For the Conversion of Souls

Brideshead Revisited is a conversion story. It’s a book about a collection of sinners who, whether on their deathbed, drunk in a monastery, or performing their military duty, return not just to God but to a Catholic God. Evelyn Waugh, the author, was himself a fervent, reactionary Catholic, a man by all accounts unpleasant to be around and arrogant in manner. He referred to this novel as a “Great English Classic,” and while that may be true, the ability to say so about one’s own work is inconceivable to me.

When I first read Brideshead Revisited, I was fourteen and had just been to my first Catholic summer service camp. I re-roofed a house and discovered Adoration and fell deeply in love with Jesus as a real, living person. That was, I think, my conversion. I cared about God before that, in a vague way, but it wasn’t until that summer that I became devout. I read Brideshead and found a deeply Catholic novel with a deeply queer character and I loved it.

My faith remained at the front of my life for the next five years. I prayed, I considered becoming a nun, I served. I found joy in the Eucharist, joy in Catholic community. When I went to college this did not wane, not at first. But crisis followed crisis, and something was bound to break. By the time I was twenty, I found myself having panic attacks every time I went to mass, and I knew something had to change.

My attendance at Church was between God and me. We had a handful of secrets, and the latest was this: I’d stopped going. It was sudden when it happened, the chance decision of a Sunday, except for the way my life had been building to this moment for a year. Whatever the circumstances were, it was strictly secret. I had Catholic friends, people I’d come to love over the past two and a half years, and I didn’t say a word to them. Whether this was a lie by omission no longer mattered very much to me.

What I wanted to avoid, no matter who I had to lie to, was people praying for me. I knew all about it. I had prayed for my share of lapsed souls: all my siblings, most of my friends, people I barely knew. I was well-familiar with that prayer: Jesus, guide them home. Bring them back. I had prayed it, and I knew that if I told anyone that I was leaving the Church, that they too would pray it for me. I knew it would not be out of ill-intent, or even real condescension on their part. But still, I could not allow it.

That winter, when I watched the 11-hour Brideshead Revisited mini-series from 1981, I rediscovered a text that felt familiar and new. I watched as all of the semi-heathens on screen ended up praying in one way or the other. Aside from being a story of conversion, Brideshead is about a man named Charles falling in love with a very wealthy family. First Sebastian, whom he meets at Oxford, and then the rest of the family: Lady Marchmain, the mother; Julia, the socialite sister; Bridey, the stiff, emotionless eldest son; and Cordelia, the youngest, devout and delightful.

Charles early establishes himself as an agnostic in the midst of the Catholics at Brideshead. Cordelia, only nine when they first meet, solemnly assures him that she will pray for him. “‘I’m sure it’s more than I deserve,’” he says, to which she replies, “‘Oh, I’ve got harder cases than you. Lloyd George, and the Kaiser, and Olive Banks.’” The latter, she explains, a girl who was expelled from Cordelia’s convent.

Charles accepts this with some bemusement. When he tells Sebastian that Cordelia is praying for him, Sebastian’s flip reply is “‘She made a novena for her pig.’” Cordelia’s prayer is at that time the prayer of the immature, the prayer that relies on quantity and repetition. I prayed like that once. I clutched Rosary beads every night as I drifted off to sleep, and I prayed for each of my siblings, my dead grandmother, a grieving classmate. I was not unlike Cordelia, maybe—though not quite so happy.

There is nothing threatening in a child’s prayer. Cordelia prays for Charles, and because she is nine, he allows it with barely a comment. A child’s prayer is rooted in some innocence, or perhaps naiveite. When you are a child, you are powerless; you are defined in so many ways by your lack of control. Prayer is an appeal to a higher authority, and it allows you to take some control back. Prayer gives you power. Not in any actionable way, maybe, but it allows you to feel as though you are doing something when action is impossible.

It is the child’s lack of power that renders their prayer harmless. Children know quite a lot, but their knowledge comes in simpler terms than it will later in life. Complexity and nuance are not yet native concepts. Certainly not to Cordelia, when she offers to pray for Charles. She has been taught that religion—Catholicism—saves, and so she believes that Charles’s very soul is in peril. But her prayer lacks teeth.

