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After the last two inversions, things may seem a bit bleak. But the fall of one-third of the angels should not bring despair, despite the fact that God gives them leash to harass us - but just enough. (We should take note that they have been defeated already, yet the end must play out.)

The existence of spirits and angelic beings (even fallen ones) does nothing to change the fact that the radically transcendent God created wholly out of love. And how do we know this? Because God praises all of his creation as “good.” When God said “Fiat lux” he was pleased.

Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

Notice that he did not say, “Let there be dark,” for nothing is the darkness. But the light is good, and light is also true and beautiful. Seven times in the first chapter of Genesis we read “And God saw that it was good.” In the last mention, a strong adverb is added:

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.

Note that God says “it was good” even after creating humans, in our pre-fallen state. Note that this declaration of humans being “good” is prior to the moment when he breathes a rational soul into humankind, but even after the Fall we are good, but compromised. We are bent but not broken. Even when our ejection from the Garden happens, the ground is cursed, not us. This is an important point to notice. Goodness in creation brings with it the language of hope, second chances, forgiveness, because all of us spiritually crippled and broken things are worth saving.

In Japan, an art form called Kintsugi takes broken pottery and mends it with a golden filler or powder so that the item becomes serviceable again while maintaining its scars. After the restoration, the pottery looks more beautiful and even becomes more valuable than the original pot. The original pot was good, but the healed pot is better. Shattered, it seemed destined for the garbage heap. However, with this art form, what was perceived as garbage or as a lost-cause is mended and brought back to life, in a resurrection of sorts. What was originally good is glorified in the restoration. That is the plan of salvation. Don’t let the Fall get you down, because the plan is greater than we understand.

And that brings us to the inversion regarding goodness: all that God made is good.

This is why sin is ridiculous. It destroys the good.

Yet the good remains and will be restored if we understand this inversion.

Cast out your cynicism and your glass-half-full thinking. Reject the notion that this world is intrinsically evil, for it was not made that way. By our sin, the pottery was shattered. Through the Paschal mystery we are repaired with golden seams. But in the meantime…

Because we have the reality of sin, we look for answers outside of the most obvious place. And this causes us to forget: that all matter and spirit created by God was good from the start. It is only by turning away that we crack up and need restoration. Yet there is much hope in that restoration, too, for in the healing, our wounds will remain but be more glorious.

Many errors about the goodness of creation has led both the Israelites and Christians and non-believers away from the right path. This often falls under an umbrella of “matter is bad” or “spirits are bad.” The error is simple. All of God’s creation exudes goodness. It is sin that is bad, because it deforms and disorders that goodness.

The one thing that God creates that he deems “not good” is when the man is alone, and therefore he creates woman. “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’”

Thus, the only thing that God created that was not good - human loneliness - was promptly addressed with the most wonderful creation of all: woman, and with her, he created another amazing gift called marriage. The Fall marred that relationship as well, for as we turned from God, we turned away from each other.

Since the Fall, we have been looking for something to blame for the state we are in, and the list of errors in what to blame grows long. If we don’t blame God, we blame something created. I would personally like to blame mosquitoes, but in the grand order of things, without mosquitoes many birds and bats would starve, and I like birds and bats. Even though mosquitoes ruin many summer evenings, they were created as good, because God said so.

Many stand-ins for mosquitoes have been tried. With Pandora’s Box the Greeks blamed the gods and woman for introducing evil. With the Manichaeans, matter was evil. In Christian history, there are thirty-one flavors of Gnostic heresies, with popular movements like Marcionism, Catharism, and Paulicianism. Most recently, the Woke movement of recent years has come up with a remarkably parallel set of doctrines to the Cathars, to the point that they seem somehow separated at birth despite being hundreds of years apart.

All of these gnostic groups die an ugly death, because they are errors and forget that God is good, and creation is good. With all untruth, it eventually turns on itself, killing off the host.

The “light versus dark” idea is not new. This mistake is ancient. The light/dark battle royale is called dualism, and here is the mistake: dualism declares that there are two equal forces in the universe in contention for power, and only those on the “right side of history” are the “good.” If you find Catholicism odd, look into the gnostic and dualist movements. You will find many strange ideas and no coherency, but a general theme of “matter is bad,” and that is not what God says. He says the opposite. He says matter is good, repeating it seven different times.

In much of the “light vs. dark” errors, there is a misconception of God and the “war in heaven” idea included God himself. But there is no competitor with God, who is the highest good and source of all that is good. Any war in heaven that happened among the angels occurred as part of God’s plan of salvation. Again, God is transcendent of all created things, even the angels. Thus, evil cannot touch God, because evil only happens in creation, which includes the created heavens. To use a metaphor, if an architect built a beautiful cathedral, and later a visitor entered the cathedral and spray painted the walls, that is not the architect’s work. The graffiti vandal represents disorder from the goodness of the creation, but the spray paint came from the creature who used creation unwisely.

Back to dualism: this idea often grows out of an imbalance in the world due to people causing disorder. We naturally fall into this state, and its called paganism. Paganism and modern political religion falls into this zero-sum game trap. The idea of competition comes from dualism, which is fundamentally a distrust in God and his plan for salvation.

Here is something we don’t like to admit: most Americans today are not Christians; they are gnostics and dualists without knowing it. We lionize competition and achievement, where failure is darkness. In other words, the Fall pushes us into continual competition, so that we do not cooperate with God’s grace or each other for the common good. After all, God created all things and saw that it was good. No, it was very good. We forget this every day. It’s good, yet something is off in creation, so we need to fix it. What could it be? What could be off? What is it that is un-good? That thing is called “me” but that’s hard to look at. Blaming something else is the path of least resistance, but wide is the way that leads to destruction and many are those who follow it.

This leads to a variety of conclusions about what is bad, or what went wrong, and so often the conclusion leads to something called “gnosis,” or secret knowledge. This secret knowledge tends to elevate the self over other people or groups. This secret knowledge pins the tail on a donkey to blame for all suffering. Gnosis behaves like a cancer cell, because gnosis takes many forms, and whatever group catches this disease always dies off in the end and becomes an obituary in history books. This is inevitable because the truth always bubbles up and continues on, like a cork in a stormy sea - no matter the weather or the waves, the truth cannot be sunk.

For some of these errors, the secret knowledge looks at matter as the source of evil, sometimes all matter. Leaps of logic are made, such as: Life is pain, ergo “bodies are bad.” An extension of that is “sex is bad” which was the cry of the Puritans and Cathars. (FYI: Puritanism is an error, as is all of Calvinism). Often specific matter or bodies are the target, like women or men, or black people or white people. Sound absurd? That’s because it is absurd. Sometimes there are specific groups, like Republicans or Democrats, capitalists or communists, that mark off the light versus dark and the group is responsible for all evil (depends on which side you are on). This blame and zero-sum game leads to a world lacking forgiveness. Conversely, the idea that all creation is good, but we are compromised, this leads to a world of forgiveness and redemptive suffering, which we’ll discuss in a later inversion.

When any cult of dualism arises - and it always does - there is an enemy that must be destroyed, for that is the root of darkness. Killing all the Jews and Catholic priests has been tried multiple times and didn’t solve the problem of evil. Caesar killed a million Gauls and that didn’t cure Rome. Currently, in the 21st century, one set of gnostic dualists say that the the enemies are whiteness, the patriarchy, pro-life groups, traditional Christians, and (the perennial pick) practicing Jews. Another set blames foreigners, economics, academic elites, and the progressive lobby.

Unsurprisingly, the enemy of the dualists never takes the name of “my personal sin” or “the Fall” because the source of all evil is elsewhere. For dualists and gnostics, the evil comes externally, not from the human heart that resides in each of us. We were created good, but like a broken pot, we are scattered into pieces. Yet there is a way to be mended, and it is by the savior that heals, the great Konsugi artist named Jesus.

We all seem to know there was an Eden, a perfect state, a heavenly existence, and we want to return to it. We can feel that creation’s goodness is real without having ever been to the eternal paradise. Our confusion swirls around how to get back to the Garden. When we turn from God’s goodness, we tend to believe that it is us who will restore the Garden, and somehow by our efforts we will get past the cherubim and the spinning fiery sword that blocks the way. To do so, we need to remove the un-good ideas or people or material that blocks the path. This attempt to boost our own way to heaven is flammable and the devil loves watching it happen, since the father of lies caused the Fall in the first place. Socialism and capitalism claimed to have the way to paradise, and both have created versions of hell on earth.

The darkness in the human heart can be hard to admit, so we project it onto other created things, or the Creator himself if we have a poor understanding of God. St. Augustine and others did much battle to knock-down the Manichean dualist claim that all matter was bad. Many others throughout the centuries have had to defend God’s holy name against a variety of similar heresies. The gnostics and dualists always come back, always with bad ideas, slightly different than before, which again makes them much like a mutating cancer cell that winds through time.

However, this inversion is not about who is to blame. It is about goodness, truth, and light. First and foremost, we must understand that all matter and spirit was created good because it came from God’s love. Another way to say it is that creation is ordered. Creation has a wisdom of its own, far beyond ours. The Catechism states:

Because God creates through wisdom, his creation is ordered …Our human understanding, which shares in the light of the divine intellect, can understand what God tells us by means of his creation, though not without great effort and only in a spirit of humility and respect before the Creator and his work. Because creation comes forth from God's goodness, it shares in that goodness - "And God saw that it was good. . . very good”- for God willed creation as a gift addressed to man, an inheritance destined for and entrusted to him. On many occasions the Church has had to defend the goodness of creation, including that of the physical world. (CCC 299)

This should not come as a shock for anyone that has witnessed a sunset, or watched seeds grow, or watched puppies play, or observed a baby being born, or caught sight of a red fox in the winter snow, or watched a monarch caterpillar emerge from its cocoon as a monarch butterfly. This should not come as a shock to anyone who has pondered the mathematical miracle of a shell on a beach, or felt the might of ocean waves against their legs on shifting sands, or visited a glacier, or hiked a mountain. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has caught a fish, or harvested apples, or has felt the sting after being too late in slapping a mosquito before the bite.

There is order in creation. All modern science rests upon that assumption. Perhaps we’ve taken this for granted for too long. We need to recognize this wonder of intelligibility. Saint John Paul II said, “It is the one and the same God who establishes and guarantees the intelligibility and reasonableness of the natural order of things upon which scientists confidently depend.” (Fides et Ratio, 34)

God created the integers and the angels, as well as the basic Legos we call carbon and hydrogen and helium - and all of this was good. Why was it good? Because it is reasonable. It is order out of nothing, out of emptiness, out of chaos. The watery void or the Big Empty is uninteresting, whereas the music of the spheres in the heavens makes sense. The soil cycle and weather cycle and Krebs cycle and tricycle: all of these make sense. As Einstein said, “The eternal mystery of the universe is its comprehensibility. The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”

In other words, nature is ordered by a wisdom far greater than our own, yet we can study it. Better still, because we are part of that good creation. God is the only thing not part of creation, because he is the sheer act of Being Itself. Thus, we should never worship creation or anything in it, because creatures are not the Creator. That means we should not worship the earth or the stars or celebrities or mascots or nations or corporations or ideas.

On this ordered “goodness” the first universities were founded, as all truth leads to God, who created all things. The foundation of order in the universe coming from the Unmoved Mover provides the bedrock for all inquiry, and we are free to arrive at our own conclusions. In the Catholic manner of thinking, inquiry into the truth is right and just, and is based on the observed order of God’s good work.

