Wisdom's Cry

It is hard for me to talk about my faith. Not because I don’t want to, but because so often when I do, my family, and my friends assail me with their infectious doubts. Doubt is a poison to faith. It is a poison to the soul, but it can also be a spur to keep us from ever confusing our faith with certainty.

My mother is primary voice of doubt. She raised me to be a Baptist. When I converted to Catholicism, she lost that common frame of reference we used to share to discuss matters of faith.

I pray the rosary. She cannot understand why.
I pray to the saints. She cannot understand why.
I pray for the souls in purgatory. She cannot understand why.
My house is full of icons, statues, and books by people she never heard of before. She cannot understand why.

The reason I say she “cannot understand” instead of “does not understand” is because we are no longer speaking the same language. Joseph Campbell once compared religion to a computer’s operating system. Programs written for Windows will not run in OS X. That is why she cannot understand. Her operating system is Baptist, mine is Catholic.

These problems are even further exacerbated by my discovery of Creation Spirituality. She follows a fall/redemption path.

I do not think it is my job to convert her, but she feels it is her duty to convert me.

She asks me probing questions. She cannot understand why I went through so much to become Catholic, going so far that I nearly became a priest, then monk. Now, I no longer attend a Roman Catholic Church, but I still consider my self catholic.

That is the source of my doubt. I consider myself a Seraphic Christian. I live (to the best of my ability) according to the Rule of St Francis. I recite it once a month, and draw inspiration from his writings. I live my catholic faith to the best of my ability in the Seraphic Father’s path, guided by what I have learned about Creation Spirituality and through the practice of Deep Ecumenism. I feel the loss of the community. I miss the liturgy, but more than anything, I feel the loss of Holy Orders.

As a child, I wanted to be a preacher. After I converted to Catholicism, I wanted to be a priest or a monk. I pray the hours daily, and to this day, I live a very monastic life.

What do I think Holy Orders would have given me?

Authority? No, it would have given me a communion of believers who walked the same path, practiced the same rituals, and prayed the same prayers. It would have given me people to share this journey with who spoke the same language, and ran on the same operating system.

This sense of community is one of the things I miss more than anything, and it is the very thing that feeds my doubt, and makes me less likely to share my faith with others.

I have dreamed for years that I would find a community of people who believed in and practiced Creation Spirituality. Now I have found the Creation Spirituality Communities, and I hope I have found such a home.

I am going to start sharing my faith, and listening as others share theirs in hopes that I can find a community to belong to. I have read the forums for some time, and I feel like this is the time for me to open up and start participating. We are close to the start of a new year, and it is time to share with others who seek out the path Matthew Fox laid out before us. I look forward to the journey, and thank you for giving me the courage to share my voice again.

(commentary on the Regula Bullata, The Latter Rule of St Francsis of Assisi)

Loyalty
As a believer in exile. The first chapter of the Regula bullata is the hardest for me to read. The Seraphic Father swears his loyalty, and all of his successors’ loyalty to the Pope and his successors. As a catholic, this used to be an easy chapter, but after the election of the current Pope, I thought this chapter was impossible to follow.

I do not take this stance lightly. I do not want to look at the rule and say these chapters I will follow, but these I will not. If we are going to apply this line item veto to the rule, then we might as well not even have one. I think our modern circumstances are different, and our embrace of this monastic model for the rebuilding of the church through the new reformation means that we have to read this chapter carefully.

The Seraphic Father swears his and his successors’ loyalty to the Pope and his canonically elected successors. That last phrase is the problem: Who is the canonically elected successor to the Pope. Prior to the reformation, this was an easy question to answer (if we set aside the anti-popes for a moment), but after the reformation, the answer is muddy.

The Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, congregationalist, and Quakers have all answered this question differently and the same. In one way or another, they have all sworn their allegiance to the Holy Spirit and each has crafted their own method to try to discern the will of the Spirit, but if you believe that any or all of these groups are guided by the Holy Spirit, then the charism of the Apostles has been passed to them. So I too swear loyalty to the guidance of the Spirit of Truth and seek to find the best method for discerning the will of the spirit.

The vow to live the Gospel by living in obedience, without anything of our own, and in chastity means something altogether different to a lay movement than they would to a Friar.

Obedience
For a Seraphic Christian to live in obedience is not a matter of bowing the knee to an earthly authority. Humans are always prone to mistakes, no matter how well intentioned they may be. To follow any person or institution blindly is dangerous and likely to cause pain and suffering.

I vow my obedience to Jesus Christ, our heavenly High Priest who stands before the mercy seat of God. All any Christian can be asked to do is to like in good conscience with their own understanding of the will of God, and to collectively try to discern the voice of the Holy Spirit in the same fashion as the Religious Society of Friends.

This is the problem I have with the Obedience and reverence to the Pope, who ever that might be at the time. I would say, if you are a Roman Catholic, then you have already made this pledge. I know I did when my heart remained within the Roman Church, but as the gulf between my spiritual home in Creation Spirituality and Rome widened, it became increasingly more difficult to do this.

The hardest thing I have ever done was leave the Roman Church. My faith was stretched to the breaking point to do so, but it was as necessary as the split during the Renaissance. The institution had overshadowed the spirit of the church. As with most denominations, political factions have replaced spiritual yearning and the desire to hear the voice of the Spirit.

The church has never been and should not be a democracy, but it should seek consensus of the faithful through prayer and study to discern the will of God. The Spirit’s voice has been heard to free the scriptures from the control of the clergy so everyone can read them. She has freed the slaves from the ecclesiastical blessing of slavery. She has revealed the injustice of racism, sexism, and colonialism. These were not easy words for the church to hear when the Word came to us, but eventually the clergy discerned the will of God on these issues.

The work of the church is to live the Gospel, not to enforce a set of particular beliefs that have evolved and changed over time and which will continue to do so. I hope that the time will come when the I can return home, but while I walk through this wasteland, I will pitch the tent of the Lord where I am.

Detachment
It is obviously unrealistic to ask a lay believer to live without anything of their own as the rule says, but it is imperative that all believers learn to live in a state of detachment from the the things in their life to help them cultivate an enlightened mind and a heart of compassion.

My possessions are not my own. They come and go as time passes. The same is true about my beliefs. Every time I read the scriptures, I see something that I didn’t see the last time through. I do not allow myself to become so attached to my preconceived notions that I cannot hear the Spirit speak in Lectio Divina. I can read the same passage three times and see it three different ways. That is the power and the glory of faith.

When have to remember the Four Noble Truths of Practice:

1. All life is unsatisfying. (we always want more)
2. The cause of this is attachment and aversion.
3. There is freedom from this unsatisfactory nature of all thins.
4. The cause of enlightenment is the Noble Eightfold Path.

This is the heart of the second vow, the vow of detachment.

Chastity
I am not a Shaker, and do not expect believers to live a life of celibacy. Chastity is a state of living morally pure. Do not use others.