Chapter Five: “We Could Sing Better Songs”: Conversion and the New Song

The turning of the heart, the call that comes through the ordinary, and the courage not to go back

Rev. Fr. Michael Doyle

“The new man will sing the new song.” (St Augustine, Sermon 34.1)

“Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He Whom thou seekest!” (Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven)

Summary: Chapter Three described the shape of the journey into holiness as a birth, and Chapter Four named the melody that holds a life together, the cantus firmus. This chapter asks what happens at the moment a person first hears that another song is possible and decides to leave the old one. It begins with a scene from Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, in which a young hairdresser sits in her family’s pub, hears her mother weeping in the middle of a sing-song, and learns that her mother too knows there are better songs than the ones they are singing. From that scene the chapter draws three movements that mark every genuine turning: an environment that is familiar yet has become alien, a catalyst that comes through an ordinary person, and a realisation that things cannot go on as they are.

The chapter then reads the scene through the Christian tradition of conversion. St Augustine’s Easter sermon on the “new song” shows that the new song is above all a song of love, sung by the new man with his whole life. Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven shows who begins the turning: God pursues, and the soul answers. The chapter names the chief danger, which is being coaxed back into the familiar song by the kindly pressure of people who love us, and it points to the saints as those who found the courage not to go back. It closes by showing why the cure of souls matters most at this moment of turning, and draws out the theoretical and practical consequences for seminaries, priests, parishes and every believer.

Introduction: The Moment of Turning

The first four chapters have built a single argument in four movements. Chapter One argued that if holiness is to be the organising principle of the Church’s life, priests must recover the cure of souls, and that the ground of the whole proposal is the claim that every human being is capax Dei, made towards God and restless until he rests in him. Chapter Two showed that the call to holiness is addressed to every baptised person, from the tailor’s bench to the paediatrician’s ward. Chapter Three asked what holiness is and how it comes about, and answered with Paul: Christ formed in us, a birth with its conception, its labour and its delivery. Chapter Four asked what remains at the centre when everything else is tested, and answered with Bonhoeffer: the cantus firmus, the fixed song around which a whole life is built.

One question has been left standing between the call and the process. How does a person actually begin? Chapter Three spoke of conception and of the quickening, the first stirring of life that is “real but delicate” and easily ignored. Chapter Two spoke of Jan Tyranowski hearing a sermon in 1935 and resolving to become a saint. Chapter One spoke of thousands of young adults arriving at the font in answer to some trial that had opened questions nothing else could answer. In each case something happened at a particular moment that turned a person round. This chapter is about that moment.

The tradition has a name for it: conversion, from the Latin convertere, to turn round, and behind it the Greek metanoia, a change of mind and of heart. Our Lord’s first recorded words in Mark’s Gospel are a summons to exactly this: “Repent, and believe in the gospel.”[1] The Catechism teaches that this call to conversion is an essential part of the proclamation of the Kingdom, and that it continues to resound in the lives of Christians for as long as they live.[2] If the cura animarumis the care of a soul’s progress towards God, then the moment of turning is the moment at which that care is most needed and most easily withheld.

A Scene in a Pub

I take as my starting point a scene from Educating Rita, Willy Russell’s play and the award-winning film made from it, in which Julie Walters and Michael Caine play the leading roles.[3] Rita is a married hairdresser from a working-class Liverpool family who longs to break out of the narrow horizon of her workaday life and to pursue an education through the Open University. For someone of her background that is itself a revolutionary step. She is assigned a tutor, Frank, a world-weary academic. Their first meeting goes badly, and Rita begins to doubt the desire that brought her there.

When she returns for the second tutorial she explains why she came back, and the explanation is the heart of the film. Frank has taken a shine to her. He finds her quick, funny and engaging, with the native wit of her Liverpool upbringing, and he says so. Rita turns on him. She does not want to be the delightful comic turn, indulged for her humour while the serious conversation goes on above her head. She wants to be taken seriously. She then tells him what happened after she had decided never to return. She went to the pub where her husband Denny, her mother, her sister and their friends were all singing a song from the jukebox. She stood there and asked herself why she should not simply give up and join in. She did join in, and she asked no questions. Then she noticed that her mother had stopped singing and was crying. The others put it down to drink and said she should be taken home. On the way, Rita asked her mother why she was crying. Her answer was that they could sing better songs than those. Ten minutes later Denny had her laughing and singing again as though she had never spoken. But she had spoken, says Rita, and that is why she came back and why she is staying.

