“There are no absolutes,” said the eleventh-grade English teacher. “Absolutely none?” came the wisecrack from the center aisle. Those in the class who got the joke snickered. The teacher was only slightly amused.
The year was 1977, the place Natrona Heights, Pennsylvania, and the sarcastic but philosophically-minded student was me. I forget whether the discussion was about English usage, literature, or life in general. At least I didn’t get sent down the hall to the principal that time, unlike in the previous year’s English class, where I chewed a garlic clove after a classmate dared me to do it.
I remember another incident around with the eleventh-grade teacher. We had an assignment to write a journal, and she was going over my work with me individually. The subject of religion came up. I mentioned I was a theist and an Anglo-Catholic. She said, “You may be a theist; but I am an a-theist.” I asked her why. She replied, “I used to be a Catholic, but then my husband was killed in a car crash.”
I hope I said something sympathetic at that point, but I remember thinking that this somehow fit in with her other remark that there were no absolutes — attractive on the surface, but not logical. If there were no absolutes, there would be no absolute truths, and so the slogan “no absolutes” could not be absolutely true. Similarly, if there is a God, and if she once believed in him, how did her husband s death change the situation? Did God break any promises, stated or implied?
By that age, and ever since, I never doubted that God existed, that death itself was not any reason to think otherwise. I had read C. S. Lewis’s Problem of Pain and his other writings (all that were then available; later on I read his posthumous works as they appeared). I decided I not only would read everything Lewis himself wrote (ambitious enough) but the books he recommended. I’m not quite finished. Perhaps someone could market the idea as “The C. S. Lewis Lifetime Reading Plan,” analogous to the “Great Books” program, The Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan by Fr. John Hardon, or John Senior’s “Thousand Great Books.” Despite my having failed to carry out the “Lewis Program” in its entirety, I made progress, not only in reading him but in reading his recommendations. This “Program” brought me in and out of libraries and used-book stores. Usually, I shared Lewis s enthusiasm for the books thus found.
They were often hard to locate — some obscure titles I never tracked down — but I spent much time and money to buy or borrow great quantities of books by the Inklings, George MacDonald, Coventry Patmore, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Thomas Kempis, Plato, Aristotle, Rudolf Otto, Edwyn Bevan, William Langland, Jane Austen, Thomas Aquinas, Dickens, Dante, Pascal, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Ronald Knox, Sir Arnold Lunn, Thomas More, Bunyan, Wordsworth, Spenser, George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Chaucer, Guillaume de Lorris, Augustine, Samuel Johnson all are writers quoted and endorsed by Lewis in one or more passages of his works.
They are of course quite a mixed lot. Not all are of equal literary or spiritual merit, but, with a few exceptions, they were strongly Christian in outlook and helped confirm in me the conviction that, whatever else might be debatable, Christianity was a given and Lewis a sage.
The next step in my pilgrimage was a difficult one. Now that I had decided to stay a Christian, it remained to be seen which was the most accurate definition of this Christian body. What were its characteristics? How best to defend the core beliefs of Christianity? (It was obvious that they had fallen on hard times and deaf ears recently.) Was there any of ficial list of these beliefs, and how did I know which needed most emphasis? Where did the light end and the darkness of error begin? One who claimed to be a Christian could in practice mean almost anything by it, as my own experience and the history of American and British religious life proved. Many were saying “Lord, Lord” who were not doing the will of the Father. This was distressing, but, in taking Lewis along as my guide, I was hopeful of finding my way.
I had been baptized as an infant in the Episcopal Church. Though I attended youth groups and summer camps from other Protestant denominations and Inter-Varsity Fellowship while in college, I was about as loyal an Episcopalian as could be imagined acolyte, lay reader, and choir member. I suppose I had stepped inside a Catholic Church not more than twice in my first twenty years nor more than five times in my first thirty.
I had heard the usual terrible things about Catholics from my earliest years: They were too rigid, too lax; too scrupulous, too unscrupulous; they ignored the Bible, they naively believed every word of the Bible; they were always too defensive and too indefensible; they believed too much in works and not enough in “the work ethic” ; they said the wrong things and then didn t do as they said; they were seeking world power and were too provincial; they drank too much wine but they drank no wine at communion. They were obviously wrong to be Catholics, but we Episcopalians were “just as Catholic” as they were and could say the Nicene Creed without any qualms at the dread adjective “Catholic.”
