My Accidental Devotions: Bl. Louis Martin and the Materialist Mind

Tags

Catholicism, depression, mental illness, prayer

I am grateful to Churl for asking me to expand a facebook post on the upcoming canonization of Bl. Zélie Guerin and Bl. Louis Martin into this short essay; it has been a welcome opportunity to further my research and my thoughts on the topic. Today, the 12^th of July, is their wedding anniversary and the day the Catholic Church observes their feast.

My memories of traveling in Europe in the summer of 2013 are centered on the relative friendliness of manuscript librarians and the quality of Skype connections. Five months pregnant and traveling alone through Europe to finish manuscript research for my doctoral dissertation, I would call my husband online whenever possible, relying on the free wi-fi in visitor information centers to send e-mails when it was not. Alençon is particularly clear: I stayed at a business hotel and the connection was good, and I wept to be so far away from my husband when he shared bad news. An older couple to whom we were close had received two bad diagnoses in the same weeks— she cancer, he a neurological condition, and she was not expected to live long.

The next morning found me at a building I had been directed to by the guide at the town visitor center, but had not expected to visit: the shrine built at the childhood home of St. Thérèse. I am embarrassed to admit how surprised I was when I was directed to the shrine when I asked about things to see: I knew that Alençon was famous for lace, and I knew that her mother had been a lacemaker, but I had not connected the two. After all, she was “of Lisieux.”

My ignorance may be attributed to the fact that I find St. Thérèse discomforting. I read “Story of a Soul” as a college freshman, on a four-hour plane flight the week before my baptism, and the binge imparted a kind of spiritual indigestion and despair. I had not returned to it until this essay. I can intellectually appreciate the value of her focus on small sacrifices and the beauty of her devotion, but French spiritual writings of her era rarely help me and devotion to her always seemed saccharine and unchallenged in a way that did not touch upon the inner struggle that shapes my own way of belief. Much more for me, I thought, was my confirmation saint, St. Teresa of Avila, who arose from her chronic illness to become tough as nails and didn’t really start spiritually maturing until her thirties. (This is yet more comforting now that I am 30 and not very spiritually mature.)

Knowing Thérèse better does not help my anxiety: if you want to be disillusioned of the aspartame sweetness that accompanies so much talk about St. Thérèse of Lisieux, I recommend Heather King’s memoir of her time researching the life of St. Thérèse, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. An adult convert and former alcoholic, King doesn’t shy away from the traumas endured by someone who endured them with—as becomes clear— a remarkable faith, from losing her mother at a young age to her father’s later illness, ending with a young death from tuberculosis, without morphine but still able to look at a crucifix and declare her love. This doesn’t make me feel closer to St. Thérèse. It makes me scared. As St. Teresa is claimed to have said, “if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few.”

As a result, I had no real intention of visiting the childhood home of St. Thérèse in the limited time I had to see Alençon. Wandering about after seeing my manuscript on my first day, I had encountered a shrine to St. Thérèse in the Cathedral of Alençon, where she was baptized. More out of a sense of duty than devotion I had placed an intention to Thérèse, asking her intercession for me as an expectant mother, and that, I thought, was enough.

My conversation with my husband, however, sent me to the narrow chapel beside the house in an abject desperation that will be familiar to some—  how do you leave a chapel when you are praying for someone’s life? A comfort to me, and a confirmation that it was the ‘proper’ place for my prayers, was that the shrine was not only devoted to Thérèse, but also to her parents, Zélie Guerin and Louis Martin, whose cause was then awaiting the final steps to move from beatification to canonization. A basket was out for requested prayers that would be offered to the couple, and in my grief I left my intentions there. It was only later I realized the confluence: Zélie, too, had died of cancer; he of a neurological condition. Against predictions, our friend’s wife is still living. It may not be miraculous, but it is a gift and a grace.

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Zélie Guerin and Louis Martin will be canonized this coming October. They are justly popular among the young couples I know as a model for developing holiness in family life and a sign that lay couples, too, can achieve the heights of sanctity. Zélie leaves more surviving letters, and the fact that she ran a business has given her a fama among observant working mothers. Less is known about Louis, and unlike his wife, I have rarely seen him discussed without his spouse. He had wanted enter religious life as an Augustinian canon but had no Latin. He was a watchmaker and known for sanctity throughout his life. Beyond the welcome addition of a middle-class married couple to the canon of the saints, however, there is something to be said about the value of holding up Louis as a model of sanctity despite his struggles with mental illness near the end of his life.

Canonizations come with lag time, and it takes much longer for someone to be declared a saint than it does for our ideas of mental illness to change. (One may consider, from the perspective of intellectual history, that the short life of St. Thérèse (1873-1897) coincides with the training and early career of Sigmund Freud.) It will be many years before there is a saint with a substantial body of supporting evidence who has endured the challenges of the conditions we recognize today, and the traditional options like Saint Dymphna, while not without value for many, can be unsatisfying. A declaration of sanctity for public veneration comes with its own challenges— so much of our language and understanding of religious devotion and holiness is focused on intention, the will, as well as emotional experience. Mental illness makes clear—particularly to those who have experienced it—how unreliable these ideas can be. It also, for these reasons, makes it a challenge to decide whether someone’s life has approached the accepted ideals of sanctity.

Changing ideas of the mind and the reticence of the past have made it hard to determine what, exactly, Louis Martin experienced. In The Story of a Soul, Thérèse writes that they feared he would suffer a ‘cerebral paralysis,’ and that “words can’t describe our agony, so I shan’t try to write about it.” A 1949 edition of her letters refer only to “the family trial,” and paralysis. The only hint that his losses have been more than physical are a letter in which Thérèse asks her sister to have their father bless the wreath she will wear when she makes her vows, and says that her request “is not difficult to grasp, and if at moments he understood, he would be so happy!”

Once again, Heather King gives an evocative description of the bitter cup, explaining that Louis Martin suffered not only from paralysis, but from a mental decline that lead to him disappearing for days at a time, and eventually to his being admitted to a mental hospital for several years. It is not clear whether Thérèse, in the convent, was shielded from the rumors that her father had syphilis, or had been driven mad by her young entry into religious life. In her letters, she would declare this period a “family martyrdom.” Louis died in 1894, under the care of two of his daughters.

Rereading in preparation for this post, I discovered that the endpapers in the used copy of  St. Thérèse’s letters I bought as a college freshman are covered in pencil notes, marking passages the previous owner found important. The first is from an early letter, and reveals a principle that underpins the spirituality of both St. Thérèse and her father, and one which may help free those of us more troubled than aided by Thérèse’s ability to embrace suffering: namely, the willingness to do so weakly:  “Martyrs have suffered with joy, and the King of Martyrs suffered with sorrow.”

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How to talk of souls? How discuss our being? It is common— but erroneous—to identify the soul with the mind, and focus entirely on the mental categories of religious experience. With a rising awareness of mental illnesses from depression to dementia, it becomes ever more important to clarify the position of mental illness in our understanding of the human person, and where God’s grace stands in relation to our weaknesses. Saint Thérèse was no stranger to the “spiritual dryness” familiar to mystics throughout the history of the Church, and this traditional acceptance of the dark night of the soul is a crucial reminder that—as a Carmelite once told me— grace is not conferred through emotion. But how can one patiently sustain one’s devotion when your dryness seems less a spiritual step than a problem within; when one’s swinging emotions make you distrust consolations; when abilites begin to fade?

