“In love with ambient blessedness”
While trying to put some order into my bookshelves, I came across Frank Sheed’s The Church and I, his somewhat autobiographical recollections of his “experience of the Church,” and now I can’t put it down. (The epigram is from G.K. Chesterton: “We’re all in the same boat, and we’re all seasick.) Before I move to another point in a separate post, I reproduce the lovely poem Sheed quotes from Siegfried Sasson describing the poet’s conversion:
This, then, brought our new making. Much emotional stress—
Call it conversion; but the word can’t cover such good.
It was like being in love with ambient blessedness—
In love with life transformed—life breathed afresh,
though yet half understood.
There had been many byways for the frustrate brain,
All leading to illusions lost and shrines forsaken…
One road before us now–one guidance for our gain—
One morning light—whatever the world’s weather—
Wherein wide eyed to waken.
This simply validates what I have believed for quite some time. Christianity (Catholicism in particular) is an adult’s religion. You can spoon-feed children in any way, shape or form you choose, but sooner or later, for it to “take,” there has to be an adult reckoning with what (s)he thinks is believed. Therein comes the conversion experience. Catholicism seems woefully short on the recognition of the necessity of facilitating the way to conversion. Rules, practices, catechism – all laid out for you, but weak on urging and nudging you toward that “aha!” moment. That moment, in turn, motivates you to the rest of the journey to the time when you meet God face to face and realize what it was all about.
Years ago, a read this and it put me on my “aha!” journey:
“God does the choosing and you find out about the rest gradually from your folks: How you have landed in a turbulent and global household with the galaxy’s most eccentric rules; that the lights are never to be put out and the stranger never to be turned away; that the meals are to be served whenever there is hunger; that the groceries must be generously depleted and generously replenished with everything everyone has; that those who fret and grouse and cheat and lie and steal and kill must be relentlessly sought out and brought back to life; that those who break the rules and those who abandon the house must be pursued to the remotest frontiers of their souls and forgiven; that those who pass judgment on the violators of house rules, like those who take their author for granted, are doomed. And that those who inhabit the household must always remember that what is outside is ending.”
Michael Garvey, Finding Fault, 1990.