Darkness and Light
This week I did a poetry reading at a little bookstore in Portland. It was a nice evening, but I was reminded again of how easily people dismiss and caricature Christianity and the Church—good, moral, spiritual people.
Two passages have come my way since then and helped to put this experience in perspective.
This is how it works: sometimes we are given just the things we need. They just appear.
The first is a passage from St. Gregory, one of the early Church Fathers, comparing the Church to the dawn. A friend mentioned it in email.
“The dawn intimates that the night is over,” St. Gregory says, but “it does not yet proclaim the light of day.” Both darkness and light are present in the Church, the good and the bad, just as in anything else—any government, any family, any person. “While the dawn dispels the darkness and welcomes the light, it holds both of them, the one mixed with the other.”
Why do so many people have a problem with the simple idea that the Church isn’t all bad? That there’s good in it, too? St. Gregory figured this out in the sixth century. Paul in the first.
The second passage is from another interview with the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. I’m very much caught up with his poetry right now, in part because he grew up Catholic in Northern Ireland and talks with such insight about the Church. Heaney gradually lost his faith in Christ and in the Eucharist, but he lost it “sadly,” as he put it, without bitterness or rancor, and all his life he continued to respect the sacramental and liturgical traditions of Catholicism.
In the passage I came across he’s talking about poets and others who leave established religion behind and cobble together their own self-created religion, taking a little bit from this tradition and a little from that, often relying on the merely faddish and superficial. But “like many Catholics, lapsed or not,” Heaney says, he thinks that “if you desert this system, you’re deserting the best there is, and there’s no point in exchanging one great coherence for some other ad hoc arrangement.”
In a way Heaney’s statement has more authority for me because he isn’t part of the Church anymore. But he’s wise, and learned, and he understands that whatever the sins of the institution—and they are substantial—it is intellectually and aesthetically coherent, richer than all the easy memes about it.
Both these passages help, a lot, though really it comes down to something even simpler.
I’m like Peter. I sink as soon as I feel even the slightest breeze. I can’t even be challenged in the polite way I was challenged that evening—I can’t even withstand lack of response, or polite blankness. “Do not fall from your own stability,” the Second Letter of Peter says, in a striking phrase (3:12-18), but I do, all the time.
The darkness and the light are in me, all mixed up.
Thank God for St. Gregory. Thank God for the good and wise friend who sent me the email. Thank God for the smart and gentle Irish poet. Thank God.
Postscript.
Actually, you know what it would really mean to be a Christian in a situation like this? To love people unconditionally. To listen, not seethe. To stand firm in your own faith and not let the misconceptions of others bother you in the first place, but at the same time not to judge or stereotype anyone else in return—to believe that Christ is present in every situation and in every bookstore and in every person and moment altogether, as he was present in all those good, moral, spiritual people looking back at me.
That’s what God was teaching me. That’s what God is always trying to teach me.
Thank God for that evening in that little bookstore.