The Law as a Schoolmaster (Part One)

I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one. —1 John 2:14

Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.

My previous article explores how the outward practice of the Faith is sometimes subverted from its true purpose. It can shift from being the form, expression, and context of a Christian’s relationship with God to being a burrier that keeps God at a safe distance in order to avoid a deepening of that relationship, a deepening which one might have reason to fear.

For those like myself who have ardent, lifelong investment in the Church’s liturgical life, as well as keen concern for the orthodoxy of her theological and moral doctrine and for the vigor of her asceticism, my reflections in that essay could well be taken with suspicion. In my teens or twenties, I would likely have found them very suspect indeed.

Why?

One way to answer that is to delve into some autobiography. I will do so in part because there may be those—some my age or older, but many younger than I—with whom my experience may resonate. This account will be followed, D.V., by a second installment in which I hope to reflect on how “the law [is] our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ” (Gal. 3:24). My thesis is that what St. Paul discerned regarding the Law in the history of Israel leading up to the Incarnation and its aftermath can also be descried in the lives of many faithful Christians with regard to their and their churches’ outward expression of the Faith. The analogy is certainly not exact, since “in speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away” (Heb. 8:13)—something we would not profess regarding the ecclesial life of the New Israel. I think, nevertheless, that the analogy will prove illuminating.

But I mustn’t get ahead of myself.

I was born in the late 70s when my father was in his middle year of seminary studies for ministry in the Episcopal Church. He was priested (as pithy Anglicans like to say) a year after I was born. Both my parents embraced the liturgical reform then sweeping through Western Christendom. Shorter, simpler services in contemporary English, felt banners, butterfly chasubles with the stole worn on top, guitars and songs containing the word “allelu.” They’d participated in all this in the Catholic Church in which they’d been raised. When they became Episcopalians a few years before I was born, they also embraced more fundamental changes like the ordination of women. By the mid-90s, when my own sense of personal faith and churchmanship was flowering, the Episcopal Church (and my parents with it) was strengthening its commitment not just to women clergy but also to gay unions and inclusive language (for both God and man). Opposition to abortion was marginal; to contraception, unthinkable.

My own middle-school epiphany took place on a hot Sunday morning in July when my parents and I visited a venerable Anglo-Catholic parish in New Haven. Christ Church was one of Henry Vaughan’s masterworks of the English Gothic revival. Dark without and darker within, it had a rood screen, a stone reredos modeled on that of Winchester Cathedral (although 13-year-old me didn’t know that yet), an excellent organ, a professional choir. Along with the priest, there was a deacon and subdeacon. There was a complex and rich smoke of incense. The Mass was offered ad orientem. The collect and post-communion were prayed at the south end of the altar. The Epistle and Gospel were chanted. We sang the Creed (mode one, mind!), we knelt at “…and was incarnate…”. And not one word that was chanted or sung or said or preached was amplified by a loudspeaker: not one microphone in this church.

All these things were new to me. But I knew that they were actually very old, older than the liturgical norms I’d been raised with. Old and mostly forgotten. Old and mysterious and esoteric: they were marvelous in my eyes! Here was a whole realm of grandeur and mystical solemnity that I’d not known before but for which I felt I had been born. For here I was given a glimpse of the beauty of heaven.

I would spend the rest of my adolescence into college taking busses and trains and subways to visit every Anglo-Catholic parish I could from Boston to Philadelphia.

As fancy as that summertime Mass had been, it was still conducted according to the text of the Episcopal Church’s modern Prayer Book. By the time I’d finished eighth grade, however, I’d acquired a copy of The People’s Anglican Missal, and thus began my exploration of pre-conciliar liturgical books, both Anglican and Roman Catholic. In high school I was ignoring my homework to read Fortescue and Percy Dearmer. I spent hours every week singing my way through Vaughan Williams’ English Hymnal. My parents rolled their eyes when they saw me scrutinizing every frame of this now-vintage Latin Mass VHS.

