Unavailable People

Some recent events have left me pondering why people believe what they do. As I’ve gotten older, the connection between the head and the heart, and the intellect and the character, has only gotten more mysterious to me.

People are more opaque, more unavailable, than I once thought. The young tend to be masters of psychology who can trace with certainty the causes for someone else’s actions. They know which arguments are so clear that the person who disagrees can only be willfully rejecting the truth. The young, in this case, don’t know beans.

I think there are good arguments to be made for the Catholic Church, for example, but they are not arguments that can necessarily convince even the well-intended, if that person does not see or feel certain prior truths. The Baptist can be sincerely a Baptist without being in conscious rebellion against the Church.

All of which makes me even more glad to have gotten in, when better men than I haven’t. But my Baptist brother would say he was glad to have been delivered, when better men than he hadn’t. That’s the basis, or one of the bases, for charity between two people divided in their fundamental commitments. You don’t know why he’s wrong and you’re right, and equally he doesn’t know why you’re wrong and he’s right, but it’s probably to do with grace and not works, lest any man should boast.