The Beauty of Free Will, Mary, Purgatory, and Other Catholic Doctrines

This is not a defense of what I believe, but simply what I believe. I have written this because I feel you are tired, dear reader, of having theological or philosophical arguments thrown at you. If you do not see any truth in what I believe, it is my hopes that you will at least see the beauty of it, so that we can all grow in unity as a Catholics, as Christians, and as a human race. When two people both stop to admire the beauty of a rose, even if one doesn’t understand it and the other doesn’t believe it to be a real rose, aren’t both unified in this act of gazing at something beautiful? They don’t fight or argue for once, but sit peacefully together, looking at the rose. I present you, reader, whoever you are, whatever walk of life you are in, whether you believe in God or not, with this rose, not to defend it’s rosiness to you or it’s color or it’s photosynthesis, but so that we can both look at this rose side-by-side in peace, admiring the transcendental that is higher than both of us: beauty.

“The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.” (Zephaniah 3:17)

“Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.” (Luke 15:6)

“Finally, brothers and sisters, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus that, as you learned from us how you ought to live and to please God (as, in fact, you are doing), you should do so more and more. For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification…” (1 Thessalonians 4:1-3)

“I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” (Luke 15:10)

“…in him there is found something pleasing to the Lord, the God of Israel…” (1 Kings 14:13)

“But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate.” (Luke 15:22-24)

“so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God.” (Colossians 1:10)

“Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” (Hebrews 13:16)

We are called to please God. Our repentance, our sacrifices, our life has the potential to cause Him to rejoice, to celebrate, to be pleased! If God made it so that we could please Him, so that this great God could be pleased by feeble man, think about the implications. If we have the God-given capability to please Him, it must be a choice to please Him. If it wasn’t a choice, if He forced us to please Him like a puppet master, it wouldn’t be us pleasing Him, it would be God pleasing himself through us, turning us into robots, which cannot be pleasing at all. And for it to be a choice, an act of free will and not one of coercion, there must be another option for it to be a choice. That option has to be to pain God, to hurt Him. If God so desired us to choose Him, to please Him that He would be willing to be mocked and hurt and pained and tortured and killed by us, how precious must this choice to please Him, this ‘yes’ to Him be? How sweet must this aroma be, our feeble ‘yes’ to Him, that He would endure to suffer all of time to hear one ‘yes’ from us. As real as His Passion was and is, His delight in us must be just as real. Yes indeed, He would “create the universe again just to hear you say you love [Him]” (Jesus to St. Teresa of Avila).

And how beautiful does that make Mary in His eyes? Her yes was perfect and complete, not lacking anything, free from the stain of original sin, putting her entire life and body at God’s disposal from the moment she could choose, even before the Annunciation. And by her own merit? Not at all! But because she received the gift God gave her in a way that was so beautiful that the stunning angel Gabriel, far more outwardly beautiful than any man, knelt at her feet and hailed her as “full of grace.” How fitting then, that her yes and her heart and her love was so beautiful, so pleasing to God that He came down to Earth in that moment in history so that she could be His mother, so that He could share in her very flesh. In a very real way, so real that we probably won’t understand fully in this life, the God of the universe was enraptured by the beauty of Mary’s soul, because of her yes, and was deeply in love with her.

That is how pleasing to God that we can be, that is how much potential He gave humanity to please Him before the fall. She was the true Eve, beauty, truth, and goodness in its highest form. She was so beautiful to Him that her pleasing aroma of holiness brought about the salvation of the world. Did she save the world? No. Did God choose to enter the world through her? Yes. God used her in the most crucial and intimate part of the salvation plan, the incarnation, and again to bring about the public ministry of Jesus at the Wedding of Cana. Jesus was so taken with delight and admiration for his mother that He turned water into wine and met human needs at her request. She was so pleasing to God that the Holy Spirit conceived in her. This is a far deeper union with the Trinity than any human has been before.

We too have the capability to please Him, and not by our own merit, but by the grace of God. He has given us a gift (grace) and made it so that when we receive it (faith), we have the power to please Him. And at such a high cost, for to have the ability to please Him we have to have the ability to hurt Him, to nail Him to a tree. May we never misuse this great power, this great gift by offending Him!

