The Sacrament of the Possible, Or, Why I Became a Catholic
Like Augustine’s Confessions, what is offered here is in a mode of theological memory. [1] It is a recollection, a re-collection, a gathering up and dusting off and laying out vignettes of personal memories side-by-side in a retrospective effort to discern a providential pattern of moments that cumulatively prompted my turn to the Roman Catholic faith at the Easter Vigil of 2005. With St. Augustine too I must ask what is to me the most urgent question: “Lord my God, judge of my conscience, is my memory correct?” (Confessions V.11). This question is pressing because as a genre both retrospective and constructive, any autobiographical writing is prone to misremembering, exaggerating, thematizing, fictionalizing, sentimentalizing, disposed either to selective forgetfulness or romance or both. In the 1874 preface to The Autobiographical Memoir, Newman opines that the genre of
Memoir, or at least a Life, is more or less the product of the imagination, a conclusion from facts, more or less theoretical and unauthoritative. Besides, for the most part, Lives are padded, or spun out, that they may give an adventitious interest, form a continuous narrative, and complete a volume (Autobiographical Writings, 23).
Newman took scrupulous care, however, to preserve testaments to his life in such media as grammar school notebooks, scraps of papers salvaged from his boyhood, and the composition and organization of his letters. Letters, he thought, are less susceptible to retrospective fictionalizing: they are confirmed artifacts which don’t lie, or which lie less, perhaps, than the stories we tell about ourselves. Letters, conversely, “are facts” (AW 23). And Newman was an archivist of his own facts, “a confirmed hoarder” of “every kind of article that had a personal bearing . . . he treasured these possessions, just because they formed, as it were, an extension of his personality” (AW 143).
One especially charming piece of such ephemera Newman kept is what has since been called his “Autobiography in Miniature,” written by Newman in a mix of pencil and ink on the back cover of one of his old school exercise notebooks over the long course of seventy-two years (1812–1884), spanning from age eleven to age eighty-three. Almost an autobiographical prose poem, the document briefly logs significant moments in his life—from a bout of homesickness before his Greek lesson as a young schoolboy to his monumental conversion to Catholicism to his being made an Oratorian priest and a cardinal—with the repetition of the simple phrase: “and now.”
The preservation of this scrap of ephemera, which survived his many bouts of purging his private journals, powerfully elucidates in one material object themes of the quiet drama of Newman’s conversion to holiness and ultimately to the Roman Catholic Church. “And now,” he writes, “in my rooms at Oriel College, a Tutor, a Parish Priest and Fellow, having suffered much, slowly advancing to what is good and holy, and led on by God’s hand blindly, not knowing whither He is taking me” (AW 5). In this one artifact there is both a sense of the passage of time as well as a sense of a continuous present.
Each new entry is extended across time and bridges many years, open to whatever future God would have in store for him as he ages from schoolboy to young adult to midlife to old age, but it is also punctuated by the immediacy of the present with the continuous repetition of the phrase “and now.” It, along with Newman’s journals and letters, represents an artifact not only of momentous events in his personal and spiritual life but even more it is an artifact that witnesses to the loving providence of God. As in the mode of Augustine’s Confessions, where the most fundamental confession of the text is not of sin but rather confession in praise of God, Newman suggests that his personal papers provide “the record of God’s great mercies to me, of the wonderful things He has done for my soul” (AW 149).
I have certainly not been as scrupulous with my record keeping as St John Henry Newman was, but I did uncover a thick leather journal from this particularly formative period of life—over a thousand bound pages—begun on May 24, 2000 when I was twenty, Protestant, single, and living in the southern United States, and ended eight years later in June of 2008, when I was Catholic, married, a mother, and working on a PhD in Systematic Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Less impressive than Newman’s seventy-two-year record, I know, but at least it was something. Facts and not conclusions from facts!
And the indisputable facts were there: some testament to my interior life at the time but far more importantly, a testament to the slow work of God’s providence. There is something about the deliberate act of retrospection that can illuminate the patterns of a life, where it comes to be seen that what might have looked at the time only like contingent events of personal history were in fact gifts of grace meted out by a watchful hand. I was surprised at how many details I had forgotten along the way. Without their preservation in writing the providence of God would have been perhaps to me only a theological theorem and not itself an insistent fact. And so comes the title, “The Sacrament of the Possible,” which is in part a little nod to Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s spiritual classic The Sacrament of the Present Moment written in the mid-1700s, a book which is customarily sub-titled Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence.
