Monthly Archives: October 2012

Women’s Rights (?)

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None of us had the option of choosing who our parents would be.  We did not know the content of their character or the color of their skin.  We did not know if they were upstanding members of society or common criminals.  We did not know if they practiced any particular faith, or if they had any sense of morality whatsoever.  We did not know if they were going to nurture us or abuse us.  We had no sense of how they treated each other.  For all we knew, our fathers could have been rapists or ministers.  Our mothers might have been prostitutes or soccer moms.  We simply did not get to choose who our parents would be.  Yet, here we are, existing, and trying to make the best of it, because someone gave us a chance at life.

Life is the primary, inalienable right.  Without life, none of the other human rights make any sense.  Consider the rights of a woman, for example.  What good are her rights if she is not alive?  One of life’s greatest ironies is the killing of women in utero in the name of “women’s rights” (or, for that matter, the killing of any human in the name of “human rights”).

Incidently, it is sometimes claimed that, since I do not have a woman’s body, I am not allowed to say anything about women’s issues, particularly abortion.  Foolishness.  My very existence is due to a woman’s body and her choices, as is the existence of anyone reading this.  Furthermore, any woman would be glad to have the support of my opinion if it was in agreement with her own.  It is only when I disagree that my gender becomes an issue.

I cannot be supportive of “women’s rights” by excluding the weakest and most vulnerable of all women; those women still in the womb of other women.  They are living in what used to be the safest place on earth.  Now it is one of the most perilous places to exist.  Don’t tell me how important your  life and your female body are while the body living inside of you (possibly another female) is being destroyed.  They are both equally important.  They both deserve the right to live and have a chance to show their quality, no matter who the parents are.

 

Saint Gianna Beretta Molla, pray for us.

Visiting Where I Was Born Again.

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This past weekend I was back in my hometown to celebrate a wedding and a birthday.  I needed to go to Church Sunday morning.  The default location was St. Ignatius, the Church I grew up in.  My parents still attend there, and it would be a chance to visit with them for a bit.  This time, however, I decided to do something different.  I was not baptized at St. Ignatius but at St. Clare, and my family attended there until I was in second grade.  Since I had not been there since I was a second grader, I thought it would be interesting to visit.

While approaching the church and school buildings, it struck me how small everything appeared.  Things are magnified to a child’s eyes, and my memory was a child’s memory.  Then I noticed the front steps.  I recalled an old photograph of my family standing on those steps with a baby.  The baby was me at my baptism.  I haven’t seen that photo in years, but I remember it.  And I remember the steps.

Upon entering the church a flood of memories hit me.  It all started to come back.  Except for the scale of things, I felt like I was looking through my six-year-old eyes.  The sights, the sounds and the aroma were familiar and welcoming.  It was like a reunion with a long lost relative.  As I took in the details it occurred to me that more than forty years had left so much unchanged.  The corner stone read “1914.”  The building was almost one hundred years old.  I was baptized there near its mid-century period.  I ran my hand along the railing that I could barely reach as a child.

Meanwhile, I was helping my wife juggle two-year-old twins and trying not to disrupt the Mass.  I had to carry my daughter to the back of the church to settle her down.  I paced back and forth while she gradually fell asleep.  Then I noticed the statue of St. Clare off to the side.  I gazed at her for a while and my eyes were drawn to the focal point of the monstrance she was holding.  When the priest lifted up the Holy Eucharist, it really hit me.  All those years that statue had been standing there holding that monstrance.  I had left, but she had not.  Yet, it was only a fraction of the time that Christ had been steadfastly present in the tabernacle of that church and in every Catholic Church for two thousand years.  He stayed with us, like He stayed with the travelers on the road to Emmaus, present in the Blessed Sacrament.

Jesus said to my heart, “You were baptized here, Thomas.  This is where you became my own.  When you left My Church, I awaited your return with open arms.  I have always been here for you, even when you didn’t care.  Though you may leave me, I will never leave you nor forsake you.  I love you, and I am happy you finally came home to Me.”  Then, I felt the warmth of my daughter asleep in my arms, and I knew the same promise was for her and her brother.  “I will not leave you orphans.  I am with you until the end of the age.”

