Sunday Night Journal — September 18, 2011
Now and then I talk to someone who’s visited Rome, and almost always, especially if the person is Catholic, I’m told that it’s a wonderful experience. And I say “Yes, I’m sure it is,” but I always feel a little guilty that I don’t feel more enthusiasm for the idea. I’m not against it, and I’m sure that if I ever do it I’ll enjoy it as much (or almost as much) as most people seem to. And I am interested in seeing the magnificent churches, and absorbing the sense of the Church’s history, etc. But Rome just isn’t at the top of my list of places I’d like to visit.
In fact, no city is at the top of my list. When I think of the traveling I’d like to do if I had the time and money, I think of the American West, or the English countryside, or of the lakes and forests and cold seas of the Nordic countries. There is nothing made by the hand of man that compels my attention, imagination, and longing the way the natural world does.
And I really don’t care much at all for big cities. I recognize their importance as centers of culture and civilization, but I don’t like spending much time in them. I grew up in the country and am never comfortable without a certain amount of space around me, and, more importantly, plenty of green growing things. The blogger who calls herself Pentimento is a native New Yorker, now in exile (as she sees it) and writes movingly of her love for the city. I can appreciate that and enter into the spirit of it, but I don’t think I could ever feel that way. When I think of being surrounded entirely by tall buildings, I feel constricted, confined, cut off, alienated.
It’s not that I’m any sort of outdoorsman. I’ve never been much interested in hunting, though I would enjoy fishing if I had the leisure and skill. I don’t camp or hike, though I did when I was a teenager and perhaps would enjoy it again if life were not full of so many more pressing things. But what’s important to me is not anything in particular that I want to do in the outdoors, but only that it be nearby. In the main I’m content to sit and read near a window, or in the swing in the front yard. I just need to be able to see something other than the man-made, something organic, to which I can feel a physical connection.
I’m not sure whether this has anything to do with the fact that I grew up in the country or not. Perhaps it does, but, just as likely, it’s a matter of natural temperament; others in the same situation dream of escaping to the city (I did, too, but only for a short time in my teens).
This is not a conclusion to which I reasoned my way, nor is it a principle. I don’t hold that my inclinations in this are anything more than that, or that there is anything superior in them.
In the abstract, to erect an opposition of nature and civilization, or nature and art, is useful only for analytical purposes; in life as we actually experience it, we cannot separate them; we are incapable of doing so, because we are creatures of matter and spirit, nature and consciousness. Art and civilization (which for purposes of this discussion are the same thing) are products of our distance from nature; they operate on nature, refining it and, in a sense, purifying it. But nature comes first, and art and civilization are not conceivable apart from it. And it is this given reality (whether one believes in a giver or not) that I prefer, and in fact need, to have near me in my daily life. No city, however magnificent, can inspire in me the sense of wonder and delight that the natural world does. And I don’t mean only magnificent scenic views, the sort of thing that the Romantics called sublime; the very ordinary domesticated environment around my home—the trees and grass and bushes and flowers, the birds and small animals, my beloved bit of shoreline—is quite enough. When I look at the technical and architectural achievements of man, all the complexity of a modern city, I am awed, but more by the skill and ingenuity of the human race than by the things themselves.
I freely acknowledge my need for the city and for civilization. I would not find nature so wonderful if nature were all I had, and I were obliged to spend most of my energy in the struggle to survive. It is from my comfortable house and my comfortable position in the modern world that I can meditate upon nature rather than engage in combat with it; I have no illusions about that, but my preference remains.
There is a loose analogy here to my relationship to the Church. The Church is the city, and the unredeemed wilderness of human life is nature. After my conversion in the late ‘70s, and even more after my entry into the Catholic Church in 1981, I felt a certain obligation to interest myself in the Church as an institution, but I soon discovered that I had little interest in its internal life. I have some interest in theology, but mainly in those areas where the most fundamental questions are treated. I have never, for instance, been able to keep the Christological heresies straight in my mind for very long. I once knew the difference between a Monophysite and a Nestorian, but without looking them up I have at this moment no idea of their doctrines (apart from what the term “monophysite” suggests on its face).
There was indeed a time when I was exercised about denials and evasions of clear doctrine among influential persons in the Church, but that danger is not what it was. I have little inclination to accuse anyone to whom the charge would matter of being unorthodox, and I’m content to leave such things in the hands of the Magisterium; that’s what we pay them for.
I wish we had a beautiful liturgy, but have never had any interest whatsoever in rubrics and vestments and so forth. I have less than no interest in the internal politics of the Church, and never read those web sites that are filled with rumors and speculation about who is going to be bishop of where. I can tell you the name of the pope, and of my bishop and my parish priests, and perhaps one or two others, but beyond that it’s a uniform sea of clerics.
It’s what goes on outside the Church that interests me, or rather what goes on where the Church meets the world. It is the world as viewed from within the Church that fascinates me, and what fascinates me most of all is the dialogue between belief and unbelief. Catholic writers like Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy dramatize this encounter in the most memorable ways. But people on the other side—artists and others—often shed their own sort of light upon it. Even in unbelief they may present the essential questions in powerful ways, or express, as well or better than a believer, the longing for pure unattainable love and beauty which is what I seem to have in place of the sense of the presence of God.
The Church is my home, and without it I could not view the world as I do, or engage it in the same way. (I’m speaking only of the psychology of the thing here; obviously the Church is, objectively, much more than that.) But the world outside gets most of my time and attention. To change the metaphor a little, I live in a sort of borderland, or perhaps one could say on the outskirts of the city, where the fields and forests begin. I’ve often had misgivings about this, since I first began to notice it some years ago: is this not the same thing that has always been condemned as worldliness? If I am really converted, shouldn’t I be more attentive to the Church than to the world? But I’ve become convinced that this is where I belong.
Light On Dark Water 
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