Ronald Knox

One author to add to your list of spiritual reading is Msgr. Ronald Knox.  I first came across him when reading Evelyn Waugh's marvelous biography (get it here.)  Prolific writer of theological works and detective fiction, he was the son of the Anglican Bishop of Manchester and ordained an Anglican clergyman himself in 1912.  He served as chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford, before converting to the Catholic Faith in 1917.  He later served as Catholic Chaplain at Oxford.  He taught on the highschool level for more than seven years and preached numerous retreats.  He preached at the funeral for G. K. Chesterton. A brief biography of his life is here.

A brilliant classicist, he won numerous scholarships and became a fellow of Oxford as a young man, and as an older man translated the entire Vulgate Bible into English.  Two things I find most admirable in him are his availability to his students and his sense of humor.  This was one of his jokes:  a scrapbook full of “Wimbornes”—“a picture cut from a newspaper with which was included from an adjoining column a particularly inappropriate caption. . . . taking its name from the photograph of a footballer which appeared in a newspaper over the title ‘Lady Wimborne, who has adopted the new windswept style of hairdressing.’”  

I am now reading his Retreat for Beginners--he's got that C.S. Lewis manner of cloaking profoundly deep theological ideas in sturdy, tangible "plain talk."  While this was directed at high-school boys, it is giving me food for thought.

Here's a passage:
Of course, you may say to me, ‘I don’t see much wrong with this external religion you talk about; it looks good enough for me. I am a Catholic, and I hope to live and die a Catholic but you mustn’t expect me to get excited about my religion, because I’m not that kind of a person; I’m quite satisfied to remain in class B, to run my religion on second gear all my life.’

If you take up that sort of attitude, I’ve no more to say to you. At least, I have a good deal more to say to you, and it will take me about fours hours to say it, but I don’t suppose it will interest you very much. I will only make three comments on your point of view. First, that that kind of religion is not the kind of religion Jesus Christ meant Christianity to be. Next, that that kind of religion is not worthy of a human being. And, thirdly, that it is not a safe kind of religion to practice nowadays, and in the country we live in; it is very easy to lose that kind of religion, and to lose your immortal soul while you are about it.

First, I say that it is not Christianity as Jesus Christ meant it to be. I remember a boy at the school I used to teach at who was asked, in an examination paper, to give the context of the verse, ‘Do no more than that which is appointed to you.’ In case you have forgotten it, perhaps I ought to explain that when the soldiers came to St. John the Baptist, and asked him how they ought to amend their ways, he said to them, ‘Do no more than that which is appointed to you.’ But this boy gave as his answer, ‘This is what our Lord told his disciples when they asked him how they should inherit eternal life.’ It would be hard, if you come to think of it, to get an answer more exactly wrong. What our Lord said was, ‘He that loveth his life shall lose it.’ What our Lord said was, ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?’ What our Lord said was, ‘He that doth not forsake father and mother and take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.’ That was his religion—something which came first, something which mattered supremely, something which did make you get excited about it, sometimes even turned your whole life upside down. Nobody is going to realize that ideal, unless his religion is something personal, not something merely external to himself.

Next, I say that this external religion is not worthy of a human being. It is man’s privilege to live by his ideals. He can live without ideals, but his life is the poorer for it; he will never know the joy of living if he lives like that. It is natural for a man to have some kind of work in life, some kind of job which is his job; if that job is mere drudgery to him, if he does it only because he has to do it, without getting interested in it or losing himself in it in any way—well, he will make a livelihood, but he won’t really live. It is natural for a man to marry; it is quite possible to marry a woman you aren’t the least bit in love with, to live quite contentedly and to bring up a family without having ever known what it is to be in love—I say that is possible but it is not natural, it is not what marriage was meant for. And if it is a warped life, a stunted life, which finds no zest in God’s gift of work and no joy in God’s gift of marriage, what shall we say of the life that finds no joy and no zest in the greatest of all God’s gifts, the opportunity he gives us, here on earth, to know and to love and to worship himself?

In the third place I say that, even if you are a Catholic, to be satisfied with an external kind of religion is to run a risk, and a grave risk, of losing your religion altogether. If your religion isn’t rooted deep—our Lord himself has warned us about it in the Parable of the Sower—the chances are three to one against the seed of faith ever bearing any fruit in your life. A religion that is external to yourself may do all right as long as everything goes well with you, but it won’t stand a shock. You will come up against difficulties about the faith, and you will not be sufficiently interested to take those difficulties to a priest or to think them out for yourself—you will let your religion go. You will come up against some temptation which will sweep you off your feet, or the prospect of some worldly advantage will encourage you to be false to your religion, and it will go. It will go, because it is not part of you, because it is something at the circumference of your life instead of being at the center of your life. That is the danger.

A school can teach you your religion, but it depends on you what us going to become of it afterwards. While you are at school, the routine of your life makes religion easy for you; custom makes religion easy for you; human respect makes religion easy for you; but all that will be no use unless you make some effort, on your own part, to realize the meaning of the religion you are being taught here and to make it your own. That is why, in this retreat, I want you to take stock of your religion and to see where you stand. ‘Is my religion personal to me, or is it merely external to me?’ That is the question I want you to ask yourself, and to entreat the Almighty God to shew you where the true answer lies.” (Retreat for Beginners, New York:  Sheed and Ward, 1960; 42-44).