“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them.”
The Center for Contemplative Practice
A Lay Cistercian Looks at Spiritual Reality
THE GREAT ENIGMA: How can a Church that claims to be Holy be populated by corruptible people?
This is indeed a crisis of faith as well as one of justice and mercy. You know what I am talking about. It is the latest crisis of the Catholic Church, the failure of some clergy and laity to protect the innocence of children and youth, and the cover-up from other clergy who live with them, going all the way up the chain. It is defenseless. It is wrong. The chaff must be winnowed from the wheat. We must move together to make all things new (once more).
I do not profess to be some herald of the truth to shed light on a subject that is so distasteful that we don’t even bring it up, much like incest. I am not a penetrating intellect to be gifted with prophecy and the wisdom to know solutions. I can’t even begin to identify problems at this point. I do know that I fall back on my core Faith, as I do every time I confront evil, which is nearly every day. The press with its penchant for making assumptions that one political person is rotten then finds stories to corroborate their convictions, the monarchical clergy with a caste system that elevates leadership to a place of judging others while they do not live lives of humility and obedience to God’s will, the laity who consider Church as a country club that you can leave without unintended consequences, like the reformers of the Sixteenth Century found out.
Each age in the Church has its own unique characteristics with a unique set of problems. As a broken-down, old Lay Cistercian, I can’t possibly set forth edicts and predictions for the future of the Church Universal. I do know that the gates of Hell will not prevail against it, especially those who, like the Pharisees (Laymen who practiced the piety of the time) that Christ condemned. Read the following tirade Christ gave to the Scribes and Pharisees (no Priests?). It is important to note that Christ did not rail against those who followed the Law in sincerity and with mercy for others. His wrath was for duplicity, phoniness, leading double lives, pretending to be what you are not, and making rules for others that you don’t keep. Christ talks to all of us sinners, not just to the Jews of his age.
I turn to Matthew’s Chapter 23 and the sevenfold indictment of the scribes and Pharisees for a cautionary tale about those who commit pedophilia, incest, adultery, fornication, and other acts that reduce us to our animal nature. We don’t want to revert to our animal past, but revert to our human nature that has been raised to the level of adoption as sons and daughters of the Father and brother to Jesus.
- First, the problem is not celibacy. Celibacy is a state where you commit yourself to having in you the mind of Christ Jesus, as is Marriage. If there is a problem with the celibate state, then there is also one with the marriage state. When celibacy becomes only being single and not marrying, then the heart is ripped out of the gift of self, and what remains is clericalism in its most heinous form. There is an aberration (sin) when you do not love as Christ showed us how. Who determines what love is? God does, and we must give our assent, as we are capable.
- Homosexuality is not the problem. Being homosexual in your orientation is no more of a problem than being heterosexual. Our heritage teaches us that the problem arises when we fail to follow God’s laws. The Church, in interpreting what it means to be an authentic member of the Body of Christ, provides us with guidance on the correct purpose of life. According to our Catechism, being homosexual is not evil. The evil comes in adultery, fornication, loose morals, and thinking that what is wrong is right. Who determines that? God does, and we must give our assent, as we are capable.
- The Church Universal should convene an Ecumenical Council to address and make clear that Christ is Lord and that we make radical steps to protect the innocent and anawim (those who are poor), heal the victims, and make reparation to God for our faults, asking for mercy and forgiveness. Who can do that? The Holy Father with advisors.
