COMING UP ON CATHOLICA: Don't tell me there is no "spirit" in the world... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Wednesday, August 29, 2012, 15:12 (267 days ago)

I might be getting jack of a lot of the things "Catholic" that I was brought up to believe but don't tell me there is not some "Spirit" in the world. Let me share with you another little story of "God-incidence".

Yesterday I brought you a commentary by Graham English that is about discarding the "excess baggage" that we acquire on our life journey — both the physical junk and as much the junk we accumulate in our minds. Graham sent me the commentary about a week ago.

About a week earlier than that Brian Pitts had sent me a commentary. In his covering email he informed me he'd written it some time ago following a conversation we had in Perth back in March. I hadn't opened it until about an hour ago as I had chosen it as the commentary I might run today. I honestly had no idea of what it contained other than the mysterious title "Mythopoeic Jigsaw" – whatever those 'Egyptian Hieroglyphics" might mean?

As I started to do the layout I suddenly realised this was the perfect follow-up to Graham's commentary yesterday. It's as though Graham yesterday set out a "join the dots" puzzle and today along comes a different person, who would have been completely unaware of what Graham had written, who started filling in the lines between all the dots in the puzzle. Here's a sample of two paragraphs to illustrate what I mean...

Right now I have an opportunity to take to the tip trailer loads of accumulated treasures of yesteryear. I have to decide and let go of electric motors and switch gear, scrap steel, electronic and mechanical parts, spares, and things I saved for a rainy day in the future. With the trash also goes all kinds of dreams, ideas, and maybes that have sat in my brain for years. It is time to get real. It will never happen. I am running out of road. Decisions like these come at a cost for me. I have to let go, load up the dreams and take them to the tip. Life changes. All of us can point to traumas of the past, marriage breakdown, death of a child, loss of a job, mental breakdown resulting in instant poverty and homelessness. These tip trips are a drop in the bucket, and when the rubbish has all been left behind in the rear vision mirror, a great sense of freedom, rid of rubbish, no more stupid dreams drive with me on the way back home. The tip brings a wonderful feeling.

The question has to be asked: "Should not the truth and authenticity of any Christian doctrine be consistent with its essential original teaching? Can we use the core beliefs of the first century about Yeshua of Nazareth as a yardstick for the measure of essential Christian belief and sift out the rubbish accumulated since 33AD?" [I've changed the order in which the paragraphs appear in the commentary as they read better in this order in this post.]

This commentary coming up is powerful stuff. In fact, at nearly 5,000 words it's too long to publish all of it today. In essence though what Brian is proposing is a big "theological clean-out". I have often thought of doing this myself — asking myself the question: "what do I honestly, really believe today?" That's essentially what Brian Pitts is doing in this commentary which I will be publishing today. And he goes right back to the original scriptural sources to do it. In fact it is an exercise he has been engaged in privately for a few years as we've disclosed in some of his earlier commentaries.

I'm certain what Brian writes will be of great interest to many of you who have become fans of Catholica. It might scare the living daylights out of some of our hierarchs but I'm pretty sure most of them have given up trying to get any enlightenment out of Catholica having consigned all of us to the categories of heretics or dissenters. What Brian Pitts writes though is a rich investigation of some of the core beliefs many of us were brought up with synthesized through a modern, scientifically literate mind.

To me it is another of those wonderful bits of serendipity or God-incidence that I seem to come across so often on Catholica these days. It's almost spooky and a challenge to my beliefs in some kind of scientific and theological rationality LOL. Hopefully I'll have it online in about another hour. Don't miss this one!

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]