The Kid Sister of Blessed Imelda

Speaking of pledging in a fraternity…

I cheerfully accepted penances which, if they were imposed in a monastery, for a supernatural motive, and for some real reason, instead of for no reason at all, would cause such an uproar that all religious houses would be closed and the Catholic Church would probably have a hard time staying in the country.

How true.  Our society tends to scoff or express outrage at the concept of penance, the more strict the penance, the greater the outrage, and yet often hazing is just kids being kids, so long as no one gets hurt and they don’t take it too far.  What does that say about a people, that they are willing to be debased for popularity’s sake but not to attain righteousness or humility? Certainly nothing good…

Here I was, scarcely four years after I had left Oakham and walked out into the world that I thought I was going to ransack and rob of all its pleasures and satisfactions.  I had done what I intended, and now I found that it was I who was emptied and robbed and gutted.  What a strange thing!  In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. 

So much wisdom in this one man.  We go out, ready to plunder the world, to conquer it for ourselves… even if only our tiny part of it, to ‘make our way in the world’… and what happens? The world has its way with us instead… and leaves us lying in a ditch on the roadside… emptied and robbed and gutted, having lost everything… and as we lie there, He who haunts us, the One Who Has Everything comes to us yet again and asks if we are willing to lose everything, so that we will gain more than it all…  and sometimes we laugh Him to scorn… we poor filthy wretches in the dirt… but sometimes we are weary… and giving up what we know from experience we’ll only lose seems a better way and so, like children, we lift up our arms to He Who Bends Near, open up our hands and let go the clutches we had on it all… all our hopes, our dreams, our aspirations, our loves, our hates, our sorrows, our joys, our family, our friends, our children, our tomorrows, and sometimes the most difficult… our yesterdays… and He takes them from us… and carries us.  At some point we realize we are able to walk again… but we don’t care, walking or being carried is all the same as long as we’re with Him… and over time on that journey, little gifts appear… our hopes given back to us, seen through new eyes, with new purpose, no longer haunt us.  Our dreams are given back, not to taunt us, but to hope anew in freedom, our aspirations no longer seem impossible but probable because they aren’t our will anymore, but His. Our loves we find are true loves now, because they are no longer selfish, but selfless, our hates are no longer hatred, but are transformed into loving- really loving- our enemy. Our sorrows become gifts of suffering to the One Who Suffered, our joys are His Works, our family, our friends are His Church made our brethren, our children are His Gifts on loan, His way of showing us what love really is.  Our tomorrows no longer ours, and our yesterdays no longer regrets but tools for the Master… He Who Has, He Who Bends, He Who Gives…and we are no longer wretched refuse, but sons and daughters on their way Home.

We were never destined to lead purely natural lives, and therefore we were never destined in God’s plan for a  purely natural beatitude.

We simply can’t be happy apart from Him, and insofar as we don’t embrace the fullness of His graces for us here on earth, we can’t be completely happy. 

If a man were to arrive even at the abstract pinnacle of natural perfection, God’s work would not even be half done: it would be only about to begin, for the real work is the work of grace and the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost.

What is “grace”? It is God’s own life, shared by us.

What a great definition… and who are we to decide what God’s own life is?  Only HE can say, and He has said, He has left instructions for us in how to share His life… if only we will accept, believe, obey, receive…

What happens when a man loses himself completely in the Divine Life within him? This perfection is only for those who are called the saints - for those rather who are the saints and who live in the light of God alone.

It probably should be noted that ’saints’ here is little ’s’ saints… However, that is why we have the big ’s’ Saints… to show us what it LOOKS like when a man completely loses himself in God… to show us it CAN be done, as a measuring stick for when we, in our pride and vanity, think we are doing pretty good next to the schmuck two doors over.  That said, they are also a great blessing when we are lost in despair, when we think we can go on no longer, when we think it can’t be done. 

We must check the inspirations that come to us in the depths of our own conscience against the revelation that is given to us with divinely certain guarantees by those who have inherited in our midst the place of Christ’s Apostles - by those who speak to us in the Name of Christ and as it were in His own Person. Qui vos audit me audit; qui vos spernit, me spernit.

So often we think we check the inspirations against scripture alone, sola scriptura… but that way lies error.  If it is an inspiration which seems right to us, and pleasant, we can always find a ‘verse’ to ‘verify’ it… and if an inspiration seems too hard, or unpleasant, or if something within us rebels, it is so easy to find an ‘excuse’.  In the end, we can not be completely trusted to hold ourselves accountable and to check truthfully without trying to ‘read’ it the way we prefer.  It is only in checking ourselves against the revelation left for us, in the hands of the authority to which it was entrusted, that we can have any faith for true reckoning.

When it comes to accepting God’s own authority about things that cannot possibly be known in any other way except as revealed by His authority, people consider it insanity to incline their ears and listen.

We are such a stiffnecked people… considering listening to the authority set over us by God to be insanity, and setting up authorities for ourselves which can be swayed with power, and money, and vice. Oh that God’s authority would be esteemed and valued, if only we would turn from our wicked ways and submit instead of setting ourselves up as our own gods, our own authorities… what wickedness could prevail if God’s people would seek His face and submit to His will? and what good can come while we insist on our own way, our own interpretation, our own knowledge, our own understanding… Has He not said lean not unto your own understanding?  Why do we not realize that as the caution it is?  We claim to be acknowledging Him, yet deny His priests, His authority. We insist He is directing our paths, and yet we ARE leaning on our own understanding, we AREN’T aknowledging Him, and so how can He direct our paths?  I have a friend with a heart for unity, who mourns the division in the Body… and I never understood it when we’d sit and talk, and she’d cry… I WANTED to, I sensed that I should understand… but I was protesting still… Now, I have nothing more to protest… and I also mourn the division in the Body and I understand…

Speaking of the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur in a book he had chosen, and the disgust and deception that he felt upon seeing it, he concludes that the very notion of the authority of the Church and the idea of its judgement on anything, even this book…

…immediately conjures up all the real and imaginary excesses of the Inquisition.

I have rapidly come to the end of my proverbial rope with the constant ‘What about the Inquisition????”  I know it is a question asked in ignorance and misunderstanding, born of lies and deception, but everything in me cries out in revulsion at the Church being so unfairly judged.  What unbeliever confronted with the faith in a protestant church demands a justification or explanation of the excesses of Henry the VIII or Elizabeth I?  What unbeliever insists they want nothing to do with protestants because at one time they slaughtered their own? No Church but the RC is held to such a standard, and yet, the gates of Hell hath not prevailed against her… she has been scarred and bloodied but she still stands firm and true, guarding the deposit of faith with everything she has and extending more grace than any other church body on earth… and those who claim to love the God who created her are some of her most vicious critics… and I, God forgive me, was once just as guilty. Even the Papal apology in March of 2000 has been ignored and forgotten by those who deny Christ’s Church, and yet they scream for blood over the Inquisition, or the exaggeration they have bought into rather than the truth of what it was, or even the rest of the events of that time.

…while I admired Catholic culture, I had always been afraid of the Catholic Church.

…what I read would be in full conformity with that fearsome and mysterious thing, Catholic Dogma, and the fact struck me with an impact against which everything in me reacted with repugnance and fear.

Speaking of his understanding of the God Christians taught to the world…

I had taken the dead letter of Scripture at its very deadest, and it had killed me, according to the saying of St. Paul: “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”

Lots to think of in that…

I know many people are, or call themselves, “atheists” simply because they are repelled and offended by statements about God made in imaginary and metaphorical terms which they are not able to interpret and comprehend.  They refuse these concepts of God, not because they despise God, but perhaps because they demand a notion of Him more perfect than they generally find: and because ordinary, figurative concepts of God could not satisfy them, they turn away….

What a relief it was for me, now, to discover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God, but also that we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him.

Further than that it seemed I could not go, for the time being.

How many there are in the same situation! They stand in the stacks of libraries and turn over the pages of St. Thomas’s Summa with a kind of curious reverence.  They talk in their seminars about “Thomas” and “Scotus” and “Augustine” and “Bonaventure” and they are familiar with Maritain and Gilson, and they have read all the poems of Hopkins - and indeed they know more about what is best in the Catholic literary and philosophical tradition than most Catholics ever do on this earth….

…But they never come into the Church.  They stand and starve in the doors of the banquet- the banquet to which they surely realize that they are invited - while those more poor, more stupid, less gifted, less educated, sometimes even less virtuous than they, enter in and are filled at those tremendous tables.

Wow.  He says this so well…. and yet it is so SAD. How hard it is to watch those with so much knowledge stand in the door… and refuse to budge… for whatever reason… So close… and yet so very far away…

…God wanted me to climb back the way I had fallen down.

I have seen this more than once, both in my life and in lives around me.  God gives us second chances… chances to make right decisions where we failed before… and what a treasure it is when we recognize it and make the right choice… what a joy… and what a hideous failing and sorrow when we fail yet again… because sometimes those second failures cost us even more than the first.  Thank you Lord for those chances to ‘do over’… and please God, help me always to recognize them for what they are, and choose wisely the second time.

And when it came time to say the Apostles’ Creed, I stood up and said it, with the rest, hoping within myself that God would give me the grace someday to really believe it. 

Sounds very like ‘Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief’ doesn’t it?

God has willed that we should all depend on one another for our salvation, and all strive together for our own mutual good and our own common salvation. Scripture teaches us that this is especially true in the supernatural order, in the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, which flows necessarily from Christian teaching on grace.

So true… God uses us, and we, by our choices, either strengthen each other or weaken each other… and each part of the Body which insists on its own way damages the Body of which it claims to be a part. We either work together to assist others to salvation, or we, in our division and insistance on our own personal doctrines, work against that salvation.

All our salvation begins on the level of common and natural and ordinary things. (That is why the whole economy of the Sacraments, for instance, rests, in its material element, upon plain and ordinary things like bread and wine and water and salt and oil.)…. But these things are themselves not enough.

So true… God uses these normal and ordinary things to impart grace, as surely as His Son took on the normal and ordinary flesh to impart grace to us.  However,the bread and wine alone is not enough… it must be consecrated for God’s use in imparting that grace to be anything but ordinary bread and ordinary wine.

The main problem is to fight our way free from subjection to this more or less inferior element, and to reassert the dominance of our mind and will: to vindicate for these faculties, for the spirit as a whole, the freedom of action which it must necessarily have if we are to live like anything but wild beasts, tearing each other to pieces.  And the big conclusion from all fo this was: we must practice prayer and asceticism.

What a bizarre thought *rolls eyes*! Prayer and asceticism??? How many people do you know that actively do these things? Not just prayer mind, but prayer and asceticism, prayer and some active regular form of fasting?  We are so confident in our ‘great piety’ and yet we do not that which Christ did regularly and took for GRANTED THAT WE WOULD DO AS WELL!  “Lord, why did that demon not come out for US?” asked the Apostles?  Can’t you just see His face in your mind’s eye when He replies, “That kind only come through prayer and fasting?”  Like boys, this is Christianity 101… get with the program.  Seriously  motivating and convicting.

…my own personal misery in my particular situation and the general crisis of the world made me accept with my whole heart this revelation of the need for a spiritual life, an interior life, including some kind of mortification. I was content to accept the latter truth purely as a matter of theory: or at least, to apply it  most vociferously to one passion which  was not strong in myself, and did not need to be mortified: that of anger, hatred, while neglecting the ones that really needed to be checked, like gluttony and lust.

Ouch.  So many don’t recognize gluttony and lust etc as things that should be mortified… I know I didn’t… and it is stunning how it is the most difficult and innocuous things to conquer, and yet not so stunning how it is those very things which most people ignore and joke about…  just look at any group of people in America and you’ll see that most of us are guilty of at least one of those… I have been struggling with the sin of gluttony (mostly due to comfort eating) for some time.  It is not an easy battle, but slowly it is being won… not that you can tell by looking at me… the weight is coming off so very slowly… it is harder to rectify the consequences than it is to get here in the first place.

While discussing Blake, Merton quotes him saying…

…having discovered Dante, [Blake] came in contact, through him, with Catholicism, which [Blake] described as the only religion that really taught the love of God.

The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will, by which man is formally united to the final end of all his strivings - by which man becomes one with God.

Beautiful, and true.  Love is an act of the will. It is not simply a feeling.  That lie has cheapened love into something unrecognizable.

A devout Hindu friend told him that…

  ‘all Christian missionaries… suffered from this big drawback: they lived too well, too comfortably.’

and…

Christians don’t know what asceticism means.

We, who should know… do not… and others know it.  Yet I am the chief of sinners in this regard… I want to do more than I do…  this too is convicting.

Hearing of the Hindu friend’s experiences in other Churches, sometimes having been asked to preach from the pulpit, Merton says…

But I was interested to hear [the Hindu's] opinion of the Catholics.  They, of course, had not invited him to preach in their pulpits: but he had gone into a few Catholic churches out of curiosity. He told me that these were the only ones in which he really felt that people were praying. 

It was only there that religion seemed to have achieved any degree of vitality, among us, as far as he could see. It was only to Catholics that the love of God seemed to be a matter of real concern, something that struck deep in their natures, not merely pious speculation and sentiment.

Ok, OUCH. I know that hurt. Heck, it hurt even when I’m only now a FORMER protestant. However, to hear the perspective of a Hindu, someone completely outside… interesting.

This same Hindu gave Merton advice…

“There are many beautiful mystical books written by the Christians.  You should read St. Augustine’s Confessions, and The Imitation of Christ.” Of course I had heard of both of them: but he was speaking as if he took it for granted that most people in American had no diea that such books ever existed… “Yes, you must read those books.” It was not often that he spoke with this kind of emphasis…  So now [after having turned to the east] I was told that I ought to turn to the Christian tradition, to St. Augustine - and told by a Hindu monk!

I can’t help but laugh at this.  God does have a sense of humor.

Everybody makes fun of virtue, which now has, as its primary meaning, an affectation of prudery practiced by hypocrites and the impotent.

…virtue- without which there can be no happiness, because virtues are precisely the powers by which we can come to acquire happiness without them, there can be no joy, because they are the habits which coordinate and canalize our natural energies and direct them to the harmony and perfection and balance, the unity of our nature with itself and with God, which must, in the end, constitute our everlasting peace.

So true… without virtue, there is no happiness… only emptiness.

Now we get to the good stuff… or so I thought… but you can see I found plenty of good stuff before this point!!! lol…

I began to desire to dedicate my life to God, to His service. The notion was still vague and obscure, and it was ludicrously impractical in the sense that I was already dreaming of the mystical union when I did not even keep the simplest rudiments off the moral law.

We have become marvelous at self-delusion; all the more so, because we have gone to such trouble to convince ourselves of our own absolute infallibility.

WHOA… the WHOLE BOOK was worth reading for that ONE SENTENCE!!! Sorry, had to stop myself there to say that. He continues immediately thereafter…

The desires of the flesh- and by that I mean not only sinful desires, but even the ordinary, normal appetites for comfort and ease and human respect, are fruitful sources of every kind of error and misjudgement, and because we have these yearnings in us, our intellects (which, if they operated all alone in a vacuum, would indeed, register with pure impartiality what they saw) present to us everything distorted and accommodated to the norms of our desire.

And therefore, even when we are acting with the best of intentions, and imagine that we are doing great good, we may be actually doing tremendous material harm and contradicting all our good intentions.  There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is in the depths of hell.

The only answer to the problem is grace, grace, docility to grace. I was still in the precarious position of being my own guide and my own interpreter of grace. It is a wonder I ever got to the harbor at all!

Ok, I was practically jumping up and down screaming at this passage. He is SO RIGHT! I have found this true in my own life and yet have been unable to articulate it so well as Merton does here.  This is SO PREVALENT in Christianity today… so tragically prevalent.

On going to Mass…

What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious  of God than of one another: not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfil a religious obligation, not a human one.  For even those who might have been there for no better motive than that they were obliged to be, were at least free from any of the self-conscious and human constraint which is never absent from a protestant church were people are definitely gathered together as people, as neighbors, and always have at least half an eye for one another, if not all of both eyes.

On hearing a young man discuss a point of Catholic Doctrine…

How clear and solid the doctrine was: for behind those words you felt the full force not only of Scripture but of centuries of a unified and continuous and consistent tradition.

On De Fide Divina…

If you believed it, you would receive light to grasp it, to understand it in some measure. if you did not believe it, you would never understand: it would never be anything but scandal or folly.

Whoever you are, the land to which God has brought you is not like the land of Egypt from which you came out. You can no longer live here as you lived there. Your old life and your former ways are crucified now, and you  must not seek to live any more for your own gratification, but give up your own judgement into the hands of a wise director, and sacrifice your pleasures and comforts for the love of God and give the money you no longer spend on those things, to the poor. 

Above all, eat your daily Bread without which you cannot live, and come to know Christ Whose Life feeds you in the Host, and He will give you a taste of joys and delights that transcend  anything you have ever experienced before, and which will make the transition easy.

Amen.  I have been called out of Egypt, to a new land. I no longer live as I lived there… Behold, all things are made new…

The saints are full of Christ in the plenitude of His Kingly and Divine power: and they are conscious of it, and they give themselves to Him, that He may exercise His power through their smallest and seemingly most insignificant acts, for the salvation of the world.

This is saints little ’s’… and it is true. It is very like this… and He delights in showing His works to us as we hide ourselves in His Face.

 It’s been a rough few days, so I’m sitting down with a Diet Coke and a Toblerone bar (the wine bottle was nearly empty) and continuing with Merton as he is always a source of comfort, even in hitting hard topics…

I don’t know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.

This had me belly laughing.  My mother tried to get therapy for me three times during my life before the age of 18 and every time the psychiatrist listened to me, sent me out, called my mother in, and told her that I was doing fine, knew exactly what was going on, how to deal with it, etc and that they didn’t need to see me.  The wondering what he was thinking was the worst part.

Discussing his impressions of the flavor or spiritual ‘feel’ of England…

…the whole of England was pretending, with an elaborate and intent and conscious, and perhaps in some cases a courageous effort, to act as if it were alive.  And it took a lot of acting.  It was a vast and complicated charade, with expensive and detailed costuming and scenery and a lot if inappropriate songs: and yet the whole thing was so intolerably dull, because most of the people were already morally dead…

Ouch again. If you just substitued the word America for the word England? Is it not a shockingly accurate description of our own country and culture? Chilling, but true.  What an experience it is to read that and to feel the spirit within me cry out to God in anguish for the people of my country, how bizarre to feel the urge to prostrate myself before Him in prayer and supplication for the sins that scream out against us from the streets… it isn’t the first time since becoming Catholic that I’ve had that experience, but it still surprises me how radically my perspective has changed, both in my attitude and my prayer life.  Talk about instilling a desire to go back and read the prophets and Psalms, see how the men of God interceded on the people’s behalf… that’ll do it.

The next quote is somewhat in the same vein, but different, and powerful as well…  There was a time when I could’ve read this and thought ‘uh uh, no way, sure, my sins are bad, but let’s not get carried away here’ and had plenty of justification and self righteous angst over it.  That was not what I felt.

Did I know that my own sins were enough to have destroyed the whole of England and Germany? There has never yet been a bomb invented that is half so powerful as one mortal sin - and yet there is no positive power ins in, only negation, only annihilation: and perhaps that is why it is so destructive, it is a nothingness, and where it is, there is nothing left - a blank, a moral vacuum.

Ouch simply doesn’t cover my response to this passage. A deep feeling of inner keening and mourning might. It made me think of the Ecthroi in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time series, forever x-ing and unnaming things. (Ok, that was simply an unforgivable dumbing down of the passage, wasn’t it? *sigh* ) Not only that, but the knowledge that I am guilty of so MUCH sin just almost overwhelmed me.  I can just hear some well meaning person pulling their hair out by the roots with the desire to remind me that Christ paid for that sin etc etc… and I know all that… but it isn’t that my sin isn’t covered, it is the understanding, even if only in a finite limited way, of just how bad my sin truly is.  It is the knowledge that despite my best efforts, I will not be able to keep from sinning again and knowing in a much more REAL way, the agony I inflict on my Beloved every. single. time.  I thought I knew true penitance… and I’m sure that God, knowing I felt as penitent as my spiritual understanding would allow, accepted it… but it was nothing compared to what I feel now. (I can just HEAR you guys thinking “And you want ME to READ this book?” )

It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago.  People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars.  On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce men and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity.  How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us?  Can there be any doubt where wars come from and where peace comes from, when the children of this world, excluding God from their peace conferences, only manage to bring about greater and greater wars the more they talk about peace?

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I am not anti-military. In fact, I am about as pro-military as they come. Few things get me as riled as reports that the government isn’t supporting our military properly. I absolutely think it was right to go to war to stop Hitler, for example. I believe there are just wars that God-fearing people must fight so that evil doesn’t win.  However, if we don’t get our military protective knickers in a knot, this passage has a great deal of truth in it.  What a different way of approaching a very old question.

I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got to New York. But you saw further and clearer than I, and you opened the seas before my ship, whose track lead me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of, and which you were even then preparing for me to be my rescue and my shelter and my home.  And when I thought there was no God and no love and no mrecy, you were leading me all the while into the midst of His love and His mercy, and taking me, without my knowing anything about it, to the house that would hide me in the secret of His Face.

I couldn’t even type that in without crying. I’m having a hard time typing how I FEEL about that quote without crying harder.  I resemble that quote.  One of my frequent sayings is that the caravan left for Egypt long before Joseph was thrown in the well.  It is a great comfort for me in times of difficulty.  Even when I was yet in darkness, God saw me, drew me, prepared my way…  Blessed be God forever.

In fact, I might need a slightly modified version of that somewhere permanent.

Ok, for all you Latin title/quote lovers out there… Here’s a gem.

Illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte, et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis ostende.

Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.

That is also the desire of my heart… I want to see Him then, after my exile is over… but I want to see Him now too, here in this wilderness where I wander… just a glimpse… enough to sustain me.

It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness. And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money.  We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

Whew. Again, so true.  While all for the benefits of a capitalist society, I am not willing to ignore its faults… and Merton is dead on here. 

However, if you are wrong, does that make me right? If you are bad, does that prove that I am good?

A bit of an oddity found in the midst of comparison between Communism and Capitalism, yet I found it oddly appropo Labor Day weekend when I highlighted it, and more than capable of standing on its own.  It is good food for thought and caused me to stop and spend some time in meditation when I happened upon it.

…wide general curriculum of an American university, which, instead of trying to teach you any one thing completely, strives to give its students a superficial knowledge of everything…

UGH! Talk about one of my pet peeves!!!

For a man to be absolutely sincere with generation after generation of students requires either supernatural simplicity or, in the natural order, a kind of heroic humility.

That was said in reference to one of his teachers… what a testimony.  Oh to be that kind of a (wo)man.  Only possible with  God, wouldn’t you say?

Also regarding the same teacher…

Mark would come into the room and, without any fuss, would start talking about whatever was to be talked about.  Most of the time he asked questions.  His questions were very good, and if you tried to answer them intelligently, you found yourself saying excellent things that you did not know you knew, and that you had not, in fact, known before. He had “educed” them from you by his question. His classes were literally “education”- they brought things out of you, they made your mind produce its own explicit ideas.

I’ve had a few teachers like that.  I loved them. I’d like to be a teacher like that myself.

You pass through the doors of the library, and the smell of thousands of well-kept books makes your head swim with a clean and subtle pleasure.

Truly, a man after my own heart.  A passion and pleasure I am blessed to share not only with many friends, but also with my children as well.

On that pleasant note, I’ll leave the rest of the book for another day…

I DID say I wore a highlighter out on this book.  The only reason I didn’t in On Being Catholic by Thomas Howard is because IT was SHORTER!

ETA: Another reason is because I realized that THIS highlighter had  built in post it tabs in the back, the other didn’t. HA. I KNEW Howard won…

This was an excellent book.  I enjoyed it immensely.  I think in SOME ways, I enjoyed The Sign of Jonas more. I think that is in part because I am more interested in his immediate conversion and experience in the Monastery than in his early life, although I DO understand why it was important to tell as he did, and I did get a lot out of that ‘life’ story too… I’m still learning to be patient.

 The introduction by Robert Giroux was helpful and illuminating.  It shed light on both the man and his writings from a position of experience.  However, the ‘Note to the Reader’ was less than helpful and put me on edge at first.  Having read Mertons’ work before, I went in with an open mind in spite of William Shannon’s commentary.  As I read, underlining occasionally, and finally came to the end of the book I felt a slow burn of anger start.  Shannon was very wrong.  Granted, we are reading post-Vatican II, and Merton is writing in the pre-Vatican II time period.  The comments regarding religious atmosphere and disparaging remarks re: anyone outside Catholicism, accusations of Merton being complacently triumphal, being vituperative about protestants, were all unfounded.  I am frustrated by this ‘note’ because I am afraid it would turn some readers away before they ever gave Merton a chance, and regardless of your faith ‘persuasion’ as it were, he has a great deal to offer. So, on to the text itself…

It seems to me, now, that Mother must have been a person full of insatiable dreams and of great ambition after perfection: perfection in art, in interior decoration, in dancing, in housekeeping, in raising children.  Maybe that is why I remember her mostly as worried: since the imperfection of myself, her first son, had been a great deception.

Ouch. I see much of myself in his mother.  Ok, forget the dancing… and though I am a neat/organizational freak by nature, forget the housekeeping… since I had children anyway. Oh I try, but it is so discouraging to clean a room, leave it for five minutes, and find it in disarray in such short order. I also wouldn’t describe myself as ‘worried’ as I trust in the Lord to make what He wills with the best I have to give. However, the essence of the statement resonates… and the next quote reinforces my faith that God will use my feeble efforts to mold my children to His will for His glory.

But it is not yet time to talk about that happy consummation, the thing for which I most thank and praise God, and which is of all things the ultimate paradoxical fulfilment of my mother’s ideas for me- the last thing she would ever have dreamed of: the boomerang of all her solicitude for an individual development.

…Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs.  I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war. 

This is an excellent description of a point I use often to explain to non-Catholics the importance, and benefit, of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  So often we think that our sins are private matters and if we have the forgiveness of God that is enough.  However, most of the things we consider ‘private’ sins, are not private at all.  We do not sin in a vacuum. Our sins, however private they may appear, very much affect others.  S*xual sin for example, does not just impact us and the person with whom we engage in it.  It affects others, any children who might result, the families of both parties, strangers who see the evidence of such sin and must explain it to THEIR children, and so on.  It is in no way a private sin.  Yet, even if we so desired, could we hunt down every person and ask their forgiveness? No! Because we do not know what mother in the grocery store had to explain our behavior etc et al… it is impossible to hunt down each and every person affected by the ripples of our sin.  That is one of several reasons why the confessional is so important.  We confess our sin, and the priest, as a part of and representative of the Body of Christ, and standing in persona Christi, forgives us and absolves us in a way and at a level we are never able to reach on our own… for who can hunt down each and every one before coming to the Lord for pardon?  We DO drag others with us, they are pulled in our wake… and it is our choice whether that be towards heaven or hell.

Reflecting on his grandfather’s anti-Catholicism, and the unpleasant feeling he aquired as a result…

The devil is no fool.  He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell.  He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin.  And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis.  And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything. 

Talk about hitting the nail on the head! This is exactly what Satan has done with the misconceptions spread about the Catholic Church!  He has persuaded people to fear and disdain the means of grace (the Sacraments etc), using obscurity, shadows and lies… and we, both supernaturally aware and supernaturally ignorant, heed the angel of death who comes so brightly lit to deceive us.

Ruminating on living in a small medieval town, long before coming into the faith, which was built around the (Catholic) Church in such a way that every road, the landscape, the houses, all focused one’s attention on the one, important central fact of the Church and what it contained…

And yet now I tell you, you who are now what I once was, unbelievers, that it is that [Blessed] Sacrament, and that alone, the Christ living in our midst, and sacrificed by us, and for us and with us, in the clean and perpetual Sacrifice, it is He alone Who holds our world together, and keeps us all from being poured headlong and immediately into the pit of our eternal destruction.  And I tell you there is a power that goes forth from that Sacrament, a power of light and truth, even into the hearts of those who have heard nothing of Him and seem to be incapable of belief.

The next quotes refer to his days in a French school… but really resonated with a homeschooling mom’s heart and personal experience…

The children I had associated with at St. Antonin had not been by any means angels, but there had at least been a certain simplicity and affability about them.

But when a couple of hundred of these southern French boys were thrown together in the prison of that Lycee, a subtle change was operated in their spirit and mentality.  In fact, I noticed that when you were with them separately, outside the school, they were mild and peacable and humane enough. But when they were all together there seemed to be some diabolical spirit of cruelty and viciousness and obscenity and blasphemy and envy and hatred that banded them together against all goodness and against one another in mockery and fierce cruelty and in vociferous, uninhibited filthiness.

Ruminating on the differences between these boys and the children he knew who went to the local Catholic school (very much different in that era than the Catholic schools of our day) and remembers as ‘especially nice fellows, very pleasant and good’ who were never ‘despised for being pious’…

When I reflect on all this, I am overwhelmed at the thought of the tremendous weight of responsibility that Catholic parents accumulate upon their shoulders by not sending their children to Catholic schools.

I would imagine that were Merton living today, he would be whole heartedly in support of the homeschooling movement, as it has not only stepped into the gap of those good Catholic schools of yesteryear but done them one better.

He continues…

Is it any wonder that there can be no peace in a world where everything possible is done to guarantee that the youth of every nation will grow up absolutely without moral and religious discipline, and without the shadow of an interior life, or of that spirituality and charity and faith which alone can safeguard the treaties and agreements made by governments? 

And Catholics, thousands of Catholics everywhere, have the consummate audacity to weep and complain because God does not hear their prayers for peace, when they have neglected not only His will, but the ordinary dictates of natural reason and prudence, and let their children grow up according to the standards of a civilization of hyenas. 

Tough words… but incredibly accurate even today.

What is the good of religion without personal spiritual direction? Without Sacraments, without any means of grace except a desultory prayer now and then, at intervals, and an occasional vague sermon? 

What indeed… While crumbs are valuable to a starving man, it can in no way satisfy or nourish the way a feast does.

I couldn’t help but feel a sad smile cross my face at the next quote given the vitriol on LLL of late… 

…It is precisely this speech “out of the abundance of the heart” that makes an impression and produces an effect in other people.  We give ear and pay at least a partially respectful attention to anyone who is really sincerely convinced of what he is saying, no matter what it is, even if it is opposed to our own ideas.

Several times the accusation has been made against the RC ladies in the forum that this speech ‘from the abundance of their hearts’ testifies against them when they testify to a hard teaching of the Church. Yet my sisters in Christ have spoken with love and kindness, apologizing when it appears they may have given offense - despite their intent not to do so, and they have been ridiculed and mocked and received derision at the hands of those very ones who attempted to use scripture as a whip against them. Truly, speech does testify against us… and I throw myself on the Mercy of He Who is Mercy enfleshed for any time I have failed to speak in charity… and yet the hateful words which cut me so deeply do not inspire feelings of vindication, but rather ones of sorrow and mourning and sickness.  Such is the result of division in the Body.  May God forgive the sundering of His Body by His children… forgive us as you forgave Saul, and mold us into useful instruments of Your Kingdom, even as you did him. As Merton says…

It was St. Augustine’s argument, that envy and hatred try to pierce our neighbor with a sword, when the blade cannot reach him unless it first passes through our own body.

Speaking about a Catholic family with whom he spent a summer…

…I have always tended to resist any kind of a possessive affection on the part of any other human being - there has always been this profound instinct to keep clear, to keep free. And only with truly supernatural people have I ever felt really at my ease, really at peace.  That was why I was glad of the love the Privats showed me, and was ready to love them in return. It did not burn you, it did not hold you, it did not try to imprison you in demonstrations, or trap your feet in the snares of its interest.

Aren’t we all somewhat that way? Do we not shy from those who’s love is like chains of bondage? Is not the true love of Christ love that does not burn, does not hold, does not imprison or trap us in snares? How often do we find that the love professed to be Christ’s love is more like bondage, but true love is not burdensome, but is as wind beneath our wings…lifting us, carrying us further up and further in.

When, during that summer, their dicussion turned to faith matters and Merton tried to justify protestantism…

‘all the solidity and rectitude of the Privats turned against me, accusing me like the face of an impregnable fortification…. I think they probably said that they could not see how I managed to go on living without the faith for there was only one Faith, one Church. So I gave them the argument that every religion was good: they all led to God, only in different ways, and every man should go according to his own conscience, and settle things according to his own private way of looking at things. 

They did not answer me with any argument. They simply looked at one another and shrugged and Monsieur Privat said quietly and sadly: “Mais c’est impossible.”

It was a terrible, a frightening, a very humiliating thing to feel all their silence and peacefulness and strenght turned against me, accusing me of being estranged from them, isolated from their security, cut off from their protection and from the strength of their inner life by my own fault, by my own wilfulness, by my own ignorance, and my un-instructed protestant pride.

One of the humiliating things about it was that I wanted them to argue, and they despised argument.  It was as is they realized, as I did not, that my attitude and my desire of argument and religious discussion implied a fundamental and utter lack of faith, and a dependence on my own lights, and attachment to my own opinion.

What is more, they seemed to realize that I did not believe in anything, and that anything I might say I believed would be only empty talk. Yet they did not give me the feeling that this was some slight matter, something to be indulged in a child, something that could be left to work itself out in time, of its own accord. I had never met people to whom belief was a matter of such moment. And yet there was nothing they could do for me directly. But what they could do, I am sure they did, and I am glad they did it. And I thank God from the bottom of my heart that they were concerned, and so deeply and vitally concerned, at my lack of faith. 

The bolded emphasis in that quote was mine, and shows the only portion I really highlighted in the book, but I had the REST as context and it was necessary for the power of the underlined portion to shine through…

If the impulse to worship God and to adore Him in truth by the goodness and order of our own lives is nothing more than a transitory and emotional thing, that is our own fault.  It is so only because we make it so, and because we take what is substantially a deep and powerful and lasting moral impetus, supernatural in its origin and in its direction, and reduce it to the level of our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desires.

Another homeschooling quote… but it also addresses at least one reason so many of us insist on rejecting any authority over us, and especially the authority of the Church.

The separation of the two generations on board the ship had pleased me. It had flattered me right down to the soles of my feet. It was just what I wanted.  It completed my self-confidence, guaranteed my self-assertion. Anyone older than myself symbolized authority. And the vulgarity of the detectivesand the stupidity of the other middle-aged people who had believed all their stories about us fed me with a pleasantly justifiable sense of contempt for their whole generation.  Therefore, I concluded that I was now free of all authority, and that nobody could give me any advice I had to listen to. 

On the topic of inflammatory books read…

I will not name the ones I remember, because some fool might immediately go and read them all… 

I admit, I cracked. up. laughing. since so many times I’ve read books about Lewis or Tolkien and the books which influenced them instantly go in my Amazon basket.  Some fools indeed! 

I was a great rebel. I fancied that I had suddenly risen above all the errors and stupidities and mistakes of modern society…

This one struck me too.  That was a great description of me in my protestant arrogance. I knew better than all those poor idiots who lived in the centuries before me and had misunderstood and corrupted the scriptures.  Unlike all those men, many possessed of more age, education, intelligence, humility, and charity than I, who had managed to MISS what was the true meaning of God’s Word - I, along with others in my current era, had managed what all of them had failed to do.  Rebellion indeed, masquerading in all the splendor of humility and righteousness.  Ugh… having tasted simply a sliver of real humility, I’m revolted by my own arrogance.

People who are immersed in sensual appetites and desires are not very well prepared to handle abstract ideas. Even in the purely natural order, a certain amount of purity of heart is required before an intellect can get sufficiently detached and clear to work out the problems of metaphysics. 

This I have found to be true in my own life.  Until I gave up a vice which God had convicted me of, and began intensive reading and study and obedience… and then as my mind was gradually cleared of the filth I had been filling it with, I was able to grasp things that eluded me before.

I did not have the humility to care nothing about what people thought or said.  

Oh I really agree with this… That is just what I was like… and now it is better… I don’t care about what people think or say in many ways, I don’t care if I die friendless in His service, but I don’t think that humility is nearly so complete until the comments of others don’t wound me anymore… if that makes sense.  I pray that in time, God will fully purge this selfishness from me…

I liked the silence… In it, …I ceased to look about and criticize the people… 

Yes, I am learning to love the silence….and learning to love prayer time that is not shared with anything else, like chores or chaos… what a change from the years when I couldn’t think of enough to pray about for a full ten minutes.

I am not even half-way through the book, but I’m calling it quits for now… I’ll try to add more later.

Chapter 5

‘I was talking to your poor father the other day and wondering where you were.’

‘You didn’t bring him?’ said the other.

‘Well, no. He lives a long way from the bus, and, to be quite frank, he’s been getting a little eccentric lately.  A little difficult. Losing his grip.  He never was prepared to make any great efforts, you know. If you remember, he used to go to sleep when you and I got talking seriously!’

How frightening… to think I might ever ‘not prepared to make any great efforts’… a very good question for examination of conscience.

‘This is worse than I expected. Do you really think people are penalised for their honest opinions? Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that those opinions were mistaken.’

‘Do you really think there are no sins of intellect?’

‘There are indeed, Dick. There is hide-bound prejudice, and intellectual dishonesty, and timidity, and stagnation. But honest opinions fearlessly followed - they are not sins.’

‘I know we used to talk that way. I did it too until the end of my life when I became what you call narrow. It all turns on what are honest opinions.’

‘When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment’s real resistance to the loss of our faith?’

‘You know that you and I were playing with loaded dice.  We didn’t want the other to be true. We were afraid of crude salvationism, afraid of a breach with the spirit of the age, afraid of ridicule, afraid (above all) of real spiritual fears and hopes.’

‘The beliefs are sincere in the sense that they do occur as psychological events in the man’s mind. If that’s what you mean by sincerity they are sincere, and so were ours.  But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent.’

‘You’ll be justifying the Inquisition in a moment!’

‘Why? Because the Middle Ages erred in one direction, does it follow that there is no error in the opposite direction?’

‘Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?’

‘Well, that is a plan. I am perfectly ready to consider it. Of course I should require some assurances… I would want a guarantee that you are taking me to a place where I shall find a wider sphere of usefulness - and scope for the talents that God has given me - and an atmoshere of free inquiry - in short, all that one means by civilisation and - er - the spiritual life.’

This is eerily similar to the arguments/excuses I hear on a regular basis. Oh this is somewhat clearer, but accurate none-the-less.

‘No,’ said the other. ‘I can promise you none of these things. No sphere of usefulness: you are not needed there at all. No scope for your talents: only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God.’

‘Ah, but we must all interpret those beautiful words in our own way!…”Prove all things”…’

Again, so similar to answers given and the response… Frighteningly similar… often called Sola Scriptura.

‘What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do wtih the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.’

Revolting analogy, but so accurate. How often people settle for what ‘feels good’, a cheap substitute for the what worship or faith was meant to be, instead of being willing to commit to what will be at times a very uncomfortable -and a most glorious - union, to achieve the true ONENESS for which we were intended.

‘You will keep on implying some sort of static, ready-made reality which is, so to speak, “there”, and to which our minds simply have to conform… If there were such a thing… quite frankly, I should not be interested in it. It would be of no religious significance. God, for me, is something purely spiritual. The spirit of sweetness and light and tolerance…’

This chapter is just FULL of similiarites to attitudes I’ve encountered as to make the hair stand on end. I could even add a few… the spirit of tongues, the spirit of health/wealth, and others. There is ONLY one Truth.  It is WE who must conform to God, to the Truth’s He has given, not vice versa.  It is WE who must move to be where God is, not vice versa.  God doesn’t come where we are and fit Himself to our ‘beliefs’ or ‘understandings’. This ‘god’ the Ghost describes is not God… and yet this ‘ghost’ like all the others, if more directly, insists that God is what he understands Him to be and is unwilling to know God if that means God is not the ‘god’ whom he’s made of his own understanding. It is an interesting concept of Lewis’ that we are only so ’solid’ (or as real) as our beliefs align with the REALITY of God.

‘…Jesus (here the Ghost bowed) was a relatively young man when he died. He would have outgrown some of his earlier views, you know, if he’d lived. As he might have done, with a little more tact and patience. I am going to ask my audience to consider what his mature views would’ve been. A profoundly interesting question. What a different Christianity we might have had if only the Founder had reached his full stature!’

Now, I know this sounds preposterous to many… but as with all the other passages (and indeed the majority of the book) it resonates so closely with the reality I have been exposed to as to not register either high or low on the tuner. I have heard people say all manner of things which are of the same attitude… ‘oh if Jesus lived now, He wouldn’t have drank wine’… or ‘oh Jesus would’ve found a better way to minister to the drunks than to go where they were’ and many more.  My eyebrows always threaten to climb off my forehead, alarms and red flags going off inside my head, and I wonder to myself what ‘Jesus’ it is they think they know…

Chapter 3 

‘Now that they were in the light, they were transparent–fully transparent when they stood between me and it, smudgy and imperfectly opaque when they stoood in the shadow of some tree. They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air. One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane. I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed.Then some re-adjustment of the mind or some focussing of my eyes took place, and I saw the whole phenomenon the other way round. The men were as they had always been; as all the men I had known had been perhpas. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our own country that men were ghosts by comparison.’

‘One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless - heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man.’

 Chapter 4

‘A bird ran across in front of me and I envied it. It belonged to that country and was as real as the grass.’

I envy the bird.

‘No need to bother about it? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’

‘No. Not as you mean. I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That is what it did for me. And that was how everything began.’

‘Personally,’ said the Big Ghost with an emphasis which contradicted the ordinary meaning of the word, ‘Personally, I’d have thought you and I ought to be the other way round. That’s my personal opinion.’

This how I feel…

‘Oh no. It’s not so bad as that. I haven’t got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You’ll get something far better. Never fear.’

How often I try to express this… and how few seem to understand or ‘hear’ it…

‘There are no private affairs,’ said the other.

So true, our sins - even the ones that seem private or hidden - affect others as surely as a stone falling into a pond sends ripples cascading out from it.

‘Come and show me now,’ said the other with laughter in his voice, ‘It will be joy going to the mountains, but there will be plenty of work.’

‘You don’t suppose I’d go with you?’

‘Don’t refuse. You will never get there alone. And I am the one who was sent to you.’

This really resonates… So often we are uncomfortable to go to the ‘high places’… it’s too much work, too uncomfortable… we’d rather get on alone, do it our way… especially if we don’t like the one who is telling us the truth… Yet none of us ‘get there alone’… and so often we insist on the illusion instead of the reality…

A book discussion was started recently on the homeschool forums. The book is The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis.  I had read this book a few years ago and thought it was good but it didn’t ‘grab’ me.  Little bit different this time around.  Not only did it grab me, it shook a little too, but I kept repeating to myself, “Lewis is dead. He is NOT lurking in the LLL forum.”  It was as if C.S. Lewis had been in our homeschool forum, observing the discussions, and wrote about them… I recognized personalities and arguments!  Very different perspective this time around, and it spoke to me SO much more than it had previously.  The trusty pen and straight edge got a workout on this book - like so many of late.

Preface

“Blake wrote the Marriage of Heaven and Hell…. In some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable ‘either-or’; …that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error….

“We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good. I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it.”

“If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.”

 ”I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.”

Chapter 2

‘”Eh? Oh well, they’d like houses that really kept out the rain.’ ‘Their present houses don’t?’ ‘Well, of course not. How could they?’ ‘What the devil is the use of building them, then?’ The Intelligent Man put his head closer to mine. ‘Safety again,’ he muttered. ‘At least, the feeling of safety. It’s all right now: but later on… you understand.’”

