Last month in this space I remarked that, with the publication of “Reflections on Covenant and Mission,” “making a case for the Catholic faith has been made all the more difficult.” Many other commentators have said the same thing. The joint Catholic-Jewish document, while intending to clarify, has misstated Catholic teaching, and now a lot of people are running around trying to clean up the mess.
In fairness, I should note that I and other “professional Catholics” are open to a charge of tu quoque (which translates roughly as “And so’s your old man!”). While I do not recall ever misstating the faith in print, I certainly have fallen into muddleheadedness at times, an occupational hazard of those who allow the ease of composition at the computer to lull them into literary complacency.
There still are Catholic writers who write the old-fashioned way. No, not with quill and ink well-I do not know anyone that old-fashioned-but with pen and paper. That is much slower than tapping the keyboard, but slowness sometimes is an advantage. Let me explain by way of analogue.
When I was in high school I took a speed-reading course. I was amazed at how much faster I was able to turn the pages. My speed went up by a factor of eight, but my comprehension went down by a factor of eight. I came to appreciate the joke told about the man who read War and Peace in half an hour. When asked to explain the novel, he said, “It’s about Russia.”
So I abandoned speed reading and settled back into my sluggish savoring of words. Ever since high school I have read not to get to the end of a book but to learn from it and to see what the author does with the language. I may be a slower reader than many, but I take in more than just the gist of a book, and I try to learn from others’ good writing how to improve my own style.
Just as one gets more out of a book by reading deliberately, so one puts more into (rather than just onto) a page by writing slowly. I know that to be true-I know it from my own experience and from observing other writers-but I do not follow my own advice often enough. Thus the occasional muddleheadedness.
Sometimes I have gone back and read something I wrote long ago-and cringed. Did I really state Catholic teaching so unclearly? What was I thinking? The problem was that I was not thinking. I was typing. When fingers are able to dance across a keyboard as fast as thought, we have an application of that mordant observation in Cool Hand Luke: “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
I feel like a penitent who confesses a sin that he knows he will commit again. I know I should try writing with a pen instead of a computer, but I too am a creature of (bad) habit.