Louisville Metro (KY) has broken some more records.
First of all, last year Louisville broke a record as the only city with three national weather disasters within one year.
This yaer we have just completed the driest September on record (as of midnight) and the driest month since February 1948.
We have broken our record of the highest number of days when the temperature reached 90 degrees or more.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
St. Augustine's Challenge
Recently I received an essay from a dear old friend by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. He raised a question by St. Augustine, who asked the Donatists, "Wherefore have you separated yourselves?" In response I ask myself now: Why have I separated myself from the Roman Catholic Church?
It seems a sin of pride to have done so. Who am I to judge the church?
I have set down some of my reasons here as well as I can express them. They represent personal hurts, grievances. I feel deep personal pain because of these realities. I am pretty sure there are thousands, perhaps millions, who feel the pain as well and even more deeply, who have yet stayed with the church.
It was just more comfortable for me to go back to the church I belonged to before I became a Catholic. I can’t really justify the choice. It seemed the right thing to do because in conscience I do not agree with some of the Catholic teachings, and the Vatican seemed to want us to leave who do not agree. My local bishop agreed with me also that I should leave since I do not agree and made clear I was welcome to come back should I come again into agreement.
These are my objections and areas of disagreement.
1. The grave hypocrisy of the Church in this age. And the great cover-up.
The dearest wish of a child abused and made a slave is to die. Yet the church has preached ad nauseum that abortion is the gravest sin, turning its back on these victim children who wish they had never been born. The stench of these horrendous priestly crimes against children continues to rise in the air all over the world, even though the Church has begun to work for justice for victims and to repent of its sins in ignoring and covering up these crimes.
I believe that Christian ethics has yet to deal adequately with the relative evil in the act of murder and the act of torture. A quick, clean murder is less evil in my value system than torture of a victim under one’s power over a period of time. This is a profound evil which damages the victim for life, even making life itself a burden for the one tortured and resulting sometimes in the victim’s suicide.
Child sexual abuse is a form of torture and is often accompanied by other forms of torture. When this is done by a pastor or priest, the damage is even greater to a child because the pastor or priest represents God. The child grows up with the unconscious belief that God is sadistic. It often requires years of hard work in therapy to change this perception. This is a dreadful kettle of fish. The church speaks rather lightly, I think, of providing “counseling” for the victims, because this is no light matter. Therapy itself is a long and hard road that doesn’t always turn out as successfully as hoped.
These injustices occurred at the highest level of the Vatican and so I believe the very authority of the Church is broken.
2. The Vatican as the great liability of the Church
The Vatican is as full of intrigue, corruption, and secrecy as the most evil of governments. This comment is relevant to the first point and to following points. It is seminal to other sins not mentioned that the Vatican has committed against humanity.
3. Cardinal Ratzinger who acted as pope before he was elected
I left the church once before because of the great hypocrisy and the great cover-up at the local level. Deeply hurt, I was enraged for some years, but I came to understand that I needed to forgive personal hurts in the matter and no longer regard priests as better than the rest of us. I longed to come back to the sacraments and so I returned. I began to become more aware of the problem with the Vatican’s rejection of women as equal servants, yet I stayed. I was happy in the church until Cardinal Ratzinger began issuing troubling edicts.
It began with the edict in the mid 1990’s that said Catholics who do not adhere to the teachings of the entire Magisterium are not in full communion with the Church. This applied to tens of thousands of American Catholics and put me in a difficult position of conscience although it didn’t seem to bother other Catholics. My pastor seemed to think it shouldn’t matter to me. I learned that Cardinal Ratzinger wrote this edict and that he seemed to think he was the pope. I stayed on, but I began feeling discomfort at the points of doctrine with which I did not agree.
A few years later, Cardinal Ratzinger began issuing instructions on how we American Catholics were to vote and instructions that some Catholic candidates for office should not be served Holy Communion This was the last straw for me. Women did not get the right to vote in this nation until after my mother was born. I will not be told how to vote. John F. Kennedy became President because he promised the American people that the Vatican would have no influence on his presidential decisions. How things have changed, and all because of Roe vs. Wade, while priests and bishops were being allowed to continue abusing children in secret.
