Regardless of what it is that might have drawn you to the Catholic Church and her teaching sooner or later you will discover the Eucharist. I was initially drawn to the Catholic Church because of a question of Christian unity. She answered that question for me in a way that it had never been answered before. But then I went to Mass and discovered the Eucharist. After that things were different, it wasn’t about theologies and theories anymore. I say “discovered the Eucharist” rather than “discovered the teaching on the Eucharist” because… those discoveries are not the same thing. And this is something I really, really want to communicate. You can live with some pretty wild doctrines about God’s love and never truly “taste and see” His goodness. (I hope you’re picking up the allusion.)

The first Masses I ever attended were in a little Catholic church in Cape Town circa 2010. The memory is warm – if I can describe it that way – there was a certain sense that I had there… like there was a love in that place. And it wasn’t because of the people. That isn’t to say that they weren’t loving people, only that they weren’t the source of that love. They didn’t “make it present”. It wasn’t there because of them. There was something else happening. They were there gathering because of that love, and I suppose I was too, though I didn’t realize it at the time. I remember also the words the priest said at a crucial point in the Mass. They went like this:

At the time he was betrayed
and entered willingly into his Passion
he took bread and, giving thanks, broke it,
and gave it to his disciples, saying:

‘TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU, AND EAT OF IT,
FOR THIS IS MY BODY,
WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU.’

Those words heralded something powerful. The “sense” that followed them was so awesome it’s hard to describe, and so beautiful now to recall.

Years later my niece asked if she could join me for Mass and so I took her along. It was a small suburban parish with no frills, no music even, nothing to write home about on any account really, except one. When I asked her about it afterwards she said to me, “When that man held up the bread and said “Behold the Lamb of God”… it felt awesome and glorious.” She felt it too. And I can tell you… there was nothing theatrical in the way the priest moved or spoke that would inspire her to say that. She had become aware of something else.

In a way the whole purpose of this Substack has been to tell my Evangelical friends about the great gifts that exist within the Catholic Church which I long for you to know about. And there’s one gift that is truly the Gift of gifts, and seeing as this is my last article before I go offline for a year (at least) I may as well use it to tell you about it.

There’s a really strange thing in the Catholic Church… we believe that the bread and the wine which are used in the central celebration which we call the Mass, by a special gift instituted by Christ through His Apostles, can truly be called “His Body and Blood”. It is crazy. And I could try and write a defense for it here but I’d like to appeal to you in a different way, not to make you believe something outlandish and strange, but rather to urge you to take Christ at His word. Though, to be honest, I hardly know how or where to start! It’s like trying to explain to someone why it’s wonderful to have a mother if they’ve never had one and don’t see why they should. Where do you start?

Perhaps with a few stories.

That same friend I mentioned earlier had found his way to Christ in his late twenties and I remember him telling me about how it didn’t take him long on his journey to realize that he longed for Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. He also knew that in order to receive Communion his relationship with his girlfriend would have to change, that he’d have to confess the sins he’d committed with her and other sins besides in order to approach the Eucharist, and yet the desire was so clear in him that the decision was clear also and he came. The presence of Christ in the Eucharist converted him.

This way of thinking would have been strange to me 15 years ago: slipping into churches to pray “in the presence of” the Eucharist; a reordering one’s life “in order to receive” Communion. But now it’s normal. It would have been strange because of the “objectiveness” of it. The way a spiritual journey, directed towards God has a locus in something tangible, something physical. But I now see that it is not something strange and foreign “added onto” Christianity. It is there at its heart. It is the Incarnation.

But I have other stories to share, so let me continue.

The moment that I met Maria I could tell that she carried a special kind of lightness about her and an inner freedom that is only the work of grace. She agreed to tell her story on the Catholic radio that I used to work for and so one morning I had her on and she talked about the first mission trip that she went on. It was at a time when she wasn’t very serious about her faith but for some reason she decided to go. Every day one of the nuns on the mission would ask her if she’d like to join them for prayers in the evening in front of the Eucharist. “I thanked her but didn’t go,” she said, “until the last day when I decided that I should go.” On this final day it happened. Exactly “what” happened? I don’t recall that even she had words for it except that something changed in her in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Hearing her talk about it was like hearing someone telling you about the moment they fell in love and yet really having nothing they could actually say – except that it happened. Ever since then Maria has been planning mission trip after mission trip, dragging her friends along to remote places in Africa. When we did the interview she was about to do a mission to Columbia for the first time. “Initially I had suggested this as a joke, but the friars took me seriously,” she said. “So then I went into the church and prayed to Jesus in the Eucharist and said, ‘If you want us to go, we’ll go.’ ” That love story that started in front of Christ in the Eucharist was still unfolding.

I remember being worried, before I really understood the magnitude of what this means, that maybe Catholics put too much emphasis on Communion. But that’s why I like stories like these. These conversions are not the fruit of a perceived value placed on Communion, as if the person’s faith causes Christ to be present, and I think this next story demonstrates this quite clearly.

I read a collection of stories of Jewish converts to Catholicism and one of my favourites was about a man whose journey to faith was in many ways quite unremarkable, ordinary and slow. And there was a moment in it when he very nearly gave up. He was sitting in Mass watching the priest perform all the rites and prayers but doing it in such a way that it seemed the priest wasn’t himself believing in what he was doing. And so the young man thought, “Well, that’s it. If not even he believes it, I think I’m done with all this.” But just as he was about to get up and leave, the priest raised the Eucharist and something changed. He said that at that moment “I believed.” The moment that the Mass ended he cornered one of the priests and asked to be baptized as soon as possible.

One might say, yes, Christ is present in Communion, because whenever “two or more are gathered” in His name He is present. And I don’t deny that. But this story for me speaks to something that goes beyond that – an objective reality that is present whether or not those present have faith to meet it. One might argue that clouds of incense, golden vessels, elaborately embroidered vestments, towering cathedrals with beams of light coming through stained-glass windows and the sweetly singing choirs cause (or trick!) people into believing that Christ must be present amongst the fanfare. But those things are there to honour the reality that is objectively there, not to make it present, and again that is why I love the stories of when this is realized by unexpectant people in unremarkable churches.

In contrast, I’ve been struck by a feeling of emptiness in some of the most beautiful Anglican churches in England, an emptiness I was honestly not expecting to find, but on finding it I found it made sense. All the architectural and liturgical logic is there in those places to honour the presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. But the Blessed Sacrament itself is not there.

There’s a story that I was privileged to hear and have learnt so much from, told to me by a young man who for a long time lived a life far from the Catholic faith he’d been born into because he was in gay relationships since he was a teenager. Somehow, however, reverence for Christ in the Eucharist remained in him. Reverence, and I’m sure love to. He knew that he couldn’t approach the table of Communion while living the way he was living and so once a year at least, at Christmas or at Easter he would live chastely for a time, confess his sins to a priest and (if the priest was convinced that he was sincere and gave him absolution) he would then receive Communion with the rest of the faithful. This continued for years until eventually the one love won out over the other and he left his long-term partner and the life that went with it in order to be reconciled to Christ. And to this day he lives chastely and in a truly fulfilled way too, but only by staying close to Christ in the Eucharist. I say that his journey went the way it did, not just because of reverence, but because of love for the Eucharist – it must also be said that love was coming the other way too, from Christ, in the Eucharist, to him.

I wanted to share these stories because I feel like it is important to put this in perspective. Many times I have argued through doctrines with friends who only take a symbolic view of Communion, trying to convince them that Jesus really did mean what he said, as Scripture, the early Church Fathers and the Church has always held. And I know that a lot of Christians from different denominations hold a range of pseudo “Real Presence of Christ in Communion” views (though I don’t really believe that’s possible, it’s either His body or it’s not). But I feel like there’s an elephant in the room that needs pointing out. There really is no point trying to convince you merely to “change your ideas” about Communion, because (and this may hurt) the real problem is that, if what the Catholic Church says is true, you don’t actually have the same thing in your churches in the first place. To split from the apostolic priesthood (which is what Luther and the Church of England did) is to split from the Eucharist. The two go hand in hand.

There’s a way in which I’d like to be wrong about this. Perhaps Christ is truly present when my friends sit down in a prayer meeting, bring out wheat crackers and grape juice, pray together and “break bread”, and perhaps He (by His own divine choice, He is free to after all) is present in the same way there as He is in the Catholic Mass on the altar with the priest praying over the bread and the wine. But I think that it is more likely that the doctrine of the Real Presence has been either watered down or lost in all these other denominations after the Reformation because the Real Presence itself has been lost. People don’t speak about “breaking bread” as being “Christ’s body and blood” because… it’s not. And the reason why Evangelicals like the ones I grew up with insist that communion is only symbolic is because what they are doing… is.

I realize that I say all this at the risk of sounding really conceited. We have something that you don’t. But I’m not trying to belittle what non-Catholics do, per se. In my own journey of faith the practice of “breaking bread” when I was an Evangelical (yes, with crackers and grape juice) was very dear, very meaningful, and I longed for it when I was unable to share in it. But I loved it as a symbol, a way of re-enacting what Christ did, prayerfully and in fellowship with other believers, but nothing more than that. When I encountered what Catholics taught about Communion I was hearing something different to anything I’d been told before (even if it was just what Jesus said). And when I encountered the Eucharist I encountered something different too. I didn’t realize what it was right away, what that warmth and love was, what that “sense” was that hung in the air when the priest said those words, the thing my niece described as “awesome and glorious”. I didn’t realize that that was Christ present in Communion, but now I do, and that’s why I’m Catholic.

There are other stories that I could share that get way crazier about miracles with physical changes happening to the Eucharistic hosts, demons fleeing, people being healed, seeing visions, etc., but I’ve chosen to share a few that have touched me and are cased in the ordinary, because that, I think, speaks more directly to the heart of what Christ is doing by being among us as our “daily bread”. You could pass over Him just as many passed the dying rabbi between two thieves outside the gates of Jerusalem 2000 years ago, and not realize that’s God.

And that’s been the wonder of it in my own life. I have never had a wild, bright-light, voice-from-heaven moment in front of the Eucharist, and yet as the years have gone by I have awoken day by day to the realization that my whole life revolves around a new centre, that I’m caught in an orbit of God’s love, because although I don’t see any bright lights and hear an audible voice I have found a tremendous peace in the presence of what my eyes see as a small pale wafer.

And not only do I see, but I taste.

There is one last miracle that I’d like to mention which I believe is one of the surest signs that Christ is present in the Eucharist although I’ve never heard anyone speak about it at length. It’s what I referred to in a previous article as the sign of celibacy. How is it that men and women have managed to make this commitment to serve God undividedly down the centuries, forsaking the normal human path of conjugal love, marriage and family and why is it that these men and women radiate love and possess a peace and inner freedom rather than living lives of frustration and misery? On what do they thrive? The answer is really simple. They are fed on Christ’s Body and Blood.

And this last miracle is one that touches me personally. As I have mentioned before, I am entering the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans) to become a friar and eventually, God-willing, a priest. In fact I am on the threshold, having arrived at the Priory a week ago and preparing for my retreat to be clothed in the habit which starts tomorrow. Many of my Evangelical friends find it really strange (oh the puzzled looks in your faces!) that I am choosing a path that means giving up marriage. And that is why I have tried to share a little bit about that here. I will certainly need your prayers, as there will be trials, sufferings and crosses, and only by God’s grace will I keep to this path. But I wanted you to know that I’m doing this because I have found a pearl of great price, a treasure hidden in a field, that I prefer this threshold to any place on earth, and that I have tasted and I have seen.

The Lord is good.

(Published with permission of my Novice Master. I will be off SubStack and all social media for at least a year, perhaps longer, during my formation.)

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Perhaps most importantly the image of plant life helps us understand how a thing can change, how it can look different (sometimes remarkably different) if considered at different stages of its life, and yet still be the same thing, i.e. not change so much (degree) or in such a way (manner) that it becomes a different thing altogether. For example, a change in degree would be from a seedling to a full grown tree. A change in manner or kind would be from a living tree to a table. In many respects the difficulty of really facing the reality of the Church centres around this very thing: what is legitimate change and what isn’t? One of the things that caused me to become Catholic was noticing how Protestants almost always defended the break from the Catholic Church by claiming that the Catholic Church had changed beyond recognition from the Early Church. Here “Early Church” is a term that doesn’t describe “the Church in her early years” but a lost perfect Church that once existed but no longer does, except as a kind of ideal for Christians to imagine and aspire to. What was interesting about this to me was that the historical connection between this ideal “Early Church” and the present “Catholic Church” was never convincingly denied. And because the connection couldn’t be denied it was rather made to seem irrelevant. And it was made to seem irrelevant, precisely because of this (apparently) drastic change that made the Early Church and the Catholic Church practically different realities. The living tree had become a table.

