The Pillar of the Cloud
Last month on July 31 we received the news from the Vatican that St John Henry Newman is to be declared a Doctor of the Church. He will thus become the 39th Doctor in the history of the Catholic Church. Significantly for us, Newman is now also the first Doctor of the Church ever to have visited the Isle of Wight! He did so a few times. He was here in October 1861. Suffering from an illness due to the cold damp weather in Birmingham, he decided to come to Ventnor to swim in the sea! He once described the Undercliff at Ventnor as the ‘finest in all England.” He had many friends on the island, including Sir John Simeon who was an MP for the Isle of Wight. Under Newman’s influence, Simeon became a Catholic and thus felt duty bound to resign as an MP because his constituents had voted him in as an Anglican, not as a Catholic. However, 10 years later, they voted him back in! Simeon was especially helpful to Newman in giving him financial assistance for the founding of the first Catholic University of Ireland in 1854. Prior to this Newman gave a series of lectures in Dublin on his ideas of a Catholic University and education. Although he never intended this to be a book, they were later collected together under the title “Idea of a university”, which became a foundational treatise on this subject still referred to today as a standard work. He is perhaps most widely known for his poem from 1833 “The Pillar of the Cloud”, now better known as “Lead Kindly Light”, which has become one of the most famous hymns in the English Language. Composed while he was at sea during a Mediterranean cruise and following a very serious illness from which he nearly died, the underlying theme of the hymn is that of the journey we go through in this life, led by the Kindly Light of Our Lord amid the encircling gloom of trials and tribulations. It was a theme, essentially that of Faith and Reason, which was to underpin his life’s work. The last line of the first verse is characteristically at the very heart of his spirituality: “I do not ask to see the distant scene-one step enough for me”. As with the Israelites on their journey through the desert for 40 years, we are only given the light to follow bit by bit, but still enough to show us what path to follow next.
Very neatly, we have a description of the virtue of faith from the Letter to the Hebrews. Faith is more than a mere opinion. It is substantial, an assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. If they were seen, then there would be no need for faith. But the idea of a ‘substance’ giving ‘conviction’ or ‘certainty’, is important. We cannot have a scientific certainty that God exists, but we can have what Newman referred to as a ‘moral certainty’ and we show this by the way we live our lives of love, in obedience to God’s commandments. There is no room for doubt here. We cannot even make a provision for a future doubt, for to do so, Newman wrote, is to doubt at present. Even more forcibly he wrote: “I may love by halves, I may obey by halves; I cannot believe by halves: either I have faith, or I have it not.” This of course is very different from a scientific view or reality. The eminent scientist and always a close friend of Newman, Sir William Froude claimed that as a scientist he felt he had a ‘sacred duty to doubt’ and therefore he adopted the same approach to religious matters. But this approach only leads to agnosticism, as happened to Froude, despite the fact that his wife, Catherine, and their children, one after the other, became Catholics under Newman’s influence!
If our focus is primarily on this present life, then we will not be ready for Our Lord when He comes, for He will come at a time when we least expect. To have faith is not to keep our eyes looking upwards that we run the risk of tripping up. Rather it is to become detached from the things here below which may be stumbling blocks on our spiritual journey. In imitation of Mary and the saints, pondering the mysteries of God while they unfold in our lives as we journey one step at a time nourishes and strengthens our faith. Notice that when Jesus speaks of being ready, He is speaking of the Master coming, His Advent, rather than we going out to meet Him. We must have a state of readiness already in our hearts and follow the Kindly Light in our day to day lives in this state readiness. To assume we can delay this and make ourselves ready at a later time is not to have substantial faith now. It is now in our day-to-day lives that we store up treasure in Heaven. Doing this means that our hearts are already there, for where yr treasure is there also will be your heart.
Newman chose for his motto “Cor ad cor loquitur” – “Heart speaks to heart”. This he took from the writings of St Francis De Sales. This saint wrote that “in Heaven where we shall see God face to face, we shall love Him heart to heart. Here below we do not see that Supreme Goodness in its Beauty, but merely glimpse it amid our darkness. We are not necessitated to love God more than ourselves. We have the holy natural inclination to do so, to love God above all, but we do not have the strength to do so unless God infuses His most Holy Charity into our hearts.” A detachment from the thigs of the world where pride rules our wills expands our hearts to discover the Divine Will, the Divine Love, and allows the Divine Heart to speak to and guide our hearts:
“O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent till the night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile.”