Into the broad daylight

On 14 June, it was 65 years since GK Chesterton died. I started a post for that day, but got tied up with other things and abandoned it. However, it has been at the back of my mind since to do something about Chesterton’s reasons for converting to Catholicism. Here are his own comments on the matter:

In other words, the convert does not in the least abandon investigation or even adventure. He does not think he knows everything, nor has he lost curiosity about the things he does not know. But experience has taught him that he will find nearly everything somewhere inside that estate and that a very large number of people are finding next to nothing outside it. For the estate is not only a formal garden or an ordered farm; there is plenty of hunting and fishing on it, and, as the phrase goes, very good sport.

For this is one of the very queerest of the common delusions about what happens to the convert. In some muddled way people have confused the natural remarks of converts, about having found moral peace, with some idea of their having found mental rest, in the sense of mental inaction. They might as well say that a man who has completely recovered his health, after an attack of palsy or St. Vitus’ dance, signalises his healthy state by sitting absolutely still like a stone. Recovering his health means recovering his power of moving in the right way as distinct from the wrong way; but he will probably move a great deal more than before. To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think. It is so in exactly the same sense in which to recover from palsy is not to leave off moving but to learn how to move. The Catholic convert has for the first time a starting-point for straight and strenuous thinking. He has for the first time a way of testing the truth in any question that he raises. As the world goes, especially at present, it is the other people, the heathen and the heretics, who seem to have every virtue except the power of connected thought. There was indeed a brief period when a small minority did some hard thinking on the heathen or heretical side.It barely lasted from the time of Voltaire to the time of Huxley. It has now entirely disappeared. What is now called free thought is valued, not because it is free thought, but because it is freedom from thought; because it is free thoughtlessness.

Nothing is more amusing to the convert, when his conversion has been complete for some time, than to hear the speculations about when or whether he will repent of the conversion; when he will be sick of it, how long he will stand it, at what stage of his external exasperation he will start up and say he can bear it no more. For all this is founded on that optical illusion about the outside and the inside which I have tried to sketch in this chapter. The outsiders, stand by and see, or think they see, the convert entering with bowed head a sort of small temple which they are convinced is fitted up inside like a prison, if not a torture-chamber. But all they really know about it is that he has passed through a door. They do not know that he has not gone into the inner darkness, but out into the broad daylight. It is he who is, in the beautiful and beatific sense of the word, an outsider. He does not want to go into a larger room, because he does not know of any larger room to go into. He knows of a large number of much smaller rooms, each of which is labelled as being very large; but he is quite sure he would be cramped in any of them. Each of them professes to be a complete cosmos or scheme of all things; but then so does the cosmos of the Clapham Sect or the Clapton Agapemone. Each of them is supposed to be domed with the sky or painted inside with all the stars. But each of these cosmic systems or machines seems to him much smaller and even much simpler than the broad and balanced universe in which he lives. One of them is labelled Agnostic; but he knows by experience that it has not really even the freedom of ignorance. It is a wheel that must always go round without a single jolt of miraculous interruption–a circle that must not be squared by any higher mathematics of mysticism; a machine that must be scoured as clean of all spirits as if it were the avowed machine of materialism. In living in a world with two orders, the supernatural and the natural, the convert feels he is living in a larger world and does not feel any temptation to crawl back into a smaller one. One of them is labelled Theosophical or Buddhistic; but he knows by experience that it is only the same sort of wearisome wheel used for spiritual things instead of material things. Living in a world where he is free to do anything, even to go to the devil, he does not see why he should tie himself to the wheel of a mere destiny. One of them is labelled Humanitarian; but he knows that such humanitarians have really far less experience of humanity. He knows that they are thinking almost entirely of men as they are at this moment in modern cities, and have nothing like the huge human interest of what began by being preached to legionaries in Palestine and is still being preached to peasants in China. So clear is this perception that I have sometimes put it to myself, as something between a melancholy meditation and a joke. “Where should I go now, if I did leave the Catholic Church?” I certainly would not go to any of those little social sects which only express one idea at a time, because that idea happens to be fashionable at the moment. The best I could hope for would be to wander away into the woods and become, not a Pantheist (for that is also a limitation and a bore) but rather a pagan, in the mood to cry out that some particular mountain peak or flowering fruit tree was sacred and a thing to be worshipped. That at least would be beginning all over again; but it would bring me back to the same problem in the end. If it was reasonable to have a sacred tree it was not unreasonable to have a sacred crucifix; and if the god was to be found on one peak he may as reasonably be found under one spire.

