Purify Your Bride

IMHO, even doctrines such as the Trinity “are dependant on other Catholic truths” and the “development of doctrine”. Though there is certainly more raw material (i.e. Scriptural passages) to work with, as Dr. Raymond Brown pointed out, this raw material could easily have taken a different “line of development”—note the following:

Then he quotes Raymond Brown:

Three different figures, Father, Son, and Spirit, are brought into conjunction in the NT. Some NT formulas join the three; other references unite the Father and the Son; and still other references relate the Spirit to the Father and/or Son. Nevertheless, in no NT passage, not even in Matt. 28:19, is there precision about three divine Persons, co-equal but distinct, and one divine Nature—the core of the dogma of the Trintiy. Greek philosophy, sharpened by continuing theological disputes in the church from the 2nd to the 5th centuries, contributed to the classical formulation of the dogma. On the one hand one may say, the, that the precise Trinitarian dogma is not detectable in the literal sense of the NT, i.e., was not observably understood by first-century authors and audiences. On the other hand, reflection on NT texts played a crucial role in leading the church to the dogma to the dogma of three divine Persons and one divine Nature, a dogma that employed new terminology and embodied new insights as a response to new questions. There is no need to posit new revelation to account for the truth ultimately phrased in the trinitarian dogma, since that truth was already revealed when God sent Jesus Christ and when the risen Christ communicated his Spirit. Yet the development was not simply a matter of logic. In faith, one can claim that the Spirit guided the church as it moved from the NT triadic passages to perceiving and proclaiming the trinitarian dogma. Christians should not be embarrassed to affirm that they depend upon the Spirit’s guidance in such an essential dogma., for that guidance is really an application of Christ’s promise to be with his community and to send the Paraclete to guide them along the way of all truth…If ‘tradition’ implies that first-century Christianity already understood three coequal but distinct divine Persons and one divine Nature but had not developed the precise terminology, I would dissent. Neither the terminology nor the basic ideas had reached clarity in the first century; problems and disputes were required before the clarity came…Precisely because the ‘trinitarian’ line of development was not the only line of thought detectable in the NT, one must posit the guidance of the Spirit and intuition of faith as the church came to its decision.
(Raymond E. Brown, Biblical Exegesis & Church Doctrine, 1985, pp. 31-33.)

I agree with all of this. It is clear enough to those who understand and accept development of doctrine. If you think the trinity is obvious in scripture then have a discussion with a Jehovah’s Witness or a Oneness Pentecostal. It was possible for Christians to go another direction. We know that it happened. But the church resolved it. They didn’t do it by telling everyone to read their bibles and notice how clearly biblical their position was. They did it by assembling the successors of the apostles and declaring what Christians were to believe on the matter. Like in Acts 15:28, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…”, their words were deemed to reflect the understanding of the Holy Spirit.

Protestants seem to have a blind spot on development of doctrine. No doubt it is a willful blindness because understanding it means understanding why Sola Scriptura is unworkable. If they are able to ignore the massive empirical evidence of the many doctrines and denominations Sola Scriptura has produced then certainly it is not that hard to ignore an analysis of history that proves the same thing. The concepts are subtle enough to allow them to escape in a debate. I accept the trinity so what is your point? The point is that the process is the same one the church used to arrive at all the doctrines you don’t like. So you are being inconsistent.

The beautiful truth is that if you embrace development of doctrine you can be consistent. The process has never produced things that are irreconcilable. That is beyond amazing and can only be described as supernatural. Sure people who want to find contradictions will find them just like with scripture. But Sacred Scripture makes sense as a unified revelation of God and Sacred Tradition (including scripture) does as well. So we can embrace both faith and reason. Our faith does not force us to accept an irrational reading of history or make seemingly arbitrary choices about doctrines.

When properly understood the development of doctrine is very faith affirming. It puts Christianity to a stringent test. The good news is Catholic Christianity passes the test. The hard news, which also ends up being good news, is that protestant Christianity fails and deserves to be rejected.

