By DONALD DeMARCO
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen fully appreciated the value of humor. He would invariably open his TV show, Life Is Worth Living, which was watched back in the 1950s by an estimated 30 million viewers, with a joke or a funny story. He knew that humor was double-edged. It could make a point as well as make people laugh, appealing both to the mind and to the funny bone.
One of my favorite of his one-liners is his reference to the man who was an atheist for a year, but had to give it up because there were no holidays.
Sheen’s witticism actually compliments atheists for it implies that they have a sense of the holy and long for it when it is missing from their lives. Dana Gioia, California’s reigning poet laureate, agrees with Sheen in principle, and credits the Church for being a kind of specialist when it comes to cultivating a sense of the holy.
“What Catholicism does is inform my work,” he states. “Whether the poem is about an angel or an alley way, my way of seeing the world (and sensing what lies beyond the visible world) is always Catholic.”
He cites Psalm 96 which instructs us to “worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness” and adds, “A nonbeliever should be able to feel the truth and majesty of the Church.”
No doubt, because Sheen was a philosopher, he believed that the “point” of his humor was more important than the laugh it might evoke. And the “point” was usually a way of making his moral message irresistible.
His artful humor brings to mind the words of the esteemed 18th-century essayist Joseph Addison: “I shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit and temper wit with morality.” Humor must steer a middle course between presenting morality as attractive and making it appear as unattractive.
A holiday, as the word implies, is a “holy day.” Holiness is not derived from the earth. Its origin is from on high. Christmas is our most popular holiday because it offers something that the world cannot provide: peace, brotherhood, and enduring love. A life without holidays is a life immersed in a world that cannot fulfill our deepest desires. Such a life renders a person a cosmic orphan, reducing him to just another meaningless atom within an infinite sea of other meaningless atoms.
Although holiness originates from on high, its reality is readily accessible. The world is diaphanous. It allows us to see through it so that we have glimpses, hints, or intimations of the holy. Life would be unbearably barren without any sense whatsoever of the holy. Christmas celebrates the arrival of the Most Holy, the One who penetrates our hearts and sanctifies our souls. It gives us a booster shot of what we are able to sense, perhaps more dimly, on a daily basis.
As C.S. Lewis states in Miracles, “The Supernatural is not remote and abstruse: It is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.”
For St. Thomas Aquinas, the Natural Law participates in the Eternal Law. It is a doorway, so to speak, into a realm that is richer and purer than the one in which we live. Thus, for the Angelic Doctor, everything has a “certain hidden secret” or a “sacred secret” (sacrum secretum; Summa Theologiae III, 60, 1). All things contain God’s secret signature.
Shakespeare added a touch of poetry to this insight in As You Like It where, walking through the Forest of Arden, one “finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Yet, for the perspicacious, this enchanted forest encompasses the entire globe. Accordingly, for C.S. Lewis, we discover “patches of God-light in the woods of our experience.” This “light” assures us that there is more to reality than meets the eye. We are not bound by the lower order of things. The eternal flashes before our mind.
The epitaph that Cardinal Newman chose for himself was “Coming out from the shadows into Reality” (ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem).
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s little poem, Flower in the Crannied Wall, is large in implication, bringing the finite and the infinite into contact with each other. Holding the flower in his hands the poet states that “if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.” The word “if” offers the possibility of sensing the divine in the ephemeral. Our lives are an unceasing attempt to translate the “if” into a realization.
It is easy for us to imagine Sheen’s atheist as being smitten by metaphysical claustrophobia. Being so constricted, boredom becomes inevitable. The attempt to escape from boredom is a national pastime. But immersing oneself even more in things that are not holy, drugging ourselves with shopping, eating, and drinking, fails to solve the problem.
The key that unlocks our prison house is the sense of the holy that surrounds us. And the passages to escape are virtually everywhere. The Christmas Season offers us a splendid opportunity to revel in the glory of a holiday so that our vision is enlarged, having been liberated from a closed and calculating world. Christmas is God’s personal response to the temptation to atheism.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His recent works, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; How to Flourish in a Fallen World, and In Praise of Life, are available through Amazon.com. His most recent book is Footprints on the Sands of Time: Personal Reflections on Life and Death.)
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