Behind Conversion

The Crisis Of A Convert

From the many narratives and personal testimonies of people who have changed their faith, the one thing that has been inadequately highlighted is the enormity of their personal crisis.

SUGATA SRINIVASARAJU Outlook India.Com OCT 23, 2008

"I am a Syrian Jacobite who converted to New Life, but nobody forced me to do so. As long as I was with the mainstream church I had no personal encounter with Jesus Christ. I was a Christian only because I was born into that religion. I had many problems and many fears. I used to drink and smoke. I used to get terrible dreams. I went to a psychiatrist, but the drugs he gave me only made me feel drowsy. I found my peace after I joined New Life and accepted Jesus as my personal saviour. It was not a change of religion it was a change of heart." Similarly, there was the story of a Hindu woman who had joined a Pentecostal group to escape the agony caused by her infidel husband. Also the story of a fisherwoman who had shown the light to a family, one of whose members was infected with HIV; a mother who had to find prayers for her daughter who was suffering from terminal cancer and so on. Verghese's pastor, Gopinath, was himself a Hindu-Brahmin from Kerala, who had converted into New Life and founded its unit in Udupi. In my effort to make sense of all that I had heard, on my return to Bangalore, quite unconsciously, I picked up God That Failed, a book long forgotten and tucked away in a corner shelf of my library. Edited by Richard Crossman and published in the 50s, this book spoke about a different kind of conversion - the ideological one. Here too, I found personal testimonies of six important writers (Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler and Louis Fischer) on why they made their journey into Communism and how they later traced their steps back to democracy. Communism is the 'God' they had all gone seeking, but they found, and explained how, that 'God' had failed. History, politics and disagreements apart, what struck me as I re-read the book was that at the core of their ideological departures and arrivals was a crisis.  read it all