THE CONVERSION OF MICHAEL SAMYN

FROM PRIDE TO LOVE

THE FIRST SEVEN MONTHS

A relationship in jeopardy

After having been together for over twenty years, my partner and I were drifting apart. Our artistic collaborations had stopped. And she had become intensely engrossed in her own job and career. I had not imagined a solo career for myself, so I felt a bit lost.

Our personal life together suffered since her professional activities were so demanding that there was little time left for taking care of the home, let alone for leisure time together as a couple. It felt like I had been pushed into the role of the 19th century housewife, completely dependent on the financial support of her spouse and facing a full schedule of washing and cleaning. I felt alone, abandoned, and I started considering the idea of leaving her. I was in need of love, and affection. And I didn't get it from my partner. In hindsight I realize that I was expecting too much of her. But we'll get to that.

Un unexpected meeting

In April of 2021 my 24-year old son from a previous relationship was diagnosed with a brain tumor the size of a ping-pong ball. The week leading up to his operation was a very busy one for my wife. I was left to deal with my fatherly emotions on my own. I lived in Rome and he lived in Brussels but I could not go to him because of travel restrictions due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

On the day of his operation, I left the house with the excuse of buying coffee. I was not religious but had developed a keen interest in the cultural aspects and artistic beauty of Christianity. As I crossed the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II I told God that I would visit the first church I saw open. When I entered San Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini, for the first time in my life I made the sign of the cross. I walked to the front row of pews. There was nobody in the church but a lost pigeon fluttering around under the cupola. I kneeled down for the first time in my life. And it felt like God was amused by that. So I sat down again on the bench. I looked around at the familiar images of the dead son in the lap of the mother and of the suffering son on the cross. With my own son undergoing major surgery far away, I started crying all the tears that I had been holding in for years. And God was there. We talked. And after I left the church, while walking, He continued to talk with me. He cheered me up. He explained how the world works in terms that I could understand. We spoke in Italian. I did not speak Italian very well then. So He used simple words. He told me that other people are angels. That they exist to help me. I didn't really know what that meant but it was comforting somehow. And I was very surprised with His personality. He was funny, cheerful, friendly and patient. Like a good friend that I had not spoken to in a very long time.

Coincidence and sacrifice

This meeting had confused me. His presence felt real. But I had lived the life of an atheist. I was used to thinking of God as a mythological creature, a fascinating invention, an inspiration for the arts. Not as really existing and present here and now. Later that day when I was practicing my Italian vocabulary, the app I used served me a whole string of words related to religion. Weird. That evening we ordered food from a random new place called Ham Holy Burger. It seemed to me that God was provoking me with these slightly ridiculous coincidences, as if he was trying to be unbelievable on purpose.

Later that evening I received the news that my son's operation had succeeded, in spite of some nerve wracking delays due to the Covid crisis. I felt relieved but could not share the extreme emotions of that day with my wife. I assumed she thought that I had been completely calm the entire day. Instead I had been crying a lot. And I met God.

Two years earlier I had quit smoking and drinking. And I had drastically cut down on my use of social media. I think these "sacrifices" together with the slice of ego cut off by relationship problems with my wife had opened me up to hear the voice of God.

The following days

The next day I left the house again. I wanted to visit San Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini again. But it was closed. I ended up in Sant'Agnese in Agone and kneeled down in the small chapel with the skull of the saint. After that I visited some other small churches. There's so many wonderful places in Rome! I wasn't sure if what I did in those churches was praying. When I came home I felt exhausted. I had been destroyed emotionally by the problems in my relationship and the crisis with my son's operation had made me acutely aware of the fragility of life. I felt like I had to do something with mine. God wants me to live!

I continued to feel exhausted in the following days. I could not talk to my wife about meeting God. I was afraid of her mockery. Or worse, indifference. All I wanted was to go back to San Giovanni Battista and cry. So that's what I did. I could spend hours in an empty church. The pigeon was still there. But I was wondering if I am not fleeing away from reality.

I didn't feel lonely anymore. God is everywhere. I only had to close my eyes to feel His presence and indulge in His love. Especially at night, when I would go to bed earlier than my wife, I would curl up like a baby and feel His enormous warm invisible embrace. And I would smile blissfully. And sleep in his arms. I had started to enjoy sleeping, while before it felt mostly like a waste of time. But now sleeping meant being with God.

