By the lights of the popular culture, the weeks up to Christmas are “the Christmas season” when everyone is supposed to be jolly.  Those who cannot rouse themselves to hilarity are often despondent.  They think there is something wrong with them.

But according to the liturgical calendar of the Church, the popular culture has it backwards.  The season of Christmas doesn’t begin until Christmas.  The season through which we have been passing and which ends with tonight’s Vigil is Advent, and it is a penitential season.  Its keynote is not hilarity but longing -- longing that is quiet and expectant, but unfulfilled.

It is not unfaithful to confess that we are unfulfilled, and the pretense of fulfillment is not what makes us happy.  St. Paul spoke searchingly of how we “groan” in the longing that what is mortal in us may be “swallowed up by life.”  Yet this is the same Paul who counsels us to rejoice.  How is that possible?

This question, which seems so hard, is really easy.  Even the fact that we mourn is a reason for joy.  For how could we sorrow at all, if we were merely evolved dirt?  If Darwin got it right, no traits should persist in the genome unless they have adaptive value.  That obviously fails to fit the facts.  If we were perfectly adapted to the way of this world, we would not grieve when dear ones died, but go right on to the next thing.  We would not experience strange longings for we know not what that are not to be found in this life.  We would not even have consciences, for whatever we desired would be good – just in the sense that we desired it.  Then what is the problem?  Have there not yet been enough millions of years to put us right?  Surely there have been.  Plainly we are not made for this world – not even by natural selection.  Then we are made for another.

I defy any atheist to pretend that he does not know what I am talking about.  When we behold the visible beauties of this world, our spirits soar.  Yet who could deny the sweet piercing pain in that transport?  The greater the visible beauty we see, the greater the longing for an invisible Beauty that we do not see, whether or not we know or speak its name.  The difference between the Christian and the atheist lies not in our longings, but in our theologies.  His theology cannot account for what we both feel.  My theology can.

And so when I reflect on this vale of tears, I cannot help but be jubilant.  If it were really all there were, then I could not even recognize it as a vale of tears; I would be at home in it.  Blessed are the discontented.  Blessed are they who weep.  Blessed are they who lay aside their satisfactions for the Creator of their longings, for they will be satisfied.  Rejoice!

Sometimes it transpires in conversations about the reality of God that the other fellow peppers me with hostile objections but doesn’t seem to hear my answers.  In cases like that, I have occasionally put the question, “Suppose we isolated ourselves for a few weeks so that I could answer every last one of your objections.   And suppose you could raise no objections to my answers.  Then would you change your mind?”

Most hostiles answer “No.”  Which makes it reasonable to point out, “Then your objections aren’t your real reasons for your view.  What do you suppose the real reasons might be?”  I insist on an answer.  Sometimes this is a moment of honesty.

Occasionally, someone turns the question back on me.  Come on, Budziszewski, play fair.  Suppose you were out-argued and you ran out of objections.  Would you change your mind?

No, I wouldn’t.  But I have better reasons.  I would not change my mind about God because my warrant for His reality is greater than my confidence that I can always discover the flaw in an argument against Him.  What is that warrant?  Experience.

As its unknown author argues in the eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews, Christian faith is not just a subjective belief in the things hoped for, or a subjective conviction of things not seen, as the passage is often mistranslated.  Rather it is a first taste of participation in the very substance of the things hoped for (the hypostasis), and the evidence or proof of things not seen (the elenchos).  I believe in the invisible for the same reason I believe in the visible:  I have touched it.

Readers:

According to Google Analytics – don’t ask me how they know this – about a quarter of the visitors to this website are under 25, half are 25-44, and the final quarter are 45 and over.  Over the years I’ve received hundreds of letters about my books, articles, and online writing from undergraduate and graduate students around the country -- some friendly, some hostile, all interesting.  Topics run the gamut from abstract and philosophical to concrete and personal.  I’ve run letters on the blog from time to time before, and I’ve been considering running one every Monday.  Would that be interesting or uninteresting?  Let me know.

Actual query:

You say that God is good, but what makes Him good?  You say that we have been ruined by trying to be good without God, but by whose standard?  God’s?  Of course if we break away from Him we will be ruined by His standard, but what makes His standard better than yours, mine, or my cat’s?  All I really want to know is what makes this Being better and more morally right.

