Mary and the Convert, Part II

I have here rashly undertaken to write on a subject at once intimate and daring; a subject which ought indeed, by its own majesty, to make it impossible to be egotistical; but which does also make it impossible to be anything but personal.

"Mary and the Convert" is the most personal of topics, because conversion is something more personal and less corporate than communion; and involves isolated feelings as an introduction to collective feelings. But also because the cult of Mary is in a rather peculiar sense a personal cult; over and above that greater sense that must always attach to the worship of a personal God. God is God, Maker of all things visible and invisible; the Mother of God is in a rather special sense connected with things visible; since she is of this earth, and through her bodily being God was revealed to the senses. In the presence of God, we must remember what is invisible, even in the sense of what is merely intellectual; the abstractions and the absolute laws of thought; the love of truth, and the respect for right reason and honourable logic in things, which God himself has respected. For, as St. Thomas Aquinas insists, God himself does not contradict the law of contradiction.

But Our Lady, reminding us especially of God Incarnate, does in some degree gather up and embody all those elements of the heart and the higher instincts, which are the legitimate short cuts to the love of God. Dealing with those personal feelings, even in this rude and curt outline, is therefore very far from easy. I hope I shall not be misunderstood if the example I take is merely personal; since it is this particular part of religion that really cannot be impersonal. It may be an accident, or a highly unmerited favour of heaven, but anyhow it is a fact, that I always had a curious longing for the remains of this particular tradition, even in a world where it was regarded as a legend. I was not only haunted by the idea while still stuck in the ordinary stage of schoolboy scepticism; I was affected by it before that, before I had shed the ordinary nursery religion in which the Mother of God had no fit or adequate place. I found not long ago, scrawled in very bad handwriting, screeds of an exceedingly bad imitation of Swinburne, which was, nevertheless, apparently addressed to what I should have called a picture of the Madonna. And I can distinctly remember reciting the lines of the "Hymn To Proserpine," out of pleasure in their roll and resonance; but deliberately directing them away from Swinburne's intention, and supposing them addressed to the new Christian Queen of life, rather than to the fallen Pagan queen of death.

"But I turn to her still; having seen she shall surely abide in the end; Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend."

And I had obscurely, from that time onwards, the very vague but slowly clarifying idea of defending all that Constantine had set up, just as Swinburne's Pagan had defended all he had thrown down.

It may still be noted that the unconverted world, Puritan or Pagan, but perhaps especially when it is Puritan, has a very strange notion of the collective unity of Catholic things or thoughts. Its exponents, even when not in any rabid sense enemies, give the most curious lists of things which they think make up the Catholic life; an odd assortment of objects, such as candles, rosaries, incense (they are always intensely impressed with the enormous importance and necessity of incense), vestments, pointed windows, and then all sorts of essentials or unessentials thrown in in any sort of order; fasts, relics, penances or the Pope.

But even in their bewilderment, they do bear witness to a need which is not so nonsensical as their attempts to fulfill it; the need of somehow summing up "all that sort of thing," which does really describe Catholicism and nothing else except Catholicism. It should of course be described from within, by the definition and development of its theological first principles; but that is not the sort of need I am talking about. I mean that men need an image, single, coloured and clear in outline, an image to be called up instantly in the imagination, when what is Catholic is to be distinguished from what claims to be Christian or even what in one sense is Christian.

Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our Lady did not stand up in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the thought of all these things. I was quite distant from these things, and then doubtful about these things; and then disputing with the world for them, and with myself against them; for that is the condition before conversion. But whether the figure was distant, or was dark and mysterious, or was a scandal to my contemporaries, or was a challenge to myself--I never doubted that this figure was the figure of the Faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this Thing had to say to humanity.

The instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered her; when I tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her; when I finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest of all my acts of freedom, it was in front of a gilded and very gaudy little image of her in the port of Brindisi, that I promised the thing that I would do, if I returned to my own land.

Mary and the Convert

Before the month of May is out, I thought I'd share a lengthy piece by G.K. on Our Lady in two parts. I present Mary and the Convert, from The Well and the Shallows. -AFZ

I was brought up in a part of the Protestant world which can best be described by saying that it referred to the Blessed Virgin as the Madonna.

Sometimes it referred to her as a Madonna; from a general memory of Italian pictures. It was not a bigoted or uneducated world; it did not regard all Madonnas as idols or all Italians as Dagoes. But it had selected this expression, by the English instinct for compromise, so as to avoid both reverence and irreverence. It was, when we came to think about it, a very curious expression. It amounted to saying that a Protestant must not call Mary "Our Lady," but he may call her "My Lady." This would seem, in the abstract, to indicate an even more intimate and mystical familiarity than the Catholic devotion. But I need not say that it was not so. It was not untouched by that queer Victorian evasion; of translating dangerous or improper words into foreign languages.

But it was also not untouched by a certain sincere though vague respect for the part that Madonnas had played, in the actual cultural and artistic history of our civilisation. Certainly the ordinary reasonably reverent Englishman would never have intended to be disrespectful to that tradition in that aspect; even when he was much less liberal, travelled and well-read than were my own parents. Certainly, on the other hand, he was entirely unaware that he was saying "My Lady"; and if you had pointed out to him that, in fact, he was generally saying "a My Lady," or "the My Lady," he would have agreed that it was rather odd.

