Dear Flannery,
"All the best people are dead," said Monsignor Gilbey. But it may not be true! I have found someone like you---alive. He was born at the end of World War II and is now in his 60s. He is Britain's best-known intellectual and political conservative, and because of that, known in academia as Public Enemy Number One.
His name is Roger Scruton and I got a copy of one of his books, Gentle Regrets, and am reading it again right after finishing it. This time I am going more slowly, hoping for an increase in grasping and remembering. Of course there is some that is above my head and I have to keep my French-English dictionary handy, but I get enough to love it. He often says the same things you did, in different words.
You would like him very much I think. He's a Christian with a great respect for rituals and rites, traditions and sacraments, for true beauty in art and music and architecture and literature. He is a professor of aesthetics, the definition of which I had to again look up: the study of fine art. And he explains why we must seek out and treasure and conserve truth and order and goodness.
I mean, doesn't this sound like you?
"A religion without orthodoxy is destined to be swept away by the first breath of doubt."
". . . faith transfigures everything it touches and raises the world to God."
(writing about "a letter from Catholic Bishops in England and Wales to the Pope in Rome, lamenting the decline in their congregations, and calling for a teaching and a practice that would be more relevant to the needs of today): What an absurd demand - to be relevant! Was Christ relevant? To be relevant means to accept the standard of the world in which you are, and therefore to cease to aspire beyond it. Relevance is not merely an un-Christian but an anti-Christian ambition."
"Christian charity is now entirely misunderstood, as a kind of collective effort to improve the world."
Quoting Gilbey, "We are not asked to undo the work of creation or to rectify the Fall. The duty of a Christian is not to leave this world a better place. His duty is to leave this world a better man."
"Those brought up in our post-religious society do not seek forgiveness, since they are by and large free from the belief that they need it." And "The triumph of sin comes with our failure to perceive it."
"However much we study the evolution of the human species, however much we meddle with nature's secrets, we will not discover the way of freedom, since this is not the way of the flesh.
Freedom, love and duty come to us as a vision of eternity, and to know them is to know God."
"Whatever its defects, my life has enabled me to find comfort in uncomfortable truths."
And there is so much more.
He liked dogs and horses rather than chickens and peacocks, but wouldn't you like him nevertheless?
J.
