Of the holy gospel according to Mark. The mother of Jesus and his brothers, his brethren, arrived. And as they stood outside, they sent word to Jesus to come out. The crowd seated around Jesus told him, your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside asking for you. In reply, Jesus said, who are my mother and my brothers?
Then gazing around him at those seated in the circle, Jesus continued, the is the good lord. News, the gospel of the lord. Praise you lord In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Since this is the feast of Titus, Timothy, great friends of Saint Paul, I'm sure they won't mind my going back to yesterday's theme of the conversion of Saint Paul. Now something very dramatic happened to Paul on his way to Damascus.
That is undeniable. Secondly, it produced a complete, on the surface at least, a reversal in his allegiances. But as I tried to point out, that's not quite accurate to think of it in those terms. The one point I want to make though is this, that Saint Paul had some kind of what we today call religious experience. Put that in quotation marks.
And from the time of Martin Luther, this has become, for a certain segment of the Western world, the test of being a Christian. You see, Martin Luther in the sixteenth century was a very disturbed monk, a very devout and a very scrupulous monk. He was a disturbed man. This is beyond dispute. And he he was he didn't know what to do.
He was he was living in valleys of depression and on peaks of euphoria. He was either high or extremely low. One minute, he thought he was completely lost. The next minute he thought he was saved. He was looking around trying to get get a hold of things.
Something happened to him. Now we don't know for sure what it was, but we know something did happen at a very definite time and place. And it came from his reading of Saint Paul that, salvation is by faith alone. That changed the man's life. It gave him a a certain conviction about salvation which became became the anchor hold of his whole, if you wanna call it, theology.
But you can you can't call it theology in any scientific sense of the word. Scientific, I mean disciplinary. Because he translates the word faith into kind of an overwhelming confidence, trust, conviction, persuasion, feeling, emotion. You know you're saved when you feel it. You go experience.
I mean experience. It's it's sensible. It's it belongs to the passions, the emotions. It belongs to the the the physical part of the human totality, to the human entity, to the human individual. And that became the test of whether or not you are with the lord or any words you wanna use.
Now you all know how true that is today. It wasn't it it was not true up until the sixteenth century. But from that time on, there's been a a large segment, the whole protestant world, as a matter of fact, because it's the essence of Protestantism. Now I'm not I'm using that word strictly as a follower of Luther or of Calvin or or of not not applying this in general to the Church of England. That's something else.
But beginning with Luther and the and the and the western Christians who followed in that path, the the concept of faith became one of your feeling about god with trust and confidence you were saved. And this comes from him. This is this is what he gives you. And if you don't have it, there's something wrong with you. Now in this country, that concept was very alive.
In the little town I grew up, it was extremely alive. You could hear it on every Sunday evening. And today you're hearing it, where people, where if you've if you've seen any of these or on television or maybe been present with some of these very, persuasive gospel preachers, I would call them, these fundamentalists. Are you saved? Come down and show it.
Walk down the aisle. Commit yourself to Christ. You you are a reborn Christian. How do you know you know you're reborn? Because you've gone through that religious, notice this word, experience.
That that has never been the Catholic view. Now in connection with this, you'll think that it's entirely separate, but believe me, it's not. I hope you're watching Brideshead Revisited on Monday night. But it's the it's a it's a marvelous, tea. I've never seen anything that, in my humble estimation, and I mean it's humble because it's based on abysmal ignorance.
But this strikes me as something totally extraordinary, this Prideshead revisited. I read the book many, many years ago, and Evelyn Waugh came into my life with a book of his called Avile Bodies. And that that book plus another incidence of that particular summer opened up a whole new not world, but worlds to me. Now, when you take men, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Wall, Graham Greene, Chesterton, take those men. These aren't well, in a sense, they are contemporaries.
They became Catholics. Why? Because they had some mystical experience? Not one of those men did. But when you come to a man like Clive Staple Lewis, he comes here he is an atheist, and of course there are antecedents, but at a at a certain moment, he comes back to his rooms, he falls on his knees, and prays to a god just a just a day before he didn't admit existed.
