Recovering Lost Passion

 This week's reflections are composed of things that have been on my mind for the past week or so, as circumstances have compelled me to re-examine some things in my own life.  The events of the past four years which have occurred in my own life specifically have more or less plunged me into a transitional time in which I had to revisit and evaluate many things.  A lot has changed in the past few years, and it has led me to a few small conclusions which I want to address today.  First though, I wanted to mention a couple of housekeeping items which will impact my future posts. 

This year marks 14 years since I began publishing a series of blog posts, and in that 14 years I have managed to channel a lot of ideas into these, and it has been rewarding.  I have also been able to sort of make my own archive of these posts in that I publish them in bound form every couple of years - it used to be every year, but in the past few years I have not written as frequently.  Up to that point, I was essentially printing those out and keeping them in binders, but at times printing multi-page blog articles can be challenging as it does expend a lot of resources.  However, when I published my first books 10 years ago, I came across a service called Lulu Publishing, and they have been a huge asset with getting things printed in a nice format and fashion.  So, I have not printed out blogs in several years, as I just wait and have them all published into book form myself.  If any of you are interested in getting printed editions of these blogs, please feel free to reach out and I will be glad to accommodate you.  I will ask for a small charge though to help my own income as well as covering the price of printing and production via Lulu, but if you enjoyed any content by all means feel free to ask and we can work out a deal.  That now leads to my second item of discussion before I get into today's reflections for the week. 

Since 2011, I have maintained three blog pages.  The oldest, Sacramental Present Truths, mainly addressed theological as well as some social/political issues.  The second, David's Mountain Memories, is this one - it primarily initially served as a platform to discuss a whole lot of topics of interest, and had a more light-hearted tone.  The third, David's Culinary Page, is my food blog - it contains restaurant reviews, recipes, and other culinary material.  Given that my doctoral dissertation has taken up much of my time in the past year in particular, I haven't been able to devote as much time to writing freelance like this, so after some thought I have come to a decision.  Effective immediately, I will no longer be publishing anything on SPT, and instead this page will incorporate both that content as well as the other content I put on here.  In time, I may also incorporate the culinary material into this blog as well, and I am actually thinking of leaving Blogspot, which hosts this, and consolidating all my writings on a new platform - I am looking into things such as Wordpress and some others to see what can be offered, and once I have the opportunity to plan it out, I may do that later. But, for my regular readers, don't fret just yet - that could be a couple of years away, so you can still enjoy content here for a while longer.  Also, as I am now 54 years old, and also am devoting much time to other pursuits, I am also planning on revisiting retiring the blogs completely when I reach my 60th birthday.  Over the next few years, as I contemplate my postdoctoral future, I am planning on devoting more writing to actual books, and won't have the time to maintain a blog at some point.  Any rate, I will keep you posted of any developments here. 

Writing has been a strength I have had since I was very young - it is the perfect way to organize my thoughts and express myself.  My writing legacy has undergone an evolution over several years in all honesty, as originally it started out with journaling 28 years ago.  Being frustrated as a young man with no creative outlet, my ex-wife Barbara then suggested I keep a journal, and it was a good idea.  Not long after starting journaling in August of 1996, one day I was talking to my mother about our old dog Jill we had when I was a kid, and that discussion made a bit of a lightbulb pop in my head - it was the genesis of the extended life story project I have been working on.  The life story began as just reflections in my journal, and that initial draft took over 2 years to document.  Later, I decided to incorporate it into its own book, and I have a series of notebooks now documenting my whole life story from as far back as I could remember to the present - I update it every year as well now.  After my doctorate program is complete and I get to a place where I have the time to do it, my plans are to typeset the whole manuscript, edit it, add facts I was unclear on or may have omitted due to not recalling them, and then I want to get that bound in book form.  It will never be available for public sale though, as I only plan on printing a limited number of them and those will go to my potential descendants as well as a copy being donated to my hometown library as a resource for researching local history.  I am doing this to safeguard against any liabilities that may potentially be risked, in that I am very candid and detailed in everything within that manuscript, even down to names.  It is important to not have that widely circulated until at least after my passing.  If all works out, I want to publish that in two large volumes - the first is a genealogy of my complete family tree, which is quite extensive.  It will contain all the pedigree charts as well as some stories of certain ancestors of mine who are of special interest to me.  The second volume then will be all my story from about the time of my birth until my 60th birthday - yes, this like the blogs will be a project I conclude when I am 60, and I have reasons for that timeline as well. Before I get into what I actually wanted to talk about, I wanted to share a bit of wisdom based on this for especially younger people. 

