on conversion
Here are some responses I had within conversations about religious conversion. The first was from a conversation about what kind of thinking led me to the Church. Instead of dealing with the thoughts directly, I focused my answer more on the sources that helped me work through them. The second selection was based on a conversation about how some people refer to a 'personal relationship with Jesus'.
"I grew up Methodist so my early formation was within a Wesleyan/Methodist framework. It was largely the hymnody and the order of worship, both contained in our hymnals, that shaped my Christian world. Other factors which seemed in tandem with those were regular bible studies with my youth pastors and other teachers and my own personal reading. Up until the early 90s I had read most of the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. You can go ahead and throw in Dorothy Sayers as well. Most of this was either fiction or essays. The kind of world I was able to inhabit was still decidedly Methodist but now it had an Anglican cast and something like a medieval Catholic soul. These new layers deepened me, prepared me for and introduced me to a whole new set of writers. Now it was the fiction of Walker Percy, Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O'Connor but also biography, like Thomas Merton's The Seven Story Mountain, a couple books on John Wesley and some writings of the saints like Theresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich. Grappling with some problems surrounding John Wesley I was pointed ever so gently to the work of the tractarians, where I further discovered John Henry Cardinal Newman. It was through such that I discovered works more crucial to my journey. At a certain point I realized that three books had had a huge impact on me: Brideshead Revisited, a novel by Evelyn Waugh, Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton and Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Cardinal Newman. Needless to say, though I resisted for a while, I ended up Catholic. It's safe to say that many of the names mentioned here are common to Methodists who have ended up Catholic."
"Well, growing up Methodist and having been a member of some non-denominational churches I see that from both sides. Of course I've become very Catholic about salvation. Far from seeing it as just one private and personal moment in a life, I see it as communal, sacramental and ongoing throughout one's life within the life of the Church. I have a certain degree of sympathy with protestant viewpoints that helps me in dialogue with those that hold them. What I try to focus on though are the solid Catholic elements alive in their traditions that bind them unknowingly to Holy Mother Church. And by emphasizing those we can build amazing unity in our talks. Eventually when we stumble on a difference it becomes this amazing unusual mystery to dance around, instead of simply a roadblock to understanding. You almost have to lure them into a fairy forest before they can turn their own thoughts inside out and rediscover them all in place and shining within Holy Mother Church. It's as if they've been living in a shadow world and they suddenly awake in a much more real and bright one."