{The Catholic Church and Conversion}

He said the same thing, in shorter terms, in the poem entitled The Convert, written after he received his first communion:

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead.

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

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A Rosary for Peace – Good Friday

(From an email I received – but I’m in.)

Greetings!

Imagine what might happen if every Catholic in the world would pray a Rosary on the same day! We have an example in October of 1573, when  Europe was saved from the invasion of the mighty Turkish fleet, by the praying of the Rosary by all Christians – the origin of the Feast of the Rosary.

In the 1920s, the Church in Portugal experienced a miraculous resurrection in the face of the fiercely anti-Catholic republican government, because the ordinary people who had seen the miracle of the sun in October 1917, willingly complied with Our Lady’s request to pray the Rosary every day …

In Austria in 1955, the Soviets voluntarily withdrew the Red Army of occupation, after 10% of the population joined in a Rosary crusade with public processions …

So, on Good Friday, let us all pray a Rosary for suffering and persecuted Christians wherever they might be, for peace in the world and the return of moral values into our communities. If possible, please pray your Rosary between Noon and 3:00pm.

Let’s unite in praying one of the most powerful prayers in existence,for these intentions, on one of the holiest days in our Church year.

Ave Maria !

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Signs of God; signs from God

Jennifer Fulwiler at Conversion Diary provides many an interesting read. I recommend her post on the ignorable God, which begins:

One of the things that bothered me most when I was first exploring religion was the fact that God is invisible. As I was reading up on Christianity, struggling with concepts I didn’t understand, I would occasionally think in exasperation, “You know, God could make this really easy and just appear to each one of us individually and settle all of this once and for all!” It seemed so much more efficient for God to do that rather than mess around with all this messy organized religion stuff.

I really don’t want to excerpt much more than that. It would spoil her nice narrative flow to give you parts, without the whole. I’d love for you just to go over there and read it for yourself. But here’s the last bit:

And why? Why not take my suggestion and slap me upside the head with a laser-light show at every Mass to command my attention when my mind has wandered to think about everything but him? I’m no theologian and don’t claim to have all the answers on that one, but I think that one part of it is this: as usual, it’s about love. One thing about love is that it must be a choice; if there’s coercion involved, it’s not real love. And in order to love someone — really, truly love them — you must first have the choice to ignore them.

I found that post, and it took me back to an earlier one – Asking God for a sign. In this post, Jennifer recalls the days leading up to her conversion; days in which she was trying to be open to the idea that God existed, but was unsure what to do next. She says she was becoming increasingly dejected about her inability to get anywhere, and she begged God for a sign. She walked out onto the balconey, and saw – a hundred miles away – a storm raging between two mountains, where lightning flashed to illuminate a cloud 60,000 feet tall. The rest of the sky was clear, and around her all was still. As she looked up eight meteors flashed across the sky, one after another, many of them with long tails.

“Well,” I smirked to myself, “be careful what you wish for.” I had asked for a sign, and this was about as “sign-ish” as it gets. What more did I want? Yet I wasn’t convinced. Even as my heart raced upon witnessing the grandeur before me I wrote it off as just a storm and an unexpected meteor shower. I refused to believe that there was anything more to this than a random cumulonimbus and some dust entering the earth’s atmosphere.I realized then that there was no sign that God could give me.

If this wouldn’t suffice, nothing would. I wasn’t open to it. Had I walked out on the balcony to see “HI JENNIFER, IT’S ME, GOD!” written across the sky I would have been impressed but ultimately written it off as a practical joke. If Jesus himself materialized to shake my hand and greet me I’d write it off as a hallucination. Because, in my mind, there was a natural explanation for everything, so therefore anything supernatural was impossible.

I arrogantly assumed that because I knew how something worked that God couldn’t be involved. I watched the storm and thought, “That’s not God, that’s just condensation!” And the tightness in my chest and tears welling up in my eyes? “That’s not my ‘soul’ yearning for anything, that’s just chemical reactions in my brain!”

This was another major turning point for me. I realized that night that I wasn’t going to see God if I was determined not to.

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Go and make disciples

“The task of evangelizing all people constitutes the essential mission of the Church.” (Evangelii Nuntiandi)

Not just a mission – the essential mission. So whose job is it? Clearly, it must be someone else’s, right?

“the whole Church is missionary, and the work of evangelization is a basic duty of the People of God.” (ibid)

Yeah, but that doesn’t mean me personally, right?

