Grace

For a period after my motorcycle accident, I had seriously contemplated the priesthood. I was raised Roman Catholic, and after going through the standard period of rebellion, had come to some respect -even awe- at the Church's accomplishments in human history. The nostalgia I had felt at hearing the Nicene Creed again, dragged into church again with my useless left arm, was replaced by a mounting sense of the document's enormity. Every single sentence represented the end product of a separate centuries-long theological debate. Behind every word lay thousands dead, displaced, or otherwise silenced.

In studying the Church at college, I could safely separate myself from its majesty and power. Rational religion was supposedly buried by the Enlightenment, all true believers had supposedly gone into the grips of the charismatic churches. At Mass, I saw how wrong I was. This juggernaut of history lived on, and, furthermore, had the intellectual capacity to absorb everything learned from the Modern period. Ad majorem Dei gloriam. The sciences, literature, and the human mind are all part of the path to revelation of the Divine Mind. Like our Creator, we have universes within us.

Unfortunately for me (or, depending on your viewpoint, the Latin Church) I have no will to grace. Basically, I reject some key doctrines, like the Eternal Soul. Our brains are us, I'm afraid, which is a much less frightening notion than the various doctrines of the afterlife. Imagine: you die and are buried. Then, at some point in the future, you are restored to your flesh, somewhat confused, at which point you burst from the earth to terrify your descendents. Alternately, you die, then your soul- bodiless- is shifted into a state so close to the divine that it can have a conversation with it on a quiet day. This new soul has less to do with you than the e.coli living in your guts. In fact, since the perfect soul is in contact with the Divine, and we creatures of matter are an infinite distance from the Divine, our new souls would be about as different from us as something could be and still be something.

For similar reasons I reject the Resurrection, although it seems possible that Christ was an emanation of the Divine. One of the high points of humanity, you might say. This makes me a heretic of a very old order, in league with the writer of the Gospel of Thomas. For this, though, I can blame the Church. It is a central Catholic teaching that you- and I mean every one of you- can do what Christ did. We can, but we don't. We reject the Divine in us, and in each other, and we fall. There is no reason for it. We play with mortal toys, like clockwork men walking in addled circles, when we have worlds within us. When we reach inside of ourselves, inside of others, we touch the Eternal, as did Christ, or Buddha, or Shakespeare, or Einstein. In touching it, it touches us. There is no reason to return to flesh and be hoovered up by the sky. Our reaching for Truth- this is true Grace.

This is also heresy. Note I never went for the priesthood.