thank you for the response and compliment. i'm not sure what i was expecting if any thing when i searched and prayed, only that it was doing what i understood to be the right thing to do . i prayed in worship and thanks giving as often as i did for guidance , to multiple paths to boot.
I can tell you that this is a great start.
i would enjoy reading your deeper thoughts and look forward to the other replies to my other questions .
again thank you .
I'll expand a little bit on what I said n my previous post. I'm just going to quote what I said to remind myself of what I wrote!
Often when I prayed for discernment into where I should go spiritually, that insight would slowly unfold over the course of several years' time and personal growth. Over the course of months I might get tiny glimpses through new insight, research, dreams, talking with different people, suddenly coming to a realization that makes me see the world differently, that kind of stuff. I understand that this is all incredibly vague and overused, but I write every word from my own personal experience. If you want, I could go into more detail.
Where to start explaining this... I don't feel like writing my entire journey of discernment in this post, since it's already getting pretty long. I'll just recount a few examples of how I believe God has spoken to me, and maybe that might give you an idea of how God may try to speak with you.
Three years ago, I became convinced that the Roman Catholic Mass as it is today cannot yield a true Eucharist, where it is in fact the Body and Blood of Christ that are present. I became convinced of this through innovations that the Latin Church had introduced in terms of her theology (different model of atonement, the Filioque, downplaying
theosis, using rationalism and Scholasticism rather than the writings of the Fathers, believing that the Scholastics surpassed the Church Fathers and the Apostles in understanding of the Faith, declaring Latin theology as dogma vis-a-vis Augustinian original sin and the Immaculate Conception, declaring the supremacy and infallibility of the Pope, and things like that. Plus, the Novus Ordo as practiced in most every parish I've ever been to is a far cry from the beauty and reverence of a Mass with the Latin liturgical tradition intact. I came back to the Catholic Church several months ago, because being away from the Sacraments for three years was quite frankly brutal, and I didn't want to join the Orthodox Church without my heart being 100% in it. My heart and my experience was inexplicably drawing me back to the Catholic Church, even though I still to this day love Orthodoxy, my spirituality is greatly enriched by it, and I yearn to be united to it.
Now that I'm on campus at my university, where the nearest Byzantine Catholic parish is 20 miles up the road and I frankly don't have a whole lot of spare money even for gas, my only real option around here is a Roman Catholic parish with the Novus Ordo. After putting up with a lot of modern hymns that are all fuzzy-feely, many being explicitly Protestant, or composed in the last couple years by commercial Christian praise-and-worship people like Chris Tomlin and K-Love, or vaguely "traditional" songs that are barely older than my mother if they're even that old, we get to the part of the Mass where the Eucharist is consecrated. Despite the watered-down Mass, despite all the other stuff I just wrote, despite whatever problems I may still have with the Catholic Church, when the words of institution are uttered ("Take, eat, this is My Body...") I cannot help but kneel down--were it not for the pews, I would likely be prostrating at that point. And when I go up to receive communion, even though it's often not the priest but a middle-aged laywoman giving me the Body and then the Blood of Christ, when I get back to my pew and start praying, I shudder with awe--I know intuitively, in my heart, whatever you want to call it, that I have received the Body and Blood of Christ, despite whatever mental issues I may have with the Roman Church or the Roman Mass.
Honestly, I don't dream much, and I don't often attribute my dreams to anything other than my subconsciousness doing random things, but when I dream of spiritual or religious things, boy, I know what's up.
I can say that, a month or two back, I fell into a certain sin I've been struggling with for a while, at least partially. I convinced myself that it was alright, and that I could still take Communion. So I went and served at the altar at my parish, and received communion. That Friday night, I had a dream. It started off random as my dreams usually do when I actually have them. The dream ended with a scene with many priests offering Mass, each at their own altar. I was back in my own bed in my own room with a paten on my lap, and (God forgive me) I was eating the Eucharist like a bunch of potato chips, sloppily grabbing fistfuls and chomping down. I had very little if any clothing on, and I was absolutely filthy. When I woke up, I realized I had committed the sin of sacrilege--by conning myself into thinking that what I had done was no big deal, I had received the Body and Blood of Christ in an unworthy manner. I promptly went to Confession, and felt absolutely awful about the entire thing. You can argue that this dream was from my subconscious mind, more devout people would say that this was God speaking to me. I believe both are accurate, and a Christian should not feel obligated to separate the two; our minds and souls are from God, so can He not use them to speak with us through these faculties? As long as we conform our hearts and our minds to what is righteous as much as we are able, we will not be misled very often.
A week or two later, the same relapse into the same sin happened--only this time, on the Friday
before I went to Divine Liturgy, I had a dream that I was walking into my parish, and all the icons were only half-constructed; they were made out of wood, but only the lower halves of the icons were completed. You know the dreams where you walk somewhere in public with your underwear on? Well, at least I was only shirtless as I walked into this dream church for the Liturgy! It was (or at least, I call it) a gentle reminder from God that I needed to go to confession before I received the Eucharist again, this time ahead of time so I knew what to do. Since then, it has been clear what I am supposed to do if I fall into that certain sin--go to Confession before receiving Jesus' Body and Blood.
