What I think is that the mystical approach to spirituality is not for everyone. As you note, God gives to each of us the gifts he sees fit. For some of us, the way is to try to strictly follow what they believe are the doctrines of the Church. And they ought to.
This is certainly the case now, but in the early days of Christianity I think this approach was pretty much all they had. They certainly didn’t have a Catechism, and if they did they wouldn’t know how to read it. It seemed like the story was told through the lives of the believers, and caught contagiously through the very demeanor of the desert fathers or whoever they were, or later by those with true poverty like St. Francis who rejected the pomp and circumstance but cleverly stayed close to the structure of the Church.
But now that everybody is “literate” we have figured a way to clutter our minds with all kinds of information, and the idea that the solution to every problem is to do a better job of thinking and acting in according with prescribed norms and training. This is the primary message I see children receiving in school, whether Catholic or public. Is that we rate ourselves on our ability to carry out cognitive tasks, and have awards for those who won. I was one of those. I won every math contest I could get hooked up with, and many other academic awards. And yet I became psychotic because I was not taugh about mysticism and conteplation, and as a 40-something cradly Catholic it kind of bothers me that the “solid food” of our spirituality has remained so well hidden. I think it’s a whole lot easier to keep us all as infants and feed us the milk of tradition and ritual, without really having a plan to progress into teaching us how to grow up.
I asked my pastor some months back, whether there was anything in the Creed that we say every week, that we actually DO have to “believe” in order to become transformed and enter into the kingdom of heaven. He couldn’t think of anything except maybe the part about Jesus coming again. I contend all of the rest is structure, and is not the central teaching of Jesus. The central teachings of Jesus include love of enemy, mercy, and being a peace maker IMO – which are much talked about in a cerebral sense but without something other than learning dogma and tradition, those have no value in and of themselves.
The Father spoke from the cloud and said about His Son, “listen to Him.” Mary’s last recorded words (save for alleged “appearances” whether they be “real” or imaginary) was “listen to Him.” So neither Jesus’s Father nor His Mother told us to worship Him, to “do what He does” or to “become an expert at what others tell you about Him.” When I started looking at the words of Jesus, especially in the gospel of John, I realized it’s about a whole lot more than knowing a bunch of dogma, and in fact knowing all that dogma is itself an impediment because it causes pride that thinks that now in the “information age” we can build a Tower of Babel that actually works. Because we have figured out technological workarounds ever since God destroyed the first one, so a human solution is now at hand.
But I have to become at peace with all of this, or I can never be the witness of the comtemplative mindset I can envision having, and seek to have as a “default” method rather than some occasional “best practices” mode.
So if I add a little about Jesus coming to divide rather than unite, and a little about many parts to one body, maybe I can learn to allow people to follow their paths even if I’ve “given my best shot” at arrogantly trying to change them. But where does that end, and a true zeal for living a gospel life and invitation to others to join me, begin? I think part of it is I have yet to learn the difference between evangelizing and prosyletizing. Haha part of my message is that others do the latter while claiming to do the former, so we really are in the “same boat” in the storm of life.
Also I get a lot of mileage out of the “dishonest steward” parable, understanding that even if I think someone else is “sinning” like for example killing heretics, it was all part of what “worldly” people thought they had to do to keep the story from being destroyed, and as it turns out it worked. No matter what the Church has done, both institutionally and “wicked” individuals running it (although there are no human “good” or “bad” trees I can know by human understanding) it was what had to be done. At least it was done, and here I am eating their fruits while judging them. So that’s kind of a bind I have found myself getting into, while trying to “spread the Good News” of mysticism.
If people gave their lives to protect a story that I fancy they never actually received full benefit from, that puts me in awe of the plan by God that we still have the story and the Eucharist after 2000 years of bloody history. And I look at what they’ve protected all this time like the worst kind of Protestant – like I’m going to take the Church’s Bible and then start telling them they don’t know how to read it. Gag me, really, I mean really. So by whatever means, the Church has been faithful to her mission and I have to keep that in mind when I bash her present-day processes. :sad_yes:
Whew. Thank you for reading.
MS
Edit: I just realized something about the dishonest steward. He may have impressed his master with how clever he was, but the story doesn’t say anything about the master changing his mind about dismissing him as steward.
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thanks, you express where I’m coming from better than I do. And yes, I do think people of Osho’s kind purposefully wrap what they are pushing, to sound familiar and pleasing. It’s how all cons are successfully initiated. Works for non religious too. The package is crafted for the target.
but I still like my space worshipping friends. 