Sunday Evening Reflections on Hell

I can still recall - with an importance borne out by the seriousness with which the grown-ups seemed to consider the topic - a Sunday evening when my evangelical pastor father's church held a Revival service. We had a guest preacher and got to dine him (No wining him - we were teetotalers!) before the church service. My sister and I speculated who would "come forward" to the altar rail to either "get saved" (in some cases, again) or renew their "personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ." In any case, it was serious, and we were inculcated from a very early age on the FACTs of the Last Four Things.

Adults can't manufacture those values; there is no winking to the audience, I am thankful to say. My father and my mother were in deadly earnest when it came to them, and my sister, Linda, and I caught those values.

So, it wasn't surprising to me to find myself after the revival preacher's sermon to find myself coming forward to the altar rail to "accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior." It wasn't that I hadn't done so before in private, so to speak; but in our neck of the woods, it you didn't trudge up where everybody could watch you do it, it just didn't count to your credit. See?

Well, I still believe in those Four Last Things, but I also know that I need the fullness of the Church that Jesus our Lord founded on Saint Peter ("Rocky") in Matthew 16, including all the sacramental grace that our Lord provides us creatures made in His image, imago dei. (For more read A Little Guide for Your Last Days.)

In fact, Dale Alquist puts succinctly the words and thoughts of fellow convert, G. K. Chesterton. (I would say fellow author, but the audacity sticks in my craw with an accompanying choking sensation.) A quick and easy essay just doesn't get much better than this one all of a Sunday evening. Read, read, pilgrim, and never forget GKC's insights in A Happy Little Reflection on Hell. And, thank you, too, Dale Ahlquist.

Don't you wish more people thought about the Four Last Things. Like those who garner power with a smug grin of happy and healthy human existence; at least, for now?

GKC - Why Be Catholic

Dale Ahlquist writing of G. K. Chesterton (of course) says,

(W)hen we have our days of doubt, when we are confused by the incessant attacks and the personal disappointments, it is a good exercise to sit down and make a list of all the things that prove that the Catholic faith is true.

• The Church is the only consistent defender of morality and virtue. It defends marriage and the family. It defends children and babies and the unborn. It defends the poor. It defends peace and human dignity. It defends order and it also defends freedom. It defends the body and the mind and the soul.
  
• The Church is the only institution in history that has continually survived its own defeats. Chesterton even maintains that it has survived its own death. Several times in history the Church seemed to be done and destroyed. But it is still here. It has survived its own death, says Chesterton, "because it had a God who knew his way out of the grave."
  
• The history of Christianity is the history of the Catholic Church. The Church has not only carried the faith through history, it has carried the whole culture. The monasteries preserved the texts of the ancient world, keeping open our only windows to the past. When iconoclasts were smashing statues, Catholics preserved the art of sculpture. Catholic artists even brought sculpture inside paintings, giving them depth and dimension. They wrote music that we can still sing. The castles built in the medieval times are now museums or ruins. The Cathedrals built at the same time are still being used for their original purpose.
  
• All other Christian sects are a reaction against or a splitting off from the Catholic Church. They are always something less than the Catholic Church, never anything more. They lack something, whether it be a pope or a priest or a pronouncement. Whatever partial truth they cling to is something that they have received from the Catholic Church, whether it be the Bible or baptism or "bringing in the sheaves."
• History's greatest people, the saints, are Catholic ... Read all.

GKC - New / Old Bad Ideas

And speaking of GKC, I acknowledge that I cut and paste from Mgr Charles Pope this excerpt from the great man:

The other day a well-known writer, otherwise quite well-informed, said that the Catholic Church is always the enemy of new ideas. It probably did not occur to him that his own remark was not exactly in the nature of a new idea. …Nevertheless, the man who made that remark about Catholics meant something….What he meant was that, in the modern world, the Catholic Church is in fact the enemy of many influential fashions; most of which … claim to be new. [But] nine out of ten of what we call new ideas, are simply old mistakes.

The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves….There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and nearly all errors.

