Musings of a Wanderer

Some Thoughts on Religion for the Year End

2011-12-29T19:50:00.000-08:00

Another year has nearly passed, and I still find myself extra ecclesiam, at least according to the understanding of the Church of Rome. What once may have passed for invincible ignorance likely has quite the Achilles' heel. I have hoped that my interest in Eastern Orthodoxy would give me a pass, seeing as how they have genuine sacraments and all that. If nothing else, if I should die in this current state of confusion, perhaps the standard sentence of damnation could be commuted to a million years in Purgatory. What is a million years, in light of eternity, after all?

Since God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him, I trust that God has not given up on me, just as I trust He has not given up on all of you fine people. However, I do not want my life philosophy to be “Lord, grant me salvation, but not yet.” I would like to at least be on the right road when the end comes. I hope that this end does not come for some time, of course, as I am very much looking forward to being a venerable old man with a flowing white beard.

Those of you who have been following my random notes and blog posts over the past few years may have noticed a common thread through much of what I write. The general theme is, “Hey, what if the Catholic Church is right about itself? Now, wouldn't that be something? Maybe we should look into this.” The “what if?” angle has prevented my writing from becoming outright Catholic apologetics. Until I step through the door myself, it does not quite feel right to argue with full force and conviction that the rest of you should step through first. If you want to read proper apologetics, I have quite a list I can give you.

How does a (mostly) nice Free Methodist boy find himself drawn to traditional Christianity? I was not born a traditionalist. I had no great passion for beautiful churches or old hymns or traditional liturgy when I was a young lad. It was only when those around me stopped caring about these things at all that I realized I missed them. The hymns were replaced with modern choruses one by one, until they almost completely slipped away. The hymn books were quietly carted off to wherever retired hymn books go. The projector screen took pride of place, and eyes that once looked upon the cross were captivated by Power Point presentations. People forgot how to sing, or at least forgot how to sing well. Nobody bothered to learn to play the organ, and the pianist had to share the stage with a rock band.

The churches began to drop the “Free Methodist” from their name, as I suppose that which separated them from other churches was no longer important. It is great to see churches work together, and I do not like to see fights over trivial matters. However, unity through not caring deeply about the distinctive doctrines of one's church is weak and shallow.

I come from a long heritage of Christian faith. I grew up learning about the Wesleys and the Methodist circuit riders. I went to church camp, where we worshiped in a barn with wood chips on the floor. I heard the tales of missionaries. There was something very serious and authentic about the whole business. For those of you who also grew up in this church, do you remember? The faith of my early years was that of my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and more. I learned the same hymns my ancestors sang over a century before, if not far longer. The current generation may never learn those hymns at all. Our theology and our music (which are closely related) have become fads, which will be out of fashion long before our children reach adulthood.

I am sure there are any number of churches out there where they still sing hymns and use the King James Bible and wear suits and dresses on Sunday. However, I am speaking of my experience, an experience I believe is not entirely unique.

This feeling of discontent led me to the gates of Rome. I would peer inside now and then, in between visits to the gates of Constantinople (or is it Moscow now?). Catholicism done (if I may be so bold) right, along with Orthodoxy, had preserved the beauty I missed from my Free Methodist upbringing, while also presenting so many wonders to me that my own church had abandoned long before I was born.

Beauty alone is superficial, however, if it is not accompanied by depth and truth. In Catholicism and Orthodoxy, I found solid and unchanging doctrine. For example, many (most?) individual Catholics may look, act, and believe no different from a mainline Protestant or a secularist, but there is no doubt what the authentic teaching of the Church is, even if they ignore it. The heresy of the past has not become the doctrine of today. Can any Protestant denomination say that?

This past Christmas Eve, I attended late evening mass (does it ever start at midnight anymore?) at the local Catholic church. The church was quite beautiful on the outside, and not bad on the inside, though the Spirit of Vatican II had done some redecorating. We sang old Christmas hymns, including a verse of “O Come All Ye Faithful” in Latin. It was a thoroughly wonderful and worshipful experience, exactly the place to be on Christmas Eve. The prayers and the hymns set out Christian truth so clearly and boldly.

On a related note, I cannot understand how Catholics who grow up in the Church can have so little knowledge of the faith. That level of ignorance must require deliberate intent so strong it is almost admirable that someone can be that committed. Almost. Then again, perhaps my experience with the Catholic Church has been more positive than that of most people. There is also something to be said about coming to the Church as someone who actually wants to learn, rather than having one's parents drag one through the door every Christmas and Easter.

It is nearly time to close out 2011. Who knows what 2012 and the years to come may bring? May we all reach a ripe old age, die in the state of grace, and reach the blessed land of Heaven. Pray for me, my friends, as I pray for you.

God bless.

P.S. - They say “and with your spirit” now, in case you have been away for a while.

Class Warfare at the Tea Party on Wall Street

2011-12-05T23:21:00.001-08:00

I walked past Occupy Tacoma on Thursday, December 1^st. I would have liked to talk to some of the participants, but my lunch hour was sadly too short, and I had to walk back to my corporate office. Perhaps this week, I will eat a sandwich or raw potato while walking, in order to have more time. Friday would be good, as it is “jeans day,” and I will blend in better. Nothing says “I am the 1%” like a pair of slacks.

It appears there is a concern that the wealthiest 1% of the country have too much influence over the government and how things are run. Then again, the problem could be that there is a top 1%, at all. Are the occupiers giving voice to legitimate concerns about the concentration of wealth, or are they jealous that others have more than they do?

There is a feeling of discontent in the air these days. We saw it in the Arab Spring, where the peoples of Egypt and Libya overthrew the old oppressive governments, in order to institute new oppressive governments. We saw it with the Tea Party movement, which called for lower taxes, a balanced budget, and less government interference. Now we see it with the Occupy Wall Street movement and its subsidiaries.

Unemployment is high, goods are expensive, we are in the midst of at least two long undeclared wars, and many of us have the feeling that the elite of this nation do not have our best interests at heart. These are the times when people storm the Winter Palace, or at least camp outside it for months on end.

One could label the Tea Party as the conservative party of discontent, and Occupy Wall Street as the liberal party of discontent, though many would disagree. Some would say the corporate support for the Tea Party robs it of its authenticity as a movement, while the Occupy Wall Street movement is more pure and spontaneous. Then again, it is not really surprising that corporations are reluctant to support a movement that hates corporations.

Perhaps conservative versus liberal is the wrong way of looking at this. If it is, instead, the establishment versus we the people, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street could be on the same side. Republicans and Democrats alike receive funding from Wall Street and the top 1%. I am of the opinion that Republicans and Democrats are nearly indistinguishable in office, once the campaigns are over. They both vote for foreign military adventures, they both maintain or increase the deficit, and they both are beholden to special interest groups and wealthy financiers.

I will set aside the Tea Party, for the moment. The Tea Party candidates from 2010 are essentially mainstream Republicans now, if I follow matters correctly. Perhaps the Tea Party will surge into the public eye again after the primaries, but for now, the focus is on the Occupiers.

What do the Occupiers want? One disadvantage to being a spontaneous, disorganized movement is that it is difficult to communicate a coherent message. Instead, there is a collage of different goals and movements. There are the anti-war types, who are still mad at Bush for Iraq and Afghanistan, but have already forgotten about Obama and Libya. There are the socialists, who want to abolish private property, and put us all under the care of the all-powerful state. There are the pro-marijuana people, who show up to all these protests, whether they know what is going on or not. There are university students and recent graduates, who are faced with loan debt and think the rich should cover the costs. There are the pro-choice types who survived their pro-choice parents. And, it must be said, there are a number of people with legitimate complaints and goals.

As they chant and wave their signs, it is clear they are all upset about something, and it is clear they want something of some kind to happen. However, it is not always obvious what they want or how they hope to achieve it. There is a general feeling that the top 1% are responsible for much of what is wrong in this country, and they should be forced to make it right. There are some on the left who believe that if someone is rich, it is because they have stolen from the poor. Therefore, they should be coerced, on pain of death or imprisonment, to give their wealth to those who did not earn it. Have people like Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Donald Trump, and Oprah sinned against the proletariat, and must they pay for their sins?

We should fight for justice, and we should oppose corruption in our government. Businesses should not be given special treatment by the government, nor should they be suppressed or brutally taxed. If they succeed, they succeed; if they fail, they fail. No one is entitled to what another has earned, and no one should be required to pay another's debts. If you want what the rich have, then work for it; don't demand that the government steal from the rich for you. When you say, “The government should pay for this for me,” what you really mean is, “My fellow citizens should pay for this for me.” When you say, “The government should pay for this for me, even if it is in debt and needs to borrow money to pay for it,” what you are really saying is, “Our descendants should pay for this for me.”

I will withhold my final judgment of the Occupiers for now. They do have something to say, under the mess, and it may be that a coherent and positive message will eventually shine through. In the meantime, however, there seems to be a great deal of jealousy and a sense of entitlement. Perhaps, in time, the “gimme” kids will go home, and the mature, serious individuals can raise their voices.

Reformation Day

2011-10-30T15:33:00.000-07:00

A priest stands at the church door with a hammer in his hand
He strikes the nail and lights a spark to burn throughout the land
No more to follow pope or priest, men's own creeds they shall make
And a thousand take up holy writ and a thousand faiths create.

King Henry sits his island throne with lustful, leering eye
For love of Anne, the lady fair, his queen he'll set aside
The headman's axe for those who cling to faith and to tradition
The crown will take the church and land, burn nunnery and mission.

The Turk stands in the Roman East, his eye looks ever West
Let every Christian take up arms, by Mother Mary blessed
But lordlings small with grasping hand, do rip and tear, divide
Like soldiers 'neath the holy cross where Christ was crucified.

Now break the stained glass windows, friends, and tear the altars down
And spill the wine and sacred bread to trample on the ground
Tradition died a bloody death, tomorrow come what may
So raise a glass and celebrate on Reformation Day.

Reverence

2011-09-25T22:23:00.001-07:00

On Tuesday, August 2, 2011, not long after 6:30pm, I found myself facedown on the floor at Christ the Savior Orthodox Church, in Chicago, Illinois. There were less than a dozen people in the church, including the priest and singers. It was dark and warm, though cooler than the city outside. The service was the Canon of Supplication to the Mother of God. There were a few pews along the edge of the church, but aside from the prostrations, people stood for the length of the service. The church was beautiful, in a way only an Orthodox church can be. Some of the older Catholic churches come close, it is true, but one must seek out the diamonds in the rough.

In the service, we gave glory to God, and we sought the intercession of Mary, most Holy Mother of God. I did not know the words, so it was difficult to chant and sing along, but the service was in English. I attempted to make the sign of the cross when the others did, to bow when they did, and to lie facedown on the ground when they did. I probably stood out like a sore thumb, but no one gave me any odd looks.

When the service ended, I walked out into the Chicago air, but I think the real breath of fresh air had been inside. Such beauty and reverence is so rare in our Western churches. In my oft-interrupted search for the Church, my sympathies have tended to lean Catholic, and still do, but even the Catholic Church could learn something about worship from the Orthodox.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; both now and for ever, and to the ages of ages. Amen.