I have paraphrased the scene rather than reproducing it, and I commend the film to the reader.

Rita’s story is primarily about education, and Russell’s play is not a religious work. Yet there is a spiritual journey inside it, though Rita may not be conscious of it, and it follows a pattern that anyone who has read Chapter Three will recognise. It has three movements, which come together in the pub.

1. An environment, familiar and now alien

The pub is the world Rita was born into. Everyone in it loves her, and she knows every word of the song. It stands for her old way of life with its comforting but narrowing horizons, and it has begun to feel alien to the new Rita who is emerging. This is what Chapter Three called discomfort, the stage at which old habits and old comforts “can no longer be endured.” It is painful, because nothing in the pub has become worse. What has changed is the person standing in it. To be reborn she must let go of what she loves, and she has not yet let go of it.

2. A mother’s tears

The catalyst is not a tutor or a book. It is her mother, a woman with no education who sits in the same pub every week. Her tears in the middle of the singing, and her remark about better songs, tell Rita something she could not have learned from Frank: the restlessness she feels is not a private fancy of her own. Her mother feels it too. Chapter One called this restlessness the mark of a creature made capax Dei, capable of God, for whom nothing less than the Eternal will ever be enough. Rita’s mother has never heard the phrase, and she has just given it its plainest possible expression. She has also made the discovery that Chapter Two described: the call can come through a hidden life. A tailor in Kraków formed a future pope, and a woman crying in a pub helped to turn a hairdresser into a scholar.

3. The realisation

The third movement is the moment of realisation. Rita sees that she cannot go on standing where she stands, and that something must give if a new life is to be born, whatever it costs her. This is the transition of Chapter Three, the point in labour at which the mother believes she cannot go on and must be carried through to the end. It leads directly to her decision and to the sentence on which the whole scene turns: that is why I am staying. A conversion is a decision made for a reason, and the reason has been given by someone else’s tears.

And then comes the detail that makes the scene more than a pleasant story. Ten minutes after speaking, Rita’s mother is back in the song. Her son-in-law’s kindly distraction has worked, and the moment of grace has been laughed away. It was only Rita’s attention that saved it. That is the danger of every turning, and I return to it below.

The Old Song and the New: Conversion in the Tradition

Rita’s mother used the language of music, and so does the tradition. The Psalms return again and again to the command to sing the Lord a new song.[4] Paul speaks of putting off the old self and putting on the new, created in God’s likeness.[5] The Book of Revelation describes a new song that only the redeemed are able to learn.[6] The image is so persistent that Augustine took it as the shape of Christian conversion itself.

His Sermon 34 is an Easter sermon on Psalm 149:1, preached to the newly baptised, the same group of young adults whom Chapter One saw arriving at the font in such numbers.[7] Augustine tells them four things that bear directly on our scene.

First, the new song is a song of love. A song, he says, is a thing of joy and, more deeply, a thing of love. Whoever has learned to love the new life has learned to sing the new song. Conversion is therefore not first of all a change of opinions or of habits. It is a change of what the heart loves, and the song is simply the sound of that change.

Second, the new man and the new song belong together. The old man cannot sing the new song, because the old man is still in love with the old things. This is what Rita saw in the pub. She could join in the singing, and she did, but she could no longer love it as she once had. The song and the singer have to change together.

Third, the source of the new love is not ours. Augustine insists that our love for God can only come from the fact that God loved us first. The turning is something done to us before it is something we do. I return to this in the next section.

Fourth, the new song must be sung with the whole life. Augustine warns the newly baptised that their lives must not contradict their words, and he tells them to sing with their voices, their hearts, their lips and their lives. When they ask him what praises they should sing, his answer is plain: live good lives, and you yourselves will be his praise. This is exactly what Chapter Four called congruence, the agreement between what we believe at the deepest level and the way we live. It also shows why the new song is not a solitary achievement. A life sings it, and a life takes time.