4. Not only has the Church failed children, but it has failed women by denying them ordination.
The defense for this decision, that Christ appointed no women as apostles, is pure poppycock. To add salt to the wounds, the Church has forbidden that the matter even be discussed further in public. To pour acid on top of the salt, I have read that the Vatican is all but persecuting women’s religious orders here in the USA.
It is likely that abuse of children and forbidding power to women are linked. An all-male Vatican is not a healthy thing. This is the good old boy network to beat all of them.
5. I came to the conclusion long ago that the Church’s teaching on human sexuality is flawed.
The roots of this teaching are somewhat obscure and have little foundation, like the foundation for denying ordination to women. In Catholic tradition there has been a grave suspicion of women as automatic temptresses. Furthermore, the notion is taught that any sexual desire must necessarily contain “concupiscence” which is automatically sinful. Although the Church has elevated the moral status of marriage in recent years, the stain on sexual desire even within marriage remains. This “concupiscence” is the reason the Blessed Virgin could not possibly have partaken of any sexual activity. She had to be a perpetual virgin because she had to be sinless. I believe it is Catholic doctrine that God created no evil. All that is, is good. Yet the church teaches that it is impossible to indulge in sexual desire or activity without the sin of concupiscence. This is simply illogical and untrue to human experience.
It has taken a long while for the Church to make peace with scientific discovery. Although the Church now begins to accept that homosexuality, at least in “some” instances, is genetic in cause, yet the homosexual is expected to live in permanent celibacy, as indeed anyone is expected to do who is not married. This ideal of celibacy forbids all sexual behavior of any sort. This is perhaps a beautiful if medieval ideal, but it is highly unrealistic.
A great many gay and lesbian people feel that God made them the way they are; that God doesn’t make mistakes; and many of them would like to live in monogamous family relationships. If they do so, they do not detract from good marriages between men and women. I can see no good reason for the Church to deny them.
I can see no logic at all in the ban on “artificial” birth control, particularly when abortion is seen as the greatest evil, and birth control would tend to prevent abortions.
Waiting
I know that Catholics who have serious objections are to wait and pray, waiting for the Holy Spirit to show the way and the light. We are to wait for matters to be resolved in time within Holy Mother Church.
I see absolutely no sign that the Vatican is going to change in any way, other than attempting to correct the injustices of the great cover-up and doing much to prevent child abuse in the future. I commend them for this. I commend the Pope for disciplining one of the worst sexual offenders as soon as he ascended to the papacy; however, I understand this perpetrator still lives free and he could well be continuing to abuse children.
If the Vatican will ever change regarding women, it changes too slowly. It has changed too slowly regarding children’s rights. It isn’t likely to change its teachings on sexuality. It still has not changed its prohibition of artificial birth control. I say the authority of the church is broken. It is no wonder that the tragedy of the Reformation occurred, if it was a tragedy.
I shudder to think how bad things could be had the Reformation never occurred. I would not want to see the patriarchs of the Greek Church, the bishops of Episcopal and Methodist churches, the Presbyterians, etc., all come into subjection to the Vatican. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is not a Biblical truth, but how often it proves true. The Holy Spirit may keep the church from error, but God has certainly not kept the church from committing atrocities in the name of Christ. It is true that other churches and church groups have committed similar and equally horrible atrocities through their history. With combined strength, these could only get worse. Structural unity, vesting even more power in the Vatican, might well lead to evil effects. Every government should try to seek first to do no harm. Perhaps some harm is inevitable. We are a sorry lot, and I am as sorry as anyone else. But the attempt should be made to first do no harm and then to do good. Democratic forms of government, though very imperfect, offer at least checks and balances.
The brokenness of the church is the human tragedy. I cannot justify my contributing to its brokenness. I don’t know what to do about it either.
The human condition has become ethically murkier with increased knowledge and power through science to do what was in the past only envisioned in science fiction. Difficult ethical issues are surfacing. Change is rapid, and the Church probably needs to be slow in her consideration, but perhaps not as slow as she is to respond to human needs.
So this is my confession. I am at home in the democratic and sacramental Episcopal Church where women and gays and refugees and all manner of people are accepted and welcomed warmly. We are headed toward still more division, it would seem, from the Anglican communion because of this inclusivity. I would rather err on the side of inclusivity than on the side of exclusivity. This seems to me more in keeping with the Gospels. It is sad, however, that another break in the Body of Christ may be looming ahead.