I accepted all these and other charges, until starting to read C. S. Lewis at about age thirteen and, years later in college, Chesterton. I read Lewis’s Mere Christianity many times over and was struck with the passage in which he says that his book was not intended to tell people whether they should become Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Roman Catholic and that “even in the list I have just given, the order is alphabetical.”
This throwaway phrase was a thunderbolt. If it meant anything, it meant that he did not consider the Roman Catholic position to be untenable or even necessarily inferior to his own. Even though this may seem a patronizing view of the Catholic Church, for me it represented a step forward at least now I began to take notice of Catholicism and was even prepared to learn from it on occasion (jolly good of me, eh?). Until I read Lewis I had no fixed notion of Catholicism but had assumed it was untenable. In his other works he spoke favorably about some Catholic beliefs and practices.
Still, he had never become a Catholic, and I clung to the church in which I was born and raised. I savored the Book of Common Prayer for its powerful liturgical language. The atmosphere of Anglicanism was hard to give up; those who have done so too can verify this. I even loved the music in the 1940 hymnal, which was in use until revised in the 1980s. When at last I became a Catholic in the 1990s, I found Catholics singing many of the hymns I had grown up with, so I had no culture shock in that department, except perhaps when the language of hymns was inclusified (rhymes with “crucified” ).
The 1979 revision of the Book of Common Prayer turned out not the disappointment to me that it proved to be to some converts. I was already in college and did not take much notice of any change in the rites. The hymnal, on the other hand, I thought was “disimproved” a few years later by the revisionists, but I did not consider myself among those who would leave their church just because of distaste for the music. (This attitude has helped now that I m a Catholic.)
I took to heart the words of Alexander Pope, who criticized those as “tuneful fools” who read poetry merely
. . . to please their ear,
Not mend their minds: as some to church repair,
Not for the doctrine, but for the music there.
He was speaking of poetry, but the idea applies to liturgy as well, I think.
Now, as much as I appreciate doctrine, I am far from being indifferent to church music, unlike C. S. Lewis, who claimed to dislike hymns. I switched from an English major in college to a music major and assuredly not from any lack of interest in English literature.
Some mention should be made of the influence that Catholic composers, not just Catholic authors, have had on my conversion – the main point is that I gradually discovered that great Protestant composers such as Bach and Handel, whom I revered, did not come out of nowhere. They built upon the polyphonic music and techniques of earlier and Catholic composers. Say what you like in praise of Bach, and I too could say much, he was not an innovator. Historians of music will verify what I say there is even a book entitled Bach the Borrower.
Even where he did not directly borrow melodies from Catholic composers, he learned his craft by studying, among other things, sacred polyphonic music from the Catholic Church. In my music history classes I became acquainted with works by Franco-Flemish, Italian, and English composers whose ingenuity created canons and fugues every bit as remarkable as Bach s, but, since they were doing all this a couple of centuries earlier than Bach, their names are mostly forgotten today.
For two years I was privileged to sing with a choral group in Northern Virginia, the Collegium Cantorum, which specializes in “large forms for small choirs” from the Medieval and Renaissance eras. The director, Timothy Kendall, has produced quite a few concerts in local churches over the years. He has performed music from the Eton Choirbook, a collection of liturgical music of England dated around 1500. It somehow escaped destruction during the turmoil of the Reformation (only about half the pages were missing, not bad treatment for those days) and lay undisturbed in the library at Eton College until rediscovered in the 1950s. The music is of a spectacular complexity – rather a challenge to perform well. The texts are mostly Marian, and before I was through with that group, I was a changed man.
In my head I was still protesting, if more feebly by the year, but “the heart has its reasons,” as Pascal said. The concerts we did in St. Matthew s Cathedral left an indelible impression on me. In the program notes to the concerts, Tim provided translations of the texts. Here is a translation of Gaude Rosa Sine Spina:
“Rejoice, Rose without thorn, Virgin, morning star shining more brightly than heaven, in whom the honor of chastity and righteousness flowers ever more pleasingly. In you there is no fall into uncleanness, but you alone have all the treasures of virtue.
