Incredible.

November 4, 2011 By Marc 7 Comments

Fog in Rio. It’s moments like these that blow my mind. Because the average Christian sees it and says “It’s a miracle!” True. The average atheist sees it and says, “It’s an admittedly sweet event, but not outside the realms of good probability!” Also true. So what are we to make of la epicness?

Exactly what I talked about in my last post, How To Convert. The miracle is that we are struck, atheist and theist alike. The miracle is that we care, when no other life-form seems to. The miracle is that we live in a world where it is entirely possible that clouds may roll like hills bearing a Victorious Christ, that we recognize the image, and that we are made speechless by a particular mass of water molecules located in a particular place. In an atheistic world, there is no excuse for awe. Awe is the recognition – however dim – of that which we cannot comprehend. It is a good sign that man was made for more than material clouds and trees, if mere clouds and trees send his mind soaring upwards.

It is a great freedom to realize this. So very often we, as Christians, seek the miracles of God. We seek his intervention in our life, his signs and wonders, his miraculous gifts and charisms. And don’t get me wrong, all of these are Very Good Things. But how often are we like children surrounded by toys and screaming for toys?

The reality is our very being is miraculous. Our intellect and rationality is the bizarre intervention of God. Our ability love is a thing entirely dependent on Him. The beauty in the world is the mark of the Creator, the ever-renewing, ever-renewed breath of the Holy Spirit. Don’t get down on yourself if you’re not experiencing mind-blowing daily miracles: the only difference between your ability to read a book and your ability to walk on water is that people are impressed by the latter.

As a side note, I think the above picture is a pretty good sign that WYD 2013 in Rio is going to be terrifyingly awesome.

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How To Convert

November 4, 2011 By Marc 14 Comments

The common view of religious conversion seems to be this: There are many ways one can stumble towards the gentleman we call God. And on the surface, I agree. After all, rainbows and relationships have lead men to faith, as have Holocausts and heartaches. Collins converted at the sight of beauty; Walker Percy at the sight of a Jew in New York City. Dorothy Day became a Catholic by a series of small and slow steps; St. Paul by one big fall, simultaneously off and onto his ass.

But it is necessary to dive deeper. For a rainbow is meaningless without our light-translating eyes, as is a relationship without our participation. A Holocaust is horrifying, but only if we have the heart to be horrified. In each instance of conversion the Self is the thing that matters. To say it coherently: A conversion occurs because an external event reveals the truth about the internal self. There may be multiple and varying facets of conversion, but there only one way to conversion, and that is through the human person. Namely, you.

And does this not make sense? The Blessed Sacrament aside, what is the most perfect image of God on earth? Where is the evidence for his existence? I hold that the greatest mass of evidence for the existence of the Creator lies in the strange creatures said to be made in his image and likeness. Ourselves. You want God? Look in.

Conversion, then, can be described quite simply as an act of seeing ourselves. Not looking at ourselves, mind you. We do that way too often, an act of bogus self-assessment, an intentional glance in a mirror and a ridiculous summation of all the things that don’t matter one bit: “I’m Joe, I work in a factory, I listen to hipster music, I look good in these jeans, I’m a social conservative…”

No, no, no. Conversion is seeing ourselves, all our shams and poses stripped away. Conversion to the Jew-God-Belief must be akin to accidentally looking in a mirror, to seeing ourselves as if for the first time, to walking down the street, looking into a shop window, stopping, and thinking “Who the hell is that? He looks so – ah. It is I.”

Take the example of the Universe surrounding us. There are two ways to go about it: One is to look – and you will walk away an atheist – and the other is to see – and you will walk away a believer.

Individual One looks up at the night sky and calls to mind several facts – the light from
the stars travels through both space and time to reach his eyes, the earth is not the center of the universe, in fact, it is not even a dust-mite in the universe, the Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter, we cannot comprehend the vastness of space, we are alone on this rock, it’s all so meaningless, how can there be a God who hold us in high esteem? Individual One looks, he makes his assessment; there is no conversion.