A Tale of an Art Museum

2011-08-30T22:15:00.000-07:00

Mr. Goldwaithe and Mr. Shreeves took it upon themselves to open an art museum. They sought out many paintings, sculptures, and other works of art to begin their collection. It was in their mind to do something new, to leave behind what their ignorant forebears had valued and instead embrace that which was exciting and fresh.

The works began pouring into the museum. They had paint splattered on canvas, twisted pieces of metal, garbage nailed to boards, cans full of oily rags, and numerous other modern works of art. Displays were set up, and soon the museum was full of visitors.

One day, an old man approached Mr. Goldwaithe and Mr. Shreeves and asked if they had any older pieces. They said there was a room, down in the basement, where an older painting could be found. It had been popular once, the gentlemen explained to the old man, but it did not fit with the museum's theme, and the young would not be interested in it.

The old man made his way to the basement and opened the door. On the opposite wall was a painting of a simple and beautiful landscape. The old man knew the artist well, and had loved his paintings in his youth. The image was marred, however, as someone had added splashes of color, which clashed with the original painting.

Mr. Goldwaithe and Mr. Shreeves explained that they had tried to update the painting for modern audiences, but decided in the end that it was too traditional, despite the changes. The old man looked said at this, but his expression changed to one of determination, and he stepped into the room. He moved to the painting and began painstakingly chipping away at the new blotches of paint.

As he worked, more people entered the room, and some came to assist him. Men, women and children of all ages stood in awe as the original painting came fully into view. As the last chip of offending paint fell to the floor, the old men stepped back and smiled. He did not know if the painting would ever move to its rightful place upstairs, but it was here now, and the people had seen it. For some, it was a reminder of their past, and for others a glimpse of beauty they did not know had ever existed in the world.

Chess and Tradition

2011-07-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

Here is a quick thought on tradition, using chess as an analogy. Due to my nerd-like tendencies, people might think I am good at chess. Not so, I am afraid. I tend to start out fairly well, but my downfall usually comes from moving one critical piece when I should not.

Let us say I moved a knight into a key position, which protected my king, while threatening one of my opponent's valuable pieces. When I moved it, I had a clear idea of why the knight was there. However, many turns pass, perhaps with a break for lunch or a round of mini golf. Later on, I look at the knight and say to myself, “Why should the knight be there? If I move him, I can accomplish something great over here.” I move the knight, my opponent takes advantage of the opening, and I lose a few turns later. I had forgotten why the knight was there, and because of this lapse, I lost the game.

Rather than explain further, I will leave it at that. Anyone want to play chess?

A Religious Conversation

2011-06-22T22:32:00.000-07:00

What follows is a fictional conversation between myself and three gentlemen. I imagine us in a quiet corner of a pub, with a few pints on the table and a muted sport channel playing on the wall television. I should think it is a Blackpool-Aston Villa game, though none of us are paying attention to it. It is late afternoon, and a light rain is falling from a cloudy sky outside. We are in England, perhaps in the north or west, though it matters little. What I am doing at a pub in England is a bit of a mystery. It may have something to do with that book of Tennyson's poems I was browsing in the basement of a bookshop during the time between times. Listen then, to the conversation, if you like, though there are other tables if solitude is your goal on a cloudy day.

“And that is why I no longer buy my shoes in bulk,” I said. “But, back to the subject of the Church, the nature of it has long been a concern of mine. If God is real, and if He became a man, and if He, as the man Jesus Christ, founded a Church, and if it is His will that we all enter into it, then that is what we ought to do. Growing up, I believed the Church was an invisible body of true believers, scattered among a multitude of denominations. However, I have come to believe this is not how the early Church saw itself. There was a strongly defined line between being in communion and out of communion, between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. In the apostolic age and during the first few centuries of Christianity, there was a visible, corporate union.”

The three men nodded their agreement.

“This is not to say everyone always agreed,” I continued, “but when there was a significant dispute within the Church, they would meet in council to determine orthodox doctrine. They would not just say, 'Let every man do what seems best to him,' and then calmly observe the subsequent splintering of the Church.”

“It is no surprise that so many Protestants would adopt the invisible Church theory,” said Mr. Pope. “After the utter chaos and disaster which followed the 'Reformation,' rather than despair at schism upon schism, Protestants simply decided that corporate union was no longer important.”

“In effect,” said Mr. Athos, “rather than solve the problem, they declared it solved in its current state, much like a child told to clean his room who then decides the floor really is the proper place for all his toys. This is not to say Christianity in the West was not already in a sorry state prior to the Reformation, of course.”

“Indeed,” said Mr. King, “though I do have, I think, a higher opinion of the state of the West than Mr. Athos, here. The Church needed a little adjustment, not a disintegration.”

“So, the Reformation happened, with some bad results and some good,” I said. “Five hundred years later, how do we look at the Church and how do we find our place in it? I am not comfortable with the invisible body of believers theory, because I am not prepared to pronounce dead the visible Church founded by the apostles. That Church is worth looking for, at the very least.”

“He who seeks, finds,” said Mr. Pope.

“Perhaps I can use the analogy of a tree,” I continued. “The Church started as a trunk in the time of the apostles. Today, there are many branches, some healthy, some sick, and some which have since fallen from the tree. Should we try to locate the healthiest branch, work to improve the health of the branch in which we find ourselves, or has the trunk itself continued to grow tall and strong?”

“I hold to the branch theory,” said Mr. King, “which is why I see Mr. Pope and Mr. Athos here as fellow members of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. I do not look at Christians without apostolic succession or without sacraments in the same way. I make no speculation about the state of their souls, but I cannot think of them as being truly in the Church. The Anglicans, the Roman Catholics, and the Orthodox are not in communion, but I do not believe the walls that divide us reach to Heaven. Our clergy have received the same authority, we offer the same sacraments, and we worship the same Christ.”

“It is very kind of you to see Mr. Pope and me in this way,” said Mr. Athos, “but of course you know our churches cannot say the same about you or about each other.”

“Of course,” said Mr. King, good-naturedly.

“Christ is not divided,” Mr. Athos continued. “If the Church is Christ's body, how can Christ's body be divided, be split up into branches? Is the Holy Spirit leading us down divergent paths?”

“Can you elaborate on what you said, Mr. King, about other Christians being different from Anglicans, Catholics, and Orthodox?” I asked. “You Anglicans are, after all, children of the Reformation, just as the rest of us Protestants are.”

“It comes down to the apostolic, sacramental nature of the Church,” said Mr. King. “The early Church believed in sacraments, and it believed in the transmission of apostolic authority through the laying on of hands. Those churches which have maintained that succession and which have maintained that understanding of the sacraments are on a different level than those bodies which have broken away from that and renounced centuries of Christian tradition. We believe the Church of England took the good from the Reformation,without at the same time tossing out the good of Catholicism. The sects that were unable to do that, and which instead threw out the good along with the bad, replacing it with their own innovations, are the ones I call Protestant.”

“You are a traditionalist, Mr. King, an Anglo-Catholic,” said Mr. Pope. “Obviously, I have sympathy for your point of view, but you are not representative of Anglicanism as a whole. It may not have appeared very Protestant when King Henry still sat the throne, but it is certainly Protestant now. Its founding was due to the rejection of authority, its doctrine is a matter of vote, and it is becoming less and less orthodox by the day.”

“We have our heretics, to be sure,” said Mr. King, “but so do you. The statements from Rome may be orthodox, but are the local parish members any different in your Church than they are in mine? All of Christendom is in a struggle in our day.”

“The faith has always had difficult times,” said Mr. Athos, “this being but the latest of many, with many sure to come. When we look at a struggle within a church, however, sometimes we have to wonder if the struggles are due to the very nature of the church itself. Schism and heresy are built into the Protestant system, as Protestantism has as one of its core values the idea that each believer has the right to determine doctrine for himself and to reject any and all authority that contradicts his view of the Scriptures. In Roman Catholicism, the idea of the development of doctrine has led to all manner of heresies which, coupled with the growth of papal power, led to the Protestant rebellion and the shattering of Christianity in the West.”

“I don't like the current state of Protestantism,” I said, “and all three of your communions are appealing to me, in different ways. However, there is a zeal for the faith in some of these non-sacramental communities that often seems to be missing in the older churches. Yes, their buildings are ugly and their music is awful, and they often bend over backwards trying to avoid tradition, but these people really do love Christ.”

“I certainly don't deny that,” said Mr. Pope. “But imagine if these people also had the sacraments and were receiving Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity at every mass. Do these people love Christ because of where they are, or would they continue to love Him in His Church? This is not a case of the nominal traditional Christians opposed to the zealous modern Christians. The tares and the wheat grow up alongside each other in every church. And an exciting service is not necessarily an indication of a strong faith. We Catholics are often accused by low church Evangelicals of being dull in our worship, simply because we treat the worship of God as a sacred event and not as a rock concert.”

“I prefer traditional liturgy,” I said, “and I love the old hymns, but I understand other people have different preferences. I do not want to accuse them of not worshiping properly, because they do not like the same kind of music or liturgy as I do. Still, modern Protestant church music is often painful for me to sing, and it is so theologically weak, it nearly makes me weep when I think about what we could be singing instead. And yet, I shouldn't become Catholic, for example, just because I don't like modern Protestant music.”

“Have you been to a Roman Catholic mass lately?” asked Mr. Athos. “The typical Novus Ordo parish is not singing the old hymns, either. They haven't turned congregational singing into a rock concert yet, but perhaps after Vatican III, they'll tear out the altar to make room for the drum set.”

“The past few decades have been a disaster, I will give you that,” said Mr. Pope, “but there is hope for the restoration of the sacred. The Latin mass is more widely available, Gregorian chant is encouraged, and much of the liturgical nonsense that has been tolerated for many years is on its way out. The Church has made it through worse.”

“You know,” said Mr. King, “if you want the old hymns, we still sing them. Come to church with me on Sunday, and I will show you a beautiful church, a reverent liturgy, and even some Latin. Mr. Pope would almost approve.”

“All form and no substance,” said Mr. Pope. “You have maintained the trappings of Rome, even when many Catholics forgot their value, but the theological foundation has eroded away. If your services are to be any more than playacting, you will have to return to the substance of the faith, and not merely its outward appearances.”

“We do not sing the Protestant hymns you love,” said Mr. Athos, “but once you have chanted the Divine Liturgy, you will not know if you are on Heaven or on Earth. And there is much in the Protestant hymns that is orthodox; sing them among your family and friends, by all means.”

“To leave one's church for another is a sad thing,” I said. “But if one were to leave one's church in order to return to the previous branch, as it were, that would be the opposite of schism. If unity is something which we ought to seek, then we should applaud such an action, if, in fact, the previous branch has managed to maintain the faith. I grew up as a Free Methodist. If there was a Methodist church in my area that was orthodox, it would be an act of unity and healing for me to join it. However, the Methodist movement itself came from Anglicanism. Would it not be even better to find an orthodox church in the Anglican communion?”

“Certainly,” said Mr. King.

“And yet,” I continued, “Anglicanism broke away from Catholicism, so would it be better yet to find an orthodox Catholic church?”

“Hear, hear,” said Mr. Pope.

“If I go back even further, however,” I said, “I am faced with a dilemma. That the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church split is obvious, but who came from whom is not. Who is the original and who is the schismatic?”

