Hate God

               I am a strong advocate for hating God. What I mean by saying this is very specific, but I hope that you find it understandable. I think that nearly everyone in the world has a reason to hate God.

               Who has not been touched by the sufferings of this life? Family members die excruciatingly painful deaths as cancer eats away at their bodies. Children are buried by their parents after being forced to fight in an unjust war. Spouses leave each other. The list can go on and on. How can an omnipotent and benevolent God allow all this to happen? God is responsible. God made this happen, or at the very least, he could have prevented it.

               The problem of evil is one that deters many from believing and brings doubt to the hearts of believers, and I don’t think it can easily be dismissed or ignored. I don’t intend to attempt an answer here. To my standards, I can satisfactorily make sense of this contradiction in my own mind, but rational answers don’t help.  Having answers doesn’t make the dead come back to life. Answers don’t make the pain any more bearable.

               Faithful believers often feel like it is a travesty to harbor a hatred for the divine. Through my own experience I can say that God is plenty big enough to deal with your infinitesimal wrath.  No matter how large the stones, or how great the velocity, you cannot throw a stone large enough, or with enough force to deal any damage to the gates of heaven.

               I wonder how often, if ever, the unbelievers of the world tell God how upset with them they are. I think that God would rather have someone speak words of hate to him than to continue their detestation in silence. The fact is that people are pained. I think we do our humanity a disservice by not admitting our pain.

               And maybe… just maybe, if you are lucky, do I dare say that God will make some of that pain go away?

Megachurches

Its not as big as it looks...its much bigger.

In Milan, I saw the 4^th largest church in the world.  What made the greatest impression on me was not the art, nor the relics, but how empty the building was.  Even with crowds of tourists, it was incredibly empty.  Of course much of this was due to the immense size of the building, but it brought a point home to me.

The Catholics had the original mega-church.  It was not built to just impress people.  It was built, first and foremost, to be used.  I could not help but imagine how brilliant it would have been to be worshipping in that church surrounded by thousands of people.  What if thousands came to daily mass?  What if our buildings of worship were always full?

I did some research later and found out that about 9 masses are said there daily.  Somehow the church felt more like a museum. It felt hollow.  To me, all this emphasized that WE are the church.  We Christians animate these wonderful works of art much like Christ animates us.  Such a wonderful piece of art needs a great deal of life to be full, and we should accept this as a personal challenge.  We must provide life equal to the splendor of the world’s greatest churches.    

A little bit on my rational.

               I wonder about trivial little things like: Why is this furniture arranged in this way? Why is the handicap door closer to the stairs than to the elevator? And why does the kitchen staff put the gravy before the biscuits 39.8% of the time? I think to myself that people have rational for acting in the ways they do, but I am ignorant to what it is.

               My ignorance of underlying rationality often leads to irritation because I begin to wonder if there is any reason behind anything at all. If any of my readers are like I am, this post is for you. I would like to give some reasoning behind what I do insofar as this blog is concerned.

               Firstly, I attempt to keep my posts short. The average person reads about 250 words per minute which would hypothetically allow a person to read a post of 300 words in 72 seconds. I find when I am surfing the wondrous wave that we call the World Wide Web, I do not stop to read an article if it will take a lot of time and effort to comprehend. I shorten my posts to the detriment of development because I do not find it necessary to expound upon a basic idea. All I try to do is present the basic idea as clearly as possible.

               Secondly, I do not laboriously proofread my articles. As a lazy college student, I do not laboriously proofread anything. Be assured that I do proofread, but I always post articles that I am less than 100% pleased with. I do this for one simple reason: if I waited until I was fully satisfied with an article to post it, I would never post anything. What can I say, but that I have high standards?!

               Thirdly, there are not a lot pictures on my blog for one simple reason: I don’t take very many pictures.  The format is also lacking due to the fact that I am too ignorant to figure out how to change it. Someday, I will find someone knowledgeable about such things, or better yet, learn myself, but until that day comes, you will simply have to put up with lackluster graphics.

               Lastly, despite the urgings of my high school English teacher, I do not often provide adequate conclusions. This is partially due to the constraints of space and time. More importantly, avoiding conclusions creates a psychotic effect in the reader which suspends the aura of finality, and so requires the reader to return to the blog in attempts to find resolution.

               Ok, I made that last one up… but it almost sounded good enough to end on.              

Everything I say is right

               I am right.

               It is difficult to find anyone on earth that does not hold this belief. Being a Catholic, I believe that my beliefs are right.  As a philosophy student, and as a skeptic, I am unsure whether any of my beliefs are true.

               I can give reasons for my faith, but these reasons do not make my beliefs true. I understand the world, and my faith in unique terms. I cannot honestly say that I hold all the beliefs of the Catholic Church. This seems like a really bad thing for a seminarian to say, but when you think of all the nutjobs out there who honestly think that Christians should kill all the unbelievers, or believe that God will consign a little girl’s soul to eternal torment just because she had never heard of Christ, it is not hard to conclude that perhaps I don’t have it all straightened out either.

