May 04, 2025
Dear Friends,
A principle conviction of Roman Catholic belief and theology is that “grace builds on nature” which means that God respects us as we are with all of our faults, immaturities, failures, and sins but as the catechism reminds us that “God created us to know, love, and serve him (sic) in this world and be happy with him (sic) forever in the next.”
So, none of us are perfect and God does not wave a magic wand to change us, we have to go through the sometimes painful, even, awful times and circumstances of our unique and particular lives as we learn to know, love, and serve God now and be happy with God forever.
All of the praying and church going and Bible reading cannot and does not take the tears of being human away. These Easter stories, in my way of thinking, address the tears of being human with a particular end in my mind.
The Gospel of John is patently different than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John does not appear to write a biography of Jesus as they do, in fact, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the “synoptic” Gospels because they appear and seem to be a synopsis of the life of Jesus even though they do no such thing.
Most Christians and surely most Catholics believe these Gospels to be literal/actual/ “real truth” about Jesus and what he said and did in his earthly life, but they are not and never will be, but you won’t believe me and that is okay. These Gospels are invitations to us to ponder how the Holy Spirit which Jesus handed over to us when he bowed his head breathed his last breath continues to work within us to do even greater works than Jesus did in his earthly life.
Treating the New Testament as actual/real/literal truth has been an easy way out for Christian leaders, they had no real homework to do, they just repeated and repeated, louder, and louder the same old stuff over and over and over again.
They turned “salvation” into a reward and punishment transaction as the Temple worship of the Jewish people had been in the earthly time of Jesus which Jesus clearly repudiated when he overturned the money changers tables, set the animals free, and whipped the sin brokers out of religion.
The understanding of salvation as a kind of rescue or redemption task did not come into use until the 12th century. Our early Catholic/Christian ancestors understood “salvation” in an original sense related to our word, the root word of salvation, salve, as in an ointment to help heal.
One of my first homilies after I became pastor here at Goretti, was based in the 1970 book by Wayne Edward Oates (1917-1999), When Religion Gets Sick, one of the first people in our country to be academically trained in psychology and theology.
He developed an informed psychologically based approach to religious faith and tried to help other psychologists, theologians, and pastors of souls to recognize the role that psychological immaturity and psychological, addictive, and emotional illnesses could play in manipulating and using religion and the idea of religious faith to avoid dealing with harmful and potentially damaging mental and emotional conditions that facilitate unhealthy personalities and practices masquerading as mature and sincere religious faith.
Our Gospel story this weekend is about immature and unhealthy religious faith as a substitute for sincere and mature religious faith. Immature and unhealthy religious faith tries to avoid being human and frail and, sometimes, very sad with a forced or rehearsed rigid set of practices manifested as piety.
In the New Testament Peter is a literary character and not a free-standing reality. Peter functions as the story tellers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John tell the story. His historical existence is not the point in the Gospels.
Peter is symbolic of immature and unhealthy faith in that it is all about him and always about him, a common unhealthy trait that adheres to any of us but in any kind of leadership position one that is potentially pernicious and damaging to good people trying to find their way to a healthy and fulfilling and reasonably happy relationship with God through Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church.
If you remember at the so called, Last Supper, Peter was such a stickler for the rules, he would not let Jesus wash his feet, “Lord, you shall never wash my feet!” and when told that he would follow Jesus later, Peter allowed his grandiose ego to kick in and said, “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you!”
But he doesn’t lay down his life. He denies him three times while warming himself around a previous charcoal fire. Correct?
In this Gospel story, Peter continues his grandiose egocentricity by saying, “I am going fishing!” By himself and in the middle of the night, no less!
And not surprisingly, he catches nothing.
As this story unfolds, we find Peter mature and sincerely try to detoxify his grandiose ego not through the damaging effects of shame as Jesus does not shame him at all. Jesus feeds him as he feeds anyone as you might remember that here on the shores of Lake Tiberius he had once before (John Chapter 6) with five loaves and two fish.
Dr, Oates developed a type of pastoral counseling that I have tried to use in my ministry, what he called a, Trialogue, a three-way conversation between the pastoral counselor and the counselee and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit as a factor in these pastoral conversations works to help the pastor recognize the damage and hurt that his/her own grandiose ego can bring to bear on the parishioner or counselee and realize their won limits as a healer and refer to greater competence and professional intervention when appropriate.
In this method of counseling there is an explicit recognition that the Holy Spirit is an active agent in our presence and that it is the Holy Spirit that is necessary to bring about healing and mature spiritual and religious faith health.
In this method of counseling you take the counselee or the parishioner or the seeker seriously at their word, but you always seek to help them articulate and name the hurt because there always is a hurt in all of us that we like to bury and deny.
Peter repeatedly got what Jesus was trying to teach him because he cling to his own ideas and ways of religion, he was closed minded and hard hearted because, like all of us, he could not believe that God could love him just as he thought he was and help him discover the name that God called him by, as God wants each of us to discover not the name that we use to avoid accepting ourselves wholly. In John Chapter 1, Jesus looked at him and said, You call yourself Simon son of John, I will call you Cephas which means Peter.
We all need to ponder who we think we are and discover, what false identity is driving our bus, what is the scab that is always picked, until it is recognized for what it is and then we can begin to eat again freely and happily the bread and fish prepared for us from the very beginning of the world, maybe not right away but eventually through continued conversation with their life and the people in it.
Grace builds on nature, God provides the grace, but it is up to us to use it, to follow the transformation of our pain into our happiness. God wants us to be happy, but we are responsible for discovering our own happiness that is why we have 12 Step Programs, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other kinds of mind and heart and soul therapists and therapies.
Peace,
Father Niblick