In the last few days, Pope Francis came out in an interview saying that if the Catholic church and the people in the church only focused on abortion and homosexuality, pretty soon it would lead to the downfall of the Catholic church. Essentially he’s right. If a religion spends its time and its money and its effort on entirely peripheral issues and makes them core issues, then eventually it falls away from the truth, the calling that it’s supposed to be answering to, and the reason for its being. Certainly abortion is not permissible in Catholic guidelines and neither is homosexuality. But, to make the campaign of the church centered on those two things misses the true purpose of the church, which is to bring man and God closer together. As soon as the mysterious relationship of man and God is taken out of the religion, then the religion begins to serve another purpose than it was originally intended.
Likewise, with each of us, we have certain ideas, obsessions, agendas, issues that are at the forefront of our consciousness, that are at the forefront of our intentions. Depending on what these issues are we are either involved in the purpose of our creation or we are peripheral to the purpose of our creation.
The religions on a large scale and people who run the religions on a large scale have issues to look after for other people. We individually have to follow what is our own religion. We in fact create our own religion. Our own religion becomes the items that we intend to be the forefront of our purpose.
In all the major religions there are sects and sub-sects and ideas and sub-ideas and people gather around these ideas and try to help progress these ideas as a group. But it all comes down to the individuals within the group. It always comes down to who are we and what are we doing and what is it that is our religion.
If we are involved in Catholicism in Northern Ireland, then one of the main tenets of our religious observance or religious idea may be to get the Protestants our of Ireland. This may be the focus of what we call religion. For the Protestants, it may be to get the Catholics out of Northern Ireland. This may be the focus of what the religion is about.
It goes on like this, where certain agenda items in the religion, that have to do with the world and have to do with certain individuals in the world, certain ideas in the world, certain ideas about what is right and wrong, overwhelm the connection between us and the mystery that is Allah, the mystery that is God, the mystery that we were placed into in this existence. As our focus steers to those peripheral things, our distance from the truth of our relationship to God gets further and further and further. We create an imaginary scenario in our own being, that we are somehow doing God’s work, but what we are doing is the work of agendas. We are not doing the real work of connecting ourselves to Allah. We are not doing the real work of connecting ourselves, identifying ourselves with Allah. We are not doing the spiritual work. We are doing some sort of worldly work.
