Staining

My parents are in town to stay with us for a whole month and we're taking advantage of this opportunity to get things done around the house. I spent most of the weekend staining our deck. It took longer than I anticipated, but it worked out well and I'm pleased with the result. we went over to a hardware store to discuss our options with fences to fence in my wife's garden plot - we may have to expand it a bit to accommodate the fence and gate orientations that are available to us - my wife was not unhappy about that, but my back might complain later. Digging up and tilling the first 20 feet by 20 feet square was bad enough, now I'll have to dig up an additional 5 feet by 20 feet to accommodate the gates... Oh well. The things you do for love. :-)

 

With my parents here we have higher church attendance to look forward to. I'm not the greatest Catholic, in terms of attendance, but we do try to go to church every week. Unbeknowest to me, that mass was the First Communion mass for the parish and therefore much longer than normal - if I went to church last week I would have known it. One of my co-workers who doesn't go to our church was there because of a friend - he just popped into my office to complain about how the priest was pontificating and making the mass longer which is interesting because I was just about to type about how much I like the priest. His sermons are amazingly mystical - very introspective and personal. He seems to acknowledge that there is a personal striving for understanding that we all have to go through and his outlook is refreshingly liberal. He renews me faith that the balance I've been striving to reach between how I've been brought up, where I am, and where I'd like to be isn't all that far removed from each other. I don't have to completely reject my "Christianity" (to the extent that I have it) to be the person I am and want to be. My impression is that if I told a "true blue" Catholic exactly what I feel, I'd probably be burned at the stake as a heretic, but I think that is because of a lack of understanding of what the precepts of the Catholic Church are. Church dogma teaches that a person must find a balance between what the Church says, what Society says, and your own personal reflection and that balance is where you should live. Unfortunately that's not a dogma that's well publicized, because it would lessen the importance of the Church in some people's eyes. Most "good" Catholics take what the Church says as gospel (heh) and leave it at that, but that ignores the other two factors. It seems to me that most people like to be told what to believe and will not spend the time to reflect on what they've been told. This is true of politics as well as religion. It constantly surprises me that I think the Catholic Church has a place for me - it's just the devout Catholics I have a problem with. Come to think of it, I generally have a problem with anyone who takes a firm stand on any topic. Science, religion, politics, personal relationships, whatever. If you known with absolute certainty that something is true, then there's usually something you are missing.

 

Which sort of leads into a discussion of God and self in a sense. Having been raised a Catholic, I've always been told that is everywhere and see everything. But my impression is that if you asked a Christian what the though about God, the answer is that God is some sort of being in "heaven", and in most cases I would guess they would say that God is seperate and apart from them. I don't agree. My concept of God - if you want to call it that - is that an omnipresent God can only be omni-present and all-knowing if that God is everything. In other words my concept of self incorporates an acknowledgement that I am part of this greater whole that extends to every single thing in the Universe - an extenstion of the GIOAT. (This resolves the Catholic - three part God mystery - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.) My love and respect for every person I meet is an acknowledgement of the "God" in everyone. It means that everything and everyone is deserving of respect because in essense we are all part of the same whole. Damage to one part is in essense damagin "God".

 

I've always had a problem with my mother telling me to pray for things that I need, partly because she also says God will do what he wants to do (in which case, why bother praying if he's going to do whatever he wants anyway), partly because it doesn't fit into my concept of God, and partly because of the GIOAT. My recieving something means that someone else doesn't. The point isn't to ask for things that you don't have but to live with what you do have and maybe strive to be able to have the things that you want. "God helps those who helps themselves" is true on several levels, one being striving to reach your goals is almost self-serving in that you are more likey to reach them if you try than if you don't.

 

What does GIOAT do to the concepts of heaven and hell? Well I think that the Universe (God, if you will) is always striving to reach something better, it's evolving and changing. Our consciousness seems to be affecting the world around us significantly. Whether that's planned or not, I don't know, but if accept the concept of free will, then it isn't planned so much as a hope that our consciousness will reach enlightment to a collective level such that we are able to positively affect the nature of the Universe. Heaven then becomes the place that the Universe is going to and hell is where we came from. (Parallels to the birth of the universe, the solar system, and this planet in intense heat and fire, and the postulated eventually cooling down of the uniiverse as its seemingly expanding may be inserted here.)

 

Spirits? Souls? Not excluded under GIOAT, just different that the way its thought of.