What It’s All About
I really liked this post about the ultimately humbling experience of writing and arguing for our faith. Mirus admits that at times, when he gets so caught up in writing about the faith and defending the faith, that he turns gold into straw, as it were.
The briefest realization of the immensity of God casts all of these efforts into the deepest shade. I trust this is not quite the outer darkness of which Scripture speaks (Mt 8:12, 22:13, and 25:30), but surely we must affirm with St. Thomas and Blessed John Henry that the barest experience of God makes dust and ashes of even our greatest personal efforts to make Him known.
This is my challenge sometimes, and one of the reasons I appreciate being off Facebook. It is so easy for me to lose God in the face of my arguments for God (or His Church, or His Church’s teachings). How much time I spend reading blogs and books about faith and culture, culture and faith, and how little time I spend living my faith in my culture! How often I turn to blogs and books about apologetics and Christology and how infrequently do I spend time with God in his Word or with His Word in adoration!
Logically speaking, faith should enlighten reason. First one encounters the thing to be defended, and then he defends it. It turns out, I have been living backwards, defending the faith which I have not fully encountered.
Instead of Facebook 
I’ve had a similar challenge for a few years now. There were times in my life when I was more devoted to prayer and relationship with God, and I possessed an awe of God–but I utterly lacked an intellectual foundation. Now I have the intellectual foundation and have settled happily into orthodoxy, but I completely lose sight of God’s majesty and surround myself with mere theological ideas rather than experiences of faith and prayer. I certainly wouldn’t go back to who I was before, but now I have to rustle up the effort to move forward. I like the way you said it, about living it backwards. One of the saints (Augustine?) once said something like, “Seek not to understand that you may believe, but to believe that you may understand.”
Love a good Augustine quote. Fr Barron in one of his homilies made a tangential point. Putting together his idea with what Francis has talked about (really in relation to CL ideas) of encounter, I feel like I (we?) have sort of been duped as it were about what Christian Living is. It was Swetland once whom I heard on a cd about the Church and politics, who talked about the church not being left or right , but Catholic. At the core of that ethos I think is the radical, life changing encounter with our Lord.
Sent from my iPhone
I’m going to reply in another post.