Not a Commandment With Your Address On It

Fornication. What a word. I don't think I've said it out loud. (class schedule below) *No Class Labor Day! Have a safe and restful day. I've listened to Fr. Mike Schmitz. His videos came up on my YouTube feed. He talks about scripture the way I wish someone had talked to me about it back when I was actually required to listen. Parochial school, kindergarten through eighth, then again for eleventh and twelfth. Kneel. Stand. Recite. Nobody explained why, or I never understood why. The teachers taught it with whatever understanding they'd been handed down, and I was a kid, and I didn't get it, and nobody expected me to, or did they??? Fr. Mike does something different. He shares what is really important and what really matters to people. One of his videos 'Love and Same Sex Attraction' at the 2016 Steubenville On The Lake Conference. This really stopped me in my tracks. I don't know about you, but I hear all this rhetoric and related to 'scriptures' and it's a big turnoff of religion and Catholicism, Christianity, etc. What Fr. Mike said is that first and foremost, you love God. Nothing else comes before that. And God already knows you're gay. That's it. That's the whole thing. I sat with that for a while. Then, a different program, because I've become incredibly curious now, what do I really know, a different program. EWTN, a host whose name I don't remember, talking about couples living together before marriage and how it makes God angry. Again, I stopped in my mental tracks. I felt the chest tighten. How does that work. God loves you no matter what, I have heard that my whole life, in every version of church I've ever sat in. And also God is angry that two people are sharing a lease? So I went looking. There isn't actually a verse that says 'thou shalt not live together.' What's in there is fornication, sexual immorality, and cohabitation gets folded into that by inference, not by name. Somebody decided that living together probably means sex before marriage, and sex before marriage falls under that word. It's a chain of reasoning. Not a commandment with your address on it. I looked for the other verses too. Thou shalt not judge. Love one another as I have loved you. Those are in there. Same book. I didn't believe the host. Didn't feel it in my body the way truth usually feels when it lands. But I've learned by now not to just take my own reaction as proof either. Maybe it's their perception. Maybe it's mine. That's the part I actually have to sit with. Not who's right. What's real, and how I'd even tell the difference. This is the same thing that happened to me with injuries. I used to think my yoga practice was fixed. A shape you either hit or you didn't. Then I got hurt, hurt enough that the shape wasn't available to me anymore, and I thought that meant the practice was over. It wasn't. The injury became the teacher. It showed me what the pose actually was underneath the performance of it. What my body needed instead of what I'd been told it should look like. Faith is doing that to me right now. What I was handed as a kid wasn't wrong exactly. It just wasn't mine yet. I'm having to find out what's actually underneath it, myself, the same way I found out what was underneath the pose. Maureen very curious Lauer-Gatta P.S. If you've ever had to go back and re-learn something you were taught as a kid, faith or otherwise, I'd love to hear how you did it. Hit reply. 📅Weekly Class Schedule 🔗Online Class Links(subscribers, please visit here to join your classes online) Inside the paid membership, you'll find: Simple weekly online guidance to support your nervous system Recorded classes you can return to anytime (Dedicated Student Membership Tier) 💖 If live classes don't fit this week, practicing on your own absolutely counts. 💖 Subscribe now Leave a comment Share