Chapter 7: The Tipping Point: Conversion as the Pivot of the Journey to Holiness

Ignatius of Loyola, C. S. Lewis, Elizabeth Ann Seton and the new Catholics of the twenty-first century

Rev. Fr. Michael Doyle

“There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents.” (Luke 15:7)

“…the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” (C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy)

Summary: The first six chapters have set out the call to holiness (Chapters One and Two), what holiness is and how it comes about (Chapter Three), the fixed centre of a life (Chapter Four), the moment of turning (Chapter Five) and the map of the road (Chapter Six). This chapter returns to the turning and asks what it looks like when we study it closely in the lives of those who have undergone it. It borrows from Malcolm Gladwell the idea of a tipping point, that “magic moment” at which a long accumulation of small things crosses a threshold and everything changes at once, and it asks whether the idea can help us understand religious conversion as the pivot on which the whole journey to holiness turns.

The chapter begins with the phenomenon described in Chapter One, the young adults now being received into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil in growing numbers, and with what the French bishops have learnt by asking them why they came. It then tells how I came across The Autobiography of St Ignatius of Loyola on the shelf of a retired priest in rural Oxfordshire, and it sets three conversions side by side: the crisis and long convalescence of St Ignatius, the slow and reluctant intellectual conversion of the Oxford don C. S. Lewis, and the steady, relational conversion of the American saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. The discussion draws out what the three have in common and where they differ, and applies both to the new converts. The chapter closes with the theoretical and practical consequences for seminaries, priests and spiritual directors, parishes and every believer, and argues that the tipping point is always the beginning of the work of the cure of souls and never its end.

Introduction: The Moment on Which Everything Turns

Chapter One began with something happening at the Easter Vigil. In France at the Vigil of 2026 more than twenty-one thousand adults and adolescents were baptised or received into the Church, some thirteen thousand of them adults, and more than four in five of those adults were between eighteen and forty. Adult baptisms in that country have more than tripled in ten years.[1] Comparable movements are reported elsewhere in the Western world, though they are less exactly documented. The Church worldwide is witnessing an invigorating new phenomenon, the reception of large numbers of mostly young people into the Roman Catholic Church, above all at the Easter Vigil, and it appears to be growing from year to year.

How are we to view this good news? The French bishops have begun to ask the new Catholics themselves why they have come. The answer that comes back is striking. For a great many of them the driving force was some trauma in their lives: the breakdown of a relationship, an illness, a bereavement, a sudden change of circumstances. They found, as they struggled, that the largely post-Christian culture in which they had been formed had no answers that made sense to them in any real and lasting way.[2] So they turned to the Church, and they did what Chapter One said serious people do. They examined the history and teaching that had stood the test of time, they weighed the claims of the Church, and in their thousands they decided to ask for baptism. They are not drifting in. They are people who have wandered for years in the barren desert of a secular culture that offers little by way of spiritual nourishment or direction beyond the superficial, and who have the sense, on arriving, of coming home.

Chapter Five described the moment of turning, the moment at which a person first hears that there are better songs than the ones he has been singing. This chapter asks a related question. What is that moment, how does it come about, and does it take the same form in everyone? The tradition has always given conversion a central place in the life of holiness, and Our Lord’s own first words in Mark’s Gospel are a summons to it.[3] The experience of religious conversion is pivotal on the journey to holiness: the hinge between the call heard from afar and the long labour of being formed in Christ. If the young people arriving at our doors are to be helped, those who care for them need to understand what has happened to them, and what may still happen.

The Tipping Point: A Borrowed Idea and Its Limits

In 2000 the journalist Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.[4] His argument is that social change, such as the spread of a fashion, the fall of a crime rate or the success of a book, is best understood on the model of an epidemic. Things build quietly, often invisibly, and then at a certain moment they cross a threshold, tip, and spread with astonishing speed. The tipping point is that magic moment of critical mass. Gladwell identified three factors that make a tip more likely: the Law of the Few, which says that a small number of exceptional people, whom he calls Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen, carry an idea to a much wider public; the Stickiness Factor, which asks whether the message is memorable enough to change behaviour; and the Power of Context, which says that small features of an environment can have an out-sized effect on what people do.

It would be foolish to build a theology on a work of popular sociology, and I do not propose to. Gladwell’s book is a stimulating generalisation and not a settled science, and conversion is not an epidemic. It is a gift of grace received in freedom by a person, and no formula will produce it. The Catholic tradition holds that God is the first mover in every turning, as the last chapter saw in the figure of the Hound of Heaven.

