Month: September 2017

The Challenge of Keeping Holy the Sabbath for Those in Church Ministry

INTRODUCTION: I began this reflection briefly this morning on Facebook and decided to fully flesh it out. Obeying the commandment to keep holy the Lord’s Day is one of the hardest commandments to keep for someone in church ministry. To truly keep holy the Lord’s Day requires more than just to be present in church. This is especially true for those who are ordained and “doing” the services on the Lord’s Day. I acknowledge that all who are ordained may not see honoring this commandment through the same lens that I have. Nonetheless, I believe that keeping holy the Lord’s Day is an ongoing challenge for all in church ministry.

While my work week really begins on Saturday, Monday still feels like the beginning of the week. One of the topics for the next Archdiocesan clergy day is how the ordained can keep holy the Sabbath. When you are working the Sabbath, you don’t celebrate it. Working in the Church can often make one weary of religion. After a load of weekend Masses, baptisms, & pastoral visits the last thing I seek is more religion.

Being essentially an introvert, it takes a great deal of energy to be present and celebrate Mass well. Unlike extroverts who are energized by large groups of people, I find that large groups of people suck the energy from me. So when I am done with Sunday rituals & visits, I need time to just be away to replenish my energy. Sabbath is synonymous with rest. How does one keep holy the Sabbath when in celebrating it, one is exhausted by it? When the Sabbath is anything but a day of rest?

Rabbi Harold Kushner addresses the important need for the Sabbath as a time to rest one’s soul in his book, “The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the Twenty-third Psalm.” He writes: “I read once of a group of tourists on safari in Africa. They had hired several native porters to carry their supplies while they trekked. After three days, the porters told them that they would have to stop and rest for a day. They were not tired, they explained, but “we have walked too far too fast and now we must wait for our souls to catch up to us.” We too can be so busy taking care of things that we neglect our souls. What shall we say about the men and women who invest so much time and energy in their jobs that they have neither time nor energy left for their families when they arrive home? Do they need to pause to let their souls catch up to them?

” … The world asks so much of us. We give ourselves so totally to our work, to the task of raising our family and running a home, to our volunteer commitments that we often forget to take time to nourish our souls, forgetting that we need to rely on the wisdom of the soul to guide our working and our living hours. Our bodies are more active when we are awake than when we are sleeping, sometimes frantically so. But our souls may be as absent during the day as they are at night. We lack the wisdom of those native porters, the wisdom to know that we have left our souls behind and we need to stop and let our souls catch up to us. The psalmist would remind us that God has given us ways to reclaim our humanity when pressures of time and obligation have caused us to misplace it, and that part of God’s role as faithful guardian of the flock is to urge us to remember to be human. Our task is to stop long enough to hear that message.

” … When our souls are on the verge of giving in to compassion fatigue, when we know what the right thing to do is but we are tired of being charitable and helpful, that is when we need God to restore our souls, to replenish our ability to act like human beings, to understand that what is asked of us is not to make the world perfect but to make one person’s life better. When events challenge our faith so that we find it hard to believe that this world is God’s world, that is when we need God to restore our souls, to reinforce our ability to believe in ourselves and in our ability to do good things. Even as a faithful shepherd gives his flock the food and water they need to be sheep, God, our faithful shepherd, gives us the strength of soul we need to be human.”*

Now beginning my 41st year of ministry, in being busy about “doing” the Sabbath for 40 years, I have realized that I have been cheating the Sabbath. It has taken its toll on me. While I have not lost my soul, it takes quite a while for my soul  to “catch up with me.”  And I confess, that some weeks and even some months, particularly the high holy seasons of Advent/Christmas and Lent/Easter,  my soul may never catch up with me.

I find it ironic that the one thing that those of us in ministry “doing religion” share with those that never darken the door of any church, synagogue, mosque or temple, is distraction from God. Many who do not go to church, synagogue, mosque or temple are distracted from God by all the things of life. Many of us in ministry may be distracted from God by being busy “doing religious things.” Having been busy about “doing religion” for over 40 years, I have come to see that “doing religion” is not being faithful. “Doing religion” is about being busy. It is about work obligations. Rather than building faith, “doing religion” is distracting me from faith, preventing me from being fully faithful.