The other issue we do talk about quite a bit is the Eucharist. Part of that is because it is the fount and the summit of our faith. The other reason is because the biblical evidence is so clear. I don’t think there is any passage of scripture more clear than John 6. Jesus knows He is teaching an important and difficult truth so He makes Himself as clear as He can. He repeats Himself. He uses strong language. He confronts the obvious objections. It is very hard for a bible Christians to ignore such a powerful passage but they must ignore it. So you can see why Catholic apologists go there a lot.

But what about Mary? Mary is seen as an objection that needs to be dealt with rather than a positive argument for becoming Catholic. So we want to talk about Mary but it is not the first topic we want to deal with. We want to gain ground on the other topics and try not to lose any when we talk about Mary. There is just such a strong emotional aversion to Marian devotion. Most Marian devotion is optional. So the strategy is just to deal with the few dogmas that must be accepted and leave the rest.

Catholics answer many questions about Mary but not from guys like James White who are more interested in taking cheap shots than getting at the source of somebody’s aversion. Part of this is about not throwing pearls before swine. Mary is holy. She is pure. She is our spiritual mother. She is the mother of God. You don’t want to get into a debate where somebody is going to throw mud at her. So many of these guys claim to love Jesus yet they have nothing good to say about His mother. They would not insult their worst enemy by speculating about the sex life of their mother but they do with the mother of the person they call Lord and Saviour. It is strange but true.

The other big reason why Marian dogmas are not debated is because they are dependant on other Catholic truths. It is a development of doctrine. So it depends on accepting the doctrines that it is derived from. That means accepting them based on the authority of the church. Those doctrines involve the veneration of saints. They involve the notion of holiness and the importance of virginity. So you have to build an argument out of many premises that a protestants won’t accept. It ends up being too much for one debate.

One of the things that discourages converts is the size of the gap between protestant and Catholic traditions. It is not even one thing that seems impossible. It is the combination of many things. Taken individually the Catholic positions don’t seem that hard to accept. Taken together it seems like a huge mountain. Part of it is wonder if you, and every teacher you have had, could be so wrong about so many things. I know I was serious about my faith for many years. I didn’t think I was perfect but I did think I was a lot closer to the truth than I was to the Catholic faith. Having a debate about Mary can leave protestants feeling like the Tiber river is the 1000 miles wide. To deal with fewer questions and let them ponder them and see how solid the Catholic position is, that tends to bear more fruit.

In the same way, when applied to the life of the mind, the Christian insight identifies purity with the union of mind and truth, not with a mind too full of fear of commitment to have contact with any truth at all. To be sure, the Christian intellect is called to “keep an open mind” until the facts are ascertained. But as Chesterton observes, the point of an open mind, like an open mouth, is to bite down on something solid. That means that the exercise of reason ultimately depends on an act of faith. Indeed, the very possibility of any mental act going forward rests, ultimately, on an unprovable article of faith: the faith that our acts of intellect will actually correspond to the structure of the world. All the sciences rest on this faith. We believe that we may understand. And, in believing, we discover again that purity of intellect, like purity of body, results in fruitfulness, not sterility.

I find this interesting when applied to tradition. Because examining our tradition involves questioning this very thing. That is asking whether “our acts of intellect will actually correspond to the structure of the world”. As a Reformed person I had been trained to think within that tradition. I had gotten pretty good at it. I had absolute faith that my thinking corresponded with the truth about God. It was required. I could not engage in reason unless I accepted that my thoughts lines up with reality. Even when I changed my mind I had to believe that my new way of thinking lined up with reality. It was not fun to meet people with different mindsets. They made clear one problem. I didn’t really have any reason for thinking my way of reasoning was right and somebody else’s was wrong.

