Return to the Fire: Reignite your authentic Faith and Heritage.

My fellow pilgrim on this rocky road of life:

Catholics of all levels and types of belief have one thing in common. They inherit an unbroken heritage from Jesus through all the minefields of centuries, going down rabbit holes only to have to come back to the only way there is to realize the truth, so that each Catholic, although as different in expression as a snowflake, centers themselves on the authentic words and actions Jesus wanted his followers to tread. This is not the way of prosperity (as is popular in some circles) or even a progressive approach to being Christian. Christians can never be authentic by adopting what society plants as the way.

Catholic’s have all Sacraments, all helps from the various types of prayers, everything they do, be they just a cafeteria catholic (Sundays, if they feel like it) to belonging to a church that stresses catering to the needs of each human, rather than the tough love approach of Christ, one that has its battle symbol tatooed on our forhead in Baptism, one where I must do more than do more, I must have a mindset of Jesus about what my life is and will be. Catholicism is a mindset, unique to each person, because we must all make new wineskins daily to hold the precious wine of our evolution as adopted sons and daughters so that it does not spoil. To have the mindset of Christ is to deny oneself, crucify our false selves (Seven Deadly Sins), and to rise each day to a new life. If that is a theory, you missed the point. If it hurts because you must give up your will with its insatiable appetite to meet its human needs (good), to move deeper into your humanity as intended by your nature.

Freedom to choose is based on knowledge, or, as St. Thomas Aquinas would say, „Knowing comes before Loving.“ Herein lies the rub. The natural inclination of humans is not to choose what is difficult, or rather, to choose what is right over what is easy, but rather to have that archetypal choice of Adam and Eve, one with consequences, and at the same time, without physical punishment if we choose poorly. Without God’s intervention into the cosmic stream (see Teilhard’s map of reality), we humans are resigned to living just on the physical level, while good, without immediate intended consequences, is not the total way humanity must develop in its intelligent progression toward becoming an adopted son or daughter of the Father.

While physical reality (matter and its interactions) has rules, ones that don’t depend on humans to exist, so too, mental reality is one where the natural progression of alll reality in complexity and consciousness (Teilhard map) is a way for humans to use their reason and free will, to choose what each one thinks is the life for them, based on the truths they assume from what they place at their center.

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In the Divine Equation, one that does not show who God is, but allows humans to begin the progress from mental universe on earth (humanism and secularism, both good and noble ways of looking at the purpose of life,) it falls short of that next level of human evolution of the mind, the addition of spiritualily as fulfilling the mental universe without God. We, humans, must have help to reach the next level of humanity, one where we have dual citizenship (like having Korean and United States citizenship).

Being Catholic is knowing what the authentic center is, and then freely and consciously choosing Jesus as the actuator of your worldview, replacing your former notions of the way, of what is true, and therefore your fulfillment as a human being, with that of Christ’s way. But, and here is the problem, once we do choose Christ as our center (and not ourselves), we play king of the mountain with satan and those demonic forces that infiltrate our very spirituality to pry us away from the way of the cross (apologies to B.F. Skinner).

Our God, Jesus, as the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit, as energy for us to use to keep our center on top, give us what we need to keep ourselves at the highest level of our humanity. Here is the rub. From the moment you commit to using Christ’s boundaries as the center for what reality looks like, original sin is a constant battle to seduce you back into just being a human without divine boundaries. Like rust, the iron of our choice corrodes under the effects of original sin and becomes unusable unless we clean it daily (making new wine skins). So, the task is to keep the mundane from taking control of our spiritual life and reducing us to mere humans, without any hope of fulfilling what our nature was intended by the Creator (the One who sets the boundaries for all that is).

Knowing this takes work (prayer) and sacrifice (transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary by means of the martyrdom of Ordinary Living). Jesus doesn’t do it for me, but will do it with me if I allow myself to go to that upper room of my inner self and wait in the presence of Christ. The Catholic Church can’t force you to use any of these helps to overcome the criminalization of reality. Still, it makes the Eucharist and Penance available to help you „pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.“

Reflect on the following Gospel passage.

Gospel

Luke 9:22-25

Jesus said to his disciples:
“The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected
by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed and on the third day be raised.”

Then he said to all,
“If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
and take up his cross daily and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
What profit is there for one to gain the whole world
yet lose or forfeit himself?”
 

WHAT IF…

…God is there, as the author of all that is, as a painter on the canvas of reality, as one who is the planter of the Garden of Eden (type for reality), only to give Adam and Eve a chance to take ownership, but having the gift rejected with the consequences of what we know to be original sin, but leaving humans unprotected from the results of freedom to choose either good or evil.

…Like an abandoned puppy in a frozen storm, God set boundaries (The Ten Commandments and prescriptions of the Law) to lift us up out of the cold of not being able to choose what is right from what is easy, but humans naturally don’t like to be told what to do.