This is the way I prayed for my siblings’ conversion. I am the youngest of five, and I was the last one in the Church, and I prayed for all of them. I didn’t think they needed to be Catholic to be happy, but I did think they needed God, and I thought that Catholicism was the most direct route to God. When I prayed for them, I believed that I knew something they did not, not through any merit of my own, but because I had been blessed by God with revelation. I prayed for them and I believed it did not alter my relationship to them.

Sebastian is an alcoholic. The first half of Brideshead is a moving depiction of addiction left untreated and met without empathy. Sebastian’s drinking grows only worse when he’s around his family, especially his mother. Lady Marchmain is pious and charming and perfect, and also the root of much of Sebastian’s self-hatred. At Easter, Charles is visiting Brideshead when Sebastian gets drunk before dinner one evening. He stays in his rooms, and Charles makes excuses for him, but Cordelia runs up and discovers that he is in fact drunk and half-dressed for dinner. The family tries to ignore this, but when Sebastian comes downstairs to apologize to Charles, slurring his speech and knocking over lamps, they can’t anymore.

The next day, Sebastian leaves for London and Lady Marchmain has a talk with Charles. She fails to understand her son, and Charles is unable or unwilling to explain him. She tells him that she was up all night praying for Sebastian, and then she adds, “‘I prayed for you, too, in the night.’” She does not detail her prayer, but there is something threatening in this line. It comes at the end of a conversation in which she tries and fails to recruit Charles as her agent in Sebastian’s life.

A friend of mine in high school, when told to put her book away during grace, continued to read as she said, “I don’t believe in the power of prayer.” This silenced her teacher, a pushover with a Midwestern accent, and it made me laugh in hearing the story. At the time, I was somewhat scandalized, as I believed prayer to be sacred, a connection to the divine. I now don’t know what the divine is, if anything, and so prayer is far less meaningful in my life. But I wonder about that phrase—the power of prayer.

Prayer has power, even if I don’t believe it can influence the course of events. When I prayed for my siblings’ conversion, that impacted the way I related to them, even if I didn’t think so. A roommate once accused me of treating her like a project, an accusation that was probably fair at that time. When you pray for someone’s conversion, you are necessarily questioning them, their choices, their autonomy. You believe you know something they cannot. And when you tell someone you’re praying for them, as Lady Marchmain does with Charles, you are altering your relationship.

When I left the church, I wrote in my journal: “I don’t need any more hands on my soul.” I wanted no one praying for me in the night, no one begging God to just help me find my way back. I knew that that’s what they would do if they knew I was gone, because it’s what I would have done. It’s what I had done. And I was through with that. My soul was my own, now, not offered up to the Church. Mine. I didn’t want anyone else thinking they could handle it.

I avoided one friend for months after I left the Church because I knew how she would respond. We had grown close over our shared Catholicism, the only two devout ones in our freshman dorm. She had an iridescent smile, talked fast, and liked to salsa dance, and we shared confidences for a year or two. One day months after I stopped attending Mass the two of us sat outside the library and caught up after not seeing each other all semester. I obfuscated, never actually telling her that I didn’t go to Mass anymore, and she told me how nice it was to have a Catholic friend. I felt like a liar as I sat there. Months later, when I finally confessed to her that I no longer considered myself Catholic, she said: “I’ll pray for you.”

Why did she want me to return to the Church? Perhaps out of a belief that I needed the Church to be whole, that I had to be embraced by Christ and congregation. Maybe she mourned a sense of community or camaraderie that she felt with me as a fellow Catholic on a secular campus. I don’t know. But whatever the reason, the moment she told me she would pray for me to find my way back, our friendship changed. I knew that I was something she felt grief over.

What grates about this prayer is the certainty. Someone praying for me to return to the Church is certain that they know better than I, certain that I have made a temporary mistake, certain that I am sinning. I was once that certain, too. I once knew with all I was that God was great and I was not. As I lost that certainty, I began to see how blinding it can be, how arrogant.

When I left the Church, it was not a rash decision. It took months before I was ready to skip Mass once, then again. I left the Church because staying hurt like claws in my chest. I knew I had to leave—it was self-preservation.

Everyone who would pray for me didn’t know that. They hadn’t seen my sobbing, or gasping for breath, under the weight of the cross. They didn’t know how hard I was trying. All they would know was that I stopped going to Mass, stopped receiving the Sacraments, and without room for nuance or explanation, they would pray for my return.

