This past Sunday I had the opportunity to speak with a woman who was attending an Orthodox church’s annual dinner. From what I could get from our talk she was a nurse who had once been Presbyterian but had converted to Catholicism. I appreciated her insights but I think at one point I offended her.

She spoke of her experience of coming to the eucharist before she converted to Catholicism, and that while it was a ‘technicality” (as explained to her apparently by a Priest) that non Catholics should not receive she did so anyways and found that the experience was part of her coming to Catholic faith. It was clear from the conversation, at least to my ears, that she didn’t see the inconsistency of violating the canons of a faith as part of her journey to embrace it. What mattered was her experience. And that’s where the offense probably started.

I gently reminded her that non Catholic receiving the eucharist in a Catholic church is not a “technicality” but canon and then I pushed a bit. Seeing that she was of the same general era as myself (I’m a late baby boomer – 1960) I began to speak of how our generation was among the most arrogant ever in the world, we Americans who came of age in the 60’s and 70’s really do think we invented sex, and religion, and music, and the what matters is what matters to us, we are ruled by our experience, and anything else is, well, anything else.

One thing baby boomers do not want to hear is that they’re arrogant and selfish, even though we are to an astonishing degree. And we don’t want to hear we’re wrong on anything, even though we often are. We don’t believe in much outside of ourselves but we do believe in the mythology of our own enlightenment with a dogmatic power that makes historic religious belief look shallow in comparison. We change laws and cultures based on our whims and the sheer force of our demographic. We’ve laid waste to institutions and then recreated them in our own image, and our image is “we want what we want when we want it”. We live in the vacuum of this moment with nothing past and nothing future and we call this wisdom.

So, although I believe all that and hope and pray enough of us recover some sense of sanity and preserve a shred or two of civilization for a future time, I didn’t give her the full dose but enough to get her face scrunched up. And then I talked about Orthodoxy and how there was faith that transcended time and even the individual but by then the wall was probably up. When I spoke with her later she kind of mumbled about how this was one point on my “journey” (dang it all if we are always journeying and never arriving at anything except ourselves) and so on. At first I was concerned but then I realized I was running up against the real American religion and sometimes it takes a while to wake a sleeping person.

Some time later it occurred to me how much I still buy into all the “stuff” of my generation. I would hope that I am aware of at least some of my delusion but the truth is that I’ve got a long way to go. Our culture is in a messy place right now, top to bottom, and this is largely because the generation in charge of most things, mine, has bought into a whole set of lies about life and faith and reality which are bearing bitter fruit even as we seem unwilling to change. It seems that to admit we were wrong and that parts of our wisdom are foolish and even dangerous is too much to ask. We’re the monkey with the hand in the gourd grasping on to the fruit and unwilling to let go even when we see the hunter approaching.

Regardless it was a time for me to see how much I live in the matrix of this world, still, collar and all.

Sigh…

From time to time I’ll browse the web looking for old friends. As time goes by the memory of them grows more special and it’s interesting to see how life is treating them.

Tonight I browsed through the reunion site for Wausau West High School, class of 1979. Had we not moved to Minnesota in 1975 this would have been my class and as I looked through the names many of them were still familiar. One of my classmates is a minister in the suburbs of Minneapolis, another works in public affairs at an electric company in Wausau, many are still around town and some who I would like to have found were simply lost. It’s all part of life I guess.

I find myself praying sometimes for people who’ve probably forgotten I even exist. Some are friends who drifted away over the years, some are people who I’ve hurt by my own selfishness, some are just passing acquaintances. Either way I truly do desire that God’s blessing would follow them wherever they are.

This is especially true about Mahtomedi High School. The truth is that those years were hard years and I felt liked I never belonged there but its something that can’t be undone. Over the years, though, I’ve tried to pray for everyone in the class of 79 in the hope that somehow it would, behind the scenes, make a difference for them and for me as well. For them I hope its an unseen blessing helping them along the way. For me its an ongoing opportunity to give and receive forgiveness in the act of prayer.

On these nights when I see the names and remember the faces and the times past as I google folks in the hope that someone familiar may appear my heart feels tender and a little bit melancholy. A part of me wants to get on the phone and say “Hi, do you remember me?” in the hope that somehow the old connections can be reanimated. It’s probably not to be but the thought of it is comforting.

However time has taken us apart I do hope to see them in heaven.

Today as I heard the news that the California Supreme Court had decided in its wisdom to declare same sex marriage a civil right I felt a wave of sadness.

On a constitutional level this decision was horrendous. The people of California had already voted in a referendum to affirm the traditional definition of marriage and the Court, like in Massachusetts, simply decided it knew best and did whatever it pleased. Why have people vote and a Legislative branch if Courts feel they can simply decide any issue? We have created a government here in the United States where basically five people, any majority of the federal Supreme Court, rule. Each time a court acts with the cavalier disregard for history and the rights of people to enact law through referendum and legislation democracy and representative government dies. And every time the people and legislatures meekly submit to these kinds of abuses the stage is set for either revolution or tyranny.

