The Quest (and the Rest)

Letters to a Growing Catholic #4

Dear daughter,

In my last letters, we got to know the friendly sisters, Faith and Truth, and we started getting ready to go on a walk with them.

Well… less a walk, more a Quest.

Not a short quest, either.

Nor, for that matter, an easy one! It’s going to be a little like stepping off Elrond’s back porch in Rivendell, heading for the Misty Mountains, and crossing your fingers that the weather isn’t going to make you go through Moria!

A picture you can hear!

This Quest is as important as any: we’ll be looking for answers to the ultimate questions of life, the universe, and everything. As we’ve seen, this is important. It has to get done.

I know I said that we’d use this letter to get started. Before I raced out the back door with you into the Wilderness, though, I realized I ought to mention something I’ve avoided so far: the Quest is not for everyone.

You are quite capable of the Quest. I’ve been your father for over a decade, and so you can believe me when I tell you that I know you have the brains, the joyous spirit, and the tenacity to be very successful at this. Irene, you were named for St. Irenaeus, one of the Catholic Church’s earliest and most pugnacious thinkers, and I’ve often glimpsed his spirit in you. Sabina, you’re perhaps the most conscientious person I’ve ever met—an essential trait when out hunting with our sister Truth. You both could do this. However, that is not the only question.

Fatty Bolger (remember Fatty?) stayed home in the Shire, because he loved it, but also because the Fellowship needed someone to cover its escape. Indeed, Fatty protected the Fellowship at a crucial moment by raising the alarm about the Black Riders. You’ll remember he also bravely fought Saruman when he occupied the Shire (and paid dearly for it). Fatty was made of stuff as stern as Merry or Pippin, but his calling was to quiet service in the Shire, not wielding enchanted blades against the Black Army on the fields of Minas Tirith.

By the same token, there are people who, for reasons of talent or mere temperament, are not suitable for the great Quest. Of course, they want and need the answers as much as anyone. Everyone needs the Truth, for all the reasons we discussed in the other letters. It’s just that some people aren’t going to be able to chase the answers through the wilderness, trap them, wrestle them to the ground, and answer their magic riddles.

Think of someone with an intellectual disability like Down Syndrome. These are some of the most wonderful people alive. (I don’t know why Downs kids seem capable of so much joy, but there it is.) Yet somebody with Downs is in no shape to go Questing through history, philosophy, Scripture, and more in search of the ultimate answers! It’d be like asking a cripple to run a marathon!

A person with serious intellectual disabilities, then, has to get his answers principally through Faith. Hopefully, there are people in his life who love him dearly and who help him with things that he can’t manage himself. (I’m thinking of parents, or family, or friends, or maybe even a local convent.) If they love him well, he is likely to put his faith in them. It is then their responsibility to help him understand, as much as he is able: who am I? why am I here? what is good?

It is their job, in other words, to teach him religion, just like any parent must teach her children religion. Everyone teaches their children religion—especially the parents who insist that they don’t. (The only question is what religion.) It is the children’s job to trust their parents, at least until (and unless) they are ready to go on the Quest for themselves.

Yet some are never ready, for all kinds of reasons beyond raw ability. Your mother is one of them! She is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. In pure IQ, I’m pretty sure she’s smarter than me, whatever I may say about our NAQT scoring records. She could be a great public thinker and writer. Yet she has never had an ounce of desire for that. She wants to create beautiful and funny stories for her friends, to cook delicious dinners for us, to be the unsung master of a library, and to live the quiet, comfortable life of a happy hobbit. God sees this, and calls it very good. I would be utterly lost without Mom, like the Fellowship without Fatty—no, like Frodo without Sam.

Mom is the first to admit that she would be lost without me, too. Not being herself inclined to chase the ultimate answers over fen and field with Truth at her side, Mom has instead chosen to lean far more on Faith. She knows that I am the sort of person who won’t stop until Truth and I have slain the beasts and dragged them home for a roast feast. Mom also believes that I have a good heart and would never mislead her. (The second is true, and my main goal in life is to live up to her belief in the first.) So she has, to a large extent, placed her Faith, not in any particular set of truths, but in me. It is my responsibility to be worthy of her faith, by not misleading her.

(I should add that Mom also keeps an ample reserve of faith in common sense, in case I ever get too carried away chasing after the newest ideas with Truth and lose my footing in Faith… or reality. You can see this in the way she throws food at me any time I start worrying too much about whether sandwiches are real.)

You will have to decide, in prayer and in the quiets of your soul, whether the Quest is for you. It is not easy. Chasing ideas all the time will tire you out. You’ll always have your nose in three books because you can’t let the search go.

Indeed, the one thing you absolutely can’t do, once you set out on the Quest, is stop early. The conversation about the true answers has been going on for four thousand years, and it shows no signs of stopping. For Questers, the great temptation is always to drop out of that conversation, because we have grown content (or even just lazy) with the answers we already have. I can’t ever stop giving a fair shake to new ideas just because they don’t fit with my own. Sometimes, that’s hard. Sometimes, I even have to change my beliefs, and that’s quite painful!

All I can tell you is that the rewards of finding things out for yourself are very rich. It is immensely satisfying, also, to be able to share what you find with the people you love, and to know that you’ve done well by them. Bilbo was right: “It’s a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and, if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” I’ve been swept off places I didn’t know existed when I set out, and those places are beautiful beyond words.