I believe Christ allows his church to be broken as he allowed himself to be broken. The church is broken because we are broken. We are comfortable with our own kind where we fit in, and so there are many imperfect tents in imperfect communion where we worship differently and believe differently according to our diverse needs. The Pentecostal needs to express intense emotion in worship while more formal personalities need more structure. He accommodates our brokenness and gives himself to us on our terms. What great love he has for us. I believe he sees us as one even when we don’t see ourselves as one. He probably thinks our differences are childish but he honors them. On the other hand, he may regard us with our differences as he does his entire and gloriously diverse creation. He said it is good. That they may be one may have meant a oneness that we cannot even imagine. Love is certainly the chief component of oneness. So let us love one another, for God is love.
It seems a sin of pride to have done so. Who am I to judge the church?
I have set down some of my reasons here as well as I can express them. They represent personal hurts, grievances. I feel deep personal pain because of these realities. I am pretty sure there are thousands, perhaps millions, who feel the pain as well and even more deeply, who have yet stayed with the church.
It was just more comfortable for me to go back to the church I belonged to before I became a Catholic. I can’t really justify the choice. It seemed the right thing to do because in conscience I do not agree with some of the Catholic teachings, and the Vatican seemed to want us to leave who do not agree. My local bishop agreed with me also that I should leave since I do not agree and made clear I was welcome to come back should I come again into agreement.
These are my objections and areas of disagreement.
1. The grave hypocrisy of the Church in this age. And the great cover-up.
The dearest wish of a child abused and made a slave is to die. Yet the church has preached ad nauseum that abortion is the gravest sin, turning its back on these victim children who wish they had never been born. The stench of these horrendous priestly crimes against children continues to rise in the air all over the world, even though the Church has begun to work for justice for victims and to repent of its sins in ignoring and covering up these crimes.
I believe that Christian ethics has yet to deal adequately with the relative evil in the act of murder and the act of torture. A quick, clean murder is less evil in my value system than torture of a victim under one’s power over a period of time. This is a profound evil which damages the victim for life, even making life itself a burden for the one tortured and resulting sometimes in the victim’s suicide.
Child sexual abuse is a form of torture and is often accompanied by other forms of torture. When this is done by a pastor or priest, the damage is even greater to a child because the pastor or priest represents God. The child grows up with the unconscious belief that God is sadistic. It often requires years of hard work in therapy to change this perception. This is a dreadful kettle of fish. The church speaks rather lightly, I think, of providing “counseling” for the victims, because this is no light matter. Therapy itself is a long and hard road that doesn’t always turn out as successfully as hoped.
These injustices occurred at the highest level of the Vatican and so I believe the very authority of the Church is broken.
2. The Vatican as the great liability of the Church
The Vatican is as full of intrigue, corruption, and secrecy as the most evil of governments. This comment is relevant to the first point and to following points. It is seminal to other sins not mentioned that the Vatican has committed against humanity.
3. Cardinal Ratzinger who acted as pope before he was elected
I left the church once before because of the great hypocrisy and the great cover-up at the local level. Deeply hurt, I was enraged for some years, but I came to understand that I needed to forgive personal hurts in the matter and no longer regard priests as better than the rest of us. I longed to come back to the sacraments and so I returned. I began to become more aware of the problem with the Vatican’s rejection of women as equal servants, yet I stayed. I was happy in the church until Cardinal Ratzinger began issuing troubling edicts.
It began with the edict in the mid 1990’s that said Catholics who do not adhere to the teachings of the entire Magisterium are not in full communion with the Church. This applied to tens of thousands of American Catholics and put me in a difficult position of conscience although it didn’t seem to bother other Catholics. My pastor seemed to think it shouldn’t matter to me. I learned that Cardinal Ratzinger wrote this edict and that he seemed to think he was the pope. I stayed on, but I began feeling discomfort at the points of doctrine with which I did not agree.
A few years later, Cardinal Ratzinger began issuing instructions on how we American Catholics were to vote and instructions that some Catholic candidates for office should not be served Holy Communion This was the last straw for me. Women did not get the right to vote in this nation until after my mother was born. I will not be told how to vote. John F. Kennedy became President because he promised the American people that the Vatican would have no influence on his presidential decisions. How things have changed, and all because of Roe vs. Wade, while priests and bishops were being allowed to continue abusing children in secret.
