Northern Virginia Catholic Bible Study & Apologetics
House rules/notes…
1. Meetup is www.meetup.com/catholicbiblestudy Zoom Meeting Logon info is the same every week: Zoom ID: 861 1782 2081 Password: 406952
2. Questions encouraged. If you have questions about anything, you can ask in the chat, email the Meetup group, or me directly at ron@hallagan.net.
3. Unedited recaps of meetings are posted via Meetup after our meeting. The final edited recap is posted within a week by Taylor on our Catholic Catacombs Light website at www.catholiccatacombs.wixsite.com/website/recaps. Taylor will notify everyone on Meetup with the link.
4. Respectfulness. We will be discussing differences between religions and between Christian denominations, and agree to be respectful at all times. Specifically, Protestants are our friends and brothers in Christ; in fact, I personally owe part of my return to the faith to them!
5. No politics. It would be easy for us to self-destruct, but that’s not our goal. Our goal is to learn/understand/apply the Bible and our Catholic faith.
6. Prison fellowship – opportunities to volunteer one Saturday per month for 2 hours (12-2 or 2-4) serving Catholic prisoners at the Fairfax County Jail. Ask Ron (ron@hallagan.net) or Gina (gmasterson99@gmail.com) for details. Why do this? "I was in prison, and you visited me." – Matt 25:36
7. Catholic Prayer & Fellowship. Are you interested in praying with other Catholics during the week? Fellow member Jason Goldberg has started just this at “Catholic Prayer, Fellowship, and Spirituality Meetup.” Sign up at: https://www.meetup.com/online-catholic-prayer-fellowship-and-spirituality/
8. I highly recommend seeing “The Chosen” TV series. We seek a relationship with Jesus Christ, which is not easy at first. It helps when we can relate to a person that we have seen and heard. They have captured the real Jesus as close as any film I’ve ever seen. https://thechosen.link/1Y1R7.
9. RSVP Reminder: Please RSVP whether you are attending the meeting or just reading the Recap notes afterwards. The more RSVPs, the more Meetup will give us exposure, which will draw more people to us, which is our way of evangelizing! Please RSVP when you get the Meetup invite weekly.
Our Bible Study Format: 5 min prayers, 10-15 min Catholic topic, 40-45 min on the main topic from weekly List below:
Week 1: Nov 1 - Gospel Week: Mt 22:37: “Love the Lord your God with all your might…”Eph 5:21-33 "Wives be subordinate to husbands."
Week 2: Nov 15 – Bible Week (Gen àRev): We just started Exodus, the 2nd book of Moses. Exodus meeting #2.
Week 3: Nov 22 – Survey Topics Voted on by Members: We are currently beginning Heaven.
Ö 1) Jesus’ Greatest Parables 2) Hell, Purgatory, Heaven 3) Christian Comparisons 4) Great Women in the Bible
5) World Religions 6) Book of Revelation 7) Major Heresies and Church Councils
Week 4: Nov 29 – Member Questions Night
1. The History of the Mass going back to Cain & Abel, and the sublime meaning of the Eucharist in the present.
2. Love and Unity are two of the Holy Spirit’s Trinitarian descriptions. How are these different? How do they affect us?
3. The knowledge of God is “participatory.” Is that why nonbelievers have difficulty?
4. Are Charity and Love synonymous? How are they different? What are the 4 highest forms of Charity?
5. Do we have suffering for a reason? How do we offer up our sufferings? When should we embrace the cross vs wait for a miracle?
6. Jesus says to love God with all our might and our neighbors as ourselves. 1) What if we don’t love ourselves? 2) How do we love God? 3) How exactly do we love the people we can’t stand, or are bad people?
7. Anatomy of a sin. Degrees of separation from God vs degrees of closeness.
8. What is justice? Is it always good? Does God cause bad just things to happen? If one suffers but the results are good, is that justice?
9. What are Partial and Plenary Indulgences, are they supported by Scripture, and how can I get them?
Next Holy Days
Solemnity of All Saints – Nov 1
Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls Day) – Nov 2
Immaculate Conception of Mary – Dec 8
Christmas – Dec 25
Opening Prayer
Dear Lord, we thank you for everyone gathered here today
and ask that you surround us with your powerful, life-changing presence.