Meditation on the life and sanctity of Louis Martin may be a consolation for those of us who endure such questions. He achieved recognizable sanctity in a very traditional model, despite his illness and the accompanying slander. His elevation to the altar is a validation of marital life, but should also stand as a reminder that we are not far from God, even when we are farthest from ourselves.

Alice is a postdoctoral researcher in Medieval History, working on conceptions of human rationality—and irrationality— in twelfth-century theology. She converted to Catholicism in 2004 and has herself suffered from depression and anxiety; her last (and first) post on A Christian Thing was about Miriam Ibrahim and Saint Perpetua. She’s recently returned to very intermittent blogging at The Accidental Philologist.

What If The Coin is a Multi-Sided Die, and What If Reactionaries Have Stories Too?

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Anxiety, Catholicism, Dinner Party, G. K. Chesterton, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Orthodoxy, Reactionary, Scrupulosity

I too wish to welcome our new blogger to the table, even if she may insist there is no table because this is not a dinner party. I also think that it is worth noting the personality difference between myself and Chinglican – faith is not woven out of a single personality type – because it helps explain what I am going to say here. Chinglican, I think, is fairly optimistic about things; I am fairly pessimistic. Where Chinglican looks at the gates of the city lifting their heads in joy, I notice how silent the streets of the city lie. Both perspectives are Biblical and reflect reality, and are a matter of emphasis within Christian tradition. But since we have had an appreciation of what has proven to be a very popular post, I would like to add, as irenically as possible, a number of caveats. But first I need to get kind of personal.

I am a stay-at-home father. One of my favorite classes in my undergraduate degree was my feminist literary theory class. And I do a good portion of the cooking in our house, if perhaps not always a good job. Iterating these things is not a matter of boasting – I mean, someone has to do them, and it is no more or less commendable just because it happens to be me. But I do say it because I am attracted to Catholicism, and I hope these instances are enough to demonstrate that some people want to become Catholic for reasons other than that they want their wife barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

Are some people attracted to Catholicism for this reason? Certainly; I have no doubt about it, just as I have no doubt that some (both male and female) who embrace the kind of open-mindedness-sans-authority proposed in the “Two Sides of the Coin” post do so on account of a non-committal attitude, a desire to run away when it all falls apart rather than go down with the ship. Much can be said about this attitude: extremists will point to it as the attitude their extremism is addressing even while missing its remedy; and modern liberals nurse it in forgetting that it is not commitment in the mind, but commitment in the gut, that at the end of the day determines where our loyalties lie. But in any case, it is not my purpose here to accuse Not A Dinner Party of this attitude – only to note that, for every visceral reaction that can be raised against close-mindedness, I have one that can be raised against the lack of radical loyalty – commitment – in our society.

What I would like to suggest, though, is that neither certainty nor uncertainty has inherent worth; it really all depends what one is being (un)certain about and how this is practiced. Because we are well into postmodernity, the problem most evident to us – and therefore less dangerous than the other – is the problem of a certainty that curtails complexity. This, it seems to me, is the target of Not a Dinner Party’s post. But I think there is also a problem of uncertainty; let me explain, with the aid of G. K. Chesterton and my own experience.

As I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I have OCD, nicknamed the doubting disease. Basically this means that, whereas others can feel the difference between a reasonable and an unreasonable doubt, there are many areas in which I cannot, at least on the usual internal cognitive basis used by most people. To take a common example, imagine someone who repeatedly checks the door to see if it is locked. What is driving this person is the recurring doubt that, when he checked it last time, he may have missed something. So he doubts; some specialists would say it is because the person with OCD lacks a certain kind of kinetic memory – whereas in others, their body itself would remember performing the action of locking the door or checking or whatever, the person with OCD lacks this capacity. Moreover, the person with OCD cannot tell differences between the magnitude of the matters he is worrying about; whether you tell him the world is about to end or that he may not have locked the car door, it will feel to him much like the same thing, because in fact no one can prove to him with a hundred percent certainty that his failure to lock the door will not in fact lead to the end of the world, or whatever he happens to love most. You see, the person with OCD has a very open mind. He can imagine all sorts of things, and is in many ways the model of what the new atheists seem to think they want to be – a doubter unchecked by any unverifiable boundaries or assumptions. Give him a space of time long enough and he will deconstruct the universe.

What is interesting is that this experience corresponds exactly to what G. K. Chesterton describes in Orthodoxy when he talks about the connection between the rationalism and madness. I know what it is to experience both, and I know the terror involved. And I know the only way out is through trust – of other persons and other institutions, that may perhaps be sane – of course the tricky part is determining who to trust and why. Intriguingly enough, this process – a process involving navigating multiple ways of knowing (such as that of fairyland) – is in some ways quite postmodern, and it attempts to evaluate truth via multiple means beyond a simple modernity-driven reason. So we actually have a paradox here – a desire for certainty that in fact invites us to broaden our definitions of what certainty might look like, or at the very least our understanding of the horizons to which we might look.

But, you will say, this is all well and good when you are talking about OCD, but what about “real life?” Not everyone (thank God) has OCD. True. But because I don’t think that anything evil can exist without being parasitic on something good, I would suggest this: mental illness is a parasitic totalization of a particular human trait removed from its proper context. Moreover, I would suggest that there is a delicate balance between biological determinism and free will. God help us if we ever forget the biological side, as so many Christians do when they tell their brothers and sisters to just “get over it.” Yet context, environment, and habit also have their place, and I do think it almost possible to diagnose entire societal aurae with these categories as well as single people. I wonder in fact if it is not possible that postmodern society itself has a bit of a case of OCD, with its stubborn insistence on an unachievable level of certainty that it must obtain before making any kind of commitment – which ends in apathy or anxious inaction.

If this is the case, it means that the desire for certainty so heavily critiqued in Not A Dinner Party’s piece is a pathology sprung from starvation. Always only offered the choice between a shiny liberal ideology and a basic human desire for trust fetishized as absolute certainty, people usually choose the former, but there is still an innate human hunger for trust and commitment that goes far beyond the Enlightenment fetishization, and when that part of the human is starved for too long, humans become ready to devour anything to get it, most prominently other humans. A starving person may raid a dumpster to try to fill his stomach. No, this is not the most sensible of behavior, and yes, it is reactionary and not the kind of thing one would contemplate in a comfortable middle class armchair. But simply calling the behavior reactionary seems to me to miss the point a bit. It would be better to offer a meal. But it is easier for us to live with our consciences if we reduce these people to mere “reactionaries” such that we don’t actually have to deal with them.

Of course, the analogue breaks down at various points, and I would suggest that the person stumbling upon Catholicism in this way is rather like the hungry person going off on his own, half crazed, and finding a feast in an abandoned warehouse that everyone mistakenly thought was inhabited by thieves. One hopes that, as he eats and drinks, his behavior might become somewhat less desperate and crazed, but this takes time – the day he found the feast that saved his life is kind of important, even if he sometimes gets carried away in being zealous about it, and maybe for a long time emphasizes the wrong parts of it. But calling him a reactionary is a sure way to kill any potential discussion.

