Reflections on Synod Question #2

Edit to include question: Question 2 - As a community of believers, what experiences of the Catholic Church have brought joys or revealed wounds? And how can these experiences help us grow together in faith and offer the hope and healing of Christ to the greater community in which we live?

 We do indeed have a Great Priest in Christ, but I wonder if our hearts are truly clean.  I know mine isn't, that's why my hope starts with the great gift of purgatory- of which we got some scientific proof of this week with the reveal of fMRI data from a poor old man who died while in the MRI machine.  ( https://www.livescience.com/first-ever-scan-of-dying-brain ) If your brain truly is going to do an examination of conscience at the moment of death, reliving every moment of shame and joy from throughout your life, don't you want those memories of joy to overwhelm the memories of shame?

We should want that, but we don't.  We often have habits of sin we are not willing to give up until they do us so much damage that we are forced to give them up.  When I think about us as a community of believers, I keep coming back not so much to this passage, but rather to my response to my own sin and to my fellow sinners.  What if as in Genesis Chapter 4, God asks us "Where is your brother?" Is Cain's answer adequate "Am I my Brother's Keeper?".  Fr. McGivney, when designing the exemplification of the first degree of the Knights of Columbus, said yes, we are indeed our brother's keeper- we will be judged not just for our own sins, but for our lack of charity to our fellow sinners.

I worry not only that I'm ignoring the effects of sin in my own life, but that my lack of ability to communicate the truth, is leading to sin in others.

My deepest wounds come from the fact that I want the church of "The Bells of St. Mary's" but I'm living in a world that is more like "A Brave New World".  I think that is the same for many of my generation and younger- we want a more moral, more Catholic world, but we don't know how to get there.  And worse yet, we were never taught the basic skills of civilization that we need to learn if we're ever going to get there.  We've lost sight of ideals in the chaos of immorality around us.  Nobody under the age of 50 seems to have the skills needed to rebuild civilization- and thus the Church, as Civilization's Builder and Protector- is not living up to what could rightly be called its secondary mission.

I'm not sure if the recent retreat away from morality in an effort to be more relevant is a part of that, but it sure doesn't help.  Instead of a church of saints, we've become Leonard Cohen's broken Hallelujah.  And I don't know how to get back to a place where pure hearts can exist without being attacked merely for being pure.