The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them. On this map of the mind the errors are marked…[but] the greater part of it consists of playgrounds and happy hunting-fields, where the mind may have as much liberty as it likes. But [the Church] does definitely take the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction…
By this means, it does prevent men from wasting their time or losing their lives upon paths that have been found futile or disastrous again and again in the past, but which might otherwise entrap travelers again and again in the future.

The Church does make herself responsible for warning her people against these; she does dogmatically defend humanity from its worst foes… Now all false issues have a way of looking quite fresh, especially to a fresh generation. ..[But] we must have something that will hold the four corners of the world still, while we make our social experiments or build our Utopias. (From Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creeds (1926). Reprinted in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. 3 Ignatius Press 1990)

Song of the Strange Ascetic - GKC

I'm heading off to Ohio to be interviewed by Marcus Grodi for his EWTN show. God bless, gentle reader, and keep me in your prayers. I'll leave you with my personal favorite poesy by dear ol' Gilbert Keith:

If I had been a Heathen, I'd have praised the purple vine, My slaves should dig the vineyards, And I would drink the wine. But Higgins is a Heathen, And his slaves grow lean and grey, That he may drink some tepid milk Exactly twice a day. If I had been a Heathen, I'd have crowned Neaera's curls, And filled my life with love affairs, My house with dancing girls; But Higgins is a Heathen, And to lecture rooms is forced, Where his aunts, who are not married, Demand to be divorced. If I had been a Heathen, I'd have sent my armies forth, And dragged behind my chariots The Chieftains of the North. But Higgins is a Heathen, And he drives the dreary quill, To lend the poor that funny cash That makes them poorer still. If I had been a Heathen, I'd have piled my pyre on high, And in a great red whirlwind Gone roaring to the sky; But Higgins is a Heathen, And a richer man than I: And they put him in an oven, Just as if he were a pie. Now who that runs can read it, The riddle that I write, Of why this poor old sinner, Should sin without delight- But I, I cannot read it (Although I run and run), Of them that do not have the faith, And will not have the fun. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The Lamp-post, the Mob, and the Monk

SUPPOSE THAT A GREAT COMMOTION arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good __ " At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediœval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily.

Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, tomorrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics

Rome Before the Brits - Chesterton

BRITAIN WAS DIRECTLY ROMAN for fully four hundred years; longer than she has been Protestant, and very much longer than she has been industrial ... Britons were not originally proud of being Britons; but they were proud of being Romans ... Rome itself obviously could not rule the world, any more than Rutland. I mean it could not rule the other races as the Spartans ruled the Helots ... A machine so huge had to be human; it had to have a handle that fitted any man's hand. The Roman Empire necessarily became less Roman as it became more of an Empire; until not very long after Rome gave conquerors to Britain, Britain was giving emperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the Britons boasted, came at length the great Empress Helena, who was the mother of Constantine. And it was Constantine, as all men know, who first nailed up that proclamation which all after generations have in truth been struggling either to protect or to tear down.

- G. K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

Happy Birthday, GKC

As brother Tim Jones points out, today is G. K. Chesterton's birthday. He gives eleven world-class things to do to celebrate the great man's entrance onto he world stage (I myself will do #'s 1 and 2, have no head for heights, so nix #3, will get out sword-cane [thank you, Linda and Chuck] and do #4, #5, will try #6 at a sports and a religion blog, #7's a cinch as is #8, #9 likewise [we need fresh, brown eggs pronto], #10 sounds most like fun, but Lady Athos may play harder to get this time, and #11 - I beg leave to substitute going to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and light a candle before the statue of Our Lady near the Grotto Church instead.)

And so, on this day of days for the fourth of our quartet of The League of the Bearded Catholics, I honor dear GKC with the following with a quote from him on a subject near and dear to my fiercely beating heart:

A MYSTICAL MATERIALISM marked Christianity from its birth; the very soul of it was a body. Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negations that were its first foes it fought fiercely and particularly for a supernatural freedom to cure concrete maladies by concrete substances. Hence the scattering of relics was everywhere like the scattering of seed. All who took their mission from the divine tragedy bore tangible fragments which became the germs of churches and cities.