But the image is useful for two reasons. First, it names something that every priest who has accompanied a convert will recognise: the sense of a threshold. For months or years nothing seems to happen, and then, quite suddenly, a person who was outside is inside. The Gospel knew this long before Gladwell. Our Lord compares the Kingdom to seed that is scattered and then sprouts and grows, the sower knows not how, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear, and when the grain is ripe the harvest comes.[5] There is a long hidden growth and then a moment of harvest. The Greek of Mark 1:15, “the time is fulfilled”, uses the word kairos, the decisive and opportune moment, as distinct from chronos, the ordinary passage of time. Conversion is a kairos arriving inside chronos.

Second, the idea works at two levels, and both are in play in this chapter. There is the tipping point in the life of a single soul, the moment at which a person who has been drifting towards faith crosses over. And there is a tipping point of a kind in the life of the Church, if the numbers now coming to the font are anything to go by. I shall return to the second level in the discussion, with a caution. For the moment I want to look at the first, and to do it through three people.

A Discovery in a Country Parish

About two years ago I had an experience that many priests can relate to. I was asked to supply and to help out in a local parish in rural Oxfordshire, where I now live. The parish priest had had to retire suddenly after a deterioration in his health. As often happens in these circumstances, he had left behind a number of books, gathered over many long years of faithful pastoral work in the vineyard of the Lord.

I was thinking at the time of writing a book about spiritual formation and direction, drawing on a long experience as a formator in a number of seminaries, and I approached those left-behind books with a measure of quiet excitement. Experience had taught me to hope. Among the old biblical commentaries and the tired, falling-apart copies of the Divine Office, I had sometimes come across a spiritual treasure that I had heard of but never owned. On this occasion I struck gold. On the shelf was The Autobiography of St Ignatius of Loyola, with Related Documents, the account of the early years of the Jesuit Order and, above all, of the saint’s own conversion told step by step.[6] I gave it a new home with some joy. It always amazes me that God puts into our hands, at precisely the right time, the book we need to read next.

The introduction to the volume says a great deal in a short space. Towards the end of his life St Ignatius told the story of his early years, his “pilgrim years”, to a younger Jesuit in Rome, Fr Luis Gonçalves da Câmara. By then Ignatius had lived an extraordinary life as the founder of the order that would become the Jesuits. Fr da Câmara had a difficult task. His holy but evidently reluctant founder found every kind of excuse to avoid their agreed appointments, even, according to the introduction, the deaths of two popes in quick succession.[7] The young priest’s persistence was rewarded. He pinned Ignatius down, and the story was told and written down. It would have been a disaster for the history of the Society and for the history of Catholic spirituality as a whole if it had not been. We are in debt to the persistence of Fr da Câmara.

The introduction also says what I think the whole book says: that this is the story of what God can achieve in the life of a soul that allows itself to enter a conversion that changes it profoundly, and which then goes on to change first the Church and then the world. I want to look at that story with two others beside it. Conversions come in all manner of forms, from the instant and dramatic, like Saul on the road to Damascus, to the slow and steady, almost intellectual conversion of long years of careful thought. The three I have chosen stand at different points along that range.

The First Conversion: Ignatius of Loyola, Crisis and the Long School of Manresa

Ignatius was born in 1491 into a Basque noble family, and he grew up as a courtier and a soldier. By his own account, in the third-person style of the Autobiography, in which he calls himself “the pilgrim”, he was a man given to the vanities of the world, and his great delight was in feats of arms.[8] On 20 May 1521, defending the fortress of Pamplona against the French, he was struck by a cannonball that shattered one leg. After surgery and a painful relapse he was carried home to the family castle at Loyola to convalesce.

Here is the first point to notice. Nothing in the picture so far is religious. A career ended in a moment, and a man who had defined himself by physical prowess was lying on his back with weeks to fill. This is the pattern Chapter One recorded among the young converts of today: a personal trial, an illness or rupture, that opens questions nothing else has answered.[2] Ignatius did not go looking for God. A cannonball removed the things that had been keeping the question out.

Bored, he asked for the romances of chivalry that he loved. The castle had none. It had a Life of Christ and a book of the lives of the saints in Spanish, and he read them for want of anything better.[9] The detail that has made the Autobiographya classic of spiritual direction comes next, and Chapter Five touched on it. Ignatius noticed that his mind went in two directions, and that the two had very different aftertastes. When he dreamt of worldly glory and a lady of high rank, he took great pleasure in it, but afterwards he felt dry and discontented. When he thought of going barefoot to Jerusalem and imitating the saints in their austerities, he was also pleased, and he stayed content and cheerful when he had stopped.[10] This was the first spark of what he would later teach as the discernment of spirits. The turning began as a difference in what two sets of daydreams left behind.