“For you have borne God and after the birth remained a virgin, untouched parent. This is she who conquered and trod upon the serpent, dispersing the guilt of Eve. This is she who brings healing to the sick, brandishing a shield against the enemy.
“Rejoice, O Mother, in your beauty, you whom angelic dignity does not surpass in honor; for you, O Queen, hold the scepter and sit beside the King in the realm of heaven, whose head, crowned with gold and decked with gems, shines among the wondering stars. The throng of angels and the choir of saints does not cease to extol you in praise.
“O how worthy a Mother to God we proclaim you, and how kind to us wretched ones; once called upon, you grant whatever the heavy heart desires and do not desert us. Therefore, I beg, reconcile to Christ those here praying and singing your praises, and permit the heavens to be reopened and us to be gathered to you for all eternity. Amen.”
There is profound doctrine here, as in most Catholic prayers, and I began to see some connections. Some of my prejudices were being undermined. I was “suspending my disbelief,” at first maybe just as a performer, but before long I was praying this prayer as a prayer. I now have no doubt that I was heard. In the midst of the other voices singing, above the distant sounds of a thunderstorm and the L Street traffic in Washington (for these can be no obstacles to the Mother of our Lord), my prayer went up.
That was one of my visits to a Catholic church, but not the first one. I think that the first time was in Philadelphia on our tenth-grade trip. I tagged along with the guy who supplied me the garlic. Twice I went to the National Shrine in Washington, first as a tourist during another high school trip and years later to hear John Michael Talbot. One item in the concert was “The Lord ‘s Supper,” his setting of texts from the liturgy. I found and still find much of his music very appealing.
Yet another visit took place in Florida, when my mother and I mistook the Catholic parish for the Episcopal church across the street. I remember being a little taken aback by the raffle ticket sales outside and the bigger-than-average crowd inside, but it didn t dawn on either of us that we were in the wrong church until the lector welcomed us to Saint’—–s Catholic Church.
We left in a hurry, nearly stopping the procession with a head-on collision. We were fittingly punished for this rudeness; we had parked in the middle of the lot and couldn t budge the car until Mass let out. “I fled Him, down the nights and down the days . . .”
Yet another visit was to the Cathedral of St. Thomas More in Arlington, Virginia. The music director at that time was Haig Mardirosian, and he had composed special music for the consecration of the new bishop. I sang in the choir. It was a spectacular Mass, and the effect of it was not lost on me. The orchestral music (to a music-theory and composition student like myself) was quite good enough. But what impressed me the most was a simple Communion hymn that was sung in two-part harmony to guitar accompaniment. If you ve attended Catholic parishes at all in the last twenty years, you ve heard it many times. I refer to the “One Bread, One Body.”
I remember thinking, “What a beautiful song.” To those who think such songs hackneyed and long for the days of Gregorian chant from the Liber Usualis, I say only this: I agree in part some modern songs have lost the sense of the sacred and yes, I do like chant, and I even chose Gregory the Great for my patron saint. But gold is where you find it or, to again quote Alexander Pope, “Be not the first by whom the new is tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”
Like many who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, I had some familiarity with the music played in Evangelical churches and on their radio stations, “contemporary Christian music,” as it was generally dubbed (no pun intended). Among the recording artists I listened to was Keith Green. His No Compromise album was perhaps his most popular record. It had these words in the title song:
Make my life a prayer to you
I want to do what you want me to
No empty words and no white lies
No token prayers, no compromise.
I used to read the Last Days Newsletter published by Green’s ministry. I have copies somewhere of the anti-Catholic articles he began publishing toward the end of his life. (He died in a plane crash.) I remember being disturbed by these and skeptical of his portrait of Catholic beliefs, partly because I considered myself to be Catholic in some sense (after all, didn t I recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday?) I mention him mainly to supply background for the following incident.
I was working in the early 1980s at Reston Publishing Company in Virginia, and a young lady who worked there was a Catholic. She once gave me a ride to the subway. On the way there she mentioned that she was a Catholic. I said that I was an Anglo-Catholic and went on to say that I found it “a nice compromise” between Catholicism and Protestantism – perhaps the most fatuous remark I have ever made. Her reply was quick and ready: “There is no compromise.”
