That's So Second Millennium

Post Christian: Why Bother?

This is in part a follow-on to the last CNAG entry on the term “deserve.” There is definitely a tension between the universalist strain within the New Testament that has cropped up from time to time within the history of Christianity, and the opposite, or at least complementary strain that stresses the importance of spreading the message of Jesus Christ and convincing others to explicitly take up his teachings and his way of life.

The problem with the universalist view is, of course, one of practical psychology. If you can be all-or-nothing “saved” without needing to “accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior,” or for that matter go through the instructional and ritual process of the catechumenate and be baptized, then why does it matter whether anybody spreads the gospel or not?

Obviously, I gave the game away with the term “all-or-nothing.” It may very well be, and I believe it is most likely, that many human beings with little or no explicit knowledge and no explicit allegiance to Jesus of Nazareth in this mortal lifetime nevertheless find themselves in His comforting embrace for eternity, because even outside that explicit structure, they ultimately cast in their lot with the good that God made known to them and repented of the evil. Yet that hardly makes it not worthwhile to do what we can to make Jesus known and revered.

First of all, if the reality is that every human being’s destiny is bound up with this man’s life and death, why would we not want to spread the word? The argument, “it’s true and I would want to know” surely suffices on its own.

Second, do you really think that there is no lasting value to doing more good in this life? Is it really the case that the best life is to enjoy as much as possible of this world’s pleasures, do a minimal amount of good for others, and just slide under the wire to make some minimal criterion for salvation (a deathbed conversion, etc.)? That is the stuff of social conformity.

I don’t know whether I can actually change anyone else’s fate by telling them about Jesus, the things I believe He has done for me, or the way Christianity makes the universe make more sense to me. I don’t know whether any of the help I have tried to give by visiting my lonely old greataunt or counseling poor pregnant women or anything else could have done that either. I don’t know if Mother Theresa, in a long life of prayer and caring for the needy, ever flipped anyone’s destiny from hell to heaven; nor do I know that any tyrant or abuser ever did the opposite.

Maybe the good and the evil that we do provide points of departure for other people to make their choices for or against goodness and God, but I have a hard time seeing how God would judge them for anything I did or failed to do.

Yet surely it is still worth while to spread the truth, and if the gospel is the truth, it is the best truth we can spread. I want to do as much good as I can. I don’t want to be mediocre, in time or in eternity.

The Post Christian meditations, written by Paul, address the larger question, “Why do people believe science and the Catholic, Christian faith are mutually contradictory?” They consider the background reasons why people in the modern West desire to punish the faith of their ancestors and deny it credibility, apart from any cogent reasons to reject its actual dogmas and teachings.

Bonus Episode - Patricia Bellm: Marriage & canon law

CNAG: Deserve, part 3

I believe I have laid out enough lemmas to proceed to my own solution to the issues surrounding the word "deserve":

• The word "deserve" is simply not an appropriate one for me, with my history of trauma and self-hatred on the one hand, and my need to have a literal and integrated understanding of concepts on the other, to use in regards to my relationship with Being Itself at all.
• God is Necessary and I am contingent. There is nothing a contingent being could ever do that could place a moral obligation upon the Necessary.
• God has chosen to love me and offer me grace. In fact, that was always the intention. Human beings run off of grace. I don't "deserve" it, but God wants to give it to me and knows that it is a good thing to give it to me. Nothing else is needed.
• Being aware that I am therefore taken care of (and I can note in passing that the very common contemporary phrase "you are enough" seems to be the equivalent to this concept, although "enough" probably deserves its own future CNAG entry), I can finally take the focus off my own wretchedness, guilt, neediness, and shame, and do something to love other people.

As a Catholic, of course, I believe this Jesus of Nazareth is, was, and always will be central to this relationship between myself and God whereby I receive the grace necessary to live in an actual human manner. This grace is offered to everyone, whether or not they ever heard of Jesus Christ or even whether they lived before his time; because the Son of God is eternal, any action of his affects the entire history of the universe.

The New Testament alludes to this in several places. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (para. 605) points some of these out:

"At the end of the parable of the lost sheep Jesus recalled that God's love excludes no one: 'So it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.' He affirms that he came 'to give his life as a ransom for many'; this last term is not restrictive, but contrasts the whole of humanity with the unique person of the redeemer who hands himself over to save us."

But if your lens shrinks those down too far, you can miss this truth amid the many other references to the possibility of rejecting grace and carrying on into damnation. Interestingly, the CCC pulls some distillations of this teaching from two first millennium "semi-ecumenical" councils, the Council of Orange (529) and the Council of Quiercy (853). The English CCC quotes the latter as follows:

"'There is not, never has been, and never will be a single human being for whom Christ did not suffer.'"

He did not suffer because he wanted you to feel guilty about it. He suffered for you because he knew it would save you and give you the strength to do good for others.

CNAG is the Catholic-New Age Glossary... not backed by Webster's or any other authority. These meditations are here on That's So Second Millennium because they are an attempt to find maximum harmony between different strands of psychology and spirituality as they are being explored and lived out in Western culture today. It flows from a respect for people's reasons for doing what they do and thinking what they think.

Post Christian: The God of Your Understanding

The modern world has generated no end of addicts: those of us who come to recognize ourselves to be unable to stop some kind of compulsive, destructive behavior no matter what we do, what books we read, or what promises we make to ourselves or others. It seems most likely that this was always the case, and whether it is worse in the modern world or not is an interesting question to ponder but an impossible one to answer. In any case, in the twentieth century a remarkably countercultural movement began with a few handfuls of drunks in the eastern United States: the phenomenon of Twelve Step programs. I say countercultural because the Twelve Steps put God quite squarely before the addict as his or her only hope of transitioning away from the lifestyle of active addiction:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

In the early twentieth century, this was quite contrary to the trend of psychology at the time, enamored of Freud and Jung and their ideas of occult but certainly not divine forces at work in the human mind, and about to embark on the dehumanizing experiment of behaviorism. The Alcoholics Anonymous book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions opens its commentary on Step 2 with the following summary bleat from the atheists and agnostics with which the world was already replete in the 1930s:

THE moment they read Step Two, most A.A. newcomers are confronted with a dilemma, sometimes a serious one. How often have we heard them cry out, “Look what you people have done to us! You have convinced us that we are alcoholics and that our lives are unmanageable. Having reduced us to a state of absolute helplessness, you now declare that none but a Higher Power can remove our obsession. Some of us won’t believe in God, others can’t, and still others who do believe that God exists have no faith whatever He will perform this miracle. Yes, you’ve got us over the barrel, all right—but where do we go from here?”

In order to "be all things to all men, to save at least some," it was not at all surprising that Alcoholics Anonymous chose to make the bar to entry as small as possible. Hence those phrases in Step 3 and Step 11, "God as we understood Him." In extreme circumstances, from atheists absolutely ready to die on their hills, "God" could and can be reduced to "Group of Drunks [who are somehow getting sober]" who are, to be sure, a Higher Power than the individual addict coming to a Twelve Step group admitting total human bankruptcy.

Inevitably, people have become doctrinaire about the very non-doctrinaire-ness of the Twelve Steps. I don't know to what degree Twelve Step programs have played into the modern phenomenon of saying "I'm spiritual but not religious," but the Venn diagram of recovering addicts and people with that motto has a lot of overlap. People in Twelve Step programs can sometimes even speak as though it's a positive command from the Steps to freeze in whatever state of spiritual and religious belief they first took the Steps in.

Obviously, I disagree.

Now, I have it easy, or at least it seems to me that I have it easy. As a practicing Catholic, I have always seen the Steps as basically a distillation of Catholic spirituality honed and sharpened for my particular state as an addict. Fourth and Fifth Step? Hey, I have admitted all my humiliating secrets before. The Ninth Step was more intimidating than all the penances I have ever been issued in all the confessionals I have ever entered, but it was still an extension of something with which I was familiar and, in fact, a step toward perfection of them that I had always longed for without always being able to name it. I sometimes now joke with my sponsor when I attend a penance service that I'm going to a "Tenth Step workshop."

What's really interesting is that the phrase, "God as we understood Him" does not come up until the Third Step. I don't think that's a coincidence. The biggest foulup in my whole spiritual works was the fact that I was in perpetual conflict between thinking God loved me and thinking God was perpetually angry at me, disappointed with me, waiting for me to make a mistake, and ready to pounce on me and ram me into the ground.

The Second Step is there, in my case, to correct that situation and resolve that conflict. God loves me, knows my limitations, made me with limitations, and always intended for me to run off of His grace.