Thank you for loving each of us and for calling us to walk with you.
We come before you as we meet and declare our dependence on you.
Be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path.
Fill our hearts with your love and fill our words and conversations with truth and grace.
We ask all of these things in praise and adoration of You...
And as Jesus taught us to pray:
Our Father Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name.
Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily Bread;
And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us all. Amen.
Church Holy Days refresher: Highest are Solemnities (24), followed by Feasts, then Memorials, then Ferial Days (means free/optional).
Of the 24 Solemnities, six are holy days of obligation (Mary Mother of God, the Ascension, the Assumption, All Saints Day, the Immaculate Conception, and Christmas).
Q: What is the “Solemnity of All Saints” (Nov 1) about?
We are used to only calling those canonized by the Church "Saints." However, Scripture makes it clear that all of us who arrive in heaven are called saints. Perhaps the best way to think about it is two groups: capitalized "Saints" and lower case "saints." The capital Saints are the Hall-of-Famers who gave their lives to God, oftentimes literally.
So, "All Saints Day" celebrates every human who is in Heaven. It is a great feast of triumph, one that in a sense even “exceeds” the triumph of Easter. For on Easter we celebrate the victory of God- become-man (Jesus) over evil, whereas on All Saints we celebrate the many human beings following him across the finish line.
Holiness. We should recall that the saints were not super-human. Often, they started out quite fallen like everyone else. This is a reminder that holiness is not outside the reach of anyone. Holiness is also not a destination; it’s all in the journey. If we are heading towards holy, we are on the Path of Holy.
But, we cannot do it alone. Holiness only requires our humility to let the Holy Spirit guide our lives through each day. This is made possible through the grace we receive in the Sacraments, starting with our Baptism, continuing with the regular infusion of the Holy Trinity through the Eucharist, and periodically running our souls through the washing machine of Reconciliation.
"The world is thy ship and not thy home."
- St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Doctor of the Church
Q: What is the “Commemoration of All Souls” Day (Nov 2)?
As for All Souls Day, we Catholics are aware that at the moment of death, we are not always the kind of persons we should be for all eternity. Hence, a process of purification follows death before we share life with God. Based on this awareness – which is rooted in tradition and scripture – we have a custom of praying for the deceased, that God may grant them speedy purification. For this we have All Souls Day, a day set aside to pray for all of souls. In this way, none of our human brothers and sisters who have gone ahead of us will be forgotten. And neither will we be forgotten when our time comes.
For those who have been taught that Jesus' death for us was sufficient to cover all our sins so that we can go straight to heaven, take note: It is certainly true that Jesus' death was sufficient to wipe out the sins for every human being who ever lived, times a billion. That isn’t the issue. What the Bible calls for is our response to this offer – not just a single statement of belief, but also by living that belief as we grow closer to Him through grace and the HS, and seeking forgiveness for new sins along the way. This is how God invites us into a relationship-building journey.
Regarding purgatory… as we come face to face with our unreconciled sins and have them released, we grow in happiness because each step of the way is closer to God. And then 100% move on to heaven.
Q: Why are these two Feast Days together?
The feasts of All Saints and All Souls fall back-to-back to express the Christian belief in the "Communion of Saints." The Communion of Saints is the union of all the faithful on earth, the saints in Heaven, and the Souls in Purgatory, with Christ as the Head. We are bound together by a supernatural bond.
Week One is Gospel Week
1. Matthew 22:37: Jesus says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment." (Mat 22:37) How are we supposed to love God with all our hearts, all our souls, and all our minds? Wouldn't just one of those be hard enough?
2. Ephesians 5:21-33 "Wives should be subordinate to their husbands." This is not a Gospel but a reading from Paul that was covered in Tuesday's Mass, and since it gets a lot of notoriety, I've decided to cover it tonight. Is Paul speaking in the culture of his times, or something else?
Reading #1: Matthew 22:35-37
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them [a scholar of the law] tested him by asking, “Teacher,* which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.
Last week we covered the 2nd part of this, where Jesus said we were to love our neighbor as ourselves. The question asked by the group was, “How can I love my neighbor if I don’t love myself?” The answer we determined was that we do indeed love ourselves (we wish ourselves well, we want to be better, we pray for ourselves, etc.). We may not like ourselves, but that is not love; it merely shows we have a conscience and want to do better than we are.
