Tietjen:
Montie, I have seen several of your posts. They all start by saying, “my aunt says…” or “I met a person at a bookstore that says…” Then, there is no more questions or comments by you concerning the original post despite how many people respond. My question is, what does Montie think? If you are truly interested in learning about Catholism, why not enroll yourself in RCIA. Of course I would like to see you stay here and post both questions and comments, but I think that you might get more out of an RCIA class.
Not as commentary on your commentary or that which sparked it, there is something of note here.
Once I really started studying the scriptures (esp NT) and philosophy and religion in earnest a few years ago, I noticed something troubling when I try to talk to many Catholics.
When I ask them what they think, they refer back to what some saint said or what the Church says. They simply have no personal opinions or are afraid to share them. My concern is that we have made people this way by (evil teachers of course mostly) asking children what they think about something, then putting them down if their “thinking” isn’t the right way. Therefore, the real question they learn to hear is not “what do you think” but “what do you think you’re
expected to say in this situation?” This is yet another rant I have about the lemming-ization of members of society.
The words “authority” is related to “author.” If I say something and take responsibility, them I am the “author” of that statement and have authority on it. Today most people think that to speak with “authority” you must have credible references. Therefore academics think the more references the better, so we never really find out what people actually think except to the extent they can mix and match old references.
Our reference libraries then become books about books, each of which is about other books.
To me, it’s interesting to hear what the Church says, but so many of us are trained our whole lives never to reveal personal ideas when asked to do so, it’s nearly an impossible expectation to get people’s personal opinion on matters religious.
It’s like people are all afraid to say what they think lest they be thought of as wrong or foolish, and I can’t say I blame them. Many times I’ve told people what I think, and by the way they responded I can tell they really didn’t want to know. This raises the question, “why do you ask what I think if you didn’t want to hear it,” while the best I can figure is the person only wants to know what I think if it already fits into their own limits of acceptability. In school, I finally, after many years of getting into trouble and not knowing why, realized that many elementary school teachers talk in code. When they say, “what do you think” they really mean “is your thinking coming around to the right direction yet?”
In the case at hand, I claim no knowledge but just found it a place to jump in and air one of my very favorite peeves.
Maybe more of us would be saints if we learned more what was in our heart without having conflicting voices in our head always battling to tell us what is the Right Thing based on everyone else’s opinions. If we conform our hearts and minds to Christ the way the Bible tells us to, then we might just find that we “automatically” begin to desire things that honor God. It’s hard to get to that point when we’re all so worried about breaking rules we may never have heard of that we don’t even hear the Spirit’s voice within us.
Then again some of us seem to think the Spirit is in us, but really doesn’t speak to anybody but the pope or certain saints, so we had better not trust anything that smacks of internal spiritual movements or intuition, when in fact I believe it is these things that when properly trained are an important component of being a saint. A submit that a saint does not do a kind act so much because of a technical calculation that it’s the right thing, but because the laws of love are written in his/her heart.
Alan
