Call to Conversion
Homily for the Rite of Election 2025 at Holy Family Catholic Church, Yakima
Deuteronomy 26:4-10; Romans 10:8-13; Luke 4:1-13
Most Reverend Joseph J. Tyson, Bishop of Yakima
Peace be with you! What does it mean to live a life of conversion? This is the question you all have been exploring over your many months and perhaps even years as you consider entry into the Catholic Church. The answer is fundamentally this: The life of conversion is dying and rising with the very life of Jesus Christ. In his life we find our own life!
No wonder then, that the Church’s Lenten liturgy each year begins by recalling Jesus’ temptations in the desert. No one gets through life without temptations. Thus, note the opening details of our Sunday Gospel: “Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil.” As Pope Francis noted in his last Lenten message: “The exodus from slavery to freedom is no abstract journey. If our celebration of Lent is to be concrete, the first step is to desire to open our eyes to reality.”
That “reality” differs for each of us. For some, the reality is simply falling in love with a Catholic spouse. That falling in love experience becomes the catalyst for our becoming Catholic. Through our love for our spouse we fall in love with God. For others, this “reality” can be much harsher. We find ourselves addicted. We learn that we cannot free ourselves or save ourselves. We have to rely – as step one of Alcoholics Anonymous puts it – we have to rely on a ”higher power.” We discover our need for God. We encounter God as that “higher power.” We explore that need for God and thus we find ourselves joining the Catholic Church. Still others confront their “reality” as a kind of listlessness. What is the meaning of my life? What direction is my life taking? Where do I find joy? What draws me more fully to life? Slowly we discover that beneath the surface of our lives, we need God. We come to realize, as Pope Benedict XVI noted in his encyclical “Deus Caritas Est,” that “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
Whatever your “reality” and whatever draws you here today, as bishop I am grateful to personally greet you and pray with you as you contemplate joining the Church this Easter season. My message for you is quite simple: this is the start and not the end. You join Jesus in the desert. You begin your life of conversion. You begin your life of conversion with all the rest of us – sinners in conversion and saints in the making. So welcome!
Welcome because “conversion” – a true and deep ongoing conversion – lies at the very heart of daily Christian living. The great fourth- and fifth-century Saint Augustine recalls in his book, Confessions: “When having withdrawn in his garden, he hears a voice of an infant that repeats: ‘tolle, lege, tolle, lege’ (‘take up and read, take up and read’); and when he took the Scriptures, he found himself with the passage of Saint Paul “Let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”
This may be a bit anachronistic, but many commentators suggest that Saint Augustine might be termed today as an “addict.” He turned to God. He did so because he wanted to become more free. He realized he was addicted and enslaved. He came to know that the more he followed Christ, the more he became his very best self. He saw that the farther away he was from Christ, the more distant he was from his deepest and most authentic version of himself. Might this be what we need too? Might this be the Lenten journey of conversion that we need to make every day of our lives?
To underscore the point, Sarah Rudden notes in the introduction to her new translation of Saint Augustine’s biography titled “Confessions” that earlier translations of Saint Augustine rubrically translated the Latin word “conversio” solely as “conversion.” But Sarah Rudden suggests that much of the time, Saint Augustine’s use of the word “conversio” would be better rendered as “turning.”
Indeed, she points out that the first “conversio” in Saint Augustine’s famous book of “Confessions” is God turning to Augustine. It would make no sense to translate this first “conversio” as “conversion” because God was certainly not being “converted” to become like Augustine. Rather, the first conversion experience is God touching Saint Augustine, God opening the mind and heart of Saint Augustine. Thus, every subsequent “turning” in Saint Augustine’s autobiography “Confessions” is Saint Augustine responding to this first “turn” of God to him. As a result, Saint Augustine’s life becomes a series of events where he turns back to God.
As bishop this is my hope for you, that whatever your temptations and whatever your challenges that your time in of Lenten preparation helps you enter with all of us this life of conversion. So welcome. Welcome to the Church! Welcome to the conversion that is yours because of the dying and rising of Jesus Christ. Peace be with you!
Art: Fra Angelico and workshop, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons