RCIA Day Fifteen

So, last night was our first day back. Father P taught, and we went over (in very basic form) the Sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist.

It was, as I said, a basic overview.

A sacrament is an outward sign of an inner change. So while yes, water is required for a valid baptism, as is the formula 'In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost', the water is not in itself, 'magically washing away sin.' As circumcision is a sign of belonging under the Old Covenant, baptism is a sign under the New. It is, in a way, a circumcision of the soul. Father P mentioned that he has, in order to protect the sacrament, refused to baptise children, if he felt that the parents were baptising, not for the right reason, to bring their child into the covenant and raise them in it, but to impress visiting parents, or because it's family tradition. We'll cover, at a later time, immersion vs. sprinkling, and why the Church practices and upholds infant baptism.

The Eucharist, I feel, is at the same time very simple and complicated. Look in the Synoptic Gospels, and you find the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. You have the miracles of the multiplying of the loaves and Jesus walking on water coming before the Last Supper, giving evidence for what Jesus would be able to do in the Eucharist. He was not subject to the laws of nature, like everyone else. You have Jesus telling his followers that He will give them His flesh for food and His blood for drink, and you have them leaving Him in droves, because they believed He was teaching cannibalism. They didn't understand the true meaning of his words. Why wouldn't He stop them, if His teaching was merely metaphorical? It's very easy to look in the Gospels and see the Lord's Supper, but it takes, in my opinion, an act of faith to believe that Jesus literally meant what He was saying.

Then, of course, there was the discussion of who can take Communion in the Catholic Church. It's closed Communion, which means that you must be Catholic (or Orthodox, in extenuating circumstances), in order to receive. And a little, peripherally, about Confession, and it's role in preparing us to receive, but we didn't get into it much.

Father P likes to fancy himself a comedian. His ring tone, we learned last night, is a chicken clucking. Very cute. He likes to tell stories, both funny and otherwise. Last night, he was going through the argument, do Catholics have to go to church? Can't we just be Catholics at home? The story:

There was a married couple, both Catholic. The wife went to Mass every Sunday, and urged her husband to come with her. He declined, saying 'You go for the both of us.' Over and over. She lived her faith, and he paid lip service to it. One day, the couple is killed in a car accident. At the Pearly Gates, Saint Peter turns to the wife and says, 'You can come in for the both of you.'

CCC: How Can We Speak About God

Muslims are, well, I actually think they're offended when we speak of God using metaphor and analogy, comparing Him to His creations. They say that we must only use the names that He has given us. I've read their list of 99 names, and I still think that they are all just analogies as well. Certainly, God contains all things in their perfect form, but when we say, 'mercy', or 'love', or 'father', we're limited to the human comprehension of those terms, which doesn't come close to the perfection of these things which is contained with God. Anyway, reading the Catechism, I came across this section on how we can speak about God:

CCC 39 - 43: In defending the ability of human reason to know God, the Church is expressing her confidence in the possibility of speaking about him to all men and with all men, and therefore of dialogue with other religions, with philosophy and science, as well as with unbelievers and atheists.

Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about Him is equally so. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and thinking.

All creatures bear a certain resemblance to God, most especially man, created in the image and likeness of God. The manifold perfections of creatures - their truth, their goodness, their beauty - all reflect the infinite perfection of God. Consequently we can name God by taking His creatures' perfections as our starting point, "for from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator."

God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, imagebound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God - "the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable" - with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.

Admittedly, in speaking about God like this, our language is using human modes of expresion; nevertheless it really does attain to God Himself, though unable to express him in His infinite simplicity. Likewise, we must recall that "between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude"; and that "concerning God, we cannot grasp what He is, but only what He is not, and how other beings stand in relation to Him."

RCIA Day Fourteen

Last class of the year.

We went over Mary and the Marian dogmas and doctrines. Interesting, but nothing that I hadn't learned before. Also the mechanics of the rosary, which, again, I've been praying the rosary nearly daily for most of a year. When class starts up again in January we're getting into the sacraments, and then moral doctrine, so I hope to learn much more then.

RCIA Day Thirteen

Well, it was mostly a review, how we felt about the Rite of Acceptance/Welcome. But we did go over the liturgical year, and how it was laid out, why Easter moves on the calendar every year, why December 25th was chosen to celebrate Christmas, etc. Mostly very simple stuff, and then we're off this coming Monday for the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is a Holy Day of Obligation.

CFD Sidebar - Satan's Jealousy

This sidebar says that the Catholic belief is that angels have a will, but it is unlike human free will. We can change our minds, back and forth, again and again. Angels, apparently, once they choose, cannot change their minds.

And this makes no sense. They're using it to, apparently, explain how an angel could disobey God. Not just one angel, but thousands (millions?) of them.

I was always raised to believe that angels have no will, they have no choice but to obey God, which is why the rebellion of Satan never made any sense to me. It's always made more sense in the (and this is just my understanding of it) Jewish stance on it, which is that "Satan" is just an angel fulfilling a purpose. A guy doing his job.

After all, if there was no evil, what good would free will do us? We'd have no options? Obey God or obey God? With Satan tempting us, we can exercise the free will that God made a point of creating us with.

