On "Thinking Catholic"

I write over at The Anglo-Catholic:

Back in the days I was a practicing cafeteria Christian who also loaded up my tray with poisonous Gnostic teachings from various sources, I had a friend who was an Anglican minister. I hesitate to say priest because he was evangelical and I’m not sure he saw the Eucharist as more than a table. But he did say once that it was important for him to have an Apostolic faith. I didn’t really know what he was talking about, until much later, but those words stuck in my mind.

The discovery came maybe ten years later, after I had done Neil Anderson’s Steps to Freedom, a series of prayers that involve the confession of influence by false teaching or occult practices, renouncing them and asking for forgiveness. The prayers also take one through renouncing unforgiveness, bitterness, sexual sin, a whole gamut of things that keep one separated from God.

I did these a little reluctantly because I was certain that many of my “truths” that I had picked up along the way were good and true and made me a lot smarter than those who bought into indoctrination and obedience to external authorities. Well, after doing them, I was amazed at my inner transformation. My mind was peaceful, no longer plagued with mental chatter and negative thoughts that I had to be very disciplined in battling. And it was as if scales had fallen from my eyes. What had seemed so innocuous to me or even good, was now so obviously poisonous, dishonest and false that my mouth fell agape at how I blind I had been to all this before.

It was then I realized how important it was to have an Apostolic faith, to choose to believe the truth, to seek out what the Apostolic faith is and to believe it in order to understand (stand-under) it. Soon after that God led me to the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada and our little Ottawa cathedral and my understanding of what an Apostolic faith is has been growing and growing ever since, and my conversion is not something where I say “I am a convert” like I’m finished but an ongoing process of conversion to a deeper and deeper faith as I submit more and more to it.

For me, “Thinking Catholic” means making the switch between “I understand in order to believe and retaining the right to pick and choose beliefs”, to “choosing to believe what the Church teaches in her fidelity to the faith of the Apostles,” beginning with the eyewitnesses of Jesus Christ, who touched him, heard him, saw him and those who have at great cost passed down this faith intact to us. And not only choosing to believe but choosing to obey.

But the two are inseparable. If you choose to disobey, your faith will grow cloudy.

That's an excerpt. There's more over at The Anglo-Catholic.