From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith

FOREWORD

You hold in your hands the best personal memoir I have read in many years: honest, vividly written, and compelling. Sohrab Ahmari is emerging as one of the finest minds and writers of his generation, and the story of his conversion recounted here will stay with the reader for a very long time.

This, of course, is a big claim. It requires some explanation, because today religion can often resemble nostalgia or sentimentalism, and the last thing Christians need is another bath in either. Stories of personal conversion are commonplace in an American culture with a taste for self-revelation, and too often the stories fail for one of two reasons: vanity lurking beneath an author’s false humility, and an unseemly appetite for melodrama. The truth is, we’re never as important as we think we are, and, in the end, we and our stories will be forgotten by everyone but God.

And yet, God made us social creatures for a reason. In needing each other, in depending on each other, we have a chance to learn how to love as God loves, and thereby to strengthen each other with reasons for hope. Thus we long for stories like Ahmari’s—stories that ring unmistakably true and can pierce through the skepticism and disappointment that dominate our daily headlines.

One of the ironies of life is that, eventually, if we have been paying attention, we know and come to understand a great many things. This makes sense because we experience a great many things over the years and develop our skills accordingly.

But the same experiences and skills that provide us with a little wisdom and mature judgment also tend to narrow our ability to recognize new possibilities and solutions. We can become quite good at naming an illness, and explaining its nature and cause, and knowing what doesn’t work, but we are not so good at imagining or bringing about a cure or a way forward. A talent at diagnosing the world still has value, because people need to wake up to the reality of a problem before they can begin to fix it. But the fixing often belongs to a different (and younger) set of eyes and skills. This is what makes authors like Sohrab Ahmari so important and also so exhilarating. They remind us that God is always young, and so are those who truly love him.

He makes all things new.

We live at a moment when science and technology can make the claims of faith seem implausible—not by attacking and disproving God but by rendering people indifferent to him, and making the vocabulary of faith incomprehensible. Yet people still suffer and die, all of us. So do the persons we care for, which means that all of us ask the question: Why? We long for an answer. We have a deep need for meaning. People also still love, which means that we have a need for intimacy, completion in the heart of another, and the fertility of new life. And people still have an instinct and a yearning for beauty, which means that beauty has the power to evade the blind machinery of logic and reach right into the human soul.

The Church, as Ahmari discovers in these pages, is mother and teacher, nourisher and consoler, in all of these things, and all of these things prevent human affairs, no matter how confused, from becoming permanently inhuman. Saint Augustine, whose own conversion took place at an age and in a climate not so different from Ahmari’s, would remind us that history is the great destroyer of human illusions and vanities. But it is also the great well-spring of personal and ecclesial hope. While we mustn’t be captured by the world, we very much need to love all the great good in it, serving the people who inhabit it and inviting them to the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ. We should never underestimate the power of personal witness, because without a living example of love that people can see and follow, truth is mute and sterile.

What we do as individual believers thus resonates beyond our own lives because our personal witness shapes others, and each of us as a child of God is meant to experience joy forever. Likewise what we do as communities of Christian friendship matters just as powerfully, because the Church, as a family of families, shapes cultures, creates the future, and sustains God’s presence in the world.

Leon Bloy, the great French Catholic convert, liked to say that, in the end, the only thing that matters is to be a saint. If we are willing to listen, the Church has many good reasons why people should believe in God, and in Jesus Christ, and in the beauty and urgency of her own mission. But she has only one irrefutable argument for the truth of what she teaches: the personal example of her saints. This is the vocation she intends for all of us.

I found myself highlighting passages in this book that I will return to many times in the months and years ahead, but among the best of them appears on the first page of the very first chapter:

My native land [Iran] smelled of dust mingled with stale rosewater. There was enjoyment in Iran and grandeur of a kind, to be sure. But when it wasn’t burning with ideological rage, it mainly offered mournful nostalgia. Those were its default modes, rage and nostalgia. I desired something more.

The lesson here is simple. We are each created for something more, and our hearts are restless until we find it. It is our great good fortune that Sohrab Ahmari did.

+ Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

Archbishop of Philadelphia

PREFACE

It was a classic Onion headline: Reason Man Turning to Religion Later in Life Must Be Horrifying.

The satirical news item concerned Paul D’Amato, a small-town Pennsylvania man who had suddenly taken up a life of Christian piety in late middle age. Formerly non-religious, he now attended multiple services weekly, wore a cross, and regularly brought up Christ’s redeeming light in everyday conversation. The accompanying stock photograph showed a man in a plaid shirt kneeling in the pews of an empty church, his eyes shut, hands clasped in prayer.