While many people get excited about Relevant Radio, EWTN, and other religious programming and media, I eschew it all. In ministry, one is immersed in religion, rest does not come from drowning in the glut of religious radio, television, and print media, much of it painfully trite, self-righteous,  filled with religious schmaltz and sentimentality, and, a near occasion of sin (EWTN especially so for me).

I love the Bible, however, I do not find rest in the Bible. Why? Reading the Bible is more about doing than resting for me. Having been thoroughly schooled in Biblical Exegesis in graduate school and the seminary, the Bible has a task oriented focus. It is hard to pray the Bible when one’s mindset has been focused on “studying” the Bible. The Liturgy of the Hours, or breviary, as church neo-cons call it, is pretty much the same. I do faithfully pray it every day. However, its focus is again task oriented. In praying the Liturgy of the Hours, we join our prayer with that of Christ to the Father, praying for the whole world. Noble? Yes! Necessary? Absolutely! Restful? No!

So, how can someone stay in ministry, keep holy the Sabbath, and truly rest in the Sabbath? This question has become my major focus for my 41st year of ministry. With only one day off a week, and that day often spent in doing the necessary things about the house and being present to my family, the day is too task oriented to truly keep holy the Sabbath, to rest as God has commanded us to rest.

I am convinced that the only way for me, as a church minister, to keep holy the Sabbath is to escape doing religion. To clarify, this does not mean to divest myself of Catholicism, to skip Sunday Masses, or to escape God. Rather, by escaping doing religion the quest is to find God.  It is basically doing that which Jesus did during his ministry among us on earth. He went away, literally escaped from the religious demands placed upon him, in order to be faithful to his heavenly Father. Jesus went away by himself to some lonely place so that he could replenish his energy by being in communion with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. This is especially true for myself, an introvert.

If the demands of ministry prevent me from escaping and resting a whole day of Sabbath, I have found that I need to insert a small time of the Sabbath into every day. This small time of Sabbath excludes those “holy things” I am obligated to do as an ordained deacon. To keep holy the tiniest piece of Sabbath every day is to escape doing of religion and fully resting in silence in the presence of God that is all around me. It means finding a quiet place, most often not a church, but a place where I can rest, free from all distraction, and sit in quiet before God.

While it is helpful that this place of respite is a quiet place far from noise, truth be told, the place of respite for which I long is more interior.  Rabbi Martin Buber’s “third threshold” (See Buber’s epic book, I and Thou, for a full examination of the three thresholds in which God and humanity meet) is the place where upon our souls meet face to face with the Divine Presence of our loving God. The journey to that third threshold is an ongoing pilgrimage for me, one in which I have experienced only very briefly. It is the place, the ultimate place of Sabbath, where my soul finally catches up with me, and as one, I rest with the God who created me and loves me.

*Kushner, Harold S.. The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the Twenty-third Psalm (pp. 60-62, 72). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

 

Learning to forgive: a homily for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Peter asks Jesus how many times must we forgive others. Jesus replies, not just 7 times, but 77 times. In Jewish culture, the perfect number was the number 7. In replying 77 times, Jesus is saying the number of times we, as his disciples must forgive, is an infinite number of times. In other words, we must always forgive others! This is not the way the world operates. Norm Peterson, a character from the T.V. sitcom, “Cheers”, summed it best up on one show. “It’s a dog eat dog world, and I am wearing Milk Bone underwear.” We live in a world in which the acceptable practice is to get even when someone wrongs us. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” is the rule by which our world operates.

Jesus tells us if we are to be his disciples, we cannot live by that rule anymore. Instead of getting even, as his disciples, we need to learn how to forgive. In another parish at which I worked years ago I knew a person I will call Marie, and she has given me permission to tell her story of forgiveness.

Marie had been married 12 years. She was a loving and caring mother of three children. One day she came to me very distraught. Her husband told her he wanted a divorce. Marie’s husband was known to abuse alcohol, and to be very emotionally abusive. He told Marie that he had been having an affair with another woman for over 5 years, and he wanted to dump Marie and his children, and marry the woman with whom he was having this affair.