There is one more thing the tradition teaches, and Rita’s story needs it. Conversion does not require us to despise the people and the places we leave. Rita does not stop loving her mother. She remains loyal to her in a new way, and it is her mother’s words that keep her where she is. Bonhoeffer made the same point of the cantus firmus: God wishes to be loved with the whole heart, not at the expense of earthly love, but as the fixed song against which the other voices of life sound as counterpoint.[8] The old songs of family and friendship are not condemned. They are taken up into a larger harmony. What is left behind is whatever refuses that harmony, and it is the old man, not the old songs, who must die.

Augustine knew this from his own life. In the Confessions he describes, with the frankness of a man who had loved the theatre and everything it offered, how long he sought satisfaction in beautiful things before he found the Beauty “so ancient and so new” that had been seeking him all along.[9] He did not find that Beauty by despising the others. He found it when he finally saw what they were for.

The Hound and the Singer: Who Begins the Turning?

If the new song is a song of love, and if our love for God can only answer the love he has already shown us, then the first question about conversion is not what we must do. It is who has begun. Here the second epigraph of this chapter speaks. Francis Thompson, who wrote The Hound of Heaven out of his own experience of addiction and destitution on the streets of London, pictures the soul as a fugitive running from a Pursuer who never hurries and never gives up.[10] The poem ends with the Pursuer’s own voice: “Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He Whom thou seekest!”

The poem has two lessons for our subject.

The first is that the soul flees what is its own good. Thompson confesses that he knew the love of the One who followed him and was yet “sore adread” of it, afraid that to have him would mean having “naught beside.” That is the fear that Chapter Three named as the principal obstacle to the birth of Christ in the soul: the sense, which is half right, that the new life will cost everything. Rita felt it in the pub. To stay at the university meant giving up the easy belonging of the song, and she was tempted for a moment to give it all up and sing. The fugitive is not wicked. He is afraid.

The second is that every lesser love eventually gives way. In the poem, the Voice behind the fleeing soul says that all things betray the one who betrays him. That is the restlessness of Chapter One seen from the other side. A creature made capax Dei cannot be filled by anything less than God, and sooner or later the lesser goods that had seemed enough show themselves to be insufficient. The jukebox song was good. It was not enough, and Rita’s mother had known it for years.

The Pursuer does not come in a thunderclap. He comes through whatever lies to hand: a sermon that Tyranowski happened to hear, a bereavement, a book given by a parish priest, a mother crying in a pub. This is why the tradition is so reluctant to separate the initiative of God from the ordinary events of a life. The Catechism teaches that even the preparation of a person to receive grace is already the work of grace, and that God’s free initiative then asks for a free response.[11] Benedict XVI put the same truth simply: being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but of an encounter with an event, a person, who gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.[12]

The balance matters, and it is the same balance that Chapter Three drew between Pelagianism and quietism. The Hound pursues, but he does not drag. Rita is not carried out of the pub. She hears, she is moved, and then she chooses to go back and to stay. If conversion were only our own achievement it would be a project and not a birth. If it were only God’s doing, we should never need to be afraid, or to be courageous. It is both: grace comes first, and freedom answers.

The Danger of the Familiar Song

The most instructive moment in the scene is the one that is easiest to pass over. Ten minutes after her mother has said something true, Denny has her laughing and singing again. He is not a villain. He is a kind man who loves his mother-in-law and cannot bear to see her cry, and his remedy is the oldest one there is: distract her, cheer her up, and get the song going again. It works. The moment is gone. Only Rita has kept it.

This is the danger inherent in every turning, and it deserves to be taken as seriously as the turning itself. Most people who are touched by grace are not argued out of it. They are coaxed out of it, gently and lovingly, by those who want them to be comfortable. The tradition identifies several forms of this coaxing, and all of them are present in the pub.

Affection. The people who surround us love us as we are, and they are afraid, often without knowing it, of who we may become. A conversion threatens the arrangements that everyone has made around the old person. Families, friendships and parishes can all discourage the one who has started to change.

Explanation. In the pub the others say that her mother has simply had too much to drink. This is the remark of people who need her tears to mean nothing. We have a more refined version of it now. Chapter One described a culture that reads every distress as pathology, and Chapter Three described the soul in labour whose contractions are medicated as symptoms. The stirring of a new longing can be explained away as stress, as a phase, or as an emotional response to a bad week. Some of these explanations are partly true. Their effect is to make a call into a mood, and a mood passes.

