Daryl K’s Final Response

The Daryl-Webster debate ends here. Daryl sent me new comments in an e-mail, and I have agreed to publish these, giving him the last word. His comments are below the asterisks halfway down this post.

I have only two final comments of my own.

1. If you read to the end of Daryl’s latest message, you may conclude, as I have, that he was set off by my stories of the guru I have called Gulliver, especially by my admission of being sexually abused. I am not surprised that Daryl found these accounts offensive. I’m sure others have had similar reactions, though unvoiced. I did not publish these accounts with any sense of pride, and I never meant them to be an exposé.

I meant only to chart as honestly as possible my improbable path to the Catholic Church. I think I have made that clear enough previously.

2. In my most recent e-mail reply to Daryl, I asked him to consider replying to comments by Neil Yetts, who is a friend of mine. Not only a friend but the RCIA teacher who led me through my first catechesis before I was received into the Church in 2007–2008. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate Neil “having my back”!

I am reprinting Neil’s questions to Daryl before Daryl’s final message, in case Daryl wishes to reply to these questions below. If his replies are civil, I will publish them; and then that will be my final word on a debate that probably should never have happened in this space.

Neil’s message—mostly questions for Daryl—is in italics here.

While Waiting for Daryl K

This morning I offered my “First Response” to Daryl K, a Reformed Baptist who is antagonistic toward the Catholic Church, which he himself left 25 years ago. I have asked Daryl to comment on my post before the discussion can proceed.

While waiting, I have remembered a recent exchange with a Southern Baptist on the question of faith. That exchange was amusing to me and did not lack for charity on either side. Here’s what happened:

My First Response to Daryl K

Dear Daryl,

Thank you for writing me yesterday to explain why you believe that I am not following Christ and why you call the Holy Mass a “fiasco.” You noted that you are a Reformed Baptist, i.e. a Christian like myself.

As a Christian and Catholic convert living in the most liberal state in the USA, I have come to realize that Christian faith is under attack from every direction. From inside come secularism and scientism. From outside comes the threat of militant Islam.

In this precarious situation, it seems to me important that Christians not attack one another. The same charity that Christ taught and that we try to model, we should show to fellow Christians. If we are not capable of charity, then, as my grandmother, my Ammie, a late convert to Catholicism herself, would have said, We ought at least to have some manners.

Your letter yesterday could have been more charitable. For example:

Daryl K's First Response

My worthy antagonist Daryl K has replied to my post of this morning. Daryl had commented on a previous post, accusing me of not following Christ and calling the Catholic mass a "fiasco."

I asked him to flesh out his comments, and he has done so, in a sort of Socratic dialog in which my comments from posts (WB) are answered by him (DK).

I will post my own reply to his latest comments, probably Tuesday if time permits. I must first read carefully and pick out the three or four most salient points that seem to require my own thoughtful responses.

In the meantime, readers are welcome to comment—with my continuing request that comments be respectful to both sides in this debate. If anyone has trouble posting to the blog (as some report), feel free to e-mail the writer at [websterb, at sign, memoirsunlimited (one word), dot, com].

My post has already elicited one comment from "Lori," whom I know to be a (presumably Catholic) reader of this blog and a friend on Facebook and Goodreads. Lori asks Daryl "to explain Jesus's meaning in John 6:54-56. His words were very plain: 'He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.…'"

I think Lori will find that Daryl "answers" this question to his own satisfaction in what follows. This is not to say that I agree with what he has written.

But anyway here you go—

An Open Letter to Daryl K

I am not political by nature, and I am no theologian.

So since I left the "Why I Am Catholic" beat resolving simply to "Witness" to my life as a Catholic, husband, etc. (see right sidebar), I haven't attracted a lot of negative comment. Some blogs find their raison d'être in controversy. "Witness" usually steers clear.

Still, as my bishop, Cardinal Seán O'Malley, recently wrote in a post of his own, "You have to feed the blog." So when I received a provocative comment last night from "Daryl K" on an excerpt of my memoir, in which I praise James Martin's My Life with the Saints as "The Book that Changed My Life," I thought it might be the start of a conversation here at "Witness."

That post and Daryl's comment are here. His comment concludes with a provocation: "Should you be up to the task, I challenge you to debate this issue on your website, per 1 Kings 18:21-24 & 1 Cor 11:19."

I probably am not "up to the task" because of my non-talents in the political and theological areas. But I know bait when it's offered. My open letter to Daryl follows here:

Word for the Day: Confidence

When I was in my late teens, I was obsessed with self-confidence. I’m not sure I thought deeply about what self-confidence was. I only knew that I didn’t have it.

It seemed logical that to attain self-confidence I needed to bolster my self. This reasoning—which was less reasoning than a generalized assumption about how the world worked—directed me toward methods of self-actualization, a term from Abraham Maslow, the so-called father of humanistic psychology. In my case, Maslow led to George Gurdjieff and his work on oneself. 

