Soul Making

Thoughts from Alan Jones that have made me hungry and introspective:

Conversion is about soul making. It is not material for the ten o'clock news. It takes a long time to make a human being and conversion is that continual process of being made and re-made (and being un-made at times, I would add. some things in us need to come down before we are built anew).

Our conversion of saying Yes to God is a real thing, but it is unfinished and incomplete... no one has an experience of Jesus without it being filtered through another person... we also encounter Jesus in a particular form or tradition, through a historically conditioned community. Sometimes that tradition is mediated through a form of worship or a body of writings. Then we have our own unique and idiosyncratic way - our neuroses push us into a particular style of believing... and all my prejudices are undermined when I meet and like people from different traditions I had rejected as bigotted or false.

So, I've been thinking about conversion as another way of talking about baptism or dying to self. We must be converted again and again. So much of what we encounter in the church appears to be simply what is outside the church with a thin veneer of Jesus. We have forgiveness and eternal life, but apart from that much is business as usual. What does it mean for me to be converted again in how I see Jesus, how I see myself, in how I view money and power and sex, in how I really love my neighbor, in how I work, in how I love the poor?

Some people are converted by reading an article or watching a movie. These are people of deep compassion and passion. I am not one of these people. For me, maybe especially as a teacher, to be converted to the scandal of the gospel (when is the last time Jesus offended you?), I have to be uprooted from my safe, distant, I've got it figured out because it works for me context and be put among people for whom my theology and beliefs don't work so easily. Then I must wrestle in order to be blessed. I must be converted again. That only happens for me where what I am regularly encountering doesn't fit with my nice, neat categories. And its not enough to be in it by myself; the load of understanding, trying to make sense of it is too much for me. Or of trying to do anything about it; the overwhelming nature of it would paralyze me. It takes a community, flawed in its own blind spots, but present in the questions and witnesses to the saving work of Jesus as we wrestle together.