And notice, by being human, by having a soul, by being exactly who we are, we have the ability to present Him with beautiful bouquets of love because of the love with which He first loved us. God isn’t pleased with us because when He looks at us He sees only Jesus or only Jesus’ righteousness because of an altar call we made when we were eight. No, He is pleased when He sees us, weak, snotty children that we are, using the grace He has given us to choose Him. He sees us. He is pleased with us. And when we please Him, say yes to Him, we become even more free, more able to please Him, to glorify Him, to love Him. What a God we serve!

This is how He sanctifies us. It is not by throwing a white robe over us, to cover us, to make us all little robot Jesus’s. No. It is by taking what’s underneath that imaginary robe, the weak and sinful nature of man, the us, with all our humanity: our past, our attachments, our desires, our weaknesses, our genders, our identities, and purifies that instead of covering it all up with a white robe of righteousness and dismissing all that is us. We are sanctified, we are made white and pure, but that whiteness comes from within our hearts and travels throughout our whole body, making us righteous. It is not snow covering a pile of refuse so that God is happy; this is not biblical and this is not a loving God. It is God giving His life to redeem that pile of refuse and working on that pile of refuse until it is something beautiful, white, and pure.

He can look at you right now and be delighted at your trust in Him, a trust He has given you all the graces you need to do. And this process of sanctifying us makes us as white as snow from within happens as soon as we say our first yes to Him… on this earth. So, when we die in His graces, in a state of putting our faith and trust in Him, and we see the parts of us that aren’t white, that weren’t purified completely on Earth, I am sure we will throw ourselves into the flames of purgatory to finish the process. What bride would go to her husband on her wedding day with anything that would cause him pain? If a human bride takes care to look as beautiful as she can for her groom, how much more will we want our souls to be as beautiful, as pleasing, and as holy as we can for our Savior when we finally meet Him face to face?

It’s important to note, all of this talk about pleasing God, that the opposite of pleasure is not displeasure or disdain in the modern sense of the word. The opposite of pleasure is pain. When we are not pleasing God, we are paining Him, hurting Him, inflicting wounds onto His body, crucifying Him. When we are sinning, running from Him, He doesn’t stick up His nose at us, get angry, indifferent, or just turn away. No. He is right by your side, crying out in pain as He lets you crucify Him over and over again, saying “I thirst for you” on the cross you have nailed Him too. He endures this pain for your whole life so that the moment you want to turn to Him, He’ll be right there waiting. That is how pleasing you can be to Him. That is how much He loves you, that is how much He thirsts for your soul. There is no limit on how far you have gone or how long you have run, He never leaves you. How it must pain His heart when a soul dies choosing Hell!

See, we are not pleasing to Him because we are so great, but because He has chosen to love us so much. The look or touch or kiss of a lover is so pleasing because we desire it so badly, because we love them so much, not because their look or touch or kiss is so good in and of itself. Yes, Jesus desires a yes from you so much that He will endure all kinds of sufferings at your hand for just one “I love you” from you on your deathbed. That is how precious you are to Him. And never forget the cost. For us to be given the ability to love Him, He had to give us the ability to crucify Him.

You might look inside of yourself and see nothing beautiful, nothing pleasing to anyone, nothing that is desirable even to another person, let alone to the God of the Universe. And there you have gotten in backwards. It’s not because you are lovely that He loves you. It’s not because you are desireable that He desires you. It’s not because you are beautiful that He delights in you.

It is because God loves you that you are lovely, because He desires you that you are desirable, and because He delights in you that you are beautiful. And this, friends, will never change.

Why I Converted to Catholicism

My freshman year of college, I left the PCA, Presbyterian Church that I grew up in to make a lifelong commitment to the Catholic Church. I get asked why I did this all of the time. I’m going to answer this question as much as I can on a blog post, but to do so, I need to tell you a story.

Two people fall in love. They get married and have a baby girl. From the day she is born, they tell her about Jesus. She grows up learning about God’s love for her, the Gospel, and everything else in between. She loves praying to Him and spending quiet time with Him.

