It’s appropriate that at the beginning of this week, this Holy Week, I’m going to share with you a most interesting conversion story.
It was fascinating in its own right, but then, when you compare and contrast with Catholic conversion narratives of the present day, even more so. At least, I think so.
What I’ll probably do is share the general story today and then on following days, share some choice quotes and observations.
This might interest you from an historical perspective. Or geographical – because there’s a whole lot about Scotland and Ireland, and in fact, after spending the weekend in the company of this writer, I am ready to head to the Outer Hebrides right this minute.
It also might interest you if you are at all interested in the lives of women through history, especially Catholic women and Catholic history. Her story and her approach to life is a bracing antidote to the notion of “Catholic womanhood” that some cling to today, believing that the ideal they have created must certainly have been the expectation and the norm for all women before the evils of the present moment.
It also might interest you if you are wary of, suspicious of or simply put off by an emphasis on emotion and feeling in the spiritual life, wondering if your not-particularly-emotional faith is real or “authentic.”
So let’s meet Daphne Pochin Mould.
So how did I meet her? As per usual, I’m not quite sure, even though she only came onto my radar a couple of weeks ago. I think it was via my reading of Gladys Bronwyn Stern, whom I wrote about here. I don’t know if Mould was mentioned in one of Stern’s books, or in something else I read about her…all I know is that I clicked on her Wiki entry, encountered a woman who seemed fascinating – geologist, pilot, mountaineer, Catholic convert – and I had to know more.
Her book about her conversion – The Rock of Truth– is available via the Internet Archive, while her book about her new life as a Catholic, The Boat of Peter was not. I got it through Interlibrary Loan. It arrive on Friday, and I actually read it first, thinking, eh, one more conversion story – I’d rather read the aftermath. Only to finish the aftermath and think….well….I’ll bet that conversion story is fascinating.
And it was.
I’ll give you the summary first:
Mould, born in England, raised Anglican, with a strong Anglo-Catholic angle, thanks to an aunt, was a skeptic from an early age. She was baptized and eventually even confirmed, but never without questioning. She learned to drive early, and her car was her means of independence. She discovered Scotland in her late teens, fell in love with it, and took her aptitude and love for the sciences north and began her studies in Edinburgh.
She was in Edinburgh during World War II, by which time she had completely separated from religion – the Church of Scotland had no interest for her. Geology became her focus, and she eventually earned a doctorate. Any spirituality she had grew out of her love of the natural world, especially mountain climbing.
She attained her degree, then moved to Fort Augustus, Scotland. She was doing geological work, then became interested in the history of the area, growing out of geology, an interest which then became focused on churches and the saints who had settled Scotland.
Mould was completely anti-religious and particularly anti-Catholic at this point, and she set out to write a book about Celtic saints, not only to explore their historical role, but, in a sense, to expose their intellectual folly.
You won’t believe what happened next.
I’m telling you, this is one of the more interesting conversion stories I’ve ever read. One reason is Mould’s own personality and character. She (b. 1920) is a completely independent woman who doesn’t stress at all about her femaleness or her role in society as a woman – and she never indicates anyone else does either. She drives her car and loves driving her car. She is an outdoorswoman and is very, very tough. She learns to fly (not covered in the books, but it’s one of the things she’s famous for – flying, teaching others to fly, and aerial photography). She’s intellectually oriented, but disarmingly open to exploring her weaknesses in that regard, especially in relationship to her spiritual journey, admitting that the search for truth came first and that her embrace of God’s love for her was actually a challenge.
Both she and Stern are forthright about the fact that conversion is a beginning, not an end. There’s no pretense about the struggles, the doubts, and the gradual acclimation to living the Catholic faith, post-conversion.
Far more helpful and, dare I say it, “authentic” than most contemporary conversion stories.
I’ll just close this entry with a couple of quotes:
Exactly why people should climb mountains, when it is often dangerous or physically exacting, is impossible to explain to people who do not climb mountains. Perhaps at the very heart of the urge is a longing for beauty—the beauty of rocks and the clear air, of corniced snow against a blue sky. For me it brought a realization of beauty as beauty, and a backhanded idea that behind all the bewitching loveliness of the Scottish mountains might be some final and ultimate beauty. I thought, too, about truth; that beyond all the bits and pieces of truth in which my science dealt there might be some ultimate thing which was truth itself, and that this final truth might be beautiful, might have the same transcendent splendour that I seemed to be half-seeing through the sunshine on the hills.
Rock of Truth, p. 60
From the opening chapter of Peter’s Boat, inspired by her journey with Dominicans and others into Galway Bay for an annual blessing:
For me the ship of the Church, Peter’s boat, will probably always seem as something very small, like a Connemara hooker or some other small fishing boat, tossed in a very rough sea and with myself often in imminent danger of being ptiched overboard either by letting go my hold or being ejected by the exasperated crew.
Peter’s boat very definitely is no luxury liner, for that is rather the image of hell. She is a boat that works for her living and her decks are kept clear for the nets and ropes. She is not the sort of boat in which you have to go for a long walk to find the sea–rather the choppy little waves spray right across her. She moves with the times. From the wheel house of those small fishing boats of which I am thinking, comes the spit and crackle fo the radio trelephone; but she also possesses a surprising capacity for adaptation and improvisation….
Peter’s boat is then crowded with all sorts. There is the man with a bottle of Guinness in either hand, trying do the rock’ n roll, and the man who spent some time at the pub before coming aboard and is sure to sing “Westering Home.” There are people who like to find a snug corner out of the wind and people like myself who crouch in the bows getting the benefit or otherwise of the spray and the motion of the boat. The crew and the engine are mixed up with the crowd; they cannot retire to a remote Olympus of their own as can the liner’s engineers and officers. “Would you please move a little so we ca see where we’re going?” a tanned, blue-eyed Irishman shifts the group propping up the mast who are blocking the view from the wheel-house. We have room for an old lady who says she’s come for the sake of a day out, “anywhere for a day out,” and room for the person who really wants to get where we’re going. Peter’s nets have in fact caught a great many fishes and some of them are very queer fishes. Nobody ever said they were particularly respectable fishes, or virtuous fishes; in a sense we are all “bad Catholics.”
Peter’s Boat, pp 13-15