I had a conversation recently with a 70-year-old new convert to Catholicism. Conversion stories are as diverse as converts themselves, but they generally fall into categories, nonetheless. So many converts from the Anglican persuasion, for example, say that their decision came from their recognition of the need for eccesiastical authority. Reasons do come in categories then, even if converts themselves do not.

This man’s reason was different. He says, simply, “I *choose* to believe.” On the surface, it sounds a bit dubious. Over decades of teaching, I’ve had a few occasions to listen to students’ expressions of religious doubt. Very often, these doubts cause them agony: “I can’t help it. I just don’t believe. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t force myself to believe.” One knows they’re sincere and counsels accordingly: “Doubt is part of faith, not its contradiction. You’re just finding your own faith, not your parents’. Be patient with your own journey.”

So, how can this man—obviously intelligent, well-educated—he’s a retired chemical engineer, by the way—how can he simply *choose* to believe? He gave me the reasons behind the reason: As a person of intellectual integrity, he had always been an atheist. He never believed in God. He “recognized” the universe as material and could not with honesty ascribe any other characteristic to it. He was a good man, moral and ethical, and adhered to a humanistic code of behavior. He had a wife, children and grandchildren, whom he loved deeply, but he knew that love was ultimately a matter of brain chemistry, expressed as emotion.

But, he said, one morning about fifteen years ago, he woke up with no reason to live. After trying to work his own way out of the depression, he went to a doctor who prescribed anti-depressants. They didn’t work. No change. Finally, he went to a psychiatrist who tried analysis. For a long time, he believed that his depression was due to aging. When we get older, we start to evaluate our lives. A poor assessment can cause depression. Also, we simply don’t want to age and die—anxiety about that inevitability can express itself in depression. It was all very logical, and for a long time, he believed it. Years went by, however, and neither logic nor chemistry had any ameliorative affect on his depression. It deepened.

The only respite—without which, he says, he would have been suicidal—was beauty. It was like a salve on an open wound. Beauty in nature, in art, music—wherever he could find it. “I found myself as dependent on beauty as other people are dependent on drugs. Life without it was literally impossible.” It became his Great Love, “…as a man loves a woman so much that he believes whatever she tells him. The thought that she might lie to him, betray him, is utterly unbearable. So, even as he knows that she might lie, he chooses to believe her—no matter what.”

One senses what’s coming, can almost see Keats’ hand at work: “Beauty is truth and truth, beauty/That’s all we know on earth and all we need to know.” The inevitable argument is that “beauty” is not truth; it can and does deceive. But the fact is that beauty doesn’t deceive, only the *beautiful* does that. A Grecian urn can betray, but the hand of its maker does not. He said that that realization came like a dawn after a lifelong night. He had loved all things beautiful, made them his reason to live when all other reasons had exhausted themselves. They were—even music—material, because of course, his universe was material. The beautiful was material—but beauty itself was not. It was abstract. It was “the hand of the maker.” It did not lie. Indeed, it was the only thing that never lied. It was objective truth. It was God.

He realized that in order to continue to perceive material beauty—which, for him, had become his reason to live—he would have to admit into his material universe an abstraction. That meant he had to *choose* to believe in the hand of the maker. And so he chose. Since then, he sees that hand behind the chemistry, behind everything that gives life to us all, and to some of us, a reason to live. He says his faith is indestructible. I believe him.