You see, for all I have said about being unlike such reactionaries in my attraction to Catholicism, there is a part of me that wants to stand with them – not to condone categorically their perspectives, but because few other people will, and because I have to acknowledge Christian brothers and sisters even when they are still working things out. I know what it is to be on the other side of the “reactionary” charge. I am a fairly conservative Christian myself. I come from the Prairie provinces of Canada, and know what it is to have bishops come from Toronto to fix the non-progressive “backwardness” of prairie folk. When I first entered my Doctoral program at UBC, I think the leader of our cohort’s Intro to the Doctoral Program nearly fell out of his chair when I said that I had at one point wanted to be a medical missionary. And to put icing on the cake, I was home-schooled. From Kindergarten through Grade 12. The target I have painted on my back should be fairly clear by now.

And what I always wanted to say about these things – particularly about being home-schooled – is that there may be more to me than you think. But if there is, it is certainly a part of me you are not going to get to know (let alone advise) because your first step has been to provoke my defenses. If all I am to you is a backward, conservative, homeschooled Christian, that is how you have decided to see me, and I am not going to expend energy to disabuse you of that, because one has to pick one’s battles, and frankly, it is exhausting. So I know what it is to be thought of as the resident reactionary – what’s more, in some of the things I have said in this post, I have probably done little more than bolster these assumptions. But if you hear one thing, hear this: what the reactionary you so despise needs is not more arguments. What he or she needs is to see you love him or her as a Christian, as a human – such people need to see that your degree of love outweighs all your spite. A tall order, yes, and one which I myself don’t live up to. But I do think it is a Christian Thing. Something about loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you – even when they also happen to be fellow Christians.

Two Sides of the Same Reactionary Coin: In Which Chinglican Finally Persuades Me to Post on The Thing

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Calvinism, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Complementarianism, critical thinking lapse, crossing the Tiber, Evangelical is Not Enough, evangelicals getting high, Franciscan University of Steubenville, John Piper, magisterial Catholicism, Mark Driscoll, neo-Calvinism, patriarchy, PCA, Peter Kreeft, Restless and Reformed, Rome Sweet Home, Scott Hahn, The Gospel Coalition, Theology of the Body, unedited rant, Young

So, of course, when one first posts on a blog made up of serious academics, read by thoughtful, educated people, one wants the post to be clever, well-edited, and planned, not cut and pasted from a recent Facebook rant (also, one wants it to include cleverly placed videos and pictures, as so many Thing posts do, but who’s got time for that??). However, our own Chinglican at Table can be very persuasive, and after enlisting me as a contributor to A Christian Thing some time ago, has not lost hope that I will, in fact, actually contribute something, so has asked me to post the following from a recent Facebook thread. Obviously, I would ask that you please forgive the rant-y nature of this initial post.

Aside: I also would like to have had a bio up before I posted this, for a little context, but alas, though an avid user of social media (you can find me here and here, in a less pseudonymous form), and moderately technologically adept, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to add to the bio/about page. So, here’s a biographical summary: I’m a grad student at Regent College who studies religion in China, so I’m ostensibly interested in theology, attending theological graduate school as I do (spoiler alert: not that interested), but my interests also include dogs/animal rescue, American politics, West Coast 90s rap, feminism, and Crossfit. Oh, did I mention China? Because I’m really into China.

Anyway, there has been an article that has gone “viral” (in quotes, because it can only go so “viral” among a subset of Christians that is fairly limited in size but includes most of my Christian friends) (and probably yours), which observes that many evangelical colleges, universities and seminaries are inadvertently sending students down the Canterbury Trail, across the Tiber or, less commonly (in my experience) to Wittenberg or Constantinople. Many are posting this in a sort of smug way, as in, “that’s right, we ARE worshipping at high churches, as a response to evangelical schlock! Thanks for noticing!” This kind of posting skips right over the fact that the guy is clearly suggesting that a) this is a problematic trend and b) that serious, Reformed catechesis could stem the tide! His blogroll consists of Neo-Reformed standards, so we know where he stands. This caused me to reflect on the little-noted (but, IMHO, glaringly obvious) similarities between the appeal held by the neo-Reformed movement and the Catholic Church.

Here is what I posted, alongside the link:

As my friend Jonathan D. Fitzgerald would say: ‘altogether now, “evangelicals are converting to Catholicism!”‘ In other words, this is a trend piece about an ‘old news’ trend…in other words: yawn. EXCEPT: this guy, who appears to hail from a neo-Reformed background, himself, identifies the appeal/retention power of robustly confessional Protestant churches as the same appeal held by high church traditions. WHICH I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO TELL EVERYONE FOR YEARS. I think the simultaneous rise of the new Calvinists and the conservative catholic converts are a) two sides of the same coin, with that coin being discomfort with the realities of postmodern/late-modern rootless existence and b) troubling.

After I posted this, I got (justifiably) a couple of “what do you find troubling?” queries from various Facebook friends. I’m a busy lady (read: it’s July! I needed to sleep in and take my dog for walks!), so a couple of days of radio silence ensued before I posted the following, which Chinglican asked me to share–unedited–here (although WordPress thankfully removed the smiley-faces, as if to force this post to look slightly more professional):

I like how I sort of mic-dropped this and walked away, not answering people’s follow-up questions! What I meant by “troubling,” in case people were still wondering, is not that I am anti-Catholic or anti-Reformed. I respect many things about both traditions. In fact, I attend an Anglo-Catholic church, so I am “getting high” myself. What upsets me, i.e. what I find “troubling,” is that the sectors/iterations of the Reformed world and the Catholic Church that are experiencing general growth or attracting converts–Mars Hill in Seattle, the PCA in general, Piper, Driscoll, Mohler, Grudem et al, The Gospel Coalition, on the Reformed side or the “magisterial Catholic” scene, e.g. Kreeft/Hahn/Howard-esque converts, First Things and Register readers, the “JPII/B16 generation” types and Tridentine Mass lovers, chapel veilers, etc.–are both inextricably linked, in my mind, with very rigid and essentialist gender views and throwback, nostalgic traditionalism, both of which are a reaction to the challenges of navigating a world where patriarchy is no longer legislated or systematized in the same way, although we certainly have a long way to go, God knows.

Oh, Rome Sweet Home–gag me.

It is troubling to me that the discomfort wrought by figuring out how to share responsibilities in the home and workplace, whose career takes priority, how to make sure boys are still attended to and empowered in schools when girls have equal opportunity and are often more suited to traditional academic contexts, the problem of perpetual adolescence, the challenges of modern discussions of sexuality, etc. etc. have driven many to the easy answers of “biblical womanhood,” in the sense that, perhaps these problems wouldn’t exist if men just provided for their families and women took care of the home, NO PROBLEM TO SEE HERE! (neo-Reformed complementarianism) OR to Catholic teaching on gender, which doesn’t beat you over the head with proof texts, but with biology, i.e. if we just realized that WOMEN HAVE VAGINAS AND MEN HAVE PENISES, so obviously men are supposed to initiate/lead and women receive (my summary of Theology of the Body), then we would have modern gender issues all figured out. and also JESUS WAS A MAN, btw, so only men can rep Christ in the Eucharist. Don’t you see how important HUMAN BODIES ARE?

I’ve said many a time that I’m a “single issue voter” when it comes to ecclesial identification or attendendance, so I’m sure my view doesn’t shock anyone. However, I think the trend is particularly troubling, beyond the gender questions, because the gender questions bring up something larger, i.e. things that become problematic when you go in this direction.

Complementarian text, “Girls Gone Wise,” includes makeup, apparently.

