Thank you for your response. I guess the way I looked at it is how I was taught that even if it’s don’t know it’s a serious sin if you do it it’s still a serious sin.
Yes, and that is incorrect. Corrupt worldly authorities, including parents often I’m afraid, hold us to standards we were never told as a routine way of life. They seem to presume that others either knew or “should have known” and so too bad so sad.
That’s one reason the US Constitution
supposedly prohibits the government from enacting “ex post facto” laws. Somebody does something legal but we don’t like it, so we make a law after the fact and they convict them of having done something that was legal when it was done.
There are lots of muddy waters on this because so many Catholics have their own ideas and egos prevail so often in discussions. And they just can’t seem to stand the idea that something bad can happen and nobody is going to be “held accountable” for it under threat of Pain of Eternal Suffering.
It’s like wherever there is “pain,” we go on a hunt to find shame and blame. Jesus endured much pain, without shame and blame. The only ones he shamed and blamed, were those who were accusing sinners of breaking the law. Imagine that. Oh yeah and the moneychangers. If you haven’t read the
“seven woes” in Matt 23, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Imagine anybody saying that to church leaders, in an environment where heresy and sin could invoke the death penalty? I can’t imagine anybody saying these things to Church leaders today, even to the extent that these issues have not gone away but just gone more “stealth.”
Being my age I should know my faith better then I do. That, in my opinion, makes me a bad Catholic.
You and me both. I was 42 years old before I even HEARD of contemplative prayer, for example, or even the word “spiritual journey” or anything. I was a cradle Catholic, active in the church leadership, worked on projects, played music at Mass every week? How is it possible that I never even heard of this stuff?
This is one of the reasons I feel so much like “getting up in the face” of some of what I consider the more dysfunctional ideas floating in the primordial mental/spiritual soup that we’ve all been swimming in for centuries until now hopefully with the “information age” and how we can compare notes with others and look up source documents and all like right here and now. That way one “purification station” has the potential to reach around the globe in one generation. It took 2000 years to reach a billion Catholics. Now with Internet it takes about 7 friend-hops for an idea to spread and directly or indirectly influence almost everyone on the web, Catholic as well as others.
How am I to help others be better people if I don’t know how I am to act? I went to confession and received penance for my behavior once I had found out what I was doing was wrong in accordance with the faith.
Exactly. I refuse to accept guilt for standards I wasn’t told about and would not have violated had I known.
So far, I have been doing much better. I occupy my thoughts whenever I speak to her so that I don’t start to go down that road of wishing I could be dating her. For now, being that this is so fresh in my mind and my desire to be the man in her life and treating her with respect and dignity which she doesn’t get from her current significant other, I feel this is the best way to handle things for me. In time, I’m sure that those thoughts and wishes will die down.
Sounds like a working plan, for the time being.
As you can probably tell, I am a person who is very hard on himself when he does something wrong. I’m not a person that likes to fail or let others down. It’s just the person I am. To quote Ed Harris’s character of Gene Kranz in Apollo 13 “Failure is not an option”. That’s my competitive spirit and my worst quality.
Don’t squelch it, use it. Apply that same competitive spirit, toward personal emotional/spiritual/mental goals.
Give yourself permission to think whatever your competitive mind needs to think, to figure something out. To me and Einstein, this means to correctly understand an N-dimensional problem, you need an N+1 dimensional “thought space” (my term not his).
Be your own observer, not just of your behavior and how it compares to your desired behavior, but of your own emotional reactions. Find out that when you get defensive, there is a little ego in there trying to protect itself – in addition to, and not necessarily helpful to, finding out whether it’s really wrong.
I love it when I can frame a situation to the point where I’m the one who is wrong, because that means I have the ability to fix it. There are times I can’t do that and sometimes it doesn’t pay to pretend – yes sometimes it is not only Not My Fault, but I may have been completely accurate in accusing someone else. I second-guess my accusations a million times, but at some point I have to realize, I called it right.
For those times I call it “as I see it” and find out I saw it wrong, the very experience of seeing it wrong and then being corrected, usually is a more complete lesson than if I had done it right in the first place.
Luke 15:7 – “I tell you, in just the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.”
Luke 15:10 – "In just the same way, I tell you, there will be rejoicing among the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
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