But the ordinary change that happens in the life of any plant I believe can help one see that the Church is the same living reality, not something dead and changed beyond recognition and I shall try and demonstrate how.

If you’ve ever spent time working in a garden or growing your own vegetables you’ll know just how stark the ordinary stages of change can be in the life of a plant. Seedlings of very different plants can look incredibly similar to each other in their early stages but then grow to be easily identified later. The point is, the plant changes. It doesn’t look the same as what it looked like as a seedling or a shrub. And yet a trained eye will tell you that it’s not completely different either, that what you see in the mature towering tree you will have begun to see in the earlier stages of the seedling and the shrub. You might not recognise the connection between what is developing and what is developed, but that doesn’t mean that they are not connected.

And that’s a key word: development. Anyone who has looked seriously into Catholicism and its intellectual history will have come across John Henry Newman, that great English saint who first tried to argue that the English church (as he understood it) had a right to be “Anglican” just as much as (and hence the coining of the term) the French church was “Gallican” or the church of Rome was “Roman”. (You still find this way of thinking among the followers of Newman’s pre-conversion movement who refer to themselves as Anglo Catholics along side Roman Catholics, as if the two were different flavours of the same cuisine. If you’re unfamiliar with these peculiarities such that you’re finding it hard to follow, please don’t stop here! The rest should still make sense.) Newman, in trying to rediscover, outline and defend the English church’s apostolic orthodoxy independent of Catholicism, which to him was a mixture of true Apostolic teaching mingled in with later inventions, slowly started to find that these apparently “Roman inventions” were present farther back than he’d realised, though often in undeveloped form. In other words, what seemed to him new and foreign ideas in the life of the Church were in fact traceable to the Church’s earliest years, to the Scriptures, the Church Fathers and the liturgies. But you would find them there in seedling form, or like buds on a shrub that needed still to spring forth. This is one of the things that convinced him that the Catholic Church had the fullness of the faith and that his project of defending the English church’s legitimate authority, independent of Rome, was futile. He called the phenomenon that he’d witnessed in the life of the Church of seeing truths remaining the same and yet the full thrust of their implications only being realised over time The Development of Doctrine (which he wrote about in his book length essay under that title), and his articulation of this concept is a key contribution to the way we understand the teaching of the Church. The Deposit of Faith remains the same, nothing added or subtracted from it, and yet it does become more fleshed-out – truths blossom, and come to fruition.

And all that can be explained with the image of a tree. For a tree undergoes exactly this kind of change, a change of development from a tender stem to a trunk, from a shoot to a branch, and from a bud to a flower and a fruit.

The last part of that description is really helpful. Because the flowers and the fruit of the plant are often the most surprising in the life of its development. Who would have thought when they saw the seedling of an aubergine that such a strangely shaped purple fruit would one day hang from its branches? You might say that there simply is no way that anyone could make the connection, and therefore what use is this analogy if in the end you can use it to justify any strange flower or fruit that appears on the branches of the Church’s teaching? But these things only appear strange and unexpected. If you follow the development closely you’ll find the connections are there. And we can do this in hindsight in the life of the Church, as Newman did through studying her history.

I say this because I have found it helpful when I look at certain Catholic practices like Confession. You will not find Confession in its current form in the earliest accounts of the Church. Take for example the early practice of public confessions, performed before the entire community when a new member came forward for baptism. Where is the now-mandatory element of privacy before a priest? Where is the seal of secrecy that a priest breaks on pain of excommunication? Confession now and back then looks significantly different. And yet, on more careful observation, taking the time to look at it’s origins (Christ granting the apostles the authority to forgive sins) and tracing the life of this gift through the ages, you will find that you are looking at the same thing in different stages of its development, different stages of growth. Remember: bud, flower, fruit.

In the actual structure of the Church I think this is really helpful. I get a bit flummoxed when speaking to a Presbyterian friend who argues that because the terms deacon, priest and bishop are not clearly delineated in Scripture and seem to be used interchangeably one must conclude that later when they appear with greater clarity and distinction (as early as the 2nd century) that this must be a mistake and a human innovation. Is it so hard to believe that under the guidance of the Holy Spirit what was indistinguishable at first developed and matured into what was always there in seedling form? Such a view always seems at pains to reject the one piece of living evidence that we do have, namely the Church herself, in favour of one’s own theory derived from Scripture in isolation.

(Mini-rant over.)

Coming back to the Church’s teachings, I’ve found the image of a plant and the way it develops really helpful when it comes to doctrines about Mary, and I know many others have too. Just the other day a friend of mine told me of how a certain Marian doctrine was always really hard for him to accept, especially because it made historical claims about Mary and yet evidence of this teaching seems to appear quite late in the life of the Church. But having learnt to trust the Holy Spirit revealing truth in the life of the Church he prayed for insight into this teaching, asking that his difficulty in accepting it could be overcome. What unfolded was a truly beautiful story of him being led to see all the elements of this doctrine in seedling form in the Scriptures that were used on its feast day as he prayerfully went over them. (I’ve deliberately left this story vague because I want this friend to tell it himself. You know who you are.)

And when I was unsure of some of the claims about Mary I had a similar experience, for example the way Catholics refer to her both as their Mother and Queen. Why insist on this? These ideas don’t seem to be present in the early teachings of the Church as they are today, nor in Scripture… or so I thought. My frustration was halted when I considered more closely the image of the woman in Revelation 12, clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars, and a little later all those who follow Christ are referred to as her children.

Hmmmm, interesting. So both the queenship (crown of twelve stars, see Rev 12:1) and motherhood (Christ followers called her children, see Rev 12:17) are there. Those ideas are not expounded upon, prayers and devotions are not written about them there in the verses that follow. But I suddenly realised that if the idea of Mary as Queen and Mother of all Christians was so problematic (as many Protestants would have me believe) why did I seem to find the first bud of that flower in Scripture?

So I found it helpful to stop trying to find literal restatements of Catholic doctrine in Scripture and rather to see them as they might appear: in seedling form, little nodes on the stems of larger more clearly defined doctrines ready to bud and flower and fruit.

There is one last application of this image of the tree that I have found really helpful, which I will add here at the risk of doing just that: merely adding it on. It was in one of Tolkien’s letters, I think, that he described his own experience of change in the life of the Church as he lived through a tumultuous time after the Second Vatican Council, a time when many things were changing in the life and practice of the Church and a discerning eye was needed to know the difference between those that were organic and natural and those that weren’t. To quote him from memory, referring to the Church now and this imaginary “Early Church” Tolkien said that although an oak tree may now look remarkably different from the acorn from which it sprung, even those who long for what it once was should not be so foolish as to try and dig at the roots of the tree in hope that they might recover it.

I’d like to share with you one of many ways in which this happened for me.

Some time ago I was on a pilgrimage walk to Walsingham in Norfolk with some friends and for some reason in conversation with a young married couple we got talking about the passage where Jesus says, “Call no man father on earth.” The husband, who is on a journey of discovering the Catholic Church beside his already-Catholic wife mentioned that this was a passage Protestants might bring up in opposition to the way Catholics call priests “Father John” or “Father George” apparently ignoring the biblical command. I had not, however, ever come across anyone who seriously made this objection, I said. In my experience people who engaged with the Catholic Church and what she teaches didn’t see this as a real issue at all.

We left it at that but later that evening when we’d arrived in Walsingham and we found ourselves enjoying a meal in one of the local pubs the conversation picked up again. “What would you answer to someone who raised that objection?” I was asked by ​one of them. It seemed that a face-value reading of the prohibition against calling men “father” suddenly did seem a bit worrying.

Well, I said, if you take this Scripture at face value you’re left with a few problems. It would mean that wherever the Gospel was preached, the right thing would be for Christians to discover the word used for “father” in that specific language and make sure that it is only ever used to refer to God. But to do so would eventually render that word fairly meaningless because its earthly context would be eliminated, and invariably a new word for “father” would emerge to replace it, putting us back at square one. (As a side note, this is what I believe has happened outside of the Catholic world with the word “priest”. Protestants have insisted on “the priesthood of all believers” at the expense of a ministerial priesthood and as a result there is this idea that everyone is a priest but no real understanding of what a priest is. Because the “particular” no longer exists to inform the “universal”, both are essentially lost.) But if the absurdity of trying to eliminate the word “father” with reference to earthly fathers is not apparent, consider that the rest of Scripture doesn’t take Jesus at a face-value reading of this. You still find Paul referring to himself as a father to Timothy (Philippians 2:22) and perhaps more explicitly to the Christians at Corinth saying that he had “begotten them through the Gospel” and was therefore a father rather than merely a teacher to them (I Corinthians 4:15).

So that should suffice that whatever Jesus meant by “Call no man father on earth” He must have meant something other than the options I’ve just ruled out. But this then leaves the question unanswered. What did Jesus actually mean when He said “Call no man father on earth”?

In the same conversation with my friends I shared one of those little embodied applications that shed light on it for me. I don’t think it exhausts the meaning of what Jesus said, but I do think it’s a true application of it and when I saw it I thought, Ah, so that’s what this looks like.

I’ll have to give the scenario a bit of context.

When we look at Church history we might be tempted to speak of pivotal players, men and women who were so important that they left their mark such that when we talk about this or that doctrine their names come up. But if we spoke in this way, using words like “pivotal” and “leaving their mark” I think we’d be making a mistake. “Pivotal” implies that the Church might have been going in one direction but was then steered in another, and as regards “leaving a mark”, well, if the Church is the Body of Christ then the marks it bears this side of the Resurrection it bears for eternity and that’s that. What am I saying? Do the great figures of the Church’s history not lend their names to specific teachings and doctrines? Isn’t St Athanasius associated with the idea of Christ being equal and co-eternal with the Father, St Augustine associated with the idea of original sin and the importance of infant baptism, St Thomas Aquinas with transubstantiation, and Blessed John Scotus with the Immaculate Conception of Mary? Surely these people are responsible for these key teachings and without them they would not appear now in the Catechism?

Well, not really.

It is true that you will find that these figures and others championed a specific idea in their age, sometimes against seemingly insurmountable odds (the Arian crisis which questioned Christ’s divinity had become so wide-spread that we remember Athanasius as being “Against the World”) but we believe that their ideas won, not because they were the cleverest, most well-argued answers, but rather because they were the true ones, and more importantly, they represented what had always been held by the Church up until that point. True, often the ideas had not been expressed with such language as these figures used. A prime example of this is what is believed about Communion. The doctrine of Transubstantiation uses metaphysical terminology that had not been used in the first millennium to describe how Christ is present, but it was not trying to do anything new, it was just expressing the same truth in new language.

At least this is what I found when I began to read these great figures of the Church. They were not trying to put forward their own ideas but rather to defend the ground that was (often for the first time) being contested but that they claimed had always been part of the Deposit of Faith.

And so their names have been attached to this or that doctrine, not because it is “Augustine’s idea” but because when that idea was called into question Augustine stood up in its defence.

In contrast I thought about Protestant doctrines like Total Depravity or Sola Scriptura. These ideas, I would argue, are more properly called “Calvinist” or “Lutheran” respectively because you can trace them to those men whose names they now bear. These men are (and this can be said of so many Protestant ideas) in a truer sense the fathers of these ideas, regardless of how cleverly they try to argue that they are “just there in Scripture.”

And so I began to see that the people that we actually call “Church Fathers” seem to be doing something different, seem to be pointing away from themselves and to something that came before them. They do not seek to be fathers in the sense of “originators” of ideas but rather point to “Him from whom all fatherhood is named” (Ephesians 3:15) and in a beautiful sense I found that it is those whom we call Church Fathers who fulfil Christ’s command to “call no man father on earth.”

There are other images, however, that might more properly be called metaphors, because they may not go “as deep” as the image of the body when describing the Church but still have important resonances. I’d like to consider one of these.

