THE INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH: My New Catholic Church made in my image and likeness.

If you have read my other two blogs, you will know I am perusing the notion of an Institutional Church or organized religion. In all candor, I only have two choices, the existing institutional church, which has ties going back to Jesus, or an unorganized religion, with ties that begin (and end) with me.

The anarchy of which I speak is a word I do not use lightly because it can mean many things to many different people. I looked around for all kinds of words that would convey the notion that Christ had when he told us that he came to cast fire on the earth and would that it be kindled. Abandonment is also a word that is bandied around but is used so frequently that, in my case, I needed something to convey the absolute destruction of everything before, as the obliteration of all I knew before, the complete cutting of all lines of communication.

Jesus is my Christ Principle, the overarching replacement of what I have destroyed with all new things. In actuality, I use the notion of new wineskins being needed to hold the new wine of Christ’s presence in me. My anarchy means giving up everything you have (as if it were mine to own) and replacing it with The Christ Principle.

Like the dying of self that I do each day (conversio morae) in my Lay Cistercian practices with their charisms, I discovered that I needed to abandon my old notion of Church (old wineskins) and replace it with my center (“Have in you the mind of Christ Jesus.”) (Philippians 2:5)

This dying to self is to renew my Faith in the Catholic Universal Church and strip away all those who incite factions and think they are holders of orthodoxy, when in fact, Satan has them in its grip, laughing at how weak their Faith is. It is no small coincidence that the first sixty popes were martyrs. I choose Jesus as my center and not the institutional or organized religion, in doing that I reaffirm my will to that of the institutional church. I must make everything new using the Eucharist and Penance for my sins. Far from sloughing off the Catholic heritage given to me by my parents and their parents, I prioritize that the kingdom of heaven is what I seek first, and I do that using the means Christ gave me as presented to me in my Catholic Faith.

I want to keep these blogs short so you don’t go to sleep while reading them, so I share with you three models of the new Church, the New Jerusalem, and the New Covenant, as I see it now with a lifetime of trying to discover who I am as a human, what it means to love fiercely, and what or who is truth.

All are true, but none adequately describe what God has waiting for those who love him.

To be continued…

UIODG