Interview With Walker Percy

Q: Do you regard yourself as a Catholic novelist?

A: Since I am a Catholic and a novelist, it would seem to follow that I am a Catholic novelist.

Q: What kind of Catholic are you?

A: Bad.

Q: No, I mean are you liberal or conservative?

A: I no longer know what those words mean.

Q: Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?

A: I don't know what that means, either. Do you mean, do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?

Q: Yes.

A: Yes.

Q. How is such a belief possible in this day and age?

A: What else is there?

Q: What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.

A: That's what I mean.

Q: To say nothing of Judaism and Protestantism.

A: Well, I would include them along with the Catholic Church in the whole peculiar Jewish-Christian thing.

Q: I don't understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?

A: Yes.

Q: Why?

A: It's not good enough.

Q: Why not?

A: This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer "Scientific Humanism." That won't do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e. God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don't see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and wouldn't let go until God identified himself and blessed him.

Q: Grabbed aholt?

A: Louisiana expression

The System vs. The Kingdom

N.T. Wright: Adam and Eve

John Walton: How to Read Genesis 1

Pete Enns: Challenging Old Assumptions

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy

And yet us look upon this...as a kind of journey or voyage to our native land

...And let us look upon this purification as a kind of journey or voyage to our native land. For it is not by change of place that we come nearer to Him who is in every place, but by the cultivation of pure desires and virtuous habits...

But of this we would have been wholly incapable, had not Wisdom condescended to adapt Himself to our weakness, and to show a pattern of holy life in the form of our own humanity. Yet, since we when we come to Him do wisely, He when he came to us was considered by proud men to have done very foolishly. And since we when we come to him become strong, He when he came to us became weak. But "the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men" (1 Cor. 1.25). And thus, though Wisdom was himself our home, He made Himself also the way by which we should reach our home...

And though He is everywhere present to the inner eye when it is sound and clear, He considered to make Himself manifest to the outward eye of those whose inward sight is weak and dim. "For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe" (1 Cor. 1.21). Not then in the sense of traversing space, but because he appeared to mortal men in the form of mortal flesh, He is said to have come to us. For he came to a place where He had always been, seeing that "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him." But, because men, who in their eagerness to enjoy the creature instead of the Creator had grown into the likeness of this world, and therefore most appropriately named "the world" did not recognise Him, therefore the evangelist says, "and the world knew Him not" (John 1.1o). Thus, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God. Why then did he come, seeing that he was already here, except that it pleased God through the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe?

...In what way did He come but this, "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1.14)? Just as when we speak, in order that what we have in our minds may enter through the ear into the mind of the hearer, the word which we have in our hearts becomes an outward sound and is called speech; and yet our thought does not lose itself in the sound, but remains complete in itself, and takes the form of speech without being modified in its own nature by change: so the Divine Word, through suffering no change of nature, yet became flesh that he might dwell among us."

Augustine, On Christian Doctine, Book I, Ch.10-13