Jesus famously said “and on this rock I will build my Church and the gates of hell will not prevail” (Matthew 16:18). Here the Church is being compared to a stone structure, a temple, a synagogue, or, yes, even a church, in the sense of the actual place of worship that we use today. What has often been argued about here is what Jesus meant by “this rock”. Did He mean Simon, whose name he had changed to Peter (meaning rock) or to Simon’s profession of faith, or even Simon’s faith itself? This is a Scripture that I have heard theologians split hairs over, pulling the sentences to pieces trying to prove that a specific interpretation fits (crucially) at the exclusion of another.

I don’t really want to get into the language and syntax like that here. Rather I want to make a few simple observations that have occurred to me having sat with this for a few years now. The first is that it would make sense that what the Church is and what the Church is built on should be the same or at least a similar substance, and that this should be reflected in the metaphor used to describe it. What I mean is, if the Church is fundamentally a belief system, then her foundation would be a belief. But I don’t think any of us think that the Church is a belief system, and therefore I don’t think it’s the best interpretation of the metaphor to say that she is built upon one. (As you’ll see later, I’m not completely ruling this out.) Now if the Church is the People of God, then it would make sense that her foundation would be persons, or a person. And it seems to me obvious that Christ is using the image in this way and that He is telling us that the foundation is Simon whom He now calls Peter. I realise that for many people to say that the Church is built upon “a person” other than Christ, can be a very uncomfortable thing to say, even if that person is the prince among the Apostles. But are we really doing anything outlandish here? Are we not just reading the metaphor as it’s been presented to us by Christ Himself? At least we can take consolation in that Christ is identifying Himself as the builder, and there too is great value in dwelling on that.

But to return to the “persons as stones” point, when I started to think about this more I noticed how it seemed consistent with other passages of Scripture, that is, that “stones” or “rocks” were not images for “professions of faith” but rather for people. Consider Isaiah 51:1b-2a

“…look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were digged. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you.”

Israel, it seems, need feel no shame to be seen as rocks hewn from the great quarry of Abraham and Sarah. Compare this to the Book of Revelation which describes the new Jerusalem as a city built of precious stones, and what are its twelve foundations? Whose names appear upon them? None other than the twelve followers of Christ, the Apostles of the Lamb (Revelation 21:14). Finally, both St Peter and St Paul refer to us as “stones” built into a spiritual dwelling which is the Church, again laid upon the foundation of the Apostles, and yes, with Christ as the cornerstone (I’m not trying to argue that Christ isn’t also the rock, don’t hear what I’m not saying) (see 1 Peter 2:4-7 and Ephesians 2:19-22).

All this is to show that however we read that phrase “upon this rock” I think that it shouldn’t be strange to think of the “rock” as a person, both because it’s consistent with what the Church is and with the rest of Scripture.

I suppose the irony of this, someone may point out, is that you will find in the Catholic Church’s liturgy on the very Feast of St Peter that the opening prayer of the Mass does in fact refer to “the rock” upon which the Church is built as Peter’s faith!

Hmmm, awkward.

So was Luther, who championed this interpretation against all others, actually right?! Has the Catholic Church capitulated, and am I writing all the above in defence of an idea that even the Church no longer holds? And was my whole point about the foundation and the structure being of the same substance actually nonsense?

No, I don’t think so.

A heresy is usually the exultation of one truth at the expense of others. Luther was correct to say that the rock upon which Christ built His Church was Peter’s faith, and I’ll even give it to him that the metaphor can work in that way, just like you can say, “This football team is built on a foundation of trust and teamwork.” All I’m saying is that I think the image of the rock goes deeper, that it refers to persons primarily and that it embraces other interpretations too, Luther’s included.

And surely we need all of these interpretations.

I remember asking a Protestant friend if he really found any consolation in thinking that the Church was built on Peter’s faith, especially as Peter’s faith would err both directly after that profession (“Get behind me, Satan!”) and during Christ’s Passion. Shifting your ecclesial blueprint from the fickle (see how I avoided “fallible”… wink) person of Peter to the abstract metaphysical concept of his faith doesn’t really solve the problem. And yet any one of these facets of the building’s foundation should not be hailed at the expense of the others: Christ without the Apostles, the Apostles without Peter, Peter without his faith, Peter’s faith without Peter, etc. Each exclusion will have its danger and the building will not be the Church.

So if we are not to be heretics we must include them all, and perhaps most crucially we must include ourselves. That’s right, me and you – we must be incorporated in the building (along with our own profession of faith of course). But perhaps I’ll just let it be said in the words of St Peter, that stone of stones, as he knew a thing or two and says it much better than I could.

“Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

(1 Peter 2:4-5)

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So here goes.

One of the things that I think is very misunderstood and not properly appreciated by Christians outside of the Catholic Church is the practice of celibacy. I’ve experienced this in a number of ways and from different sides, you might say. (Queue Joni Mitchell’s “I’ve looked at love from both sides now…”) For example when I was a teenager (and as one of my closest friends from that time likes to remind me with a smile) I used to joke about how Paul in the Scriptures recommends that it is better not to marry. It was, honestly, a joke and I had no intention of taking Paul seriously for myself even if at the core of it I thought that the joke was worth making because Paul was serious and as far as I could see none of the serious Christians I knew took him seriously.

As was the case in other respects, I didn’t think the Catholic Church had any light to shed on this topic, except maybe to show how things should not be done. I remember listening to a pastor I greatly respected saying that there would be fewer cases of sexual abuse if the Catholic Church would allow priests to marry. I probably nodded in agreement. The connection seemed obvious. The idea that the Catholic Church actually might have some positive insights into what Paul was saying was simply not in my line of view at the time.

Then after my reception into the Catholic Church I started to see the whole thing a bit more clearly… but still only in theory. I understood that celibacy was important and now I could see it in action in the Catholic Church in priests and religious who chose this path for themselves to serve God more fully. But the real thrust of it didn’t sink in for a number of reasons. One of them was that I hadn’t seen a great many priests and religious for whom the celibate life looked like a fulfilled life. It looked like a life that was lacking something - a bit like meeting someone in the middle of a fast that isn’t going very well. All you see are signs of hunger. It wasn’t until I saw examples of priests and religious who were really happy, truly alive, that the supernatural goodness of the celibate life became apparent to me. It was like meeting someone in the middle of a fast and noticing - yes, they might be a bit leaner than usual, but their face is glowing, there is a light in their eyes. To be fair, I had seen glimpses of this here and there in the early days. But I needed sustained examples. When these sustained examples came the result was quite unexpected. Not only did I see the goodness of the celibate life, I discovered (much to my horror) I wanted it.

I say that I wanted “it” but that is the first thing that I think needs qualifying. Similar to chastity, one of the things that is misunderstood about celibacy is that it is often described as a lack, the absence of something, rather than a presence. Essentially celibacy is framed as giving up something for God, and therein is the value, again like fasting from food. But to think of celibacy, or chastity as something full blooded and real in itself, a thing to strive for — that was new to me. (There was an essay on Marc Barnes’s brilliant blog, Bad Catholics, about this that was very formative for me. Sadly I don’t think it’s live anymore.) The key text was not, in fact, Paul speaking about remaining single, but more appropriately it was from the Gospels, the teaching of Christ who says that some will make themselves “eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom”. Eunuchs had special roles to play in ancient regal courts. They had acquired this through great personal sacrifice but they were rewarded for it. The image might be just as unattractive as it is remote to the modern mind, but it carries weight which I think we need to consider. A strong word is used because a new category is being suggested, something that goes beyond what was present before. When I saw this in priests and people who were in religious vows, when I saw that they occupied a unique space in Christian society, a new category, that’s when these words of Christ began to make sense to me. Christ’s words literally took on flesh and blood in the people that I encountered.

More than that, I began to realize that there was something prophetic about celibacy. Christ said that the Church would be marked by those who “made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom”. So this raises the question - where are these people? Where is this “sign of celibacy”. It should be one of the marks of the Church that men and women take up the call to follow Christ, leaving the prospects of being joined to a husband or a wife, children and grandchildren. Paul writes about this as something that is already present in the early church. People say that part of the motivation for Paul’s emphasis was the fact that it was believed by the early Christians that Christ’s second coming was likely to be within their lifetime, thus making the ordinary way of living something to be suspended with the eternal in mind. But while this might be a good reason to take some of what Paul says with that specific context in mind, it’s not so with the words of Christ.

All these thoughts I was working out while feeling something new within me come to the fore. The natural desire for marriage did not so much as disappear (and I must emphasize that it was strongly present - both for the companionship and intimacy of spousal love and the desire to have and raise children) but rather something appeared which superseded it. In other words, a higher desire came to rest on top of that natural desire — literally a supernatural desire, for a life of celibacy. The experience matches up with the theory. The desire to live celibacy comes as something positive, something real - not an absence, not as a lack. It is the sense that there is a God who wants you to Himself, undivided, given to His service, and that if you were to join yourself to a spouse that undividedness would not be achievable.

It is not compatible with the married state because it has its own nuptial quality to it. And this is why, in my experience, the beauty of the celibate life shines no more brightly than in the life of contemplative nuns. They embody the “bridal” quality of the Church in a particular way as female contemplatives specifically that men (even men in contemplative vows) do not, and it is beautiful to see.

I speak now with a wealth of examples in my mind, but when I first started to become alive to this the initial examples struck me with quite a significant force, like something from another world. First they were stories in books and testimonies on the internet. Later they were people that I met in the flesh. Now they are close friends.

There was one such testimony from the early days of a young lady who had entered a convent after hearing God call her in prayer to become a nun. She tells the story in a few phrases, starting with the simple awareness that this was something God was asking of her. Then she decided to put her headphones on and open up one of her favourite songs on YouTube. Instead of hearing the song she heard the words, “Will you marry me?” She turned off her computer, closed her eyes and said, “Yes.” And that was that.

This story hit me so hard. I told it to some of my non-Catholic friends because I found it so profound. One of them laughed as she noticed my eyes suddenly glow as I got to the punch line. Clearly it was opening something up in me that was interesting for the outsider to see, but not something they seemed to understand.

In the years that followed I slowly gained the courage to follow this new found desire. And it took a great deal of courage, I must say, and a lot of stumbling and even running away from it at times. But once the flame of that inner lamp is lit, it is very difficult to ignore. There is the sense that you will never be at peace, truly, until you have resigned yourself to a life lived wholly for Christ, forsaking all others. And that is not to say that you become closed in on your little love affair with God. The celibate life bears the most remarkable fruit of fellowship. But that would need a space of its own to talk about.

I wanted to get onto something else that I began to see as the value of this life wholly given to God began to make sense to me. Often I had heard people, like that pastor that I respected, complain that the Catholic Church would be better off if it didn’t impose celibacy on its ministers, if it allowed them to marry. What was missed in this analysis was that people who spoke like that assumed that the Catholic Church had a list of rules that it expects people to follow for certain paths of life. “If you want to be a priest or a monk or a nun, you have to agree to x, y and z.” This is not quite the case. It’s certainly not the full picture. Rather than celibacy being something imposed on people within the Church, it is something that has naturally (or supernaturally) flowered up within the Church and the Church has had to respond to its presence accordingly. What do I mean by this? If you look at the history of monasticism, for example, you don’t find that there were bishops desiring to establish places of prayer and they thought to themselves, “Well, it would make sense if the men and women who lived in these places and prayed where not married because then they’d have more time for prayer and they’d need fewer resources, there’d be no problems with finding inheritance for their offspring, etc. etc.” No, that would be putting the horse before the cart. Rather, men and women emerged in the Church with the conviction that they needed to devote themselves to God wholeheartedly in prayer and service of the poor, to sell all their possessions and to live celibately. Some became hermits in the desert, some gathered in communities to support each other (see the widows and virgins spoken about in the New Testament and extra-biblical sources) and over the centuries these became accepted paths and patterns of life, monasteries with time tested rules, wisdom passed down of what worked and what didn’t and institutions designed to safeguard this precious gift, the gift of the celibate vocation.

Again, celibacy was not a harsh restriction, a privation imposed on certain members of the Church, but rather a flower that appeared in the garden of the Church, unknown in ages before, but foreseen by Christ: a fragile flower that needed tending and care, but like all living things its origin is not of our own devising.

I find it helpful to trace out the history of celibacy like this in the life of the Church not only because I think many people don’t understand it in this way, i.e. as a phenomenon that arises and must be stewarded, but also because the same saga that plays out in the history of the Church plays out in the life of the individual who discovers the seeds of celibacy in himself or herself, germinating, growing and, with the right help, budding forth.

