CONVERSION: EMBRACEDBYLOVE Turning back to God means ‘radically being loved’

God calls everyone into deeper relationship with him — sometimes in dramatic ways. How can people be alert to that call and respond positively? How might the Catholic faithful help one another in a journey of love and growth? In this special section of four stories and a guest commentary, The Catholic Spirit explores God’s call to conversion. This article features Paul Ruff, the writer’s brother.

By Joe Ruff

The Catholic Spirit

Splintered inside, alienated from God and each other by original sin, men and women are always being called back into deeper relationship with the Lord — at times dramatically — and knowing what that call sounds like can help people navigate the journey, said Paul Ruff, assistant director of human formation at The St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul.

“Conversion literally means a ‘turning back.’ It is a turning back to God, the source of our creation and of love, rather than hiding in our self-sufficiency and shame, covered by a fig leaf,” said Ruff, who also is director of counseling services at the seminary. “It means allowing ourselves tremulously to be found again and surrender to just radically being loved and participating in love. And, knowing that is going to mess things up. To convert is also letting go of the defensive ways that we have tried to control that relationship.”

Such defenses can include perfectionism, self-

GUEST COMMENTARY | FATHER ROLF TOLLEFSON

sufficiency, a desire to earn and deserve God’s love rather than simply receive and respond to it, Ruff said. God offers the free invitation to be embraced by his love continuously and gradually, and then, at times, dramatically, Ruff said. This is beautifully described by St. Augustine of Hippo in his autobiographical “Confessions,” written in the fourth century. Ruff has written a chapter for a book on St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” with contributors from around the country organized by Christopher Thompson, the seminary’s academic dean and professor of moral theology. Titled “Augustine’s Confessions and Contemporary Concerns,” the book was published last spring by the seminary’s St. Paul Seminary Press.

St. Augustine lived a hedonistic lifestyle in his youth, until his conversion to Catholicism and subsequent ordination as a priest and bishop. He is a doctor of the Church. In his writing, Ruff places St. Augustine’s spiritual conversion into dialogue with findings in the field of phenomenological psychology, which notes intense, rapid, out-of-control feelings that are a result of forces outside of the self, leading to a dramatic and even abrupt change in growth both psychologically and spiritually. In Book 8 of the “Confessions,” St. Augustine says of his own conversion: “All I knew was that I was going mad but for the sake of my sanity, and dying that I might live” (8.8.19). The experience can be one of simultaneously falling apart and coming together. It can — and in the very same experience — bring intense emotional upheaval and deep peace. Whether it is described spiritually or psychologically, the gift of such transformation brings a clear “before and after” sense of self — the landscape of the heart and mind have