Marie had worked very hard to make her marriage work. Like many married couples, Marie got married with the dream of building a life with her husband, having children, and growing old together. In cheating on her, he had betrayed the sacred trust of their marriage vows. Now all of Marie’s dreams of married life were now shattered like shards of broken glass on the floor. He moved out and filed for a divorce.

Torn apart by grief, Marie sought healing for her children and herself and they did extensive counseling individually and as a family. With the loss of her former husband’s income, Marie had to go out and find a job to support herself and her children. No longer able to afford it, Marie had to sell their family home, and she and her children moved into a much smaller, cramped townhome which she could afford on her salary. Little by little, over time, the family healed from this tremendous wound in their lives. After some time had passed, I asked Marie to help facilitate a separated/divorce support group in the parish. Having known the anguish of divorce, she was a source of hope to many who were overwhelmed by the nightmare that accompanies the initial stages of divorce. Though her children had their challenges as adolescents, they all survived them and grew into wonderful, faith-filled adults.

Ten years later, on a cold, wintery, sleety February night, Marie was preparing an evening meal for herself when she heard a knock at her door. She opened the door and found her ex-husband on her door step. He looked awful. His face looked thin and drawn. He was depressed, wet and cold. His second wife, tired of his abuse and his alcoholism, threw him out of the house. He had nowhere to go. He was suicidal. He came to Marie as a last desperate gesture for help. Marie invited him in. Took his wet coat and hat and hung them up. She invited him to sit down at her table and shared a warm meal with him. He poured out his heart and his sorrow to her. She listened, and worried that his mental state might endanger his life, convinced him to go with her so that he could seek help for his mental illness. On that cold, sleety February night, she drove him to St. Mary’s hospital in Minneapolis, where he admitted himself into the Psychiatric ward to receive the help he needed.

When Marie talked about this with her brothers and sister, they were angry with her. This man had destroyed her life and the life of their children. She would have been justified to have slam the door in his face. I asked her why she had helped him. She replied to me, “I saw in his face, the face of the suffering Christ. How could I say no to the presence of Christ within him?” I said to her that not many people in similar circumstances would not have been as compassionate as her. She replied to me, “I forgave him a long time ago the horrible wrong that he did to me and our children. However, I have not forgotten what he did. Forgiving is different from forgetting.” I replied to her, “Marie, the worst thing that ever happened to you was your divorce. And, the best thing that ever happened to you was your divorce. It was through that suffering you experienced that you have become the tremendous person you are today.”

How do we fulfill Jesus’ command to forgive others an infinite number of times? Marie’s words hold the key. When we are able to see in the face of those who wrong us, the face of Jesus, how can we not forgive as Jesus forgives and continues to forgive, an infinite number of times?

Confronting Sin in our lives and in others: a homily for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

A Catholic priest, an Episcopalian priest, a Lutheran minister, and a Baptist minister went on a hunting trip together. One night at the hunting cabin, they decided to confess their worst sins to each other. The Catholic priest said, “My sin is alcohol. One time a month I binge drink.” The Episcopalian priest said, “My sin is greed. I only put a nickel in the collection basket.” The Lutheran minister said, “My sin is gluttony. Once in a while, I get in my car and go to a faraway town and go through the drive-up window and order four half-pounders and a bucket of fries.” And the Baptist minister said, “My sin is gossip, and I can’t wait to get back from this trip.”

Just like the four clerics in the story, we all have sins and faults that are our Achilles heals. Try as we may to avoid thinking about our sins and faults by keeping extremely busy or by finding all sorts of things to distract us, they are always there. It is impossible to runaway from them. These personal sins and faults are attached to us like our shadows, so much so, that many spiritual writers refer to the dark side of sin in human life they call it our shadow self. As faithful disciples of Jesus, we are called to be self-aware of our shadow self, knowing full well that every day we are in need of conversion. This is why we begin Mass acknowledging our brokenness and our need for healing before God and one another.

The scriptural readings today remind us that we do not live in isolation. We live in community with others. Our relationship with others is vitally important for our spiritual and emotional health. We may like to think that the affect of our personal sins and faults only affect us adversely. The reality is that our personal sins and faults have a ripple effect that impacts the lives of all with whom we are in relationship. Because of this God requires us to personally be accountable for them. We are held accountable to our family and neighbors. We are held accountable to our Church and our civic communities. And, ultimately, we are held accountable to God.