Spiritual But Not Religious (No Longer)

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Why do so many people say that they are “spiritual but not religious?”  Usually it has something to do with some degree of disenchantment with organized religion.  I can’t speak for everyone, but I know why I used to say it.  For me it was a way of avoiding the grunt-work of searching for truth.  It was a non-committal, relativistic place to sit on the fence and make no real decision.  It was almost an agnostic perspective.  Since I wasn’t sure what to decide, I would make no clear decision and just be “spiritual.”

I also believed it was a way for me to be non-judgmental of others.  Choosing any particular path would mean rejecting other paths.  I would have to admit that not all paths are equal.  Calling myself “spiritual but not religious” allowed me to be “broad” instead of “narrow.”  I would not have to confront the idea that, just maybe, someone was wrong.  That didn’t seem “nice” to me.  Who was I to say someone might be wrong about the path they were on?  I didn’t want to risk the arrogance of claiming to be correct.  “Religious” meant, “My path is the correct path” and “spiritual” meant, “All paths are correct.”  I wanted to be inclusive and avoid judging others.  I ran into problems, however.  For example, it simply is not possible for both monotheism and polytheism to be true.  But I had not yet allowed myself to confront such realities.  I had not come to realize that judging a path is not the same as judging the person on the path.

One principle I failed to grasp was invincible ignorance.  I was not considering that one could possibly be “wrong” about a religious path yet still gain eternal life.  Not until I returned to Catholicism did this principle hit home to me.  I had been steeped in a Fundamentalist Christian perspective that emphatically denied Heaven to people that had never even had an opportunity to hear about Jesus.  “Too bad,” they would say.  “No missionary reached them in time.”  Such thinking helped fuel my desire to distance myself from “religion” and just be “spiritual.”  In my own way, I was trying to give those poor, un-evangelized souls a fighting chance.  “Surely, they too are spiritual, whatever their religion might be,” I thought.  I didn’t realize that the Catholic religion I had been raised in and rejected was also giving them a chance.  This same principle (among others) would also help me when it came time to decide which brand of Christianity to commit to.  Again, I had to admit that not all Christians can be correct while teaching opposing doctrines.

It also took me a while to realize that, while most religions are about humanity’s search for God and/or eternal life, the Christian path is about God coming down to seek out humanity and offer eternal life.  This is a stark contrast.  It certainly does not place all religions on equal footing.  There were other choices to consider as well.  For example, if I decided on monotheism, would I become a slave to a harsh Master/Owner (Islam’s Allah) or a son to a loving Father (Christianity’s, Abba, “Daddy”)?

Being “spiritual but not religious” also turned me into the ultimate religious authority.  I could pick and choose which things seemed best and fashion my own eclectic “religion” out of all the parts.  I became the Pope, the priest, the minister and the congregation of my own little “church of Tom.”  It didn’t matter if I got any of it wrong or misinterpreted the Bible because I was being spiritual and, as far as I could tell, it worked for me.  So, Tom created God in his own image.  It was upside down.  I could pretend that it was all about love of humanity, tolerance and acceptance, but it was really about me and what I wanted (mostly comfort).  Ironically, I was just being religious in my own, private way while saying I was “not religious.”

The more I realized that I didn’t have to climb up to find God, but that God had condescended to find me, the more I fell in love with Christianity.  When I really delved into Catholic teachings I began to realize that abusive priests, atrocities of crusaders, inquisitions, etc. were about bad Catholics, not about Catholicism.  The more I learned about the Catholic blending of faith and reason, the beauty of the Catholic religion and the lives of the Saints, the more I wanted to be spiritual AND religious.  The more I understood about the history of Christianity and the different doctrines, the more I wanted to be a Catholic Christian.

Being “spiritual but not religious” was part of my journey, but not my destination.  My journey continues as a spiritual, religious Catholic Christian.  I’m still learning.  I don’t know everything.  No one does, except God.  I do know that I am not God, and neither are you.  We should all be glad about that!  The church of Tom has disbanded.  I have discovered that truth is not an idea but a person, Jesus Christ.  I have submitted to the obedience of faith, the religion of the God that is a loving Father, and the original Church founded by Jesus Christ.  I now call myself “spiritual and religious,” yet, I judge no one (that’s God’s job).

 

(A shout out to my buddy, Steve for partly inspiring this post)