“You know my answer to that,” said Mr. Athos.

“Perhaps we can each make our case,” said Mr. King. “As a branch theory believer, it matters little to me, eternally speaking, which you choose, but obviously I am Anglican for a reason. The Church of England is the Church of my fathers. It is the church in which I was raised. I grew up singing the hymns, living through the liturgical year, and celebrating the Eucharist. The ancient churches that tower over the English countryside, which our ancestors built, are Anglican churches. Mr. Pope would surely say they ought to belong to Rome, but they are English churches in which English people have worshiped for centuries. I see a continuity from the days of St. Augustine of Canterbury and those who preceded him up to the present day.

“The people of England stayed loyal to their bishops, not needing a bishop in far-off Rome to legitimize their authority. If your ancestors, Mr. Kinyon, had stayed loyal to their bishops, you would be an Anglican. If you want to end your current schismatic state, you need go no further.

“Besides,” he continued, “as a literary man, certainly you admire C.S. Lewis?”

“I do very much,” I said.

“He was an Anglican, and he was quite orthodox and sincere in his faith. Christians all over the world, Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox alike, admire his writings. Newman and Chesterton became Catholic, it is true, but so much of their inspiring and thoroughly Christian work was written while they were still Anglicans. Can you look at these men and say, 'Anglicanism does not produce Christian men?'

“Come to the Church of England, and you can worship God in reverence and beauty. You can recover the traditions you thought were lost, and gain that which you have never had. You will not need to accept odd and un-biblical doctrines like purgatory or papal infallibility, which you will if you join Mr. Pope's church. You will not need to reject your own Western Christian heritage, which you will if you join Mr. Athos' church. Yes, we have our modernists and our liberals, who seem intent on wrecking their faith and bringing the Church down with them, but the faith is strong within many and the light of Christ's love burns strong and true.”

“Mr King, your love for your church is admirable,” said Mr. Pope. “May God bring unity. I believe the Catholic Church is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church spoken of in the creed. As Christ said, 'you are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church.' Peter, chief of the apostles, was given special authority to feed Christ's sheep, to guard and guide the Church. His successors, the bishops of Rome, have done this for nearly two millennia, and they will continue to do so until Christ's return.

“The Catholic Church is the Church founded by Jesus Christ. All Protestant denominations, Anglicanism being no exception, are schisms from Christ's Church. What is the source of their authority? Protestantism is collapsing, moving further and further from orthodoxy with every passing day. The Catholic Church has continued to teach true doctrine, continued to confess the creeds, and continued to hold to traditional Christian morality. Even the Eastern Orthodox have compromised on contraception and divorce.

“In the Catholic Church, God's grace is given through the sacraments. Every day, all over the world, mass is offered. The Church spans the globe, just as it has spanned the centuries. The Catholic Church is your home. It is where your ancestors worshiped, and the door is open for you. Mr. King speaks well of Anglicanism, but the good and beauty found within are remnants of Catholicism. Even these remnants are fading, as Anglicanism moves away from the source of its strength. It is no accident that men like Newman and Chesterton entered the Catholic Church. When an Anglican strives to be orthodox, a journey to Rome is nearly inevitable. We may even see our good friend Mr. King in the Church someday, particularly with the ordinariate now in place.

“The Catholic Church covered Europe with cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and universities. It preserved the learning of classical Greece and Rome, and combined it with the fierce and noble spirit of the barbarians. It developed the code of chivalry. It has continued to produce great scientists, doctors, philosophers, writers, and artists. In its music, art, and architecture, it has shown the world what beauty is.

“Most importantly, however, is the fact that the Catholic Church is true. It bears a truth sanctified by the blood of martyrs, a truth which has stood strong against all the attacks of heresy, a truth that will not compromise. The Church is the ark of salvation, and it will bring you safely to Heaven's shores.”

“Orthodoxy is, sad to say, quite unknown in the West,” began Mr. Athos. “Those who are even aware of us think of us as Roman Catholics with beards and funny hats, or as a tribal religion for Russians, Greeks, and Arabs. However, this is changing, as immigrant communities become more established and as Westerners join the Church. For Western Christians, it really is a reclamation of their heritage. The West was Orthodox for a thousand years, professing the same faith in union with their brothers in the East.

“The Orthodox Church is the ancient Church, holding to the same faith as the apostles, safeguarding it through the centuries. It has not been led astray by heresy, nor has it wandered down the path of speculation and novelty. Orthodox Christianity is the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

“Consider Protestantism. It claims to be a return to the ways of the early Church. And yet, when we look at the early Church, where is this Protestantism? Consider Roman Catholicism. It claims its late doctrinal definitions are merely confirming what the Church has always believed. However, when we look at the early Church, where are these doctrines? The Orthodox can look at the early Christians and say, 'we confess the same faith.'

“In the Orthodox Church, the emphasis is on Christ the Savior, who conquered death and saved us. God sent His Son into the world to rescue us from sin and death, not to stand in our place in a legal sense, suffering the wrath of the Father. Western Christianity so often portrays God the Father as our enemy. Yes, God is just and holy, and yes our sin is an offense against Him, but in Orthodoxy, we never forget that God loves us and He wants to save us.

“Orthodoxy has maintained a sense of beauty and reverence. While Protestantism and Roman Catholicism have both turned away from tradition, in favor of weak pop music, poor art, and poor architecture, Orthodoxy has preserved the Heavenly liturgy. Many a Roman Catholic, distressed by the post-Vatican II iconoclasm which has afflicted his church, has come to Orthodoxy, drawn first by the beauty and then by the truth.

“Orthodoxy is a family Church. Many of our priests are married and have children. Honoring Christ's desire to let the little children come to Him, we offer communion even to infants. Children attend the Divine Liturgy and participate in the service.

“Consider your spiritual welfare and that of your family. Mr. King's parish may be fairly orthodox, and Anglicans of his catholic leanings may be strong Christians, but they are a minority. Anglicanism is dying, and attending a conservative parish is only delaying the inevitable. Mr. Pope's church may look great on paper, but far too many of the priests and bishops do not hold to church teaching. The members at the parish level are no different than the Anglicans, though perhaps with even less interest in tradition. In Orthodoxy, the same faith is held everywhere, not changing with the times like in Protestantism, and not dictated from on high and then ignored like in Roman Catholicism.”

There was so much more to say, but I felt myself being drawn away from the table and back to my own land. Rather, that is something that may have happened, if in fact this event had happened. I rather think it would have been a joy if it had.

Dear reader, what do you think of these three men? Where do you think they were right or wrong? Where do you think they could have each made a better case? Could another have entered the conversation with something meaningful to contribute?

Royals and Revolution

2011-05-07T13:58:00.000-07:00

It would be an understatement to say the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, was a popular event here in the United States. The descendants of the men who fought at Lexington and Concord, who froze at Valley Forge, and who renounced their loyalty to the crown, thrilled to the sights and sounds of the British Empire in all its glory. I think perhaps King George III would crack a smile.

And why not, eh? It has been nearly two hundred years since American and British fighting men were putting serious effort into killing each other on purpose. For the past century or so, our bullets have been going in the same direction in our various shared wars. We share a language, even if the British generally make better use of it. We have a common heritage, and we have stood together, even when it was not individually advantageous for us to do so.

Our mutual ancestors fought at Hastings and Agincourt, at Stirling and the Boyne. We repelled the Spanish Armada. We built castles and monasteries, cathedrals and universities. This rough mix of quarrelsome Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen and Irishmen, along with numerous others, built one of the greatest empires the world has ever known.

Some of us continued to make the British Isles our home, but others traveled across the sea to America. We built our homes, planted our fields, and raised our families, all under a common flag and a common king. Vast oceans tend to make people drift apart, however, and those of us on the western side of the Atlantic tore down the Union Jack and went our own way.

And yet, we still follow the British royals. We share in the joys of a wedding, we line up to watch The King's Speech. When we see Queen Elizabeth II ride by in her carriage or wave to the crowd from a balcony, we do not see her as we see any other foreign leader, or even any other nation's monarch. She is someone important to us as a people. We Americans may not owe her our allegiance, but I think in some small way, we feel we still ought to.

I am a traditionalist, as both my regular readers know, and I admit to holding unpopular and outmoded ideas about loyalty, duty, and honor. I have a low view of violent revolution, colored perhaps by my own experience with armed insurgency. I stand with the Cavaliers, rather than the Roundheads, with those who defend the king and not with those seeking his head.

As such, when I consider our own revolution, that nearly sacred event we celebrate every July 4^th, I am conflicted. I admire the patriots, because I believe they meant what they said when they devoted their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause. There is something very inspiring about Washington crossing the Delaware, about ragtag militias forming ranks against a professional army, about the people of America saying, “Don't tread on me!” and then taking up their muskets and sabers to fight against tyranny.

However, you cannot spell “loyalist” without “loyal,” and I must say my greater sympathies lie with those who stood with King George, honoring their oaths of allegiance to the king. While the actions of the rebels may have been very understandable, and I give them the benefit of the doubt as to their intentions, I think that ultimately those who said, “I was a king's man before the revolution, I am a king's man now, and a king's man ever I shall be,” had the right of it. A man who was loyal to the crown in 1766 did not somehow become a villain because he was still loyal to it in 1776.

Two centuries have passed of course, which is, as they say, a great deal of water under the bridge. I believe it is good that America is an independent nation, even if I do not fully agree with the means by which that independence was achieved. I am very proud of my country, and I am very proud to have served in my country's military. Our quarrel with the British monarch ended long ago, and the United Kingdom is perhaps our greatest ally.

I am a romantic, so my thoughts are not entirely based on cool and impassioned logic, but I think highly of monarchy as a system of government. A monarchy is not necessarily less free than a democracy, so long as individual rights are recognized and protected. One could argue that the British had far more rights in the past, when the monarch had more power, than they do now. A monarch has more responsibility to the realm than an elected president does. A president may be tempted to experiment with radical policies and then leave it to the next president to fix it, but a monarch will be leaving the kingdom to his or children. Plus, elected presidents are nearly always people who sought out the job, and are, therefore, the last people who should actually have it.

Not everyone thinks the way I do about the monarchy, I realize, but I think many other Americans view the British monarch as being special to us, in a way that no other foreign leader is. Queen Elizabeth II may not be our head of state, but we are still glad she sits the throne.

I, for one, hope the British keep their monarchy for as long as this world endures. If the monarchy were to pass away, the British, and the world, would be the poorer for it. In a sense, the monarchy represents the soul of Britain, something rarely seen in our day, but so beautiful and glorious when it is.

God save the Queen!

The Journey. A Rough Draft Excerpt: The Church of Recovering Catholics.

2011-02-28T22:17:00.000-08:00

I was walking down a lonely road one morning in the early Spring. The frost still clung to the low-lying branches, but the songbirds were out and about, greeting the sun and rejoicing in the new day. The crisp cold air was invigorating, and I quickened my stride, proceeding on my morning journey. As I made my way around a bend in the road, I saw two buildings in the distance, one across the road from another.

The building on the right was a stone structure, covered in moss and ivy. The grounds were overgrown with bushes and weeds, and if it were not for the cross on the roof, I would not have known what the building was. As I drew near, I identified more markings of a church: a bell in the tower, stone crosses in the graveyard, and dusty stained glass windows.

