THE INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH: My New Catholic Church made in my image and likeness. Three processes I use to build a new reality.

It is one thing to be a Catholic Anarchist and wipe clean all notions of those beliefs that irritate me and those that I find personally objectionable, but quite another to restore my landscape with something better. My image and likeness, what I am as a result of my choices to be fully human as my nature intended, to love with joyful abandonment of rules, and the truth that leaves me genuinely free to be an adopted son (daughter) of the Father, is hardly a fitting or even suitable replacement. One such as myself, burdened by the effects of original sin and having the default of only seeking what I think is good for me, can hardly be the stuff on which my three longings can rest naturally.

Like a woman who wishes to buy a hat but tries on fifty before that “right one” appears, I don’t have the luxury of knowing what is right by looking at my image and likeness. Straightway, I proclaim that my replacement for the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church, but now with a caveat.

Do I believe everything the Magisterium teaches about what I must do to be saved? No, and neither do you. We all choose this or that doctrine or belief as it suits us. We have no choice but to use our humanity, with all the warts and miscues we make along the way, and with all the times we actually moved from information to formation in our spiritual journey to find meaning. I am the sum of my choices, those that lift me up to a higher humanity, but I always can continuously abandon those components that are sinful or harmful to my destiny. Sometimes, my Faith is strong in certain areas but weak in others. Because I can choose what I want as my center, what I choose as good in my formative years may not be my final choice at the end of my life (which is the situation in which I find myself).

What I replace with my scorched earth fire on the earth must contain the seeds of something better and more sustainable. My Catholic Anarchy is done daily with the realization that I must die to myself EACH DAY but replace it with something or someone better. Freedom to choose repeatedly raises its inconvenient head, and I return repeatedly, as I am compelled to do by my human nature, to select which god is good and which is false (First Commandment).

Being a Lay Cistercian helps me not be seduced by the lures of a world in which I find myself oddly at odds with more and more. I choose a way that allows me to satisfy my hungry humanity in its quest for resonance against the dissonance of prophets who offer cotton candy. This way is the opposite, in many ways, of what my human instincts and human reasoning say is the correct way. It is the Way of the Cross; the hard road is the high road that human nature instinctively would not choose if not for Christ, and the Hero Archetype of anarchy to those choices that are easy rather than right.

I now share some of the replacements I made to my house cleaning to separate the chaff from the wheat. There are three syncretic substitutes that, all taken as one, approximate but do not entirely encapsulate what I abandoned. My life is a work in progress, a process of becoming more like Christ (capacity dei) by the choices I make daily to “Have in me the mind of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 2:5). In subsequent blogs, I will try to explore the three plans I use to create my own Catholic Church and how it is sustained.

The molting of my Faith contains three elements or processes, otherwise it is condemned to the oblivion of corruptibility.

• THE RECURRING THEMES OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND COMPLEXITY: The snake
• BUILDING MATERIALS FOR MY NEW CHURCH (NEW SKINS): Five-story temple of the Holy Spirit
• EXPLORING NEW WORLDS: Spiritual Astronaut Training

To rebuild my Catholic Church, which is not so much the destruction of all that I know to be true but rather to make a conscious choice (conversio morae) about new wine, which comes from my being in the presence of Christ in the upper room of my inner self, but also new wineskins, which only I can exchange with old ones and keep my new wine from spoiling (capacitas dei).

THE RECURRING PROCESS OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND COMPLEXITY: The snake

In this first example of a floor plan for my new temple of the Holy Spirit, I use the molting of a snake as my example against which I look at the Institutional Church. Several lessons I have gleaned from being under the influence of Cistercian practices and charisms. One is the notion of constant growth of not only my spiritual life but the context in which it must flourish (Outside the Church there is no salvation).

The Teilhard map of reality (unattributed) which I use as the core syncretic paradigm of my spirituality, stressed constant growth in consciousness (capacitas dei) and complexity (conversio morae). The institutional church, or as I perceive it new wineskins, must be constantly updated and renewed, daily, if we believe what the Scriptures hint at in taking up your cross. Lay Cistercian lesson two is that I use the Principle of Subsidiarity when trying to define institutional church, as I do with adapting Cistercian practices and charisms to my unique piece of life. My notion of being Catholic and what institutional church means will be different from what you think. This newness, “making all things new,” is at the heart of the Teilhard map.

To make this process clearer in my own life, I have taken my cue from nature, as it pertains to the process of molting or shedding skins to recreate new skins or shells, one that will protect me yet allow me to expand my spirituality (capacitas dei) as nature intended. A snake comes to mind and how it must die to itself (molt its skins) to grow as nature indicates it should.

POINTS OF SIGNIFICANCE

• If I build a church, it must survive my own frailty.
• If I build a church, it must not be corruptible, so its components must exist beyond the corruption of matter.
• If I build a church, it must not be with myself as an Architect but one who has the power to transform my human nature to its next level of evolution. Only one power can achieve this and it is beyond my humanity.
• I can use the power of infinity to build my new edifice, not of stone or fragile matter, but one based on the consciousness and complexity of the spirituality of the Master Architect, from whom I receive the capacity and capability to cobble together a reality with no corruptibility.
• I freely choose the Christ Principle as my principal construction company, from whom I take the only materials that won’t corrupt.
• The snake example means that whatever I build must contain the ability to always grow deeper in knowledge, love, and service, an institution church that molts itself, as well as allowing me to make all things new in my church.
• My church has no ending but is the result of my conversio morae (way of life) that constantly makes all things new.
• I must shed my skin (convert myself by dying to my humanity’s corruptibility) each day as a Lay Cistercian and be conscious of where I fit in the canopy of my humanity within what I know to be reality.
• My renewed Church is composed of the choices I make to stock my building, realizing that “Unless God builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.”
• Not only do I molt at my level of the institutional church, but so do all five levels (Read in the next example of a process).

Treasures New and Old.

51 “Do you understand^* all these things?” They answered, “Yes.”

52^* And he replied, “Then every scribe who has been instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old.”

53 When Jesus finished these parables, he went away from there.” Matthew 13: 51-52

I am the one who must make new wineskins, and my new wine is my daily conversion from my false self and my openness to becoming ever new. I do that through the simplicity of being in the presence of Christ as much as possible and then waiting. The Institutional Church, my Catholic Faith, provides me with the context in which I seek to be in the presence of Christ. All there is is the institutional church, founded by Christ as a continuance of the New Jerusalem. I have chucked the notion that the institutional church is somehow less than real in favor of looking deeper into the depths of the mystery, and might I add with the assistance of the Holy Spirit. You ask, “How can you do this?” I just ask.

To be continued…

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