A prayer

Dear God, please help everyone be happy and safe and healthy and full of love and peace. Please give everyone who worked in the factories of the products of perpetually reselected fifteen hundred grocery stores 45 million prize package 63s and a billion jackpots, and add that same amount to all the accounts of all the people in their communities or who went to schools with those people or read five of the same words they did at any time, and please give everyone 45 million prize package 89s and a deluxe tailored theme spinning shipment to all the people who helped a child or prayed for a friend on any day that one of those grocery stores sold a transaction totaling $65.35. Please take the transaction number of the receipts for 40 other totals based on secret triumphs and make that a full and growing representational code in a sequence of a thousand prize packages designed to include Christmas blessings plus charged game provision maximums. Please categorize all things with 80 percent overlap and give a variety bonus of a thousand variation color-codings to the interior designs in any building with a blue door. Please activate and apply the key map with eventual resets whenever there is a person or animal in a room or a computer on with names in some databases. Please expand the relevant population to include all siblings and cousins and extra generations, people on the same roads that the same times, plus their school and work associations and a linked sequence of thousand thousand thousand based on that, with a thousand blessing additions per person to the main jackpot to be duplicated and repeated with a distribution pattern based on the answer lists to the tests that a new included population scored high on after studying or just taking a risk for. Please take the whole group of people now and add 50 million treasure map quest hauls from eternal layer 500 plus repeat for each person with a restart translation give-away including all people in societies ten societies away, plus an account booster collection jumble added to all accounts for the inverse of the original grocery factory winners.

You can’t be Protestant without the Catholics

     I have recently decided to be both Presbyterian and Catholic, or really have just accepted that I really am both things and do not have to choose one or the other.  The Protestant Reformation was literally a reaction to the Catholic Church and some of its ways of doing things at that time, and I think that Protestants are better off sharing their theology in a Catholic context. People say that is not true and that the Presbyterian doctrine is so sound that it doesn’t need any association with Catholicism at all, or that it always has that context, because any erroneous view of the world is a form of Catholicism, with people thinking they are good enough for God or can earn his approval.   All I can say is that first of all, trying to please God is not the default status of all people needing salvation, and to present Catholicism merely as a religion of trying to earn God’s favor is also a distortion of the truth.  In other words, the hope of pleasing God is usually a good thing, and should not be turned into some kind of offense, even with the glorious truth that Jesus accomplished all the righteousness that is needed for people's eternal salvation.

    That is the special news that Presbyterians try to believe and profess, and it is based a lot on Christ’s statement at the cross when he said “It is finished.”  It is an announcement that he has done the required lifelong act of salvation, living perfectly in every moment and offering his life as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of his people and anyone who wants his righteousness to count for them. 

    For me, where Catholicism comes in is how people can still interact with Jesus while he is on the cross.  He is the eternal God, and he is a priest. There is no disputing the fact that even as the sacrificial lamb satisfying a true need for atonement in the Jewish sense, he was also a priest and a spiritual master using real authority to forgive people, heal them, and establish various relationships and realities in their lives. In all his life and especially on the cross, he was reconciling people to God. No matter how much people want to talk about his statement that “it is finished,” we know just as much as we know people are still being born that the priestly intervention is still happening. So if people want to live a Catholic life and receive their salvation day by day, gradually, over a lifetime or even millions of years, that power and negotiation is all there at the cross and it is all there in Christ’s eternal existence. It’s just not a problem to ask him for actual, personal righteousness now and continually, and should not be viewed as a problem except when people have specific fears about assurance of salvation.  And I think the people who most often have those kinds of problems tend to be Presbyterians, who might see a lack of justice and personal righteousness in their life or corrupt systems, which causes them to doubt whether the transaction that provided salvation really worked.  Well is it more true to say it worked, or it is working and won’t fail?  I usually prefer to go for the real time righteousness and believe that life is probably worthwhile in some way even though people try to reduce it all to some kind of account status or legal verdict that already happened. I also think that on the Catholic path is where the most obvious revelation of the Presbyterian thing Christ did will become apparent.  Without that effort to please God, saving faith becomes kind of like a Baptist Catholicism, where you earn your salvation by believing something, which is really nothing but the cheapest of Catholic indulgences.

I could be wrong about this

     There is something in the Bible that people worry about sometimes, and it is referred to as a sin that is unforgivable. I think it is in the letters of Paul and it says that blaspheming the Holy Spirit is the unforgivable sin.  A lot of people think it has to do with saying something bad about the Holy Spirit, or maybe saying something bad about God and Jesus. A lot of mentally ill people worry about it, because we have a lot of problem thoughts and behaviors sometimes. I myself now have a disorder with a lot of intrusive thoughts that are by nature exactly what you don't want to think and say.  One of the solutions for accepting that condition is to know that the worse those thoughts are, the more it is an expression and even profession that you don't approve of that content. So it could be like expressing something more positive if people really understood.
    But this post is not about that. It is about what I think that passage refers to instead as something unforgivable. I have started suspecting that the idea of that kind of blasphemy might refer to something different than saying something very bad, and that the level of harm and offense in question is more related to things like horrific child abuse that tears souls and burns holy things like God himself.
    You can kind of get an idea from what I am talking about from learning about trauma symptoms, and I think there are problems even beyond that where people hurt very innocent life with evil and disrespect that is incalculable. People would say, actually, thankfully it is calculable and therefore finite and disposable.  Well I guess that is probably true.  But anyway, the main thing I am saying is that people are mostly right when they say anyone can be forgiven for anything. And that the things that are by nature unforgivable are actually beyond even the bad choice of refusing forgiveness.  It is evil beyond that.
   I do not understand it all, and I actually differ in my beliefs from a lot of people by thinking that there could be a range of destinies for people, which include death, hell, purgatory, jail sentences, creative Judgement Day verdicts, life experiences that simply teach people things over millions of years, and of course total forgiveness and heaven.
   But the thing that I do feel more suspecting of is that something truly unpardonable is not something that people just stumble upon during a confusing life in a confusing culture.  It is a deliberate and calculated, defining and inevitable violation of innocent, precious life.  Child abuse is probably closer to it than cursing, though God has officially made an offer to forgive anyone who asks, including people who get in trouble for almost any crime we could think of.  Not asking for forgiveness is probably not the unforgivable thing either, but also not a good idea. I mean wouldn't it be all the more stupid to make forgivable things be unforgivable after all.