Letter #118: The Long Journey Home

There's one step you can't skip.

Ser Dad,

Well, I have to say, I did not have “getting relic-pilled” on my bingo card when we started this conversation. It’s like that Monty Python sketch, only instead of the Spanish Inquisition it’s Geoffroi de Charny popping his head in to shout, “NOBODY expects...the Shroud of Turin!”

Surprise!

But it’s perfectly true that the Church’s venerable fondness for knick-knacks testifies to the deep and abiding Christian hope of “seeing face to face.” As you stressed beautifully, it’s no good knowing God as some theoretical postulate if he doesn’t figure for you as a tangible, human reality.

So it’s less important whether those really are St. Athelby of Padua’s holy toenail clippings than it is to reflect that saints have toenails as well as souls, which might prompt the weightier consideration that God has hands as well as nail-wounds. Like a lot of hoary oddities in Church ritual, relics seem phony and eccentric...until they don’t.

And this seems related to something funny that keeps happening to me. As we’ve been saying, lots of old formulas that once seemed bright and lively have come to feel dried up and pointless—the slogans of Reaganite politics, the retreads of American pop art, the nature worship of paganism, and yes, the standard-issue boilerplate of the Church. This makes me want to clear the decks and think up fresh words for describing and communing with God “in various style...unmeditated,” like the innocent Adam and Eve of Paradise Lost.

And so I devise various styles of prayer, scrounging a little from books, drawing what inspiration I can from hither and yon. Often this does produce genuine insight. But here’s the funny thing: as I follow the logic of these innovations to refine them, they basically always turn back into traditional forms of liturgy. So I’ll start out with silent meditation each morning, then find myself meditating on Good In Itself, then looking for words to respond and ending up with...basically the rite of morning prayer.

It would be tempting just to skip the innovation step and go straight to the ritual. But I don’t think it works like that. Because the ritual would never have seemed as glowingly alive, as fitted to the moment, if I hadn’t stumbled upon it in my flight from it. G.K. Chesterton famously began his book on Orthodoxy with the fable of an English yachtsman who set out for undiscovered vistas, only to discover he had landed back in his home country.

Sometimes people cite this as if to conclude that we should all stop complaining and just recite the Latin mass already. But I think Chesterton was saying almost the opposite: that sometimes departing from tradition is the only way to find your way back to it. It’s the departure and return that creates what C.S. Lewis called “the condition...in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul.” Much as we might wish it otherwise, the voyage to paradise can only ever be a long and roundabout journey home.

Love,
Spencer