Reason to believe
PAUL JOHNSON
Every Sunday I attend the 11 o'clock Mass at the Jesuit church in Farm Street, Mayfair. I have been doing this, intermittently, for decades. For me, Farm Street is the centre of English Catholicism and brings back memories of my boyhood at Stonyhurst, the ancient Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire. The Mass is in Latin, and is sung to music written mainly in the baroque centuries. The sermons are brief and sinewy in the Jesuit manner. The congregation is a cross-section of Catholicism in England today, from old recusant families to Poles and Irish.
Among these people I feel at home, happy and safe. They share my view of life and what is likely to happen to us after death. After Mass we have coffee in the hall, and talk. They are not saints or martyrs. But they are good, charitable, above all thoughtful. We have a fellowship, we commune together. I imagine it was not so different, two millennia ago, among the early Christians in Rome. They recognised and greeted each other by making the sign of the cross. We still do so, and feel distinctive as a group. The first Christians were under constant threat, and faced the possibility of a horrific and public death. They drew strength from each other. We, unlike the embattled Christian communities in the Middle East and Africa, have no such fears. But we live in an alien world of pagans and materialists, who trumpet their ceaseless worship of hedonism in print and over the air, and whose deafening voices draw us together. We, too, reinforce each other's faith. I feel nourished by spending an hour or so among my fellow Catholics, and a little more ready to move around the world of incomprehension and ridicule, even hostility, which surrounds us. Among the good people I meet in church, my faith flourishes, it raises its head proudly, I feel the sursum corda, the lifting of the heart which is the essence of the happiness Christianity brings.
So my first reason for faith is communal, and it is a very powerful reason. But even stronger is the assurance I get from prayer. I am not talking of public prayer, which is the essence and reinforcement of the communal spirit, but private prayer. This is an activity in which I engage every day, wherever I can. I try to follow the practice of the late Pope John Paul II, who when he was not actually obliged to do something else which occupied his mind, prayed. It is a habit I am acquiring, now I am well into my eighties and nearing the close of life.
Prayer is the most remarkable — I am tempted to say sensational and spectacular — activity in which a human being can engage.
Among these people I feel at home, happy and safe. They share my view of life and what is likely to happen to us after death. After Mass we have coffee in the hall, and talk. They are not saints or martyrs. But they are good, charitable, above all thoughtful. We have a fellowship, we commune together. I imagine it was not so different, two millennia ago, among the early Christians in Rome. They recognised and greeted each other by making the sign of the cross. We still do so, and feel distinctive as a group. The first Christians were under constant threat, and faced the possibility of a horrific and public death. They drew strength from each other. We, unlike the embattled Christian communities in the Middle East and Africa, have no such fears. But we live in an alien world of pagans and materialists, who trumpet their ceaseless worship of hedonism in print and over the air, and whose deafening voices draw us together. We, too, reinforce each other's faith. I feel nourished by spending an hour or so among my fellow Catholics, and a little more ready to move around the world of incomprehension and ridicule, even hostility, which surrounds us. Among the good people I meet in church, my faith flourishes, it raises its head proudly, I feel the sursum corda, the lifting of the heart which is the essence of the happiness Christianity brings.
So my first reason for faith is communal, and it is a very powerful reason. But even stronger is the assurance I get from prayer. I am not talking of public prayer, which is the essence and reinforcement of the communal spirit, but private prayer. This is an activity in which I engage every day, wherever I can. I try to follow the practice of the late Pope John Paul II, who when he was not actually obliged to do something else which occupied his mind, prayed. It is a habit I am acquiring, now I am well into my eighties and nearing the close of life.
Prayer is the most remarkable — I am tempted to say sensational and spectacular — activity in which a human being can engage.
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