September 29, Ordinary 26C (Luke 16:19–31; Amos 6:1a, 4–7)

I love a good transformation story. Saul on the road to Damascus. Augustine stumbling upon Paul’s letter to the Romans. Martin Luther in a thunderstorm. John Wesley after his abject failure in Georgia. All stories about saints of the faith—and egregiously, mostly men.

One of my favorites is Elizabeth Ann Seton, who, through a circuitous route, became the first US-born Catholic saint. When her husband took ill, they sold everything to move to Italy. He died there, and Elizabeth went to mass—where she found purpose and euphoria in the Catholic faith. She came back to the States and—I’m skipping a lot here—sacrificed her most important relationships to become a nun. She started the Sisters of Charity and went on to start several schools, orphanages, and hospitals.

Conversion narratives raise a question: Why does it take so much to get there? I too can remember being in a dark place, without much to lose, before deciding to turn my life over to God. Even that language—“turning one’s life over”—carries with it a sense of the extreme, as if the life that the one who created the universe asks of us is plausible only after exhausting all other possibilities. In recent years we have heard as well of another, similarly extreme sort of conversion: of extremely rich people who decide to give their wealth away, moving from consumption to generosity based on their conviction that they have more than they could possibly spend.