Thank God I am not a liberal

I just want to vent, O, internet world. The title says it all. It is God alone to be thanked and praised forever and ever that I am a Catholic Christian priest of Jesus Christ. Otherwise I would be have been swept into the great mass of unbelief long ago. As a child of thirty years today, I will tell you who I really am today.

Thanks be to God for the misery that he allowed me to undergo. Thanks be to God for the innate sense of the hell rising up all around me. May Christ be praised for the courage to believe that I was made for something more!

Praise Jesus Christ for the Catholic friends who welcomed me in my searching. Thank you God for the people who first challenged my notion that abortion was a compassionate response to the plight of young pregnant women. Thank you God for those who calmly told me that premarital sexual intercourse is wrong and that man and woman should not live together before marrying. I don't know why I accepted all of these liberal teaching as a very young man out of high school, but they seemed to be things I took completely for granted. Thank you, Holy Spirit, for dispelling the fog of liberal dogmatism. Thank you for opening my mind in the beginning.

Thank you, Jesus, for not letting any other lights attract me as your own light of life did. From the first moment that I saw it, truth entered my mind. Before Christ, there was no truth there. Once he came into full view his truth entered as well. I could not counteract his truth with arguments of my own making. Thank you, Jesus Christ, for drawing me toward you in prayer and in your holy word. You held me close when my mind could not fathom your truth. When I questioned, you communicated everything to me as though I were trustworthy. As your confidant and you mine, you helped me to align my life with you laws one step at a time. Thank you for not letting the fear, shame, and pain of my past life win out, O Christ. For you alone have the words of everlasting life, and I would gladly look like an ignorant fool one thousand times a day than lose you.

Thank, Jesus Christ, for drawing me to you in the Holy Eucharist. Thank you for the daily sacrifice of the Mass, ever living and true God! Thank you for confession, where again I finally became a new creation as I was created to be. Thank you for loving me more each day. Finally Lord, when you were ready, you made me a creature that could really love you back. You forgave my debt so that I can love you more. Thank you for calling my relentlessly to your holy priesthood, my Jesus, and for the steadfastness with which you have continued to call, even as I truly became aware of all the reasons that I was unfit. Thank you Lord for giving humility to me and to all of your priests. For in the end we have nothing but you. Thank you for your people who we are called to serve. Thank you for teaching us about the souls that we encounter and allowing us to share in that healing, teaching, and apostolic live that you once showed to us. Thank you Jesus Christ for being a real person at the beginning and the end of all that we do.

Thank you Blessed Mother of God for your undying vision of your Son that you manage to see in us. You, Mary are the comfort of a priests life and the easy yoke that we take unto eternal life. Thank you Holy Mother Church for binding and loosing. Without you, know one in this "liberal world could make any good thing stick to me. Nor could anyone loosen any of the tragedies that constantly befall us in this dark valley. Thank you Saints for you witness to the very end. You show us how to live and how to die for him who is forever raised.

So for this great story that is my life, I lost the liberalism that permeated me. I gave up the inconclusive data of my life. Prior to Christ's sweetness, thoughts about myself dominated my existence. Why and from what natural cause can possibly stem this constant questioning of self? For what reason did I look to other creatures simply to believe that I could survive my life? Was I not as real as everything else? Was I conditioned incorrectly to so refuse to become like my surroundings? Ah misfit and restless soul, was there every a gift that you did not in someway reject prior to the gift of God himself?

I thank God that I am not a liberal. I am skeptical of the world and its wisdom so as to be more and more trusting of God's world and God's wisdom. Notice by world, I do not mean the natural world by the spirit of the age that seeks to dominate the meaning of my life and yours. By worldly wisdom, I do not mean scientific knowledge of the natural world nor the human sciences of our visible nature, but the so-called wisdom that has currency only because it seems to be new or unheard of. We all to easily adopt thinking that seems so correct without making a lick of common sense.

By believing in all that we see with our eyes we all the more fully distrust the God who loves us. We distrust the one happiness that we can actually aspire to that won't ultimately fail.