Spiritual direction: God and his given religions

Understanding God and his religions

One of humanity’s greatest misunderstanding about belief in the one God and obeying the religion he has founded is that people think religion is an individual event and responsibility. It is not; God’s religion is a community event. This has always been a weakness in logic in humans, to think it is “up to each person,” but it has become distorted beyond recognition in modern times. Before modern times, strong love and allegiance toward one’s family, community, tribe, clan or other social organization ensured the glue that kept the seeking of God and obedience to his religious tenets in a community setting. The first breaking away of realization that God expects and delivers “salvation” (to use an evangelical term) on a community basis came with the Reformation. Not only did the Reformation give birth to the notion that one can break away from the Church institution founded by Jesus Christ and in the true Apostolic lineage, but hundreds of years later the notion arose that people can construct their own denominations. Communal worship became incorrectly transformed into “virtual communities” as people collect together according to what pastor or church “they select.” So this is one example of the splintering of true human communities of worship into artificial cohesions of people who “shop at the same faith store.” I don’t mean this to disparage individual faith or goodness of intention. But clarity of vision is sometimes unpleasant feeling, and so you have to be a bit uncomfortable in order to see the truth. Just to point out a further extension of the Reformation children’s breakdown of natural collective worshiping communities and their replacement with “choice” based virtual communities, within this devolution was the notion that the individual is responsible for finding “the right church” and that salvation is “individual based.” This is the exact opposite of God’s intention regarding how he gave religion to humans and how they should view it. Religion is not “one person’s search for making themselves “OK” with God, and doing so with like minded individuals who find each other shopping at the same faith store.” And so you find post Reformation children sneering at traditional Catholics who “let the Church ‘tell them what to do’ when it ought to be ‘between the individual and God.’” Um, no, if you read the Bible you see that the religion that God gave the children of Abraham is never “just between the individual and his or her conscience and God.” There is absolutely no Biblical justification for the “individual searching for the ‘right’ religion and ‘truth’” delusion that many live under today.

In the Jewish faith you see the same problem, only this time instead of the Reformation it was the destruction of the Temple, the Diaspora and secular pressures that resulted of division of worship from one community to roughly three: Reform, Conservative and Orthodox. Again, because of social pressures and the belief that “it’s up to the individual” the community worship disintegrated. Some reform rabbis have gone so far as to even meddle in Catholic dogma by “hosting” profane “ordinations” outside of the Church. I mention this because I guess Reform rabbis don’t find enough to do to worship God in their own faith that they have to muck about in someone else’s. This is why I’ve always had an affinity for the Orthodox. Even if I disagree with their politics they have never once forgotten that faith as mandated by God is a community event that is focused on God and his expectations, not “what each individual feels ‘called’ to do.” So you see in the unrecognizable extremes of the three broad parts of Jewish faith that one end clings correctly to understanding that communal values as dictated by God comes first, while the opposite end is “do your own thing.” Again, I do not question individuals’ theoretical love of God. But as in any love relationship, its trueness and purity is ascertained by asking the question, “Do you put the beloved first in importance?” Individuals and congregations that do not put God first, putting him behind social pressures and individual “conscience” cannot really say that they love God as much as the person who puts their worship of God and obedience to his will, even when they don’t understand it, first and foremost.

Islam too had to deal with a fragmentation crisis, but this is much different from the rejection of the community embodiment of faith as God has dictated. Islam’s fragmentation did not come from the secular influences of “do your own thing within your ‘conscience,’” but rather from legitimate cultural confusion regarding the successors to the Prophet (PBUH). Unlike the post Reformation Christians and the liberal wing of the Jewish faith, it never has and it never will occur to Muslims to start thinking of their faith as “individual and conscience based” and to abandon the community embodiment. Instead Islam split into legitimate community bodies based on tribal, familial and ancestral interpretation of how to be part of the lineage of the Prophet’s successors. Islam maintains the community worship cohesiveness that God has demanded of all the faiths, but it does so along several separate lineages. These were not resulting from “secular” pressures or the “rational rise of the individual,” but from understandable difference in interpretation of how to maintain consistent lineage from the familial and spiritual descendents of the Prophet and his companions. So you would never see a mosque being built that is a “non denominational mosque” or a “mega-mosque” or a “liberal mosque,” in either branch of Islam. This is not because Islam is “stuck in the past and won’t modernize” but because they are correctly faithful to the understanding that worship of God must be communal in the tradition sense of community, not artificial or “virtual” communities based on “shopping preference.”