As a Catholic the issue does not go away. What happens is you choose a tradition for a reason rather than just falling into a tradition or perhaps choosing one that feels right to you. What is really amazing is that God provides a tradition you can trust. So the choice becomes easy. It is a choice between one of many human traditions and the only Sacred Tradition. Actually it still isn’t easy. Changing traditions is never easy. But it allows you to have confidence that the next thing your mind closes on will be true. That your faith in reason is really a faith in God. That He allows your mind to work along lines that correspond with His mind. That makes being Catholic so much more exciting. The beauty is deep. The love intense. The truth is profound. Everything about it has the fingerprints of God. That is awesome and scary but it is where I want to be.

But there are people who argue this. Now if you hang out around Lion fans you won’t meet many of them but they do exist. Some Packer fans say Brett Farve is the best ever. They seem intelligent but are obviously biased. We shouldn’t think of them as evil although such feelings come quite easily. They are just blinded by their presuppositions. Still we can be confident that Barry Sanders is the best player ever. It is an objective truth. It is clear from the evidence. Why should we doubt it?

Now we have Lutheran, Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans, and Presbyterians. They all have their own truth that seems clear and objective to them. Just like football fans they can see the bias in the arguments of others but they think their own arguments are pretty objective. Endless arguments don’t resolve anything. But there is a difference. Questions of faith are important. We need to get them right. We can be wrong about football and all we suffer is the indignity of being a Packer fan. Now that is pretty serious indignity but being wrong about faith can put our eternal soul at risk.

So we need to step back and admit at the very least that logic that seems crystal clear to us could be somehow mistaken. That is an act of humility. To admit that contradictory traditions imply a lack of clarity in the scriptures. That there is at least a question to be addressed that cannot be resolved by endless exegetical arguments. That there needs to be a certain charity required in speaking about our brothers in Christ. We tend to do just the opposite. We tend to live in denial of the problems and cover them up with bravado. By feigning great certainty we try and prevent ourselves from addressing the obvious question: What if I am wrong?

It occurs to me that God has preserved just enough history for us to know how He intervened in history. We have been able to reconstruct much of what happened around the middle east way back. Other parts of the world, not so much. So we have a context to put the story of Israel into. So God does not just reveal Himself in history but he provides a way to preserve that revelation.

Now an atheist might argue the opposite. That the Christian/Jewish story eventually won out because they were good record keepers. That eventually what they were saying was more compelling because it was older. But that does not mean it is true. It just means they stumbled onto a good practice and that caused their teaching to be left standing. This is the way Darwinism works. The best available philosophy wins but that does not mean it should not continue to evolve into something really advanced like atheism.

But that only makes sense if the history they passed on was true. Having information is a great thing if you can critically analyze it. That leads to better decisions for the future. But would an atheist accept that the Jews and later the Christians were passing down true information? Is the story of the 10 plagues and the 10 commandments true? The parting of the Red Sea and the manna in the wilderness? Story after story about the supernatural. Including the stories of the miracles of Jesus and He resurrection. Are they true history?

If they are not then an atheist is hard pressed to explain why a sense of history was such a great advantage when most of what they preserved was all wrong? Would that not just lead them to act on false information and leave them worse off? In fact, an atheist is forced to contend that the principle conclusions they drew from this history, namely the ones about God, were completely wrong. So you would think that would make their society dysfunctional and therefore, by Darwin’s theory, less survivable. But it did survive and thrive like no other religion.

Christians can easily accept that the Judeo-Christian respect for history did give the faith strength. That these supernatural events did occur and they not only learned from them but learned to reflect on longer term human experience generally in a way most societies never did. They can also believe that God intervened to create circumstances so that the truth of His revelation would survive. Or they can believe a combination of the two. They don’t end up with the same problem.

Heaven and earth will pass away but my words will never pass away.
Mt 24:35 Mk 13:31 Lk 21:33

And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. Mt 16:18

Progress requires us to build on what previous generations have done. We need to discard what they did that was bad and develop what they did that was good. But to do that we need to be able to tell the good from the bad. Jesus gives us some clues in these verses.

