Do You Want to be Happy for the Rest of Your Life? There's a Way!

Owen Francis Dudley

I've been re-reading Owen Francis Dudley's series on the Masterful Monk which is recommended by Fr. John Hardon in his Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan. Dudley was an Anglican priest who converted to the Catholic Church in 1915 and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1917. Like Anselm Thornton, who became the Masterful Monk of the series, but was a doctor, he served in the British Army (as a chaplain) during World War I and, again like Thornton, was wounded. 

Dudley's series addresses the problem of human happiness. It explores the meaning of suffering and exposes the moral quandary after the war when many rejected the belief that a good God could allow the horrors of trench warfare, poisoned gas, etc. that marked that horrible waste of human life.

The first book, Will Men be Like Gods, is a non-fiction work that sets the stage for the five novels that follow. Dudley frames it as reply to H.G. Wells' utopian novel, Men Like Gods. Wells, whose philosophy was addressed by G.K. Chesterton in Heretics, was an atheist who believed God could be replaced by "Humanity." Men, he believed, could be motivated by an altruistic sense of love for humanity, based on nothing but man's own goodness. No God needed! 

Now there are, in fact, atheists who rise to the supreme level of self sacrifice for others. During the Spring of Life baby rescue in Buffalo I was in jail with one, the only one I might add among the 120 or so women incarcerated. She loved the unborn and had a mother's heart despite not believing in God. But anyone with eyes to see realizes people like her are few and far between. And, in fact, one is more likely to find them in novels (like Sydney Carton in Tale of Two Cities) than in real life. 

I highly recommend Dudley and believe his books are appropriate for Lenten reflection. He presents compellingly the case for the Catholic Church and the absolute necessity of supernatural grace to aid man in living a good and moral life. His refuation of materialism and humanitarianism reflects his hero's "masterful" reasoning. Man's natural state, after original sin, is selfishness; it's only supernatural grace won through the redemptive passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ that can transform him into a saint.

Interestingly, G.K. Chesterton wrote an introduction to Will Men Be Like Gods, first published in 1924, two years after Chesterton himself converted to the Catholic Church. One of the points Chesterton makes is that it's easier to embrace a vague "humanity" than individuals. As he puts it: "It is more possible to love men indirectly than directly." He expresses this thought in his own inimitable and amusing style;

Few are fired with a direct individual affection for the five people sitting on the other side of a railway-carriage; let us say a wealthy matron, given to snorting and sneering, a bright little Jew stockbroker, a large and vacant farmer, a pale and weary youth with a limp cigarette and a young woman perpetually powdering her nose. All these are sacred beings of equal value in the sight of God with the souls of Hildebrand and Shakespeare; but a man needs to be a little of a mystic to think so; or even to feel anything like it. In a vacuum of absolute agnosticiam, in an utterly dry light of detached objectivity and positive knowledge, it is questionable whether he would feel it at all....In the right mood he can still see a halo round humanity, because he still half-believes that humanity is half-divine....That the halo will in any case shine out of the interior of the fat farmer, by itself, and be visible to anybody anywhere, has never been scientifically demonstrated.

We all want to be happy. Some chase after it with untiring zeal in all the wrong places. The fact is however, that one only needs to stop, like the man pursued by the Hound of Heaven and take the hand of God our loving Father who made us for Himself and wants as His own:

'Rise, clasp My hand, and come!’

Halts by me that footfall:

Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?

‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He Whom thou seekest!

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’

And in driving God away; one drives away any hope of happiness!

One final thought: How can you possibly go wrong with a series recommended by Fr. John Hardon, S.J. and G. K. Chesterton?