A new perspective
February 7, 2025 at 2:02 p.m.
Like most Catholics, my family and I have a particular pew (or at least a section of pews) that we normally sit in. During the Christmas season, however, for daily Mass or my holy hour, I often sit in the front row on the far left side, as you face the altar.
At Sts. Peter and Paul Church in Huntington, Indiana, we place a beautiful Nativity scene directly in front of that pew, angled at about 45 degrees from facing the back of the Church. For those few weeks between Christmas Day and the Baptism of the Lord (alas, we don't keep the Nativity up until Candlemas, as is the European custom), I like to contemplate the scene as I am worshiping or praying.
Depending on where I sit in the front row, however, I may find my view of the Christ Child obscured by a shepherd boy or a wise man, or even completely blocked out while I am kneeling. I have to adjust my position to see him once again, and sometimes I reflect on the irony that, if I sat where my family and I normally sit, I would be able to see the Child in the manger at all times, without obstruction. By itself, my desire to be closer to the scene isn't enough to reveal Him to me; I need the right perspective.
In an important sense, our mental landscape is very similar to our physical one. The crisis of faith in our modern world, and especially the falling away of so many cradle Catholics in recent years, has been the result not so much of a conscious decision to reject Christ (though, of course, it is sometimes that) as of an inability to see Him, to keep Him in our line of sight. He fades, at first, into a distant memory, and then, as with a grandparent who died when we were very young, we find ourselves thinking of Him less and less, until finally we don't think of Him at all.
The very structure of our shared mental landscape in the West for the past five centuries has gradually been built up to keep us from looking beyond the horizon of our everyday world to the spiritual world that suffuses and sustains our material one. Both the pre-Christian world and the Christian one regarded the spirit that animates all things as equally real (if not more so) as what we can see, smell, taste, feel, and hear.
Just as, in the modern world, words have become fossilized, abstract, deprived of any greater meaning than names for the objects or actions they signify (thus the dearth of modern poetry worth reading), so, too, our sense of the world around us has hardened, crystallized, chased out any sense of the spiritual – ironically, at the very moment that modern physics has discovered that what we see, smell, taste, feel and hear does not correspond directly to the reality of the material world but is, in an important sense, a construct of human consciousness and imagination.
Our crisis of faith is not merely an intellectual one that can be solved by better – in the sense of more accurate – catechesis. It is a failure of imagination, a curtailing of the experience that was common to most of mankind before the modern era, and now is harder and harder to revive in a world where we are convinced that what you see (and only what you see) is what you get.
To revive the Christian experience, to immerse ourselves in the mystery of our faith, to be able once again to keep Christ in our sight no matter where we stand and where we look, we need to open up the horizon of our modern mental landscape. We need a new perspective.
Scott P. Richert is publisher for OSV.
The Church needs quality Catholic journalism now more than ever. Please consider supporting this work by signing up for a SUBSCRIPTION (click HERE) or making a DONATION to The Monitor (click HERE). Thank you for your support.
Related Stories
Friday, February 07, 2025
E-Editions
Events
Like most Catholics, my family and I have a particular pew (or at least a section of pews) that we normally sit in. During the Christmas season, however, for daily Mass or my holy hour, I often sit in the front row on the far left side, as you face the altar.
At Sts. Peter and Paul Church in Huntington, Indiana, we place a beautiful Nativity scene directly in front of that pew, angled at about 45 degrees from facing the back of the Church. For those few weeks between Christmas Day and the Baptism of the Lord (alas, we don't keep the Nativity up until Candlemas, as is the European custom), I like to contemplate the scene as I am worshiping or praying.
Depending on where I sit in the front row, however, I may find my view of the Christ Child obscured by a shepherd boy or a wise man, or even completely blocked out while I am kneeling. I have to adjust my position to see him once again, and sometimes I reflect on the irony that, if I sat where my family and I normally sit, I would be able to see the Child in the manger at all times, without obstruction. By itself, my desire to be closer to the scene isn't enough to reveal Him to me; I need the right perspective.
In an important sense, our mental landscape is very similar to our physical one. The crisis of faith in our modern world, and especially the falling away of so many cradle Catholics in recent years, has been the result not so much of a conscious decision to reject Christ (though, of course, it is sometimes that) as of an inability to see Him, to keep Him in our line of sight. He fades, at first, into a distant memory, and then, as with a grandparent who died when we were very young, we find ourselves thinking of Him less and less, until finally we don't think of Him at all.
The very structure of our shared mental landscape in the West for the past five centuries has gradually been built up to keep us from looking beyond the horizon of our everyday world to the spiritual world that suffuses and sustains our material one. Both the pre-Christian world and the Christian one regarded the spirit that animates all things as equally real (if not more so) as what we can see, smell, taste, feel, and hear.
Just as, in the modern world, words have become fossilized, abstract, deprived of any greater meaning than names for the objects or actions they signify (thus the dearth of modern poetry worth reading), so, too, our sense of the world around us has hardened, crystallized, chased out any sense of the spiritual – ironically, at the very moment that modern physics has discovered that what we see, smell, taste, feel and hear does not correspond directly to the reality of the material world but is, in an important sense, a construct of human consciousness and imagination.
Our crisis of faith is not merely an intellectual one that can be solved by better – in the sense of more accurate – catechesis. It is a failure of imagination, a curtailing of the experience that was common to most of mankind before the modern era, and now is harder and harder to revive in a world where we are convinced that what you see (and only what you see) is what you get.
To revive the Christian experience, to immerse ourselves in the mystery of our faith, to be able once again to keep Christ in our sight no matter where we stand and where we look, we need to open up the horizon of our modern mental landscape. We need a new perspective.
Scott P. Richert is publisher for OSV.
The Church needs quality Catholic journalism now more than ever. Please consider supporting this work by signing up for a SUBSCRIPTION (click HERE) or making a DONATION to The Monitor (click HERE). Thank you for your support.