Turning Again: The Beautiful Ache of Conversion

Conversion, that elegant and aching word, is not some thunderclap moment, not merely the curtain rising on a stage lit by sudden grace; it is rather the long obedience of the heart, the daily turning of the face toward light. The Fathers of the Church knew this, those gardeners of the ancient soul who tilled the rocky soil of the human heart and found there seeds of divine longing.

Saint Augustine, restless and brilliant, staggered through philosophies and indulgences until one child’s voice, lilting and strange, urged him to “take and read.” When he opened to Paul’s stern mercy…put on the Lord Jesus Christ…his heart, he said, was flooded with light (Midwest Augustinians, 2018). Conversion, for Augustine, was no single burst of brilliance but the beginning of a life turned always toward the One who loved him first. “You have made us for Yourself,” he prayed, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” In that restlessness lies the rhythm of conversion.

And Gregory of Nyssa, that poetic mystic of Cappadocia, saw conversion as ascent, an endless reaching toward the infinite (Magis Center, 2023). The goal of the Christian was not stasis but motion, a heart fixed on Christ, perpetually climbing. In his theology, conversion was no static cleansing, no “one and done” baptism of behavior, but a pilgrimage, a purgation that becomes illumination, illumination that becomes union. The soul’s homecoming is not to some fixed address but to love itself, a love that forever draws the soul beyond itself.

Then came Bernard of Clairvaux, the honey-tongued abbot who spoke to clerics in Paris and sent half of them scurrying to the cloister. In his Ad clericos de conversione, Bernard mapped conversion according to the Beatitudes, a movement from poverty of spirit to the light of mercy, from mourning over sin to the fullness of peace. Conversion, for Bernard, was the soul’s education in humility: to see oneself, to surrender the illusion of self-crafted salvation, and to receive the penetrating sweetness of grace. To convert, he said, was to consent to be loved. What a great line!

Thomas Aquinas would later draw the map in sharper ink: grace perfects nature, he said, and though the will aches for goodness, it leans on grace to rise. For Aquinas, the will participates in its own conversion; the grace of God does not overwhelm but elevates, inviting cooperation. In this delicate dance, desire is not crushed but purified; love is not replaced but rightly ordered. One could almost imagine Bernard nodding in his stone abbey…yes, yes, love is the furnace in which sin is melted down to its gleaming ore.

In the modern world’s fragmented mirror, where meaning splinters into reflections of self, John Henry Newman saw conversion as “illumination of conscience,” the subtle and lifelong education of the heart. He called conscience the “aboriginal Vicar of Christ,” that inner cathedral where God still whispers. For Newman, conversion was less a singular gesture and more a faithful listening, the yielding of one’s inner ear to the slow and patient schooling of grace.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, with his taste for the sublime, described conversion as participation in beauty itself. For him, divine love is not coercion but attraction; it stuns, it draws, it ravishes. The converted heart does not merely obey; it adores. “Love is ecstasy,” Benedict XVI would later write, echoing this thought; “not in the sense of intoxication, but as a journey, an exodus out of self toward liberation through self-giving.” (Magis Center, 2023)

Pope Benedict spoke often of daily conversion, the seriousness of repentance not as moral scrubbing but as orientation—“changing direction in the path of life,” an ongoing “reversal” against the current of moral mediocrity. And Pope Francis, as ever, pastoral and wincing with tenderness, called conversion a “daily battle fueled by grace,” a process of purification, a struggle and a promise (National Catholic Reporter, 2020). Both men refuse the myth of arrival; both say the same quiet truth: that conversion is not done until we are.

At its core, conversion is the artistry of God upon the human heart. It is struggle and freedom, battle and balm. It reveals not our power to achieve but God’s endless patience, the mercy that waits when we retreat, the grace that coaxes us home. Conversion is beautiful not because it is easy, but because it is love’s slow victory over pride. It is the daily “yes,” whispered through our weariness, to the One who calls: rise, follow, come.

When an old pope sits beneath the echoing dome and tells pilgrims that every day is an “acceptable moment,” he is only repeating what the saints already sang. Conversion is not a pageant of saints but the persistent ache to be made whole. It is Augustine’s tears, Bernard’s fervor, Newman’s quiet conscience, Benedict’s reversal, Francis’s hopeful struggle…and it is ours.

To be converted is to be alive to mercy, to allow oneself to be astonished again by love. And in an age of cynicism and noise, that astonishment is its own profession of faith. For conversion, finally, is not an escape from the world but a door opening toward its redemption. It is the soul’s steady return to the One whose hands still bear the marks of our becoming.

References

Benedict XVI. (2010, February 16). Daily conversion frees and saves, Pope declares as Lent begins. Catholic News Agency.
Bernard of Clairvaux. (2025, October 1). Preaching conversion through the Beatitudes. Catholic Culture.
Francis. (2020, September 27). Conversion is a daily battle fueled by grace. National Catholic Reporter.
Magis Center. (2023, July 9). The 3 levels of conversion. Magis Center.
Midwest Augustinians. (2018, December 31). Conversion of St. Augustine.
Newman, J. H. (2024, November 2). Newman and the key to conversion. Catholic World Report.
Von Balthasar, H. U. (2020, August 23). The beauty of forgetting. Church Life Journal.