If you think that REALLY INTENSE, ROBUST THEOLOGY is the answer to postmodern, wishy-washy livin’/church, then every issue is going to be a “gospel issue.” You can hardly read an article about this or that on the Gospel Coalition blog without being told that not holding a certain position sells out/loses/compromises the gospel itself. This is not a helpful posture toward Christians who have likely given a lot of thought to their biblical and theological positions and happen to have come out in a different place than you have. It also happens to be an ABSURD thing to say.

On the Tiber-swimming side, my greatest pet-peeve, also illustrated by the gender issue, but potentially illustrated by about any other issue, is that there is an endless stream of criticism of evangelicalism for being–I am not joking–really sexist, for say, not letting women preach or suggesting that there be certain gender roles in the home, based on biblical prescriptions of one kind of another, and yet a “see no evil” approach to all of the blatant and rife exclusion of women and bizarre biological theorizing that compose Catholic gender teaching and practice. Or, say, the evangelical attitude toward LGBTQ people (“so hateful!”), with no acknowledgment of what makes up the entirety of the US Bishops’ current agenda (“the Catechism’s position is so gracious!”). or criticism of evangelical silliness/anti-intellectualism, while dismissing any criticism of Catholic oddities/superstitions as being MYSTERY AND TRADITION.

All dudes up there, too, guys.

I mean, just please keep your thinking caps on in regard to all manifestations of the Christianity itself that you’re reacting to, even if you can’t see through the exotic (dare I say, Oriental) incense clearly enough to critique the new (or “ancient”) and different.

I think that BOTH the longing for a Westminster Confession/Sola Scriptura/Inerrant Bible full of clear, theological guidelines AND for an Infallible Magisterium and Tradition with a capital “T” are ways of avoiding the hard work of thinking through the ambiguities and challenges of modern existence. And I find that troubling, indeed.

*Note: I am a bit of a stickler, when it comes to spelling or grammatical errors, so am particularly nervous about this unedited post being rife with them–a good friend already noted on the ‘Book that there is a their/there error somewhere I have yet to identify. Yikes! So, I ask your forgiveness in advance.

An Apology and a Parable

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Anglican Communion, Anglicanism, Bottle, Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Fountain, God

I am fortunate in having friends to remind me what it means to be a Christian, and in saying this I am not talking about friends from a particular denomination or even only my Christian friends; to the degree that they have held me up to the standard of the faith I claim to believe, atheists and agnostics have here served God’s purposes as well. And there can be no other response to this than thankfulness, a thankfulness I am very bad at expressing. But I do want here to take a moment to express it, particularly regarding my last post.

As Chinglican pointed out in an off-the-blog conversation, the tone I adopted in the last post was – well – not very catholic. Sometimes the words run away with me and I can speak in an off-the-cuff manner that wounds other Christians. I do continue to stand behind what I said, but I also apologize for the manner of delivery and whatever ungracious hurt might have been caused. I also request prayer.

To explain why I need prayer, I would like to post a response I gave to Chinglican privately in explanation of the tone of the post:

“I really hope [the post] did not come across as potshots; when I argue like this, my purpose is not so much to “shoot” at others as much as at the best form of a counter-argument that I can conjure up (drawn from comments of others, my own thoughts etc.). I want to see if what I am thinking can survive my own most devastating counter-argument. So I think that when I find myself arguing against myself like this I sometimes get carried away and permit some mockery. The points I will stand by, but you are right to remind me that when I talk about these things, I am saying things that are overheard by others and taken as directed at them. I will try to be more gracious, though it is sometimes hard with matters like this that reach to the very root of my heart and pluck all the strings of my being, still ungracious as it is this side of heaven.”

It is particularly this latter bit that I want to take up here and articulate further, that is, that though I speak in a fairly philosophical tone, these matters are quite close to my heart. Because I am good at hiding it, I don’t think anyone really quite understands how often and how close I come to utter despair. It is a little like this. Imagine you are on a desert island. And here and there you have found bottles, some more full, and some less full. And for a time you live off these, going from bottle to bottle. But soon you realize you are not getting enough water and eventually you will die of thirst. You keep drinking from the bottles – because what else can you do – but there is no longer the immediate joy and certainty of survival you had when you first found them. And then two things happen. You meet a friend, and a little later on, you discover a fountain. The friend is still fairly new to the desert island, and is happy living off the bits of water in the bottles. He still has hope in this water. But you are taking the long view of the bottles – what for him is hope has become prolonged despair. But the friend has also heard things about the fountain – that though it looks like water, it is really a deadly poison that will kill you certainly, though slowly. This does not entirely bother you because you know you are dying slowly anyway. But your new friend Is adamant and you are put in crisis; you look over at the fountain and are nearly driven mad by the sight of fresh water – you can almost taste it – but you do not want to move without further evidence. So you wait and watch. You see various animals drink from the spring, quite happily, but there is really no way to tell how it affects them – the poison, if it is poison, acts slowly. Finally, much to your amazement, another person comes along and takes a deep draught from the spring, and you ask him whether the water is poisonous. He laughs a little, and says, no, he hasn’t found it to be so. But you press further. What if he is a liar? What if he wants you dead? What if the poison just hasn’t had time to work on him and he doesn’t know? But he points to the stockpile of different bottles you and your friend have collected and tells you that the bottles you have been living off the whole time – variously empty and full – have in fact all been filled at this spring. You have no way of knowing with a hundred percent certainty, but if it is poison, it is a poison you have been drinking the whole time. In finding the fountain, you have not found something different, only the source.

The stranger leaves, and you turn to your friend very deeply hopeful about this, thinking that, with a fountain like this, you may be able to survive after all. But your friend’s reaction is completely different. He does not trust the stranger. But perhaps more irksomely, he is still elated at the fact of having water to begin with – the long-term plan is not in his mind. He is still very excited about the bottles of water, and thinks it is still a pretty good deal to be able to live off them, and he does not want to risk being poisoned when he can have more certainty in sticking to what he knows is safe (he does not in fact believe that the water from the fountain and the bottles are the same). He has not, like you, weathered years in the desert and seen that though the variously filled bottles will kind of get you by from day to day, eventually you start dying of thirst. You become parched.

And there you are, standing beside the fountain with your friend. You are nearly mad with thirst – the deep thirst only fresh water can quench – and at just the moment when you are about to take a drink, he decides you should sit down, share one of the bottles, and talk about the matter for three days, so as not to rush into anything. And you agree, because he is your friend. But you are still parched, and because you are parched, it is sometimes hard to tell where your words are coming from. Sometimes they are reasonable. Sometimes thirst takes over. And sometimes the annoyance at your friend’s reasonable pedantry is too much. You don’t understand how he can sit there and make a show of reasonableness when you are dying of thirst. And so, yes, you sometimes snap, and say things you don’t mean. You forget that, though the water in the bottles did not work for the long term, they did keep you alive up to this point. And they did, in fact, if the stranger was telling true, bring water from the spring. But because your friend is so bent on telling you over and over again how wonderful the bottles are – and wondering why in hell you would risk the poisonous fountain over the bottles – you snap and start badmouthing them. You start telling about the dirty dregs you found at the bottom of one bottle, or the tepid temperature of another, or the mosquito larvae you found in a third. And the more insistent your friend is, the louder is your protest. Not so much because you are arguing with your friend per se. No, it is because your friend has woken in you something that your heart very deeply fears – that he is right. But this for you is a fear where for him it is a hope, because, unlike him, you know that sticking with the scattered bottles means death. In this situation it is hard, to say the least, to speak objectively and without offense. There you are, and there is your friend. And there is the fountain, and there are the bottles. And your thirst is great.