There is no dispute that the times we live in right now are crazy - just turn on any news broadcast and you will see it.  Much of that is due to a general issue in our society, where a sort of postmodern iconoclasm has reached epidemic proportions in our society.  It is commonplace now for historical revisionism to take over the academy, and the destruction of statues, important art work, and even literature seems to be what the psychopaths who embrace such iconoclasm are championing.  From a purely spiritual perspective, I believe this is all demonic activity.  The ugly, the deceptive, and the evil have overtaken society in many places, and they have uprooted what are traditionally believed to be divinely given transcendental properties of our being, namely three - beauty, truth, and goodness. While there is always hope, and indeed it will reverse course in due time, it is vital at the present time that as much of one's personal legacy should be preserved as is possible.  This is why I strongly advocate for journaling and documenting even the most minute aspects of one's life in a tangible form, and then safeguarding it.  A form of detailed personal expression may be what saves Western civilization from cannibalizing itself, and I especially encourage young people to get into the habit of journaling.  Besides, journaling is a way to challenge ideas and other things into an expressive form to produce other work, such as books and other productions.  Creativity is an attribute of God, and it must be appreciated and valued.  We each have a degree of this within us as well, and it is our individual expression of it that makes it important to our society.  The so-called "cancel culture" of the epidemic disease of "wokeness" wants to sacrifice that in order to enforce a totalitarian groupthink upon every person on earth, and it is aided by billionaire oligarchs who meet every year in a town in Switzerland and attempt to conspire to control every aspect of individual lives, even down to the very thoughts an individual has.  It is important to resist this totalitarian BS that the elites try to push on us, and if we do so, we do as James 5 challenges us - resist the devil (and these oligarchs are controlled by him, no doubt!) and he will flee from you.  The greatest fear of any totalitarian demagogue is that people think for themselves, and if they can see through the smokescreen, it will threaten their control over the world.  Many will dismiss that as "conspiracy" or something dredged up by Alex Jones or something but examine the facts for yourself - we saw it with Hitler, with Stalin, and even as far back as Robespierre during the French Revolution.  Totalitarianism in any form, whether practiced by Hitler or by Bill Gates, is demonic at its origin and it goes against the nature God gave us.  Therefore, it needs to be resisted.  The resistance does not have to be violent or revolutionary - it can be expressed as easily as keeping a personal journal to preserve the real story in a time of oppression.  And our youngest people need to be the torch for this, but anyone can do that as well.  Anyway, enough said on that. 

Now that I got that off my proverbial chest, let me get into what I wanted to talk about.  This past week, two very important reminders were planted in my soul that made me begin to think about something - what happened to the passion I once had in certain areas?  The first of those reminders came from my parish priest, Fr. Timothy Grassi.  In his Easter homily this past Sunday at my parish (St. James the Greater in Charles Town, WV), Fr. Grassi said something that got my attention.  While focusing on Christ's Passion on Good Friday leading to the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, Fr. Grassi notes that we find hope in that - in many ways, we all experience a Good Friday episode at some point in our lives, where we feel like we too are dying inside.  But, hope should not be lost, in that a resurrection is coming.  I have felt like I was laying in a tomb myself over the past couple of years, much like Jesus did on the Holy Saturday before Easter.  I am in no way comparing myself to Jesus, as I am not even close - the analogy refers to how he chose to redeem us by taking on our sufferings.  However, in my particular case, a series of circumstances that have transpired over the past four years - a divorce, the deaths of both my parents and my last surviving grandparent, economic challenges which almost threatened even my home, and other things - have gotten me off course concerning things I used to enjoy and would get excited about.  I have felt like something was really missing in my life, even I could say like a fish out of water.  Transitions in life are never easy though, and when going through those it is easy to feel like you just exist and have no real purpose.  The uncertainty haunts and plagues you every morning as you wake up, and that at times can really cause problems.  As another example, you feel like you are set adrift in a small boat on a large ocean with no paddle or rudder, and it makes one lose perspective. That has been me the past several years.  All that has happened to me has shaken me up somewhat, and to be honest it has led to shouting matches with God, and days where I just don't feel much of anything.  Call it a "funk," or the spiritual "dark night of the soul," but it is not a good place to be.  That then reminded me of a couple of other things that started to come to mind I wanted to reflect on with you today.