The second thing to notice is the stickiness of what he read, to borrow Gladwell’s word. Ignatius did not simply read the books and put them down. He began to copy out the words of Christ and of Our Lady, in red ink and in blue, in a book of three hundred ruled pages.[11] He was handling the Word and being handled by it. Somewhere in those weeks a threshold was crossed. A night came when he saw an image of Our Lady with the Child Jesus, and he dated from it an abiding revulsion from his former life.[12] The tipping point was not a single flash. It was a slow accumulation of reading, noticing and writing that finally tipped.

But the most important lesson of the Ignatian conversion is that the tipping point was not the end. It was the beginning of a long school. In the spring of 1522 he left Loyola, made a vigil of arms before Our Lady’s altar at Montserrat, laid down his sword and dagger, and exchanged his clothes with a beggar. He then spent about ten months at Manresa, praying for hours each day, fasting, and doing severe penances.[13] And here something happened that readers of Chapter One will recognise. Ignatius fell into scruples. He was tormented by the sense that his past sins had not been properly confessed, and no amount of confessing could quiet it. He was brought to the edge of despair before he came out the other side.[14] The tradition we met in Chapter One, which distinguishes true guilt from neurotic guilt and the well-formed conscience from the scrupulous one, was being learnt on the pulse of a man who needed it. He later said that in this period God dealt with him as a schoolmaster deals with a child.[15] Out of this long schooling came the Spiritual Exercises, which have formed generations since, and out of the Exercises the Society of Jesus, whose Formula of the Institute names its purpose as the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine.[16] That is the cura animarum, the cure of souls, as Chapter One defined it, given an institutional form.

The pattern is therefore this. A crisis (the wound), an accumulation (the weeks of reading and noticing), a threshold (the night of the vision), and then a long aftermath (Manresa), in which the new life had to be learnt, tested and purified. Ignatius’s was a conversion that began with a shock and continued as a school.

The Second Conversion: C. S. Lewis, the Slow and Reluctant Don

If Ignatius was converted by crisis, Clive Staples Lewis was converted by argument, imagination and friendship, and with a great deal of resistance. Born in Belfast in 1898, Lewis lost his mother when he was nine. He was baptised into the Church of Ireland as a child, but in his teens he drifted into atheism, and he held it with some force through the First World War and into his years as a young Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was, in his own account, a defended man, and his defences were intellectual.

What dissolved them was not a single refutation. It was an accumulation. From adolescence he had been visited by moments of intense longing, which he called Joy: sudden stabs of desire for something he could not name, which no earthly object satisfied.[17] Years later he came to see that Joy was a signpost and not a destination, that it pointed beyond itself to something. That is Augustine’s restless heart and Chapter One’s capax Dei described from the inside by an atheist who did not yet have the words. At the same time, the authors he most admired kept turning out to be believers: George MacDonald, whose Phantastes he read at sixteen and which he said baptised his imagination, and G. K. Chesterton, whose Everlasting Man he found annoyingly reasonable.[18] A sceptical colleague remarked to him, to his alarm, that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was surprisingly good. Lewis felt, as he put it, that all the chinks in his defences were being closed one by one.

In the Trinity Term of 1929 he gave in, admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed, a conversion he describes as that of the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.[19] But it was to a bare theism, not yet to Christianity. The next stage came through friendship. On the night of 19 September 1931 he walked and talked along Addison’s Walk at Magdalen with two friends, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, about myth and Christianity, and they argued late into the night that the story of Christ was a true myth, a myth that had actually happened.[20] The final tip came nine days later, in a manner that has become famous precisely because it is so unromantic. Lewis was being driven to Whipsnade Zoo in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle. When they set out, he tells us, he did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when they arrived he did.[21] He had not been aware of any strong emotion, and he compared himself to a snowman at last beginning to melt.[22] You couldn’t make it up.

The pattern of Lewis’s conversion is therefore different from that of Ignatius. There was no cannonball. There was a long intellectual and imaginative approach, a pivot into theism and a second pivot into Christianity, and a final tip that came so quietly he almost missed it. The catalysts were books, a sceptical colleague, and above all friends, one of whom, Tolkien, was a devout Catholic. What followed was also different. Lewis did not found an order. He became a lay Anglican and a writer, and the broadcast talks that became Mere Christianity have since led many to the faith, many of them to the Catholic Church. And the aftermath had its own labour. When his wife Joy Davidman died in 1960, he wrote a raw account of the grief and of the apparent silence of God, which readers of Chapter Three will recognise as a dark night.[23] The tipping point opened the road. It did not remove the pain from it.

Lewis was never a Catholic, and I do not offer him as one. I include him because his path is that of a great many intelligent seekers today, who reach faith by weighing evidence and following their imagination, and because Catholic priests will meet many more like him.

