Immigration status

Some thoughts that rose to the surface after 500,000+ folks gathered in LA to offer their suggestions for immigration reform:

I've been thinking about J's concern that if Protestants really start reclaiming the Tradition, then we start having to deal with issues of apostolic authority, and then we have to really consider whether we can take part in and contribute to the one, true, apostolic church without allowing for its authority in our lives. If you want to claim the fathers, do you have to obey the pontiff if you want your mother to speak to you? Cardinal Newman said, "To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant" (and D.H. Williams wants to prove him wrong).

Maybe, though (and surely I'm not the first to say so), I want to be a Protestant, that is, a Protester - not a not-Catholic or a post-Reformation Christian, but a believer in the line of the apostolic tradition whose position is a stance of dissatisfaction from within that tradition, or, Tradition. It's still my tradition/Tradition, but there are some points at which I object to the direction of the self-designated mainstream, even though I still carry my membership card. Now, there is the problem of claiming a line that doesn't claim me on some points, but that's the beauty of being a Protester. I keep my card as an act of conscience.

Granted, being a Protester sounds like it could get tiring. But 500 years has accumulated a lot of support to draw from, and the last 100 give me reason to believe that we might be accomplishing something more like reform and less like dissension, factions, et al. It would do me good to keep in mind what exactly I'm standing here for (and be sure I can do no other): out of love for what stood before me . I am standing in a mass of folks who believe we are citizens of the Kingdom, although our position in the Church is not always on paper what it appears to be in practice. A eucharistic mass, if you will.

More and more, I get the feeling that I need to cling to this whole history if I'm going to make sense of my faith. The effective strategic response to the "threat" of post-Christendom is not that we find social legitimacy though political power, or establish that we founded and sustained the society everybody's now enjoying, but that we are in a legitimate, continuing family line going on 2,000+ years (whose author and finisher did found the world we're enjoying, as a matter of fact). There's just a few ancestors with whom I have a beef, which I express in peaceful protest by my Sunday pew, in hopes of accomplishing my purpose of sharing citizenship with (most of) them when my protest is heard.