Perceptions of the Church - Looking under the Bonnet

For all my interest in intellectual pursuits, I have a bit of a boyish weakness I have never been able to shake. I quite like cars. From F1 to WRC to the average Volkswagen on the street, I can spend far too much time thinking about cars and what goes on underneath them. But having confessed this, I know that I am not alone. Numerous colleagues of mine - men and women - will turn their head toward a nice-looking vehicle. And for good reason. Cars can represent the best in design, with lines as appealing as just about anything human beings have contrived.

Having said that, for the vast majority of people, the immediate appeal of a car does not rest in what it has under the bonnet (hood). Rather, it will be the colour, the shape, the purpose - the possibilities it holds forth, and which capture the imagination - that will appeal. There are some, certainly, who will consider a car’s engine capacity, its brake horse power, and the torque it puts out at so many RPMs, but these are either the specialists or the hobbyists; such matters will be of little interest to the common admirer.

As I left the cinema after Into Great Silence and walked out into the street, I got to thinking the same thing. Except that instead of cars, it was the Catholic Church that occupied my mind.

What I had just witnessed on screen was a picture of the Church that one would be hard-pressed to resist, either as a believer or an unbeliever. It was the sort of image of the Church that one often has of Orthodoxy - that is, it was wordless, mystical, transcendant, beautiful. I suppose it was not all that dissimilar to the image we have in the West of Buddhism, with its placid, orange-robed monks, its incense, and its bells. What was remarkable about the monks in the film, though, is that they were Catholic monks. They represented a mainstream monastic Order in the Latin tradition: a tradition that is normally impugned for its ‘harsh’ dogmas, and its ‘reactionary’ public pronouncements.

Why it is that the Catholic Church is most often seen for its doctrine and dogma instead of the beauty of its life is beyond me. There may be a thesis in there somewhere, but it seems to me that no one ever really talks about the Orthodox Church in terms of what it believes (beyond the Trinitarian and Christological basics, that is!), yet on so many points of doctrine and social teaching, Catholics and Orthodox are agreed. Even when it comes to Buddhism and the gentle face it presents to the West, there would be a great deal in common between the two religious systems.

That the Catholic Church is rather heard for its many words than seen and experienced for its beauty may have something to do with the Reformation, or perhaps its post-Conciliar liturgical turmoil. Whatever the case, what the Catholic Church is can be far better apprehended in the lives of the monks of La Grande Chartreuse than in the words of countless media descriptions of what she has last written, or indeed, in the words of what she has in actual fact said.

As I wrote in ‘Into Great Silence - A Review‘, the film has virtually managed to show the whole of the Christian life. What the viewer gets to experience in those three hours is the beauty and the mystery and the simultaneous immanence and transcendence of God, as manifest in the lives of a group of Carthusian monks. Their lives are dedicated to knowing God in silence and prayer, in the Liturgy and in work, and it is almost impossible not to see him there, even as we - the viewers - are more than a step away.

Like a car whose lines we appreciate, but whose mechanics we leave to the experts, so might the Church be. The Catholic Faith is a beautiful thing both inside and out, but it is not necessarily for every potential admirer to know. As Catholics, we need to get on with living the Faith and manifesting its beauty for all to see. As observers, the rest of the world needs to stop reaching straight for the Catholic bonnet release so it can peer at the inner workings, and rather accept the beauty of the lines that have so much to offer.

What is on offer is nothing less than life in God. The better way by far is to approach it with awe and wonder.