St. Joseph carried the cup which held the wine of the Last Supper and the blood of the Crucifixion to that shrine in Avalon which we now call Glastonbury; and it became the heart of a whole universe of legends and romances, not only for Britain but for Europe. Throughout this tremendous and branching tradition it is called the Holy Grail. The vision of it was especially the reward of that ring of powerful paladins whom King Arthur feasted at a Round Table, a symbol of heroic comradeship such as was afterwards imitated or invented by medieval knighthood. Both the cup and the table are of vast importance emblematically in the psychology of the chivalric experiment.

The idea of a round table is not merely universality but equality. It has in it, modified of course, by other tendencies to differentiation, the same idea that exists in the very word "peers," as given to the knights of Charlemagne. In this Round Table is as Roman as the round arch, which might also serve as a type; for instead of being one barbaric rock merely rolled on the others, the king was rather the keystone of an arch.

But to this tradition of a level of dignity was added something unearthly that was from Rome, but not of it; the privilege that inverted all privileges; the glimpse of heaven which seemed almost as capricious as fairyland; the flying chalice which was veiled from the highest of all the heroes, and which appeared to one knight who was hardly more than a child.

Rightly or wrongly, this romance established Britain for after centuries as a country with a chivalrous past. Britain had been a mirror of universal knighthood. This fact, is of colossal import in all ensuing affairs, especially the affairs of barbarians.

- G. K. Chesterton, Short History of England

Longman - Yeomanry Will Rise Again

Phillip Longman at Mercatornet writes on the comeback of yeomanry:

Today, there is a strong correlation around the world between adherence to traditional Christian, Islamic or Judaic religious values and high fertility. The result is an emerging world in which the ancient, patriarchal values of these religions are becoming stronger, while secularism suffers demographic decline.

The current world economic crisis will most likely compound the trend, for a variety of reasons. The widespread loss of jobs and retirement savings gives a survival advantage to those who still have abundant human capital upon which to rely, specifically, strong, largely self-sufficient families in tight-knit, high-trust, self-financing communities. Under currently unfolding conditions, the “fittest” are those who invest heavily and successfully in building up strong families and local community support networks.

Many people may try to contend with their financial and economic losses by forming secular communes. History suggests, however, that families and communities bound by common blood and religious faith are more likely to succeed in fostering the necessary sacrifice of individualism and consumerism.

These changes we are living through are very scary, but they also, I think, have the long-term promise of restoring the economic basis of the natural family and renewing society generally. Seeing more specifically how this future might unfold requires dwelling briefly on a few poorly remembered traditions from the past.

In a recent issue of Foreign Policy Magazine, I have published a brief article entitled The Return of Yeomanry. This word “yeomanry” is now obscure in English, and may be impossible to translate into many other languages. But particularly in America during the 18th and 19th century, it stood for a clear ideal of human organization, which was small-scale production centered on a self-sufficient family unit.

One of America’s most prominent founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote frequently the superior virtue of the country’s then substantial yeomanry, which mostly comprised family farmers who owned their own land and small family business owners. Jefferson’s vision of America’s future was that widespread family ownership of small scale productive would remain the dominant form of social and economic organization, and that the influence of both Big Business and Big Government would be held in check..More>>

For those of us convinced of the merits of subsidiarity - what Father Vincent McNabb, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc called "distributivism" - Longman's words bring hope.

Ahlquist & GKC - Last Words

GKC handing on the Tradition

Last words from Dale Ahlquist's distillation of G. K. Chesterton:

ONLY THE CHURCH can cure the ills that now face this civilization. Those who have abandoned the Church have in effect cut themselves off from something much greater than they realize. They cannot cure the ills. As Chesterton said:

The severed hand does not heal the whole body.

But not only does the world stubbornly refuse the Church's help, some people even make themselves enemies of the Church and try to prevent it from having any influence in society. they try to discredit the Church by making all kinds of sensational charges against it. Chesterton shows how contradictory this is.

When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem to entirely forgetg that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious: but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.

Chesterton said that the earnest freethinkers, who are so worried about the persecutions of the past, are quite blind to what would happen in the world if their own ideas prevailed. In one of his most chilling prophecies he said:

Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant, we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.