Back in my early 20s, I was caught up in the Pentecostal movement and was part of a denomination called the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.  That all culminated after an event that occurred on June 19, 1989. I was fresh out of high school, and was getting prepared to go off to college that Fall. So, I stayed with my dad in Brunswick, GA that summer, and just prior to that I received a graduation gift of some money and invested it in a new book that came out a year earlier, Gary McGee's Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements.  To this point, I had belonged to a small Southern Baptist church in my town of Terra Alta, WV, and was part of that from the time I was baptized on February 9, 1986, in another Baptist church in Kingwood, WV.  Due to some bad experiences and faulty theology my mother had, I became very ambivalent to Pentecostalism after my own conversion, and wanted nothing to do with that.  But, Dr. McGee's book changed me, and as I started warming up to Pentecostalism again, during my summer while I was at my dad's I began visiting a small Pentecostal Holiness church in Brunswick that today is called the Potter's Wheel Church, and the lady pastor, Sister Mayfield, was very helpful for me during that time.  That June, the church had this revival and an evangelist from Michigan was preaching, and during one sermon I felt like he was speaking directly to me, and I felt this urge to get this "baptism of the Holy Spirit."  So, at the altar call, I went forward, and a group of very devout old Pentecostal ladies of that church - they had long dresses, "glory buns" and all - were surrounding me and praying over me.  At that point, I felt in my gut this bubbling feeling, and next thing I knew I was saying things I didn't understand!  I had at that point received what was called Spirit baptism, and what I was doing was speaking in unknown tongues. It was actually quite a powerful experience in all honesty, and I do not doubt that it was something real.  So, I go off to Bible college that fall - at a Baptist school! - and within a year I had left the Southern Baptists and joined a local Foursquare congregation in nearby Midland City, AL.  I chose Foursquare mainly because at that time I was a big disciple of the guy who was perhaps their best-known minister, Dr. Jack Hayford.  The experience in that particular church would not prove to be great (it was actually a traumatic experience of spiritual abuse later), and that story is for another time, but it galvanized my own newfound Pentecostal experience and led to being introduced to other things, such as personal prophecy, and that is where I want to go next with this because it is the second important thing that came to mind this week. 

At the Foursquare church in Alabama I attended, in late 1990 a guy started attending who talked a lot about the restoration of "prophets and apostles" in the Church, and he was associated with a nondenominational Charismatic organization in Destin, FL, called Christian International Ministries.  CI, as it was abbreviated, was founded by a former Pentecostal minister named Bill Hamon, and it was associated with this new emphasis on modern-day prophets and apostles that was starting to catch on in Pentecostal circles then. At that time, they had these Friday night "Schools of the Prophets" down there, and given it was about 60 miles away from us, my future wife Barbara, a friend from school, and myself visited down there.  The church at that time was just getting off the ground, but it had a small sanctuary which was packed to capacity.  On this particular night, they had a speaker there named Tom Nicholson, and as was practice at the end of these meetings there was a sort of altar call for people to be prophesied over.  When it came my turn, Tom began to pray over me, and the prophecy he gave me was quite interesting (I still have this on tape too) - he said he saw me at the bottom of a deep well, and I was feeling like no one was there to help me out, but then the Lord appeared himself and delivered me.  There were other details that are not relevant to the story that I now believe pointed to my eventual reception into the Catholic Church, but that prophecy came to mind this week as I began to reflect on things.  I want to first give some clarification and then I want to get into that part of the story.

