St. Jude, pray for us.

Well, you (dear reader) can thank Jean Rose for this blog. She suggested I keep a journal detailing my continuing discernment and entry into religious formation. And it is likely that I will do so with distressing honesty. Why bother elsewise?

I am a man of unclean lips, from a people of unclean lips. Obviously, I am a sinner. I suppose that's a given. I am a convert as the blog title suggests. I came to faith fortuitously, through no effort of my own, in the spring of 2005. One moment I am a disagreeable, fatalistic, stiff-neck default-agnostic unconcerned with religion and the next moment... well, I am a disagreeable, fatalistic, stiff-neck man with the doubtful beginnings of religious faith. 

It was an act of God. I am as convinced of that now, after nine years of reflection and trial, as I was suddenly, inexplicably, in that strange, unquiet moment as I watched the news coverage of then pope John Paul II's illness and death, when something reached out and struck me.

I am still amazed that God bothered. Bad enough that I was created when so many others could have been, but that I should be given faith...? It beggars the imagination. It certainly does something very disconcerting to pride. Something sharp and stinging.

I originally conceived of my shabby little epiphany as an anxiety attack, minor stroke, dyspepsia even. A physiological or perhaps purely mental disturbance. After all, I had previously had a 'cardiac event' that the doctors weren't well able to diagnose. I was certainly under significant stress at the time. I was (and, really, still am) a rough, choleric man, irascible and opinionated. But, given the changes impelled in me from that moment onward, I find such simplistic explanations unsatisfying.

In time, as my perspective broadened and a work was noticeably being wrought within me, I realized that the only explanation that satisfied all the involved criteria was, on the whole, to blame God. 

Initially, I think I would have preferred the stroke.