The speaker told the group of Protestant pastors gathered around the table, “I think the Catholics have domesticated the Holy Spirit with the sacraments, while we have domesticated the Holy Spirit with the Word.” Most of the men nodded. It was the sort of attack on “the rules” that Americans seem to like.
I relayed the comment to a Catholic friend a few hours later. “But the Holy Spirit uses the sacraments to domesticate us,” he said. This is a better and wiser way of putting it. The people who are letting the Holy Spirit domesticate them through the sacraments and Scripture are the people most likely to hear him when he speaks to them personally. It is the tame horse that lets itself be ridden.
The Church gives us the sacraments and all the sacramental disciplines-the rules-to domesticate us, to make us fit to live at home. It knows that without divine aid we all tend to live like spoiled two-year-olds who will scream when others are talking; grab whatever anyone else has whether or not we really want it; and push, pinch, and scratch anyone who gets in our way. The Holy Spirit has to work hard to make most of us tolerable to other people, much less to make us the sort of creatures who can appear before the Lord without shame.
The Rules
And in our better moments we know it, which makes the disciplines a proper object of an evangelistic appeal. It is something the Church has to offer that the world wants. Some people will want the disciplined life more than they want Catholic doctrine. It will compel them to come in when the usual apologetic appeals will not. They want-though they do not yet know it-to be domesticated by the Holy Spirit.
Most evangelistic work starts, and quite rightly, with the obvious benefits of the faith. If you’re talking to a non-religious person, you tell him about the Lord, about how coming to know the man who died and rose again will help that person become the man he knows he ought to be and often wishes he were. If you are talking to a Protestant Christian who knows the Lord but not the blessings of life in the Catholic Church, you describe the security of the Church’s teaching and the Lord’s Real Presence in the Mass and any other of the benefits that might appeal to him.
You do not start by telling him he will have to go to Mass every Sunday, even if he is on vacation, and go to Mass on holy days of obligation too, even if it means getting up two hours earlier than usual, and go to confession at least once a year, and fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, even if he has to work those days. In other words, you do not start with the rules.
Rules usually put people off. But they should not, and they will not if they are presented properly. When my family became Catholic, our eldest daughter, Sarah, remarked with some dismay, “There are so many rules.” We had been Episcopalians, and though we had lived by the Catholic disciplines, the denomination had not insisted upon them. It had few rules, and almost all of them were negotiable. I explained to her that the Church gave us all these rules, these disciplines, because it knew from long experience that they would help us become holier.
It was like horse riding, I said. My daughter rides “English,” the style of riding in which the rider bobs up and down or “posts” in what is to the untrained eye a funny way. The English style of riding has all sorts of rules that make no obvious sense. The rider is supposed to keep her heels down and clasp the horse with her thighs and at the same time sit up straight in the saddle. To learn to ride this way takes time and effort. The instructor will have to tell even experienced riders to drop their heels or sit up straighter. It is not a natural thing to do, but only by sitting this way will the rider be able to do all she can do on the horse.
This, I told Sarah, is all the Church is doing in giving us all those rules. Sarah knew how the seemingly inscrutable rules of English riding help her get better, and I promised that she would eventually know what the rules of the Catholic life do as well. She had only to trust the Church as she had trusted her riding teachers.
Order and Stability
Something like this might be said when you are sharing the faith with someone. A lot of people feel that their life is not what it should be, that it is out of balance or out of control. They do not feel at home in their lives. It is often a background feeling; they can get rid of it for a while by driving off to the mall or turning on the television. But it never leaves them for long.
Many people feel this misgiving most when they think about their children. They see them going off in several directions at once. They feel that they do not have the authority they ought to have, and they feel this strongly when they talk to their children and find that the world has formed their children’s thoughts more than have their parents or their religion. These parents want some order in their life, which would let them know and guide their children as they ought.