…Tripping over their flawed human choices that could never lead to achieving the highest level of humanity without help, Jesus came to SHOW us the correct way that leads to truths that we could use to inform our choices, thus reimagining the life of Adam and Eve in the archetypal Garden of Eden as it should have been. Yet so many don’t, can’t, or won’t see how to move from just a human to being an adopted son or daughter of the Father and heirs to that Garden of Eden lost in the original sin of pride and envy.

…The big problem for all movements founded on an individual is succession planning for what happens after death, in the case of Christ, giving us another Advocate (God the Holy Spirit) to be with us post Ascension, making Jesus present body and blood, soul and divinity, as real as when he told his Apostles, „You believe because you have seen. Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believed.“

…Like the Father, Jesus set boundaries for reclaiming our inheritance as adopted sons and daughters of the Father, those being to love one another as He loved us, and to tell everyone that Jesus is Lord and awaits us in Heaven, if we keep His commandments.

…Jesus gave the Church the authority to bind and loose, meaning the Mystical Body of Christ, the living embodiment of Jesus, must trust in the Holy Spirit to address issues of Faith and Morals, setting authentic boundaries for us to practice THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE in the silence and solitude of the upper room of our inner selves.

…The Church gives its baptized members the authority to preach the Gospel (to their own world) and make Christ present because each one must convert themselves daily from the Seven Deadly Sins to the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, using the Corporal and Spiritual works of Mercy to ensure Christ is present to anyone we meet.

…A bishop or priest is ordained and ministers to the faithful, but does not believe or practice the boundaries set by the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit; instead, their hearts are far from Christ.

…What does it profit a surgeon or dentist, if they are the best at their craft, but miss setting boundaries given by the Father, the Son, and managed by the Holy Spirit?

Ultimately, I must be in resonance with the archetype of all boundaries (Creation, Christ, Spirit of Truth, Church as Conduit of Truth down through the ages, to the purpose for all of this–me). I am the one, because of my reason and freedom to choose good or evil for what I think makes my life more fulfilled, who must abandon my most precious of all human characteristics (using my will to make boundaries that affect me alone) to submit to the ultimate boundaries created for humans by God and for the energy to move to a higher form of evolution set by the boundaries of how to behave by Christ. „Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.“

The background noise of cosmic reality, discovered only recently by humans, contains the physical elements of noise, but that contains only a third of reality; the other two parts are the mental noise of human existence. This is the world in which I live alone, but in the context of all other beings. The second of the two parts is an invisible one, one that looks forward to who I am because of what I have become so that I can view the future, now, and later on in Heaven. I don’t exist apart from all that is, but because of all that is. I alone have the capacity to absorb life lessons about what is good or bad and make judgments about their value to my worldview.

Because of the archetypal sin of Adam and Eve (wanting to be an impossible nature, i.e., divine nature, when I only have the cosmic energy to be of human limitations), I have to make choices in a vacuum. When God realized that humanity needed help to make authentic and correct choices that were not prostituted by humans‘ needs for self-gratification for emotional feeling (B.F. Skinner’s notion of rudimentary pleasure or pain), God spoke to humanity through the Old Testament prophets and Moses, in the form of the written Torah and the prescriptions of the Law.

But humans, as a whole and specifically as the chosen people, created to tell the whole world about what is good or evil for their future inheritance, missed the point and limited these boundaries to only the Twelve Tribes. Consciousness and Complexity keep evolving, and God had to send His only begotten Son not only to TELL humans what they needed, but also to SHOW the only authentic boundaries that would enable them to fulfill what their humanity intrinsically contained through God’s DNA in each atom. Herein lies the new paradigm in evolution.

Up to and including now, and into the future, all matter and all mental capabilities grow in complexity and consciousness. Evolution, to fulfill its DNA from the one who sets boundaries but has no boundaries, moves into an invisible reality, one accessible only to each individual when they abandon what seems like all reason and free will, to choose to be adopted sons and daughters of the Father, the only source of energy that can lift their humanity to its highest evolutionary expression.

From the moment of adoption (Baptism), each individual now has two citizenships, one on earth until we die, and concurrently, a second one that begins with our free choice to renounce Satan and all Seven Deadly Sins on an ongoing basis while living, then dying with Christ to rise to the fulfillment of all human evolution, one designed for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Heaven).

The Catholic Church is the living conduit from Christ forward to me through all the centuries to ensure that I know how Jesus wanted me to live the way, so that I could access the truth beyond human rationalism, and thus live in this life with all its minefields of tempations to be God and one who makes boundaries, to one of humility in resonance with The Divine Equation.

I had to return to my Catholic heritage to actually deny the Catholic Church (my false self) to move to a deeper awareness and make new wine skins that only I could pour in the wine that Christ gives me each day. Like the abandonment of self to the will of God, my abandonment of the Catholic Church is more like shedding old skin or old wine skins to make new ones, but ones informed by the teaching authority of the Church from Christ.

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