The Golden String

I give you the end of a golden string; 

 Only wind it into a ball, 

It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, 

 Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

 This poem, from the artist and author William Blake, has been on my mind the past few days, since coming across it in a book called Conversion:  The Spiritual Journey of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim by Malcolm Muggeridge.    I am reading the book slowly; it is not really a narrative autobiography, but more like a series of reflections on different stages of his life with the golden string metaphor uniting them.   And it's worth reading just for the quotes, from Blake, Simone Weil and many others.

It occurred to me, though I'll have to keep thinking about it to see where the analogy falls down, that there's a sense in which the golden string applies to the progress of the Catholic Church.  To make it apply, you would have to think of the Church as what Vatican II called the "pilgrim Church", that is, the earthly but mystically oriented Church we experience on earth, sometimes awkward and stumbling because we are the Body and are not all we should be, but still in her identity glorious.   

Or perhaps in terms of a kind of fairy story -- the princess that follows a string, in George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (given to her by her wise and beautiful great-great-grandmother, if I remember correctly, to lead the princess back to her).   She is daunted when it seems to lead into a wall, but then starts pulling away stones and receives help from a friend.  And so it goes, into the very lair of the goblin king and queen, and beyond.

Of course, there is another sense in which the Church IS Jerusalem, the heavenly city, the destination.  So there is where the analogy does not entirely avail.

But the golden string seems to apply whenever I think of the history of the Church since the earliest days, since the Acts of the Apostles, or even before if you consider the proto-Church in the Old Testament.   So many false starts and stops.  So many obstacles, false guides falling away, truth revealing itself.    In today's Office of Readings, Pope St Clement is quoted from his Letter to the Corinthians:

  Pick up the letter of blessed Paul the apostle. What did he write to you at the beginning of his ministry? Even then you had developed factions. So Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, wrote to you concerning himself and Cephas and Apollos. But that division involved you in less sin because you were supporting apostles of high reputation and a person approved by them.

So even back then,  in the 1st century, Clement was looking back to still earlier times when there was strife and false teachers.    I am currently reading the Petrine Epistles and it is a theme there too.

In The Princess and the Goblin, the invisible thread leads the princess through walls and right to the lair of the goblins, but also beyond them and to safety.

This is one of the strongest reasons for my own conversion -- I followed, though imperfectly, this seeming string that leads through all the multiverses where things could have gone so badly wrong, throughout 2 millenia and more.  In fact, they do go wrong, and they keep going wrong, yet as the Savior showed on the Cross, the very wrongness is overset and becomes the key for victory.