Light On Dark Water

Of course you don’t need me to tell you about the pope’s visit, but there’s one thing in his speech at the White House that I want to note:

[The Church] is convinced that faith sheds new light on all things, and that the Gospel reveals the noble vocation and sublime destiny of every man and woman.

It’s almost strange to me that after almost thirty years as a Catholic—years which have included times when I was sick of the Church and of most of my fellow Catholics and thought I might be happy to dump the whole thing, but knew that I never would because, in the end, it’s the Church or darkness, and I had long before chosen against darkness—the Faith is to me a flower that never stops blooming.

What I always want to say to people who don’t or can’t or won’t believe is that to live in the Faith is to live in a different and better world. In this new light everything is different: you are not just an odd unusually intelligent animal which will soon die and be forgotten, but a unique combination of body and soul created to know perfect love and joy; your life is not a meaningless succession of incidents, but a grand story; the universe is not a bunch of atoms zooming around in emptiness but the product of Thought inconceivably great. And that all this is not a happy fantasy, but a fact; it would not truly be better if it were only a dream. The world to which the Faith provides entry is in reality a better world, because the Faith is true. No, I can’t prove it. But there is more evidence for it than you might think. Much of it is already there, in your heart.

(Thanks to Amy Welborn for the full text of the speech.)

(Re-reading the above, I ask myself why I don’t say “God” instead of “Church”; it’s because I know that I can only know God in and through the Church, and in the end I can’t really separate them.)

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