Ghosts from the Past
I was reading a blog today that said that most American Catholics are "Calvinists who drink alcohol", which is a memorable turn of phrase with the added benefit of probably being true.
My own experience would suggest it. Before my re-conversion in the late '90s I was, above all, independent -- which is not exactly the Catholic spirit. Emerson and Thoreau were as guiding lights, or at least they were the guiding lights behind some of my guiding lights. If anything I was a Pelagian Calvinist with Norman Vincent Peale as my mentor. The vacuum of Catholic leadership at the time led me to go elsewhere and much of what Peale said seemed to fit well with my native individualism anyway.
I think I read Robert Ringer's Looking Out for Number One without a prick of conscience. In fact I savored it. I now recall little of it though something that did make an impact was that if you work hard you'll succeed because hardly anyone works hard - their laziness is all to your benefit. It was a motivational book that was far more philosophical than it might sound from the title and it was at least startlingly honest. Ringer had that authoritarian ring I was apparently seeking and had about him the scent of a wise guru (his symbol/avatar was a tortoise).
Back then Billy Joel had a hit song Honesty and I didn't experience too much of it in the Church, or at least any explanation for her rules and doctrines, until John Paul II's remarkable Crossing the Threshold of Hope. It's hard to describe how revolutionary that felt at the time. Soon after I happened across someone named Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, who was the most honest person I'd ever read in my whole (very limited, though I did not know that) Catholic ouevre. He had a stunning impact and the trick now is to keep that zeal of conversion. I recall a letter John Henry Newman wrote to a recent convert that said something like the real test would come after the initial enthusiasm abated.
Life's probably too short to go back and read the books that had an influence in your youth but it would be interesting to try and even more interesting to see what the authors are doing today - to see if they had any ephiphanies in the meantime. That's something the Internet makes possible since everybody and their brother has a website. A cursory Google reveals Ringer's in the e-letter business.
Another book that had influence was Dr. Wayne Dyer's Your Erroneous Zones, which I read at an age so tender that I couldn't spell, nor maybe even discern the meaning of, "erroneous". Part of the problem with being precocious is that few are precocious in discernment - which is ultimately the only kind of precociousness that matters. It's not so much being able to understand a text that matters but being able to sort dreck from gold. To choose. Dyer's book is probably not dreck, though again I should like to re-read it so that I know what a younger self was reading. More likely it was in the spirit of the time (the '70s), from which I think it's safe to say not a whole lot of good fruit emerged.
What is common about the seemingly dissimilar Ringer, Dyer & Peale? All focus on personal action. You can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it. God and other people are periphereal; props on the stage of Your Life. That is poisonous and I could wish that I was a little less precocious, or at least be precocious in the form of reading St. Augustine. For this reason, I have much sympathy for Calvinist Catholics. You really can't hold someone responsible for what they don't know or for inadequate formation.
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