Jeanette Outside Readings #4

"Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil."
                     Matthew 6:9-13

I love praying the Our Father. I grew up saying it, and loving it, and meditating on it, and I'm still trying desperately to live it.

The line that always stood out to me the most, the one I rolled around on my tongue the longest, was “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. And I would pray that and I would be praying to live out love and miracles that I said I believed in–I’d be praying, and expecting, that God’s kingdom coming and his will being done meant that people would know God, and know what it was to hear his voice, and then obey it. That it would mean humanity being set on fire with passion for God and for holiness. That it would mean intentionally sacrificial lifestyles and miraculous healings and words from God and living in love and fullness and joy. Basically, that the veil between heaven and earth would be as thin as possible before death.

And it does, I still think that it does mean that.

But it took me way too long to realize that it could mean something very big about what the church was and how I was supposed to fit into it. One day, during my junior year of high school (after a buildup of more and more Catholic conclusions in my life and a simultaneous fear to look into them any further had settled), I was praying that prayer and was hit from the front and the back and both sides with the conviction that heaven probably wasn’t about various denominations of Christianity worshiping in an infinite number of corners (P.S. I clearly don’t know what heaven looks like) “according to what seemed best to them”.

I know that this probably seems obvious to you. Thank God, I think you’d have to search a long time to find any Christian that would say they believed that to be true. There’s a lot of talk of ecumenism these days, which is fine if it doesn’t become muddied and relativistic. In spite of all that, however, there are tens of thousands of verified Christian denominations (the accepted number is something like 40,000+), which is tragic. And so I’d always thought that I was somehow getting above all that by being “nondenominational”–but nondenominational obviously meant Protestant, because that was the default. Obviously.

On earth as it is in heaven. It kept gnawing at me, making me feel physically sick a lot of the time. Verses about Christian unity kept standing out to me in my Bible reading…in John 13, when Jesus said “by this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”, or John 17  which is basically a plea for unity from Jesus himself. And not unity for some abstraction of humanity, because then I could write that off as meaning unified in the sense that everyone is “some kind of Christian…or something”. NOPE, ’cause he’s praying for his disciples, who are already Christians. He’s praying that they won’t be divided, and that wasn’t some random interpretation I could choose to accept or not, because it was right there spelled out. What he prayed, for whom, and when.

So I then had this obligation to try and figure out what unity meant. So first, I had to deal with Church vs. church, with the idea that an institution and a body could be two different things. And that's what eventually led me to Catholicism.