Recently in Conversion Category

Catholics don't tend to use the expression "born again."  I think that my return in 1998 was too unemotional to be called a "born again" experience, though in 2002, when I decided to write only for Christ, that was an intense emotional moment and a "born again" moment.  I was certainly born again at that time as a Christian writer, and only now some 6 years later am I realizing that I am born again to an entirely new literary world.  Not only does my writing emcompass the Christ the Lord series, of the utmost importance; but I am also writing Songs of the Seraphim, a series of metaphysical thrillers about angels and their activity with humans on Earth.  I see a whole spectrum of Christian novel possibilities before me: Christmas novels, novels about the early Christians, and other possibilities yet unimagined.  ---- I am born again. There seems no doubt of it.  The change after 2002 was total and pervasive and dramatic.  Before that time, though I was going to church, I was learning more and more every week about my religion and what it was asking of me.  I was in an interim stage. I'd returned, yes, but I did not know yet what Christ was asking of me personally, and that came to be that I write for Him, and also that I seek to understand His Gospels much more deeply and completely than ever before, and that I seek to live by them. 

 Anne, your memoir singularly describes a girlhood of beauty and sensory experience and then a sensory-experience conversion, and my question is this: If it is accurate to observe a sensory dimension in your return to the Catholic Church, what would you say you were "lacking" at the sensory level that found resolution in conversion?

Your question is a challenging one, but I was not lacking at the sensory level when I returned to the church. Rather the "going home" was all the easier because the sensory elements of Catholicism were still richly present, and they attracted me as much as an adult, as they had attracted and satisfied me as a child.  But my life was full of sensory elements at the time, especially paintings by my husband, religious statues that I had collected, numerous photographs of gorgeous places I had visited, etc.   The underlining key is this: Catholicism does embrace the senses, and has never sought to "purify" its sensuous elements, and for this reason I feel very comfortable in my childhood church.  The mystery of the Eucharist which drew me back to the church is enshrined in sensuous elements: the golden tabernacle, the ritual of the Mass, the incense, bells, the ritual of receiving communion etc.  I should add that as a child, I was shaped by this sensuality, and it marks all my work.