Enemy Lines

It means a lot that he called. I missed it-- left my cell phone at home, and Patrick picked up, which is a relief. It's not a conversation I was ready to have.

There wouldn't have been an apology if he was a fundamentalist preacher instead of a Catholic priest, I'm certain. There wouldn't have been an "I used words I shouldn't have, and I'm sorry." There would have been an "I'm sorry you interpreted what I said other than the way I meant it. I'm sorry your feelings were hurt, but I was only speaking the truth."

I think that fundamentalists don't understand how words work.

If I'd been home to answer the phone, I would have gulped and said that it was a poor choice of words, and that I was glad that afterward he thought of us, sitting halfway down the huge sanctuary at the cathedral, and that yes, it did upset me to hear those things said about non-Catholic Christians, and that while I know we'll never agree on the matter, if he wants to sit down informally some time, as a friend and a mentor instead of as the priest at the pulpit, and try to tease the idea apart, maybe we would both learn something that we needed to know.

Into the Desert

I was taught that Christians are the only people who understand what the point of reality is. I was taught that everyone has a God-shaped hole inside, and that people who don't know Jesus spend their lives in a mad chase after temporary, fleshly passions, trying to ignore the God they think they don't need and trying to fill the void with things that don't fit. But Christians, we lived life with full satisfaction in each day, because God was with us. I was pretty content that I knew everything that really mattered, and so this made sense.

Then I left Rhea County and found that I was taking a different shape. For one thing, I learned some new synonyms. What we called bleeding-heart liberalism was called compassion by my new church. What we called the reign of secularism was called social justice by the Roman Catholics. What we called being ashamed of the Gospel was called humility by the saints. My brain stretched out to accommodate these new ideas, and I found that the God I'd brought with me from Rhea County was starting to rattle around loose. As I learned more about Jesus, that void got bigger, not smaller. And God didn't fill it any more.

Watering the Seeds of Doubt

I found the following on my old blog. It's an excerpt from a paper I wrote for a theodicy class four years ago.

These are the premises set out for us by both orthodox and popular Christianity:

-Our god is omnipotent, a god of infinite and perfect power, reigning over the natural world and the spiritual realm

-Our god is benevolent, a god of infinite and perfect goodness, caring for us as a parent cares for a child

-Humanity experiences suffering, existing in a fallen state of pain, disease, and violence

This is where the questions begin. If our god is so good, why are we allowed to suffer? Does God not have the power to stop our suffering? Or, if God can prevent human suffering, then is God cruel and uncaring, choosing not to rescue us from pain?