"Follow me"
- FR. DONALD HAGGERTY
Conversion is the spark that allows a soul to catch fire with God.
It strikes the flint and begins the early burning of a passion for God. It is the first leap of flame that can quickly become a fire lasting a lifetime. Conversions are necessary for deeper spirituality, as many saints can testify. It would seem that no one without an experience of a serious conversion will be taken to the more profound depths of a personal encounter with God or invited by grace into a contemplative life of prayer.
This seems to be almost a private maxim of our Lord with souls. He wants us to know the experience of being finally conquered and subdued in the presence of his love. For being vanquished by him is essential to all greater love for him. And then, once he is known, he wants us to taste a longing and a pure desire for himself.
We do not have to be sullied with terrible corruption in our lives to need this experience of conversion. We simply have to be ignorant of our Lord to some degree. The flame ignites all the same whether sins are small or great for one primary reason.
Whenever an overpowering encounter with Jesus Christ on his cross at Calvary pierces our soul, he draws the deeper desire of the heart, and a conversion is ready. The sight of Jesus Christ crucified gazing down on us in a single hour of our life is sufficient to change us forever. But we must choose to seek such an hour. We cross a threshold in spiritual perception in looking at the eyes of this crucified man who is God himself, perhaps overcome by an incomprehension of what he may be asking of us in his suffering.
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Acknowledgement
Fr. Donald Haggerty. "Follow me." Conversion: Spiritual Insights into an Essential Encounter with God (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2017).
Reprinted with permission from Ignatius Press.
The Author
Fr. Donald Haggerty, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, serves at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. He has been a Professor of Moral Theology at St. Joseph's Seminary in New York and Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Maryland and has a long association as a spiritual director for Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. He is author of Conversion: Spiritual Insights into an Essential Encounter with God, Contemplative Provocations, Contemplative Enigmas: Insights and Aid on the Path to Deeper Prayer, and The Contemplative Hunger.