The Catholic intellectual tradition and the contemporary university share two underlying convictions: that to be human is to desire to discover truth, and that the quest for truth is sparked by the expectation that the universe is intelligible. In the Catholic view, these convictions arise from belief in the union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ and the unity of all things in God. From this theological perspective, the Catholic intellectual tradition is based on two fundamental principles: first, that the search for truth in all aspects of life extends to the ultimate search for truth that animates faith; and, second, that faith is a catalyst for inquiry, as faith seeks to understand itself and its relationship to every dimension of life. Thus, the most probing questions in every discipline are never deemed to be in opposition to faith but are welcomed into the conversation on the conviction that ongoing discovery of the intelligibility of the universe will reveal more of the truth about God. The Catholic intellectual tradition can thrive only with the participation of all who seek the truth, including those whose inquiry leads them to question whether the search reveals purpose, meaning, or God, or to conclude that it does not. (from The Catholic Intellectual Tradition: A Conversation at Boston College)

The ultimate truth is God, so all honest inquiry leads back to God. Hence, if we are to truly, honestly “follow the science,” it will lead us to God. But much of modern science leads away from God and every thirty years those erroneous papers are scuttled, because “the science” was actually disguised ideology, often with motives not unlike the gnostics and dualists. St. Paul tells us that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” which explains the confusion. Drawn to artificial light, we stray from the true God. This happens in our own moral behavior, in our pursuit of happiness, and even across entire nations.

The intelligibility of creation, which is good, comes from God, who is love. He created out of love, not because he had to, or needed to.

God does not compete with anything in creation, as he is the Creator. Just as Shakespeare cannot compete with Macbeth, God has no competitor that can even approach or fathom his glory. The closest beings to him, as handed down by tradition, are the Seraphim, the angels of the highest order (or choir), and yet there is zero chance of them overtaking God. In our much lower place, we can conclude that we know better than God, and that we can make his creation operate properly, when it is exactly our sin that disorders creation. This is the opposite of humility.

Pope Francis wrote Laudato Si, or Care for our Common Home, which delved into details about the goodness of creation, rejecting all dualism and gnosticism, and putting it into terms of how the creation in Genesis and the Gospels clearly dovetail, particularly in the life of Jesus. Closing out this inversion, here are six paragraphs from Laudato Si.

1. Our insistence that each human being is an image of God should not make us overlook the fact that each creature has its own purpose. None is superfluous. The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God. The history of our friendship with God is always linked to particular places which take on an intensely personal meaning; we all remember places, and revisiting those memories does us much good. Anyone who has grown up in the hills or used to sit by the spring to drink, or played outdoors in the neighbourhood square; going back to these places is a chance to recover something of their true selves.

2. God has written a precious book, “whose letters are the multitude of created things present in the universe”.[54] The Canadian bishops rightly pointed out that no creature is excluded from this manifestation of God: “From panoramic vistas to the tiniest living form, nature is a constant source of wonder and awe. It is also a continuing revelation of the divine”.[55] The bishops of Japan, for their part, made a thought-provokingobservation: “To sense each creature singing the hymn of its existence is to live joyfully in God’s love and hope”.[56] This contemplation of creation allows us to discover in each thing a teaching which God wishes to hand on to us, since “for the believer, to contemplate creation is to hear a message, to listen to a paradoxical and silent voice”.[57] We can say that “alongside revelation properly so-called, contained in sacred Scripture, there is a divine manifestation in the blaze of the sun and the fall of night”.[58] Paying attention to this manifestation, we learn to see ourselves in relation to all other creatures: “I express myself in expressing the world; in my effort to decipher the sacredness of the world, I explore my own”.[59]

3. The universe as a whole, in all its manifold relationships, shows forth the inexhaustible riches of God. Saint Thomas Aquinas wisely noted that multiplicity and variety “come from the intention of the first agent” who willed that “what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another”,[60] inasmuch as God’s goodness “could not be represented fittingly by any one creature”.[61] Hence we need to grasp the variety of things in their multiple relationships.[62] We understand better the importance and meaning of each creature if we contemplate it within the entirety of God’s plan. As the Catechism teaches: “God wills the interdependence of creatures. The sun and the moon, the cedar and the little flower, the eagle and the sparrow: the spectacle of their countless diversities and inequalities tells us that no creature is self-sufficient. Creatures exist only in dependence on each other, to complete each other, in the service of each other”.[63]

…

1. Jesus lived in full harmony with creation, and others were amazed: “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” (Mt 8:27). His appearance was not that of an ascetic set apart from the world, nor of an enemy to the pleasant things of life. Of himself he said: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard!’” (Mt 11:19). He was far removed from philosophies which despised the body, matter and the things of the world. Such unhealthy dualisms, nonetheless, left a mark on certain Christian thinkers in the course of history and disfigured the Gospel. Jesus worked with his hands, in daily contact with the matter created by God, to which he gave form by his craftsmanship. It is striking that most of his life was dedicated to this task in a simple life which awakened no admiration at all: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mk 6:3). In this way he sanctified human labour and endowed it with a special significance for our development. As Saint John Paul II taught, “by enduring the toil of work in union with Christ crucified for us, man in a way collaborates with the Son of God for the redemption of humanity”.[79]

2. In the Christian understanding of the world, the destiny of all creation is bound up with the mystery of Christ, present from the beginning: “All things have been created though him and for him” (Col 1:16).[80] The prologue of the Gospel of John (1:1-18) reveals Christ’s creative work as the Divine Word (Logos). But then, unexpectedly, the prologue goes on to say that this same Word “became flesh” (Jn 1:14). One Person of the Trinity entered into the created cosmos, throwing in his lot with it, even to the cross. From the beginning of the world, but particularly through the incarnation, the mystery of Christ is at work in a hidden manner in the natural world as a whole, without thereby impinging on its autonomy.

3. The New Testament does not only tell us of the earthly Jesus and his tangible and loving relationship with the world. It also shows him risen and glorious, present throughout creation by his universal Lordship: “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col 1:19-20). This leads us to direct our gaze to the end of time, when the Son will deliver all things to the Father, so that “God may be everything to every one” (1 Cor 15:28). Thus, the creatures of this world no longer appear to us under merely natural guise because the risen One is mysteriously holding them to himself and directing them towards fullness as their end. The very flowers of the field and the birds which his human eyes contemplated and admired are now imbued with his radiant presence.

And that includes the mosquitoes. Hard as it is for me to say, God bless the mosquito.

Further reading:

Why death and violence in God’s good creation?

Why God creates

UCCSB’s Care for Creation

Pope Francis: Laudato Si (Care for Our Common Home)

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Building off the prior inversion, to declare that the “heavens” are real does not imply superstitious beliefs. Rather, it implies something exists beyond just clouds, stars, feelings, minds, integers, and imagination. “Heaven” implies something unseen, yet knowable in a strange way. We have knowledge of integers, yet no human has ever seen one, and no human ever will. No matter how powerful a microscope or how clever the experiment, an integer will never pop out at us. Yet integers exist. Likewise with angelic beings, we know of them without sensing them. The “third heaven” of a previous inversion is where these immaterial beings live, while mysteriously interacting with us here. Genesis declares this upper floor of this great house called Creation to be real - very real. And angels somehow occupy this house; so too demons, also known as fallen angels.

The word angel means messenger, and if you pay attention during your day, you will notice messages that come from something other than your phone. This inversion is about thoughts, which lead to actions. We should consider each thought, wondering where it comes from, and what to do about it.

Throughout each day, perhaps you will notice that some messages are good, and some are not. When you think, “I’d like to see some nudes on my phone,” that is a message, which is a very different message from the message, “I should call my mother.” I’ll leave it to you to ponder which type of spirit delivers those two different messages.

But it is not the demon who places the thoughts, from what I understand, as Jesus himself says in Matthew 15 that “…what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.” Because of this, we cannot blame our thoughts on the demons, nor our actions. We must cooperate with God, not the accuser or tempter. This makes sin our personal responsibility, which is why we must own up to it in Confession for healing.

St. Paul says to “put on the mind of Christ” and to “pray constantly.” There is solid reason for this, because when your mind is full of God and good things, there is not space for demons. But if you do not believe in the idea of heaven or God, you will be opening messages without even knowing it, and a moving truck of demons may have arrived long ago. Anyone who has dealt with squatters’ rights knows: it’s hard to get unwanted guests to depart. Even in real-estate court, sometimes it takes a miracle.

Since these beings have no bodies, they can move like mathematical points on a graph - that is to say, they move instantly. Thus, when Jesus drives out thousands of demons from one man, and the demons rush into the pigs that drown themselves in the sea, this is not surprising. Like points on a graph, bodiless spirits can be set to the same coordinates, and if those coordinates happen to be your head and heart, then you could be teeming with a legion of spirits as well.

If you ever took Algebra II, this concept should be familiar, as a point in space can be moved with the negation or multiplication of a number. Students learn about translation, reflection, and rotation as ways to move points on a graph. Numbers are not physical, they are immaterial. As Stephen Hawking said, “God created the integers,” and like the integers, spirits have no bodies. Without the weight of matter holding them in space and time, spirits can reflect, translate, and rotate their position from one place to another, a million miles away, without so much as a bus pass.

Perhaps you thought Algebra II would never come in handy, but for understanding how angels and demons can “move” it helps for illustration. Pure intellect can move instantaneously, just like the math concepts of translation, rotation, and reflection can move a point in space any distance with the toggling of a number. Consider this the next time your guard is down and temptation arises. You need only a nudge, and plenty of spirits are waiting for the gap in your spiritual defenses to drop in and say “Hello.” A spirit can - and does - translate to your location to offer a nudge. No airfare needed, it is immediate. In the St. Michael the Archangel prayer, a warning is mentioned about these spirits who seek your destruction: “…the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.” Because they can arrive instantly, you must pray constantly. The good news is that your guardian angel, St. Michael, and others are there to help. Spiritual combat is real. In any war, successful attacks come swift and unannounced. Like a cyberattack faster than fiber optic speeds, you will be overtaken if unprepared. You are always being watched and studied, steered into moments of temptation. If you are reading this, they are reading it with you and observing your reaction. Demons will translate, rotate, and reflect into your location to suggest doubt in God. Prayer is the weapon, humility is the tactic.

This is something to consider the next time you make a decision quickly without discernment. Even as I make progress toward God, sometimes impulsive decisions occur, after which I wonder how it happened. The suggestions to take an action come in an instant, and this is often alarming. It’s almost like someone or something is guiding me, or waiting to suggest something at exactly the right moment.

This means that when the notion comes to scroll a certain website or tell a lie, a demon is pleased to nudge the temptation forward. It cannot force you, but it can suggest things. In fact, you should start considering where your thoughts come from altogether, because no one can “make” a thought. Thoughts will appear before your left brain has time to reason with your right brain that this was a bad idea. After all, demons are smarter than us, and move even more efficiently than the crow flies. They are like a really good TV lawyer, like Columbo or CSI investigators or Sherlock Holmes, always one step ahead. Surely, many brilliant people are in hell for believing in the delusion that they knew more than spirits. Human brilliance is like a dog thinking it knows more than a human, or a toddler playing hide and seek with a teenager. In a battle of wits with angels and demons, you lose. Spirits are pure intellect and it is folly to think we can outwit them.

Prayer and the Sacraments are what you need to know for the spiritual combat. It’s not terribly complicated or dramatic. Mostly the warfare means knowing when to kneel and pray. Literally, wherever you are when the temptation arises, you must kneel and ask for help. That is the only way to “win”. Surrender in spiritual matters brings aid. Prayer summons the heroes you need. It is knowing who, when, and how to ask for help, so that the right messenger, your guardian angel, appears and gets rid of the other spirit, the demon. This is why the Surrender Novena prayer is becoming widespread in usage again today, as people realize that spiritual combat means surrendering to God.

Because these beings of pure intellect can move about instantly, they can be around us constantly or whenever they like. They move at the speed of thought, far faster than the speed of light. As pure intellect, they are smarter than we are, by a thousand times, because while we are the highest animal, we are the lowest spirit. A brilliant person is a cute case of delusion to angels and demons, like a third grade basketball player who believes he could beat Lebron James in a one-on-one game. This is where “smart” people stumble and the religious “fools” succeed: because the pride of worldly knowledge hoodwinks us. While angels will warn us to back away from that error, demons will stoke the engine of pride, vanity, and sensuality with continuous fuel. Worth noting: knowledge does not equal wisdom. Piles of data do not produce humility; rather, data tends to produce unwarranted pride and a sense of control. We are but one giant solar flare from every data center in the world being formatted to a blank state, thus whatever expertise and security we have today must be received with gratitude instead of hubris.

