Welcome to a special edition of the Fit Shepherds newsletter. Fr. Mark shared a talk yesterday after the Fit Shepherds’ workout on the “Secret Faults” as described by Blessed John Henry Newman, who is going to be canonized as a saint last this year. These faults were outlined in Parochial and Plain Sermons, the seven-volume collection of Cardinal Newman’s sermons delivered in Oxford’s Church of St. Mary the Virgin.
If you weren’t able to make it to yesterday’s workout, you can listen to the talk by clicking on the audio above. If you did make it to the workout and wanted to hear the talk again, here’s your chance.
For those who don’t have the time to listen to Fr. Mark’s audio talk, read below. It gives an excerpt, written by Nathaniel Peters, from an article in First Things, a religious journal, that mentions Cardinal Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons. I share it as a way to get a small glimpse into some of the wisdom of Newman’s thoughts :
In his sermons, Newman strove manfully (as he would have put it) against the religious tendencies of his day that could compromise Christian faith and vitiate the pursuit of Christian holiness. One of his core themes is the right place of the affections in the spiritual life. In his day, as in our own, people settled for a lukewarm Christianity. They talked about sin, mercy, and forgiveness as ideas, without examining themselves to see how they played out concretely in their own lives. This, Newman argues, leads to false comfort and empty faith. By contrast, “self-knowledge is at the root of all religious knowledge.” Newman continues:
Without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally; you may endure for a time, but under affliction or persecution your faith will not last. This is why many in this age (and in every age) become infidels, heretics, schismatics, disloyal despisers of the Church. They cast off the form of truth, because it never has been to them more than a form. They endure not, because they never have tasted that the Lord is gracious; and they never have had experience of His power and love, because they have never known their own weakness and need.
In order to experience and believe in God’s love, you have to experience just how much you need that love. In order to speak truthfully about God’s mercy, you have to know the reality of that for which he has mercy. “Fear and love must go together,” Newman writes, “always fear, always love, to your dying day.” Hence Christianity is not about feeling happy, good, or saved. Rather it is about feeling [in Newman’s words]:
a deep resignation to God’s will, a surrender of ourselves, soul and body, to Him; hoping indeed, that we shall be saved, but fixing our eyes more earnestly on Him than on ourselves; that is, acting for His glory, seeking to please Him, devoting ourselves to Him in all manly obedience and strenuous good works; and, when we do look within, thinking of ourselves with a certain abhorrence and contempt as being sinners, mortifying our flesh, scourging our appetites, and composedly awaiting that time when, if we be worthy, we shall be stripped of our present selves, and new made in the kingdom of Christ.
Newman’s point is not to replace self-satisfaction with self-loathing. Rather, it is to stop thinking about ourselves, think about Christ, and obey to his commands. Bernard of Clairvaux and the rest of the Fathers would nod in agreement.
The hedonistic paradox is the truth that if you pursue pleasure for its own sake, you will not find it. In his sermons, Newman sets forth a paradox of Christian affections: If you focus on your own feelings and state of mind as if they were “the main business of religion,” you will never develop them rightly. Instead, you should turn from self-contemplation to the contemplation of Christ and let right feelings arise from following him. God is not an emotional high, and seeking God does not equate with seeking an emotional state.
Furthermore, you should not wait until you feel the way you think you should before deciding to act. Living faith produces works, but living faith is not a matter of having right feelings, especially right feelings independent of right works. It is not a matter of “spiritual-mindedness” or “certain emotions and desires” but of the mind and heart laying claim to truths.
A Portrait of Blessed John Henry Newman:
