I remember the occasion well. It was a Saturday evening, a slow night in my second year at Rice University. The usual diversions had begun to lose their savor; the quest for meaning had devolved into aimless wandering about the stacks of the Fondren Library. Hoping for little and expecting even less, I suddenly paused at a dusty book with the curious title The Catholic Church and Conversion. It was one of those chance encounters that would change my life.

It was also my first encounter with G.K. Chesterton. Flipping through his book, which rehearsed the steps that led to his conversion to Catholicism, I was overcome with self-recognition. Not that Chesterton was introducing me to the Church. I had read St. Augustine’s Confessions and Pascal’s Pensées the previous semester. But Chesterton’s little narrative possessed a remarkable clarity about “the obvious blunders” and “the real obstacles” that stand in the way of potential converts.

Chesterton first directs our attention to the perennial novelty of the Church. This feature, as he notices, may frighten the relatives of converts. No father fears the prospect of his son converting to mainline Protestantism, “but amongst these dangerous juvenile attractions he does in practice class the freshness and novelty of Rome.” What scares fathers intrigues sons. Thus I found enchanting Chesterton’s suggestion that conversion is a form of revolt.

Conversion to the Catholic Church is not—and cannot be—only a revolt. It is also a return. It is a rediscovery of the basis of our civilization and its most fundamental ideal. Rome is both very old and very new. “Among these annoying new religions, one is rather an old religion; but it is the only old religion that is so new.” The paradox is to be lingered on, even cherished. Catholicism is not only the oldest form of Christianity. It is also the only form is that always “coming in as something fresh and disturbing, whether as it came to the Greeks who were always seeking some new thing, or as it came to the shepherds who first heard the cry upon the hills of the good news that our language calls the Gospel.” As Chesterton concludes, there is something “legendary about the religion that is two thousand years old now appearing as a rival of the new religions.”

Chesteron’s deft analysis of the blunders made about the Faith is still worth reading. The caricatures of the hidden Bible, the profligate priest and treacherous Jesuit are very much with us. Only a decade ago, one of my Protestant relatives (not in my immediate family) exclaimed over lunch: “I didn’t know that Catholics were Christians!” For such cases there may be no human remedy. But many less obvious, and therefore more insidious, blunders continue to obstruct thinking about the Church—and not just among conventional Protestants, but increasingly among “cradle Catholics” who are shockingly ignorant of their own tradition. There is no better antidote to them than to read Chesterton.

But what of the real obstacles? Chesterton knows that not every reservation about the wisdom of conversion to Catholicism can be regarded as sheer blunder. There are genuine reasons that cause one to delay, but these are “almost the opposite of the recognized difficulties.” Rather than recapitulate Chesterton’s analysis, I will simply commend readerly attention to three “stages” or “states of mind” that the convert commonly passes through. The first stage is principled indifference, “that of the young philosopher who feels that he ought to be fair to the Church of Rome.” The second is quickened interest, where the “convert begins to be conscious not only of the falsehood but the truth, and is enormously excited to find that there is far more of it than he would ever have expected.” As Chesterton says, this is probably the most pleasant and exciting stage, “easier than joining the Catholic Church and much easier than trying to live the Catholic life.” The third stage occurs when the magnitude of the challenge sinks in. It is “perhaps the truest and the most terrible. It is that in which the man is trying not to be converted.” Before the iron leaps to the magnet, as Chesterton says, there is a moment when it opposes it.

Converts will pass through these stages, or phases very much like them, in an infinity of different modes. Chesterton never forgets the particular. He knows that the “the Church is a house with a hundred gates; and no two men enter at exactly the same angle.” But no matter how particular your angle of approach may be, light is required to see the gate. Few are more illuminating than Chesterton.