Various Catholic Feeds

America will not have noticed but I failed on July 4th to post my annual appreciation of Uncle Sam. It was quite remiss of me. And while I realise America can get on very well without my admiration, something in me breathes deeply a love for a land I was lucky enough to call home for a few short albeit eventful years. And love must speak its name.

I'm calling it 'America', knowing full well that this is Anglo speak. I'm inclined this way for two reasons, one of which is that that is how the Mother Country most often refers to her former colony. But whatever one calls it, it remains - like all true persons - a complexity, a paradox, easily perceived but much less easily understood. Gabriel Marcel would have called it 'a mystery' rather than 'a problem'.

I still remember flying into Minneapolis just about 24 years ago this autumn. We travelled in over the Canadian border and I learned immediately why Minnesota is called the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. Nothing will erase from my memory the moment when the airplane banked on its final approach and the sparkling towers of downtown - unremarkable by American standards but dazzling to my British eye - shot up out of the flat suburbs. That was perhaps only one version of urban America staring up at me from 1,000 feet, but it was thrilling all the same.

My theme is memory, as Charles Rider says. Why do such things linger in the mind while those of much greater importance have eroded and failed? A thousand trivial details come flooding back now as I pursue my theme. I remember hunting high and low for the toilets on my first night. Wandering along a corridor where everything was labelled, I could find the 'showers' and I could even find the 'rest room' which, without opening the door, I imagined to be some kind of gentlemen's lounge where one could read a newspaper undisturbed. But where was the toilet?

It was painful in the early days, as I watched the natives straining to handle my Mancunian lilt. I adjusted naturally. People back home (should I say 'folks' back home?) said I acquired a mid-Atlantic accent. It didn't last of course. Skin-deep things never do.

I have to confess, however, that much of my perception of America was then only skin deep. It was influenced by the simmering anti-American sentiment I was surrounded by. Of course that sentiment justified itself on doctrinal grounds. But sometimes - as much more experience has taught me - not everyone who says 'doctrine' really understands what it means. 'Doctrine' does honour to Revelation, but it is in no way an excuse not to look at what is around you. Doctrine informs the mind but if God is the God of Revelation and Creation, no experience can ultimately contradict it. It is odd to think now of doctrine serving as a kind of blindfold to experience, rather than as a complement.

Longer reflection on my American experience in later years - which I am truncating now because, as usual, the human needs of my children are at this very second beginning to bellow louder than my duty to the blog readers - taught me some of the secrets behind what I treated then almost as a film set. Leaving a country, like finishing a book, does not mean that one is finished and done with learning its essence.

In more recent years, America has come to mean a host of other things. As a younger cousin of modernity, it has not yet entirely trampled to death the symbolic depths of our social life. For all its talk of pragmatism, it does more honour to the life of the mind than the barren landscape of European academia. For all its destructive role in Vatican II, it has now much greater religious and spiritual depth and fruitfulness than many European hellholes.

It is still way too much in love with its technological roots, although when its empire finally falls - as a very wise man once said - it will be remembered as the civilisation that first set foot on another 'world'. Much of its cultural politics is now being sucked into the vortex of postmodern disintegration, best symbolised by the bizarre hybrid who calls him/herself Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner. Still, we all have faults, people in glass houses cannot throw stones and everyone needs our prayers.

So, America and all American readers, two weeks too late (a delay you will forgive with your customary graciousness, I know), I send you my greetings for July 4th 2015. I wish you lots of things in the years ahead, but most particularly wisdom. Wisdom to judge with the charity of Christ, and wisdom to see the world with His eyes.

You are still a pup in comparison to the old dame of Europe. May you never become the bitch she now is.