August: “I hope to understand the book more deeply, while pursuing a conversation with you, my old beloved schoolmate”

I stopped posting again during the first half of August, but then near the end of the month I started up again, and really started something.

While on vacation in Maine, when I wasn’t playing croquet, I was spending time with an old friend from school days. Later, he e-mailed me a dismissive comment about the Catholic Church, and I took umbrage. Then I sent him a copy of a book, The Lord by Romano Guardini (pictured)—and started a series of nearly 90 chapter-by-chapter posts on it. All in the form of open letters to my friend, as a way of saying, OK, you gonna say dat bout my Church, dis is what I got to say bout dat.

Romano Guardini’s The Lord: Conclusion

Dear friend,

Well, Charlie, we’ve done it. Back in Maine in August, we met and discussed old times. We hadn’t really seen each other for forty years. And the one thing we didn’t go into, the elephant in the room, was a subject we took up by e-mail afterward. The elephant was my becoming a Catholic. You found that imponderable.

So I had an inspiration: to read a Catholic book about Jesus Christ and mail you a copy and then write you daily letters about the book, one for each chapter, sometimes recallling our days together in boarding school and the one year we shared at college. I looked at the table of contents of Romano Guardini’s The Lord and counted: 86 chapters, plus preface and conclusion.

Yeah, I could do that.

The Lord: Chapter 86, “The Spirit and the Bride”

Dear friend,

The modern city is a noisy, dirty, dangerous place. New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Calcutta, even Jerusalem—none of us want our children left alone there. The smog, the violence, the lawlessness. Modern cities are not good places to be innocent, or lost. Our vision of the city is far removed from the ancient one. Maybe that’s one reason why the final visions of Revelation are hard to fathom.

The “bride,” the so-called “spouse of the Lamb” is the city Jerusalem, the heavenly version. Its walls measure so high by so wide by so thick, and they are set with gems. This Jerusalem has no temple inside because God Himself is its temple.

The Lord: Chapter 85, “Promise”

My dear old friend,

I know I can’t fool you, or shouldn’t try, now that this long roll of letters about The Lord by Romano Guardini is coming to an end. (Just two more installments after this one!) So let me just say it:

I struggle with faith. There are many times while writing these personal, amateur reflections when I have realized how often my head outruns my heart. And vice versa.

I sometimes think I get what Guardini is writing about, but my heart doesn’t feel it. It’s as though I have solved a problem in plane geometry, but without the eureka. At other times, my heart feels a surge of faith, but my head shakes dubiously: Nope, doesn’t make rational sense to me.

What’s the old prayer from St. Mark, something like—“Lord, I believe. Help me in my unbelief”—? I’m right there most of the time—despite my seeming self-assurance in these letters.

The Lord: Chapter 84, “Victor, Judge, Perfecter”

Dear friend,

As you know, I am writing a memoir of my journey from the Protestant communions of my boyhood, through a long middle period of search, to the Catholic Church today. Why did I leave Christianity in my teens? Why did I follow what I followed then? Why did I “come home” to Rome? My grandmother would have rolled over in her grave to hear about it, or so my father said.

The hard part of writing a memoir is—duh—telling the truth. Before telling it, I have to know it. In my case, this is harder than it might appear. Yes, I am aware that this and that “happened,” but why? What facts have dropped between the cracks in my memory? What caused me to (mis)conceive reality as it was occurring around me?

In my case, at times, power stood in the way of truth. And so today’s chapter from Guardini, about the final visions of Christ in the Book of Revelation, touches me deeply.

The Lord: Chapter 83, “The Great Sign in Heaven”

Dear friend,

We are coming to the end of this series of posts on Romano Guardini’s The Lord. (Can I hear you say, Amen!) I began my daily reflections on Labor Day and will end the day before the start of a new liturgical year, by the Catholic calendar. If the Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise, I may start a new series on the First Sunday in Advent, this time about the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I have never read. Mea culpa.

The purpose of this series of posts was to stay in touch with you, my old friend from boarding-school days, while also putting myself in better touch with Jesus Christ. I’m not sure I’ve accomplished either goal, though I am more confident about the latter. (I’ve had only one whispery reply from you. You know I love you, man, even if I never hear from you.)

But getting close to Jesus—Means what?

The Lord: Chapter 82, “The Christian Sense of History”

Dear friend,

If you asked the average man on the street for his “sense of history,” what would he say? Even if you tried to explain yourself: Does human history have any order to it? Is it going anywhere? Or will “we” just muddle along (without “me” in a few years), trying our best to be just and to avoid nuclear and biochemical disaster until—what?—the sun explodes?

I used to worry about the sun exploding. The most chilling episode of “The Twilight Zone” I ever saw was about a boy who predicted the future on television and one day saw that the sun would become a supernova tomorrow. Is that your sense of history?

