A Catholic Christian

Jinx and I walked this morning under the coverlet of humidity that has parked itself over these mountains and announced that it will not be leaving anytime soon. The crickets and locusts rasped on in a steady note from the damp fronds of green in all directions, and we both walked more slowly than usual.

I saw in my missal that today is the feast day of Saint Augustine, the revered Doctor of the Church. I prayed for family members as I walked, and I thought on the sorry things that mar the days in this age. While evil overtakes the Western world, the Roman Catholic Church has paralleled the spirit of the age, the corruption therein, the dismay it evokes.

I’ve noticed that for all their fear and masks and bottle of hand sanitizer clipped to their belts and purses, the Protestants don’t seem to be troubled by the effects of the current hysteria on their churches. They closed for a while, then they reopened, sort of. They may close again. Who knows? Shrug, shrug, shrug. I remember in my Protestant days when the cascade of televangelist scandals washed over America in the late 1980s. My reaction and the reaction of my pious ecclesiastical cohort seemed to be, “Ah, well. I knew they were crooks…” And we were untroubled by the implications both of what these electronic pastors had done and their flocks reactions to their actions. Perhaps it is easier to shrug when one doesn’t feel a genuine ancient tie to a line of people stretching back to the beginning.

But in contrast, I see and sense today that the truly faithful Catholics are deeply grieved in their spirits over what is transpiring in the ancient Church. Everything holy is being attacked, upended, inverted. They are weary of looking to their leaders to help them, because they have been disappointed and betrayed so many times. And so it is with the West. Everything once revered is being canceled, slandered, torn down, painted over, erased, mocked, spat upon, denounced, criminalized, dismissed. And those who should be leading this, the most prosperous and advanced civilization the world has ever seen, are meek and silent. They are even complicit.

I pushed these thoughts as far from me as I could while Jinx and I walked in the heavy morning air, and I thought as I so often do that the verdant and mountainous world seems to be an immense room, carpeted with grass, pillared with trees, draped with vines and shrubs, painted with clouds, and adorned with the bric-a-brac of beasts and flying things.

Jinx looked up at me when we paused on a hill to catch our breath.

This house is furnished with suffering, he said into the center of me. You walk through it, pulling books off of the shelves and taking from them what you will, knowing that the words will hurt you. You sit on its uncomfortable chairs, gaze out of its dingy windows, feel its dusty floors beneath your sore feet, listen to its creaks and groans in the night.

But one day, you will leave this house and go to another, just as I will. You will come to understand then the things you want to know, and will have answered the questions you cannot even formulate now. But here we are, in this house of suffering, and it is good that we are here.

I ran my hand down his rough, brindled back, and I was glad Jinx was with me. We walked on. And I thought, “The one thing we all have in common right now is that we all seem to be waiting. Waiting for something to happen.”

Today is the Feast of Saint Augustine. This holy man of old was a wild one in his youth, and was the source of much suffering endured by his mother, Monica. Her fervent and unceasing prayers were the engine that drove Augustine to cry out to God for mercy and to finally embrace the cross. Augustine recorded her dying words in his Confessions:

But you know, O Lord, that in the course of our conversation that day, the world and its pleasures lost all their attraction for us. My mother said: “Son, as far as I am concerned, nothing in this life now gives me any pleasure. I do not know why I am still here, since I have no further hopes in this world. I did have one reason for wanting to live a little longer: to see you become a Catholic Christian before I died. God has lavished his gifts on me in that respect, for I know that you have even renounced earthly happiness to be his servant. So what am I doing here?”

I do not really remember how I answered her. Shortly, within five days or thereabouts, she fell sick with a fever…

From the Confessions of Saint Augustine [emphasis mine]

~ S.K. Orr