All By Myself

In the modern, secular, post-Christian West we love our individualistic delusions of grandeur. I can do it on my own. I don't need help. I don't need instruction. I'm perfectly capable of interpreting things. This is particularly true in religious and spiritual matters. We tend to think that we are the authority and our interpretation and opinion is equally valid with any other. The is a very peculiar idea. We don't take this attitude with anything else. Or, at least, very few of us do. Those that do take the "I know everything about everything" approach to life are generally understood to be either harmless fools or raging narcissists.

Let's have a thought experiment. Would you trust yourself to build a rocket and then get in it and fly to the moon? All of you out there who are engineers, think of something else. My undergraduate is a liberal arts degree that required one math class called "Math for Liberal Arts Majors". I can tell you with some certainty that 2+2 does equal 4. I also know, at a college level, that circles are round, squares are not. Now, let's say that like several of our friends you happen to be a NASA engineer working on the new shuttle (I almost called it a space-ship, but I don't want to hear about it). Okay, so you're a NASA engineer and I'm me possessing all the math and engineering skills that my beloved state requires as "minimum". I invite you over one day and take into my garage and show you the shuttle I have built (and to make it really ring true, with plans I got off the Internet). What would your reaction be? You may laugh and ridicule the abject stupidity of me attempting to design and build a functioning shuttle in my garage because I not only lack anything resembling proper materials but I don't have anything close to a rudimentary understanding of what is needed to construct functioning spacecraft. Or you may smile and patronizingly congratulate the village idiot on a job well done while you secretly hope I don't really intend to fly it and the 55 gallon drum labeled "Rocket Fuel" is really just my lawn clippings. Finally, you might tell me truthfully that I have not built a shuttle. What I have done is poorly construct a death-trap of duck-tape and tin foil mounted on a wheelbarrow that in some abstract way remotely resembles something that was used in a mid-century B-movie about space. You might add that even if I had the plans from NASA for the shuttle, I wouldn't be able to read them. You would remind me that you spent many years in school being taught by experts in the field how to read those plans. That you live and work in the field of space-stuff and even you, with a whole team of engineers, still get it wrong sometimes. But... what is the thing you wouldn't say? You wouldn't say that I have made a fine shuttle and if I believe that it will fly then it will. You won't tell me that rockets, however different, are equally capable of space-flight. You also won't tell me that it's up to each individual to decide how a space shuttle should be designed and built and that we should be give equal respect to all designs because all space shuttles are just different paths to the same moon. Why wouldn't you say that? Because it's stupid. It's very simple, if you don't follow the plan you can't build the shuttle correctly and it won't fly and it might blow up on take off. Sometimes (the Challenger) even if experts do follow the plan they've made accidents happen. To follow the plans, to design and build a shuttle, you don't just pick up a pen and paper and start drawing and assume that because you had math in high school you know all you need to know the leave the earth's orbit in your homemade ship. You learn, you educate yourself through reputable sources, through tried and true methods. You go to the people that are supposed to know what they are talking about and you ask questions and you listen and you discuss. And after many years of this you might be allowed to get coffee for the guys who are designing the next shuttle. 

My Homer Simpson Space Shuttle is the way (as ridiculous as it seems) many of us understand our spiritual lives. Most us possess what might be considered an elementary school knowledge of our faith (if we're lucky) yet we present our opinions on all matter religious as if we were the ranking theologian at the Angelicum. Many of us stopped our religious education before high school, which would put us at about a 6th grade level. Again, there are also many that have no religious, theological, or philosophical education, yet, we believe our opinion should be given equal weight to St. Thomas Aquinas or the greatest living theologian, Benedict XVI. Why? Why do we think this? You wouldn't ask a junior-high student to design a shuttle or handle your retirement accounts. So why do we trust a junior-high student with our soul? I don't trust myself to change my own oil. One of the dumbest statements I've ever heard in my life is the very typical, "I went to Catholic school, I know all about the Church". That's the equivalent of saying, "I took math in high school, I know all about quantum physics."

We must look to the experts. We must look to the tried and true. The experts I mean are the experts in the spiritual life- the saints. We must look to what God has provided us; the Church and the Scriptures and all that is contained within those two. If I'm not sure how to do something and I don't want to screw it up, I try to find someone who does know how to do it, because they've done it already and done it well. If I want to grow in my spiritual life I want to look to those who have already done it and succeeded. Read the lives of the saints. Read the works of the saints. Read your scriptures and receive the sacraments. Together these are blueprints for our lives.