How often do we trade the feeling of safety for the reality of safety?  Appearances mean more to so many these days than reality.  Appearing to be charitable instead of really BEING charitable; appearing to be honest instead of really BEING honest; and so on… Being ‘Christian’, but being nothing like Christ. Saying God is in charge, but making God fit inside the ‘box’ we are comfortable with… Like the people in the book, we are so good at convincing ourselves that Aslan is a housecat, when in reality He is far from a tame lion… Is my ‘house’ real? Or when the rains come, will they pierce it through as though a mist? What is ‘Aslan’ to me? The King of the Jungle or a housecat in my neatly constructed little house?  The rains are coming…

Remember, Howard is the brother of Elizabeth Elliot…

Some favorite quotes from the book, without commentary.  Though long, absolutely not to be missed… the last is, by far, not the least.

 From the Foreword by Father Richard John Neuhaus: 

‘Becoming a Catholic is not a matter of preference but of duty freely embraced.  …I must add, joyfully embraced.’

‘For the non-Catholic Christian, becoming a Catholic is the completion of what he already is.’

‘A great strength of Lead, Kindly Light is that the author does not blink at all that is unsatisfactory in the Catholic Church today.  There is so much that is unsatisfactory; there always has been and there always will be until the final coming of the promised
Kingdom of God. I confess to missing the more elevated liturgical language and, most painfully, the great hymnody that I knew as a Lutheran.  Dr. Howard has his own list of thoroughly justified discontents with contemporary Catholicism.  But all that fades into relative insignificance by comparison with all that is gained in becoming a Catholic. In any event, the point is not whether I prefer being a Catholic, although I do.  The point, as Thomas Howard rightly insists, is “whether something is true or not”.

 From the text of Lead, Kindly Light: 

Re: differences in understanding of what worship is…

‘I came to see that the Eucharistic liturgy, far from being merely “a” worship service among many options all spread out like a smorgasbord to please the sundry tastes of us Christians, was “the prayer of the Church”, the Great Thanksgiving, which took shape very quickly after Pentecost, and constituted, quite simply, what the ancient Church had understood by worship.  It is not a disputed point: the denominations that have substituted a “worship service” with the sermon as the piece de resistance, only intermittently including “communion”, would agree that yes, they have, in fact, substituted a recently devised service for the Church’s ancient Eucharistic liturgy, but that they have good reasons for doing so. …It is all a matter of what one prefers…This is a confused line of thought … The Church, as she moved out into the long haul of history during the decades that followed Pentecost, did not cobble up varieties of “worship experiences” in response to what everybody wanted.  Liturgy is not just a fancy service for people who like ritual: it is “the work of the people” (that is what the word means), and that work, from the beginning has been understood by the Church to be the offering of our worship in union with Christ’s self-offering to the Father. The Lord’s Table is the particular locale of this offering of ours. The modern Protestant preaching service abbreviates the liturgy, lopping off the anaphora (the offering-that is, the Eucharist itself) and leaving only the synaxis (the “gathering”-that is, the readings from Scripture and the homily).’

In reference to the liturgy, the liturgical year, etc…

‘… the pattern of our interior life takes shape…”

As regards the Real Presence in the Eucharist…

‘…the Word made flesh, “made present” (this is what anamnesis, the word the Lord used for “remembrance”, means) in the Eucharist.’

On Sola Scriptura…

‘Not a few of us may think, during our less reflective moments, that all we need is the Bible and our own wits.  Sola Scriptura.  Just me and my Bible. But that is a notion unimaginable to the ancient Church.’

On authority and discipline (and unity and a number of other applications)…

‘And the Fundamentalists, while they may have fierce and exact views, all have their own spheres of influence- independent congregations and affiliations and seminaries- so that no one needs to listen to anyone else.’

‘Saint Paul had called the Church, not the Bible, “the pillar and ground of the truth” (I Tim 3:15).’

On Church roots…

‘Clearly we modern non-Catholics were living in a scheme of things altogether unimaginable to the Twelve Apostles and the Fathers of the Church.’

Under Ecclesiastical Confrontation…

‘The trouble here, for me, was that what these wrong-headed men wrote- about God, about our Lord Jesus Christ, about his Church, about the Christian’s walk and warfare- was so titanic, and so rich and so luminous, that their error seemed infinitely truer and more glorious than my truth. I gradually felt that it was I who was under surveillance, not they.  The “glorious company of the apostles, the noble army of martyrs, and the holy Church throughout all the world” judge me, not I them.’

Also on Church authority…

‘If one will read the story of those decades that followed Pentecost, and especially of those that followed upon the death of the apostles, one will discover that the unction to teach and to preside in the Church that passed from the Lord to the apostles-and from the apostles to the bishops- was understood tob e an apostolic unction. I, for example, could not start up out of the bulrushes and say, “Hi everybody! The Lord has led me to be a bishop! I’m starting me a church over here.” The Holy Spirit, in those days, did not carry on private transactions with isolated souls and then announce to the Church that so-and-so had been anointed for this or that ministry.  Even in the extreme case of Paul, the Damascus road crisis had to be subjected to and ratified by the Church.’

On Church unity…

‘There was one Church: the Church was one. And this was a discernible, visible, embodied unity, not a loose aggregate of moderately like-minded believers with their various task forces all across the globe.’

On worship (ie the Mass)…

‘The whole presents such a shape of  such rich perfection that one wonders what exactly is the task of the “coordinators of worship” on the staff of various churches.  The worship of the ancient Church is far from being a matter of endless tinkering, experiementing, and innovating.  The entire mystery of revelation and redemption is unfurled for us in the Church’s liturgy.’

On the sacraments…

‘Sacrament is the Latin word for the Greek mystyrion-mystery, or pledge.  And, indeed, we are in the presence of mystery here, for the sacraments, like the Incarnation itself, constitute physical points at which the eternal touches time, or the unseen touches the seen, or grace touches nature.’

On Catholicism and Mary…

‘… the word Catholic took on all the vitality and ardor and articulateness for which I longed, and Marian piety, far from detracting from the Christocentric nature of the Faith, was shown to be the very handmaiden of true Christocentrism.’

On becoming Catholic…

‘It was as though I stood on a threshold, and the door now stood open before me.’

‘…unfolded with such clarity, and that has been in the event, ratified and validated gloriously and incalculably…’

On Sacred Scripture and Tradition…

‘Non-Catholics often fear that Tradition entails a shelving of the Bible, and a turning to a second, separate source (the imaginations of mere men) for doctrine. Not so. Scripture and Tradition cannot be sundered any more than hydrogen and oxygen can be sundered if we want water, or any more than Bread can be sundered in the Eucharist.’

On the inability to settle all issues in his mind before becoming obedient and Catholic…

‘On certain points I had to step down, as it were, from my unwitting, self-appointed role as arbiter and judge of all doctrine, and remind myself that I had, indeed, become convinced that the Catholic Church is the Church-and that there was a sense in which a man may have to “hand over” to that Church the final responsibility for doctrine.’

On the Rosary…

‘In this connection it would be an excellent thing for non-Catholics to refrain altogether from assessing whether the rosary is a legitimate, and even rich, mode of prayer.  The rosary constitutes a discipline that is entirely unimaginable to one who is a stranger to it. …Where the rosary is sincerely and regularly prayed, you find ardent piety and pure devotion to the Lord.  The rosary cannot coexist with cynicism, worldliness, unbelief, pride, and concupiscence.’

On the failures of the Catholic Church, and lack of unity with it…

‘As Augustine would teach us to say, “Alas: your criticism is too true. There may be wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet; but  we cannot dismember and hack to pieces the Body of Christ.’

