A few thoughts...

Tonight as I went through my usual routine of checking out I kept coming across various references to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  I wont do my own personal tribute.  There are enough of those out there and they are wonderful... instead I want to reflect on the beauty of the events.  As I was listening to Dr. King's most famous speech, his "I Have a Dream" speech.  I was thinking about how much has changed in our nation since then.  I thought about how different my life was as a child in a public school than my parent's lives in similar schools.  As I grew up, I can remember plainly that I had more difficulty in certain cases knowing the differences between a boy and a girl than I did knowing the difference between a black child and a white child.  I can remember in 2nd or 3rd grade first discussing black history and the things that were talked about were unimaginable to me.  I never understood that kind of hatred as a child.  Our school one year did a simulation to attempt to show us the horrors that went on when our parents were children.  In the restrooms the doors were labeled as to who could use them.  There were stalls for children with brown eyes and stalls for children with blue eyes.  I remember that the only available one was a stall for children with blue eyes, and that meant I had to wait.  Even though it seems silly looking back, it was a good, although weak, picture of what it must have been like for children who were growing up in that time.  While we've come a long way, parts of Dr. King's speech can still be applied today.  I wont be foolish and blind enough to not see that there is racism still in many places in America.  I think many of the things in the speech can apply to other types of hatred and predjudice.  In the background that I came from I am sad to say I might have seen more predjudice (racism included) than in many places.  It reflects upon an even deeper injustice... religious predjudice.  I have always felt that there was no room for predjudice of any kind... there is no reason to hate another person. I have seen sexism in its most subtle form.  I have seen racism.  I have seen political predjudice (which i'm sure is a really bad way to explain it).  Strangest enough, I have seen religious predjudice.  It's all based out of an ungodly fear of things we don't understand.  Fear.  It seems innocent enough... but it ends in hatred and a waste of a lot of emotional energy that we could be using to... um.... i dont' know... make the world a better place? 

"We have not been given a spirit of fear..."  

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: 
               Free at last! Free at last!               
               Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!-
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

w00t first post of 2010

and i'm not writting somethign sappy and nostalgic because I just don't feel that way about 2009.  From start to finish the year was hard and I think that's ok but nevertheless, I'm so not nostalgic... at least not about any part i would write publically.

Anyways...

Recently I've had a lot of thoughts about where I came from and where I'm going.  I guess I get afraid sometimes that I will make the wrong choice and choose a wasted life rather than a life that's adventurous and worth all the difficulties it will bring.  I suppose I still feel a bit in a haze when it come to religion. 

Being an outsider of sorts has provided me with an interesting perspective of religion and also of personal faith.  It seems that within each religion (and denomination within that religion) people are willing to do some pretty awful thigns for the cause that they believe is true and right.  During the crusades people were killed and people killed because others didn't buy into their particular brand of faith.  In the 2000's people start political battles and split families and guilt people into living according to their standards which may or may not have a basis in some document claiming to be inspired by an actual diety.  What interests me more than all of that ugly, is the ugly that i find right within the religion that I claim as my own: Christianity. 

Having come from one side of things, the conservative protestant side, I see the problems.  I see the issues and I see big reasons why I can never go back to that kind of place.  I see fallacies in thinking that at this point in my journey of faith I find completely unreasonable and hard to even comprehend how any sane person would choose them.  However, at one point I also thought this about having a Christian college exprience... and I also thought this about some of the lifestyle choices I have made today.  So.. you never know... maybe in a state of temporary sanity or insanity I may stumble back across mainline conservative protestantism and think its truth.  We'll see.

I suppose what they taught me at the University was true... in today's culture no one is looking for scientific proof... they're looking for a sense of genuine, something that works.  I know that's what I'm looking for because I don't see how a religion that claims to have all the truth and love and all those lovely intangibles could treat people as badly as some parts of conservative protestantism. 

I'll give it this much.  At some point in late adolesence/early adulthood a person has to make a choice how they will live for what they believe.  I have not made that choice firm yet, I have only made the choice of what it cannot be and will not be.  Many young people stay right on the path that they began in college or before, some change along the way but most of them choose the path of least resistance, the one mom and dad picked for them when they were kids.  Leaving that path comes with immeasurable amounts of others guilt and lonliness because essentially when choosing an unapproved path one must do it alone.  It is claiming that something else is bigger than comfortabilty.  I suppose that is my lot in life.  I have never had an easy road and to be perfectly honest I don't think I would have wanted one.  I like the challenge, although some days it hurts more than I can say. 

But getting back to the point...  

Our concentration it contains a deadly flaw
our conversations change from words to blah, blah blah
we took prescription drugs but look how much good that did
well I think I had a point, but I just got distracted

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Good

So... having all this free time this week has led me to getting some studying and thinking done... yay!

Anyways...