I do not forget, and indeed it would be a very thankless thing in me to forget, that I was lucky in this relative reasonablenesss and moderation of my own family and friends; and that there is a whole Protestant world that would consider such moderation a very poor-spirited sort of Protestantism. That strange mania against Mariolatry; that mad vigilance that watches for the first faint signs of the cult of Mary as for the spots of a plague; that apparently presumes her to be perpetually and secretly encroaching upon the prerogatives of Christ; that logically infers from a mere glimpse of the blue robe the presence of the Scarlet Woman--all that I have never felt or known or understood, even as a child; nor did those who had the care of my childhood. They knew nothing to speak of about the Catholic Church; they certainly did not know that anybody connected with them was ever likely to belong to it; but they did know that noble and beautiful ideas had been presented to the world under the form of this sacred figure, as under that of the Greek gods or heroes. But, while putting aside all pretence that this Protestant atmosphere was actively an anti-Catholic atmosphere, I may still say that my personal case was a little curious.

On St. Philip Neri

Yesterday was the Feast of St. Philip Neri, a truly Chestertonian saint. Over at the First Thoughts blog, there is a lengthy excerpt of the Venerable John Henry Newman reflecting on St. Philip's contribution to Church and culture. Here's a sample:

St. Philip Neri ... lived in an age as traitorous to the interests of Catholicism as any that preceded it, or can follow it. He lived at a time when pride mounted high, and the senses held rule; a time when kings and nobles never had more of state and homage, and never less of personal responsibility and peril; when medieval winter was receding, and the summer sun of civilization was bringing into leaf and flower a thousand forms of luxurious enjoyment; when a new world of thought and beauty had opened upon the human mind, in the discovery of the treasures of classic literature and art.

He saw the great and the gifted, dazzled by the Enchantress, and drinking in the magic of her song; he saw the high and the wise, the student and the artist, painting, and poetry, and sculpture, and music, and architecture, drawn within her range, and circling round the abyss: he saw heathen forms mounting thence, and forming in the thick air:—all this he saw, and he perceived that the mischief was to be met, not with argument, not with science, not with protests and warnings, not by the recluse or the preacher, but by means of the great counter-fascination of purity and truth. He was raised up to do a work almost peculiar in the Church. . . . for Philip preferred, as he expressed it, tranquilly to cast in his net to gain them [souls]; he preferred to yield to the stream, and direct the current, which he could not stop, of science, literature, art, and fashion, and to sweeten and to sanctify what God had made very good and man had spoilt.

The rest is here.

The Reason - Commentary and Poem by Michael Hughes

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” Alarms and Discursions (1910)

One might add on High Schools, as well. Localism is one of the key dimensions of a Chestertonian worldview—you live somewhere, part of a neighborhood, a network, a community: besides the parish and the town hall, what institution could be more important than the local high school, or regional one, which unites several towns? You probably remember your local high school, for better or worse: your life then and there makes you an alumnus or alumnae of a particular alma mater. We know to call ‘homeless’ a man without a home, but what should we call a man without an alma mater? An educational orphan? Do you have a reason to love your alma mater? Would you wear her colors proudly?

Aren’t these observations true in the greater Worcester world? You need just flash the colors and mascot of your high school (I wear the Red and White Pioneer of St. John’s High, where I teach) and you’re back in the realm of medieval heraldry, of the pageantry of Renaissance city states, enacting a sartorial symbolism which both connects you with your own tribe and alienates you from the surrounding principalities. “Go Pioneers!...Go Naps!... Go Guardians!…Gaels!….Colonials!…Polar Bears!” As surely as the fleur-de-lis upon Henry the Fifth’s chest, ‘Prince Hal’ today is wearing the garb of his own home country, his High School. And while the young men of SJ go home to their many hometowns, could we rightly say that the strength of a town or community is reflected in how many Varsity Letters, jackets and caps are worn with pride by the students outside of their school? Will an adult in Leominster sport a Blue Devils logo? Could he be seen in public being friendly with someone wearing the Fitchburg red?

Dare we hope for a chivalrous devotion to our own logos, while being hospitable towards those from the ‘enemy’? As Chesterton said of the various contradictories which Christendom sustained in paradoxical harmony, they abide “side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George” So, the next time you see me at Fitton Field, cheering on the Pioneers at the annual Thanksgiving Day game, wearing the red and the white, say hello, whether you’re wearing the purple Guardian of St. Peter Marian, or the logos of other alma maters. Chesterton certainly believed our friendship was possible, despite, or perhaps because of our local loyalties. Why can we do so? God, Our Father, gave us the Reason.

Click on the image below to see Mike's poem 'The Reason':

Tolerance

The following parody is a great example of the intolerance of "tolerance", especially as it applies to some modern educators.



Contrary to the hippie peacenik, former-seminarian "facilitator" (played by Kevin O'Brien), G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy is an outline of sanity. (BTW, the etymology of orthodoxy is actually ortho = right or straight, and doxy = opinion or thinking; that is, orthodoxy comes from the Greek meaning right opinion.)