Chemotherapy for the Soul

When I first converted to Catholicism I carried with me much Lutheran baggage. I professed that the Catholic Church held the fullness of the truth, yet, like so many Catholics today believed that it was wrong on some very important points. I let my pride guide my mind as I set forth to prove where and why the Church was wrong.

My biggest beef was in the way the Church distributed communion. She freely shared the word of God with anyone who would listen but she reserved the body of God to a select few who met a certain criteria. The Church teaches that you have to be in a state of grace to receive communion. Aren’t sinners the ones who really needed the Lord the most? Didn’t Jesus himself say that the healthy are in no need of a doctor and he came to heal the sick?

My logic was sound. Sound logic is what made people like Luther and Calvin so popular during the reformation. As sound as my logic sounded to me at the time it was never the less still wrong. The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Catholic faith. The Catholic faith begins with the Eucharist, is centered in it, and ends with it. To question the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist is to question the very foundation of the faith. Had I really converted or was I just another Catholic in name only?

If we liken mortal sin to a cancer that destroys a soul then we need a very powerful chemo to kill the cancer. The Eucharist is not that chemo. The Eucharist does not remove the stain of mortal sin from a person’s soul. The Church does possess the chemo that destroys the cancer. It is the most powerful type of chemo that can destroy even the most aggressive and deadly cancer. This chemo is called the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Jesus gave the Church the authority to forgive sin. Jesus gave the Church the medicine to heal those dying from the cancer that devours souls. Forgiveness is the strongest medicine known to man. It is the antidote to the poison we let into our lives.

So if the Eucharist is not a medicine what is it? The Eucharist is the ultimate super vitamin. It takes a healthy body to the next level. The Eucharist is the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus. When we take the Eucharist into our bodies we are forming a very personal and intimate relationship with him. He lives in us and he dwells in us. If we release our will to his we become one. So why can’t a person receive the Lord at this level unless they are in a state of grace? Why does the Church keep Christ from those who do not believe this simple truth?

Sometimes people are so sick, their bodies so weak, that the cure would kill them. Before we can treat the cancer we have to treat the person to get them strong enough to survive the cure for the cancer. To a healthy body the Eucharist is a super vitamin that will bring the person to the closest state of perfection they can obtain on this side of heaven. To a sick person the Eucharist can be deadly. Saint Paul tells us very clearly that those to receive the Eucharist unworthily bring death upon themselves. When a sinner, who knows that they have committed grave sin, thumbs their nose at the Church and takes the Eucharist anyway they do so at the risk of serious peril.

The Church knows and understands this and that is why communion is restricted to those who hold this understanding of what the Eucharist is and who, to the best of their knowledge, are in a state of grace. The Church has the authority granted to her by Jesus to heal the disease with the Sacrament of Reconciliation and then strengthen body and soul with the Sacrament of Holy Eucharist. These “medicines” have to be administered in the correct order to be affective. One without the other or administered in the wrong order can be deadly.

There is one less bag I will be carrying through this life. Fortunately for me it was also the heaviest.

δοῦλος

This is the Greek word – doulos. It is most often translated in Holy Scripture as servant. This is the lesser of its two meanings. A better translation of doulos is slave. A slave is;

“one who gives himself up to another's will those whose service is used by Christ in extending and advancing his cause among men.”

Or

                “Devoted to another to the disregard of one's own interests.”

This word is translated as servant in scripture because the modern understanding of slave has been colored by the use of racial slavery in the beginning of this great nation. Racial slavery is a great evil we all should oppose. It has nothing to do with “giving up one’s self” or “devoting to another”. It is all about a stronger will devouring a weaker will. There is nothing good about devouring, even when it is about a plate of barbeque ribs. Nothing should ever be devoured.

But slavery in and of itself is not a bad thing. There are different kinds of slavery and they all have a place in this world.

When I was in the military I was an indentured servant. An indentured servant is one who signs a contract, also known as an indenture or covenant, in which they agree to work for a certain amount of time in exchange for something. I swore an oath to serve no less than eight years in exchange for the benefits I received. The collateral for this oath was my life, which I could be ordered to give up if it were required. I was no longer my own. I was G.I. – Government Issue. I could be punished for something as simple as getting a tattoo because it was considered defacing government property.

Indentured servants were common in the time of Jesus. It was a noble profession. Indentured servants were often well taken care of and some of them were paid enough that they could afford to have their own slaves. Another form of indentured servant are those who have sold themselves into slavery to pay off a debit they have incurred.

I am doulos, in the sense of both definitions above. My life is not my own but of the one who lives in me. At my baptism I invited Jesus into my life. God adopted me as his child. Each time I receive the Eucharist I recommit myself to Jesus. I take the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus into myself. I ask him to live and dwell within me and to make the light of his love push out all darkness within me. I give myself up to his will for his service in bringing him to those in darkness and to bring those in darkness closer to him. Your will, not mine, be done. Although I am imperfect and fail at this task it is what I desire and the goal I try to live to each and every day.