The building on the left was also a church, by the look of it, though much larger and more modern. There was a large parking lot, full of vehicles of all kinds. I was intrigued by both churches, but as no one appeared to be at the older church, I departed the road on the left side and approached the larger building. I walked to the glass doors and, seeing a crowd inside, pushed open the doors and entered the church.

“Welcome, welcome!” said a pleasant, overweight gentleman in a gray suit. He shook my hand and asked, “What brings you here?”

“Just on a walk,” I said. “Not really sure where I am going, to be honest.”

“Well, let me show you around,” he said. “We're always glad to have visitors.”

He led me to two young men who were standing by a rack of tracts, a cup of coffee in each of their hands. They were dressed casually, both in jeans, one with a hooded sweatshirt and the other with a plain black tee shirt.

“We have a visitor,” my guide said, and the two young men welcomed me and introduced themselves. We exchanged names and the usual pleasantries, and then I asked them if they knew anything about the church across the road. At this, their smiles disappeared, and the older man made a rather disgusted face.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm just very interested in history, and the church looks like it has been here for a while.”

“Forgive me,” said the older man. “You see, we all used to attend that church, but we are now on the road to recovery. This is the Church of Recovering Catholics.”

“I see,” I said.

“That church across the road is a bit of a sore subject, I'm afraid. We all left for a variety of reasons, and we are all very glad we did. For myself, it was the Catholic Church's insistence on being the only true Church. Can you imagine? That sense of exclusivity and the drawing of such a clear line is incredible!”

“And they are way too hopeful when it comes to the salvation of non-Christians,” said one of the young men. “If you're not a Christian, you're going to Hell. That's the end of it. I don't know why they can't see that, but then they're not actually Christians, are they?”

“Catholicism is far too difficult to understand,” said another member of the church, a middle-aged woman with glasses. “So much doctrine and so many rules. You need a PhD to understand half of it. Where is the simple message of Jesus Christ?”

“It is an ignorant peasant religion,” said another member of the church, an elderly man with an aristocratic air. “It appeals only to the common people, the brawling, stinking masses.”

“They have no room for Scripture, you know,” another said. “It's all man-made traditions, replacing the word of God.”

“And they were always reading the Bible during mass,” an older woman said. “I swear, they spent more time reading the Bible than the priest spent explaining it during the sermon. The sermon is really the point, isn't it? If they could cut the readings to one, they would have more time for a good, inspiring sermon.”

“The Catholic Church is so strict!” said a young woman. “There are so many rules. Don't do this, don't do that.”

“And they are far too forgiving,” said another. “I have never known such a bunch of sinners in my life! The vast majority should have been cast out of the doors long ago, but they are still there, week after week!”

“They make you confess your sins to a priest!” a young man said. “We should be able to take our sins directly to God and confess to Him privately in prayer. They make confession so difficult!”

“Confession is too easy,” said a middle-aged woman. “These young people would be out fornicating on Friday night, and then they would all be lined up at the confessional on Saturday. Checking the box is all it was; there was no change of heart. When I pray silently to God, I really mean it, not like those kids!”

“The Catholic Church is a patriarchal nightmare!” said a young woman. “An all male hierarchy ruling from on high and oppressing women!”

“And the Church is so feminine,” said a young man. “Everywhere you look, there's a statue of the Virgin Mary. My high school was controlled by a mob of authoritative nuns. I'm glad I escaped from all that and found a church where women know their place!”

“The Catholic Church is so violent!” another member said. “What with the Crusades, and the knights, and the Inquisitions, the Church's hands are stained with blood!”

“They're a bunch of weak-kneed pacifists!” a tall man said. “The old pope even opposed the war in Iraq! When you oppose God's empire, you oppose God! And speaking of which, the Church is disloyal. Our old priest baptized the children of illegal immigrants!”

“It's a bunch of superstitious nonsense,” said another member. “None of it can be proven.”

“And the Catholic Church thinks far too highly of science,” a woman said. “Did you know Catholics are allowed to believe in evolution and an old Earth? After the service today, we're going to burn some science textbooks. Care to join us?”

“And everyone knows the Church hates sex,” another said. “That's why their priests are celibate, you know.”

“And the Church keeps saying, 'be open to life, welcome children, rejoice in your union with your spouse,' as if our decision not to have children was any business of theirs!” another said.

“Because, of course, the Catholic Church does not allow contraception,” said a man wearing gloves and a surgical mask. “I hope you don't mind if we don't shake hands. I'm not much for touching people. My wife and I don't even sleep in the same room.”

“Speaking of wives,” said a middle-aged man. “The Catholic Church insists that my marriage to my first wife is still in effect, despite the fact that I have official government documents confirming that what God joined together was separated with a few signatures on a Monday afternoon last August.”

The members of the Church of Recovering Catholics continued to share their tales of how awful their former church was. Their service was about to begin, but I politely bowed out, saying I still had a journey ahead of me. As I walked out the front door and took a breath of the fresh, clean air, I looked across the road at the old church. The sun was shining on the steeple, and I could hear a hint of organ music.

I crossed the road, and as I drew near the church, I saw that it was not quite as broken down as I had first thought. The walls were strong, and the stained glass windows were intact. It was a solid structure; it had stood beside that road for many years, and it looked as if it would be there for many years to come.

A man was sitting on a bench by the church gate, smoking a pipe. He was an older man in a tweed jacket, and his eyes lit up when he saw me.

“Are you here for the mass?” he asked, rising and shaking my hand.

“I suppose so,” I said.

“You're just in time. Please come in!”

At this, the old man put out his pipe, placed it in his pocket, and we walked through the doors and into the church.

TO BE CONTINUED …

On Mortality

2011-02-18T23:40:00.000-08:00

I often contemplate my own mortality. This may seem odd or morbid, but it helps give me a sense of perspective. When I walk through cemeteries and see the names and dates on the headstones, I think to myself that these people once walked the ground, just as I do. They once lived and loved. Perhaps they too walked among the graves and pondered their own eventual deaths. Now their bodies lie beneath the earth, where one day I too shall lie.

Since I first started writing this, the fact of our mortality was driven home by the death of my own grandfather. I cut out much of what I had written, and edited much of what was left. Writing about death when it is personal tends to change one's perspective.

Until a few years ago, death had been a very abstract idea for me. This began to change when I joined the Army and deployed to Iraq. I remember sitting in stunned silence when I learned that a soldier in my company had been cut down by a sniper's bullet. I remember feeling the heat of the explosion that killed a friend of mine, the warmth washing over me as the smoke rose in the sky. I remember walking among the bodies of Iraqi civilians, killed by a truck bomb, watching as grieving bystanders found the charred, blackened body of a young boy. I remember news of other bombs, other attacks, other names, people I had known, talked with, lived with. Death became something tangible in that distant land.

And yet, even these comrades, these friends, were people I had known for only a short time. My grandfather was someone I had known my entire life. Someone who had always been in my world was suddenly gone from it.

There is a sense that death is always tragic, always something that ought not be, even when the one who dies is old. I had thought this for some time, but in these past few weeks, I have felt it personally. It was inevitable that my grandfather would die, just as it is inevitable that I myself will die, but it still feels as if some awful violence has been done to the universe. It feels as if one who should have walked forever in the sight of God and among his fellow men was ripped away, contrary to all that is right and good, leaving a gaping, tattered hole that can never be repaired for as long as this world endures.

This troubles people, and I am no exception. We know death is our fate, but none of us, or at least very few of us, are comfortable with that. There is fear and there is uncertainty, a mystery we do not fully understand. We know we are going to die, but the nature of it, as well as what, if anything, comes after, is unknown.

Death could come for us at any moment. One minute, you're enjoying the good life. The next, you're being torn to pieces by a pack of Lesser Anatolian wolfbears in a Novosibirsk slum. When you woke up that morning, you may not even have known where Novosibirsk was (not in Anatolia, incidentally), but the wolfbears did, and they were there waiting for you.

Death can defy our expectations. A man of seventy yells at a boy of ten for running on his lawn. The man is bitter about his own advanced age, and he is envious of the years the boy has ahead of him. And yet, the old man lives to 105, and the boy is killed ten years later when his platoon's position is overrun by a wave of enemy staff officers.

Another man in the same platoon survives three years of war, countless artillery barrages, hundreds of firefights, and he goes home and is killed when his pickup truck crashes through a plate glass window and into a herd of bison.

In the end, however, whether young or old, whether it was a surprise or an expected and even overdue event, all of us will die. The mortality rate is sitting steady at one hundred percent, with no sign of changing anytime soon.

It is odd to me that so many of us have died, and yet none of us who are alive today know what it is like. Despite the experiences of billions of our ancestors before us, the exact nature of our fate is a mystery, shrouded behind the veil. We all pass the threshold, as it were, with a fair amount of uncertainty.

There is a general human idea, held by most of us on this planet of ours, that we each have souls that live on after we die, and that our conduct in this world has at least some impact on our eternal fate. Within that vague mass of theism, I personally hold to the Christian view of the universe, that God has created us, that He became a man and died for us, and that He has prepared Heaven for all those who accept His forgiveness and grace. This is a significant claim to make, and I do often have doubts, but here, on Christ the solid rock, I stand; I can do no other.

“What if you are wrong?” someone might ask. “Would it not be horrifying to get to the end of your life and discover Christianity is not true?” I say it could be a good deal less horrifying than discovering it is. Christianity offers us the hope of being saved from a fate too awful to contemplate, but I cannot say I would be sad to discover this awful fate was never actually a concern at all. Still, I am not one to pick and choose, tossing out the bits of God's revelation I don't like. Truth does not depend upon my approval, so I soldier on, filled with a mix of hope and fear.

As I have traveled on my as yet uncompleted journey into Christian orthodoxy, I have shed much of the presumption I previously had. I can no longer say I was “saved” on such and such a day, with Heaven a certainty and every good deed a favor to the Almighty. To me, asking a living person, “When were you saved?” is like seeing a man who is waist-deep in the river and asking him, “When did you reach the shore?” He may very well not be as deep as he once was, but he has not reached the shore yet. There is even the dreadful possibility that he may yet turn around and plunge back into the depths. I need God's mercy and grace every single day of my life. We all do.

When our lives end, what will become of us? What will become of me? I must admit I fear God will find my love lacking, my excuses for not being within His visible Church feeble, my Christian service a lie. And yet, I hope for His floodgates of mercy to pour forth, washing me clean of all sin, cleansing me of all my faults and filling me with all the good I lack. I hope for forgiveness, so I forgive. I hope for love, so I try to love as best I can.

Being ready to die is not some morbid fascination. It is prudent and wise. Just as we have life insurance and wills, so also should we mind the state of our souls. None of us knows when we will take the journey of death, but we will all take it. I hope to live for many more years, seeing my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but that last day will come.

My goals in life are simple. I want to raise my children to be good and holy people, I want to die in God's grace, receiving His mercy and forgiveness, and I want to do something good, leaving this Earth better than I found it. I hope and pray that we will all have such a life.

As I live, with the knowledge of my eventual death and mindful of the future state of my soul, I put my trust in Christ who conquered death. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. May Almighty God watch over us, guide us and guard us, and may He welcome us into His presence at the last.