With my understanding of God thus rectified, it's then safe for me to take the Third Step and commit myself to this Being who loves me and wants the best for me.

And I rather think that the Second Step is there to serve a similar purpose for everyone. Further, if you work the Twelfth Step and "practice these principles in all our affairs," that Second Step spirit keeps working in you.

Like so many things in life, it's an iterative process. Life is multiaxial, and progress on one axis depends on progress along other axes. A bit of reshaping my understanding of God is necessary for me to act on that understanding and work the next Steps. Once I've worked the Steps, though, and get in touch with God, I'll find that God is telling me more about Himself and also about myself. Resting and pondering those new and deeper truths then lets me commit myself to something better and work that for a time, when I will be ready for still more insight.

The Post Christian meditations address the larger question, "Why do people believe science and the Catholic, Christian faith are mutually contradictory?" by considering the background reasons why people in the modern West desire to punish the faith of their ancestors and deny it credibility, apart from any cogent reasons to reject its actual dogmas and teachings.

CNAG: Deserve, part 1

Here's a point of tremendously sharp conflict. What do we do about this word "deserve"?

"You deserve to be happy / fulfilled / have meaning in your life / wake up every day excited..."

 - every contemporary self-help / New Age guru

"As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace [that] you have been saved."

 - this Paul of Tarsus guy (Eph 2:1-5), and not the only time he said something like this

I realize I have bitten off a lot right there. All I want to do at the moment is try to sum up decades of thrashing around in inner turmoil.

I tried to live with the idea that I was unworthy, that that was my fundamental relationship to God, for a very long time. It was not mostly intentional. I can read, and the New Testament says an awful lot of things about God's love and tender care for human beings and therefore for me specifically.

The problem is that I came to the Bible with even earlier experiences and filters. I use the word filter because it is widely used and recognized, but I actually don't like the image of a filter; I don't think it accurately describes the situation. A filter blocks some things and lets others pass. I don't think I had a filter; I had a very warped lens that shrank some things down to very tiny importance and expanded others enormously.

Given my existing lens or filter, then, passages like this got very distorted. I have purposely given you a nice long pull to show you how it worked. The lens shrank down to unnoticeable dimensions the past tense in the first few sentences. I read this and thought, "I do deserve wrath, pain, punishment." After all, I was very used to thinking that; in a horrible way, comfortable with it.

Then I went on to read the next sentence, and I could not really accept it. It seemed to contradict the thing I had just read, or really the conclusion I had just reinforced for myself. My place of rest for that sentence was more or less: "God is sort of offering mercy and forgiveness and happiness in heaven and whatnot, but He knows I don't deserve it, and He's making some sort of mistake, and He'll take it back... probably already has." The really insidious thing is that this was going on at the level of inarticulate emotion and gut reaction, and I could not see what I was doing to myself. I was always uncomfortable reading this passage and others like it; that was all I think I could have told you back then.

CNAG is the Catholic-New Age Glossary... not backed by Webster's or any other authority. These meditations are here on That's So Second Millennium because they are an attempt to find maximum harmony between different strands of psychology and spirituality as they are being explored and lived out in Western culture today. It flows from a respect for people's reasons for doing what they do and thinking what they think.

Post Christian: "Selfism"

I am filing this under "Post Christian," but in a way, it would make more sense as "Post... Everything, Really."

I just listened to the latest Word on Fire podcast with Bishop R. Barron (http://wordonfireshow.com/episode165/) in which Brandon Vogt basically reads to him the entire opinion piece by David Brooks with the corny subtitle "The Gospel of St. You."

I was pretty troubled by the episode. I might try to sum my troubles up by noting that I did not hear the word "grace" or any reference to the concept in the entire interview. The interview and article sounded to me like an airy condemnation of people struggling to make their way through the postmodern world, with all of the transcendent hopes humanity has ever held finally demolished and left in smoking ashes by the baby boomers.

The thing about it is, and this is the whole point of what I'm trying to say in these Post Christian entries, that there was a lot wrong with the world in 1960, or 1900, or 1700, or 1500. The cultural thermonuclear holocaust of constant revolution that we continue to put ourselves through is an overreaction and a misreaction, but it's a misreaction to real problems.

