Why doesn't the Holy Spirit guide us with a heavier hand?

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Mijoy2

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I was going to entitle this thread, “Why does the Holy Spirit appear to be doing a poor job”?

I don’t mean this in a blamsphemous manner. We believe the Holy Spirit guides us. We believe the Holy Spirit inspired scripture, guides the Church infallibly in dogmatic decision and teachings and leads us to truth in what we believe. However if this so, why does God loving Christians get guided in different directions by the same Holy Spirit?

If the Holy Spirit does not guide all those who believe in Christ, in the Holy Trinity, in Christ sacrifice for mankind, in the Passion of Christ…all the most fundemental beliefs of Christianity, in the same manner, how can we be sure we are ever guided by Him?

My Faith would be tremendously enhanced if Christianity were not divided.
 
We’re all called to the Catholic faith. Some people hear the Spirit and refuse to listen at all. Some listen to Him and filter out anything they don’t want to hear. Some listen to Him and follow His calling, to the True Church. It’s that simple.

God bless.

+Joel
 
Sgt Sweaters:
We’re all called to the Catholic faith. Some people hear the Spirit and refuse to listen at all. Some listen to Him and filter out anything they don’t want to hear. Some listen to Him and follow His calling, to the True Church. It’s that simple.

God bless.

+Joel
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Thank you Sgt, but the problem I have with your answer is that I have to believe that most members of the Protestant faith truly desire Truth. In thier hearts and in thier minds they are as correct as we believe we are in matters of Faith. I don’t believe they are turning a deaf ear, they, as us, desire the Truth. In listening to many Protestant ministers and lay people, most love God with all thier heart, mind and soul. This being true, I’d think the Holy Spirit would guide them out of thier supposed errors.
 
Well, you’re talking to one Protestant who has been guided out of his “supposed” errors. I’ve grown up Protestant and have been very serious about my faith for some years now. I was sincere in my Protestant beliefs. The problem was, I was sincerely wrong.

My conversion to the Catholic faith has come about because I finally stopped filtering the message of the Spirit. I investigated Catholicism on its own merits, and realized I couldn’t stay where I was. As Chesterton points out, once one begins to be honest with the Church, he begins to be drawn to it.

In my case, the Spirit waited until I was ready. He brought me to the fullness of Truth gently.

I’ve always desired Truth. I found some of it, and it satisfied me for a time. But when I was done with milk, I moved on to meat. There was no other way. Many other Protestants feel this hunger, and answer the call of the Spirit to come to the Catholic Church. Other remain where they are, becoming more and more malnourished. Atrophy occurs.

True, many Protestants are sincere and honest. But that doesn’t make them right.

God bless.

+Joel
 
He guides with as heavy a hand as He requires at the moment.

Christianity being divided is not a sufficient reason to question your faith. It is a reason to realize the reality that the Body of Christ is composed of members each of which is partly worldly and partly divine.

By adoption, we are sons of Adam and brothers of him and Christ, all at the same time.

If there were no divisions in the Church, she would soon die. No species can survive without natural enemies.

We would never have stopped symony. We would never have stopped persecution. We would never have experienced some of the healing we have.

If the Church marched lockstep with the pope like a lot of people think it “should” then we’d be in serious trouble. Plus, Saddam Hussein would probably still be in power. Is that good? I dunno but it doesn’t sound good to me.

According to Deepak Chopra, knowledge is the recombining of that which is separated. According to Jesus, the one whose greatest sins are forgiven in the one who loves the most. Jesus called us friends, because He told us His father’s business. This means he unified us into his family, thus giving us “knowledge” in the Chopra sense that he re-membered His family that Adam dis-membered. When we participate in the Holy Eucharist, we participate in re-membering Him by coming together by recieving the truth that is the knowledge that Adam so nicely lost. After all, if he ate from the tree of knowledge, maybe that’s what gave him the idea to go forth and multiply, because having a desire to “know” what has been separated, then he wanted to “know” Eve. Or did I get that wrong? Did Even and Adam have conjugal relations before the apple incident?.