An Ecumenical Appeal to Tradition

2010-12-10T23:18:00.000-08:00

An Ecumenical Appeal to Tradition

Sometime in ages past, we in the west decided “tradition” was a bad word. Venerable began to mean the same thing as corrupted, ancient began to mean the same thing as dead. What we sought instead was that which was fresh and new, that which was novel and exciting. We are still doing this today, having discarded even the novelties, once their shine began to dull.

Tradition has come to imply a Pharisaical rule, set up in opposition against the law of God. We see it even in our Bible translations. In the New International Version, for example, the Greek word paradosis (παράδοσις) is translated as “tradition” when it is used as a negative, and as “teachings,” when it is used as a positive. And yet, it is the same word in the original language.

The Apostle Paul tells us, in 2 Thessalonians 2:15, “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions [paradosis] which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.” (KJV) Yes, there are some traditions of men that should be discarded, but there are also holy, sacred traditions passed down to us from Christ and the apostles. Even the Scriptures themselves are part of what is often called Sacred Tradition.

We as Christians have such a rich storehouse of tradition, inherited from our forebears in the faith. And yet, we have cast so much of it aside, treating it as something of no worth. We have come to believe that what our ancestors valued highly is, in fact, the equivalent of last week's rubbish, which ought to be taken out before it begins to smell.

I believe this is a great tragedy for our culture, and a great tragedy for the Church. However, there is hope. We can hold onto what we still have, and we can work to reclaim that which we have lost.

Here I am, as a non-Catholic (so far), arguing people across the Tiber again, some might suspect. However, I am appealing to all Christians to reclaim their traditions, and I must point out that the Catholic Church is by no means immune from the deliberate rejection of tradition we have experienced in our day. In fact, the “modernization” of the liturgy, along with the accompanying—and likely connected—decrease in knowledge of the faith by clergy and laity alike, makes me far more wary of the Catholic Church than I would have been in Newman's day or even Chesterton's day. Still, there is reason for hope.

Christian

In what may prove to be a controversial move, I will first address the term “Christian.” It is a noble term, and one with a long history. As the Bible says, in 1 Peter 4:16, “Yet if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf.” (KJV) For centuries, men and women have died, proudly claiming the name Christian. In our time, however, many have come to believe the name contains too much baggage. Seeing that there have been some bad Christians, many modern followers of Christ have attempted to disassociate themselves from those in the past who did not quite measure up. “Christ follower” is one common substitute, though others are likely in use.

What troubles me about the alternate terms is not so much what they say. After all, every Christian should be a Christ follower, and that is even one of the definitions of the word. What concerns me is what the new terms are trying so hard not to say. It is as if the modern believer says to God, “Thank you that I am not like the Christians who fought in the Crusades or ran the Inquisition, or burned “witches,” or walked around in suits with their fifty pound King James red letter Bibles. I am a Christ follower, and I am hip and modern and wear American Eagle and drink fancy coffee. May the world see that I am approachable.”

There is something of a fad in all of this. Soon, even “Christ follower” will fall out of favor, as people discover that Christ followers, just like Christians, can be self-righteous and hypocritical, full of sin and human failings. Perhaps “Jesus admirer” will catch on next, followed by “Divinity sympathizer” or something equally inspiring.

What I propose is that, rather than ditch the name “Christian,” we fight to show the world what it really means. If some have not been worthy of the name, then let us work to be as worthy of it as we can. It is our word, a word we share with two thousand years of our brothers and sisters in the faith who have gone before us and now sit with the Church Triumphant, awaiting our victorious resurrection, by the grace of Christ our Savior.

Hymns

One of the greatest possessions of the Church, which I remember with great thankfulness from my Protestant youth, is the overflowing treasury of hymns we have received. I could go on and on, listing my favorites. They were hymns of great beauty, but also great holiness. There was doctrine in the hymns, and one could be grounded in the faith without listening to a single sermon.

By contrast, the music of today does not even approach the majesty of what was written by our ancestors. One could argue about why this is so, but I think it is largely because we have lost a sense of the sacred. The writers and composers who put the old hymns on paper were overwhelmed by the glory and grandeur of Almighty God. They were also unafraid to point out that we are sinners in need of God's grace, and they rejoiced in praising His power, love and mercy.

Today, we sing vague songs about how God loves us, and how we love Him, but the lyrics could just as easily refer to a sappy relationship between infatuated teenagers. We could throw the songs onto the pop radio station, and many people would not even know they were about God.

I believe we need modern music, as we need to encourage the next generation of Christian writers and musicians. However, we still have the old hymns, and we should not let them pass away. They are priceless, a great gift to pass down to our children. Please, sing a couple on Sunday, in addition to the more modern selections. And writers and musicians, do not look only to pop music—rarely good for congregational singing, as it is—for your inspiration. The secular musicians have that covered, and they are consistently making better pop music than you are. Instead, look to the hymns of the faith, look to the Scriptures, and let the Sunday morning worshipers sing beautiful, holy, songs to our God and King.

And Catholics, please bring back the occasional Gregorian chant. Even the Protestants are making you look bad, and they sing better, too.

The Church Calendar and Special Events

In the liturgical churches, there is the idea of the Church Calendar, where special dates are celebrated, certain saints are honored, and certain customs are practiced. The Christian lives through the year, celebrating with his or her fellow believers, sharing in fast and feast alike.

Modern non-liturgical Protestantism is barely hanging onto Christmas and Easter, but there is often nothing else. No Epiphany, no Ash Wednesday, no Lent, no Advent season. Even Christmas and Easter are in danger. How many of you have been to an Easter Sunday service where the pastor did not preach about the resurrection? How many of you have been to a Christmas Sunday service where the music was no different from that sung the rest of the year?

There is something very important about special days and special times. Consider how excited we get about birthdays, Thanksgiving, or the Super Bowl. If we can rejoice in these secular events, why can we not share in joyous commemoration of our Christian faith?

To this I would add noteworthy events in the life of the Christian. Baptism is a time when sin is washed away, and God's grace fills us, and this event should be celebrated by the whole Church. Families should come, the date should be written down, and the Church should welcome a new brother or sister.

In the same way, receiving Communion should be an incredibly important event. In the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, it is offered every Sunday—and every day in the Catholic Church. Receiving our Lord in the Eucharist is the central point of the whole service. The Orthodox serve communion even to infants, and the Catholics celebrate a child's first Communion.

In our more “modern” churches, we make a point of celebrating Communion rarely, fearful, perhaps, that having it too often will cheapen it. This is odd when one considers how we have already stripped away the sacramental, horrified that the spiritual could become physical. One wonders how we have managed to maintain our belief in the Incarnation, God made flesh.

These special observances, in the lifetime of a Christian, and in the liturgical year, serve as milestones in our lives. They make each day special, they unite us with our fellow believers, and they help us see our place in the vast company of the faithful, past, present, and future.

Beauty

I read an article recently by John Zmirak (http://www.insidecatholic.com/feature/stitching-in-limbo.html), in which he said, “Most 19th-century prisons look more humane than churches built in the 1970s.” I agree. Our culture used to value beauty in its art, music, architecture, and worship. We have now become utilitarian, churning out soulless and drab substitutes that fail to satisfy.

Several centuries ago, some people decided that churches should not be beautiful. They removed the statues and icons, they whitewashed the walls, and they turned Sunday worship into “four bare walls and a sermon.” They took away the incense, a visible reminder of our prayers rising to God. They took away the images, which reminded us of the Incarnation and the physical reality of God's work. They took away the beautiful music which united the worshipers with the Heavenly choir.

People need beauty. They long for it, they seek it out. The man who stares at splattered paint on a canvas in a modern art museum and says he prefers the Renaissance painters is not a philistine; he is a normal human being. The woman who prefers the “smells and bells” of traditional liturgy to power point and rock and roll is recognizing the beauty and reverence of the former, a beauty and reverence which the latter, for all its energy, cannot match.

Beautiful buildings and beautiful services draw our hearts and minds to God, the Author of beauty. They are also a way of honoring God, by giving Him our best. Our ancestors knew this, which is why Europe is dotted with beautiful churches.

Some will say that beautiful churches cost money, and that the money would be better used to serve the poor or support the ministries of the church. Beauty, however, is not always a matter of expense. A small chapel can be beautiful, and a large mega-church can be an architectural monstrosity. And so often, the money we save by making a bland building simply goes to folding chairs, drum-sets, sound systems, and coffee supplies. Sometimes it really is better to break the bottle of perfume over Jesus' feet and give Him the honor that is is His due.

I ask you to consider beautiful music. Consider putting a cross in front of the sanctuary, for all to see. Show scenes from Scripture in stained glass. Dare to cover the walls with the stations of the cross or icons of the apostles and saints. Do not be afraid of the physical reminders of God's grace. If you are building or remodeling your church, honor God even in that.

In Closing

I thank you for reading my appeal. There is much that unites us as Christians, and we can all work together to do the will of God. May He guide us through our disagreements and bring us into all truth. As we move forward, let us take hold of our common heritage, honoring those who have gone before, and preparing the way for those who are to come.

Is Union With Rome A Moral Imperative?

2010-09-18T22:51:00.003-07:00

Is Union With Rome A Moral Imperative?

I am a Christian, a member of a religion stretching back two thousand years. I am, one could say, the spiritual heir of nearly one hundred generations of those who came before me in the faith. And yet, I was born into a divided Christendom, clinging to one of the Reformation's innumerable shards.

And, so far as shards go, it was not a bad one. I grew up as a Free Methodist, the result of a schism from mainstream Methodism, which was itself a schism from Anglicanism. Anglicanism has its own story, of which more will follow later.

Free Methodism is a Protestantism of the Arminian variety, which affirms free will, denies eternal security (the belief that we can never, even through deliberate renunciation, lose our salvation), and does not teach that God is a most, shall we say, “unpleasant” being who has decided to hate (to the point of predestined damnation) the bulk of humanity from the moment of their conception. The Free Methodist Church is a wonderful church, and it has been the spiritual home of my family for many generations.

And yet, as a body created by schism, it has had a relatively short life on its own. The heritage of faith only goes back to 1860, before one must jump back into the parent church. Continue back through Methodism, and one finds oneself in the Church of England. If one dares to continue, one will find oneself in the Church of Rome, the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church, by its very existence, is controversial to the Protestant. There is this idea that we Protestants rediscovered Christianity five hundred years ago and put the religion back on the right track. It can be baffling to see so many believers -- indeed, the largest single group of believers -- still within the Roman communion.

Those who know me very well know that I have been strongly interested in the Catholic Church for several years now. This has been surprising to some, and even shocking and upsetting for some others. To say to a devout Protestant that one is considering Catholicism is much like saying that one is considering renouncing one's citizenship and pledging allegiance to a foreign land. This is particularly shocking if the Protestant believes, as many do, that the Catholic Church is evil and apostate, the home of the anti-Christ.

I first expressed serious interest in the summer of 2005, while serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq. Someone, in such a callous disregard for separation of church and state that Barry Lynn would have surely collapsed from shock had he known, had taped the Prayer to St. Michael to the window of one of our humvees. I investigated it further, out of curiosity, and this led to further study of the Catholic Church.

