Learning to trust our spiritual intuition and inner guide —
dealing with guilt and the labyrinth of the mind
that prevents us hearing the inner guide...
Friday, 8th September 2006

Dear friends,

Well there's certainly been much invigorating discussion on both the public and members' forums in recent days. Thank you to all who have been contributing. John O'Keefe has posed an interesting question in response to yesterday's email. He asks "I wonder if we are supposed to hand on 'the faith' at all?"

I certainly do not have the sense that my father would have had of "passing on the faith" to me. Deep down though I have a sense of wanting to pass something on to my children. (They're aged 30, 28 and 26 by the way.) I've been wondering about John's question since he posed it yesterday. What is it, precisely, that I would like to pass on to them? Most other parents that I mix with seem to have a similar sense to me of wanting to pass something on to our offspring — a set of values, a way of looking at life, their neighbours and the world. I definitely would not want to pass on some "hoop-jumping" concept of religion similar to what I was brought up on and believed for a large part of my life. I honestly do think though there is a particular "Catholic" way of looking at the meaning of life that is distinct from populist religion and the sentimentalism and quasi-superstition that so often passes itself off as "authentic Catholicism". Catholicism at its best does foster an enquiring mind and an attitude of openness to allowing the Spirit to work within us. I suspect they are the values I most value and in large measure I'm very happy with the education my children received in Catholic schools and at home in that they all do have enquiring minds, they are all attentive to the spiritual dimension of life, and they are all attentive to social justice issues and in endeavouring in their different ways to making the world, and their various communities, better places. Only one of them continues to attend Mass but I am neither impressed by that nor perturbed that the other two don't. I would be a heck of a lot more perturbed if they were all attending Mass but that is about the only "religious" or "spiritual" dimension to their lives there was — and I see plenty of both younger and older people with outlooks like that. It would be interesting to see some sort of survey results on what the expectations of parents are for their children.

In the meantime Theologos is addressing some tougher stuff today...

Guilt and the complex labyrinth that is the human mind and emotions... This is a difficult commentary from Theologos but I suggest you not give up. It follows on logically from his commentary last week which was about "learning to trust our spiritual intuition and inner guide". Today he's looking at some of the factors which prevent us hearing our inner guide. [more]

Best wishes for a great day wherever you happen to be ... in life, and in our world.

Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher
Catholica Australia