And the Point Is...

The comment on my previous post deserves a full response.

First, a distinction needs to be made between people outside the Faith being able to attain heaven, and people who have rejected the Faith being able to attain heaven.

First of all, I don't know, nobody knows, exactly what God has in store for us. What we do know is what Jesus taught us.

It bothers me terribly that the words of Jesus have been cherry-picked; that Jesus himself has been co-opted; and that even his own representatives on earth (his priests) don't pass on what he taught faithfully.

The fact is, Jesus 1)said he had come to fulfill the Old Law (as in, put it away); 2) he said he was establishing a Church; 3) he said the only way to the Father was through him (not through Mohammad, not through Buddha, not through secular humanism); 4) he said that many would be called but few would be chosen (not everybody was gonig to make the grade). He also said some other revealing things, such as, you had to feel strongly about him - if you were "lukewarm" he would spit you out of his mouth. He said we should be prepared to sell all our possessions (give up the things of this world) and follow him. (Not follow a "good enough" path.)

I think if Jesus meant to tell us that it didn't matter which path we followed as long as we were good people, he would have said that. He said a lot of pointed and controversial things - controversial enough that his own people figured they'd better get rid of him because he was threatening all that they knew.

Jesus said a) he was God; b) he was the Messiah.

Ok. So, for my money, you either believe him, or you don't. If you believe him, then you've at the very least got to be Christian; ideally, you will be Catholic (if you believe that the Faith was passed down through the popes, bishops, and priests). The God of Mohammed is not the God of Christianity. The God of Christianity sent his SON to be our Redeemer. The God of Mohammed sent a prophet in the person of Jesus. Jesus brought a new and deeper understanding of God, in which the punitive Father was enhanced by the loving Son and the wise spirit. This has not happened in Islam, for example. And I don't even need to go into the other world religions to make it clear that their understanding of "God" it quite different from that of Christianity.

Now, I'm not saying that even the Catholic Church doesn't teach that someone who truly does not know about, or does not accept what the Church teaches can't get to heaven. I don't understand what the equation is there - what kind of behavior such a person has to exhibit, or what kind of "heaven" awaits him. (The Church is fully accepting of the idea of "mystery," after all.) I was never taught that someone who had never heard of Christ was doomed to hell. What I was taught that someone who believed and who chose to reject Jesus because the path was too hard, or the lure of the world too great, was putting himself in a danger of losing his soul.

So for me, the real issue is: do you believe what Jesus told us? As C. S Lewis has pointed out: either Jesus was crazy, a con man, or he really was the son of God. Take your pick.

But don't try to reinvent what he said, or what he asked us to do, because what he said, and what he asked, aren't to your liking. What's the point??

A Moral Nation

As usually happens when I ready anything by C. S. Lewis, I was struck with an insight - oddly enough, about politics, our President, and the nature of Christianity.

Lewis, in Mere Christianity, is discussing "love your neighbor as yourself." This is, as he rightly points out, not an easy concept for humans to wrap their arms around - no pun intended.

Typically, Lewis puts it in order for me: he asks us to consider how we love ourselves. He reminds us that we don't necessarily "like" ourselves or our actions all the time; we can be harsh in our judgement of ourselves. We can be impatient with ourselves when we fail, and we can demand that we do better the "next time."

Too often, he says, Christians think that "loving one's neighbor" means being all warm and fuzzy toward him, approving him, almost feeling "infatuated" with him. And of course, we can't do this with most people.

Christ wasn't expecting us to be all cuddly with everyone we encounter. Just as he cautioned us, again and again, to keep try - to "sin no more" - there is no reason why we can't expect the same from our neighbors. Just as we judge our lapses and falls from grace, try to obtain forgiveness (from God and ourselves), and try again - this is how we should be "loving" our neighbor as we "love" ourselves. 

This got me to thinking about Obama's policy of non-judgemental interaction - bowing to the Saudi King, for example - as opposed to having moral standards that we live by, and while we may have to accept other standards as "real," this does not mean we have to accept them as "moral." We can and we should judge them as not meeting our standards.

"Judge" has become such a bad word. But in fact, we judge every day of our lives: we choose this restaurant over that; this brand of shoes over another; Winesap apples are better than Delicious. By our standards, one things fails to measure up to another.

So, we do not believe that stoning adulterers is appropriate. On the other hand, we can also believe that adultery is wrong - we can judge it wrong, without going all the way to stoning. We can acknowledge in a  public arena that we disapprove of this behavior, and our relationship with anyone who indulges in it will be tempered by that behavior.

I had an argument with my sister and niece some years ago, when I was still off in exploratory mode. It was the typical intellectual elite versus fundamental Christian dispute: I said that any person who was honestly trying to live by his principles, his religion, was worthy of salvation; my niece argued that one religion was not as good as another. A religion that nodded to, for example, infibulation, was simply misguided, wrong, and not worthy of the same respect as Christianity.

