Prologue
I wrote this account of my conversion in 1981 and, in one of
the nicest things anyone has ever done for me, the editor at the
time of the National Catholic Register, Francis X. Maier,
published the entire thing as a special insert to the paper. It
attracted a certain amount of attention and several people
suggested that I expand it to book length. I made a stab at that
but never could quite get a handle on the best approach; I did
not want to write an intimate confessional, and yet I did not
consider myself intellectually equipped to write philosophically
and theologically. The project languished and was dropped. I
wrote occasional opinion columns for the Register
throughout the ‘80s but never seemed to quite find my
groove in that form and eventually gave that up, too.
Upon reading this piece for the first time in many years in
preparation for putting it on the web, I found myself wanting to
edit it here and there to reflect changes in certain of my views.
I would, for instance, if writing this now, assign less blame for
my errors to the times and assume more to myself. And I am very
tempted to add comments on my relationship with the Church over
the past twenty years. But as regards the first of these I
believe I will let it stand as I wrote it in 1981; to edit it
substantially from my present point of view would be like an old
man painting gray hair on a picture taken in his youth. And as
regards the second I have added an epilogue. I have made a few
minor corrections in the area of grammar and punctuation, but
otherwise the piece is as it appeared in the Register.
When I wrote this testimony (I am indebted to my friend Reuben
Sairs, a Mennonite minister, for assigning it correctly to that
genre), I gave it a title which I cannot now remember. It was
Fran Maier who titled it after the great Bob Dylan album. At the
time I didn’t particularly care for his choice, but now it
seems pretty close to perfect.
—August 8, 2004
One
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I grew up in rural Alabama just across the Tennessee River
from a town called Decatur. In 1965 I was a junior in high school
and was dating a girl who lived in Decatur. She was unfortunately
not nearly as fond of me as I was of her, but though our evenings
turned out less and less happily as time went on, I always loved
driving home across the dark peaceful river.
Naturally I always had the radio on. One night I heard a song
so strange and beautiful that I almost drove into the river as I
reached to turn up the volume and strained to hear the words. I
was swept by a great longing; I felt that I was being called away
to a world whose existence I had never suspected, yet which
seemed like a lost homeland. It was the Byrds’ version of
Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man,
Play a song for me.
I’m not sleepy and
There is no place I’m going to.
It seemed to me that this was my story. And all across
America, several million unhappy and alienated kids like me heard
the same story and responded in the same way.
Not sleepy. No place to go. That was the way our whole
situation appeared to us. We were living proof that the human
heart will never be satisfied by the things of this world, for it
seemed to us that America offered us everything except what we
could not live without: a purpose. Some of our perceptions were
accurate, some not, but it is not really my intention here to
make that judgment. What I am attempting is to describe what was
going on in our hearts, in my heart at any rate, and to look at
the rebellion of the 1960s as one who was in it and now appears
to be entirely removed from it. I was a hippie then and now I am
a militantly orthodox Christian. But there is a thread which
connects those two positions, and I am trying to follow that
thread.
Two
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How, then, did the world appear to us in the mid-’60s?
Threatening, perhaps, but the world has always been threatening.
More importantly, it seemed futile. No place to go. This seemed
literally true when we thought of the threat of nuclear war. It
wasn’t so much that we were afraid of our own deaths as
that we seemed to be staring at a steel door beyond which the
human race itself would never pass. This war, we were constantly
being told (whether accurately or not, we had no way to judge),
would be the end of the whole human episode.
I think that the fact that we were the first generation never
to have known life without this shadow of extinction has been
underestimated in attempts to explain our aberrations. Lacking
strong religious beliefs, we tended to feel that there was little
point in living as if the future mattered. (This feeling seems to
me to account partially not only for the conscious nihilism of
the punk fashion in music and appearance today but also for a
certain ruthless quality in the ambitions of many young people
who appear to be quite conventional. But perhaps this is only my
imagination.)