The Third Conversion: St Elizabeth Ann Seton, the Steady Way

Perhaps the most sedate conversion of the three, and arguably the most quietly Catholic, is that of the American saint and foundress of a community of Sisters, St Elizabeth Ann Seton. Born in New York in 1774 into an Episcopalian family, she married William Magee Seton at twenty, bore five children, and was known in the city for her charity to poor widows. In 1800 her husband’s business failed, and in 1803 she sailed with him to Italy in the hope that the climate would cure his tuberculosis. Instead the family was held in quarantine at Livorno, and William died on 27 December 1803 at Pisa. She was a widow of twenty-nine, thousands of miles from home, with a little daughter at her side and four children waiting in New York.[24]

She was taken in by the Filicchi family, Catholic merchants who had been her husband’s business friends, and it was in their house and in the churches of Italy that she first saw the Catholic faith lived. What struck her was not an argument. It was a people’s faith in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and a household’s habit of prayer. She returned to New York in June 1804 and began, quietly and unhurriedly, to read, to pray and to question. Her Episcopalian friends and her own rector urged her to be cautious. She weighed their counsel for months. She was received into the Catholic Church on 14 March 1805 at St Peter’s Church in Barclay Street.[25] It cost her dearly. Friends and family cooled, and the school with which she hoped to support her children failed.

This is how St Elizabeth Ann describes her “steady as you go” conversion to the Catholic faith: [Author’s note: the source text breaks off at this point, before St Elizabeth Ann’s own words. Her description of her conversion should be inserted here.]

What I can say from the record is that her conversion had the character of a long, steady walk, and that its great catalysts were relationships, bereavement and the Eucharist. It was not intellectually dramatic like Lewis’s, nor was it a shock like Ignatius’s. It was a deepening that came through the witness of a Catholic family, through suffering borne in faith, and through a growing conviction that the Church of the sacraments was where she belonged. In 1809 she founded the Sisters of Charity of St Joseph at Emmitsburg, Maryland, the first religious community for women founded in the United States, and she was canonised by Paul VI in 1975, the first native-born citizen of the United States to be declared a saint.[26] She had lost nearly everything she had in New York and found a vocation that touched thousands.

There is something of Emmaus about her story, and Emmaus is a good icon for all three. The two disciples on the road to the village were walking away from Jerusalem, disappointed. A stranger walked with them and opened the Scriptures, and their hearts burned within them. But they recognised him only in the breaking of the bread, and then they got up that same hour and ran back.[27] A companion, the Word, the sacrament, and a mission at the end: it is the structure of the steady conversion.

Discussion: What Three Conversions Teach Us

Ignatius, Lewis and Seton differ in almost everything: in century, nationality, temperament and, in Lewis’s case, in the Church that finally received him. That makes what they share more interesting, and what separates them more instructive.

Five things they have in common

1. Each tipping point followed a long, hidden accumulation. No one tips on nothing. Ignatius had weeks of reading and noticing; Lewis had decades of Joy, of books and of friendships; Seton had a year of grief, of observing Catholic life and of reading. Gladwell’s insight that small things, accumulating unseen, are what make the threshold crossable is exactly the insight of Mark 4. The seed grows, the sower knows not how. This is the Chapter Three truth about gestation seen from the point of view of the convert: the quickening is only felt after months of hidden growth.

2. Each was mediated by ordinary persons and things. A book left in a castle, a colleague’s remark, a conversation on a college path, a ride to the zoo, a merchant family in Livorno, a priest who received her in a New York church. Not one of them was converted by a programme or a campaign. This is Chapter Two’s lesson about the hidden life, which formed a future pope through a Kraków tailor, and Chapter Five’s lesson of a mother’s tears in a pub. In Gladwell’s terms these are the Few, though they would have been astonished to be called that.

3. Each was provoked by suffering, loss or longing. A shattered leg; a mother’s death in childhood and a life of unsatisfied Joy; a dying husband and a bankrupt business. Here we find the same thing the French bishops found in their survey of catechumens, where a personal trial opened questions nothing else would answer.[2] The tradition has always known this. Suffering does not cause faith, but it removes the things that have been blocking the question.

4. Each cost something. Ignatius gave up a career, a name and his sword. Lewis gave up the proud security of his atheism. Seton gave up her social standing, her friends and, for a time, her livelihood. Chapter Three said that those who never experience the joy of a spiritual birth are generally those who will not pay the price. These three paid it.