This week, the focus is on God. How do we love God with all our hearts, all our souls, and all our minds? Since Jesus says it’s the first and greatest commandment, we should try to understand what this means!
I must first point out that Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy 6 with a slight difference: In the third part of the commandment, Jesus says “mind” whereas Deuteronomy says “strength” (or “might”).
Q: Why the difference?
Keeping in mind that Jesus' words in Matthew are written in Greek, Deuteronomy is written in Hebrew, and we are translating both to English, let’s go ahead and review each – heart, soul, and mind-strength – and see if we can explain it.
Exegesis comment: Just so you are aware, for this exercise I looked at the definitions/descriptions for each word in both Greek and Hebrew, and then compared how these words were used elsewhere in the Bible to verify their contextual usage.
Greek and Hebrew descriptions of “Heart”: thoughts, emotions, inner man, will
Q: What do you think it means to love God with all your heart?
To love God with all your heart means to express your love with your emotions; to praise Him, to be grateful, to be happy, to be joyful in the Lord.
Without a God who loved us into existence first, there would be every reason to despair. Existence would be meaningless, and desiring love and purpose would merely be a cruel joke of evolution; for we are merely an accident of the universe like the rocks around us, except they don’t have to live, pretend, and then die.
But, this is not the situation. It’s the opposite. The reason we love and desire love is because we are emulating our Creator. And the reason we seek meaning or truth in all things is because God owns both, and we have the freedom to relate to His or make up our own.
Q: What about when things aren’t going well?
Continuing to love God even when bad things happen (or when good things don’t happen) isobviously a function of faith but it is also the key to a life of contentment. Worldly contentment is fragile and temporary (“built on sand”). Spiritual contentment is permanent (‘built on rock”). This ability to be content – also called peace or equanimity – is so stunning that it is worth every effort to get it. It might take some practice, but to not try is tantamount to sloth or ingratitude.
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.” (John 14:27)
These were among Jesus’ last words to the disciples on the night before his arrest – a very frightening and anxious time. In spite of Jesus’ words, our experience tells us that ongoing peace is a challenge to attain, particularly the kind of peace Paul describes as “passing all understanding.”
An interesting reference about what we are trying to understand may be found in Thomas Kempis’ book, Imitation of Christ, when he says, “Our peace consists in a humble bearing of suffering and contradictions, not in being free of them, for we cannot live in this world without adversity. He who can best suffer will enjoy the most peace.”
Q: Kempis’ quote was not fun! How is this possible for “he who can best suffer will enjoy the most peace”?
Most suffering is physical, psychological, and emotional. The physical often can’t be avoided but it is worsened by the onslaught of psychological and emotional impairments of fear and unknowing. “Whose fault is it? When will this end? What should I do? Where is everyone? Why doesn’t everyone care? Nobody understands! ...etc.” We generally won’t find worldly answers to our questions, or meaning to our suffering, and so our ‘unknowing’ continues to weigh down our situation like an albatross.
However, God routinely changes human evil, pain, and suffering into something meaningful. That’s what he does all throughout the Bible, most notably with Jesus himself. He uses our torture and execution of Christ as payment for OUR sins! Therefore, when we give our sufferings to God – that is, when we attach them to Christ’s sufferings – they are transformed into something usable and therefore meaningful. They are deposited into what Pope Benedict calls our “heavenly treasury” and can be used to help others anywhere; and therein lies new meaning.
Eventually, we want to reach a point where we can say that
“I can live on almost nothing and I can live with everything. I am content no matter what.”
Paul said that.
And if you do this, what’s the worst that can happen? Die?
Remember, humanity’s battle between good and evil ended 2000 years ago. Good won. Jesus Christ won it for us. All that remains is for humans to decide what train they want to get on, God’s train or their own. If you are baptized and not in a state of mortal sin, then you’realready on the right train. So lighten up and show some joy; the best is yet to come.
Greek and Hebrew descriptions for Soul: spirit, life, being, life, self, person
Q: What do you think it means to love God with all your soul?
Our soul is our true identity – who we are, the home of our memories, our conscience, our free will, and our connection to God.
