Christian Simplicity

You’ve seen me cite the following passage more than once:

     And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?
     And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.
     He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

     [Matthew 19:16-19]

I regard it as vitally important. In a sense, it codifies Christ’s other monumental prescription:

     But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
     Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

     [Matthew 22:34-40]

The perfect congruence between those two utterances escapes many who look at Christianity “from the outside.” Indeed, if we judge by their behavior, it escapes many practicing Christians and clergy. Yet the point is hammered down flat by what Christ said immediately before He addressed the “rich young man:”

     Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them.
     But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. And he laid his hands on them, and departed thence.

     [Matthew 19:13-15]

Christ’s rebuke to the disciples is also a rebuke to those among us, including our clerics, who presume to prescribe and proscribe as if they were Christ Himself. No man has that authority. If a stricture is not wholly in conformance with the Two Great Commandments and the ones He uttered to the “rich young man,” it is not binding. Not even were it proclaimed by the Pope himself.

Put with maximum concision, Christianity is a simple creed. The insistence that it contains rules of conduct that don’t descend from the two Great Commandments is the greater part of the reason so many people fail to grasp it. The rest is the unwillingness of the Church to acknowledge that:

It has proclaimed mistaken, even completely false doctrines in the past;
It’s still capable of doing so today.

Consider this: The early Church taught that once a man had been shriven and baptized a Christian, any sins he committed thereafter were unforgivable. Try to square that with the sacraments of Reconciliation and Extreme Unction. The medieval Church held that certain mortal sins such as apostasy justified execution. It also held that games of cards, dice, and chess were sinful. Those are just the most dramatic examples.

***

I had no idea that I’d be writing about this before I returned from Mass. The subject possessed me with overwhelming insistence when I reflected upon the passage from the gospel of Mark that parallels one from Matthew above:

     And he came to Capernaum: and being in the house he asked them, What was it that ye disputed among yourselves by the way?
     But they held their peace: for by the way they had disputed among themselves, who should be the greatest.
     And he sat down, and called the twelve, and saith unto them, If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all. And he took a child, and set him in the midst of them: and when he had taken him in his arms, he said unto them, Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me, receiveth not me, but him that sent me.

     [Mark 9:33-37]

The human tendency to pursue stature among men doesn’t afflict small children. They have to get a little growth on them, taste the power that awaits them as adults, to develop the desire to be “the greatest.” Small children seek acceptance and affection. Their urge is to belong. The Christian exhortation is quite similar: Love God and your neighbor, for in those things are we most innocent – most like a small child whose paradise is in his mother’s arms. In accepting God, loving Him, and loving one another as we love ourselves, lies the key to all Christian truth.

***

In recent years the Church has returned to the emphasis of the Great Commandments and how they underpin the Decalogue of the Book of Exodus. That’s what it should have done throughout the millennia, any and all representations to the contrary notwithstanding. People who think the Church has somehow betrayed itself by doing this are sadly mistaken or misled. The earlier, iron-handed “whatever we say goes / everything not compulsory is forbidden” Church had committed immense though remediable errors. Many of its prelates were led astray: by their own desires for personal greatness. Thus they replicated the errors of Christ’s original disciples.

Contentions about whether the Mass “ought to be” said in Latin or whether the vernacular, Novus Ordo Mass is acceptable are pointless. Rituals change. They always have and they surely will. Contentions about whether non-Catholic Christians can attain sainthood are bigoted in the worst way. Anyone, be he Catholic, Protestant, or even a virtuous agnostic can attain sainthood. For in living according to the commandments Christ gave to the “rich young man,” one implicitly embraces God even if he cannot quite grasp the imperative of a Supreme Being. Would God have denied sainthood – i.e., eventual admission to heaven and eternity in His nearness – to the millions who lived and died before Christ’s Nativity, ministry, Passion, and Resurrection? Would He deny sainthood to those who have never heard the Gospels? Would a God who would do so be worthy of worship?

Christianity is simple. Yes, its theology embeds mysteries, but its prescriptions and proscriptions for Man are as Christ stated them: no more and no less. What could be simpler than the love of God and one’s neighbors? And what else could Christianty mean?

***

The above is actually prefatory. The following, a snippet from a novel-in-progress, is my real point. Please read with attention.