Fast forward to high school. She’s a teenager. She still loves God, but there is something missing. There is something inside of her heart, deep down, that she cannot describe or even admit to herself. There is a longing.

People describe this longing in talks and sermons, but they say it as if it only applies to non-Christians. She hears a talk, she doubts the authenticity of her faith, she prays another prayer, and marks down a new Christian Birthday. The cycle continues, but the longing always comes back.

So many people are shouting at this young girl. Some people tell her that she doesn’t love God if she doesn’t feel it. Some people say that if she feels like she needs to know Him more, she needs to ask Jesus into her heart again, because if He was really in there, she wouldn’t feel this way. Some people tell her that if God isn’t king over all of her life, he isn’t king at all.

This girl, tender hearted as she was, loved God, but slowly Doubt crept in and put its slimy hands around her heart. Everyone was shouting at her, but what one said contradicted the next one. Everyone shouted at each other. Could this be the God that she thought that she knew?

Everyone told her the answer to her longing was to know God better. How could she know God better? She prayed to Him, read about Him, studied about Him, served at her church, lead a Bible study, etc. She had all of the boxes checked, and she was exhausted. She still knew deep in her heart that something was missing.

Slowly, Doubt’s seductive voice got louder. She must be the problem. Maybe she’s not able to love and to know God. Or maybe God isn’t who He says He is. He’s awfully confusing if everyone’s telling her and (firmly believing themselves) all of these different things as objective truths.

She was exhausted. She was told to know God by doing these 3 things every day (prayer, reading, and service), but she was told not to make a list or check off any boxes. She was told that she’s supposed to follow her own conscience as her ultimate authority, but that everyone’s heart is full of deceit and cannot be trusted. She was told that once Jesus is in her heart she’s going to heaven no matter what she does, but she was told that if her actions didn’t line up with her faith that she never had real faith in the first place. She was told that faith was saying a prayer, that that prayer was only real if actions followed it, but that her best actions were like a dirty rag to God.

She was told that you can’t please God with your good actions, but you can displease Him with your bad actions. She was told that to get closer to God was to know Him more, and to know Him was to study and learn more about Him, but she was told that relying on her knowledge was pride. She was told to church-shop to find a church that fits her own needs and makes her happy, but she was told that church shouldn’t ever be about her.

Her weary heart bowed its head in discouragement. No matter what anyone said, she couldn’t know God more because to know Him more lead her to pride. She couldn’t pick a church that met her needs because that lead her to selfishness and a judgmental heart. She couldn’t have the faith that everyone talked about because she still had doubts and weaknesses and shortcomings, no matter how hard she tried. She couldn’t aim for holiness because that would be prideful and a works-based faith, but she couldn’t sin because if she did that meant that her faith wasn’t real. She had to choose God to be saved, but she didn’t have the innate power to choose God at all because she was a sinner.

God and her faith life became like this puzzle that she had to solve without looking at the box. The Christian life that God wanted her to live was some jewel hidden in a cloud in the sky that she could reach for her whole life but would always fall short of. She had this deep longing to know God more, but was forced to suppress it as a sure sign that she did not trust God enough.

 A battle for her very soul was going on. One day, this girl found the Catholic Church, and her life was changed forever.

I could go on and on about the theological arguments for why I chose Catholicism over every denomination of Protestantism all day. I originally wrote this post as  lengthy, Biblical arguments for why the Catholic Church is the fullness of truth. These arguments are important, and they are necessary, but I find they most often end in a stale mate. Arguments and wordy discussions were not what made me convert to Catholicism, although praise God the Catholic Church had a Biblical answer for every question I threw it’s way.

What made me Catholic was that it offered the thing that my soul ached for: it offered intimacy with Jesus Christ in a more physical and spiritual way than any other church offers on the face of this earth.

I longed for more than a relationship with Jesus; I longed for intimacy with Jesus my whole life. Without the Catholic Church, the only way to find it was in knowledge or in actions. None of these gave me intimacy.

I was longing for what my heart was made for: The Eucharist.

