Catholics Called to Change or Not?

Readings for Today
In homilies and retreats, we sometimes hear that we are already perfect, that God is already pleased with us, and likes us just as we are. Perhaps these speakers grew up watching Fred Rogers on television, but we are no longer small children in need of comfort only, but adults in need of both sustenance and growth. Certainly, God may be pleased with some of us, as we are pleased when we pass a familiar point on the road that indicates we are getting closer to home. But some of us are on the right road, and some are not. To those on the right road, the Scriptures say "beware of corruption, stay on the road." To those off the road, "get on the road before it is too late." To tell people they are fine, as a blanket statement to a thousand at once, is to call Christ a liar. The argument might be that our perfection was achieved by the cross and resurrection, and we no longer need to hear warnings and correction, but this is not Catholic, and it is not human. We are not yet complete and humans change constantly: we call it aging. We grow complacent at times and need to wake up; we go astray at times and need correction. Jesus gives us a wake-up call and our leaders hit the snooze button.
At the same time, God does love us just as we are, because He loves us -- period. This love provides defense against discouragement, comfort when we fail, and incentive to rise up to try again. Some voices claim this love means we have no reason to exert ourselves, and there is no heroic effort to be made, yet when we read about the Saints we see heroic effort, and past writers have told us that to live an ordinary life well takes extraordinary effort. Perhaps this is why we read about the disciples falling asleep while Jesus prayed? And perhaps Samuel Beckett was thinking of this when he wrote Waiting for Godot:


Vladimir:
Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?
(Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir looks at him.) He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. (Pause.) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.
Let us not sleep on, but awake and begin the work of growth and change, starting with ourselves.

Catholic Marriage Teachings Too Hard

Readings for Today
Look at the alternate reading from Ephesians today and you will see that the part about wives being submissive to their husbands can (and probably will) be omitted. As the omitted verses are not long, it appears to have been removed from the scripture to avoid offending women. Ironically, the gospel reading begins with "many of Jesus’disciples who were listening said,'This saying is hard; who can accept it?'” There is a serious concern when the readings are censored to avoid offense, and even more serious when a group in the Church is exempted from hearing a hard saying of Paul's.
But is submission a bad thing, and what does it mean? Paul was not redefining marriage, but showing us what it was intended to be all along: a Sacrament, a sign of Christ's love for the Church. The fullest meaning of marriage only became evident after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, which is why it is a Sacrament and why a priest or deacon presides. Recently, we had to attend a class given by the bishop's representative, and when she talked about marriage we were asked "what is the outward sign of the sacrament of matrimony?" Of course, the answer came back "the married life, lived in unity and love." And the sister teaching the class said, "No, it is the rings and candles." This is entirely wrong, but it shows the level of confusion in the Church.
Paul reminds us, or would if we would let him, that the wife is submissive to show what our attitude to Christ should be. C.S. Lewis likens marriage to a play about God and His people, and Hosea did the same. Submission is not saying the wife is less than the husband, but that she contributes to the sacrament by playing the role of the Church, and the husband plays the role of Christ. For modern people, who have long since rejected the idea of being submissive to Christ, uxorial submission is a silly, outdated notion. Marriage is seen as a contractual arrangement, not really necessary, a piece of paper, but also a way to legitimize sex. Dorothy L. Sayers said that marriage used to support the State by ensuring the smooth transition of capital, and this is true. She also said that when the State no longer required it, the support would vanish, and she has been proven right. Perhaps the leaders of the Church are no longer interested in supporting marriage, and so they teach it is all about rings and candles, and not about being living sacraments.
The concerns about bad marriages where the husband is domineering and abusive are valid, but that is the opposite of what Paul writes. When a perfectly submissive wife is coupled with a perfectly loving husband, the acts of submission are few or zero, and perhaps this is the greatest lesson of all: that when we are perfectly submissive to Christ, we are not downtrodden or abused, but get everything we really want and more. The real irony is that the more we unite ourselves to the will of God, the more or own will is strengthened and the more we get what we really want.
It is too bad that lesson will be kept from the Catholics at Mass today where the alternate reading is used.