On a personal level I feel sorry for the people in California. At some point in the future the folly of these actions will bear bitter fruit. No the sky hasn’t fallen in now and may not for some time, after all the mill of God grinds slow but exceedingly fine, but there will be a time when the pain, disease, and suffering caused by people who believe their right to sexual expression transcends common sense and even science will come to a head and it won’t be pretty. Already we have spiraling rates of STDs, broken homes, psychological wounding, and the extraordinary social costs that come with them all. Yet instead of seeing these as calls to reexamine our vision of sexual and moral life we plunge in further, “waist deep in the big muddy and the big fool says march on…” Some future generation will have to clean up this mess and until sense returns a lot of people are going to be hurt and some will die. What a shame!

I have to admit there is a part of me that would like to grab, as it were, a musket and take back my country from the selfish and short sighted fools who often are in charge of things. That’s not, however, our way, but one thing is certain. We Christians have got to look at events like this and realize its time to end our passivity and live our lives as Christians knowing that the only way this will change is to change our culture from the ground up, one person coming to Christ (and sanity) at a time. The people who have made these horrible decisions will have to stand before Christ for what they have done, but so will we if don’t hear the call in all of this and realize that we need to combat this darkness the only way with can, with the Light of Christ.

From time to time I post the www addresses of sites worth considering. One such site is Lifesite News. Here you can get information on life issues, moral issues, and coverage of government actions in a way that you’d probably never find in the mainstream press either in Canada or the US.

Like any other site I recommend you need to visit and make up your own mind as to what you’ll keep and what you’ll toss but this site is certainly worth a look.

Now we know why our vacation plans fell through. Had a visit from a plumber and electrician. The plumber was cheap but the electrician was around $2000. Oh well, to everything there is a season…

An interesting article on how technology actually changes brain chemistry and the way you think.

The www site of Fr. Zakaria Botros a Coptic Priest with a profoundly influential ministry reaching out to Muslims with the truth and love of Christ. It speaks to a profound truth; we cannot change the Islamic world by offering them capitalism, secularism, and consumerism, indeed these in the extremes often practiced in the West are destructive of authentic life, but rather by offering something spiritual, true, and transcendent which can only be found in Christ.

This amazing man has been led to gently and truthfully confront the Islamic world with the reality of its own faith (he was the one, for example, who challenged Islamic scholars in Egypt to justify a hadith that suggested grown men should breastfeed with women so they would be considered “sons” and therefore unavailable as sexual partners ostensibly to get around that religion’s strict rules regarding the mixing of genders) yet lovingly and without rancor provides an invitation to consider the claims of Christ. Thousands have responded.

In this we may have a model for reaching our own culture, stuck in the rigid orthodoxy of secular materialism and suffering from the results of that worldview’s essential illogic. With love and truth we can confront that worldview (also embedded in ourseles) and call people not simply to a religious version of it, but to something better and higher, authentic life in Christ.

An interesting article on Islam written in 1936…

My wife and I are scehduled for vacation time this weekend and we had grand plans. We were hoping to travel to Milwaukee and Chicago to catch a few baseball games. Actually we had hoped to go to Denver for the same reason but the costs was too high, flying, hotel, meals, game, etc..

So we got on the computer and began to attempt reservations. No go for Milwaukee, no go for Chicago. Tickets unavailable for games. We even tried Kansas City because we’ve never been to Kaufmann Stadium (we like to experience new baseball stadiums as we travel). Nothing doing there. So what to do?

From time to time we’ve had these experiences where plans seem to fail and all doors are closed. In this case rather then force the issue we came to the conclusion that for some reason we need to stay here this week. Now we don’t know why, and we certainly hope it isn’t something bad, but it looks like circumstances or fate or perhaps the hand of God have directed us to remain where we are this weekend. So we’ll do a little traveling, catch a Minnesota Twins baseball game and watch events unfold.

Stay tuned…

It’s the first Monday off and we’ll have to see what happens.

For the past several years I would come home on Sunday and simply go to work on Monday through Friday and return to church on Saturday to start the whole thing over again. But a few weeks ago I applied for a reduction in hours and got it sooner then I expected. Be careful what you wish for!

So now I have a whole day with, well, nothing. I don’t doubt that I can fill the time its just that, like a lot of Priests, I’m a workaholic, addicted to the motion if not the substance, of work. Feeling busy makes me feel alive and after a few days of vacation I start itching to get back at it.

One thing that for sure will happen is a lot of home chores will get done. With both my wife and I working and traveling, the home front gets short shrift as we both come home tired. So I’ve got some raking to do and some picking up around the place and maybe a supper to make and given my nature I’ll probably fill the day with different tasks.

I could try resting but that’s just no fun!