Last night I found myself looking back on my life as a Christian so far. The reason for doing so was a remark made by a fellow parishioner: “You’re a convert, but you’re not as zealous like a lot of other converts”. I think he meant the über zealous neophytes that are sometimes very visible in the Church. I’m more a “middle of the road” person, or at least I try hard to be like that. I wasn’t always like this. I have been the “über zealous neophyte” for quite a while. I don’t believe all converts display the neophyte behaviour, and those who don’t go around rather unnoticed. Those who display this behaviour stand out, usually in the negative way, like me way back when. It is easy to fall into this trap after discovering something new and exciting and all you can think of is sharing it with others and make others join in the fun, regardless of the thoughts and feelings of the other party.

I am guilty of behaving like this in the past, especially in the two or three years after my initial conversion to the Christian faith. I became a member of a very strict and orthodox Evangelical church: the type with two services on Sunday, not buying stuff on Sundays; not going out for dinner on Sundays; no studying or other work on Sundays. There were a lot of rules you had to obey to because this was how they were teaching and living the Ten Commandments. They were serious about it, and in fact I liked that. Not because they were the rules and you had to do it because it were the rules. I found myself doing a lot of these things already as a result of trying to live a Christian life. I was very happy to be a Christian and would make sure everybody got that. At one point I started to expect other people to live the same lifestyle I was living because that was how to live properly. If you would adopt another lifestyle, you weren’t living a good life. Same approach for doctrine: I held tight on what the church was teaching, on what Calvin and other reformators were teaching and anything that wasn’t in line with those teachings was heretical in my mind. I gave other people in my church a hard time because they weren’t sticking to the doctrines of their own church.

After a while it occurred to me that my behaviour had no results whatsoever: nobody had the slightest inclination to live a more orthodox life or corrected their flawed understanding of doctrine. And that had nothing to do with them and their approach, it was me. I had this “I’m doing it right, you’re doing it wrong, and I will tell you how to do it right” attitude. According to my own pastor and other orthodox people, I knew a lot about my faith and I was right to defend what I held for the Truth. That may have been the case, I hear a lot of people saying that I know a lot, but I wasn’t spreading the Good News efficiently. There may have been a big chunk of insecurity as well: because I was new to the faith it felt odd to be so different from the others. The inability to deal with the Dutch approach to authority may also have been playing a role. Whatever it was, whatever I was doing, it wasn’t working. If I really was interested in defending the faith, I had to change my approach. I needed to learn other people’s language and see where they were coming from and be gentle and actually listen to them. It took a while to get there, but when I adopted this approach I noticed people becoming less hostile to what I was saying and that they actually started to listen what I was saying.

This experience shaped me and how I deal with other people. One of the things I heard most frequently back when I was this Evangelical neophyte was that I was so arrogant and self-righteous. This was totally not how Christ wants me to be, so I needed to learn to be humble the hard way with God’s help. I needed to go around with an open mind and had to acknowledge that some of the things I defended as the doctrine of the Evangelical church I belonged to was actually incorrect. The reason why a lot of Evangelicals didn’t stick to it anymore was that they also sensed it was flawed. This led to a huge crisis. If some things were wrong, other things could be wrong too. So I needed to rethink everything and learn that things can be different in reality from how they look at first glance.

Why do I come up with all of this? At the one hand to remind myself to be gentle and patient with new Catholics who have a lot of zeal and at the other hand to hold up a mirror. It’s very easy to fall back in this trap of forcing your point of view down other people’s throats. This doesn’t mean that truth is something optional. But there’s truth and ways to share it. And there are different audiences. If someone claims to be a devout Catholic but is not living like one and has opinions that go against Church teaching, I will treat that person different then a non-Catholic who opposed the Church because he or she doesn’t know what the Church actually teaches. One big thing I learned to respect is the fact that people have a free will. I can give out information, I can be an example living my life, but I can’t make them believe and live a virtuous life: only God can.

I believe most converts go through this phase and I can understand how they can frustrate cradle Catholics. But keep in mind they have good intentions. They need to learn the hard way how to deal with differences among faithful Catholics. This is especially difficult if those neophytes come from a Protestant or even an Evangelical background. In a lot of those churches there’s not much variation allowed: differences are often seen as a form of heterodoxy. Yes the Catholic Church has well defined what her doctrine is, and that what’s they have learned in RCIA (hopefully). What they didn’t really learn is all the different kinds of spirituality and all the different ways to live a virtuous Catholic life and still be faithful to the Magisterium. Don’t blame them. It’s not something you can learn in RCIA but only by living the faith in full Communion with the Church. They need their time. And they need good examples of how open-mindedness doesn’t necessarily leads to heterodoxy. A challenge for both sides, cradle Catholics and converts alike.

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