In the novel Brideshead Revisited, the English author and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh portrays a conversation between two characters illustrating the challenges as well as the joys of living the Catholic faith. The first speaker in this scene, the (at the time) agnostic Charles Ryder, is bewildered by the childlike faith of the cradle Catholic Sebastian Flyte.
“But my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.”
“Can’t I?”
“I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.”
“Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.”
“But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.”
“But I do. That’s how I believe.”
In this passage, Evelyn Waugh expresses a long-held insight of our Christian tradition: beauty helps us come to the knowledge of the truth.
“I believe that. It’s a lovely idea”. Advent is a season of anticipation. And there is something to be said for Advent anticipation. This is not about a count down to Christmas, but rather something much deeper—something that helps determine how we live our very lives! In the Gospel about the final days, St. Luke says men will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming. But we should stop right there and ask, “Why would we die of anticipation, since we know where this path ends?”
The abbess of a monastery in New Mexico once told this little story:
“My mother had this little idiosyncrasy of always wanting to see how the book ended. When she began to read, she would always read the ending, and then she would diligently go back to the beginning and read the book through. It used to amuse me as a child, and I started to do the same thing because you always like to do what your mother does. We want to see how it is going to turn out.”
And with the eye of faith we do know! Not about the book that the abbess’ mother was reading, but what it is that is coming at the end of time. We know what is at the end of the path. And so, if we die of anticipation, we should be dying of joy.
But how many of us really do this? The beauty of Jesus’ teachings may attract us as do the Scriptural stories of the first Christmas and the star and the three kings and the animals in the stable. But as we get older and more beaten up by life, do we start to think like Charles Ryder does in Brideshead Revisited, and say: “But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.”
A person of faith would say it is a lovely idea, but it is also the truth. And this confidence should change the way we approach life’s situations. We know how it will end because we have been promised the joys of eternal life with Christ.
But what happens is that we start to lower expectations, so to speak. The abbess from New Mexico says: “When we are not anticipating rightly because we are not going firmly forward on the path, is it not because we are anticipating lesser things?…Do we waste our energy sometimes on anticipating how it is going to turn out? We think: things are going to get worse and worse, and I don’t think I can do this, and I don’t think I can make that much effort, and maybe it won’t come out right anyway, and I’d better not do it at all because maybe I can’t…Even in the things that cause the most suffering, God always has in mind something wonderful for which we need to be purified by suffering. And so we know where the path ends.” So start living your life with an Advent anticipation. See the beauty in the “lovely idea” and know that this lovely idea is the starting point to something much more profound. No matter what lies ahead we know how it will end. We know this because we have faith and we are “dying with joy”.
