Sunday Night Journal — April 17, 2011
I spend a lot of time in the car every day, well over an hour,
with a 40-45 minute commute each way. When I give up music for Lent,
I usually try to maintain complete silence during those drives, but
after a couple of weeks I begin to compromise by listening to
something that’s not music. That isn’t necessarily a bad
thing: one year I listened to C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, or as
much of it as would fit into six weeks of commuting, and that was a
very rich and beneficial experience. But then sometimes it has in
fact been a bad thing, like the year when I maintained my morning
abstinence pretty well, but slipped into listening to the terrible
Paul Finebaum sports talk show on my way home. I call it “terrible”
not because it’s incompetently done but because 80% of the
conversation revolves around the Alabama-Auburn rivalry, which is as
hateful as the liberal-conservative rivalry: imagine a political talk
show that gives more or less equal time to the most hostile on each
side. No matter which side you’re on, or none, it’s not
exactly what you need to assist your spiritual progress; at best
you’re likely to start thinking “Lord, I thank you that I
am not as these…” Fortunately, that bad habit was broken some
years ago when the local station stopped carrying it for a while. And
after I had been away from it during one football season, when the
rivalry is at its most intense, I wondered why I had ever wasted my
time with it, and haven’t listened to it again, though it’s
back on the air again (I think).
Anyway…when that urge to listen to something began
to take hold in earnest this year, I set my AM radio tuner to a local
Christian station, WMOB,
and left it there, which is easy to do because my car stereo has the
most non-intuitive, user-unfriendly radio controls I’ve ever
seen: it’s impossible to set a pre-set without having the
manual in hand, and it’s not obvious how to use them once
they’re set, so I tend to leave it on one station in each band
(NPR on FM, a talk radio station on AM). And for several days I
listened for 15 minutes or so on both my morning and evening
commutes.
And I was the better for it. I
will never repudiate
the conservative Protestantism of my roots, and listening to this
station occasionally reinforces that conviction. The preachers are a
diverse lot: old, young, black, white, male, female. The one I heard
often in the morning and took to be a young man with a somewhat
high-pitched voice turned out to be a woman, Joyce
Meyer, and one morning she left me with a thought that is wise by
any Christian standard, Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox: “You
can’t tell if your face is clean except by looking in the
mirror. You can’t tell if your soul is clean except by looking
in the Word of God.” She meant the Bible, of course, and that
works; those of us who know the Real Presence know that there are
other means of facing oneself in the light of the Word.
I heard an old man, who had been
in a Christian marriage for many years, speak very wisely to husbands
and wives. I heard a different old man echo Aquinas in saying that
“After more than forty years of ministry, I sometimes feel like
I know less about God than when I started.” He spoke not in
frustration but in humility and wonder. Some time back, on the same
station, I heard a black man encourage us to look to the real source
of trouble in this world, in words I’ll never forget: “You
got to remember, folks is
not yo’ enemy! The devil is
yo’ enemy!”
There was only one broadcast I turned
off: the speaker, a young man who sounded cocky and full of
himself, was attempting to prove that St. Paul’s “thorn
in the flesh” was not an illness or temptation of his own, but
the obstinate resistance he encountered to his preaching. I have no
opinion as to the worth of this theory, but his approach to proving
it reminded me of how claustrophobically narrow fundamentalism can
feel: one small mind, with little to no knowledge of the original
languages, isolated from the main currents of Christian (to say
nothing of Jewish) tradition, alone with a huge and complex book
which grew slowly over many centuries in an alien culture,
desperately trying to encompass it all. The preacher’s
confidence in his own ability to sort these things out seemed at once
arrogant and desperate.
Yes, there are plenty of things wrong
in this branch of Christianity: it’s often superficial, often
show-biz-y in a gratingly inappropriate way, rarely well or deeply
read outside the Bible itself and a narrow range of commentary. And
of course much that is of critical importance is simply missing,
beginning with sacraments, the Church as a visible body, and any
serious acquaintance with tradition. Several weeks into Lent I
started listening to an excellent series of talks by Fr. Emmerich
Vogt, O.P., which Janet Cupo sent me on cd. In many ways they seemed
of a different world, starting with the fact that Fr. Vogt is from
Connecticut, not the South. His approach is calm, coherent, nuanced
(I’ve grown wary of that last word, because it sometimes seems
to mean “vague and evasive,” but it has its place), and
thoroughly grounded in scripture, tradition, serious theology, and
that essential thing that we call the mind of the Church.
But sometimes it’s good for me to
hear the lively straightforward good sense of these radio preachers
at their best. It’s partly a cultural affinity: these are
familiar voices for me, literally so in their mostly Southern speech.
But it’s also the fact that their preaching, though deficient
in many respects, is generally solid on the most basic and essential
doctrines.
I think I’ve told this
story before, but I’ve been producing this site for a full
seven years now and have written enough that I can’t remember
all of it. So I’ll tell it anyway. In the late ‘70s, when
I was in the process of returning to Christianity, I had a couple of
friends who were making the same journey. We had been political and
cultural leftists, antagonistic to the established order, or what we
took to be the established order, though it was in the process of
shifting dramatically. I remember one of these friends railing
against a preacher he had heard on the radio: half-literate,
belligerent, ranting, intolerant. “I have nothing in common
with that guy,” said my friend. “Nothing.”
And I sympathized with him. But in a
flash I saw that I had to accept that I had a great deal in common
with that guy. We both believed the essential core of the Christian
faith: that God created us, that we are fallen, that Jesus Christ,
true God and true man, is the only savior of the world in general
and ourselves in particular. And I understood that whether I liked it
or not, the preacher and I were on the same side in the great cosmic
war. And that he and many others like him were now my brothers in
arms, whether we liked it or not. And that we were linked in a way
that we could not be linked with someone who did not believe, no
matter how much more temperamentally and intellectually compatible
they might be.
And in spite of all that is missing from their conception of the
faith, and whatever eccentric doctrines they may sometimes wander
into, these preachers, most of them, know the one thing that is
needful (Luke 10:42) and they aren’t about to let go of it, which is more than can be said of a great many more sophisticated Christians.
Light On Dark Water 
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