First of all, I am not a Greek scholar but I have heard preachers talk about how the verb tense in the first verse refers to an ongoing process that will complete in the future. So it is not strictly a future even Jesus is talking about but a process of degradation and decay and eventual collapse of this world. Similarly the reference to building the church is not a one time even. Creation is instantaneous. Building takes time. It is a process. So we are living in an era where we should expect to see the church being built by Jesus while the world should show more and more signs of the destruction it is headed for.

We see many Christians acting as if the opposite is true. That truth they find in the church is ever shrinking. Sola Scriptura says that Jesus cannot build the church beyond what is explicitly in scripture. But new opinions on scripture come out all the time. So things that seemed clear 100 years ago are now seen as questionable. So rather than Jesus building His church you have a bunch of people chipping away at the faith.

What about the world? Do Christians see it as passing away? Some do and some don’t. There is liberal Christianity in both the protestant and Catholic worlds that does look to the world as a source of progress. The thinking tends to damn Christianity with faint praise. It is about the individual. It provides comfort to people to believe some things about God. But it does not matter if they don’t add up logically. Real truth is to be found in science. Real progress includes everyone from all world views.

Of course conservatives protestants reject this but often offer no alternative vision of progress. Conserving is a negative thing. We want to avoid losing something. Building a church is a positive thing. Jesus wants to raise humanity up to new levels. But it requires a vision of church that can grow and develop over time. People can see that the world is changing fast. It will either be great or it will be a disaster. But it will need the word of God to be living and active.

Only the catholic church offers a true alternative view of progress. When Jesus said His words would not pass away he wasn’t just talking about something that would cease with the ascension. Jesus continues to speak through His body, the church. So we have a developing understanding of God and man. Jesus builds His church higher and higher so each generation can discover new things. God know our need to explore frontiers.

Goodness is another real strong suit for them. As guys like Mark Shea endlessly point out, they tend to borrow morality from the philosophical infrastructure around them. They don’t have a legitimate source of morality. But it must be said that they are very moral people. Atheists go on and on about immoral acts committed by Christians. Sure there is some anger towards Christianity but it is a righteous anger. They really believe that rejecting Christianity is morally right. They have a point. There is an embarrassing amount of immorality in church history. I know the sins I commit must make people wonder if the gospel could really be true. The church should have many more saints than it does.

But the third desire we have for beauty seems to be somewhat lacking in atheists. They pride themselves on being able to accept hard truths. Why should the human person have dignity? Why should my life have purpose? Why should there be life after death? They see Christianity as being simply too good to be true. That life is ugly and Christians just try and make it beautiful because they are wishful thinkers. Heaven is for dreamers. Of course, they are right. But our dreams are meant to come true.

So why is this? Why do we have so many people losing their desire for beauty while being passionate about truth and goodness? The two things that come to mind for me are sex and liturgy. Romantic love and liturgical worship are two places where we are supposed to get a glimpse of the beauty of heaven. But the last 50 years has seen a huge decline in the level of respect for each of them.

Sex has become distorted to the point where church teaching is almost incomprehensible to most people in society. All they can see in sex is an occasion for inward focused pleasure, in other words sin. They have real trouble seeing it as a place where you can experience beauty deeply and profoundly. This becomes reinforced over and over as people live out the distortions of sex and internalize the ugliness. People get very hurt and very cynical. They see the church with her sexual morals and they know deep down inside she is right. But they react with anger because they feel guilty and they see no way to change.

Atheists live truth and goodness most of the time but when it comes to sex they have no desire for those either. Then suddenly morals become unknowable. I wonder if the sexual revolution has created the atheist movement by destroying people’s capacity for beauty. By treating people as objects for pleasure rather than givers and receivers of self sacrificing love. Sexual abuse is so rampant that most of it is not even called abuse. Someone talks about love, has sex with you and then leaves you? Just an expected part of life. Enough of these intimate betrayals and you can feel God has betrayed you.

Before I became Catholic I had thoughts like this to. Then I was trying to find the right song, the right story, the right way of praying before the service. Some magic bullet that we could use to cause the church to start touching people more deeply and more effectively. I wonder if my desire as a protestant was really a longing for a truly holy liturgy. In other words, a longing for the mass.

