It\u2019s Holy Week for the Christian Faith, time once again for the remembrance of Jesus\u2019 final week of life. Jesus spent that week in Jerusalem with his close followers, making purity preparations for the Passover ritual. So let\u2019s not forget that it was all a Jewish thing, entirely Kosher. I grew up in the Roman Catholic faith, entirely non-Kosher. But in my middle age I joined the legions of Catholic baby boomers who left the church, looking for a Christian (but still non-Kosher) alternative. <\/p>\n
After fiddling around with the Episcopalians and Quakers for 20 years or so, I dropped the whole subject after reading a bunch of entirely reputable books about the life that the Jewish Jesus may have actually lived (as opposed to the Christian \u201cGod-Man\u201d view). The \u201chistorical Jesus\u201d scholars convinced me that Jesus was not God or the Son of God or the Christ. He was Jesus of Nazareth, biological son of Joseph, fellow human being, a man who was born a Jew and died a Jew. Period. No more bodily resurrection for me, no more transubstantiation of the sacred body and blood during the Mass. No more communion wafers that start smoking or burn the rug if dropped on the floor (as we were told in Sunday School). <\/p>\n
And yet . . . I don’t have bad feelings about Christianity, and harbor no destructive wishes against the Catholic Church. In fact, I still feel a sympathy towards it. Luckily I was never abused by a priest, and as a guy I was never treated as a second-class child of God. Had I wanted, I could have applied to become a priest, unlike about half of the Church\u2019s members (and probably a much bigger percent of those who still go to church on a regular basis). So yea, other than the Church’s pig-headed doctrines about marriage and its hypocritical annulment policies (with which I did have some bad experiences), I don\u2019t have much reason to look under the \u201crock of Peter\u201d. <\/p>\n
But I acknowledge that the Catholic Church is a human institution and has always been a human institution. Over its two thousand year history, it has played host to humankind\u2019s worst instincts, including power politics, exploitation, war, misogyny, genocide, sexual perversion, and many other forms of rank hypocrisy. It had a dark side in its earliest years (e.g., in Acts when the disciples marveled at how a couple who were holding back some property from the church were struck dead), and it still has a substantial dark side today. It has broken many a good young man and woman who came to it with much idealism about serving the Lord and His\/Her Children. People argue that the Church is morally no better and no different than, say, BP or the Soviet Communist Party or Hamas. <\/p>\n
And yet . . . I still feel, down in my heart, that there is something different about it. And to find that difference, I think we need to get back to the Kosher point of view. The Jews find God in their powerful sense of history, captured in their Torah and other sacred scriptures (the Old Testament to us goyum). The Hebrew Bible isn\u2019t exactly an accurate historical textbook, as it has plenty of myth and mythology to it. Still, it is quite honest about human foibles. There\u2019s plenty of war and oppression and idolatry and adultery and hypocrisy practiced by the tribes of Israel, and it hardly seems to get better as the narrative progresses from the time of Abraham to Moses, thru David and Solomon, past the Exile and into the Prophets and further conquest by the nations (with that crazy little Hassemodian blip where the Jews got their kingdom back but quickly frittered it away through ego, political infighting and disunity). <\/p>\n
And yet, somehow in the midst of that stinking mess, millions of devout sons and daughters of Israel find God. Well, if they can do it, why couldn\u2019t a post-historical Jesus version of the Catholic Church re-interpret its theology and teachings as to find God somehow manifest in the story of all those who devoted themselves over the centuries to the story of an idealistic Galilean apocalypticist who was exterminated by the Romans for calling on God for a just kingdom? When I was a young idealist myself volunteering with a Catholic homeless shelter outside of Washington DC, I had a friend who took the Church very seriously. (I believe that he and his wife are still devout Catholics.) We were all quite angry about the hypocrisy and stodginess of the Church\u2019s bishops and priests, and often insulted them and called out for revolution of some sort (usually over a couple of beers somewhere down on King Street in Alexandria). <\/p>\n
And yet, when we pushed our angst to the point of wondering why we remained involved with such a terrible institution, my friend said something that I\u2019ve never forgotten. He told me that you have to look at the Church as a \u201cmatrix\u201d, a container, a holder of something. He said that the walls of this \u201cmatrix\u201d were certainly corrupt, as were all earthly things. And yet, somehow they have preserved and coveyed over many, many years at least some part of the sacred intentions that Jesus must have felt, and which his disciples surely sensed in him. Despite all the corrupt priests and popes and bishops over the course of time, somehow the Church occasionally spawns a timeless soul, a Francis of Assisi or an Edith Stein or a John 23rd or a Mother Theresa. And probably countless other women and men who struggled and died without fame, but are known to God for what they did to help lift the poor and comfort the sick and wounded. <\/p>\n
Yea, sure, other organizations having nothing to do with God or Jesus also accidentally turn out truly wonderful humans. I can\u2019t prove that the Catholic Church has a better rate of spawning saints then say a college university or a Wiccan coven or a community development corporation. And yes, I will admit that even those Catholic saints-by-accident aren\u2019t perfect either (the late, great Trappist monk Thomas Merton, for example, certainly had his dark side). I don\u2019t have statistics, I can\u2019t provide energy readings or such. I can only say that I myself still feel something holy \u201ccoming through the matrix\u201d, even though I know just how corrupt the walls of that matrix can be. (And further that there is no \u201cTrinity\u201d or \u201cIncarnation\u201d powering its leaders in their imperfect teachings.) <\/p>\n
Today I am part of a Zen sangha, and I have much regard for the teachings of the Buddha and other eastern sages. But ironically enough, they themselves provide me with a strong rationale supporting the \u201cspiritual matrix\u201d viewpoint. They often focus on the important of emptiness. They offer saying like \u201cwe define the house by its walls, and yet we live in the emptiness between them\u201d. “We form pots from clay, and yet it is the empty space within those pots that hold what is important to us” (wine, for example!). We cut holes in windows to allow light through the empty space. Without emptiness, no light. Without the walls, made of corrupt earth, there is no usable space. There\u2019s a yin-and-yang thing here, as if God requires human foibles in order to convey Her \/ His true spirit. <\/p>\n
From that point of view, I can still feel reverence for the tainted Roman Catholic Church; I still feel the need to keep it around. And yes, in an odd sort of way, I still feel a part of it. I will not go to mass this Easter Sunday as I\u2019ll be sitting zazen at the zendo. I have no desire to go to confession. I have no plans to go and cross myself in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, I will not recite the Apostle\u2019s Creed, and I will not take the precious body and blood from some neurotic priest. And yet, I still believe that God is there in the midst of that Church. But to see that, you need the right kind of lenses — the Kosher and Buddhist kind!!!!<\/p>\n
(And yes, admittedly, it also helps not to have been severely hurt or disappointed by all the “walls” that comprise the Holy Church.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s Holy Week for the Christian Faith, time once again for the remembrance of Jesus\u2019 final week of life. Jesus spent that week in Jerusalem with his close followers, making purity preparations for the Passover ritual. So let\u2019s not forget that it was all a Jewish thing, entirely Kosher. I grew up in the Roman […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2039"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2039"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2058,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2039\/revisions\/2058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}