My First Conscious Conversion

An excerpt from my new book, With All the Saints

Image by Godsgirl_madi from Pixabay

Oops—on two accounts.

First, last week I announced I wouldn’t be sending a newsletter today. But my fishing trip was shortened—not the fishing part, but the overall visit with family—so I had nothing to do on Thursday, my prep day. So why not?

Second, marketing-impaired as I am, I completely overlooked the fact that last week my new book, With All the Saints: My Journey to the Roman Catholic Church, was released. Duh. So this week’s PV is an excerpt. The first chapter is about my conversion to Jesus, a narrative that I think will interest Protestants and Catholics alike.

For those who would like to read more, you can buy the book directly from Word on Fire, the publisher, or from Amazon. An audio version is also available from WoF, recorded by yours truly. You can also watch a short interview with me about the book.

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Conversion—it’s complicated. We find ourselves changed but not exactly sure how it happened. Sometimes it’s not clear what we are being converted from or converted to. A conversion to Catholicism does not necessarily begin with a conscious awareness that Catholicism is where one is headed. God is more subtle.

One can confuse a tributary for the main river into which it feeds. If the main river is substantial, the tributaries will be as well. Only when you find yourself merging into the main river do you realize you’ve been in a tributary. The traditional metaphor for becoming Catholic is “crossing the Tiber”—a reference to the river that runs through the city of Rome. If you approach the Vatican from the east, you literally have to cross the Tiber to get there. A better metaphor for my journey would not be that I crossed the Tiber but that I let myself be carried on it toward Vatican City, where I knew I was to get off.

Until then, I had dropped my boat into tributaries that I believed would lead me home. I discovered that they all ended up in the same place: a river called Tiber. I’ve traveled at least three tributaries, maybe four, which more precisely might be called conversions.

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I begin with the most crucial conversion. Unfortunately, I have no memory of it. Since I’m trying to discern the conscious reasons for my affiliation with Rome, I’ll have to bracket it. But theologically, it’s decisive.

It happened in 1952 at St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church in San Francisco a little more than a month after my birth. I was baptized, which in Catholic theology is definitely a conversion—from a state of original sin to a state of grace. One would wish that such a conversion would be memorable, but alas, this is one downside to infant Baptism.

Apparently, it didn’t mean a whole lot to my family, since I don’t recall attending church as a boy—until it came time to receive First Communion. I vaguely remember catechism classes to prepare for that, though I remember nothing I was taught. I do remember that my younger brother deeply impressed the sisters with his apparent devotion. (As these things go, he became the prodigal, and I the minister.) I also have a memory of going to confession and afterward kneeling in a pew and saying a number of Hail Marys and Our Fathers in penance—I assume in preparation for receiving First Communion. To be frank, I don’t know that I would remember First Communion except for the family pictures of me and my brother in coats and ties, Grandma Galli in a flowered dress, and my mother in a stunning white suit with her black hair piled dramatically high.

Since we didn’t start attending church after that, I’ve gathered that the reason for these two sacraments was my Catholic paternal grandmother, who I suspect nagged my father into forcing the issue, maybe with a refrain I heard often as a child: “Now, Bob . . .” Overall during childhood, religion was simply absent from my consciousness. One might argue, when listening to other stories of Catholic upbringing, that this void of Catholicism is what made for the complete happiness of those years!

All to say, it wasn’t until my first conscious conversion that God became more than a swear word to me. It culminated at an altar call at the Evangelical Free Church of Felton, California, in December 1965, when I was thirteen years old.

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A few months earlier, my mother had given her life to Christ. She had a rocky relationship with my older brother, Michael, as he began to enter adulthood at the end of high school and into his first year at community college. Since he lived at home, my mother’s need for psychological control and my brother’s need for independence often exploded into shouting matches and slammed doors. After one intense bout that led to my brother bolting from the house (with the characteristic slammed door), my mother prayed in desperation, “Lord, if you get Michael to join the army, I’ll accept Jesus.”

The groundwork for that prayer had been laid for months, as her sister, Sasha, a devout and annoying evangelical, had been witnessing to her about Jesus. It apparently brought a glint of clarity in my mother’s otherwise confused heart, and in a crisis, she blurted out what amounted to a bargain with the Master of the Universe. She had no idea with whom she was dealing. Later that day, my brother returned home and announced that he had joined the Air Force. To my mother’s mind, that was close enough, and a deal was a deal.