Reply:

Your mistake is thinking of God as something separate from Good:  He may be in accord with it, He may not.  That’s not how it is.  God and Good aren’t two things; they are one.  He simply is the Good, and good things short of Him are good because He made them.  It’s His goodness that these thousand goods reflect, as white light refracted through a prism gleams in a thousand brilliant colors  -- love, joy, wisdom, beauty, strength, and all the rest.  Now God cannot be at odds with Himself.  It is because He is the Good, and with infinite wisdom knows Himself, that He knows what Good is.  To think that you, or I, or your cat might know Good better than Good knows Himself is pretty silly.

Another way to answer was suggested by C.S.  Lewis.  God is the source of our ability to know about Good.  He gave us our minds; He gave us our conscience; it was He who gave us the knowledge that evil and good are different, He who polarized our souls to fear the one and long for the other.  The very power to ask questions and form judgments about the matter comes from Him and depends on Him.  So to set this power against Him is like sawing off the branch that we are sitting on.

That answers your question; in fact it answers it twice.  But here is something else to think about.  One of our names for God is the Desire of Nations.  The reason for this title is that if He Himself is the Good, then whether or not we know it, to long for the Good is ultimately to long for Him.  Turning the same thought around, to seek good things apart from the One from whom their goodness flows is ultimately to stuff our mouths with dust and ashes.  There will come a day when you wonder why you can’t swallow.  Come to the Fountain instead.

I speculated last Sunday that scholars of different disciplines are attracted to different kinds of humor.  What about historians?

Historians tend to be acutely aware of irony.  Whether they find it funny, though, is another question.  In his 2010 book The Historian’s Paradox, Peter Hoffer suggests that historians are not very funny people at all:  “As someone who has attended nearly one hundred conferences of historians and sat through countless panels of scholars reading detailed and dry papers followed by commentators reading equally detailed and dry comments, I can say that many historians do not seem fond of humor .... Apparently there is nothing humorous in what we study and humor has no place in how we do our studies.”

But I think Hoffer himself is being ironic, and enjoying it too, for he launches immediately into a discussion of the relevance to philosophy of history of shaggy dog stories – tales “whose ending does not quite measure up to our expectations.”  Here is his chief exhibit:

“A young man decides to discover the secret of life.  He wanders all over the world, asking its most revered holy men and women to explain the secret of life to him.  Dissatisfied with their answers, he travels to Tibet to seek the wisdom of the holiest man there.  From the holy man’s disciples, the seeker learns what he must do to purify his soul and prepare his mind for the answer.  For years he practices the most rigorous exercises, and finally he is permitted to approach the holy teacher.  ‘Holy man,’ the now older and frailer seeker asks, ‘What is the secret of life?’  The holy man replies, ‘Life is like a bending branch.’  Still perplexed, the seeker asks, ‘How is life like a bending branch?’  The holy man thinks for a moment and then answers, ‘You mean life is not like a bending branch?’”

I am suspicious of most fashionable theories, but the narrative theory of the self has a certain merit if one doesn’t take the metaphor it is based on too literally.  Maybe we could view things like this.

In the soul is a story, of which I am the author and in which “I” am the main character.  In a sense I make myself up as I go along -- not my entire self, but a part of myself -- the part of myself that is my story of myself.  My story of myself, my so-called ego, is what I think of as myself. 

There is a story of this kind in every soul.  But the story is never very accurate.  Besides telling it, one of the things a person must do in his life is try to uncover the hidden errors and correct them.

Suppose it were rewritten so profoundly that it became, for the first time, wholly true.  Yet suppose the old draft with all its errors was not just thrown away, but incorporated into it:  “Once I told that misleading story, and tried to make myself into it; now I tell it more truthfully, but part of the truth is that I told it the wrong way before.”

The great thing would be to revise the narrative to reflect my real motives, and God’s actions, at every point.  The self would still be the main character in the story, but God would be what it was about.

Only God can rewrite my story in this way.  That is a metaphor for redemption.

By His own laws, He will not do so without my go-ahead.  That is a metaphor for repentance.

As I tell it, my story is full of perjuries – evasions about my motives and attempts at justification, misrepresentations of divine love and apparent neglect, sheer lies by which I treat myself not only as the main character of the story but also as its theme.  That is a metaphor for pride.

I can never rewrite the story deeply enough.  I cannot even get outside it to see how it would have to be rewritten.  Only Truth Himself can make both my very self, and my story of myself, wholly true.  If only I can see it, if only I can confess it, that is a metaphor for humility.

The freshly retold self is something like a child.  Perhaps that is a metaphor for the beginning of maturity.