I have been slowly working my way back to the Catholic faith but as the members of my present church try and talk me out of it, I find myself in a battle to defend my decision. Lately the tactic has been “Why would you want to return to a church that persecuted people for reading the bible in their own language”?
Schroeder, pp. 17-19).
You have been given the gift of Faith… Your true journey is to become a ’
christian person, show that faith to the people in your life, and to save your Soul.
The bible is a “means” to help you to abtain the Grace of God in order to ’
“become Christ” and fulfill your personal vocation.
The first step is to santify your self… To do the works of the new nature that is
growing within you. To obey the ten commandments and to reach out to those in your life
who are in need of the Love of God which can come through you ie: feed the hungry,
clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison… etc…
Your Faith is to be shown to the people directly in your life… family, friends, co-workers,
neighbors and the stangers who comes across the paths of your life’s journey.
You pick and choose the church which will give to you the channels where you can
obtain the Grace of God in order to be who He wants you to be.
I suggest the Catholic church as it has the most meaningful means for me to obtain
that actual Graces of God for me. I highly recommend the sacraments of Confession
and to receive the Euharist as often as you can… " I am the vine you are the branches
you must remain in me to have life"…
You have you own call to follow… I can not tell you what it is that God wants you to do
nor how to do it.
For me the Bible is one of those channels for me to gain the Grace of Knowledge of God
for MY life.
Go surf on this forum and notice the endless hours of arguments that are bible based
from thousands of visitors here and see how they are still arguing over the meaning of the exact scriptures and have been for five hundred years between the different christian denominations… Each time one of them claim a certain bible truth the other goes to another interpertion of the bible from one of ten different languages and they are not getting to far too fast… it “seems”
Let me share something with you… which opened my eyes when I was a very young
man and was in my first year of my first monastery as a novice…
Ten of us monks would go once a week into a room… in this room of silence was a large round wooden table. We sat around this table in silence. There were tablets of paper and a pencil in front of our chairs. One of the Monks… would take out a piece of paper he had brought with him and he would read a verse or two of some particular scripture from the bible. He would read it and then stop. We would sit and meditate on that reading.
after ten minutes of this silent meditation the monk who read the scritpure would
knock on the table top with a light tap… At that time each of us would take the pencil and write on the tablet what that particular scipture meant to us. The papers were folded
and placed in a large wooden bowl which was passed around to each of us.
When the head monk got the bowl of papers. He would take them out one at a time.
he would slowly read each of them and we would meditate on what each had written.
In the seven years I participated in that bible study… there was never two papers which
had the same meaning written on them from of the same scripture…
I really don’t know what it is that you are seeking from your letter… but this is written to
give you some seeds of thought as to what I think one should use the bible for.
To seek the Grace of God to be who he wants you to be…
But if you are indirectly wanting to point out that the catholic church used religion
in order to kill certain people in history and this bothers you… I can understand that.
You might open your bible to where God set up the laws where killing was very much
in order I might suggest Lev and Num to start out with.
Anyone who broke many of the laws of the Jewish faith had death sentences on them
and in some cases if one person violated a law his/her whole family was put to death.
You might seek out some of the history books regarding that time of the world’s history
and see what it might show…