The Joys of Catholic Paradoxes

I have been so busy lately I have not been able to keep up with this blog, but I have for some time wanted to post about the paradoxes, the enigmas, seeming contradictions I have found within Catholicism and plan yet on doing that. But yesterday, I was again reminded of this when I was walking into St. James Cathedral in Seattle.

There are many homeless people in Seattle and they hang around the cathedral because there they find shelter and food. As we were walking into mass yesterday morning a man, obviously a mentally ill vagrant, was walking in with us. Besides the bags of his earthly wealth carried under his arm, he was wearing jeans with a woman's dress over them. His face was caked with women's makeup, his eyes smeared with eyeliner making him look somewhat like a raccoon.

I was going to mass with a mentally ill, cross dressing, homeless man. Something I had never been exposed to in other churches. He sat down on a wooden chair, and the magnificent organ began the prelude. The choir began its glorious praise to God and I felt so wonderfully small and insignificant amongst the beauty of the sound and the high ceilings full of stained-glass windows and golden pillars.

In the Catholic Cathedral we are reminded that beauty draws us to worship the creator of beauty. We are brought into a building of unparalleled breathtaking magnificence in Washington State. The sounds bouncing off the ceilings so high I have to put on my glasses to see any details way up there. I find a God there who wants to bring us into the opulent, lavish grace of His presence. It is a taste of heaven.

And there also I find the darkest depths of sadness in the eyes of the lonely comic looking man. In one moment heaven and hell stand in the same room. I am reminded by this paradox, this strange scene that in Catholicism we are living in the Kingdom of God and also, not yet.......

Now, About my Mom...

The last post was about my dad, so this one will be about my mother.

We were talking yesterday and she, being a Seventh-day Adventists, decided that it was terrible that the family was being torn apart by different beliefs. So I was amused at her solution:

We all start a new church and call it Cathadventism or Cathventism.....

We would take the doctrines we like out of Adventism and Catholicism and put them together and build a little chapel on their land and we can all worship together. Problem solved, unity achieved. I laughed, only she was serious. She compromised greatly by saying that we could ditch the SDA prophetess Ellen White as long as we attend services on Saturday. The Saturday Sabbath is something she could never give up for anything or anyone. She's okay with Mary, Penance, Confession... so we could include those things.

When I realized that she was being serious, I didn't know what to say. She was, after all, being very sweet and wanting unity between us!

There is truly a great difference in Catholicism and Protestantism. Protestants believe that if you don't agree with others about your beliefs, just start a new denomination! Make everyone happy about what they believe no matter what truth is.

If there is anyone out there who would advise me on what to say to my mother about this, she has an attention span (with religious topics) of about 90 seconds.... I would be so grateful. I am still a baby Catholic and sometimes I feel like I don't really know enough to give authentically "Catholic" answers!

Catholicism, Adventism and the Great Gulf of Thought

My father just visited me from across the country. He is a Seventh-day Adventist. Our visit was wonderful because he is wonderful. He taught me about God's mercy and grace as a child. He was a very good example of a loving God and if God is anything resembling my father, we have very little to worry about as far as justice and mercy.

As an Adventist, though, I wonder how difficult his visit was with us. Adventists have a very anti-Catholic set of prophecies including one that has Catholics leading a civic witch-hunt against them in the last days. We, especially we who have left Adventism, will persecute them with ever more degrees of severity beginning with the dreaded Sunday law. We will insist that they worship on Sunday instead of Saturday "Sabbath." Then we will ratchet up the persecution until, in the very end, many will be martyred at our hands. I grew up hearing this scary stuff in Adventist churches and schools--including their universities.

Most people outside Adventism don't understand that I wasn't raised in a particularly strange sect within Adventism, because they don't see this side of the doctrines with their Adventist colleagues and friends. But it is there, under the surface. Their prophetess, Ellen White, predicted these events with visions that have been recorded in her book entitled, The Great Controversy.

What part of these prophecies were lurking in my dad's subconscious as we took him all around Seattle, to our magnificent St. James Cathedral and Pike's Place Market and Mount Rainier? I do know that he is concerned about us spiritually. It was all over some of his comments, like the worried, "Just promise you won't give up spiritually searching...." He even laughingly joked that one of his best friends think we are crazy for becoming Catholic. But his was a nervous laugh.

It pains me deeply to know there is such a gulf in our beliefs and yet we worship the same God. How is it possible that prejudices within the Body of Christ can leave people so paranoid of each other? I wanted to spend some time defending my faith, yet I know that there are no words that can pierce through the cloud of so deeply ingrained misunderstanding. So I prayed and I leave it up to God as to when is the right time, if ever, for a discussion. I am hoping that love will bridge the gap when words fail. Love, perhaps, will reach into places where prejudices have a stronghold and soften their nasty grip.

