Something from my Rosary the other Day

C.S. Lewis remarks somewhere that “God is love” sounds beautiful in an April wood, but like vicious mockery when you are sitting at the bed of a dying child.

I have a good solid Irish sense of gloom and doom, and a deeply pagan emotional makeup whenever tragedy strikes. I will sometimes run across atheists who will jabber about how people of faith are sheltered and blinkered from “facing reality” and, by that, they always mean the reality of pain, death, and suffering. (These are, of course, the same people who complain that Catholics are incurably morbid with all their crucifixes, fastings, stakes, vigils, and mementos of death.)

I, at any rate, am not among the believers for whom the faith provides a balmy gauze of insulation from the dread of suffering. On the contrary, my emotional makeup tends to lean me (in my private thoughts) more toward a Puddleglum tendency to anticipate the future with a certain amount of anxiety. The future is, after all, the place where all you know and love will be dead, and old pagan emotional outlooks are hard to kick, even when one becomes a believer and is taught to hope. Hope, it should be noted, is a virtue to be practiced by the will, not a mood or a feeling. So practice it I do, often quite against my natural moods, again rather like Puddleglum, though not quite so hilariously gloomily as he.

My point is this: emotionally, my default setting is to assume that the universe is waiting for the perfect time to betray me and reveal itself as a place at once both monstrously malicious and mindlessly empty. When life is good, there is always a little voice in the back of my mind saying, “Sure. That’s what they *want* you to think. But if you lower your guard and enjoy the goodness of life… WHAM! That’s when they’ll spring the trap and show you up for the sucker you are! Don’t you realize that you and everything you love is going to die someday, stupid? Goodness is an illusion. Don’t be fooled! Brace yourself!”

This deeply pagan approach to the world is perfectly natural. Life sucks and then you die. Lots of ancient religions, especially among the neighbors of the Jews, simply enshrined this basic emotional orientation and worshipped it, creating gods who were frankly and openly acknowledged as capricious jerks to whom we must bow and scrape, not because they were good, but because they were bigger than we are and would smash us if we didn’t.

The Jews took a different route. In a world filled with pain and suffering–a world without novocaine or anesthetic, mind you–they had the inspiration (and the courage) to assert that, at the bottom of it all, creation was good and God was good.

Curiously, it is the anti-God types who rail most at this. That was the thing that occurred to me the other day as I was praying the joyful mysteries. I thought of a passage from Screwtape in which he advises Wormwood on how to tempt his “patient” (who has gone off to fight in WWII):

Probably the scenes he is now witnessing will not provide material for an intellectual attack on his faith—your previous failures have put that out of your power. But there is a sort of attack on the emotions which can still be tried. It turns on making him feel, when first he sees human remains plastered on a wall, that this is “what the world is really like” and that all his religion has been a fantasy. You will notice that we have got them completely fogged about the meaning of the word “real”‘. They tell each other, of some great spiritual experience, “All that really happened was that you heard some music in a lighted building”; here “Real” means the bare physical facts, separated from the other elements in the experience they actually had. On the other hand, they will also say “It’s all very well discussing that high dive as you sit here in an armchair, but wait till you get up there and see what it’s really like”: here “real” is being used in the opposite sense to mean, not the physical facts (which they know already while discussing the matter in armchairs) but the emotional effect those facts will have on a human consciousness. Either application of the word could be defended; but our business is to keep the two going at once so that the emotional value of the word “real” can be placed now on one side of the account, now on the other, as it happens to suit us. The general rule which we have now pretty well established among them is that in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are “Real” while the spiritual elements are “subjective”; in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main reality and to ignore them is to be an escapist. Thus in birth the blood and pain are “real”, the rejoicing a mere subjective point of view; in death, the terror and ugliness reveal what death “really means”. The hatefulness of a hated person is “real”—in hatred you see men as they are, you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a “real” core of sexual appetite or economic association. Wars and poverty are “really” horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments. The creatures are always accusing one another of wanting “to cat the cake and have it”; but thanks to our labours they are more often in the predicament of paying for the cake and not eating it. Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment.

The Rosary follows the same pattern as revelation. It begins, as Scripture does, with the insistence that life is fundamentally good, fundamentally joyful. Creation is neither the ruse of a malicious god, nor a mere neutral collection of quarks, atom, and molecules going through its mindless whirl. It is sacramental and invested with goodness by her good Lord. Yes, there is sin and death and tragedy and evil. The sorrowful mysteries make that clear. But these are not the final word either about our origins or our destiny. God remains good and creation remains good, despite all. Hold fast to Jesus as Mary does in the Rosary, and we shall come to the glorious mysteries. The Rosary is a Success Story.