Perhaps better than any other twentieth-century writer, Chesterton showed that the faith is the only thing that really makes sense. And though he wrote millions of words, he summed up his defense of the faith in only a few words:

The only argument against losing faith is that you also lose hope - and generally charity.

Wisdom of Father Brown

I CAN ALWAYS grasp moral evidence more easily than the other sorts. I go by a man's eyes and voice ... and whether his family seems happy, and by what subject he chooses - and avoids.

If you want to know what a lady is really like, don't look at her; for she may be too clever for you. Don't look at the men around her, for they may be too silly about her. But look at some other woman who is always near to her, and especially one who is under her. You will see in that mirror her real face.

- Father Brown in The Duel of Dr. Hirsch

Ahlquist & GKC - 'Splendid Dupes'

THE NORMAL PERSON has always known that preventing the birth of a baby is a highly unnatural act, no matter how it is done. But it is made to sound harmless and even sensible when it is called "eugenic" or when it is called birth control or when it is called reproductive freedom. But anyone who cannot see the real evil behind such terms is what Chesterton calls a "splendid dupe."

Evil always takes advantage of ambiguity ... Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.

The only way to explain what happened in Nazi Germany (which took its lessons directly from Margaret Sanger and her Birth Control Review) is that evil won through the strength of its splendid dupes: too many people thought they were doing a good thing because they believed a lie. A lie that sounded good because it was called patriotic and was supported by the scientific officialism of the regime. It is also the only way to explain what has happened in this country for the last three decades. Millions of people have believed an incredibly evil lie. A lie that sounds good because it is called "choice". A lie that sounds even better when it has scientific officialism behind it.

- G. K. Chesterton - Apostle of Common Sense, p. 155

Resistance is Not Futile

If the following words do not make inimitable common sense to you, more's the pity. From Dale Ahlquist's enormously important G. K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense:

Big government and big business have used machinery to push us toward consolidation and a rather flat world of standardization. The problem is that big government and big business are both soulless. They are in revolt against the normal and the ordinary. "They are in revolt against the Citizen." They do not want the common man to have power.

They are willing to give him a vote, because they have long discovered that it need not give him any power. They are not willing to give him a house, or a wife, or a child, or a dog, or a cow, or a piece of land, because these things really do give him power. (Outline of Sanity, 208f)

To combat all this, says Chesterton, we need a moral movement. We have to be able to criticize ourselves. We have to be able to resist the tendencies toward consolidation. We have to resist monopolies. We have to resist endless and invasive bureaucracies. We have to resist the mentality that does not trust the common man to be able to take care of himself and his family.

Let that last sentence of Chesterton's sink in: They are not willing to give him a house, or a wife, or a child, or a dog, or a cow, or a piece of land, because these things really do give him power. Since when has popular culture - so largely a product of Madison Avenue and slick advertising - employed by big business and (now) big government - said such things are "hip", "cool", or will lead to human happiness?

Neither socialism nor big business proclaim the moral imperative of the gospel. Pope Leo XIII did that and inspired Hilaire Belloc, Chesterton, Father Vincent McNabb, E. F. Schumacher and a host of others to resist both as wrong-headed and wrong-spirited.

Do not sell Distributism - Subsidiarity - short. It is a call to sanity, human happiness, and ... much more. It is the Church's social teaching, it is definitive, and it is a path to human happiness in this world.

Alleged Quote of the Day

"There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious."
- Ayatollah Khomeini

Why? because the Scimitar does not contain the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the Prophet's tomb is not empty, and it does not have G. K. Chesterton.

Ahlquist on Chesterton: Dignity

All other systems (besides the Catholic faith) at some point and in some way attack the idea of free will. And when they attack free will, they attack human dignity. One of the reasons for Chesterton's greatness is that he always defends freedom and dignity. He argues that nothing is inevitable. We need never surrender to this or that set of circumstances, to social forces, to biological determinism, to history, or to fate. This is the essence of freedom.

