Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion

by Abigail Favale

My body was broken, but in a way it was meant to break. This was purposeful suffering.

Some Christians seem to manage, somehow, through faith alone, cut off from the sustaining flood of sacramental grace that still flows in the ancient Church. But my faith couldn’t survive without it. I’m too weak, too wayward for that. I need that golden cord to bind myself to the mast. Without it, I wander.

G. K. Chesterton, in his own conversion narrative, writes that the Catholic Church “is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”14

:o

The bodily receptivity and fecundity of the woman is an emblem of humanity’s greatest power: the capacity to be receptive to divine love, to assent to that love and invite God into one’s inmost being, where divine love flowers into new life.