Here is my question, I have been raised as a catholic but becamed lapsed in my 20’s I really want to get back into the church but I am having a hard time since my personal beliefs are in total contrast to the churches beliefs. So what do I do? Do I give up on it? I know that I won’t change my beliefs so does this mean I can’t have a realtionship with God?
Don’t give up.
You’re 20 something now? I’m 50 something. I used to roll my eyes when my mother (now 80 something) would tell me that if I had changed my mind on something, I could change it again. Sure, maybe
little things I would say to her. But big things? Once I, a college graduate, had become
convinced that what I formerly believed was wrong? How could I possibly change ‘back’ and go from what I was now
certain was right?
30 years pass. Welcome to "things we thought were wrong weren’t really wrong’.
You’re too young to remember but back in the 1980s we were told that eggs were absolutely
the worst thing in the world. LADEN with cholesterol. Nutritional nightmare. The news channels ran all kinds of ‘scientific’ interviews with world-reknowned nutritionists showing the data, the ‘proven data’.
So it’s 2012. Eggs are ‘good guys’. Turns out all the proven science was . . .wait for it. . .
wrong.
I won’t go on (but I could) about everything from coffee (bad, good, bad, good) to children sleeping on stomach (bad), back (bad), side (bad). . .that could flip flop in just a couple of years. Meanwhile, each time "science proves’ that ‘sleeping on the stomach causes crib death (SIDS)’ hundreds of thousands of conscientious parents made SURE their children slept on their back, only to hear a short time later, “Sleeping on the BACK causes crib death”. . .
We were told that the pill opened us women to ‘consequence free sex’ (yay, just like the men). . .we weren’t told that they also opened us up to STDs, increased risk of gallbladder disease, increased risk of stroke, increased risk of PID (pelvic inflammatory disease often leading to sterility).
No matter what, you could find a study that said that “X” was good and then sooner or later you’d be told “X” was bad.
So --my mother was right. (by the time I was wise enough to accept this, I no longer was so supremely self-righteous that I couldn’t acknowledge I had been wrong myself.)
IOW – you can explore what you are told by experts and you can come to a conclusion that seems totally proven ‘correct’–and find out later that the experts were wrong and the data you used were fatally flawed. The decision you made as ‘right’ you would NOT have made had you been aware you were using that fatally flawed data.
Many of the Church’s teachings that we THINK are totally in conflict with our well-reasoned belief choices really aren’t that much in conflict. We might THINK that our path is more ‘just’ and ‘loving’ because we have been told that our ‘data’ is right and the Church’s data is wrong’. . .but if we knew that data we were told was wrong, we might take a good hard second look and see the Church was trying, and succeeding, in doing what we thought we could do ‘better’ by doing wrongly. Social justice, for example. Great concept, the Church is certainly for it. . .but while we sneer at its supposedly ‘backward approach’ to women, take a
good long look (I’ve been doing it for nearly 40 years now, pretty much from my teens onward) and see if what ‘science says’ about ‘what women need, want, etc’ has
done the job it claims. Because if the ‘rational scientific modern view’ is directly opposed to "Church teaching’, and if it has resulted in women being less safe, less honored, less ‘happy’, less fulfilled etc., then maybe the Church isn’t as ‘wrong’ as some claim.
Remember, the Church does NOT say that married women 'can’t work outside the home. It doesn’t say that “the husband is always right”. It doesn’t say, “You must have a gazillion babies.” It doesn’t say, "If marriage turns dangerous for the woman and children, tough, you’re stuck."
**Etc. **
There is a lot of misinformation out there. Been there, seen that.
Keep an open mind that even the best ‘experts’ out there can get it wrong, sometimes tragically so. Again, the Church doesn’t try to tell you what society should be: “Monachy!” “Republic”, “utopian”. It speaks infallibly only on faith and morals . . .it doesn’t let people use their infinite capacity to find a loophole because, “but MY circumstances are SPECIAL”. Modern experts will let you do that, and then stand by and claim that anything that doesn’t work out isn’t because they gave you rotten advice, but because YOU must have done it wrong.
Imagine. Experts are in a win-win situation. If things work out, it was ‘their good advice’. If they don’t, “You didn’t do it right”. You won’t hear from THEM that they were wrong. In fact, in the many cases where they were proven wrong, the SILENCE is deafening. They ignore it and try to send the people off on the next self proclaimed 'road to perfection as given by EXPERTS", knowing that if they line the ‘road’ with enough bling and hype, people will be drawn to it. Sound byte culture means something ‘wrong’ is ‘yesterday’s news’, not even worth a glance. . .
Just offering you a little advice but you’ll probably have to live a few more years to see it first hand. Experience is a good teacher but I hope it will treat you relatively gently and guide you ‘home.’
God bless.
I still have a realtionship with God, just no longer with the church… The last priest I talked to (years ago mind you) said that a true catholic wouldn’t hold the beliefs I did. So that kind of made me turn my back on the church.
How do you KNOW this? Do you believe that you’re bigger than God and that there is no way on earth that God can change your heart even if you aren’t expecting Him to? When it comes to God, don’t ever say what you will or won’t do, because He’s been known to work on some pretty tough cases (me being one of them for sure!)!