Ok, I know you don’t drop into the Buzzyblog to pursue anything like a discussion on spirituality, but if I promise to observe the b’s by being brief and being gone, tomorrow we’ll be back to the Buzzyblog mainstays of b.s. and beer.
In a rare moment of reflection however, my previous post yesterday on St. Ignatius made me think about a theology lesson that my cousin Father John once explained to me: there are four kinds of spirituality – Ignatian, Franciscan, Augustinian and Thomastic. (Click here for related article. There is also a survey which you can take and it will tell you what type of spirituality you follow click here.)
John’s discussion came on the heels of my having confessed to him that I didn’t get much out of going to church and that I felt more spiritual and closer to God while I was in the woods or out on the water than I ever did in any church. John assured me that there was nothing wrong with that and he attributed it to me being a Franciscan spiritualist. (Cool isn’t it, how Catholicism always has an answer for everything?!) John then explained to me the four types of spirituality.
When I just took the survey in the above link, I had to smile and think about John when the survey came back and revealed that sure enough my spiritual type is indeed Franciscan. Perhaps then, I’m not going to hell after all for thinking that time spent in a church could be better used spent somewhere else. Always makes me think of the last line in this song “Men grow crazy in congregations, they only get better one by one.” (From an upbeat tune with some dark lyrics about a father’s death and the son wanting to skip all the funeral stuff and just bury his old man at sea. Another confession – this song ran thru my mind a lot during Buzzy’s funeral proceedings.)
Tomorrow – back to b.s and beer. I “gar-on-tee” it. (Whatever happened to that guy who used to say that? Answer: he died and is buried in Louisiana. Guess it would’ve been too full circle had he been buried at sea.)