For most of my life, but especially in the past few years, I have been laboring under a mind slavishly devoted to systems: systems of thought and of control, of piety, of religion, of money and commerce, of education. When I reflect on my life, I can remember my childhood slipping from unindividuated experiences of wonder and playfulness into the tunnel of slowly closing horizons that marks adulthood. I have regarded the systems which society uses to organize and control human beings as both my greatest comfort and cruelest jailer.
It comes on in strange ways. I, having always been a straight A student, nevertheless can still sense the palpable terror that tore my stomach in knots at the prospect of getting poor grades on a single test, seeing in this the slow but inevitable decline from failing that Algebra test, to failing the class, to failing to get into college, to failing to get a job, to failing utterly in life.
When I converted to apostolic Christianity in college, I felt certain that I was fleeing the confines of an uninformed and parochial Baptist religiosity which was my only connection with Christ, even despite the manifest sinfulness of my life up to that point. In the Catholic Church I did find solace, and nourishment. Without the graces bestowed upon me in my participation at the Eucharistic table, it is very possible that the spark of the divine within me, which calls me on past the horizons of my own self-constructed prisons, would have died out long ago.
Nevertheless, always seeking what is fundamental, what is solid and immovable, so that I might cling to it against the winds of the world, I found myself drawn deeper and deeper into the realm of the “traditional” Catholic. Though I didn’t attend a Latin mass, nor did my priest saunter around in a saturno and quote Lagrange from the pulpit, I clung to the advice and drank up the poison of persons and personalities that attacked the faith that had given me succor when I had become unmoored from both the Baptist tradition of my childhood and the self-destructive life of sin, calling such faith inadequate and dangerous. They claimed the Church was decadent, in terminal decline, unfit to shepherd souls. They prescribed moral rigorism and cultural recalcitrance as the rock upon which the Church was built. Along with this came a preoccupation with the mortally sinful, the obsessive-compulsive examinations of conscience that riddled my mind at even the slightest imperfection within myself. I will never forget the image of one particular priest who, on a talk show with one such hyper-traditionalist, railed against people grocery shopping on Sunday, laughing along as the host said in a mirthful tone of mockery that these people were “pushing their shopping carts into Hell.” The casual disdain with which these two men could condemn people to everlasting torment seemed, at the time, a reflection of how God would look upon me if I found myself in the flames.
I found it more and more difficult to look upon God as merciful and loving, and saw him as a reflection of the earthly taskmasters that I both resented and wanted eagerly to please, whether real or constructed in my own imagination. My failure to reflect the perfection of the moral rigorists, even despite my best efforts, reflected for me the utter despair with which I also regarded my economic situation and the way in which I had spectacularly failed in college to become an English teacher and so settled on earning an English Literature degree to salvage the time I had spent there. God, I felt, was one more unapproachable figure just like the bank officer who would never, in a million years, even deign to give me a predatory loan by which I could purchase a decent house for my growing family, or the boss who would retaliate against me if I even dared to ask for a raise.
All these kinds of despairs I grappled with, sometimes feeling in high spirits and much of the time feeling merely defeated. Then, I must confess, I began a series of conversations with a friend on the topic of universal salvation. He, a reverted Catholic, was a vigorous defender of the doctrine while I still clung surely to my Augustinian view of Hell, which I always returned to even after a brief period of mental flirtation with C.S. Lewis’s Hell of The Great Divorce or that of the more modern apologists. And in beseeching this friend of mine to return to what I regarded as orthodoxy, what the taskmaster God wanted for us, I all at once came to a realization that I did not, could not, believe in Augustine and Aquinas’s Hell. I suddenly found a wedge driven between myself and any that would say that God, knowing the consequences, would ever withdraw his hand, so to speak, from a sinner when he has the balm that will save his soul, and has it in radical abundance. How could he? And yet, how could this omnipotent God of decrees, which I think the Scholastics knew quite rightly worked on men in forceful ways and was not shackled by the fickleness of creaturely will, be reconciled with Lewis’s version of the city of Dis, even if the denizens thereof had painted the hideous words “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” onto the gates themselves?
Thus I opened my eyes to the mere possibility, the sincere hope, like von Balthasar, that God may, in fact, be a true ransom for all. That saints and learned men could not encompass all that God truly is. That he can work miracles, including bringing all of fallen creation back unto himself. And it was with this thought that I dared to hope that all of the magic of the world came flooding back to me. I began to ponder thoughts both higher and lower in greater dignity. Instead of asking what works I may do or not do to please the Lord, I began to revel in the majesty of the Cross. I saw, in my mind’s eye, stars and planets and creatures all praising God who would stop at nothing to reorder the whole cosmos into glorious harmony. And in my small thoughts I no longer pondered whether this or that small indiscretion of mine would send me into eternal fire, but rather I turned to hopeful thoughts. Silly, childish thoughts. Upon buying my wife a purple hyacinth for the house, whose fragrance seemed to kindle in me a real appreciation for flowers for the first time as I rode home with it in the car, I wondered at what kinds of fairies might live in (or on?) a hyacinth. Would the birds like it? Would it be happy in its pot on my porch? Would that my whole life was filled up with flowers and fairies and that be the legacy I leave my children: a goodly man who loved God’s creation, not a crabbed man who labored in drudgery and misery for his angry God.
Doctrinally, what am I? Who can say? Do I deny my Catholic faith? Most decidedly I do not, for I came to a new love of Christ and a full love of Christ through that very faith, and all of my dreams of cosmic reconciliation are inextricably settled in that world. But is Catholicism merely cassocks, confessionals and hellfire? Or is it quiet churchyards on a Monday afternoon, a Rosary murmured before Holy Mass, good Father O’Brian who drinks perhaps a little too much at the church social, and the children who play amongst the flowers and the trees in the rolling green hills, superintended by an old stone church with a reverberant brass bell?
Do I deny dogmas and doctrines? No. Do I deny those who put my God in a box and shut him away behind manuals and papal bulls? Decidedly so, for I was such a one that put this light under a bushel, and in revealing it I find all my despair having melted away.
I have spent too much of my life in abject fear, too much of my life in anxiety. I find all concerns I have nursed, railings against my political opponents and pearl-clutching at the moral decline of the world, fall away into one undifferentiated thought: that my God has ransomed me, my loving Father, and that he wishes to show me wonders, and wishes for me to revel in his Creation like the child I once was, and the child I will be again.
He lives!