Pilgrims Log

Father’s homily yesterday started me thinking about how we percieve God’s prescene and the prescene of religion in our lives. We live in a very secular world where saying your Christian is often tantamount to saying you read the bible cover to cover on a weekly basis, pray at every possible moment and shout ‘Halleljuah! Praise the Lord’ (imagine cheesy Kentucky or Texan accent) at the drop of a hat, and waiting for the Judgement Day to crush all the infidels!…that, or your a carbon copy of Ned Flanders (Not that there is anything wrong with that…wait a minute, what am I saying! there is something very wrong with saying ‘diddly’ in every senetence construction!). Saying your Catholic often seems to spark some deep seated suspicion that you worship the ground the Pope walks on, think his word is gospel and that ‘Papal Infaliability’ means that what the Pope says is divine! (talk about twisted perceptions..incidentally Papal Infalliability refers to a Pope’s statement not the person and has only been invoked twice, both times to assert something about Mary, like the Immaculate Conception).

Of course for the everyday Christian or Catholic all this is definetely not the case. First of all Catholics are not a bunch of drones blindly following the faith as set down by the Catholic Church. I think it might shock people to know that Catholics think for themselves and often disagree with what the Church or Pope says on a no. of issues. There is nothing wrong with that! Its what keeps the Church vibrant. I mean we have a long history of prominent discent…sure it didn’t always end well for the discenter but it didn’t always lead to burning at the stake either.

But, you may then ask, why stay Catholic if you don’t agree with everything the Church says? Well, my answer is that there is far more to Catholicism than following Canon law…and anyway, I don’t agree with everything my dad, mum or hubby say, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to leave my family. The Church is also my family, its not perfect but I love it.

Catholicism also offers me a no. of different ways to engage with God and make him present in my life. The sacraments all aim at bringing me closer to God and letting him know that I am open to his precence and will. God only wants me to be happy, and the sacraments help me stay close and open to that fact. Sure, he doesn’t need Reconciliation, or Confirmation, but I do because these sacraments remind me that He is there, guiding me. I think sometimes people forget that the sacraments are not there for God, there there for us. We are human and its easy for us to drift and get distracted form our faith, make mistakes and blunders. The sarcaments, like Reconciliation, say that ‘that’s normal, come to me and we will help you get back on track’. Who doesn’t feel special after Absolution!

There aren’t to many certainities in life but i know for a fact that God loves me and wants me to be happy, and that being part of the Catholic Church is one way to remind me of it.

K.