Our soul is not biological. It is given to us at birth by God. In this life, it is our “self” on training wheels trying to learn, or find, itself, which spiritually means we are trying to grow up without selfishness (what Jesus means by, “if you want to follow me [to heaven], you must leave self behind”).
It is because of our soul that we have knowledge of a higher reality, why we can know God, why we understand right & wrong and justice, and the freedom to choose them, or not.
You’ve heard the saying, “All roads lead to Rome.” By now, you should realize that all our seeking leads to one place – God. All these abilities of the soul are God’s calling cards.
Because of free will, humans are like caterpillars trying to spin our cocoons – spiritual cocoons – either according to ourselves and this world, or according to God. Jesus Christ became human for this reason – to show how to accomplish this, so we can follow Him.Without Him, though, we will never leave our cocoons.
To love God with all our souls means to yoke our “selves" – our souls – in faith to Jesus Christ every day, and bring him with us on our journey.
Get in the habit of taking Christ with you all day, every day. It beats talking to your ego.
Q: The question was asked, “What is joy?”
Whereas happiness usually involves something specific, joy is something deeper. Knowing that evil has been eternally conquered and that we are on the path to heaven can enable us to find serenity, peace, calm, equanimity during any and all trials and tribulations of this world, because these are temporary. Such equanimity and joy is sublime.
A google search came pretty close to this as one site stated the following:
“Joy is an inner feeling. Happiness is an outward expression. Joy endures hardship and trials and connects with meaning and purpose. A person pursues happiness but chooses joy.”
We will finish Mind/Strength next week.
Reading # 2: Ephesians 5:21-33
"Wives should be subordinate to their husbands."
This is not a Gospel, but a reading from Paul that was covered in last Tuesday's Mass, and since it gets a lot of notoriety, I've decided to cover it tonight.
Is Paul speaking in the culture of his times, or something else? Let’s see.
“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, subject yourselves to your husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, of which He is the Savior. As the church is subordinate to Christ in all things, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in all things.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, to make her holy, cleansing her by the water through the Word that He might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or blemish or any such thing, that she might be holy and without fault.
In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they love themselves. He who loves his wife loves himself, for no man hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of His body.
“For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
This is a profound mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one.
So again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”
This is one of those passages that many of us would rather skip over. Paul’s words to the believers in Ephesus, “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands”, can sound outdated and even offensive. We might acknowledge that Paul was speaking according to the culture of his times, but we would be wrong to conclude that this passage has nothing to say to us today.
If you want to understand Paul’s advice, we must start with the initial verse (21). There, Paul makes no distinction between men and women or husbands and wives. He tells everyone to “be subject to each other.” This is like saying, “always put the other first.”
Or as Paul says in Philippians 2:3, everyone should “humbly regard others as more important”than themselves.
This is God’s message to us as well. He wants all of us to take on an attitude of humility and deep reverence toward one another. He wants us to put other people’s needs and concerns ahead of our own and to “lay down “our lives for each other (John 15:13). If we can do that, then all our relationships—especially with our spouses—will be marked by unity, peace, and love.
Q: What might this look like in real life?
In marriage, first and foremost, it doesn’t involve letting your spouse take advantage of you or make unreasonable demands—or doing those things yourself.
In any relationship, it could mean listening attentively while the other person lets off steam about challenges at work. It could mean no longer insisting on getting your own way. It could mean making it a priority to come together in unity when your paths seem to begin diverging. It could also mean trying to forgive long-standing hurts and overcoming deep-seated resentments. In other words, the call to be subordinate to one another is just part of Jesus’ call to love one another as Jesus loves us.
As you can see, it always boils down to love: letting Jesus’ all-encompassing, unconditional love overcome our selfishness so that we can show that same love to the people around us. Especially those closest to us.
Closing Prayer
1Cor13
Heaven Father, help us tonight and tomorrow to be patient,
Not to envy, or boast, or be proud,
Never to dishonor others, nor to be self-seeking
Nor easily angered, and to keep no record of wrongs.
Help us to rejoice in the truth, to always protect, trust, hope,
and to never ever give up, but always persevere.
Hail Mary, full of grace the Lord is with thee.Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
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