OK, I know that some of us used to be “Marxists,” back in the 1960s when we were reading Marcuse and nodding numbly at stuff we didn’t deeply understand. That gave us a pattern for how events unfold. But today, my friend—what do you think drives the story of mankind, and where is it driving us?

The Lord: Chapter 81, “Things”

Dear friend,

Nowadays, we love making religions out of the things of our lives: our homes (nesting, feng shui, Martha Stewart Living); the objects we craft to fill them (pots, stainless steel cookware, fine woodwork); the foods we cultivate and cook in them (organic, whole, local); the children we raise on these foods and in these spaces (healthy, balanced, brilliant of course). How strange that we forget Who made these things, Him to whom these things point!

How strange, too, that we celebrate the Home while letting the Family fall apart!

This is a strange topic—things—to encounter near the end of a book about Jesus and the New Testament, smack dab in the center of Romano Guardini’s consideration of the most “spiritual” book in the Bible. Revelation is made of visions, but visions of things; it has “objects scattered throughout,” as RG notes. Lamp-stands, stars, a tree, a crown, a pebble, pillars, a throne, harps, censers, a scroll, a Lamb, horses . . . “What does it mean, this multitude of things in eternity? Revelation describes the dislodging and consuming of time by the eternal—why this mass of earthly objects?”

The Lord: Chapter 80, “The Seven Seals”

Dear friend,

This chapter in Romano Guardini’s book The Lord has nothing to do with Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 movie “The Seventh Seal.” But that’s where my mind went. Immediately.

Back in the 1960s, when we were in school together, Bergman ruled the art cinema, along with other inscrutable European directors like Truffaut and Fellini. Remember?

Our culture has become so saturated with modern and postmodern imagery, so de-Christianized, that when you think of the seven seals you think of Bergman and death and nothingness, instead of the beauty and terror and hopefulness of the Book of Revelation. Which Guardini continues to elucidate here.

The Lord: Chapter 79, “The Lamb”

Dear friend,

In a mosque you won’t see pictures of God. But Christianity “runs the danger of scandal,” Romano Guardini writes. Christianity says that God “became flesh.” Its saints and artists have represented God with imagery for two thousand years.

No image of God is stranger to me than that of Jesus in Revelation: the lamb. (Note the lamb at the base of the cross in this image by Matthias Grünewald, cited by Guardini.) A weak, humble, albeit warm and friendly creature, what is the lamb doing as a central symbol of God made man in Christian life?

That’s what RG asks in this chapter.

The Lord: Chapter 78, “Adoration”

Dear friend,

I was raised in the Congregational Church until age 10, when my family moved east and into an Episcopal Church. To me the only difference was the kneelers and the more elaborate choreography of devotion that went with them.

I had to learn how and when to kneel, though I wasn’t sure why. Why do Catholics and most* Episcopalians kneel? Why didn’t we kneel in the Congregational Church? What is the meaning of kneeling?

In this chapter about the Book of Revelation, Romano Guardini has a simple explanation:

The Lord: Chapter 77, “Throne and Throning One”

Dear friend,

After the first three introductory chapters, the Book of Revelation really gets trippy. I use the late-60s term not only to get your attention, my dear old friend, but also because I am remembering a day when some in our generation—I’m not naming names—thought that the “doors of perception” could be opened with the aid of chemical substances. 

The term comes from the title of a 1954 book by Aldous Huxley that certain unnamed characters in our age bracket took as a sort of Bible of spiritual discovery. Writing about his experiences with mescaline, Huxley took the term from William Blake’s epic poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” I doubt Blake used mescaline, but he probably took his inspiration from Revelation.

All of which says to me, So why did we think we had to reinvent not just the wheel but God and heaven too, when all along our religious tradition had given us a clear vision of these and more?

The Lord: Chapter 76, “He Who Reigns”

Dear friend,

I have a dear friend whose father died when he was seven years old, leaving his mother a widow with seven children, all still quite young. My friend developed a fantasy that his father wasn’t dead but was on a secret mission for the President of the United States, and that Dad would return in glory, complete with front-page headlines and a hometown parade.

Imagine that a letter arrived from my friend’s father telling his family not to worry, that he was still alive and would return. Imagine that the father told the seven children that he knew about their troubles in his absence and reminded them to be good and mind their mother while he was away.

According to my reading of Romano Guardini, that’s what we have in the first three chapters of the Book of Revelation.

The Lord: Chapter 75, “The Book of Revelation”

Dear friend,

Red Dragon, a thriller by Thomas Harris. “The Seventh Seal,” a film by Ingmar Bergman. The Four Horsemen, famous running backs on the 1924 Notre Dame football team coached by Knute Rockne. . . . The Book of Revelation is packed with so much imagery stolen by popular culture that it’s hard to believe the last book of the Bible means anything now.

Then along comes Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels, to put her spin on it in her latest work of creative scholarship, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy & Politics in the Book of Revelation. Maybe it’s just me, but Pagels’s book—which denies much of Catholic teaching about Revelation—seemed to get more ink and air-time in mainstream media than any “religious” book in the past twelve months. Why is that, do you suppose?

