City Of God 24

It is baffling that after two thousand years of almost never getting it right, the Roman Catholic Church still insists that they are God's representative on earth. How did an already flawed organization get to such heights of denial? There are many answers to this question, but I think it also alludes to the huge power of human denial. I am a believer. Not in the church, but in God. I don't simply believe in God, but I presume to put my trust in him, not as though he is a living reality, not because God is a living reality, but because God is the living reality. God is not only living and not only real. God is life. God is reality. Stephen Hawking had it wrong. He tried to determine the nonexistence of God by presuming that God is simply another alleged entity or thing whose existence can be determined or not by empirical evidence. He could not have had it more wrong. We cannot see, or gauge or judge God's existence like he's a planetary or star system simply because God is so much bigger and so much more than that, so much more present, so alive and present in the very heart and nucleus of each particle of existence, life, matter and energy, and this makes us so much a part of him, that we cannot see or judge him empirically. We don't have the faculty for this. We are too limited. I suppose the church has played a role in making these things real for me, not really the Catholic but whichever church I happened to be connected with at the time. and certainly through the words and writings and lives of various theologians, thinkers, saints and activists in the church. But I still never could see a human organization as being God's sole representative, nor necessarily as being God's representative at all. Human institutions are by their very existence and fiat, flawed. And even though God makes himself real in our human flaws and weakness, this should never be used as an excuse to cover for the churches, many crimes, historical and current, against persons. On the other hand, I love the presence of an open church building, especially when I'm visiting a foreign country. For example, throughout Latin America, or where I have visited in Latin America, which certainly isn't everywhere. I am thinking of such cities as Mexico City, Coyoacan, San Angel, Puebla, San Cristobal de las Casas, all in Mexico; San Jose, Costa Rica, and Bogota, Colombia. All very Roman Catholic countries. But the churches were like places of beautiful and quiet refuge. Where one could sit, or kneel in silence, surrounded by beauty and history, but also breathing in an atmosphere soaked in the tears, prayers and music of centuries of worship and presence. This visible presence in no way apologizes for the Crusades, the Inquisition, the raping of children. I think that even if the church has failed, and failed so miserably at her purported divine mandate, simply that there are people in the institution who are faithful, who do love, who are dedicated, then this perhaps helps compensate for her many crimes. But God needs no earthly representative, at least not in the form of an institution, but perhaps through individuals who love and care enough to make him real in their lives. I remember when one pastor, whose teaching I sat under in my teenage years, said in a sermon that a Christian is someone who loves. I would imagine there are also Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and perhaps even the occasional atheist who loves. Does this makes them Christian? Well, that depends on what you mean by the word Christian. If you take it in its most fundamental (not fundamentalist) meaning, Christian simply means to be like Christ. Jesus Christ, if nothing else, loved, and his life was marked and defined by love, the very love that nailed him to the cross. If you love, like Christ, you will be like Christ. Purely and simply. You might still be a Jew, Buddhist, Muslim (preferably a Sufi) or even an atheist, but if you love, then you have become like Christ, and in a sense you have become to others Christ, or the face or presence of Christ. Which makes you, in the most de facto sense, a Christian. And you might never on your earthly pilgrimage profess a belief in him. But that's okay. We will still meet him together, on the other side, in the New Jerusalem, and we will be walking and dancing together on the streets of the City of God, that very city that begins and is, here and now, bonding us together in love, whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not.