4. Not only has the Church failed children, but it has failed women by denying them ordination.
The defense for this decision, that Christ appointed no women as apostles, is pure poppycock. To add salt to the wounds, the Church has forbidden that the matter even be discussed further in public. To pour acid on top of the salt, I have read that the Vatican is all but persecuting women’s religious orders here in the USA.
It is likely that abuse of children and forbidding power to women are linked. An all-male Vatican is not a healthy thing. This is the good old boy network to beat all of them.
5. I came to the conclusion long ago that the Church’s teaching on human sexuality is flawed.
The roots of this teaching are somewhat obscure and have little foundation, like the foundation for denying ordination to women. In Catholic tradition there has been a grave suspicion of women as automatic temptresses. Furthermore, the notion is taught that any sexual desire must necessarily contain “concupiscence” which is automatically sinful. Although the Church has elevated the moral status of marriage in recent years, the stain on sexual desire even within marriage remains. This “concupiscence” is the reason the Blessed Virgin could not possibly have partaken of any sexual activity. She had to be a perpetual virgin because she had to be sinless. I believe it is Catholic doctrine that God created no evil. All that is, is good. Yet the church teaches that it is impossible to indulge in sexual desire or activity without the sin of concupiscence. This is simply illogical and untrue to human experience.
It has taken a long while for the Church to make peace with scientific discovery. Although the Church now begins to accept that homosexuality, at least in “some” instances, is genetic in cause, yet the homosexual is expected to live in permanent celibacy, as indeed anyone is expected to do who is not married. This ideal of celibacy forbids all sexual behavior of any sort. This is perhaps a beautiful if medieval ideal, but it is highly unrealistic.
A great many gay and lesbian people feel that God made them the way they are; that God doesn’t make mistakes; and many of them would like to live in monogamous family relationships. If they do so, they do not detract from good marriages between men and women. I can see no good reason for the Church to deny them.
I can see no logic at all in the ban on “artificial” birth control, particularly when abortion is seen as the greatest evil, and birth control would tend to prevent abortions.
Waiting
I know that Catholics who have serious objections are to wait and pray, waiting for the Holy Spirit to show the way and the light. We are to wait for matters to be resolved in time within Holy Mother Church.
I see absolutely no sign that the Vatican is going to change in any way, other than attempting to correct the injustices of the great cover-up and doing much to prevent child abuse in the future. I commend them for this. I commend the Pope for disciplining one of the worst sexual offenders as soon as he ascended to the papacy; however, I understand this perpetrator still lives free and he could well be continuing to abuse children.
If the Vatican will ever change regarding women, it changes too slowly. It has changed too slowly regarding children’s rights. It isn’t likely to change its teachings on sexuality. It still has not changed its prohibition of artificial birth control. I say the authority of the church is broken. It is no wonder that the tragedy of the Reformation occurred, if it was a tragedy.
I shudder to think how bad things could be had the Reformation never occurred. I would not want to see the patriarchs of the Greek Church, the bishops of Episcopal and Methodist churches, the Presbyterians, etc., all come into subjection to the Vatican. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is not a Biblical truth, but how often it proves true. The Holy Spirit may keep the church from error, but God has certainly not kept the church from committing atrocities in the name of Christ. It is true that other churches and church groups have committed similar and equally horrible atrocities through their history. With combined strength, these could only get worse. Structural unity, vesting even more power in the Vatican, might well lead to evil effects. Every government should try to seek first to do no harm. Perhaps some harm is inevitable. We are a sorry lot, and I am as sorry as anyone else. But the attempt should be made to first do no harm and then to do good. Democratic forms of government, though very imperfect, offer at least checks and balances.
The brokenness of the church is the human tragedy. I cannot justify my contributing to its brokenness. I don’t know what to do about it either.
The human condition has become ethically murkier with increased knowledge and power through science to do what was in the past only envisioned in science fiction. Difficult ethical issues are surfacing. Change is rapid, and the Church probably needs to be slow in her consideration, but perhaps not as slow as she is to respond to human needs.
