Mr. Payne,
His silence is not a lack of response; his silence is the response. Even though the Grand Inquisitor suffers it; even though we suffer it. How else to still us? If the idiom of the interior life of God is unspeakable, what truer communicatio idiomatum could there be? You suffer like a Caravaggio so you want a Caravaggian Christ, but what if God paints icons?
As for your other point: I had a professor in seminary who used to say that purgatory did not exist until Protestantism. Before the Reformation, every soul had someone performing penance for it, applying the merits of Christ; it was only the denial that anyone was in purgatory that put a stop to it and so stranded souls there. So also hell: it is an exaggeration, but an exaggerated truth, to say that the only reason hell is populated is because people think it is empty. To take it seriously is to avoid it; to take it seriously is to foreclose it for others by your prayers. Purgatory in that sense is a creation of the Protestants, and hell of the universalists. Those who first counsel God’s mercy experience his judgment; those who first counsel his judgment experience his mercy.
We are downstream of so many heresies about these things that you cannot trust your instincts. Hell is real. Purgatory is real. Each is a paradigm of how to hold suffering—as a criminal or as a Christian, as our old ship captain said—and your only choice is between them. “We only live, only suspire / Consumed by either fire or fire.”
In this world of wasted silence, wasted solitude, wasted celibacy, do not waste your suffering.
Ms. Bushra,
I must say, your note took me completely by surprise. I cannot apologize for it, because I am not contrite. But it was also not my idea—if Fatima is interested in Christianity, it must be because of things Felicity has said, and only secondarily perhaps because of what she has seen in this house.
If Felicity is old enough to preach, it seems to me that Fatima is old enough to hear preaching. If you want her to be able to choose for herself, then you cannot complain that she is exploring the options. This does not, then, border on a kind of spiritual statutory rape, as you so delicately put it. You are right that we do baptize infants, but only with their parents consent—only with their own consent, when they are of age. From this indeed was born the behemoth of freedom, long since grown monstrous, and we welcome still its monstrosity, in some moods; only we are able to find that freedom in more than just the individual, we are able to see it in whole traditions.
At any event, as innocent as you say Fatima is, that innocence is not necessarily a mark of immaturity, of an impaired freedom. Indeed it may be the opposite, a mark of emancipation. For us, you must know, the freest choice of all came from a first-century Jewish girl, who in amaranthine youth and adamantine habit gave our fiat to the new creation.