               Catholicism is so incredibly big. It is so old, and there are so many dogmas and defined beliefs that it is near impossible for an ordinary working man or woman to know them all. One is almost bound to slip up in his or her understanding somewhere along the way.  I think a great sin lies in believing that ‘I am right about everything’. Even if one had an institution –such as the Church- that would communicate the entirety of truth, one would make mistakes.

               I try to talk about what I know. If I have not already, I will most likely end up proclaiming a heresy. That is not such a big deal. It is not a big deal to not accept the truth. Often I find that the truth is incredibly hard to swallow. The real sin is not being open to being wrong.  Heresy can be recanted, but recanting can only be done if one is open to being wrong.

               If we are ever to come to the truth in our beliefs, we must first admit that not all our beliefs are right. So let us swallow our pride and be a little bit more open to being wrong.

Brevity is the Soul of Wit

               There is a priest that occasionally celebrates mass here. He has a maxim concerning preaching: Be brilliant and brief, and if not brilliant, then be brief. This seems to be a dictum of American Catholic preaching. And although, the attempt to be concise is a pastoral effort, I think that it often does a great disservice to the people of God.

               There is a guideline here at the abbey that during the week, a homily should not exceed three minutes in duration. Do not get me wrong, I appreciate these time constraints as much as anyone, but I find it interesting that a Catholic priest runs the risk of being flayed alive if the mass runs over an hour. I think this is a rather interesting phenomena of our culture.

               I do not mean to imply that short homilies should not be given; on the contrary, I have experienced a number of one minute reflections that have struck me like bolts of lightning. I only think that time expectations are petty and trivial. For example, when a guest bishop or archbishop speaks, one can expect at least fifteen minutes of oration. But this extra time does not mean that the bishop has anything more to say.

               Chief amongst my complaints is that priests often try to sound intelligent. There seems to exist an unspoken requirement to use high-sounding theological and liturgical wording. What the people need is not a exegesis concerning the transcendence of the eschatological man. We need someone to simply talk to us. The best sermons I have experienced here are when the priest puts away his notes, steps away from the ambo, and talks to the congregation as a friend.

               If I imagine myself as a priest, I do not think that my messages would be delivered more professionally, have better content, , or in any way be more effective than the very sermons that I critique. Much like this blog, I doubt that I will ever be ‘consistently brilliant’. Like my future homilies, I hope and pray that my condensed blogs do not do a disservice to my audience. I hope that I do not leave you hanging by not fully developing my thesis.

…or by providing an adequate conclusion…

                

Monks are people too

After a brief introduction to his lecture, my monastic professor said

               “So, tonight is…”

               The class was clearly baffled as to what the answer was. We were thinking… what religious holiday was November 3^rd? or was he referring  II Vespers for a saint or feast for tomorrow? Or perhaps there is some monastic significance on the date? A few students tentatively responded “The junior class meeting?”

               The junior class meeting is tonight, and I count myself blessed that I am not classified as a junior anymore, but this was obviously not the answer. No, Brother Anselm responded “It is the season premier of Burn Notice”. Although no one could have guessed, no one was really surprised, and I think this says a lot.

               Now I am sure that somewhere on a high mountaintop there are plenty of monks that live much more austere lives than the ones here at Conception, and the very thought of those monks loyally following a television series is a travesty. These monks are not those monks. It is not unusual for the TV lounge to be taken up by the chaplain rooting for his football team.

               I think people need to realize that religious people are ordinary people like you and me. Ok, well I admit that I’m not normal, but then again, neither are you! Being a monk doesn’t mean you can’t be a Kanas City Royals fan, but in my opinion, you are pretty crazy if you are either of them. My point is that spiritual matters are not for ‘some man on a mountain’, but are for each of us… but more on that later. Right now I have an episode of How I met Your Mother that I need to catch up on.

                

Windmills

http://3d.xkcd.com/556/

               For those of you who do not know, wind powered generators dot the horizon around Conception. For the most part they go unnoticed save for the calm nights where a faint whoosh...whoosh…whoosh… can be heard. Now, in all technicality, these enormities are not windmills since they do not mill anything. Yet I refer to them as windmills. I apologize if this insults your sensibilities. Deal with it.

               Two things baffle me about these behemoth structures. First, how do they get those little red lights on top to blink on and off at the same time? Secondly, how is it that one windmill turns quickly, while the adjacent windmill barely manages to move at all?

               This calls a certain verse to mind: “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; ….”  John 3:8a. How is that for taking a verse out of context? No matter how much you stretch the meaning of multivalence, I doubt that one could say that Christ was referring in any way to wind turbines.

For me, windmills serve as a reminder that comparisons are unfair.

               I am no engineer. I do not understand what it takes for a windmill to move. Perhaps a particular slow windmill is actually generating more electricity than the windmill adjacent to it. It is doing its job better, yet being judged as inferior in comparison to its neighbor. Perhaps a stationary windmill is undergoing repairs   or upgrades.

               If something as simple as a wind turbine cannot be understood by a simpleton such as myself, how can the complexities of a human person be understood? I tend to make excuses for other people –this is probably carryover from the plethora of excuses I make for myself-. I don’t really have a point to make in all this, it is just something that I think about.

But if I did have to make a point, I would say that  I AM GOING TO CALL THEM WINDMILLS. Don’t judge me!