Some weeks later, she tuned in to a Billy Graham crusade broadcast on a local TV station. During the altar call, with the choir singing “Just As I Am” in the background, Graham turned to the camera and said that those at home who wanted to receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior could do so by kneeling in front of their televisions and praying the sinner’s prayer along with him. My mother went to her knees.

When my mother found a new passion, the rest of the family (except for my father) was afflicted with it as well. Soon after the fateful deal, my older brother left for the Air Force, and we moved to Aptos, California. As my mom’s religious enthusiasm caught hold, the family included my brother Steven (not yet a prodigal), my cousin Judy (who was separated from her husband, pregnant, and living with us at the time), and me. We were cajoled not only into attending Sunday morning worship and Sunday school but also Sunday evening worship and Wednesday night prayer meetings at the Evangelical Free Church of Felton.

The pastor—really the church in general—had so emphasized the need to be “grounded in the Word” that my mom thought we should study the Bible together every night we were not at church. She naïvely assumed that this was the habit of all Christians. So, after the dishes were cleared, we’d bring our Bibles to the table and work our way through the Gospel of John. At first, none of us had Bibles to speak of, so we had scrounged them up wherever we could find them. My mom found one for me at a flea market—a King James Version she picked up for fifty cents.

Cigarette smoke swirled around my mom’s coffee cup and Bible as we explored “the strange new world within the Bible,” as Karl Barth put it. Naturally, Barth was unknown to us, but the power of the Bible to reorient us was becoming a new if strange reality every night.

What was cemented in heart and mind during that period took place in one Sunday school class. The teacher read some passage in which Jesus had commanded something of his disciples—the particular passage has long left my memory. He asked the class of restless junior high kids, “Why should we do what Jesus tells us to do in this passage?” Various answers came forth, all of which amounted to one version of pragmatism or another: it would be good for us, it would be good for others, and so forth. The teacher kept shaking his head, saying, “Those things may be true, but those are not the main reason we should obey this command.” When we finally admitted we were stumped, the teacher said, “We obey this command because it was given by Jesus.”

Even at age thirteen, I marveled at the wisdom of this simple answer. For reasons too mysterious and complex to fathom, this has become an unshakable conviction for me ever since. We obey the teachings of Jesus, and of Scripture in general, because of their divine origin. Today, I recognize how difficult it is sometimes to hear the voice of the Lord in Scripture or in prayer, as well as how nuanced and varied our interpretations of what that voice is saying can be. But between those evening Bible studies and the insight of my Sunday school teacher, I’ve never been able to seriously doubt that the Bible is the Word of God or that Jesus is the focal point of Scripture and thus, naturally, the Word of God in a deeper sense. To be clear, it would be a number of years before I loved the Bible, but more on that in a bit—one conversion at a time.

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Among the other things I imbibed at this fundamentalist church was the need to make a “public profession of faith.” Specifically, that meant the need to come forward during an altar call and accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, either committing or recommitting one’s life to Christ. Altar calls were a fixed liturgical feature in the Sunday morning service, with every sermon ending with one; however, there was rarely a call to stand up and walk the aisle forward. Instead—usually with every head bowed and eyes shut—Pastor Lawrence would ask anyone who wanted to make a commitment to raise a hand.

Sometimes, if there were no takers, he would broaden the appeal and ask people to raise their hands if they were burdened by some sin; if there were still no takers, he would start naming particular sins. My mother—whose checkered history included three marriages, giving up a baby daughter, and long battles with alcohol and depression—still had a lot of worldly wit in her, and would joke that sometimes Pastor Lawrence was so desperate for a raised hand that she was sure he was going to say, “Tennis anyone?”

She was also usually desperate for a smoke after worship, so while everyone gathered for coffee in the narthex, she’d go out to the parking lot and light up. Needless to say, smoking was considered a sin in this church. But I give credit to the pastor and members, who never criticized her for smoking, with one elderly man regularly taking the trouble to leave coffee fellowship to come and talk to my mom in the parking lot. I’ve read many accounts of people who have had horrific, manipulative, and abusive relationships in their fundamentalist churches. Though I don’t deny their experiences, I’ve never been able to relate, as my experience of this church was affirming, even though I’ve come to reject some of its teachings and practices.

