Though raised Catholic, attending parochial schools until college and participating in weekly Mass, my love affair with the Faith is a recent thing. I could probably blame many of my teachers, especially in high school, who presented the rich catholic faith as dead, something that was more dull than even geography. I don't think I can really fault my teachers though, and for two reasons. First, I had in me the pride and arrogance of any adolescent who has finally figured out that he can use his brain on his own. I have been told, by a good friend, that my ego is so big it exploded. While I respectfully disagree, he is right on one point. I firmly believe that I am right about most everything, but so do most people. I have the audacity to admit it. And believe it or not, this confidence has actually waned a bit. There is humility in me somewhere, I sarcastically brag.
The other reason I cannot fault my poor instructors is that the school, while ostensibly Roman Catholic was comprised of, primarily confused or self-righteous agnostics--or apathetic. It was not that I became a pagan, dissenting to rebel. Ironically, I took the side of the Faith in most debates, but it was mostly because this put me on the short end of things, and I loathed a fair fight. My defenses were notably pitiful, as I could not defend what I did not understand and what I only tepidly believed.
College marked a turning point for the worse. Although I attended mass, sometimes, God was put up as a contractual obligation to be fulfilled right before the Packer games. Then came the dark time which every Christian who has turned from God knows all too well. This period of despair lasted for far too long. A dark cloud covered me most of sophomore year.
I had finally started to attempt to come back at the end of the year. My mom, who is a strong Catholic woman, gave me a book by a man named G.K. Chesterton at this stage. I had never heard of him. Although he is now a staple of mine--if not an obsession--I did not quote the man until August 3rd in this particular blog. He is one of the newfound treasures of the Catholic Faith.
Anyway, I began to read his book, Orthodoxy, some time during the early summer. The book has a fascinating and strange quote on the copy my mom gave to me.
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.
Still a skeptic at this stage, I almost laughed aloud. Orthodoxy might be mildly amusing, but it is certainly not perilous or exciting. I actually had to look up the definition of orthodoxy, for fear that I was mistaken about what was at stake. But Chesteton had set his hook and lured me in, and the best part about it is that, unlike much modern advertising, he does so while telling the truth.
It might be expected that I devoured the book, but this was not the case. For starters, Chesterton can be a bit mystical. At this stage in my journey he was certainly a bit too mystical for me. But I still enjoyed it, working my way through his many paradoxes. For here was a man who could stake a claim to truth, not despite his faith, not apart from it, but because of it. And he was witty and funny too!
It is a great regret of mine that books do not make me laugh very often. Perhaps it is a testament to how drawn to reason and ideas that I am that I often miss the jokes in a great many books. I read Catch 22 and enjoyed it well enough, but only chuckled a few times throughout. One of my math teachers had recommended it as the funniest book of all time, and I allowed myself to suffer no small amount for missing the joy of the thing.
But as I have said, it was not the same with Chesterton. Further, no one had told me Chesterton was funny; no one had told me Catholics could be funny. Sure, our priests made jokes from time to time, but they were always the light kind that I was far to dignified to laugh at, not being a simple adult, but being instead a complicated and difficult teenager.
The interesting thing about Chesterton's story is that he discovered Christendom quite by accident. He calls Orthodoxy a “slovenly autobiography”, which I suppose it is, if by slovenly he means excellent. Anyway, the young Chesterton was a firm atheist, committed against the heresy Christianity. He recounts his journey to a philosophy and his amazement that this philosophy already existed in Christendom.
My readers know my love for GKC; now you know a bit of the reason for it. Suddenly Catholicism had the possibility of being even more fun than explaining why liberalism was so problematic. And Chesterton was right, it was more dangerous too. In comparison to eternal life, disagreements over public policy seem, and indeed are, trivial.
Although this is getting a bit long, it must be pointed out that this is not the end, but only the beginning. For Chesterton lead oddly enough to the first autobiography: St. Augustine's Confessions. Here I understood better the dark times I had gone through, and empathized with the great doctor of the Church. It was a very difficult read, but must beneficial as well.
I have read other things besides, but it has been conversion stories which I have enjoyed the most, perhaps because I can relate with what I can only call my reversion. I read C.S. Lewis's Surprised By Joy as well, and smiled when he recounted that he too had done a bit of reading of Mr. GKC before coming around and becoming the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century.
Now I am reading Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. There are themes running through all of these at once horrific and wonderful stories. Perhaps the most important lesson of all though, is that Christianity is not something to be entered into out of fear, as many moderns believe. Certainly, there are many whose only raison d'être is the fear of God, which may be more accurately called in this case, the fear that they are wrong about Him.
Instead of being terrified into compliance with the Lord, these very reasonable men have discovered that just as there are laws which govern a man's body, so too are there rules that govern his spiritual and emotional health. Just as eating Oreo cookies will make a person not well, engaging in what we Christians call sin leads the soul to hell and the mind to despair.
It is one of the more preposterous fallacies of the modern world that freedom means doing whatever you want. “Art, like morality,” says Chesterton, “consists of drawing the line somewhere.” No sane humanist would believe that unfettered sexual promiscuity is acceptable. They draw a line in the sand somewhere, though they do not really know where that line may be at any given moment. Isn't it at least reasonable to believe that the Church, which had held her line steady for two thousand years, has a better chance of getting it right?
The Church offers a paradox to humanity. Obey rules which God had revealed to be good for you and you will be free. Just as the ins and outs of a ball game give us the liberty to enjoy the sport, so too it is with the moral life. It is only by submitting that we can ever be free.
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