As we hear in all three readings, God’s expectation for us is to live lives of accountability. In the reading from the prophet Ezekial and the Gospel, we are told that if necessary, we are called by God to intervene with another person if that person’s sins and faults are destroying not only the person, but the lives of the people with whom the person is in relationship. Ezekial goes so far as to say that if we remain silent and do not confront the person who is self-destructing, we will be held accountable by God for that person’s demise. There will be times in our lives, when we must confront another person about his or her sins and faults. There will be times in our lives when we will be on the receiving end when others confront us about our sins and faults.

The accountability God requires of us is not based in vindictiveness or revenge, it is based on the law of Divine love. If we truly love one another, and want the best for those we love, we will confront them about those things in their lives that are destructive. Conversely, if they truly love us, they will confront us about that which is destructive in our own lives. As St. Paul writes to us today, “The commandments, ‘you shall not commit adultery; you shall not kill; you shall not steal; you shall not covet,’ and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this saying, namely, ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Loves does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law.’”

Perhaps the best process in which conversion is lived out is in the 12 steps used by Alcoholics Anonymous, Alanon and many other 12 step groups. These 12 steps are: 1) We admit we are powerless over whatever behavior or sin we have and that our lives have become unmanageable. 2) We come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. 3) We make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God. 4) We make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. 5) We admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. 6) We are entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. 7) We humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings. 8) We make a list of all persons we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to all of them. 9) We make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. 10) We continue to take a personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it. 11) We seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understand God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out. 12) Having received a spiritual awakening as the result of these 12 steps, we try to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Like the Catholic priest, the Episcopalian priest, the Lutheran minister, and the Baptist minister in the opening story, we all have sins and faults, something or perhaps many things in our lives that may be destructive not only to ourselves but to others as well. In humbly acknowledging these faults to ourselves, to our neighbors, to our community, and to God, we will find mercy, healing, wholeness and love.

It’s Labor Day for goodness sake! Why the discussion of Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays?

In looking at the posts on my Facebook this morning, I found a post expressing great outrage about greeting people with “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas”. Really??!!! On Labor Day of all days??!! The Winter Solstice is still four months away. Why speak about that bitterly cold, miserable time of the year at the end of summer? Here is my response to that post.

I read a post this morning by “Bikers for Whatever (their nom de plume largely forgettable)”. It was post basically stating that anyone who refuses to say “Merry Christmas” and instead insist on saying Happy Holiday sometime around the Winter Solstice is a jerk and they should be deported from the United States. One might be surprised that I truly do not care whether someone greets me with Merry Christmas or Happy Holiday at that time of the year. I suppose one might assume that I being an ordained Roman Catholic Deacon might take great umbrage (anger mixed with insult for the vocabulary deprived) at being greeted with a “Happy Holidays!” It matters not one iota to me.

First, you have to understand that Christmas is a manufactured feast day. Theologians, astronomers, and biblical scholars have stated that scientifically, Jesus was NOT born on December 25th. Our current calendar was not adopted till the time of Pope Gregory centuries long after the birth of Jesus. He was probably born 4 years prior to the year we give him. (Note: that in historical research the BC/AD (Before Christ/After the birth of Christ) no longer are used in historical study because of its historical inaccuracy. The BCE/ACE, Before the Common Era and After the Common Era are now used for more historical accuracy). He was also born at approximately the birthing of the lambs, sometime in March/April. So clearly, in terms of science and historical research, December 25th was not the day in which Jesus was born.

Why was December 25th chosen? Ancient societies chose to have great celebrations at the Winter Solstice. In Roman society there were huge drunken/sex orgies (bacchanalias)  celebrating the shortest day of the year. Many early Christians loved pagan drunken, sex orgies (they would have a certain allure), so in order to control the more primal urges of the faithful, the Church “Christianized” the pagan festival, in a sense, rebooting the festival from unwholesome debauchery into something a wee bit more wholesome e.g. without the rampant sex and drunkenness. In truth, the Church did not celebrate the birth of Jesus for over 3 centuries. The first of Christian feasts is Easter, followed by Pentecost. It was not until about 3 ACE that Christmas began to be celebrated as a feast day. This is not the first of major Church feast days treated this way. All Saints Day was a “Christianizing” of the pagan holiday we know as Halloween. (As I recall, the Baptist Church does not celebrate Christmas because of its connotation with the pagan Winter Solstice holiday)

