Posted on 01/27/2008 7:56:14 PM PST by Manfred the Wonder Dawg
***Salmon are Canadian...***
And Scottish and Irish and English; I don’t know about the Welsh (but then who does?).
***Do you even OWN a tea pot ??????
And NO dumb lemon slices...
Milk and sugar
In the States, 2% milk works best***
We currently have two. Our favourite is our Brown Betty. I agree with the lemon but think that a higher fat content milk is better.
I DO think that the Catholic Church (kindly note the absence of “Roman”) is the royal road, so to speak. And I certainly think that those whose proselytizing includes a heavy dose of “Ho of Bab’lon” might need to do a gut-check or something. Using untruths to sell the truth is parlous at best.
But if somebody tells me that He's invited the Lord into his life and has repented of his sin and all that, I'm going to rejoice for and with him.
THEN I'll tell him that Roger Williams is the “Ho of Rhode Island.”
Okay, I didn't mean the last part. I'll just point out the polyester double-knit and let him draw his own conclusions.
(And I'd try to distract him when a priest came in with a tacky gold lame vestment -- or some tie-dyed monstrosity.) Seriously, I think sheep-stealing is not likely to bring peace. I know a fluttery Little Old Catholic Lady who didn't take up a personal relationship (or wasn't granted the consolation of a personal relationship) with IHS until rather late in life, and I would say that all here sort of "ruled-based" religiosity has only strengthened that turn in her life. Consequently, I have become even more patient with the tempo of other people's dances, and am not going to conclude too quickly that just because they haven't done this one thing or experienced this one experience that they're wasting their time.
HOWEVER I do think that the vulnerability of some of the Catholic sheep to other missionaries should be taken as a wake-up call to some Catholic preachers. The Gospel always makes a fine sermon, IMHO.
And God said: Let there be acetylsalicylic (sp?)(the spell-check angel was taking the day off) acid, and let it bring forth a combination of ingredients, not unlike a doctor’s prescription, and let there be Alka-Selzer. And there was plop-plop and there was fizz-fizz, and there was great relief in the land, and nobody could quite remember the evening but the morning was just another day. And God said, “It’ll do. Next time remember how bad you felt.”
***To rejoice in another’s embrace of heresy would be un-Orthodox in the extreme, MD. I am surprised.***
As am I, Kolo. What gives, MD?
IMHO: For An Orthodox or Catholic Xtian who knew his religion to apostasize is a calamity and mortal sin. His soul is in very grave peril.
I do not understand the phenomenon I'm about to relate, but I think it's undeniable:
My Orthodox Acquaintance (hereinafter MOA) is what you might call OINO - no not a wino, "Orthodox in name only." He sees nothing wrong with worshiping at the Episcopal Church and receiving the sacraments there. He knows, but it seems only in an academic - with a slight tinge of ethnic pride - way some of his religious background. MOA and his wife do not say "grace" over meals or prayers at home, they don't talk about the Faith. They both are good, conscientious folks, she's Episcopalian, who have no idea that God loves them enough to die for them. I once inflicted upon them one of my Xtian panegyrics and they both said it was "beautiful", but I could just tell that they thought it was kind of like Spiritual Disneyland -- beautiful, entertaining, provocative of nice longings and feelings, but not REAL, not THE REALEST of ALL. They didn't get that if it was beautiful it was so not because I write beautifully, but because I write clumsily about the most beautiful thing, about beauty itself
Now I would say they are currently negligently sinful (and I'd guess that the vice of despair lies beneath this.) They are not really seeking grace, not reading the Bible nor the Fathers, not deliberately following the advice in the parable of the unjust judge and nagging God.
I lay at least some of the blame for this at the feet of their pastors.
In the days of my "radio show" I made a point to end every show with "God loves you," and to structure the entire 30 minutes of yatta yatta toward making that declaration clear and developing what it means in our lives. I preached at a prominent Church near here and a number of people said that was the first time in a long time that anybody had either told a joke in the pulpit or told them that God loved them and yearned for them to love Him.