It’s refreshing for me to read Guardini’s introduction to the Book of Revelation, founded on two simple ideas:

The Lord: Chapter 74, “The Lord’s Return”

Dear friend,

St. Paul was wrong. Jesus did not return during Paul’s lifetime, and Paul was sure he would. In his final chapter on Paul’s Epistles, before moving on to Revelation, Romano Guardini explains this about Paul and what the whole idea of the Second Coming means.

This idea has become embedded in our culture. Every year or so, it seems, there’s some nut job in the desert predicting that it will happen in forty-two days. So that we have come to disbelieve in the Second Coming on liberal principle—though some might call that phrase an oxymoron.

The Lord: Chapter 73, “The Eternal High Priest”

Dear friend, *

Sacrifice. The blood of a lamb smeared on a lintel. The remains of a sacrificial victim carried into the holy of holies. Killing a living being to give its blood to God? The modern mind—vegan or not—rebels at the idea.

I understand sacrifice as giving up to get better. Avoid sweets for a better body. Play fewer video games to have more study time, for better grades. But give up life for God? Not me, not today.

And yet sacrifice is at the foundation of Christianity! It is all but the theme of the Old Testament. Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses—they were all involved in sacrifice. And not just the Old Testament. Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” The defining moment of Christianity, honored over altars everywhere, is a human sacrifice, the Crucifixion.

The Lord: Chapter 72, “Ecclesia and the Firstborn of All Creatures”

Dear friend,

There are chapters in Romano Guardini’s book The Lord that make me feel like a first-grader at his first catechism class. I mean, take a gander at that title: Ecclesia? And that difficult theological term applied to Jesus, firstborn? I wish the chapter clarified these ideas to my satisfaction, but it doesn’t. So when I read something like this, and still wish to understand it, I latch onto a phrase or sentence here and there, to get the nutrients I’m capable of absorbing.

For example, this sentence: “Christian spirituality does not mean that a person turns inward, or strives to reach essential (psychological or spiritual) depths, but that Christ enters into his being, bringing his spirit with him, to remain as long as he remains, to depart when he departs.”

OK, first, let’s admit, the idea of Christ entering me, like an astronaut slipping inside his space suit, is hard to even picture. How exactly does that happen? But let’s put that doubt aside, let’s put all doubt aside, and try to get what we can—

The Lord: Chapter 71, “The New Man”

Dear friend,

With this chapter, Romano Guardini leaves the Acts of the Apostles and launches into the final books of the New Testament, riffling through the Epistles of St. Paul to arrive at the ultimate book of Revelation. Right up to the moment of the Ascension, the first event in Acts, Christ’s disciples lived “in sight of” him, according to Guardini. Now, they begin to live “in” him.

St. Paul (left) writes repeatedly of Christ’s living “in” him. Guardini calls this “the very essence of apostledom.” But what does it mean? When we Christians say that Christ lives “in” us, are we only dreaming, indulging in mystical wish-fulfillment, setting ourselves up as the butt of skeptical jokes?

The Lord: Chapter 70, “Renewal”

Dear friend,

Every kid wants to conquer the world. My best friend in Cilley Hall lower year believed in establishing a world government. He also aspired to be the first Jewish president of the United States. Obviously, those goals haven’t been reached quite yet. Still, having lived through the MLK assassination together in the spring of upper year, we both would have been flabbergasted to learn that the USA would have an African-American president before we turned 60. The times they were a-changing.

My ambitions were always on a narrower scale. I wanted to change myself. From soon after I left home for our old school, I felt restless and discontented with me, WB. I wanted “Renewal.” Of course, in one way or another, that became the theme of our whole generation, at least for a short time, making me not so very unique. Romano Guardini writes: “There are experiences in which unknown possibilities seem suddenly to unfold; creative forces of which we were totally unaware. At times this urge seems to take hold of a whole culture.” Witness our culture, circa 1969.

The Lord: Chapter 69, “Lord of History”

Dear friend,

In boarding school I stumbled through history: Greek and Roman in lower year; then in upper year the dreaded American, with its super-dreaded term paper that all the seniors warned us about. In light of the forthcoming film “Lincoln,” with its team-of-rivals view of the Lincoln administration, it amuses me that I wrote my essay on “William Henry Seward and the Republican Nominating Convention of 1864.” I will have to see the movie to remember who Seward (left) even was. In the movie he is played by David Straithairn (right).

The thing about history was, I wanted an overarching theory. I thought there might be a few sentences, maybe a short essay at most, that could sum it up—what drives humankind. But I was so poorly read, such an amateur just struggling to complete my homework assignments (Herodotus? Thucydides? Who were they again?) that this desire to grasp history in the palm of my hand was a pipe dream.

And all along the Catholic Church had done it!