Like many a restless soul, I had left my faith by the wayside by the time I reached my mid-teens. An analysis of the dynamics of this loss, and indeed of the inadequacies of what was lost, would make a good topic for another essay. Enough to say here that in spite of years of warming pews and the desks of Catholic elementary schools, precious little religion seems to have seeped into my mind, let alone into my heart. By fourteen I had absorbed, as if by osmosis, the secularist world-view of the dominant culture. This adolescent rationalism was characterized by shallow agnosticism and a naive faith in scientific and political progress. I would like here to reflect on the collapse of this illusion and the revelatory role creation plays in coming to faith.
The late sixties were heady, visionary times and to many of us who came of age then the era remains both formative and problematic. The world seemed full of promise and dreams. And though most of the promises proved to be lies and the dreams illusions, we tend to view the disappointment itself as a grace, the way a disillusioned lover may be grateful for the approach of love, even if it proved too elusive to grasp. So at first my illusory rationalism was replaced by other illusions. But these at least admitted the possibility of mystery, at least made a large enough crack in my materialism for some opening to the spiritual to be possible. It was into this crack that the cosmic mystery burst.
There were certain powerful moments in this process which stand out. The first occurred on an autumn night when I was eighteen. I was sitting in a park on a windy, starry night after an evening of hanging out with friends. I began reflecting on a conversation I had had with an uncle some weeks before. The uncle, a bookish fellow given to science fiction and speculation, had presented me with his latest theory. Solar systems and atoms, he told me, were structured the same. What if, he asked, solar systems are the atoms of a larger world and atoms the solar systems of a smaller? From there, in his theory, worlds grew out of one another microscopically and macroscopically into infinity.
The comparison, I realize now, is greatly flawed, but the meditation I embarked on from it, while gazing up at the stars, left me in a state of awe. Even purely physical expansiveness profoundly affected me, and this amazement made me aware ever after that the world was likely to open out onto infinity at any moment. Most unsettlingand here awe touched fearwas the fact that at the moment of perceiving this infinitude there was a disturbing sense of presence. I felt that infinity was pressing in on me, tiny against the starry night that expanded forever; that the universe or something just beyond the universe was breathing down my neck.
I was still a far cry from faith but I have always dated the time that my rebellion became a search to that night.
This experience at the beginning of the search was unique in that it began with the reasoning process and ended in awe. Subsequent experiences began with awe and were followed by reflection. These experiences became quite frequent, in part because of the life I was living. I had dropped out of college and spent my time in either manual labor or hitch-hiking and backpacking. I lived, too, for a while on a communal farm in the hills of Appalachia. I was thus in close contact with nature and with primal reality. These later experiences were initially intuitive, generated usually by the perception of beauty or causal relationship in the natural world. Years later, reading Gerard Manley Hopkins, I identified many of these experiences with the grasp of what he called inscape. What strikes me in looking back on these moments is their unexpected appearance. They could not be produced, but out of nowhere a certain form or imagethe bright red of tulips on a misty day, the strut of a rooster across the barnyardwould catch my eye, and my heart would expand as the world unfolded into a bright wonder. There seemed to be something just beyond my perception trying to break into this magical moment.
At the same time I had begun reading widely from explicitly religious writings: Hindu, Buddhist, and others. I was by then more or less a pantheist and viewed these experiences in light of that belief, seeing these moments as ones in which the soul of the world broke through into perception. At their most powerful, a sense of presenceof awe expanding into something near terroraccompanied these moments, though this was more likely if the reality sparking the experience was huge (seas, thunderstorms, a starlit sky) than small (wildflowers, a leaf, a little child).
I did not, as the Church teaches is possible, reason from this beauty and order to knowledge of a personal God. Rather, these experiences spurred my reading and searching. Thirst was awakened but not quenched. There was a Presence, to be sure, but the Presence was silent.
How I sorted through the many gurus and religious counterfeits of the early seventies and came to encounter Jesus Christ through reading Scripture (with the help of C.S. Lewis) and eventually returned to the Catholic faith cannot be treated here. The dynamics of one's own conversion are complex and elusive, and certainly seem to evade any neat description. But though the intellectual and intuitive processes were simultaneous and interwoven, it does seem certain, in retrospective reflection, that the entire search was stirred and sustained by the wonder, awe, and fear evoked by these moments of pre-intellectual perception which more resemble Zen insight than dialectical reasoning.
