FAITH AND CONVERSION

We are in the fourth week of the holy season of Lent - a season which calls for repentance and return. Today's (4th week of lent Monday) Gospel passage (John 4:43-54) sheds light on the close relationship between faith and conversion. The government official whose son Jesus cures makes a significant movement from faith to conversion. Of course the miracle serves only as a passage towards his conversion along with his entire household. This conversion meant a shift in his fundamental option. What shift did he make? He must have been one of those who have been faithful in practicing his faith. But after his encounter with Christ he alters his fundamental option. There he makes his fundamental option for Christ.

Bernard Lonergan would call this shift a religious conversion. Religious conversion is the turning-around that resets our consciousness in terms of unrestricted love. When we are religously converted, our hearts, the centers of ourselves, open to embrace whatever good, noble, true, is humanizing. If so, religious conversion is a yes to the mystery of God, an acceptance of the Creator's ground-rules or conditions. We have been made to be beyond all partial goods and truths, to reject all idolatries. We must refuse to worship anything less than

the unlimited , infinite goodness that whispers in our limitless questioning. The official in this passage is the example of one who realizes his limits and sets on a journey to embrace what is really true - the person of Christ.

In every conversion love occupies the primary place. In making his option for Christ the official enters into a loving relationship with Jesus. When he is in love, he accepts the values and meanings of the beloved; because he loves, he begins to understand anew the values and meanings he has accepted; he begins to even see and hear and feel differently.

The message of lent is not anything lesser than making a fundamental option for Christ, especially for Christ Crucified, because it was on the cross that Christ epitomizes love. Our response consists in sincerely accepting the demands of his love, that with the light of Easter we may see, hear and feel people and things differently.