My journey is still very much underway. Initially it took me into an enclosed monastery where I spent four years pursuing a life of contemplation and simple manual labour. I thought that this would be my existence until I died and was lowered into the ground, wearing a simple white monastic habit, on a bear pine plank like some of the old men I buried when I was there, men who had lived lives saturated in prayer and whose faces were aglow, as if they stood on the threshold of heaven, beaming its brightness back on the rest of us. But that chapter came to a close in March of 2022 for me and I have spent the last few years picking up the pieces and praying about where this journey is to go from here.

It is with a deep sense of gratitude that I prepare to re-enter a religious vocation, this time as a friar in the Dominican Order, which means picking up many of the same things that were a part of my life as a contemplative monk, but without the strict enclosure: the monk without the monastery, you might say. So my own call to a celibate life continues under a different mode and soon I’ll be a novice again, in a white habit (again) and cut off from social media (again), though not for ever. I’ll enter the Dominican house on the 23rd of August 2025 and my social media posting will stop for at least a year. I ask for your prayers. I’m really excited, and there’s still quite a bit I want to tap out on this Substack before that blessed Saturday morning when I hand in my devices and focus on what lies before me.

I hope that at least someone finds these reflections helpful whenever or wherever you might be reading them.

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But, as is my habit when it comes to talking about Gregorian chant, I digress.

What I really wanted to talk about was a connection that I’ve noticed before between Gregorian chant and something unique in the way the Church teaches her doctrine. I’ll need you to stay with me a bit.

Here goes.

If you don’t mind, I’d like you to step back into the Gregorian chant class with me for a moment.

We took some time to look at some of the more ancient forms of notation, what to the untrained eye (and I count myself in this category) looks like a bunch of lines and squiggles. These lines and squiggles used to sit above the text without any staves (the long straight lines on which the notes sit, indicating the pitch). They give certain interpretive directives, i.e. where to go louder, softer, faster, etc, which you won’t find in later notation, but in terms of pitch (a very important part of singing!) a great deal is left out. Our teacher took a long time to answer someone’s question who wanted to know how a certain piece would be written using the older form of notation and we discovered just how rudimentary this notation was with regards to pitch. It could only just about tell you where to go up and down or stay on the same note, but even this wasn’t always clear, and as for jumping an interval of a third or a fifth (if such signs exist, as I said, I’m still in the “untrained eye” category on this front) we didn’t learn them. But before we could protest that this old system was seriously lacking in what it needed to record melodies for chants our teacher told us, “You were expected to know them already.”

Having said this he then nodded, looked at us and smiled.

In the pause that followed the excitement in me started to mount.

The notation was not there to introduce you to the chant. It was not there to teach you the melodies. You were expected to know them.

This raises the obvious question: how?

How were you expected to know them?

These melodies would have been known by the communities that sung them and they would have taught them to each other and kept them alive in this way. There was, before the notation, a practice of aural transmission that predated the writing down of the chants. The notation in its early forms was not there to record the chants in the way that we understand recording but rather to act as memory aids, a kind of marker to the singer who sees the lines and squiggles and says, “Oh, yes. That one,” remembers it, and starts singing the tune that he or she already knows.

It would take a long time before notation reached a stage where you could look at a piece that you’d never sung before and sing merely by reading the notes on the page. But it’s important to realise that the notation was not even meant to make you do that. It presupposed you knew it, as our teacher told us with a smile. And presupposing that you knew it means presupposing you were part of the community that transmits these treasures, the community to whom these treasures belong.

Hold that thought for a moment, and I’ll come back to it.

You might think that we’ve come a long way: Isn’t it great that we have much more sophisticated ways of recording these melodies such that so much can be preserved? And I’d agree with you. But I think we’d be passing over something important, a way of thinking about the reality of abstract things and how they exist and are preserved that is worth dwelling on and has resonances to other things which I’d like to draw out.

The beautiful thing about Gregorian chant that I noticed when I started to learn it was that the notation itself had a kind of beauty to it, not only in what it presented to you but in what it left out. It reminded me of when a skilled painter can give the impression of an image with just a few brush strokes. You get the sense of the full picture - nay, the thing itself! - from those few strokes in a way that a high-resolution photograph often fails to bring across. It shows (this is a theory I have) that “more data” does not always communicate “more reality,” does not always create a clearer and truer connection between you and that “something” – whatever it might be. The analogy that I love to use is the difference between that piece of A4 paper with your 3-year-old’s footprint impressed upon it which she brought home from school one day in a sloppy smudge of paint, as opposed to, again, a hi-res photo of the same child’s foot. The first one, with all its messiness, and all that is left out, I would argue, would still make your child’s foot more present to you than the photo.

But again – I digress.

Let’s get back to the concept of “treasures” being in the care of a community because this brings up the importance of the communal practice Remembering: the concept of things being kept alive in the heart and mind of a community and passed on, transmitted, in an active way, and how remarkable that is and how foreign it is to us and what we’ve lost by not having enough concrete concepts of it.

When you start to learn chant you start to realise that the notation, even though it has gained a sophistication such that you could look at a piece of notation and sing a piece that you’d never heard before (in other words, you’re no longer expected to know it before hand) you still will never sing it properly if you’re not standing within the world in which these chants are transmitted. They have a life, an existence, that predates the text, and to access that you need to be with the people who keep them.

And when I noticed this about Gregorian chant, I realised that I had already felt something similar in a different part of the life of the Church, namely with her doctrine. The treasures of her teachings, although written down, are not wholly accessible through picking up a text and reading them. Although something of their reality is certainly communicated through the text, they have a reality that predates any written text and is not exhausted by it.

By contrast, I had grown up being told that these treasures of divine revelation exist in Scripture. Now I must stress, this idea is not wrong. You will find in the Scriptures, not the ideas of men but divinely revealed truth – the word of God. But this was communicated to me in such a way that the text itself was seen as being sufficient to transmit that message on its own - nothing (or no one) else was needed. If you were left on a desert island, I heard a pastor often say, and all you had was the Bible, you’d have everything you needed to live a fulfilled Christian life. In such a schema, it seems, that the purpose of the whole salvation story is to produce this sacred text.

In Catholic teaching I found something different. I found that the truths of the faith find their fulfillment not in a text but primarily in a Person – namely, Jesus Christ. God, having spoken in many and various ways has now spoken through His Son (Hebrews 1:2).

So it’s a Person, primarily.

And then a text?

Not quite… not yet you might say.

The treasures of the faith find their fulfilment in Christ and then Christ bequeaths these treasures (bequeaths Himself) to a community, a people. The law is no longer written on tablets of stone (papyrus, paper, pixels, etc), but on hearts.

This was a key shift in my way of thinking, that “the Gospel” the good news of what God wished to reveal of Himself was entrusted to His bride, inscribed into her on her heart, in her memory.

The reason why I became so excited when I made this discovery about plain chant, this sudden realisation that through these few strokes on a page I was being offered a window into a reality that existed in the living memory of a community, was because it offered me a way of explaining something I’d already felt when I read Scripture for the first time situated in the community to which it was entrusted. Becoming Catholic I started to see that the Church understood Scripture in a way that went so much deeper than the approach I grew up with because it understood that Scripture doesn’t give you “all the data”. Scripture is not the primary reality, it’s not even trying to be a high resolution photograph of the primary reality. It’s much more like the footprint in paint on a page. It gives you the contours of something beyond itself, pointing to a reality that has made its impression on the page. And I had encountered many a priest, many a faithful lay man or woman who had smiled and showed me the bigger picture merely because these people were part of that community that remembered them, the community that knew them before they were written down.

If you’re sceptical of this concept, I’d encourage you to read the first few lines of Luke’s Gospel. It’s all there. You get the idea that this Gospel, this message, has been alive and present “in the air” and Luke is taking the time to write an account of it for his friend Theophilus. The written reality comes after this living reality. Or the first Letter of St John, the opening line, “that which we have seen, and touched and handled!” he says. This is the thing he is now trying to communicate in words on a page.

There is a word that I’ve avoided using throughout this reflection because I wanted to communicate its meaning without the baggage and misconceptions that it usually has attached to it, and that word is Tradition. It is so often seen as a kind of additional, secret and exclusive set of myths and rituals that Catholics hold as a second source of revelation in parallel to Scripture and which Catholics fall back on when they want to explain why they see things differently to other Christians. But that is not what Tradition is. Tradition merely means that which has been passed on. And “that which is being passed on” in this context is the Gospel itself alive in the heart of the Church, written on the tablet of her heart, safeguarded by the Holy Spirit, present from one age to the next in this living community, the people of God.

My personal experience of it went something like this. I’d hear a Catholic priest talk about what Communion was with a clarity coherence that I’d never known before, and then I’d go back to the Scriptures I’d read so many times and I’d think… okay, it would be hard to get to exactly what the priest said just by reading the Scripture verses on their own, but if I took what the priest said as true (and indeed it rang true), suddenly all the pieces of data of Scripture make sense. Or to put it another way, believing what the priest taught would naturally cause me to say what Scripture said, in a way that the Protestant teaching on the same subject wouldn’t. At best, the Protestant teaching could derive a theory that accounted for as many points of data found in Scripture as possible, with varied success. But it always quite clearly, proceeded from the text, whereas with the Catholic teaching it felt like I was given access to what those who wrote the Scriptures knew when they were writing it.

It was as if the Catholic Church was nodding and smiling at me saying, “We are expected to know it already.”

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It is a poignant meditation on the different kinds of closeness and separation that we can experience between each other. Distance can be measured by geography, it can be physical. But there can also be distance of a different kind, a distance of heart and mind, what might be called emotional or relational distance.

The scene beside the bed of her youngest sister moments after the little one had died demonstrates this well. “The parents sat together,” we read “both of them weeping softly. Everyone in the room was crying. When Kristin went over to her father, he put his arm around her shoulders. He noticed how she was trembling and shaking, and then he pulled her close. But it seemed to her that he must have felt as if she had been snatched farther away from him than her dead little sister in the bed.”

Both Lavrans’ daughters have slipped from his grasp, but not in the same way.

Kristin has come home physically, but her heart is firmly tethered to the man that she has given herself to and so in another sense she is farther away than ever.

When we die the Christian hope is that we will go to heaven. When I was a child there was a record of Kid’s Praise songs that we used to listen to and on it there was a song that went, “Heaven is a wonderful place / filled with glory and grace / I want to see my Savior’s face / because heaven is ​a wonderful place.” I think the song was wise to rhyme “wonderful place” with “Savior’s face.” To be in heaven is to be in the presence of God, to see Him face to face. And yet I think that calling it a “place” is not without its dangers. How often have we heard people talk as if heaven were somewhere you were “allowed to go to” for one reason, and “not allowed to go to” for another, a kind of reward for good behavior, or the right profession of faith or whatever might be the correct idea of salvation. But if heaven is being in the presence of God (rather than some kind of “place”) what does that actually mean? (Leaving the question of how it happens to one side.)

I don’t think that the different kinds of space that we experience here in this life, physical versus relational, will exist in the next — certainly not between us and God. If there is to be a closeness between us and God it will be of only one kind, a relational closeness, the closeness of hearts in agreement. And if there is a separation the same will be true. Like Kirstin we will be confronted with the reality of what our hearts have been tethered to and either we will be coming home to a loving embrace or we will face a kind of torture — what one might call, a living hell.

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There’s a lot I could comment on from chapter to chapter but one small remark made me smile, I think it was the first evening that I heard the book being read. The phrase that caught my attention was this, “I wanted to understand the role of Mary in salvation.” In fact, “Understanding the Role of Mary” may have even been the title of the chapter and I think it was Birgitta whose voice was being heard in that part of the book.

It made me smile because it had both a true aspiration and an error in it at the same time.

Let me explain.

Coming to a place of realizing that there is a significance to what Mary does, to her action and her agency in the salvation story, is the “truth” hidden in that statement. And it may seem obvious and hardly worth mentioning to most Catholics, but in my experience evangelicals it is not so obvious. On the contrary they are often at pains to downplay and even eliminate that very thing. If God the Most High incorporates Mary in the plan of the salvation of the world by allowing her to be the mother of the Saviour, it is often said that this is just incidental. God would have done it anyway whether she had consented or not. Or another way I’ve heard it put, Mary couldn’t have said anything but “yes” to the message given to her by the angel. To give her action importance would be, in the mind of many Protestants I’ve spoken to, in conflict with God’s sovereignty. To acknowledge any real agency to her decision, her “yes”, the movement of her will in harmony with that of God’s divine and perfect will, would again, imply that God needed Mary’s cooperation, that His will was waiting on hers and could not acquire what it wanted without her consent. In this schema of thinking, God’s will and human will (in this case Mary’s will) exist on the same playing field, vying for the same real estate. That is why, as I understand it (and apologies to the Calvinists who are more familiar with this idea than I am) certain strands of Protestant thinking either effectively or explicitly deny the existence of free will.