I continued my study when I returned to the U.S., amassing quite a library of Catholic apologetics. I even entered the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) program in Savannah, Georgia, with the intention of joining the Church on Easter Sunday, 2007. I did not follow through, however, due to some lingering doubts. That decision, I fear, has been to my detriment, though perhaps the fact I see that is a sign of hope.

In an earlier note, entitled “500 Years After Rome,” which I posted on February 5, 2010, I argued that the Protestant Reformation has had rather disastrous consequences and that, in hindsight, maintaining union with Rome, even a flawed Rome, would have been a better course of action. That argument was based primarily on the idea of unity and doctrinal cohesion.

I made a later argument in favor of traditional Catholic-style liturgy, in my note, “Give Me That Old Time Religion.” Certainly, I prefer traditional liturgy to what we have in Evangelical churches today, but that is largely, though I would not say entirely, a matter of taste. And, if aesthetics are to be the deciding factor, I attended an absolutely beautiful Church of Ireland (Anglican) service in Dublin recently, which put the Ordinary Form (Novus Ordo, post-Vatican II) of the Catholic Mass to shame.

And yet, as beautiful as the service was, Anglicanism has no great appeal to me. It looks, at least in the glorious high-Church atmosphere of the 11^th century (and therefore, formerly Catholic) Christ Church Cathedral, like Catholicism used to look, but appearances are deceptive. Underneath the beautiful display, the doctrines and moral teachings of historic Christianity have been eroding away. In the Catholic Church, however, the doctrinal and moral foundations are still firmly in place, no matter how strenuously clergy and laity alike so often rebel against them.

Anglicanism is interesting, however, when it comes to my own religious heritage. King Henry VIII had once been a loyal Catholic, and he had opposed the innovations of Martin Luther and the other Protestant reformers on the continent. However, his desire for a male heir – and Anne Boleyn – coupled with some good old English nationalism, led him to break with Rome. If not for those factors, England may have remained a Catholic nation. As a Free Methodist, tracing my heritage back, I cannot help but wonder if I would have been raised a Catholic instead, if King Henry VIII had stayed true to his wife and to his Church.

However, King Henry did split, the Reformation did happen, and here we are, heirs to a centuries-old schism. The question is, what are we to do about it? May we continue as we are, accepting the status quo, even if we lament the original separation? Or, does each and every Protestant have a moral duty to return to union with Rome, in the Catholic Church?

These are very serious questions. We Protestants often talk of the importance of unity, and yet I cannot help but think that Protestantism, by its very existence, is an offense against unity. It had its origins in rebellion and division, and it perpetuates rebellion and division. Personally, I do not believe Protestantism contains the viable framework necessary to maintain any sort of unity or doctrinal orthodoxy. This is nothing against the strong faith and commitment of so many Protestants, but I believe we are working within a system that is doomed to failure.

And yet, most of us are born into this system. We did not choose to leave the Catholic Church. Our ancestors, for various reasons, chose to do this long ago. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says the following, in entry 818:

“However, one cannot charge with the sin of the separation those who at present are born into these communities [that resulted from such separation] and in them are brought up in the faith of Christ, and the Catholic Church accepts them with respect and affection as brothers . . . . All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church.”
Very well; this is all very positive. We are not charged with the sin of separation, and we are acknowledged as fellow Christians. However, skipping down to entry 846, we read this:

“Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.”

If I may repeat the last sentence again, “Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse to enter it or to remain in it.”

Those are fairly strong words, though still showing a great deal of mercy to the ignorant. Most Protestants ignore or disagree with words such as these, believing that their faith is perfectly fine, thank you very much. However, for those of us who do consider such words, for those of us who think there is at least a chance the Catholic Church is correct in what it says, we cannot set the matter aside.

This is where that moral duty comes in, which I mentioned earlier. This is not about aesthetics or about what each of us may prefer in a church service. This is a matter of what we must do, not a matter of what we would like to do. It is a matter of our salvation. We may look into the Catholic Church and decide, in all sincerity, that it is incorrect, and we ought to stay where we are or go elsewhere. Or, we may embrace its claims and rush eagerly into its doors. What we cannot do, I believe, is ignore it.

Schism is an unfortunate state in which to be. As Protestants, we are separate from those who were our predecessors in the faith. At some point in time, our spiritual ancestors said to their bishops, “We will no longer acknowledge your authority,” and then went their own way. In the years since, many of us have have come to accept their decision as the default. What I propose is that we each consider the matter anew. We should each decide if the schism is something we wish to personally maintain and pass down to our children, or if we should return to Rome.

“What a minute,” some will say. “You do not understand. I was raised Catholic, and I never heard the Scriptures; I never learned how to have a personal relationship with Christ. I was saved out of the Catholic Church. Why would you want to go there?”

Leaving aside the question of what in the world they were doing during mass, if they never heard the Scriptures, or what can be more personal than receiving Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist, I think these are legitimate things to say. The Catholic Church in our day has done an astoundingly poor job of teaching the faith to its members. One could argue about why this has happened, but the result is that many Catholics have left the Church and have embraced some form of Evangelical Protestantism or left Christianity entirely.

The fact that so many Catholics do not know their faith is a serious problem, but the problem, in my opinion, is not the faith, but the fact they do not know it like they should. One almost never hears of learned, faithful Catholics in our day studying their way into Protestantism, though there are numerous examples of the reverse being true and Protestants studying their way into the Catholic Church. Instead, the casual Catholics and the Christmas and Easter Catholics and those who found themselves simply going through the motions on Sunday are “saved” by Evangelicals who actually do know their faith.

The newly converted Evangelicals worship God wholeheartedly in their new church, and one cannot fault their zeal, and one cannot help but be glad they are now seriously serving Christ. However, did they have to leave the Catholic Church to do this? Did they have to commit themselves to a new and exciting version of Christianity, or could they have stayed in the Catholic Church, sharing in two thousand years of faith and participating in the sacraments?

I have, over the past few years, had some objections to the Catholic Church, but they were not the objections of Luther or Calvin or any other Protestant. My concern, a concern shared by John Henry Newman, was that Rome had introduced innovations and perhaps the true, apostolic, historic faith was to be found elsewhere. Newman believed, for a time, that this faith could be found in Anglicanism. I have often thought it could be found in Orthodoxy. I do not think it is likely to be found in some radical new theology preached in the new church down the street.

“But the Reformation was a restoration of the true, historic, apostolic faith!” some might say. While I respect the opinion, I must disagree most emphatically. When I look at the practices of the ancient Church, its writings, its councils, and its creeds, I see sacraments, apostolic authority, the communion of saints, infant baptism, and a visible Church. The Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church continue to hold to these. Protestantism has largely rejected them, while adding a few doctrines, such as sola fide and sola scriptura, that were clear departures from what was previously believed.

If someone were to be suspicious of purgatory, papal infallibility, or the immaculate conception, I would be sympathetic. These are doctrines believed by the Catholic Church, but not by the Orthodox Church, and they were formally defined after the East-West split in AD 1054. I have respect for the Orthodox objections, and if someone, out of a desire for the true, apostolic, historic faith, were to become Orthodox, I would completely understand. However, if a Protestant were to object, simply because the doctrines did not line up with his or her interpretation of Scripture, then I am unlikely to be convinced, particularly since the Protestant also rejects so much that Catholicism and Orthodoxy hold in common.

It is difficult for me to believe Rome was right about the inspiration of Scripture, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of Heaven and Hell, and yet Rome's teachings about the communion of saints or the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist are damnable lies. If the Catholic Church is completely wrong about sacraments, authority, and Sacred Tradition, I am far more likely to reject the faith entirely than to scrape away a few pieces and make my own personal Christianity out of them.

What shall we conclude? Was traditional Christianity hopelessly flawed, with the mess that is Protestantism being the best we can do? Is the Christian religion itself a hodgepodge of conflicting options which we should abandon in favor of agnosticism or atheism, admitting that none of us have a clue who God is or what He wants from us? Or, did Christ found one Church, which He has continued to guide into all truth, promising that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it?

For myself, I am increasingly inclined to believe Christ did found a Church, the Catholic Church, and it is the obligation of every person to enter into it. I am still a bit indecisive and I have not made any formal decisions, but I have to wonder how much longer my indecision will be a valid state of inquiry, rather than a form of rebellion against Almighty God.

I welcome your thoughts. May God have mercy on us and guide us to the truth.

The End May Or May Not Be Near

2010-06-15T22:54:00.001-07:00

The end is near, I have heard it said. Soon, perhaps as early as next Thursday, the Rapture will happen. All the true followers of Christ will suddenly be lifted up to Heaven, leaving cars without drivers, airplanes without pilots, and Mr. Smith's biology class without that one kid who rolls his eyes whenever Mr. Smith says the word “evolution.”

It appears that something great and terrible is about to befall humanity. Great plagues will lay waste the land, the multitudes will suffer indescribable pain, and “them that dies will be the lucky ones.” Thankfully, if we are the right kind of Christians, we will get to skip out of here before the going gets tough.

This belief that the end of the world is imminent is very popular within a particular segment of Christianity. Numerous books have been written and movies have been made about this subject. Sermons have been preached, Study Bibles have been published, and detailed accounts of the “Last Days” are readily available.

A fascination with the end of the world is, I suppose, normal for us. Jesus' early followers thought the end was going to happen in their lifetimes. As Rome fell in the West, the end had to be near. When the year AD 1000, with all its Y1K concerns, approached, I am sure many throughout the world thought the world's story was almost complete. We saw it in 2000, and it looks like we get to have it again in 2012.

And yet, the world keeps on spinning and we are still here. True, I suppose the world could end before I finish this sentence. Then again, perhaps we will have to wait a bit longer. While we're waiting, perhaps I'll hunt down a copy of 88 Reasons Why The Rapture Will Be In 1988. I do love to read.

I would like to address two issues that are affected by this “End Times” fascination. One is peace in the Middle East, and the other is the environment. Both are areas where end times fever goes beyond an eccentric hobby and can actually have very real consequences.

As I sit and think, it occurs to me that a devastating nuclear war in the Middle East, in which millions die and the land is ruined by radiation, is actually a bad thing. And yet, there are many people who eagerly look forward to such a scenario. This big war could be just the thing to set off the end times and trigger the Rapture, if it hasn't happened already. Every time someone throws a stone in the Gaza Strip, the Armageddon clock can move forward one more second.

The conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis is a complicated one, and I do not pretend to have the answer. Both “sides” have their supporters, who tend to thoroughly ignore the humanity of their “side's” enemies. One tends to expect the radical Islamists, if the term is appropriate, to support the Palestinians and the radical Jewish Zionists to support the Israelis, so this is no surprise. It is a little less expected to see Western anti-war leftists on the same side as the radical Islamists, and it is also a bit of a shock to find Fundamentalist Christians on the same side as the radical Jewish Zionists.

Leaving the Islamists and Western anti-war leftists aside for this discussion, let us look at the Fundamentalist Christians. They are a powerful ally of the Israelis, influencing U.S. foreign policy and sending aid to Israel. And yet, there is something very peculiar about this relationship. Fundamentalist Christians have a tendency to think that Jews, by virtue of not being Christians, are heading for Hell, and they also have a tendency to think that a horrible war in the Middle East is a desired event.