Boy, you’ve got to think it was something pretty terrible that made him religious at this point, coworker Jessica Redmond told the Onion’s reporter. She went on: "The guy’s nearly 50, and now he finds God right out of the blue? I bet it’s something with drugs. Or maybe he killed someone in a car accident. Either way, something super messed up happened to him. Only something really, really bad" could have brought about a conversion like this.

Like all good satire, the Onion article reflected the spirit of the age in exaggerated form. In our age, a conversion like D’Amato’s appears, by turns, alarming and ridiculous. Cosmologists today can pinpoint the age of the universe down to the smallest unit of time, neurologists trace every desire to the firing of synapses in the brain, cars drive themselves, and the Internet offers total, instantaneous knowledge about nearly everything. Perhaps there is a Great Mathematician out there, our contemporaries allow, and perhaps this deity looks upon the cosmos with a generally benign countenance. But a personal God, who takes an interest in the destiny of Paul D’Amato of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania—you can’t be serious.

If you are serious about your conversion, then it must be owing to some trauma: drug addiction, guilt over a past misdeed, anxiety associated with rapid globalization. Or maybe you are lonely. Maybe you are desperate for attention.

When that Onion article appeared, on December 2, 2016, I was thirty-one years old and less than three weeks away from being received into the Roman Catholic Church. The joke cut close to the bone. I knew what it was like to submit the contents of one’s inner life for external inspection as a convert. My mostly secular friends were more generous than D’Amato’s, though in social gatherings there were the knowing smiles, the condescending glances, and, very rarely, the expressions of outright hostility to Catholicism.

Only in my case the worldly stakes were somewhat higher. I was working at the time in London as a columnist and editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal. More important, I had been born and raised in the Islamic Republic of Iran. My spiritual life was therefore laden with political and even geopolitical weight that our fictional friend didn’t have to carry. It didn’t help that I had already announced my decision to convert on the Internet.

When I began my course of instruction six months earlier with a priest in London, I resolved not to come out as Catholic until after I was baptized. In July 2016, however, something ghastly happened across the English Channel. A pair of jihadists inspired by the Islamic State assailed a church in Normandy, France, and murdered a priest, Father Jacques Hamel, while he was celebrating Mass. They forced Father Hamel to his knees and cut his throat, but not before the old priest managed to shout: Get away, Satan!

The news accounts and online images of the frail and gentle Father Hamel gripped me. As a Catholic-to-be, I had to react to this atrocity. But how? I blurted out a message of solidarity on Twitter. #IAmJacquesHamel, I wrote, in the style of the #JeSuisCharlie Twitter hashtag that became popular in the aftermath of the January 2015 Islamist massacre at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Then the big news: In fact, this is the right moment to announce I’m converting to Roman Catholicism.

The tweet went viral. Thousands of social media users worldwide retweeted and liked the announcement or otherwise contacted me directly on Twitter and Facebook. Save for the odd fundamentalist Protestant warning me to beware the whore of Babylon—that is, the Catholic Church—the responses were positive. Even so, I had to delete the tweet later the same day. I was unprepared for the brouhaha it set off.

Catholicism was the destination I reached after a long, circuitous spiritual path. That path cut across my Muslim background and Iranian heritage, to be sure, and these in turn shaped its course. But it wasn’t as if I had been praying to Allah one day and the next day accepted Christ as my savior. My Internet cheer squad craved precisely this simplistic narrative, which Twitter, with its tendency to flatten human experience into readily digestible memes, supplied.

As the hours went by, Christian outlets published stories about my conversion in half a dozen languages, though most didn’t bother to contact me first. Moslem Writer Moved by Priest’s Martyrdom to Convert to Catholicism was a typical headline. Still more social-media users shared these articles on their timelines, usually along with Tertullian’s saying that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church. The narrative took on a life of its own. At first, I tried to contact the editors to request correction or clarification. I wasn’t Moslem, dammit! My conversion process had begun long before Father Hamel’s killing. Eventually I grew exhausted and gave up; the online frenzy died down.

I hadn’t taken stock of the public, political facets of faith. Whether I liked it or not, many people were bound to view my conversion as a decisive step from the House of Islam into Christendom. These terms sound grating to contemporary liberal ears. Liberalism honors religious faith as one of the pillars of civil society, at best, but it goes no further: The content of religion and the individual conscience are supposed to be beyond the reach of the liberal state (whether actually existing liberal governments fulfill this promise is a different story).

The trouble is that Islam makes no such distinctions between the subjective and objective sides of faith. And Catholicism—Rome—is linked with community, nationhood, and civilizational boundaries in a way that is simply not the case with the various Protestant strands of Christianity. Add the martyrdom of a French priest at the hands of radical Islamists, and you can see how I was in over my head.

