To my brothers and sisters

  A few weeks ago, we had an extraordinary event at Zion Lutheran church.   Bishop Warfel, the Catholic Bishop of the Great Falls- Billings Diocese, Bishop Crist, the Lutheran Bishop of the Montana Synod, and Pastor Paul Seastrand of our Zion Lutheran Church, got together and invited members of both congregations to gather together for a dialogue.  They wanted to give some clarification on a few key theological points of contention that often seem to rise between Catholics and Lutherans and open up the floor for discussion and give a chance for people to ask questions.
We started out with a potluck dinner downstairs where Lutherans and Catholics mingled and conversed about everything from the weather to how glad they were that there was such an event taking place.  While they chatted about that, I chatted with the Catholic Bishop, Fr. Michael Warfel. I shared with him briefly about my experience and how excited I was that he was there to speak to us. He had questions for me and I, for him, but most of the time we sat there was spent laughing(he has a wonderful sense of humor).  Then our conversation got cut short because it was time to go upstairs for the dialogue.  He invited me to coffee next time I'm in Great Falls. I imagine we'll share a few more laughs.

Bishop Warfel, a fantastic man

   Pastor Seastrand spoke from a more historical perspective about how the Lutheran church came to be and the main reasons why Martin Luther set out to reform the Catholic church.  After that, Bishop Warfel spoke to some of the main differences between the Catholic and Lutheran teachings and focused a lot on the Sacraments.  Bishop Crist shared with us her experience at a conference in Rome with Catholics and Lutherans where the idea for these dialogues came from.  She started out by showing us a picture of her shaking hands with Pope Benedict XVI with ELCA Bishop Mark Hanson standing in the background then talked about how from that conference came the inspiration to go out to churches across the state, along with the Catholic Bishop, and hold dialogues like this one to start opening up the door for more communication and understanding between the two churches. After that, Starla and Monte Solberg, a couple who are faithful members of the Lutheran church shared their experience with both traditions as Starla was raised Catholic.
 Then I was asked to speak.  Pastor said I would have five minutes and he just wanted me to share a bit of my experience of living as a Lutheran in a Catholic community.  Well, I ended up talking for about 12 minutes(there was no chance of me keeping it to five minutes, are you kidding me? I don't think anybody could summarize their expereience from two years into 5 minutes.) I didn't write anything until the night before because I figure the longer I had it written, the more I'd want to change and add to it.  I wanted to make sure I didn't cross any lines or offend anyone with my words but I also wanted to be completely honest with where I was at. So I sat down the night before, said a little prayer and then wrote whatever came to my head.  This is what I got.