But the mass does not seem to connect with everyone either. So maybe we can do it better. The obvious place to look is the old liturgy. Bringing back the old liturgy completely might work. But we have done that. The growth of those parishes has been quite modest. Latin seems overrated to me. But some forms of reverence seem like they might be a big step forward.

The head covering thing appeals to me partly because I know society would be outraged at it’s sexist nature. But modesty is sexist. The issues just are not the same for men and for women. So you could make a statement about modesty and about reverence for the Eucharist at the same time. But I am a man. Women would need to buy into this for it to work. It could be a very good thing or a very bad thing.

What is needed is leadership. No matter what the change is, it needs to be made by the whole community. If one person kneels and takes communion on the tongue I don’t see a value in that. Perhaps for that one person but then there are issues of pride. What is needed is for the priest to call for a change, for him to teach and explain why this will bring the community closer to God, and then for him to require everyone to do it at least for that one mass.

That is pretty hard. Even a very minor thing is likely to cause some people to get quite upset. That is just the nature of our modern, uncatechized, even unevangelized parishes. But nothing is going to happen if you don’t rock the boat. Anything that draws people to a fuller commitment to Christ is going to upset people who don’t want to go there. The choice will always be there. The enemy will always be there. If nobody gets upset then maybe you are not doing any good.

In some way he does care. The boat with Jesus and His disciples is not going to sink in a freak storm. That would destroy God’s salvation plan in one fell swoop. It isn’t going to happen. Not because Peter is such a good pilot. But because God is God.

Our priest pointed out that Mark was writing to Christians in the middle of persecutions. Many people were being killed. The question, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” must have been asked in many forms. But in that case people had actually died. So God was not guaranteeing safety for these people or their loved ones. What they could be sure of was the church would not be wiped out. The figurative barque of Peter was safe for the same reason the literal one was. God has a salvation plan and He won’t let it fail. The church is the centerpiece of the plan and Roman persecution won’t ultimately stamp it out.

But how comforting is that? To know your side will win the war but you still might not survive the battle? But some hills are worth dying on. Death is very hard but it is unavoidable. Dying for the only thing that really matters in life is not something to fear. Don’t fear him who can kill the body but fear him who can take body and soul. Do we believe that? I noticed Amy was asking something similar except focusing on the second reading. Have we really had our thinking transformed by our faith? Jesus makes clear that the disciples failed the test. He tells them plainly they have no faith. Then they ask the big question. Who is the this Jesus guy anyway? Mark leaves those persecuted Christians with that question. Who is Jesus anyway? If He is who you say He is then why are you afraid?

Suppose a protestant church tried to venerate some saints. What would happen? First of all there would be huge debate about which saints should be venerated and what should be the process for deciding. So their model of church is really lousy at making decisions so they have to try and minimize decision-making. Rejecting the saints means they get to pass on thousands of debates which would leave them snookered over and over again. Their only solution is schism so it would be a disaster from that point of view.

The other issue they would have is it would highlight how much protestant Christianity changes from generation to generation. I know in the Christian Reformed church there is precious little that has not changed since I was a child. So it would be very hard to venerate anyone from that time and that is less than 50 years ago.

CS Lewis died in 1963. Could he be a protestant saint? He was strongly opposed to contraception. He believed in purgatory. He could not pass the kind of scrutiny that Catholics apply to saints. So what do you do? Lower the standard and accept a lot of people? That does not seem right. The only thing you can do is to accept nobody. So you may as well try and turn it into a virtue. To say we don’t have saints because we are so holy rather than saying we don’t have saints because we are dysfunctional.

The church does recognize a danger in venerating somebody who is not in heaven. They get around this problem by waiting for miracles to be verified and studying the life of the person in great detail. But at the end of the day we still need the gift on infallibility to insure the canonized person is in heaven. So they can avoid this danger only by God’s special grace.

