Jim Cogley: Reflections: Tues 1 Oct – Mon 7 Oct 2024
Note: The usual first Wednesday Healing Mass in Lady’s Island has been changed to Wed 9th Oct at 3pm.
Tue 1st Oct 24 – Trying to figure God out!
A lady was struggling with her faith and didn’t really know if she believed in God anymore. She was typical of so many today for whom the cosy cradle of non-questioning acceptance has been upended and she now finds herself having fallen out into that uncomfortable place of questioning non-acceptance. She made remarks like, ‘All this questioning is doing my head in’ and ‘I don’t know how I am ever going to figure out this God bit, and yet I know that it’s so important.’ ‘If you were a small pool of water on the seashore, would you be able to figure out the ocean’ she was asked. ‘No of course not’, she replied. ‘Is that not precisely what you are trying to do with your little brain? Why not give your head a rest and trust that if God exists He is greater than all your doubts about Him. Just let go of your questioning, be patient and allow the tide to come in. It is within God’s remit to reveal, but it is not within your ability to figure out.’
Wed 2nd Oct – One True Church?
Up to the 1980s there was still a strong belief that the Catholic Church was the one true church and that only Catholics would get to heaven. It found expression in all sorts of ways; Catholics were not permitted to go into a Protestant church or even to attend Protestant funerals. Mixed marriages were frowned on, and made incredibly difficult. Schools also were completely separate, and in many cases still are. The thinking was that if a Protestant child were to attend a Catholic school he/she might be influenced to change sides and vise-versa. This created untold suffering in the lives of so many. One man told of living his life in fear that if his mother died he would never see her again since she was of the Protestant faith. Only his father would get to heaven.
Thurs 3rd Oct – Religious Bigotry
As a young priest I was friendly with a Methodist minister who was a very good preacher. I invited him to come and take part in a local service and address the congregation. Most were delighted to welcome him. However, I was shocked by the reaction of one family in the area that would have been regarded as the bastions of Catholicism. One member knocked on my door in anger and with venom in his eyes warned me that should that individual try to enter the door of ‘our’ church he would be there with a shotgun and prepared to use it. This I would have had difficulty believing had I not also been in the firing line. Needless to say that minister did come, and there was no one armed at the door waiting for him! However, what an example of religious prejudice and ‘there being none so blind as those who think they can see’.
Fri 4th Oct – The Only Lonely Ones
A story is told of a man who arrived in heaven and was being escorted around by an angel. He was shown a Muslim area, a Jewish quarter, a Protestant section and lots more. Then they came to pass an enclosure and putting his fingers to his lips said, ‘Let’s be quiet here, this belongs to the Catholics and they have cut themselves off from the others because they like to think that they are the only ones here.’ This has been the story of nearly all religious groups; to think that we are the one true church, we alone have the truth and if you want to be saved you must belong to our group and believe what we believe. An example of this was the Jehovah Witnesses who took the symbolic number of 144,000 in the Bible and applied it literally to their membership, but then had to introduce an ‘Associate Membership’ when their numbers exceeded the quota.
Sat 5th Oct – Too Small a God
More and more I find that the Catholic God that I grew up with has become far too small for the God that I now know and believe in. Our Catholic God was so small that of all his creation, since the dawn of humanity, only a small bunch of Catholics were going to end up being with him and all the rest was a waste of time and space. Worse still all the Non-Catholics were going to hell. Here let’s be real and ask, how could we ever have believed such nonsense, that salvation was reserved for a minute fraction of the entire human population, and even out of them, there would be lots who wouldn’t make it, either because they ate meat on Friday or missed Mass on a Sunday!
Sunday 6th Oct – How Adult am I?
Adulthood is something that can be defined in so many different ways. Society grants us legal status at eighteen and this becoming legal leads many young people to believe that they have arrived. Adulthood is a watershed moment in our lives when we believe we have grown up. We measure it in terms of our ability to think more for ourselves, with being more independent and with being legally responsible for our actions. It’s also supposed to be the time when our lives are more stable, when we have greater control of our emotions and when we can be more objective about seeing things as they really are. To truly be an adult is to have given up childish ways. Or at least that’s the theory.
On a few occasions Christ spoke of the need to become childlike in order to enter into Kingdom living and he was not talking about the afterlife. There’s a world of a difference between being childish and becoming childlike. Where we carry deep wounds and unresolved issues from our early years, it doesn’t take much to trigger a reaction where we re-enact an earlier drama and experience the emotions that we buried back there but are now alive and well in the present. Jealousy is one of the most destructive emotions that emanates from childhood. It can go back to an early absence of love and a subsequent belief that there’s not enough love to go round. Jealousy is like a monster that devours love under the pretext of keeping it alive. Similarly with envy, that tendency to compare ourselves with others, is usually rooted in some form of childhood comparisons.
The assumption that when we reach a particular age we put away childish ways should not be made too quickly. The legal age is no determinant of adulthood. Many never grow up and hold on to childish ways for a lifetime. One woman said to her friend that when she got married she was duped. She thought she was getting married to her husband while in fact she was only fostering him; she had taken over where his mother had left off. After just six months he began to call her Mam and then she knew she was in trouble! Sometimes it’s as if the child just puts on adult clothes and then as the old saying goes ‘the main difference between men and boys is the price of their toys’.
For so many, infant whining just gives way to a more sophisticated form of complaining. Some even become serial complainers. A stubborn child can so easily become an adult who is set in his ways. A needy little child often becomes a needy adult who wants to be taken care of and then spends their time wondering why others keep their distance. Even the wild impulses of youth may not dissipate but take the form of addictions later in life.
One of the things St Paul does in his letter to the Corinthians is to make a close connection between love and being an adult. Perhaps the very best ways we can examine how adult we have become, and to what extent we have given up childish ways, is to reflect on the quality of our love. One of the finest statements about adult love ever written was by St Paul when he wrote:
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. What he says in just a few lines is more than a mouthful and a great way to measure just how adult we really are.
It is childish to blame others for how we feel. It is adult to take responsibility.
It is childish to be jealous and possessive. Adult love always gives freedom.
It is childish to be bitter and resentful. It is adult to practice forgiveness.
It is childish not to talk to someone. It is adult to want to sort things out.
It is childish to want to be right. It is adult to want to be in relationship.
It is childish to complain about what you don’t have. It is adult to be grateful.
It is childish to focus on getting. It is adult to focus on what I can give.
So how adult am I really?
Mon 7th Oct – My Way or the Highway!
The curse of all religions has been self-righteousness. This is the belief that my way is the only way to come to God and it is this notion that has caused so much death and destruction that countless numbers have run in the opposite direction. In a very real way we badly need to allow our religious beliefs to catch up with our 21st century awareness. For far too long we held this concept of God as being ‘only for us’. Because of this thousands of lives have been lost and countless people have been martyred for not accepting and practicing the ‘true’ faith. We badly need to expand our concept of God making the Divine Being large enough to reach by any route. Suppose any of us had been born into another faith culture should that have left us at a disadvantage in having a relationship with God? Surely a belief like that doesn’t do justice to a loving God.