Further reflections on conversion

Returning to the ecumenical centre this week I've had time (occasionally!) to reflect on my own conversion, on what I once believed and what I now believe.
At morning prayer on Thursday we heard the reading from the book of Acts 16 about the conversion of Lydia. "The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was being said." Sometimes in the international setting I sense it might be possible to get rather blasé about a new message that comes from others. Perhaps in the modern globalised world we will all feel that there is nothing new to listen eagerly to...

Meditating on the text I sensed also that my prayer that God might keep my heart open was itself a reflection of my privileged position - I have never had to struggle to claim my Christian identity, I've never lost my job becasue of what I believe, or not been able to study or had to take my right to believe to court.

The need for enshrining true and clear freedom of belief into national constitutions and the practice of the law came across to me most powerfully in the experiences from Malaysia that Rev Dr Hermen Shastri shared with us in Toulouse. Where confusion exists between religious law and secular law, individuals and groups of people can be caught very painfully in the middle with the secular courts sometimes giving way to the law of the religious majority. I wonder what it is about someone believing and practising something different to ourselves that destablises we human beings so much. And of course the story of one individual converting can sometimes be instrumentalised to forment unrest or to encourage tightening of the legal framework.

Today's French Protestants have within them a fairly strong sense of being the inheritors of a once highly persecuted minority, yet today many local congregations are not historical protestants at all but converts from Catholicism or more likely from secularism. Sometimes I wonder whether looking to the past in the way we sometimes do is very healthy. However in 2005 French Protestants celebrated 100 years of the separation of church and state and used that event to ask that the French government consider a similar law for recognition of France's Muslem community. I think that's quite a positive way of using awareness of one's own history to try to speak the truth to power in one's own time.