Exactly! I thought, encountering the Gurdjieff Work. That’s just what I need to do! Work on myself!

In the past couple of weeks, I have been thinking about confidence again, but in a new way consistent not with Maslow or Gurdjieff, but with my Catholic Christian faith.

Forgiveness: Not So Fast

Since before I can remember I have said the Lord’s Prayer. Taught me by parents I thought would live forever, The Lord’s Prayer seemed eternal and unchanging. Then when I was ten it changed.

My family began attending Episcopal services instead of Congregational, and I no longer asked and offered forgiveness of debts and debtors. Now I had to wrap my tongue around the word trespasses and the ungainly phrase those who trespass against us.

As a young Christian, I never thought much about the difference between debts and trespasses—one an unpaid bill, the other a boundary violation. In fact, I never thought much about this part of the Lord’s Prayer at all. By saying Forgive us our debts or trespasses or whatever, I only figured I was striking a sort of level bargain with God:

Catechetical Question: Why Did God Wait So Long?

With the offensive taste of an anti-Catholic book on pilgrimage still in my mouth, I am reading Eric Metaxas’s new book on Miracles to cleanse my palate. It’s very good eating.

In an early chapter, Metaxas writes of many scientists who are devout Christians, thus demonstrating that a life of faith and a career in science are not irreconcilable. He notes that the Big Bang theory is generally accepted now, even by Christians, and reels off recent confirming evidence.

This led me to the following question: If you accept the Big Bang theory, which says the universe began about 14 billion years ago, then why did God take so long to make man?

Genesis says it took God six days. Science says fourteen billion years. Explain.

Catechism: Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, OCD, Meets the Saw Doctors

I love the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) for some of the reasons I love Pandora, the internet music-streaming service. You just never know who you’re going to hear.

The Catechism is a direct experience of the communion of the saints: all those voices, all that heavenly music. Tune into a chapter on any subject and you may hear St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, or a chorus sung by the Second Vatican Council.

Likewise Pandora. I enjoy what you might call Celtic folk rock: traditional tunes from Ireland and Scotland played with electric instruments, often with a helping of punk. If you start a Pandora station with the Irish band The Saw Doctors, as I have done, you’ll end up hearing songs not only by other Irish bands like The Pogues but also from Scotland (Runrig), Brittany (Tri Yann), Newfoundland (Great Big Sea), and even the USA (Flogging Molly and Boston’s own Dropkick Murphys). Except for the Dropkicks, I didn’t know any of these bands before starting the station.

Just as I didn’t know Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity until I reopened the CCC this afternoon. A French Carmelite nun, Blessed Elizabeth was a sort of Little Flower Junior, who died at the age of twenty-six in 1906, nine years after Thérèse of Lisieux.

Here’s how I met Blessed Elizabeth:

Catechism: The Trinity

For the past few days, I have found myself stymied by the Holy Trinity like an old sailing vessel laboring through a tight passage against a headwind.

My sole New Year’s resolution was to continue my series of posts on the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) suspended nearly two years ago; but after seven days I have written nothing on the CCC. That’s not because of the nature of resolutions or because I can’t keep them; it’s because of the place I left off in February 2013.

Up next: the Trinity (paragraphs 232 ff.). The Most Holy Trinity is not only that on which “the faith of all Christians rests” (232) but also “the central mystery of Christian faith and life” (234). Isn’t that a contradiction, a dilemma, and a cussed annoyance?

That my faith is supposed to “rest” on a “mystery” is more than my rational mind can handle. But is that then maybe part of the point?

Before moving on past these shoals by going around them (I may come back, don’t expect a miracle) here are a couple of thoughts about the Holy Trinity, amply covered by the CCC, paragraphs 232–267:

Resolution Time: Catechism

I don’t hear voices or see visions, at least not in waking hours. But quite often in moments of quiet prayer—at mass or at home in my quiet-prayer place—a thought will come to me with crystal clarity. I have yet to go completely wrong following one of these “prayer thoughts.”

Such a thought came to me about a month ago after a long sleepless night of tossing and turning over my memoir, The Long Walk Home, and what the bloody hell to do with it. I went to mass at 7 a.m. as I often do, with only two hours’ sleep under my hat, and I had the thought that led to Gulliver.

That is, in the middle of mass, when I probably should have been more attentive to the liturgy, I understood that I could publish my experience with an abusive guru at age nineteen by fictionalizing it in a certain fashion. Doing so, I could preserve all the dynamics of what happened, especially its effects on me near the beginning of a long, winding path to the Catholic Church—while also veiling the identities of others.

That’s as clear as I can be or want to be about what I’ve done in posting thirteen excerpts so far, including the latest yesterday, “Aftermath: Dreaming of Gulliver.”

All of which is preamble to this: I had another clear thought this morning while attempting a small bit of morning prayer at home.

