“Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
How do you get there from here?
Let us assume that your rationality has told you to flee from the sourness of godlessness and seek the sweetness of paradise. The question then becomes:
How do you get there from here?
To help us make our escape from here to there, God established an escape route, defined it with holy places, made a map of them and entrusted the map to the Church.
The Church knows the way.
The Church has the map.
A new exodus is afoot and is now in progress on the escape route through the hostile desert of godlessness from slavery under the yoke of Pharaoh to freedom with God and their holy family in the promised land. The Church is the new Moses leading/serving the new exodus making its escape on the escape route from godlessness to God. The Church has been helping the children of Adam and Eve make their escape for more than two thousand years. Its experience has given it confidence that it knows the way.
The movement of the new exodus forms the needle of the compass that always points to God.
Only by making our escape from holy place to holy place that define the escape route can we be sure that we are heading in the right direction.
The escape from godlessness to God is primary. Nothing else matters. Everything else is secondary. Anything that interferes is suspect.
The Church is God's gift to the children of Adam and Eve. The Holy Spirit is tugging at our souls. The curious are following the tug back to its source. The job of the Church is not to interfere. Its job is to facilitate the escape not to frustrate it or filter it. Its job is to be grease for the wheels of the escape not an obstacle in its way. When the Church becomes an obstacle in the way, the children of Adam and Eve go around it, under it, and over it. And the Church becomes irrelevant.