So you have people who are sincere followers of Jesus honestly believing they know God’s mind when they don’t. You have many of them all giving different versions of what God’s mind is. So we learn to not take them too seriously. Even protestants learn not to take other protestants too seriously when they contradict their faith. As a protestant I was never bothered by someone saying you had to speak in tongues to be saved. Different strokes for different folks. If you think about it that is actually a serious doctrinal error but we didn’t think about it.

But it gets worse. The solution to all this, God’s solution, is the Catholic church. But what happens in the church? Well, you get a lot of people thinking like protestants. They dissent freely from the tradition of the church and the teaching of the magisterium. They do recognize the pope and the bishops as being legitimate leaders but only ceremonially. They are even missing many of the best things about protestantism. Like the love of scripture and the willingness to sacrifice for Jesus. So they have the worst of both worlds. They lack the zeal of the protestant and they lack the orthodoxy of the Catholic.

So where does it go from here? We have major spiritual problems growing in the church. We have technology creating all sort of moral challenges like birth control, pornography, abortion, and stem cell research. We have the rise of a very militant Islam. We know the church will come out of this still standing. But how is that going to work? I suppose it looked very bleak for the church at a few other points in history. How do we recover? How did we before?

This is what Pope Benedict is pointing us towards. First he gives us the year of St Paul which points us to a time where the church went from a tiny group to eventually taking over the Roman empire. How did he do it? By getting the gospel right and by living it without compromise. Now Pope Benedict puts before us the office of the priest. What is going on there? I think it again has to do with zeal and orthodoxy but the grace comes through the hands of the priest. The pope seems to know what the church needs to do. He is gently prodding them to do it. By them I mean everyone, protestants, orthodox, liberal Catholics, conservative Catholics.

John Paul II said we can never impose Catholicism on anyone. We can only propose it. It seems like we are starting to get to the point where it has been proposed to the bishops and for the most part they have accepted. The next step is to propose it to the priests. This is a slow process and the church is working on many other fronts as well. But I do see it as constantly proposing and slowly people are taking it up.

I do think we will see amazing breakthroughs in terms of church unity in the next few decades. The groundwork is being laid. It goes slow but it will happen. What has happened is more than anyone would have predicted 25 years ago but it is only the beginning.

The reason this kind of talk seems so convincing is that most Christians don’t know why it is not a problem for the faith. The truth about Jesus does not depend on there not being any counterfeits. In fact, there are many false religions that have enough truth to be appealing. What it does depend on is the integrity of the early church. In a word, it depends on Christian tradition.

The question that needs to be asked is whether it is reasonable to suppose that the early church mixed pagan ideas with the teachings of Jesus during the first few centuries. Christians need to know the answer to this because many doubts are being sowed in many minds about how much we can trust the scriptures. Most Catholics don’t know these things because they just don’t know anything about their faith. Most protestants don’t know because they focus on scripture and you can’t use scripture to prove scripture has not been altered.

It is helpful to look at the people in charge of the church at that time and what was happening then. There are a few things that make it very hard to suppose the church was in the business of changing the gospel:

1. There was persecution. Why does persecution happen. Because a group does not bend it’s beliefs to suit the government or the culture. Like the Jews before them the Christians were known as being willing to die rather than change their faith.

2. The church was spread out. Very quickly the church gained a presence in a very large area. Lots of churches in lots of cultures. If the faith was changing you would see differences in faith from one region to another. But we really don’t. The same Catholic faith is taught in Europe, Africa, and Asia. That only makes sense if they got it from the same place and preserved it effectively.

3. The church fought heresies. You look at a guy like Marcion. He was trying to take the church in the exact direction these theories allege it did go. He wanted to import pagan doctrines and revamp the scriptures. But the church had no interest in that at all. The leaders were very concerned about purity of doctrine. They passionately defended the gospel against Marcion and many other heretics.