The Catholic idea is different. We acknowledge that Mary has a role in salvation because her “yes” was a true one. She actually made it and could have decided not to make it. (Though being “full of grace” as the angel proclaims of her renders her so free that it is inconceivable that she would have said “no” – a subject for another post, i.e. how freedom is, in the Catholic understanding, always a freedom to choose the good. This is why it is silly to say that in heaven we can’t be truly free if in heaven it is impossible for us to fall back into sin, as some atheists have argued. This fails to understand the kind of freedom that we would have come into, but again, this would need its own post.) God’s will is not of the same nature as ours. It is qualitatively different to ours, in the way that a cube is qualitatively different to a square, even though they share things in common. Our wills, therefore, and God’s will are not in competition. Our freedom is His gift. It does not diminish His sovereignty but rather shows forth its glory.

So, Mary has a significant role with regards to salvation because her actions and her agency were real actions, her agency was true agency. And that is the beginning of the mystery which one might ponder (just as Mary was said to have pondered) in many directions, from the undoing of Eve’s consent to fall from God’s will and God’s grace, to how our own wills participate in the divine will of God or resist it and fall from it and the grace that is offered therein. And this is to say nothing of the other aspects of Catholic doctrine with regards to Mary’s intercession demonstrated at the Wedding at Cana, or her universal motherhood of all gifted to us from the Cross, and reiterated in the book of Revelation.

That covers the “truth” as I see it in the phrase “Understanding the Role of Mary in Salvation,” namely coming to a realization that she indeed has such a role.

The part that I would say was not correct and made me smile was the “understanding” part.

Salvation, you see, is a deep and unfathomable mystery, and part of the wonder of it is that it has, in some way, turned, like an opening door upon a hinge, on a young Jewish girl’s “yes”. That is not to confuse the young lady, or her yes, with the Salvation itself, which comes through that door, but the mystery is not diminished by her involvement either, nor is her involvement comprehensively “understandable”. The part she plays, her role, is taken up in that mystery and although we can learn true things about it, we shall never fully understand it.

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What was strange for me about this story was remembering how this would have once seemed strange to me too, and now it doesn’t at all.

One of the great joys that you come to feel in the fabric – quite literally – of the Catholic Church, is how at home it is with the physical world. That fierce dichotomy between the world of matter and the world of spirit that was drummed into me growing up, peels away when you start seeing the world sacramentally. I don’t think you can start seeing things sacramentally, truly, without living a sacramental life. It’s not the kind of thing you can get from a book. And so it’s quite impossible to communicate. I can’t prove this, but it’s just a feeling I have, and the change from one way of thinking to another was something I remember experiencing as the sacraments became part of my life. But I was still eager to try and communicate something of this difference. Because, even if one cannot acquire a sacramental way of thinking through descriptions I think you can still get a sense that there’s something there, something waiting to be discovered. I hope that doesn’t sound patronizing. It’s just that I remember hearing others talk spiritually about material things in a way that made me sit up and go over what they’d said in my mind, thinking, “That is completely foreign to my way of seeing things.” And in like manner I now look at things like kissing stones in holy places and think, “Strange. Once I found this uncomfortable, foreign. Now it is completely normal.”

The best way to share this with my friends, I thought, was to tell them a story about something that happened to me last year. And seeing as today is Good Friday and it happened on Good Friday, I thought I’d share it with you too.

I was singing in the church choir in a little parish church in Cambridge where I was living and we had practiced hard for the Holy Week liturgy which was quite a lot of work. Good Friday has, from the time I approached the Catholic Church, been so profound. The first one that I remember attending was the day before I was received into full communion. I and a group of friends got together in the morning and watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and then saw it all rehashed again in the liturgy that afternoon. The drama of the film followed by the drama of the liturgy was such an interesting progression.

Since then I’ve become more and more familiar with Good Friday and it’s profundity. If Maundy Thursday is about the Last Supper, Good Friday is about the Crucifixion, and quite starkly, the Cross. It is not a Mass. In fact, it’s the only day of the liturgical year in which no Mass is celebrated. And you feel it.

That said, we do receive communion, the sacred hosts that were consecrated in Mass yesterday during Maundy Thursday. But in a real sense the liturgical high point of Good Friday is when the Crucifix is taken out, unveiled as it is processed down the centre aisle while the priest sings the following chant

It translates, Behold, the wood of the Cross, on which hung the salvation of the world. O come let us worship.

After singing this three times, rising in pitch each time, the priest stops in the front of the church and all the faithful come forward to venerate the Cross.

Without getting into what this theologically means, I’ll tell you what you do. You get out of your seat, as you would for Communion, come forward to the front of the church, kneel down before the Cross that is being held by a priest and a server and kiss the feet of Christ.

Does that sound strange? What if I told you Good Friday was one of the most packed liturgies of the year. It’s up there with Christmas. Churches are often standing room only. And that’s what it was like when I was in that little parish in Cambridge last year singing in the choir.

And I suppose I didn’t really realise just how much this gesture meant even to me until I heard the priest tell us moments before we were given the signal to come forward, that this year we would not be kissing the Cross.

What? Presumably it was a health and safety precaution. But this was 2024, not 2021. Surely covid was well behind us. I didn’t have much time to mull over it. Being in the choir we were set to go up before everyone else so that we could make our way back to our places to sing while everyone else went forward. When it came my turn I didn’t know what to do. Could I kiss my hand and touch the cross? Was that allowed? I knelt awkwardly and made the sign of the cross with my hand and then returned to my place, discovering in me a feeling of frustration and confusion. Why had this thing been taken away from me?

The service came to an end and the confusion was now mixed with a deep sadness. I had been barred from kissing the feet of Christ.

This sadness stayed with me as I left the church and made my way home. Why is it that the Good Friday service is so powerful, that it attracts so many people, that the churches are often standing room only? What is it about this act of kissing the feet of a wooden carved out Christ that makes all these people flock?

I can’t explain it but I knew something of the importance of it through the absence of it that day last year.

But before I went home I stopped into another church along the way where some of my friends had been attending the same Good Friday Liturgy, hoping that I’d catch them at the end and say hello. This was a much larger church in the centre of Cambridge and there too the church had been standing room only. Arriving I found that everyone was still inside and so I locked up my bike and came in the side door. Entering close to the front of the altar I saw the place teaming with people and at the front of the sanctuary two men held the Cross and approaching the Cross, coming down the centre aisle between the packed pews was just one person. I realized that that person was about to kneel and kiss the Cross. This was the last person in the room to do it. How on earth could they only be at this point in the liturgy? The tightly packed room was the answer.

At that moment I realized the gift that had just been given to me, the unspoken prayer that had been answered. I slipped my bag off my back, dropped it near the front pew and quickly covered the distance to take my place before the Cross, seconds after the last person had knelt there, and moments before those who held it were about to take it away.

My sadness had turned into profound joy as I knelt through the remainder of the Good Friday Liturgy a second time and looked forward to telling the story of the answered prayer to my friends.

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After having discovered it, its rhythms, symbols, the way it juxtaposes one scriptural passage with another to bring out their meaning, its ability to make you relive memories of salvation history together as a community, and so much more – I can’t imagine my life without it.

And yet I know so little. I’ve just come out of The Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Maundy Thursday. If you asked me to explain to you the structure of what happened this evening, I could give you the broad strokes of how it started, progressed and where it ended, and although I’ve gone through it more than a dozen times now, I still need to be reminded of what happens. There’s the fact that this is the Mass that commemorates the Last Supper. Oh yes. I hadn’t thought about that since last year. There’s the washing of the feet after the Gospel. Oh yes. Again, I hadn’t really thought about that since last year either. The Eucharist is taken from the high altar, processed around the church as we all sing and then it is put on one of the small side altars where the faithful come and gather. All the other altars are then stripped of their coverings and the tabernacle where the Eucharist is usually kept at the high altar is left open (always reminding me of the empty grave, although it’s a little too soon for that). The church is dimly lit with candles and all the statues and crosses are covered as they have been since Palm Sunday, draped or veiled with purple cloths, leaving the church visually muted. And that stillness is felt.

I can’t tell you all the movements of the liturgy, but I do know them. Not in the sense that I can recite them to you, but rather, I know them in my body. That’s how liturgy works. Just like the body remembers pleasure or trauma and responds when events bring that remembrance to the surface, so the Church, Christ’s Body remembers, and I feel that remembrance in mine.

I was in the choir tonight and after we made our way, processing behind the Eucharist, carried by the priest to the altar of repose where it would now rest, I packed away my music from the evening and then returned to that side altar, beautifully lit by candles, and joined those kneeling in silent prayer, worshiping Christ truly present.

When I rose I found that some were sitting and kneeling in the main church praying too and the emptiness of it was so profound with the altar stripped bare, the darkness think, though not heavy or gloomy. Just still.

I sat there too a while and considered taking up that inner dialogue of prayer again but then felt that maybe silence – even inner silence – was really the best thing I could cultivate just then.

After some time I left the church but before I made my way here to put down these thoughts I crossed paths with a friend who’d been praying there too and I told him what had been on my mind while sitting in the silence.

Never in all my time as an evangelical did I ever experience anything like this. Never would anything like this have ever been part of my life of prayer and devotion to God. Every year we do this. We sit before the altar in the candle lit silence and pray and some stay until midnight. Everything we did as Christians together before I was Catholic was constructed. Someone had to be leading a meeting, giving a sermon, singing a song. Here, after the Mass people just sat in the church in silence praying, some before Christ in the Eucharist, some before the stripped altar, like a son or a daughter lingering in the room of a recently deceased parent – remembering. And we do this every year, and we all do it. It’s not just a clever idea that someone suggested we try. It’s what we do.

My friend agreed. There’s also something about the fact that this takes time to unfold, he added. Here we are: Maundy Thursday, the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. Tomorrow will be Good Friday, and so it rolls on leading us to Holy Saturday and the vigil on Saturday night for Easter Sunday, each with its own particular character, solemnity and meaning.

The long, slow journey of Lent, spread as it is over the weeks that span Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday was the first of the Church’s liturgical seasons to impress itself on me in the early days of me being Catholic. I remember feeling like I was tapping into a deep subterranean river, a wellspring of life under the surface of everything that might have once seemed merely humdrum and ritualistic. Or to bring it back to the idea of the body and how it remembers, I recall feeling like Christ’s Body was remembering the road to Calvary, standing before Pilate, being betrayed by Peter, crowned, nailed, crucified and buried (and yes, what comes after that – but not yet). A bit like Frodo’s wound which ached on the anniversary of its infliction, so it is with Christ’s wounds and it was in the liturgy that I was being invited into these memories. Only, in His wounds we don’t merely relive the ache. In His wounds we find the healing.

I paused on that page and wondered how I might explain my lack of participation if I were asked to cooperate in an act of public kneeling. The mere fact that the gesture is situated within a pre-existing narrative is where it becomes difficult. You are being asked assume a part in the play, so to speak. You are not in control of your actions and what they communicate. The script is already written, the moves choreographed. Will you take your place or not? Failing to comply is also problematic. Not kneeling may imply more than you intend as well.

The example I have in mind may as well remain unnamed. Focusing on it is not the purpose of this reflection. It is the point about the will which Varden made which I found more profound. The tyrant wants acts of reverence, whether true and sincere or not. He doesn’t mind if they go against our will. Perhaps, in some cases, he even prefers it that way. How different it is in the life of faith.

A lot of ink has been spilt on the problem of salvation, whether by works or by faith, or some synthesis of the two – faith being alive through works; works being a ‘fruit’ of faith; or as the Council of Trent put it, ‘love’ being the more primary thing through which faith works (Gal 5:6), and so on and so on.

But what of the will? Try considering the absurdity of God ever being satisfied by mere acts of reverence like the tyrant I described, with no true movement of the heart. Such a thought makes it clear, to me at least, that what is really desired by Him is the inner orientation of the will towards Him. Having been given the gift of volition, we are able to make a real gift through it – or perhaps more correctly, of it.

