Word: burtons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pear trees, and the bees are buzzing from one glorious daffodil to another. It is early March, the middle of Lent, and Catholics all over the world are immersed in contemplation and penance over the passion and suffering of Christ. But just outside the chapel where David Burton is teaching a class for new Catholic initiates, on the green grounds of the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Nashville, Tennessee, the season seems intent on fast-forwarding beyond late winter and penance right into renewal--to Easter, perhaps. Or perhaps to something even more glorious...
...Burton likes to think about heaven. He might even be said to revel in it. Oddly enough, he has had to struggle to think about it or at least to find fellow believers and pastors whom his thoughts don't embarrass. And more oddly still, his struggle is not unique. It began about 14 years ago, when Burton, then attending the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, converted from his childhood Southern Baptist faith to Catholicism. For the most part, the switch suited him fine. The Baptists were a little too easygoing for him; he preferred the Catholic view that...
...Kreeft complains that even if our basic belief has not wavered, "our sense of beauty, glory, wonder, awe, magnificence, triumph has shrunk" into something "joyless." Marked by an apparent combination of lay ignorance and pastoral skittishness, the minimization of paradise not only creates problems for heaven-hungry believers like Burton; it also suggests the marginalization of one of Western civilization's greatest ideas...
Amen to that. David Burton, however, has managed to find a church that is not waiting for a funeral service to talk to him about that which touches his soul. When he moved to Nashville five years ago, he found Fathers William Fleming and Patrick Kibby of the Cathedral of the Incarnation. Burton says they were not only willing to state in their homilies that heaven is the appropriate reward for a life of faith and work. They were, in fact, "always reminding us that this life is not all there is. We're being called to something much greater...
That was all Burton needed to hear. There is a cheerful babble today as his Catholic ritual class, having completed an earnest discussion on the intricacies of Lenten observance, joins the rest of the congregation for coffee and doughnuts. A woman comes up to Burton carrying a beautiful, cruller-smeared little girl in her arms and tells a visitor how much help, both spiritual and practical, Burton gave her in adopting a Chinese child. He is embarrassed but obviously pleased. The present and the future both look pretty good. "The important thing," he says, "is I know what...