Reflections

• Thoughts on becoming Catholic (about one and a half years later):

  •  It is really difficult getting to church every Sunday (and especially so during the week), let alone once a month, after I received confirmation. It’s hard to imagine that my family was at church 2-5 days a week, whether volunteering, taking part in social events and activities, etc.
  •  I feel lazy about my participation in Catholicism and disappointed at my own disappointment concerning the quality of sermons. On the other hand, I rarely leave Mass without feeling unmoved in some way.
  •  It is rare to encounter Catholics in my state who don’t support gay marriage.
  •  Not having to deal with Young Earthers is a fantastic benefit to becoming Catholic.
  •  It’s very cool that my last church worked with Tibetan refugees (the city I was in is one of the largest migration areas for Tibetan refugees in America) and my current one participates with the local synagogue. This sort of reasonable bheavior is alien to past experiences.
  •  I still don’t buy into the commonly held soteriological perspectives: I can see no lasting salvation, no permanence save through repetition and the display of universal ideas, and everlasting joy, fear, and trembling with the gift of the Beatific Vision given, perhaps, as a blissful glance at the Source—there, in the corner of one’s eye, an object of lust appears, and we fall back down again to greet it.
  •  Chesterton is right. The Church is bigger on the inside. (Or was it the Doctor who said that)?

   

Chesterton on the Life Everlasting

We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.

– G.K. Chesterton, Everlasting Man

Excerpt from Chesterton’s “Autobiography”

[My maternal grandfather] had been one of the old Wesleyan lay-preachers and was thus involved in public controversy, a characteristic which has descended to his grandchild. He was also one of the leaders of the early Teetotal movement; a characteristic which has not. But I am quite sure there was a great deal in him, beyond anything that is implied in mere public speaking or teetotalism. I am quite sure of it, because of two casual remarks he made; which are indeed the only two remarks I ever heard of him making. Once, when his sons were declaiming against mode and convention in the manner of all liberal youth, he said abruptly, “Ah, they talk a lot about fashion; but fashion is civilisation.” And in the other case, the same rising generation was lightly tossing about that pessimism which is only possible in the happy time of youth. They were criticising the General Thanksgiving in the Prayer-Book, and remarking that a good many people have very little reason to be thankful for their creation. And the old man, who was then so old that he hardly ever spoke at all, said suddenly out of silence, “I should thank God for my creation if I knew I was a lost soul.”