Imagine that you are in love with someone. What do you want to do? Simply put, you want to touch them. An accidentally brush of the hand can leave you with butterflies. A gentle kiss on the lips can leave you floating all the way home. Why? That is how God made us. Our bodies and touch express our love.

Now, imagine being desperately in love with someone that you’ve never seen. You learn about him, you even talk to him on the phone, but you’ve never seen his face or touched his hands. What do you long to do more than anything? You long to touch him.

This is what Protestantism is for everyone who loves Jesus. It’s a long distance relationship and it’s a very real relationship. But that longing in your heart won’t ever go away until you get to touch Him.

But what if I told you that you could be completely intimate with Jesus Christ right now? That intimacy that you long for can be fulfilled on this earth. You can have heaven on earth! It’s not just me saying this, it’s millions of Christians who went before me as far back as the first disciples and the millions of Catholics who live now.

There is only one person that you want to give your body to in the act of sex. Why? Because it is the most intimate and precious of gifts. It is you saying that you completely surrender yourself to this one person, and they completely surrender themselves to you.

Jesus loves you so intimately that He gives His body for us. However, it doesn’t stop on the Cross. Every day at the mass, He says, “this is my body,” and literally gives us His body.

The Eucharist is the bread and the wine that Catholics partake of in communion that is the physical presence of Jesus. At the words of consecration, it becomes physically and literally His body and blood. It is not like His body or a symbol of His body; it is His body, just like He says it is.

This is crazy. This is radical. This is strange. We believe that bread turns into Jesus? We believe that we eat Jesus? Ask yourself this: is it any crazier than three Gods in one person? Is it any crazier than a virgin birth? Is it any crazier than Jesus being fully God and fully man? If, when Jesus was on earth, His divinity was hidden, couldn’t He be in a piece of bread with His divinity and His humanity hidden?

Now, where exactly does this teaching come from? Surely not the Bible, or at least the Protestant Bible, right? Wrong. Read John 6:25-72. Pay special attention to these verses:

“’I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world.’ The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying: ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ Then Jesus said to them: ‘Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him.’” (52-57)

Read the entire passage. Over and over again He says it. Some disciples leave saying that this teaching is too hard. At that point, if He meant symbolically or anything less than literally, would He not have clarified right then, rather than allow them to leave? But He doesn’t. He only repeats that they must eat His body and drink His blood.

When Jesus says He is the gate, does anyone say, “Jesus, you’re not a gate!” When Jesus says He is the vine, does anyone say, “Jesus, you’re not a vine!” Does anyone leave because they think He is being literal? No. This time is distinctly different. People leave thinking He’s literal. If He wasn’t being literal, wouldn’t He have stopped them? The upholding of this teaching was so important to Him, that He was willing to lose followers rather than retract it.

When the young girl in my story was faced with these facts, she was faced with a decision. She did not understand all of Catholicism; she was just a girl. However, she searched and found that it had Biblical answers to all of her questions (sola scriptura, the Pope, faith vs. works, confession, purgatory, Mary, etc.) that I do not have the space to expound upon here.

On the one hand, she could not believe that Jesus was being literal and the Eucharist is just a piece of bread. All of the arguments against the Eucharist, and believe me there are plenty, boil down to this: That is not Jesus’ body. However, Jesus held up a piece of bread and said it was. It’s a man’s word vs. God’s word.

She could take that chance, and bank on the man, and bank on the fact that millions of the worlds’ most devout men and women were wrong. Not being a Catholic, she was the minority. Her faith was the newest (five hundred years to two thousand years) and full of much less people. If she was right, good for her. If she was wrong, what would she be missing out on?

If it was true, if it was really Jesus in there, she could be not only in the spiritual presence of Jesus, but she could literally sit at his feet. She could be in the physical presence of Jesus. She could eat Jesus and become more like Him (because we are what we eat). She could be as deeply intimate with Jesus as is humanly possible and consummate her love for him and His love for her by taking Him into her body. She could get literally and spiritually closer to Him then she ever could be without the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is everything. What it means to be Catholic is to believe in the physical presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. This is everything. Why wouldn’t it be? If you heard that the President or one of your famous heroes was in town and you could go actually sit at his feet and talk to him and listen to him and touch him, would you go? Or would you be content to just read his or her books or biography? Take it a step further. If millions of people throughout history and throughout the world claimed that Jesus was in their Church and you can go sit with Him and physically be with Him, wouldn’t you go? Even if you were skeptical, wouldn’t you at least check it out?

