Another thought! I'm all tingly

I send out daily quotes to my e-mail buddies, and I was indexing some past entries (can you say, "compulsive"?), and came across this one by Leon J. Suprenant, Jr., from the "Catholic Exchange" website":

Many who consider themselves Catholics believe they are justified in rejecting those teachings they don't agree with. Often there is an inadequate understanding of the Church's teaching, and unfortunately the Church's teaching on issues such as contraception or homosexuality is caricatured in the media. Yet, even the most honest and well-researched disagreement with the Church on an issue of faith or morals is problematic, because it involves replacing God's laws with our own private judgment.

This led me to think of another quote by Fr. Joseph Tagg, from a mini-retreat he gave:

We cannot trust our own understanding: one of the most crucial decisions of life
is to do something we do not understand SIMPLY BECAUSE GOD ASKS IT.

And it occurred to me that these two thoughts are related. When I first saw the quote from Fr. Tagg, I thought that it was in response to "doing" something that one didn't want to do, but if it is taken to mean "believing" something one didn't want to believe, that makes it a lot more powerful. Just think about how much more grace would be flowing through our world if people were obedient in this fashion. Wow.

And, by the way, I did use paragraphs on this entry, and typed them in on the actual "post" page instead of cutting and pasting. Let's see if my paragraphs finally show up! It's weird; when I hit "preview," the paragraph settings are there, but when I click "publish post" they disappear... Spooooooky!