Among the central tenets of almost any type of spiritual pursuit is that the pilgrim involved in it must become converted. Adherents need to be transformed from one kind of person into another kind of person, preferably a better one.
“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” St. Paul admonished the Roman Christians.
Conversion goes by different names among different faiths. I’m no expert on Eastern religions, but I believe Buddhists call this transformed state nirvana. Hindus might speak of moksha, or enlightenment.
Being saved
In the Christian low-church traditions from which I sprang, transformation can be referred to as being saved, or born again, or sanctified, or baptised in the Holy Spirit.
The words used depend on which of the Protestant schisms you happen to be dealing with and which level of conversion you’re referring to.
I grew up as a Baptist, and in those days of yore, it seemed every other sermon I heard was about the necessity of getting saved .
We heard this experience invariably arrived via a dramatic Saul-on-the-Damascus-Road summons from Jesus. (The other half of the sermons were about the Second Coming, which would occur any day.)
Finally I gave up and chased Saul down that old Damascus Road and allowed myself to be gloriously I-saw-the-light born again in the twinkling of an eye, as the angel choruses sang and fiery chariots whirled across the sky above.
The very next Sunday I heard another sermon urging everybody to get saved. And the week after that. And a couple of Sundays after that. And on. And on.
It wasn’t long until I started thinking, which as we know is a dangerous thing to do. I was a young man. With luck, I might have another 50 or 60 years to walk the pilgrim’s path on earth with my Lord and Savior.
So, now that I had got all there apparently was to get, what the heck was I supposed to do with the rest of that forthcoming time?
Was I consigned to spend the next half-century twiddling my spiritual thumbs and waiting to go to heaven?
The daily task
Today I’m writing from the other end of that journey. My half-century of forthcoming time has pretty much come and gone. I’m standing on the pearly gates’ threshold.
But I’ve learned a few things along the way. Among them is this: Conversion is not a one-time event.
Conversion is a lifelong process. As we pursue our spiritual sanctification, our moksha, our nirvana, our Spirit baptism — whatever name we give it — we find we need to get repeatedly born again, over and over.
I want to be understood here rather than misunderstood.
For those of you who are Christians, I don’t mean to imply, because I don’t at all believe, that eternal salvation is like a revolving door you go around and around in endlessly, saved one minute and ejected the next, converted and then, whoosh, a reprobate, and then converted again.
That’s not even what I’m talking about.
What I’m saying, and what I think other religions understand better than Christians do, is that we must continue to grow spiritually, to evolve and learn for as long as we live, or else we become stagnant, bored and disillusioned.
We must, as the New Testament says, progress from glory to glory.
There’s a related truth I’ve learned, this one less pleasant but unavoidable:
After those initial, ecstatic, mind-bending visitations from the divine, most future growing we’ll do will happen in the valleys rather than on the mountaintops. The Buddhists say life is suffering. They’re largely right.
Richard Rohr, the Roman Catholic priest, expressed this idea in a recent devotion on the website of his Center for Action and Contemplation.
“Having undergone several surgeries, cancer, and a heart attack, I’ve been consoled by the way my body takes care of itself over time,” he wrote.
“In religion, however, many people prefer magical, external, one-time transactions instead of this universal pattern of growth and healing — which always includes loss and renewal.
“This is the way that life perpetuates itself in ever-new forms: through various changes that can feel like death.”
Yes, exactly. To be repeatedly reborn anew, we have to die repeatedly to our past glories, our physical strength, our deeply cherished rules.
Allowing ourselves to be continually and progressively converted involves pain, which might be why so few people seem to do it.
But the rewards are worth the difficulties. Moving forward certainly beats getting stuck in the past, or mired in the present muck.
Jesus said, “You must be born again.” I wish he’d added, for clarity, “Every day.”
- First published in Religion Unplugged
- Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years and is also a journalist.