  My name is Kari Beth Shobe and I went to Concordia College, a Lutheran liberal arts school in Moorhead, MN where I got a degree in Youth Ministry.  When I was younger I was always very involved in my home church, Zion Lutheran. After college, I applied for the ELCA Young Adults in Global Mission program.  I got placed at the SPEC Centre, a Catholic youth retreat center in England, (just north of London about 20 miles) which was much like a Bible camp, where I lived for two years.
Before I went, I knew a little bit about Catholicism as my mom was raised Catholic and some of my friends when I was younger were Catholic.  But when I landed in England, I really had no idea what I was getting into.  I had no idea how much I actually didn't know about the church.
  SPEC wasn't just a place that ran retreats, it was an international Catholic community with 25 young adults from all over the world. Every day we had Holy Hour, which was a time of community prayer in the Chapel.  The first half hour was a certain kind of prayer each day; the second half hour was quiet time for personal prayer.  That one hour every day, in itself, was a wonderful learning experience for me.  Not only was I learning the beauty of silence, but I was also getting to learn some of the different Catholic prayers and traditions like Rosary and Adoration.
     I have to admit, before moving to England, I had a rather closed view of Catholicism. I had always seen it as a very strict, traditional kind of theology that stuck so close to the book, there was no room for openness to spirituality.   But when I landed in England, my eyes were opened.  The term "Charismatic Catholic" never existed in my vocabulary, I'd always put them at two different ends of the spectrum.  But in England, it was much more of a common term. I have to say I met some of the most spiritual people I've ever seen while I was there(aside from Hindus I saw in India).
   Charismatic, to me, is a real ecstatic religious experience, a way of opening yourself up to letting God work through you and having such a relationship with God is much more focused on spirituality than the tradition itself.
  I got asked many times if it was hard living as a Lutheran in a Catholic community. I often found myself responding," Well, it's not always easy, I just have so much still to learn."  Fortunate enough, I never felt alone.
   Everyone was on the journey. There were 3 or 4 others(both years) that weren't Catholic and I like to think that the Catholics in the community learned just as much from living and working with us as we did from them as a lot of them had little to no knowledge of Lutheran traditions.  As for the work with the young people, many of the sessions we would teach were not specifically Catholic- focused but rather Christian-focused. Many of the young people we worked with were not even Catholic themselves but the diversity among us would never fail to lead us into intriguing conversations, oftentimes keeping us up til the wee hours of the morning.
   One of the biggest challenges I did face was answering all the questions I would get. Yes, I did major in religion but I guess I missed the day they taught "How to respond to young people in England from Catholic schools when they ask if Lutheranism is a cult." Needless to say I quickly learned how to give a 3 1/2 minute history of the Lutheran church in an understandable but exciting enough way to keep their attention.
  I found myself up late at night studying Lutheran theology because I was unsure how to answer some of the questions. At first, I was totally intimidated by all the questions but then I finally realized how good the challenge was for me because it made me dig deeper into my own faith and ask myself some of the same questions we were asking the young people.  My first year, I usually passed off a lot of the questions to Erik, a Gustavus grad who went to Seminary for a while and loved talking about theology.  But because he was not there my second year, I found myself having to do a lot more explaining as the three other non-Catholics were often not so confident in their English speaking skills to answer them.  Believe it or not, I would even get questions like "Why would you come to live in England... as a Lutheran... when you could be a Catholic? And live in AMERICA!?" Well I never felt like I came up with a very good answer for that one other than just saying that I was placed there by my organization, and I believe God knew exactly what he was doing when he put me there.
So many of my previous misconceptions of the Catholic church have been blown out of the water. I learned the church does not pray to the Saints as if worshiping them, but rather they are asking for their intercession, asking the saints to pray alongside them. The saints are valuable role models and I was shocked by some of the lives I learned about, people my age or younger, people that did no great dramatic deed in their lifetime but simply love with their whole heart. They were people that followed God so closely, they changed many lives along the way.  Many of the saints have become true inspirations to me in my own faith.  I was so fascinated by some of the things I learned about saints that I wrote a session on them that we used for year 10s, challenging them to "Become saints of the 21st century," as Pope Benedict XVI said we are all called to be in his address to the young people of the United Kingdom in September 2010. In the past two years, I have learned so much about the Catholic church, about the Lutheran church and where I fit in between, I'm barely able to touch on all of it in these few minutes. But if it had not been for those things I learned while at SPEC, I wouldn't have been so excited to see the Pope in Hyde Park my first fall in England. I wouldn't have been so interested in hearing Christopher West speak on Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body. I wouldn't have been so thrilled to get to see St. Catherine of Sienna's Cathedral, or the Vatican in Rome. I wouldn't have the faith I do today.
    Other volunteers in our program were sent to South Africa where they had to learn about the cultural traditions as well as how to speak Afrikaans or Zulu.  Some got sent to Argentina or Mexico, where they had to live in an environment so foreign to their homeland. I was sent to England, where I learned to live in a strong Catholic culture, though be it a small one, within a wider culture where Christianity was not so accepted.
  I was asked several times before I left for England, usually with a grin, "Well, in this Catholic place, are you going to join them or are you going to try to get them to join you?"  I would say, "Neither. I'm going there to learn and live to embrace the beauty in the differences on our journey together."  (may sound cheesy, I know, but that's what I felt.)
    In England being a Christian is not seen as "cool" and being Catholic is often looked down upon even more. I think most of the stigma comes from all of the chaos that ensued with the English Reformation. King Henry VIII started the Church of England and tried to reform as much as he could and even ordered for all the Catholic churches and monasteries to be destroyed.  That perspective has carried on through the generations and continues to influence the peoples' outlook on religion. However, wearing a Rosary around your neck is currently a huge fashion trend, whether you're a Catholic or not.  So while we may not have had strong language barriers to battle with(though I believe British English really is a different language than American English) or extremely different cultural traditions to learn, we had our own challenges we faced in England.
   There was something Pastor Olson said once(he was the pastor at our church when I was growing up) that has stayed with me to this day that I have found myself using as sort of a mantra over the past few years. He said that we are not baptized specifically Lutheran or specifically Catholic, we are baptized Christian.  I believe, while there are still some differences in our theology and our traditions, we are all called to live as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Peace.