Amazing Maisie Ward

 Out of curiosity more than anything else, I picked up a  slim paperback, a used book from a pile of  discards offered by the seminary library. What attracted my eye was the author, F.J. Sheed, a writer who had nourished me in my seminary years and early priesthood.  To my joy, I discovered I had a gem in my hands, a book of his I had not known about. In it, Sheed was writing about the human heart, based on his life experiences, and the wisdom he had gained from his wife and soul-mate, Maisie, who was quite an author in her own right.

What follows are statements by Maisie as quoted by Frank. (There are many more delightful observations in the little volume than the few quoted here.)   

I love her summation and critique of Modernism. Maisie defined Modernism as the belief that "dogmas are not the statement of truths revealed by God but expressions of the religious mind at the stage to which religious experience has brought it; the value of dogmas is measured not by the religious truth of what they tell us about God, but by the adequacy with which (for the time being and personally) they express our own religious consciousness." Neat way to reduce religion to psychological awareness, no? Thank you,  Modernism!

Writing about St. Catherine of Sienna and the scandal caused by high placed clerics, Maisie commented: "Too much awareness of the defects of Catholics (especially Catholics in high places) tends with most of us to dim our realization of Christ working mightily through his Church....But with Catherine, the appalling evils in the lives of so many ecclesiastics seemed only to highlight her vision of the glorious things they were profaning." Wow! Wish I could do that too! Focus on the glorious things that are profaned, and not get lost in the pure negativity of criticizing the profaners.

Maisie spent much time and effort into she preaching outdoors on a soapbox to the public in Hyde Park. She saw the outdoor work as a small part of "the Church's effort to get loose from the civilization that is passing away and to insert herself as a living ferment into that new civilization which is in danger of being swallowed up by paganism." Sounds like she understood what we today call the New Evangelization.

Here she explains why she prefers to do evangelizing, preaching, and teaching the Faith,  instead of engaging in defensive Apologetics: "Like Newman I feel that the presenting of Christianity, indeed of God himself, is far more vital than argument with one's fellow Christians." She believed we should: "offer the object of faith as a reality the mind can seize, not merely as the conclusion of a rational process." Let the Faith in all its glory challenge and measure us, instead of reducing it to nice sounding cliches and ideologies.

Here's how Maisie tackled the argument that the Resurrection is merely inventing a myth out of the cycle of the seasons wherein the death of winter is followed by the spring of life: "If God has indeed created the world through his Word, if the coming of the Word into the world is the central event of its history, what more likely than that the seasons are modeled after the pattern of his life." Open us to the Crucifixion and Resurrection instead of reducing Mystery to myth.

Maisie was well aware of the great contribution converts bring to a Church filled with semiconscious Catholics: "Most of us hear the answers before we have asked the questions. It is nearly impossible to see the answer to a question you have never formulated, and without the sense of urgency that an insistent question brings, most people do not even try." Maybe that's why a lot of us cradle Catholics are so unaware of the riches our Faith offers? We didn't wrestle with the questions Life forces people to ask themselves before they believe. We believed as a way of avoiding the questions, and the wrestling.

Explaining why she wrote the book Young Mr. Newman, a study of the Cardinal's life up to his conversion. she said: "No man knows the whole truth about himself- especially a man with a life long habit of self examination! He had been too busy counting the trees to get a clear idea of the wood." Introspection alone can produce only more self absorption. It's Grace  that got Newman beyond himself and into contemplation. The same is true of us too, of course.

I think her comments on GKC are marvels of insight: Her husband tells us she regarded Chesterton as a mystic who was not an an ascetic in the normal sense of the word, but whose writing performed the spiritual discipline that his physical life style lacked:

1. "But is there not for the thinker an asceticism of the mind, very searching, very purifying...that sense of the pressure of thought which Newman called 'getting rid of pain by pain';  the profound depression that often follows; the exhaustion that seems like a bottomless pit...Faith, thanksgiving, love, surely these far above bodily asceticism can so clear a man's eyesight that he may fittingly be called a mystic since he sees God everywhere." I think so. I think GKS saw everything so oddly and uniquely, because he saw it as it really was, in relation to God and not to himself. And that is the very thing that surprises me when I read him, because I am used to seeing everything in relation to myself. So naturally, I find his perspective refreshingly different when it really is normal.

 On the agony and ecstasy GKS found in writing:

2. "It was his lifelong beatitude to observe, wonder and conclude... and ""Intense vitality, joy in living, vigor of creative writing, bring to bear on their owners immense happiness and acute suffering...the reaching upward and upward of the mind is at once the keenest joy and the fiercest pain."...."The deepest pain in writing means thought struggling to break out. But it is better than numbness." I never came across anyone who said that before: asceticism through art: creative writing as purgative and painful, as well as contemplative and joyful. 

On GKS's ability to recognize the incongruency of the comical with the ugliness and horror that exists in evil:

3."There is in diabolical wickedness an element of the farcical."

She saw a paradox in CKS' just anger at the greedy rich, because he failed to recognize the small-mindedness of their greed. Maisie doubted that Chesterton... 4..."understood the degree of stupidity required to amass a fortune. He would have agreed that the love of money narrowed the mind: I doubt that he fully grasped that only a mind already narrow can love money so exclusively as to possess it exclusively." That's more Chestertonian than Chesterton!

Regarding God not as a distant Creator, but intimate Sustainer of even the smallest grain of sand: 

 a."There is no reality without God, who has put into creation whatever reality it possesses."

On God who calls us to co-create his kingdom: 

b. "...creation is at work everywhere on a large scale occasionally, but more significantly in small scale achievements by the hundred, by the thousand. I have found it in small groups who are building a new world".

The Instructed Heart, by F.J.Sheed,  pp. 20 - 33  published by  Our Sunday Visitor, 1979