Welcome back, y’all. Sorry
for pooping out on you last week, I was traveling all over the “Land of
Enchantment” (New Mexico) for my job and didn’t have time to post anything. This
week was filled with traveling to 17 different Indian reservations, all with a
different pharmacy setup. The amazing thing I learned was that all of the
reservations had their own language. Even different Pueblo Indian reservations
had their own distinct native tongue, making it possible for hundreds of
languages to exist all in the confines of one American state. At each site we
performed a controlled substance inventory and review on policies and
procedures, so a LOT of administrative work, but it was really helpful. Thanks
to my experiences this week, God blessed me with some great reflections on
something that’s been on my heart since I’ve moved out here. Get your thinking
caps and waders on, people, it’s about to get deep.
I have a question for
everyone reading this: Do you love God?.......
No, I mean, do. You. love. GOD?
Exhibit
1:
Do you think of him often
and want to be around him constantly? Do you arrange your day so that you can
catch up? And I don't mean monologue-ing, but dialoguing. Do you go to him for
counsel with life problems? Do people get annoyed listening to you go on and on
about "You won't believe what God did the other day" or sometimes
question, because of the realness you speak of him with, if you are really
talking about a person and they just misunderstood you? Do you frequently make
little gestures throughout the day that you know only He would see and smile
about? Is God that person you can't wait to introduce your friends to at a
party?
Exhibit
2:
Or is God a name-dropper for
you, a big wig you’ve maybe shaken the hand of but know nothing about? Is He
that “friend” who asks to meet your other friends and you, being embarrassed of
Him, say you'll get back to Him on that but with no real intention to? Is God
your tagline you use as a reminder to everyone that you're
"Christian"? In short, do you love God, the person, or the idea
of God?
Why am I asking, you ask?
Because I want to know of you, and of myself, do we at all times view God as
a person, who has feelings, desires, and the capability to live and
interact with us; in other words, does God have our full permission to live
through us as a being capable of dynamic relationship? Or do we prohibit
God from becoming too personal for fear of
unpredictability and pain that comes with change?
“Well who says they can tell
me how I view God? Maybe to me God IS
an idea or an indifferent deity who wants nothing to do with his creation anymore,
who can tell me I’m wrong?” mmmmm, God can, you relativist! Just ask the second
person of the trinity who became the physical presence of God, purposefully
sent to Earth to hold us by the hand and teach us how to be in RELATIONSHIP
with God. Are you gonna deny that he was a person?
Thanks to that little gift
we call “free will”, however, God will not impose himself on our lives any more
than we allow him to. Just as the fate of an infant’s life in today’s culture
of death (the abortion era) rests in the hands of its parents, we can start to
view allowing God to LIVE, or to act
as a person, within our lives in the pro-life/pro-choice framework.
Let’s
first define a term… to “live”. For my purposes here, to “live” is to have
interests, the ability to make choices, and to freely act on those interests causing an impact on one’s
surroundings, including the way others react and make decisions. For example,
if I am to live, I have the freedom to make choices that may influence the
lives of those around me and, down the road, influence their own choices. I
argue that God should have that same ability to work freely through us and
impact our own choices.
Now
let’s apply the fundamentals of the pro-life/pro-choice struggle to decide if we
are pro-life for God (i.e. complete allowance for him to live as a person among
us) or pro-choice treating Him as something with no life to begin with (e.g. an
idea). The pro-choice agenda illustrates this idea of prohibiting God from
existing as a person in our lives beautifully because the pro-choice movement
is nothing more than a refusal to relinquish power and allow unpredictability
into our lives. As Christians, I think we naturally tend to classify ourselves
as “pro-life” in this sense.
But should we?