These are the people to whom the Church may appeal not just because she offers the truth but because she offers order and stability-because she offers to domesticate them. They may see that in the Church they will find help in ordering their lives, in putting their lives into balance and getting them under control.
You can explain to them that one of the gifts they will receive in becoming Catholics is a system of disciplines that will help them put their lives in order, that will make them people who can live well at home. You might add, if they ready to hear it, that these disciplines come with divine power. The Church offers not only a way of life but a life lived in Christ, mediated to us through the sacraments, that makes it possible for us to live that way of life.
It is this witness that sometimes brings conviction to the person who likes the Catholic Church and does not really object to any of her teachings but does not want to convert. This sort of person, who may not see the point of a systematic and comprehensive doctrine, often does see the point of an ordered, peaceful, domesticated life.
These people may see it, for example, in the ordering of time the Church requires. In obeying the requirement that they go to Mass every Sunday, and in following the teaching of what a Sabbath day should be, they see a regular time when the chaos of their life is brought to a stop and order reestablished. Mass-going brings their life and the life of their family from its usual chaos of interests and activities to a single act in which they all share and that points them to something greater than themselves. It stops them in their tracks and raises their sights.
Domestic Witness
So how do you witness to the virtues of domesticity? It is not an easy thing to convey. You cannot explain it in the same direct way you can answer a challenge to the Resurrection or the infallibility of the pope. You cannot begin with the rules, because they will sound simply like rules.
You must witness to the joys of being domesticated by the Holy Spirit through the sacraments and the sacramental disciplines with the usual combination of listening and sharing. What you must share is not the discipline itself but the life it has given you, and if you get a hearing then you might say something about the rules themselves.
Had someone told my daughter that in order to ride she must keep her heels down, grasp the horse with her thighs, and sit up very straight, she would not have wanted to ride. But because someone introduced her to horses and riding, she wanted to ride the way they rode and was happy to do something that was neither easy nor natural. She wanted to follow the rules, because she had seen first what following the rules would bring.
You begin by talking to people and listening to what they say about their lives, not just to what they may say about religion or the Catholic Church. You ask questions about their spouses, about their children, about their jobs, about their hopes for the future-the sort of questions you will ask naturally if you are genuinely interested in them.
If you listen, you will soon hear many of them say that they feel their lives are unbalanced or disordered. And then you share how your life has improved because you became a Catholic. Many of us can say, “I used to feel like that too,” because our lives were disordered and unbalanced before we became Catholics. We know what it is like to feel as if we might lose our footing any minute.
You might say, for example, that you have found going to Mass every Sunday a wonderful way to bring your family together and to remind everyone of the most important things. You might explain how having to go to Mass on Sundays and days of obligation has helped you all to break free of the world and its demands and taught you how little power the world really has.
If they are interested, you might tell them that the Church tells Catholics to come to Mass every Sunday because it knows that only in the regular worship of God, made a priority and taking precedence over all other activities, will any fallen man or woman begin to live before God as they ought. It knows that only in the regular reception of the body and blood of the Son of God will a man begin truly to be formed in God’s image and likeness.
Happy at Home
Americans do not like rules. They assume that they are born to be free in the worst sense of the word. Many of the people you talk to may believe that the Church imposes rules because it likes to make people do what it wants, or because people want to domesticate the Holy Spirit so that he will not ask too much of them.
But the Catholic whom the Holy Spirit has begun to domesticate through the sacraments knows that the Church does not tell us to come to Mass every Sunday only to keep us in line. It is not holding up hoops for us to jump through to make sure that we will jump on command whenever it really wants us to. It does not give us rules because it likes making up rules.
The Catholic knows that the Church wants all its children to be at home. It wants them to be domesticated and knows, because it has been at this a very long time, that only thus will they be happy and fruitful. The domesticated apple tree bears more fruit and sweeter than the wild tree. And the Church cares that we be happy and fruitful-not because the Church is a tyrant but because she is a mother.