Because if the tyrant wants the action, and perhaps even has a use for the breaking of his subjects’ will in the process, God is not like that. His concern is, in sharp contrast, that our wills turn to Him and become healed and in so doing return to their original shape, before they were bent and deformed, wounded and made unsound.

I have often thought that it is wrong for us to think that heaven is somehow a reward consisting of immense pleasure and bliss, however wholesome, given to the person who has made the correct profession. If we still fundamentally desire evil at our core, if we still do not will the good, if our hearts are turned away from God, have we really been redeemed? And is there anything beyond this work of transformation in itself? Is it not the be all and end all of salvation, to inwardly (in the words of the Psalmist) look towards Him and be radiant? (Ps34:5)

The question is not entirely rhetorical. Most errors and therefore heresies occur in reducing a doctrine to this or that part to the neglect of everything else. But it’s useful to focus one’s attention on one part of a doctrine that may have been forgotten – that’s what I’m proposing here.

Returning to the book that prompted these thoughts, Varden goes on to describe Wolfgang Büscher’s search for a thing worth kneeling before, to fulfil that deeply human need which he recognized, seeing it first with unusual clarity within himself. The search for it would lead him into the life of the Church, and specifically the celebration of the Mass where Christ becomes present in the Blessed Sacrament and in preparing to receive Him the faithful kneel and say the words “Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof but only say the word and my soul shall be healed”. Büscher was unable to participate in this act, the saying of the words, the beating of the breast, and the narrative in which it is situated for years without a deep welling up of emotions. His heart had finally found the right place to point that movement for which he knew it longed.

It struck me as I went over this account again how profound that prayer is. Only say the word and my soul shall be healed. In saying it we are the Centurion, the man of agency and authority who first uttered those words and in whom Christ recognized a faith not found among the chosen people. But the words are altered slightly so that in saying them we are also, at the same moment, the ailing servant completely at the mercy of another’s benevolent will.

The will is not healed without recognizing its need, how crippled it is. But nor is it healed without its own cooperation.

I have sometimes been struck, even a little disturbed, by the sight of an individual refraining from kneeling at this point in the Mass – not just sitting, as some do who either cannot kneel or do not yet feel they are ready to kneel, but in fact standing while the rest of us descend and say this prayer. The motives for doing so may range from being part of a different liturgical tradition on one hand to an act of defiance on the other. But perhaps I should not be too excited by the sight the next time I am confronted by it. Such a person is a reminder to me of how different this kingdom is in which we are being invited into, one in which the will is invited into freedom, not coerced into it.

Our will is not healed without us, in some way, willing it.

For the last week I’ve been visiting friends and family in South Africa and when I’m here I always find myself having to defend or explain this or that Catholic belief, usually to people I grew up with and who knew me before I entered the Catholic Church. It was conversations like these that made me think it was worth putting some of these ideas down here, in fact.

The person who asked me this question is one of my oldest friends. And this is what I told him.

I had a similar feeling, I think, before getting to know the inside of the Catholic world better. I really did think that this was a danger, especially with Mary. And I have heard of places where Padre Pio, for example, is more popular than Jesus. But I’d really have to think hard to find an example from my own experience where I thought that love for the saints got in the way of true devotion to Christ. (Love for the Pope is perhaps a different matter – I would agree that there is too much ‘celebrity’ in our modern approach to whomever holds the office of the pope and I can think of examples where this gets in the way of Christ.)

There are, I went on to say, different ways in which we get to know Christ. Prayer, Communion, each other, and the poor, are a few, and Scripture is perhaps the most important way of all. What better way to get to know Him than to prayerfully read His very words? Is he not also on every page of the sacred text, hidden in the Old and revealed in the New, as we would say in Catholic doctrine? To this, my dear friend nodded, even if we didn’t have a chance to pause on what ‘Communion’ might mean for us and how we might agree or disagree on that one.

But there are other ways of meeting Christ, other ways of having him come close to us, and this became real to me right in the early stages of my discovery of Catholicism, with one of the very first Catholic books I read: G.K. Chesterton’s St Francis of Assisi. In it, he described how the pope was won over to approve St Francis’s order by the argument that although it was rash what he and his followers were doing, namely selling all and giving alms in order to follow Christ, this is precisely what Christ Himself requested. And on that score, they simply could not forbid the very thing that Christ had asked for, regardless of how rash it might seem. And so he and his band of men were given permission to establish their order.

What struck me about the passage when I read it was that what began to emerge was that Chesterton was not just sketching a portrait of a 13^th century Italian mystic. He was looking at an icon of Christ – the face of Christ brought more than a millennium closer because one man decided to devote himself wholeheartedly to embodying who Christ was. He did not embody the whole Christ, of course. But he did embody him in as much as seemed possible for him. His particular sized cup was full, in other words. And that embodiment went as far as bearing the wounds of Christ on his body as only a few saints have done.

I saw then that there was a way of both discovering Christ and reading Scripture (whose proper goal is the former in any case), namely, to look at the saints. The saints are a kind of embodied, living, or incarnational study of Scripture – a flesh and blood exegesis. Looking at them, verses that we may have thought too rash, obscure, or whatever, come to life. Furthermore, the face of Christ is seen in the glimmer on smiling cheeks of His saints. It is only because they reflect their Lord that the Church points them out for observation, saying, “Look, there is Christ again, His hands, His feet, His face.”

If you’ve ever been to Assisi you find something quite remarkable. I went there some years ago on a day trip when I was staying in a monastery in Norcia. I didn’t think that I would be so impressed with what I would see or hear or feel. I thought that the hype of the place was probably inflated by all those tree-hugging hippies who have their own ideas about the brown-clad bird whisperer. How wrong I was. I, and so many others I’ve spoken to since, will tell you that there is something in the very fabric of the place that seems to remember with gladness that man of peace and joy who graced its streets hundreds of years ago.

And that reminds me of another verse of Scripture, that says that all of creation is groaning, waiting in eager anticipation for the revealing of the sons of God (Romans 8:19). Perhaps Assisi found the consolation to its longing, that for which it had been groaning.

And there you go. Just another example of how the saints, those icons of Christ, illuminate the Scriptures for us.

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He paused and listened to my explanation, probed me a bit further, and then proceeded to give his analysis. I had scored myself lower than was true, he believed, and he made a note of this in the assessment.

I had been told that when I underwent this assessment there might be disagreements between me and the psychologist when he presented his analysis and that I would have a chance to voice these so that he could correct them. But I was also told that he would have the right to hold to his view if we continued to disagree. The analysis would then reflect that we disagreed on a specific point and that he had chosen to stick with his interpretation. This seemed fair to me, and I could imagine scenarios in which such a difference of opinion might occur. A person might recount a situation to the psychologist and think that what they did or said was perfectly normal behaviour whereas for the psychologist it indicated something of great concern. What I didn’t expect was for him to have a more favourable view, a kinder interpretation, and for the disagreement to go in that direction. I was happy in my case to accept his perspective. I think I did score myself artificially low. I am dutiful, even if I am a bit disorganized and sometimes late with paying friends back. I get to things in the end and I’m working on being more punctual about it.

Glad that’s settled!

As I was thinking this over today it made me think of something similar with regards to Confession – the Sacrament of Reconciliation in the Church. It is one of the truly great gifts of being within the Catholic Church (or the Orthodox, for that matter). Before he ascended Christ breathed on His disciples (an act of huge significance – remember when God breathed on mankind before this!) and gave them authority to forgive and retain sins (John 20:21-23), a certain function of His own which he passed on to them. Over the ages this function has crystalized into its current form: Confession between a priest and a baptized member of the body of Christ in which the priest listens to your sins and dispenses God’s forgiveness in the name of Jesus Christ.

Now, why did this psychological assessment make me think of Confession, and why in particular this aspect of when there might be a disagreement between the psychologist and the person being assessed? Because a similar thing can, and often does happen in Confession.

Our analysis of where we have fallen short is very important. To make a thorough examination of conscience, prayerfully asking the Holy Spirit to illuminate darkness in our hearts and bring actions to mind that have offended Him is an essential part of preparing for a good confession, and of course for receiving Communion. But our analysis of ourselves is not always accurate. Part of the effects of sin is that we become blind to what is of true importance. Anyone who confesses regularly will know that after going through your list of sins to the priest, the priest will often focus on something that you thought was of lesser concern and have nothing to say about the thing you thought was the most serious. It’s a bit like going for a checkup with a doctor and describing your symptoms and your exercise and eating habits. What is important to him is not always what you had expected. But if he knows what he’s doing, he'll help you get to the root of the problem better than you can on your own.

So, that difference of opinion is important to acknowledge. But mentioning it is just to help me get even closer to a similarity that occurred to me between the psychological assessment and Confession, and the role of the Church in helping us in moral issues.

I remember some time ago a lot of people were talking about the primacy of conscience in the Catholic understanding of morality. I understand that the idea of conscience was present in the Greco-Roman world long before the Christian era, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it acquired a much fuller meaning especially at the hand of St Paul and then in the life of the Church thereafter. John Henry Newman described the conscience, not merely as the place where we discern what is right and wrong but as the Aboriginal Vicar of Christ. If that’s not clear what he means, it’s the native or primordial ambassador of God in our hearts. To put it another way, drawing again from Catholic teaching, conscience is the place where God’s voice echoes within us.[1] We are required, always, to follow our conscience.[2] For a Church with literally thousands of prescriptive moral doctrines (i.e. explicit dos and don’ts) that is a point worth dwelling on. Always follow your conscience!

Yet, as I just mentioned, I remember a time, not too long ago, when conscience was being spoken about a lot and it was being used to justify things that were clearly in conflict with Christian morality – always, it seemed, things to do with sexual morality. The argument went, “Sure, the Church says x is wrong. But if a person’s conscience does not condemn him or her in doing x, given that we must always follow our conscience, it is right for them to do x.” (As I write this I realise that I may have just won a few converts over to this form of moral relativism by presenting it in such simple terms – please God, I hope not!) In truth this is not the whole picture: at best it is shortsighted, at worst a form of self-deception. The reason is, although we should always follow our conscience, we also have a duty to form (and inform) our conscience. Conscience is the surface (to return to the metaphor) upon which God’s voice echoes within us. But that surface can be distorted, cluttered or misshaped, and thus we can hear incorrectly or partially, just as a mirror can be warped and give us an imperfect reflection. When there is a disagreement between what our conscience says and what Christian morality prescribes, if we desire to be Christians in the first place, we have the work of reforming our conscience to agree with Christian morality – not pursuing some kind of moral loophole, as if such a thing existed.

I remember once receiving a letter and being delighted that the postage stamp had no mark on it and so could be reused (before they brought in these barcodes which they now use in the UK). When I mentioned it to the friend in the letter that I sent with the same stamp now on its second journey through Her (then) Majesty’s mail service my friend upbraided me for the dishonest act – I didn’t pay for my postage. And she was right. What was interesting is that my conscience was completely untroubled until it was properly informed of its error.

But the mistake can go the other way – and this is why it bears resemblance to the psychological assessment that I started with. There can be times when we are sure that an action or a thought is sinful, when in fact it is not. We can be too harsh on ourselves – too scrupulous, to use the exact terminology. In such cases, it can be a life-giving relief, it can save a soul from the verge of despair, to know that our analysis is not always sound, and that that means it is sometimes too strict, sometimes completely erroneous and needs an external corrector.

Anyone who has struggled with scrupulosity (it’s real thing, if you didn’t know about it) and come out the other side will understand the joy of knowing that we do not always see our sins with perfect clarity, and that God is there not to accuse us but to lead us in paths of righteousness and truth. There may be times “when our hearts condemn us,” but of such times St John assures us that “God is greater than our hearts.” (1 John 3:20)

I think this is an important thing to bear in mind, if we are going to insist that the conscience has primacy, when what we really mean is that it has tyranny, like a dictator whose judgements cannot be questioned. We may be the favoured subject for a time, but such a dictator could just as easily imprison and torture us.

Thus the Church dispenses this God-given gift of Reconciliation, through the voice of the priest in the Confessional, and offers, not just forgiveness, but the opportunity for our conscience to be renewed and reformed, sometimes to be more vigilant, but also to see where it has been tyrannical and overbearing. What grace awaits those who would seek it in the Confessional, grace freely given.

[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1776, Quoting Gaudium et Spes, 16.

[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1782. The exact wording: Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. "He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience. Nor must he be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters."

