Holy Trinity Parish of Ocean Beach

San Diego Reader: What’s your favorite subject on which to preach?

Father Lawrence Bausch: The importance of receiving the perspective that enables us to look at this life and our world from God’s point of view. For example, we’re in the church year where scripture urges us to think about the passing away of this age. There are signs to look for that this age is passing away. I believe that these signs are characteristic of every generation. Essentially, the last days were inaugurated after the Ascension of Christ and Pentecost. Therefore, we’re urged to be able to see the temporal in the context of the permanence of God, and the direction in which he is leading us that shows us how to handle what’s going on.

SDR: What is your main concern as a member of the clergy?

FB: The enormous shift in our culture away from religion as a part of everyday life. There is a sort of — I won’t say it’s a science — but a certain quasi-intellectual scientism that assumes anything to do with the spiritual realm or religion is inherently irrational and that what one does when one chooses to believe is to close one’s mind. But I am of the conviction — and one of our great witnesses, a woman named Flannery O’Connor, who was a fiction writer for the most part back in the ’50s and ’60s made it clear — that it’s the fullness of the Catholic faith that keeps the mind open to mystery. Anything else that limits our understanding to what we can see and measure through the tools we have, it is that kind of thing which narrows the mind because there is so much more going on than meets the eye.

SDR: Why Anglican?

FB: Being a Catholic represents and embodies continuity with the church from the very first centuries, and Anglicanism expressed its Catholicity by endorsing fundamentals about which everyone was expected to agree, but everything after that, we could disagree. They centered on the decisions of the church in the first millennium before the first split between East and West. So, what all Christians believed in the first millennium — that’s what I mean by Catholicism…. I don’t believe Catholicity is limited to Anglicanism by any means. It is certainly embedded in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches as well.

SDR: Where do you go when you die?

FB: To a certain extent, it’s up to us. We are taught that all truth comes from God and all truth is of God and insofar as we are open to receiving the truth and being informed rather than trying to impose our views on the world, that openness to truth allows us to receive the grace that God will give which ultimately includes salvation. If we resist the truth and harden our hearts sufficiently that we have resisted the truth — in the biblical tradition, the adversary of God is sometimes considered the Father of Lies — and if we choose falsehood or lies rather than the truth, then illusion rather than reality is presumably what we will get…. Whatever it is, if we pit our will against God’s will permanently — the Christian writer C.S. Lewis says that for everyone who does not say to God, “Thy will be done,” God will say to them, “Thy will be done.”