April 9, 1773, was Good Friday. For breakfast, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson had “tea and cross-buns.” From their morning repast they went to the lovely Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson had a “seat.” During the service, Boswell carefully observed Johnson and judged his demeanor to be “solemnly devout.” Boswell went on: “I shall never forget the tremulous earnestness with which he pronounced the awful petition in the Litany: ‘In the hour of death, and at the day of Judgment, good LORD, deliver us.'” The two gentlemen went to church on that day “both in the morning and in the evening. In the interval between the two services, we did not dine; but he read in the Greek New Testament….” Boswell does not record what Johnson read, unfortunately, but we can presume, I think, it was the passion accounts in the Gospels.
I suspect that the word “awful,” which Boswell used to modify the petition Johnson recited so devoutly, meant, in1773, not “bad,” or “terrible,” or even “regrettable,” but rather “full of awe” at this final mystery which Good Friday calls so graphically to our attention, while gradually preparing us to await the end of life as also a beginning.
When I was in grammar and high school I lived in a small town in Iowa — unlike Pocahontas, where I was born, not a “Catholic” town — where much of the community shut down from 12-3 p.m. on Good Friday to commemorate Christ’s death. We Catholics — we were few, but hearty
went over to St. Anthony’s, where Father Garrity and later Father Horan would lead us in a solemn Stations of the Cross, everything in purple. We seemed to be in church for most of the three hours. Of course, Lent used to end at noon on Holy Saturday, after which we would eat all the sweets we could get hold of. And I recall how beautiful the little church used to look on Easter Sunday. I used to look forward to the singing of a haunting “Regina Coeli,” which I do not think I have heard, lo, these many years.
In her essay, “The Dogma Is the Drama,” in The Whimsical Christian, a book of extraordinary merit, Dorothy Sayers suggested that “we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore.” We have done this, of course, as Miss Sayers pointed out, because we did not hold and teach exactly the faith as it is articulated in the Creeds. And, as Ann O’Donnell has pointed out [“Saying It Like It Is,” January, 1986], even the Creeds lose much in translation and therefore miss the most important issues of our times.
Someone told me recently of an ad for a theologian at a Jesuit University. The ad evidently called for someone qualified to teach the “modern theologians.” Then it gave a list. Suffice it to say, Karol Wojtyla, Josef Ratzinger, Walter Kaspar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and Jean Galot, among others, were not cited. Alas, the dear students will hear the same crashing bores, but none of the “dogma” and the “drama” that Dorothy Sayers so rightly argued would appear when the classic essentials of “orthodoxy” (Chesterton’s word) were taken seriously. These latter are the only things that “liberate” us from those pedants who see their main mission as that of transforming Christian doctrine into support for the ideologies of this world, which they somehow believe (wrongly) to be more exciting or, even, more believable.
In his Pensees, Pascal wrote, “Jesus Christ is an obscurity (according to what the world calls obscurity), such that historians, writing only of important matters of state, have hardly noticed Him.” Easter is the Christian celebration of the resurrection opesus Christ, true God and true man.
Some fifteen years ago, the laws of our (and other) lands were changed to allow, then encourage, the killing of our kind already conceived in human mothers, often with some mothers’ promotion. During the past couple of years, we do not hear so much of this slaughter. The press is full of accounts of killing those who are already born but deformed, and increasingly, I notice, of the old. Euthanasia has already replaced abortion as the hot topic. What now seems mostly in place, awaiting a court decision, is not so much a tolerance for ordinary dying, but government- condoned, medically-assisted dying, which is cheaper and more painless. The dying prefer it, we are told.
“In the hour of death, and on the day of judgment, good LORD, deliver us.” Whether we die by a heart attack, an automobile, a bullet — as Paul Johnson pointed out in Modern Times, by far the greatest single killer of this century is the armed ideological state, usually controlled by a few intellectuals — or by an injection administered by law at our own request, these words of the old liturgy still haunt us.
As for me, with Dorothy Sayers and Samuel Johnson, I prefer the exact wording of the Creed — the least boring paragraph ever written. Just because I happen to have it from somewhere, I will cite from a small prayer book, Russian on one side, English on the other, published in 1929 by the United Russian Orthodox Brotherhood of America: “I believe in One God, the Father Almighty . .. and in One Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God . . . who . . . was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried. And rose again the third day according to the Scripture . . . . I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life in the world to come.”
Pascal was right; historians writing only of the important affairs of states hardly noticed. But Samuel Johnson noticed, so did Dorothy Sayers, and we noticed it in St. Anthony’s.