Take the first point Brooks implicitly makes in his sarcastic tirade. We should aspire to be like great human beings of the past--out of the vast panoply of human excellence, he plucks Abraham Lincoln and Mother Teresa. But instead, Brooks claims, we reject "external standards of moral excellence, [because] they often make you feel judged. These people [promoting these standards] make you feel sad because you may not live up to this standard."

The problem is that if you have a gram of self-knowledge, and no sense of connection to God, you know very well that you can't live up to such standards. You have at least two options in that scenario. Option A is to reject the standard as irrelevant to your life under some true or false rationalization. An honest "I can't possibly live up to that, because I couldn't live without X comforts and Y attitudes and Z structures supporting my false sense of self" is rare, so false rationalizations abound, but in this case they support a pretty legitimate concern. I'd recommend Option A over Option B, limping along, trying to pretend that you're trying to live up to the standard and hating yourself every day for failing, having tried Option B for at least 17 years.

The whole point of Christianity, and why it's still Good News for people in the third millennium after Jesus of Nazareth, is that it opens up Option C: tap into the power of Someone capable of making you capable of living up to high moral standards, and willing to forgive you and pick you back up when you sin or make mistakes or experience pain.

The Post Christian meditations address the larger question, "Why do people believe science and the Catholic, Christian faith are mutually contradictory?" by considering the background reasons why people in the modern West desire to punish the faith of their ancestors and deny it credibility, apart from any cogent reasons to reject its actual dogmas and teachings.

CNAG: Self-Love

One of the most fraught issues in our "post-Christian" society is the complex of questions around the issue of how to regard oneself in a moral sense. I find myself thinking my way into a morass of terminology trying to make that more clear, so instead let me just cut to the specific dilemma I want to face today.

A great deal of your typical self-help literature and culture in modern America encourages you to love yourself. Jen Sincero ends every single chapter in You Are a Badass with the section header "Love Yourself" followed by some hopefully pithy reflection related to the chapter content.

The theologic/philosophic tradition I am heir to often defines love as "to will the good of another." Self-love can then be taken as almost a self-contradiction. If not, of course, it simply means to will my own good, and Christian thought can exhibit something of a split personality about this.

"Self-love" is very commonly used in Christian writings as a synonym for "selfishness." I'm not aware of much of anyone, aside from fictional characters meant to embody negative tropes, liable to use the word "selfish" in any but a negative context. We nearly all agree there is some such thing as "selfishness," and I think it is commonly understood to revolve around choosing good things, real or apparent, for ourselves at an undue cost to other people. What "undue cost" is then becomes an all-important thing to discern, along with whether a good we will for ourselves is real or not.

On the other hand, as much as Christianity depends on love of neighbor, there is an irreducible individualistic element in it. We will receive an individual reward or punishment for our own actions (loc. cit.!). We cannot save one another, although interestingly enough, St. Peter exhorts us to save ourselves. St. Paul even comments in passing, as if it were an obvious thing and in no contrast to either Christianity or plain common sense, that no one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it.

Ultimately, I think we all have to accept that self-love is a very critical term to understand in a properly nuanced way. The Big Red Book of the Twelve Step program called Adult Children of Alcoholics has an entire chapter on Self Love, which contains some important attempts to clarify these issues:

"We cannot address the issue of self-love without examining some of the confusion surrounding this important spiritual principle. On one side, there are those who argue that self-love always leads to the slippery slope of narcissism. In this line of thinking, self-love is cast as self-absorption. These critics usually cannot define self-love because they are too absorbed in saying what it is not. They liken self-love to Narcissus, the character of Greek mythology who “fell in love” with his own image. Transfixed by the pool, gazing at himself, Narcissus dies emotionally and physically due to his inability to connect with another person or God. This is not self-love. Narcissism and self-love often get linked together, but these two concepts could not be more different. One is self-absorption while the other is self-awareness. The person who practices true self-love cannot be narcissistic. The practicing narcissist can never know self-love.

"There are some sincere, religious folks who think that self-love diminishes the authority of God. They believe it elevates the human side of the person while lowering the Almighty. These well-meaning folks stand ready to correct any talk of self-love or self-worth. They fear that selfishness or unclean motives can rule the person and society. This attitude is akin to defining self-love wrongly as narcissism...

