Who’s Story Is It?
One idea stuck with me from a conference I attended. The speaker talked about two ways of looking at life. First, you can see that God is a part of my story. He might be a big part or a little part but He is out there. Conferences are when a speaker challenges you to make God a bigger part of your story when he starts to get crowded out by regular life. The second way of looking at life is not where God is not a part of the story. That really comes back to the first case because removing God completely from our thinking is really just something we do for a while. Something always happens to bring thoughts of the transcendent back.
The second view of life is to see yourself as a part of God’s story. That may seem like a small change at first but when you think about it you begin to see the difference is huge. The question of how much of a role God should play in my life goes away. My life is a gift from God and it is a joy and a privilege for it to be given significance by God. So the question becomes, how much of my life has been honored with an importance in God’s story? The answer is all of it. Amazingly enough even seeming insignificant private thoughts can become very powerful. If we choose to use them in prayer or worship we can change the world.
When we see life with God in the center we avoid many issues. Are we trying to be saved by works or by faith? It just does not come up. Our works and our faith become one. We don’t need to think about believing enough or doing enough. You simply see it all as being from God and for God. Obedience just means recognizing God as the source of what you have and using your gifts in harmony with the way He has ordered things. It isn’t even surrendering things to God as it is just letting God’s creation be what it was intended to be. Letting you choices fit into God’s plan. All the tension disappears.
The reason why this resonates with me so much is that it connects with how my view of life has changed since becoming Catholic. When you focus on a personal relationship with Jesus you end up in the first view of life. You try and make God the most important think in your life but it is a constant struggle. Other things creep up. When you add a church, and saints, and a sense of salvation history you really get a feel for God’s story. You pray about the church’s struggle with moral relativism, with liberalism, etc. You lift up Pope Benedict and all the bishops. You see world history in terms of church councils and religious movements.
The other thing you stop doing as a Catholic is seeing your faith in relation to other denominations. It is ironic because I argue more with other faiths than I used to. Still that is because I feel I know something now when before I really felt I was unsure all the time. So you can see God’s story when you can see what is truth and what is heresy. Otherwise you are just not sure. If I am unsure if ESCR is right or wrong then how can I see God’s story in that?
It is ironic because the truth behind Sola Fide is similar to this. They were rebelling against a notion of do so many prayers and so many masses and you will be saved. It was a “God is part of my story” type of thinking that Luther found so objectionable in Catholics and protestants today rightly see much the same thing and object. Still the problem is not the theology. It is the practice. Many Catholics do have a mentality of how much God do I want in my life. It is not Catholic but it is there and often tolerated more than it should be. Still when protestant groups end up being a split of a split of a split then it is hard to see God’s story in your denomination. So changing the theology and breaking up the church ended up making the original problem worse. One real solution I find is protestant converts in the church. I see them as being particularly effective at challenging Catholics to change their practice.
[...] talks a bit here about how Catholicism effects the way we think about history. It reminds me a a post I made a while back. It seems that another thing protestants have in common with atheists is they [...]
November 19th, 2008 at 5:09 pm