Nostalgia. Israel in the desert longed for the fish, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks and the onions of Egypt, and forgot that it had been slavery.[13] The old song is remembered at its best, and its cost is forgotten. Lot’s wife looks back, and the Lord warns that no one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the Kingdom.[14] The parable of the sower names the same dangers: the seed that springs up quickly in shallow ground and withers when the sun rises, and the seed choked by thorns.

It is the same danger that Chapter Three traced to fear. The woman in labour who is afraid and wants to stop is not a hypocrite. She is in pain, and the pain is real. What she needs at that moment is someone who has seen it before and will stay with her.

And here the tradition adds a note of hope that Rita’s story hides. Being coaxed back is not necessarily final. Peter’s tears after his denial were the work of grace: the Lord looked at him, and he went out and wept bitterly.[15] Yet after the Resurrection, Peter says that he is going fishing, and goes back to his old trade on the lake. The Lord comes to him there, on the shore, and asks him three times whether he loves him.[16] The Hound of Heaven does not abandon the one who has run back to the familiar song. He is waiting on the shore. Rita’s mother returned to the singing, and what she said remained said. Whether she ever hears the better song is something we cannot know, but what Rita heard was heard, and the Pursuer’s work in her did not stop.

Those Who Did Not Turn Back: The Saints as Evidence

Even a cursory reading of the lives of the saints shows what happens when a person, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, allows himself to be taken up into this process. The pattern of the pub scene appears again and again: a familiar world that has become too small, a catalyst that is often humble, a moment of realisation, and then the decision not to go back. I take four examples, chosen because the catalyst in each is so ordinary.

Augustine. The man who preached about the new song had to learn it himself. In the garden at Milan, torn between the Lord and the old life, he prayed for chastity and continence, but not yet.[17] The turning came through a voice. He heard a child, from a neighbouring house, chanting words that sounded like “take up and read.” He took up the Apostle’s letters, read the first passage on which his eyes fell, and the doubt was gone. He was baptised by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil of 387. The song that brought him round was sung by a child he never identified.

Ignatius of Loyola. A cannonball wounded the young soldier at Pamplona in 1521, and during his long convalescence he asked for the romances of chivalry that he loved. The castle had none. It had a life of Christ and a book on the lives of the saints. Reading them, he noticed something that became the root of his teaching on the discernment of spirits: the dreams of worldly glory pleased him while he dwelt on them and left him dry afterwards, while the thought of imitating the saints left him at peace.[18] The turning began as a difference in what two sets of daydreams left behind.

Teresa of Avila. She had been in the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation for many years, living in what she later called a stormy sea, divided between God and the world, and praying less than she should. One day she came upon a statue of the wounded Christ, which had been brought out for a feast. She was overcome, threw herself down in tears, and begged him to give her strength not to offend him again.[19] The catalyst was an image, a statue in a convent chapel that others had walked past. She needed it to be there, and she needed to look at it.

Edith Stein. The philosopher, a Jewish atheist from Breslau, was staying with friends in 1921 when she took a book from their shelf, the autobiography of Teresa of Avila. She read it right through, and when she closed it at dawn she said, “This is the truth.”[20] She was baptised on 1 January 1922, entered Carmel in 1933, and died at Auschwitz in 1942. The catalyst was a book on a friend’s shelf, a story told by a woman three and a half centuries earlier.

None of these four was a spiritual professional when the turning came, and none of them was prepared for it. The catalyst was a child’s voice, a book, a statue and another book. What they have in common is that they did not explain it away, they did not distract themselves from it, and after some resistance they did not go back. It takes courage. The saints are those who found it, and they are not different in kind from Rita.

Who Hears the Mother’s Tears? The Cure of Souls at the Moment of Turning

The moment in the pub had one witness who took it seriously, and she was a young woman who happened to be there. Had Rita not stopped to ask her mother why she was crying, nothing would have come of it. The question that follows from this is the one that Chapter One has been asking all along: who, in the life of the Church, is trained to notice when the singing stops?

The cura animarum, as Chapter One defined it, is the sustained, personal and prayerful responsibility of a pastor for the progress of particular souls towards God. The moment of turning is the moment at which that responsibility is most tested, because it is the moment at which a soul is most open and most easily lost. A priest, a deacon, a religious or a trained lay director who has learned to listen will hear things that other people hear and miss. He will hear the parishioner who says, almost in passing, that nothing seems to satisfy any more. He will hear the newly baptised man who says that the old friends no longer fit. He will hear the woman who has come to the same pew for fifty years and cries during a hymn, and he will not say that she is tired.

