Whilst I was raiding the theology shelves at Powells Books in Portland, I came across G.K. Chesteron’s The Catholic Church and Conversion, which I’d not previously read. Which is to say, I sometimes felt like I’d previously read it, as it turns out that many of the Chesterton quotes one runs across from time to time originated here.

My own journey of faith has been rather different than Chesterton’s. His family were English Unitarians, and he came only slowly to Christianity, first as an Anglican, and then as a Catholic. I started out as a Catholic, became an Anglican, and then returned. So my experience is rather different than his, and large portions of this book seemed somewhat remote (although I enjoyed them anyway). But there is one passage that very much describes my feelings on re-discovering the Catholic Church and its teachings:

Nothing is more amusing to the convert, when his conversion has been complete for some time, than to hear the speculations about when or whether he will repent of the conversion; when he will be sick of it, how long he will stand it, at what stage of his external exasperation he will start up and say he can bear it no more…. The outsiders, stand by and see, or think they see, the convert entering with bowed head a sort of small temple which they are convinced is fitted up inside like a prison, if not a torture-chamber. But all they really know about it is that he has passed through a door. They do not know that he has not gone into the inner darkness, but out into the broad daylight. It is he who is, in the beautiful and beatific sense of the word, an outsider. He does not want to go into a larger room, because he does not know of any larger room to go into. He knows of a large number of much smaller rooms, each of which is labelled as being very large, but is quite sure he would be cramped in any of them.

The feeling Chesterton describes, of having stepped from a smaller world into a larger one, is very much the feeling that I’ve had for the past couple of years. The Protestant project, these days, seems to be, “What’s the minimum of doctrine we all have to agree on in order to be considered Christian?” Catholicism says, “Let’s be sure of everything we possibly can know.” And when you add the principle that truths known by divine revelation and truths known by examination of the world around us cannot, in the final analysis, be in conflict (for God revealed the one and created the other), the Catholic perspective takes in not only all of the world of faith, but also all of the world of science as well. Nothing true is alien to the Catholic mind, despite all of the foolishness one hears about the Church being anti-science. (Did you know that the Big Bang was first theorized by a scientist who was also a Catholic priest? True story.)