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

MY CHURCH IS LIKE A FIVE-STORY BUILDING, EACH FLOOR HAVING FOUR QUADRANTS OR ROOMS

If I build a church in my image and likeness, subject to the whims of my emotional self for self-gratification, the results might not have anything to do with Christ. It helps me to take one of those plans from Christ’s architectural portfolio and try it on. Using the Cistercian charisms and practices of silence, solitude, work, prayer, and community, as I know them as applied to my particular worldview, I chose a contemplative portfolio that looks like the one below.

My Lay Cistercian life has five separate levels, each with four rooms. The Christ Principle is my center. It might look like this. The Christ Principle is my center and penetrates all five levels. When I try to grow deeper each day (capacitas dei) in Christ’s love for me by loving others instead of judging them, this is what I mean. When someone says, “What does it mean to be a Roman Catholic,” this is behind that statement of what my institutional church looks like to me. Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. I have stopped trying to prove anything to anyone about what is in my heart. I now only wait for the Lord until he comes again in glory.

LEVEL FIVE OF MY FIVE-STORY TEMPLE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT — The Penthouse

My highest level of Church is about what I do to make the other four levels happen. In subsequent blogs, I will discuss the Church Universal level, the Church Militant level, the Church Episcopal level, and the Church’s local gathering of like-minded followers of Christ. My penthouse is how I make everything new each day as only I can or you can. It is making new wineskins so the wine of Christ does not spoil in the old wineskins of apathy or lack of a vibrant and passionate faith that the words of Christ are true.

When I say I recreate my Catholic Church, I am not saying I give up my Faith tradition going back to September 29, 1940, when I was baptized and the Father accepted me as an adopted son. The only church I can change is the one I can change. What sounds like a conundrum is my personal living out of what I perceive to be my life’s purpose. I can choose orgiastic sex as my center, as is being flaunted on YouTube by the hype over Mr. Combs, or I can choose any path I want as what guides my life, my morality, and my purpose in life.

Choice is at the center of my center. Being one with reason and capable of choosing or discarding anything I place at my center, God gives me the ultimate choice of my destiny. My choice, having in me the mind of Christ Jesus, to the best of my ability (Philippians 2:5-12), is to choose Christ’s way, truth, and life, that of the cross. But there is a problem (Isn’t there always?). Like playing king of the mountain when I was young, I spend my time not getting to the top of the mountain but fending off the onslaughts of enemies trying to throw me off this precipitous perch. My Catholicism (in the only place I can change it, which is the inner room of my inner self) needs daily conversion and deepening to maintain my equilibrium.

Being a Lay Cistercian (or some other form of intense spirituality like Franciscans, Dominicans, or Carmelite Laity), I focus on these two charisms of what I know about the Cistercian experience. Still, I do so as only I can do it. In his book, The Cistercian Way, the late Dom Andre Luft, O.C.S.O. explains it as converting one’s life to that of Christ as the default, plus always seeking to grow deeper and deeper in Christ Jesus. Lay Cistercians, adopting the charisms and practices of Cistercians (Trappists), must take the concept of conversio morae and capacitas dei and try, through a conscious and concerted effort to approach whatever comes in the day with Christ as our center. This is almost impossible, with human nature being so fidgety and prone to want pleasure stimulations every eight seconds or so.

Personally, since I am a decrepit, old, broken-down temple of the Holy Spirit at 84 years of age, I use Lectio Divina. My personal adaptation of this mindset is what I mean by making new wineskins each day so that the new wine of my encounter with the ontic possibility of the manifestability of all being encountered that day is intertwined with the heartbeat of Christ, next to me on the couch of the upper room of my inner self.

I am fixated on being patient in silence, the stillness of solitude (within me), and being present to Christ. Waiting is my mantra these days. I am not waiting for Christ to show up next to me on the couch, but rather for my spirit and heart to wait to hear the heartbeat of Christ next to me. Time is of no value here.

In one such experience, what came to me as the Holy Spirit challenged me to develop my five stories with four rooms, what they would look like, and what I should put in them as my new wineskins. I had to fill out these four quadrants with the furniture that would make me fill the constant longing in my depths for three unresolved questions. What does being a human at the highest level of my humanity mean? What does it mean to love at that deepest level? How truth lifts my humanity to that next level of evolution must come from a truth outside my human nature. Jesus knew this was impossible, so He emptied himself of his godhead to assume the condition of a slave so that we could know how to use his knowledge, his love, and his truth to help us (each person individually) to do the way, the truth, and lead a life on earth that will continue after death claims our body. Atheists claim this is a bunch of fairy tales. And you know what? They are correct. It is. But the folly of God is wiser than all of humanity combined.

The upper room of my church is how I relate to knowledge, love, and truth with the capacity I have gained from a lifetime of trying over and over. Lay Cistercian spiritual at its pinnacle, at least for me, is waiting to hear the whispers of God about how the three longings of my deepest desires are resolved only by something so astounding that no one having reason would ever believe it. This is where dying to self each day through conversio morae allows me to have a chance to listen to life’s experiences and encounters as whispers from Jesus. Stillness, silence, and solitude are needed by me to calm the rebellious human nature that has been wounded by the sin of Adam and Eve. Waiting, in this scenario, is not for the faint of heart. The cross is my help to remind me that “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” (St. Augustine)

Be patient with me in my old body.

To be continued

UIODG