What does he do with what he hears? The scene suggests three temptations, all of which belong to Denny, and all of which echo the failings that Chapter Three named in a director who has not himself been through the process.

• To distract. He cheers the person up, changes the subject, and moves on to the next item on the agenda. This is the kindly reflex of a busy man.
• To explain. He decides that the tears are a symptom, that the longing is a mood, and that the right response is to reassure. Chapter One warned that the therapeutic culture makes this the default reading of every distress.
• To refer. He sends the person to someone else before he has heard what is being said. There are times when referral is right, as Chapter One said, but it must never take the place of attention.

The alternative is to do what Rita did, which is to ask and to listen. After that, the tradition offers three further resources.

Discernment of spirits. Ignatius, as we have seen, learned from his own convalescence to distinguish the thoughts that leave a person at peace from those that leave him restless. His rules for discernment include one that bears directly on the temptation to return to the pub. In a time of desolation, he teaches, a person should never change the decision that he made in the light, but should hold firmly to the resolution made before the darkness fell.[21] The pull back to the familiar song, felt in the days after a conversion, is very often desolation of this kind. The task of the director is to remind the person what he saw when he saw it clearly.

Perseverance. Rita says that she is staying, and the word is worth noticing. Conversion is not a single event but a series of turnings. The Catechism calls the continuing call to repentance a second conversion, an uninterrupted task for the whole Church, and the task of each believer.[22] Rita’s decision in the pub has to be made again every week of her course, whenever the going is hard. A director is above all someone who stays, as Chapter Three said of the person who attends a labour, and who is still there in five years’ time when the first fervour has gone.

A road, and companions on it. When Tyranowski himself went to his parish priest for guidance, he was given a book, Tanquerey’s The Spiritual Life, and he went on to gather a small group of young men around the works of Teresa and John of the Cross. A longing that is stirred and then left alone will usually fade, as Chapter Three said of the quickening. The same longing, when it is met with a book, a group and a person to talk to, can become a way of life. Chapter One argued that the newly baptised need years of mystagogy, and the long-faithful need to be asked by name. Both are cases of the same need: someone has to hear the tears.

This is a work that the Church cannot leave to priests alone, and Chapter One said why. The mother’s tears were heard by her daughter. In every parish there are lay men and women, and religious, who hear what the priest never will. What they need is training in what to do with what they hear, and supervision, so that the ear that has been opened is also a safe and wise one. That is the case for the school of spiritual direction, the programme of formation and the reordering of priestly training for which this book has been arguing.

Theoretical Consequences

1. Conversion is first a turning of love, and only then a change of opinion. If Augustine is right that the new song is a song of love, then a theology of conversion must give a central place to the ordering of the affections. People are rarely argued into the Church and rarely argued out of it. They are moved, and the movement is a change in what the heart takes to be worth loving. This confirms from the side of the individual soul what Chapter One argued from the capax Dei: the human being is constituted by a desire for God, and conversion is that desire coming to know its object.

2. Grace precedes, and freedom answers. The Hound begins the pursuit, and the soul must still choose to stop running. A sound theology of conversion holds both at once, against the Pelagian view that we turn ourselves round by effort, and against the quietist view that we need only wait. This is the doctrine of Chapter Three applied to its beginning: conception is a gift, but the mother must carry, endure and yield.

3. Conversion is a process with a decisive moment, not a single event. The moment in the pub is real, and so is the ongoing task. The Catechism’s teaching on a continuing, or second, conversion fits the six stages of Chapter Three: the turning corresponds to the quickening, and it recurs at every transition thereafter. Theology should therefore speak of conversion in the plural, as a series of turnings in which the first is only the most dramatic.

4. The call comes through the ordinary and the hidden. Chapter Two argued that holiness is lived in ordinary places and that its influence is often hidden. The catalyst in the pub is a woman crying, in the saints’ lives a child’s voice, a book, a statue. Theology needs a fuller account of how grace uses secondary causes, and especially of the part played by lay people who have no idea that they are instruments.

