If this kind of process is conversion, then I am continually converting. I sometimes wish there was a language to describe profound changes that occur without a label shift, without a linguistically ordered new thing to be. Everyone I know, whether they have stayed in the religious framework they were given as a child or not, has experienced profound alterations, shiftings, and surprises in how they perceive everything around them, seen and unseen. Think about your own experience for a moment. What conversions go unnamed, shading the words that still have the same shape when you claim your identity?
When I go to church, my conversions and changes stretch and reach out, and interlace themselves with the familiarity of the patterns, the actions, the words, and the songs. The interaction is rather unpredictable: it can be boring, tender, infuriating, wondrous, and deeply painful. Sometimes it is all of those at once! Perhaps this is actually the way that changes unfold, through a confluence of factors swirling in toward you, and what you see is the one step you take, your stumbling response to the multitude of stimuli.
If that's the case, than I think the courage is sometimes the choosing, rather than what choice you make. And faith, the really potent kind you can get your hand around like a rope, is opening your mouth to say "I am," while the end of the sentence is always uncertain, always, and essentially, open to change.
Rebecca Lynne Fullan is now feeling that claiming her identity in biographical sentences is more difficult and meaningful than she previously imagined, and hopes you will excuse her, and check out www.fromthepewsintheback.com, to which she is a contributor.
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