My primary point in telling this story is to try to explain – though never excuse – the kind of uncharitable things that sometimes come through when I write about these matters. Evangelicalism and Anglicanism have indeed kept me alive thus far. And for that I can only be grateful. To return to the metaphor of the story, it cannot be denied that the water I drank from these bottles is real water. As Chinglican rightly points out, there are many things to be grateful for in the Anglican communion, and his examples hit home. I was blessed with the Alpha course when, just at the end of my time in the Evangelical church, its doctrinal stability had a calming effect on my more neurotic radicalist tendencies. The first Anglican church I went to – where my wife and I got married, and where my son was baptized – was and remains an amazing place spiritually – when I visit home, and go to St. Mary’s, the church too feels like home. And, as Chinglican also notes, there is Cursillo. My parents, who incidentally followed me into the Anglican church, have been deeply blessed by, and found ministry in, this movement. These are all things to be thankful for.

What one realizes though is that such things come and go. For instance (as in my case), one might find oneself in an Anglican diocese where the low church people cannot tell the difference between a lawsuit and Christian witness on the one hand, and the bishop can’t tell the difference between Christianity and his own political agenda on the other. And then again (having moved out of this diocese) one might find oneself in a fairly good Anglican church again. But as far as the primary experience of church goes, things can move and things can change yet again. And it is the same with other of the aforementioned spiritual things as well. They come and go, or, as my favorite author would say, “To everything there is a season…” And at some point you realize that these things sustain you for a time, but you cannot live off them. They are bottles of water, but they are not the source. And then you encounter Catholicism, where the deepest source of everything is Christ’s real presence in the sacraments. The positive and the negative experiences will still be there, the wheat along with the tares. But at the end of the day what one is called to drink from is not an experience here or a revival there, but the cup of Christ that is his blood. One of course never stops trying to bottle this water of truth and goodness and distribute it as far as possible among parched people. But the bottled water is not what you live on. The fountain is.

That is, if it is not poison. And there are so many people who want to tell one so. They are still excited about the spiritual experiences here, the liturgical order there, the intellectual rigor here, the ministry to the poor there, etc. And they should be, because it is right to be excited about these things – they are of God. But when they tell me there is no source – or rather that the source is in some kind of vague symbolism or ethereal spiritual experience or freedom to develop intellectually – I despair. And when I despair, I get just a little cranky, because I am thirsty, and have been for a long time. And I know this crankiness left to its own devices will turn into an ugly lack of charity. And so I request, whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever side you are on, pray for me and use me gently – I am deeply in need of love.

Is the Desire to be Catholic Simply a Desire to Escape the Responsibility of Independent Thought?

Tags

Anglicanism, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, community, Individualism, Mark Driscoll, Tradition, Western Christianity

This, in brief, is how some people see an attraction to Catholicism. We are complex human beings who have squarely on our shoulders the responsibility of being faithful to a long and arduous quest for truth that involves much searching, reflection, and exercise of our consciences, minds etc. But some of us are weary and broken. Worse still, some of us are lazy. And so we are attracted to an institution that can do our thinking for us. We can give up a God-given mandate to search and rest on our laurels while we let an all-powerful system take care of the rest. The more heroic stance is the one that remains tentative, open, and uncertain, whether this is in the secular realm or in regard to faith – for instance, many justifications of Anglicanism suggest this openness is one of the merits of it.

What I want to ask is whether this is a valid critique. Are people like me – with a deep attraction to Catholicism – simply lazy copouts? Or is there another side of the story? I suggest the latter, and here’s what I propose. People who make this charge have a fairly strong sense of self, what their self is, how it does it’s thinking. This sense of self in fact is not something that has come naturally to post-lapsarian humans. The self that we are called to pay attention to, to exercise, to depend on rather than authority, is a self built over the past two thousand years of Christian history. It is a self that owes its origins to the Christian salvation of the self that had been corrupted in Eden. And it seems we are all too happy to throw out all these trappings – all the props that contributed to making this self – and suggest that it is on this self we solely depend, and any other dependence is weakness.

Of course, as many of us know, this sense of self is very quickly collapsing with the collapse of what might be called Western Christendom. Please note I am not here making a judgment about what ought to be done about this or trying to say we should just go back to “the good old days.” I do think though that this concept of self is weakening – has indeed grown very weak – and so we are left in all sorts of postmodern crises of identity.

As someone very closely attuned to such crises of identity, it is very hard for me to identify with those who simply want me to take responsibility and forge on as an individual, embracing uncertainty over allegedly cheap certainty. Why is this hard for me? For one, I know what mental illness is. It makes one wonder what exactly one’s self is. It is profoundly disturbing to find that you can’t always trust what you think is the “I” doing the thinking, and I know how often I mistake mental illness for the true voice of this “I”. I suppose in a sense this has also allowed me to see how this works even in cases where mental illness is not involved. People often think they are asserting themselves, being radical and heroic individuals etc. And they are so often not aware that something other than the “I” is doing their thinking for them. There are an infinite amount of cross-pressures – to borrow a term from Charles Taylor – that masquerade as their selves. As we know from the Eden story, rebellion itself is the oldest of clichés. And so, when people lionize the heroic individual self forging its way toward truth, I can’t help seeing, not individual heroes, but mass-produced sophists. It is very rare when an individual – a real philosopher – breaks out of this, and usually when they do, their highest realization is that they really don’t know anything at all, and their end is a cup of hemlock. Modern people though, not liking the taste of either self-doubt (real self-doubt, not the fashionable half-hearted kind) or hemlock, are quite content with sophism producing a tentative non-committal attitude toward the rest of faith and the world. In my opinion, this lack of faith – not only in religion, but even in very basic human relationships – is one of the most grievous losses in the modern world.

To put it another way, modern society suggests that, at the end of the day, the complex “I” that I am must always remain on top and in control. To trust (at least when it comes to religion – I say nothing about nation states…) is a form of weakness, and though we may admit that there are some areas where we have to trust, it is important to keep such areas at a minimum. There is no place for throwing ourselves into something as a last ditch effort when all else seems lost – because we know ourselves to be strong and not lost. Would that I were lucky enough to be this strong. Actually, no. I am glad I am not, because this sounds a little to me like a description of hell.

To come to my point, most people assume that I am looking for something that my self recognizes as good, true, noble etc. They imagine me here, sitting in my armchair, surveying all the candidates and taking notes. But this is not the case. The case is much more like that of a dying man on a battlefield – I am doubting that he will interview his doctors to see which he gets along with, or which has the best bedside manner. No, the one thing he cares about is whether it is a doctor who can save his life. You see, I am not looking for something for myself; rather, I am looking for something that will root and sustain the self I am, a self-fast fading in the backwash of postmodernity, the self that is simultaneously the most mysterious and deadly thing we encounter as humans. It is not so much that I want to be Catholic. It is more that it is only within Catholicism that I can conceive of preserving and saving a self that even has the capacity to say “I want…” to anything.