Supporters
of the pro-choice movement recently claimed that infanticide, or they would
prefer it be called “after-birth abortion",
One more clarification…
Person
≠ Human
Person
= Being
Well, how am I
using the word “moral” here and who is the entity being spoken of? God is the
entity in this example. Using “moral” I mean the difference of right and wrong,
good and evil, truth and untruth. Well, In reference to what? In what the right
way to view God is (i.e. a person, not an idea). Some would say that this
argument has nothing moral about it, that it’s just a subjective matter of opinion,
that no one can tell you how to view God (a theoretical pro-choice relativism).
But I say, and
you can take it or leave it (but please take it), it does matter morally to God to rightly, goodly, and
truthfully view Him as a person and not as an idea. It’s not simply because his
feelings will get hurt if we don’t accept him (the subjective view). Remember,
God doesn’t need us, but God’s very being prohibits him from simply remaining
an abstract, high-in-the-sky idea that we can sit around the campfire singing
kumbaya about. He is “being” himself, the source of life that our fallen souls need for survival into eternity and to
act in a pro-choice manner and keep God as an abstract idea denies others
around us the life-giving relationship that they deserve since God’s “person”
resides and acts through us, his body, but only, remember, by our permission. We
were created in a very specific manner that requires intimate relationship for
salvation, so only allowing God to exist as an idea and not a person in and
among us would be immoral (thus constituting moral status).
So a
“pro-choicer” in this example would be someone who only allows God into his
life as an idea, or ideal, because they see no moral implication as to how God
is viewed (therefore, not allowing God’s gift of life to be born). A
“pro-lifer” would allow God in their lives as a person because they recognize
this as being the only way for salvation to be born to others and not doing so denies
a moral good to others around them (thus having moral status and being immoral
to “deny life” to the person of God).
So now the
question that begs to be asked of you is this: Are you pro-life or pro-choice?
Now is the point
where all the self-proclaimed choir members of the church that I’ve been
preaching to for the last page and a half stand and shout…
The greasy,
slimy, disgusting connotation that “pro-choice” has among Christians and those
of like-mindedness is almost enough to make someone reading this laugh out loud
when they read what I’m about to suggest: I bet you are pro-choice without even
knowing it. Seriously! Because if you aren’t a saint yet, you are pro-choice
about God and don’t fully love God the person, the reality of God, but rather
still love the idea of God. In some ways, you are exhibit 2 (see above). Go
ahead, throw the rotten tomatoes at me, but that’s not going to help the
repulsive feeling you have about justly being called pro-choice. Remember what
I’m meaning here…
If you are Pro-life
(a.k.a. a saint) = You welcome a permanent residence of God, the person, in
your life for the good of others.
If you are Pro-Choice
(a.k.a. 99.99999999999999999999% of all Christians) = you do NOT permit His
permanent residence in your life as a person.
I love this comparison of
how we view God because it works to dramatize a point that for Christians is seldom
realized but so desperately needs to be if we are going to see what a life with
God on this Earth truly looks like! That point being that how we view God is
a matter of life and death to our own spiritual life. As always, my
rambling at the beginning of every blog serves a purpose, and the purpose of
this one, surprisingly, is not just to give everyone a headache. It’s to
shamefully but humbly declare this: I am a pro-choice lover of God.
Well let’s think about what
it means to be pro-life for God. Permanent residence, free reign to impact his
surroundings with his actions, not caged in like an animal or compartmentalized
like a business plan, treated as though and interacted with as another one of
us. This must be true for God because he has given us earthly human
relationships and his son to help us come to understand His nature. Just as he
gave each of us an earthly family to understand the dynamics of the divine
family of the trinity. I’m not trying to make God into a human like us, I’m
trying to express he wants us to be as intimate and real with Him as we are
with our brother, or our best friend, because if we don’t, then we are
pro-choice, meaning we don’t recognize God as a person and don’t interact with
him as such.
Now you’re probably
wondering, “Why are you being so dramatic about this point, Ethan? Haven’t you
taken it a little too far this time to call us pro-choicers?” Perhaps, but I
don’t think so. If you ask yourself if you truly desire the fullness of God all
the time and find that there are times when you hesitate, you set aside God,
then my suggestion of you being pro-choice is true. Until we get over our
hesitations, God cannot remain in us because we don’t truly desire life, hence the
“pro-choice” label.