What about religion, then? I had been intensely religious as a
child (and later I found this to be true of many of my bohemian
friends), but at the age of fifteen or so I declared myself an
atheist. To many of us the religion we saw around us seemed only
a social convention, in importance somewhere above good grooming
and below athletics. Many adults seemed a little embarrassed by
the actual content of religion; men especially seemed to see it
as a sentimental business, something for women and children and
anyone else not strong enough to face the world as it really is.
And even for those who came from strong religious backgrounds,
the omnipresent secularism of the mass media was really much more
important in defining basic assumptions than were the teachings
of Church and family. It was (and is) not even necessary that
Church and family be attacked—it was enough that they were
either ignored or sentimentalized into absurdity.
It was thus very easy for a teen-ager to develop genuine
intellectual doubts about his childhood religion. I was old
enough to ask questions to which I got no satisfactory answers.
And I might not have accepted them if I had, because the thrill
of rebellion soon became sweet in itself. I quickly discovered
that peculiarly nasty vice of the modern intellectual: a love of
shocking the middle class. And I didn’t recognize that it
was founded on the basest of emotions: contempt.
For a short time I played at being a scientific materialist.
But that was impossible for a boy who hoped to become a poet. An
important turn came when I read Bertrand Russell’s Why I
Am Not a Christian. I was of course delighted by
Russell’s sneers at Christian hypocrisy but happened upon a
passage (in the famous “Free Man’s Worship”
essay) which made me thrust his whole philosophy from me as one
might thrust away a piece of rotten meat:
…even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the
world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world,
if anywhere, our ideal henceforward must find a home…man is
the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were
achieving…his origin, his hopes and fears, his loves and
beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collactions of
atoms.”
Everything in me rejected this idea. It contradicted plain
realities. A universe operating on such a principle could only
have been dead and ugly, whereas I knew it to be alive and
beautiful. But though I rejected Russell’s opinions I could
not refute them. After all, he was a great philosopher and he
spoke with the authority of the great god Science, and
hadn’t we all been taught—not in so many words, but
implicitly by the assumptions of a secular society—that
what Science does not perceive, does not exist? The phrase
“accidental collocation of atoms” remained in my mind
for years like a death’s head, a negative light source
shooting spears of darkness into every aspect of my life. I clung
stubbornly to a vague notion of spiritual reality, but in my
heart I had succumbed and believed that Russell was right.
A lot of silly things have been said about the idealism of the
youth of the ‘60s. I never saw that much of it
myself—except among a few young women who were quickly
divested of their ideals by monstrously callous young men and who
are now militant feminists. What I did see, though, was a
hunger for ideals. It seemed to many of us that if America
had a philosophy it was pragmatism or utilitarianism. Virtue
seemed taught not as a thing “lovely in the sight of
God” but as a merely prudent aid to earthly success. Truth
was mentioned only in the context of scientific fact, and wisdom
seemed only a higher cunning. This perception led not to idealism
but to bitter cynicism. And into this vacuum came the moral
absolutism of radical politics, on the one hand, and on the other
the colors, music, and incense of the hippie phenomenon. It was
the latter which attracted me.
Three
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In the spring of 1967 I was a college freshman. Whatever it
was that had been happening in Haight-Ashbury became, for me and
millions like me, a myth even as it was fizzling out in lunacy
and violence. It was the revelation of a new, albeit a bogus,
religion. I never went to San Francisco; I never felt that I
needed to. I had the message: peace and love. I had the music. I
fell in with a group of bohemians and we all began slavishly to
imitate the California trend. We sat around in dingy apartments
listening by candlelight to the strange new music and professing
our pathetic excuse for a faith. And it really seemed, for a
month or two that spring, like a new world. The flowers were
brighter, the new leaves greener, because a darkness had lifted.
There were other people in the world who felt as I did. We were
finding each other, and soon we would change the world or perhaps
build another, where the strange haunting joy that seemed to
hover near us would come to rest and be ours.
The lovely bubble burst almost immediately. It became clear
very quickly that for the most part the hippie movement was not
at all interested in peace and love but rather in drugs and sex.