Before the Pope came down on lay preachers during Mass (and I think he was right to do so) one of my very favorite pastors, a holy and loving man, even if he is pretty much a pinko, sort of meditatively observed that Catholic homiletics tended to assume that people were "saved" while Protestant homiletics (by which, he explained, he meant mine) took the rhetorical stance that the preacher had good news to impart, news which hadn't yet been heard.
My personal "spirituality" (gag, retch, bleah) is centered on the notion that contemplation of the FACT of God's love and action coming out of that contemplation is where it's at. Part of my Dominican call is not the intellectual side of it but the evangelical.
Even in the Sheriff's office, where most of the full-timers thought I was a klutz (at least until I got into some fights) and thought the idea of a lay chaplain was stupid and just one of the Sheriff's crazy notions -- even there they responded with startled amazement when I told them, usually individually, that God loved them, right then, just as they were, and that nothing they could do could ever make Him love them more. And consequently they listened at least respectfully when I advised them that an appropriate response to that was to start praying and to go to Church and to think about their faith.
Looks like a digression -- it isn't.
The person who is susceptible, I think, this is all in my head, to sheep-stealing is the person who has not, whoever's fault it is, expected to have a personal relationship with IHS or to meet him personally, or to find him in the Most Holy Sacrament. Now being in that case may involve mortal sins, as I said above. But when someone is so empty in his personal life with Christ I don't think it's a mortal sin when he, in response to effective evangelical preaching by some of the other groups is finally brought to offer his heart to Christ.
This is NOT, I don't think, countenancing apostasy. It is patient parsing. The commitment to Christ is good, and it MAy amend all. The stepping away from the means of grace and the plene esse of ecclesia is a disaster.
But in disasters we must keep our heads. We must affirm the "coming to Jesus" and rejoice in it, while we also deplore the separation from the fullness of the Church.
It's not for nothing that Our Lord had to do with fishermen. If you throw the net wrong, the fish spook. Timing matters. And what we lay people need to do is to be ready to explain to these people how what they are talking about has been taught about in their own churches not only for millennia but for them in their time. We need to accept that it was often taught very badly or negligently. And we need to trust that even though today such and such a person is not with us before the Sacrament, God is at work with Him and He may help him understand that IHS is not the property of the other groups but is and has always been beckoning from the altar.
Pope Adrian VI in 1523 said
We freely acknowledge that God has allowed this chastisement to come upon His Church because of the sins of men and especially because of the sins of priests and prelates ... We know well that for many years much that must be regard with horror had come to pass in this Holy See: abuses in spiritual matter, transgressions against the Commandments; indeed, that everything has been perverted.I'm not minimizing (I think) the sadness and general terribleness of people leaving the Church for another group. But while we can't stop sheep-stealing, we can see that the sheep let themselves be stolen for a reason which ought to set or at least influence our agenda. We need a new commitment to evangelization, not only for the unbaptized or members of the other groups, but for those in the pew every Sunday.
Oh, and I take solace from the stories told be the Coming Home Network of people who leave the Catholic Church as a result of some religious experience but then return. So I'm not going to panic and I'm not going to condemn the good in their newfound relationship with Christ. But I will work and pray to get them back. And I don't think that's going to be accomplished if I start the conversation with, "You know, you're committing a mortal sin here ...."
OK, you're saying that's not your experience and I don't doubt you for a minute. No problem. So, it sounds like I didn't convey where I was coming from very well. I do NOT think that priests are an especially "snooty" bunch who think they are better than everyone else. :) That's not what I meant. On this "class" thing, I have only been talking on a theological basis about theological claims. If I met someday the nicest, sweetest, kindest-to-his-mudderist priest who ever lived, a true Christian, closer to God than I, and I asked him if he could have my sins forgiven, in some form I would expect him to answer in the affirmative. I am sure he would also smile and ask if he could do anything for me.
Thanks for your anecdotes about Father Ralph. That really is the first time I have ever heard of anything like that. Almost all the Catholics I know are from middle-class burbville, like me.