Le’me explain what parts of
me remain pro-choice, and maybe help illumine some part of your own life that
is similar…
Fresh Off the Reservation:
Since moving out to Colorado
and far removed from my normal daily life, at times I find myself craving my
regular mass, regular friends, regular conversations despite all of the
opportunities to open myself to a vastness of new experiences. I admit part of
it may be a little home-sickness, but I think it’s deeper than that. Being
home-sick happens most often for children who have no concept of the world’s
vastness and see their home as their only safe-haven. And let’s face it, as
adults, especially ones that believe in an ever-present God, we’re mature
enough to know that home-sickness isn’t reality, but rather a delusional perception
of our present situation. But if these cravings aren’t a result of
home-sickness, what are they?
I think it’s a
misunderstanding of who God is in our lives. How often do we fall into a
routine of who we hang out with, what prayers we pray, how we approach the
topic of God, how we make new friends? None of this is bad, but I have to ask,
when we experience “growth” from that, are we growing more in love with God or
the comfort that those familiarities offer us? And if it’s the comfort, how
does this affect our ability to perceive the fullness of who God is? I would
argue that if it’s the comfort we are growing to love rather than God, then we
are reducing God to something less than he is, we are trying to
compartmentalize him, trap him into this cookie-cutter idea that we think God should be. We struggle to understand God’s
presence in things that don’t fit our model of God and at times reject Him
because of that. That temptation to reject the unknown, I think, is the feeling
I get when faced with a different setting for mass, or new people to get to
know, or just new approaches to my own prayer life. There’s something internal
saying that “This isn’t what you know God to be, return to what you know.” In
essence, we become pro-choice, not treating God as a dynamic person who
changes, interacts, or impacts His surroundings but rather as an ideal that we
selfishly desire to remain as we perceive Him. This is also the work of Satan.
He doesn’t want us to perceive the vastness of God because he knows that such a
realization would take away his ability to isolate us. If he succeeds, our
souls will die because they fail to be fed spiritually from the idol of comfort.
It will be impossible for us
to fully love God as the person that He is until we cut ties with our
attachments. COMPLETELY cut ties! He can’t reside in our hearts if it already holds
a lie about God that we accept above His true self. That is why a saint is
pro-life; everything, and I mean EVERYTHING (material and spiritual) they have
is loss, the only thing they cling to is the fullness of God. God isn’t limited
to the feeling you get after the choir sings your favorite hymn during
communion, He’s not just that good buddy you share conversation with at Charlie
Hooper’s after mass on a Wednesday night, and He’s not confined to the corner
of your bedroom set up for morning prayer, So stop ignoring Him in every other
place that He can be found!! Stop being pro-choice for God, be pro-LIFE (I am,
of course, telling myself this as much as I am you, so please don’t take
offense)! After all, God cannot change who he is, which in reality, is a
person. We can only accept or reject it, and if we ignorantly reject it by
trying to confine God to items or situations, we’re no better than the ignorant
pro-choice advocate in the abortion arena who campaigns against a “war on women”
whilst spitting on the soldiers fighting for her own protection, a proverbial Jane
Fonda of the pro-choice world!
Two saints I would like to
quote in closing that I think will bring my point home are JoseMaría Escrivá
and Augustine of Hippo:
“Don’t have a ‘small town’
outlook. Enlarge your heart until it becomes universal-‘catholic’. Don’t fly
like a barnyard hen when you can soar like an eagle.” – Escrivá
“Since, then, you fill the
heaven and earth, do they contain you? Or, do you fill and overflow them,
because they cannot contain you? and where do you pour out what remains of you
after heaven and earth are full? Or, indeed, is there no need that you, who
contain all things, should be contained by any, since those things which you do
fill you fill by containing them? For the vessels which you do fill do not
confine you. since even if they were broken, you would not be poured out.” –
Augustine
God bless!
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