"We also have seen thoughtful people who confuse self-love and self-esteem. This confusion represents a segment of the self-esteem movement that seems to place too much emphasis on affirmations and positive self-talk while attempting to neutralize anything negative in a person’s life. Under this model of self-esteem, the person experiencing failure or challenge is encouraged to minimize any uncomfortable feelings associated with an event. This is all noble and kind, but a key element of building true self-esteem is left out in some cases...  Self-love as we understand it does not eliminate pain or the need to try harder in some circumstances."

Ultimately, in my own life, I rely on the results of my own inadvertent experimentation on myself. Very young, I internalized the idea that hating myself, focusing on how hateful my actions (which I could not separate from myself) were to God, was the way to self-discipline and virtue. As I later saw it summed up in a therapist's handout sheet, I thought I could "horsewhip myself into compliance." I failed, or at any rate, I stalled out at a very low plateau. No one would ever confuse the me of the past with Don Bosco or Mother Theresa. Of course, sadly, they still couldn't, but I have come a long way, and I have done so by means of the Second Step of the Twelve Steps, which is stated and later augmented in Ch. 5 of Alcoholics Anonymous: "Came to believe that a Higher Power could restore me to sanity... God could and would if He were sought." God only does this because He "wills the good of another"--that is, me, and it just fails to make sense to me that I should hate myself when God loves me.

More on this next week, when we tackle the word "deserve."

CNAG is the Catholic-New Age Glossary... not backed by Webster's or any other authority. These meditations are here on That's So Second Millennium because they are an attempt to find maximum harmony between different strands of psychology and spirituality as they are being explored and lived out in Western culture today. It flows from a respect for people's reasons for doing what they do and thinking what they think.

CNAG: Happiness

Cheating a bit today, since this issue goes far beyond the realm of merely New Age concepts into the way the words "happy" and "happiness" have mutated in definition over the centuries. It's not unlike the situation with the word "substance." There is all the difference in the world between Thomas Aquinas' definition of "substantio" or the "subst-" in "transubstantiation" and the idea of a "chemical substance." Likewise, Boethius' or Augustine's "felix" apparently is an almost complete stranger to the modern definition of "happy" as, most notably, a fairly shallow positive emotion.

The classical philosophical definition of happy does not even make the cut in Webster's nine-subpart definition listed above. For Plato, Aristotle, and centuries of philosophers down to the present, the words cognate to "felix" or "happy" were used to describe a human being living in the best way possible, with all the virtuous habits and use of reason necessary for that to happen.

So far was happiness from being one particular emotion, it was possible to debate whether you could know whether a man was truly happy until after he was dead, and all his choices had been made and their consequences tallied up.

I stumbled across a podcast by a local priest recently in which he gave a sweeping overview of Western history's idea of God or the gods and God's will. Interestingly, he titled it "On Happiness." In it, he comments that the classical and high medieval sense was that God's will was simply for human beings to reach this optimal state of happiness, and God's laws were means to that end. Bishop Barron likes to quote one of the ante-Nicene Fathers, Ignatius of Antioch perhaps, as saying, "The glory of God is man fully alive." This gave way, Fr. Hollowell comments, to the nominalist late medieval and early modern idea that God is so "free" that He cannot possibly have been somehow constrained to give us laws that were merely good for us; they had to be given for some inscrutable reason of divine randomness, confused with freedom.

So very many of us remaining religious folk, as Fr. Hollowell notes (quite insightfully, I think), are just going through the motions and doing this and abstaining from that just because "those are the rules," with little if any meaningful sense of why those rules actually benefit us. It's a major bridge to cross for many of us to return to that state of innocent and childlike trust that God means the best for us, despite all the pain that we go through: the pain that comes and finds us no matter what we do, and the pain we incur turning aside from things that are against the rules... or that, eventually, we really have come to learn are bad for us.

Many things are on the other side of that bridge. There is not an end to suffering, but there is a sense that both the suffering and everything else has a purpose, and that sense of purpose leads to more frequent experience of the feelings of joy, contentment... possibly even happiness.

CNAG is the Catholic-New Age Glossary... not backed by Webster's or any other authority. These meditations are here on That's So Second Millennium because they are an attempt to find maximum harmony between different strands of psychology and spirituality as they are being explored and lived out in Western culture today. It flows from a respect for people's reasons for doing what they do and thinking what they think.

Episode 044 - The Brain and The Pain of Being Human

In this episode, we expand on our introduction to the brain by discussing some theories - ranging from well-documented to rather speculative - about the specific structures of the brain that are active (or less active) in situations ranging from autism to depression, stress, and trauma.