5. Each was a beginning and not an ending. This is the most important point of the chapter. Manresa followed Loyola. The long years of apologetics, friendship and eventually grief followed Whipsnade. The founding of the Sisters of Charity and a decade of work, with the loss of her husband and two daughters still ahead of her, followed Barclay Street. The tipping point is a pivot, and what turns on it is the whole of a life. In the language of Chapter Six, the convert has found the first signpost, and the road is still to be walked. And each of the three, as that chapter would have predicted, needed guidance: Ignatius at Manresa, in his scruples; Lewis in the company of Tolkien and Dyson; Seton from the Filicchis, from Fr Matthew O’Brien and from Bishop Carroll. No one on this list was the disciple of a fool.

Three kinds of tipping point

But the differences matter, particularly for those who guide others. We may say, as a rough typology and not a set of boxes, that the three conversions pivot on different faculties.

Ignatius’s conversion began in the affections. It was a crisis that shook him, and it was settled by attending to what his feelings were telling him, which is why the discernment of spirits was his great gift. Lewis’s began in the mind and imagination. It was reasoned and reluctant, and it was settled by argument, beauty and a friendship in which both could be tested. Seton’s began in relationship and worship. It came through the witness of a believing family and the experience of the sacrament, and it was settled by steady prayer, counsel and perseverance.

Any priest who has met the new converts will recognise all three types among them. There are those who come because their lives have collapsed, as the French survey found for roughly two in five, and who need above all someone to help them read what is happening in their hearts. There are those who come by reading and thought, often with an initial suspicion of anything emotional, and who need a patient and intelligent companion and a church that does not treat their questions as impertinence. And there are those who come because a friend, a spouse or a community lived the faith in front of them, and who need to be brought into that community and into the sacraments. Most converts are some mixture of the three. The pastoral mistake is to assume that everyone is of one type. A director who treats every convert as an intellectual to be argued with, or as a wounded person to be consoled, or as a social being to be integrated, will serve some of them and miss the others.

The tipping point revisited: the Few, stickiness and context

It may now be worth asking whether Gladwell’s three factors throw any light on how a parish might serve these converts, taking the analogy for what it is worth.

The Law of the Few corresponds to the quiet figures we have met all through this book: Tyranowski at his tailor’s bench, a mother weeping in a pub, a Tolkien on a night walk, a Fr da Câmara chasing a reluctant founder for the story that would help the Church. The Church does not need many celebrities to bring about a movement. It needs a few trained, patient people in each place who know how to listen, which is, of course, the argument of Chapter One.

The Stickiness Factor corresponds to what lets the experience of the turning become a way of life: a book that is copied out and pondered, as Ignatius did, a practice of prayer, a rhythm of Scripture and sacrament. This is the content of Chapter Six’s four signposts. Without stickiness the tip does not last.

The Power of Context is the least obvious and perhaps the most important. Gladwell argues that small features of the environment can change how people behave, and that the size of a group has a great deal to do with whether it can hold together.[28] The pub in Chapter Five was a context in which the old song would always win. A parish can be a context too. A parish in which a newly baptised young adult is greeted warmly, paired with a companion, invited into a small group of fifteen or so who read Scripture and pray together, as Tyranowski’s Living Rosary groups did, is a very different context from one in which the convert is handed a leaflet and left to find the right pew.

When the tip tips back

One warning must be added. A tipping point is not irreversible. Chapter Five described how a person may be coaxed back into the familiar song by those who love him, and the tradition describes the desolation after the first fervour in which the old life appears attractive again. A tip that is not supported by guidance and a community can tip the other way. This is a risk at both levels. For the individual convert, the weeks and months after baptism are exactly when the old context returns with force.

For the Church as a whole, the caution is greater still. I said at the start that this good news is growing from year to year, and the figures support the claim that it is growing sharply: adult baptisms in France have more than tripled in a decade. But the figures we have are counts of baptisms. They do not tell us how many are still practising five or ten years later, and the honest answer is that we do not yet know. Chapter One was careful on this point, and I want to be as careful here.[1] The Church would be unwise to announce that she has reached a tipping point and sit back to enjoy the spread. It is more accurate to say that she has been given a moment, a kairos, and that what she makes of it depends on whether she can form those who arrive. A threshold crossed by thousands of people at the font can look very different five years on if nobody has taught them to pray.

What this means for the new converts

So what can the stories of Ignatius, Lewis and Seton do for the young people converting in such numbers today?

First, they tell the converts that their experience is not strange. An accumulation of small things, a trial that stripped away the usual answers, a book or a friend, a reluctance that gives way, a cost: all of this has happened before to people who became saints. A newly baptised young adult who is anxious that the strength of the first experience is fading may take comfort in knowing that Ignatius’s journey began with a long convalescence and that Lewis felt almost nothing on the way to the zoo.

Second, they tell the converts that the tipping point is the start of the road. The first fervour will pass, as it did at Manresa, and the real work begins. They need to be told this in advance, as Chapter Three said that the soul in labour needs antenatal classes.