Should I stay or should I go?

Every afternoon I would leave the house. Spring was making its glorious entry. And I would visit new churches. I didn't tell my wife what I was doing. I often left with an excuse. Sometimes without saying anything. In part to be away from her, although her behavior didn't bother me as much now that I wasn't alone anymore. I did feel like I had to make a decision: either I stay with her and make the best of it, or I leave and start a new chapter in my life. After all, we were never married for the church. Staying with her without intimacy, without tenderness, seemed like a waste of life. And I felt this strong responsibility towards God not to waste life.

My wife started noticing that I was not feeling well. But I still could not talk to her. I wanted to but I felt she never made enough time for me to figure out how to explain it. She didn't have the patience. And that kind of endeared me because it was so typical. But I had this enormous need for tenderness, for patience, for my mistakes to be forgiven, or at least forgotten for a while. I felt that over the years of our relationship, I had made myself smaller and smaller in order not to disturb her. And that I had reached my minimum size. I did not realize then that this is exactly the condition in which we can meet God. That she had really been my angel, by what I used to consider destroying me, destroying my personality, destroying who I was, she had, in fact, simply ripped away the parts that were standing in the way of meeting God, part after part, year after painful year. But I had not realized that yet. And I was not thankful yet.

I believe!

A week later, for the first time I called what I did in church "praying". It felt defiant: "Yeah, I'm praying! And so what? I'm not just sitting here being cool. I'm doing that retarded dorky thing for superstitious fools, that only toothless old ladies do, drowning in despair or fear. I'm praying!" The day after that, during a particularly intense conversation in Sant' Andrea della Valle, God told me that I believed. I didn't know why that took me by surprise but it did. So I asked Him if I believed in all the things that I saw around me in the church, the saints, the angels, the martyrs, and so on. And He said yes. And that made me intensely happy.

Because He was telling me so many things that I loved hearing, I had grown suspicious. During a conversation in San Luigi dei Francesi I started wondering if I wasn't hearing the voice of the devil instead of that of God. God told me that he is stronger and that I should turn to the Church to understand how to tell them apart. This was a crucial bit of advice. Despite my belief in God and visiting churches where I talked with Him, I had not actually considered any kind of interaction with the Church as an institution.

Staying

I did not choose to be free. My wife forced me into freedom by deciding to work alone. It was my faith that gave me the strength to accept this unwanted gift.

I felt free after this realization. Free to do anything. Even to leave her. As I explored AirBnB for potential destinations, I continued to take daily walks through the city, visiting different churches where I would talk to God, and ask for advice. On a day when the anniversary of my wife's move to Europe coincided with Ascension Day, I discovered the beautiful small Santa Maria dell'Orto in Trastevere. Above its altar there's a stained glass window with an enormous "AM" symbol. It stands for "Ave Maria" but I had long imagined it as a monogram of the initials of my wife's and my first names. I took it as a sign of God. Next I climbed the hill to find the interior of San Pietro in Montorio covered in blue velvet for a wedding. I thanked God for this second sign. It was clear to me that He wanted me to stay with my wife. But it would take me some time to figure out how. Her independent behavior would still irritate or sadden me regularly.

My wife and I were married civically, not for the church. And we are both infertile. Unmarried and incapable of having children, but willing to stay with my wife and love her, I had trouble understanding the place of sex in our relationship. Strictly speaking, according to what I knew of the Church at the time, we simply should not be having any sex at all. I started reading the catechism in order to learn about the rules.

Attending mass

It took more than two weeks before I attended my first mass as a believer. And it was even by accident. But it happened in the mother church of them all: the Basilica of Saint-Peter in Vatican City! For the first time I had stepped into the area reserved for praying, where tourists are not allowed. I was incredibly nervous. My lips trembled uncontrollably. I was happy to hide my state under the face mask required by pandemic measures. But then a bell sounded. Three priests walked to the altar and mass started! I did not have the courage to sneak out. But I also accepted this event as wanted by God. After mass I walk out with many questions. Can I call myself a believer? Is what I do in churches really praying?

