Cradle Catholics have a lot in common with the early disciples of Jesus and not in ways that always show us to advantage. We, like them, come to Jesus through, and sometimes in spite of, an already articulated religious context. As Jews, they had a hard time accepting Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s promise to them and we are challenged to understand Jesus so embedded in our religious culture as to be almost invisible. As it took his disciples quite some time to recognize Jesus as the Christ, we too have our own onion to peel getting from Jesus to Christ.
In my earlier post, I outlined how I saw Jesus as inspiring because of what he did; the flashy heroic stuff. It’s a pretty good place to start for a younger person - interest in Jesus because of his extraordinary accomplishments as a human. Still human, but extra. And I was content to leave my understanding of Jesus there - Jesus as a historical religious figure who was a miracle worker of some note. And I moved on.
The Catholic culture is thick with identity markers that tell us Catholics who we are and who we are not. I came from a rural Oregon setting where we were the Catholics and many of our neighbors were not. Just what they were, was of secondary importance to their not being Catholics. It did seem, however, that they read their Bibles while we only heard tiny parts of it read to us. But eventually, the Catholic Charismatic movement arrived in our part of the world and we began to read that dusty book on our shelves.
We realized that the Bible did not belong to just the non-Catholics who surrounded us. These stories were for us. And the story of Jesus, the gospels, starts with Jesus not only doing interesting things, but teaching his followers how to live. And this goes on for pages and pages with a few miracles to spice up the story. Miracle yadda yadda yadda miracle yadda yadda yadda. I only paid some attention to any of it.
In fact, the miracles were sort of embarrassing.
However, when I was in college, I began to meet people who thought of Jesus as a teacher. Fair enough. I was in a Catholic university, and sitting through the required Religious Studies classes, actually learning what Jesus taught. In that setting, his importance came from the content of his teaching and not from his miracles. In fact, the miracles were sort of embarrassing, but could be passed over in silence, while concentrating on the passages of rich teaching.
Jesus begins his ministry teaching that the Kingdom of God is near, certainly closer than we expected it to be. The Kingdom of God: an era in which everything is transformed through the power of a loving God. The Jewish people had been waiting for it and Jesus claimed its arrival was imminent.
The character of Jesus starts to change from role model to a teacher of a new reality. By insisting that there is more to this world than just this world, Jesus opens up a box we don’t even know we are living in. This radical claiming of the historically Jewish promise of a world transformed by God, began to change my expectations. Jesus did this for me, He changed what I expected from life, from my life.
This did not happen in a lightening struck moment. Like all teaching, it soaked in over time. And it is still soaking in. I routinely act as though this life, in this context that we share, is the only life and the only context. But when I can let the teaching of Jesus effect my expectations then something else happens in me. If the Kingdom of God is a certainty, then I begin to consider how I am living my life. Ah, the sound of rubber hitting the road!
If the Kingdom of God is at hand, am I ready?
The teaching of Jesus first challenges me to expect more. Then I am challenged to inspect how I am living into this life with God. If the Kingdom of God is at hand, am I ready? Not ready for the rapture, but ready to live a life centered on the teaching of Jesus? His teaching outlines, and underlines, a way to live life in a community of hope and expectation of what could be. His teaching insists that we could live in peace with each other, that the least could have the most, that the meek could inherit the earth.
What Jesus teaches is unexpectedly practical. Turning the other cheek, loving our neighbor as our self, challenging unjust authority, and the rest, can make your life better. It is pretty easy to agree that Jesus has had a huge civilizing effect on humanity as a great teacher. Jesus is like Plato or Martin Luther King Jr, or Marie Curie, a really great person who changed the world. I could call myself a Christian like I could call myself a Platonist, by following his teaching.
This is good up to a point. That point is when absorbing the teaching of Jesus, you begin to trust Jesus’ point of view. The more time you spend with Jesus, more of what he says seems trustworthy. You begin to try it out in the real world and the recipes for peace and meaning actually work! And then, like the early disciples, you notice that Jesus is also teaching about himself, he claims that he is the Son of God.
Warning! Whole other level. And in the story of Jesus, this happens when his disciples, who have been following a teacher for a couple of years, living with him day and night, struggle to answer this question posed by Jesus.
“Who do you say that I am?”
They are about to move from following a role model, through arranging their lives around his teaching, to knowing Jesus as Christ and it will change everything. Some are able to answer the question then, some later, some maybe never. I came to my own answer, I am looking forward to hearing how you answer it.
See you next week.
"Who do you say that I am?"
Cradle Catholic. Cafeteria Catholic. All those labels! Puts me in mind of an event not long ago where I was at a social gathering with a priest, his friend and a non-Catholic, a young woman who had offered to treat us all to lunch. She was our business contact for work done at our parish and a delightful young woman. We were chatting when she asked about Catholicism. I shared my experience as a convert, that being that I had been searching for a faith tradition that pared down Christian belief and life to its essentials and one that made a place in it for holy mystery. I told how at the end of my RCIA course the priest had us all stand up, recite the creed (b.t.w. - my listener knew what that was) and then told us, "All this time, we've been talking about what Catholics don't believe. This is what they do believe, and that's about it." I explained how I'd found so much of a living experience with Jesus the Christ in the mystery of the Eucharist. Her eyes lit up, she was interested. Then the priest interrupted me. "My friend and I," he said, "are what is called "cradle Catholics."" Well that shut down the conversation. Also, the light in the eyes of the young woman. First of all, she had no idea what "cradle Catholic" meant, but it clearly meant something other than me. The priest did not elaborate and the conversation moved on. I shut up. I got the message. I've done a lot of that since I got here - and I'm a Catholic.
But I had to go back and edit this, because after thinking about it, about how much it hurt and how ... well, marginalized I felt, I remembered this line from AA, "You spot it, you got it." And it occurred to me that on many occasions before I came here and had to feel what I feel, I'd done the same thing in the same way. As in, "You're not important. You're a little slow on the spiritual development growth chart." Ouch!
I pray a lot that my pride and selfishness be removed. That I finally learn to be sufficiently mature not to be offended when it's made clear I'm unwelcome. Less than. I try to remind myself that "they know not what they do." Also, that I remember that I have a somewhat overactive sensitivity to rejection. But I can tell you, it takes a lot of prayer and if it's working, I can't see it.
I did, however, find a label with which I'm a lot more comfortable: Galilee Catholic. Yeah. That one. Not to differentiate myself from others but to remind myself who walks with me. I find a little peace in the middle of the day with the Examen. And then, I go out and trudge another few steps with Him beside me.
deeply honest. the longer i'm around the more i appreciate the scope and reality of death (and birth) - and can understand heaven in an existential way (the platonist line); can even experience wordless awe. here i am, from and for love. a heart of stone kept me from intimacy - accepting that i am *with* love, and love is with me, that love (jesus) is the way on the way to love. my heart is the burden i lift; it may be that my heart remains stone, but jesus changes what a stone is - what it is as an offering or action... by grace, in awe, my heart is sometimes the silence of faith, and the readiness of hope (a beginning). i'm begun, then i begin, then i begin again, god willing.