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.

HOLY SPRING

We are on the threshold of a very meaningful season which marks a significant phase in the whole plan of salvation. The season of Lent as we know, is a time for renewal – ridding the old self and putting on a new self. I would like draw the example for renewal from the nature itself. If we just gaze at the trees we see them shedding off old and dead leaves and giving birth to the new ones. A tree that was looking bear and dead-like appears fresh, green, full of leaves, full of life. We call this phenomena ‘Spring.’ Lent has to become for us a Holy Spring. Lent has to be a time of death to old selves and rising in Christ on Easter Sunday. But this resurrection has to be preceded by conversion.

The Mother Church offers us a period of forty days to undergo transformation. A period of forty days is not to be taken as a conventional

number used to indicate a period of time necessary for actual preparation and maturation of an event of great significance. Thus the number forty was used to indicate the years that erring Israel had to spend in the desert before they were prepared enough to enter the Promised Land.

Often we might fall prey to the danger of marking lent by time. It may turn out to be a mere practice of the exhortations of the Church regarding the season. One may fast, pray and abstain for forty days and just await the forty first day to get back to old practices. I say, if all the fasting, praying and abstaining don’t lead to a deep conversion experience everything would seem useless.

So as we are about to embark on this beautiful season let us plan how worthily we can enter into the season. Let us plan each step we take with Christ on his way to Calvary. And may every step we take with Christ be a milestone we cross before reaching our conversion, because "conversion is resurrection."

I wish that all of us may be liberated from our iniquities just in time to have a real Easter experience, a death and resurrection experience.