“Zero Dark Thirty” and Faith in One God

I woke up yesterday determined to resume my series of posts about the Catechism and turned to the next section, “The Implications of Faith in One God” (222–227). I ended the day at Hollywood Hits, watching “Zero Dark Thirty” with Katie.

Now I am awake in the middle of the night realizing that there was a theme to my day all along: faith works.

All this despite the fact that my much-loved and respected pastor, Father David Barnes, is being reassigned in phase one of the reorganization of the Archdiocese of Boston.

At such times, faith is as vital as oxygen. The Catechism says faith has “enormous consequences for our whole life.” (222) “Zero Dark Thirty” shows it kicking ass.

Why Is It So Hard to Be Both Loving and Truthful?

Short answer: Because we’re not God.

You know how hard it is sometimes to tell someone the truth without “hurting” them? Or how easy it is to be “nice” without telling the truth?

Scripture has a word for such a dilemma: it’s called being “fallen.” We’ve come apart from God, from that place where love and truth hold hands.

At least, that’s the message I get from today’s reading in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. After instructing the faithful that God lives and is and has a name (paragraphs 203–213), the CCC gives just two attributes of God: He is loving (kind, good, gracious) (218–221) and He is true (constant, faithful, steadfast) (215–217).

It Depends What the Meaning of “I Am Who I Am” Is

Continuing my train of thought in the previous post, it is possible to turn everything in Scripture into code for inner, psychological work.

I know because I tried to do so for years. I was essentially a gnostic. The Scriptures, according to the point of view I assumed, can only be understood by the initiate, the one keyed in to some sort of “esoteric” understanding.

When God says to Moses, “I am who I am” (YHWH), the religious person understands this simply, as God telling Moses his name.

Pop Quiz: Know Your Creeds!

OK, all you Catholics out there, catechized to a T. Let’s see if you know your creeds. And yes, there are more than two. But we’ll start there. (Answers below)

Why These Formulas?

There’s scandal lurking in paragraph 185 of the Catechism (CCC), the first paragraph in Section 2, “The Profession of the Christian Faith.” Scandal in its etymological sense of stumbling block to faith. The first sentence reads:

“Whoever says ‘I believe’ says ‘I pledge myself to what we believe.’”

Immediately something in me is incensed: Why believe what everyone else believes? Doesn’t a man, a full American man, think for himself? The creed asks me to be a follower, not a leader!

Well, yes.

Jesus’s Great-Grandson

St. Irenaeus of Lyons in his day was as close to Jesus Christ as I am now to my great-grandfather Frank T. Heffelfinger. Just as my grandmother (a late-life convert) knew and loved her father; and my mother knew and loved her mother; and I know and love mine—so Irenaeus heard and admired St. Polycarp of Smyrna, who was ordained by St. John the Apostle, who was as close as it got to Jesus.

So when the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) quotes St. Irenaeus, I sit up and take note. While I can’t tell you many details of Great-Granddaddy’s life, I am sure—because of the love that flowed from generation to generation, and because I know my mother and grandmother to be honest women—that I “get” him in the important particulars.

Why, if I want to be closer to Jesus, would I ignore the testimony of his great-grandson?

Formulas of Faith

There’s no more admirable thing in the world than a mother who fights for her children, to the death if necessary. Which is just what the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) talks about in paragraph 171, under “The Language of Faith.”

Here the Church is “a mother who teaches her children to speak and so to understand and communicate.” What language is that? It is “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. [Mother Church] guards the memory of Christ’s words; it is she who from generation to generation hands on the apostles’ confession of faith.” 

What a responsibility! Guarding Christ’s words, keeping them as is, handing on the formulas in which the apostles encapsulated what they had received from Him.

Random, Possibly Connected Thoughts on Faith, with a Bonus Song of the Day

It is the unstated buzz phrase of every extraterrestrial tale from “War of the Worlds” to, well, “ET.” The phrase is “We are not alone.” Science calculates the probability of there being life on other planets. Note to sci-fi believers: Phone home. Of course, we’re not alone. The universe screams His presence.

“He loved us,” John tells us in his first letter today, more of a whisper. “His heart was moved with pity for us,” Mark says, before Jesus fed the five thousand. But “Faith is a personal act” (CCC 166). It is our “free response . . . to the initiative of God.”

“But faith is not an isolated act.” I usually think so, though less now that I’m a Catholic. In the Protestant churches of my childhood and especially in the heady Protestant-based liberal-arts schools of my adolescence, it came down to me and God. Did I believe? I?

The World’s Shortest Handbook of Faith

If you question faith in general or your faith in particular, as I do sometimes, you could do worse than consult the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC). In sixteen short paragraphs (150–165), the CCC lays out the anatomy of faith: skeleton, musculature, nervous system, heart, lungs, all internal organs.

Along the way it calls a remarkable collection of witnesses for your journey: Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, John Henry Newman (pictured), Abraham, the Blessed Virgin Mary. They’re all here in fewer than six footnoted, cross-referenced pages of gold.