Sunday, December 28, 2008

Intellectual Participation II

...(continued from here)
This long exploration of questions and answers began from a curiosity and progressed during research into needing to fill a spiritual vacuum, a blank, lifeless open mental wound. This mental need for understanding, for resolution, for closure requires intellectual participation. Reading, interacting with others over the subject, listening to other peoples views, positioning the mind in various states of conclusion, measuring logic and reason for each view with fresh, open and objective vision.

During that period of investigation, each discovery led to more hunger for details, corroboration, deeper insight. My intellectual passion was fed by these discoveries and given the amount of time past the event and significant volume of information available each year going by (some valid and some erroneous), I was able to make determinations of fact and find a path of documented events that revealed the most consistent version of truth, means and motive.

This is a parable of my faith journey years ago. My religion from birth was attacked and wounded in my intellect, due to my lack of intellectual, behavioral and spiritual participation. I was defenseless accept to point out the obvious (IE. 1 Billion Catholics cant be wrong) which was fruitless to the attacker and myself. I had to start engaging my intellect in reading Scripture, Doctrine and Protestantism. Thats where participation led to understanding and a presence of the Holy Spirit became evident personally. Once the personal relationship began, a personal conviction was mine to own, use and grow.

3 comments:

~Joseph the Worker said...

I'm going to see if a friend of mine has an electronic copy of his journey. I think you would really enjoy reading it. He basically grew up Catholic but didn't know the difference between Catholic and Protestant teachings until he had gotten halfway sucked in by Fundamentalism, then realized how wrong something they taught him was. He's dedicated the last 10 years of his life to make sure he will never do that again and is working on his Masters in Theology. I think you would enjoy it.

The Catholic Journeyman said...

I would be interested, yes. A similar path, except I cannot put the family on food stamps and head for Steubenville...yet.

~Joseph the Worker said...

Well he's taking his ONLINE from Steubenville so that he can keep working and provide for his family! :) Funny you mentioned Franciscan though.