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nqes7t9
Guest
Hi CAF!
This post is mostly addressed to my contemporaries or near-contemporaries: let’s say “young-ish” and “American” are two of the traits of us folks.
However, it might be helpful to an even wider audience.
This is it: I don’t want you to be like me! I don’t mean to say, “I really stink, don’t do anything that I’ve done.” Rather, I mean that it’s a big, mysterious world, with many secrets and surprises, and we each have our own unique contributions to make.
For example, I sometimes like to look at art, or listen to music, but I have little or no training in the making of either. So I need other folks to be artists and be musicians! I benefit from your work that I cannot do.
I think sometimes when people think about religion, and this is where I have Americans particularly in mind, they think of conformity, of losing your individualism, of being nothing more than a blob of stuff in a mold. Well, reforming the ego is part of good religion, in my opinion. But part of good religion is also about coming into contact and becoming the best version of yourself. I found a CD in my church years ago with a talk by a person named Matthew Kelly about this very topic.
So, do I think you should be more like me? Yeah, a little bit. I have good traits, traits that you can certainly emulate. But that’s not going to do the trick for me. If everyone else besides me just did the right thing all the time, I would still sometimes be a jerk. And emulating me is not going to do the trick for you, either. You can’t do everything that I can do, and I can’t do everything that you can do, and that’s the way it should be! That’s good. But we can have some overlap. I actually sometimes do follow the Ten Commandments, although not always. You can follow the Ten Commandments at least sometimes too.
Be the best version of yourself. That’s what I think you should do. And what I also suggest is that God can help you do that, at least a bit, and God has some particular ways in mind that he’d like to operate. I am a Catholic.
I hope this helps someone who is thinking about getting into religion, and specifically Catholic Christianity.
n
This post is mostly addressed to my contemporaries or near-contemporaries: let’s say “young-ish” and “American” are two of the traits of us folks.
However, it might be helpful to an even wider audience.
This is it: I don’t want you to be like me! I don’t mean to say, “I really stink, don’t do anything that I’ve done.” Rather, I mean that it’s a big, mysterious world, with many secrets and surprises, and we each have our own unique contributions to make.
For example, I sometimes like to look at art, or listen to music, but I have little or no training in the making of either. So I need other folks to be artists and be musicians! I benefit from your work that I cannot do.
I think sometimes when people think about religion, and this is where I have Americans particularly in mind, they think of conformity, of losing your individualism, of being nothing more than a blob of stuff in a mold. Well, reforming the ego is part of good religion, in my opinion. But part of good religion is also about coming into contact and becoming the best version of yourself. I found a CD in my church years ago with a talk by a person named Matthew Kelly about this very topic.
So, do I think you should be more like me? Yeah, a little bit. I have good traits, traits that you can certainly emulate. But that’s not going to do the trick for me. If everyone else besides me just did the right thing all the time, I would still sometimes be a jerk. And emulating me is not going to do the trick for you, either. You can’t do everything that I can do, and I can’t do everything that you can do, and that’s the way it should be! That’s good. But we can have some overlap. I actually sometimes do follow the Ten Commandments, although not always. You can follow the Ten Commandments at least sometimes too.
Be the best version of yourself. That’s what I think you should do. And what I also suggest is that God can help you do that, at least a bit, and God has some particular ways in mind that he’d like to operate. I am a Catholic.
I hope this helps someone who is thinking about getting into religion, and specifically Catholic Christianity.
n