And so that brings us to “cafeteria Catholics.” We have the traditional and true Catholics and we have a huge dose of “cafeteria” or “liberal” “Catholics.” Now, I want to exclude from this discussion Catholics who are earnest with the Church but struggle in good faith within themselves regarding a teaching such as birth control. I am not speaking about them at all in this explanation and critique. Rather, I am speaking about those who want to break apart the faith from within for exactly the same reasons as the Reformation children did, although they may deny it. Gosh, I wish that nuns and others who feel that way would just leave. I really do. Their continued presence within the Church is just not worth their “good deeds” and “devotion.” The moment that they took off their habits for their own “comfort,” they put God aside in second place. We don’t need them and I wish they would go to the nearest “non denominational” church and become their cross to bear! Boy, would the non-denominationals earn brownie points with God if they took liberal “Catholics,” especially those from the religious orders off us Catholics’ hands. So the busy bee nuns who ruin the faith and still claim they “want to be priests,” do God a big fat favor and leave the Church and go worship him with a non-denominational. I mean, they are all “equal” and “fair,” right? I am not joking. Do us all a favor and leave. You ruin the community of the Church that is already challenged by societal and geographic pressures. But be smart and do not keep adding that sin of pride and sabotage to your hands: do the right thing and LEAVE.

The Catholic Church with the traditionalists in her body, remain faithful to the concept of God’s worship as community, even as it struggles with secular pressures and deliberate attack by those who feel they represent either “fairness” or the Enemy (and they are hard to tell apart since the outcome of their deeds is so similar). But the traditionalists demonstrate over and over that the Catholic Church maintains its communal aspirations of faith just as God has demanded, and as articulated by Jesus Christ. For example, Churches do close down in urban areas, and it grieves me to see this even more than it grieves all of you, trust me. Remember, those are buildings that held the sacred Presence of Jesus Christ, they weren’t just Christian after school activity buildings with a basketball hoop. Whenever a Catholic Church closes, you know what it feels like to me? That a cemetery full of loved ones is bulldozer over to “make way for ‘progress.’” But my consolation is that the community of Catholics has moved, whether it be to the suburbs, or to the Southern USA, for example, and a new Church will arise there. But do not forget that every Church closing to me is the shuttering of the place that once held the sacred Presence of Jesus. However, I will not accept it staying open if the price is that people who undermine the faith from within continue to use it. I don’t want guitar playing “womyn priests” dancing around their “sacred cauldron” because “hey, you need us because you are low on vocations.” No, I don’t need you. Shut down the Church and go to your local non-denomination and lord it over them. Don't tell me "it's your church too." It's not. If you reject it and sabotage it from within, obviously it's not "your" church. So find one that is and beat it, and do everyone else a genuine favor.

So whenever a Catholic Church closes down, as painful as it is, it is still a legitimate consequence of reality of community faith. If there is not enough of the traditional community left in the area, then the Church must close down and resources be pooled at the next highest and dispersed level of community worship. And if the traditional faithful must leave, due to migration, job pressures and societal relocation, then they will open a new Church within their community. And wherever they are they can look to Rome, to the heir of St. Peter, for the true global Church community. You see examples of this in Muslim countries, where they have come to recognize that with immigrant workers comes a mobile, dislocated Catholic, and other Christians, community that must have places to worship. It is the Islamic faithfulness to God in their understanding that worship of God is communal that has helped them to be generous to recognize that Christians need facilities even in Muslim countries, for they cannot, as the Muslims themselves do not do, worship individually in back rooms of their apartments. So here you will see migrant workers, such as Pilipinoes and Indians, come together in formation of a local Christian community. These migrant workers are not “picking and choosing” to “select the place of worship” that “best suits their individual ‘needs’ and ‘conscience.’” They are creating new communities by virtue of their being Christian, and needing new churches to satisfy that need. They aren’t flipping through the yellow pages in order to go to the place that they are “most comfortable with” because it’s a “fair place” and “matches my needs.” They are pilgrims who bring the need for their church with them upon their backs. They are the ones who understand God’s gift to them of community based worship, not cafeteria or non-denominational personality based and demand free “individual choice.”

And now I must say something that I do not enjoy, but I do not want to be accused of neglecting the validity of the faith of others. I have always been fond of the Dali Lama as a person, and as a spiritual personage. But I cannot relate to a religious leader who left his one and only faith community behind. It’s not like Tibetan Buddhists are misnamed Global Buddhists. When Tibet was claimed by China, the body of the faithful who in my Abrahamic view of religion needed their leader to stay. It is not like during the capture of Israel by the Babylonians that the Jewish priests cut and run. The Jewish priests went along into captivity with their people. I mention this example because there you have one body, one community of faithful, with one leadership, exactly as the situation was in Tibet. It’s not like he moved “his flag from one command ship to the other.” Now, I read his books and I understand that he was a young man and pressured to flee. But once one is older, and one sees that one’s people are left behind, why does one not return to them, if one truly believes their faith and destiny? Celebrities and the secular politics latched onto him, and I mourned that, for that demarked the end of the legitimate community of worship. And of course, in the Catholic faith, the cardinals wear red for a reason.