The other reason that December 25th was chosen was primarily theological. The Church chose to place the celebration of Jesus’ birth at a time of the year for symbolic purposes. Because the Winter Solstice is the darkest time of the year, it symbolized the darkness into which humanity had descended. The days begin to get longer immediately after the Winter Solstice, so by placing the celebration of Jesus’ birth immediately following the darkest day of the year, it symbolized that into the darkness of humanity, God introduced into the world the Divine light that will save humanity from its own darkness.

Flip all this forward to our present time. December and early January are filled with a number of different holidays religious and cultural. As Christians we seem to want to impose our religious holidays on all people whether they are Christian or not. We forget that the Christian religion is only one of many world religions. The Hindus, the Buddhists, the Muslims, and many other religions do not impose their religious holidays upon Christians. They quietly celebrate them as should we, if we are truly to remain faithful to the intent of the Holy Day.
Also note, that the Christmas holidays that the United States celebrate are anything but Christian. Christmas in the United States has very little to do with the birth of Jesus. It is all about cutthroat consumerism in which retailers hope to make up the losses they suffered during the rest of the fiscal year. Greed, licentiousness, drunkenness etc are just as rampant in the United States (note the Christmas parties that are celebrated in corporate America and within family units) as they may have been in ancient Rome. Perhaps the leg lamp displayed in the picture window of Ralphie’s home, “electric sex” as it is referred to in the movie “The Christmas Story”, is an apt description of what Christmas has become in the United States.

So instead of looking askance when someone greets you with a “Happy Holiday” during the Christmas season and telling them to get the hell out of the United States for failing to recognize whatever Christmas you think it to be, greet them instead with a return, “Happy Holiday.” If they greet you with Happy Hannukah, return the salutation and so forth. It is time for Christians and so-called Christians (note: Fox Cable News, religious neo-cons, and trump) to quit being horses rosettes about this whole subject. Instead of flipping people off when they greet you with Happy Holiday, instead spread the good will and peace of Jesus, which we Christians purport to say we believe, and greet them in kind with joy.

An essay/reflection on an ancient poem.

SAILING NOWHERE

I was placed in my boat of reed,
And placed in a river run smoothed.
I drifted past Moses’ landing place,
Nestled amongst the rushes,
past Peter’s boat and fishing nets,
past reformed basilicas and black minarets,
and factories of manufactured creeds and needs;
all, whose only purpose is to clean the streets,
tattoo feet, and recycle old shoes and dirt.
I sailed, past them all,
into the unknown of the ocean.

I came across this poem I wrote as a sophomore in college. In the grand scheme of Fowler’s stages of faith development I was in stage four, in which I, as a 19 year old person, was questioning everything I had been taught by my parents, my Church, and my government. Every value I had been taught was up for grabs. Every value I had been taught was severely examined for lies and fabrication.

What I discovered was that the values my parents taught me were solid. My dad and mom lived authentically that which they believed. While I might not always hold to their politics, I was even a liberal then, I knew they were trustworthy.

On the other hand, while my Church preached the Good News, I found that my Church didn’t always live authentically the Good News. For a Church in which the Great Commandment of Jesus was central, to love one another as Jesus loved us, had been very poorly followed by many in the Church, including some revered saints. From the Crusades, through the Borgia Popes, the evils of the Spanish Inquisition, the slaughter and enslavement of indigenous people, the slaughter of many Christians, all in the name of God, was as bitter a betrayal of Jesus as that of Judas Iscariot. Could my Church, or for that matter, any institutionalized religion could be trusted? My 19 year old self said emphatically, “No!.”