So this is my confession. I am at home in the democratic and sacramental Episcopal Church where women and gays and refugees and all manner of people are accepted and welcomed warmly. We are headed toward still more division, it would seem, from the Anglican communion because of this inclusivity. I would rather err on the side of inclusivity than on the side of exclusivity. This seems to me more in keeping with the Gospels. It is sad, however, that another break in the Body of Christ may be looming ahead.
I believe Christ allows his church to be broken as he allowed himself to be broken. The church is broken because we are broken. We are comfortable with our own kind where we fit in, and so there are many imperfect tents in imperfect communion where we worship differently and believe differently according to our diverse needs. The Pentecostal needs to express intense emotion in worship while more formal personalities need more structure. He accommodates our brokenness and gives himself to us on our terms. What great love he has for us. I believe he sees us as one even when we don’t see ourselves as one. He probably thinks our differences are childish but he honors them. On the other hand, he may regard us with our differences as he does his entire and gloriously diverse creation. He said it is good. That they may be one may have meant a oneness that we cannot even imagine. Love is certainly the chief component of oneness. So let us love one another, for God is love.
Mohler made the front page
Yesterday's Courier-Journal carried an article by Peter Smith on Mohler's concern about Christians practicing yoga. He is concerned about the eastern mystical roots of yoga practice and the possibility of its deceptive influence on faith. He said that Christians don't believe in using the body to connect with God.
I can't imagine a human being doing anything without using the body. Every thought we have uses the brain which is certainly part of the body. Baptists sing hymns, stand, sit, listen, preach, and some raise their hands in praise. All of these actions make use of the body. Bible study and prayer are the cornerstones of Christian practice. They can't be done without using the brain and the hands to turn pages.
Monday, September 20, 2010
Apologetics
I attend church regularly with my mother who is in her nineties because she has a tendency to fall unexpectedly. My somewhat realistic hope is to catch her if that should happen. Sometimes I have caught her, sometimes not. I love the women in her class, a warm and true group of stalwart souls. They have their own physical problems, however, and could not be expected to catch her.
Their Sunday School teacher recently offered a lesson on apologetics. She was unfamiliar with the word and said it sounded like apology, but she explained how the lesson materials defined it. She said we need to be always ready to explain what we believe and why.
I am there every Sunday with my mother and I listen to their teachings and their pastor’s sermons, often helpful in fighting the good fight against my own selfishness and sloth and in drawing nearer to God. These dear people are good for me.
Most of the time my disagreement with some of their viewpoints doesn’t matter very much, but there are times when it needles me sharply. This particular apologetics Sunday was one of those times. The teacher mentioned the very good column in The Courier-Journal, Faith and Works, by Peter Smith. This week Smith featured a debate on Evolution between Alfred Mohler and Karl Giberson, both authors and figures in Christian academia. Mohler represents a viewpoint that reigns broadly at my mother’s church. The teacher, a woman I love and admire, an RN and retired teacher of nursing students, said, as far as she is concerned, God said, it; I believe it; and that settles it. This quote among my mother’s people refers to every word of the Bible as literal and infallible truth. Giberson calls this belief “fundamentalist literalism,” according to the column.
Mohler is quoted by Smith as saying: “It simply is not credible, at least to me, that God gave us this text with such rich detail and sequential development” if it was only symbolic. This refers to the Genesis accounts of creation. As an aside here, I would ask Dr. Mohler and my mother’s pastor why then would Our Lord have given us such richly detailed words and actions and why would the apostles have written such marvelous passages referring to baptism and communion if they were “only symbolic”? But I will come back to this subject.
As the Sunday School teacher spoke of apologetics, I thought of people I deeply care about who have told me they lost their faith in college or grad school. And I thought of Giberson’s sad recalling of the many students who lost their faith because they felt forced to choose between their faith and scientific evidence, an unnecessary choice. Not only is a fundamentalist literalism to blame for this false choice, but also a certain closed minded dogmatism among some scientists and professors who have insisted that the big bang and subsequent magnificence could only have happened by chance. By accident, in their view, do we live with our powers of reason, imagination, and compassion amid this vast universe. The latest theory is that God is unnecessary to the natural processes at work in The Grand Design. God may be scientifically unnecessary, but then perhaps science needs new words, a new language. The word design most definitely implies a designer.