I don't know how, whether I can or should make your "beef" about the claims go away. It is the sort of "objective" nature of the indelible "character" of ordination that it is divorced from the personal qualities of the priest. He is more a custodian in that respect.
OK, it looks like you WERE able to decipher where I was coming from, despite my clumsiness. :) I suppose I'm just stuck on the "power" and the "worthy man" thing that is in my head. It sounds like you are saying there is not necessarily ALWAYS the wedding there that I can't help but think of. I will give what you are saying more thought.
Tell Clint I said "hey". :)
I assure you that it IS FRIENDLY fire! :)
“IMHO: For An Orthodox or Catholic Xtian who knew his religion to apostasize is a calamity and mortal sin. His soul is in very grave peril.”
I love it when you guys go all Latin on us with the “mortal sin” as opposed to “venial sin” stuff!
“My Orthodox Acquaintance (hereinafter MOA) is what you might call OINO - no not a wino, “Orthodox in name only.” He sees nothing wrong with worshiping at the Episcopal Church and receiving the sacraments there. He knows, but it seems only in an academic - with a slight tinge of ethnic pride - way some of his religious background.”
He's not at all unusual, at least here in America. For many decades there was a belief among the Orthodox here that the Episcopal Church was merely English Orthodoxy and that there was a de facto if not a de jure (though there very nearly was in the ist decade of the 20th century)communion between the Piskies and Orthodoxy. Orthodox believed and were even told by some priests that if there was no Orthodox Church nearby, they could go to the local Episcopal Church and intercommune etc. After about 1910, no bishop said that but priests did into the 1960s at least. Episcopals from bishops on down encouraged this. Virtually all of the Orthodox who did this, and I had some family members who did, honestly thought it was OK. It still goes on. We recently received a family back into the Church after a couple of decades in the Episcopal Church. They were received by Confession, recitation of the Creed and then Communion.
Your OINO friend's priests bear a heavy burden having failed this man but he too is guilty of a grave sin. In Orthodoxy, sin can be voluntary or involuntary. Your friend's is at least involuntary. The reason is because sin is a missing of the mark, Christ. There's no requirement that the miss be intentional. One assumes, I suppose, that an intentional miss is less worthy of divine mercy than unintentional, but who knows these things? Maybe it makes no difference to God. You are of course correct that going to your OINO friend and calling him an apostate will accomplish nothing. But that, MD, is not the issue. The issue is rejoicing over communion, knowing or unknowing, with heresy because it appears to be better than nothing. I submit that since we don't know the extent of God's mercy or whither the Spirit goes, outside The Church but we do know the result of communion with heresy, your position can never be acceptable for members of The Church. It stands to reason then that The Church should always oppose the efforts of ecclesial groups to gain adherents in lands where The Faith of The Church is The Faith of the nation, as in Poland or Ireland or Italy or Greece or Serbia or Russia. I do believe that any group has the right to serve its own people wherever they are so long as its teachings and practices are not contrary to the good order of society.
Well, I'm trying to get out of the habit of saying, "The sh*t hits the fan," and "mortal sin" just came to mind ...
It stands to reason then that The Church should always oppose the efforts of ecclesial groups to gain adherents in lands where The Faith of The Church is The Faith of the nation, as in Poland or Ireland or Italy or Greece or Serbia or Russia.
I'd say our best efforts, though, will be in evangelizing our own members, if one can use the word that way. (I guess we find in Paul the evangelizing of the Baptized, so I guess it's okay.)
I do believe that any group has the right to serve its own people wherever they are so long as its teachings and practices are not contrary to the good order of society.
And I think there is a kind of crypto-evangelism in the laudable enterprise of "outdoing one another in good works".
I am not commending, and do not want to be thought of as commending the groups that come into some place with the mission of converting Orthodox or Catholic Xtians. But hey're gonna do it. You see what they say about us. They think they're doing God's will and saving people from our clutches. But as I say, right now when I talk to this OINO, we have almost nothing to say to one another. (I'm remembering also a wool customer and nice dutiful Catholic who wrote me one day and told me she'd just found out that God loved her. I was kind of non-plussed, as you can imagine. I wondered what it was we'd been talking about ...) I think he'd at least be bracketing the mark if he one day gave Himself to Jesus. Then maybe he could sharpen his aim even more and find out what is in the Church he currently neglects.
