“He was, without a doubt, the most powerful voice for Catholic culture
in the Anglophone world.”
Stratford Caldecott – a Tribute
As a tribute to our friend Stratford Caldecott–Catholic scholar, intellectual, husband, father, grandfather and comic book aficionado…I publish here Strat’s conversion story which was first published by Gracewing in my first book, the best selling volume of conversion stories, The Path to Rome – Modern Journeys to the Catholic Church.
Gnosis and Grace
Contemporary Paganism and the Search for Truth
by Stratford Caldecott
I was not baptized as a child, my agnostic father having prevailed upon my mother to let the children decide their own religious fate when old enough to do so. My parents were South African intellectuals, who left their country in 1951 after years of working against apartheid. It was in London that I was born and brought up, in a comfortable, loving home flooded with all the cultural influences of the 1960s. The house was full of books, my father being a publisher (editor of the Reader’s Union Book Club, and later joint chief editor at Penguin, and founder of Wildwood House), and I devoured them. My favourites were fantasy novels and science fiction, then popular science, and eventually mysticism.
As long as I can remember I have had a sense that there is a God. I associate my religious instinct largely with dreams, of which I remember many from my childhood: dreams that seemed to be more than dreams, like other lives and other worlds within this one, bearing revelations that can never fully be expressed in words. As a child, I was sickly and bedridden a lot of the time, developing a particularly close relationship with my mother. We talked for hours about the meaning of life and suchlike. And then, when I was fourteen, I finally discovered the ‘secret of the universe’ – or so I put it to myself. This was a philosophical insight. I had been pondering whether the world is, as the materialists claim, mere matter and energy. Suddenly I realized that the very consciousness of the question, my very awareness itself – to say nothing of the substance of my dreams – was in itself non-material.
It is hard to convey the force with which this insight impacted upon my life, or the horizons it opened up for me. At around the same time I had a similar insight concerning time. I realized that whether or not the past existed for us any more, it must be every bit as real as the present. No doubt the same applies to the future, which is as yet undetermined (it will be determined, in part, by the decisions we are now making). Thus there must be a dimension beyond time, and in this a unity enfolding all things: matter, consciousness and time. Here I felt I had at last ‘located’ the Presence whose existence I had long suspected. I filled endless notebooks with pencilled argument and ideas, these reflections evoking in me a series of mystical experiences that were to cease a few years later, in the very moment I first told another soul about them, for all the world as though I was being punished for violating a secret.
I became fascinated by arguments for the existence of God. In particular, I pondered how to prove God to those who have not experienced that gift of contact – who had not smelt that perfume from the hidden garden. Obviously one cannot prove God by a syllogism. Nevertheless it seemed that there must be ways of opening up the mind to that dimension. Simply by daring to think, do we not posit a world that makes sense to us, that we can understand better by investigation and reflection? Should we not assume that the world in fact makes the maximum possible sense? I was struck by a sentence from a science-fiction novel by Alfred Bester, ‘Somewhere there is something worthy of belief.’ Now that seemed to be the right place to start. You won’t find it unless you believe it is out there, somewhere. And surely we all worship something: namely whatever we put in first place in our lives. The measure of our humanity is fixed by whatever it is we worship. Let us by all means ‘worship’ with every breath the noblest reality that might exist, and act as though it were as real as the things we saw with our eyes. In this way I dimly sensed that religious faith, since it concerns the invisible, cannot be merely passive, but must in some way a creative act, an act of will.
At the time I was still not much interested in Christianity.
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Read more: www.patheos.com
Read more in Prudentia Politica:
25 Feb 2014
Uno de estos expertos es Stratford Caldecott, que participa a través de la pantalla desde Inglaterra. Pertenece -señala María Martínez- a las primeras generaciones de niños ingleses que leyó El Señor de los anillos, en los ...
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by Stratford Caldecott. Probably the majority in the environmental movement do not see the relevance of mysticism, or personal virtue and morality, to the great issues of our day. To them it is merely a technological or political ...
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by Stratford Caldecott. I'm pretty sure G.K. Chesterton is in heaven, and therefore a saint—or at least I hope so, since this gives much hope to the rest of us. But, of course, he is not officially canonized. The campaign to ...
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by Stratford Caldecott. In a book on Catholic social doctrine, published just after Easter, I found myself integrating a lifetime's work on a range of topics, from liturgy to politics, from sex to economics. Not As the World Gives aims ...
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by Stratford Caldecott. Our society, indeed what remains of Western civilization, seems to many people to be falling apart. The economic crisis, the moral crisis, the ecological crisis, and the political crisis combine to create a ...
19 Abr 2014
by: Stratford Caldecott. How should Christian classical educators in the early 21st century evolve, and on what points should we stand fast in the face of the rising tide of progressivism and modernism? I want to focus on one ...
06 Mar 2014
by Stratford Caldecott. Political correctness is philosophical nonsense. What we need is Justice not just Equality, Moral Responsibility not just Freedom, Intelligence not just Reason, and Charity not just Niceness or ...
29 Mar 2014
by Stratford Caldecott. Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age. The title of Gregory Wolfe's excellent collection of essays, Beauty Will Save the World, is based on a much-quoted line from ...
16 Jun 2013
by Stratford Caldecott. The Winter 2013 issue of Humanum, the freely available online journal of the Pope John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, DC (or rather the Institute's Center for Pastoral ...
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