Individual Two looks up at the night sky and recalls the exact same facts. He too is struck by the apparent infinity of the universe, the utter worthlessness and laughable unimportance of the World. But then something happens: He turns and accidentally faces a mirror. What makes the 1000 light-year galaxy so tremendously great? It is not the number – who can conceptualize such a size? It is not the thing itself, for there is no rational reason we should be impressed by a Very Big Thing any more than a Very Small Thing. “What on earth? Ah – it is I.”

There is no conception of Frightfully Huge without me to project that conception. A planet might be larger than other planets, but it takes a human person to give it the quality of Unimaginably, Awfully Larger. As C.S. Lewis says,

“To puny man, the great nebula in Andromeda owes in a sense its greatness.”

There is no reason the size of the Earth makes it an unimportant dust-mite other than the fact that I have a conception of importance and of dust-mites, and I have given it to the universe around me.

If we were only material creatures, we would look at the distance between us and our workplace; 5 miles. We would look at the distance between us and the farthest galaxies we can see; approx. 1000000000 light years. We would move on; two distances, one much larger than the other, absolutely nothing more to it. But what does the mirror actually show? People freaking out, falling on their knees in despair over such a distance. People looking up and contemplating their existence.

In short, our actions admit that we apply the Spiritual to the world around us. They admit that we are spiritual creatures. The man pointing to the skies and saying our existence is meaningless is the greatest proof I can offer that our existence is meaningful. Conversion happens as a result of this – realizing there exists within you the conceptions of awe and majesty and terror and horror and that these are not of this world. What animal is thrown into existential crisis over the size of a mountain? What rational reason do we have to be awed?

So to the Christian hoping to win converts, the point is this: The overused, “How can you not believe in God? Have you never seen a sunset?” is close, but not close enough. The real question is, “How can you not believe in God? Have you never seen yourself seeing a sunset?”

To my Catholic readers, the point is this: We must show man himself. We must create beauty. What is art – poetry, painting, great novels, music, movies, myth – but a mirror held up in the face of man, calling him to “know thyself”? What is the experience of being overwhelmed by beauty but the acknowledgment that there exists That Which Is Too Much For Me? And if that does indeed exist, why on earth would I be able to acknowledge it, unless by some incredible and strange fact I am made in the image and likeness of That Which Is Too Much For Me?

To my atheist readers: convert.

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In Defense of Stupid Conversions (God Exists!)

October 23, 2011 By Marc 30 Comments

The New Atheist gets all grumpy about ‘stupid’ conversions to the faith. Francis Collins – a self-described ‘obnoxious atheist’ and incredible genetic scientist – revealed the end of his own journey to God…

“I turned the corner and saw in front of me this frozen waterfall, a couple of hundred feet high. Actually, a waterfall that had three parts to it — also the symbolic three in one. At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The next morning, in the dewy grass in the shadow of the Cascades, I fell on my knees and accepted this truth — that God is God, that Christ is his son and that I am giving my life to that belief.”

His brother, Christopher Hitchens, is dying and could use your prayers.

…and was called weak-minded, a cop-out; someone who had clearly not thought out either of his positions, atheistic or theistic. Or Jennifer Fulwier, that beautiful woman who writes over at Conversion Diary. Her atheism ended the moment she looked at her new baby. Or Peter Hitchens, a believer after seeing a painting of heaven and hell. All of them have been snidely called out as subjective, emotional and illogical human beings.

In reality, the majority of conversions to the faith are of this nature – an experience with beauty. Granted, most of these experiences are preceded with some logical venture – Francis Collins was convinced of Darwinism’ inability to explain the Moral Law before his hiking trip. But this isn’t stupid at all. In fact, it’s one of the most logical reasons to admit the existence of God by admitting the existence of beauty; by experiencing beauty.

“A frozen waterfall? What intellectual failure! What pathetic sentimentality!” the atheist might argue. Not so. The atheistic position falls flat in the face of a frozen waterfall.

They're treats if you've ever seen one on the side of a highway.