Whatever attempts it made at philosophizing came to little more
than a belligerent repetition of various unsavory intellectual
developments of the past century, from Nietzsche to Artaud, or
shallow rereadings of Eastern thought. Very soon, too, the
movement came to be composed predominantly of people with whom I
had little in common—most of them simply hedonists, some of
them people who would have been called in other times ordinary
hoodlums.
I say that I recognized all this, and yet I not only remained
with the movement but became more frantically attached to it.
This was in part because I was too confused to really know my own
mind, in part because I was proud and stubborn, and in part
because I simply didn’t know what else to do with myself.
The world of industrial capitalism seemed a spiritual prison; and
if the world of bohemianism was equally or more menacing, well,
at least I had a few good friends there. I felt that this
community was all I had.
I turned increasingly nihilistic. I held a hodgepodge of more
or less pantheistic, vaguely Eastern religious beliefs, but they
had no power to lift me into the light. How could they? There is
no essential distinction between the One of Eastern contemplation
and the Abyss of Western nightmlare; the difference is that the
Eastern mind attempts to respond to nothingness with a smile,
while the Westerner wants to scream. I tried to appropriate the
Eastern response; I succeeded at times but could not sustain
it.
There were glimpses of light. Many of them came from the
popular music that I loved. I grant at once that most rock music
is poison, but for those of us who grew up with it, the best of
it can be very beautiful. Its howling intensity served us as a
sort of anchor to emotional reality in a world which seemed to be
disintegrating into disconnected abstractions.
I was particularly indebted to a group with the silly name of
The Incredible String Band. They weren’t a rock group but
practitioners of a weird amalgam of English folk and Eastern
influences. Their songs were filled with mystical poetry which
for a time became my only link with religion. They were not
Christians, but the name of Jesus, along with a great deal of
imagery borrowed from medieval Christendom, seemed to turn up
rather often in their lyrics. In their hearts they were far
closer to Christianity than either they or I knew. And so was I.
But our minds were firmly prejudiced against it.
So there we were, all of us for whom the great rebellion was
the expression of a furious and only half-conscious yearning to
see the face of God, a hope which seemed to be, if not denied by,
then at least irrelevant to the great scientific and industrial
enterprise of the West. How could we ever hope to find what we
sought when we were too cynical even to believe in its existence?
And how could we begin to understand the way of the Cross when we
had adopted self-indulgence as our only ethical principle?
Four
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By 1969 or 1970 a nice liberal intellectual had dignified our
movement with the term “counter-culture,” and it had
reached the height of its mass appeal. But it was no longer much
more than a community of drug users and (mostly) dilettante
revolutionaries. I have said little about either of these
pursuits because I was, compared to most of the people I knew,
not heavily involved with them. I talked about revolution and
participated in demonstrations, but my motivation was more
nihilistic than reformist and I always thought that the people
who really believed in socialism and communism were crazy. I took
various drugs now and then but tended to shy away from them
because I found them as likely to lead to nightmlare as to
beauty.
In the summer of 1970, following Kent State, the estrangement
of the counter-culture from the rest of America had reached its
widest point. We were totally adrift, most of us cut off from our
families, dropping out of school, living hand to mouth by odd
jobs or drug-selling. We despised the American way of life and
were in turn despised by those who lived it, and it looked as
though we would never go back. But it was early in that summer
that something happened to me which put a sudden end to my
contempt for ordinary hard-working people.
A friend and I were hitchhiking from Miami to Tallahassee.
Somewhere in central Florida we got stuck in a small town. It was
getting dark and starting to rain, and we had begun to despair of
getting a ride when a car pulled over. The driver hadn’t
stopped out of kindness; he was a redneck probably more given to
harassing than helping longhairs like us. But he had been
drinking and had a long way to go and wanted one of us to drive.