I think I figured out what it is specifically about the attitude of the general population of people from my background.  They are taught to do good for others which is all well and good.  However, the good they are taught to do is agendacized.  Also while facebook stalking I came across thoughts on social justice and I hated what I read.  It was a separation of social justice and salvation.  And I'm pretty sure you can't have one without the other.  When Jesus taught things about doing good for others it wasn't so that people could preach sermons about it.  Jesus taught that we need to care for the poor and the oppressed so that people dont' go hungry and die.  There is so much injustice in this world and I don't get what is so bad about doing something about it without a "religious" agenda.  It seems horrible to sit up in a proverbial "monastary" and cast down judgements on the rest of the world about what is good and what is not when you yourself are doing nothing.  Instead take a day away from it, come down out of your tower and hang out with the rabble of the world.  Forget that you believe you have been called to the pastorate for just a minute and sit on a street corner and watch them.  Go through the supermarket line and rub shoulders with the unwed mothers and poor old men.  That's what Jesus did after all. 

Maybe that's the whole point.  Jesus came down to earth and was born.  He humbled himself to rub shoulders with the poorest of the poor.  He hung out with the most sinful of society and was not afraid.  He knew that what he had to offer them would make their lives abundantly better.  They could have hope and genuine good.  For those who rejected the hope and the good that he had would be a most disastrous end but not becuase he himself wanted that for them.  The foolishness of the rejection....

Good with an agenda is not good.  I think good with an agenda is like a glass of water with a pinch of arsenic.  The whole thing is corrupt.  Good is good when it is done for the other.  It is love when it does not expect anything in return.  So please, no more of this separation of social justice and the gospel.  The whole gospel includes social justice because Jesus came to do just that.  

Something that bothers me...

So as I'm bored out of my mind this evening, trying to find something to do I ended up spending some time facebook stalking old friends that I haven't talked to in a while just to see what's up. 

I ran across one friend's profile that was FULL of Bible verses and thoughts about this or that... sadly, the entire thing did not cause any feelings of encouragement to me, instead fear.  I started to wonder if I was being a "false teacher" as this person claimed so many others were.  I wondered if I was doing the wrong thing and being deceived, because after all... I would have called others in my same situation months ago deceived.   I wondered at everything for just a moment and then I realized something.  This person is what I'm fighting against becoming.  The bible says that we have not been given a spirit of fear.  We ought not to live our lives in fear of being deceived or of whatever because we have the Holy Spirit within us.  I know that might not make sense to everyone who reads this, but I'll just say this... there probably are false teachers out there, people who would seek to deceive other people just because they can or becuase they're tools of the masterplan of the devil or something.  However, to live in fear of that is silly. 

Good is good no matter where it's found.  Truth is true no matter where it's found.  Those things are what drives me onward in my search.  I do not want to live my life in fear of being wrong so much that I allow my background to restrain me to seeking truth where i may have found snipits of it before.  I cannot miss the bigger picture that comes from my past and present.  I have not found an answer yet to my current church situation but that doesn't mean I have stopped looking.  I have not gone a day without wondering and 2nd guessing myself...but in that same thought I have found that since I have begun truthfully seeking without regard to denominational boundaries I have found myself so much more free and so much more at ease about every aspect of life.  Life is about growth and change and learning.  It's about making mistakes and learning from them.  As I choose that path daily, I find that I enjoy work and relationships and chores much more than I did before.  God is still leading me... even if that doens't look like evangelical christianity. 

The truth will set you free!

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Christianity and Works

As I think through and work through some of the issues in modern christianity certain issues seem to continually resurface.  One such issue is the issue of the place that good works have in religion. 

During my childhood church education I was taught that those who hold to the Catholic faith believe that it is by their works that they will achieve salvation.  I am now finding that this is not a true statement.  At any rate I have been working through just what place works do have in religion and life.  I am not talking about the use of good works to obtain something, either from God or another person.  I am finding one thing to be true.  Those who do good works because they want to help the other person are doing the best work they can for all.  Real good works are not ones that are done out of duty or out of compulsion.  True and genuine good works are done because one person has taken the time out of their day to care for another person. 

I think about relationships and friendships and the various levels that I have with different people.  I have friends who would give their right arm for me in a second... friends who if it is possible will stop what they are doing and come out and help me with something even if it is an inconvienience to them.  They don't do it so that they have something to hold over your head later or so that they can pat themselves on the back at the end of the day to be a good person, they are doing it because they care and that's enough.  I have had times when things happened or I needed help with something so badly that a friend was willing to put themselves out in a rather large way for me... spending a whole day or even just an hour to get whatever it was done.  Those friends never hung that over my head or made me feel bad about asking for help they just helped.  I know I'm being a little repetitive or redundant here but the point is very important to make.  Real good deeds are genuine deeds that are done for the good of another without regard for the self.  That is a form of love.  It's what God calls us to do.  (And I realize that when I say that God calls us to do something there is a sense of duty there... but really, it's what happens when we genuinely care as we were made to do.. when we are the kind of people we were meant to be... doing good is no inconvienience.)

Tonight I was again reminded that my better friends... my best friends are mostly those who aren't in evangelical Christianity.  Too often evangelicals seem to claim the market on the good works thing.  I think sometimes people in those camps fail to see the real point of doing good... it's not for you, it's not for your cause, it's so that the world is made just a little better for your existance.  That's the kind of good works I'd be proud to be a part of.  Catholic or not... doing good for others is praiseworthy. 

As I continue my endevor to understand Catholicism at the present that is one less hang up I'll have.