I hope that you all, especially the young people, who, like Pope John Paul II, are always on my mind, find this useful, although perhaps a cross to bear in understanding. God never intended his word, his instructions and his institutions to be reduced to what one individual “evaluates” that he or she is “most comfortable with” or finds the “fairest.” To help, here is an analogy.
Suppose that God gave humans a set of blueprints for their individual homes that were absolutely fail proof. If one followed the instructions and built the three bedrooms, two bath all mod con home exactly according to instructions it would last a lifetime, be safe, affordable and easy to maintain, withstanding even harsh weather. So for several thousand years family after family built their houses and passed the blueprint from God on to their children.

Now, we have the “Do your own thing” generation that thinks it is demonstrated its wisdom by rejecting what the old folks say (and having a few puffs on weed while they are at it). They say, “Why should we believe that these blueprints are ‘the best?’” Should we not shop for “options?” So many of them do not use the blueprints at all. Others make “modifications” that “correct stupid mistakes.” For example, they take out the cellar because “Who needs a cellar?” And then they do not understand when the old folks tell them that in a tornado, to go into the storm shelter in the cellar. Huh? Others decide that “aliens” are “filled with wisdom” and are “channeling advanced and spiritual blueprints” and they either build houses based on that, or they endlessly doodle what they think they are hearing from “aliens,” or they live in traditional houses paid for by gulliable people who buy their books containing “alien blueprints.”

Eventually an entirely obsessive compulsive generation of home builders arises. They follow the blueprints given by God to their parents but with one exception. They spend a day building a wall, and the next day they knock down that wall. The day after that they raise the wall again, and then the day after that they knock that wall down again. And the next day they build a second wall, because it’s “the right time” to build that particular wall, and then the day after that they tear down that wall again.

That is what happens when a generation does not understand that true wisdom is accumulated and handed down, and that the body of information is not meant to be “reinvented” over and over again. That’s almost as stupid as if someone declared that it is passé to breathe oxygen, and from now on the truly enlightened will only breathe hydrogen. I mean, belief in breathing oxygen is so old fashioned and oppressive. Who is God or our ancestors to tell us to breathe oxygen? That is what it is like to deny fundamental truths and fundamental healthy community of worship as given to humans by God and God alone. These people will tell you that the “blueprint drawers” were “oppressed” and that is why they have “three bedrooms” because in the “patriarchal bourgeois society of the past the women were forced to be demeaned” and that this shows that God and the blueprints from him are “mistranslated” or the “rest of societal oppression.”

I may seem that I’ve strayed from the original point but I have not at all. There is an arrogant affectation that will result in the end of humanity that arises from the modern notion that “individuals decide what is best for them” and that only old pagan beliefs are good, while old truths that God has taught are “bad or at least questionable.” They ignore saints who were pagans, who were intellectuals, like St. Justin, who looked at pagan and Christian dogma side by side and chose Christianity, recognizing the truth of it. But today, many of the middle aged and older people grew up with a belief that “if it is old it is good, unless it is Christianity.” I’m hopeful and very prayerful that the younger people are beginning to see the error in logic of their parents. Why are “runes” so enlightening while the Bible is not? Who cares what the Pharaohs thought, because they are dead now aren’t they? I mean, if they were such geniuses and so holy and smart, where are they now? Hmm. Who is there instead? The children of the true Abrahamic faiths: Muslims and Christians. But your parents’ generation, dear children, because they wanted to be self proclaimed priests and priestesses, glommed onto anything old and rotten so that they could have libertine lifestyles and call themselves “special” and “enlightened.” And as a result, young people, they are teaching you out of textbooks of rotten skulls and cat box dung.

No one knows humans better than God, obviously, because he knows everything, he created humans, and he knows everything they do and what they will choose to do in the future. Yet God did two things because he loves humans. He gave them free will to make their own decisions, and he gave them the safest and most joyous blueprints possible, knowing what they need to live, thrive, and hopefully, choose to find Him and be saved. What have your parents given you? Have they passed on to you the blueprints that they received from God through their parents? Or have they passed onto you something else? Think about it.

God bless those who seek and find.