In retrospect, I’ve realized that Pastor Lawrence was a master of the altar call. Every Sunday, guilt and uncertainty would course through me as he invited unbelievers to raise their hand. After enduring this for months, and as Christmas was approaching, I’d had enough of this spiritual dread. I decided to raise my hand at the end of the service the Sunday before Christmas. I didn’t want to feel guilty any longer.

So on December 19, 1965, I entered the A-frame sanctuary and slid into a shiny wooden pew next to my mom, my brother, and my cousin, as was our routine. When Pastor Lawrence asked those who wanted to receive Jesus into their lives to raise their hands, mine shot up immediately. That’s when Pastor Lawrence pulled a fast one. I’d been attending for months, and never in all that time did he ask people to stand up and come forward. So when he asked all those who raised their hand to come forward and pray with one of the elders, I was annoyed. This was not what I had bargained for. But I had made a commitment by raising my hand, so forward I went.

An older man escorted me to the bride’s room, and we knelt and put our elbows on two metal folding chairs. He led me through the sinner’s prayer line by line. We had to pause a couple of times because I was crying so hard. I wasn’t mature enough to grasp the enormity of my sin and the utter graciousness of Jesus, so I don’t think this was in play. I’m sure the anxiety and guilt produced by many home Bible studies and weekly church services was what burst forth as I prayed.

A month later, I was baptized by immersion. For a long time, I considered this my real baptism. Then for a time, I’d joke that I was well-covered, since I’d been baptized by sprinkling as an infant in the Roman Catholic Church and by full immersion as an adult (or at least at the age of accountability) in a Protestant church. Of course, I now celebrate my Baptism every September 28, the day I was baptized in 1952 at St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church. But at the time, discipled as I was in evangelical religion, baptism was not the real marker. I believed I had been saved on December 19, 1965, at about noon. This is the sort of thing evangelicals do: we know the day and hour of our conversion, when we were set up to enjoy eternal life.

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And yet immediately there were complications. In particular, the next Sunday, the day after Christmas, I again went to church with the family, and as Pastor Lawrence warmed up to the altar call, I was shocked to discover I felt just as guilty as ever! What the heck? Another thing I hadn’t bargained for. But I remembered the words of the elder with whom I had prayed, who had assured me that once I had confessed Christ with my lips, I was saved.

This was the first inkling that the Christian life was not as simple as I had imagined. This was also the moment when I realized—though I couldn’t have articulated it like this—that human psychology was in play in the religious life.

I soon learned that altar calls were part and parcel of the fundamentalist liturgical year. The church sponsored an annual missions week as well as an annual revival, both of which were opportunities “to get right with the Lord.” This revealed to me the inherent paradox of this tradition: On the one hand, it was declared that once you accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior, it was a done deal. You were assured of the forgiveness of sins and entry into eternal life. But every revival preacher was skilled at making you doubt your original profession of faith or convincing you that you had backslidden. Thus, many believers shared the experience of one of my young friends at the church: one day he told me that he had already accepted Jesus six or seven times. Though mightily tempted to go forward during the altar call at times, I never did so again; I kept telling myself, I’ve already done that!

I’ve concluded, years later, that the weekly altar calls and the annual revivals were the fundamentalist version of the Eucharist—regular events where one goes forth bodily to receive the grace of God in fresh ways. “Once saved, always saved” has a lot going for it theologically, but weak human beings need to participate bodily in their salvation and do so regularly. As much as the fundamentalists wanted to get away from anything that smacked of Catholicism, they couldn’t escape the fundamental truth of Catholicism: the body matters, as does liturgy. Apparently, neither could I.

This conversion, then, was a conversion to Jesus at a basic level. Along with it came a deep respect for Scripture, the need for daily prayer, and the willingness to live my life as a Christian. This planted me in the tributary of evangelical Christianity, whose twists and turns and rapids I navigated for fifty years. I won’t detail all of them but only the ones that left their mark on me.

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Grace and peace,

Mark Galli