Increase Our Faith

So amazing that two thousand years later a phrase from scripture can reach out and grab you. This Sunday's gospel reading from Luke 17:5-10 begins with the apostles asking Jesus, "Increase our faith." Certainly, the apostles were as overwhelmed by the task before them as we are today in 2010. So much has happened to shake the foundations of the faithful: Church scandals, government corruption, the great recession, terrorism, wars, global warming - the list is endless. "Increase our faith!" How will this happen? It will happen when we get back to the task at hand. Change the Church and increase our faith - demand an accounting by the hierarchy to the faithful, demand that they be as counter-cultural as was Jesus; demand reinstatement of women as equals within the Church; demand inclusivity, all are welcome at the table of the Lord. Change the government and increase our faith - demand politicians give a full truthful accounting to the people; stop the lobbyists; stop corporate donations to campaign funding; end the wars; end the incivility of the political party agendas; stop demonizing others based on race, creed, gender,political affiliations; demand environmental protection. If today you hear His voice; harden not your hearts! The cost of discipleship is everything. "When you have done all you have been commanded, say, "We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do." Or did we? Increase our faith Lord!

Twitter Hacking

Someone hacked into my Twitter account so I deactivated it - so annoying - why would anyone do that? So much identity theft out there that I am thinking of closing down this blog as well. It has been really unnerving but I guess that is what hackers get off on doing to unsuspecting people. Too bad.

Catching Up

It's really hard to start a blog and keep at it. I guess I just don't have the discipline to log on and blog every day but I am hoping that after Labor Day I will have more time to think and write. So much is going on in the world right now that I am spending hours reading other blogs just to keep pace. And to be honest there are many days lately when I just listen to music or I get lost in a good book just to keep the depressing news of the world at bay. So much discussion on faith, religion, politics out there and much of it reeks of vile diatribes. I need to just have some old-fashioned summer time right now.

Anyone else tired of it all?

Hate can be a hard lumpy mean thing that settles in a person’s soul. It is so easy to despise and hate what we don’t know. We formulate our mean little opinions of people based on what exactly? What the media tells us? What other people tell us? What misinformed emails tell us? What our own prejudices and biases tell us? Who’s right? Who’s wrong? All the current pettiness serves one big purpose. It keeps us divided and suspicious of one another! There’s no doubt that even the best examples of humanity can fall prey to harboring evil within the soul. Even Mother Theresa admits to a “dark night of the soul“. I know I fall prey to periods of xenophobia when the nightly news has terrorized me out of my mind! Lately I am just so tired of the smallness, the meanness, the incivility among Americans and world citizens. When did we forget that we are all in this together? I don’t want to be made afraid of tomorrow all the time. I don’t want to keep hearing vile rhetoric from both political parties. I don’t want to feel that if I disagree with someone’s political opinion that I will be labeled. I don’t want anymore people fighting in wars that will never have any winners - only losers on both sides. I just want to be free. Freedom just doesn’t feel much like freedom anymore. It all feels pretty oppressive lately.

FAITH VS RELIGION

Admittedly I am a cradle Catholic schooled for twelve years in the parochial tradition. Yet, my family was anything but traditionally Catholic which I won’t go into here other than to say there were conversions made for love or conviction - I don’t know which. I will say that even at an early age (seven, the age of reason) in my First Holy Communion preparation I began having doubts about what I was being taught as dogma of the Catholic faith. The claim was made that the Roman Catholic Church was the only true religion and only Catholics are saved. Hmm. Even as a second grader with a Jewish grandfather and a Lutheran grandmother, I knew that wasn’t kosher! I went home upset and told my parents that the teacher said Papa and Grandma wouldn’t be with me when I died and went to heaven because they weren't Catholic, and that if this was true, I wanted no part of heaven. And to make matters worse, the teacher informed me that I could not love animals as they had no souls and could never love me back. That was just plain wrong and heresy in my book. Apparently, I must have vocalized this to my teacher that day in class as my parents were quickly called into school for a parent teacher conference to prevent me from further outbursts in religion class. So began my love-hate relationship with organized religion and in particular with the Catholic Church. It is a relationship that I struggle with to this day. Now, I am a deist with my whole heart and soul. My faith in God has never wavered even if the darkest nights of my soul, but my faith in religion or, more accurately stated, religious practices, has wavered, and still wavers. I am just not sure that organized religion always has humankind’s best interests at heart. I find organized religions to be more divisive than unifying. I find it troublesome to think that people who believe in a merciful, kind, loving God can believe that their way of religious practice is far superior to another group’s way of religious practice. I also know that faith and spirituality needs to be practiced in relationship to others and within a context of a community. Yet, finding a community that can be authentic and free of rigidity has been difficult. Yet, to this day I would still call myself Catholic. It is as much a part of my identity as my gender, race, and cultural ancestry. However, I also feel free enough to practice my faith along side any denomination of my choosing. And I want to practice along side as many denominations as I can because that it what makes me a "practicing" Catholic. And somehow I think Jesus Christ would agree with me. Authentic discipleship begins with authentic fellowship with others. This does not happen easily unless you are willing to step out of the “dogma” box without losing your true identity.

