Golf, The Amish, and The Catholic Sensibility

On a sunny Sunday morning several years back, before I gave up playing golf—before, that is, I fully realized that “golf” spelled backwards precisely names the applied masochism the game entails—three horse-drawn buggies containing three Amish families on their way to Sunday service passed by on the road near the green I was approaching. As they passed, each occupant in each buggy turned to look at me. I wondered, do they think I am profaning the Lord’s Day by being on a golf course instead of in a church? Then, almost immediately, unable to pass by myself, I wondered, am I?

And there it was. The Catholic sensibility. The earth has spun around the sun forty times since I was a practicing Catholic; forty times since I actively embraced the faith into which I was born, upon which I had been raised, and in which I had been educated; forty times since I had been to Sunday Mass; forty times since I had conscripted myself in the capacious army of the fallen away. And still, still, that persistent, low-frequency hum of Catholic sensibility from which a periodic, stiletto-sharp, consciousness-piercing pulse of guilt erupted.

Catholic sensibility is the Mariana Trench of concepts, deep enough for every human being on the planet, and, possibly, elsewhere, to validate the assertion of that sage semanticist, Humpty Dumpty, who tells Alice, “When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” For me, Catholic sensibility is a set of principles that ligature experience—of the world and of oneself—and keep the soul right side up. It is not the prose of doctrinal conformity, so much as a mindfulness of the poetry of spiritual immanence and a determination to shape one’s life by the stern claims of its entailments. It is the stance of Anselm who, in the preface to his Proslogium, declared he wrote as “one who seeks to understand what he believes,” “understand” here meaning thorough knowledge in the service of accomplished performance. It is the stance of Aquinas, whose prescription for salvation is to know what we “ought to believe,” what we “ought to desire,” and what we “ought to do.”

I have found, and continue to find, myself bruised in the encounter with the last of Acquinas’s oughts: “ought to do”. Catholicism makes performative demands, and for me they are a “reflexive” confessional, Emerson’s term for the standards by which I “absolve me to myself.” By that standard, I remain unshriven. Belief, I believe, is not doctrinal assent; that is merely passive fundamentalism. Rather, belief is basic theological principles practiced. The good of any activity, its virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre says, is internal to the practice of it. I know what I ought to believe and believe it; I know what I ought to desire and desire it. I believe in a natural law that reveals universal moral precepts and desire to conform myself to them. I believe in the reality of conscience, free will, and individual responsibility and desire to be alert to their dictates. I believe, with Aquinas, that human reason is “rather like God in the world” and desire to be an analyst as well as a witness. I believe in Jesus’s second great commandment and desire to seek the well-being of my neighbor with the same alacrity with which I seek my own. I believe that the Mass is a ceremony commemorating atoning sacrifice and conferring benediction, and that, at its heart, in a time when the word is so casually applied, lies a miracle.

But, despite knowing what I ought to do, I falter. I am too often decentered by glibness and cynicism and self-absorption and inattentiveness and lack of trust and stubbornly imperviousness to the needs of others. I am too often weak, just plain weak, and without the moral arrowroot that would thicken my fortitude. Catholicism demands that what I believe and desire be fully integrated into all aspects of my life, that it be the lived texture of all my relations with the world. Knowing that, and knowing as well my capacity for indolence and indecisive lassitude, suborns me; it leads me to accept the flat-souled givenness of my doing instead of its oughtness. That is, in me, the Catholic sensibility that gave me pause before the gaze of those three passing Amish families.

Perhaps their being Amish keyed open the door of my Catholic sensibility, for their lives bear witness in every way to Paul’s description in Romans of the practice of belief: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is.” “Test and approve,” action incorporated, embodied: thus the simplicity of dress to act humility; thus the refusal of connection to electrical grids to act a disconnection from a world that demands conformity to its structures of thinking and feeling; thus the lack of car ownership to act a communal equality of status, wealth, and power; thus the Ordnung to act a way of life governed not by statute but by a tradition absorbed so undilutedly into the community’s capillary system it need not be spoken. And thus, while I played golf, three families committed to service and holy living, to transformation and renewal, on their way to their church district’s Sunday service.

By the end of that round of golf I had resolved to never again play on Sunday. One year later, I quit playing golf entirely. And to this day I am still thinking, still wondering, still almost but not quite prepared to listen to the still small voice that tells me I ought to return to Sunday mass.