"Private Revelationism"

Was up all night last night for no particularly good reason, and so am desperately tired. Will go to bed soon, but read a bit in Touchstone as I was brushing my teeth. Stopped partway through an article and decided to jot this down for future reference, and just to get it out there to my widespread readership. Brian McDonald, in his article “Merely Saved or Merely Damned?” (not available online, as of this posting) writes a paragraph that I felt described an aspect of my life precisely. Dad says he married his second wife, my stepmother, because he felt God was telling him to. He essentially felt called, as one might in a vocation, to marry her following his divorce (please know that the somewhat heartless tone that seems to be taking over – I almost typed, “to marry this woman” – is simply a result of my trying to use no names). Writing of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, he says,

Screwtape emphasizes that even other-directed prayer, properly managed, can immunize the patient against reality. If Wormwood can get him to indulge in high-toned prayers for his mother’s “soul” [do I do this, I wonder?] while ignoring the needs of the real woman, then “in time, you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling for the imagined mother will ever flow into his treatment of the real one.”

Thus, while Screwtape regards prayer as a disagreeable subject, he also shows that a skilled tempter may turn it into an effective means of getting patients into the house of “our father below.” The trick is to “keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the actions of their own wills.” Such prayer will become an exercise in imagination insulated from fact and ultimately from God himself, “the Fountain of all Facthood,” as Lewis calls him elsewhere.

A will bent on manufacturing feelings may well veer into private revelationism and away from the hard and public revelation of God and his will in the Scriptures and the Church. (Note the phenomenon of modern Christians justifying their divorces on the basis of inner illuminations rather than the Lord’s teaching or the Church’s counsel.)

The kicker, the point of retyping the whole passage, as the discerning reader will by now no doubt have realized, is the parenthetical expression. (Let me take this moment to briefly decry what appears to be a new trend of using parentheses in lieu of brackets when inserting one’s own words into a quotation – what does one do when the quotation itself has parentheses, revert back to brackets temporarily?) I have no way of knowing just how true my father’s personal revelation was, though I have no doubt it was sincerely come by. I think, however, that McDonald’s dimetop landing on just the spot of the philosophical airfield my father occupies was more than coincidence. Lots of people are crowding that aerodrome, attempting to fly, and perhaps succeeding for all I know, though I believe they are not. There’s been something in the water, though, through the last sixty years, and either the generation’s wrong, generally speaking, or the Church is.

My apologies if I’ve not been entirely coherent; I’ve got to go to bed just now.