“May-the-4th Be With You?” Alec Guinness Found Grace

“May the Fourth be with you.” This year the old joke makes me chuckle.

I am currently finishing up writing my monthly column for Magnificat on the story of Sir Alec Guinness (the actor who played Obi-Wan Kenobi and many other great roles on screen and stage). His real-life journey took him on a greater adventure than any of his movies. 

I have been working with lots of material from biographies, memoirs, and letters. It is a very moving story of grace and humanity. As is so often the case, my little two page column (Coming up in the December 2024 issue) cannot do justice to the story of how Alec (and soon after his wife Merula) first found faith in Jesus, and then were drawn to the fullness of belonging to Jesus in His Catholic Church.

I am doing my best to shine a light on these “stories” of conversion, hoping to inspire others to continue and expand this work. We need to point out more fully the peculiarity of every person called by the Lord (conversion doesn’t eliminate a person’s individual character but—on the contrary—renews and deepens it) and the incredibly diverse circumstances that led to their encounters with Christ.

Jesus is at work all through the world, and He knows how to bring us to Himself. Writing these articles every month for a dozen years, I have chronicled a lot of conversions from every part of the world, from every period in history, and I have seen that God our Father loves each of us (and all of us) in ways beyond anything we can imagine. He seeks us and sends His Son Jesus to find us and bring our hearts near to Him. Whatever wretched unhappy condition we find ourselves in, God wants us to draw near to Him in our hearts. He loves us! His love will open our hearts and place within them the beginnings and the increase of our capacity to love Him and one another.

Conversion happens when people stay with the One whose Heart has worked infinite love into human history from within—inside history, inside relationships and communion. Our very freedom itself can be made whole, rejuvenated, changed. Stay with Him. Don’t run away and try to hide in the vortex of your own loneliness. Or, if you do run away, draw near to Him once again. Stay as close to Him as you can, with your heart. Inside that “staying” is a prayer that the Holy Spirit—God who ha