"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
Last week I was interviewed on the Forte Catholic radio show by Taylor Schroll and Fr. Anthony “I’m going to blow up the moon” Sciarappa. I’ve embedded the audio below, but you can also find it on the Forte Catholic website. My segment begins at 19:27.
We talked about what it means to be a Restless Pilgrim, why it’s great being English and why everyone should read C.S. Lewis. Enjoy!
I recently devoted several posts to an exchange I had with a sedevacantist called Mike in the hope that, if you ever encounter a sedevacantist like him, you’ll have some idea as to what to expect.
Well, a little while ago I had some correspondence with a non-Catholic Christian named Jerry and I thought it would also be helpful if I posted some of that exchange here as well.
As often happens, we began our discussion by focussing on the Reformation doctrine of “Sola Scriptura” (“Scripture Alone”), the subject of my recent four-part series. As you can see from our exchange below, Jerry was a little confused as to the meaning of this Latin phrase…
I was at lunch with a new friend the other day and, as a matter of course, as we were leaving the café, I opened the store’s door for her. Her reaction was one of utter surprise! She asked me if opening doors was an “English thing”! I replied no, it’s a “real man” thing.
You may have heard the joke that if you see a man opening a car door for a lady then it’s either a new lady or a new car. Unfortunately, this joke appears to be, in fact, reality. This is tragic! It’s so sad when a man does not think enough of the lady in his company so as to perform this simple act of kindness. It’s even more heartbreaking when a husband does not do this for the woman to whom he has pledged his life.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies… – Ephesians 5:25, 28
Continuing my attempts to produce these Lectionary Notes in under four hours…
The Readings this week focus around life in Christ.
We begin with an account of St. Paul’s failed attempts in Jerusalem to commune with Christ’s Body, the Church. Strangely enough, it turns out that people tend to be a bit stand-offish if you’ve previously tried to kill them! In our Gospel Reading, Jesus teaches his disciples using the metaphor of the vine, showing us that union with Him is essential if we are to live. He gives us a warning too, that if we do not produce fruit, we will be cut off from Him and deprived of His Divine life. St. John restates this sentiment in the Second Reading, exhorting his readers to “love not in word…but in deed”.
Let us come to Mass this week thirsty for the grace of Christ which is communicated through His Church. Let us drink deeply, returning to the world refreshed, ready to share the life of Christ and to bear fruit which will last.
Through Him, and with Him, and in Him…
Picking back up my notes for C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”…
1. There are two main senses of the word “faith”
(a) Faith related to belief
“In the first sense it means simply Belief-accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity”
(i) Our relationship to reason is not what we might imagine
(A) The human mind is not controlled only by reason
“I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so”
(B) This is demonstrated in the way we behave
“…my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics”
(C) The battle is against emotion
“It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other”
A call on a Catholic Answers Live episode demonstrated this point very clearly at the 18:45 mark.
(D) Very often we lose faith in our reason when confronted with emotion
“A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, ‘Perhaps she’ll be different this time,’ and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her”
(ii) We see something similar when we look at Christianity
(A) Reason is involved
“I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in”
(B) Faith (in this sense) comes in later
“But supposing a man’s reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments where a mere mood rises up against it”
(C) Faith is a virtue as you “ride out” your changing moods
“Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway… you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith”
(D) Prayer and Church attendance aid here
“…in some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and church going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed”
(E) We must beware of the slow fade
“…if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?”
(b) Faith related to our spiritual bankruptcy
(i) You must first really try to practise the Christian virtues
“I want to add now that the next step is to make some serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues. A week is not enough. Things often go swimmingly for the first week. Try six weeks.”
(ii) In doing so, you will see you fail
“By that time, having, as far as one can see, fallen back completely or even fallen lower than the point one began from, one will have discovered some truths about oneself. No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”
(A) Good people are the ones who truly understand temptation
“Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later.”
