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Season 6 Episode 3
Welcome to episode three of season six! This season, I am discussing my book, Journey to Christendom - the Freedom Dance. Each week, I post a chapter to my one of my books. You can buy them on Amazon or become a paid subscriber and read along each week. As a paid subscriber, you can make comments and join the chats to discuss the essential points in each chapter.
In this episode, I discuss a significant juncture on my journey with St. Joan and St. Thérèse: The Dance of Reason.
Joyously through the woods on
The dance of freedom
We came to a bridge where I
Froze in my tracks
“What? This on the path of the
Dogmatic Creed?” I could not accept
“The path of the Dogmatic Creed
Cannot contain this!”
“No, it cannot be…I became lost
Looking for this very bridge”
Many years ago, I described my search to reconcile faith and reason through the poetic metaphor of a bridge. This was the bridge of reason I crossed on the Dance of Reason with St. Thérèse. I struggled with how to explain my search in the aftermath of the phenomenological, intuitive certainty of my conversion on the Feast Day of St. Thérèse. I could only come up with another metaphor, that of concentric circles.
Now, imagine the journey of Faith and Reason as a series of concentric circles. The outside circle would represent the question of whether or not God existed, and it is at that wall that men of faith are battling it out today with the hellions of the Revolution in the modern world. Let us suppose that you were to conclude that there is a God, and you pass inside to the next layer. Here, you have another battle going on. The hellions are behind you, but you have now run into conflicts between believers like you, and you wonder why they are fighting each other. Now, the relativists, one-world religionists, and Eastern New Agers would naively plead here, in the name of universal oneness, to have all the believers put their weapons away. They would stop all this warfare by preventing everyone from going deeper into this mystery of reason. “Just don’t fight!” they would plead. “The differences between you are meaningless and only man-made, for the Spirit of the Universe loves you all!” Oh, but there are differences, and these differences are driven by much more than a simpleton, manufactured belief system. These genuine differences have to do with the question of Faith and Reason. One-world Universalists would like to pretend this is not so, for they wish the world could get on with its main business of money-making and power-building. Universalists are Universalists because they don’t believe anything other than getting religion out of the way. No, the differences at this level are severe and, dare I say, even respectable in their intellectual honesty. The Universalists and relativists are not intellectually honest at this wall.
So, you must decide on the question posed at this wall if you are to follow the path of reason. If I am to believe in God, what religion should I follow, if any? You now fight through that wall by choosing a religion, and let us say, for this example, that you choose the Christian faith. Yes, you have guessed it; you now run into another wall and another battle inside that last one. The struggle here is between the Christian denominations. Having chosen the Christian faith, what Church, if any, should I belong to? When you crash through that gate, you arrive at the core of the concentric circles, representing the core of your beliefs. And is this not what we all desire, to come to terms with reason and faith, with our core belief systems? But it took fighting through several walls, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat, to get there.
Fifteen years later, I realize that my intuition around the use of concentric circles was a good one. This image formed the core eidetic principle behind all that I expanded upon in the development of my model later.
I hope you enjoy this episode as I explain it all to you.
Journey to Christendom is the story of one man's wonder-filled spiritual exodus out of the Dark Forest and into a land of freedom and joy on a path called the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed of Roman Catholicism. This book leads the reader on a spiritual journey with the Virgin Mary, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, St. Joan of Arc, and other saints of the Church. You will dance out of the Dark Forest of the modern materialistic culture, across the dangerous Bridge of Reason, through stormy valleys of mental and physical suffering, and, finally, to the magnificent land of destiny to meet the King, Jesus Christ, Savior of humanity. Journey to Christendom is a testimony about finding peace, joy, and life-giving meaning through the Catholic Faith.
Check out the Heroic Hearts podcast on Substack, Spotify, or Apple. Heroic Hearts is a podcast about healing, enchanting, and elevating our hearts through the stories and spirituality of St. Joan of Arc and St. Therese of Lisieux. Co-hosted with Amy Chase.
S6E3 - Discussing The Dance of Reason in my book Journey to Christendom