     The rectory doorbell rang. Ray marked his place in the Confessions of Saint Augustine and trotted to answer it. Juliette Hallstrom stood on the stoop. Ray peered about but saw no one else.
     Juliette smiled. “Good afternoon, Father. I wasn’t sure you’d be available. Am I interrupting anything?”
     “Nothing that can’t be interrupted.” Ray gestured her inside, and they made their way to the rectory’s little sitting room. She sat on the old brocade sofa. He took the armchair across from her. They hunched toward one another.
     “How are you doing, dear?” he said.
     “Father,” she said, “what’s the next step?”
     He peered at her. “After what?”
     “After accepting the Faith.”
     That made him sit up straight. “Oh. You’ve decided?”
     She nodded. “A couple of days ago.”
     No wonder Celia isn’t with her.
     “Are you willing to tell me how it went?” he said in his lowest register.
     “Sure.” She sat back and dropped her hands to her sides.
     I haven’t seen her this relaxed before.
     “Well?”
     “Oh.” She chuckled. “Well, to make a long story short, I stopped picking at it.”
     “Hm. Could you provide a few more details, dear?”
     “Oh yeah,” she said. “That might help Celia, too. How well do you know her, Father?”
     “Not terribly,” he said. “I know she’s very bright. Todd Iverson thinks the world of her. And she asks good questions.”
     Juliette smiled. “That she does. Anyway, she’s sort of my idol. I’d love to be more like her, in a lot of ways. But there’s a downside to being as smart as she is. The questions never stop. She always has to know more.”
     “That’s the inquiring mind in action,” he said. “Minds of that sort don’t have an off switch. They want to know everything.”
     Juliette nodded. “About everything, too. But it can get in her way.”
     Ray sensed that a revelation was imminent. He decided to ask a delicate question.
     “Are you suggesting,” he said, “that there’s a point where demanding to know more about the Faith can get in the way?”
     “Of accepting the Faith? Absolutely, Father.”
     Ray breathed deeply once. “I never expected anyone as bright as you to say such a thing.” He held up a hand. “Not that I’m offended. It’s just that now I need to know more.”
     “Well,” Juliette said, “did you know everything there is to know about the Faith when you decided to accept it?”
     “Uh, no, I suppose not.”
     “Did anything of what you learned afterward make you say to yourself ‘I wish I’d known this before I accepted baptism?”
     “Of course not.” Ray chuckled. “I was baptized when I was less than a month old.”
     “Oh,” Juliette said. “Right. Then how about before you were confirmed?”
     “Uh…”
     “Accepted Holy Orders?”
     “No.” He snorted. “I think I get it, dear. But what made you decide that you know enough to say ‘I believe it and accept it all?’ What article of fact or explanation made that occur?”
     Juliette grinned impishly. She hunched toward him as if to convey a deep secret that he must reveal to no one else.
     “That’s the thing, Father. There is no such fact or explanation. If you insist on one, you’ll never get there. Do you know John Keats?”
     “The poet?”
     “That’s the man. He said something to a friend that puts it better than I can. He wrote that ‘what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.’ I think that was his personal credo.”
     She shifted to prop herself upon an elbow.
     “What’s the basis of the Christian faith?” she said. “How did it start? The teachings of Jesus, right? Then He went to his death on Golgotha, He was buried, and He rose again and was seen by hundreds of people, and then He ascended, and His apostles went out and convinced a whole continent that He was the Son of God, and that what He taught them was true. Right?”
     “Well, yes, but—”
     “But nothing! The apostles had only Christ’s life and teachings to work with. That’s all they had. They couldn’t provide material evidence of His miracles. They couldn’t prove that He’d risen from the dead, or ascended into heaven. All they could do was talk it up. But that was all they needed to go forth and teach all nations, and for those they taught to be convinced and become Christians and teachers themselves. That alone was enough to change the world.”
     Ray forced himself to sit perfectly still. Juliette examined him critically, then nodded.
     “Get it?” she said. “It wasn’t that Christ’s teachings were provable. The apostles couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they’d been sent forth by the Son of God. It was the perfection of it all. The simple, perfect beauty of the story. No one who accepted that the apostles were speaking the truth could have any other basis for doing so.”
     Ray shook his head, then shook it again. He felt as if a fog of some sort had overlaid his thoughts.
     If she’s penetrated to something I haven’t…
     “But there are a lot of beautiful stories, dear,” he said. “Most of them are pure fiction. Why couldn’t the story of Jesus, as beautiful as it is, be fiction too?”
     Juliette’s face glowed in the dim light of the November afternoon. Her lips curled in a smile that spoke of a promise kept.
     “Because it’s not just beautiful. It’s perfect. Think about it, Father! The Son of God allowed Himself to become a mortal so He could walk among us? To free us of the old covenants and replace them with a covenant that promises eternal life in perfect bliss? Doing miracle after miracle, always in the service of life and love? Then despite His power, he allowed Himself to be put to death for His preaching, and rose from the dead three days later to prove He spoke the truth? Taking no vengeance for what had been done to Him? No human writer could come up with a story like that! Think of the thousands of years, the dozens of religions that came before Him. Did any of them tell a story that perfect?”
     The simplicity of Juliette’s language, so direct that it was almost childlike, struck through Father Raymond Altomare as nothing had done since his ordination.
     She’s had the Beatific Vision. She just doesn’t have a name for it.
     This is the greatest gift I could have imagined coming from another mortal. Just after visiting with His Holiness, at that.
     “I… yes,” he whispered shakily.
     “That’s what has to get through to Celia,” Juliette said. “Instead of demanding to know absolutely everything all the way down to the electrons, she has to back off the questions a little so she can see it whole. Get the beauty and perfection. The love and mercy. But she won’t get it until she stops insisting on more information.”
     “Do you think she will?” Ray murmured.
     Juliette nodded. “She’s too sharp to miss it forever.”
     She leaned back, her hands in her lap and her ankles crossed, once again entirely relaxed.
     “So,” she said, “what’s the next step?”
     Ray rose. “Let me get my stole.”