Today is the birthday of the finest Catholic writer of the modern era, James Joyce. Below is the famous epiphany scence from Joyce’s semi-autobigraphical novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (you can find the whole thing here). I like this novel a lot, and a lot of Catholics find the story of Joyce’s rejection of his faith deeply affirming, ironically, of their own faith. Joyce is rejecting a stern sort-of Catholicism with rigid rules and a deep, deep rootedness in guilt. This is not exactly the kind of religion that I think of as mine, and what I think Stephen discovers in this epiphany is not the reason to be atheist but an actual connection to the transcendent:

–Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His
cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On
and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly
to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the
holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had
leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate
life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal
youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open
before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error
and glory. On and on and on and on!