Well, it could be argued that a lot of bad things have been done in the name of Christianity. Gays would argue that fundamental Christianity persecutes them, for example. And what about (pulling a few chestnuts out) The Inquisition or The Crusades?

The difference, I was reminded, is that Christianity does not recommend that gays be castrated in the name of purity. It simply suggests that they not act on their impulses, and that to do so is simply a sin like many others. While adultery may be a sin according to Christian morals, the punishment recommended is not stoning. (In fact, wasn't the heart of Christ's message, "I forgive you, I came here to die for you so that you could be forgiven, now go and don't do this again?"

That's a vastly different message from "We condemn you for this, we will now bury you up to your neck in the ground and throw stones at you."

How about the bad things done in the name of Christianity - Catholicism in particular? What about the Inquisition? While it's impossible to clear the Church's name where events like these are concerned, the more important point is: was the Church acting according to Christian principles when these things were done? Of course not.

These events were the result of an unhappy marriage between the Church and monarchies - a thing that the United States, at least, has been at pains to correct for. Even Catholics, who desire the Kingship of Christ, don't presume to want the Kingship of the Pope, for example. We know that's probably not a safe thing, as, much as he is the Vicar of Christ, and his representative on earth, he is still human, and is only "infallible" when speaking on matters of faith and morals, not when speaking on matters of politics and commerce.

So, getting back to "loving our neighbors," and our moral standards as both Christians, and as citizens of the United States: Obama's brand of tolerance is like my old, and I now think misguided notion that all paths to God are equal. The United States has to stand for decent, moral, humane behavior (we can get into torture another time). We may not always live up to our own standard, but we've got to try. (Just as, individually, we may not always live up to our own standards but we must judge both ourselves and our neighbors when we fall short - and we must expect the same behavior of both ourselves and our neighbors.)

A Fullness in God's House

I realize that what I'm about to relate in this post is completely subjective, but here goes.

When I entered my Church on Good Friday I was struck by its emptiness. I know that this is at least in part because all the accoutrements of the altar are gone - the altar cloths, the candles, the reliquaries, the flowers. But it's more than that. There is a spiritual emptiness, as well.

Father instructed us in the seven last words, and between each instruction, we prayed. I was also struck by how much these prayers felt like the praying at the Protestant services I had attended from time to time. The praying itself was sincere - the sense of the presence of God was missing.

I went to Mass at my sister's NO church on Easter Sunday. And I was struck again, in a church decorated to the nines, and full of people, how empty that church was, as well. With the applause, with the people running up and down the aisles, with the guitar music (yes, guitar music) and hand shaking and Father singing a pop song while he consecrated (I think) the host, the church still felt empty.

I realize that I run the risk of fooling myself with this "feeling" thing.

I can only honestly say that when I enter our shabby little Church, there is a feeling of "fullness," which C.S. Lewis so perfectly describes in the Space Trilogy when he talks about how the main character feels in the presense of the Eldil (angels). I could no more run and shout, or applaud, or call across the room to a friend (all things I see in NO churches) that I could pull out a sandwich and eat it. My sense of "other" is far too great. Is this conditioned reflex? I don't know...

In a way, perhaps, it doesn't matter. Perhaps what matters is being open to the numinous. If little children are taught to behave with great deference in Church - to whisper, to genuflect, to pray quietly - then perhaps these very acts open our hearts to the presence of God, and then we can feel it more acutely. And if we just go about our ordinary business, while God is still there, and while yes, we should feel the presence of God in all that we do, perhaps we are not experiencing it as fully as we might.

And after all, isn't this what Sunday is all about? God is with us everyday, in everything that we do. Sunday Mass is setting aside time devoted utterly to Him, and as such, He is with us in a special way. It is a time when we should be doing something outside our ordinary routines.

I can't help but grieve again for all that the Church lost when it chose to give in to the pressures of the world.

A Beautiful Image for Holy Week

Thanks to culturewarnotes

Mere Anarchy

I read this feedback on a website this morning. The specific reference was to Tony Blair's taking the Pope to task for his "archaic" stance on homosexuality.

"This is why the bible should only be considered as an average novel, not literal instructions on how to live your life. What is immoral should be assessed by the values of the day and not be prescribed by an archaic book. To survive, we must modernise."

What's dangerous about this thinking is twofold:
1) all things "modern" become the next generation's "archaic."
2) simply adopting something "modern" is no guarantee that it will be better.

If we go down the road of "whatever, as long as it's new," we fail to grasp the concept of entropy. What is it the poet says?

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

- William Butler Yeats, from The Second Coming

Systems tend toward chaos. Society has persevered simply because some human do cling to "the old ways," and demand moral behavior that is not relative, but absolute. It is in the dynamic tension between the inevitible pull toward chaos, and this human tendency to absolutism (given by God?) that our survival subsists. 

Read This!

Such a good post here.