George Weigel makes an interesting point about Gerard Manley Hopkins, Graham Greene and other famous English-speaking converts to Catholicism:
If there is a thread running through these diverse personalities, it may be this: that men and women of intellect, culture and accomplishment have found in Catholicism what Blessed John Paul II called the “symphony of truth.” That rich and complex symphony, and the harmonies it offers, is an attractive, compelling and persuasive alternative to the fragmentation of modern and post-modern intellectual and cultural life, where little fits together and much is cacophony. Catholicism, however, is not an accidental assembly of random truth-claims; the Creed is not an arbitrary catalogue of propositions and neither is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It all fits together, and in proposing that symphonic harmony, Catholicism helps fit all the aspects of our lives together, as it orders our loves and loyalties in the right direction.
I am not a Catholic. But I rather like the analogy of the church and her life and witness as a symphony of truth. Because a symphony, of course, not only requires a composer to write it, but an orchestra that can perform it, and in performing interpret it. That orchestra will of necessity be composed of different musicians playing different instruments. But the goal of them all is the same: To come together and create an “agreement or concord of sound,” as the Greek term συμφωνία, from which our word "symphony" is derived, means.
One thing I hope to explore in this blog is how gay Christians fit into this symphony. We may, in some respects, play our own unique instruments, and we may play them in a different key. But the theme of our lives and of our loves and struggles is the same. And that is exactly how the Composer, in his infinite imagination, intended it to be.
Comments