Not all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men . . .
Conversion is rarely a sudden thing. It often plays itself out over time. For example, today we read of Abraham’s first call to follow God out of familiar surroundings “to a land I will show you.” The invitation was vague but to his credit Abraham moved out – until he reached God’s destination and saw people dying of starvation all around him, for “there was a famine in the land.” Immediately Abraham’s old reflexes kicked in and he high-tailed it back to a safer environment, until God propelled him out again. And that’s the way it went: two steps forward, one step back; three steps forward, two steps back – until he arrived at that prolific state of trust and peace that won him the title “Father of all believers”.
St. Peter’s conversion was just as gradual. Despite the Gospel’s saying he immediately left his nets and followed Jesus, Peter remained for a long time entangled in his old ways. He was the kind of fellow who, when he experiences a new insight, tries hard to fit it into his habitual frame of reference. In Peter’s mind only his nation was God’s elect nation and all others were profane. And for a long time Peter kept trying to pour the fascinating new wine of Jesus into old wineskins. He was especially shocked when Jesus was excommunicated by the chief priests of the Temple, leading to Jesus’ execution. Suddenly the chief priests’ brand of orthodoxy became for Peter a safer boundary within which to live, to become –safely – just another face in the pews – if only that persistent servant girl by the fire in the high priest’s courtyard hadn’t called him out as bearing a resemblance to Christ.
Well, the resurrection and Pentecost snapped him out of it again. Under these extraordinary experiences, he opened his mind to a fresher understanding of what Jesus was all about (grace, universal and personal love, peace). He even began to stand in Jesus’ place before the Temple hierarchy of his day – a workingman without credentials explaining things to authorities who used explain things to him! Still he remained entangled in past habits of mind. He clung to old notions of what was unclean: certain kinds of animals and all Gentiles as well – so that God had to shout: “You are not to call unclean what God considers clean!!” Again three steps forward, two steps back!
Peter’s progress remained gradual even after that. The last we read of him in Antioch, St. Paul confronts him about his timid inclination to dine only with Jewish not Gentile Christians. But should we condemn Peter for the hesitancies of his conversion process? How can we, since his story is but a mirror of our own oscillation, for instance, between our pre and post Vatican II ways of expressing, experiencing God’s call to Abraham – to go to “a land I will show you” ?
Which calls to mind old Hepzibah Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables. She lived entangled in aristocratic illusions of herself. She looked with disdain upon the world around her, until grace in the form of poverty forced her to open a “cent shop”, to open her closed mansion to experiences that would put her in contact with God’s wider world and release her truer self. She didn’t like it. It involved her in little frustrations, as when (while arranging her window display) she spilled a whole box of marbles all over the floor, forcing her to get down on her knees to gather them up. Yet, what a marvelous symbol of how God often has to scatter or shatter our old configuration of things, if only in the end to reintegrate our lives around something bigger and deeper than those tired old habits of pride and prejudice – and sloth.