Two things are needed: humility and obedience to what may be considered to be a reach of Faith. St. Benedict defines steps in achieving humility for his monks in the Rule of Benedict, when he says that the first step in humility is fear of the Lord. Don’t forget that God is God and everything about the spiritual life now and in heaven is in, with, and through our presence with Christ, so that I now have not only human energy that comes from my birth as a member of this race, but now, I can actually move up to that next level of my humaness with a power that only I can summon. Humility to recognize that the purpose of life is not for me to be happy and fulfilled as a member of the human race, which happens AUTOMATICALLY as I am a part of that intelligent progress of humanity moving forward in complexity and consciousness. I have reason for a reason. I can say YES to what might seem absurd to my humanity and is ongoing growth through nature, can move to that next level of my intelligent progression only if I give up the reason and free will of my humanity up to this point to die to self, and thus place myself in the presence of Christ in profound humility and profound choice that God is the boundary maker not me, and that I become an adopted son or daughter of the Father. If I do make that choice to play in God’s sandbox and not just puny one of my humanity, I choose to adhere to the rules or boundaries set by God as set forth by the convenant in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the new realationship that is also outside of mere human reasoning, i.e, to love with my whole mind, my whole heart, and my whole strength and to love my neighbor as myself. (Deuteronomy 6:5 and Matthew 22:36) I do so in a formal ceremony of the Body of Christ, the living arms and feet of Christ in each age, called Baptism, and am given that same Holy Spirit that descended upon the Apostles as tongues of fire in the upper room. The Church Universal exists from Jesus with an unbroken thread or quantum entanglements of being one, holy, catholic, and apostolic as it moves FORWARD throughout each century, dispensing the very words of Christ to His Apostles to me and you as individuals. These four marks are not material cables or threads of yarm, but composed of the energy that comes directly from God through Christ and managed by the Holy Spirit in the Church so that I can say, “I am here, Lord, I come to do your will.”
3 SEXUALITY IS THE PREDOMINANT EMOTION WE ALL HAVE IN COMMON. God must have known that, giving any human both the ability to reason (to distinguish us from the animals) and the choice of good or bad that shape who we are, so our behaviors would not be dependent upon natural rhythms, like the animals, would end in tragic failure. It did. Being human, unfortunately for humans does not come with a HOW TO book with the steps on how to handle urges like murder, pride, lust, envy, adultery, factions, gossip, falsehoods, calumny, detractions, wishing for the neighbor’s wife instead of your own, and wishing you had more money. God the Father probably had a conference with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and to tell them all is not well with their decision to give humans reason and free will so that they would at least have a chance to rise to their ultimate level of evolution. Things just were not working out, and they needed help.
Why would God even fool around with humans, given their preference for self-interest and selfishness by wanting what is easy rather than what is right? Genesis 1-2 is a masterful treatise on human nature and the reasons why good people do bad things. God made us good; Adam and Eve did not make us bad, but rather, so needful of emotions that we choose to satisfy our most primitive instincts, such as revenge, murder, lust, rather than the more difficult choice as outlined by the boundaries God gave us, and the pursuit of money for me personally. Ironically, the most important aspect of my humanity is to grow in awareness that lust is not love, and that the Ten Commandment were given by God, not to limit our human intelligent design but to allow us to reach that deepest and most private part of humaness, managing the trasition fron animal to human and from mere human to a deeper level of our evolution– that of being capable of living in an dimension with no time or space nor matter. Learning how to control my sexuality so that I don’t revert back to my animal roots nor become hostage to sexual pleasure as the center and purpose for my existence, is why God gave humanity lessons in how to move from lust to love and from love as a human to love as an adopted son or daughter of the Father. One of my teachers in Moral Theology once said something that keeps popping in and out of my thinking. He said, “You don’t break the commandments; they break you.” Think about this for a moment. God gives us what we truly need to become human at the deepest level possible on this earth, but only if we die to ourselves to put on the new person that is both humble and obedient to those lessons God is sending us. Like SETI, most of the messages I receive from God go unnoticed or are unable to be translated by my human self-centeredness. The only way for me to listen to the whispers that come from God is to sit in the presence of Christ in all I do and say and wait. I am waiting for Jesus to say words to me, but what happens is actually I am overshadowed by the Holy Spirit with the energy and able to assimilate it as I have made more room for Christ and less room for my false self (capacitas dei).
I have heard critics of the Catholic Church, especially those inside the boundaries of the Faith, criticize the institutional Church (the only one we have before us), because our teachings about sexuality and the boundaries God gave us make each of us less human. The more humane sexual practice is to create my own personal boundaries and get as much pleasure and self-stimulation as I can. Carrying the cross each day is folly, these naysayers point out. Actually, the reverse is true. With all things dealing with that most dominant emotion, the drive for sexual stimulation, the teachings of the Church are not that we should not enjoy our sexual experiences, but that they may never drive the purpose for which we are created. Marriage is not the purpose of life, but the purpose of life is marriage. It is all about using God as Magister Noster (Our Master) through the visible teachings of Jesus and the advocacy of the Holy Spirit as the Church struggles and wobbles down the path of trying to figure out what is good and what is evil for me, both as a group and personally.
