It was about a month ago that I decided to look into joining the Catholic Church. My feelings about doing so have wandered all over the place, ranging from general excitement to outright dread. For the vast majority of my life I would have forced my feelings to take a back seat to my reason. But at the same time that I’ve been looking into Catholicism, I’ve also been ceding ground, little by little, to my emotions. Well, emotions is not the right word, though I can say that things tend to affect me much more strongly than they ever did. I am still as concerned with truth as ever; I want just as much as ever to have hold of something that doesn’t change. Reason holds such an attraction for me, perhaps because of my personality, and perhaps because it is so vocal in claiming to be able to discern eternity from the multifoliate, ever-changing reality about me.

But there are problems with reason, not least of which is its presumptiveness, its insistence that the world can be tied to a particular cart and taken to market. This is not to say that reason is meaningless, or even utterly corrupt (as Luther would have it). But neither can it be elevated to the status it enjoyed during the Enlightenment, that of the sole light in a world of darkness and chaos. Reason alone does not satisfy the whole man. It is a sharp sword that every man should carry, and carry well, but a sword cannot build a house or plant a garden. Those who live by this sword find themselves, in the end, on a dark, featureless plain filled only with a rushing wind that will sweep away anything that tries to take root.

I have already completely exceeded the scope of my intent for this entry, and will forbear from a critique of Romanticism and Mysticism, which elevate the faculties of the heart and the spirit beyond their station, and which end, as surely as Rationalism, in despair. But where these fail, faith does not. Faith is greater than reason: it restrains reason’s destruction, gives meaning to reason’s constructions, and, when reason is speechless goes on.

Let me state it another way. A man can believe all sorts of things on all kinds of grounds: he can be convinced by reason (through evidence or through metaphysics), by beauty, by love or hate, by moral sensibility, by the memory of an experience. Belief is a powerful thing, a performative use of language by which a person picks something out of the deafening chaos and names it his own. He may hold on to it through thick and thin—and there is a certain kind of strength that develops in those who can stick to their word—but then, he may lose the thread somehow, unable to escape the dungeon and the devouring Minotaur. Belief fails because it requires us to hold the string, and as even the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane found, the night is long.

Thanks be to God that we are not saved through belief! Thanks be to a God who can find us even when we cannot find ourselves! Belief fails, but the love of God does not. Faith is our knowledge of this love. In faith we do not believe in this or that, but in the character of God. In faith I know that though every kind of madness is seeking to devour me, God is seeking me in order to be with me, to give me every good thing.

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I should step back from these reflections, for a while at least, and talk about the class a little. There are about 10 students, who range in age and experience from undergraduates to theology graduate students to middle-aged “recovering recovering Catholics”. The class is led by a priest, Father Al, and three lay leaders (whose names escape me at the moment). We meet once a week in a lounge at the Newman Center. We spend a few minutes in small groups talking about the topic of the day, and then one of the leaders gives a talk.

To be perfectly honest, I was a little discomfited by the talk this week. Now, some discomfort is to be expected, as I’m not used to the way Catholics talk about theology, and having been raised Baptist I have a pretty visceral reaction to the mystical elements in Catholicism, especially the adoration of Mary and the saints. I’m trying to keep an open mind, and frequently recalling Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who is so certain he understands Christianity that when Christ actually shows up he throws him in the dungeon. But there’s an additional layer of complexity, which comes from the fact that the Newman Center is probably one of the most liberal parishes you’ll ever find, and I need to be able to distinguish between actual Catholic positions and the lay leaders’ personal interpretations.

For example, there was a lot of talk about “divine sparks” in the talk, which was about the nature of God. I don’t object to the concept or even the vocabulary: after all, we are made in the image of God. But that kind of language is typically used by liberal and neo-orthodox theologians who, let’s face it, aren’t really interested in the God who is there. If they don’t reject the authority of Scripture outright, they do so in practice, preferring to cite philosophers and other theologians rather than the Bible. Again, not that there’s anything wrong with philsophers and theologians, but it seems to me that a religion that’s based upon the claim that God chose to reveal himself in Scripture will stand or fall on the content of that revelation. Put another way, a man who just received a love letter would be an idiot to spend ANY amount of time asking himself about the nature of his beloved or whether her name was just confusing the issue (and there are certainly plenty of theologians who suggest that the word “God” should be dropped).

I keep my eyes wide open.