Alex O’Connor’s growing popularity as an even newer kind of atheist is something I’ve only half followed, despite the algorithm’s efforts to keep him in my line of sight. But just the other day a friend sent me his conversation with Fr Gregory Pine OP and in it I heard O’Connor describe his (thus far, and ​w​hat seems to him) futile search for God and for a personal faith. O’Connor outlines both the sincerity of his scepticism – he just doesn’t find the arguments for God’s existence convincing – coupled with his attempts even to pray and find this God that so many claim has made all the difference to their lives. He’s been knocking now for so long, he says, that his knuckles have become bruised.

​Yet still, no response.

There is a temptation as a Christian to watch atheists like Alex O’Connor, to hear their complaints, and ​to look for a way of placing the fault with them so that we can continue with our lives undisturbed by their agony. It’s not really true agony, is it? Surely, he’s just not trying hard enough or​ not asking in the right way?

One of the things I appreciated about Fr Gregory Pine in this interview is that he doesn’t do that. And​, even though it features his usual outbursts of spontaneous laughter, there appears to be a deep sadness ​in Fr Pine as he listens to O’Connor. “At times it was like he was hearing Alex’s confession,” said the friend who’d recommended the video to me.

​I think it's because, despite his nonchalant delivery, the anguish O’Connor​ describes does seem sincere. At the very least we should give him the benefit of the doubt, while in doubt he remains and continues probing and seeking, often through the interviews with believers and converts ​for which he has become deservedly famous. Maybe it will take a personal crisis to move him that critical step towards believing. Perhaps it will be when he at last desists from beating at the door, bloody knuckled and panting that he’ll hear what at first seems like echoes of his own insistent knocking but is in fact the gentle hand of Christ. (Most of us know the story behind the famous​ "Light of the World" painting​ by William Holman Hunt, based on Christ's words in the Book of Revelation, "Behold I stand at the door and knock.​" The handle is on our side of the door.)

The thing about looking in on conversion stories in real-time​ is that, barring those with a special gift of discernment, we don’t really know what’s going on at the heart of the seeker, no one can tell us their inner dialogues, until, that is, they reach a cadence. Then the traveller himself, or herself, reveals what was really going on inwardly and why it was so hard, took so long, or whatever the story was, to find Christ and by Christ to be found.

I hope it does not seem that I have done, albeit obliquely, what I said we should be careful not to do, namely, to put the blame on O’Connor for his inability to come to faith. I really do think that if he continues asking and seeking he will find what he’s looking for. As Fr Gregory quoted from the Letter to the Hebrews, God is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. My prayer is that Alex does not give up the search before ​that promise is fulfilled.

As so often happens when a problem like this is lying in the back of my mind, something from my daily reading came up to shed a little light on it. Here is a passage from an account of a traveller perhaps not altogether unlike O’Connor, writing after he had found his way. It too has been said to read like a confession​ and as I said, I came across it ​just this morning.

O Truth, you hold sovereign sway over all who turn to you for counsel, and to all of them you respond at the same time, however diverse their pleas. Clear is your response, but not all hear it clearly. They all appeal to you about what they want, but do not always hear what they want to hear. Your best servant is the one who is less intent on hearing from You what accords with his own will and more on embracing with his will what he has heard from you.

Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!

​St Augustine, The Confessions, X, 26, 37 – 27,38a

Mind if I share a few?

This will not necessarily be in order of appearance as I intend to leaf through my pencilled notes and draw out passages I've already underlined. I’m currently about halfway through its 400 pages.

But here's one I just came across today. Addressing God (as he does throughout the whole book) Augustine writes concerning the recent death of his dear mother Monica,

I was rejoicing and thanking you as I recalled what had earlier been well known to me; her constant preoccupation with the grave she had provided for herself beside the body of her husband. Since they had lived together in such harmony, she wanted this blessing also to be added to their happiness (so inept is the human mind at grasping divine reality), a blessing people would remember; that when her pilgrimage overseas was done, it had been granted to her that the earthly remains of husband and wife should be covered by one same earth. When this frivolous wish had by your generous goodness left her heart I did not know, and I was filled with wondering joy that its departure had been signaled to me in this fashion; although in our conversations at the window her words, “What still keeps me here?” did not suggest that she desired to die in her own country. Later I heard that already during our stay at Ostia she was one day talking with motherly openness with some of my friends, in my absence, about contempt for this life and the blessings of death.

Monica, Augustine’s mother, seems to have a disregard for where she might be buried in a way that I think most Evangelicals would find sensible and Augustine himself gives it his approval.

What then are we to make of the line which follows?

[My friends] were amazed at such courage in a woman — for it was you who had given it to her — and asked whether she was not afraid to leave her body so far from her own city. “Nothing is far from God,” she replied. “There is no danger that at the end of the world he will not know where to find me and raise me up.” [1]

While Monica has forgotten her desire to be buried close to her husband she has not forgotten the dignity of her body. She remembers that it will be raised. Indeed this is what it means when Scripture says that we shall be raised.

I mention this because I've noticed that it's not always apparent to our modern way of thinking - this bodily resurrection, I mean. The idea that we will live beyond the grave is of course a Christian belief, as firm as they come. But the separation between body and soul has become so commonly accepted that very few people think of humans as a unity of the immaterial and the material but rather as something immaterial primarily, joined to what is material... temporarily.

We forget that when God made us it says He formed us from the dust of the earth. (Genesis 2:7)

It's something I'll revisit again I'm sure but I thought I'd just point out that when Monica expresses her faith that all will be well she says that there "is no danger that at the end of the world [God] will not know where to find me and raise me up."

When it comes to being found on that last day, it is the whole me God will be seeking out. And seeing as I am neither pure spirit, nor mere matter, it is the union of both that He will call to Himself.

Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
^“Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is your victory?
O death where is your sting?” [2]

Notes:

1. Augustine, Confessions, IX, 11, 28
2. I Corinthians 15: 51-55

When I started thinking about the Church differently, I too tried to find images to communicate the newness of this way of thinking – this way of seeing – so that I could more aptly share it with others.

A few significant changes happened. Firstly, I found that my vision of the Church had refocused, and I was seeing the same things but with greater clarity. For example, essential things within the life of the Church, such as baptism, now had a deeper significance because I understood them better.

Secondly, there was a reordering of my vision. Certain things moved into the centre while others took their place in the margins. Charity, for example, became more important than charismatic gifts. Love of neighbour and love of enemies moved into the foreground, and things like praying in tongues and prophesying moved to the side. Both remained in the picture, but the arrangement had changed.

As you may notice that I am using a visual metaphor to express how my idea of the Church and the elements within the Church changed. I have not, however, said very much about what exactly changed or how this change came about.

How did things go from being hazy and blurred to being defined and clear? When it comes to making sense of the Church, I think most Christians can identify with the experience of not knowing how to tell the wood from the trees. Who are the true Christians, and who are merely Christian by name? Which churches are authentic, which churches aren't? Is it possible to be a Christian and at the same time not be a member of the Church? How do I know that I’m a true member of the Church? How do I know I’m a member of the true Church? If I look down the list of names of different churches in a phone directory (remember those) are some of these true churches and others false churches?

Dwelling on these questions can be quite bewildering and answers can be hard to come by. And even when an answer seems to be found it can still be unsatisfying.

But if you’re someone like me, for whom the question of unity among believers is a question that has troubled you for a long time, you won’t be satisfied to just forget about it. What is more, when you consider that Jesus Himself put a firm emphasis on the importance of His followers being one (John 17:21-23) it is clear that the divisions we have between ourselves are no trivial matter, even if they are not every Christian’s personal bugbear.

So, what changed for me?

I said that my picture of the Church acquired a new focus and a new ordering. But there was a third thing that happened. 

New things entered the picture that hadn’t been there before. In fact, the refocusing and the reordering would not have occurred without these ‘new things.’ It’s a bit like trying to arrange the furniture in a living-room without a dinner table, or a study without a desk. If you’re missing an essential piece of furniture it's hard to find order in everything else, even if you manage to keep it all neat and tidy. But once you find that thing the rest of the room can start to make sense.

What then were these new things that I discovered and what difference did they make?

Enter: Catholic priest.

The priesthood is a fascinating thing, as it exists and is understood by Catholics. I shall have to take a moment to describe this for those who do not know about it. If you go to your local Catholic church, there you'll find a man whose primary role is to do something we call ‘offering the Mass’. What this means is following a structure of prayers and readings which leads up to a moment in which he and those present receive a thing called the Eucharist. The prayers and readings (mostly from scripture) are given to the priest through a long tradition which stretches back to the Apostles. The Eucharist, also known as Communion, is bread and wine which the priest prays over, and these prayers (when said by a priest) enact a change that renders them no longer mere bread and mere wine but the sacramental vessels of Christ’s Presence: in a phrase His Body. This sacramental Presence is then given to those present that they may partake – that’s right: eat! – and in so doing be united to Christ’s Body.

Now, bear with me. I’m trying to explain this in a way that is coherent if you’ve never heard these things before, but I’m not (at least not right now) trying to defend it. I just want to make it as clear as possible.

Where was I?

The Priest. The Mass. The Eucharist.

How, you might ask, does the priest presume to have such power to change the substance of bread and wine such that it becomes the sacramental Presence of Christ, such that they are now His Body and Blood? The answer is he doesn’t presume to have such power at all. It is a gift which he receives through his ordination.

Ordination… what is that, you ask?

Enter: Catholic bishop.

It is only through a bishop that a priest receives his ordination, and the ordination exists to enable him to bestow on the members of the Church certain gifts we call sacraments, of which the Eucharist is primary.

It is not, therefore, because the priest learned how to follow those special prayers and readings with exactness and correct intention (though that is important), nor that he was held in high esteem by his local community and they put him forward as a desirable candidate for the priesthood (also important, but not necessary), nor is it because he heard the voice of God in the small hours of the morning telling him that he was called to be a priest and ‘offer the Mass’ in Christ’s name (again, this might have happened, but it wouldn’t make him a priest). He is a priest because a validly ordained bishop ordained him and made him a priest. He has authority because it was given to him by someone who had the right to give it to him.

So how did the bishop get that authority, you ask?

Enter: long line of bishops.

The bishop received his authority from another bishop, who in turn received it from another, and so the story goes on. Where does it stop? More properly: where did it start? If you’re following the line of Catholic bishops, we believe it starts with the Apostles, the 12 men chosen to establish the Church in the first century. They were the first to appoint bishops to continue their mission, to preach, baptize, forgive sins, break bread (another phrase for the Eucharist) and shepherd the flock entrusted to them.

And where did they receive their authority from?

Enter: Jesus Christ of Na…

… you get the idea.

Perhaps you’re saying, ‘Okay, fine. You’ve explained what Catholics call Apostolic Succession. How does that help us answer the question we started with? How does this better help me understand the Church?’

I’m glad you asked.

That local Catholic priest down the road from where you live and I live has something that other Christians don’t have, something unique – a mission, a mandate, and an authority – not by some special learning, not because the Christians around him delegated it to him and not by some charismatic gift. He has something special though his communion with the bishop (through the ‘laying on of hands’ use its biblical reference) and through that to the wider Church both here and now, and also (crucially) through time, stretching back to Christ Himself who (literally) ordained it to be so when He chose His Apostles. In short, there are men among us who have certain offices that fulfil certain roles to benefit all Christians, given by Christ Himself.

The presence of such people with a certain ‘function’ and ‘office’ among us presents us with a question: what is my relationship to these people? If they have certain gifts which Christ wants me to receive, such as the Eucharist and other things besides, to put myself in the right relationship with Christ means putting myself in the right relationship with them also.

The presence of the ministerial priesthood, I began to realise, caused me to think about the Church as a whole differently.  Rather than asking ‘which denomination is the true one’ or ‘who are the true Christians’ the question was left aside altogether.

You might say, 'But isn’t that exactly what Catholics claim? Doesn’t the Catholic Church claim to be the one, holy, apostolic church, and every other church to be false?'

Not exactly, no. We see things in a different light. We propose (and answer) a different question. We leave denominations aside. They are superficial, man-made distinctions. Forget the question ‘which church’ altogether. It is not helpful.

The Church is one, not just united, but truly one. Oneness is a fundamental property of her being. This is the starting point of how we should understand the Church. Divisions that we see among Christians are scandalous not because they divide the Church but because they are sins against her fundamental oneness.