I am no longer a Pentecostal, nor do I identify as one. Many of the practices of self-proclaimed "prophets" and "apostles" are just ridiculous, if not downright manipulative or even heretical.  I still very much believe that prophecy can happen, and that God does show us things, but over the years thankfully the Church has helped me to mature.  So, despite my own story, please do not think that I am in any way endorsing non-Catholic Pentecostal "prophets" or anything like that - far from it actually.  However, just like in Numbers when God used a jackass to speak to Balaam, I believe God can use some things, despite their flaws, to give one insight.  While some of what the person may be shown may not be evident for years after the fact, God allows it to give us perspective on situations we may find ourselves thrust into.  That is how I view many earlier experiences when I was a young Christian, and I think it is justified to say that my Christianity didn't begin when I became a Catholic - I knew I was a Christian long before I took that step, but the Catholic Church helped complete that work.  So, at the risk of stirring up controversy with some of my more traditionalist friends, I do believe Protestants are Christians, and have no doubt many of them do have a sincere faith in Christ.  I just see the Catholic faith as completing that work, that is all. 

That experience of being given that word from Tom Nicholson brought to mind my journey.  I mentioned many times before that I came into the Catholic Church as a process, and that process started many years before in a similar way that other people found their way home.  In the early 1990s a movement called "Convergence" began to attract many of us who identified as Pentecostals.  I explained this movement as being a way to integrate "three streams" of Christian expression - Evangelical, Charismatic, Liturgical - into a new thing which would restore Christianity to its fullness.  This movement, as I noted in earlier posts you can refer back to, had its roots in a meeting in 1977 in Chicago in which Dr. Robert Webber, Fr. Peter Gillquist, and other former Protestants began to articulate a need to revive ancient faith by integrating it with the positive aspects of their respective denominational traditions.  This "convergence" of different streams of Christian expression was seen as restorative in that many denominational traditions often emphasized one while eschewing the others, and thus an incomplete Christianity emerged.  One of the groups that grew out of this was comprised of a number of former Pentecostals and nondenominational Charismatics who embraced the Anglican liturgical tradition and thus formed the Charismatic Episcopal Church as early as 1992 I believe.  A very prominent nondenominational Charismatic minister, Malcolm Smith, later joined the CEC and became eventually a bishop.  He has perhaps one of the most insightful liturgical studies ever produced called The Power of the Holy Spirit in Liturgy, and in all honesty, I need to listen to those again.  Bishop Smith though is important here in this discussion for another reason.  In one of his teachings from some years back, he was discussing 2 Corinthians 5:17, which says this - "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away, and all things have become new."  It is the last part of that verse which Smith focused on, and he proposed something very radical that makes a lot of sense.  I want to now talk a bit about that, as it relates to my whole experience recently. 

There are two parts to this discussion I am going to deal with, one being theological and the other personal.  The theological aspect must rest on one principle - all Scripture is the inspired Word of God, and no passage in Scripture can contradict another.  It is the same message throughout, and thus consistent.  Context here means everything.  So, the first thing we note in Genesis is that as God created the heavens and earth in that 7-day period, he would conclude each segment of the creation with the words "it is good."  Let's start there, and then we move onto Psalm 24:1, which proclaims "the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof, the world and all who dwell therein."  It is one reason as well why the Church as a whole has always taught the importance of the transcendental properties of being - Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.  What God creates is good, and therefore it should be accepted with joy as a blessing from him.  However, in parallel movements both among Protestant Evangelical/Fundamentalists and the postmodern crazies that want to destroy statues and paintings, there is this quasi-Gnostic mentality that all matter is somehow evil and thus is not worthy of preservation and love.  I remember hearing ad nauseum from televangelists and preachers in pulpits in some Pentecostal churches as a younger man such crazy phrases as "in the natural," "it's the flesh talking," and other BS.  Coupled with that was their treating of the concept of tradition as if it were the F-bomb, and even the mention of the word by someone would call into question their very salvation.  I always thought this was insane, and in reality what they were proposing could not be implemented in practice, due to the fact our own human nature does have an aesthetic dimension and we are - God forgive me for paraphrasing Madonna! - "material people in a material world."  It is not our fault - God created this world, and he created us to live in it.  So, what thankfully Bishop Smith understood about the verse in 2 Corinthians was absolutely truthful - God doesn't replace Creation, but he can renew it.  This in turn would be in line with what both Bonaventure and Aquinas taught about supernatural grace - it elevates, heals, and renews nature, because Nature is a "book" authored by God Himself just like "Revelation" is. It doesn't mean we worship nature or anything about it, but it does mean we appreciate it and always see God's creative hand in it.  That alone dispels a lot of bad theology that has been mouthed from pulpits for years by well-meaning but ignorant Pentecostal, Evangelical, and Fundamentalist ministers.  Likewise, it exposes the demonic irrationality of the "woke" mobs who are making news by trying to destroy anything that "offends" them.  This is a lesson that needs to be taught more, and I may revisit it later myself in a future post here.  