Now the reason Beauty gets a bad rap – especially as a catalyst for conversion – is because the modern mind conceives it as subjective. How can Beauty lead you to God, if to the next man it may be regarded as ugliness? But as I have attempted to show, the modern mind is just plain stupid. Beauty is objective. Beauty is outside of us. If we close our eyes, our children are still beautiful. It is not defined by us, rather it is something we recognize.

But there is another quality to Beauty, or rather, a quality within a quality (Quality Inception!) that a reader-whom-I-hope-will-not-mind-me-quoting wrote on,

…beauty really hurts. It causes intense longing and a painful desire, sehnsucht. It makes us wonder. It’s both agony and ecstasy. We catch a tiny glimpse of the fulfillment of all desire, and it awakens an even fiercer desire for that object. That’s probably why the saddest things strike us as the most beautiful – because beauty hurts. It’s like fire, as Augustine makes clear: “Thou touched me!—I tasted thee, and now I burn to live within thy peace”…

This is a fact of life I believe everyone can attest to, that beauty makes us long, whether it be framed in our wives, the Shenandoah Valley, or the poetry of The Chronicles of Narnia. Though perhaps I am being presumptuous. Perhaps, by some strange miracle, you’ve never experienced The Longing. Sit then in the quiet with this, and I apologize for ruining your hitherto simple life with soul-tugging pangs of sweet-pain.

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This sudden and breath-taking feeling of ‘something greater’ cannot be discounted as mere sentimental emotion – as the New Atheist might wish – for it is a universal experience. No, this quality within the experience of Beauty is our innate acknowledgment of the infinity of Beauty. The experience of Beauty is often described as lifting our hearts, elevating us, pulling us to something higher, etc. etc.  - what are these phrases but attempts to explain that there is always more Beauty? If Beauty were finite, perhaps we could be simply satisfied with it; sit down with some Mozart and say, “Yep, this is dandy. I feel perfectly satisfied.” We could leave the Pieta, unmoved; walk in a New England Autumn woods and feel no inexplicable desires. But if it is infinite, it would make absolute sense that the experience of Beauty is accompanied with Longing – for an experience of Beauty could only ever speak of greater Beauty to be found. The experience of the infinite would send the heart and mind soaring upwards, for infinity is the always-more.

This innate knowledge of Beauty being infinite (which, by the way, is a fact taken as self-evident by the Ancient philosophers) fits perfectly with the fact that it is objective. If it is objective, that is to say, something that is, not simply something that exists upon the certain construction of nature, or upon ourselves viewing those constructions, then it is outside of nature. Outside of us. Supernatural. You might draw an exquisite piece of art, but you conformed that piece of art to a knowledge of beauty; the art does not bring the beauty into existence. Thus if art did not exist, beauty still would. If the world did not exist, beauty still would.

Beauty is infinite necessarily. Because to judge anything from not very beautiful at all:

to the famously, incredibly beautiful:

…is to admit the existence of a scale. But since there is always possibility of more beauty, as there is always the possibility of a greater number, the scale must be infinite. The most Beautiful Thing Ever would have to be infinitely beautiful. And saying something is infinitely beautiful is saying that something is Beauty itself. (If I am infinitely like a train, I am a train.)

So have the conclusion: If Beauty can indeed be maintained to be an Infinite, Supernatural Existence, then God is Beauty. For there cannot exist two independent infinities. An immovable object and an unstoppable force cannot meet. Another way of saying this is that God is infinitely beautiful, which as I showed in the train example, is the same as saying God is Beauty. This means that St. Francis, upon recieving the stigmata and crying to Our Lord ‘”You are beauty…You are beauty!” was not being poetical in the subjective sense of the term. He was being honest. He was being absolutely, ruthlessly logical.

So when Francis Collins falls to his knees before the sight of a gorgeous, frozen waterfall, it isn’t emotionalism. It isn’t weakness. For all practical purposes, it seems to be basic mathematics. The existence of Beauty declares the existence of God, for Beauty, in it’s infinity is God. Any experience of beauty, whether experienced by the hardcore atheist or the flabby-minded Christian, is an experience of God.

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