Fr. Thomas M. Pastorius January 15, 2017 Spiritual Ponderings
As I continuing sharing my thoughts with you I pray and hope that they will help you develop a deeper faith life.
5. Anti-Authority I have mentioned a few times already my love for baseball, and I know this love for baseball started off as a kid playing Wiffle ball with some of the other children in the neighborhood. If you would go to my mother’s house today, you could probably find four patches of dirt in the front yard where the grass was not given a chance to grow because that was where we placed our bases. Sadly most of these games ended not after nine innings but rather after a fight where one player thought the runner was safe and another player thought the runner was out or where the pitcher thought he had thrown strike three and the batter thought the pitch was a ball.
Playing baseball in my parents’ front yard and later playing baseball for a CYC team taught me the importance of having umpires and referees. Many people today leave the Church because they do not see the value of structure or rules. They think in some way these rules limit our freedom but the truth of the matter it is the rules and the people that enforce them fairly that allow us to interact with one another in a loving and free way.
The Church has always taught individual that they have a duty to follow their conscience but more importantly the Church has taught that we have an obligation to inform our consciousness. While we can determine whether an act is morally good or evil, we cannot make an act morally good or evil. In addition evil acts or often at least momentarily pleasurable and thus at least slightly addictive and therefore we cannot say whether something is morally good or evil by how it feels. While a parent may enjoy physically abusing a child because it allows the parent to release his or bent up frustration, we know that it is not morally good for a parent to physically abuse their child because a child is a person who has certain rights. Morality therefore cannot be left up to what people feel otherwise there would be no way to hold rapists and murders accountable.
Many people today leave the Church because they choose to see the Church’s teaching as being restrictive instead of loving. They are like children who become frustrated with the parents because their parents will let them touch the fire or put a fork in an electric socket.
6. Karma I am amazed at the number of Catholics that I encounter that believe in karma. Many of them would deny but at least subconsciously their actions and expectations seem to show that deep down they do believe in karma. The idea behind karma is simple. Good things are supposed to happen to good people and bad things are supposed to happen to bad people. In other words the more good things you do the more good things God will give to you and the more bad things you do the more bad things that will happen to you.
While I think life would be much easier if this was true we know deep down that it is not true and that sometimes bad things happen to good people and good things seem to happen to bad people. This mostly manifests itself when we believe that God is punishing us for something despite having done everything right. For example, I might get a speeding ticket on the way home from helping the homeless and feel that God should have somehow prevented the officer from seeing the fact that I was speeding because I had been doing nothing but good today. On a more serious level we may assume that God is displeased with us because we have been diagnosed with Cancer and we ask ourselves what did I do to deserve this illness? The truth of the matter is that bad things do happen to good people and no one ever does anything to deserve an illness. Our world because of sin is in chaos. God does not leave the world in Chaos though but enters into it in Jesus Christ and suffers right alongside. God’s ultimate answer to suffering in the world is not karma but rather the Resurrection