Third, they tell the converts that they should not expect to do it alone. Not one of the three travelled without guides. Bernard’s warning in Chapter Six stands over the new Catholic as much as over the seminarian.

Fourth, they tell the Church what it owes. If thousands arrive at the Easter Vigil, each of them having been tipped across a threshold by an entirely personal and particular route, then the Church needs people who can discern which route each one has taken and what each one now needs. That is the cure of souls.

Theoretical Consequences

If the foregoing is accepted, the following consequences follow at the level of theology itself.

1. Conversion is both a process and a moment, and theology must hold both. The Church has always taught that conversion is gradual. The Second Vatican Council speaks of its progressive character, and the Catechism describes initiation as accomplished by stages.[29] Yet the Church has also always celebrated the decisive moment, from Saul on the Damascus road to the water of the font. A theology that speaks only of process loses the decisive threshold, and one that speaks only of the moment loses the long preparation and the long aftermath. The tipping point is the place where the two meet.

2. Time has a double structure: chronos and kairos. The ordinary time in which seeds grow and the decisive time in which a person is called are not opposed. The kairos is given within the chronos and is prepared by it. This is the temporal form of the doctrine of grace that Chapters Three and Five set out: God’s initiative and the human response, the seed and the soil.

3. There is a plurality of paths and a unity of end. The Spirit uses the affections, the intellect and the relationships of each person, and conversions will differ as persons differ. But the end is the same for all: Christ formed in us, as Chapter Three said. A theology of conversion must therefore be able to say, with the same breath, that the paths are many and that the goal is one, and it must resist the temptation to make any single path, whether crisis, argument or community, the normative one.

4. Conversion presupposes and reveals the capax Dei. In each of the three lives the turning was prepared by a longing that nothing in the world could satisfy: Ignatius’s dryness after glory, Lewis’s Joy, Seton’s hunger for the Real Presence. Chapter One argued that the human being is constituted as a creature made towards God. Conversion is that constitution coming to know its object, and the three lives give it flesh.

5. Conversion is mediated and therefore ecclesial. Nobody in this chapter converted alone. Books, friends, families and priests were the means by which grace reached them. This supports the teaching of Chapter Six that guidance belongs to the structure of the spiritual life, and the ecclesiology of Chapter Three that the birth of Christ in the soul takes place within the Church as Mother. It also gives theological weight to the Church’s ordinary structures of initiation, the catechumenate and the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, which are the Church’s own way of accompanying a tipping point and the long road beyond it.[30]

6. Conversion is the pivot between the call and the formation. In the architecture of this book, Chapters One and Two spoke of the call, Chapters Three, Four and Six of the formation and its map, and Chapter Five of the turning between them. This chapter confirms that the turning is not a side-event but the hinge on which the two parts rest. A spiritual theology that begins with stages of growth and has nothing to say about how a person enters the road has a gap at its start, and one that celebrates the entry and says nothing about the road has a gap at its end.

7. The Church is a context, and context is a theological reality. If grace works through ordinary mediations, then the quality of the Church’s actual life, her parishes, her welcome, her formation and her prayer, is not a matter of mere presentation. It is part of how conversion is made possible or hindered. This gives ecclesiology a practical edge: the Church must ask not only what she teaches but what kind of environment she provides for the moment at which a person tips.

Practical Consequences

Theology that changes nothing on Monday morning has not been believed. The following measures build on those already proposed in Chapters One, Three, Five and Six.

For Seminaries

• Include in the spiritual theology course a study of conversion narratives, with the Autobiography of St Ignatius, a chapter of Lewis’s Surprised by Joy and the writings of Elizabeth Seton as primary texts, read in their own words and not through summaries. A seminarian who has studied three different conversions will be less likely to expect everyone to convert in the same way.
• Teach the typology of the affective, the intellectual and the relational pivot, with the explicit warning that it is a help for listening and not a set of boxes.
• Ask every seminarian to write, in a page or two, the story of his own turning, and to read it with his director. A man who cannot tell his own story will find it hard to hear anyone else’s.
• In the practicum of spiritual direction, include supervised work with people who are newly converted or on the threshold, so that the future priest learns to recognise the signs of an accumulation and to ask the second question.
• Teach seminarians what follows the tipping point: the long school of Manresa, the desolation after fervour, and the way these map onto the stages of Chapter Three and the signposts of Chapter Six.

