On dogmatism and hide-and-seek...

This rang bells of my not-so-distant past for me (doctrine and sacramental life though I'd had) as we read it tonight at a book group I'm in - a selection from Caryll Houselander: Essential Writings.

There is a way of convincing a man that puts him off. The average non-Catholic has only one thing, his personal approach to God. He has no authority, no doctrine, no sacramental life. He has only the secret approach to God in his own soul. A thing as darkly mysterious and lovely as the reaching out of the blind man's hands to learn the features of the Beloved Face, through his finger tips.

It is the most precious and intimate thing that he has, and all too often the unskilled apostle gives him the wholly wrong impression that the Church threatens it.

Catholicism is represented to him, not as life in which his own life will grow and flower, but as a set of dogmas which must be swallowed whole like vitamin pills. He is told that personal feeling does not matter, that what does matter is a dogged, if arid Will, and the arguments put out to support the claims of the church are unanswerable.

At all events, the man's head can not answer them. His heart rebels. It seems even easier to forgo the certainty of Faith, than the touch in the darkness that is the sweetness of life.

The more convinced a man's mind is, the more resistance does his heart put up. The more does the church seem to be a menace to him, the more he is in conflict with himself.

In reality, the Catholic as much as the non Catholic, has his secret life with God, his continual search in darkness. Indeed the secret lives of the saints, presumably the most child-like people, have been games of hide and seek with Eternal love.

Everyone who comes to God must come through his personal experience. His particular temperment and its difficulties are all part of God's plan for the making of his soul. Witness the tears of spiritual travail that assailed Cardinal Newman, of storm and passion that buffeted St. Augustine, and in contrast, the split second in which Saul became Paul. Go back to the midnight of the Incarnation in History and see the different ways in which God leads different men to Himself. The simple shepherd who could hear the angels' voices and find the infant close at hand, the sages who could only find their way through long, scientific study of the stars and must journey from far distant countries to find the King.