He also knows you’ll be filing for divorce before the top layer of that cake freezes over.
I call this Assuming Divine Permission, but I also have another term for it: Religious Free Agency. Taking religious license is a very common occurrence these days. It’s easy to do and relatively pain-free. There are no religious regulatory agencies that are going to give us a hard time about how we deal with The Divine. Religious free agents organize their own teams. They draft their own players, sign their own free agent contracts and then set their own rules. All the while they assume that what they’re doing and saying is perfectly okay with God: “God doesn’t care what we wear to church”, “I don’t have to go to mass in some building— I can go anywhere and be in church,” “God agrees with what I’m doing” and “He knows I’m a good person”. And for the Catholics out there… “God doesn’t need to see me in a confessional to say I’m sorry; I can confess my sins just as well in the privacy of my bedroom.” “Why would God care whether or not I seek an annulment for my failed marriage?” And take a look at these fundamentalist doozies: “God sees sex as a dirty act, which should only be used for procreation,” “All homosexuals are going to hell,” “God smiles when we bomb abortion clinics” and “God wants us to kill the infidels.”
Religious free agents spin off into their own private orbits, something seen more and more these days as church attendance hovers at around 40%, and they assume what they believe will always garner God’s friendly approval. This attitude demonstrates classic individualism. It’s incredibly self-centered, audacious and naïve—just the opposite of what God has shown us through divine revelation: to be God-centered, humble and informed. A gentle reminder of where we all came from is sorely needed. Not a shift to radical fundamentalism, but rather a soft whisper in the direction of the major faiths and their basic tenets.
You see, it is we who need to seek out the will of God. We can’t say this is what I think and then demand that The Lord make His adjustments to us. That would be completely backwards. Still, people do that all the time, don’t they? Check out the December 20, 2005 ABC News Poll entitled, Elbow Room No Problem in Heaven.1 There’s no surprise that the vast majority of those polled believe in a heaven. Overall, 85% of the respondents said they expect to go there. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Of those that described themselves as not religious, a whopping 77% still believed they would be going to heaven one day. Is this not a classic case of minimal effort expecting maximum results? Sounds a bit like a guy putting $35.99 into a money market account, fully expecting the interest earned to make him a multi-millionaire in twenty or thirty years.
In her 1993 paper, Self-enhancement and Superiority Biases in Social Comparison2, Vera Hoorens points out the following: “An impressive number of self-related biases in social comparison and social cognition have been identified during the last decades. To give an example, most people relatively overestimate the proportion of others sharing their opinions…”
If people make this error with others, don’t you think they make it with God? It’s nice to have opinions, but regarding something as important as faith it is probably best to have informed positions. Educated positions. So, outside of our personal opinions, to where and to whom should we turn for these types of answers?
First of all, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to invite a little humility into our lives. Humility will tell us that, often times, we do not possess the answers. Humility will let us know that we have to seek out the Divine Will from sources greater and wiser than our own minds. Unfortunately, that’s not going to come about by visiting the nearest mountaintop. Nature’s majesty can be edifying, true, but we’re not going to discern The Almighty’s will simply by staring at Mt. Everest, an ocean or a flowery meadow. The divine truth isn’t, very often, going to come about by dredging up and recycling our personal opinions and hang-ups, or by listening to the incessant pontifications of Phil the barber. That’s what the individualists and relativists do.
We must return to the centers of religious knowledge and wisdom: the major churches. Consider why these churches are the biggest. Consider why the masses have made them their home for so many centuries. And consider the great minds that have contributed to these great institutions.
Do not consult with opinionated knuckleheads. They’ll volunteer plenty of opinions regarding religion and God, but consider the feeble quality of that advice. A Muslim seeking guidance concerning a religious pilgrimage should consult with a mainstream cleric, not a fringe radical. Questions regarding the Torah should be directed to a rabbi, not a goof who calls himself Jewish but who’s never seen the inside of a synagogue. Catholics should consult their priests for guidance on confessing sins, and not their opinionated neighbor, who flunked out of parochial school and still has an axe to grind with Father McCarthy. Leave the nit-wits to their ways. Consult the professionals. In other words, read the instructional manual of your faith. Know that this manual was written and refined, over the course of many centuries, by many great minds—minds far-greater than our own.
Consider, for example, the question of whether or not a Catholic should go to confession.
The opinionated person might say, “I can confess to God directly…I don’t think I should have to…I’ve asked my friends and they don’t see the point…I don’t want to…Who says I should have to?…God doesn’t care either way.”
A wiser person might do a little research and find something interesting: Jesus gave his apostles (John 20:23) the authority to forgive or retain people’s sins… “Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven”…St. Augustine, in the 5th Century, warned against the direct confession to God…As St. Francis de Sales says, “In confession you not only receive absolution from the… sins you confess, but also great strength to avoid them in the future, light to see them clearly, and abundant grace to repair whatever damage you have incurred. You will also practice the virtues of humility, obedience, simplicity, and charity. In the single act of confession you will exercise more virtues than in any other act whatsoever.”…St. John Vianney said, “When you go to confession you un-nail Our Lord.”… The Catholic Catechism is very clear about confession using the priest as an intermediary: “Individual and integral confession of grave sins followed by absolution remains the only ordinary means of reconciliation with God and with the Church.” (Church canon #1497), Anyone conscious of grave sin must receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation before coming to communion (Church canon #1385), “After having attained the age of discretion, each of the faithful is bound by an obligation faithfully to confess serious sins at least once a year.” (Church canon # 1457)
You may not be Catholic, but that’s okay. You can still compare the two. One assumes divine permission while the other does the research and actually proves it. One has nothing to back it up, while the other has centuries of tradition behind it. One has a few feeble minds thinking in unison, while the other has great minds feeding its logic. Only a Catholic who is woefully misinformed or is completely consumed by hubris would ignore the arguments of a well-thought and researched position with centuries of tradition behind it. Only a person consumed with arrogance can, with a casual and careless wave of the hand, dismiss centuries of great thinking. Pardon me, but I will try my best not to be that person. Honestly, I don’t boast of such hubris. But on a more practical basis, I don’t have the guts. And I don’t have any problem admitting that, either. I would no more dismiss a young Jew’s call to the Torah than I would wave off a dentist’s opinion of what should be done with the rotting tooth inside of my mouth.
I think it would behoove all of us to remember the following when it comes to making religious or faith assumptions: Check Holy Scripture and make sure the interpretation is solid. Free agents find all kinds of ways to twist and distort what has been written. Research what many of the great theologians and philosophers have said about a given topic; after all, they’ve dedicated their lives to finding the truth. Respect that. Speak with your priest,