Noonan on JP II

About half-way through John Paul the Great, Peggy Noonan’s book about her personal ruminations on and experiences with the greatest man of the twentieth century. Since I’m not done and haven’t even begun to digest some of the truly remarkable observations I’ve come across, allow me to simply quote Noonan’s words. Please do yourself the favor and read through these slowly …

“So many times in so many ways over the past twenty-five years I could go back and forth. I would follow the implications of my interior knowledge and embrace belief, and read great classics of religious thought, reach out to those who, it seemed to me, were more knowledgeable, more highly evolved. I would go to church and pay attention. I liked being there. And then I would step back, and stop, and become immersed again in the stupid and alluring world of No Belief. The French in another context call this ‘the nostalgia for the mud.’ They mean a bourgeois romanticization of impoverishment, which is to say they mean it to some degree in economic terms. But I mean it in spiritual terms. Every time I recognized the truth and lived it, I was happy, and when I did not, I was not. And yet I always returned to not-happy, as if that were … warm and happy mud.”

***

“I think finally coming to believe in Christ is like getting well after an illness: You can’t say at exactly what point the recovery commenced, but you know when you’re getting better and stronger, and at the end you know when you’ve recovered.”

***

“My eyes filled with tears. The pope proceeded down the line. As he came closer, I tried to think of what to say. Of all he meant to me. But it was too exciting. There is no right thing to say when you meet a saint in the flesh, when you meet a giant who wants to shake your hand and keep going. And suddenly he was inches from me, to my left. I just wanted to touch him. He came closer and his frozen face was before me. One eye bigger than the other, and tearing. I touched his left hand with my hands. When later I thought of his face, I would think of the scene near the end of the Tom Hanks movie Castaway in which he is floating on his raft at sea, and a giant whale rises from the deep and looks at him with an ancient eye.”

Hey – I remember little of that movie, but that scene has always stayed with me!

***

“I still have the picture of our meeting. I never saw anyone take it and was surprised to receive it in the mail from the cardinal’s office. I look happy, transported. John Paul looks serious.”

***

One of my fervent desires in this life is to meet someone like John Paul II, and be inspired and motivated and … transported, I suppose … willing to do all for Him, at 110 percent instead of the normal 5 or 7 percent that I churn out on autopilot.