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Reflections, thoughts, writing on Thursday, September 6th, 2007

I didn’t convert to Christianity at some moment in 1971. Rather, I grew into it. Even though I was entering a movement that virtually required an adult conversion experience, I didn’t have one, at least not in the traditional sense. I grew-up Catholic. Christ already kind of fit.

That is not to say I was a conscious and reflective Catholic. I was not. I had not consciously reflected on Catholicism and rejected it so much as forgot about it. In retrospect, I implicitly accepted the possibility that Christianity might be true before I went to BASIC. That was the inheritance of my Catholic childhood.

But this lack of a profound personal conversion experience (a PPCE) always singled me out from so many in the movement, at least for me it did. I felt different. Lacking an experiential conversion, I began reading about this faith I was now believing and voicing to see where I fit in and what I thought. My conversion experience was signified by growth as opposed that of resolution.

Now, to backtrack a bit, at that time of my conversion was reading Walden, National Geographic, and fishing and hunting magazines. Fishing, conservation, living in the woods, living off the land filled my imagination. Euell Gibbons and Henry David Thoreau were my guides here. Ecology was the thing.

Also, I appreciated Martin Luther King, Senator Mark Hatfield, and liberal Democrats. I believed in truth and justice. Make love not war. Changing the world was the thing.

So my Christianity and my thinking was a confluence of all these streams. Additional tributaries would contribute over time. I am constructing a detailed time-line, a picture of the complex flow of my history to better understand how I got to where I am and to figure-out how to articulate it.