For animals, sexuality is probably the most dominant urge, followed by survival, food, and safety (as per Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). As we humans transitioned or evolved from being animals to humans (our species was the only one to successfully make that transition), nature was doing what comes naturally; that notion of fulfilling urges, some of them sexual, others greedy, while some led to anger and murder, dominated all human sexual mores, until that one, wandering Armenian got tired of watching his neighbors sacrifice their firstborn to the gods and decided to do the same. This is where our morality first became more than incantations. Abraham listened to God and did what God said. The divine economy had its genesis at that moment.
We share such an infinity with all living things, most of all the fact that we are. All of us who are also in the process of movement towards being more(consciousness and complexity as time moves us toward our Point Omega). What distinguishes Catholic evolution is that I am the nexus between the flow of life as all reality, and my surfacing for 85 years (or however many you are) to dip our toes in the waters of the universe as it moves inexorably toward a point somewhere in the future.
We are still pulled in those pagan (secular only verses secular and spiritual) directions even today and only break the circuit by calling upon Jesus to sit with us and not look on us a the sinner that we are, but upon the couch of faith of the Church Universal, as it tried to do your will in the midst of the effects of original sin. Those who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. Because of this unrelenting movement forward, Catholics find that their commitment of Faith for the moment is only that. While an adopted son or daughter and still living on earth, life literally goes on, and that means our struggle is in the Martyrdom of the Ordinary, where I must continue to cut the grass of my existence or suffer the weeds of inattention and dissonance of my purpose. Only Christ gives me that energy through Eucharist and the constant plea for forgiveness of my sins and those of all those I know and don’t know, the gift of self-sacrifice that keeps on giving unconditionally to those who suffer from daily bouts of disbelief and doubt. There is no doubt, however, that all of us will reap the rewards we have sown in our lifetimes, Catholic or not. At a funeral for the loss of the body of a loved one, a spouse, a parent, a child, we sometimes lose sight of the belief in Christ’s promise that he will take care of us after we die. Life is changed, says Scripture, not ended. A true loss would be the realization that there is no hope of reuniting after death, for then, the purpose of life would have only been to find meaning in the secular world without moving to that next level of our evolution and continuing our journey forward forever.
When contrasted with the urge for sexual stimulation, those who have put on the mantle of Christ testify that God makes the boundaries within which sexuality must be understood and practiced. What is important is the realization that the Church, the guardian of the new covenant of Christ and His followers, might be perceived as having a negative attitude towards sexuality and sexual pleasure, whereas it is an important element of humanity that allows us to propagate, but more importantly, how to love as Christ loved us. What seems like the Church is against pleasure and any form of sexual fulfillment is actually a call to use our sex as it was intended to be used in the Garden of Eden, before the fall, and what will be restored when we die and go to heaven for judgment.
4. DON’T BE HELD HOSTAGE BY THAT MOST FUNDAMENTAL AND HUMAN URGES– SEXUALITY– I think it is important to point out again that the purpose of life is not sexual satisfaction or pleasure, although one cannot be fully human without using it as it evolved. God intervened in human history beginning with Abraham and ending with me, so that we could put our feelings of sexuality in proper perspective and not be held hostage to our whimsical urges. To seemingly go against what is the greatest emotion humans can experience on the physical and mental levels alone is counter to reason and certainly messes with the notion of good and evil. With apologies to B.F. Skinner and his notion of operant conditioning, I now see that humans choose the fulfillment of their sexual needs over all other values, even Pride. We are stuck with an emotion and wonderful that we sometimes can’t control it. Maybe God knew all along that we would slip and slide down the path of righteousness, complete with all the consequences of our choices. Bad marriages, infidelity, living together before marriage, with or without the same gender, incest, pedophilia by priests and others who have lost sight of the value of dying to self each day, are the wages of sin. As you know, the wages of sin (choices that do not use as their boundary) are death, and not just physical death, but more tragically, mental and spiritual death. Having in you the mind of Christ Jesus is a constant battle to push back against the fog of rusty thinking that corrodes the difference between good and evil. To love Christ, we need the power of the Christ Principle and the energy from the Holy Spirit in each waking moment.
