I am just home from Alpha, where tonight's topic was talking about the faith with others. One of the women at my table was talking about her fear of being seen as a wackadoodle if she shared candidly about her beliefs. I have some thoughts on this question, which I am going to attempt to corral into a speedy speedy post. Let us see if they are willing to be corralled...
Imagine asking an average "none," a member of the mushrooming demographic that expresses no religious preference, to describe the priorities of the Catholic Church. What do you figure she would say? My guess: don't get abortions, don't have sex, don't use contraception, listen to the pope. These putative priorities, you'll note, do not align well at all with the actual priorities of the Catholic Church (love God with everything you've got, love your neighbor as yourself). Just this morning I encountered the first words in the catechism on abortion, a six-paragraph section that starts on page 547. Next month there's a 12-page section on sexual morality, but a lot of it is stuff that people generally agree on: rape is evil and cheating on your spouse is a bad idea.
Let me say it again: all through 2016 I have been inching up my way to p. 547. Nothing about abortion -- not a word -- until today. Less than 2% of the book addresses the topics that take up so much space in the public conversation about what the Church stands for.
Isn't that kind of weird?
I think there are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the Church and the nones are asking different questions. The catechism addresses two primary questions: who is God, and what does he ask of us? If a person is an atheist, perhaps it makes sense that the answers might seem to be "nobody and nothing, but what was that crazy thing about birth control again?"
Here's another factor. In speaking to its members, the Church reiterates St. Paul's message: You are not your own; you were bought at a price. And I suspect, though I have not investigated the question thoroughly, that frictions between the Church and the world have always arisen in the places where the Church tells a culture to hold lightly to something it values deeply. Maybe in times past that issue was patriotism, and people looked skeptically at the Church's teaching on just war. Probably Church teaching on parents' responsibilities to their children was unpopular in the long-ago era of paterfamilias. But here in the US in 2016 we live in a culture that places immense value on sexual freedom, and so that's where the sparks fly.
When we talk about sex in this place and time, we are destined to sound like wackadoodles. But really, to talk seriously about the Catholic faith is to sound like a wackadoodle. I believe that I have been redeemed and set free by God's willingness to become incarnate, and by the power that enabled him to rise from the dead. Hallelujah! And what a wackadoodle thing to say! I believe that I can receive my savior himself, body and blood, soul and divinity, as often as I attend Mass in a state of grace. Hallelujah again, but does it get any wackadoodlier than that?
I am weary, my friends, of the Facebook arguments in which the measure of one's faith is allegedly the vociferousness of one's opposition to [insert least favorite sin here]. I suggest, you guys, that a better strategy is for us to strive to be the gentlest, joyfullest wackadoodles we can be, to put the focus on the crazy glorious truth that we have been invited into a deepening union with the eternal God.
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