“Mission is a duty about which one must say ‘Woe to me if I do not evangelize’ (1 Corinthians 9:16)

And Pope Benedict makes it even clearer in his message for World Missions Day:

The Gospel is not an exclusive good of the one who has received it, but is a gift to be shared, good news to communicate. And this gift-commitment is entrusted not only to a few, but to all the baptized, who are “a chosen race … a holy nation, God’s own people” (1 Peter 2:9), to proclaim his wonderful works…

With that in mind, here’s the tail end of a conversation that has been going on across several blogs in the US.

I am going to use the metaphor I used below, of Catholicism as the graduate school of the spiritual life. We have this enormous, gorgeous “Great Library” (the Church) full of the riches of the ages and open 24/7 to anyone who wants to enter and read the books at their leisure.  But first you have to teach yourself to read and write.  Cause we don’t have a public elementary school system and the majority of our people are illiterate.

In this metaphor, “literacy” stands for a man or woman’s personal faith response to Jesus’s invitation to follow him in the midst of his Church.  In other words, discipleship.

So remember as you read this, Great Library = Church, “literacy” = personal discipleship.

And the conversation goes like this:

Evangelizer: All sorts of studies indicate that 70% of our citizens seldom or never use our wonderful Library.  And over the years, some of us have noticed that the vast majority of our citizens whom we have interviewed are either completely illiterate and can’t read at all or only can only read at a first grade level while the books in our Library are on a graduate school level.  We’re thinking that the fact that our people can’t read might be the reason they don’t come to our beautiful Library.

Response: We built the Great Library.  It’s the biggest, oldest, most beautiful library in the world.  It has a spire that is a hundred feet high.

Evangelizer: Oh, I agree 100%.  Our Library is a stupendous, gorgeous treasure and I love the gothic architecture.  But I’m worried that 85% of our young adults don’t use the Library regularly and that the majority never cross the threshold at all.

Response: Our Library is the Great Library.  It is not only bigger and better than anyone else’s library, it is the only real library.

Evangelizer: True.  But over the years, we’ve noticed that the vast majority of our citizens are either completely illiterate or only can only read at a first grade level while the books in the Great Library were written on a graduate school level.

We’re wondering If the fact that most of our people either can’t read at all or can’t read well enough to understand our books might be the reason they don’t come to our beautiful Library.

Response: We wrote most of the books in the Great Library.  And they are great books: they are old and complicated and deep and lots of them are in Latin.

Evangelizer:  Oh I love to read our books. But I can’t help worrying about the fact that most of our people never enter the Library at all.  And that large numbers of the 30% who do enter at least once a month, only have a first grade reading level.  They can’t read our books in English, much less in Latin.

Response: We are the people of the Library.  The Library is everything.  Real Catholics love to be in the Library, to smell the books, to dust the books, to touch the books.  Our books are better and older and more beautiful and deeper than anyone else’s.  Our library is filled with treasures.   They are too precious to loan out.  You couldn’t read all the books in our library in a lifetime.

Evangelizer: Absolutely. I get euphoric smelling old books.  But I’m concerned that most of our citizens don’t read any of the books in our library.  I thought the point of a library was to make books available so that whole community could have access and read them.  But most of our people can’t read so they aren’t coming to the Library at all.

Response: The purpose of the Great Library is to be a beautiful place that keeps great collections of great books safe.  Having lots of people reading all the time is Protestant, not Catholic.

Evangelizer: Huh?

Response: I know what I’m talking about.  I used to have a library card over at the Protestant “library”.  It was small and plain and only one story high.  And the books were much simpler.  Most of them were cheap paperbacks and written only at a high school reading level.  And the place was always filled with badly educated working people checking out books and reading them outside the library.  But I wanted more.  So when I heard about the Great Library and incredible collection of leather-bound books it held, I went to visit it and was so enthralled by its beauty, that I signed up right away.  I never go to the small library anymore.

Evangelizer: So you are literate?  That’s great.

Response: Oh, yes.  I learned how to read at the small, plain Protestant elementary school across town.  But I’m so excited now that I am Catholic because I have access to all the incredible books in the Great Library.  I am in training to become a librarian.

Evangelizer: That is great!  Wouldn’t it be great if all of our people could experience the same joy?  We don’t have a good elementary school system and I’ve been wondering if that is why so many of our people aren’t literate and don’t come to the Great Library.  We could found our own elementary school and teach everyone in Catholictown to read and write and then many more of them would want to come to the Great Library to check out the books!