The presence of priests helped me see this because their position in the Church I understood and grasped. They caused me to realise that rather than asking ‘Does this group represent the whole?’ I should rather ask ‘How does this part correspond to the whole?’

It is at this point that I get excited about wanting to share my new perspective but realise that I could really do with a metaphor to help me because I’m not sure if it’s really coming across properly.

So perhaps I’ll compare the Church to a nation that is in a state of civil unrest. Certain groups have set themselves up against each other and each is trying to be true to carry that nation’s name and bear its flag. Everyone is caught up with trying to figure out which group they should give their alliance to. For me discovering the Catholic priesthood among Christians is like discovering the nation's forgotten monarchy. The best thing I could do was to forget about the dividing parties (i.e. denominations) and align myself with legitimate authority. 

That’s one metaphor, and it gets the point home to a certain extent. And it's useful because the nation is already one, but just divided in its purpose and the presence of the monarchy shows a clear way which coherence can be achieved, very similar to how I experienced discovering the priesthood. 

But I continued to look for other metaphors that might better embody this perspective, not being convinced I had found the correct one. To what shall we compare the Church, I asked? 

And as I thought this through a strange thing occurred to me. We have already been given an image for the Church in Scripture and this image is actually far more useful than any image I could come up with. Paul tells us, in multiple places, that the Church is a body.

How is this helpful?

Firstly, a body is (by its nature) whole, integral, one. Its oneness is not something that is achieved over time. It’s just there, it’s a given. To divide it is to cause death, either to one or both parts. That means that whatever divisions we see in the Church are (as I said before) superficial. When we choose not to associate with each other it’s like the eye saying to the hand, I have no need of you… Sound familiar? (I Cor.12:21) 

And secondly, this means that instead of asking ‘Is this group or denomination the true church’ what I can now ask is ‘which part of the body is this?’ And this is helpful because I can then evaluate whether it is in correct relation to the whole and whether I’m in correct relationship to it.

In my own life I find this helpful because I look at the Catholic Church and I see certain parts that are clear to me. The deacons, priests and bishops form a hierarchy that makes sense and derives itself from the very earliest stages of the Church’s life - they are things put there by Christ. If I had to tell you what part of the body this hierarchy forms, I’d say they are like the body’s bone-structure. The rest of the body is held together by it. As long as I’m connected to my local priest and he to the bishop and the bishop to the college of bishops I know that I’ve found my place in the body.

In contrast, I look at other communities of Christians, such as Evangelicals like the ones I grew up with, and I am not so sure how they relate to the rest of the body. There is a lot that I admire about them, many spiritual goods that I am glad are present, but I’m not sure how they correspond to the whole, and I imagine neither do they. Notice that I am not considering them as outside the body. I take it for granted that they are a part of the body. I am just not sure which part.

This becomes more confusing when certain groups use terms like priest, deacon and bishop but without a proper relation to the whole Church. There are groups that use those terms after having broken the links to their Apostolic roots, and others who use them with no links to their Apostolic roots in the first place, claiming a kind of 'spiritual' leadership. It matters a lot because in some cases it is clear that they do not have a true Eucharist. In others it is simply not clear one way or another. Again, I emphasize that I look upon these groups as being part of the body rather than outside it. Again, I am just not sure which part they are, or how they relate to the whole.  

And then I look at the eastern Orthodox churches. There I see priests and bishops too, and things are a lot clearer, clearer than they are with other Christian traditions. They are like limbs of the body that have a lot of vitality in them, coherent structure and life blood flowing through them. Most notably, their Eucharist is true.

And yet they are not in full coherence with the rest of the body. Their deacons, priests and bishops are real deacons, real priests and real bishops but there is dissonance between them and the whole. They are a bit like limbs out of joint then. The bone structure is not altogether in line.

I appreciate that they would say it is the Catholic Church that is the dislocated limb, and they are the ones who have the greater harmony with the whole. But harmony is lacking, whichever way you look at it.

Pope Benedict XVI called the eastern Orthodox church the ‘other lung’ of the Church. She needs to breathe with both her lungs.

This is so beautiful.

For it shows that when looking for metaphors by which to understand the Church we would do well to use what has been given to us in Scripture.

I hope that recounting my little journey of rediscovering the importance of this image has been helpful to someone and that like me, you would look at aspects of the historical Church, her hierarchy and her sacraments with this image in mind, asking ‘How does this relate to the whole, and how do I relate to it?’ Perhaps you'll come to a different conclusion to me but I am convinced that the approach is sound, for I'm inclined to think that this image is more than just a metaphor, that it describes a deep reality: what the Church truly is. May we remember therefore that we are a body, and however it is that we fit together, may we never forget that Christ is our head. 

Puzzle of the mosaic in San Clemente, Rome. Photo Credit: Tim Hutchinson

Now suppose you found out, much to your surprise, that this woman is still alive and well. Moreover, you are told that she lives in the same town as you and that your paths have crossed quite frequently. In fact, you have known her for a long time. You just didn’t know that she was the same woman you’d been reading about in that book.

This is what it was like for me with the Church. The Church was like a person I had gotten to know through reading a great book – the Bible. In that book she was a leading character. The Bible described her origins, her early years, what she did and taught and where she was destined to be in the future. I read about her and was fascinated by what I learned. I felt like I had a familiarity with her. I knew what distinguished her, how she thought, what she would do in this or that situation. If I were to meet her today, I would know and recognize her – so I thought.

Then I discovered that here and now, in the world I live in, there was a group of people called Catholics whom I believed had no connection to ‘the Church’ that I had read about, and yet this group claimed to be just that. Granted, I did not know a great deal about Catholics, but what I did know seemed to contradict what I read in ‘the Book.’

The Catholic Church, I was told, had all kinds of strange practices and beliefs that I was sure had no relation to the Church I saw in the New Testament. She (the Catholic Church) had for that reason, gone largely unnoticed by me. I hadn’t bothered to investigate her beyond what I had been told. But when I realised that historically her claim to be ‘the same person’ as the one I had been reading about in the Bible was too strong to just be dismissed out of hand, I had to give her a closer look. But what if the difference was too great between the image I had of the Church in my mind and the living Church that I was now getting to know? How would I reconcile the two? Would I have to completely abandon the image I had constructed from what I had read in the Bible and embrace the living reality of the Church that I now encountered, or would the break be too much? Would I rather conclude that this so-called ‘living Church’ was in fact an imposter — not the true Church but an institution of some other origin (not Christ) posing as His Church.

Fortunately, reality is seldom that extreme in either direction. There was a great deal of truth in what I understood about the Church from what I had read in Scripture. On the other hand what I thought I knew of the Catholic Church was full of misinformation and downright nonsense. In the end getting to know the Catholic Church was more like meeting a person about whom I had been told many half-truths and discovering that she did in fact fit the description of what I had read in Scripture. This, and so much more.

Now, I’ve chosen to frame my approach to the Catholic Church in this way because I think it is helpful to understand that when you encounter her you are not encountering something that is ‘based on the book’, like a hit film that comes after the novel: sometimes they get it really close to the original, usually, the book is better. This is what all Protestant communities claim to be (though they may word it differently). Scripture comes first, and then the good Protestant models his or her church on what is written.

But the Catholic Church claims something different. She claims to be the ‘same person’ about whom the book is written. She is uniquely placed to make that claim by the mere fact of her traceable origins to the first Apostles, as any historian (Christian or otherwise) will tell you.

What is more she claims to have remembered all that Christ taught her.

Think about that for a moment.

She holds in her living memory, for example, what Christ meant when He said, ‘Unless you are born of water and the spirit you cannot enter the kingdom of God.’ (John 3:5)

If what she claims is true it’s a game changer – as it was for me – just like meeting a person you had come to know and love through a book might be a game changer. The living person sheds light on the things you’ve read, and vice versa.

But while you may be intrigued, you’re probably not so easily convinced that this is true – especially if you’re a Protestant of the variety I was brought up as, and it is to you, dear Evangelical nondenominational Charismatic type (the adjectives abound) that I am directing these words.

Why exactly am I taking it upon myself to speak to you? Usually what I have seen people try to do is to explain, painstakingly, how thoroughly biblical all Catholic teaching truly is, focusing on the difficult teachings that get Protestants the most worried, like praying to Saints or Purgatory or the use of icons in worship. In other words, these defenders of the Catholic Church try to appeal to the Protestant maxim of sola scriptura — Scripture Alone. They want the Protestant to feel that he or she needn’t leave this firm ground on which they stand. As helpful as I found those attempts myself when I was being drawn into the Catholic Church, I think that they can only go so far.

I’m hoping to do something a bit different.

If we go back to the analogy of meeting a lady in real life who claims to be the lady you’ve known through a book, at some point you need to stop scrutinizing everything she says with the line, ‘But where is that written?’ and just let her tell her story. One would expect that when you meet a person you had known through a biography — even an autobiography — that the real person would ‘flesh out’ what you had come to know through the text in ways that amazed, and sometimes even surprised you.

This is the encounter that I want to facilitate.

However, I’m not asking you, dear reader, to give the Catholic Church a blank cheque – of course what we know of a person in reality and what we know from written descriptions must be shown to be consonant and complementary on the deepest level, not dissonant, divergent. But what I am asking is that you allow the ‘living person’ to speak for herself without holding a checklist of biblical criteria to every phrase before you’ve heard the end of the sentence.

I truly believe that there is only so much you can learn about a person in that ‘prove it to me’ mode.  Once you get past that, other aspects about the person can become known to you: her humour and charm, her kindness and beauty… especially her beauty. Because beauty, while it can be deceiving if it is corrupt, when it is genuine it is the clear radiance of truth: truth given a chance to shine.   

That there is my task: to present the Catholic Church, her life and her teaching to you as clearly and as coherently as I can, using language that an Evangelical Charismatic (etc.) Christian would understand. And the point regarding language is an important one. Too often I’ve heard the Church’s teaching explained in ways that only makes it more obscure, or otherwise well-meaning Catholics unwittingly trample on things precious to the Protestant, not because of what is said, but how. I think I am well positioned to help in this regard — at least whenever I get the chance to make these explanations to my non-Catholic friends they tell me that they have not heard it explained like that before.

Sometimes I will be diving into things that are uniquely Catholic and other times I will be explaining things that Catholics and Protestants hold in common but with different understandings attached to them: such as baptism.

One of the things I am hoping to do from time to time in this Substack is to trace the story of a Catholic doctrine from its origin to the present day. Take Communion, for example. I will start by asking, what did the Church Fathers say about Communion? What are the earliest examples of bishops and martyrs from the first centuries on this subject? Then I will see what the earliest Councils said. What was considered ‘heresy’ in those ages? I’ll then examine prayers and songs from ancient liturgies. What was present in the Church’s life of prayer and what does it tell us about how they understood Communion? How did the Church use Psalms and passages from the Old Testament to illuminate this doctrine in her worship? After that I will bring it home to the present day, looking at what you might find if you entered your local Catholic church and asked the priest to tell you what he teaches about Communion. Finally, to really make it come to life I’ll share testimonies of present-day Catholics who have experienced the life-giving power of Communion in their lives.  

If a coherent picture emerges by tracing a doctrine like this through the life of the Church I’d then turn to what we find in Scripture and leave it to you to see if the two pictures harmonize or not. My hope is that this will demonstrate an alternative way of testing whether a doctrine is truly part of divine revelation (what Catholics would call ‘the deposit of faith’) or not – a way that goes a bit deeper than the Protestant way of merely looking for explicit statements of doctrine in Scripture which might be interpretted one way or another.

It's up to you how far you’re willing to follow me – you can check in or check out whenever you want, of course. For some it might be a voyage into deep waters, where familiar shores become distant or even completely out of sight. Why would I want to do that? Would that not put one in danger of shipwrecking one’s faith? It is true that losing your bearings can do that, but I would only invite you to lose them for the sake of finding them again more surely. It is when we have lost sight of land that we must learn to look up and navigate by the stars.

If the path I am marking out seems completely foreign, bear with me. You may find the Lord walking in places you hadn’t expected Him to walk. It was so with His disciples. It is often so with us. If you feel sure that you have completely lost sight of Him, by all means, return to where you last heard His voice and held His hand. But consider that it might be Him who is leading you beyond the known, beyond the comfortable. It is often there that we get to know Christ afresh and He shows us something of Himself that we did not know before.

That is my hope, that is my prayer.

When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, 'Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’ — Luke 5:4 NRSV

Photo: Finesterre (The End of the World) by Tim Hutchinson.