That’s why mass is offered everyday. That’s why there are chapels open 24 hours with a piece of consecrated bread in a tabernacle for us to go and pray to Jesus at his feet. Where Jesus is, I must be.

But if she was wrong, and she missed out on all that…the thought made her shudder. After reading this verse, “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day,” could she risk being wrong? After seeing all of the richness and the fullness of truth that the Catholic Church teaches about the Eucharist, could she risk missing out on that? Could she risk missing out on the real, physical presence of Jesus? Could she risk missing to hold His body in her hands and have His physical body and blood become a part of her body? Could she dare to take the chance that Jesus, in body, blood, soul, and divinity, had made Himself available in a piece of bread for her and just let Him wait there for her and stand him up?

I was that girl. I didn’t know. How could I leave everything I knew behind over a piece of bread?

One day, I heard some Catholics talking about an adoration chapel. They said it was open 24 hours so anyone can go and see Jesus whenever they want to. They said it so casually, but this rocked my world. That’s what the Eucharist means. The Son of God becomes bread and wine for us so that we can go see Him, sit at His feet, or partake of His divinity any time we want to.

I went to that adoration chapel as soon as I could. And He was there. Jesus, my King and my Savior, was sitting in a tabernacle in the form of bread. And I knew right then that I had to become Catholic. I needed to have the Eucharist. I needed to have Jesus. It’s not something we can see and it’s not something we can even always feel; it’s a faith.

I still had so many questions. I didn’t even understand how Jesus could be in a piece of bread. But, where Jesus was physically, I had to be. I trusted that if Jesus chose to come down in the form of bread and wine in the Catholic Church, He was not going to let His bride or those seeking Him be lead astray. And He didn’t. Over time, everything became clear to me. He has not allowed the gates of hell to prevail against His bride and His Church.

All of the questions and the doubts that I had were put to rest, because the Church had one, clear-cut answer for me. It was not found in works or knowledge, but in a piece of bread. That intimacy that I longed for is satisfied when I take Him, but makes me want to have Him even more again the next day, like a wife on her honeymoon. I didn’t have to church-hop and find the worship that suited me because the crux of a Mass isn’t the songs or the sermon but Jesus. I could have a peace and allow Jesus to fill this longing. I could aim for holiness because of the graces given to me in the Sacraments and it wasn’t prideful. I could rest in the authority of Christ’s Church and not on my own feeble understanding.

I finally saw the Catholic Church for what it was. All I had known about it was the Crusades, indulgences, priest scandals, and other horrible things. While these are real and the Church isn’t perfect, it isn’t doomed. It’s made up of humans and growing in holiness like we are. It is the largest provider of social services in the world and feeds, clothes, and shelters more people than any other institution in the world. It started the education system and the study of science itself. It is the oldest and largest institution in the world and the only one that even secular sources have recorded as it’s founder Jesus.

Being Catholic is the best decision that I have ever made. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t practical. It wasn’t comfortable leaving everything that I had ever known and risking ridicule and the severing of relationships. These did come. It wasn’t comfortable to leave everything for what looks like to everyone else just a piece of bread.

But we are not called to be comfortable. We are called to be followers of Christ.

This decision is not just for me, just like the call to follow Christ isn’t just for me. This call is for everyone. The intimacy that Jesus offers is for everyone. The Catholic Church is for everyone.

We were made for much more than what we settle for in our comfort zones. We were made for physical intimacy, and Jesus gives us that intimacy in the Eucharist. We were made for radical love, and Jesus gives us that love in the Eucharist. This intimacy and radical love crushes the head of the Doubt that had been growing in my heart like a weed for so long. We need only to trust in Him, even if it leads us to something that sounds crazy or scares us and accept His gift of Himself. That is where true peace, freedom, and joy lies because that is where Jesus’ body lies: in the tabernacle of a Catholic Church.