Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Christianity LS

Here's a picture of the roof console of my Chevy Uplander van, which has the LS trim. LS is the lowest of the General Motors trim designations, behind LT and LTZ. That means any GM vehicle with an LS after its name is without the bells and whistles that come automatically with the more expensive trims.


None of those buttons do anything. The blank placeholders indicate that I've got no rear power window vents, no built-in DVD player, no parking sensor, no heated seats. The very presence of the empty spaces is evidence that I'm missing something.

For the Protestant portion of my life, this was Christianity for me. But I didn't have the luxury of seeing a visual display of what "features" I was missing. Then one day I sat in somebody else's Christi-van-ity (just... just roll with it) and saw all these extras on the console like the Eucharist, the profound definition of a sacrament, the beauty of the liturgy, the Apostolic Succession and the See of Peter, the vivid and simple logic of the Eve-Mary parallel, even literal bells (but no whistles, although sometimes clackers during Lent). Yet despite all these extras, I was still in the same type of salvific vehicle.

I then returned to my own Christianity LS and realized what I was lacking. I couldn't stand it; I needed those upgrades like I needed air. I could not have been fulfilled as a Protestant Christian any longer.

Chesterton had a similar experience, and I've quoted this from him before"When a man really sees the Church, even if he dislikes what he sees, he does not see what he had expected to dislike. Even if he wants to slay it he is no longer able to slander it; though he hates it at sight, what he sees is not what he looked to see; in that place he may gain a new passion but he loses his old prejudice. There drops from him the holy armour of his invincible ignorance; he can never be so stupid again."

I had been raising thinking Catholics generally were not heaven-bound. We even had a bit of a backhanded compliment about this notion: "Sure, Catholics can be Christians too, if they accept Jesus as the Lord and Saviour." And yet here I realized that not only were they on the right road and knew it better than I did. They were also travelling in style.

If you're reading this as a Protestant, have you ever seriously considered what you might be missing?