That is what ought to distinguish a child’s prayer from an adult’s: an understanding of complexity. A humility, an acknowledgement of things unknown. Cordelia cannot be blamed for her certainty at nine years old, but Lady Marchmain, in her forties, ought to know better. Charles accepts both of their prayers with little comment, even in narration. I wonder if my indignation is because I know what it is like to pray, and Charles does not. I know the pleas, the solicitations. I know the certainty.

You cannot pray for someone to convert unless you possess that certainty. You can either be like Cordelia, an adult who never learned to question, or you can be like Lady Marchmain, remaining firm in your convictions while willfully ignoring other possibilities. If you aren’t certain in one of these ways, why would you ever pray for conversion?

Well, Charles prays for conversion in the only way I find acceptable. Lord Marchmain has returned to Brideshead, ten years after Lady Marchmain died, in order to pass his last days in his old home. He insists that he does not want the sacrament of Last Rites throughout his sickness, and when a priest is called in, Lord Marchmain dismisses him. Still, in what Julia sees must be his final hours, she calls the priest back. Lord Marchmain is unresponsive as the priest performs the ritual, and Charles finally kneels. He prays: “‘O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.’”

I revere the uncertainty in this prayer. I think it is the noblest thing to admit to a lack of knowledge. If the power of prayer lies in what it does to human relationships, then this uncertain prayer allows for the love found in many prayers of conversion without requiring the same condemnation. I cannot say I will not pray to a God I don’t believe in, because in that too there is certainty. ‘O God, if there is a God,’ is as good an opening line to prayer as I can think of. It is the opposite of Cordelia’s prayer, of the child’s prayer. Rather than trying to reclaim control, it is a complete admission of ignorance and powerlessness.

I best know what my soul needs. To those Catholics whom I have known, and who have loved me well, my embrace of agnosticism represents a fall from grace of some sort, if only a temporary one. Does it matter to them, I wonder, that I am happier than I have ever been? That I am far happier than when I struggled to live as a faithful Catholic? I can hear the replies, in the tones of my middle school religion teacher, that life is not about happiness. I suppose he would tell me that while I think I am happy, I lack the joy of Christ. A part of me believes that he would be right, that I, too, should pray for my own conversion. After all, there is great comfort in certainty.

These things swirl together: the certainty, the love, the power. They make a prayer for conversion a dangerous one. Cordelia thinks Charles will go to hell. Lady Marchmain thinks so, too. Both of their relationships to him are changed when they pray for him, and changed again when they tell him they have prayed for him. The praying changed their understanding of their relationship with him; the telling changed the relationship in practice.

I cherish my autonomy. It is important to me that I not only have control over myself, but that others view me as having that same control. If, as I say, I don’t believe in the power of prayer to alter events, why do I feel like it is a threat to my autonomy to be prayed for?

The youth minister who was so important to my faith when I was a teenager is, by her own confession, mournful that so many of the students she has worked with have left their faith. The first time I told her I was no longer going to Mass, we were in a café in Arlington when I was home for a weekend from school. “I’ll pray for you,” she told me. What I heard was, “I do not believe you.” It felt as though my experience was being doubted, my own self-knowledge not to be trusted. I knew when I had to leave the Church. But she would claim to know better.

A prayer for conversion, a prayer of certainty, denies so many possibilities. It maintains a single story line, that salvation is found in the Church—if not only in the Church, then most fully in the Church. I believed this once. The characters in Brideshead Revisited, even the ones who profess no religion, believe this as well. Evelyn Waugh certainly believed it.

But Charles, when the novel ends, is alone. He is unhappy and alone and he has no one left in his life. His conversion did not save him. Sebastian’s conversion did not save him. We know little of what has become of Julia after hers, but she too is alone. Conversion did not save these characters, because not everyone should convert. The Church was never what was missing in these characters’ lives; what was missing was love.

Too cheesy a line to end on, so I’ll add an addendum. In reviewing this essay, I wonder if anyone else feels this way, or it’s just me. It’s entirely possible that because of the particular way I prayed, I view prayer as threatening to my autonomy. Others might not have a problem being prayed for. This is the thing about living out of uncertainty: I can write an entire essay claiming something about a spiritual experience, and I can acknowledge that in truth I know nothing but my own life. I will not pray for you. But I suppose if you wanted me to, I could.

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