Hi AstmaLady,
First, I want to express my admiration to you, since you have chosen to be honest. I have read your main post, many of your following posts and also many answers – though not all, so forgive me, if I touch upon something that have already been discussed. I think Catholic4Ever did give you a very good answer.
Second, I am a cradle catholic, too, and I have been where you are.
I was born, baptized and brought up as a Roman Catholic, but I have spent many years away from the church. These stray years was partly caused by influences from my father, who was a catholic, but at some time started to believe in reincarnation and to study Hinduism and Buddhism. My mother though, stayed a devoted catholic. So did my father actually, and he remained catholic at heart and also to have a great devotion to the Holy Virgin. At his deathbed, he obtained full absolution from our priest.
However, my dad, for many reasons that I will keep private in respect to his memory, WANTED to believe in reincarnation. He had long, public discussions with the bishop in our country about this topic in the 70’ies. However, he never managed to combine the thought about reincarnation and the resurrection of the flesh. These two sets of beliefs are inconsistent and forever irreconcilable.
To me and my siblings, however, my father also talked about reincarnation and as a little girl, I found it cozy to believe I had been my father’s mother in another lifetime. And so, after all, reincarnation became a natural part of my way of being and my way of seeing life and death from an early age. Sadly enough, Catholicism was rejected by both me and my siblings, while my mom quietly remained a faithful catholic.
I will tell you, as I grew older, I spent many years searching for the truth. And if I did something wrong, like falling in love with a person, who was married, for example, I explained to myself that it was because we had been married in an earlier life and was meant to be together in this life too.
I don’t say you do this also, but, reincarnation is HUGELY used as an execution of things we don’t want to take our own responsibility of – or to explain pains that we don’t find any other reason for. It is HUGELY used as (sometimes in a very unhealthy way) explanations of not being responsible. For example, I experienced that a person I know closely one time became EXSTREMELY mad at me. I mean EXTREMELY. She scared both me and my husband and for a long time after, I was scared of her. I mean really scared.
I talked to her about the episode, and I told her, she had been so angry, that I felt she wasn’t herself, standing there madly belching fires from unknown inner volcanoes. She, on her part told me, that she didn’t feel like herself either, and she believed influences from an earlier life came through!
I don’t want to go more in details with this, but it was scaring how much she avoided looking at her own responsibility and just abandoned it all as something from an earlier life. (to be continued)