There are higher spiritual beings than our own rational souls, and we cannot sense these beings. We cannot see them but they can see us. On occasion they are visible, such as what we know from the scripture regarding Abraham and Mary. They may appear to us. They very likely do. We walk among them unaware at times and even interact with them. Hence, “love others” is wise at all times.

There are also lower vegetative souls in plants, and sensitive souls in animals. Consider how we feel superior in our ability to outwit a mindless flower or fish. Yet this is how angels and demons feel about us. We are like a flower or fish to them - certainly simple, perhaps silly…perhaps beautiful. The best scriptural example of this is at the battle of Jericho when Joshua and his army are prepping to fight and the angel of the Lord appears. I get the feeling that the angel is looking at Joshua like I look at my dog.

…when Joshua was by Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing before him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?”

He replied, “Neither.” (Joshua 5:13-15)

Whether this is an angel or God himself, this angelic being in Joshua’s vision seems somewhat uninterested in Joshua and his question. He is there as commander of the Lord’s army, and Joshua appears to be suddenly demoted.

This is important for understanding our place in the spiritual order, in the whole order of creation, and should encourage humility, as Joshua learned in that moment.

We are not that high on the ladder, but we could be in the end. Jesus, who was fully human, is the second person of the Trinity. St. Athanasius famously said that “God became man that we might become God.” That is powerful stuff. Consider as well that Mary is the queen of heaven. She is above all angelic beings, which is quite remarkable, and it is said that this really bothers the demons, who consider humans to be lowly worms.

This inversion is like the others. It is not for trivia night or light conversation: it is for your mental health. Reality includes spirits, which means angels and demons. You have a soul. Your soul has a body. You have a guardian angel. Demons may be allowed to bother you, by God, to draw you closer to God. There is a cherub with a flaming sword guarding the way back to Eden, and we can only return there by persevering in these tests.

Heaven is the place of the the unseen, the invisible, the enchanted world. Even in our imagination we park many things in other dimensions kind of like heaven, like ideas or Platonic forms or fairies. The end-game is Eden, heaven, and the tests that we experience here have supernatural interactions. In our daily lives, we are engaged in supernatural events, which is a reality that we have deadened under the influence of illusory power and knowledge.

A fun historical fact is that in the ancient world, stars were often seen as gods. Even in the Bible, angels and stars go together. A star led the Magi to a little town of Bethlehem, and the star was not Alpha Centauri - it moved to sit right over the place where Christ was born. In other words, this star was an angel, a messenger. If this seems too abstract, then on the next Christmas tree you see, look to see what is on top of it: it will be either a star or an angel. Stars and angels have been used together for a long time. In the ancient world, stars were seen as living beings. They can symbolically be angelic beings, because we need stories to understand the supernatural. Angels are messengers of the one true God. They are not matter, as stars are. They do not twinkle, and they are not magical astrological superstitious objects for use in New Age incantations. But the use of metaphor can help us articulate the supernatural, but we must stop in wonder and not name the stars as angels.

Your soul has a purpose. That purpose is to return to God. The angels will help you get there. The demons, not so much…but they will be granted enough leash to trouble you, giving the exact trials you need to find your way home. All trials are a gift. This is hard to accept. If you wonder why God might do such a thing, find a quiet place and look to the crucifix for the answer.

Some have said these angelic beings cannot know our most inner thoughts, but that they can observe all that we see and hear. Others have suggested that our thoughts are placed into us by angels, or demons. Whichever is the case, the answer to it is that every thought must be captured to Christ. If we “put on the mind of Christ” then Jesus filters and corrects every thought. Thus when we loathe our enemy and have evil thoughts, that is precisely when the thought must be captured and handed over to Christ, or sent to the foot of the cross.

The power of suggestion and placing thoughts into our heads via whispers in our ears, is exactly what the devil does in the Garden to Eve. He suggests that God is lying. “Did God really say that?” He places doubt. “You will become like gods,” he lies. The error of Adam and Eve is to cooperate with the serpent’s lies. These whispers we all hear in our mind and heart is the result of the fall. Thus, influence can come from outside, which is usually called the world, the flesh, and the devil. But we can never just say “The devil made me do it,” as if we have no agency, free-will, or personal responsibility. Jesus states rather plainly: “…what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.”

Because of these influences, we must stand like archers on the walls of the castle, shooting down that which may not enter, otherwise we will be overcome, and it takes much work to eject the enemies that have already taken occupation inside the castle. This is why every thought must be captured to Christ. Thinking is where much of the battleground happens between light and dark, because it precedes the act of the will. The Spiritual Combat by Dom Lorenzo Scupoli is a book to be read and re-read in our age of materialism, because we have been inverted into a worldview where angels and demons do not exist, which is the exact goal of the demons: to be laughed off as unreal. The Screwtape Letters is another fine source to help understand what is happening when we doubt that angels and demons exist. But they most certainly do, and we would do well to meditate on the Fall in the Garden, Jesus’ temptations in the desert, and Jesus’ endurance through prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, for all three have answers regarding how spiritual beings can influence us and how to respond. The word angel means “messenger,” and this is the whisper. We need our mailbox open to receive the good angel’s messages, and the demons’ mail should go directly to the spam folder.

Again, this should scare you, but should also give hope, for the way to win is by trusting in God. This is the inversion of what we tend toward since the Fall, which is to trust in the self. That was the error in the Garden of Eden, and Jesus in the Garden on the night before his death does the opposite. Like his mother at the Annunciation, he says “Thy will be done.” He trusts in God.

As for us, capturing every thought to Christ is critical. Alone with our own imagination is a dangerous place to loiter, and while we may consider that we generate all our own thoughts, an inversion of this modern way of thinking is to consider that the world, the flesh, and the devil all play a part. Go to God, and talk often to other people who are striving for salvation, and you will discern which messages are worth keeping and which messengers should be put on the “cease and desist” and “do not call” list. Keep in mind the shape of the cross, which has a vertical and horizontal beam. Vertically we must speak and look up to God for help, and horizontally on the ground here we must speak to others. Getting out of our head opens up the heart to God and others.

Further reading:

How does a guardian angel work?

Can demons put thoughts in our minds?

Can the devil read your thoughts? (start at 22:14)

Can The Devil Know Our Thoughts And Hear What We Say

Guardian Angels in Catholic Theology (video, Jimmy Akin)

Do a consecration to your guardian angel (and the theology of such a thing)

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The mention of “heavens” carries a massive piece of luggage with it labelled Spirits, and not the liquor variety. The idea of spirits may not have shocked ancient readers, but modern readers may laugh and shrug at the idea of immaterial beings, yet are still afraid to descend the stairs into a dark basement. Ancient people believed in spirits, but today we feel that we know better. “The age of magic is over,” we say, and then spend millions on New Age crystals and cards. “The age of superstition is dead,” we say, and then we proceed to ask for help from AI software treating it like the oracle at Delphi. “Prayers are useless” we say and then pray for the field goal to clear the uprights. Today, the “spiritual but not religious” crowd grows in numbers, without any understanding exactly which spirits they have opened themselves up to. The spirits are real and ever eager to locate the indifferent.

The inversion here is the one that may scare you. Really, it should produce awe and wonder. Like a healthy fear of swimming in the ocean, this can keep panic at bay and thereby help you breathe.

The culture’s suppression of supernatural things has smothered the unseen realm. Images of cartoon devils in tights, wall-art of chubby baby cherubs smoking cigarettes, platitudes at funerals about uncle Joe getting his wings, and the reduction of all demons to psychological issues - all of this misdirection has had a blinding impact on us to what is real.

But angels exist, and they are present now. They are reading or listening to this with you. Over your shoulder, whispering messages, they are present.

If we accept the inversion that angels are real, we should spend some time considering what they are, while not obsessing over it, because we must be aware of this reality, without seeking to fly too close to the sun.

What are angels then? Let’s use a list of 12 things to know on angels from Peter Kreeft:

• They really exist. Not just in our minds, or our myths, or our symbols, or our culture. They are as real as your dog, or your sister, or electricity.

• They’re present, right here, right now, right next to you, reading these words with you.

• They’re not cute, cuddly, comfortable, chummy, or “cool”. They are fearsome and formidable. They are huge. They are warriors.

• They are the real “extra-terrestrials”, the real “Super-men”, the ultimate aliens. Their powers are far beyond those of all fictional creatures.

• They are more brilliant minds than Einstein.

• They can literally move the heavens and the earth if God permits them.

• There are also evil angels, fallen angels, demons, or devils. These too are not myths. Demon possessions, and exorcisms, are real.

• Angels are aware of you, even though you can’t usually see or hear them. But you can communicate with them. You can talk to them without even speaking.

• You really do have your very own “guardian angel”. Everybody does.

• Angels often come disguised. “Do not neglect hospitality, for some have entertained angels unawares”—that’s a warning from life’s oldest and best instruction manual.

• We are on a protected part of a great battlefield between angels and devils, extending to eternity.

• Angels are sentinels standing at the crossroads where life meets death. They work especially at moments of crisis, at the brink of disaster—for bodies, for souls, and for nations.

Accepting they are real may require a willingness that is difficult, yet it is essential to this inversion, to see the world right-side-up instead of upside down. One stumbling block comes from the Bible itself, because they are not explicitly mentioned as being created in the six days.

The lack of mention about the creation of angels and demons stands out in Genesis. Did Moses just forget to write that down in the Torah? Where are the ghosts, Moses? On which day were the watchers, archangels, and guardians created? If the writers of sacred scripture were inspired by God, or literary geniuses, how could they possibly have missed mentioning the timing of the creation of angels and the fall of the demons?

This seems a gaping hole in the creation story. Surely it seems impossible that this could be missed…unless it is omitted on purpose or for quiet reasons. There is much here to consider. This omission is one of the great conversation starters about the opening book of the Bible, because we often talk so much about what is there, but in this case we must discuss what is not there.

The standard answer is that when God created the heavens, he created the angels, and a third of the angels fell with Satan when they turned their will against God. This is alluded to in places, particularly in the last book of the Bible, in Revelation, and in Daniel.

In terms of timing on when they were created, we have a short answer from the Catechism stating that angels were created before human beings.

The profession of faith of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) affirms that God "from the beginning of time made at once (simul) out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly, and then (deinde) the human creature, who as it were shares in both orders, being composed of spirit and body." (CCC 327)

Now, if you are Catholic, like I am, this answer to “when were angels created” is sufficient. ‘Tis enough. The faith provides an answer, which satisfies my curiosity and saves me from tilting at windmills in long thought-quests of “which came first, the spirits or the atoms?” The spirits and the stuff were created at once, out of nothing, and we came after. Was it a day, an age, an eon, a billion years? It really doesn’t matter. But truly, even in light of modern science, this is hardly a shocking concept, as even our scientific models has all matter and energy there at the beginning, and we come long afterward. Angels and demons are created, therefore God created them, and it happened before he breathed a soul into Adam. The details are not terribly important for my wrestling with faith on how to live for God and others today. In fact, thinking about such things too much detracts from exactly those two commandments of Christ, to love God and to love others. He didn’t command us to spend a lifetime contemplating the exact construction of time, space, matter, and angels. Accepting the mystery of this is liberating.

As for the fall of the angels, or how they became demons, we know it happened. How do we know that? Because Jesus said he witnessed “Satan fall like lightning.” If you have a first principle of believing that Jesus is the second person of the Holy Trinity, and that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life…then it follows that all that he says is true. Then he means exactly what he said: “I saw Satan fall like lightning.”

Conversely, if you don’t believe that Jesus was fully human and fully divine, then nothing that he says would matter anyway, because he would then be lying. This is why the first principles of belief matter so much, as every line of the Apostles’ Creed then forms the foundation of all that you do, say, and believe.