If God prevented evil, then he would also prevent the joy we experience at the prodigal son. He would also prevent the lesson to the Pharisees.

I think what we call evil or good are only symptoms of the evil and good in our very being.

I think of justice as a judge, which is God maybe, or Truth or whatever you want to call it. At the left hand of God is the prosecutor who decieves, accuses, condemns, and generally his job is to indict wrong behavior and wrong thinking by using the law and whatever other tricks it takes so sentence the souls to hell. He really doesn’t care if you’re really guilty or not; his job is to hold you bound. At the right hand of the judge is the defender, who does everything He can to prevent you from suffering eternal punishment, no matter how many wrong things you have done.

So I imagine the “left hand right hand” had to do with court room, where the advocate was on the left, and the defender on the right. If you don’t want to help the devil, then don’t let the left hand know what the right hand is doing.

Also I gleaned from some polls I started the last couple days, that people are very confused over friend/foe, good/evil thing, and can’t even decide if they’d prefer to be condemned or praised. Now, is this a planet of space aliens, or are we just discovering that we are mixed up?

Well, we are mixed up. We are both human and divine. When we accuse and condemn, we do the work of the accuser. When we defend and justify, we do the work of the defender. We are human, so it’s nothing to be ashamed of that we work to support both the left and right hand of the judge, but the funny part is we are often too ignorant to know which side we’re supporting, even if we smugly prefer one side over the other.

Why is it not terrible that we sometimes work for Christ and sometimes satan? First, we all do so it’s nothing to compare each other by. Some do more accusing, others forgiving. Here’s why. It takes both an accuser (or DA “devil’s advocate”) and a defender (or the Holy Spirit or counselor, or maybe Christ the savior) to give a person a trial that both protects society from unrestrained evil, while being fair to the falsely accused.

Who is the greater hero? Well, if a person is innocent than Christ is the hero because He saves good souls for the mutual benefit of the souls and heaven. If a person is truly guilty, than satan can be the one who makes a case that Christ simply cannot defend. Christ, though, being demonstratedly more able than satan, doesn’t let satan win unless He lets him, such as He did with Judas. I wonder if Christ loved Judas?

Alan
 
Your question only has a sting if you presume the protestant heresy is permanent.

The early Church saw the Arian heresy which lasted for many centuries but was ultimately abandoned in futility. Arians just like protestants today were convinced they had the truth in their hearts.

Stay tuned, my friend. Pope Benedict XVI has said he would like his legacy to be reunification of Eastern and Western Churches. This would be a stunning event and might lead to other developments.

Who in the 1980s would have expected the Soviet Union to fall? Or the Berlin Wall?

As to why the Holy Spirit acts as it does, you can ask it in a poetic sense I guess but surely you don’t literally expect an answer here???.
 
Could the reason why the Holy Spirit does not seem to be assisting ecumenism too well be that Catholicism, the true Church, is sometimes disgusting to God?

For example, our own American Church’s own study admits to homosexual style contacts between priests and below-18-year-olds in the case of more than 50,000 below-18-year-olds.

90% of all American Catholics, and according to a federally-financed study 73.5% of those who regularly attend Sunday Mass, regularly violate God’s laws against use of contraceptives.

Maybe God, who allows us to cooperate with his salvation program, is less-than-enthused by us.
 
we can be clay or we can be marble
you see clay is easer to form. the Holy Spirt can work faster.
marble , on the other hand takes a chisel and hammer to work it.
the Holy Spirt has to work longer and it hurts much more, those
who suffer much. i would call that a heaver hand.
and then there’s that free will thing thats hard to overcome if you
believe in free will. God gave it to us and He’s not going to take it back.we have a choice . wish all you want wrong is wrong, and
right is right. Jesus said say yes when you mean yes and no when you mean no. there is no gray area in Divine Revalation.
the Word of God is Clean and Clear and Pure, for It JESUS.
 
