Rejecting Reverence

What if you were taught that walking in the woods is the closest you can get to being with God? If you believed that, then every time that you had a good experience walking in the woods, you would think of it as proof that it was true, and thus work to develop that type of spirituality further. You would also think it crazy if someone tried to tell you that walking in the woods was not closer to God, but actually further away from Him than many other places where His presence is found.

The point should be clear: we trust evidence which confirms what we already want to believe. It is a part of being fallen humans. This can either help us to find God rightly, or it can lead us away from God and into a spiritual nightmare. We all must be very cautious in what we consider to be a proof of the faith (for it may be no more than a self-fulfilling prophecy).

Let us take something that is a bit more close to home now. What if someone taught you that you are closest to God when you are singing pop tunes about Jesus? What if someone taught you that you are closest to God when you are casual and relaxed and acted like you are just kickin' back on the couch at home? What if someone taught you that you are closest to God when you treat Him like your buddy-chum-pal? The consequences should be obvious.

If you were misled about what behaviors strengthened your relationship to God, then you would likely think that a different behavior of devotion from what you were used to was "uncomfortable" or "not fun". Where this becomes an issue is when you have been misled so much that you reject the form of devotion that was universally accepted for the two millennia before Vatican II. It is not as though deep and humble reverence suddenly became contrary to Catholicism and now we need contemporary kitsch. Yet kitsch has taken center stage in many Catholic parishes.

If this were all we were dealing with it would be hard enough, but we have to take it one step further. The real thing that Catholics have been taught today about their relationship to God is that it needs to be entertaining. I know of many people who have attended a reverent Catholic Mass and walked out upset (sometimes even before the Mass is over--which is an atrocity!) because they were not entertained. It takes a stunning amount of deception to make any Catholic turn away from what was fine for all of our forefathers before 1965!

People's minds have been captured by modern culture and the Church is being made to look like the modern world. We used to call that "compromise" now we call it "ecumenism" (oops, I wrote that!?). What we see going on in a large percentage of Catholic parishes is the Priests knowingly seek ways to entertain their people in the Mass and then teach them that the euphoria they experience is called faith. The people duped by this will keep coming to Church if it entertains them, but they will quit when they get bored. Those who come to revere the Lord do not quit, because Jesus is always present and that is an eternal reality that no entertainment can compare with.