For the next two weeks I will be off to New Mexico to participate in a traditional Navajo ceremony. The ceremony itself will take place from October 1st through October 4th. I'll be leaving tomorrow in order to arrive a few days early in order to meet other participants and get a better idea of what to expect. Then one usually spends a few days after the ceremony exchanging visions and experiences, so I expect to be back home around the 9th or 10th of October. This is assuming I don't stop in Vegas. Just joking, I think.
In the meantime Carl will be taking over for me. Rather than waste anyone's time giving you a skewed profile of Carl I'll let him speak for himself. I just want to send out a big thank you to him for agreeing to keep Enlightened Catholicism up and running while I'm off getting enlightened.
I just wrote a comment to Carl on yesterday's post, and am going to reproduce it here, with a little editing. He asked me why I thought our Catholic leadership does not do as Christ did, does not do as He said followers of his would, which is "you shall do these things I do and more."
I answered Carl thus:
My guess Carl is that our leadership is alpha in attitude and that makes them very left brained. Benedict speaks constantly of faith and reason, but healing and mysticism takes a type of faith that transcends left brain reason.
Dissecting the scripture and past theological treatises is a left brain process. It does not develop the connections across the corpus collosum that fosters communication between the hemispheres. Which is important if most of the necessary receptors are in the non dominant section of the brain.
Padre Pio's biggest advantage was to grow up in a family with a psychically gifted mother and a father who supported both of them. In many ways Pio's early life was a fantasy land which fostered the development of both hemispheric modes of thought and communication. Pio was born into a very pious and poor Italian peasant family, and other dimensional worlds were as real to them as this world. Had Pio been born into a middle class family in the west he would most likely have been considered schizophrenic, not spiritually gifted.
Then there is the issue that women have more communication between halves of the brain, and hence a lot of women are involved in healing work. A lot of them have been killed for it. Pschic/Spiritual talent is disproportionately represented in women and gays. The two groups which are not welcome in our clergy.
With this type of psychic/spiritual talent, direct lineage is genetic. It isn't a product of the laying on of hands in Apostolic tradition. While I think everyone is capable of this, it's spread across a continuum like intelligence. Genes count and genes pass to the next generations. In other words if a priest does demonstrate healing ability, I bet there's a gifted woman somewhere in his background. Exactly like Jesus had in His mother Mary.
The fact is that any talent our leadership has would die with them, courtesy of celibacy. It's almost like we have a built in system to insure that genetic spiritual/psychic talent in the religious and clergy dies off. Only God knows how many gifted genetic lines have been truncated by the doctrine of celibacy.
Natives would say this is a dumb thing to do. Then again, their spiritual leadership is based in psychic/spiritual talent. If you don't have it, or don't show that you can communicate with other realities, you don't get the appropriate training or you don't pass beyond certain levels. They realize there is a very definite genetic component, and like Pio, in many cases the training and environment is designed to foster the talent when children are very young.
Catholicism does not see these talents as gifts, and in fact spends most of it's official work trying to disprove and debunk it, rather than train and foster it. Pio was subjected to decades of sanctions by superiors who couldn't handle what he did. That is the norm, not the exception.
From my perspective the Church has done everything it can to prevent it's gifted from doing as Jesuse did, to stamp them out, to assign them as products of Satan. Medjugorge is just another example in a long line of examples. There is something out of the ordinary going on at Medjugorge and the visionaries are gifted. Discernment is not limited to whether or not they report Mary to be spouting the correct Catholic dogma. While the Church dithers over these issues of doctrine and dogma, ordinary people are experiencing deep conversions. That too should be part of the discernment process.
From my perspective the Church has done everything it can to prevent it's gifted from doing as Jesuse did, to stamp them out, to assign them as products of Satan. Medjugorge is just another example in a long line of examples. There is something out of the ordinary going on at Medjugorge and the visionaries are gifted. Discernment is not limited to whether or not they report Mary to be spouting the correct Catholic dogma. While the Church dithers over these issues of doctrine and dogma, ordinary people are experiencing deep conversions. That too should be part of the discernment process.
The reason is for all of these attitudes is obvious. It threatens the absolute power of the male clerical system, which is based in the unprovable theology concerning transubstantiation and the power of ordination. These we are expected to take on Faith, and personal experience, the truth of it is beyond scientific observation.
Given the population of Catholicism, some one billion, one would expect that there is a lot of psychic/spiritual talent in the ranks of believers. So where is it? It's all around on the outside edges of official Catholicism. It's in the closet. It's gone in droves to the pentecostal and charismatic churches. It's been shut down for fear of mental illness or satanic influence. In other words, this particular light is under the bushel. That's a shame, but it's most definitely a result of our tradition.
Of the group of us from Helena going to New Mexico, too many are ex Catholics, and only one has Native blood. It's frustrating for me to know that our talent is recognized by Native American practitioners, but would be held at arms length at best, by the clerical representatives of our birth Church.
That's the way it is folks, but as more and more scientific verification comes forward concerning human capabilities and the nature of the cosmos, maybe this is a place where reason needs to guide faith and we will have finally come full circle. We'll be right back to seriously looking at what Jesus said we could do and be, and it will only have taken us two millennia to refind our Catholic healers.