We do not comprehend the mysteries of God and Creation, the problem of evil, the why of it all, nor do we need to understand these things in order to know Christ crucified, to be conformed to the pattern of his death, and to experience the power of his resurrection. Nor do we need to deny the questions raised and perhaps to be answered by the Swiss collider experiments, the observations and conclusions of Darwin, or the mapping of the human genome in order to believe the Nicene Creed. Faith and the quest for knowledge need not be inimical.
But my mother’s people do not even use the creeds of the church. As her teacher continued, she said with emphasis in a tone of disapproval that there are other churches whose “doctrines are very different from ours.” When she ended the lesson we moved into the sanctuary where we received communion. Mom’s pastor once again reiterated that this act of remembrance is only that and has no power, no grace in itself other than remembering the great sacrifice of Christ. It is only symbolic, in their view. But for me Christ is real in the elements of his supper, whatever the pastor thinks. And in Christ I become aware that we are one church, all of us, whatever our differences. He sees us as one and probably regards our differences as petty and childish.
This brings me to my own church which I don’t get to attend very often. It is a small, struggling group of dear ones who work out their own salvation differently from Mom’s people. For them, symbol is what it represents, and myth is powerful and true in a more profound manner than that of a merely literal statement. For many of them, living in the presence of God is more essential than the points of a creed. But I generalize. For some of them, the creed is more important. They differ from one another and they tolerate differences, just as people in Mom’s church differ. Some in Mom’s Sunday School class, for instance, see no problem with women deacons, while others are more hardline literalists. Officially, though, there will be no women deacons.
In my church there is a woman pastor, two women deacons, and a Sudanese deacon. A deacon teaches our Bible study group, and she is a teacher I love and admire for her honesty and knowledge as well as her loving commitment to Christ and to us. Once a month I am able to attend this study and maintain contact with my church. The pastor made a comment recently that when she is asked if she is born again, she replies, “All the time.” Our former pastor often emphasized that doubts and questions are welcome here. Our organist and a choir member are a gay couple. All are welcomed in my church including many refugee people. We have language barriers but the liturgy and God’s love are the same in any language. On this Sunday in my Mom’s church the pastor spent some minutes of his sermon speaking against the concept of gay marriage. Some members of my church might debate marriage for gays but they accept gay couples.
I grew up in Mom’s church and I love them, but as a youth I longed for a deeper way. Many of them are content to accept what they have been taught and they are not bothered by doubt or question. It is a beautiful, strong, simple faith handed down and received intact with emphasis on prayer, trust, and kindness to others; it is my mother’s faith and I cherish it. It nurtured me in my youth, and I can’t sell it short.
But I had questions and more than doubts, I had a yearning for something it did not offer me, perhaps what might be called mysticism, but at least the power of symbol or metaphor, which is what it signifies. It is akin also to my awareness in nature that spirit is within everything. And so I found my way into the Catholic side of the Christian Church. Eventually a Protestant Catholicism won out over the Roman Church because of the Roman brand of fundamentalism and its failure to fully accept women. My mother’s church continues to be what I would call overly rational, eschewing sacramental theology which they might consider superstitious. With its inclusion of mysticism, the Roman Church is also very rational, formal, and suspicious of mysticism. Some in my church are more rational and some, more mystical. Everyone is welcome, and the differences are not overly legislated by church laws and dogma.
As I grow older and more of my loved ones move on to the other side of death, the communion of saints becomes ever dearer to me. To receive the body and blood of Christ is central in communion, and in that communion we become one with the whole church, living and dead, here and hereafter, and in all the tents with different labels, our brothers and sisters.
My church leaders enjoy learning, nor do they deny scientific inquiry and the growing body of knowledge. We have discussed whether discoveries in various fields shake our faith. In what is our faith grounded? If it is grounded in the Person of Jesus Christ, we will not lose faith. This we share with all those Christians in other tents.
I think of Mom’s pastor and a leader in her class with whom I grew up who have a rock solid faith, and they simply dismiss whole bodies of scientific knowledge as irrelevant and mistaken. They stick to the beliefs they were taught and do not stray from them. It seems to me there is a difference of personality type. These are intelligent and highly educated people who think in black and white terms perhaps or who simply have no need for complexities to the degree that I do. Perhaps they have no patience for complexities that I feel compelled to consider. I have had friends of other faiths as well who did not understand problems I discussed. It seemed we were from different planets. I sense that some in the sciences and some atheists have a similar simplicity.