9-11 and Catholicism

To me, this 9-11 remembrance just feels different because I am a Catholic. When I had just left the Seventh-day Adventist church and 9-11 occurred, I was thinking, “last day events, the world deserves this for its sins, much more ahead.....”

I didn’t feel a part of anything going on, even when we went and visited the former site of the Twin Towers in NYC. Everything was so distant, so “the world” and as a good Christian, I wasn’t really in “the world.”

Today, things are different. As a Catholic I feel connected with everything. Walking inside the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, I actually am more at peace and at war. I am safely inside God’s body, yet, as part of God’s body I am expected to be Him for the world. Everything that happens is not distant, it reverberates within God’s body and we weep with those who weep and we laugh with those who laugh. We are to render assistance not as some charitable act of self-righteousness, but because love and unity draws us to it as if the wounds were our own. We are those who died, they were part of us. We, as Christ’s body, ARE those who now suffer and grieve. They are our griefs and our sorrows too.

Catholicism doesn’t allow me to view life from a safe distance. As God’s arms to hold, I am to hold, as God’s heart I must feel, as His eyes I must see, as His ears I must hear. I am called to LIFE, not to comfort. As a Catholic life calls to me, and I must answer.

9-11 Now a sad memory. God be with those who are still suffering with the loss of loved ones. May we reach out as God’s body and comfort them.

Seventh-day Adventist to Roman Catholic: The ELCA, Up the Creek

Seventh-day Adventist to Roman Catholic: The ELCA, Up the Creek

His is interesting...... Obama and the Catholic Church

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVN2MMuiedI

Seventh-day Adventist to Roman Catholic: We Are Catholics

Seventh-day Adventist to Roman Catholic: We Are

The Tree of Knowledge

Mankind has gorged upon the Tree of Knowledge.

Yet even through the ages of this greedy banquet, he has failed to perceive which fruit is poisoned, so his tongue has grows numb and tasteless. New generations glut themselves on haute-cuisine enlightenment, yet endlessly remain famished and parched.

Instead of enlightenment, the search for truth has blinded mankind senseless. Desperately groping for keys to let him out of his prison of angst, man discovers Higgs particles and new universes, but does he find anything to quench his thirst and hunger for understanding?

No.

As technology shoots him out amongst the vast and infinite, he has become visionless, starving--- only to indoctrinate his children that it is all vacuous and void.

The university gods’ answer to this cosmic desertion?

WE.

WE offer you our paradise, our bread and wine of wisdom.

WE as tribe,

WE as monarchy,

WE as oligarchy,

WE as socialism and communism and totalitarianism and naziism and fascism.

Even when WE as a republic and democracy have been studied and experimented with and lived and died for--in the end, we are thrown prostrate, shocked and suffering to watch our best and most noble ideals deteriorate.

The masses have followed philosophers, scientists and politicians as they have led us from this banquet table of education to a grotesque communal retch.

Daniel’s vision, our idol is smashed.

After the wars created from the kingdoms of WE, the cynical barbaric question becomes “I?”

My conscience, my choice, my ideal, my understanding. I am the rock from which flows the water, the wine, the bread. I hold the keys.

Nietzsche’s Superman and Freud’s id-- God is not, but I am?

Satre suicidally laughs that there is no such thing as bread and wine, the kingdom has only locks with no keys.

Mankind is exhausted with lies and failure, innocence and idealism. We are even tired of the absurdity of randomness. All the questions of truth have been spent and gone unanswered. Striving to be god has left us cynical, empty, lonely and twisted.

Gasping, Mankind reaches up in one final attempt at truth. Creation’s fingertip stretches down from heaven to us in our hellish dust.

He utters the gentle, unimaginable question, “who?”

The Word is not how or even why, but “who?” It is no longer WE or I asking the question, but the answer asking the question. And WE must not find in the question ourselves. WE or I must not rise again to create a new totalitarianism.

Who is left to when Mankind abdicates his reign? Whose vision survives? Who has the keys to the Kingdom, who has the bread and the wine of wisdom?

When our sovereignty is released to His Kingdom, we will be reminded of One who knelt under the ancient Olive trees in chaos and agonizing confusion. Even the ultimate Answer could see no answers. With immortal suffering, The Answer flung His id, his Superman into eternity, with “Not my will but thine.”

Blood flowed from His agonizing brow uniting with His tears. The blood turned to water and the water into wine. From His lips came the prayers that turned into bread. We join Him in that watery death, that we may eat and drink of His life and His kingdom.

Now we courageously lay down the quest for a perfect Utopia where we are masters of the answers and Truth falls from Trees.

Now Faith looks through His perfection and we kneel before His Kingdom and say, “though I do not understand, I will obey.”