Interesting sermon today at mass given by one of the more enlightened priests in our parish. He has won over a lot of parishioners with his short, concise and relevant sermons, and with his ability to lead a straightforward mass without a lot of 'extras' (singing half the mass in Latin, a long drawn-out liturgy, boring sermons that merely repeat the gospel message). This is the way you get people on board with attending mass. It tells me that it is not necessary to subject people to boring sermons and an exaggerated liturgy. There is room for hymns and music, yes, but there should be room for a mass or two each week that is short and to the point.
The sermon today had to do with faith--belief in some of the things that the church teaches, for example, the Trinity. Or that communion is the intake of the body and blood of Christ. He stressed that the latter is not just a symbolic idea. I've always wondered about this, because it is one of the things that makes Catholicism different from Protestantism. I've accepted certain Catholic theological ideas on faith alone, because there is no proving what we say we believe in. And that was the priest's point. We live in a world that wants proof, wants to measure and define everything, a world that wants explanations for all things related to religious faith. But in other areas of our lives, we 'accept' things that are impossible to explain, define or prove. So why should our religious beliefs be any different than what we accept on faith when we talk about love, trust, fidelity, and hope. We believe in love, in the existence of love, and while doing so, we accept that love exists with zero proof that it actually exists. We cannot really define it or explain it. We feel it, we know it to be true with our rational minds, but we cannot prove its existence. And yet we fall in love, marry, are faithful to our partners, and trust that our partners are faithful to us. We build lives based on hope, another intangible entity. The lives we live, based on love, fidelity, trust and hope reflect the existence of these things, but they are not scientific proof of them.
This made so much sense to me. It was a perfect example of someone saying something so wise and so relevant that it will stick with you forever. It makes it easier to accept some ideas on faith alone without needing proof of them. I can accept this as a scientist, because I learned that even in science, there were thousands of things that we could not explain. But we like to believe we can explain most everything. We cannot. Some things, like religious ideas, love, fidelity, trust and hope, we must accept on faith alone without being able to define them.