I think of the openness of our deacons, priests, and others who serve Christ with a different perspective. Most of them do not see their lives as Christians dating back to a single moment of being born again. Rather, as for me, the Christian life is one of continual conversion and giving over more space for God to operate in our lives. Grace is given each day in many ways, and there are many conversion points through life.
Perhaps my commitment is less than that of my mother’s people. Simplicity is a virtue that I do not have. But ultimately these differences do not matter much, if only we could see it that way. We humans are more comfortable with our own kind, and so the different tents remain. Let us at least think and speak kindly of one another and work together as we can to fulfill the prayer of Christ that we all may be one, at least in his Spirit. In his kingdom we are to be one. As my brother once said, “How will we be at home in Heaven if we can’t love each other here?”
Their Sunday School teacher recently offered a lesson on apologetics. She was unfamiliar with the word and said it sounded like apology, but she explained how the lesson materials defined it. She said we need to be always ready to explain what we believe and why.
I am there every Sunday with my mother and I listen to their teachings and their pastor’s sermons, often helpful in fighting the good fight against my own selfishness and sloth and in drawing nearer to God. These dear people are good for me.
Most of the time my disagreement with some of their viewpoints doesn’t matter very much, but there are times when it needles me sharply. This particular apologetics Sunday was one of those times. The teacher mentioned the very good column in The Courier-Journal, Faith and Works, by Peter Smith. This week Smith featured a debate on Evolution between Alfred Mohler and Karl Giberson, both authors and figures in Christian academia. Mohler represents a viewpoint that reigns broadly at my mother’s church. The teacher, a woman I love and admire, an RN and retired teacher of nursing students, said, as far as she is concerned, God said, it; I believe it; and that settles it. This quote among my mother’s people refers to every word of the Bible as literal and infallible truth. Giberson calls this belief “fundamentalist literalism,” according to the column.
Mohler is quoted by Smith as saying: “It simply is not credible, at least to me, that God gave us this text with such rich detail and sequential development” if it was only symbolic. This refers to the Genesis accounts of creation. As an aside here, I would ask Dr. Mohler and my mother’s pastor why then would Our Lord have given us such richly detailed words and actions and why would the apostles have written such marvelous passages referring to baptism and communion if they were “only symbolic”? But I will come back to this subject.
As the Sunday School teacher spoke of apologetics, I thought of people I deeply care about who have told me they lost their faith in college or grad school. And I thought of Giberson’s sad recalling of the many students who lost their faith because they felt forced to choose between their faith and scientific evidence, an unnecessary choice. Not only is a fundamentalist literalism to blame for this false choice, but also a certain closed minded dogmatism among some scientists and professors who have insisted that the big bang and subsequent magnificence could only have happened by chance. By accident, in their view, do we live with our powers of reason, imagination, and compassion amid this vast universe. The latest theory is that God is unnecessary to the natural processes at work in The Grand Design. God may be scientifically unnecessary, but then perhaps science needs new words, a new language. The word design most definitely implies a designer.
We do not comprehend the mysteries of God and Creation, the problem of evil, the why of it all, nor do we need to understand these things in order to know Christ crucified, to be conformed to the pattern of his death, and to experience the power of his resurrection. Nor do we need to deny the questions raised and perhaps to be answered by the Swiss collider experiments, the observations and conclusions of Darwin, or the mapping of the human genome in order to believe the Nicene Creed. Faith and the quest for knowledge need not be inimical.
But my mother’s people do not even use the creeds of the church. As her teacher continued, she said with emphasis in a tone of disapproval that there are other churches whose “doctrines are very different from ours.” When she ended the lesson we moved into the sanctuary where we received communion. Mom’s pastor once again reiterated that this act of remembrance is only that and has no power, no grace in itself other than remembering the great sacrifice of Christ. It is only symbolic, in their view. But for me Christ is real in the elements of his supper, whatever the pastor thinks. And in Christ I become aware that we are one church, all of us, whatever our differences. He sees us as one and probably regards our differences as petty and childish.
