More Religious/Catholic talk!

I really don't get why so many religious people are so violently opposed to anything dealing with postmodernism. We actively talk about faith as being transformative, and I can't think of anything more postmodern than that - belief impacting behavior and perception. The basic idea is that, if you really truly believe that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the eternal Son of God who came to live among us, then you're going to live your life differently. You're going to try to follow His example and His teachings more closely. You're going to have a new appreciation for the handiwork of creation in light of the revelation of God's love. The reality you live in will, in a real way, be altered from the reality you understood before believing.

Thinking about this finally helped me to understand the Catholic sacraments. The common definition of a sacrament is "An outward sign, initiated by Christ on Earth, to give us grace". The definition as I tend to remember (and prefer) it is "An outward sign of God's grace, initiated by Christ on Earth". The difference here is that the grace, in my definition, is pre-existing. It is something that the sacrament is a reminder of and not something conferred by participation in it.

Here's where I'm going with this. If I receive the Eucharist, and I firmly and truly believe that it is, metaphysically, the body and blood of Christ, who sacrificed himself that I may live more fully...then I'm going to respond to that presence. I am going to honor that sacrifice in my living. I am going to strive to be a better person. That's not to say that I couldn't do those things without having received the Eucharist, but participation in the sacrament, if I believe in it, heightens my sense of duty and my awareness of the abundant grace I have already been blessed with, grace I may not otherwise be aware of.

I've seen this in people. I had teachers throughout my Catholic education who tried to make it to Mass every morning, and you could tell when they hadn't. They were grumpier, they were less patient, they didn't teach as well. Daily Eucharist was a ritual by which they connected to God and their duty in the classroom as Christian educators, and without it, they were lost. For other people, myself included, Eucharist doesn't have nearly this big an impact...but that's because we don't believe in it, or at least not to the same extent.

Some people would look at what I'm saying and construe it as another way of saying "oh, religion is for the weak, the people who don't have the will to lead the lives they know they should without it". Maybe that's a valid interpretation. Maybe it's all a bunch of psychosematic crap we would be better off without. I disagree, though. I think that any way we have of pushing and encouraging ourselves to be better is of value; and I happen to believe very strongly that Jesus was right in His teachings of what it means to be better.

That is all.