Why Catholicism? Because of two things: obedience and catholicity. As far as I can tell, obedience and trusting others is the only way out of a self so ingrown it can no longer see itself. This, for instance, is why Anglicanism is hard for me. Yes, I can, as people like Chinglican and others say, be as Catholic as I want within Anglicanism. Yes, as Catholic as I want to be, excepting my need for boundaries and obedience. The Anglican church is quite happy to let me be as Catholic as I want, but it is also quite happy to let me be as hellish as I want. There is a terrible reality behind the idea that one can be oneself as an Anglican; perhaps one can, but one can also be oneself in hell. People balk at the power and authority the Catholic church claims. But such people, I suggest, do not understand – really understand – the power of sin and its entanglement with the fallen self. Sin is not so little that we can face it on our own.

But why the Catholic church? After all, there are plenty of churches everywhere happy to make me obedient (for instance, why not Mark Driscoll’s church?). My answer depends on catholicity. I want to be subject to all the saints in the room. This, indeed, is the difference between the Catholic church and a cult (because cults demand obedience too). The Catholic church in its ideal form is a mechanism for making all the voices of the saints (present, past and future) heard in a society that wants to confine meaning to the present moment. It is the widest possible jury of my peers. Unlike a cult, which generally depends on a particularly charismatic person who draws people away from their historical moment into his own world, the Catholic church draws the modern world itself into a crowded room of saints. As a Protestant, I have always considered it important to pay attention to what the Christian across from me says when we are doing a Bible Study – I may disagree with him or her, but we are both Christians, and I should at the very least be troubled by our differences. But how much more when we are reading the Bible with saints? Shouldn’t we be just a little troubled that those Christians we encounter from the past differ from us in some areas? Not that we can or should go back, or that we should automatically assume that Christians in the past got it all wrong and we get it all right. But we should be troubled, for they are Christians and we are Christians.

And yes, to anticipate the question, a lot of Protestants actually do think like this. They do look at as many saints as possible. But what they lack (as far as I can tell) is the mechanism for processing this tradition and the call to obedience so necessary as a safeguard against the waywardness of the self. You see, for the past number of years, I have been such a Protestant, trying to engage as deeply with a fully catholic Christianity as I can. But the task is daunting. I have spent some six years just looking at Gregory the Great, and I still cannot say I have “mastered” him – not that that would be a wise thing to say under any circumstances. But if it takes me so much time to even begin to think through the work of a single Christian from the past – indeed, a space of time that was only available to me on account of academic funding – how can I expect to process the rest of tradition? And how can I invite others to this burden when they probably have even fewer resources and time than I have been blessed with?

The temptation in this situation will be obvious: to play a game of cherry-picking exegesis with tradition. Pick the sexy saints, the Francises and the eminently quotable Augustines, and make a coat of many colors to match our moods. Again, here is where the whole issue of the self comes in. It will be much quicker and expedient to salvage what we like and abandon the rest. For all the claims that Anglicans make about tradition, I cannot help but see the Anglican church (where it is dealing with tradition, which is not everywhere) as one picking up “retro” scraps of tradition here and there and making it into hipster garb – it is flashy, but I prefer the seamless robe of Christ.

In contrast, the Catholic church is cursed with the burden of tradition – and I say this in the same way that I would say that humans are cursed with community and love. The Catholic church cannot think about something for a moment but there is a stutter from the past, a hiccup, something that must be considered. It makes for very slow processes of thinking and complex ones, but for my money, the complexity is something that reflects the complexity of reality, not an undue multiplication of entities without charge. As most modern people point out, tyranny would be easier – embrace what is progressive, what is winning etc. – but if we are going to listen to all the Christians in the room of history, who in turn are tasked with listening to all the people in the world, things are going to get messy and complex and yes it will take a while to think about things. That is the price of listening and loyalty – not just to those who exist in the present moment, but to those who have gone before us and will come after us.

Is the Catholic Church Anglicanism’s Orient?

Tags

Anglican Communion, Anglicanism, Anglo-Catholicism, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Edward Said, Literature, orientalism, Pope, Rome

I am thankful for friends who raise difficult questions, because it forces me to answer them. Then again, it is difficult. It is difficult precisely because, while I would like to simply agree with what Chinglican has said in defense of Anglicanism, the matter lies too close to the heart of the issue. If what he says is true, there would not be that much point in becoming Catholic – I would be Catholic already as an Anglican. And so, while I want to answer as irenically as possible, my response might be shocking and kind of offensive because the matter is too pressing a question to be dealt with sensitively. So I request the forgiveness of those I offend.

Basically, Chinglican argues that there are two churches in the Anglican church, the political and the literary. The political is not really very justifiable. But the literary has been there time and time again to raise the thorny theologies that imperialism would suppress. In many ways, this read on Anglican history seems about right, which is probably why I became an English major. Early on, I realized that some of the most profound theological things happening in the English milieux were works of literature. Literature, for Chinglican, plays for the Anglican church the function the pope is supposed to play for the Catholic church – to call kings to account.

I will not get into the history of this, as such would be tedious and could be reckoned in many and various ways. I could imagine an interpretation that sees literature as theological protest, as well as an interpretation that sees literature as a political flunky. But the one thing I would point out is that the capacity of literature to fulfill its critical function is directly dependent on its connection to real theology. Donne could be what he was because he was so deeply indebted to pre-Tridentine Catholicism. And the political split did not immediately destroy all theology. It did not take away the wealth of things that had gone before.

But I can’t help wondering how sustainable this might be. I would certainly agree that, in the Early Modern period, literature is a form of theological protest and critique, seen particularly in someone like Milton. But by the Victorian period or so, I’m not so sure. The Blakean romantics have run off with sola emotion, and the Enlightenment types have run off with reason (see Pope’s Essay on Man). Literature gets appropriated by various movements and finds itself left without a theology, and all we have left is poor Mr. Collins of Pride and Prejudice to defend us from the monarch. What I am getting at is that, if English literature has in the Early Modern period the protesting character Chinglican sees in it, this has significantly cooled by the time the Victorians come around with their state-embedded church. There are of course exceptions to this. But if Chinglican can truncate history, so can I. What I am getting at is that English literature can protest just to the degree that it has in its cultural memory a kind of faith that can protest against the state, the kind of faith seen in Thomas More and (dare I say) Guy Fawkes? But amnesia sets in, and the church is integrated nicely with the state.

And I suppose this is my difficulty. I imagine I would find it much easier to be an Anglican (actually, the term Anglican is anachronistic here) in the Early Modern period – that is, if I didn’t lose my head for some reason or other. But now, the church is so far removed from that root that I imagine to actually be the kind of Anglican that wants union with Rome – that weeps proportionate tears and longs for the radix, the root – would be emotionally devastating. I am all for mourning. But the level of mourning required here would kill me and make me unable to function. Put another way, it seems to me that far too many Anglicans claim to want unity, but in fact are quite happy going about their merry lives without a pope. And this leads me to the question of orientalism.

Because in a very real way, I think the thing that annoys me about many Anglo-Catholics is that they are Anglicans discovering a Saidean orient in the Catholic church. I have a friend working on the French as the “other” to English “normalcy” – the other both exotic and dangerous – and I kind of think that a similar thing occurs with Catholicism. It is the deeply dangerous thing we all have to fear – reading some of the English indictments of Catholicism are a little like reading some of the modern indictments of terrorism (though again, there was a Guy Fawkes, who seems to have been both). But the Catholic church is also fascinating in all its gaudy dangerousness. Shakespeare’s attractive “Catholic” fool Feste is counter-posed to the “Puritan” Malvolio. It is no surprise that Oscar Wilde, when he becomes increasingly interested in faith near the end of his life, is interested to Catholicism. Like good Englishmen, we are attracted with Charles Ryder of Brideshead to the many exotic sins of Catholicism. The Catholic church is the foreign woman that both threatens and mesmerizes England.

