Heroes of Distant Days.

To badly misuse C S Lewis, "A middle aged man can't be too carefully with his reading". Or more importantly, beware what you take home with you from the Abbey! In my usual raiding of the Abbey reading room ( I am very spoilt in been allowed to borrow from the monks) I came across this large tomb, "Literary Converts".

A great book. A fantastic read. Food for my soul. It recounts the spiritual journeys, generally to the Roman Catholic Church but not exclusively, from the late 19th centuries until the last quarter of the 20th. Great writers and great people are discussed. Tolkien, Lewis, G K Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Ronald Knox, C S Lewis, Graeme Green, Evelyn Waugh and so the list goes on.

 As I look back, I think reading the Narnia series changed me and started this journey. Inside,  it made me long for something. Something mysterious and perhaps, just out of reach. I have talked before about this being a sense of "Northerness",  a need for myth and light and cold. There is something in these writers which impacts me deeply, and brings me to within inches of the long-fored place. A humour. An intellect. A certainty, but also a light touch. Honesty. True humanity. A catholicity of life which I find sadly missing from many Christians which I both read and encounter. Imagination and possibility.

But still yet more. These were, on the whole, pre-Vatican II Catholics. Their faith was generally traditional, their liturgy in Latin, their devotions, the Rosary and the   Saints. Fasting. Fish on Fridays. Pilgrimages. But all through an English lens. I have always considered myself a Vatican II catholic. I hold to much of the reform, the re-imaging if you like, of what the foundations of the faith might look like now. My reading of "Literary Converts" has not so much undermined this belief, as broadened it. Perhaps I need to experience the mass in Latin, to know the traditional (i.e. Pre-Vatican II) practise of the faith better.

Who would have thought the road would lead to here?