contra mundum
““Oh dear, it’s very difficult being a Catholic,” complained Sebastian Flyte, the son of an old aristocratic English family that had remained Catholic since the days before Henry VIII. Sebastian was address¬ing Charles Ryder, a fellow Oxford student and friend, whom he had invited to vacation at his family’s estate called Brideshead.
Ryder was a polite agnostic who looked upon religion as pious nonsense—a hobby which immature people professed but enlightened people did not. And he wasn’t really surprised by Sebastian’s remark over the difficulty of being Catholic, because Sebastian was hardly a practicing Catholic. For one thing, he drank too much. So Charles replied, “1 suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?”
“Is it nonsense?” mused Sebastian. “I wish it were. It some¬times sounds terribly sensible to mc.”
“But my dear Sebastian,” pressed Charles, “you can’t really believe it all. I mean about … the star and three kings. And in prayers? You think you can kneel down in front of a statue . .. and change the weather?”
“Oh yes” said Sebastian. “Don’t you remember last term when I took Aloysius (his Teddy Bear!] and left him behind I didn’t know where? I prayed like mad to Saint Anthony … and immediately after lunch there was Mr. Nichols at Canterbury gate with Aloysius in his arms, saying I’d left him in his cab.”
I think what Eveyln Waugh is trying to show in his novel Brideshead Revisited is how odd or schizoid we Catholics may appear in this day and age to people of more recent vintage. We are as modern as the next person. We accept the findings of science as far as they go. We are in fact physicists, doctors, astronauts, engineers.
We admit that comets have tails millions of miles long. And yet we persist in believing that a personal Creator (someone not unlike us) explains this great universe and not just a Big Bang. We believe this Creator remains in touch with us and is behind every human Exodus from bondage to real freedom, and that this Creator became present among us in Jesus whom we ineffectually killed because he would have us love rather than despise one another.
And so we can understand why Sebastian says he finds it difficult to be Catholic—to be caught up in two different worlds: one that prefers a skeptical approach to life and one inclined to give things seemingly fabulous the benefit of the doubt. At one point Ryder admits that Catholics at times do seem the same as other modern folk. But Sebastian plaintively protests, “My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not … they’ve got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time.”
The Charles Ryders of this world will continue to say, “How can you believe all that; there’s no scientific evidence of God; no one has ever seen God.” But since when has the human eyeball become the final arbiter of what exists or doesn’t exist? And insofar as the God of our Gospels has been ultimately identified with Love, doesn’t God become sublimely visible every time a human being behaves with compassion? Such sightings of God have been hap¬pening since the dawn of history and will continue to occur when¬ever love compels a human ego to explode with beneficence.”
- Living the Lectionary: Links to Life and Literature
by Gepff Wood
Ryder was a polite agnostic who looked upon religion as pious nonsense—a hobby which immature people professed but enlightened people did not. And he wasn’t really surprised by Sebastian’s remark over the difficulty of being Catholic, because Sebastian was hardly a practicing Catholic. For one thing, he drank too much. So Charles replied, “1 suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?”
“Is it nonsense?” mused Sebastian. “I wish it were. It some¬times sounds terribly sensible to mc.”
“But my dear Sebastian,” pressed Charles, “you can’t really believe it all. I mean about … the star and three kings. And in prayers? You think you can kneel down in front of a statue . .. and change the weather?”
“Oh yes” said Sebastian. “Don’t you remember last term when I took Aloysius (his Teddy Bear!] and left him behind I didn’t know where? I prayed like mad to Saint Anthony … and immediately after lunch there was Mr. Nichols at Canterbury gate with Aloysius in his arms, saying I’d left him in his cab.”
I think what Eveyln Waugh is trying to show in his novel Brideshead Revisited is how odd or schizoid we Catholics may appear in this day and age to people of more recent vintage. We are as modern as the next person. We accept the findings of science as far as they go. We are in fact physicists, doctors, astronauts, engineers.
We admit that comets have tails millions of miles long. And yet we persist in believing that a personal Creator (someone not unlike us) explains this great universe and not just a Big Bang. We believe this Creator remains in touch with us and is behind every human Exodus from bondage to real freedom, and that this Creator became present among us in Jesus whom we ineffectually killed because he would have us love rather than despise one another.
And so we can understand why Sebastian says he finds it difficult to be Catholic—to be caught up in two different worlds: one that prefers a skeptical approach to life and one inclined to give things seemingly fabulous the benefit of the doubt. At one point Ryder admits that Catholics at times do seem the same as other modern folk. But Sebastian plaintively protests, “My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not … they’ve got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time.”
The Charles Ryders of this world will continue to say, “How can you believe all that; there’s no scientific evidence of God; no one has ever seen God.” But since when has the human eyeball become the final arbiter of what exists or doesn’t exist? And insofar as the God of our Gospels has been ultimately identified with Love, doesn’t God become sublimely visible every time a human being behaves with compassion? Such sightings of God have been hap¬pening since the dawn of history and will continue to occur when¬ever love compels a human ego to explode with beneficence.”
- Living the Lectionary: Links to Life and Literature
by Gepff Wood