For me, doing any of this without Christ as my mentor, Magister Noster (Master Teacher) and guide, is almost impossible, like being in the middle of the ocean without a raft and not knowing which direction to go or with help swimming. Christ won’t swim for me, but gives me the North on my earthly compass, and the energy to swim distances that sexuality or mere human strength could ever help to achieve. For me to be Catholic is symbolized by a sign of contradiction, the cross. When I cross over the invisible boundary from being a just physical and secular human to one who now fulfills my deepest potential as a human being, one with the fullness of physical, secular human, but now raised to new life as an adopted son or daughter. I do not let my humanity define my sexuality by my emotions. I am not hostage to sexuality and the sin mindset that rusts and corrupts the spirit within me. Christ makes all things new, and my challenge is to use every moment to be present to Jesus and His saving embrace. As a Lay Cistercian, only in my later years, when I had sloughed off the baggage of being hostage to sin and sexuality without boundaries, did I realize that all I had to do was to seek the kingdom of God first by continuously pleading for mercy for myself and to do restitution for my wayward wanderings by praying the penitential rosary as urged by Our Lady of Akita. https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/message-from-our-lady–akita-japan-5167 I don’t dwell on the apparitions more than to say it resonated with what I was going through at the time, and I used the recommendations for penance and restitution for my waywardness, and now pray for others in purgatory that they be loosed from their sins. I can pray for them, but they can also pray for me (not themselves) as they are given a second chance to make the right decision. I include Hugh Hefner and all the movie stars in my plea for forgiveness for them. Talk about being way out there!
Like human nature itself, sexuality as created by God is good. Adam and Eve (our archetypal prototypes) used their ability to make choices to choose themselves as God, wanting to be the boundary maker for their sexuality and how to use the new attribute of reason and free will to seek their own pleasure of what is easy over what is right and from God. We humans still don’t know how to tame sexuality, but waffle back and forth between our animal urges and what God calls us to be as adopted sons and daughters of the Father. Catholicism is not for the faint of heart.
5. IF THERE IS NO SEX IN HEAVEN, WHAT IS THERE THAT AROUSES THE HUMAN SPIRIT? — If I understand it correctly, Muslims teach that martyrs who die for their faith will go to heaven and have 77 virgins at their beck and call. Other than betraying a proclivity for lustful sex without consequences, I find the notion fraught with inconsistencies, although the prospect is attractive based on its superficial merits.
To confront the notion that “there is no marriage or given in marriage is heaven,” what is there in heaven that is the dominant and deepest urge of our animal selves on earth? We will take that urge with us to heaven? On the one hand, all that is in heaven in heaven (not heaven on earth) is closely linked with our humanity. As I view heaven, this is a physical place, like a containment area, where Christ ascended into heaven to receive all those who have earned the resurrection of the body at the end of time, the fulfillment of humanity’s journey from God back to God (Alpha to Omega). There are many mansions there, according to Christ, and he prepares a place of finality for those who love him. This doesn’t make human sense, much less common sense.
Every disciple of Jesus in the Catholic Church has, because of baptism and confirmation, two citizenships or two passports, not one. The first one is as a member of the human race, all those who live out their lives on earth in both the physical and mental universe. Each of these passports spans from the time I was born to the time I die. Let’s call that citizenship the ruler of the earth or the kingdom of the earth (John 12:31). I don’t exist with the earth to sustain me, and it gives me a framework in which I can use my reason and free choice (without God’s intervention) to choose what I think will make me happy in this life.
Using the energy of the four marks of the Church Universal (of course, by the Holy Spirit), each individual Catholic can make all things new in their Faith each day. This is creating new wineskins to hold the new wine that Christ offers to us each day. In heaven, we can take with us what we have stored in those new wineskins to decorate the mansion the Father has waiting for those who love Christ.