For Priests and Spiritual Directors

• Ask the convert how it began, and listen for the accumulation. People rarely tell the whole story unprompted, and the small things in it, a book, a friend, a funeral, are often where grace has been working.
• Discern which of the three paths this person has taken, and adjust accordingly. Console and help to discern the affective convert, reason patiently with the intellectual one, and welcome and integrate the relational one. Do not impose one method on all.
• Warn every convert in advance about what comes after the first fervour. Say that it will pass, that this is a recognised stage and not a failure, and that Ignatius and Lewis both went through it.
• Be a member of the Few for someone. A priest who is willing to give a convert a book and an hour, as a parish priest once gave Jan Tyranowski a copy of Tanquerey, has done something that may be remembered for a lifetime.
• Make sure you are yourself being directed. Ignatius, Lewis and Seton were all guided, and the person who guides others must be a traveller first.

For Parishes

• Treat the Easter Vigil as a tipping point and not as a finishing line. The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults already provides for a period of mystagogy after the sacraments. Make it last for years, not weeks, and give each new Catholic a named companion.
• Create context. Small groups of a dozen or so, for lectio divina, for prayer or for simple friendship, are the Living Rosary of Tyranowski translated into the twenty-first century, and they are among the most effective means of keeping a new life alive.
• Prepare a team of trained lay listeners who can recognise a person on the threshold and know what to do with what they hear, in the way that Chapter Five asked.
• Be honest about the cost. Many converts lose friends, family approval or a way of life, as Seton did. A parish that knows this will make a point of becoming the new family.
• Do not forget the long-faithful. Many of them have had a tipping point of their own, long ago, and are still waiting for someone to ask them where it led.

For Every Christian

• Look back over your own story for the accumulation that led to your faith: the books, the people, the losses. Give thanks for each of them, and for the Few who were used.
• If you are a convert, expect the first fervour to fade, and do not take that as evidence that you made a mistake. Find a guide, and keep walking.
• If you are a cradle Catholic, ask yourself whether you have ever really made the faith your own, and whether you need a second conversion, a new tipping point.
• Be a small thing that makes a big difference to somebody. A word, a book, a lift to church, a welcome to a stranger, may be the thing that tips someone who has been quietly accumulating towards the faith.

For the Individual Priest, Beginning This Week

• Read the first thirty or so paragraphs of the Autobiography of St Ignatius, slowly, with a pen.
• Identify one person in your parish who joined the Church in the last three years, and ask him or her how it began. Listen for the accumulation.
• Write one page on what tipped you.
• Choose one convert, and one lifelong parishioner, and offer each of them a conversation about where they are on the road.

Conclusion

A book left behind on the shelf of a retired priest in rural Oxfordshire is not the kind of thing that makes the news. It is a very small thing. And yet God put into my hands, at just the right time, the story of a man who was shot out of one life into another, and it set me thinking about all the other ways in which people are brought home.

That is the point of Gladwell’s title, and it is, in a sense, the point of the Gospel: little things can make a big difference. A cannonball, a book of saints, a night walk, a motorcycle sidecar, a lazaretto, a Mass in Livorno, a woman crying in a pub, a tailor in Kraków. None of these is a strategy. Each of them was, in the economy of grace, a hinge. The Church’s task is not to engineer tipping points. It is to be ready for them: to be the kind of place, with the kind of people, in which a threshold can be crossed and a life can be built on the other side.

The young people now coming to the font in such numbers are, whatever their individual route, tipping across a threshold that others have crossed before them. Some arrive like Ignatius, shattered and searching. Some arrive like Lewis, reluctant and thoughtful. Some arrive like Elizabeth Seton, steadily, drawn by what they have seen in other people. All of them, as Chapter Five reminded us, will be tempted to go back to the old song, and all of them, as Chapter Six reminded us, will need a map and a guide. They have crossed the line, and what lies beyond it is the whole journey of holiness.

The two disciples on the road to Emmaus recognised the Lord in the breaking of the bread, and that same hour they got up and went back to Jerusalem. The tipping point is that hour. It is the moment at which the eyes are opened and the walk begins again in the other direction. It is for the Church, her priests and her lay directors to be on that road when it happens, to walk the first miles beside the converts, and to stay with them for the rest. That is the cure of souls, and it is what this book has argued for from its first page.

Notes

[1] See Chapter One, nn. 7–9, for the figures from the French bishops’ annual survey of catechumens (25 March 2026) and for the cautions attached to them. The figures are counts of baptisms and say nothing about perseverance.

[2] See Chapter One, n. 8: the same survey, covering some 1,450 catechumens across sixty dioceses, found that roughly two in five began their journey after a personal trial, such as illness, bereavement or a comparable rupture.

[3] Mark 1:15. The Greek kairos denotes the decisive, opportune time, in contrast with chronos, time as duration. Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 1427–1429, on the call to conversion; see also Chapter Five, nn. 1–2.

