Dave Zahl at Mockingbird posted this the other day:
From the collection of her letters, The Habit of Being, pgs 99-100, ht WH:I can never agree with you that the Incarnation, or any truth, has to satisfy emotionally to be right (and I would not agree that for the natural man the Incarnation does not satisfy emotionally). It does not satisfy emotionally for the person brought up under many forms of false intellectual discipline such as nineteenth century mechanism, for instance. Leaving the Incarnation aside, the very notion of God’s existence is not emotionally satisfactory anymore for great numbers of people, which does not mean the God ceases to exist. M. Jean-Paul Sartre finds God emotionally unsatisfactory in the extreme, as do most of my friends of less stature than he. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.
There is question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say the thought of everybody lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that this journey is often impeded by emotion. I don’t think you are a jellyfish. But I suspect you of being a Romantic.
8 comments:
Love this!
Yep - Flannery's a pip....
So...meet the new blog, same as the old blog? :)
(You've probably heard her opinion on "Real Presence"?
I was once five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater....She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hand't opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broad water said when she was a child and received the Host, she though of it as the Holy Ghost. He being the 'most portable' person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable."
!!)
So...meet the new blog, same as the old blog? :)
For now. ;-)
I'm glad I deleted all that old stuff, though - it was really depressing me. I feel light as a feather now!
Yes! I love that story! I would often use it when discussing the Eucharist with my Protestant friends in College. It had a double-punch: good Eucharistic theology and a swear, so it was doubly sure to have offended them! :)
<>
You're allowed to do that? Suppose you said something really really profound once and then forgot you'd said it. It'd be lost forever...
RR
RR, it's all out there in cache, if anybody needed it....
(Also, you can save your blog as an XML file if you want. Nothing on the web is lost forever; in fact, you can't ever get rid of it. That'll be a big problem in the future, believe me....)
Post a Comment