So if you believe in Jesus as the only begotten Son of God, this is a statement from Jesus that should make our jaw hit the floor, because if Jesus saw “Satan fall like lightning” then he can only be declaring himself to be the Creator, a.k.a. God. This also means he has always existed, before all ages, and that through him all things were created.

This declaration of seeing Satan’s fall is as wild and radical as when Jesus forgives the paralytic’s sins, because only God can do that. (No wonder his contemporaries hated him. Imagine a neighbor making such a claim. But then your neighbor can’t walk on water or multiply bread, so it’s a bit different.)

This fall of Satan seems to happen instantly, abruptly, and all at once, without any kind of grand battle. Lightning is instant, perhaps the most instant thing we can imagine as humans, as anything beyond the speed of light becomes difficult to fathom. Thus, it seems that upon creation, Satan fell immediately in rejecting God, and it doesn’t sound glamorous or valorous, it sounds kind of pathetic, like he got drunk and drove off a cliff after closing time at the local bar. Angels are said to be locked into their choice without the ability to repent, thus upon creation perhaps he fell immediately. But we don’t know that, nor do we need to know. The whole idea of “when” only makes sense to us living in time, whereas God is eternal, and the concept of time in aeveternity (angel time) is a mystery beyond our understanding.

So we know that Satan fell, and hard. He goes by other names, such as the ancient dragon, the serpent, Lucifer, the Devil, et al. But whatever the name he began as an angel. He fell and then we fell because he planted the temptation to question God in our first parents. We fell for it. One fall leads to another.

In that fall of the angels, we have much speculation on how and why it happened. Unfortunately, we have John Milton’s Paradise Lost which skews the fall of Satan and paints the devil as a mafia boss. Milton made an error, it seems, in his Puritan gnosticism of light versus dark. It seems that Milton started us on the path to this cartoon devil idea that we have today, and while the poem might be interesting, it misleads.

We are better off with Dante and the medieval view, which has sadly been replaced by so much Protestant shedding of sacraments, angels, and saints, and more recently from the Enlightenment and scientific materialism. In Dante’s Inferno, the devil is miserable and encased in ice at the bottom of hell. His existence truly blows - literally, it blows because he’s flapping his wings in angry desperation forever, causing the very ice that forms around his torso.

Cold, isolated, miserable, alone. That’s hell.

Neither of these books are considered sacred scripture, but Dante’s worldview makes far more sense than Milton’s, for if you reject the Highest Good, which is God, the result is a miserable hell. And hell is not a good time where any ruling happens, it’s a lonely place of death in the abyss. After the death on the cross, Jesus descended into hell and not all souls were brought out of it, only some. Yet the devil remains. Why?

Why didn’t the paschal mystery of the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension finish off the devil and fallen angels once and for all?

This too is a mystery. The cliffhanger continues until the Second Coming. In the meantime, the devil is permitted by God to operate in the world to guide men toward salvation and to carry salvation history forward. But the fallen ones are not in any sense enjoying the experience. Jesus showed the way to life; it is through trials that we find it, and trials come in the form of crosses, but if we carry them, they become gifts. This is a hard thing to accept. Yet we must.

The book of Job is the graduate level class on the idea that God allows suffering to bring about a greater good. In Egypt, Joseph states the answer of why evil is allowed by God: “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” One verse that has stood up on the page for me is the moment that God sends an evil spirit to put Saul into a state of depression and self-loathing. God seems to push it onto Saul. Read this verse slowly:

“Now the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him.” (1 Samuel 16:14)

To me, this is another jaw-dropping moment, because the good spirit leaves and God sends an evil one to Saul. This is God sending the evil spirit to Saul, the first king of the chosen people.

What does this mean? Does this mean that God is evil? No, it means that God uses the evil spirits to bring about salvation history. He uses all of creation to bring about his will. This is why we must wrestle with God, like Jacob. This is why he wrestles with us, each of us. God is teaching us with life, with trials, and hopefully we realize, like Jacob, that the angel of the Lord is stronger and we eventually must submit (but like Jacob we should also ask for his blessing once our hip socket gives out and we accept surrender).

If this sending of an evil spirit happened to Saul, there is no reason to think we may not also be given this kind of treatment. But the difference is how we respond to it. Do we react like Job, or like Joseph in Genesis, accepting our struggle? Or do we act like Saul, and seek out the witch of Endor? Do we try to take control by other means, or do we surrender to his will?

Obviously the ultimate instance of the trial is described in Jesus’ fasting in the desert, where after his baptism he goes into the wilderness for forty days. At the end, at his weakest moment, the devil tempts him. This of all things should help us see that we are in for a test, or multiple tests, as the fully human and fully divine Jesus showed us how to suffer and serve. It is this full dying to self that we see in Christ’s life.

After all, hell is choosing the self over God, the ego over the Creator. Thus, the fallen demons are lost, wailing and gnashing their teeth forever in the nothingness and “fires” of hell. This “fire” of hell may be a freezing place, where fire is so hot that it feels like ice. Anyone who has had to jumpstart a car in a Minnesota winter, fiddling with battery posts and cables at minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, knows well how cold can feel like burning fire. Whatever the fire, the takeaway here must be only this: that it is awful. Thus, the idea that Milton’s Satan said, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” is absurd, because he is in hell. There is no enjoyment there. It is a constant jumpstarting of a car in a poorly lit parking lot at minus 35 five degrees Fahrenheit during a blizzard - but much worse.

Reading the Gospel without acknowledging the glaring fact that Jesus considers demons and angels to be real will make for a disappointing read. Worse, dismissing angels and demons without serious reflection will make for a disappointing eternity. Yet the intro of Genesis lacks this seemingly all-important element.

But why?

We first meet the serpent in Genesis 3, and the cherubim with the flaming sword who guards eden comes shortly after that. So the angels are mentioned early on, but the details are light. How can this be? There’s no mention of the creation of the serpent-demon, but suddenly he’s there. God created all “out of nothing” so clearly the serpent-demon was created. It seems this is not mentioned so as not to lead us astray.

There are several inversions needed here to get us focused on what is important.

First, there are books that are not in the Bible that go into the fall of the angels, such as the book of Enoch, and much ado is made of that online today. Many strange religions have a fixation on the book of Enoch, and the book of Enoch is truly fascinating. Yet it was not selected by the Israelites as part of sacred scripture. It is not in the Septuagint, the first Greek version of the canon. Genesis would have been the most logical place to write about the creation of angelic beings, yet it was left out, or covered under the umbrella of “God created the heavens…” which includes all things that exist in the heavens. Allusions to the book of Enoch appear in a few places, so why wasn’t it included? We are not forbidden to read it, but it is clearly not critical for our salvation, otherwise it would have been included in the canon.

Sacred scripture provides only what we need for salvation, not all the gory and exciting details we would like to know. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine listed good reasons why the creation of angels is not covered in detail. Resting in the mystery is one answer, but perhaps this angelic creation story was not made clear to Moses and therefore was not written. But Aquinas’ most convincing argument is that when humans focus too much on angelic beings, they are prone to falling into worshipping them, a.k.a. idolatry. In fact, Hollywood has little interest in Abraham or David or the Eucharist or the Mass, but throws gobs of money at making movies about demons. This alone is telling. Those who spend too much time thinking about angels and demons forget the purpose of sacred scripture, which is to help us live as humans, not anywhere above our place in the hierarchy of created beings. This would be like a rabbit attempting to ponder Plato instead of foraging.

Thomas Aquinas, also known as the angelic doctor, has this sensible reason as to why Genesis begins the way it does.

Although Thomas believes that angels, like everything else in creation, actually do contribute to the greater glorification of God, he does recognize some dangers. In Ia 61, 1 ad 1 he responds to the objection that, because angels are not mentioned in the Biblical account of creation, God did not create them. He says God created everything that exists, and the fact that angels are not mentioned in Genesis 1 is no indication that God did not create them. Aquinas attributes their omission to the danger posed by knowing about them and too much attention being paid to them. Indeed, it seems as though the Israelites in the Old Testament were in constant danger of worshiping something other than God as God. So rather than mention them, Aquinas says that Moses sought to remove an occasion of idolatry from the people. This shows that there is a danger in focusing too much on angels as opposed to God without whom they would not exist, and without whom their existence is unintelligible. Angels are, after all, messengers, and one ought not attend too much to the messenger while neglecting the message, which is God’s Word. (Dr. Joseph Magee, from AquinasOnline.com)

We must not become too focused on angels and demons, lest we take our eyes off of God. St. Paul said in Colossians, “Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you. Such a person also goes into great detail about what they have seen; they are puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind.”

What an interesting comment. Paul says that to be interested in angels to the point of worship is to be unspiritual. This feels like an indictment on Hollywood and the YouTubers obsessed with exorcisms. As it turns out, the spiritual combat is really a steady prayer life, keeping the commandments, wrestling with God and then surrendering your will and intellect to Jesus and his established visible Church, and putting all your trust in God. What are we not to do? Obsess over angels and demons. The Divine Mercy quote of “Jesus, I trust in you” kind of sums it up.

More than a few people become obsessed with the messengers, the angels, instead of the Trinity. Entire denominations go astray and conflate angels with God or Jesus (Jehovah’s Witnesses, LDS, a thousand New Age cults). The “worship of angels” is fool’s gold. Thus, consider only Michael, Gabriel, and Rafael, the sainted archangels of scripture, who are highest in rank for our concern, that is, of human concern. Praying the “St. Michael the Archangel” prayer is far more important than the Pledge of Allegiance, as the nation will pass away but God will not, nor will his Church, the new Israel.

As for your personal concern, the guardian angel assigned to you is enough, but do not name the guardian, just let it be “my guardian angel.” The Angel of God prayer can and should be said daily as a basic devotion. This is like brushing your teeth. It’s for your health, too, your eternal health.

Focusing too much on angels and demons instead of God leads to irrational fears and concerns, to the point that you have more of a relationship with the demons than if you didn’t believe in them in the first place. The atheist living by “reason alone” is shielded against errors like this one (even while making the worst possible error, which is the total rejection of God).

But they are real.

To comfort our modern sense of security, we assume all that old chatter about demons was mere superstition and mental illness. Right? But it scares us to think of it. When we feel scared, we have our coping strategies. Perhaps we sign in to our 401K account to check the balance and sigh in relief. Or we check our security system and insurance policy. Another reaction to the terror of angelic beings is to start cleaning the house, or to scold someone online, or to scroll porn and news, or space out on a video game. We find some worldly thing to control (like writing/pontificating on a blog, as I do, or judging others, as I do).

What we should do is kneel to pray and invoke the name of Jesus and the Trinity, and pray for the intercession of the saints and angels, trusting in God’s will in humility. Call to mind our own sins and recognize our weaknesses and need for a Savior. The most important prayer that we do, of all prayers, is the one we do without even knowing it’s a prayer: that prayer is called The Sign of the Cross.

The idea of demons has been made comical by horror films and Halloween costumes, which is what the devil would like us to believe. As for angels, they have been wall art and figurines for so long that we assume at everyone’s funeral that a human turns into an angel at death, automatically. This universal salvation is mentioned nowhere by Jesus, nor is there any mention of giving of angel wings to humans. Humans are embodied souls, without wings. Both angels and demons have become cartoons to us. But the meaning of the word “angel” is messenger.

Your mailbox might receive a message sometime in the night, in the small hours, when the eyes open and the radar of conscience pings a spiritual presence. We can ignore or acknowledge it. Truly, it should terrify you a bit because if you are not on the right side of the battle, you will ultimately lose. The great trick of spirits is to guide your actions with suggestion and misdirection, and if you live unaware of their influence, you are a sitting duck. Rather, you are already on the side of demons if you don’t think they exist. But to know they exist is one thing, and to think about them is another. Keep your mind clean by turning your thoughts to God, always back to one of the persons of the Trinity. Your guardian angel is always ready to help. For many, the person most accessible is the person of Jesus, which makes sense, because like us he was fully human, and unlike us, he was fully divine.