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AlanFromWichita:
According to Deepak Chopra…
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You mean, Deepak Chopra actually has something to say that’s useful???😃 (Of course, he does; I’m just amazed to see him mentioned in a positive light on this board.:))
 
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Ahimsa:
You mean, Deepak Chopra actually has something to say that’s useful???😃 (Of course, he does; I’m just amazed to see him mentioned in a positive light on this board.:))
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I’ve not seen him mentioned before so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

When I heard him refer to “knowledge” as the recombination of that which is separated, it really gave me a lot to think about. This is just some stuff I’m making up right now, that was triggered by my hearing that the other day:

Adam “knowing” Eve.
Knowledge is the prodigal son
Knowledge is the repentant sinner
Knowledge is coming together with facts about the universe that we once knew but no longer do. When we were babies we knew all we cared to, so in essence we knew it all.

Knowledge, then, cannot exist without a separation so that there can become a reuniting. This seems to work well with eastern thinking because there cannot be a reunion without a separation. No redemtion without something to redeem. No life unless there was death. No virtue without sin.

If all was virtue, you would not know virtue. If there was no separation, you would not know the joy of connection, of knowledge, of friendship.

Adam and Eve could not have “known” God because they had never been separated from him. They were blissfully ignorant. Once they ate from the tree of knowledge, though, they “knew” there was a good and a bad, and therefore in their mind they considered “what if” they were separated from God?

Can you imagine how scared they were when they realized that there may even be such a thing as being separated from God? No wonder they went and hid. They were naked because they knew that their sin was written all over their faces. Even the thought of separation from God resonated through every cell in their body. Only a body bag would truly hide that smirk from their faces now, and release their sin from their flesh so it is no longer bound.

Christ reunited us with God, by giving us knowledge of Him. He said he calls us friends, because we know the Father’s business. Therefore, through Christ we can follow His way and use His light to find Life, which is reuniting with the Father.

Adam and Eve were not separated from the Father, so “knowing” the father wasn’t really an issue. The Father just was, as Christ is.

I’m getting distracted so I guess that’s the end of this sroty.

Alan
 
Adam could “know” his wife, only because he was already separate from her. If he were one with her, he would have had no desire to “know” her, know what I mean?😃

It seems that sex, like knowledge, is predicated upon some sense of separation.
 
My short answer and 2 cent worth is because of free will. People choose to continue to drink milk instead of eating meat to grow. Some people are just comfortable drinking milk. If the Holy Spirit stirs for someone to eat meat and that person does not like meat and is content and choose only to drink milk then the Holy Spirit can’t go any further. Free will.

God bless
 
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Ahimsa:
Adam could “know” his wife, only because he was already separate from her. If he were one with her, he would have had no desire to “know” her, know what I mean?😃

It seems that sex, like knowledge, is predicated upon some sense of separation.
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Yes, I think I do know what you mean. The desire for knowledge, IMO, works in contradiction with faith. That’s OK, though, because we have to use worldly knowledge to operate in the world so we can proclaim heavenly knowledge more effectively. I think that’s biblical but I’m not sure where – like being shrewd or something. Also the dishonest servant was praised for his cleverness by the guy who was actually hurt by his cleverness. It’s a matter of whether you become so worldly that it becomes your whole universe.

Even though Adam and Eve were two people, there was no sense of separation because there was no sense of identity, the big “I”. That’s like a baby, who doesn’t know any sense of “mine” or not mine. It is the sense of identity, the “I” that implies there exists a “not I” and therefore separates us from the universe. In our society we are taught to be individually responsible for things, which is contrary to unity.

I figure Adam and Eve were the first engineers. Instead of just enjoying the beauty of the planet, they had to try to take it apart and see how it works. Engineers think they design it better, or if not, they want to marvel at the way it was designed.

Alan
 
We must learn to hear God’s still small voice. Difficult? Yes! Impossible? No!
 
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CalledtoServe:
We must learn to hear God’s still small voice. Difficult? Yes! Impossible? No!
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It helps when we learn how to take time to quiet our minds so our hearing is more sensitive.
 
well
(a) if the hand was heavy to the point of being obvious there would be no need for faith
(b) it would interfere with the principle of free will
 
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