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KARL KEATING'S E-LETTER
TOPICS:
"UNFRIENDLY AND INDIFFERENT": MOI?
CATHOLICS TURNING RIGHT
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
I am old enough to remember when long-distance calls were uncommon and overseas calls were a rarity.
If a long-distance call came in, you dropped everything and rushed to the phone, largely out of courtesy to the caller, who was spending a not inconsiderable sum to contact you.
If the call was from overseas, as likely as not it was bad news about a distant relative--otherwise, why would anyone go to such expense when an airmail letter (remember those?) made more economic sense?
Today you can call the furthest point on the globe for only pennies a minute, and you can be in touch with someone there at essentially no cost if you use the Internet.
In a way, Prague or Sao Paulo or Auckland are as close as the next town along the freeway, but that is a perception that may never register completely with those of us raised on an older technology.
Thus my attention was caught by a reader's response to one of these E-Letters:
"Thanks for the forth-right views. I appreciate them. Jacques Bezuidenhout, Namibia."
Not that many years ago any message from Namibia would have arrived in a flimsy envelope bedecked with a peculiar-looking stamp.
One glance and you'd know that the letter came from Far Away.
Today you have to read the fine print to realize that an e-mail was posted by someone on the other side of the globe, living in a place you likely will never see.
No doubt some clever theologian has taken a cue from this annihilation of distance and has drawn inferences about what it is like in the Hereafter, where everyone is instantly present to everyone else.
SEEN AND UNSEEN
A few issues ago I wrote about my impending backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon and said, "With luck I will see no one during my time in the wilderness."
Reader Terry Gleason wrote back:
"Doesn't that sound a bit inhuman?
Consider that Catholicism comes from the Mediterranean civilization, and such cultures value human contact much greater than our own.
While trapped in mass mind culture, we often like to isolate ourselves from each other, but Catholicism preaches the beauty of human contact.
While you do go in the wilderness to 'escape,' hoping to see 'no one,' gives the impression of being rather unfriendly and indifferent."
Maybe I am unfriendly and indifferent.
I will leave that judgment to the individual reader and particularly to those who know me personally (and to those who know I have sympathy for St. Jerome, the patron of crabby people).
What I can affirm is that I like to spend time far from my usual haunts.
Partly I like the absence of crowdedness (I live in the sixth largest city in the country).
I like the quiet and fresh air and distant vistas.
I like the exercise of putting one foot in front of the other, thousands of times in a day.
And, yes, I like the solitude.
Frankly, I could do without much of the "human contact" I get in the Big City:
the guy who plays loud rap music while stopped at the traffic light;
the check-out clerk with six studs in his ears and a vacant look in his eyes;
the construction worker who leers at passing women;
the folks who worship at sports arenas rather than in churches;
most denizens of the mall.
I wish most of my everyday "human contacts" were people as well rounded as Mr. Gleason probably is--or I wish that I took fewer cues from St. Jerome and more from St. Francis.
But even the latter lit out for the countryside, didn't he?
Some people never feel a need to do so; either they find sufficient fulfillment in the midst of our mass culture, or they never have developed an appreciation for things rural.
I am not one of them.
I think Mr. Gleason read too much into my comments, and I don't want to read too much into his.
We shouldn't do that with Scripture, and we shouldn't do that with casual and uninspired writings.
Besides, I suspect he and I are not really in much disagreement.
I value our cultural heritage.
The problem is that I don't find much of it in everyday life.
I also think that time alone in the wilderness is a good corrective;
it helps wash away the mental soot that unavoidably settles on us.
IF "U.S. CATHOLIC" SAYS IT, IT MUST BE TRUE
Well, not exactly, but this flagship of Catholic liberalism does have an unexpected cover story this month:
"A Turn in the Right Direction," written by Bob Smietana.
He looks at movements toward orthodoxy within the Church, and the list of contacts at the end of the article includes Opus Dei, Women for Faith and Family, the Institute on Religious Life, Catholics United for the Faith, EWTN, PetersNet, and--ta daa!--Catholic Answers.
You can read the article at:
http://www.uscatholic.org/2003/05/cov0305.htm
After looking at how St. Thomas of Canterbury Church in Chicago turned from being a "progressive" parish to an "orthodox" one, Smietana offers a contrasting point of view from Fr. Paul Hansen, a Redemptorist priest in Toronto.
Fr. Hansen worries about new seminarians who are "to the right of Attila the Hun.
They believe they have been ordained to undo what my generation has done."
I feel Father's pain.
I hope you do too.
But the fact is he's right:
Although new seminarians are not being ordained precisely to undo what his generation has done, that is what will happen--and the sooner the better.
You get a sense of the problem when Smietana describes Hansen as saying there is a danger in claming to know "exact details of theological truth."
One can affirm belief in the Real Presence and the Resurrection, "but knowing precisely what those beliefs mean is another matter."
Isn't there something insouciant about that attitude?
"Sure, we believe in the Real Presence and the Resurrection, but we don't worry about what they mean."
With that approach you are likely to end up with a contentless faith, and what good is that?
People are turning away from "progressive" parishes because they are tired of not affirming anything other than platitudes.
You remember that famous line from "The Imitation of Christ":
"I would rather feel compunction than know how to define it."
True as far as it goes, but I would prefer to feel compunction while simultaneously knowing its definition.
I want to affirm belief in the Real Presence and the Resurrection, and I also want to know what those beliefs really are, to the extent such mysteries are revealed to us.
This makes for a hard-edged faith: We say Yes to this and No to that.
Fr. Hansen's generation of priests, for the most part, offered a soft-edged faith.
It turned out to be a faith that didn't satisfy, which is why people of all ages are turning to what "U.S. Catholic" calls the right and to what I call orthodoxy.
It's the wave of the future--and the wave of the present.
I'm afraid Fr. Hansen and priests who think like him will find themselves left behind.
One has to feel for them, but our feelings should not dissuade us from going where we need to go.
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