My son’s confirmation Mass and our Easter dinner table had one surprise guest: a non-Catholic delivery guy. Join our family rosary and you’ll hear specific prayers for another delivery guy’s progress through his vocational school.
I want to brag on my wife about that — but the truth is, April’s kindness and awareness of the human beings she comes in contact with isn’t extraordinary; it’s human and it’s Catholic. She is doing what the rest of us should be doing.
Let me explain.
My wife sees delivery guys on an almost daily basis. We all do. But she really sees them.
We have a lot of things delivered to our house, and we also have groceries brought out to our car. For me, that means I interact occasionally with an app, and communicate by motioning to the back of my car.
For my wife it means she has truly human interactions with other human beings.
One delivery guy, let’s call him “Malik,” is from a far away country. Members of his family have become Christian, but not him. Malik has sought various career paths in America, from California to Kansas, and keeps his delivery job while he plots his future.
My wife befriended him, and began inviting him to events. He came to a community dinner at our church, and to our family milestones — and, hopefully, next, to “monk soccer” with the guys from St. Benedict Abbey.
Let’s call the other delivery guy George. He’s American born and bred, and has a less personal relationship with the family — but we have prayed George through study nights he was stressed out about and physical tests he had to undergo. Join us in prayer for his upcoming finals.
April hardly mentions the faith to these guys, but she is practicing the most effective form of evangelization possible.
Andrew Whaley, a speaker at Benedictine College’s Symposium on Transforming Culture, has made it his life’s apostolate to create spaces where people can gather and get to know each other. The ultimate goal is to evangelize — effectively but not directly. He explained that the method comes from Nicky Gumbel, the founder of the Alpha Course:
“Gumbel says he wants people to belong, believe, and behave — in that order. We tend to go the opposite direction, pushing on behavior modification, justifying that push with doctrine or apologetics, but never get around to providing a real context in which people belong — where they say ‘This is my place and these are my people.’”
You can see his method here.
But this is the evangelization method that converted one person I know well: Me.
I discovered my faith in college at a Great Books program in San Francisco associated with Father Joseph Fessio, the publisher of Ignatius Press. The power of the Catholic intellectual tradition won me over — eventually. First, I found myself embraced by a community of believers. Their friendship made their ideas attractive, not the other way around.
One way to describe this phenomenon is the way St. John Henry Newman did. “The heart is commonly reached, not through reason but through imagination,” he said. “Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us … no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.”
Your favorite school teacher said the same thing another way: “No one cares what you know until they know that you care.”
This is how all the great conversion stories go.
For famous converts such as actors John Wayne and Gary Sinise, it was witnessing the faith of their spouse's families. For Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, it was meeting mentors in New York. For Clare Crockett and Elizabeth Ann Seton, it was immersion in the Catholic cultures of Spain and Italy.
The best fictional conversion stories follow the same pattern: For Jean Valjean the bishop’s welcoming household is the first step to faith; for Charles Ryder it’s the family at Brideshead.
Other examples are waiting to be written — but they all start with people meeting Catholics who are welcoming and loving. You, for instance.