My guess is that the Israeli Jews appreciate the aid, though they would personally like to avoid the horrible war, and perhaps even Hell, if that's not too much to ask. Their faith that God will miraculously save them during the war by sending fire to destroy their enemies may not be quite as strong as that of their Fundamentalist benefactors.

Resolving conflicts between peoples tends to require compromise and reasoned discussion. For the Israelis and Palestinians who truly want to live in peace, there is hope that they can sit down at the table and work something out. Perhaps other parties can even participate. However, if a particular group, such as the end times focused Fundamentalists, believes that it is God's will for the modern state of Israel to extend to the Euphrates River and that the Palestinians have a moral obligation to move to Portugal, it is difficult to see what help they can be. They may even sabotage the peace process by their hardline stand on behalf of the people who actually have to live with the consequences.

It is a wonderful thing when brothers can live together in harmony. What a glorious thing it would be if the Israelis, Palestinians, and all the people in the region could share peace, happiness and mutual prosperity. To work for such a peace would be a noble thing, and I salute all who are doing so. For those who are hoping the Rapture takes them away before they have to deal with wrinkles and walkers, however, this peace could actually be a disappointment.

This world is a changing place. Not so long ago, the oceans teemed with life, and vast forests covered much of the world. Today, as we look at our polluted, deforested planet, we are becoming increasingly aware that many of our actions are harmful, and real change is needed in order to preserve our home. This awareness has begun to move from fringe environmental groups to the mainstream, and there is hope that we may be able to work together to ensure our children will inherit a liveable planet.

Among the end times crowd, however, this goal is often looked upon with scorn. If Christ is going to take us all away in a few years, why do we need to protect our oceans and forests? Why do we need to make sacrifices for future generations that are not going to exist? Why do we need to take care of this planet, when God is going to give us a new and better one?

While opinions do vary, there are many who believe Christ's return will occur during the lifetime of those who saw the restoration of Israel as a nation in 1948 (some will stretch it to 1967, when Israel reclaimed the old city of Jerusalem). Whatever date one chooses, this probably only gives us another fifty or sixty years, at most. If we are to assume that this planet only has fifty or sixty years left, it is easy to see how an environmental policy of rape and pillage appeals to people. Let's use it while we have it, and then watch it burn as we ascend to glory.

How many more generations of humanity are still to come? We simply do not know. Perhaps we will all be wiped out by a meteor strike in a few decades. Or, in a more hopeful scenario, perhaps we will become a galaxy-spanning civilization, living out our lives on countless worlds, our earthbound years being but the infancy of our species. Who is to say?

I propose that we take care of our home, in the best way we can. Perhaps I am sentimental, but I would like for my children to be able to walk through a forest or see a pod of whales skimming the surface of the ocean on a summer's day. I would like to know that I did my best to ensure those who come after me inherit a better world than I received. We do not know how long this place needs to last, so let us take the concept of stewardship seriously, and take responsibility for what God has given to us.

I understand that people want to feel special. They would like to feel that God has chosen them, out of all the generations in human history, to be taken up in the Rapture. They would like to feel that there is something that sets them apart from those who have come before. They would like to feel that they, uniquely among the masses of humanity, will be spared the pains of death.

And yet, if the experience of every other generation in history is any indication, the reality is that you, me, our families, friends and acquaintances are all going to die. This is a scary and often upsetting truth, because no matter how strongly many of us believe in the glorious hereafter, none of us really know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what is going to happen to us. And yet, countless generations before us have experienced the same thing, and there is little to indicate that our generation is something special. Our bodies will shut down, for one reason or another, and then...we shall see.

I mean no offense to people who, based on their reading of the Bible or the teachings of their theological traditions, truly think that the end is near. What I am suggesting is that none of us can be certain. Life is a gift, and none of us, Rapture or no, can know how long we have. So, rather than obsessing over the coming apocalypse, why not spend our days loving our neighbor and making a better world for our children? And then, perhaps in some distant age, Christ will return to a world we have not managed to destroy. Keeping the place in order in the meantime seems like the decent thing to do.

Give Me That Old Time Religion

2010-05-08T15:44:00.001-07:00

There is a song I remember from when I was a child. It was called “Give Me That Old Time Religion,” and the chorus was very simple:

Give me that old-time religion,

It's good enough for me.

Other verses would follow, listing other people for whom that “old time religion” was also good enough. There is another version, by Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger, which references various ancient religions, which we did not sing in church. It is quite funny, but its content is outside the purpose of this discussion.

Getting back to the original song, this gospel tune, dating back to the late 1800’s, tends to make me think of old camp meetings and Sunday morning services in country chapels. It makes me think of ministers preaching the Gospel in a straightforward, uncompromising way. It makes me think of the great hymns of the faith, sung with gusto by the entire congregation, all without the benefit of drumsets or electric guitars. It makes me think of a more pure, simpler time, a time that had already largely passed before I came on the scene.

It is a time I miss, as I stand in church in my jeans, the pop/rock strains of the latest contemporary music filling the room. I miss the old days of singing “Amazing Grace,” “Revive Us Again,” or “On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand.” I miss the days when church on Sunday was a little less like the rest of my week, the days when it was something special and sacred.

I hesitate to bring all this up, because sometimes I feel like an old man, yelling at the neighborhood kids for walking on his lawn. Musical styles change, people will say. We have to appeal to the new generation, people will say. Dressing up for church scares away the poor, people will say. I appreciate these arguments, and I am sure there is something to them. However, I cannot help but feel that there is more at work here than simply a change of style. It seems to me that what we are experiencing is a loss of our sense of the sacred.

It was a Saturday in 2006, and I was stepping cautiously into the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Savannah, Georgia. Unless one counts a few masses in Iraq held in the shared chapel, I had never before set foot in a Catholic church. It was the most beautiful church I had ever seen. As I walked in, I was faced with the holy water font, a reminder of my baptism. The walls were covered with paintings and stained glass windows, showing stories from the Bible and from the lives of the saints. All along the sides of the church were the stations of the cross. In front was the altar, an object that held far more meaning in this Catholic house of worship than in any Protestant church I had previously attended.

Soon after my Saturday visit, I attended mass. I sat with a kind married couple, whose Bible Study I had participated in earlier that morning. I saw people walk in, drop to one knee beside their pew and, facing the alter, cross themselves in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We knelt to pray, we said the Creed, we prayed the Our Father, we sang hymns (to include one in Latin!). I watched the procession, as the priest walked down the center aisle, holding the Sacred Scripture over his head. We heard more scriptural readings than I had ever heard in one service before. We stood, out of respect, during the reading of the Gospel.

Though I, as a non-Catholic, did not receive Holy Communion, I felt that I had truly participated in the reverent, holy worship of God. This was not a show put on for my benefit. There was no rock band on a stage, there was no multimedia display. And when the priest elevated the Host and said, “This is my body,” I felt that I truly was in the presence of Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity.

It was much the same at St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church, also in Savannah. I walked in alone, not knowing what to expect. Here I found the same reverence as at St. John’s. The people lit candles, kissed icons, and made more signs of the cross than I had ever seen in my life. Incense filled the air, the choir sang (again, without a rock band) in Greek and English, following a liturgy whose age is comparable to the settled canon of the New Testament. When it came time for the Eucharist (communion), even infants in their mothers’ arms were brought forward to receive.

Having experienced the reverent, sacred liturgies of both East and West, it has proved difficult to find the same level of worship in modern Evangelical Protestantism. The statues and icons of Christ and the saints have been torn down, the stained glass windows have been smashed, and the sacraments have been reduced to mere symbols. Even the great hymns of Protestantism have begun to disappear. As Dr. Thomas Howard, the brilliant author of Evangelical Is Not Enough once said:

“Evangelicalism has changed drastically, having bought almost completely into a jazzy, breathlessly contemporary ambience, registered most obviously in their hymnody, which is now limited to ‘praise songs,’ in the place of the immensely rich, 500-year-old treasury of hymns which were Protestantism's greatest glory.”

This sort of talk likely offends many people, which I understand. Modern evangelicals are proud of their churches and believe that they are true places of worship. I do not doubt that this is the intent, nor do I doubt the sincerity of the worshippers. To me, it is ludicrous to suggest that God requires a beautiful liturgy and beautiful churches. Humans, however, are creatures who are drawn to beauty and who are inspired by beauty. Keeping that in mind, is it really a good idea to strip away any sense of beauty, reverence and ceremony from our services?

I think this is a question worth pondering, and even the Catholic and Orthodox churches should consider it. The Catholic Church, in particular, has gone through a ruinous 40+ year affair with iconoclasm, from which it is only now beginning to recover. It remains to be seen how the Orthodox Church, still a bit of an outsider in the West, will deal with the pressures of the modern world.

Much of this is about preference, I realize, and I know there are other issues at work. Doctrinal disputes are important, of course, which is partly why, along with love for my current church family, I am not yet a Catholic or Orthodox Christian. Still, I cannot help but long for the ringing of the bells, the smell of the rising incense, the reverence of traditional liturgy, and the physical act of worship in the sacraments. There is also something wondrous about the idea that Christ is present in the Eucharist, that the waters of baptism truly wash away sins, and that a man and woman are truly united in marriage.

Those are just some of my thoughts. I welcome comments.

God bless!

500 Years After Rome

2010-02-05T23:14:00.004-08:00

Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther was a priest, teaching at the University of Wittenberg; John Calvin was not yet one year old; Ulrich Zwingli was a college student at the University of Vienna; Menno Simons was not yet four; King Henry VIII had only recently ascended to the English throne; and Western Europe had one faith and one Church.

Today, the situation is quite different. We have gone from a society with one Church, to a society with many Churches, to a society that believes the Church does not matter.

Many of us may object to this, exclaiming that our faith matters very much, and that we are fully committed to living a Christian life. I do not doubt this. What I do doubt, in many cases, is our commitment to and belief in the Church.

Consider, if you will, where we attend services on Sunday. What sort of name is on the sign or printed on the bulletin? It may say, “First Baptist Church,” or perhaps, “St. Paul’s United Methodist Church,” or some such thing, but in many cases it probably says something like, “ Town Name Christian Center,” or, “Town Name Community Church.” With some churches, in very small print, we might see written, “a Free Methodist congregation,” or “a free and independent member of the SBC,” but there is often no indication of denominational affiliation at all.

“Bravo!” some will cry out. “We are all followers of Christ. Denominations do not matter. Let us break down these barriers and rejoice in our common faith.”

It is a noble-sounding sentiment, and it fits well in a time when tolerance is seen as the highest virtue. However, if I may quote G.K. Chesterton, “Tolerance is the virtue of a man with no convictions.”

To clarify, the reason our theological differences do not matter is that we do not truly believe in our own theologies. The average Christian in the pew may profess a great deal of love for Christ, as he or she may understand him, but few would be willing to die in the defense of their church’s distinctive doctrines.

Unity is certainly something to be sought after, but the unity we rejoice in today is a result of reducing Christianity to the lowest common denominator. This process is still ongoing, and it does not show signs of stopping anytime soon. The dogmatic certainty of the early sixteenth century Church has been diluted to “mere Christianity,” which is itself on its way to “mere spirituality.”

