The title line is from Peter Kreeft’s conversion story Hauled
Aboard the Ark. The following is an excerpt from this article:
Perhaps, I thought, these good Protestant people could
worship like angels, but I could not. Then I realized that they couldn’t either.
Their ears were using crutches but not their eyes. They used beautiful hymns,
for which I would gladly exchange the new, flat, unmusical, wimpy “liturgical
responses” no one sings in our masses�their audible imagery is their crutch. I
think that in Heaven, Protestants will teach Catholics to sing and Catholics
will teach Protestants to dance and sculpt.
…Then one summer, on the beach at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, I
read St. John of the Cross. I did not understand much of it, but I knew, with
undeniable certainty, that here was reality, something as massive and positive
as a mountain range. I felt as if I had just come out of a small, comfortable
cave, in which I had lived all my life, and found that there was an unsuspected
world outside of incredible dimensions. Above all, the dimensions were those of
holiness, goodness, purity of heart, obedience to the first and greatest
commandment, willing God’s will, the one absolute I had discovered, at the age
of eight. I was very far from saintly, but that did not prevent me from
fascinated admiration from afar; the valley dweller appreciates the height of
the mountain more than the dweller on the foothills. I read other Catholic
saints and mystics, and discovered the same reality there, however different the
style (even St. Th�r�se “The Little Flower”!) I felt sure it was the same
reality I had learned to love from my parents and teachers, only a far deeper
version of it. It did not seem alien and other. It was not another religion but
the adult version of my own.