[4] Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000). The three rules are set out in chs 1–5: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor and the Power of Context. The book is a work of popular sociology and has been criticised for generalising from limited cases.

[5] Mark 4:26–29.

[6] The Autobiography of St Ignatius Loyola, with Related Documents, ed. John C. Olin, trans. Joseph F. O’Callaghan (New York: Harper & Row, 1974; reprinted by Fordham University Press). The reference is to the copy found in the parish library; the edition should be checked against that copy before publication.

[7] Fr Luís Gonçalves da Câmara (1519–1575) took down the account from Ignatius from 1553 and completed it by 1555. Jerónimo Nadal and others had long urged Ignatius to give it. The reference to the deaths of two popes is taken from the introduction to the edition in the author’s possession. The popes in question would be Julius III (d. 23 March 1555) and Marcellus II (d. 1 May 1555), and this should be verified against the edition.

[8] Ignatius of Loyola, Autobiography, n. 1, where the author calls himself “the pilgrim” from n. 4 onwards.

[9] Autobiography, nn. 1–5. The books were a Vita Christi (the Life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony) and a Flos sanctorum, a Spanish version of the lives of the saints.

[10] Autobiography, n. 8. See also Chapter Five, n. 18.

[11] Autobiography, n. 11, where he describes copying out the words of Christ in red ink and of Our Lady in blue.

[12] Autobiography, n. 10.

[13] Autobiography, nn. 17–18 (Montserrat) and nn. 18–31 (Manresa).

[14] Autobiography, nn. 22–25, on his scruples and the severity of the trial.

[15] Autobiography, n. 27, where God is said to have treated him as a schoolmaster treats a child.

[16] Julius III, Exposcit debitum (21 July 1550), the Formula of the Institute of the Society of Jesus, n. 1. See also Chapter One on the cura animarum.

[17] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), passim; on Joy as a signpost, see especially ch. XIV.

[18] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, on George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) and on G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man(1925).

[19] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, ch. XIV, “Checkmate”.

[20] C. S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves, 18 October 1931, in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. I, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2000). The conversation took place on 19 September 1931.

[21] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, chs XIV–XV. The trip to Whipsnade took place in late September 1931, in the sidecar of his brother Warren’s motorcycle.

[22] Lewis, Surprised by Joy, ch. XV. The image is of a man of snow beginning to melt.

[23] C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), published under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk.

[24] On the life of Elizabeth Seton see Elizabeth Bayley Seton: Collected Writings, ed. Regina Bechtle and Judith Metz, 3 vols (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000–2006); Joseph I. Dirvin, Mrs Seton: Foundress of the American Sisters of Charity (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1962).

[25] Seton was received by Fr Matthew O’Brien at St Peter’s Church, Barclay Street, New York, on 14 March 1805, and confirmed by Bishop John Carroll in 1806. See the sources in n. 24.

[26] Seton was beatified by John XXIII in 1963 and canonised by Paul VI on 14 September 1975.

[27] Luke 24:13–35. The image of Emmaus also illustrates Chapter One.

[28] Gladwell, The Tipping Point, chs 4–5. On the size of groups, he draws on the observation that communities work differently above and below about a hundred and fifty members.

[29] Second Vatican Council, Ad Gentes, Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity (7 December 1965), nn. 13–14; Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 1229–1233.

[30] Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (Vatican City, 1972; English translation 1988); Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 1229–1233.

Bibliography

Scripture and Magisterial Sources

Second Vatican Council, Ad Gentes, Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity (7 December 1965), nn. 13–14.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd edn (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nn. 1229–1233, 1427–1429.

Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (Vatican City, 1972; English translation 1988).

Julius III, Exposcit debitum (21 July 1550), Formula of the Institute of the Society of Jesus.

Conférence des évêques de France, Enquête annuelle sur les catéchumènes (Paris; figures cited from the survey of 25 March 2026).

Patristic, Monastic and Classical Spiritual Sources

Ignatius of Loyola, The Autobiography of St Ignatius Loyola, with Related Documents, ed. John C. Olin, trans. Joseph F. O’Callaghan (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

Ignatius of Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia.

Seton, Elizabeth Ann, Elizabeth Bayley Seton: Collected Writings, ed. Regina Bechtle and Judith Metz, 3 vols (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000–2006).

Other Works Cited

Chesterton, G. K., The Everlasting Man (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925).

Dirvin, Joseph I., Mrs Seton: Foundress of the American Sisters of Charity (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1962).

Gladwell, Malcolm, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000).

Lewis, C. S., Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955).

Lewis, C. S., A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961).

Lewis, C. S., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. I, ed. Walter Hooper (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

MacDonald, George, Phantastes (London, 1858).