I am also doulos because I have devoted myself to another to the disregard of my own interest.  This should be obvious. I am a husband and a father. My life is not mine to live as I will because it was given up for the welfare of my wife. My main purpose in this life is to get her into heaven. When I became a father that extended to my children as well. Everything I do should be directed to this end, even if that means I do not make it with them. I often think of a scene from The Avengers. Ironman saves New York City by guiding a nuclear missile into space. He cannot go with it and ultimately falls back to earth, seemingly to his death. If my family were that missile and space were heaven I will have fulfilled my purpose if I guide them there, even if I don’t make it with them. One of my prayers before receiving the Eucharist is that God allow me to bare the punishment for the sins of my family so they can enter into his Kingdom at the end of their time on earth. If that means they make it to heaven and I don’t I am ok with that. What loving person wouldn’t take on to themselves the suffering of a spouse or child if they had the ability to do so? That is what it means to be devoted to another to the disregard of one’s own interests. It is what I would do for them and it is what Jesus did for me.

It is also what he did for you.

Are you doulos?

Time for a Real Solution

In the wake of yet another tragic act of violence there has been the usual knee jerk reaction calling for more laws and more restrictions, more bans and more loss of freedoms concerning guns. The gun is to blame for the killing in Las Vegas. If we only had one more law this could have been avoided.

Chicago has the strictest gun control in this nation. Some of their laws even have been ruled as being unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States. The types of guns people use in these senseless acts are illegal altogether in Chicago. On paper, Chicago should be the safest place in this country. Yet, every year Chicago leads the nation in the numbers of murders and the numbers of people who are shot. Their crime is now spilling over to neighboring communities and they too are seeing a record number of murders. Obviously more legislation is not the answer to the problem.

Perhaps the solution is more incarceration. Maybe if we jail more criminals and keep them there longer these sorts of things wouldn’t happen. The United States also leads the world in the number of people we incarcerate. It does not appear that building more jails and filling them with the unruly is the solution either. So what is the solution? Where do we start?

Society is broken. We have lost sight of what is good and true. We hold lies and impossibilities in higher regard. For example, we have institutions full of people we have locked away simply because they believe themselves to be something they are not. Mr. Jones thinks he is Abraham Lincoln so we have to institutionalize him for his own good and for the protection of the population. Yet, Bruce Jenner is heralded as a hero, given his own TV show, and made woman of the year for becoming Caitlyn. Mr. Jones is a danger, Bruce is a hero. Both believe themselves to be something they can never truly be.

Our society has gone completely off the rails. We idolize decadence and debauchery. We kill our children and call it a choice. We extend rights to places they were never intended to exist and take the same rights away from those they are intended to protect. We live in an age where everything perverse is permissible and everything good is unfathomable. Nothing is forgiven.

If we want to rebuild this society to the greatness it once was we will have to begin by restoring our foundation. It makes no sense to fix a leaky roof when the crumbling foundation is about to bring the entire building crashing down. Contrary to popular belief, the foundation of every society is the family, not the individual. As goes the family so goes the society. It should come as no surprise to anyone that our society is in shambles. We have been chipping away at the family for over fifty years now.

The women’s liberation movement started the ball rolling by neutering the male. We have never had a feminist movement in this country. What we have had is an attempt to masculinize femininity. There has been a highly successful campaign to get women to believe that the only way they can be considered equal to a man is if they can say and do everything a man does. They try to shame women who embrace their maternal side to stay home and raise the next generation. We created the pill so women can have sex like men, without fear of getting pregnant, and then made abortion legal so they can kill the unwanted if they still did. These two things combined have done more to destroy our country than any enemy we have ever faced on the battlefield.

The “empowering” of women disenfranchised the men. There is no job a woman can’t do better than a man, including being a father. With the male’s role severely reduced in society his role as father was also reduced. Fathers took a far backseat in contributing to the upbringing of their children. God made us male and female and bestowed upon us different characteristics. Both father and mother are vital to raising a well balanced child.

The glue that holds a family together is the marriage of the father and mother. This too has been under merciless attack for decades. Marriage began as solely a religious institution but state governments quickly got involved because of the importance of marriage and the family in the structure of society. Government used to recognize this and support the traditional marriage. We no longer consider traditional marriage as being the primary building block that forms the cornerstone of society. Marriage is now viewed as an individual right, not important to society. Marriage has gone from a life-long covenant to a dissoluble contract. The family has paid a great price for it. Blended families are now the norm. Fatherless families are not that far behind. The statistics of what happens to the children of fatherless families are staggering. It is rare for good things to come from a family without a father as its head.

If we want to rebuild our society the first thing that has to happen is that fathers have to step up and do the job correctly. We have to restore the value of men and those men have to be the strong examples their children crave.

We have to realize that marriage isn’t about love or what two consenting adults want to do to each other. Marriage is about procreating the next generation and to provide stable unity for those children to grow, thrive, and be loved in. Marriage is a vocation. It is not a right. A vocation is a calling from God. Not everyone is called to be married and no one is called to be in a nontraditional marriage. That is the devil at work in our lives.

With fathers being fathers and mothers being mothers who are committed in a life-long traditional marriage we can raise a well adjusted next generation who can start to right the ship. Until we fix our broken foundation we will just continue the slide into moral decay. The pendulum can only swing so far before it starts swinging the other way. I hope that we are almost at full amplitude.