*   *   *   *   *

The tweet had been a mistake. Conversion is foremost a matter of the individual conscience, and the Catholic Church’s cosmic mission is the salvation of souls; everything else flows from that. In my case, however, the political currents generated by the announcement risked overtaking this more crucial interior dimension. Only a fool or an opportunist would make a public conversion like mine as a statement about Islam and Christendom. I don’t believe I was either.

I became Catholic after concluding that Catholicism is true. My accidental circumstances—Muslim born, Iranian American—were secondary. How could I permit my conversion to be reduced to politics and identity, when in fact it had been sparked by the opposite idea: that there is such a thing as truth, truth that is eternal and universal and isn’t circumscribed by politics, history, genetics, language, geography, or identity?

Then there was the vulgar triumphalism in some of the initial coverage. I didn’t convert publicly to score a point for Team Jesus against Team Muhammad, but that was how some were interpreting my decision. If I was reacting against anything, it was against the materialism and relativism that had taken root in the West beginning in the nineteenth century. I had turned my back against Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault, not the prophet Muhammad, whose religion had left only faint imprints on my soul by the time I entered adulthood. This was lost on many of those who applauded as I crossed the Tiber.

The hardest question raised and left unanswered by my tweet and subsequent efforts to explain myself was: Why Catholicism? The ranks of Iranian Christians have been swelling lately. Despite intense repression meted out by the ruling mullahs, there are up to a million converts in Iran, though more conservative estimates put the figure between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand. Most of these new Christians are evangelicals. There are Catholics in the Islamic Republic, but they belong to Iran’s historic Christian minorities, mainly Armenians and Assyrians. Catholicism is thus an ethnic phenomenon and relatively inaccessible for most Shiite Iranians. It is the evangelicals who, at great personal risk, distribute the Gospels in Persian and promise an immediate, personal relationship with masih, the Messiah.

So, again, why Catholicism? The suddenness of my turn to the Roman Church puzzled and, in some cases, disappointed evangelical friends. Was it the intellectual’s snobbery that had drawn me to Catholicism? Had I fallen for bells-and-smells liturgy? Had I given reformed Christianity a fair shake before ruling it out in favor of Rome?

Meanwhile, a few of my more secular friends wondered out loud if I wouldn’t have been better off with one of the mainline Protestant denominations. How could I reconcile my self-proclaimed classical liberalism with Rome’s hard teachings on divorce, homosexuality, the ordination of women, and the like? The question lurking behind these questions, I suspect, was this: Had I found in the Catholic faith a way to express the reactionary longings of my Persian soul, albeit in a Latin key?

The memoir you are holding attempts to answer these questions and to correct the record—to demonstrate that my conversion was sincere, well considered, and in line with the dictates of my conscience; that my becoming Catholic had something to do with being Iranian- and Muslim-born but that it was ultimately a response to the universal call of grace. It retraces the steps that took me from the strident atheism and materialism of my Iranian and American youth to the small chapel in central London, where I was received into the Catholic Church on December 19, 2016.

Most of the book recounts how I came to assent to a personal God from a position of unbelief. That was the barrier I rammed against, over the course of many years, before it gave way. From there to mere Christianity—C. S. Lewis’ term for the basic beliefs shared among the major denominations—was relatively easy going. The final leg, to Rome, was easier still. The book reflects this three-stage dynamic.

This isn’t a general autobiography. The book deals with the pieces of my intellectual and spiritual life that had a bearing on my decision. It singles out a number of awakenings, if you will, a few of them concrete events, most having to do with the life of the mind. This has resulted in some elisions. There are episodes in my life that perhaps deserve to be recounted in print but that don’t belong in a spiritual memoir.

The various stages of one’s spiritual life don’t come neatly, one after another. Nor is there some hidden device in the soul that sounds an alarm at pivotal moments, as if to proclaim: You are learning something profound here—etch this one in your mind for future reference. Spiritual growth proceeds in fits and starts, the various stages overlap, and there is much regression and backtracking. The pivotal moments seem that way only in retrospect, often after the passage of time has eroded their luster. Yet the constant temptation in a memoir like mine is to lend interior developments greater cohesion and clarity than they first possessed. I haven’t always resisted this temptation, but I have tried to capture some of the turbulence, haphazardness, and essential mystery of the process.

The book, finally, touches on the lives of others—my wife, parents, grandparents, teachers, colleagues, friends, and ex-friends, who didn’t necessarily ask to play characters in my memoir, and some of whom are no longer alive. I ask these others for forgiveness, and in some cases, I have changed names to protect their privacy. Paul D’Amato, I think, would understand how awkward all