There is a story about Fr. John that he was eventually summoned to Rome and chastened. Did he not understand the mission of the Church is not to make people feel good about themselves with the good news of the gospels, but rather to addict them to the institution, outside of which there is no salvation. An institution that can neither deceive nor be deceived; that has all the answers but tolerates no questions.
I suspect you 'get this,' as Pope John XXIII did, but you sit on Peter's Chair and must maintain the atherosclerotic traditions that serves no further purpose beyond their own continuation.
The time has come, Pappa, to finally update the Church's map of heaven and earth, of the mind, and of the soul. It is time to put away the image of a static, celibate god, on a marble throne, existing outside of the fertile universe, forbidding fertile women in his presence.
And at long last, leave behind the pastoral Hebrew god demanding the blood sacrifice of innocent victims to massage his ego. (As expressed at every Mass, 'And so, Father, we offer you this cup of blood. The blood of your own son... We trust it will make you happy so you will be kind to us.')
Leave behind Aristotle's 'unmoved mover, himself unmoved', who could never have conceived of quantum theory, black holes, lightspeed, big bangs or chaos theory.
What would it take to create a believable belief system in harmony with the many revelations of the scientific age, and the many capabilities afforded by new technologies?
I am sure that in all of your travels you have seen, as I have from Silicon Valley, that a life centered on buying and selling consumer products has horrible consequences, on green nature as well as on human nature.
Once, the universe of faith and the physical universe were consonant. And that is why believers then could be inspired to construct a Chartres Cathedral and compose a Missa Solemnis. But no more.
Yet every new discovery by science, and every new application of those discoveries in technology (at the quantum, atomic, molecular, systemic levels), demand we ask why. But ultimate why questions are forbidden in scientific and technical literature. And as a technical writer for 40+ years, I assure you this is the case. But why?
The supernatural and the natural are not two distinct domains, as tradition says. And they never were. And this is the heart of the matter. We do not live in a two-tiered bi-verse of grace and nature. It is called the uni-verse for a good reason. It is one unified field. And it has been so from the get-go in spite of what our tradition has said.
So up to now, a man could own a coal mine and still sit unashamed in the front row of Sunday service; a woman could be a senior executive at an arms manufacturer and not face questions from her children at dinner about the amount of blood shed somewhere to earn this daily bread.
The Gospel of Thomas was written by Coptic Christians in Egypt in the second century, and later condemned by Rome as were many early gospel stories. This one was buried away and then re-discovered in a cave at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945.
Rome prefers to see God locked away in Heaven, with the Pope holding the keys to the Kingdom, and Jesus locked away in the tabernacle and the parish priest holding the keys. What it is about the God of our tradition that he has to be kept under lock and key? Is it to keep him from getting at us, or us from getting at him?
Given that Rome tries to keep God and Heaven at a remote distance that Rome alone controls, it's not surprising that the Church condemned Thomas' gospel. Consider passages where Jesus says, "The kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it" (Passage 113). And again, "The kingdom is inside of you, and outside of you, as well" (77). And in that same passage, "Whenever you split a piece of wood, or lift a stone in the garden and see all the living things crawling in the wet soil, or when you see sunlight play upon the clouds, you find God there."
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