5. The old song is not abolished but taken up. Aquinas teaches that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.[23] Conversion therefore cannot be understood as the destruction of a person’s loves and loyalties. It is their purification and re-ordering around a centre, which is what Bonhoeffer meant by counterpoint around the cantus firmus. This guards the doctrine against both a naive supernaturalism that despises the human, and a sentimental humanism that refuses to let anything be given up.

6. Desolation and the temptation to return belong to the doctrine of sanctification. The pull back to the familiar is not a sign of weak faith. It is a predictable stage, and the tradition of the discernment of spirits is the theological instrument for reading it. A doctrine of sanctification that says nothing of the days after the turning will leave the convert unprepared for them.

7. The pursuit is ecclesial. The Hound’s footfall is heard through the Church’s members, and the answer is given within the Church. This extends the theology of the priesthood that Chapter One called for and the account of the priest as one who labours that Chapter Three gave: the priest and the lay director are collaborators with the Pursuer, whose task is to be the ear and the companion in the moment when the call is heard.

Practical Consequences

Theology that changes nothing on Monday morning has not been believed. The following measures are those that this chapter’s argument requires, and they build on those already proposed in Chapters One and Three.

For Seminaries

• Teach the theology and psychology of conversion explicitly, as part of the spiritual theology course of Chapter One: the first turning, the continuing turnings, and the typical forms of the return to the old song.
• Include in the practicum of spiritual direction a specific training in the first conversation, in which a person says, often indirectly, that something has begun. Role-play and supervised cases should practise listening without distracting, explaining or referring too soon.
• Teach the Ignatian rules for the discernment of spirits as a working tool, with particular attention to the rule for times of desolation, so that a future priest knows what to say to someone who wants to go back.
• Help each seminarian to recognise and name the moment of his own turning, and to read it with his director. A man who cannot tell his own story of conversion will find it hard to listen to anyone else’s.

For Priests and Spiritual Directors

• Learn to notice when the singing stops. At funerals, in the confessional, after a homily, a remark that seems out of place may be the beginning of a turning. Ask a second question.
• Resist Denny’s three reflexes. Do not distract, do not explain too quickly, and do not refer before you have listened.
• When a person is newly converted, expect the pull back, and warn them of it in advance. Say plainly that a week or a month after the first fervour they may feel that they have made a mistake, and that this is a recognised stage and not a failure.
• Remain available. The converts of the first year are the ones who most need a named person who will notice if they stop coming.
• Give a book and a small company, as Tyranowski’s priest gave him Tanquerey, and as Tyranowski gathered the young men around Teresa. A stirred longing needs both.

For Parishes

• Create, in every parish, a small group of trained lay listeners, men and women to whom a person can say that something is happening, who will pass nothing on to the parish gossip, and who know to whom to introduce the person next.
• Preach on conversion as an ordinary and continuing part of Christian life, so that the vocabulary is there before the need. A person who has been told that a longing for “something more” is an invitation will know what to do with it.
• Make the Easter Vigil the beginning of a journey and not the end of one. Pair each new Catholic with a companion who will walk with them for years.
• Notice the long-faithful. The woman who cries at a hymn may be hearing exactly what Rita’s mother heard. She has waited fifty years for someone to ask.

For Every Christian

• Learn to listen to your own tears. Notice what moves you, what the old song fails to satisfy, and what you cannot explain away.
• When it comes, do not let anyone laugh it off, and do not do it yourself. Write it down, tell a trusted person, and take it to prayer.
• Expect the old song to call you back, and have your answer ready. Rita’s was a short sentence: that is why I am staying.
• Be Rita to someone else. When you see a mother crying, a friend who has gone quiet, or a colleague who says there must be more, stop and ask why. You may be the only one who does.
• Pray, as Augustine would have us pray, for the grace to sing the new song with the whole of life: with voice, heart, lips and conduct.

Conclusion

The young woman in the pub did not hear a sermon. She heard her mother say, through her tears, that they could sing better songs than those. Everything in this chapter is an attempt to understand why that sentence mattered so much, and what the Church must do so that it is never lost.

It mattered because it said aloud what Augustine said in Milan and Thompson on the streets of London: that a human being is made for a song that nothing in his surroundings is able to supply, and that the longing for it is the surest sign of what he is. Chapter One called this the capax Dei. Chapter Three described its labour, and Chapter Four its fixed centre. The scene in the pub shows the instant at which a person first hears it.