The assertion of scripture, tradition, and the teaching of the Church is that spirits matter for your life, death, and judgment. Spirits are real. What is not real (or healthy or useful) is the denial of spirits. Worse yet is obsessing over them. New Age religions dabbling in spirit invitations is directly problematic, because summoning, channeling, manifesting, and opening ourselves to spirits comes with consequences. Plenty of spirits are happy to join in, and they will devour you.

Spirits will indeed take you up on an invitation to enter you, but it won’t work out the way you expected. If a demon enters you, perhaps you will perceive a benefit, similar to how taking supplements allows you greater gains in the weight room. But whatever “gain” you receive, the fallout of possibly dying in a state of mortal sin far outweighs the trifling, short-term benefit you gain here.

This is serious business, not a game. You are a low-ranking participant in the spiritual war, not a captain or admiral. To assume a higher rank is to fly too close to the sun, and much of life is discovering where you fit in this world and the next (Hint: for a kickstart, start discerning like St. Therese of Lisieux).

Any spirit you invite into your life will be real, so it’s extremely important to consider what you are engaging in when dallying around with the unseen realm. In fact, the only spirit you should ever ask into your life is the Holy Spirit, and you do so with a three-word prayer. “Come Holy Spirit.” Say it now. Say it three times, but just say it. There is no magic in it. This is simply the one spirit that you need to align your will with God’s will, because the Holy Spirit is God Most High. Actions matter. Speaking matters. Prayer matters. Doing a thing with your body and soul is a natural and supernatural interaction. So if you channel demons on a Ouija board, you have done an action invoking demons with your body and soul. If you say, “Come Holy Spirit” you are turned toward God. Turning is repenting. Turning to God is what all of the inversions are about, and belief in the Holy Spirit and the angels of heaven is part of submitting your will and intellect to the maker of all things.

Further reading:

Peter Kreeft on Angels

St. John Damascene’s De Fide Orthadoxa, book II. (An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith)

St Thomas Aquinas and Angels

Aquinas 101: Angels and Demons

Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraphs 325-336, 390-395

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The six days of creation provide a unique inversion to us today, because initially the order of the objects doesn’t appear to make sense. After all, the sun appears on the fourth day, after the land and oceans were created. Every middle schooler who reaches the fourth day of creation can see a problem here, because the sun surely preceded the earth in terms of formation. Did we not just read in the opening verse of the Bible that “God created the heavens and the earth”? Is Genesis already switching the order and putting the sun, which is part of the “heavens,” after the earth? Did we just go from “Heavens First” to “Earth First”?

This is where we apply our modern science to the book of Genesis, and in doing so we lose the wonder. But it’s ok, there is an inversion waiting for us here, too.

The sacred writer of Genesis did not know that the earth was round. Or maybe he did know. Or perhaps he thought it was shaped like a sausage. The point here is that it doesn’t matter. I realize that saying “The shape of the universe doesn’t matter” is blasphemy to a materialist who thinks that truth can only come through scientific proof. But this is the reason why materialists tend to get nothing out of the Bible, particularly the creation story.

The spiritual reading is lost entirely unless you are willing to believe in spiritual things. And the first thing that you must be willing to believe in…is God. If this first principle is not in place, the Bible will be a strange read throughout and you will be sneering the entire time. If you approach it with doubt, you will get nothing from it. If you approach it with the eyes of faith, you will get the whole universe and the heavens, too.

The key piece of being “willing” does not mean abandoning reason. Rather, it means using reason with faith, because they go together. One of the greatest documents from a Pope ever written is about Faith and Reason (in Latin, Fides et Ratio). It begins like this:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

Thus, if you approach the Bible like a half-formed ghoul, with only reason, or only faith, or only your body, or only your soul, you will miss the point, to your detriment. If you come with only faith, you will be a Fundamentalist. If you come with only reason, you will be a cold atheist. Why be either one? Be whole. Be your whole self, as God intends us to be. (Hint: These inversions are really about becoming a whole person, body and soul, with faith and reason.)

When we express belief that the Bible is “inerrant” we mean in terms of faith and morals, not mathematical truths. But if you consider “reason” to only cover provable concepts and material things, then you will be a one-trick pony who has to play dumb when considering art and beauty. No scientific answers come for the great questions, or even basic ones like “Why is a sunset beautiful?” or “Why do children bring such tears and joy?” or “How did that song change my life?” or “Why do I feel the Presence of God in a silent adoration chapel?”

Beauty is a great lead-in to God, but Biblical inerrancy is a hard sell today. Thus, we should stop trying to sell it at all. I am tired of being sold. Who is not tired of being sold, when all we see is marketing from dusk ‘til dawn? I don’t want a product or an experience, I would like authenticity and truth, and there is not even an atheist that I know who doesn’t see both of those things in Jesus Christ. And if you don’t see the supernatural in Christ, then you cannot fully see His authentic truth, as He is the way, the life, and the truth. This requires no song and dance, just as Jesus did not dance for us.

We must remember the purpose of sacred scripture is not to give us the Pythagorean theorem, but rather to give us spiritual truths. When we read Genesis, at certain points we may be reading the “science” of the day when it was written, or we may not be. Just as the science of Ptolemy’s day put earth at the center of the universe (and was wrong), so was the science of the day of Moses wrong about the shape of the earth. Funny, then, that “the science” can change but God does not. This is why the phrase “Follow the science” is so slippery and fraught with missteps.

Truly, our model of the universe we have today will likely be quaint and silly in a century. The beauty of sacred scripture is that it opens a conversation, rather than delivering a hard answer, as we expect math to do. Here is where the idea of “mystery” bothers us modern people, but the mystery of scripture is directly caught up in the ultimate mystery of God, who created all things out of nothing, who is the “sheer act of being itself,” who formed us out of clay (or atoms if you like). What could be more fun than this escape room outside of the Garden, where at the end we can be with the God Most High, who transcends all? We love mysteries. Why shouldn’t we love the conversation with the greatest mystery of all? I urge you: set your Google-brain aside, and embrace the mystery.

And the first part of that mystery and conversation that gets us spun around and walking away is the six days of creation and the shape of the universe. However, this is exactly the place where if you come back to it with faith and reason, it can open up a story that transcends what happens in NASA’s images of outer space. The pictures of the Crab Nebula are beautiful, but there is another view of the universe beyond the stars.

The shape of things, as seen by Moses, in the spiritual view is like a house. There is an upper, middle, and lower section. You might call this the heavens, earth, and hell worldview. This is much like a house. But this is not to address anything related to science, it is about addressing the physical and spiritual reality that we occupy.

Now, here we must briefly pause for the Galileo affair, the most misunderstood event in modern history. If you have not read a history of what really happened with Galileo, I recommend you read Galileo Revisited: The Galileo Affair in Context, because a fascinating tale it truly is. The story you may have heard has been massaged by propaganda writers who really dislike the Church. In fact, one of the best summaries of the Galileo affair is from an episode of the History for Atheists podcast. We live in strange times. The God-deniers first stoked the myth of the Galileo story, and now various God-deniers are looking back and de-bunking the propaganda of God-deniers.

Let’s get to the point: the geocentric model of the universe was not devised by the Church. In fact, the model of Ptolemy came from the science of Egypt long ago. Long before that were other models, like the “Firmament” idea we find in Genesis, which many find funny today. Any beefs that we have with the shape of the physical universe is an academic discussion, not a spiritual one. Too much time and energy has been spent away from the spiritual life, and it seems that the model where the earth or humans are at the center is always a bad model. We think too highly of ourselves. (Note: we can think highly of ourselves as we are made in the image and likeness of God, but with humility in knowing that we are not God).

In Genesis, the model is simple. It is speaking to our human reality. As a human being, I can look up, I can look at eye-level, and I can look down. I know there is something higher and something beneath. Here on dry land, I live on the “main floor.” The spiritual upper and lower rooms have deeper meanings. I can’t go to those floors right now, but I know they are present. The error we can make is to think that our eye, on the main floor, is at the center of the universe. This is perhaps the ultimate error. The de-centering of mankind is essential to humility, and if anything, we should be grateful to science for doing just that. To be de-centered is humbling, and wonderful.

Thus the simple vertical world of up/heaven, middle/earth, and down/hell in Genesis should not cause us any alarm, because if we live long enough, we will get to see this same de-centering of our own settled science. It will be proven wrong. Yes, the science we are certain of today will be modified, perhaps wildly modified, by future findings. How do I know that? First, because scientists are nowhere near the full understanding God’s universe. Second, because science cannot test and verify spiritual things, as science cannot test for God. It’s a ludicrous idea, like 2 + 2 = 5.

Hopefully this does not shock you: our current model of the universe is wrong. Yes, it’s accurate enough to build houses and space stations, but wrong in ways we don’t know about yet. But that’s good: it gives graduate students something to do. If the puzzle were complete, we would become bored and go crazy (mainly because we fail to realize that boredom can actually lead to serenity, but a discussion on concupiscence will come later).

An inversion sits here in this space, because this is where our approach to scripture must step into the spotlight.

Now, I could say this inversion is about reading the Bible in the four senses of scripture, which is critical, because these ways will expand the text for believers and unbelievers. The literal, allegorical, moral, and “how it relates to Christ” readings are all important. But there is a more subtle inversion for us.

The inversion here is that we assume that all we know today is the same that we will know tomorrow, and many 19th-century Germans who thought themselves clever are beginning to look more foolish with each passing decade. The same is happening for 20th-century academics, such as those involved in the “Quest for the Historical Jesus,” as if they were Lancelot and Percival.

However, in this relentless dissecting of the Bible as a dead body, scholars took the historical-critical method to its logical end. Now we have some good data and a bit of useful information from that quest. Better yet, now we can use that data to further our understanding of God. The rest we can throw away. As St. Paul said, “Test everything; hold fast what is good.” This is great advice because all of the Bible scholars who tried to turn Jesus into a common teacher of ethics or tried to reduce Moses into a mere model of the will-to-power, are now gone and so are their anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic theories. We can keep what is useful, and toss out the rest. (Julius Wellhausen, Rudolf Bultmann, Bart Ehrmann, et al: goodnight, gentlemen - thank you for the data, as we can now use it to increase our faith.)

For a long time, Biblical scholars have been doing violence to the Bible because they see it as a work of literature rather than a sacred text. The era of “Comparative Religion” courses at universities is waning, as is the dogmatic absurdity of the “Q source” Gospel, a hypothetical document that does not exist. (And if anything it would be an early version of Matthew in Hebrew, written by the apostle named Matthew.)

In another twenty years, a vast swath Biblical scholarship will be swept aside and flung into oblivion, as artifacts of an era riddled with excess curiositas and too little humilitas. However, we are living in a long hangover from attacks on scripture, and need some fasting (not Taco Bell) to cure this hangover. The old German doubters’ and comparative literature ideas are still ringing in lecture halls, killing off one student’s faith at a time. Professors of Bible scholarship can’t get hired if they disagree with a secular dogma of a Bible that doesn’t believe in miracles, spirits, or even God. This begs many questions that we’ll avoid for now.

For the past two centuries, academics have been approaching the Word of God with “reason alone” and using suspicion as their interpretive key, but the key has worn out, or God has replaced the locks. When we hear that Jesus’ miracle of multiplying the loaves and fishes was just people sharing the bread that they had brought, we should laugh out loud. This miracle is one of the few that all four Gospel writers recorded. “Sharing” is not a miracle. Sharing is great, but it’s not mind-blowing or life-changing. The apostles did not get bludgeoned, burned, and buried to proclaim the good news of “sharing.” Sharing is nice, but we know all about sharing without God becoming incarnate and dying on a cross to defeat the world, the flesh, and the devil.

So we come to the inversion of how we should approach the Word of God. Even before you open the book, this approach decides what you will receive from the text. In the introduction to the Navarre Bible, a quote sums up the way we should approach the Bible, which inverts the way modern scholars read:

“…the interpretations of Scripture should never be approached as a research exercise dependent on the researcher’s technical skills. It is, rather, an encounter with the Word of God in the living Tradition of the Church…” (Pentateuch, p 16.)

