I am really fed up with my friends and family quoting scripture piecemeal and appealing to Catholic Social Teaching with a superior tone, especially when doing the equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and walking away. By what authority do you dare to interpret Scripture at me? Where is your Collar? Your Holy Orders? When half of the priests in this country can't decide of Jesus was some flimsy hippie or a genocidal maniac, you think that you can somehow do a better job than they?
Very few of you, despite your years, have read more of the Scriptural Commentarries, Church Fathers, or Talmud than I. In having read such things, I have found myself recalcitrant in taking the Divine and wrapping it up in my agenda. When I was a child, I could find justification for all things in my benighted self-catechesis and sunday school preachers. In my youth, I found a great confusion in the ways man can so horribly misinterpret Revelation and sacrifice their very relationship with God to fight an intellectually dishonest war with their fellow man. How many saints are there who actively rebelled against their sunday school teachers? Their priests? The very Pope himself? In every instance, it was due to a man overstepping his bounds, attempting to take the divine and make it a mere possession, a tool in a sorcerer's bag of tricks. You think you can do better than a Pope? I challenge you.
I can take the Word of God, wrap it up in bullshit and throw it at you disdainfully. I used to do it quite frequently. It was probably one of the single most soul-rending behaviors I have ever engaged in, but it's a skill that once-learned, never rusts or dulls. Unless God Himself sends the Ophanim, with a golden scroll bearing the seal of the Tetgrammaton, carried by the cherubs and escorted by all the principalities and angels to tell you that you have his Divine mandate to carry out your deeds and preach what you preach, you had better make damned well sure that your heart, mind, and soul, are in the right place and are living in His heart. For, if they are not, you blaspheme and sully His name, a sin that in earlier ages would wipe you from existence.
Humility may be a virtue that does not come to me easily, but do not mistake what little vestiges of humility, awe, and shame I bear with regards to His Word for ignorance or apathy. I merely believe that it would be imprudent to claim I know His will with certainty when I am still fallible and sinful. I urge you, my friends and family, out of my care for you to consider the same.
Very few of you, despite your years, have read more of the Scriptural Commentarries, Church Fathers, or Talmud than I. In having read such things, I have found myself recalcitrant in taking the Divine and wrapping it up in my agenda. When I was a child, I could find justification for all things in my benighted self-catechesis and sunday school preachers. In my youth, I found a great confusion in the ways man can so horribly misinterpret Revelation and sacrifice their very relationship with God to fight an intellectually dishonest war with their fellow man. How many saints are there who actively rebelled against their sunday school teachers? Their priests? The very Pope himself? In every instance, it was due to a man overstepping his bounds, attempting to take the divine and make it a mere possession, a tool in a sorcerer's bag of tricks. You think you can do better than a Pope? I challenge you.
I can take the Word of God, wrap it up in bullshit and throw it at you disdainfully. I used to do it quite frequently. It was probably one of the single most soul-rending behaviors I have ever engaged in, but it's a skill that once-learned, never rusts or dulls. Unless God Himself sends the Ophanim, with a golden scroll bearing the seal of the Tetgrammaton, carried by the cherubs and escorted by all the principalities and angels to tell you that you have his Divine mandate to carry out your deeds and preach what you preach, you had better make damned well sure that your heart, mind, and soul, are in the right place and are living in His heart. For, if they are not, you blaspheme and sully His name, a sin that in earlier ages would wipe you from existence.
Humility may be a virtue that does not come to me easily, but do not mistake what little vestiges of humility, awe, and shame I bear with regards to His Word for ignorance or apathy. I merely believe that it would be imprudent to claim I know His will with certainty when I am still fallible and sinful. I urge you, my friends and family, out of my care for you to consider the same.
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