The lesson of the scene is not comfortable. The turning is given freely, and grace goes before us, but the answer is ours, and it has to be made again and again against the kindly pressure of people who love us as we are. Most of the baptised will meet this moment more than once. Some will meet it with a friend who stops and asks, and some will meet it alone. The saints are not those who never felt the pull back to the old song. They are those who found, in the moment when it counted, someone or something that helped them to stay.

That is the work of the cure of souls. A priest who has been formed in it will hear what Rita heard. He will not distract, explain away or refer too soon. He will ask, and then he will stay, as the Hound stays, on the shore and in the pub and in the confessional, until the new song has become the life that the person lives. And the lay people and religious who are trained beside him will do the same.

The last word belongs to Augustine, who spoke it to people newly baptised and standing where Rita stood. You want to sing of the One you love, he said, and you ask how to sing his praises. Live good lives, and you yourselves will be his praise. The better song is not one we perform. It is the life that we, at last, begin to live.

Notes

[1] Mark 1:15.

[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 1427–1429.

[3] Willy Russell, Educating Rita (stage play, first performed 1980); film directed by Lewis Gilbert (1983), screenplay by Russell, with Julie Walters and Michael Caine. The scene described is from Rita’s second tutorial with Frank. It is summarised here and not reproduced, and only her mother’s remark about better songs is echoed in the author’s words.

[4] Psalms 33:3; 40:3; 96:1; 98:1; 144:9; 149:1; Isaiah 42:10.

[5] Ephesians 4:22–24; Colossians 3:9–10; 2 Corinthians 5:17.

[6] Revelation 5:9; 14:3.

[7] Augustine, Sermo 34, 1–3, 5–6 (CCL 41, 424–426), a sermon on Psalm 149:1 preached to the newly baptised in Eastertide, and used in the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours. The quotation of Sermon 34.1 in the epigraph is given as supplied by the author.

[8] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, letter of 20 May 1944; see Chapter Four, n. 15.

[9] Augustine, Confessiones X, 27, 38 (“sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova”); on the theatre, III, 2, 2.

[10] Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven, first published in Poems (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893). The lines cited are from the closing section of the poem, and the epigraph reads “He Whom thou seekest” in the original.

[11] Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 2001–2002.

[12] Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (25 December 2005), n. 1.

[13] Exodus 16:3; Numbers 11:4–6.

[14] Genesis 19:26; Luke 9:62; Matthew 13:3–9, 18–23.

[15] Luke 22:61–62; Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1429.

[16] John 21:3–17.

[17] Augustine, Confessiones VIII, 7, 17 and VIII, 12, 28–29. His baptism by Ambrose at Milan is recounted in IX, 6, 14, and its date, the Easter Vigil of 387, is traditional.

[18] Ignatius of Loyola, Autobiography, nn. 5–8.

[19] Teresa of Ávila, Libro de la Vida, chs 8–9, esp. 9, 1–2.

[20] Teresia Renata Posselt, Edith Stein: The Life of a Philosopher and Carmelite, on the night of reading in 1921. Stein was baptised on 1 January 1922, beatified in 1987 and canonised in 1998.

[21] Ignatius of Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia, Rules for the Discernment of Spirits (First Week), n. 318.

[22] Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1428; cf. Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, n. 8.

[23] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2 (gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit).

Bibliography

Scripture and Magisterial Sources

Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (21 November 1964), n. 8; ch. V.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd edn (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nn. 1427–1429, 2001–2002.

Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, Encyclical Letter (25 December 2005).

Patristic, Monastic and Classical Spiritual Sources

Augustine of Hippo, Confessiones, III, 2; VIII, 7 and 12; IX, 6; X, 27.

Augustine of Hippo, Sermo 34 (CCL 41, 424–426).

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2.

Ignatius of Loyola, Autobiography; Exercitia spiritualia, Rules for the Discernment of Spirits, n. 318.

Teresa of Ávila, Libro de la Vida, chs 8–9.

Other Works Cited

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Letters and Papers from Prison (London: SCM Press, 1953).

Posselt, Teresia Renata, Edith Stein: The Life of a Philosopher and Carmelite.

Russell, Willy, Educating Rita (play, 1980); Gilbert, Lewis (dir.), Educating Rita (film, 1983).

Thompson, Francis, The Hound of Heaven, in Poems (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893).