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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Don’t Water down the Wine of Catholic Doctrine

Don’t Water down the Wine of Catholic Doctrine

This book costs too much. It is, however, an almost universal fault of books these days. The price of publishing has gone up; and publishers, like grocers, taken the opportunity to raise their prices in advance of further possible costs.

page 640

I look back with nostalgia to the day when my father gave me fourpence and I bought James Hogg’s poems from an Edinburgh bookstall. I still have the book. Admittedly it was second-hand but nowadays it would cost at least four shillings.

The fringes of the Church go with the world, though her centre remains free of the tendencies of any age. So it is not strange that publishers of religious books should be no different from their secular cousins.

This book, subtitled ‘Contemporary Christian Prayer’, is well worth reading; and some of the prayers could even be learnt by heart. I would like to see these words set to music:

He is God’s only son
born of a human mother
in every sense a man
and every man’s own brother.
He is among you whom you do not know . . .

It comes close to the clear folk poetry of the songs people made just before the Reformation. Here too is the end of a magnificently calm and triumphant Christmas carol:

The promised one of Israel’s story,
a bridegroom clad in fire and light,
the morning sun in all its glory,
dispelling darkness and the night,
has come to dwell with us for ever,
uniting us in peace and love,
and in his body we need never
be parted from our God above . . .

It says much for the work of the translator, N.D. Smith, that this does not read like a translation at all. But there are some shadows in this book which I feel bound to mention. When Father Oosterhuis puts these words into the mouth of the people of God (not just into the mouth of some dramatic actor) I feel he may be treading on shaky ground:

Let us pray
for all ministers and priests
and for all who hold some office in their church,
that they may imitate the High Priest Jesus
who did not think his dignity a thing to be grasped.
And let us pray for all churches
that they may continue,
page 641 in poverty and without pretensions,
the work of service to all men
that Jesus came to do.
We pray that they may avoid compulsion
and offer no false security,
but present the gospel to all men
and inspire faith. . . .

Am I over-critical when I think I detect in these lines the acid deposit of those wranglings with Papal authority which have recently disturbed the Netherlands? I hope I am. But I notice that the ‘Prayers of Petition’ from which I have lifted this extract do not include any prayer that the people of God may retain their ancient safeguard of obedience.

This is not to suggest that Father Oosterhuis himself lacks the spirit of Christian obedience. But the admirably idealist spirit of enthusiasm which runs through this book could lead to the unwished-for terminus where the Church would appear in the guise of a ‘movement’ rather than an institution. Like Lucile Hasley (quoted in a recent issue of the Marist Messenger) I am less than charmed by the slogan: ‘Quit being a good Catholic! Be a Christian!’

Perhaps it is became I came to the Church as a convert that I tend to react sharply to even the most innocent attempt to water down the wine of Catholic doctrine, in particular those parts of doctrine which relate to the authority of the Bishops and of Peter. Father Oosterhuis is a ‘committed’ man in the sense that he advances spiritually to meet his brothers in other denominations and plants himself firmly at the centre of that curious existential void which the whirlwinds of modern life have created. His writing is at one and the same time highly abstract and highly personal. I recognise it as a religious application of an idiom at the present time deservedly popular among the young.

The danger lies almost solely in its reliance on feeling. If ‘faith’ is a warm interior feeling that rises from time to time from the abdomen to the chest; if ‘hope’ is a vague but strong desire to be somewhere else than where one is; if ‘love’ is the movement towards attachment to some other creature (even if that creature is Jesus in His humanity) – then all this is destructible if the feelings should happen to change. We cannot afford to be weathercocks, however holy our intentions may be. To be a stone is as good as to be a rainbow, if God wishes one to be a stone.

Am I happy when Father Oosterhuis addresses his Creator thus?

God of no one
simply people
march of ages
stranger we come
page 642 slowly to know
you elusive
stone of the sages
you not God
as we think you
furnace of silence
difficult friend. . . .

Yes and no. I am happy as a poet to see another poet employing images very adequately. I do not doubt the sincerity of the poem. But I would rather it was written about a woman in childbirth or a black pudding that Father Oosterhuis has just eaten. Our feelings guide us to God in either silence or the actual liturgy of the Church. Poems which are pseudo-liturgical do not cheer me up either as a poet or a believer. But no doubt this good priest is not a poet when he hears Confessions or teaches catechetics.

This book has many real merits, of which originality is by no means the least. I have indicated some of its possible deficiencies; and these it shares with a great many similar books which are being written at the present day. And I do prefer an excessive personalism to dull bone-headed piety, as long as nobody makes the hideous mistake of thinking that his or her personal view of the Church and the world should have an authoritative weight for other people. The only authority for us Catholics is to be found in the magisterium as exercised by the Pope in conjunction with the other Bishops.

Have I been too hard on Father Oosterhuis? Perhaps I have. It was his ebullience, his mystical enthusiasm, which I distrusted a little. But he is a Catholic and I am a Catholic. We kneel at the same altar. I apologise if I have misread his sincere meditations on the nature of God and man.

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