 

At the end we spend a few minutes on a preliminary critique of the materialist reductionary attitude ("interpretation" is too grandiose a word for it) toward brain science by many of its practitioners and reporters. Free will, for example, is not an illusion just because the physical part of the brain where it happens can be injured and we can be deprived of it... but much more on such neurophilosophical issues as the year progresses.

CNAG: Frequency / Vibration

Definitely the word that generates the most eye rolls per appearance. I have something of an allergy to physics metaphors that I didn't create myself; that's a character defect. There is also the chilling sense that I get that people like Jen Sincero and Danielle LaPorte and so forth in some sense think they're talking literally about the frequency of... something... vibrating: "enthusiasm vibrates at a higher frequency than..."

 

Unless and until you can show me the plot of frequency versus mood or attitude, tell me how many hertz are involved, and show me what is actually vibrating, I'mma go on considering it to be a metaphor.

 

Frequency is tied up with the law of attraction. Apparently you attract things by "raising your frequency" to match the thing, or type of thing, you want to have in your life. This raising of frequency is accomplished by setting expectations and taking external actions to reinforce them: changing how you dress, the decor on your walls, the way you eat, and the people you choose to spend time with (that last being the most difficult and the one where the fewest suggestions are given!).

 

Underneath the pseudo-scientific name of "frequency" I think there's a ton of insight lurking. It's so clear that different groups of people set very different expectations for one another. My neighbor down the road hangs out with a biker club on the weekends. That's his world. In that world it makes sense for him to spend several thousand dollars out of his near-minimum wages on a motorcycle. In my world that makes no sense whatever, and I think that Triumph motorcycle he has his eye on is surpassingly ugly. These are things that don't admit of right or wrong answers. I could choose (it would have been easier to start when I was 16) to go live with him in that world. I'd pick up the rules eventually. Maybe I'd enjoy it. I don't know, and never will.

 

Yet there are worlds I would have liked to explore, and maybe still will. In college I was very torn up about dancing. There is something so appealing to me about learning an "actual" dance, like swing or salsa or two-step, and that's true despite the fact that I am a complete outsider to that world. I made several efforts to cross over, but I was always so cripplingly self-conscious that I withdrew in defeat, not to make another attempt again for months. I still feel that longing to experience the music, move my body, cooperate with a partner in creating something elegant, no matter how ephemeral. I would have to "raise my frequency" and set some expectations in order to do that. I would have to center myself very squarely on the truth that it's acceptable for me to make mistakes and learn. Further, maybe I could put some Fred Astaire posters up, join a Meetup group, find a place and make myself go every Friday for three months or a year, and finally find myself on the other side. I think I'd enjoy it. I'd like to find out.

 

I see significant parallels between this concept of "frequency" and my attitude toward God. It was a shocking revelation when it finally hit me that I have been thinking about God's attitude toward me all wrong. I know that for myself I thought of God as permanently displeased with me, permanently expecting something of me despite the fact that I had no idea how to get it done, completely unwilling to help me, and permanently ready to condemn me for it. I realized that I thought of the whole Christian concept that nothing good happens without grace as hinging on whether a random and capricious God chooses to give you grace or not. I shudder when I think of all the Christian and Muslim groups that apparently think that believing God to be sovereign and free means that He is essentially random and unpredictable.

 

My mind's eye trails off over a vista of entire societies with crippling father issues...

 

In any case, that kind of voluntarism (if I may so use the term) I have concluded is inimical to a faith that works. A faith that works, I think, abides by this augmented version of the Second Step:

 

"Came to believe that a Power greater than myself could restore me to sanity, and would if He were sought."

 

Grace is not about whether God is willing to give it. He is. He has chosen to be consistent, if you will, has promised, and who are we to gainsay that promise? The choice is on my side, whether to "raise my frequency" and step out into the fog and trust that the grace I need will come, and that whatever failure I experience when I try to do the next right thing I see is just part of the plan and altogether acceptable to a loving God.

CNAG is the Catholic-New Age Glossary... not backed by Webster's or any other authority. These meditations are here on That's So Second Millennium because they are an attempt to find maximum harmony between different strands of psychology and spirituality as they are being explored and lived out in Western culture today. It flows from a respect for people's reasons for doing what they do and thinking what they think.