Wow. Thanks. Interesting and provocative.
I have, as most of you know, the profoundest respect for +BXVI. He is, I suspect, the nearest, or almost the nearest, I will come to seeing a true Father of The Church in my lifetime. On the other hand, I think he can be wrong and here I think his long association with Protestants and his understandable and laudable desire to stem the tide of secularism in the West has got the better of him. He knows better than what he is saying here:
“It is obvious that the old category of “heresy” is no longer of any value. Heresy, for Scripture and the early Church, includes the idea of a personal decision against the unity of the Church, and heresy’s characteristic is pertinacia, the obstinacy of him who persists in his own private way. This, however, cannot be regarded as an appropriate description of the spiritual situation of the Protestant Christian.”
He is wrong on his history, if he is including the East, and as for now, he is clearly wrong about at least American Protestantism if FR is any indication at all.
There's no "h" in Greek, MD. "Αμαρτια"
It's you degenerate moderns, is what it is. But I'm interested that it is no longer given voice. We were taught to pronounce it, and from time to time I try to remember it. Do you all pronounce phi like 'f'?
There are at least two matters here that get my attention. There is, so to speak, the, ahem, hobjective fact of hmissing the, ahem, hmark.
But, heck, you're a lawyer: do you think mens rea counts up there in the heavenly courts? If, say an Orthodox Presbyterian finds himself chafing at some of the strictures of his assembly and yet submits, I think there is the objective wrong of submitting to the wrong bunch, but the virtue of prizing the opinions of those who are his leaders and, in some sense, ecclesiastical betters above his own whim.
It's hard to evaluate for me, I think partially because it was the grace of longing to do IHS will which brought me INTO devout Episcopalianicity, and then OUT of it and into the Tiber. But here, wringing my clothes out on this side of the Tiber I discern strong, though sometimes -- usually -- subtle benefits to not only the Sacraments and sacramentals, but also to "little" things like praying or reading my Bible "with" the Church.
SO I evaluate my experience so as to conclude that it was not a total loss out there in PECUSA (now TEC) but that depriving myself of bona fide sacraments was indeed a great deprivation. But I did receive graces there.(I leave aside the matter of conscience that made it impossible for me to stay in PECUSA as not strictly relevant -- because ignoring that would have been a wholly different and very disastrous sin.)
I'm going to have to go to bed soon. I asked one of the guys to do an Inquisition on my main huge verbose post and he said he might be able to get to it next week. If his opinion is helpful I'll share it.
Also I'll post on my website a little paper I wrote at the request of the guys to some Episcopalians who were struggling on that side of the Tiber. It might shed some obscurity, uh, light, I mean light.
BUT how to think about it is a poser. Maybe it's just that Baptism has more mojo then even we imagined.
Love is not an action. It is a decision.
AH HA! (he says :) I disagree that love is not an action. I work at loving my loved ones all the time. But in any case if you say it is a decision, then that clearly denotes a change. :)
FK: ***IOW, those who walked away from Jesus were not actually true followers in the first place. They were posers.***
Every one sins; everyone walks away from God at least on occasion. Does that mean that all are posers? Or can the non posers sin with impunity?
Of course not. But you demand perfection from believers and that does not happen. Your side says the only other possibility is confession to a priest. Ridiculous. True believers do sin on occasion, but never to a level that would cause the loss of salvation. Otherwise some ONE would have snatched the believer out of God's hands. Scripture forbids this. There is NO exception, explicit or implied, for the believer to snatch himself away from God. That is SOLELY anti-Biblical (not extra-Biblical) Tradition.
Where does God say that believers cannot renounce their faith?
John 10, obviously. It says NO ONE. If a believer counts as one person then he is included in NO ONE. There is no other way to read it. It is explicit and clear. It is easy to understand.
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