For example, I used to be involved in running a retreat ministry. We would limit the number of people who could come to any given retreat. But when a retreat was full we would often be torn. We would have people who we knew could really benefit from the retreat want to go. We knew the limit was there for a reason. We were feeling the emotional struggle that we should feel when we set such limits. Then sometimes we responded to that and let the person come anyway. Does that mean we acted badly? No. We let our emotion override our logic. What is wrong with that? Sometimes it made for some interesting retreats but we lived with our choices.

God does not decree from heaven that you must have x number of people at a retreat. Just like he does not decree that a couple must have x number of children. He lets us make decisions and feel good about them or feel bad about them and maybe stick to them or maybe change them. That is how God works. He lets us figure things out and that involves emotional angst as well as rational analysis. We live with our choices and it can make life quite interesting. But when it comes to family planning we are less comfortable with it. We feel like we are doing it wrong. Why is that?

One reason might be that the emotional angst is connected with sex. When we make choices about retreats the concern is around people being able to connect with God and maybe go to confession and have an opportunity to change their life dramatically for the better. When we make choices about family planning we are talking about our desires to have children and to make love with our spouse. These are connected with hormones but they go much deeper into our heart than that. But somehow we don’t see God speaking though these feelings. There is something about God and sex that does not compute. Perhaps the scars from some sexual sins or the residue of bad teaching. We are embarrassed to admit we find avoiding pregnancy unnatural. But it is unnatural.

Catholics often get jealous of how much effort protestants put into singing and preaching and revivals and such. But we needed to do that to make the moment. The only holiness we could find is in our hearts. So we had to convince ourselves it was there. That we were really in God’s presence. As Catholics we don’t have to have a feeling of holiness. We know things are holy because of what they are. The Eucharist is holy. So when we do adoration we don’t have to manufacture a moment. But we can’t fall asleep either. We need to believe and respond to the holy things that are given to us through the church. It is an embarassment of riches. But we need a heart of worship. How do we get there time after time?

It is a hard question because when we do anything over and over it can become quite dry. As Catholics God gives Himself to us quite freely. It is almost like a marriage when a wife gives herself to her husband freely. Sometimes husbands get bored because it comes too easy. Catholics can get the same way with the Eucharist. We don’t have to work for it so we lose sight of what a great gift it is. Sometimes we don’t even bother. We can make it seem more like a burden than a blessing.

So how do we fix it? It is just like a marriage. It is not to hard to figure out what you need to do. Deal with sin if it exists. Make an effort. Spend time with the Blessed Sacrament outside of mass. The biggest thing for me was to understand that it can be very quite and slow. Protestants talk about a glimpse of glory. Catholics want to soak in His presence. That is a little simplistic but the emphasis is like that. We can have dramatic moments of conversion but the norm is a long term, slow burn purification.

I almost feel like I want to write the parallel post on marriage. The analogy stretches quite far and really goes beyond analogy. God’s grace enters into our family relationships and every other area of our lives. We don’t just get filled with love and awe for God but we become better husbands and fathers and workers and friends. We might even become better bloggers.

Catholics need the Eucharist. They need confession. They need a priest. But priests can be annoying. They can make demands. We call them father for a reason. They give us direction and leadership like a father. But children need fathers don’t they? They don’t always know how much they need fathers but we know they do. Are new Christians any different? I eventually came to realize that even more mature and catechized Christians like me need fathers. That was a hard lesson to learn. It is pretty plain in scripture. We are called children. We are called sheep. We are called disciples or followers. It stands to reason we need a father or a shepherd or a leader.

Look through you local Christian book store. You will find a lot of books on leadership. You won’t find many on being a follower. We love to lead. The priesthood is all about the idea that God has provided leaders and you are not one of them. The people you most want to pick as your leaders are probably not one of them either. God calls. His church ordains.

So the idea of the priesthood of all believers really appeals. That means I can get rid of this pesky spiritual fatherhood business. But what does it really mean? Priests offer sacrifice. What sacrifice do we offer? Penance. But they don’t believe in penance. Never mind the details. It is the concept of the church as royal priesthood that we like. Everyone becomes a priest so nobody is a priest. Never mind the details about what words mean.