History Repeating Itself

Don't get upset about it 

No not anymore 

There's nothing wrong that wasn't wrong before 

No Name No. 5- Elliott Smith

At this point I will take a small detour from the Catholic years story and write about a few things I found out while learning world history with my children.


These came from my children's Christian home school history books.


One day while reading to them we encountered The Code of Hammurabi. According to the book, Hammurabi was a king of Babylon about 1780-50 BC who believed that the chief God of Babylon made him king so he could rule the people fairly. Okay, no problem so far, but when I started reading the laws he wrote, some were all too familiar.

"An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. If a man puts out the eye of another man, put his own eye out. If he knocks out another man's tooth, knock out his own tooth. If he breaks another man's bone, break his own bone." -The Story of the World Volume 1 p.61

Here is another source for more.



At first glance, I naturally assumed that this Hammurabi guy had somehow ripped off Moses, so I checked it out at the time. According to the date of the Exodus it looks like it may have been the other way around.


So one could also say that this resemblance to the Mosaic law could be explained that this was how people viewed moral laws at this stage in human history. However, that kind of takes the majesty out of Moses's getting the Law directly from God on the Mount. God's law was no different than what was already being practiced in some parts of the world already.


Also in the book was the story of Sargon which was even older than that of Hammurabi. Susan Wise Bauer writes in her book:

"There are many stories about Sargon. One of the oldest stories says that he had no parents-he just floated down the Euphrates River in a basket when he was a baby. The basket got stuck in the reeds at the edge of the river..." The Story of the World Volume 1- p.45-46

We've all heard something like that about Moses, too.


The legend goes on to tell how Sargon the infant was taken from the water by a servant and became a member of the King's household and eventually became a dictator of the whole of Mesopotamia (this part sounds more like Joseph). This was around 2300 BC apparently.




I guess to some who knew about these things and for those who don't take the Bible literally, it may not have made such an impact. However, it showed that the likelihood of these stories of Moses being unique to the Torah were not, plus these stories were older and we have the actual tablet of the Code of Hammurabi, but not the Ten Commandments.

source

And I wasn't looking for this stuff, mind you, just reading from a Christian home school curriculum.

I don't know, it was just disappointing.





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I Love Road Signs

Birth and Rebirth Anxiety

See here how everything

Lead up to this day

And it's just like any other day

That's ever been

Sun going up and then

The sun going down

Shine through my window

And my friends they come around

Black Peter- Grateful Dead

The Church baptizes adult converts once a year and our parish dedicated one Sunday per month for infant baptisms.  I was baptized in April of 2001 and our second child was born in June of the same year. Baptism has always been a puzzlement to me, mainly because in all of Christian history it has been such a matter of disagreement.  Check out this chart for example. What utterly shocked me was when reading the church Fathers how very very important this water ceremony was in determining the eternal state of anyone.

Our first son's baptism

I read many of the things that the Early Church Fathers wrote about it, and it was very disheartening to say the least. Let's just say one had better have the priest there in the delivery room to make sure your little one doesn't go to Hell. Here are some quotes (emphasis mine):

"Likewise, whosoever says that those children who depart out of this life without partaking of that sacrament shall be made alive in Christ, certainly contradicts the apostolic declaration, and condemns the universal Church,in which it is the practice to lose no time and run in haste to administer baptism to infant children, because it is believed, as an indubitable truth, that otherwise they cannot be made alive in Christ."Augustine,Epistle 167,7,21(A.D. 415) source

" 'Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.' No one is expected: not the infant, not the one prevented by necessity."Ambrose,Abraham,2,11:79(A.D. 387) source

Be assured, and doubt not, that not only men who have attained the use of their reason, but also little children who have begun to live in their mothers' womb and have there died, or who, having been just born, have passed away from the world without the sacrament of holy baptism, administered in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, must be punished by the eternal torture of undying fire; for although they have committed no sin by their own will, they have nevertheless drawn with them the condemnation of original sin, by their carnal conception and nativity." (sec. 70.)—Bishop St. Fulgentius, 4th century source

How horrifying it was to imagine that if the baby wasn't baptized and something horrible happened, then what.. Hell forever, really? This struck me as some kind of unimaginable cruelty on the part of God, but this is what many of the Fathers wrote and was what was believed.  The fate of anyone was dependent on a ritual performed by man.



There was also a limbo that was developed a bit later to soften this up a bit, but as far as I know the Church has never set that in stone one way or another. It's better, but still, the unbaptized soul does not get to go to Heaven.



Needless to say, while being Catholic each pregnancy and birth was shadowed with this fear that we'd better hurry up and do this thing as soon as we could. Rather than being a matter of tradition, family togetherness, sharing our faith and of course obedience, it became a source of great anxiety to me. This could very well be the difference between Heaven and Hell and I took it very seriously.