On a more personal dimension regarding Malcolm Smith's insights on this verse, I want to begin by explaining the analogy of a structure - let's say, a house.  Every house has a foundation, walls, ceilings, etc., and as often happens, with the passage of time some components of that structure do deteriorate.  A brick in the foundation may crumble, the cement which bonds the bricks together may not have been mixed right, or something that enhances the structure may drop off or be lost in some way.  If a brick is faulty in a house, you don't just tear down the whole house - no, you repair the brick by replacing it with a new brick that will strengthen the integrity of the foundation.  Same principle if a part of the house that may be aesthetic or is integral to the overall design - if it gets stolen, damaged by elements and falls off, or is just lost, you don't want to necessarily replace it with something that is unrelated to the original, do you?  Of course not!  You reconstruct and restore that missing component as close as the original, but maybe with some improvements to prevent damage or loss.  In the same way, one's life may be in need of a little renovation, but you don't necessarily replace it with something totally different, do you?  There is an epidemic of self-denial among many Evangelical and Fundamentalist traditions in regard to the past - they want to throw out anything that does not align with their worldview, and they compel their members to do this as well.  Recently, I have been reading Jeri Massi's experiences with Baptist Fundamentalism, and she wrote an excellent book about it entitled Bitter Root: Atheistic Practices Embedded in Christian Fundamentalism (Jupiter Rising Books, 2013).  On page 59 of this book, Massi notes that many Fundamentalists base their mentality not only on a quasi-Gnostic understanding of nature, but upon even modern (and abhorrent) psychological theories such as those of B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov - the elimination of belief in conscience, in human will, and in human self-determination.  In doing this, it is easy to see why they would eschew the past, even for many people as individuals, and they will even go as far as to say that embracing the good aspects of one's past is a bad thing.  Why??  Thankfully, the teaching of the Catholic Church is a lot more logical and charitable in that it encourages embracing the good of one's past while also learning from the bad.  The misunderstanding in regard to that later aspect is that many people think that you should totally suppress the negative aspects of one's past.  This is not healthy, but it also is not a way for someone to be honest with themselves.  Scars will remain, and on occasion someone will initiate looking at that scar - maybe they are going through something that caused your scar, and your experience could help them, which is why God allowed the scar in the first place.  This is what makes Malcolm Smith's insight so relevant - God is not trying to destroy anything to replace it with something foreign, but rather he restores us by leading us to embrace those things which helped us grow, and a few blemishes are left on our structure to remind us that we overcame hurts and challenges and grew beyond them without denying they happened.  That being established, let me now tell you what I got from that this week.

I remember as a young man, and even fairly recently, being passionate about certain things and I derived a sense of purpose from all that which really excited me and motivated me to do many things.  However, in the past several years, life smothered much of that passion, and I almost forgot what it was about.  I had this urge to reflect upon some things about my own faith journey this past week, which is why Malcolm Smith came to my attention - he was a very influential voice in my own spiritual journey, and I owe becoming Catholic in part to him.  When I read that statement of his, it really touched the core of my being, and it was one of those "aha!" moments in my life where I realized I was missing something.  We have all felt a little "off" at some point in our lives - uncertainty, lack of direction, etc.  So, we cry out to God to give us that, and what he sometimes says is "look within yourself."  Of course, once that realization hits, then comes the next step - where do I take this now? How do I recover my old passion for this or that?  I am still figuring this out even as I write this, but one of the inspirations I did get from it was to actually write more in my blogs again.  And, more than likely, God has it orchestrated for this to maybe touch and impact someone else.  If that is you, I challenge you today to look within yourself, ask "what am I missing?" and then definitely keep your journal - if you don't have one already, start one.  The more self-discovery you begin to do, the more it will help you.  It is another way to say that at times the answer to our individual dilemma may be right in front of us, or in this case inside us.  Time to draw it out and reflect upon it if that is the case. 

I know I had a lengthy missive this week, but I am attempting to relaunch myself as I seek to get back in touch with the person I am as well. Please pray for me, and may God's guidance be with you as well.  See you next time.