and a looooong-awaited switch to Word Press. I guess it’s possible that nobody cares even slightly as much as I do about all of this, so perhaps I should say, BE PREPARED FOR ME TO TALK ABOUT THE AWESOMENESS. Assuming nothing goes horribly awry (and, really, what could possibly go wrong with migrating a blog with a custom domain, 1,000 posts and 23,000 comments to a different platform on a new server?) it will be up sometime next week.

A big thanks to my friend Hallie for hosting 7 Quick Takes last week. I was in Raleigh for a family emergency, so it was nice to know you all were in good hands. Because of all the travel I was offline pretty much the whole week. Did I miss anything?

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like to fly. In particular, I am not a fan of turbulence. As my plane was bounced around on its descent to Raleigh last week, it occurred to me that I have a new item for my Lost Bet Ideas list. (Do other people do this? Keep lists with their spouses enumerating the most torturous things they could sign up to do if they ever lost a bet? No? Anyway…) If I am ever ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that I am right on some issue and want to throw down with a bet-to-end-all-bets, I will dramatically announce that, on the minuscule chance that I should be incorrect, I will go on a flight on a Hurricane Hunter, one of the planes that flies into the center of hurricanes. I’m not sure if there is any activity with a higher “Not For Me” factor in all the universe.

So people fly into hurricanes? Seriously? I’m not done with this subject.

I came across an article where a journalist when out in one of these planes that flew intto the eye of Hurricane Gustav. For a while my career plan was to be a journalist, so my mind immediately flashed to an image of me working at a newspaper in Florida, and my boss coming in and giving me my assignments: “Interview the new police chief, go to the City Hall meeting, and, oh yeah, fly into the center of a Category 4 hurricane.”

Actually, that would never happen, because the resulting article would read like:

Orlando, Fla. — Journalist Jennifer Fulwiler went out on the Hurricane Hunter this weekend to get an insider look at the practice of gathering data about hurricanes via airplane. She reports, “AAAAAAHHHHH!!!!! SOMEBODY KILL ME!!!!! I JUST CHUGGED MY SECOND FLASK AND THIS STILL SUCKS!!! I JUST THREW UP ON THE PILOT!!!! AAHHHHH!”

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be flying out to Renewal Ministries‘ studios in September to be on their show The Choices We Face with Ralph Martin and Peter Herbeck. I’ve been a fan of that show for a long time, and love the work that Martin and Herbeck are doing, so I’m honored to be a guest. Air travel aside, I’m really looking forward to it. It won’t air for a few months, but I’ll update whenever it’s going to be broadcast.

This is so lame, but the upcoming show taping has caused a sort of Clash of the Titans over here as Vanity and Sloth battle it out in my head. On the one hand, I’d like to lose a few pounds if I’m going to be on international television. (And no, this ain’t the Saint Diet. This is the Me Wanting to Lose Weight so that I Can Wear Cute Clothes on TV Diet.) On the other hand, I keep backsliding and re-gaining any weight I lose. I’d love to say that it’s because I’m at a level of spiritual maturity where I am fully detached from concerns about my physical appearance, but it’s more that I don’t like to move and I do like to consume large plates of food.

This situation has been a good opportunity, however, to work on the sin of pride, specifically as I recall the proclamations I used to make when I was about 22 that neither age nor childbearing has any impact on a woman’s ability to lose weight. I wish I could go back in time and slap my 22-year-old self upside the head with my scale.

This is “back to school” weekend for us, though it’s a little complicated since we haven’t nailed down exactly what “school” is going to look like this year. At least no one can accuse us of rushing into things.

I’ve come to realize that it might take us a couple years to find the right educational model for our family. We seem to be misfits of sorts: we can’t afford private/parochial school, public school isn’t a good fit for us, but the classic homeschooling model isn’t quite what we’re looking for either (though it’s probably closest). Lisa of Cheerfully Chaotic has started a homeschooling discernment series where parents who are/were similarly on the fence will share their experiences. I’ll be reading with interest (and may beg her to let me do a guest post so that I can collect all my scattered thoughts on the subject).

I look forward to reading your posts!

[linky list temporarily down due to technical problems]