Last year, I read a book which I keep going back to and re-reading parts of.  It's call Path to Freedom, written by Fr. Jean Corbon.  It applies the stages of salvation history from Genesis to Revelation to the personal journey of faith.  In particular, I took to heart his warning against legalism: "If we wish to keep legals values where they belong and delve further into the true sources of our autonomy as sons of God, we must be aware of the dangers of paralysis from legalism. ... The radical powerlessness of the law -- of any law including our own  generous resolutions or our careful programs for perfection -- make us more sensitive to the invitation to allow ourselves to be save by grace.  The complexities of law make us long for the pure space of gratuitousness in which we can breathe  freely.  We can all honestly say that we have experienced the failure of any law in our lives to restore and heal us from within."

Here are some music selections...

Our boys (ages 5, 4, 2, and 2 months) absolutely love Nick Alenxander's CD (http://www.nickalexander.com/).  He takes classic popular music and changes the lyrics to fit various Catholic themes.

Praise and Worship?  Make sure you check out www.WorshipTogether.Com (not particularly catholic, but still, great music).  Check out Jim Cowan (http://jimcowan.com/) and Martin Doman (http://www.martindoman.com), both of whom are catholic.

Also, ChristMusic (http://www.christmusic.org) has a great Catholic Kids Worship CD which my four boys absolutely love!

Enter into His presence!  Immantentize the Eschaton!  May Christ dwell in your heart though faith!

I thought I'd write a little about one of my favorite apostolates, the Saint Paul Center for Biblical Studies, which was founded by Dr. Scott Hahn.  Their mission is to promote biblical literacy among Catholics and biblical fluency among the priests.  What I like the most is their approach, while thoroughly faithful to the Church, is not reactionary in away way.  They are committed to helping catholics to encounter Jesus Christ through the Sacred Scriptures, so that our experience of Christ in the sacraments become more powerful.

They are doing so many important things.  They have some great online Bible Studies, a newsletter, a theological journal, and they train Bible Study leaders across the country.  They are working on what will become the best Catholic Study Bible ever written.  And, Dr. Scott Hahn has written the definitive high school Bible Study course textboox.

There's all kinds of buzz on the Internet about the Catherine of Siena Institute and their new blog.  In particular, here I quote:

"We have been quite startled by all the attention because the two things that make us stand out:

"1) confounding conservative-liberal categories;

"2) insisting on talking about about things that Catholics on both the right and left don’t talk about - like discipleship and formation and gifts and vocational discernment for all the baptized"

This is it folks.  Conservatism and liberalism are very similar, insofar as they are both heresies of rationalism!  They both reduce the Person of Jesus Christ to some sort of idea which fits into human intellectual categories.  Faith is Christ is so far removed from and unlike these two ideologies.  This cannot be said strongly enough.  Conservatism and Christianity are not bed fellows.  They are in direct opposition to each other!  The former is natural and the latter is supernatural.  The former is on the road that leads to practical atheism.  I remember someone once said to me, "I was a conservative, and I got more and more conversative, until I became a liberal."  This rings true!  And the person who said those words recently did become an agnostic.

This morning, my wife watched the children (bless her) while I went to mass.  While sitting and praying, my heart was so far from the Lord and I realized that I didn't want anything to do with Jesus.  My rebellious heart was screaming for exit, to have nothing to do with God.  This is the heart of everyone who spends too much time in conservatism.  Convervatism sucks life out and replaces the Life of God with a Dead Legalism.  I begged the Lord to change me and received communion, perhaps not nearly as aware as I should have been of the awesome mystery in which I was taking part.

That Catholicism which reduces the life of the spirit to a few legalistic rules is a counterfeit.  And Pope Benedicts agrees: "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction."

My name is Bill Mild, and this is my first blog entry here on www.CatholicNJ.Com.  There's so much going through my head.  Where do I start?  Well, my wife's name is Joanne and we were married June 20, 1998.  We four boys: Billy, Joseph, David, and Joshua (plus three miscarriages).  Billy and Joseph are at Grandma's.  My wife went to get her hair cut, David and Joshua are asleep.  And, so, here I am writing my first blog entry.

I think, since this site is called, www.CatholicNJ.Com, that I might as well start by saying something about the Catholic Church in New Jersey.  We are hurting and yet there is life.  There is no way that I can pretend to have any sort of pulse on the whole state of things in Catholic New Jersey.  Having just been to the March for Life in Washington, DC, I can say that there were many, many parishes represented from NJ, which gives me great hope and joy.

Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in Truth and Tolerance that "The attempt, in this crisis of mankind, to give back an obvious meaning and significance to the concept of Christianity as the religion vera, must, so to speak, be based in equal measure upon orthopraxy and orthodoxy." (page 183)  I think this speaks to the core of our own situation, as far as I can see from my limited vantage point, here in New Jersey.  What is former Cardinal, now Pope, talking about here?  Orthopraxy is "right doing."  Orthodoxy is "right thinking."  Orthopraxy is about living in freedom.  Orthodoxy is about living in truth.  The post-modern culture in which we live and breah here in Catholic New Jersey has separated truth and freedom, Orthopraxy and Orthodoxy.  And so, we have, in the Catholic Church, a strong division between "conservatives" and "liberals."  The conversatives "have the truth" and are often angrry and bitter about it.  The liberals "respect freedom" and are also often quite angry about it, too.  To some degree, both conservatives and liberals have replaced the living experience of Jesus Christ with an ideology.  Jesus, in his Divine Person, is both Truth and Freedom.  Us Jerseyans, due to our own pride and self-reliance, have not been able to assimilate the mystery of Jesus Christ into our lives.  And, in the Church, we have pretty reduced Him, to something that our intellects can handle, either truth or freedom, but not both.  Indeed, to the intellect, truth and freedom are intellectual categories which an incompatable.  Only the experience of Jesus Christ can show us otherwise.

Perhaps, I am reading my life situation into my perception of the situation in Catholic NJ.  I could be wrong.  I suppose this blog might be a way to put my ideas out into the marketplace of ideas for testing.  My own situation is that, for the past 7 years, I had slipped into the conservative mentality myself.  I had become self-righteous, self-reliant and I retreated into patterns of control and anger.  And, then, one day, I woke, and realized that I had lost the relationship with Jesus Christ that I once had.  It was during this past Advent season that I began to experience a new "coming" of Christ back into my life.  I now realize, its not about persuading people that the "Catholic Church has the Truth."  Actually, its the other way around.  It is the Truth that has the Catholic Church.  Its not about persuading people that birth control, abortion, homosexual and autosexual activities are sinful.  It's about helping others to find Christ, and letting His Holy Spirit change our lives as we open ourselves to Him.  I still slip back into a conservative ideology, but I'm being changed, because I'm surrrendering to the Lord.

And, so that's where the problem lies in my thinking here in Catholic New Jersey.  Our self-reliance, our spirit of independence, causes us to rationalize our faith to death.  As a result, we become ideologues, either conversative or liberal, and we abandon Jesus Christ in the process.  We must open ourselves together to each other and to the Lord, welcoming Him into our hearts, experiencing that Truth which brings Freedom.

And, I think there are some movements might help our parishes here in New Jersey to open ourselves to Christ.  Check out the new blog for the Catherine of Siena Institute and the website of the Saint Paul Center for Biblical Studies.