This brings me to my own church which I don’t get to attend very often. It is a small, struggling group of dear ones who work out their own salvation differently from Mom’s people. For them, symbol is what it represents, and myth is powerful and true in a more profound manner than that of a merely literal statement. For many of them, living in the presence of God is more essential than the points of a creed. But I generalize. For some of them, the creed is more important. They differ from one another and they tolerate differences, just as people in Mom’s church differ. Some in Mom’s Sunday School class, for instance, see no problem with women deacons, while others are more hardline literalists. Officially, though, there will be no women deacons.
In my church there is a woman pastor, two women deacons, and a Sudanese deacon. A deacon teaches our Bible study group, and she is a teacher I love and admire for her honesty and knowledge as well as her loving commitment to Christ and to us. Once a month I am able to attend this study and maintain contact with my church. The pastor made a comment recently that when she is asked if she is born again, she replies, “All the time.” Our former pastor often emphasized that doubts and questions are welcome here. Our organist and a choir member are a gay couple. All are welcomed in my church including many refugee people. We have language barriers but the liturgy and God’s love are the same in any language. On this Sunday in my Mom’s church the pastor spent some minutes of his sermon speaking against the concept of gay marriage. Some members of my church might debate marriage for gays but they accept gay couples.
I grew up in Mom’s church and I love them, but as a youth I longed for a deeper way. Many of them are content to accept what they have been taught and they are not bothered by doubt or question. It is a beautiful, strong, simple faith handed down and received intact with emphasis on prayer, trust, and kindness to others; it is my mother’s faith and I cherish it. It nurtured me in my youth, and I can’t sell it short.
But I had questions and more than doubts, I had a yearning for something it did not offer me, perhaps what might be called mysticism, but at least the power of symbol or metaphor, which is what it signifies. It is akin also to my awareness in nature that spirit is within everything. And so I found my way into the Catholic side of the Christian Church. Eventually a Protestant Catholicism won out over the Roman Church because of the Roman brand of fundamentalism and its failure to fully accept women. My mother’s church continues to be what I would call overly rational, eschewing sacramental theology which they might consider superstitious. With its inclusion of mysticism, the Roman Church is also very rational, formal, and suspicious of mysticism. Some in my church are more rational and some, more mystical. Everyone is welcome, and the differences are not overly legislated by church laws and dogma.
As I grow older and more of my loved ones move on to the other side of death, the communion of saints becomes ever dearer to me. To receive the body and blood of Christ is central in communion, and in that communion we become one with the whole church, living and dead, here and hereafter, and in all the tents with different labels, our brothers and sisters.
My church leaders enjoy learning, nor do they deny scientific inquiry and the growing body of knowledge. We have discussed whether discoveries in various fields shake our faith. In what is our faith grounded? If it is grounded in the Person of Jesus Christ, we will not lose faith. This we share with all those Christians in other tents.
I think of Mom’s pastor and a leader in her class with whom I grew up who have a rock solid faith, and they simply dismiss whole bodies of scientific knowledge as irrelevant and mistaken. They stick to the beliefs they were taught and do not stray from them. It seems to me there is a difference of personality type. These are intelligent and highly educated people who think in black and white terms perhaps or who simply have no need for complexities to the degree that I do. Perhaps they have no patience for complexities that I feel compelled to consider. I have had friends of other faiths as well who did not understand problems I discussed. It seemed we were from different planets. I sense that some in the sciences and some atheists have a similar simplicity.
I think of the openness of our deacons, priests, and others who serve Christ with a different perspective. Most of them do not see their lives as Christians dating back to a single moment of being born again. Rather, as for me, the Christian life is one of continual conversion and giving over more space for God to operate in our lives. Grace is given each day in many ways, and there are many conversion points through life.
Perhaps my commitment is less than that of my mother’s people. Simplicity is a virtue that I do not have. But ultimately these differences do not matter much, if only we could see it that way. We humans are more comfortable with our own kind, and so the different tents remain. Let us at least think and speak kindly of one another and work together as we can to fulfill the prayer of Christ that we all may be one, at least in his Spirit. In his kingdom we are to be one. As my brother once said, “How will we be at home in Heaven if we can’t love each other here?”
Friday, August 20, 2010
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Magic
The Don Juan Rose is next to the corn. Candles of Heaven are on the other side of the fence.
Corn is tasseling. Squash just getting started.
Pole beans are ready to bloom, I hope.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
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