To answer your other questions...
"so what your saying is i cant believe because i don't believe , even if i try?
I don't think belief or faith is something that you can force upon yourself. You can use rational arguments to make your mind think that it assents to certain beliefs, but it isn't in intellectual certainty and airtight arguments that one finds belief or faith. The Apostles weren't convinced of Jesus' message because His parables sounded cool. They were convinced because of the
acts He performed in front of them. When Jesus walked across the water and stopped the storm, that is when the Apostles said "Truly this man is the Son of God." When St. Thomas saw the Lord in the flesh after His Resurrection, put his fingers in the nail holes and his hand in Jesus' side, St. Thomas proclaimed "My Lord and my God!" When St. Paul encountered Christ on the road to Damascus, though he was convinced that Christians were heretics and needed to be destroyed, the encounter with Jesus made him instantly do a 180. When the centurion and the guards at the cross saw the eclipse and felt the earthquake, it was then that they shouted "Truly this was the Son of God!". It isn't us willing ourselves to believe, or convincing ourselves intellectually, but rather an encounter with God.
how can i confess that if i do not believe? how can i believe if i can not confess that?"
The mistake here made by the person you were talking to is that they thought that belief caused the confession, and vice-versa. This is wrong.
To use an illustration: I'm a single guy. When it comes to looking for someone to date, I'm pretty incompetent. So once in a while I'll look up advice for learning how to make small talk with people, how to be a better person to talk with, how to get from being someone's acquaintance to their friend, how to tell if a girl might like me, etc. But one thing I always have to remind myself, and one thing these self-help websites will often tell me, is that none of these approaches are ultimately guaranteed to work. A relationship is an organic thing that unfolds over time, not a recipe or a checklist where if you do A, B and C, you'll for sure 100% of the time have a girlfriend, or even just a normal friend. And when I ask myself how I got the friends I already have, I realize that I never really tried, nor did they. Just over the course of multiple interactions, swapping stories, talking about our interests, a friendship just kind of... happened. Neither of us really
tried to become friends, we just
were. Did I make small talk with them? Yes. Did I find common interests and talk about that with the person? Yes. Did we ask each other questions about one another's lives, interests, funny stories? Yes. But did we become friends because of a bunch of things on a checklist that we did? I would say no. We simply found each other enjoyable to be around, and we just started liking them as people. We could have talked for a long time and started hating each other, even if we did all the things on the list right.
Our relationship with God is much like our relationship with our friends and our loved ones; it cannot be forced, either by us or by God. It just kind of
happens. You can probably point to an event and say "This is where my relationship with God took off". My aunt once told me the exact thing that made her decide that she was going to marry her uncle, when he bought her a bunch of books about subjects that they had talked about on various occasions. In the same way, we can define a time where we perceived God in His love, or His mercy, or even His rebuking as the moment where our relationship with Him started in earnest. Some of us Christians might still have not had such a moment with God, even after years of coming to and practicing the faith, praying to God, studying the Bible and the Church Fathers, weeding sins out of their life and their heart, and doing good works. Some of us had that moment when we were absolutely mired in sin and had done literally nothing for God to reach out to us. Can I explain why that is? No, not anymore than I can explain why, for example, one of my friends makes another friend with one person of like interests and compatible personality vs. another person with those same characteristics. In the same way, God may seem to appear constantly to one person, but seems as if He hardly ever if at all reveals Himself to another person.
But it must be said that God speaks to people in a multiplicity of ways, often through the most ordinary of circumstances. Others will likely view this as just life itself teaching us lessons; for Christians, there is no separation between life teaching us wisdom and God teaching us wisdom, as He is the Creator and sustainer of the entire world. The Psalms are replete with references to the created world teaching us the things of God. Jesus Himself uses the birds and lilies to teach us of God's care for all of creation, including (and especially) us.
It may be that God speaks to us through our everyday lives. An example of this: On one occasion, when I was learning another martial art that had a lot of overlap with an art I had already learned, I was determined to make the way in my art known to them. On another occasion, when I was learning iaido (Japanese swordsmanship), I was partners with a man for a drill meant to help us practice a counterblock that I believe is called
makyotoshi in our style; the man had practiced kenjutsu (another art of Japanese swordsmanship), and rather than having me practice
makyotoshi, he was insisting that I instead practice a technique he had learned in his own art that he found superior. I, for my part, being ignorant of
kenjutsu and wanting to get good in iaido, wanted to practice
makyotoshi instead, but I didn't end up getting much practice with the technique. It was then that I recognized the folly in my pushing my own art on others within another martial art, and my hubris was put in its place. Since then my motto has been "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."
