Faith transcends beliefs, even mythical beliefs. God transcends the God or gods or beliefs, doctrines, ceremonies. Catholic traditionalists seem to want a cultic, ritualistic God, and they want a God who can be defined, or at least presented, in unchanging, fixed dogmas and doctrines. Traditionalists want to “worship” their imagined God and to the extent possible to live in a cocoon that protects their minds and hearts from contacting reality. Finding the world, the country, the society, the church as they are now unacceptable to them, they desire to change the church into a cocoon of their own making, to protect themselves from unpleasant and ever-changing reality. They do not want or tolerate change. They seek not only to stop history, to stop change, but even to reverse time and return to an imagined time of unthreatening safety, in which they can feel isolated from corruption and “worldliness.” The traditionalistic Catholic seeks to escape from reality into an imagined Utopian dream, a kind of liturgical nirvana. By praying in Latin, their minds are left free not to be confronted by the word, and they can imagine that they are rooted in the Catholic past. (Or they are free to pray the rosary during “Father’s Mass,” as so many did in the not-so-distant past.) These traditionalists do not know, do not understand, that the roots of Catholicism were not Latin, nor primarily liturgical ceremonies, nor doctrines, but concrete experiences of reality.
It is not the truth of reality, nor the truth of the God beyond human imaginings, that traditionalists are seeking. They seek the comfortable and pinned-down deity of doctrine and ritualistic formality. They believe that the dogmas and doctrines are “objective,” and show little awareness that the truth in the Catholic teaching arose from the truth of genuine spiritual experiences by men and women open to reality and to the unknown God, not entrapped in the doctrinal formulations of the past. Stephen, the first Christian martyr after Jesus, was stoned to death for saying, according to the evangelist Luke, “God does not dwell in buildings made of stone but in hearts of human flesh.” Those who could not tolerate such a rejection of the fixed, familiar, old, and safe ways chose to silence Stephen by death. It is ironic and unfortunate that these present-day successors to the Jerusalem Temple cult of the first century want more “traditional worship,” and are also divorcing themselves from the nourishing truth of experience. As with the Temple cultists who rejected Jesus and stoned Stephen, these traditionalists do not want contact with the living God unless it comes in a way and measure acceptable, predictable, and controllable. In reality, their faith is insufficiently weak for the adventure of faith. They cling to beliefs rather than risk themselves by faith. Rather than swim in the ocean, they seek to build sand castles on the seashore: sandcastles with high neo-Gothic altars attended by plasticized priests wearing pretty and expensive vestments. And of course gold vessels on the high altar.
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The truth of reality lies not in doctrines, formulations, or rituals, but in real experiences by real human beings living in the present under and in the Divine. All doctrinal formulations, all rituals, are secondary at best. Reality lies open to spirits that are open, and God presents himself to those living in the present, here and now, demanding nothing, not seeking to change anything, receiving what the God has to offer here and now.
That our world, our country, our society, our church, and we ourselves display real problems is evident to anyone with eyes to see. The solution is not in escapism of one type or another, not in political or liturgical tampering, not in “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” to borrow a popular cliche. What is needed in the Catholic church, in the Christian churches, is not a withdrawal into an imagined past nor into credalism, but a Spirit-guided movement into greater contact with God and with reality. The churches of self-professed disciples of Jesus Christ need to be open to the full range of truth as it has been manifested in history. How can a community call itself “universal” if it is not genuinely open to all truth? The churches need members who live in accord with the Nous of Plato, with the dhamma of the Buddha, with the Tao of Lao Tsu, with knowledge gained through natural sciences, with the whole range of truth as it has become known in history. The churches need to be opened up, not closed off; they need to be attuned to a far richer world than they have yet known. And this openness is not achieved by changing doctrines or rituals, but through charity, study, and contemplative prayer.
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When a storm blows, little men scurry about, seeking the hut they had found in the ravine when they were children, or when their grandparents were children. “My goodness,” they cry, “so much wind, so much dust, who can endure it?” Storms come, winds blow, leaves fall, rain pours down, and the earth is prepared for growth tomorrow. By faith one ventures forth, not knowing where one will end up, or how bloodied one may become in the process, but trusting that “all will be well.” By a lack of faith, by the artifice of mere opinions and beliefs, fearful people shrink back.
“Christ emptied himself.” So must we empty ourselves of ego to become real human beings. So must the churches empty themselves of dreams, static conceptions, addictions, romanticized visions of the past, or we will become empty of humanity, empty of anyone actually attending.