I got behind the wheel. In a little while he perked up and
started talking, and while my friend dozed in the back seat he
told me the story of his life. It hadn’t been a
particularly easy life, or a particularly virtuous one. He had
been born poor and had had (if he wasn’t exaggerating) more
than his share of bad luck. He was struggling to attain and hold
on to the level of middle-class prosperity which had spawned my
friends and me and at which we sneered.
Staring into the warm, rainy darkness and listening to him I
began to feel ashamed. I realized that it was we who were
contemptible. His ambitions, dull though they seemed to us, were
nobler than ours, for he wanted to make a better life for his
family. His middle-class culture might have been in some ways
ludicrous, but its foundations were saner than those of our
increasingly demented alternative. That night was the point at
which my growing sense of dismay and hopelessness about
“the movement” became focused, though I didn’t
part with it until sometime later.
Five
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The early ‘70s seem to have been a period of stupor for
many of my generation. All the flamboyant activity suddenly
ceased ; we became quieter and more withdrawn. Yet, speaking for
myself only, a battle was joined in those years which would
decide the course of the rest of my life, certainly in this world
and perhaps in the next.
I found myself falling toward Christianity yet resisting it
mightily. I appropriated more and more of Christian philosophy in
my effort to make sense of the world. Unnerving things happened.
I looked for a way of thinking about politics which could refute
the absolutist claims of the modern state and set rational limits
on its power. I found Maritain’s Man and the State,
which not only gave me a fully satisfactory description of the
state’s subservience to a higher power but also the name of
that Power, though I was unwilling to accept the latter. I looked
for a theory of aesthetics in which art would be, as my common
sense said it should, more than a game and less than a god. I
found Eliot’s essays. Everywhere I found Christian thought
putting something in its proper place, making neither too much
nor too little of it. I proudly reached what I thought to be new
conclusions to many questions only to realize that Christianity
had reached them hundreds or thousands of years before—I
came to believe, for example, in an idea not much different from
the traditional doctrine of the Fall, because nothing else seemed
to account for our condition.
I found myself agreeing with almost everything Christianity
had to say about this world and man’s place in it, yet I
was unable or unwilling to believe in the supernatural
foundations upon which all the philosophy rested. What had
happened was that I had become a modernist Christian, though in
my naiveté I didn’t know that it could be legitimate
to believe as I did and still call oneself a Christian, so I
seldom did so. I am inclined to think that modernism can never be
more than a stop on the road to either atheism or orthodoxy. One
may reasonably argue that Christianity could someday disappear
but not that modernism will replace it; modernism is essentially
an intellectual’s plaything and can never satisfy the human
mind and heart in the way that a real religion, even a false one,
can.
I base this opinion on my own experience. My syncretist
hodgepodge was an interesting intellectual venture, but it gave
me no help at all where help was most important: in the war
between good and evil. It left me with no way of making moral
choices because it gave me no solid reason even for choosing
good, much less for deciding what was good and what not. It
seemed in many ways plausible enough to think of God as the
ground of all being, or the spirit of all there is. But what does
that sort of God have to do with how one lives one’s life?
Does a man obey and worship the ground of his being? No, not if
that is all he thinks it is—the very phrase implies that he
is superior to it. He will view it as something which is there
for him to stand upon while he does what he likes. I made a wreck
of my personal life; my religion gave me no reason not to.
Six
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In 1976 I was living in a small house in the country. I
remember looking out the window late one winter afternoon,
watching cold white clouds move across the blue sky. Naturally I
would have had nothing but patronizing chuckles for the idea that
the sky had anything more to do with God than the floor of my
room did. But for a moment that afternoon there seemed to be a
connection. Abruptly the thought came into my head: “Your
sins can be forgiven”. I don’t say that God spoke to
me. But I don’t say that He didn’t. At any rate I was
made aware that I had sins which needed to be forgiven, and I
felt touched by a Power which had not only the love but the
authority to forgive them.
I began to attend an Episcopal church, still something of a
pantheist, still not certain that I was willing to believe in the
supernatural as Christianity described it: a God who was in some
sense a Person; His Son, who was a man and yet somehow also
Himself; the death and especially the resurrection of the Son.