A week later, on Pentecost I sneaked out of the house to attend mass in San Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini where I first met God. I did not know the texts or the songs. And I knew I could not partake in communion because I needed to confess first. But after the service I felt cheerful and light.

Coming out

A month after my first meeting with God I decided to confess my conversion to my wife. She's atheist, or agnostic, just like I was, just like most people we know. Contrary to those, as artists, we had developed a very positive appreciation of the Christian faith. We even attended services once in a while. But that didn't mean we believed in God. We were fascinated by the beauty of Christianity and felt slightly rebellious engaging with what most of our friends and relatives rejected.

While chatting with my wife over tea and biscuits, I was imagining a whole range of sentences in order to direct the conversation towards my confession. But in the end I just mentioned lightheartedly that I wanted to go to mass next Sunday and that I take this seriously. She responded in an equally lighthearted way but I felt certain that she understood just how serious this was for me. I felt great relief and hoped that we could discuss this more in-depth later.

On her birthday we had a longer conversation about the catholic faith. She takes my conversion completely seriously and encourages me. With respect to us having to marry again for the Church, she alluded to a conversion of her own, even if I had already discovered that the Church would allow a marriage of people with different faiths. But there's an ocean between saying and doing.

Roaming churches

My wife and I used to visit churches often before my conversion. We both loved the art and the serene atmosphere, even if we often ironically talked about the ambiguities in the depictions of religious scenes. On our walks through the city now, we continued this custom. But churches had now become something else for me. They had become places where I talk to the Lord. I wanted to make the sign of the cross, I wanted to kneel, I wanted to pray. But I felt embarrassed. I felt too timid to do that when she was with me. So visiting churches with her became awkward.

Every Sunday I would attend mass in a different church. There's hundreds of churches in Rome and most offer a generous schedule of mass celebrations. I was looking for the one church where I felt most at ease. Artistic beauty was important to me. There was no way I could attend mass in modernist architecture. The priest was important, his style, and the things he talked about during the sermon. The music mattered a lot too. Many churches would use soft folk music but I was into baroque. And finally I paid attention to the other people who attended mass. Because of the pandemic, however, their number was extremely low. I often attended mass with only four or five other people in these gorgeous baroque temples in the center of the eternal city, with the Caravaggios and Raffaellos staring down at us. There might be more tourists waiting at the door for the mass to end, than locals attending the service.

It would take three months for me to find and settle on Basilica dei Santi Ambrogio e Carlo al Corso with its magnificent architecture (the only church that I knew in Rome with an ambulatory, just as in the gothic churches from the North that I was familiar with), impressive organ and above all wonderful erudite and entertaining priest. It took another three months before I had the courage to ask the priest if I could speak with him, something we later did on a regular basis and which has been immensely helpful (it's good to have a tangible human to confirm what you imagine the Holy Spirit whispers in your soul).

Relationship repairs

A month and a half after my conversion I realized that I had forgiven my wife for breaking up our artistic collaboration when I found myself enjoying doing the chores in the house while she was working hard on her art. I don't mind being a "househusband", even if I hadn't chosen that career myself. But thanks to the strength my faith gives me this doesn't bring me down anymore.

Thanks to the strength I found in my faith, it had become possible for me to suppress the anger towards my wife that would often result from either unequal division of housework or discussions about art or politics. I hoped to find the strength to one day tell her about how my faith had been crucial in staying with her.

As a birthday gift I asked my wife to listen to me. On my first birthday as a Christian, we sat down in the living room and I told her the story of my conversion and of how it had changed my life and how it had stopped me from leaving her, regularly breaking out in tears, both of us. For my birthday she had bought me a rosary. Which I found the sweetest gift, because it meant she accepted and supported this thing that was so important to me.

Sharing the faith

When my children visited Rome, I found myself incapable of expressing the big change in my life. Having grown up in complete atheism and despite my half baked efforts as a divorced father they knew very little about Christianity. I did manage to drag them to Saint Peter's Basilica for a solemn mass at the high altar on Sunday.

