Going through the motions?

I've been looking through old blog posts recently after someone I work with said that he was "half-Christian". There was a time I felt utterly fulfilled by being a Baptist. So utterly fulfilled, and then, I just started going through the motions a bit I think, once we began contemporary services.

It was astounding to have such contemporary music, but it caused divisions in my church. The basic human instinct of lashing out at others came from the old to the young and the young to the old. Complaints of parking spots being taken, of being tried to be expelled from the church.

This showed our superficial surfaces that perhaps all of us didn't really realize existed. It was saddening, but not the end. Eventually the senior pastor left, and a new one was to take his place. He was an associate pastor who drove others from the church, wittingly or unwittingly I do not know, until over half the congregation had left.

Those who remained overruled a 150 or so year church constitution and changed it to give this man the position he desired which the church constitution had forbidden. This shocked me to the point of physical pain, who would dare violate 150 years of tradition like that? Who would flaunt what had been set in stone?

Then a friend goes "Guess you know how the Pope felt during the Reformation eh?" He was right, and that startled me even more. I was reacting so poorly to 150 years, what of more than a thousand? Who were we to abolish traditions?

Going on, my church has begun to excommunicate others. The letters of being taken off the church membership rolls have begun to show up in some other churches, where at least one local pastor has said, "We will never do this to those who have not attended. We are here to reach them, not to shun."

So I have gone to other churches since. A Pentecostal church where energy was raised, everything was so high as a kite, but as I took Communion, I just felt hollow inside. The same at my mom's new Methodist church.

Why would I feel so empty? Why would I not love Communion, the primary symbolic representation of all Christianity? Perhaps because that's all it is...a symbol. It is not His Presence. It is not His Flesh. It is not His Blood.

You see, with my longing for a church home, but sick of going through the motions, I'd been investigating Catholicism for years. I do mean years...my oldest post I could find was dated to the summer of 2003, around the same time I learned at a church camp, the Catholic practice of Lectio Divina.

So what so tangibly changed in this past year though? I decided to disprove Catholicism. I decided to go to Eucharistic Adoration, and to paraphrase a French Archbishop's own pennance once, look upon the Crucifix and the Eucharist and feel nothing, and effectively say in my mind, "All this you did for me, and I don't give a damn" because it was patently false.

So I went. I felt nothing, or so I thought. Then I broke into tears as I finally lifted my head to look at Him; the sight took my breath away and broke me. That night, I prayed my first rosary with no true intention, just as a sign that I had been broken. In a quiet little town accessible through only back roads prone to flooding and landslide, in a small chapel off of a small church, with only six chairs and some wall benches, I was brought low by the power of Christ for the second time in my life aside from being Saved...which in itself was a completely supernatural experience I may recount some other time...

I feel as though I'm going through the motions now. Like my "half-Christian" friend who say of himself, "I believe in God and stuff, but not all this crap about gay marriage and abortion". He goes to a local megachurch, and from what I hear, this is not too uncommon a view there.

How often do we go through the motions, realizing it or not I wonder? I know talking about Catholicism with some friends, many from that mega-church, I get, "why would people even consider it except that it's easier than being a real Christian, because it's just empty ritual" and "Well if you like to touch little boys I guess it's a good religion" and of course, "It sure is easy just to go to Mass on Saturday night so you can be drunk and sleep in with your hangover on Sunday".

Stereotypes perhaps, but I believe that if you embrace Catholicism in its fullness, it should not be easy. Christian life is sacrifice as a great Saint once said, and G.K. Chesterton was fond of saying, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried."

John Henry Cardinal Newman once said, "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant." Perhaps he was correct, because apparently in the late middle ages and early enlightenment we said that Christianity as it was then was too difficult to be tried, and to break away. Perhaps a monk who only became as such due to crying out for the aid of Mary in a thunder storm and promised her that, found things to be too difficult to understand and mixed it with a corrupted form of indulgences to split the Church so that it would be easier.

Perhaps in the end, even Luther, until tearing asunder God's Church, was just going through the motions.