After all, it is the Church’s position that all things in creation are good. So that, for her to regard reason (which is of creation) as anything but good, would be to contradict what she has already recognized as fundamental.

And one need look no further than the Church’s encyclicals and her catechesis (where all her principles reside) to discover that it is a fact.

Of course, there is no shortage of instances in history where the ignorance and failure of men has made this truth seem otherwise. But there are far more instances where that truth is evidenced, and made apparent.

The truth is that the Church is profoundly rational, delights in logic, has laid the foundations for much of philosophy and science, and has contributed to what was once (though perhaps no longer is) the flourishing of higher education in the West.

Because here is another thing of which people are often unaware, or about which they are misinformed. Rationality, or ‘reason’, has always been regarded by the Church as a gift that contributes to our comprehension of reality and of God (to the extent that any comprehension of God is possible). Even if, at times, those who represent the Church have failed to recognize the workings of that gift, or have seemed not to have prized and advanced those workings.

It is to say, rather, that rationality ought not be the only basis for the organizing of one’s faculties and perceptions, though it may at times be the primary basis.

Which isn’t to say that one abandons rationality, or that one remains gullible, as a child can be gullible.

So that one must retain, into adulthood, if one is to be religious in any meaningful sense, something of the artlessness and naivete that are associated with childhood.

Of course, a person must remain childish, to an extent, to be genuinely religious. That is, the ‘sophistication’ of adulthood often involves a falseness which spirituality cannot abide.

Best illustrated by the attitude one often finds in people who wish to dismiss religion as ‘childish’ or irrational.

Only, what it thinks of as an understanding is really a wrong impression (deliberately or mistakenly held).

Which isn’t to say it doesn’t think it has an understanding. To the contrary, it is certain that it does.

And it doesn’t care about God because it has no understanding of who or what God is.

Of course, the age we live in doesn’t care about the ‘transcendental’, because it doesn’t care about God.

It is also why, I suppose, one can never, in this life, ‘possess’ the transcendental, or in some other way ‘attain’ it, but can only, at best, hope to move with it, or abide with it, through time, in a kind of wakefulness that might be similar to what the Japanese call satori.

This is because reality, though unchanging in substance, is always changing in arrangement and manifestation. So that the fabric of our existence never ceases to present us with new scenarios by which we either, through virtue, conform ourselves to the ‘transcendental’, or, through sin, do not.

Meaning, the process of conforming ourself to the ‘transcendental’ (and not to the shape of our own desires, and our own ego) does not end, but proceeds through time, from moment to moment.

Although, to speak of this conforming as if it were an occasional thing, rather than a process that is ever-present, and ongoing, is to misapprehend it.

Of course, I’m an ordinary person myself, and not infrequently I fail to conform to the responses I know are within my capacity to conform to, while conscious of the ‘transcendentals’ that should precipitate those very responses.

The ordinary person might recognize a ‘transcendental’ for what it is, and, in some instances, when they are at their best, might even conform themself to it, but, in the mundanity of life, when they are having a bad day, are feeling uninspired, and cannot gather to themself the will to defy their own inertia (which is how the habit of sin is maintained), such a person would rather flee from a transcendental, or turn their gaze from it, and pretend not to see it, than conform themself to whatever response its configuration invites.