There is one more element of heaven that I have often taken for granted. Heaven on earth is that citizenship that comes from dying to self and rising anew with Christ. With this second type of citizenship, now an adopted son or daughter of the Father, using the help of the Catholic Church, Christ lifts me above the mere human (physical and mental universes), to gift me membership in the kingdom of heaven on earth. The problem is, I am still a two-citizenship member on earth until I die. My notion of heaven is about that second membership, one that Jesus speaks of when he says he is going to prepare a place for us. I just can’t help but think that I won’t waste my lifetime of saving up good works for heaven only to find it is something incompatible with my humanness, and I won’t have a frame of reference in which to even comprehend, much less feel, what is going on. What I think is happening is a place prepared by Christ so that all humans can relax and enjoy concepts and situations with family, friends, and those for whom I have prayed in Purgatory. We say we believe in the resurrection of the body after we die, so this makes perfect sense to me. I would not last a second in God’s heaven, where I have neither the capability nor the capacity to hold in my consciousness God as pure energy. Christ not only came to save all humans but to give them access to life at that second level of citizenship, the kingdom of heaven, and leave behind the earthly kingdom, where I can no longer fulfill my destiny as my evolution prescribes. Life is changed, not ended, with my death.
I expect to be able to live at that advanced level of my humanity, with 100% of the knowledge I need at that level, with love at the deepest level my humanity can tolerate, and with the certainty that truth in this realm is absolute and fixed for all time. There is but One God, One Faith, One Baptism, One Lord, One Church, and still only one of me or you. Instead of marriage, I move up the ladder of evolution to being able to assimilate the knowledge, love, and truth of all in the kingdom of heaven. The purpose of life is not marriage, but the purpose of marriage is life. All humans will be overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, each one judged by how well they had in them the mind of Christ Jesus on earth. In heaven, I will be able to access all those I knew on earth and all the people they knew, and on and on. Perhaps it is similar to the six degrees of separation of Kevin Bacon, but with the addition that all people are joined together in one hymn of praise to the Father by just being human as they are.
- AI Overview from Google.com. “Six degrees of separation” is a concept suggesting that any two people on Earth can be connected through a chain of no more than six acquaintances. The idea originated in the 1929 short story “Chains” by Frigyes Karinthy, was popularized by John Guare’s 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation, and was further adapted into a 1993 film of the same name starring Will Smith and Stockard Channing. The theory has applications in social network analysis and is the basis for games like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” (Google.com)
When I made my final profession as a Lay Cistercian before Dom Augustine, O.C.S.O., they asked us all to write a pledge which we and two witnesses would sign and be placed on the altar and then entered in the archives. My daughter, Martha Conrad, and my friend and colleague, Deacon Jerry Haynes, had to witness it and sign the petition. It has been the gold standard to which I strive to attain each day with the new wine of Christ in the wineskin I have made through prayer and reparation for my sins. I offer that prayer, made in the presence of the Catholic Church, for your reflection on your own condition.
FINAL PROMISES AS A LAY CISTERCIAN OF OUR LADY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT MONASTERY (TRAPPIST), CONYERS, GEORGIA
I, Michael Francis Conrad, a member of the Lay Cistercians of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit, a community of Catholics living in the world, promise to strive for a daily conversion of life as my response to the love of God.
I commit myself to live in a spirit of contemplative prayer and sacrifice in obedience to God’s universal call to holiness, using daily Cistercian practices and charisms of simplicity, humility, obedience to God’s will, hospitality, and striving for conversion of life to move from self to God.
I give thanks to my wife, Young, and my daughter, Martha, for standing with me on my journey. I ask for prayers from the Monastic community of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit and the Lay Cistercian community, to include the Ecumenical and Auxiliary communities. I place myself in the hands of those who already stand before the throne of the Lamb, including Holy Mary, Mother of God, St. Benedict, St. Bernard, the Seven Cistercian Martyrs of Our Lady of Atlas, Father Anthony Delisi, and other deceased monks and Lay Cistercians of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, and also Deacon Marcus Hepburn. Finally, I accept the Rule of St. Benedict as interpreted by the constitutions and statutes of the Strict Observance Cistercians as my guide for living the Gospel within the time I have remaining. Ut in Omnia Dei glorificatur.
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