I recently watched an interview with actor Shia LaBeouf that a friend tipped me off to. For the record, I didn’t make it very far into the interview, which was recorded the day after LaBeouf was released from jail on bail for a drunken physical altercation at a bar in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. The actor appeared to be somewhat inebriated, was dropping f-bombs left and right, deflecting responsibility for his recent objectionable behavior, and probably making his agent panic backstage. As a public figure, and a recent Catholic convert with a checkered past, it was uncomfortable to watch and wasn’t a good look for him personally or for the body of believers, his brothers and sisters who make up the universal Church.

There was a moment in the interview, however, where LaBeouf’s bravado falters and he starts to cry when asked what he would say to Jesus if he met Him. “I wouldn’t say nothing…I would kiss his feet,” he says, eyes to the floor. In the interview, he refers to himself as one of those “dirty Christians,” which is a bit of a double entendre. Did he mean the holy Christians secular society despises and regards as socially unclean? Or was he referring to his own mired state of sitting in the proverbial pigsty, far from home and spattered with the dirty hogwash of sin?

LaBeouf’s bravado falters and he starts to cry when asked what he would say to Jesus if he met Him. “I wouldn’t say nothing…I would kiss his feet,” he says, eyes to the floor.Tweet This

I’ve had a soft spot for Shia since his interview with Bishop Robert Barron, in which he spoke about the draw of the Latin Mass (“I feel like they’re not trying to sell me a car”). He was honest and unpolished, as if no one shared the memo with him about the protocol for trying to make a respectable case for the Faith on air. I also saw a lot of my own unwieldy, oxbow-like journey through Catholicism over the past 28 years since my own conversion.

Coming into the Church at the age of 18 was easy for me; I came to know, by grace, that it was the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free. And I wanted to be free—free of the futility of trying to find happiness in the world, the tedium of nights in high school shooting pool with my friends, drinking in parents’ basements, and watching Saturday Night Live. Free of my sin and existential tethers, which kept me mired here on earth. Free of the fear and anxiety of an existence without the hope of an afterlife. Free of possessions and status. I wanted the freedom of Paul the prisoner, not the conventions that bound Pilate by way of expectation.

I’d like to say I cleaned up immediately, did a 180 metanoia kickflip in which I left my former life behind tout de suite. But it wasn’t in God’s plan that I would have such a clean break with my former life and former friends. Beyond prayer, repentance, and Mass attendance in college, I—like Shia, I might surmise—did not know how to live as a Christian, practically speaking. 

Grace was at work, but it was two steps forward, one-and-a-half steps back. I would still throw huge parties (Mardi Gras was my favorite, ironically enough), and I consistently drank and smoked too much. I grew cannabis in my closet at a time when it was a felony to do so because I liked to garden in my apartment. I continued to hook up with girls when there was a mutual attraction, leaving a wake of hurt and embarrassment at my conflicting behavior. I got engaged to an exotic dancer/bartender (the engagement broke off just before the wedding). I rode my motorcycle on open roads at 120 mph and OD’d on benzos, which landed me in the hospital.

My language was course and would make a sailor blush. I dabbled in New Age and blasphemed our Lord in states of manic unrest. Though this was before the social media and YouTube era where bad behavior could be blasted online for all eyes to see, I engaged in pretty much all the stuff Paul admonishes the Corinthians not to do, except maybe for the orgies—all as a faithful Catholic who loved Christ, yet simultaneously knowing I was a walking contradiction and scandal.

I would die for my friends, but I wouldn’t die to myself. I kept a foothold in the world because I loved the world and there was still a part of the world that wanted me for its own. And yet, “if the love of the world is in you, the love of the Father is not” (1 John 2:15). Holiness seemed so unattainable and out of reach. I continued to stumble for years, all the while confessing, getting up, and falling again. It was only God’s grace and evergreen patience that sustained me, for goodness alluded me; and indeed, there was no good in me (Mark 10:18; Romans 3:12) except for that tiny flicker from the pilot light of grace.

And it was only grace that eventually, slowly, straightened me out, like a brace for a child with scoliosis. I owe a lot to Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, who turned my wife and me away from using contraception early in our marriage (I knew better, but didn’t know anyone at that time, Catholics included, who weren’t contracepting and could be an example for us of how to live by the Church’s teaching). It was as if our grieving and merciful Lord was forced to send His Mother on a special envoy to unshackle my spirit once and for all by way of this powerful sacramental, the heavy spiritual artillery necessary to obliterate the bonds of Satan who had so deceptively lodged himself like a demonic cavity in the back molars where you always forget to brush. And I was due for a spiritual root canal.

All this is to say there is a part of me that knows what converts like Shia LaBeouf are going through at some level. You think conversion is a clean, one-and-done process, a B.C./A.D. moment in which you wake up and are no longer a miserable, dead-in-the-mud sinner but a respectable member of a reputable Church. Instead, you might find yourself drunk and crying in a bar when you think about how unworthy you are to kiss the feet of your Savior. Or struggling to cut ties with your former party friends whom you love but know in your heart are not your people anymore. Or finding yourself in the apartment of a former lover who is toxic but familiar, reading the Bible in the middle of the night as you wonder why you are there in the first place.

[New converts can] think conversion is a clean, one-and-done process, a B.C./A.D. moment in which you wake up and are no longer a miserable, dead-in-the-mud sinner but a respectable member of a reputable Church.Tweet This

If it weren’t for God’s patient grace (and my Guardian Angel, who has clocked a lot of overtime over the past few decades), I would be spiritually DOA. And whether it’s Shia or someone less in the spotlight, I know I am not the only one. But while I despaired for my life beyond this life, God never did, for “He knows what He is about,” as St. John Henry Newman so eloquently said.

Grace is the cartilage for the joint that allows us to walk. It is the plasma to the blood, the H₂ to the O, the spark that warms the hearth when it can just as easily set the forest ablaze. If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13). But we must continue to fan the flame of grace with our flawed prayers, our timid cries, our inconsistent oblations, our inebriated confessions. Even that He will honor, miserable sinners that we are.