Response: Elementary schools are Protestant.  If we start our own elementary school system, our people might go over to the small plain library and check out the ugly paperback books there and read them by themselves.  You are talking about a “me and the book” faith.  That’s Protestant.  We are people of the Library.

Catholics aren’t into literacy, we are into mystery. We are an incarnate faith.  Real Catholics learn by looking at beautiful books, smelling them, touching them, shelving them, dusting them in the library because they are too valuable and precious to take out.  Borrowing cheap, paperback books out and reading them by yourself at home or on the bus is Protestant.  That’s individualistic.  Catholics have a communal and incarnate faith. You just want us to become Protestants.

Evangelizer:  No! No!  We just want our Catholic citizens to be able to read and be changed and be made wise by the incredible riches to be found in our library, the Great Library.  The beautiful, leather-bound books were written by Catholic authors to be read by all our citizens.  I want all our people to be able to access the beauty inside our books as well as the beauty outside.  After all, that’s what Jesus, the Founder and Lord of the Great Library, told us was our mission. . . .

Response: Shhhh.  We never mention the Founder by name except in the liturgy.  It’s disrespectful and irreverent and Protestant.  The Founder isn’t your buddy.  If you were a true Catholic in culture, you’d know that.

You would also know that the majority of our people have never been literate.  My parents and grand parents were good, devout Catholics and none of them were literate.  Ordinary Catholics don’t need to be literate and we don’t talk about the Founder.  We have the Great Library.

It’s probably a good thing that the majority of our citizens don’t come to the Library anyway.  They don’t understand and would just make it noisy, crowded, and dirty.  It is much better that only a small, tidy, well behaved group of Catholics who really understand, enter the Great Library.

There we can talk about the Great Library.  We serve the Great Library. We live in the Great Library.  We love the sight of the ancient, burnished, leather, the sunlight gleaming on their gilded lettering, we love the sound of the old pages crackling.  We work together in reverent silence: cleaning the books, repairing the books, smelling the books.

Ordinary Catholics don’t need to be literate.  We have a small group of very brilliant Catholic librarians who read the books and talk about and to the Founder so other Catholics don’t have to.  I am being trained to be a librarian right now.   Catholics are the people of the Library.

And so the conversation goes in my experience .

This post has links to some of the others across cyberspace.

Followed by Catholics are Dead; Protestants are Stupid

Then Of Spiritual Babies and Graduate School

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The Christian response to rationalism

Here’s a quote from the last of P. Canalemessa’s three advent homilies:

In [a] university sermon entitled “Faith and Reason in Confrontation,” Newman illustrates why reason cannot be the last judge in matters of religion and faith, with the analogy of the conscience: “No one will say that conscience is against reason, or that its dictates cannot be thrown into an argumentative form; yet who will, therefore, maintain that it is not an original principle, but must depend, before its acts, upon some previous processes of reason? Reason analyzes the grounds and motives of action: a reason is an analysis, but is not the motive itself. As then conscience is a simple element in our nature, yet its operations admit of being surveyed and scrutinized by reason; so may faith be cognizable, and its acts be justified, by reason, without therefore being, in matter of fact, dependent upon it. […] When the Gospel is said to require a rational faith, this need not mean more than that faith is accordant to right reason in the abstract, not that it results from it in the particular case.”[3]

Newman’s analysis has new and original features; he brings to light the so to speak imperialist tendency of reason to subject every aspect of reality to its own principles. One can, however, consider rationalism also from another point of view, closely connected with the preceding one. To stay with the political metaphor used by Newman, we can describe it as the attitude of isolationism, of reason’s shutting itself in on itself. This does not consist so much of invading the field of another, but of not recognizing the existence of another field outside its own. In other words, in the refusal that some truth might exist outside that which passes through human reason.

Rationalism was not born in this guise with the Enlightenment, even if it impressed on it an acceleration whose effects still persist. It is a tendency against which the faith has always had to struggle. Not only the Christian faith, but also the Jewish and Islamic faiths, at least in the Middle Ages, were faced with this challenge.

Raised in every age against such a pretext of the absolutism of reason, has been the voice not only of men of faith but also of militant men, philosophers and scientists, in the field of reason. “The supreme act of reason,” wrote Pascal, “lies in recognizing that there is an infinity of things that surpass it.”[5] In the very instant that reason recognizes its limit, it breaks it and exceeds it. It is the work of reason that produces this acknowledgment, which is therefore an exquisitely rational act. It is, to the letter, a “learned ignorance,” [6] a knowing of not knowing.

