Golden Age of Devotional Writings

The tone of each of the books reviewed is affected profoundly by the inward renovation of the Church, expressed and in some degree set in motion by the Second Vatican Council. They are each serious, free, speculative, with the motion of a goldpanner sifting gold from grit and iron. If there is some grit among the gold, and if some gold is lost with the grit, we should not complain too much.

The quality of a wholly free obedience depends on the spiritual maturity of the thinker. It is probably impossible for any modern Catholic writer to avoid some inadvertent faults of emphasis. At any rate, we read the books now; we read them with the concentration and absolute interest they deserve. Once it was not so, when one book of devotion was much like another.

We are now in the golden age of devotional writing. I say ‘devotional’ advisedly, since Anita Roper’s book is an untraditional meditation on the old and traditional devotions of the Stations of the Cross, and Karl Rahner, writing of the ideals and duties of priests, makes it plain that his comments are in a large measure personal and devotional; and even Theo Westow, writing of the possible new directions in which the people of God may journey, writes with a strongly devotional emphasis, urging on all a sacrificial ‘folly’ of self-abnegation.

When I first thumbed through Theo Westow’s book I was somewhat disturbed. It seemed to me that the Church he was talking about was not the Church I knew. He made no definite distinction between the Church Visible and the Church Invisible; his notion of obedience left so great a latitude for personal choice not to obey that the form of obedience itself seemed to have vanished; he emphasised the finding of Christ, through love, in our brothers, in such a way that the Eucharistic Christ seemed to be swallowed up in an indifferent though high-minded humanism. I liked what he had to say about the working classes, severe though it might be: ‘It may be, however, that the Church never lost the working cases; it was rather the clerical classes that lost the Church. Pope John saw this clearly. The poor, the disinherited, the underdeveloped, the oppressed have never been lost to Christ: they are Christ. . . .’

I could imagine a sincere but irritable seminarist reading this with an inward shout of joy – then finding, when he tried to act in the light of Westow’s prophetic intuition, that a minor universe of catechetics and hospital visitings page 31 and advice to the blindly scrupulous and the sad discipline of being a curate in a parish designed only too perfectly for the needs of the middle classes would slowly blunt his zeal.

Westow is a prophet of a kind; but a flawed prophet. He tends to shoot off his very live ammunition at random, to exaggerate real defects and ignore the silent strength of monotonous lives – a mistake that Karl Rahner never makes. Yet his intuitions are valuable and real, and he has a gift for the telling phrase: ‘“R.C.” to have any true meaning at all, should mean Radical Christian.’

Or this great statement about the Second Vatican Council:

Rome is now seen to be doing and suffering what everyone else should be doing and suffering. Here is a slow unveiling of genuine greatness, and Catholicism, with its too unrealistic security, its overblown prestige, its wordly pomposity, its almost arrogant, self-assurance, is seen, gradually to take on the true likeness of the suffering servant of Yahweh, in public, for all to see; one feature after another is being revealed so that the Church truly becomes in reality the ‘sign of salvation’; not in power, not in glory, but in service and in love. This, to me at least, is a slowly developing event of breath-taking beauty. But the consequences are unsettling, particularly for those who mistakenly, belong to the Church because they wanted that security which their faith in fact requires them to surrender. . . .

The sting of the statement is in its tail. I think Westow is right; but the meaning of his revolutionary thesis may be too tough for many sincere believers to accept. What is this agony; of the Church of which he writes?

Is it the usual agony of being a Christian and sharing, however remotely, in Our Lord’s Passion? Or is it something new and different? Change we have seen, a great deal of change; agony we have seen and felt – but is it a new agony? Westow thinks that the times demand either a wholly sacrificial belief or none at all:

Christ seized death and turned it, through His resurrection, into life, into something positive, into life for others as well as Himself. He did this by surrendering totally the whole of His human security. Nor can any man share in this overcoming of death except by also totally surrendering security. Such self-surrender is only possible when we surrender to a person greater than man to a person whose very nature is unstained by any aspect of death.

The agony then is an agony of division between those who see the Faith as a guarantee of absolute spiritual security and those who see it as the means of forgetting security in Christ’s love. It is not a new agony. There are parallels in many fields.

To be a true spouse, a man or woman may have to abandon – not the desire; that, I think, is impossible – but the demand for approval, sexual satisfaction, or that self-revelation to another chosen person which all hope for in friendship and marriage.

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They may have to abandon these things, even though the need for them was the first impulse that led them into marriage. To be a true priest or nun, a man or woman may equally have to abandon the demand for spiritual sweetness, awareness of God’s presence, the sense of meaning in service, or even the moral certainty of salvation, though these things brought them first to the priesthood or into a religious community.

This, as I see it, is the meaning of the Cross. We Christians are already in varying degrees aware of it, and shrink from it or welcome it according to our character and condition. The division between shrinking and welcoming is itself crucial.

‘God is our spiritual security,’ says the soporific devotional writer absorbed by a million hearts avid for the certainty of salvation, for an absolute spiritual calm. And we absurdly present our merits to this imagined God, saying again and again: ‘Is this enough yet? Surely this is enough.’

‘No,’ says the true lover of God. ‘He is not my spiritual security. I throw away my security to come to His arms, which cannot even embrace because they are nailed apart. I love Him whether He numbers me among the saved or the lost. My virtues, if they exist, are no ladder by which to climb to Him. To join Him I must be nailed alongside Him, and share the dereliction that separates Him even from the Father’s face. Here, on the terrible throne of Dismas, is where I wish to be. Here I tremble and rejoice.’

We are not true lovers of God. Secretly we want that old spiritual fire insurance policy that was offered to us when we were children. But God can do all things. He may yet effect in us a change of heart.

I think Westow asks too much of the Church. He asks that the Church should be collectively what she is only from time to time in individuals, as originally in the Mother of God. Those who see religion as their spiritual security may grow to make the leap into the dangerous arms of Christ.

But Westow demands what Our Lord demanded without the recognition of human growth and weakness so deeply apparent in all Our Lord’s dealings with us. There is a spiritual impatience in him, partly springing from charity, partly from a lack of resignation to the incomprehensibility of God’s actions among us. I wish he had at least once mentioned the enormous value of the Sacrament of Penance.

Karl Rahner has all the resignation that Westow lacks. He does not need any advertisement from me. In his meditation on the meaning of the priesthood I have found much to engross me, though I am a layman.

Rahner has a marvellous capacity for showing the inward significance of traditional cults and ceremonies and observances, so that we can keep them but use them more profitably. It is so with his meditation on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which would have delighted Pope John.

And his letter to a young priest who was questioning his vow of celibacy is very human and very deep. What he knows more than anything else is page 33 that the ways of God cannot be known; and this is where the fountain of his wisdom lies.

Anita Roper’s book is a closely reasoned theological meditation upon the Stations of the Cross. I don’t think any of us will use it as a handbook for that exercise.

But I was glad to read it, because I have always been aware of the value of the Stations as a private devotion. Her comment on the three falls of Our Lord on the way to Calvary – namely, that He was joining Himself to our faults, and especially to those faults which carry in them a measure of good – was for me at least most illuminating.

I had often pondered on the falls of Our Lord, but never before connected them with any felix culpa. It is the theological breadth and depth of her meditation which makes it unusual.

I recommend it to any Catholic who wants to do the Stations with a greater understanding.

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