And even this explanation makes little sense to me. If an angel can never change his mind, then the original decision to obey God should still hold. None of the angels should have been able to make another choice.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it just doesn't make sense to me.

RCIA Day 11 & 12

Well, I've been sick and lazy.

Day 11 - Church History. How do you jam 2,000 years or history into an hour and a half? You don't. But we hit the high points, and the low points, and it was interesting. Something that I'm definately going to go into at depth as I get a chance. Interesting: There are 33 Doctors of the Church. Two of them are women. All of the Doctors of the Church are also Saints, of which there are thousands. It is much harder to become a Doctor of the Church than it is to become a Saint. Also interesting: There was a point, in the 1300's where there were 2 and then 3 popes at one time. Only one of which was valid, but it was a kerfuffle.

Day 12 - Sponsor Day. We got introduced to our sponsors and told what to expect on Sunday (today) which was the Rite of Acceptance. My sponsor is a very nice lady who I shall call Babs. She's actually been in the class the whole time, acting as assistant to the teachers.

RCIA Day 10

Who is Jesus Christ?

1. How does Jesus describe himself in the scriptures?
a. John 4:25-26 - the Messiah
b. John 6:48 - the Bread of Life
c. John 8:12 - Light of the World
d. John 10:14-15 - the Good Shepherd
e. John 11:25 - the resurrection and the life
f. John 14:6 - the way and the truth and the life
g. John 15:5 - the vine

2. Jesus Is - to me, the most important 'is' is 'Word of God'. Everything else falls under that, but the Trinity makes sense, to me, if Jesus is described as the Word of God incarnate.

3. The mission of Jesus on Earth:
a. To reveal the Father to us
b. To bring salvation for mankind:
1. redeem us from our sins
2. establish the new and everlasing covenant
c. to establish the Church on Earth for all generations

There was, clearly, more detail discussed in class, but that's the general outline.

RCIA Days Eight & Nine

Eight was the Ten Commandments. The first three comandments cover mans relationship with God, and last seven deal with mans relationship with other men. However, Jesus said that the first two comandments are the greatest, and that all the comandments are covered thusly: Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Nine was more on the gospels, and how we got the gospels that we have. Nothing that I haven't read before, Q source, yadda, everybody copied from Mark. My problem is this: the Deacon mentioned the Nag Hammadi library, in the sense that he left the impression that there was nothing contrary to cannon in the finds. Which I know is not correct. The majority, if not all, of the texts found at Nag Hammadi are gnostic, which makes them heretical. I'll bring it up in review this coming week. I would have said something this past week, but I wasn't sure, so I waited to double check myself.

RCIA Day Six - The Covenants

Took a *long* break there. Not on purpose, I've been getting ready for my vacation. Yay vacation! Which always makes me busier than I'd be if I just kept going to work. But the vacation is here now. This was the RCIA lesson from two weeks ago.

The People of God - The Covenants

The lesson was that the Jewish nation has always been, and will continue to be, the Chosen of God. Christians are a new graft into this vine.

But here's the part that I found interesting. The covenants. Vic gave us a listing of them, and we discussed. But here's the thing: the covenants started out very, very simple. Adam & Eve - don't eat of the tree of knowledge. They progressively got more and more detailed, culminating in the Mosaic laws, which are very complex and detailed. But then the New and Everlasing Covenant - love God, love others as yourself. Back to simple again. Oh, sure, there's more to it, as I'm certain that there was to the original covenant with Adam and Eve, shades of implication and detail. But the *letter* of the covenant. Simple. Why is that?

I'm thinking it has to do with God walking with man. In the beginning, God walked with Adam & Eve. They were without sin, and the closest to God anyone has ever gotten. Sin separated us from God. We could no longer get that close, so the covenants got more detailed, to reign in our newly sinful natures. But then God walked with us again. Only this time, He came to us, because we could not go to Him.

RCIA Day Four

Two 'sections' or 'lessons' tonight:

The Bible -

What it is, who wrote it (a variety of authors, most of which we do not know the identities of for certain). The Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old it the history of God's chosen people, leading up to the birth of Christ, the New Testament is the story of Christ's life and the birth of the Church. Understanding how the Bible is broken down, book, chapter, verse. That the Bible is considered the inspired Word of God, and therefore always correct.

Saint Jerome, in 360, translated all the extant texts that the Church was using into latin, creating the Latin Vulgate, which was sanctioned by the Church at Tret in 1546 as the official Sacred Scriptures.

The difference between the Catholic Bible and Protestant Bibles - Catholics have all the books. Protestants have removed seven, and use a shorter version of Esther. Also, some language has been changed.

Interpreting the Bible -

Pentatuch - "Torah", "Jewish Bible", the first five books of the Old Testament. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition and the Magesterium are the Deposit of Faith.

Major sections of the New Testament: Gospels, Acts, Epistles (Letters of Paul & Catholic Letters)

Sacred Scripture can be interpreted in four ways - literally, historically, spiritually and allegorically. One must look at the context of the scripture to understand how it is to be applied, though they all have multiple levels of complexity.