Readings for The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ

Readings for Today
The core beliefs of Catholicism, and indeed Christianity, are being abandoned in ever increasing numbers. Today's readings are about sacrifice and saving actions that make no sense to most people, even Catholics. The vision in the first reading of blood being sprinkled on the people is repulsive to most tastes and seems primitive. And it is. Some scientists and their promoters say that the human race must outgrow religion and embrace science as the replacement, and they have it partly right. Humanity must grow, and that implies a less-mature state in the past, in the same way that children must mature from a conceptus in the womb to adulthood. Diapers are messy but we accept this as appropriate at a certain stage. There is no stigma attached to having been an infant, yet we may regard early religious development as an embarrassment. From a time before history, God was calling us. From a time when we were little more than upright apes, He was calling and we responded the best we could, often as poorly as a child first responds to potty training. He called us to come away from the beasts and become an image of God, to embrace the spiritual and intellectual life, to put aside mere instinct and know virtue and love. Moses prepared the people for Jesus in a way they could barely understand, and lifted them higher than they had been before. It is like the steps in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where we must move from the basics of survival up to greater levels of living. Without the sprinkling of blood in the past, we could not make the leap to Holy Communion, where our senses see no blood, and only our intellect and spirit can understand it. The meaning is communicated in a new way, but we must respect the way we arrived here. Each of us started as a baby, but we must not ridicule babies now that we have grown.

The question is what is next along this line of growth. The Church teaches that the faith is complete and no new revelation is to be expected. In nearly 2,000 years, we have yet to rise to the level of the Gospel: the world is still full of violence and stupidity, and those in the Church are doing no better than the ones outside. There is room for much growth and maturity, and if we finally decide to live the Gospel, we can then ask God, "What is next?"

Sunday Readings - Sixth Sunday in Easter

Readings for Today

In all the homilies on this gospel reading, I cannot remember hearing any mention of the conditionals included. "If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love" and "You are my friends if you do what I command you." We get assurances that God is our friend, that He will put up with our abuse, just as any good friend does, and that He is a kindly, indulgent old man who just wants us to be happy. And the implication is that being wanton children is what will make us happy.
But these "ifs" remain. Is God's love inconstant? God's love for us stands steady, but we do not, and Jesus sees this. It says elsewhere that Jesus knew men's hearts, and "he needed no one to tell him about human nature." His love is constant, but we can and do wander out into the cold. We freely choose to not remain, to go our own way and congratulate ourselves on it. We expect God to accept our behavior even though we have these "ifs." This is consistent with other areas of human behavior: buying things we need not, with money we have not. Our desire for a thing overrides all sense, ignoring our lack of money, time, discipline, and even ignoring our experience, so that we make the same stupid mistakes repeatedly. We want the perceived benefits but are shocked to learn the price.
Quite possibly, we do not believe at all. The words of Jesus are full of promises, and perhaps we do not believe him. This would explain why we continue to go our own way and ignore the teachings of the Gospel, and comfort ourselves (with help from the clergy) that all is forgiven or that we are not all that bad. As a side note, it is not that forgiveness is not real, but it requires repentance. We justify ourselves and grant absolution to ourselves.
These "ifs" are a challenge. Can we see that a response is required, and that we cannot expect to live in a love that we have rejected?

