A Protestant pastor among my Facebook friends said he didn’t want to hear what anyone else was giving up for Lent. He was all for observing Lent, but he asked if people had forgotten Matthew 6. That’s the chapter in which Jesus tells people to act as if they weren’t fasting when they were. The pastor was clearly cross, and a little peremptory about it.
It’s dangerous to generalize about the differences between Protestants and Catholics, but I think this points to one. It’s more a matter of culture or imagination or style, not theology. It appears most clearly in the traditions’ everyday practices, in what each looks like on the ground, in the normal course of things, in what the typical believers do.
Our Protestant friends tend to feel that grace corrects nature. We know that grace perfects nature, but more to the point here, that grace enjoys nature. Even religion at its most serious can be played as a game.
The Protestant and the Catholic
You see it in the way each reads that passage. The Protestant looks at the instruction and follows it not only to the letter but makes it big, comprehensive. (I mean seriously believing ones, and especially the Evangelicals, who dominate American Protestantism.) He takes it to cover every related thing and to leave no room for exceptions. That would be casuistry, and casuistry is bad. Obedience is a deadly serious business and if Jesus says look happy, you look happy. If he says don’t tell a soul, don’t say a word.
Our Protestant friends tend to feel that grace corrects nature. We know that grace perfects nature, but more to the point here, that grace enjoys nature. Even religion at its most serious can be played as a game.
I admire the biblical rigor and the serious obedience. Better to go too far than not bother at all. But still, it’s a bit grim and puritanical. You must fight your nature, not enjoy it.
The Catholic knows what Jesus said, and he wants to obey his Lord. But he might be found telling his friends, or through the web telling the world, what he’s giving up. It’s part of the Church’s culture, it’s what everyone does, no one’s special for doing it, and therefore it can be enjoyed as a game as well as a discipline. He will speak lightheartedly about it, which his Protestant friends may take — have taken in my own case — as showing he doesn’t care enough about sin.
The Catholic reads that passage more precisely. Jesus said not to try to trick people into thinking you’re being all pious, and if you’re not being all pious, why not tell? It’s no different than keeping the ash cross on your forehead all day as you walk around town, which Jesus seems to have ruled out as well, if you read him as the serious Protestant does. It’s all right, though, because you’re only doing what (as I’ve explained) you’re supposed to and what a lot of your peers are doing.
The Catholic can play even when he’s about the most serious things. He sees the disciplines as the rules of a game -— one at which he’s going to lose a lot -— and also a game at which he’s going to get better, in which he has teammates and the help of coaches and the support of fans (most of them dead but more useful for that). And he’s never out of contention, because the season doesn’t end (until he does), and he can always (through Confession) reset his record to 0-0.
Puritanical Elements
Which is not to say there aren’t puritanical elements in the Church. I wrote about the annoyingly censorious Catholic Lenten Puritans last year. The Christian life must be serious, by which they mean somber and furrow-browed and earnest. Everything must be spiritualized, which means not enjoyed in the way you enjoy other things in life. I mentioned this in my entry in our Lenten observance forum.
The Catholic can play even when he’s about the most serious things. He sees the disciplines as the rules of a game, and a game he’s going to lose a lot. But also a game at which he’s going to get better.
In America, the puritanical impulse comes from evangelicalized Catholicism, which imports that movement’s earnestness; culture war Catholicism, in which the disciplines rigorously practiced strike blows against the wicked liberal world; and traditionalism, which inherits the puritanism (or Jansenism) of the past. They overlap a lot, even the first and third.
Protestantism has its Catholic elements, in the sense of enjoying our religion the way we enjoy the rest of our lives. High Mass-loving Anglo-Catholicism and beer-hall Lutheranism for two. The original Puritans weren’t actually all that puritanical. Mainline Protestantism tends to be less puritanical, but then it’s mostly given up all the things people don’t want to do anyway.
So a generalization. But as a generalization I think it works.
Latimer v. St. Lawrence
The Catholic enjoyment of nature helps us, it heals us sanctifies us. Puritanism can, but only by imposing an unnecessarily hard way to do it. And one that harms as well. Our believing Protestant friends don’t mean to do this, and their better (we might say Catholic) impulses often keep them from doing this), but their belief that grace corrects nature leads to it.
The Anglican C. S. Lewis noticed the effect. (As I did as a youth discovering serious Christianity through admirable Evangelical friends.) “A certain inhibition … had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood,” he wrote, as a man who’d grown up in Belfast Protestantism.
He called it Christianity’s “stained-glass and Sunday School associations,” and asked: “Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical.”
St. Lawrence, in the story we have, offers the Catholic alternative. As he was being roasted (literally roasted) on an iron grill, he is said to have joked, “Turn me over. I’m done on that side” and near the end, “I’m cooked enough now.” He made jokes. He didn’t make a point. He’d already made that in the way he lived, which was the reason he was being roasted to death.
He treated it as a game. If I were ever being burned for the Faith, I’d like to be St. Lawrence. I wouldn’t be, Screams R Us, but I’d like to be. I can practice a bit, though, in playing our religion as a game.
The illustration is St. Lawrence in a detail of a painting attributed to followers of Caravaggio (Getty Images).
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