Jesus didn’t change my life once. He changes it every day

I never thought I’d be asked to write a memoir but one of the benefits of ageing, along with the free bus pass, is the idea that an author has something to say about life. So, I’ve written an account of my life that culminates in my ordination as an Anglican priest five years ago. It’s not a book confined to my Christian life but running throughout it is a journey towards faith, a seemingly inevitable road walked in the direction of Jesus.

I wasn’t born into a Christian family, and only developed any interest in the church when I was a teenager. There were various attempts at belief, but each time I’d find a way to say no. It was like walking further and further on the beach, each time the waves making me more wet, until finally I could no longer resist because I was in the sea.

The night of my baptism, I shook like a frightened child. I was in my early 20s, a grown man, but I felt so young and so weirdly vulnerable. I knelt in front of the huge, beautiful altar and felt something I could never then and can’t now properly put into words. The gentle but powerful touch of Jesus, the reassuring coat of certainty put around my shoulders, a relationship with God dressing my naked soul. I know that the emotions of a great occasion can change the way we feel and be more the stuff of brain chemistry than a lasting and meaningful experience, but I’m convinced this was more than that. Something transformative happened, and I felt drawn through a gate of longing into a garden of grace.

Three days after my baptism, I recall lying on the sofa in my flat and feeling driven to go out into the street and tell people all about faith and God. I have to tell someone - I have to tell someone, I thought to myself. I didn’t, though. It was the first time I’d felt the Holy Spirit. It’s happened since, although not as often as I’d like. I know that some will doubt me and even consider this ridiculous. It was, they’ll claim, not more than an extended serotonin rush, a feeling, something that can be entirely explained by the rational mind - nothing to do with God. I know what all of those feel like and this was different. So, we’ll have to agree to disagree.

But while I accept the idea of conversion, or rebirth, I also think that the Christian journey is a series of conversions, or if you like a permanent revolution of love, a gradual unfolding of grace, an unpacking of theology, faith, and belief. Faith in God is based on a relationship with Jesus, and as with any relationship it evolves and matures. My wife and I have been married for 37 years and when I look back to our early days together, I see a radically different partnership. Not better or worse but simply different. We now know each more deeply, understand who and what we are, and I’m sure the love is much deeper.

Faith in God is based on a relationship with Jesus, and as with any relationship it evolves and matures

The same, surely, with Christ Jesus. Some of my raw enthusiasms may have become gentler but not lost, never lost. The love and commitment are deeper and more pronounced, and living with Christ has become part of my very being.

But there’s something else. Faith is the sandpaper of the soul, and as it refines us it can sting and even hurt. I experience another step in my conversion each time I sit at the bedside of someone who is dying, each time I take the funeral of a dear soul who has died too young, each time I try to help someone who is poor, homeless, hungry, or struggling with the demons of mental health. I am dented by it all, but in that lack of ease, in that struggle, I’m convinced I become a better Christian, a new form of convert.

Perhaps my greatest guide through the last 40 years has been the great CS Lewis. Many will be familiar with his quote that, “I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.”

He will indeed accept anyone. In writing my memoir I’ve sometimes cringed at the ways I’ve acted and the number of times I’ve failed. But conversion is about so much more than that. It goes on forever because God goes on forever. Say yes, and then start the hard but wonderful work of being.

Heaping Coals by Michael Coren is out now