At A Loss For Words for a post-romantic Valentine's Day

I am a fan of anything written by the Canadian author Diane Schoemperlen. The first book I read by Diane was, Our Lady of the Lost and Found. It was such a phenomenal read that I went online to find more of her books. So far I've managed to read most of what she has written. At A Loss For Words,a post-romantic novel was written in 2008 and manages to capture that desperate essence of wanting to be in love with someone so badly that you are willing to believe anything that remotely reinforces that this is the greatest romance of your life even when subconsciously you know it isn't. It is brilliantly written and enfolds you in the obsesessive nature of a love gone wrong. Diane Schoemperlen represents for me the "everywoman" effect. A great read for such a short novel. If you are alone on Valentine's Day it's a book you can begin to read in the afternoon and be finished with it by bedtime.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

For me being Catholic has never been easy. It is something I struggle with day in and day out. If I did not take my identity as a Catholic as seriously as I do, this struggle would be a non-issue. Fortunately, and (by self-report) unfortunately, I was born into Catholicism - it is not a faith I chose on my own. But I am a captive and I wish I could simply explain my troubles away by virtue of an affliction of Stockholm syndrome. But it is so much more complicated than that.

Being Catholic is who I came to be first and foremost in this life, and everything after this fact is secondary and subject to this first fact. I can not escape this. Do I live my life in strict adherence to Church teachings? Absolutely not - I can’t in good conscience do so. And I state this because I happened to listen and learn well during my twelve years of Catholic schooling. I know what it means to follow the gospel as preached by Jesus, the Lord, the Christ. I’ve read the scriptures. I’ve studied the scriptures. And I know that I will never know what the exact meaning of scripture is. I know that “I will never know what God knows” - this is my mantra.

That is why I read as much good theological literature as I can reasonably understand given my limitations in intellect and religious studies. For the past six months I have been reading, processing, and meditating on a work by Paul Elie called “ The Life You Save May Be Your Own - An American Pilgrimage”. It is a scholarly treatise on the writers Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. While I have read some works by each of these writers I was not very familiar with each writer’s unique Catholic pilgrimage.

Coming away from this book I have a sense of being affected profoundly by this thorough examination of these writers and their own struggles with being Catholic and what it means to be an ‘authentic” Catholic. How refreshing to know that there are great Catholics who never purported to know all the answers; never judged others harshly for their limitations in following the faith as they did; never presumed to know what God knows. These writers pointed the way to following Christ in the ideal sense. And according to Elie never wanted anyone reading their work to believe as they did, or to copy or emulate their faith experience. These writers pointed the way for believers to read, learn, absorb and create their own unique faith experience-journey. Day, Merton, Walker, O'Connor provide the blueprints for authentic Catholicism - to follow a faith based in the reality of the daily experience of each unique believer.

Sisters Singing

It was just one of those days. Someone's negativity was beginning to build up to a toxic level and I was feeling trampled down by it. My escape for these situations is to hit the bookstore. Meandering around I was hoping for a good antidote to what was ailing me - and I found it! A delightful book called, Sisters Singing, Blessings, Prayers, Art, Songs, Poetry & Sacred Stories by Women edted by Carolyn Brigit Flynn. Here is an excerpt from its introduction:

" A few years ago I learned a term from the world of carpentry that delighted me. A piece of wood attached alongside an existing beam for extra support is called a sister joist. And the verb describing the particular and specific action of providing essential, side-by-side support is known as sistering. Thus we see from an ancient handcraft of brothers a truth so old, so necessary, so obvious, that it comes unbidden outside the world of women. To sister is to provide an extra bit of vital support, to stand beside, right next to, to support invisibly - to hold someone up.
And of course, in truth, we all know what a sister is.
Most of us have one, a true one, if we are lucky. Some of us are gifted with sisters through blood and family lines. But beyond that, we find that our sisters simply emerge along the journey of our lives. Here, at this moment, this woman came forth at just the right time. She brought me tea, or good whiskey. She let me put my head in her lap. She held me to her breast and let me cry. She listened. She did not need me to be more, or different, less broken-hearted, more wise. She knew I needed simple reinforcement, help where I felt weak. She provided that help. She held me steady. She sistered me."

How can you not love a book like this? I am richly blessed with a biological sister who has been all of the above to me time and time again. I am also blessed with sisters of the heart who journey with me through this life as the invisible support to my sometimes shaky beams! Go get this book - it is a treasure!

Divine Encounters

Somewhere in the synapses of memory there can be this sense of having been in contact with the divine, even before having the ability to attach any verbiage to the feeling. Maybe it happens when one is very small and there is that faint memory of lying in bed between two parents feeling wrapped in love and at once having a pre-cognitive thought - magical wish - of wanting to keep things just like this forever! Isn’t that the thought that lingers throughout a lifetime even as the magical wish fades in the face of reality. But never let it fade even when reality becomes a naysayer to the divine. The possibilities of divine encounters within a single day are endless. Look at any given moment in a day and the divine is present. Ah, the sacrament of the present moment. Sacrament offers grace. Take in the divine grace that life has to offer. Be open to the experience of the divine - let it refill those memory synapses with the joy of being wrapped in love. Hold on to the magical wish for it to stay like this forever! The encounter with the divine awaits.