Two profound conversions
29 January 1999 10:31
The following item comes from the Trinitas Newsletter, October 1997.
TWO PROFOUND CONVERSIONS
On a recent trip to Sweden, Bob Carroll spoke with two women about their extraordinary stories of conversion through the messages of True Life in God:
Elisabeth, now 18 years old, dropped out of school at age 13 and spent all her time hanging around the streets of Stockholm, completely outside adult authority. She was what she describes as a typical “Swedish problem child” when her mother, a Catholic, asked her to come with her to hear Vassula speak in Stockholm in September 1995. Elisabeth doesn`t know why she went and she didn’t listen to a word but “something woke up in me. I started to think `Wow, this woman has met Jesus and I don’t even think about Him!'”
Elisabeth started going to Mass but soon drifted back “to drinking and doing all the same stupid things again.” But she kept the Holy Shroud picture of Jesus in her room where she always glanced at it, until one day she picked up the flyer that had been handed out at Vassula’s presentation. She read the message that had been translated into Swedish and “started to cry and cry.” She immediately got all the books and devoured the messages.
Shortly afterwards, Elisabeth read about the Rosary in the messages and wanted to learn it. She joined a Medjugorje rosary group and began “to live the messages” of Medjugorje and of True Life in God. She recently made her First Communion. She has also returned to school to finish her education.
Now she tells anyone who wants to listen about the True Life in God messages and how they have changed her life. She attends a Protestant adult education school and she has been able to share the messages both in her religion course and during group discussion in the chapel. She laughs at her enthusiasm and how different she is now from her old wild self. Her sincerity and joy about what she has found is proving to be a beacon of hope for other young people still searching for that kind of peace and fulfillment in their own lives.
The second woman, Inger, was born in Sweden and went to Paris as a teenager to become a top photographic model. Later she became a prominent stage actress and continued to live a glamorous life, although there was always a certain emptiness. She had everything she could have hoped for materially and felt fortunate to have been born at all. Her mother, pressured into an abortion, prayed just before the procedure that God would somehow intervene and save her baby. A month after the abortion Inger’s mother realized she was still pregnant. The doctor, certain of what he had done, was dumbfounded. He called it a miracle.
It seemed indeed the prayer was answered, and Inger was born. Only after her conversion did Inger understand more fully. Jesus let her know that she had been a twin.
Inger believes that the abortion from which she was spared accounted in some way for the fact that she could never retain what she read.
In 1994, Inger’s attention was drawn to a poster about Vassula speaking in Paris. She was intrigued by the Swedish last name, “Ryden”, but something beyond that impelled her to look into this. She had a neighbor she knew was Catholic, so she asked her if she had ever heard of Vassula. “Yes”, she said, “I just heard her speak two days ago. Would you like to read her first book?”.
Inger took the book home and began reading. She came to a line from which the words rose off the page in big black letters: “CHANGE YOUR LIFE.” As she fell to her knees a power and warmth welled up in her. She knew at once it was the Lord’s presence. She went to the cupboard and rummaged around until she found an image of Jesus stashed there long ago. She hung it up on the wall and asked, “Jesus what do you want me to do?”. The answer that came to her was “Witness.”
She bought the whole set of Vassula’s books and started reading practically nonstop. A couple of days later she went back to her neighbor who, when she saw how Inger had been touched, told her to go to confesion. Inger, although a Protestant, said “of course, I want to do that! How do I do that?”
Her friend gave her the name of a certain priest. Inger looked up his address, tore the page out of the phone book and rushed out to find him. He turned out, she said, to be “so, so very nice.” When she said she wanted to go to confession he noted that he had never seen her before. She said of course he hadn’t because she was a Protestant. “Ah, a big fish! I like that. Come with me. When we leave here you will be flying.” And that was how she felt, filled with a peace and joy that seemed to her like one must feel in Heaven, “the Peace that surpasses understanding.”
She learned later that another non Catholic had approached the priest some time before seeking confession and absolution. He had hesitated but at once distinctly felt it was what the Lord wanted him to do. It was another instance in which Jesus had laid the groundwork for Inger’s journey.
Soon after as she passed by a Catholic church she felt drawn to go inside. As she entered, the priest and servers were in procession toward the altar to begin the Mass. It felt to her “as if Heaven was opening at that moment; that all Heaven was present, Jesus and Mary and everyone. I cannot describe how wonderful it was to me!”
For a time she had “one foot in both Churches.” She went to her Protestant church every Tuesday and every Sunday she went to a Catholic church. But she realized she could not go on that way so she went to Jesus again for direction. The answer she got was to convert to Catholicism.
She worked at it for a year and a half but it was Jesus who taught her the catechism she could not have retained through reading. “He taught me by giving me mental images or even inner lights about something on TV or through a person I would meet who would teach me something I needed to know about the Catholic faith.”
During that time she was spending three hours every afternoon in church besides morning Mass. A priest who always saw her praying and knew she was not a Catholic asked her one day if she knew the Catechism. She said yes, she had learned it. “You don’t have to go through instruction,” he told her, “what I have seen is enough.” So she became a Catholic. “Thus Jesus arranged everything so that I could convert without ever having to go through a course.” When she received Jesus in Communion she felt His real presence “so very, very strong!”
“Now I had Jesus, and next came Mary.” Her neighbor in Paris invited her to a prayer group where Inger asked someone to teach her the rosary. When she began to pray it she felt Mary close to her. “I knew she was listening to my prayer… So I had first confession, then Jesus, then Mary… and the Pope? Well I already knew he was a saint and genuine.” Next, during prayer, as she pronounced the name of Sweden’s patron Saint Birgitta (or Bridget, who like Vassula, received dictation from Jesus), Inger felt Birgitta’s presence. She also felt the presence of her guardian angel when she prayed for his protection. Inger believes this was all part of Jesus’ formation of her that showed her graphically the truth and reality of the particular things that Catholics believe.
After her conversion to Catholicism, Inger left everything from her 25 years in Paris -career, home, red Jeep, and a rather astonished but understanding circle of old friends. She left because she understood what Jesus wanted her to do: to “go back to Sweden.”
Living now in Stockholm, when she is not engaged in her daily devotions she evangelizes, but only when she discerns a distinct inner leading to do so. She is also involved in a mission that she helped to initiate in France. A special pilgrim Virgin statue representing “Our Lady of Sweden” is being placed in one Protestant church after another throughout Sweden. This statue, along with 197 other pilgrim statues, had rested in churches, prisons, hospitals, and homes throughout France. All the statues currently circulating in 108 countries will be brought to Bethlehem for the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ.
Following what Jesus tells Vassula, Inger says that at every step now, she puts her total trust in Jesus and Mary. “In my prayer I am like a child. I turn to Him for everything. Since that first time three years ago when I asked Jesus what He wanted me to do, I feel His presence welling up within me to give me direction. At every step I ask Him: `Jesus, can I do this or not?’ If I don’t feel that sense of His presence, I just don’t go ahead.
“In my life before I had everything I could want and did just about everything you shouldn’t do, but now I am happy, so happy -and you too, “she added, nodding to Elisabeth who was smiling across the dinner table as she listened to Inger’s story. Our Lord had brought them, by their different paths, together in the same prayer group.
“Ah, how I rejoice, for you have behaved as I would have you behave, leaving everything in My hands and remaining a Nothing… I do not intend to hide My Inexhaustible Riches in these times of need but I will cast them out through your nothingness. With little time left now, do not delay, for I am afflicted beyond your understanding; hurry, for death is imminent out there in the desert. Delight in delight; I bless you. IC”. (From True Life in God, notebook 83, pp. 8-9).