My passion for liturgy flowed into a love of traditional theology and apologetics. I started with Lewis my freshman year of high school. Kreeft, St. Thomas, Eric Mascall all followed suit. Kreeft’s Handbook of Christian Apologetics showed me that Christ’s Resurrection was an indisputable fact of history. I had never doubted it before, but he taught me how certain you could be about it. His Unaborted Socrates made me pro-life to the bone. Meanwhile, conservative Anglican voices like FitzSimons Allison and Samuel L. Edwards instilled qualms within me about the modern Episcopal Church. My father resignedly lent me his volumes of F. J. Hall’s Dogmatic Theology, forewarning me about their “extreme orthodoxy.” Later, he offered to debate me on women’s ordination. In my senior year at Catholic high school, my pants-suited religion teacher, Sr. Janice, had to deal with the kid in the front row with the Catechism of the Catholic Church lying on his desk at the ready.

What can be said? I am very grateful for those years! At the same time, the way either my church (local and national) or I myself practiced its faith weighed me down with anxiety. My repertoire of opinions on every liturgical and doctrinal detail grew expansive and inflexible. When things were not done the way I thought to be proper, or when things were not taught as I knew to be true, resentment became my companion. Resentment and bitter disappointment, along with phantasies of a better future—often featuring me at their center. Not all was right in the Episcopal Church, this I knew well. But I was less acquainted with what was amiss inside me.

In 1996, I went to an Anglo-Catholic youth event in Massachusetts. This week-long gathering of teens and young adults was not a “camp” but a “conference.” St. Michael’s Conference, like its patron, was Serious. Its brochure depicted the Archangel crushing Satan’s skull in triumphant service to Christ and informed your parents that there would be Solemn Mass every morning before breakfast, three theology classes each day, recreation in the afternoon, Solemn Evensong every evening, and a nightly staff meditation. The Angelus was said in refectory before meals, and over a hundred young New England Episcopalians found themselves going to confession—many for the first time—having been thoroughly prepared to do so by a catechetical curriculum fine-tuned over the Conference’s forty years of existence. I was impressed by it all when I was seventeen. Broader experience of church life since then makes me even more impressed with it now. Other Michaelites’ memories may be less rosy. Certainly it was not perfect. But it was effective.

One particularly lasting impression comes from a lecture given by a leading traditionalist priest one evening my second year there. “The Present State of the Episcopal Church” was a barn-burner. It laid out the case against women’s ordination, sexual immorality, liturgical innovation, inclusive language, and a host of other departures from apostolic faith and order. The priest then proposed a kind of church-within-a-church structure that would place traditionalist communities under the autonomous oversight of select orthodox bishops while, it was hoped, allowing them to remain with their parish properties and endowments.

What sticks in my memory about that night was the fervor of the audience. The room crackled with it. We were electrified by zeal for truth and godliness, and we were eager for the fight. Our reflexive ovation gave vent to our anger at the Episcopal Church’s folly. We had been roused. Our faces were flushed. God was with us—who could be against us?

Nearly three decades later, I do not denigrate this. It was thrilling to be with a large group of kids that cared about the same things I did; it was exhilarating to receive some hope and vision for a better future within the church structure I loved as my home. Such hope might have been misplaced or naive or simplistic. Of course. But there was an underlying conviction that Christ is real, that His Church and His sacraments are real, and that He is calling me to be faithful to them.

I had often feared, back then, that such fidelity might eventually oblige me to leave the Episcopal Church and join the Catholic Church—the Church of my grandparents, the Church my parents had left, the Church of 40-minute Masses and bingo and microphones. I had no idea, back then, that, only a couple years thence, it would first lead me into Orthodoxy. Regardless, the flames of zeal that were fanned in us kids that night gave meaning to our life, and that meaning carried at least some of us forward into a lifelong dedication to the apostolic Faith in its integrity.

But if someone had come along that night and told me that my zeal came with a price, I would have taken him to be an enemy of truth and a champion of ugliness. If he’d told me that my strong opinions, while not necessarily wrong, were borderline idolatrous, and that the reason I adhered to them with such insistence was that I was actually afraid of letting God get too close to me and experiencing His love, I’d have waved him off as a liberal.

The word I would have used to describe this guy’s faith was “watery.” Such faith lacked that edge, lacked that electricity that for me was the hallmark of staunch loyalty to tradition. I’d have felt the same irritation towards him that I often felt towards my own father’s preaching: too much about God’s unconditional love, not enough about man’s need to repent of his sins. Too much psychology, not enough morality. Too much mercy, not enough truth. Too many symptoms of modern Christianity’s besetting sin: anthropocentric pride.

And my diagnosis would not have been entirely wrong!

But neither would the other guy’s have been.

Read part two here.