3/2/15

I've been so busy this past couple of weeks that I haven't had much time to write about anything. Things are going OK for the most part. RCIA is going well. Barbara and Romanos seem to have hit it off, which is good. We're going to be doing the first of the three 'scrutinies' next Sunday. They're a combination of blessing, examination, and exorcism from what I understand. One of the things I like about all these rituals is the rich symbolism underlying them. Dogmas are kind of like mandalas in a way, i.e., representations of truths that are more easily grasped by the imagination than logic.

I gave what I had of my testimony Thursday night. I can't remember precisely how it went. I was pretty nervous and it all just came tumbling out. It diverged quite a bit from what I'd written out, as well as what I'd said to Rose before that. But I recall that I started with the fact that I wasn't raised with any sort of religious faith, mentioned that I was inspired by talking to Romanos, reading books like In the Spirit of Happiness, and my visit to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and ended with how I saw the love of God manifested in the relationships we have with one another.

The latter was something I heard from Romanos the first time we met at Holy Trinity ("when I see you, I see God"), and was further reinforced by my reading of the Gospels and something Fr. Charlie said during Wednesday night's RCIA class to the effect of, "Having a relationship with Jesus means having a relationship with others; if it's just you and Jesus, you're doing it wrong." To know Jesus is to know others. To love Jesus is to love others. To serve Jesus is to serve others. And in that sense, the Church to me is everyone who experiences God through their interactions with one another.

It's a lot easier said than done, though. I think one of the reasons we often struggle to really follow in Jesus' footsteps is the fear of rejection, of being judged and condemned as unworthy. We feel as alienated by the opinions of others (or our perceptions of what others think of us) as we are our own self-centredness. Focusing on our own comfort and happiness, we push away the world as much as we feel the world pushing us away; and when that happens, we find ourselves unable to turn towards the love and peace that I think we all intuitively seek in our spiritual lives.

Selfishness is like a cocoon that we build around our hearts, creating our own little self-contained worlds that exclude everyone else. But unlike the caterpillar that transforms into a beautiful butterfly, it's a reverse kind of metamorphosis, one in which the person who emerges is, spiritually speaking, an even more larval version of themselves. No one knows that better than me.

Christianity isn't just about being social or unselfish, however. That's only part of it. I think there's a contemplative aspect involved, as well. Today I learned that many of the early Christian mystics who were influenced by Platonism used the word theoria to describe a method of contemplation on the paradoxical nature of God that transcends thinking and conceptualization, halting the mind's activities and opening it up to an ecstatic union with God (History of God, pp. 118-27). It's not unlike the use of koans in Zen, which are used in a somewhat similar way.

Unfortunately, I'm not terribly good at either aspect at the moment, but I'm working on it.