Many of us will disagree, I realize. We will say, perhaps, that we believe the Bible is true. We will say we firmly believe in the existence of Christ and the reliability of the Christian faith. I applaud this, I really do. However, I must take this a step further. We believe in the truth of Scripture and the Christian religion? In that case, is it important to believe rightly when it comes to the importance of baptism and what it does? Is it important to believe rightly when it comes to the nature of Holy Communion and what it really is? Is it important to believe rightly when it comes to demonstrable gifts of the Holy Spirit? Is it important to believe rightly when it comes to the assurance of salvation?

At this point, many will say that these are “non-essentials,” and that disagreement on these issues should not prevent unity. It is important to note, however, that this list of non-essentials was not so long fifty years ago, and it certainly was not five hundred years ago. Care to guess how long this list might be in another fifty years? As time is passing, less and less Christian doctrine is considered to be important. If nothing is done to halt this trend, in a few centuries or less, will there be any Christianity left?

This progression from orthodox Christian belief to modern relativism stems largely from the rejection of authority. We disagree with our church’s stand on a particular issue or issues, so we reject our church’s authority and form our own. And, really, to be honest, is this so surprising? For the children of the Reformation, all of our churches exist because of a previous rejection of authority. As we storm out of the church and form a new one down the street, what can our former pastors say? If we are rebels, then so are they, and so are their spiritual forebears.

To continue, once we, as a society, decided that it was legitimate and proper to throw off the authority of one Church, why should it be a surprise that it has become common practice to throw off the authority of every Church? Our religion is increasingly becoming the religion of the individual and his or her interpretation of the Bible. There is no recourse to an authoritative Church. Rather, individual Christians, many of whom likely believe the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility to be a damnable heresy, believe that the Holy Spirit is guiding them to an infallible interpretation whenever they pray for guidance and read the Holy Scriptures.

We are left with a problem, however, because we Holy Spirit-seeking, independent Christians disagree about any number of doctrinal matters. If there are a hundred of us in a room, there are probably a hundred different sets of doctrine. Odds are that many of us are quite sincere in our search for truth, and yet we still disagree and come to contradictory conclusions.

At this point, I believe we must consider the possibility that perhaps the one person and his or her Bible system does not work. Perhaps the wholesale rejection of authority is not the best way for Christianity to operate. Perhaps, and this is the shocking part, we were better off five hundred years ago than we are today.

“You would return us to the darkness of Romish papism!” some will cry out, wringing their hands and looking frantically about for Spanish inquisitors. It is a rather significant thing to consider, I will admit, and I realize that, for many of us, the thought has not dared to cross our minds. It lies in forbidden territory, inscribed with the warning, “Here there be monsters,” on our Protestant maps.

And yet, that is the Church from which we came. Sometimes I think we forget this, as if somehow Christianity was on pause for fifteen hundred years. We think we can go from the book of Acts to Martin Luther, ignoring fifteen centuries of men and women who served Christ and belonged to His Church.

Perhaps we do not agree with every doctrine of the Catholic Church, but can we at least say that these men and women were Christians? If we Protestants can call each other Christians, despite our various theological differences, can we not say the same about these Catholics? Or, while tolerating the errors of our misguided brethren down the street who formed their particular sect in 1892 or 1986 or 2009, are we truly going to deny the Christian faith of those within the Church that we all came from and that dates back to the time of the apostles?

Were people going to heaven under the care of the Catholic Church? Were they being encouraged to live righteous lives? Were they told to love God and love their neighbor? If people were being saved within the Catholic Church, has the splintering, chaotic explosion that is Protestantism proved to be any kind of an improvement? Are we as Christians and as a civilization better off now?

1 Timothy 3:15 says that the Church is the pillar and foundation of the truth. If we agree with Scripture, can we really say that leaving the Church behind was such a good idea? Some will say that the “Church” is an “invisible body of believers, scattered throughout thousands of denominations.” Perhaps I am old fashioned, but it seems that a pillar and foundation that people can see and identify and look to for truth is a superior kind of pillar and foundation. Foundations and pillars are strong, and they hold up large and tall buildings. If the foundation and pillar were to be broken apart and scattered, the building would fall. Since the Church is the pillar and foundation of the truth, if the pillar and foundation are invisible, the truth is much more difficult to find.

We rejected the authority of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. Since then, we have been steadily rejecting more and more of traditional Christian doctrine and practice. Would the apostles recognize our churches? Would the early Protestant reformers even recognize our churches? We have established a pattern of rebellion, continually breaking away from what is old and embracing what is new and different. When our children leave the faith entirely and take up atheism or some new and exciting foreign religion, they are going down the same path that Martin Luther and John Calvin and their compatriots took all those years ago.

As this comes to a close, I want to point out that this is not intended to be an attack on anyone’s faith in Christ. I see this as more of a critique of a system, a system that has shown itself to be flawed. This is not a work of Catholic apologetics. I am not at a place in my life where I could write such a thing. I am a class of ’07 RCIA dropout, with great affection for Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, along with an appreciation for all that is good (and there is much) in my Protestant heritage. I think, however, that we have been taking the Protestant system for granted, assuming that it is the way things ought to be. With all respect, and with great love for all people, I ask you to at least consider the possibility that it is not.

May God bless us all and guide us to the truth.

Authority and the Adventurer

2009-11-22T19:45:00.003-08:00

This is an excerpt from G.K. Chesterton's book "Orthodoxy":

If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, "For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity." I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts.

The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy. It is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend. The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion.

Now, the non-Christianity of the average educated man today is almost always, to do him justice, made up of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences against it. For when I look at these various anti-Christian truths, I discover simply that none of them are true. I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows the other way. Let us take cases.

Many a sensible modern man must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such converging convictions as these: first, that men, with their shape, structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts, a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom. Those three anti-Christian arguments are very different; but they are all quite logical and legitimate; and they all converge. The only objection to them (I discover) is that they are all untrue.

If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humor or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton.

People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel’s-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an anthill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a beehive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old?

No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals, following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk. So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.

It would be the same if I examined the second of the three chance rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call divine began in some darkness and terror. When I did attempt to examine the foundations of this modern idea I found simply that there were none. Science knows nothing whatever about prehistoric man for the excellent reason that he is pre-historic. A few professors choose to conjecture that such things as human sacrifice were once innocent and general and that they gradually dwindled; but there is no direct evidence of it, and the small amount of indirect evidence is very much the other way.

In the earliest legends we have—such as the tales of Isaac and of Iphigenia—human sacrifice is not introduced as something old, but rather as something new; as a strange and frightful exception darkly demanded by the gods. History says nothing; and legends all say that the earth was kinder in its earliest time. There is no tradition of progress; but the whole human race has a tradition of the Fall. Amusingly enough, indeed, the very dissemination of this idea is used against its authenticity. Learned men literally say that this prehistoric calamity cannot be true because every race of mankind remembers it. I cannot keep pace with these paradoxes.

And if we took the third chance instance, it would be the same; the view that priests darken and embitter the world. I look at the world and discover simply that they don’t. Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and colored dresses and art in the open air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame that has preserved the pleasure of paganism.

We might fancy some children playing on the flat, grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the center of the island, and their song had ceased.

Thus these three facts of experience, such facts as go to make an agnostic, are, in this view, turned totally round. I am left saying, "Give me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of man among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some ancient happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan joy in the countries of the Catholic Church."

One explanation, at any rate, covers all three: the theory that twice was the natural order interrupted by some explosion or revelation such as people now call psychic. Once heaven came upon the earth with a power or seal called the image of God, whereby man took command of nature; and once again (when in empire after empire men had been found wanting) heaven came to save mankind in the awful shape of a man. This would explain why the mass of men always look backward; and why the only corner where they in any sense look forward is the little continent where Christ has his Church.

I know it will be said that Japan has become progressive. But how can this be an answer when even in saying "Japan has become progressive" we really only mean "Japan has become European"? But I wish here not so much to insist on my own explanation as to insist on my original remark. I agree with the ordinary unbelieving man in the street in being guided by three or four odd facts all pointing to something; only when I came to look at the facts I always found they pointed to something else.

I have given an imaginary triad of such ordinary anti-Christian arguments. If that be too narrow a basis I will give on the spur of the moment another. These are the kind of thoughts that in combination create the impression that Christianity is something weak and diseased. First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second, that Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people still strongly religious or (if you will) superstitious—such people as the Irish—are weak, unpractical, and behind the times. I only mention these ideas to affirm the same thing: that when I looked into them independently I found, not that the conclusions were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts.

Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament, I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god—and always like a god. Christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the a fortiori. His "how much more" is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in the clouds.

The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of nonresistance greatly increases the mystery, but it also (if anything) rather increases the violence.

We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane, for insanity is usually along one consistent channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac. Here we must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given: Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other. The one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it is that it is the survey of one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.

I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalizations; I read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.

If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: It didn’t. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with skeptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterward the ship sank, but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered Rome.

If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever reemerged (and many such have never reemerged), it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.

I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened or made stagnant by superstition. I added it only because this is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood.

It is constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if we refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at what is done about them, we shall see that the Irish are not only practical but quite painfully successful. The poverty of their country, the minority of their members, are simply the conditions under which they were asked to work; but no other group in the British Empire has done so much with such conditions. The Nationalists were the only minority that ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply out of its path. The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these islands who have forced their masters to disgorge.

These people, whom we call priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be squire-ridden. And when I came to look at the actual Irish character, the case was the same. Irishmen are best at the especially hard professions—the trades of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier.

In all these cases, therefore, I came back to the same conclusion: The skeptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. The skeptic is too credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopedias. Again the three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The average skeptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel, the connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this incomparable energy that appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy that can die with a dying civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy that last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island of the Empire can actually help itself?"

There is an answer: It is an answer to say that the energy is truly from outside the world—that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of a real psychical disturbance. The highest gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese. Nevertheless, it is no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume. All other societies die finally and with dignity. We die daily. We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural life: It could be explained as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse. For our civilization ought to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome. That is the weird inspiration of our estate: You and I have no business to be here at all. We are all revenants; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about. Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon, something entered into its body. And Europe has had a strange life—it is not too much to say that it has had the jumps—ever since.

I have dealt at length with such typical triads of doubt in order to convey the main contention: That my own case for Christianity is rational, but it is not simple. It is an accumulation of varied facts, like the attitude of the ordinary agnostic. But the ordinary agnostic has got his facts all wrong. He is a nonbeliever for a multitude of reasons; but they are untrue reasons. He doubts because the Middle Ages were barbaric, but they weren’t; because Darwinism is demonstrated, but it isn’t; because miracles do not happen, but they do; because monks were lazy, but they were very industrious; because nuns are unhappy, but they are particularly cheerful; because Christian art was sad and pale, but it was picked out in peculiarly bright colors and gay with gold; because modern science is moving away from the supernatural, but it isn’t—it is moving towards the supernatural with the rapidity of a railway train.

Lead, Kindly Light

2009-11-22T19:18:00.001-08:00

LEAD, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home—
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see

The distant scene—one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor pray'd that Thou
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path, but now
Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,

Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

-John Henry Newman, 1833