“Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.”
— Ash-Wednesday, I

I discovered the poetry of T. S. Eliot at the age of thirteen, a skinny kid in small town Montana who had, for some strange reason, a love of poetry, the novels of Dickens, the music of Mozart, and the art of Andrew Wyeth. All of these are an inter-mingled mystery, even in hindsight, and I suppose they really remain so, as the attraction of great literature and art is a mystery bound to The Mystery. I’m quite certain that my first Eliot poems were The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Hollow Men—the former darkly exotic (“the yellow smoke that slides along the streets”) and the latter oddly apocalyptic (“This is the dead land”).

In 1896, at the age of 87, former British Prime Minister William Gladstone made his last public speech. It was at Hengler’s Circus in Liverpool before an audience of 6,000 people. The meeting was called after news reached England of the massacre of more than 2,000 Armenians in Constantinople in addition to many more massacres throughout the Turkish Empire. Gladstone described these atrocities as the “most monstrous series of proceedings that has ever been recorded in the dismal and the deplorable history of human crime…a disgrace to the civilisation of the nineteenth century”. He said that to these atrocities were added the work of “lust, torture, pillage, starvation” and “every wickedness that men could devise”—all seen “under the eyes of foreign ambassadors”.

A Canadian Catholic who believes in the virtue of patriotism faces a similar problem to that of G. K. Chesterton, during the period in which he deliberated becoming Catholic. Chesterton’s dilemma was whether he simultaneously could be a patriotic Englishman and a Catholic, given how closely tied British identity was to the Anglican Church. Yet Chesterton makes such a compelling case for the virtue of patriotism based on the need for a person to have something of his own to love. This is the animating spirit of his defense of widely distributing private property; it is what drove his case for a Jewish homeland; and it is the reason he stood opposed to British colonialism: both the colonizers and the colonized already had their own nations of which they could be proud.

If a paradox is a seeming self-contradiction that is actually true, what, then, might we call a seeming truth that is really a self-contradiction? What might we call a mysterious miracle of a man who rejects the very mystery and miracle of his own being, only to conclude unkindly that all of humankind are simply highly evolved, self-conscious molecular configurations which are no more than advanced, arbitrary animals rather than aspiring spirits moving a little lower than the angels; that all things tangible and intangible—including his very reasoning—are the resulting culmination of a continual, colossal, cosmic accident; and that all talk of religion and faith is just a fairy tale?

“Born as the Victorian era was breathing its last, Ernest Hemingway initially only knew the Protestant world of Oak Park where he grew up, not far from Chicago.

Later, while serving with the American Red Cross Ambulance Corps in Italy in the summer of 1918, the budding writer discovered the richness of Catholicism—with all five senses. He bathed in Mary’s love and soaked up the redemptive reality of her son Jesus hanging on that wooden cross, writhing in pain, to his very sinews, the great European cathedrals he visited punctuating this reality. He was just seventeen. The experience was transformative.”

It should come as no surprise that the spiritual awakening of both Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn occurred during their years of penal servitude. There were major differences between the tsarist katorga and the Soviet
GULag, but in both systems of detention reflective men were forced to confront themselves and their past as never before. Dostoyevsky’s past had been one of guilt, closely associated with a hatred of serfdom. In pleading for more money, he had, or so he believed, forced his father to increase pressure on his serfs, who murdered him in response. A Christian in a vague humanitarian sense, the young Dostoyevsky found himself drawn to utopian socialism and, for that reason, he joined the Petrashevsky Circle, a discussion group organized by Mikhail Petrashevsky, a disciple of Charles Fourier.

The first time the poet Gerard Manley mentions the Blessed Virgin Mary is in a letter to his father, who is dismayed that his Oxford-educated son is on the verge of converting to the Catholic Church. Young Gerard writes:

I shall hold as a Catholic what I have long held as an Anglican, that literal truth of our Lord’s words by which I learn that the least fragment of the consecrated elements in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is the whole Body of Christ born of the Blessed Virgin, before which the whole host of saints and angels as it lies on the altar trembles with adoration. This belief once got is the life of the soul and when I doubted it I shd. become an atheist the next day (October 16–17, 1866).

The first words of Hopkins about the Blessed Virgin acknowledge her as the Mother of the Eucharist. Already the young poet understands the eternal relation of the Incarnate Creator to the world. Mary is the point at which the Eternal Creator chooses to take flesh from a creature. Because God is eternal, the unity of God with His creatures is not bound by time, or by place. No time is future to Him; no time is past. His spiritual relationship with His saints is always present to Him; and so His Body is always the Body mothered by Mary—wherever and whenever he chooses His Body to be present.