In short, I wouldn’t trade places with your mother for all the salt in the sea. (I’m sure she feels the same way.) (Except not about salt. Probably something insane, like all the sparkling grapefruit juice in the Coca-Cola factory.)

You certainly do not have to decide today, or even for the next few years, whether the Quest is part of your vocation. God calls many, perhaps most, to other labors. However, if you do decide to set aside the Quest, to stay comfortably at your version of Bag End—or if you decide to retire there after many years Questing for the answers—that doesn’t mean you can just ignore the Big Questions. You will need to place your faith somewhere, and keep it there.

As we saw in the last letters, faith is nothing more nor less than earned trust, held strong against the storms of emotion. You could place your faith, then, in someone who has earned it, the same way I earned Mom’s faith: by unflagging dedication to the Truth, plus love. (It does always seem to come back to love, in the end.)

However, I hesitate to make any single person the repository of your faith. People are—rather famously—a little wobbly.

When your Mamie was a rebellious teen, she used to get into the most stupendous shouting matches with Merc,¹ your great-grandmother, whom I dearly miss. Mamie thought women should be able to use contraception, and she knew all the trendy arguments why. (Being pro-contraception was very trendy at the time.) She demanded that Merc explain why she was wrong, and Merc tried. Merc was natively brilliant and a voracious reader, but she had grown up in a poor family and had only a high-school education. (Later, she would get her Master’s in history, but not yet.) Meanwhile, Mamie was getting her Ph.D. in philosophy. It is not surprising that Mamie beat Merc on points, but Merc fell back on her faith.

Merc could not take your mother’s option of having faith in her husband. Merc’s marriage was very difficult, with many reasons for distrust, and she was smarter than him anyway. Instead, Merc placed her faith in the institutional teaching of the Catholic Church.

Merc reasoned that the smartest people across twenty centuries had all contributed to the great conversation within Catholic Christianity. From Irenaeus to Aquinas all the way to about 1920, they had collectively concluded, virtually unanimously (and in strong terms), that it was bad for women to use contraception. Mercedes Lynch was not smarter than Thomas Aquinas—and, Merc reminded Mamie, neither was Merc’s daughter. So, Merc thought, they should both trust the answers they’d been given. She figured it was perfectly right and good to ask questions of authority, including Church authority—but asked the way a child asks her father questions about where water comes from, not the way a KGB interrogator questions a prisoner about troop deployments for West Germany.

The Church had not led Merc to an easy life, by any means. (That’s a set of stories for another day.) But the Church had, she sensed, led her down true paths and protected her from many dangers. In retrospect, she was correct, and she knew it well by the time she died. She wasn’t able to articulate exactly why all that added up to “contraception is bad,” but the Church had indeed earned her trust.

A few years later, Mamie met Pops in their Ph.D. program. Pops was an adorable Catholic dork when he was young, and he had the answers Mamie craved. Within ten years, she was married, had us, and was not only following the Church’s teaching on contraception; she gave about a million talks explaining and defending it as a good thing that contributed to human happiness.

Of course, not every story of faith ends that way. When you decline the Quest and place your faith in someone or something else, it’s an act of radical trust. There are always risks. No normal human or human institution has ever led anyone else perfectly.

That includes even the Catholic Church. The Church is not entirely human, but is, sadly, human enough. Hopefully, I have already taught you that you should never, ever trust a bishop. The average bishop will sacrifice you the same way he’s sacrificed so many others: without a second thought. Above-average bishops exist, but you have no way of knowing who they are until too late. Fortunately, the individual bishops are not the same as the Church’s long teaching tradition.

Even when it comes to the big institutional doctrines, though, the Church has sometimes failed to recognize a full truth by getting hung up on a half-truth. Too often, this error-of-omission has misled the very people who depended on the Church the most. For example, at many times and places throughout history, the Church has become so focused on Catholicism as the Ark of the New Covenant that they have lost sight of the Old Covenant and the special role God’s Chosen People play in it. Too often, Catholic flocks have translated this into contempt for the Jews—or worse.

For all that, though, I still don’t think you could do much better, in the span of an ordinary human lifetime, than to put your faith in the Church. We will presently explore some other reasons why the Church might be worth trusting, besides Merc’s point about all the smart Catholics over the centuries. The Church is deeply flawed—but so is everyone and everything else you might place your faith in, from your family members to “my country, right or wrong” to the “academic consensus” of Ivy League professors. (These professors are some of the most powerful people in our society, but they are, for the most part, alas! quite insane!)

Of course, the other option is not to be dependent on faith in anyone, by going on the Quest yourself. That, too, has risks—but at least the risks are under your own control.

My own quest for answers has taken me all over. These next letters describe the things that I found most important, or at least the most fundamental. You might think of the next few letters, then, as a map. If you someday decide to follow me out the door on the Quest, they will give you a good starting point. If not, then it is all the more important for me to tell you what answers I’ve learned. Either way:

Onward to Mordor!

Love,

Dad

DE CIV NEXT VOYAGE: it’s Supreme Court season, and it seems unlikely that I’ll manage to get through June without typing something about The Nine! I have also nearly finished the next letter in this series… because I was already writing it and only at the very end decided I should double back and write this one first. Other drafts in my Drafts file include something called “Give Your PC to Theseus,” which I have finished, but I’m not sure is substantial enough for you readers (let me know if you want to see it).

1. To those of you reading this who are not my daughter: “Merc” is short for “Mercedes” and is pronounced “merss,” like the first syllable of “mercenary.”