Notes on Conversion and Confession

Ground

How does an individual or group understand and express the ideas and experiences that
have led to their current notions of self-identity and purpose? How are ‘decisive’ events in one’s
life integrated over time? These two general questions lie behind our project to clarify our
contemporary public understanding of conversion and confession. The world of ideas has never
been far from the world of concrete, daily life, but the particular set of issues we face now
requires a renewed inquiry into the interplay of idea and person. For with the loss or diminished
presence of various traditional forms of life (religious, cultural, etc.) and the increasingly
widespread thin individual sense of self, we note the rising level of attraction to strong
expressions of authority that, although related to death in complex ways, seem to offer a stability
lacking elsewhere for many people. This stability is fraught with danger, for it nearly always
involves a deep disregard for select others, different individuals or groups—a disregard that blurs
the boundaries of life and death in world-changing ways. For when a living tradition is narrowed
into fundamentalism, it loses its capacity for difference and growth, and occupies a rigid,
defensive state characterised by a strong sense of embattlement. To deal with the complexities of
the world, it tends towards increasingly reduced definitions of self and other, and favours
abstract ideas over concrete life.

We can say without exaggeration that we live in an era marked by multiple crises.
Religious and political fundamentalism, terrorism, war, and forced mass emigration coexist with
dying traditions, loss of community, an increasingly stressed relationship with the material world
(environment, food, energy production, etc.), and a significant shift of everyday life to the online
world. These (and other) crises condition individual life in two related ways. First, in the general
tendency to have our way of thinking marked by ‘crisis-time’, to the extent that our habits of
mind have grown accustomed to relying on drama and excitement, and grown unaccustomed to
those ideas and events that do not trade on the excitement of spectacle or the drama of finalities
and proposed solutions. Second, the loss or recession of healthy traditions, cultures, and
communities means that individuals have a meagre or absent supra-personal context for strong,
decisive events. Manifestations of authority are measured primarily by an individual’s own
experience, for there are few healthy larger and established meaningful contexts/traditions that
significantly deepen everyday life. Without a larger meaningful context by means of which
discernment may be cultivated, the individual is left alone and struggles to differentiate between
appropriate and fundamentalist forms of authority as they come to light. In this context personal
identity (who I am) and integrity (how I comport myself) become frangible and thus volatile—
‘strong’ events or experiences may alter one’s sense of self in decisive ways, and integrating
these ‘strong’ events or experiences into one’s own understanding of other events and
experiences may prove beyond one’s individual capacity.
 We aim to deepen contemporary understandings of the diverse ways of making sense of
decisive, particular experiences that may be seen to define or shape an individual or group,
through the focused prism of conversion and confession—for although these terms are
commonly relegated to a theological register, they remain merely pronounced forms of common
experience, turning points in life, self-awareness, and self-expression. Finally, in a world
significantly marked by religion and yet significantly ignorant of theological ideas and traditions,
we hope to open up a dialogue between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ ideas and ways of thinking.

Conversion

The experience of conversion essentially involves ‘turning points’ in life and the process
of personal integration. To see as typical religious conversion narratives—in which God
suddenly reveals the truth which now must be followed—is to frame conversion in terms of
‘crisis-time’. It is also to understand conversion to be a passive experience, which in turn
neglects the central role that active recognition and identification play in the conversion process.
For conversion involves a sense of ‘coming into one’s own’—which, initially at least, is a
coming into one’s own through something different than one’s own. So something must be
recognised as ‘true’ about the different, new idea, and then the decision must be made to identify
with it. The truth of an idea or event may not be equated with the strength of its first impression;
indeed, the opposite may be the case, for the sensation of being overwhelmed is essentially
antithetical to reasoned discernment regarding its particular form of authority. If one ‘turns’ in a
new meaningful direction—converts to a new way of life—without due and discerning
consideration, the appeal of the authority of the newfound meaning often is amplified by a strong
sense of enthusiasm and a desire to experience as much as possible of this new way of life—to
the extent that impatience comes to define one’s participation. Above all, impatience circles
around ideas of finality and completion: finality because certainty is wanted to verify one’s
choice was correct; and completion because one wants all of what this new tradition or way of
life has to offer (Dostoevsky’s image: the immediate desire for the furthest ends of the new
continent). In broad strokes, this possible process of conversion begins with an overwhelming or
ecstatic experience/event, which is followed by enthusiasm, passionate interest, recognition of
‘truth’, and a subsequent identification with this new tradition. Because one’s meaning has been
defined by an exceptional moment either one must maintain a rigid and ‘enchanted’ (to use
Auden’s term) sense of that moment’s longevity throughout the many unexceptional moments
that make up life, or one will inevitably slip into a kind of wary cynicism (with its mixture of
indifference and despair) as the defining, exceptional moment fades into the dream-like past.
Nothing else can live up to it, unless it is another similar moment that ‘turns’ one anew. In its
basic outline this conversion-model closely resembles undergoing trauma: an event (and, by its
light, its immediate surroundings) comes to be defining for a person, after which everything is
renewed or must be rebuilt (one’s sense of self, identity, relationships, purpose in life, etc.).
Because the event is so overwhelming/strong, it prompts one to focus on oneself, to see things in
terms of one’s own experience, and to proceed in life via new boundaries around and blocking
things … boundaries that not only ground oneself but remake the world in their own image—
boundaries that require strict control to maintain and a reactionary response when threatened. A
very strong possible result of this process is fundamentalism.

