Word came this week of the passing of political reporter and columnist Robert Novak. A couple of years ago we spotted this item from Novak's just published autobiography:

Blogger Rod Dreher has gotten an early peek at a forthcoming biography from political columnist Robert Novak. Novak includes an account of his conversion to Catholicism after a lifetime of living as a secular Jew. Rod provides the excerpt:

Novak married a Methodist, but never had any role in the spirituality of their family life. But in 1992, his wife Geraldine started attending a Catholic mass, and invited her husband to go along. He agreed, and found that in contrast to his past experiences with Christian ritual, he was really moved by the Catholic liturgy. He also was becoming friends with a couple of smart conservative Catholic priests who would explain Catholic teaching to him. Yet for all the intellectual firepower present in those conversations, it was a single line said to him by a student at a 1996 college dinner at Syracuse that tipped him:

There was one woman on the College Republicans committee, seated across the table from me. She was striking looking, wearing a gold cross on her neck.

What happened next may be distorted in my memory and shaped by the religious mysteries that I see entwined in this episode. Without mentioning the cross, I was impelled to ask the woman a question that normally I would not consider posing. Was she a Catholic? I thought she answered yes and then asked me whether I was one. "No," I replied, "but my wife and I have been going to mass every Sunday for about four years." "Do you plan to join the church?" she asked. I answered: "No, not at the present time."

The the young woman looked at me and said evenly: "Mr. Novak, life is short, but eternity is forever." I was so shaken by what she said that I could barely get through the rest of the dinner and my speech that night. Sometime during the short night before rising to catch a seven a.m. flight back to Washington, I became convinced that the Holy Spirit was speaking through this Syracuse student.

Novak formally entered the Roman Catholic church in 1998. In 2005, working on the book, he tried to find out who the mystery woman who said the fateful words was. He discovered that her name is Barbara Plonisch Edmunds, and though she didn't remember the remark, a photo she sent to Novak of herself and her husband and infant son solved the mystery. She is, in fact, a Russian Orthodox Christian. Novak writes, "That she had forgotten what she said to me only confirmed my belief that the Holy Spirit was speaking through her."

We never know the consequences even the most tossed-off of our words can have on people, do we? The eternal destiny of Robert Novak might well have been decided at that dinner table that night in Syracuse, all because a college student had the courage to utter a single line of conviction.