SPIRITUAL ENTANGLEMENTS FROM HEAVEN TO EARTH (and beyond)

WHAT REALITY LOOKS LIKE USING EVERYTHING I HAVE LEARNED UP TO THIS POINT

As I keep stressing over and over, my Catholic Faith depends not on my adhering to a set of rules, as if doing the activities themselves (ala good works for its own sake) will get me to heaven or allow me to place myself in the presence of Christ and wait. As with all things Catholic, “what is essential is invisible to the eye.” As I apply the totality of my knowledge and experiences to the questions I long to grasp (not possess), my notion of the Catholic Church is, like the proverbial iceberg, only what I can see. Jesus came to rescue me (and you) from merely reciting prayers, thinking that this is enough to fulfill the hungry heart. How I respond, the choices that I make, are the stuff that makes my catholic faith mine alone, yet linked with all other Catholics through the Church Universal in heaven, on earth, and in purgatory.

The Old Testament, with its emphasis on adhering to the letter of the prescriptions from God and through the Prophets, stressed a mental approach as primary in meeting God. To be sure, keeping the letter of the law is a sine qua non, or the foundation of our notion of God, and particularly how each human interacts with the Sacred. Jesus told us that He was here to fulfill the law and that what we do at the deepest potentiality of being human is to love others as Christ loves us. The problem is that the energy and sustainability to accomplish this love do not come from human nature, with all its flaws and inconsistencies, but from pure love, whose truth is beyond change. To receive this power, appropriate to my unique Catholicism (capacitas dei and conversio morae), all I have to do is ask in humility and obedience to God’s boundaries set for all humans, and, heeding Mary’s advice to us, “Do what He tells you!”

MY CATHOLIC CHURCH IS THE NEW WINE SKINS I CREATE BASED ON SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION DOWN THROUGH THE CENTURIES

Here are some random (and not-so-random) ideas about the meaning of the Catholic Church, as I live out my allotted time on earth.

• Like everything and everyone else in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and in heaven, it is alive, not dead or symbolic. It just is.
• My hypothesis is that the Church’s advocate, the Holy Spirit, infuses not only individual members like me (and you) with the direct energy from God.
• This energy must be asked for, which is why I say that the essence of the Church is in various ways Christ left his faithful to be in the presence of that pure energy.
• If the Holy Spirit is pure energy (service), then Jesus is the transformer that allows each of us, if we wish, to just be in His presence and exist (I call it waiting).
• Mary’s response to when the Holy Spirit overshadowed her was, “Be it done unto me, according to Your word.” Jesus selected her from before time to be the way, the truth, and the life (His life) and to act as the archetype for the Church to do the same overshadowing on each person who asks.
• The Catholic Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, a living gathering of those who have died in the peace of Christ and are now the fulfillment of their humanity (heaven), or the militant, struggling members who alternatively careen between belief and unbelief (the kingdom of heaven on earth), and last of all, those who get a second chance to discover the purpose of life, the purpose of their life, what reality looks like, and how it all fits together and, most important of all, how to love fiercely (purgatory).
• The tabernacle containing the Holy of Holies, the Eucharistic Last Supper, is housed in a building called the church, where all of us gather to celebrate the death of the Lord until he comes again in glory.
• Just as there is an unbroken line from Christ through the Apostles by the power of the Holy Spirit, I have that same unbroken connection with God’s energy through the Church Universal. The four marks of the authentic Church, which Christ founded to help us get to heaven, are one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.
• These marks are like cables, entangled links from God to me so that I have direct contact with God, if I so choose, and fulfill that human part of me that “is restless for the Lord until it rests in the ONE who created it.”
• These links are like power lines from the source of all energy, the Trinity, which we do not and cannot see with our mere human senses and reason, translated or transformed into energy we can see and do by Christ. He is that energy made present as in human form, so that, through the Church visible and invisible, I can choose to be in the presence of Christ and wait in silence and solitude, giving appropriate honor and glory to the Father through Christ.
• St. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 100 AD) wrote a letter to the Smyrnaeans, which might interest you in how the Church developed in those very early years. If you read it, be sure to read Chapter 8. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0109.htm.
• This Church was not handed a book of rules and regulations except the Torah and the sacrifices at the Temple. It had to, as a group of disparate believers from different parts of the Roman Empire, adapt the Jewish covenant to those who were not from the twelve tribes of Israel.
• This movement with complexity and consciousness of all matter is not lost on the Church and its inexorable movements to make all things new. I make all things new by making new wineskins daily to receive the fresh wine that Christ offers to me,
• Just like an electric fan, I must plug my fan into the wall socket (The Church Universal) to receive the energy of God as I have the capacity to receive it (capacitas dei). When the fan cools, that is the good works that come from God and soothe all in its range of motion.
• I am the only one who can make the Catholic Church new, as in new wine skins. I achieve this by drawing closer to Christ through the Church’s four marks and my Lay Cistercian practices, which keep me focused on sitting next to Christ in the upper room of my inner self and waiting. (Matthew 6:5) This is another way of saying that I use the heritage left me by the Church down through the centuries to “Have in me the mind of Christ Jesus.”
• Because these four cables of energy (one, holy, catholic, and apostolic) are live links from the Father to me (“You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.”), I can love authentically with that saying, “If you love me, keep my commandments,” and “Love one another as I have loved you.” The energy to do that must come from God to allow me to sustain my adoption as son or daughter of the Father.
• Often, I think that God has abandoned me, simply because I don’t feel His presence in Christ, or because I don’t receive the things I ask God for. These four marks of the Church are proof that God left the Church to keep the heritage that He bestowed upon them while he lived, and the Holy Spirit actualized at Pentecost. For me, that is what I inherit, but, as is the usual case for humans, I must work hard to dig the heavenly gold, in this case being present to Jesus in all that I do and think, and say. Keeping that mindset sustained is what I mean by taking up my cross daily. Catholicism, for me, is the most demanding and challenging spiritual mindset.

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