Sunday Readings - Second Sunday in Easter

My son reported that his English teacher said last week that St. Thomas More, in the novel Utopia, espoused communism. Today's first reading might seem to support her, if we ignore the anachronism and confusion of communism with collectivism. "No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own."_{(Acts 4:32)} What More described fit well with this, but such a unique individual, and one so devoted to the person of Christ, could scarcely advocate the loss of individuality inherent in collectivism (or socialism, communism). The Catholic faith reconciles both collectivism (of a sort) and individuality, for we celebrate the diversity of the Saints who each expressed the same Faith in different ways, yet all were responding to the same call. This is not a Faith which requires the loss of self, but understands that as each individual approaches perfection, they become both more unique and more like Christ. It is a paradox, not a contradiction.
Is it possible to order a society along lines close to Acts 4? To paraphrase the Gospel, for us it is impossible, but not for God. The key is found in Acts 2:42, and details the response of the early community to the inrush of the Holy Spirit: "They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers." _{(Acts 2:42)}
This describes the right response to the gift of salvation and the Holy Spirit, and it is a requirement for the way of life known in the early Church. Without such devotion to truth and prayer, the communal life breaks down, and this can be found in the Hebrew Testament as well, forbidding sowing a field with two kinds of seed, plowing with ox and ass, or even cloth with two kinds of thread. _{(cf. Deut 22:9-11)} Unity is required for community to work, not a forced unity aimed toward social justice, but a unity of love for God that has social justice as an inevitable outcome. The byproducts of love are sustained only when the love is divine, and cannot be manufactured or forced on their own.
So what Luke describes today must be seen as the result of the early Church's response to Pentecost, made possible by God's love, giving the community the power to unite in faith, worship and prayer. Everything good we find in that community is a consequence, not an ideology pursued or forced.

Readings for today

For another view of this, see Donne's Meditation 17.

Sunday Readings - Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time

One thing I found interesting while studying to become Catholic was the idea that we are baptized as priest, prophet and king. Today's readings start with Jeremiah, whose attitude is repellent to modern ears. He sounds paranoid and vindictive, especially to those who have not read his story. Like Socrates two hundred years later, he gave an unwelcome message at a time of crisis, and suffered the same fate at the hands of the State.

We, too, are called to share in the prophetic office of Christ. Others have said rightly that we need not preach with words, but act in a way that proclaims the Good News; but the Good News is not viewed as good while the world or the country is in crisis. More than crisis, the world is still at war, with itself, with conflicting values and with God. Every murder, every terrorist act, even every unkind word bears witness to this ongoing conflict in which the world refuses to accept the better way, and continues to resist it because it is not forced.

In the Psalm, the verse about being an outcast and a stranger, even to one's own brothers, sisters or children, provides the basis for the Jesus' admonition that our enemies will be of our own household. A few days ago, I spoke with a landscaper who was disappointed that none of his three sons wanted to take over the business. The psalmist complains that his children do not share his love for the Lord, so that even family ties are of no help. Perhaps now more than any other time, the children have no interest in receiving the gift of faith from parents. No doubt this is the parents' fault in the majority of cases, but it is no less heartbreaking.

Jeremiah and Jesus, as well as Paul, offer hope. Even though others may fall away, or even set themselves against us, we will triumph. Jesus says, "Fear no one." God is watching over us. In the end, our relationship with God will not depend on what anyone else did or said. We are called to walk with the Master, and his path leads through suffering and death, but also resurrection.

Read the text here.

Statement of Purpose

Despite our nearly 30 years of gainful employment in computing, this is the first attempt at a blog, the intent of which is to hold the news of the day and selected personal experiences up to the Gospel and logic, and these are closer to the same than the atheist du jour or the tools of the zeitgeist would have us believe. This being our blog, we will make a few outrageous definitions here:
1) The Gospel, Christianity or similar terms refer to the teachings of Jesus as he intends. This means no one here has a perfect understanding of it, but we believe the closest is the teaching of the Catholic Church. Some qualifications must be made immediately. It does not mean the practices of the Church, including rules that can change, such as married priesthood. It does mean that we believe Jesus to be both True God and True Man. It also includes true Free Will, a resistance to determinism in all its forms, and the strongest affirmation of the primacy of Love, the definition of which will have to wait for a later post.
2) At the same time, we reject no one. Many non-Catholic Christians believe in and live the Gospel. Because protestants reject the notion of a central authority, we can scarcely say they are teaching wrong, and the label is not very useful. Instead, non-Catholic Christians are invited to question and explore points of Catholic teaching with which they agree or disagree, which they live or fail to live, what they find attractive or repulsive, easy or difficult. We reject no brother or sister in Christ, whatever the denomination, or even with no denomination. We reject no person who is created by God, either.
The purpose of this blog is not to judge who belongs to what, but rather which ideas and practices are consistent with the Gospel as preached by the Catholic Church, and secondly to examine which ideas and practices would seem to lead to a deeper relationship with God, within our own personal limits of understanding.