Then there was the United States government. Like Ron Kovic (Born On the Fourth Of July), I had been taught to never question my government. Right or wrong, the government was never to be questioned. And, as Kovic discovered, the United States government was not to be trusted. It had lied about the Vietnam War. The sins of our politicians and our military descended upon us like a plague. Many men and women had their lives destroyed in this horrific war based on lies. The nation was torn in half. Those who had believed their government and fought honorably were despised by many opposed to the war. Even the American Legion would not accept them because they had not won the war. Those who opposed the war and either went to Canada to avoid the draft, or were imprisoned by refusing to be drafted were equally despised for having shirked their duties. All that followed by Nixon’s criminal behavior and those of his administration utterly shook the faith of the nation in the government. We all came away from this suspicious of all government, never entrusting our faith again in our political system.

It was from all of this that this poem was written. All these broken beliefs and trusts lay around me like shards of broken glass. However, out of this pile of broken debris arose, like a Phoenix, something incredibly wonderful. I began to embrace and welcome the truth of Mystery in my life.

I found that while religious and/or government creeds could not be trusted because much of it was of human construction, the concept of “Mystery” could be trusted. Mystery’s origin lay in the Divine. The one thing I could trust is that I am unable to understand Mystery. I can’t construct or control Mystery. Mystery is something to be experienced, something in which to be immersed. While some insight may be gained in the experience of Mystery, Mystery will never be fully understood. From the time of the burning bush, God can only be addressed as Mystery. The name God gave of God’s self to Moses is the ultimate Mystery, a Divine riddle that puzzles all who hear it. This mystery is aptly reflected in Sister Joan Chittester OSB definition of God as “changing changelessness.”

That 19 year old undergraduate of the College of St. Thomas is now a 65 year old Roman Catholic ordained deacon. How does this poem, written 46 years ago stand with me today? I find it still very spot on. The questioning never stops.

A faith that complacently accepts all that is taught is dead. True faith is life lived in the crucible. Faith is life lived in contradiction struggling to understand Mystery. Mystery is filled with paradox. There is a reorientation in our lives that is in direct opposition to what we have learned in our world. Jesus refers to this reorientation when he states that salvation is obtainable only by denying oneself and carrying one’s cross and following him, especially when this does not seem to make any rational sense. The word salvation is couched in mystery. Exactly what is salvation?

For all the stories of near death survivors, for all the soothsaying of mystics and mediums, no one truly knows with any certainty exactly that which awaits us as we leave this life for the next. In his song/poem, “Visions of Johanna,” (from the album “Blonde On Blonde”), Bob Dylan writes, “Inside the museum, infinity goes up on trial. Voices echo back, ‘This is what salvation must be like after a while.’” The then, agnostic Dylan (this was prior to his ‘religious conversion’) was trying to desperately understand the Mystery of salvation. I have come to think that perhaps his acknowledgement of not knowing was probably more a product of faith, than a lack of faith.

In the Gospels, Jesus uses mysterious metaphors in speaking of salvation. He often references wedding feasts to describe the elusive concept of heaven. During the time of Jesus, wedding feasts were occasions of joy, in which food, drink, warmth, happiness, and acceptance were provided for all who attended. Using this metaphor to describe salvation, Jesus is saying that it is that in which all human senses are sated and fulfilled.

All St. Paul can say on the subject is that what we see and believe to be real in this life is all transitory and empty. That which is truly real lays beyond the comprehension of our senses. In his not knowing, St. Paul was resolute in sacrificing everything, including his life, in order to embrace the Mystery which lay beyond his comprehension and senses. Within the Mystery of salvation lies a glory that is incomprehensible to our human minds. It must be experienced within Mystery.

As one who is beginning his 41st year of ministry in the Church, I am still on that boat of reed floating out into the unknown of the ocean. Being immersed in Mystery for all these years, I have come to know that not all creeds and beliefs, religious or political, may be true. I have come to accept that I will never fully understand that which I say and have promised to believe. In the Kevin Smith religious parody film, “Dogma”, a film that is at times extremely offensive and far off base, and at other times an honest, comedic critique of Catholicism, Rufus, the “13th Apostle”, says to the “last scion” that the words “I believe” means “we have a good idea about what we are saying.” That is a fairly accurate statement.

Living in and with Mystery has taught me that the grace and the goodness that flows out of the Church is of Divine origin. Grace and goodness does not originate in the bewilderment of our confused humanity. My trust in the Christian creedal statements lay not in the words expressed, but in the Mystery that lay beyond the words.