Baptismal regeneration is what is taught in Catholicism as the washing away of original sin, the rebirth spoken of by Jesus in the gospel of John. If original sin is not washed away, then the soul is in Adam and doomed to spend eternity without God and worse, if the horrific "visions" of Hell described by the Saints were to be taken seriously, then it truly would be better to never have been born (or even conceived) at all then to have missed this Sacrament.


This isn't necessarily unique to Catholicism, though. My mom told me once of a protestant church's graveyard in her town that some of the elderly ladies called Hell's Graveyard.  They were referring to a section unbaptized infants were buried.



The God I was saved by would not allow such an enormously serious task left to human hands. It seemed to me that He must be in more control of His creation that this? Babies in Hell? What kind of God would allow such a thing?


I also knew that this had been contested and up for debate by all the Fathers and Doctors of the Church throughout the years about the fate of those unbaptized babies. However, we were told that the One True Faith has remained constant since the time of the Apostles. My first cognitive dissonance with the Church's authority began. How could the Faith have remained unchanged and yet changed many times through the centuries? And why in the world was the Bible not more clear about this?

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Small Fall Tomatoes

Mary and Me

Triumph all ye Cherubim 

Sing with us ye Seraphim 

Heav'n and earth resound the hymn 

Salve Salve Salve Regina

Salve Regina (sung at Church on some of Mary's feast days)

After being officially initiated, I decided if the Roman Catholic Church was where it was at, then I was going all in. My husband was also reading quite a bit of Catholic literature trying to cover the years he had missed and my in laws were getting into the Faith pretty heavily as well after being disinterested for many years. The Mary thing came up early as there was so much of it in Catholicism. To me, the idea of a Heavenly Mother was not particularly attractive but it seemed to be so for some. I knew nothing of Mary's intercession during my initial and what I still considered real salvation experience, but it was such an integral part of the Faith. I had to give it an honest try.

My husband bought Alphionsus de Ligouri's The Glories of Mary. I read this thing cover to cover and ended up just as confused about God, Jesus and salvation as ever. If you are brave go and read it. Here is an excerpt (emphasis mine):

If we desire to find the grace of God, let us go to Mary who has found it. She always has been and always will be dear to God; if we have recourse to her, we shall certainly find it. God has placed her in the world to be our defense, and therefore she is ordained to be the Mediatrix of Peace between the sinner and God. 

Saint Bernard gives encouragement to the sinner and says: "Go to this Mother of mercy, and show her the wounds which your sins have inflicted on your soul. Then she will surely beg her Son to pardon you, and the Son Who loves her so much will certainly hear her." So, too, the Church teaches us to pray to the Lord to grant us Mary's powerful intercession so that we may rise from our sins: "Grant us, merciful God, strength against all our weakness, that we who celebrate the memory of the holy Mother of God may, by the help of her intercession, arise again from our iniquities. p.51

So we need Mary's intersession? This was completely foreign and unsettling to me, but here was the One True Church encouraging it. Some priests did say in their literature not too take the Mary adoration too far, but if you will read any of the Fathers or Saints when they speak of Mary, it was too late for that. And to point out that the Bible says nothing about this doesn't matter one bit.

I hesitantly started learning about the Rosary and would say it from time to time at first. We were given brown scapulars by some family members and had started putting pictures of Mary and Jesus around the house. This took all the personal relationship out of my walk with God. If I said this prayer, went to confession on First Friday or First Saturday, wore the scapular, or pledged some other devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus or the Immaculate Heart of Mary this was somehow supposed to bring me closer to God. It was beginning to seem that Jesus was just another in the chain of command to get to God and not the only Way at all. Of course this is never taught outright, but ....

In addition to this, we began reading some of the books by the Mystics of the Church. St. Bridget and St. Catherine of Siena especially. These ladies would spend hours in visions and prayers, refusing to eat. One of them only taking communion for sustenance for a time and always going on and on about how sinful we really are just being human. Jesus didn't do it all, apparently, we must also suffer. It was not finished and the peace I had had about my relationship with Him was being destroyed little by little.

What began to develop instead was fear, doubt and confusion. The God I knew who had loved me and saved me and heard my cry for help was not this God of the Church. This God was distant, aloof, seemed to delegate responsibility and power to priests, Saints, and intercessors. I had a hard time feeling that I could directly pray to Him anymore and He seemed so much more like a stern and scary authority figure than a loving Creator. I was scared of Him like never before and my sins were always before me.

Instead of this making me speak up though, I dug further into the theology of the Church. After all, they were the original Church and who was I to think I knew better?

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