I’ll never understand how people can say that it
isn’t important whether Christ rose physically from the
grave or whether He was truly the Son of God. To me these facts
remain all-important because without them, Christianity is only a
philosophy or a mythology to be ranked among others of its
kind—the finest of them, perhaps, but possessing no more
authority than any of the rest. I was no longer interested in
such an approach to religion—I would either believe or not
believe.
In the end I believed, because I ran out of reasons not to. I
never heard it proved (except with tautologies) that Christ was
not the Son of God or that he did not rise from the dead. I was
not a materialist and so could not reject these ideas out of
hand. And it seemed more and more that most of the evidence was
on the side of belief. I read the Gospels as if for the first
time and was surprised by both the wildness and the sanity of
Jesus. I read C.S. Lewis’ Miracles and my resistance
to the idea of supernatural intervention in the world crumbled.
Somewhere along the line I stopped fighting.
My movement from liberal Anglicanism to Catholicism has been
simply a continuation of the movement from non-belief to belief
and is so similar that it needs little elaboration here. Again I
put up the rationalist’s resistance to a claim of divine
authority; again there was the puzzle of confronting something
which seemed wiser than anything around it and yet marred by
strange superstitions such as transubstantiation and the
infallibility of the Pope. And again there was the slow
realization that things which appeared to be deformities were
absolutely essential to the structure of the whole, and that
things which appeared to be irrational were in fact the
foundations of rationality, without which reason itself would
wither and die. The Catholic Church began to seem as different
from other churches as Christ from other men, and it won me just
as He had done.
Seven
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Many of my generation look at the world with a strange mixture
of cynicism and gullibility. We thought we had seen through all
the world’s hypocrisy, and we sneered at everything it
tried to tell us. Yet our skepticism was itself the product of
the deathly chill at the heart of 20th-century
civilization, and we fled from it as well as from what it showed
us. At our worst we ran into terrible delusions, and some of us
died of them. But we were after something real. We loved music
and color and stories filled with wonders and marvels but
rejected out of hand the notion that the real world was anything
but meaningless. We were gullible without being
innocent—had we been innocent we might have noticed that
our favorite book, The Lord of the Rings, was written by a
devout Catholic. And we might have learned from him that the
truth of the universe is actually not less but more
beautiful than our most beautiful dreams.
Some of our more perceptive critics have noticed that for many
of us our rebellion was fundamentally conservative, radically so.
It is a strange twist words have taken which has made the term
“conservative” applicable mainly to the partisans of
industrial capitalism. Many of us—the wandering religious
fanatics, the agrarians and communitarians, the
artists—were part of a movement so conservative that there
was no longer even a name for what we sought, at least not in the
vocabulary of secularism. We wanted a world in which fundamental
realities—spirit, earth, light, death—would be
visible in all their simplicity, obscured as little as possible
by the phantasmagoria of vanity which is generally referred to as
“the real world.”
Somewhere in our hearts—never mind how our words and
actions belied it—we believed in a God of peace and love,
and we dreamed of a civilization in which even the trivial events
of daily life would acknowledge His presence and our dependence
upon Him. In short, we longed for a sacramental life. And our
ideals resembled more closely than anything else the
half-forgotten ideal of Christendom. Above all, we were certain
that there is a spiritual reality which rules the material,
little knowing that this was an obsession we shared with the
popes of a thousand years ago.
So we marched off to war and fought for the wrong side, giving
good service to the enemy. But our army scattered in the night,
some of us suspecting the truth about our general and others
simply tired or afraid. Now I find myself at the gate of an old
fortress, one of those we had attacked and which we had thought
to be a place of darkness—it had looked so grim in
battle—and I find it alive with light and music, banners
flashing on the towers and bright tapestries on the walls inside,
heroes and heroines watching at the gates and stories of others
being told around the table. Though treachery is common and the
castle seems always on the verge of being taken, its inhabitants
are oddly serene and confident (almost reckless, it seems, when
one considers their danger), and they take me in without fear. It
proves to be the castle of the King, the Lord of love and beauty,
the Prince of peace, whom I had wished to serve all along.