I could never hear that Keith Green song again without those words of hers echoing in my mind. (Green himself would have been on the Protestant side of the “compromise.” My attention was uneasily divided between two different sides a frequent complaint of people who are sitting on fences.)
A few months later my father died, and this same young woman told me that she had just had a Mass said for my father. I asked her, “You had a what?” “Don t you know what a Mass is?” “Of course I do.” In reality, I had only the foggiest notion of what she meant. “They prayed for him at church.” “Oh. Thank you very much.”
It would be nice if I could point to more personal influences, perhaps holy friend or a relative with a gift for apologetics, who helped me along the way. But I won t mislead you. None of my close friends or relatives was Catholic. An uncle was an articulate atheist. When he lay dying (in a Catholic nursing home) there was a picture of Pope John Paul II on the wall, and, though my uncle s speech had been affected by a stroke, he could still point and say, “That’s a bad man.”
For every good example there were these other, less salutary ones. Ironically, even bad examples, even bitter anti-Catholics, can do much good, against their will. They can be instructional books, after a fashion. Salvation history is full of bad examples, from Cain to Judas to the latest scandal-monger. In my contacts with ex-Catholics, I often detected a note of the illogical, the petty, or the confused.
More perplexing than the ex-Catholics and the anti-Catholics were the nominal Catholics. They tell you, “I am a Catholic, of course, but. . . “Then they assert something at variance with Catholic teaching. I have in mind contemporary theologians such as Charles Curran. Even before I became a Catholic, I was puzzled by his struggle to retain a teaching position in the theology department of Catholic University of America.
I followed the events up to the hearing in which a judge ruled that the Church was not infringing his rights of tenure, contract, or academic freedom by dismissing him. I am not acquainted with Curran, but I had a heightened interest in his case because I worked for two years at the reference library at CUA.
This brings me back to books. It was ultimately through reading that my difficulties were resolved. Study of the Bible helped, since through it I was able to see where Catholicism was born and how the sacraments appear in the context of the early Church. Although the parables had been confusing when given non-Catholic interpretations, they made luminous sense when “the kingdom” was considered as “the Church.”
While at CUAI had the opportunity to read many works on Catholicism. I particularly liked apologetics and books by Catholic converts such as Sheldon Vanauken, Peter Kreeft, and Thomas Howard. Several titles published by Ignatius Press were particularly persuasive for me. I read Kenneth Baker s three-volume Catholicism, Karl Keating s Catholicism and Fundamentalism, and works by Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar.
One of the best parts of working in the library was getting to check out volumes that were not readily available as reprints G. K. Chesterton’s innumerable essays, Robert Hugh Benson’s Confessions of a Convert and Religion of the Plain Man, and Ronald Knox’s Spiritual Aeneid, Difficulties, and Caliban in Grub Street(my personal favorite for its hard-hitting logic and gentle but devastating satire on modernity s religious confusions). I read John Henry Newman’s sermons, Development of Christian Doctrine, and his ever-popular rebuttal of Charles Kingsley, Apologia Pro Vita Sua(or in the vulgar: Well, Excuse Me For Living!)
The sermon that cinched it was “Faith and Doubt.” I read this in an anthology, The Treasury of Catholic Wisdom, edited by John Hardon and soon thereafter was knocking on the parish door. That was over four years ago. It is unclear at this writing whether I am called to a religious vocation or to remain a layman, but I have every confidence that God, who has begun a good work in me, will complete it. I can do no better than to end with a portion from Newman’s magnificent sermon:
“As in a court of justice, one man s innocence may be proved at once, another s is the result of careful investigation . . . so Holy Church presents herself very differently to different minds who are contemplating her from without. God deals with them differently; but, if they are faithful to their light, at last, in their own time, though it may be a different time to each, He brings them to that one and the same state of mind, very definite and not to be mistaken, which we call conviction. . . . A man may be so sure upon six reasons, that he does not need a seventh . . . As regards the Catholic Church, men are convinced in very various ways: what convinces one does not convince another; but this is an accident; the time comes anyhow, sooner or later, when a man ought to be convinced, and is convinced.”