Modern(s) think freedom means breaking the rules, but, as Chesterton points out, freedom means exercising free will to obey the rules. Without freedom there is no such thing as obedience and responsibility. We are not forced to obey. We choose. That is what gives us our dignity. We make a vow by choice. Freedom means keeping the vow, no matter how difficult, not breaking it, no matter how compelling.

The world, of course, thinks that a person who becomes Catholic gives up his (or her) liberty. But, as Chesterton says,

Tell a Catholic convert that he has lost his liberty,
and he will laugh.

Ring a Bell?

G. K. Chesterton's What’s Wrong with the World although non-fiction contains three fictional characters, Hudge, Gudge, and Jones. Hudge is the "energetic progressive," a socialist. Gudge is the "obstinate conservative," an industrialist-capitalist. Hudge is Big Government. Gudge is Big Business.

And who is Jones? Jones is a common man. He married for love. Considers home the only place of real liberty. And he hopes to live long enough to become a great-grandfather one day.

The trouble is, says Chesterton, Hudge and Gudge both conspire to unhinge Jones by taking away his property, his dignity, and his independence. Remember: What's Wrong with the World was written in 1910 - it might have been written today.

Chesterton says Hudge and Gudge have led western man Jones to accept industrialism and collectivism not as ideals, but as "necessities". It is "the huge modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul."

Madison Avenue pushing the goals of Gudge and special interests pushing the goals of Hudge have left poor Jones twisting in the wind by loss of religion, of home, of family. He does not even know what he wants any more.

Which, of course, is precisely what Hudge and Gudge want.

Return to the Truth

"Candy-gram ... Delivery ... Room service ... UPS ... "

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf reports - and comments on - the findings of the Catholic League and the

Obama wants abortion coverage in reform bill, Catholic League charges

New York City, N.Y., Aug 11, 2009 / 02:36 pm (CNA).- Health care reform is hitting a wall, claims Catholic League president Bill Donohue, and if you want to know why, the answer is opposition to coverage for abortion.

According to Donohue, President Obama has thus far refused to ask Congress to pass an amendment to exclude abortion coverage from public funding because Obama is so committed to making the procedure more available.

Echoing observations made by pro-life advocates, the Catholic League president notes that only 35 percent agreed with Obama on allowing funding of abortions overseas and that a later Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans now consider themselves pro-life.

Despite these findings, Donohue charges that the president and his staff are so extreme that they are "apparently willing to sink health care reform before ever excluding abortion from the final bill."

As it tries to deal with the public backlash against the various health care proposals, the White House has created a "Reality Check" section to answer objections people have to the bills.

Noticeably absent from a list of objections that includes rationing, euthanasia, veteran’s care and private insurance, is the issue of taxpayer funding for abortions, notes Donohue. "There’s a reason for that—every time an amendment has been introduced to formally exclude abortion, it has been defeated." More>>>

Not only is Catholic truth under attack by a divide and conquer strategy of the Last Self-Help Administration, so is the family, more unborn babies, and, ipso facto, common sense. All under the aegis of so-called "progressive" humanism.

The public have so long given up on any politician telling the truth, that the Administration just goes ahead and lies, like the "Land-Shark" of old Saturday Night Live shows - whatever it takes to get their agenda through. After all, our chief executive has said plainly the culture wars are over - he is going to cut the Gordian knot - or so he thinks.

G. K. Chesterton once said, "(Moderns) are always saying, 'You can't put the clock back.' The simple and obvious answer is, 'You can.' The clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed."

But first there must come a moment of reckoning, of coming to our collective selves like the Prodigal Son in the far country slopping the pigs (Lk 15). We must realize the unwarranted worship and idolatry of human desire is sheer folly and, more often than not, evil.

What we must return to is the revealed truth of the Bible, the Church's Tradition, and of Our Lord. Modernism, secularism, paganism, and idolatry have been wanting and have failed too often in the last sad 300 years. Christendom must awaken again and trudge home to the Father's House.

And I don't care who the devil knows it, including, I might add, the devil. It may interest those who not only do evil but lead others to join them that the devil normally breaks his tools when he is finished with them.

Chesterton

Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World (1910)