The Teaching Church does not seem to treat this type of pre-conceptual creational encounter except to say what it is not. Thus the anti-Modernist Oath states that it is not to be confused with faith. Pius X also, in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, refutes the notion that what he calls the religious sense, which seems to be what is spoken of above, is the germ of all religion, in the sense that dogmas are changeable intellectual constructs, mere human attempts to articulate the ineffable.
Still, it is difficult for me to see this sense as less than a grace, albeit a primeval one. Incomplete in itself, incapable of bringing one to relationship with God, it nevertheless stirs one to seek that relationship. This awakening of awe in the face of creation certainly seems to be the starting point of the religious search. While always distinct from Revelation it does open one to that reality, and it would seem wise for Christians to explore its value and meaning, particularly in light of current trends both within and without the Church.
By focusing mainly on philosophical reflection upon creation and rarely dealing with the wonder that initiates reflection, the Church seems in some sense to have minimized the religious meaning of creation. True, doctrinal statements of the teaching Church, generally based on the dominant Thomistic scholasticism, have always stressed that one can know that God exists through creation. But once one has come to accept revealed truth isnt the impression sometimes given that nature, leading one only to the most elementary truths, can now be set aside?
There are other voices in the tradition with richer possibility in this area. Pascal, for example, spoke of an experience of infinity remarkably like my own. And the non-mainstream Augustinian-Franciscan philosophical and theological tradition seems more open to this intuitive encounter, especially as it peaked in Gerard Manley Hopkins poetic expression of Duns Scotus philosophical insights. But it is possible to have a good Catholic education or seminary training and only encounter these voices in the most fleeting way, if at all.
It may be that the importance of such a fundamental human experience was largely assumed and hence did not need to be articulated in the pre-technological age. Today, though, the human milieu has undergone profound change. People are alienated from the universal primal experiences which have been common to humanity through the ages. We take this for granted, but, if we pause and consider it, the changes have been revolutionary and affect human consciousness in as yet unmeasured ways. To take one example, Cardinal Ratzinger has gone so far as to comment that the representation of the world by the mass media makes a bigger impact today on consciousness than does personal experience. This is a startling statement. Does the creation of this secondary world make the primary world less accessible? Doesnt this world of imagery cloud rather than illumine reality? St. Paul said that Gods invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things which he has made (Romans 2:20). But if ones world is one in which the things made by God are replaced by the things made by man how can this not affect ones receptivity to the God of nature? And though it must be noted that mans transformation of creation is less than total in all but the most urban areas it should be apparent that we speak here of a change of consciousness and perception as great as the external change in environment. Hence one could live in a pleasant suburb where Gods handiwork is plentiful but is perceived only as the green blur against which the real world of technology and consumer goods stands in sharp relief.
Grace, Catholics believe, builds on nature. And it is precisely because modern man is separated from naturealienated from both creation without and humanity withinthat faith comes with such difficulty. The natural man, so harshly compared to the spiritual man by St. Paul, may well have merited praise had Paul ever encountered the artificial man. It does not seem at all accidental that the development of atheistic humanism paralleled the development of the techno-industrial world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
But as always, in the economy of grace, every darkness hides a light. Thus, the revelatory power of creation may be actually increased when the technological man finally turns his gaze to look at it. It possesses, for the one who pauses to see, a newness and freshness which may be lost or taken for granted by one too familiar with it. Once the jaded eye has wakened it may see that every bush is burning.
There are, of course, dangers in this rapprochement, as we can see in certain trends among Catholics interested in creation theology: pantheism, romanticism, superstition, an over-emphasis on the natural at the expense of grace; all of these are obvious snares. But the essential impulse in this reaction, the underlying hunger for contact with the real real world, must be nurtured. For though the religious sense, the sense of wonder and awe, is not faith and does not save and must be seen in light of divine revelation, it seems that the life of the human person, let alone the graced life of the Christian, is impoverished without it.
Daniel Nichols writes from Manassas, Virginia.