But I will go one further: we are all, whenever we encounter anyone or anything, orientalists, that is, original sinners. We all of us will always initially encounter the other like this. The real question is what we do with this encounter. Do we keep the exotic as a pet, to pleasure us and remind us of our own superiority by turns? Or do we in fact engage – try to get past this impression and encounter the other on terms other than our own? Because this for me is the real question. Am I appreciating Catholic theology as an ornament or pet of my own individuality, or am I in fact in the state of knowing what it means to be fully Catholic, that is submitting to the Magesterium? Many Anglo-Catholics critique the highly individualistic appropriation of Scripture in Evangelical circles, but isn’t Anglo-Catholicism just the flip-side of the coin, an individualistic interpretation of Christian tradition ultimately unguided and undisciplined by the authority of the Church?

I realize that what I am saying here will anger many, but I can’t help feeling this way. If I am going to preach Catholicism, I want to know the pain of being Catholic, rather than preach something that I can leave at the door when I go home at night. Because I am not content manipulating a Catholic orient. No, I want the Catholic church.

Once More With(out) Feeling: OCD as an Amplifying Factor in Thinking About Matters of Faith

Tags

Anxiety, Catholic, Catholicism, Christ, Christianity, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Faith, God, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD

Today I want to talk about the elephant in the room. That would be OCD. It plays a factor in all of what I’ve said, and it is only fair to address this. The factor it plays works in multiple ways.

First, the doubt and fear I have felt recently is something I haven’t felt quite so strongly since high-school, when I went through a very severe period of OCD, severely doubting simultaneously (it will sound odd) whether Christianity was true and whether I had in fact done the right things (e. g. prayed the proper prayer, been devoted enough etc.) to be a Christian. As with most OCD fears, my experience was based on fears that are in some situations valid, but that were amplified and made ubiquitous by OCD. It is, for instance, not an unusual thing for those who grow up in a Christian context to have doubts about their faith at some point, and about whether they are in fact Christian because they believe it or are just going along with their family. Usual, yes, but as I pointed out to a psychiatrist once when he asked how I knew it was OCD, it is not usual to be so caught up in one’s mind that one can’t even participate in regular conversation. It is not usual to hole oneself up in one’s room to replay a loop – an unanswerable loop that will in fact find chinks in any and every potential answer to all questions, no matter how absurd. It is to be afflicted with doubting for its own sake (it is not for no reason they call it the doubting disease), rather than in fact looking for something. They say that at the root of OCD is an inability to live with uncertainty, that is, to proceed (as most people do without realizing it) taking a certain amount of things for granted and being okay going what seems most plausible rather than waiting for 100% certainty to act (compulsions are attempts to neutralize and gain control over the uncertainty). People don’t realize how much trust and faith they exercise daily in living their everyday lives, how much they take for granted. And it is right that they should. But when you have OCD, you can’t. Every moment and every site is an instance whereupon the world hangs. And theologically speaking it may be so. But those without OCD are able to blessedly let God or fate or whatever they believe in worry about that for them. With OCD, the fate of everything rests on one’s shoulders. And that is presumably why, in the prior posts, the question has emerged so urgently, and why it has been the thing I obsess about day and night, often to the detriment of things I ought to pay attention to. This, I want to be clear, is not a function of the validity of the question or the matters I am dealing with (I have written an entire doctoral dissertation haunted by the OC mentality, and it does not I think invalidate what I have argued – just makes it much harder to know the difference between real, valid criticisms and that of my fiercest and most false critic, my mind). For those staunch supporters of the Reformation who want to simply explain away what I have said on grounds of madness, I will here note that Luther, an instrumental figure in the Reformation, very probably had OCD. So it cuts both ways. I will not explain the Reformation away as merely a function of OCD if you will do me the favor of not explaining me away.

The OCD amplifying factor is perhaps most relevant in understanding my first post on these matters. OCD makes it hard for me to tell the difference between the Evangelical church as it exists and the Evangelical theology my OCD latched onto and warped into tyrannical torture. Was I so very attacked, or was my brain attacking me? And if my brain was attacking me, was it doing so on its own, or simply amplifying a real fear or danger in Evangelical culture? To make the converse of the Luther parallel again, the number of hits on that post do suggest that writing it was a little like climbing a blind staircase and reaching out to a rope for support, and finding that the rope rang a bell that everyone recognized. OCD or not, I seem to have hit on something.

But there are also other factors of OCD involved, and this is where I do think one can identify more of a problem in Evangelical theology. It has taken a long while for me to be able to articulate this, but part of my brand of OCD involves a fear of emotional/spiritual contamination. One knows the horrors in one’s own head – particularly when one suffers from intrusive thoughts – and one knows the potential for perverted intentions and manipulation – and one knows that even the best of us may fall prey to these. And so, from childhood onward, one of the deepest things I have wrestled with is how to relate to others. More typical contamination fear in OCD involves fear of spreading germs and diseases to others – the compulsion that follows the obsession usually involves a ridiculous standard of cleanliness and an avoidance of others (if you avoid others you cannot make them sick – at least until OCD dissolves even this certainty). This is me, but on an emotional and spiritual level. As a human being I have, like all others, an innate desire to connect with people, in friendship and in love. And in my worst OCD moments I refrain as far as possible because I do not want to ruin it. I do not want to ruin the people I love around me. I do not want to manipulate or use them. I do not want to think of them in improper ways. And so I avoid. There is a sense in which I can in fact be physically present with people and emotionally/spiritually absent, or as absent as is possible, my mind clenched in a tight little ball of control.

And this, I suppose, is where I will take Evangelicalism to task, and this for its individualism. From what I can tell in my experience of it, community is allowed and encouraged for those who have a taste for it, those who are extroverted or make friends easily. But it is not enough of a tenet of faith to be enforced. That is, there is not a spiritual duty to seek out those on the sidelines, who are isolated, and ensure they are participating in the community of the church. Faith, for Evangelicals, at the end of the day depends on one’s personal – where personal is understood as individual – relationship with God, and, at the end of the day, community is not part of salvation economy – we are left alone with God on our knees, and expected to do anything – whether the community agrees or not – that we feel God wants us to do (and if you protest that we are not left quite alone – we have the Bible – well, OCD unguided by tradition can do very funny things with that as well). And very often these things we feel God wants us to do – crazy from all normal perspectives – belong in fact to the voice of OCD in our heads. The person with OCD is left alone before a God he or she can’t see clearly, and out of respect for personal piety, no one will pry into them and help them to be real Christians, to experience real grace.

And this is where I see, at least in its ideal form (practical may be a different matter), the Catholic church being an improvement. Christ’s grace is mediated through the Church, and this, far from being a dilution of faith, is a way of supplanting that other mediator – our personal spirituality, our minds, our OCD – and making sure we are actually Christian. You will understand how desperate I am for such salvation if you consider my position; take whatever passion, reason, and imagination you may find in my writing, amp it up about ten times, and then imagine it fueled by a boundless ferocity and viciousness toward a particularly unfortunate target. Now imagine that you are that target, and how that might feel. And now realize that I, in fact, become such a target daily, a target of my own most deadly weaponry. Let me introduce my traveling companion, OCD. Please to meet him; can you guess his name?

