Sometimes the Church universal is its own worst enemy.  United we progress, divided we often fail miserably.  We claim to understand aspects of the Gospel and lock onto those at the cost of other parts of the Gospel. This is a very human trait, one that I share. My experiences of God’s love in Jesus focused me on Jesus as not only my Lord, but even more as my best friend. Though I worshipped God as  creator, and power beyond my understanding, I focused on the human Jesus as the fleshing out of a tender, caring, understanding Love.

The Catholic Church finally began to experience the Reformation with Vatican II. The biggest shift in focus was on the unconditional love of a God who knows the worst that goes on in our minds and hearts, but loves us just as we are, even though always calling us to grow more like Jesus. This was a huge shift away from the focus on guilt and the idea that we had to earn the love of God and were cut off from it when sinning. The person of Jesus became real for us in a relationship as a source of understanding and love even when we were attempting stupidly and futilely to dull our human pain with sinful distractions.

After my conversion and return to the Catholic Church, an elderly priest who had been a Scripture consultant for Vatican II was assigned to our small rural parish.  He began to make drastic changes such as changing the golden tabernacle that held what we had always considered the presence of God in the consecrated host to a humble wooden one and moving it from the center of the altar to an obscure corner.  This appealed to me, because I thought of it as a home for the humble spirit of Jesus, who was my best friend. I often had to walk by it and I would kind of pat the top of it like I was patting Jesus in friendship and affection. It wasn’t meant to be disrespectful, in fact it always gave me a vivid sense of the presence of  Jesus.

But in the decades following Vatican II the theology and understanding of the changes was not communicated effectively, so it wasn’t accepted even by many of the clergy. So, the Bishops would rotate the priests in parishes every seven years, changing them from old fashioned conservative priests to liberal Vatican II enthusiasts and then back again, etc.  So, the next priest then put the golden tabernacle back onto the center altar.  And seven years after that, when the new liberal priest came, I happened to be in charge of recruiting, training and making assignments of two lay readers for each of the three masses every week.  I typed them and put them in pigeon holes for them to pick up.  Well, the new priest hadn’t yet changed the tabernacle again, but decided to start changing the focus by telling the readers to NOT genuflect in front of the tabernacle when crossing to the lectern to read.  Unknown to me, he added this order to the bottom of each of my assignment sheets, but didn’t sign it. The old fashioned Catholics who still clung to their awe at the sense of the presence of God on the altar were furious with me! So, I was irritated with the priest whom I had known well as a friend about thirty years before. Being the Irish rebel that I am, when I next was the reader and had to pass in front of the tabernacle, I not only genuflected, I went down on both knees and bowed my head. It was not for any religious or spiritual reason.

But when I did this, I was suddenly totally overwhelmed by an awareness of the glory and power and awesomeness of God.  I had to fight the urge to prostrate myself and to slowly struggle to stand and continue walking. 

Friends, God can be wherever God wants to be in any way at any time and for anyone. We do not control God by our own personal or by any human authority’s understanding or decision. The Vatican II idea was to emphasize the presence of God in the people of God gathering in His name, rather than a static presence in the Tabernacle. But at that point, no one had effectively explained the theology behind the changes.

 I have taken all sorts of courses on Scripture and Theology. I have a mind that questions and is open to new understanding and the changes in Vatican II matched my experience of the Love of God fleshed out in Jesus, so I happily embraced the changes of Vatican II. But as I also kept studying psychology and learned about the many differences between how each of our minds relate to the world, so I began to recognize the root of the estrangements that keep the Body of Christ divided. My husband, Julian, and I were total opposites in every aspect of personality and ended up giving talks on Marriage preparation weekends about there being differences even in how we express and receive love.  I also explored and gave presentations on how these differences affect how we learn, how we teach, our type of spirituality, how we relate as managers to employees and the huge differences in what type of reward motivates different personalities.

Frankly, when I was Director of Religious Education for the Catholics for the Chaplain’s Division at Fort Campbell, my heart broke over the pain the changes in the Catholic church were causing many of the people.  For the military families, the Church was the only stable aspect of their lives.  Many, possibly most, people grow up trusting what they were taught and depending on that for a sense of safety. They are focused on the concrete world around them and gifted in repairing and using it. They trust the reality they can see and touch and the ideas they grew up with. Change is not their cup of tea.  Theories and new vocabularies are not either.

But increases in our understanding of our physical bodies, world, universe, even spirituality are equally important for our survival, so the theory and innovative people are crucial to exploring possibilities for making our health, our lives, our world, our universe, and our spirituality better. 

The challenge is to realize that the balance between what is and what now needs to change for our descendants is a constant teeter-totter between stability and change.  And half the battle is recognizing the need for the balance and the other half is developing a mutual sensitivity to each way of being in the world and finding a vocabulary that makes it possible to communicate across our differences effectively.