Chesterton, Call Your Office
St. Paul’s Cathedral, on a rainy, cold day in January 2015. St. Paul’s Cathedral has been the home of many important services, including the funerals of Admiral Nelson, Winston Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher. It is, of course, an Anglican cathedral, which is incongruent with the essay below’s defense of Catholicism. The article is really defending High Church in general. Besides, Florence King liked to tell me that Anglicanism was Catholic Lite. The cathedral is gorgeous. Makes me regret attending church in what looks like a dead-space Ikea.
Protestants, iconoclastic by our nature, eventually define God down to the point of ineffectiveness.
Troubled by this truth for some time, I was again reminded of it during a recent church service in which I was forced to listen to a New International reading of the 23rd Psalm.
Traditionally, the 23rd Psalm goes a little something like: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want… Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me…”
But as I was sitting in the congregation the other day, I heard instead: “The LORD is my shepherd. I lack nothing… Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil…” Even though I walk through the darkest valley… Now, that’s a clanger if ever I heard one.
Whereas the King James passage flows rhythmically, the New International version sounds like Linda Blair regurgitating pea soup. More importantly, it makes no sense, theologically or otherwise. Who, after all, is afraid of a dark valley? I would think more people are afraid of Virginia Woolfe. Not a single soul ever said: Woe to us, for we walk through a valley of no light. It’s just not scary. A fellow can simply wait to walk the valley when the moon waxes. Or he can take a flashlight. Or a candle. Or he can navigate by the annoying glare on his smartphone. Or, hell, he can start a fire or shoot a flare. If nothing else, his eyes will adjust over time.
But the valley of the shadow of death? Now that doesn’t sound so easily traversed. And indeed, that is the point. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. I will fear no evil because a great and powerful God comforts me; I will fear no evil because an unfathomable Being, Whose transcendent order relegates even death far beneath Him, walks with me.
I’m incessantly told three things by Protestants: first, that Catholics place too much emphasis on works instead of Grace; second, that it doesn’t take a pope to talk to God; and third, that a formal pomp and circumstance – like flowery, arcane language – doesn’t cultivate a personal relationship with God. Hence such travesties as the New International 23rd Psalm – it’s all a part of Protestantism’s master plan to make God more accessible. Not unlike matriculation at Auburn, however, accessibility often means the opposite of enlightenment. For instance, Grace and works cannot be divorced. Moreover, the Catholic Church never said anything about believers not being able to directly communicate with God, merely that the Church, as an institution, is in a better place to receive Gods transmissions than are fallible, depraved commoners. Secondly, personal relationships are, to a varying degree, emotional, thus undependable. Hence, marriages are meant to be a threefold chord, uneasily broken, between man, wife, and God; so, too, are spiritual relationships threefold as well, with man and God connected by an institution that’s been mortared together by centuries of thought and order.
Having a God who’s only as impressive as a flashlight is why a Protestant nation will always be a nation in decline. Flashlights are no way to steer a people. Institutions are.
This article was first published by MainstreetNews (February 2012). Reprinted here with express permission.
