The House Where It All Began

If the whole point of doing theology is to conduct reasoned discourse about God, whose mysteries defy all human efforts to master, how then does one measure success? By what criteria are we to know the job is done, that the market on the meaning of God, both who He is and what He’s done, has been, as it were, finally cornered? The answer is by faith, there being no other dynamism to drive a discipline dependent on data drawn from God Himself. That is, Divine Revelation, without which, to quote a wise and holy monk named Anselm of Canterbury, there can be no understanding.   

And what is it that this faith is being asked to understand? Well, among other things, the fact of an infinite God becoming a finite man, a virgin becoming a mother, a helpless child born into the world He made.

Call it the Divine Paradox, of which the following anonymous poem from the fifteenth century provides vivid and striking expression:

A God and yet a man?
A maid and yet a mother?
Wit wonders that wit can
Conceive this or the other.
A God, and can he die?
A dead man, can he live?
What wit can well reply?
What reason reason give?
God, truth itself, does teach it;
Man’s wit sinks too far under
By reason’s power to reach it.
Believe and leave to wonder.

Oh, yes, and while on the subject of such “impossible things that are,” what are we to make of a house carried by angels from one place to another more than seven centuries ago, an event alleged to have happened on December 10, 1294, which we now celebrate as the Feast of Our Lady of Loreto?

Do we even believe it? I mean, are we really expected to credit a claim so patently preposterous? By the standards of modern science, surely not. 

Isaac Newton, for instance, would have laughed such a conceit to scorn. “A fellow who,” as the essayist Charles Lamb once put it, “believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle.” And because of so impoverished an imagination, the poet Keats would complain that it was he, that awful man Newton, who quite ruined the rainbow, having reduced it all to a prism. “Cold philosophy,” Keats called it in his poem “Lamia,” and lamented how in the exercise of its power it managed to “unweave the rainbow.”

So, where would that leave the House of Loreto?  

Just where the Muslims left it, presumably, having first destroyed the basilica surrounding it back in 1260, while allowing the Franciscans to maintain the house itself. The trouble with that analysis, however, is that it fails to account for the stark staring fact that there is no longer any evidence of there being such a house at all in a place called Nazareth. But there is such a house many hundreds of miles away in a place called Loreto, located along the Adriatic Coast of Italy, some four hours by train from Rome. The mortar and stone of the house cannot be found anywhere in Italy; nor are there any fissures in the wall to suggest that the whole thing had been dismantled by others and then painstakingly reassembled on another continent.   

Apart from the supernatural, there is no explanation for it at all. And, of course, anyone can see it anytime they wish. In fact, it sits just inside a huge basilica that enshrines it in a marble frame measuring thirty-one-by-thirteen feet. Hardly a palace by anyone’s reckoning. Apart from the supernatural, there is no explanation for it at all. And, of course, anyone can see it anytime they wish. In fact, it sits just inside a huge basilica that enshrines it in a marble frame measuring thirty-one-by-thirteen feet.Tweet This

Yet it remains, inarguably, the most revered relic in all of Christendom. 

Why is that? Because, according to Catholic belief, it is precisely the place where it all began—namely, the Incarnation of God Himself. Owing to an assent given by a young girl named Mary to allow the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity to assume flesh in her virginal womb, God entered the world in no other place than Mary’s home in Nazareth in order to redeem a fallen human race. A home to which, following the flight into Egypt, she, Joseph, and the Child will return for the next thirty some years.

Still skeptical?  

Then what about the sheer number of canonized saints who have journeyed there to experience the closeness of God and His Blessed Mother? St. Therese of Lisieux, for instance, tells us in her Story of a Soul, 

How deeply I was moved to share the same roof, as it were, with the Holy Family. On these walls our divine Redeemer had gazed; on this ground the sweat had fallen from Joseph’s brow, here Mary had carried, in and out, the Child of her virginal womb. To have seen the little room in which the angel greeted her, to have put down my rosary-beads for a moment in the bowl from which the Child Jesus had eaten—those are things you can’t remember without a thrill.

It was there, on ground no more hallowed than which may be found anywhere else on earth, that she and her sister Celine were given Holy Communion, “a blessing straight from heaven,” she tells us, for which she could find no words equal to all that she felt. “It was a foretaste of that moment when we shall be made one with our Lord in that other, eternal dwelling-place of his; when our joy will be unending…because his home will be our home for all eternity.”

It was said of Henry James that he had a mind, a sensibility, so fine that no mere idea could ever violate it. Which, if true, suggests that he could easily have entertained the idea of angels transporting a house across the sea. And why must we regard him as in any way unique in this matter? Such a great many ideas there are already swirling about, the acceptance of which we do not in the least view as acts of violence upon our minds or sensibilities. Not a few of which are far stranger than the House of Loreto.

In less than a week, for example, my wife and I will find ourselves strapped into a couple of seats within a steel capsule designed to catapult us across two thousand or more miles of empty sky. Why, the very idea of air travel amounts to an affront to both mind and sensibility. Mine at least. But I shall make no complaint. I shall welcome it, in fact, knowing that for all the shock it represents to my system, it will, please God, bring us safely to those we love for Christmas.