There are two relevant Chesterton quotes that I have been particularly thinking about lately. One is from the biography of Thomas, where he suggests that the beauty of Thomas’s incarnational theology is that it saves people from their own spirituality. I understand this, and it is in fact a very important aspect of the Church even before Aquinas – part of the Church’s uneasiness about eremitic monasticism emerged from this very problem – crazy people like me going off into the desert for reasons only masquerading as God-inspired, and unguided by the tempering factor of community.

The other Chesterton quote I am reminded of is his observation that the Church is like a detective that hunts down people and finds out their sins, not to condemn them, but to forgive them. This is what I need. I need a church that is a hunter, relentless as a hound, that will pursue me to the utter reaches of hell and batter my heart till the fortress falls. And I’m not sure how many ecclesiologies are strong enough to do this. Certainly, a church is weakened in this regard just to degree that it is not bound to the heavy and ponderous battering ram of tradition with Scripture glowing at its core. And though I am still having trouble explaining to others this next matter on anything other than grounds of desperate hunger, I want a church with the full package. Seven sacraments. A Mary blessed among women and called blessed by all generations (an assertion strangely not accepted by most alleged Biblical “literalists”). A full set of the communion of saints. And a real presence in the Eucharist (this IS my body) that I can not only appreciate in the experience of communion, but that I can also adore. Because the gates of hell are strong gates indeed, and they are very deeply embedded in me, and salvation can be nothing less than a full assault on these gates with all the forces available – material, spiritual, and otherwise – in heaven and on earth. Indeed, I even imagine that many Evangelicals and Protestants reading this are right now agreeing with me and wondering why I would have to be Catholic to think this. I may not, but I am not sure that it can come out of any other imaginative matrix than Catholic tradition infused to saturation with Scripture.

An Open Letter to the Evangelical Church: Where the Hell Were You?

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Bible, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Christ, Christianity, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Trinity

For a good long time now I have been very attracted to and defensive of Catholicism.  Certain things recently have made this attraction more pressing, and something I need to figure out now rather than at some point in the distant future. And usually when I bring this up with some of my Evangelical friends, they are uncomfortable – usually the strategy is to point to some superficial, cherry-picked proof text that allegedly tells against Catholicism, and to tell me that I am becoming un-Biblical or something and that I need to be careful. That there are scandals in the Catholic church, which are inherent in the Church and not incidental, as apparently is the case in Evangelical scandals. In fact, as someone who grew up in Evangelicalism, I don’t even need someone around to tell me these things; my brain is so trained that these responses pop up all by themselves. Here is my response, but I want to begin with a clarification. As I write this I do not have a specific person in mind, and I will also add that not all the Evangelicals I know and knew are like this (though incidentally usually those who are not seem to be outliers in their churches). But I do want to respond to this voice, and my response can be summed up as follows: You who care – who suddenly care so much about my faith – where the hell were you? Where were you, when I was spiritually thirsty and you did not give me a drink, when instead I got a shiny powerpoint presentation? Where were you during the times of doubt and fear, depression and OCD, when I was forced to dig – deep into Christian tradition – to find those parts of the communion of Saints that actually spoke to my condition? Where were you when my world was shattered, multiple times? Where were you when I was the odd person on the edge – the person who didn’t and still doesn’t fit in – and you had the advantage of being normal? If it matters so much now to you – that I stay – where were you when it counted?

And do not, for a moment, think of answering with something emergent or hipster or some such bilge. As far as I am concerned, this is just Evangelicalism 2.0, yet another attempt to be culturally sensitive, that is, to absorb and overlook the most destructive elements of a culture of death just because you want to be relevant. When we were children, we wounded with the sword of modernity. Now that we have become adults we have put away childish things and taken up the more sophisticated passive aggressive sword of postmodernity, or whatever it is we are in right now. No, I do not want to attend your church with some cool and sensitive symbolic name. And yes, I do suggest your ecclesial structure is as unstable as the shifting movement of history. And no, I don’t care what you think “modern people” (whoever they are) need. I need love. I need Christ. And you think I want a trinket wrapped in the gaudy disguise of ostensible sincerity.

Of course, others will say all this is not at all the issue. Surely one should hold to the truth regardless of one’s experience. So, these will say, you have had a bad experience with the Evangelical church. So what. Christ and Christianity are not synonymous with the church. Maybe you should just stay the course regardless – suffer through it for the sake of truth. But what truth, and how do I know it is truth? The things that Evangelicals think are so self-evident Biblically are in fact not (show me how we get the doctrine of the Trinity without tradition and I will be happy to listen to you). Just reading through the Bible will not make me an Evangelical – it will not even necessarily make me a Christian. Because the Bible is received through the church. What you are telling me is that I should, despite bad experiences, stick with the Bible as understood by the Evangelical church out of a sense of loyalty to truth in spite of difficulty. And if you protest that yours is simply a plain reading – not informed by and dependent on the Evangelical church – I will be happy to point out all the cultural and other factors that have slanted your “plain reading.” There are many heretics who were “just plain readers” of Scripture. So you are faced with a choice: are you asking me to stay true to a Biblical faith unmediated through a certain Christian community? Or are you asking me to trust the Evangelical community? If the former, I would suggest that such a Bible does not exist (given that individual interpretation itself is shaped by the community that it is part of) – if you think you are just reading the Bible plainly, on your own, you are manifestly unaware of the structural and ideological forces that have shaped you. Not (I think) that being so shaped is necessarily a bad thing – but it does make things a matter of which communities one trusts rather than a matter of looking under a rock and finding God one day.

And this is where my problem is. I cannot trust Evangelicalism, with its suggestion that somehow, in spite of the fact that most Medieval writers had the Bible at the tip of their tongue in a way that no one does today, they went wrong whereas we in our modern laziness and stupidity have somehow got it right via “progress.” Evangelicals protest – what about the Bible, won’t it get lost in tradition? I would reply that the Bible is precisely the reason I question Evangelicalism. I question it because the Bible, a book that ought to be read as God’s word, has become a pawn of modern relevance. And those who become reactionary – the “it isn’t popular but God’s word says it” kind of people – are usually just the same people in a converse dress. Their agenda for the Bible is set by a reactionary knee jerk reaction to the relevant “liberals.” Far from being a simple confrontation of corrupt modern culture with God’s word, theirs is the dissolution of the Bible in a simplistic and modern worldly polemic. And so, no, I’m not sure that I would stick with this community in spite of bad experiences – because often there is not even a Bible at the heart of it to keep me there.

As far as I am concerned, the ecclesiology I have found that actually supports sticking with a Church – amidst and despite its sins and scandals – is a Catholic ecclesiology, because it insists that Christ’s church inheres in its material manifestation beyond some vague ethereal thing that disappears every time you try to grasp it. It insists that there is something in the very material fabric of the Church herself that justifies sticking with her over against any of the pain-sparing merits of disembodied spirituality. And I have come to see that being part of a church will mean being faithful to something because God is there rather than because I feel a certain way about it or have a certain experience with it. And unless you can convince me that at the heart of Evangelicalism there is something worth trusting, all the picky little trick questions and idle challenges you can throw at me won’t do a thing. Even a single tear or a gesture toward recognizing my pain might do miraculously more, though it may be too late for that. You – who care so much, so concerned about protecting a Bible you don’t actually read, a Bible you appropriate for you own purposes – where was your concern when I was in pain? Where the hell were you?