For several centuries now, we have been poking at the Bible like a dead trout washed up on the riverbank. But the Bible is much more like a giant whale that cannot be caught…yes, like Moby Dick. We have stopped reading the Word as sacred and started reading it like a biology book, where nothing supernatural or exciting ever occurs. We need to read it like it has the answers to the Biggest Questions, because it does.

The death of many people’s faith began in the era of the Renaissance and Reformation, as we began to discover new places and models of the universe. I do believe that this was all part of God’s plan. Of course it was; everything is part of God’s plan. Likewise, God’s truth about the universe will lead to the death of our modern idols, too. It is inevitable.

In the thousands of years from the first Passover to the Paschal Mystery to today, many great saints lived alongside many sinners, and many saints started out as great sinners. This exit and return from God, back to God is indeed the road home, as the parable of the Prodigal Son said (and so say we all!). The parable of the weeds and wheat applies in history and today, and it applies within each one of us. And like King Josiah had to smash to the idolatrous “high places” in the book of 2 Kings, so must we, and today the main idol that is a stumbling block for faith is not a golden statue or stone pillar, but ideologies and the idol of the “self.” Idols always need smashing. We are in yet another era of strange idols, so let’s get to smashing (don’t smash yourself, just the false image of the “self” as idol.)

If you think God is not working to do the same things now to the idols of modernity as he did to past idols, your assumption of final knowledge will eventually come for you, or even burn you, just like it did to so many 19th century Germans’ grandchildren in the 20th century.

As for those who believed in such silly things as a flat earth and six day creation, those people were not as simple as we think. Rather, we too will seem simple in a hundred years, let alone a thousand, if the Lord does not return before then. Remember that Genesis is not teaching science or the shape of the universe - that is the task of the scientists and scribes of each age. What sacred scripture teaches is humility before God. If we approach scripture with humility, we will see the forest instead of the tree. If we approach the Word of God in wonder, we will choose the tree of life, rather than the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The tree of knowledge is the one that says, “I know better than God.”

In defense of those ancient scientists and scribes, let’s imagine for a minute what the world looked like to them:

When we live purely by the senses, without the aid of telescopes and books and knowledge handed down, the world does appear to be flat. While I am not a “flat earther,” most of the time the world is actually flat. Most of the time, I am not pondering the sphere I am standing on. I am getting groceries or walking the dog, and everywhere I go is flat in this Minnesota prairie land. Thus, it’s reasonable that people believe in a flat earth because we cannot see the sphere. However, we have come to know better through reason, which is a great gift from God to us. With reason, we can use induction and deduction to arrive at conclusions. We can even make proofs about the roundness of the world.

What we “know” by the senses alone is not always accurate. Our senses can fool us. This is why seductive beauty can be so deadly, but also life-giving. Beauty is like water or fire in this way, where it can aid life or destroy it. However, the same applies to reason, and by reason alone we can only get so far. By reason alone, we cannot reach the spiritual unseen realm, but we can know it dimly by logic and science. Yet there is more. By art, music, and literature, we can know of spiritual realities. Just as we can measure the earth by reason, we can at least open the door a crack to spiritual realities by art. Everyone has a song or lyric that brings tears to their eyes, a feeling that touches on something deeper than they can articulate. But to fully open the door to faith beyond this world and life requires a “willingness” to be willing, and the act of faith by our will invites our intellect into a broad new expanse that is beyond all sense and calculation. Observation and reason can take us to the door, but faith must place the key in the lock and turn it to walk into that panoramic spiritual valley.

Since I cannot see all things at once, I take it on faith, from science, that the earth travels around the sun, not the other way around. I really have no means (or motivation) to prove it, which is why it makes sense to me that, prior to Copernicus, the prevailing wisdom and mathematical models did not have the sun at the center of the solar system but rather the earth. My eyes can see that the sun travels over the sky - yet the senses can deceive us. I myself have not empirically proven that the sun is at the center of the solar system, but it’s wonderful that mathematicians and scientists managed to prove it. But contrary to popular belief, this dance of the sun and earth does no damage to the religious truth presented in Genesis. None whatsoever, because the two things are related yet separate.

Here is something important to pause on: for people who lost their faith because the earth was no longer at the center of the solar system - they were inverted the wrong way. They were not seeing God correctly. Their God was too small. Likewise, when the “New World” was discovered, a falling away from faith occurred in Europe. Enlightenment writers said that that “man was decentered” by science; man was knocked off a pedestal by the findings of Galileo and Darwin and others. Also, geology and the discovery of dinosaur bones put man into a tiny sliver of time, making him question his centrality in the order of the universe. When I was young, this all seemed to point to religion as the enemy of the truth.

Having been raised in the cult of Protestant liberalism (also called the United States of America), this made for a very strange childhood experience. We were like the mythical Pushmi-Pullyu animal of Dr. Doolittle, getting yanked in two directions by two heads. On the one end, all the history books and literature showed that science had dethroned man as the measure of all things. Then on the other end, the cults of liberalism and humanism preached freedom, self-esteem. So at the same time: I was being showered with praise for my uniqueness and specialness while scientific proofs declared me smaller and smaller. Is it any wonder that we are now confused? These two things don’t flow together well. If man is not central, but is merely matter, then what ruse are the humanists trying to play with the endless plug of uniqueness?

This raises a larger question, however. If man is not special, and is instead like any other species, to what do owe our “self-esteem”? If there is no soul, as public school and modern media taught us, then meaning is only what we make for ourselves, is it not? This is a tall order for each person to determine, since we must all start from scratch. But the truth is: we don’t need to do any of that, if we submit our intellect and will to God. The question is already answered, if we are only willing to set pride and vanity aside for peace and hope.

Truly, none of this can make sense without God as the beginning and end of all things. Thus the phrase, “made in the image and likeness of God” is so powerful, because it puts us into a relationship with His transcendence, into a nearby friendship that resolves both our smallness and our uniqueness. He is not so far that we cannot know him, nor so close that we are him. We are not God, but we are his friends.

The contradiction here is that the Enlightenment spilled much ink, and even more blood, in attempts at making meaning. When the various revolutions of liberalism and communism and capitalism failed to bring the cure for sin, the humanists took up the standard and attempted to shock us to life with a foundationless hype regarding self-worth. But without God, it falls flat.

Now: the problem is as follows. Placing man or the self at the center is an error. Genesis and the order of creation de-centers us. We are more valuable than many sparrows, yes, but we are not more valuable than God, or even the angels. Knowing our placement in creation brings freedom, because it allows us to willingly bend the knee to God for his grace and glory. From our proper place we can love and serve.

Some people believe that the dinosaurs bones were sown into the earth to test our faith. While I find this to be absurd, it’s not exactly wrong. Because if the existence of giant reptiles from a period long ago causes us to lose belief in God, then we had an error-ridden faith to begin with. If the concept of evolution upsets our ability to kneel and pray, perhaps we have never really kneeled and prayed. If anything upsets our trust in God, then we may be projecting what we want to be God, rather than receiving in humility what is God’s truth. This is not a defense of creationism or darwinism or liberalism or any other “ism”: this is a goodbye to human pride masquerading as faith in God.

The truth is that we are not the central item of all creation, we are a part of all creation, and a very important part. We are loved by God, more than the rest of creation. We are different from all other creatures. We are special, but not more special than God. Coming to trust in God’s will means to follow Jesus’ advice to “consider the lilies of the field” who do God’s will without toiling or spinning. They do not worry, they do not fear - they reach up their petals to heaven, glorifying his creation.

What I am getting at goes all the way back to Christ on the Cross. Upon the Cross you have the summary of all necessary first principles. On the Cross, the strangest experience in all history happened. The theory of evolution should not disturb you. The Christian story of the Creator of the universe being born into this world by a woman named Mary, living among us, performing miracles, and then being crucified by us - that is what should disturb you if you fully come to understand what it means.

Dinosaur bones? The beak of the finch? A new continent across the Atlantic? The sun’s position in the sky? Those are the things that made us stop believing? Those are the things that led us away from God and into the dead arms of modern idols? We trade our inheritance far too cheaply.

What this means is something troubling. Most of us believers are not that serious. Most of us are just in it for Donut Sunday and cultural benefits. We may say, “Jesus, I trust in you,” but not really mean it like St. Faustina did. We were warned by Jesus about Donut Sunday faith. He said “…there are many who will say, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’” And in hell, of one thing I am certain: there are no donuts on Sunday or any other day of the week.

No wonder our faith was sunk. Our trust is really in ourselves. We say we trust and believe, but we don’t. We don’t go out into the world and take action like Abraham did. We don’t comply with God’s will like Moses did, when he insanely walked into Egypt to scold Pharoah, the most powerful man in the world. More than words or going through the motions, real trust in God means doing, partaking of the Sacraments, and even praying for your enemies.

When geocentrism or evolution causes us to stop believing, we are like Peter walking on water who focuses on the wind. As the Lord said to Peter as he fell into the water, “Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?” No finding or discovery should shake our faith. If anything, it is only a test to find out if we trusted God in the first place. As the Lord said to the Apostles, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, for I have conquered the world.” We are too afraid to fully trust.

St. John Henry Newman said, “Ten thousand difficulties make not one doubt,” and here I’ve only listed four: dinosaur bones, beaks, the discovery of the Americas, and the position of the sun. That leaves 9,996 difficulties yet to go before a single doubt should even be entertained.

If Darwin or Columbus or Copernicus or Diplodocus caused our faith to die, then our faith was not sailing free and fully trusting God, but was moored to the dock of the self long before we arrived at our current wacky age of postmodernism.

The key to understanding where we sit in the order of creation is to know that God is far beyond our understanding, yet is simple, true, good, beautiful, omnipotent, and omnipresent. The key to the good life is knowing that God is at the center, not me.

If a discovery here on earth is made, nothing about God changes. New findings should not rattle faith if the right ordering and principles are in place, because truth cannot contradict truth. And none of the revelations of science in the last five hundred years have done anything to displace the truth of “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Where the earth sits in the universe, where mankind sits in time and space, how our thumbs may have developed, or what land is discovered, what formulas are yet to be discovered - none of these things disrupt or shake the Creator of all, from whom all Being extends.

If any of these things shattered faith, or embarrassed believers, then the faith was not built upon a rock but was actually sitting on sand. Evolution or heliocentrism changes nothing about faith and morals, beginnings and endings, bodies and souls. It just changes the map of the heavens, or the timeline of salvation. But God is always up, and hell is always down.

As for God, these revelations are like me throwing a pebble at the moon from my driveway. Not only can the pebble not reach the moon, even if it could, it would have no impact. To me, the findings of evolution are interesting but not that important for the Biggest Questions, because humility before God has precedence. If his creation developed, it seems all the more amazing. However we came to the day of the Fall, the Fall happened, and it happened with the first two people from which we all inherit our concupiscence. The topic of how my body or brain may have developed is interesting, but not necessary for salvation. If the Fall happened 6,000 years ago or 60 billion - it makes no difference. I must live today and keep God’s commandments, not because I have to but because I want to. The Fall happened, and that’s what matters, and I can prove it by own penchant for sin, and I can only overcome it through the work of Jesus’ redemptive suffering.

If tomorrow aliens arrive, a believer should not be alarmed. The best thing to do would be to invite Gleep-Glorp to Holy Mass. If tomorrow the physicists do indeed prove there are infinite universes or that we are living in a video game, this should have no impact on a faith that knows that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This is the certainty in which you may sail uncharted waters, outlast storms, converse with aliens, navigate confusion, resist mutiny, endure war, suffer famine, persevere in poverty, ignore propaganda, and resist fear. The main thing to be wary of is those who preach against the spiritual truth of the creation, the fall, and the resurrection.