We may outline (in equally broad strokes, and in contrast to this first ‘model’ of
conversion) a different possible conversion process—one characterised/conditioned by patience
and an appropriate sense of ‘spiritual pacing’. It too may begin with a strong, determining
experience or event which pulls at one’s mind and brings about a ‘turning point’ in one’s life; it
too follows the pattern of recognition and identification but, crucially, the recognition of the need
to turn towards something new fits into and arises from a previously habituated effort to cultivate
one’s discernment of the truths and possible pitfalls of various traditional realities, and the
decision to identify with this new current of meaning (to make it part of one’s own meaning) is
closely aligned with the realisation that it must be integrated into a newly understood sense of
self such that one’s self neither loses its own coherence nor finds itself tempted into rigid,
reactionary stances. Patience is essential, for one realises that this new world of meaning is larger
than oneself and thus contains elements that may be only gradually apprehended; and a sense of
‘spiritual pacing’ is involved, for true identification with and participation in a new form of
meaning occurs incrementally and varies from person to person. If the turning point is integrated
carefully into daily life and thought, conversion becomes not so much an event as a steadily
strengthened and enduring personal ‘directedness’—an ongoing decision to see things in a
certain informed and considered way. This different way of seeing is or may be attended by a
deep being-at-peace (re. patience, pacing), but not by a state of intellectual certainty or spiritual
necessity, both of which belong only to fundamentalism and the darker aspects of thinking in
terms of ‘crisis-time’. It is a way of seeing that necessarily deepens rather than diminishes or
partitions the world, and its own internal sense will augment rather than reduce experience and,
as Bakhtin characterises his idea of an ‘internally persuasive discourse’, it will retain ‘semantic
openness’ for its participants and will find ‘ever newer ways’ to anchor and enrich the life of a
person, family, community, culture, etc.

Of course, we realise that most individual experiences of conversion will fall somewhere
between these two abstract etchings of the process, blending elements of each extreme in its own
unique way. Nevertheless, it is important to consider the two boundaries between which lies the
tangle of particular stories.

Confession

Alongside our general concern with the sense and contours of different forms of
conversion, we examine different particular images of confession. Confession is the deliberate
act of making sense of who one is—or, more precisely, it is part of the process of making sense
of what has become one’s own. The process of confession involves one’s very identity and is, in
its own unique way, deliberate definition from within (for it is an affirmation of personal truth)
and from without (for it is an affirmation of a truth larger than one’s own self in which one has
chosen to participate). The act of confession is also an expression of the fundamental urge to
confront (come face-to-face with) both one’s own self and another person’s countenance.
Although the most commonly recognised form of confession is the popular, reductive theological
act of statement and expiation, this reduction does not do justice to the profundity of liturgical
confession and it obscures other significant confessional forms, like artistic expressionism or
cultural stories that may be a witness to what otherwise would remain unknown. Indeed, these
other forms of confession help us to resist the idea that finality has any part of confession, as if
being could be encompassed by one act of saying. For an act of self-expression no more exhausts
the meaning of the self than one story told exhausts the meaning of a culture. In this light one’s
theological or philosophical ‘confession of faith’ may be seen alongside other kinds of
confession for what it is essentially: a still point (or distilled image) that occurs in ‘open time’ (as
defined by Gary Saul Morson), and thus its ‘stillness’ (or stilled-ness) is more like a pause before
continuing than a stepping outside of time or a cessation of time’s ongoing flow. Confession is
always ‘unfinal’ (or conditional and provisional) in the sense that it is part of the larger dialogue
of person, culture, and tradition. As part of a larger dialogue, confession is itself a testament to
the centrality of self-determination, choice, and freedom to human life; and it demonstrates
thoughtful activity and vital movement that characterises the human spirit as it works to draw
near to what it recognises as true and good.