(B) Bad people don’t know much about badness
“They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it”
(iii) This helps us discover two things:
(A) We could earn salvation
“If there was any idea that God had set us a sort of exam, and that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be wiped out. If there was any idea of a sort of bargain – any idea that we could perform our side of the contract and thus put God in our debts so that it was up to Him, in mere justice, to perform His side-that has to be wiped out…God has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of earning a pass mark in this exam, or putting Him in your debt.”
(B) We could never give God anything that is not already his
“Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already.
It is like a small child going to its father and saying, “Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.” Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction. When a man has made these two discoveries God can really get to work. It is after this that real life begins. The man is awake now. We can now go on to talk of Faith in the second sense.”
1. What are the two different sense Jack puts forward regarding “faith”?
2. Do are minds work purely on reason? If not, what gets in the way?
3. How is “faith” a virtue?
4. Why does Jack think you really need to try Christianity before you can really understand the second sense of the word “faith”?
5. What conclusions can we draw from trying (and failing) to live out the Christian virtues?
No doodle!
Bishop Barron had a podcast episode where he talks about the idea of “faith” which has a lot of overlap with Lewis.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed that I’ve been slacking for a while. I haven’t really written anything substantial for at least a month. Sure, I’ve published every day, but the posts have been extremely brief.
At the beginning of October I began a new series, The Bogwash Epistles, a spin-off of C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. Despite having notes for the next ten or so letters, I only completed a few. I had also intended to do a series of posts to supplement the talk I gave at Theology On Tap, expanding on some of the areas I had to truncate due to time constraints. That didn’t happen. I had wanted to do a post examining the logic of those who oppose Halloween. Nope, that didn’t happen either… 🙁
The last two months have certainly been busy, so time has been at a premium, but even though now my time constraints have relaxed a little I feel like I don’t have the “head space” to do much writing.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that I’m going to take another blogging hiatus. I’m going to take a break from writing for all of December. As before, quotations from the Desert Fathers are scheduled to keep you company while I’m away.
I’ve been studying Hosea recently and in that book the Lord speaks through His prophet saying that He will draw Israel back out into the desert, to the place where she first encountered Yahweh. It is there that He will speak tender words to her, restore her and rekindle the Divine Romance. I’ve booked myself a weekend silent retreat, blocked Facebook and cancelled a bunch of activities I had planned for December. I think t’s time to head back to the desert…
I first encountered Islam about six years ago when I was living in London. After meeting a Muslim for the first time, I decided that I should probably become more familiar with the religion, given that it is followed by 1.6 billion people, approximately 23% of the world’s population.
In my naiveté, I decided to start reading the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam. Oddly enough, I had been given a copy of the Qur’an at my (Catholic) school’s prize-giving about ten years earlier. I dug out my copy and started reading…
I’ll admit that I found the text of Qur’an very dry and I gave up after reading it when I was only about a third of the way through. Jumping straight into the Qur’an is very difficult, particularly if you don’t know much about Islam. It would have been helpful to know, for example, that the chapters (“suwar”) are not placed in chronological order, meaning that as I read sequentially through the chapters, I was jumping between very different periods in Muhammad’s life.
I’ve recently been reflecting on the subject of Islam and have concluded that the need for Christians to be familiar with this religion will only become greater with time. I’ve therefore decided to do more posts on this subject over the coming months. I have already written an introduction to Islam and the odd apologetics post, but in preparation for these upcoming articles, and for the sake of gaining credibility, I have decided to read the Qu’ran from cover-to-cover, but on this occasion I will read the chapters in chronological order.
Below you will see my reading plan, with the chapters arranged in (rough) chronological order. Discerning the exact chronology of the chapters is somewhat difficult for Muslim scholars to discern, particularly give that some chapters even contain verses from different periods. I found several different chronological orderings on the Internet, but I have chosen this one. There were other orderings I found on Christian websites, but in an attempt to limit Christian bias (which I will already bring to the text), I chose to use a chronology from a Muslim website.
My plan is to post some very brief thoughts about the chapters I read each day. I’ve also written a glossary of Islamic terms to make these easier to follow. From time to time, I’ll visit an Imam in San Diego, in order to clarify anything which I have found confusing.