It is not always easy to see that vision of the Catholic
Church, what with the dull liturgy, rebellious priests, feminist
nuns, and the gray mold of modernism sometimes threatening to
cover everything. But if the Church is never perfect she is also
never lost; even now she is blessed with one of God’s true
knights as her head on earth, and sometimes I wonder why all the
ex-hippies in the world aren’t flocking to his service. In
fact I think that some of them will—not all, probably not
most, perhaps not even many. But some. And for those of us who
have seen the vision it will be the labor of our deepest love to
show it to others.
Epilogue, Twenty Years On
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It is, indeed, “not always easy to see that vision.”
It is with real sadness that I compare my
closing paragraph above to a remark I made to a friend a few
years ago: that my relationship to the Church is now like an
unhappy marriage. That is putting it perhaps a little too darkly,
but it’s accurate with regard to one aspect of that
relationship, which is the liturgy. I have a deep and intense
need for liturgical worship that is rich, dignified, and
mysterious. Although I found quickly enough that I could not
remain in the Episcopal church for doctrinal reasons, the Book of
Common Prayer (those parts which have not been made drab by
modernization) and the Anglo-American hymn tradition comprise the
most powerful expression of Christian worship in the English
language; certainly it is the most deeply affecting to me.
I am not going to dwell here on the problems with the Catholic
liturgy and especially with Catholic music. They have been
discussed until every one involved is bitter and exhausted and
unspeakably sick of the subject. The comparison to a bad marriage
is very applicable here, specifically to the stage when the
combatants have ceased to expect anything at all of each
other.
This may seem a frivolous complaint, and perhaps it
wouldn’t matter so much if I were indifferent to liturgy or
never had any trouble in my life. But when trouble comes and
there is no comfort to be found in the place that is not supposed
to fail of comfort, dessication of soul follows. (Yes, of course,
there is sacramental grace, and no doubt that has kept me afloat;
I’m speaking of the subjective experience.)
Moreover, I have not found, humanly speaking, an especially
comfortable community in the Church. This is not the
Church’s fault, but rather a function of my own
eccentricity. Nevertheless it is a fact, and an unhappy one. And
then there is the fact that the Church is so divided, so that
those of us who believe the faith more or less as it was
traditionally believed and taught find ourselves in continual
combat with those who would have the Church revise its doctrine
along the lines of liberal Protestantism.
In sum, I regard the Church as having, at bottom, two reasons
to exist: to maintain doctrine and to worship “in spirit
and in truth.” And when one feels that one must struggle
constantly to find these things in the Church, is it any surprise
that the temptation to abandon ship is strong at times?
But in spite of all this I can say with some assurance that I
will never leave the Church. I still believe everything I
believed in 1981, and more. The fact that I have not found the
road to be smooth and pleasant does not mean that it is the wrong
road. There is, simply, nowhere else to go. “Lord, to whom
else should we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” I
can imagine ceasing to be a Christian—and a few years ago
in a period of serious depression I was in some danger of doing
so—but I cannot imagine becoming a Protestant. (Orthodoxy
would be a possibility, at least from the doctrinal point of
view, but I don’t believe I could ever give myself to it as
I have given myself to the Catholic Church.) If I ever cease to
be Catholic, I will cease to be Christian.
Nor, despite my disappointment and my grievances, have I ever
regretted for a moment that I became a Catholic. When I look back
at my life thus far it often seems like a long string of sins,
mistakes, and missed opportunities. But my adoption of the
Catholic faith is not in this list. If there is any thing
I’ve ever done that I believe was unquestionably the right
thing to do, it is this.
As I take stock of what I have said here, casting about for a
final summation, a couple of lines from a more recent Bob Dylan
song come into my mind and assume an unexpected significance:
Summer days, summer nights are gone
I know a place where there’s still something going
on
Light On Dark Water 