Thinking about the cosmology of the universe is fascinating because it all leads to greater wonder in creation. But in my day-to-day life, I need to prepare food on the main floor of this “house.” In some respects, you might say that I offer up prayers to the top floor, while living on the main floor, and as for the basement - well, I don’t want to go there. The house is haunted with spirits. There are spirits on every floor of the house. And the sooner you realize this, the less fearful you will be, because even now they are watching you. They are always watching you. I don’t want to scare you at the end of this inversion, but as Nirvana said in its lyrics:

Just because you're paranoidDon't mean they're not after you

The next inversion is about angels and demons.

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Everything outside of planet earth we call “space” or “outer space.” This inversion is about reclaiming wonder for “the heavens,” which has been lost during the onslaught of “The Enlightenment,” for which a better name would be “The Great Flattening,” “The Vanilla-ing,” or perhaps “The Vacuuming” since we have undergone three centuries of sucking the enchantment out of life, making heaven and all spiritual things prohibited from the public square. Instead of lying in the grass or on rooftops looking up in awe at the incredible depth of the heavens, we now are face down looking at Webb telescope pictures of space on our phones. What a buzzkill. The pictures are amazing, but the wonder is gone if we just see the pics as the images of a mechanical automation spun off by an absentee creator. Even the word space tastes like a saltine cracker compared to the triple-fudge sundae of the word heavens.

Perhaps you noticed that the word is plural in some translations of the opening line of Genesis. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth.” In some translations, heaven is singular, but most use the plural form. This requires some inspection because we tend to only think of heaven as where God is, but the bible uses this word to mean the sky, the stars, and where the angels and saints live.

Before going too far in this inversion, let’s set a stake in the ground as a marker. Whether we say “heavens” or “heaven” matters little in the end. What matters is enchantment. When you are re-enchanted to say “heavens” instead of “space,” heaven becomes larger and more inclusive than what the engineers and physicists have taught us to believe. Seeing the “heavens” opens creation back up to link the immaterial with the material. Much like the composite of our body and soul, so are the heavens of the angels and the stars and the saints and the sky. All of God’s creation brings the believer a collective wonder.

So how many heavens are there? Or how many levels? Dante had ten. But according to St. Paul, there are three. Let’s stick with St. Paul. He said, “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven.” In the days of creation, we can also read of the three heavens:

• Atmosphere or air, the place of birds and clouds.

• The starry heaven, what we now call by more dull names, like space or the universe.

• Highest heaven. The third heaven. The heaven closest to God. The unseen, invisible realm, is best described in the book of Revelation. Also known as paradise.

We still use terms like this today when speaking of the heavens, but we mean different things when talking about heaven at a funeral versus talking about the heavens in astronomy class.

The first answer everyone wishes to know is: what is this third heaven? Is it a place? Is it a dimension? We often use metaphors of mountains or clouds with our imaginations, but imagination is a bit dangerous. Popular ideas about heaven imagined by artists suggest that it’s all harps and pearly gates. Seems kind of weak. This is likely why many people would rather rock out at a music festival than pursue heaven. Harps and golden gates lack appeal. Did it ever appeal to anyone? I think not. Please set those old artistic images aside and think of them no longer, because Jesus doesn’t elaborate when he tells the apostles that he will go to make a place for them, making no mention of harps or gates. He only speaks of “dwelling places”:

In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. (Jn 14:2-3)

So it is a place, but a place we cannot fully know yet. It’s a house of some kind. A good spiritual reading on heavenly places is The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila. Now there is a mystic that needs to be read by modern people. She embraced the mystery of the heavens and had the gift of articulation for this place that can never be fully articulated in human words.

Mystics like Teresa of Avila can lead us toward God without giving us a formulaic answer. This is frustrating for us in the age of data because we want to know all the details, but Jesus says if we know him, we will know the way to this house - and that is sufficient for our salvation. We want all the data, but one of the most important steps toward humility before God is accepting that we cannot know all because we are not God. This concept of the “place” of heaven where the saints exist is a mystery, and the greatness of the act of faith, from the Trinity, to the Incarnation, to the Eucharist at Mass is enmeshing our whole minds, hearts, bodies, and souls into these mysteries in humble prayer. This “place” of heaven is yet another wonderful mystery, which is why meditating on the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary every Wednesday and Sunday is a great way to spend a holy hour.

But like many mysteries, Jesus gives clues. “I go to make a place for you,” tells the apostles there would be a place for them to be after earthly death. The third heaven is that place. In other words, what we usually think of as heaven means the third heaven that St. Paul speaks of when his friend in Christ was “caught up” to the third heaven. This is powerful language. St. Paul, like his friend in Christ, is a saint, which means his soul is in the third heaven, even though the bodily resurrection has not yet happened. A few people have been “taken up” body and soul to heaven already. We know that Jesus’ resurrected body and soul went to heaven on his own power, in the mystery of the Ascension. The only other human we know for certain was taken up body and soul into heaven is the Mother of God, Mary. She was assumed into heaven, as in pulled up body and soul. As for us regular humans who experienced the effects of the Fall, we know of three specific people in the bible who seem to have been pulled up to the third heaven.

• Enoch in Genesis 5: “walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him.”

• Elijah goes up to the third heaven in a fiery chariot.

• Moses’ resting place is unknown and it is a traditional pious belief that he was taken up to heaven.

This brings us to one of the strangest events in the Gospels, which is why you should pause on this mystery every Thursday during the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary. I’m talking about the Transfiguration, which has much to do with heaven. Jesus takes three apostles to a mountaintop. Jesus turns into pure light. “There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.”

Now, the light aspect of this event requires a whole chapter of its own, but for now, just consider who appears with Jesus. Moses and Elijah, two spiritual heavyweights, flank Jesus. Notably, these two men are believed to have gone straight up to heaven. Could it be a preview of the third heaven for the apostles? Could it be that Jesus is showing a glimpse of the unseen, invisible heaven? Yes. Of course it is. What are Moses and Elijah doing? They are talking with Jesus. Understand, please, that this is heaven. They are face-to-face and talking to God. To paraphrase another quote from St. Paul, he says that here on earth we see through a glass darkly but in heaven we will be face to face with God. What is happening at the Transfiguration? We see in heaven Moses and Elijah are face to face, speaking with God. That’s what heaven is. No harp is needed. Consider the sixth Beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Those who have been purified live in rest, in peace, with God, face to face.

No wonder Peter is stunned and stammers some nonsense. He hasn’t been purified yet for heaven. James and John also fall to the ground when God speaks. And what mere human wouldn’t fall to his knees and stammer at this sight? That is actually the correct response. They see their infinite unequalness to God’s glory (yet…yet, we are invited into it! Do you see how huge this is? Proceed to the Eucharist if you understand). Seeing Jesus turn blindingly bright and talking to the long-deceased Moses and Elijah - that alone would bring jaw-dropping wonder. Enter in the booming, thunderous voice of God. Then add the glory cloud of the Holy Spirit. Peter, James, and John are alive in space and time, yet somehow amid the Holy Trinity and two of God’s most holy chosen people who bore crosses for God to the end, who endured and gained their eternal souls.

This would be enough to make us all fall to the ground. But that is the point. That is how we should experience the Trinity. After all, fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and wisdom comes from humility before God. Peter repeatedly learns that God is not his equal or just some extra thing in his life, but that God is infinitely higher and utterly central to his life. Best of all, his preview of heaven in the Transfiguration was recorded by the apostle John so that we can all go there, to the mountain, again and again, and see the preview that Jesus offered. Contemplative prayer done on the mountain of Transfiguration is where the intellect, will, and even the dangerous imagination can seek a glimpse of heaven. We can see the sky and the stars, but we cannot see the third heaven without the help of scripture and prayer. The invisible realm is beyond reason and requires the submission of our intellect and will to see.

Another example of a clue about heaven is when Jesus is dying on the cross. He tells St. Dismas, the Good Thief, that “today you will be with me in paradise.” He’s not talking about Hawaii. He’s talking about the third heaven. It is the place of everlasting worship of God, where everyone lives in obedience to God. And what is paradise? It’s not likely what you think. Basically, paradise is where everyone just lives out the Ten Commandments. That is what heaven is: people living in joyous obedience to God and singing together, without trying to win or one-up God or each other. That is what the music of the birds and clouds and stars and planets and angels and saints is. Paradise is kind of like the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas where all the Whos in Whoville sing together out of joy even after all their consumer stuff is stolen. In fact, the Good Thief in his humiliation on the cross is being purged and purified for paradise right alongside God incarnate. He has a change, a repentance, a turning to Jesus. Obedience to God comes late to him, but the only thing that matters is this: it comes. It happens. Yes, perhaps he only labored in the field for an hour, but Jesus is generous and gives him the full day’s wages. He’s already singing God’s praise while being tortured to death.

St. Dismas now desires to be obedient, not out of fear, not for the promise of heaven, but out of the joy that comes from the forgiveness of a loving Father. He wants to follow the Commandments and live in harmony with God’s will. And what happens when his turn is pure and true? He is granted entry into paradise by Christ. Jesus says that heaven is paradise. Again, no harps. In the end, the third heaven isn’t that hard to understand, because it’s just people living the commandments and embracing God’s love by giving up their will and ego. What St. Dismas discovers in his last hours is what many of us never will, because our own will is in the way of God’s will.

Regarding this mysterious third heaven, the question of time arises. I spent a lot of time discussing the nature of time in the first inversion. But here we must consider the nature of time once more. This falls into mystery territory as well. Jesus is like a best friend who won’t tell all the spoilers, he only tells us what we need to know to have ultimate enjoyment, or what is known as the beatific vision - pure happiness - upon reaching heaven.

If we are talking about heaven as the sky and stars, then time certainly exists, as we can track asteroids and land rockets on Mars. We measure wind in terms of miles per hour. But if we mean the third heaven, empyrean - the highest heaven of the angels and saints - then I’m afraid that knowing the nature of time is beyond my pay grade. God is eternal, outside of time, because he created time. The Maker, the Prime Mover, the First Cause is most certainly outside of time, but can also be present in time, as the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the Incarnation of Christ prove.

However, what of time in the heavens of the angels and saints? There is an idea from St. Thomas Aquinas and others called aeviternity, which is not quite the same as eternity. This is not much spoken of today, but I wish it were. Time may be different in St. Paul’s “third heaven,” where the saints are. Does time exist in the highest heaven? What do we need to know about it, if anything? Jimmy Akin’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Heaven” can help us here.

Connected with the question of whether heaven is a particular place is the issue of whether time exists in it.

A popular conception is that it does not. The logic is fairly simple: God exists outside of time. God dwells in heaven. Therefore, there is no time in heaven.

That’s true enough when heaven is conceived of exclusively as the dwelling place of God, but it is not true when it is conceived of as a place that is occupied by angels and by humans after their deaths. In that case, a different sense of the word time is involved.

The First Vatican Council taught that God “from the beginning of time brought into being from nothing the twofold created order, that is the spiritual and the bodily, the angelic and the earthly, and thereafter the human which is, in a way, common to both since it is composed of spirit and body.”

This indicates that the spiritual realm is created and subject to time. Thus John Paul II taught that eternity, in the sense of being beyond time, “is here the element which essentially distinguishes God from the world. While the latter is subject to change and passes away, God remains beyond the passing of the world” (General Audience, Sept. 4, 1985).

In short, time may exist in the highest heaven, or some form that we don’t fully understand. But the good news - great news - is that if we partake in the Sacraments and die in a state of grace, we will learn the answer. As far as salvation goes, we need not know the details about the place Jesus prepares. This is difficult, but this is where the mysteries of the faith can be great sources of meditation and humility.

God is first. The heavens are mentioned as his initial step in creation. Earth comes afterward. Worth noting here is that the heavens are created, as God created “out of nothing.” That is to say, the heavens did not exist before or concurrently with God. Like time, it was also created. Like the stars and the sky, the highest heaven is also created. The thrones, dominions, powers, and principalities - all are created by God who created all out of nothing.

In this order of introduction regarding creation, heaven gets top billing over earth. This doesn’t belittle earth, it simply makes an argument that the spiritual realm existed before matter. This is why spirit is higher than matter. This is why we should realize that our soul has a body, too, as the spirit gives life to the material realm. This order also places us in the proper posture of humility before God, because there is an order to creation and even beings within creation.

