Final Childhood

The Catholic Thing

By Anthony Esolen
"And I shall go in unto the altar of God."
"To God, who gives joy to my youth."
So, for eighty years, the priest and the altar boy at the church of my childhood prepared for Mass in prayer apart from the congregation. Anyone who had once served at the altar, and anyone who had a missal handy, as most people did, would be aware that the prayer was going on. Otherwise, people were silent. They prayed, or they let their minds wander, or they did a little of both.
But there was no need always to be "public, like a frog," as Emily Dickinson aptly puts it. Indeed, old films show Catholic churches in two lights. Either a Mass is going on, and that can be glorious, or there is silence and warmth, not because the church is empty, but because it is indwelt by a spirit of prayer.
As I grow older, I cherish that verse from the psalm more and more. I imagine what it might feel like to a priest whose knees can hardly bend without trembling, to hear the response, "to God, who gives joy to my youth," from the voice of a lad such as he himself once was, and perhaps such as he yet aspires to be.
"For unless ye become as little children," we might say, "ye shall not go in unto the altar of God." What does the verse mean?
It is inexhaustible. The child, more than the adult with all manner of responsibilities in the world, the adult who must make some show in public, like a frog, encounters the world as an immense mystery. He has not yet reduced it to inconsequence, or to material to be labeled, used, cleared away, or disregarded. He does not need the Mississippi River. He has a creek in the back yard. He does not wish to cut down the big half-dead willow. He wishes to climb it and perch in its crook, and if there is a hole there, so much the better, for secreting things away. He does not strive for glory. He has the sky.
Sentimentality? No. "These things," says the poet Hopkins, "these things were here, and but the beholder / Wanting." When Milton describes the beauty of the Garden of Eden, it is the small and near things that most exercise his imagination, such as:
umbrageous grots and caves
Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling vine
Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creepsLuxuriant.
Those are like the quiet words that Adam and Eve speak to one another as they eat their supper fruits, words we do not overhear:
Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles
Wanted, nor youthful dalliance as beseems
Fair couple, linked in happy nuptial league,
Alone as they.
They have not fallen yet - from silence and soft music into noise, from the private into the merely public, from comfort and concord with the natural world into alienation, from humility and its grandeur into self-presentation and pettiness.
When Elijah was on the mountain, he did not find God in the noisy things, but in the still small voice. That is not because God must be relegated to things of no consequence. Elijah himself was of great consequence. The difficulty is on Elijah's side, on man's side.
We are battered by noise. "Ne let the unpleasant quire of frogs still croaking / Make us to wish their choking," says the poet Spenser, praying for peace and quiet for him and his bride on their wedding night. When the frogs croak, we cannot hear ourselves think. Perhaps we cease to think. Perhaps we cease to hear and to pray.
Sin is noisy, and so is politics. If I open my "newspaper," that is, if I visit a social media site, it is not like reading at the breakfast table, as I did for so many years with my father and mother when I was a boy. It is like entering a room full of psychotics, shouting, snarling, accusing, laughing without mirth - and never a page with Charlie Brown or Beetle Bailey to lift my spirit a little and remind me, in a gentle way, of human folly.
If I go to Mass, I do not want to be stunned with noise. The sounds of children are not noise: their laughter is like falling water. People praying - the old woman muttering as she tells over her rosary beads...