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Pied Piper of Atheism: Philip Pullman and Children's Fantasy | Pete Vere and Sandra Miesel

God Is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins | Thomas Crean, O.P.

Socrates Meets Descartes | Peter Kreeft

Sermon in a Sentence: Saint Thomas Aquinas | John McClernon

New Outpourings of the Spirit | Joseph Ratzinger

Meet Henri De Lubac | Rudolf Voderholzer

Marian Devotion in the Domestic Church | Catherine & Peter Fournier

Joseph Ratzinger: Life in the Church and Living Theology | Maximilian Heinrich Heim

The Greek Fathers: Their Lives and Adventures | Adrian Fortescue

Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: The Letter to the Hebrews | Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch

Chastity, Poverty and Obedience | Mother Mary Francis, P.C.C.

The Blessing of Christmas | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Chance or Purpose?: Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith | Chrisoph Cardinal Schšnborn

Island of the World: A Novel | Michael O'Brien

The Order of Things | James V. Schall, S.J.

The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan's Top Hand | Paul Kengor & Patricia Clark Doerner

Seek that Which is Above | Pope Benedict XVI

Jesus, the Apostles and the Early Church | Pope Benedict XVI

God and His Image: An Outline of Biblical Theology | Dominique Barthelemey

An Invitation to Faith: An A to Z Primer on the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI | Pope Benedict XVI

Mother Benedict: Foundress of the Abbey of Regina Laudis | Antoinette Bosco

Pope Benedict XVI: The Conscience of Our Age | Vincent Twomey

Ronald Knox as Apologist: Wit, Laughter and the Popish Creed | Fr. Milton Walsh

Christians in China: A.D. 600-2000 | Jean Charbonnier

 



"Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender …"

It’s startling to consider these lines from T.S. Eliot’s haunting poem "Ash Wednesday" some twenty years after I first read them. At that time I was in junior high and had just discovered Eliot. I became enamored with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Hollow Men." I fancied myself an artist and figured that Eliot’s dark vision of life in the modern world (a vision that changed once he became a Christian) was one full of dramatic, if not always uplifting, images.

I read several more of Eliot’s poems, including "Ash Wednesday," but didn’t say much about them to friends or family. After all, I was a devout, self-described "Bible Christian" who expected the end of the world and Armageddon to come with explosive violence, a far cry from Eliot’s contention that "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."

This tension between apocalyptic expectation and vaguely literate despair would begin to come to a head while I attended an Evangelical Bible college. During that time I was introduced to the works of Flannery O’Connor and the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and was reintroduced to "Ash Wednesday." My interest in Prufrock and hollow men had waned, but I was being drawn to the quiet, mysterious "Lady of silences" who Eliot describes as the "Rose of memory" who sits between the yew trees. Who is she? Is she Dante’s Beatrice? Or is she Mary?

Even if she is not Mary, I couldn’t avoid the Marian qualities of the poem. Other questions began rising to the surface: What is Ash Wednesday? Why does Eliot draw so heavily upon liturgical texts? Why did Eliot’s description of the Incarnate Word resonate so deeply with me?

Although Eliot never crossed the Tiber, his later poetry was very Catholic. But as a conservative Evangelical I had been raised with strong prejudices against the Catholic Church. It went without saying that Catholicism was a perverted, apostate form of Christianity, a form of paganism cleverly wrapped in a thin veneer of Christianity. Since Catholics loved ritual, we avoided it. Because they turned the Lord’s Supper into an idolatrous representation of Jesus’ finished work, we downplayed its importance.

Since the Romanists worshipped Mary, we hardly glanced in her direction lest we be tempted by some theological trickery. In the first twenty years of my life I heard three sermons dedicated to Rahab the harlot, which was three times as many sermons as I heard about Mary, the mother of Jesus. And that single sermon was a perfunctory Mother’s Day sermon, adequately summarized as saying, "Mary was a good mom."

While in Bible college I grew in my faith in God while often struggling to make sense of the difficulties of life. Much of my artwork at the time was dark, sometimes angry, and often filled with despair. At the end of my time there I found myself at a crossroads that I could not put into words or even capture in thought. Instead, the inarticulate longings poured out in images, especially two that reoccurred several times: the Crucifixion and the Madonna with the Christ Child.

I had been raised attending a small "Bible chapel" that featured a barren cross on a wall and where no mention was made of Mary. Yet I found myself drawing and painting Jesus on the Cross and Mary holding her Son. I didn’t know why. I would sometimes cry as I worked on them, and I didn’t know why.

But Jesus knew why and so did Mary. It took some time, but a few years later I picked up the newly published Catechism of the Catholic Church. The first sections I looked up were those addressing Mary and her relationship with her Son. Mary had been there all along, the silent Mother praying for a terrified sinner.

And now, today, I can sit in the presence of the Crucified One and pray, in return, "Hail Mary, full of grace…"


This column originally appeared in the August 15-21, 2004 edition of the National Catholic Register. Reprinted by permission.



Carl Olson is the editor of IgnatiusInsight.com. He is the co-author of The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code and author of Will Catholics Be "Left Behind"? He writes regularly for National Catholic Register, Our Sunday Visitor, and other Catholic periodicals.

   
















G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was one of the finest Christian authors and apologists of the past two hundred years. Raised as an agnostic, he embraced Christianity as a young man, ultimately entering the Catholic Church in 1922. He wrote hundreds of essays, as well as novels, short stories, poetry, apologetics, literary criticism, and nearly everything else imaginable. Dale Ahlquist, president and co-founder of the American Chesterton Society and author of G.K Chesterton: Apostle of Common Sense, writes, "Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology. His style is unmistakable, always marked by humility, consistency, paradox, wit, and wonder. His writing remains as timely and as timeless today as when it first appeared, even though much of it was published in throw away paper." Read more about the life and work of this remarkable thinker, author, and apologist.



Confessions of an Ex-Feminist
by Lorraine V. Murray


Confessions is the honest and heart-rending account of a woman who was born into a Catholic family, attended parochial schools and fully embraced the beliefs of her faith, but ran into major roadblocks in college. Amidst the radical feminist college environment of the 1960's, she lost her faith, and her morality, jumping aboard the bandwagon of "free love." She indulged in a series of love relationships in college, all of which crashed and burned. Despite the obvious contradiction between feminist teachings and her own experience, Murray still believed she had to free herself from the yoke of tradition. Attaining a doctorate in philosophy, with an emphasis on the feminist writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Murray taught philosophy in college. For many years, she launched a personal vendetta against God and the Catholic Church in the classroom, trying to persuade students that God did not exist, mocking values Catholics hold dear, and touted feminism as the cure for many social ills. When she discovered she was pregnant, Murray followed the route that feminists offer as a solution for unmarried women. Much to her surprise, her abortion was a shattering emotional experience, which she grieved over for years. It was the first tragic chink in her feminist armor.

Read more about Confessions of an Ex-Feminist, or read an excerpt from the book.










 
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