"My Name is Lazarus": Chesterton's Converts

I haven't been blogging much this month, since late March and early to mid-April (and April is almost gone) was first taken up by Holy Week and Easter and the Octave, and then by two deaths in my circle of friends, one after hospitalization, surgery, another surgery and then hospice, and the other killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking, preparing for the Kansas Camino from Wichita to Pilsen, Kansas.

The latter death, of Laurie Robinson, the founder of our local "Greater Wichita" local Chesterton Society, led me back to this book, which I've dipped into before:

34 stories of converts whose path to Rome was paved by G.K. Chesterton. Edited with an introduction by Dale Ahlquist.

Jewish converts, Muslim converts, former atheists, agnostics, and Protestants of all stripes. Drawn to Chesterton for utterly different reasons. All arriving at the same destination.

A book of curiosity and confrontation and consolation.

Contributors include Bishop James Conley, Fr. Dwight Longenecker, Peter Kreeft, Joseph Pearce, Leah Libresco, Kevin O’Brien, Brandon Vogt, Emma Fox Wilson, Carl Olson, Victoria Darkey, Matt Swaim, David Fagerberg and others. An utterly engaging collection of conversion stories. Includes a fascinating “new” account of Chesterton’s own conversion in his own words.

The book features this poem by Chesterton, written after he had been received into the Catholic Church:

The Convert

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white.
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead.

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

The painting from which the cover detail is taken (Public Domain): 

The Raising of Lazarus by Leon Bonnat (1857)

Many of the essays demonstrate how reading Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, The Catholic Church and Conversion, etc., influenced the writers' journeys into the Catholic Church. 

Laurie's essay is different, because she describes how re-reading Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, after she had been received into the Catholic Church after growing up and working for years in the Mennonite community--and particularly as a journalist for Mennonite publications--helped her resist some of the pressures she was facing. His words, read while recovering from the flu, were a weekend Mystagogy for her.

She organized our Chesterton group, which meets at Eighth Day Books the second Friday every month, nearly 12 years ago, composing this prayer for the beginning of our gatherings:

Heavenly Father,

We thank you for all your good gifts. We ask you to guide us in this conversation; illuminate our minds and hearts with eternal truth as it was expressed through the pen of G.K. Chesterton. 

Grant us the grace to bring glory and honor to you all that we say and do.

We ask this through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

We are reading Chesterton's The Everlasting Man currently and our next meeting will be on Friday, May 10. When we met on the Friday after her death on the Solemnity of the Annunciation (transferred to April 8 because of Holy Week and the Easter Octave), we read her chapter from My Name is Lazarus, paid tribute to her influences on many of us, and prayed for the repose of her soul and her family's consolation, and our own.

Eternal rest grant unto to her, O Lord, and may Laurie's soul, and the souls of all the Faithful departed, rest in peace. May Laurie rest in peace. Amen.