A Godspy interview with Randall Sullivan, author of the Miracle Detective, which, to my great chagrin, I still have not read.

Your description of your conversion experience really impressed me. It was clearly a genuine experience of God’s love.

Yeah, I think that is the essence for me. I wouldn’t understand the conversion to Christianity in any other way, personally.

I was raised by a pair of athiests who took the Jesse Ventura view of religion—that it is a crutch for the weak—minded. Both my siblings are avowed athiests. I was never really comfortable with this; even as a child I sensed that there was a divine source. As a young adult I was more drawn to Eastern than to Western religion; the Hindu cosmology made more sense to me than the Christian one, and Buddhist beliefs accorded better with the scientific skepticism I had absorbed as a youth. What happened to me in Medjugorje was a kind of conversion experience. I had an experience of God’s mercy and of Christ’s sacrifice that was unprecedented in my life, and that I found myself unable to deny and unwilling to disavow even after I returned to my secular reality in the U.S.

…Towards the end, you recount your meeting with Fr. Benedict Groeschel. How did he help clarify things for you?

What Father Groeschel did was validate my doubts without undermining my faith. It was almost as if he gave me permission to express my feeling that the events—in Medjugorje, especially—that I had found to be at once so moving and so perplexing were the complex mix of the human and the divine, of psychology and spirituality, that I imagined. What most surprised me about the aftermath of my meeting with him was the discovery that accepting my doubts actually deepened my faith. I felt a tremendous sense of liberation from the parameters I’d imposed on my belief.