Now something had he had something kind of what you'd call a mystical experience. Now the point I make, I'm not arguing against mystical experiences. I only have two things to say about them. The first one is they are to be mistrusted, And my best authority of that is Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Teresa of Jesus. I know no one who's written so much about being on a on a one to one basis with almighty god as she was.
She was having some kind of religious experience almost every day, but there's nobody I know who has written as she has who was so mistrustful of them to her dying day, to her dying day. And she was right. Now so the first my first reaction to this business of having this mystical experience, whatever word you wanna use for it, is one of mistrust. The second is that it can happen. The problem is how do you tell the authentic thing from the spurious?
I don't know. And neither did Saint Theresa the only thing she did, she just clamored and dined on the doors of of men, theologians that she trusted and had reason to trust, and some of them misled her. Now now I'm coming down to the the point I wanna make, and that is this. This we are living in a great resurgence of this business that our faith is being engaged by our emotions. You go to church, why?
To what you get out of it. Because it's the the young people that I have met and I say, why aren't you going to church? I don't get anything out of it. See, what in the heck are they supposed to get out of it? They're supposed to give.
Take all this talk today about liturgy, how we say we are going to plan a liturgy, how we go over we plan and now this is all good. I'm not saying anything against it. But what I am saying is it can be misleading. There is so much I'm talking about our our our good Catholic operations today, and I use that word very carefully, operations. Because a lot of it, it can be completely non religious.
It's in many instances, it's a show. And and here's my point. In many instances, we gauge the validity of the mass by our emotional reaction to it. We come out of church and say, that was a great liturgy. What in the heck are we talking about?
That's like leaving the Kennedy Institute and or Kennedy Center and saying that was a great concert. That was a great show. That was a great drama. And I and I hope it was, but but it's not religion necessarily. So we are today I had a young man well, I I mentioned this to you.
He had a sister whose life was totally changed when something happened to her. She came back to the church and became a very fervent Catholic. She was a newborn Christian as she called herself. So he came to me after wandering around for a number of years and and wanted to come back to the church. I said, fine.
Let's begin with going to mass on Sunday. Well, that's not what he wanted to hear. He wanted to have something like his sister had. The last I heard, he he hadn't had it, and the last I heard was I never saw him again. Now my point is this, I am not in the lease saying what happened to Saint Paul.
I know something happened. Happened. How objective that was, I and I can bring up a lot of objections to it, believe me. It's not simple. But that there can be mystical experiences or any words you wanna use, religious experience or direct communication with God and all, that that can happen, I am the first one to say, of course it can happen.
But is it proper for the for an for an ordinary Christian to expect that? Should we gauge our religious lives on that? Should I gauge my attendance at mass by the good feelings I get out of it? Should I weigh the validity of my prayers from the fact that I feel so good after I pray, that I get so much out of my prayers? Go to church on Sunday.
You'll feel better for it. I saw a huge sign like that in front of a church. We might just as well go into a into a bar and get yourself a couple shots of scotch. You'll feel better for it. We are dealing here with a most basic concept of religion.
And the concept is who comes first? Do I come first or does God? It is is religion what I get or is religion what I try to give back to God? That's in a nutshell. And in many places, we I'm not talk I'm talking about what what was referred to last night in that show as half Catholics.
Remember, a lot of this Protestantism has come into the Catholic church. We are a divided church right now. I don't know how it's all going to end, but when you go and read the sixteenth centuries I've been doing and see what's going on around you, you say, what century am I living in? It's just taken us about four hundred years to catch up with Luther. So remember, when a martyr went to the martyr, whether it was a Saint Agnes or whoever it was, whether it was an Athanasius or a Clement, they weren't asked how they were feeling about being martyrs.
They were asked whether they would offer incense to that god, and sometimes they had to do less than that. Saint Thomas More had his head cut off simply because he maintained that the head of Christ Church was the pope, and Harry could not make himself head of any church. That's the church that we belong to, the church of Clement and Athanasius and of Mor right down to the centuries. Let us realize the company we keep. In the name of the father and the son, holy spirit, amen.