Since I knew that God had created the world, I was seeing and experiencing signs everywhere. I was well aware that I could be imagining all of them, or that at least part of them really were coincidences. But weird stuff happened. Like that time when I started sweating profusely in the basilica of Celso and Giuliano after being intrigued by a woman in a straw hat who seemed to have followed me into the church. The week after that I go back to the same spot at the same time in the hope of seeing her again. But instead I met a young American seminarian in front of the church. He addresses me to ask the way to Santa Maria della Scala, one of my favorite little churches in Trastevere. So I accompanied him on the nice twenty minute walk there. It is the first time that I have a conversation with a Christian, after my conversion. And it felt so good to be able to talk about God as something that really exists.

Praying is fun!

I was getting more comfortable praying in churches. I enjoyed sailing past the tourists into the area reserved for prayer and kneeling down in front of a crucifix for all the world to see: "Yes, that's right, this is me, I believe in this stuff, and I don't care if you find what I do ridiculous."

Praying, especially in churches, could give me very strong physical sensations, in a way not entirely dissimilar to sex, but void of sexual excitement. Like having the orgasm immediately, without any stimulation. Or a little bit like the feeling of falling asleep, but without being tired or actually sleeping. Sometimes my praying would be just that for me: no words, no prayers, just sitting there and feeling this light, this warmth fill my chest and spin my head. I could often make it happen simply by closing my eyes.

The power of humility

When I heard my wife talk about her busy life I wouldn't get upset anymore that she was doing all these things on her own that we would have done together in the past. Instead I worried. I worried that she would not be able to create enough empty space inside herself to receive God. I wanted her to feel the joy that I had discovered. And of course to go to heaven later.

Until five months after my conversion, I did still get upset once in a while when my wife's busy work clashed with my life (such as when I wanted to practice music but she's on one of her many video calls, or when I have to do all the cleaning and washing up by myself because she has no time). One day I was meditating on my anger in Santi Ambrogio e Carlo, the church I had adopted a month and a half before. Why could I not accept my role as "househusband"? Millions of women have been happy in this role. Why couldn't I? After all, the most important thing in my life was my faith. God loves me. And He wants me to enjoy life. Which means avoid anger. Then I opened my eyes and noticed I was surrounded by depictions of the Borromeo motto: "Humilitas", humility. So this was why God had chosen this church for me! Humility was the key to everything! Humility gave me the strength to cope with anything, to be a good person, a loving husband. Humility was the key to my happiness!

Trouble in Paradise

It took some time for me to actually apply this discovery of humility as key. Time during which we argued a lot, in spite of my efforts to remain calm. Often about politics, of all things. I even considered again the idea of leaving her. Because my Christianity had added another element that separated our lives. I felt there was little left that we had in common. I fantasized about marrying a sweet catholic woman or entering a monastery. After all, the marriage with my wife was only civil. I also wondered why she even wanted to stay with me and half expected her to kick me out one day. Our relationship had started with finding in each other the perfect artistic collaborator. But now, not only did we not work together anymore, I even deeply disliked the art world that she was involved with. It seemed like she could do a lot better than me.

It took half a year for my wife and I to have our first conversation about spiritual issues. But much more to start talking about this on a regular basis. At first it seemed obvious to me that she would never convert. And I decided that I should try to imitate God's love as best as I could. To love her unconditionally. Never to get angry, always to be patient. To be a rock for her, a love that is always there for her. That loves everything about her, even the things that render her less happy, because everything would be alright in the end, and I was waiting for her.

The angel of my life

It had taken fifty years of life for me to understand the power of humility. I had been an arrogant man. And proud to be arrogant. I was a fortress. And I had already, over the years, very reluctantly and filled with reproach, broken down parts of this fortress, in order to restore the peace with my wife. I had been so angry with her for this. I felt that she forced me to destroy who I was in order to continue our relationship. Seven months after my conversion I finally realized that sacrificing all the parts of myself over the many years in order to continue living with my partner had been necessary to make me poor and small enough to encounter God. My wife is the angel of my life. The proud and strong person I considered myself had been living a life in which sadness and depression were simply normal. And I used to think of every concession I made as a sad loss, as making my depression even deeper, as a reduction of who I was. While in fact it was just throwing off ballast, removing armor, demolishing the walls that kept me away from who I truly was: a child of God. I had been so angry with her each and every time. But now I am grateful. It had been exactly my pride that prevented me from being happy in life. And she helped me break it down. Enough for me to find God who could help rid myself of it entirely, one day.