It must be said, therefore, that the one who puts a limit to reason and humiliates it is rather the one who does not recognize the capacity it has to transcend itself. “Up until now,” wrote Kierkegaard, “one has always spoken thus: ‘To say that this or that thing cannot be understood does not satisfy science which wants to understand.’ Here is the mistake. In fact, the contrary should be said: If human science does not want to acknowledge that there is something that it cannot understand, or — in a still more precise way — something of which with clarity it can understand that it cannot understand, then everything is thrown into confusion. Hence it is a task of human knowledge to understand that there are and which are the things that it cannot understand.”

Here’s the link to the full text.

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The Christian response to secularism

Taken from the second of the Advent homilies to the Papal household:

Taking up Hegel’s affirmation according to which “Christians waste in heaven the energies destined for earth,” Feuerbach and above all Marx combated the belief of a life after death, under the pretext that it alienates from the earthly commitment. To the idea of a personal survival in God is substituted by the idea of a survival in the species and in the society of the future.

Little by little, suspicion, forgetfulness and silence fell on the word eternity. Materialism and consumerism did the rest in the opulent society, making it seem inconvenient to still speak of eternity among educated persons. All this had a clear repercussion on the faith of believers, which became, on this point, timid and reticent. When did we hear the last homily on eternal life? Who dares any more to mention eternal life in front of the suffering of an innocent child?

We continue to recite the Creed: “Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi”: “I await the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come,” but without giving too much weight to these words. Kierkegaard was right when he wrote:

“The beyond has become a joke, such an uncertain need that not only does no one respect it anymore, but no one even expects it, to the point that we are amused even at the thought that there was a time in which this idea transformed the whole of existence.”

What is the practical consequence of this eclipse of the idea of eternity? St. Paul refers to those who do not believe in the resurrection from the dead: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15:32). The natural desire to live always, distorted, becomes a desire or frenzy to live well, namely, pleasantly, even at the expense of others, if necessary. The whole earth becomes what Dante said of Italy of his time: “the flower-bed that makes us so ferocious.” The horizon of eternity having fallen, human suffering seems doubly and irremediably absurd.

Here is the rest of the homily. Tomorrow, the last of the three.

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The Christian answer to Atheist Scientism

In Advent, the Preacher to the Papal household, Pere Raniero Cantalemessa, gave a series of three homilies on Christian responses to the challenges of the new millenium. The following is taken from his first:

In this first meditation we will examine scientism. To understand what is meant by this term we can begin with the description made of it by John Paul II: “Another danger is scientism; this philosophic conception refuses in fact to admit as valid ways of knowing different from those that are proper to the positive sciences, relegating to the confines of mere imagination either religious conscience and theology, or ethical and aesthetic learning.”[2] We can summarize the main texts of this current of thought thus:

First thesis. Science, and in particular cosmology, physics and biology, are the only objective and serious ways of knowing reality. “Modern societies are built upon science. They owe it their wealth, their power, and the certitude that tomorrow far greater wealth and power still will be ours if we so wish …. Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the riches they owe to science, our societies are still trying to live by and to teach systems of values already blasted at the roots by science itself.”[3]

Second thesis. This way of knowing is incompatible with faith that is based on assumptions which are neither demonstrable or falsifiable. In this line the militant atheist R. Dawkins goes so far as to define as “illiterate” those scientists who profess themselves believers, forgetting how many scientists, much more famous than he, have declared themselves and continue to declare themselves believers.

Third thesis. Science has demonstrated the falsehood, or at least the lack of necessity of the theory of God. It is the affirmation which has been greatly highlighted by the world’s media in past months, because of an affirmation of English astro-physicist Stephen Hawking. The latter, as opposed to what he had written previously in his last book “The Grand Design,” maintains that the knowledge attained by physics now renders useless belief in a creative divinity of the universe: “Spontaneous creation is the reason why something exists.”

Fourth thesis. Almost the totality, or at least the great majority of scientists are atheists. This is the affirmation of militant scientific atheism which has in Richard Dawkins, the author of the book God’s Delusion, its most active propagator.

All these thesis reveal themselves to be false, not on the basis of a priori reasoning or of theological arguments or arguments of faith, but from the analysis itself of the results of science and of the opinions of many among the most illustrious scientists of the past and present. A scientist of the caliber of Max Planck, founder of the quantum theory, says of science, what Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Pascal, Kierkegaard and others affirmed of reason: “Science leads to a point beyond which it can no longer guide.”

See here for the rest. Tomorrow and the next day, I’ll post excerpts from and links to the other two.

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