On becoming Catholic…

‘I may say that every yearning, aspiration, hope, and desire that marked my life as a most earnest Protestant Evangelical, and then as an Anglican, has been fulfilled a thousand times over. I have come home. I have dropped anchor. I have taken my place in the Church of the apostles, Fathers, confessors, martyrs, bishops, saints, and all the Catholic faithful. I have nothing to “protest”.’

As if I didn’t have ENOUGH to read already (see last Current Reading post), I found out that Thomas Howard wrote MORE books!  So, in a moment of enthusiasm over the discovery, the books LEAPT into my cart and arrived on my doorstep before I could remember that I have PLENTY ‘NUFF reading material already. Poor. Me.   

• Lead, Kindly Light: My Journey to Rome

This one is ‘filler’ so to speak, filling in the gap between Evangelical is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament and On Being Catholic both also by Howard.

• If Your Mind Wanders at Mass

Not that mine does, but the description was intriguing and as this is something often discussed with those who are NOT RC and who have questions, another perspective by someone as excellent as Howard is not to be missed.

Both smallish and slender as they lay temptingly alongside the other wealth I have yet to plumb and it is only Wednesday… How I long for the weekend and the freedom to read until my eyes blur over.

You know, I really like the handy-dandy little book thing that you can put in the sidebar… but let’s be frank… those weren’t made for people like me… Don’t understand? You will by the end of this post.

I’ve never been one to read more than one book at a time, and was really surprised at one of my daughters who has been known to read up to five at a time.  I had to eat crow on that recently though… A topic came up, ok a SERIES of related topics came up in the homeschooling forums, which resulted in some really serious discussion and reading… some new ‘players’ and as sometimes happens books recommend OTHER books… and so I found myself with an Amazon box full and as I spread them out, I simply couldn’t decide what to read first, and couldn’t BEAR to not start them all.  That is how I ended up with a stack of books on my night table as long as my arm… ALL with bookmarks stuck in them… and guess what I got in the mail today!!!!!

You guessed it… another box… and I have five new ones that are all vying for my attention… I wasn’t finished with the OTHERS YET!

So without further ado… the current list…

Currently reading…

Where We Got The Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church by Henry G. Graham

Explains a great deal about what are called the ‘Apocryphal’ books, explains in detail what modifications were made to the Sacred Scriptures by leaders of the Reformation and why.  Also goes into translations of scripture, and the disagreements between the Church and various ‘translators’ of the time.  Has really brought serious changes in my understanding and thought process on what version of the Bible I use.  Really good book, would’ve almost been ‘gulpable’ if it hadn’t made me so mad I had to take a break before I could finish it. Definitely a keeper, already have promised it to a friend on loan.

Edited to add: This has somewhat of an angry tone, some sarcasm… but honestly, I can see WHY.  Very much strikes me as written when he’d been pushed to the end of his wits (and tolerance) and due to being written before the age of ‘politically correct speech’, it is capable of stealing your breath at times… as well as making you laugh.

Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross

Excellent, but a very hard read.  I am so far from where I want to be… Only can handle a few pages at a time.

The Ball and the Cross by G.K. Chesterton

Also a hard read, a little more tedious but some really. excellent. quotes. in what I’ve managed to cover already.

The Sign of Jonas by Thomas Merton

This has been an unexpected blessing in book form.  Amazing how some of Merton’s spiritual experiences are very similar to my own despite the differences in our vocations.  So encouraging to know that I don’t have to be single or in the religious life to proceed in similar fashion in spiritual growth.  The peace of the lifestyle shown between those other ‘bits’ makes this a very good book for those last minutes before putting out the light.

The How-To Book of the Mass by Michael Dubruiel

Since I am already ‘there’ on the Mass, this is more informational than anything… an interesting read though and an aid for teaching the girls.

Seeking Spiritual Direction: How to Grow the Divine Life Within by Thomas Dubay, S.M.

I’m getting a lot out of this book, but in some ways I’m having to weed through some stuff I won’t use or don’t need.  Still worth it though, for the good stuff.  Formal spiritual direction doesn’t seem to be ‘in the cards’ for me, but I can see how God has provided similar ‘materials’ and assistance in other avenues. 

Deep Conversion Deep Prayer by Thomas Dubay, S.M.

Really good read.  More useful in some ways than the Spiritual Direction book.

Recently received and probably should be added to the currently reading list (because when I finish typing I’m gonna start these TOO!)…

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

Praying the Psalms by Thomas Merton

Catholic & Christian by Alan Schreck

By What Authority? An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition by Mark P. Shea

Edited to add: Very. Good. Book!  Unique style of writing, very conversational, amusing, but direct and full of truth. Wonderful way of making things easier to understand and approach. Definitely a keeper. (Who am I kidding, all of these are keepers… just some for different reasons.)

Jesus, Peter & The Keys: A Scriptural Handbook on the Papacy by Scott Butler, Norman Dahlgren, and Rev. Mr. David Hess

Edited to add: Not but a few pages into this, but it has me fascinated.  Excellent stuff… Amazing how some conclusions come to in discussions with a devout friend are offered here in very. similar. language.  Can’t wait to read more…

The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence by Ian Wilson and Barrie Schwortz

Edited to add: Always believed in the Shroud as the cloth Christ was buried in, but this goes into details, some of which I have not been aware.  Very good.

and last but not least… the Soon-To-Be-Read pile…

Saint Thomas Aquinas/Saint Francis of Assisi by G.K. Chesteron

The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesteron

My Jesus, Encountering Christ in the Gospel by Christoph Cardinal Schonborn

And then before I finished this listing, a friend recommended yet another book which has taken it’s place on my Amazon Wish List…

So many books, so little time…   

A long road trip gives one plenty of time for reading, especially when one’s husband doesn’t let one drive until the last two hours of the return trip.  The book was C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church by Joseph Pearce.  I picked it up at a Barnes and Noble in Little Rock, AR.

 It piqued my interest because reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity was a ‘speed bump’ of sorts for me as a protestant.  Now as a (wannabe) Catholic I was interested to read this comparison of Lewis and the RC.  It ended up being one of those rare books in which I wrote.  I wore out every straight edge on two paper bookmarks and one pamphlet.  Passages are underlined, boxed, and commented upon from the first page of the foreword to the last poem on the last page.  It seems I am not alone in having Lewis point me toward the RC church… He is responsible for many conversions and yet, he never completed his journey into the RC Church.  He was, for all intents and purposes, Catholic, yet was unable to overcome those prejudices instilled in him at such a young age by his ‘Ulster nurse’. What sorrow, to be held back by prejudice and bigotry from completion of your faith. 

May nothing in my walk ever be ‘untouchable’, may every act, every thought, be available to God and godly friends to sharpen and challenge me to go ‘further up and further in’.

A few excerpts…

‘Beauty descends from God into nature: but there it would perish and does except when a Man appreciates it with worship and thus as it were sends it back to God” so that through his consciousness what descended ascends again and the perfect circle is made.’
        -C.S. Lewis

Bibliolatry – the superstitious and idolatrous worship of the Bible which results from its being read without due deference and reference to theological tradition.
        -Joseph Pearce

Pride and prejudice are always obstacles to sense and sensibility.
        -Joseph Pearce

There are traps everywhere…. God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.
        -C.S. Lewis

One did not learn humility; one gained humility by abandoning pride.
        -Joseph Pearce

Eden is, and was always meant to be, a starting-place and not a stopping-place.
        -Dorothy L. Sayers