When I was a kid one of my favorite toys to play with at one time was Silly Putty. This was a polymer compound accidentally created in the attempt to make synthetic rubber. This putty could be both molded and bounced and if you placed it on something like newsprint it would absorb the ink and make a copy of it. I found it especially fun to place it on comics and to see the colorful image replicated.
In my rather strange mind I got to thinking about Silly Putty and the spiritual life. That we should all become more like one aspect of silly putty. That when it comes to Christ’s Church that we should submit before it and absorb a true image of it. More often we are like rubber stamps. We have hardened ridges etched in by our society and our personal preferences and dispositions. We are more likely to try to stamp the Church with our image then to let the Holy Spirit stamp us with his. We are more formed by modernism than scripture and tradition. Too often we hear about a teaching of the faith that it is out-of-date and needs to be updated to reflect modern sensibilities. Our pride is a barrier to being docile to the Holy Spirit.
If Silly Putty is not placed back in its container it will dry out and will no longer absorb ink. We also must work so that we are not hardened. That we continue to grow in prayer and understanding. That we mold ourselves to that narrow way that leads to life itself. Sometimes at the beginning we absorb a true image of Christ and his Church, but like Silly Putty we start to pull at the edges and the image becomes distorted like in a fun house mirror. This is why a daily examination of our informed conscience is so important. That we compare our actions to the faith that was passed down and not some amalgam of our own invention.
Well I warned you this was a silly reflection. Now I wonder, was Veronica’s veil made of Silly Putty?
5 comments
Yikes. Silly reflection.
I’m not sure it works, actually. To be Catholic is not to mindlessly accept whatever the church heirarchy is saying on any particular day. Sometimes Bishops come up with some howlers. Some priests come up with some real heterodox stuff. Catholics need a strong sense of what the Church has always taught so they can measure today’s heirarchy against that standard.
Hmmmm � A comparison between the rigid aspect of �Silly Putty� and religion � interesting. I wonder what the Bible would look like if it were written today? Very different, I suspect!
Let me re-phrase: comparing the Catholic laymans’ relationship to the Church as one of Silly Putty essentially robs the Catholic faith of any objective content.
Truth is not simply what the hierarchy says it is on any given day. Right now we have two American Cardinals saying opposite things WRT giving Communion to activist gay ‘Catholics’ who wear a rainbow sash to Mass to ‘protest’ Church teaching on homosexuality. Which one is right? Both can’t be right, can they (unless you want to say it’s all relative)? The Silly Putty analogy utterly fails to be of any assistance here. Away with it!
Except if you are confusing the Church’s teachings, and those of some of it’s members. We do need to be more like Silly Putty before the Holy Spirit, allowing Him to imprint upon us.
Lovely reflection. You’re right, to an extent, of course. We are what we eat – if we choose to surround ourselves with sin and place God and the grace-bearing things in this world far from us, there’s no way we’ll avoid sin and wickedness.
It rather reminds me of the Chinese idiom ‘近朱者赤，近墨者黑’, which translates literally as ‘near vermillion person red, near ink person black’. More poetically, ‘One who stays near vermillion gets stained red, and the one who stays near ink gets stained black’.