The Gospel passage this weekend has my mind on the beautiful love that God has for us and the way He relentlessly pursues us. Recently I heard the story of Shayne Smith coming into the Catholic church, as shared in a conversation he had with Matt Fradd. Matt has a YouTube channel I really enjoy called “Pints with Aquinas,” where he has fascinating conversations with all different kinds of people. His full conversation with Shayne Smith is about three and a half hours long but definitely worth watching, even if you only do a chunk at a time. It’s such a great conversion story that I can’t fully do it justice in this space, but I will try.
For those not familiar with him, Shayne Smith is a comedian who has been featured on Dry Bar comedy and elsewhere. Shayne grew up without much of a family life and wasn’t raised to practice any faith. He freely admits doing drugs as a child and being involved with gangs for much of his life. He’s a huge fan of tattoos and has them on large portions of his body.
Even though it is evident from his story that most of Shayne’s life was lived outside of any religion, God still pursued him. And when the time was right, Shayne encountered Him. Shayne’s grandfather, who lived in Utah till past the age of 100, was the best person Shayne had ever known. He actually moved out to Utah to be with him toward the end of his life. After his grandfather’s passing, Shayne describes having a strong recurring impulse to go to church. Finally he relented and slipped into the back of a Catholic church, without really knowing what he was doing there.
While in that Church, Shayne reluctantly decided to kneel down. As he looked up at the crucifix, he had a profound experience of Jesus and Mary. He describes a flash of light and then looking at Mary and knowing that she loved and cared for him. As he puts it, he was “bathed in warm love.” In that moment, he felt loved in a way that he truly needed but had never felt before. He realized that even though he had felt alone most of his life–in his childhood, in crowds, on stage–in this moment, he wasn’t alone. He experienced Mary’s love as a mother and knew it was something he needed but hadn’t gotten as a child. So he had a good cry in the back of the church. He talked to God about his faults and wanting to be better and asked if God loved Him. Kneeling in the back of that Church, Shayne truly felt loved. Then he left, not really knowing what to make of the experience, questioning what had just happened.
After that, Shayne continues having interior thoughts about Mary and hearing her say to him, “I love you.” And this starts getting to him; Mary’s feminine perfection captures him. Around that time, he listens to a podcast about the idea that as Catholics, we should pray for the dead and that those in Heaven can pray for us. Right around the same time, he finds out that his grandfather had been Catholic, and he has the strong sense that he should pray for and talk to his grandpa. So he goes to the local Cathedral and once again has a powerful experience of God’s love. In his interview with Matt Fradd, Shayne said, “I’m touched in a way that’s physical, that’s real.” And as he described it, he said to himself: “I’m Catholic now, I’ve gotta pray, I’ve gotta change my life.”
Shayne Smith’s conversion story shows the beautiful way that God came into his life to reveal His love, both through His Beloved Son and through Mary. Shayne was so touched by their love that he knew change was necessary. His heart was converted. We often think of conversion and repentance as God scolding us, but the Lord wants to show us His overwhelming love more than anything. Repentance doesn’t just mean arbitrarily stopping certain things because they’re wrong in the abstract sense, it means turning from false loves to True Love. Repentance is turning from lesser, incomplete loves, to the One, True Love, to the One who has loved us from the beginning. And Mary plays such a beautiful role in praying for us and sharing her motherly love with us to help us repent, just as she helped Shayne and so many others.
So this is what Jesus invites us to in this desert experience of Lent. He bravely went into the desert for forty days so that His perfect love could be tested by Satan. Through it all, His love triumphed. Those forty days of testing and triumph were His way of retracing the steps of God’s firstborn, the people of Israel as they failed over and over in their forty year journey in the desert. Where they failed, the only Begotten Son of God, with His true humanity and full Divinity, triumphed. And in this triumph, He emerges from the desert inviting others to share in the triumph of His love, to repent and believe in the gospel, the Good News that we are not alone in battle. We have the Lord to fight those battles with and in us now, and we can be victorious in Him. This is Good News!
This is the unimaginable gift we have as people of the New Covenant that Jesus has brought about. In the First Reading we see God give Noah the sign of the rainbow to symbolize His enduring, covenantal love for humanity and His commitment to us and all of creation. Though tragedies strike and we stumble and fall, His love remains. But now we have an even greater symbol of God’s covenant love, we have the Cross. The Cross that helped Shayne see the love of Christ when he stepped into that Church, the Cross which has brought conversion to countless billions of hearts. We have the New and Eternal Covenant founded on God Himself spilling His blood in a complete and total self gift for us. The Cross reminds us why we take time to fast, pray and give alms for forty days–because of the love in the heart of Jesus which invited Him into forty days in the desert.
So let us know, deep down, that Jesus wants to pour out His love on us in fresh ways during these days of Lent, that His love calls us to respond in love, to allow our hearts to be turned from what is less to He who is Everything, and there find our true Peace and our Center. This Lent, He wants us to either discover for the first time or rediscover His amazing, never ending love, and have our hearts changed. That’s what this Lent can be for each and every one of us. I pray that it is.
+ Heavenly Father, thank you. Thank you for your Love, thank you for your Son. Jesus, our loving Savior, help us to be more fully converted by your love this Lent. Holy Spirit, give us abundant grace to bring our hearts to true repentance. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen. +