Interestingly, this ordering fits with modern science, but I don’t think that’s the main point, since the sacred writer was making a point about religious truth, not modern physics. Genesis is not a math book or science book, but a book of higher truths. But still, it makes me pause to notice the accuracy: according to the Big Bang theory, the heavens were created first, if by the word “heavens” we mean the parts needed for making stars. Truly, heavens is a term worth much contemplation, because it can mean the stars and the sky, or it can mean the spiritual realm - or it can mean both - and it does. Just as we have both souls and bodies, so do the heavens. There is the spiritual heaven and the starry heaven.

As it turns out, astrology is mostly nonsense, but they are correct about a couple of things: the position of Saturn and Jupiter and Alpha Centauri do matter to us, because like the planets and stars, we also have matter and all of these bodies have a gravitational effect on each other. But the effect of the stars and planets is not focused on us. That’s the mistake of astrology. The music of the spheres in the heavens has the purpose of glorifying God, and that’s all. Indeed, these heavenly bodies matter to us, because like all of creation, they matter to God. But they do not dictate our moods or beliefs, because all things created by God that didn’t experience the Fall are still rightly aimed at God in their purpose.

The birds and clouds in the nearest heaven are good, just as the harmonic motion of the starry night is good, but best of all is the highest heaven, where the angels continually sing God’s praises. However, the angels are just doing what the stars and birds are, which is glorifying God. Like the birds, we should live our lives as a small humming in the great song of creation. Just as birds sing, we should make our own song of praise. Birds are fruitful and they multiply, working and singing, and so should we. The stars are in motion, dancing and giving light, and so should we. The saints give witness to the lights that we too can become through the humble offering of ourselves for the glory of God. No bird or star competes with God, rather, they are in concert with God. No bird or star attempts to make a name for itself, rather, they make a name for God. The birds, stars, and angels give us the same lesson that Christ did. The education of Christ surrounds us in the heavens, if only we would forget about ourselves to partake in the great play of creation. The goal of life is to reach heaven, yet as Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is among us.” “Repent and believe, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” Forget honor and wealth; look upward to the heavens, as the birds and stars and angels do.

The point here is to be inverted in your understanding of the heavens: all of creation glorifies God, from the birds to the stars to the seraphim. This is why the “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus” is sung right before the Eucharistic prayer at Mass. The “Hosts” of this song are the seraphim, the cherubim, and the angels, in the highest heaven, the third heaven. Like any concert, there are lights raised in the audience, moving in unison, and to partake in the divine nature, we raise our light to play a part in this amazing show, so that while we are just one little light, we can see that we are part of a whole. Every anonymous star adds to the majesty of the night sky, despite getting no name or notice. Our little light of faith is part of the whole, and we can share in the joy because of the certainty that God is at the center of all things, not us. Next time at Mass, when you sing the following words, know that you are part of a choir that includes all of creation, from us on earth and upward to all three heavens. This is why the Mass is more than just an obligation, it is a gift:

Holy, holy, holyLord God of Hosts.Heaven and earth are full of your glory.Hosanna in the highest.Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.Hosanna in the highest.

Further reading:

How many heavens are there?

The Hitchhikers’ Guide to Heaven

How not to think about heaven - Bishop Barron

Blasting Holes Through the Buffered Self - Bishop Barron

Re-Enchanting the Secular - Matthew Petrusek. Secularism is the predominate worldview in the West. However, it does not answer the deepest longing of the human heart.

Did God Create Heaven?

Is heaven a place or only a state of mind?

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Finally, we come to the last words of the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

With these words comes an inversion that tips over ye olde pagan worldview and also the modern secular worldview. The order here is important. Ordering often has great importance in the Bible, especially once we get to the days of creation and the Commandments. Creation is an act of ordering, and we have a bad habit of disordering that creation. But I won’t get ahead of my inversions - let’s first look to the heavens.

Notice that heavens is first. Earth is mentioned second.

Consider how strange it sounds to reverse the order. Read this aloud:

“In the beginning God created the earth and the heavens.”

Just saying it that way feels strange. I have a bad taste in my mouth now. Yuck. The other creation stories are like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth. Genesis asserts the reverse. The bible drinks the orange juice at breakfast before brushing with toothpaste. This is the proper order. This may appear inconsequential, but like all the inversions, it matters far beyond mere words in a book, because the right posture of humility before God requires it.

In many creation stories, earth comes first. Genesis shoots that idea down like a clay pigeon in this opening line. In the Greek myths, Chaos and the Abyss are the first things, but then the Greeks go even farther in their wager. Earth (Gaia) pops into existence before the Sky God (Uranus). In other words, earth creates itself. Only after earth is born do the heavens arrive.

This is incorrect. Heaven is God's first and essential act of creation, as opposed to the second creation of the visible world.

Heaven is mentioned first. Another way of saying this is: heaven is over and above and before earth.

In some translations the word heaven is singular, but in most it is plural. (We’ll get to this plural/singular question in the next inversion.) But plural or singular, one thing is always true: heaven comes before earth. Heaven was created before earth, by God, who existed before both. This is intentional. Just as there are no accidents in Hollywood, there are no accidents in Genesis.

Genesis, in one single opening sentence, has set the entire Bible in opposition to every religious system that surrounds the people of Moses.

A great deal of order can be derived from this first sentence of the Bible. This single line may pick a fight across the entire world, but that is not the intention. To argue with the ancient world is not the point. To refute our modern ideas is also not the aim. The aim of these words is to speak the truth aloud, despite the consequences. Once again, the purpose of scripture is not to set the world right-side-up, but to set our eyes right-side-up so that we can see reality properly. Everything is as God made it, only we are upside down or sideways most of the time. The ancient myths and the secular world today are trying to sell you a bad pair of glasses while holding you upside-down. They are offering orange juice after you have already brushed.

Before Genesis was written, all the differing ideas about our origin story had already been told. Widely different origin stories existed then and today because we can arrive at different conclusions. Nothing is new under the sun. The sacred writer of Genesis was not the first person to think of “God created the heavens and the earth,” but the writer was the first one inspired by God to record it for the purpose of setting the truth in a form that could be passed on by scribbling, not solely by voice.

All ideas that we think are new are old. No idea is original at this point. Ideas are just reintroduced, shined up like a dusty apple for the current generation to eat. Usually, in the reintroduction, the ideas are only made more confusing. Truly, before humans began writing, every idea of modern philosophy had already been told and tried. Every upside-down worldview has had its day, and the reason they never stick and stay is because it’s hard to pretend the upside-down is the right way to be. The upside-down doesn’t work in practice because it refutes reality. You may pretend that rocks are not real, only projections of the mind, but stub your toe on the rock and you will know that the only thing that wasn’t real was your imagination.

What’s different about Genesis is that it is a book that lasts because it is the written word of God, which is to say, it is the truth. This is why people who have followed the wrong path return to the path of sacred scripture. This is the same reason why mathematical formulas stick around. The reason why Pythagoras’ theorem lasts is because it is correct. The theorem cannot be modified to suit imagination. It is simple, beautiful, and true, and it can be applied to the real world. Basic math is a terrific illustration of spiritual truths because it cannot lie. Let’s consider the Pythagorean theorem, which describes a triangle’s sides. This upsets no one, because it is so easily shown as true, even with a simple diagram using squares on the sides of the triangle.

a2 + b2 = c2

You cannot write the theorem in another order, or it breaks. The order is critical, where c is the longest side of the triangle. In the image, side c must be at the end of the equation. The following re-arrangement would not produce a correct result. Anyone building a house or measuring distances would make a mess using this incorrect theorem, given the three sides shown in the image:

a2 + c2 = b2

You cannot disorder the sides and get the correct triangle. For instance, if the shorter sides of the triangle are 3 and 4 inches long, the longest side of the triangle is 5 inches long.

Correct: 32 + 42 = 52

Incorrect: 32 + 52 = 42

The incorrect equation is an absurdity. It fails in the mind and in the real world.

When I was learning to program C++ in college, my favorite error message was the dramatic-sounding segmentation fault (core dumped). This would happen when a program I had written (poorly) attempted to access a memory address that didn’t exist. The code I had written in the text editor was a representation of what I thought would work in practice. In other words, it was an idea in a text editor, not a physical reality in live memory. But once executed, the code came to life and quickly died, because what I had concocted on the screen was incorrect. A flaw in the design caused a devastating error that dumped the process.

There were other errors that came from impossible attempts made in my code, like dividing by zero, but a segmentation fault broke the program in an abrupt fashion, like when mechanics say that an engine has “thrown a rod.” To “throw a rod” or hit a “segmentation fault” is to have violated certain truths of math and physics.

The incorrect equation for a triangle is a violation of the truth of mathematics, and if used in the real world, it would “throw a rod” or hit a “segmentation fault (core dumped)” error.

In essence, the opening line of Genesis, like the Pythagorean theorem, declares spiritual truth in the same way. Pythagoras is declaring a mathematical objective truth with his formula, and Genesis declares a spiritual truth.

If you change the order of “God created the heavens and the earth” you end up with a segmentation fault or a thrown rod as well. At the very least, you move toward a misshapen worldview, just as an error in the theorem creates a misshaped triangle. It does not match reality. Likewise, you cannot square a circle, nor circle a square. This is even impossible for God. You may protest, “But all things are possible with God!” Yes, except for untruth. God is the Sheer Act of Being Itself and God is Truth. Like the Pythagorean theorem, God is also simple, good, and beautiful.

A circle cannot be squared. Invalid memory addresses cannot be accessed. A brittle piston rod cannot withstand engine pressures. A triangle cannot have a shape that misfits the proper formula. And earth cannot come before heaven.

Pythagoras found one of God’s great tricks of geometry, and surely he was not the first, but he was the first to be famous for it, despite it actually being a truth from God, not Pythagoras. He was the first to be widely read, like the sacred author of Genesis, but the truth of “heavens over earth” was known before the age of writing arrived.

Numbers (not the book of Numbers, but the numbers used in arithmetic) provide a wonderful method of thinking about God and immaterial things, like heaven. Numbers are not things I can pick up and move from my kitchen to my bedroom. I can pick up two cats, but I can’t pick up the number two. We can contemplate the idea of “heavens” by using numbers because they are invisible, unseen things, but we know they are very real. These odd things called numbers have no bodies but have real applications and effects in our material world, where we do have bodies.

We cannot use the wrong equation in immaterial numbers and then apply it to the real world because a material triangle will not comply with an incorrect representation of the triangle. In other words, objectively wrong ideas are not a thing - they are nothing. Let me try to explain.

If an architect of the Flatiron building in New York City had drawn a blueprint but put the wrong dimensions on each side of his triangle building, the construction company could not have poured the footings to match the dimensions on the drawing. The physical world cannot fit with imagined falsehoods. This is why objective truth matters both in math and in spiritual physics.

As long as people have lived, however, we have resisted ideas of objective truth. This is why Socrates and Jesus were both put to death - for not playing along with the imaginary truths of the Sophists, for not playing along with the subjective truth of Pilate and Caiaphas. To speak of objective truths in a world that resists them is to invite anger. If you fully adhere to objective truth, you will be hated. One thing is for sure: it is not the British who first had a stiff upper lip, it was surely Abraham and his descendants, particularly Moses and his court for writing these truths down, because to record and speak these things invited anger, just as it does today.

This inversion may not seem relevant today, but like Pythagoras theorem, the order of “the heavens and the earth” is as relevant now as it was in Canaan or Greece. Moreover, if you scratch the fresh paint of modern sacred things with your fingernail, you can find that the old paint job of Gaia’s primacy is just beneath the surface.

But it is the wrong formula and does not work.

“Earth First” has returned for many people. During the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, the chattering classes got high on an old philosophy that tossed out God, and many held that the heavens do not exist at all. Classical antiquity became all the rage for some, and Gaia, or Earth, made a comeback. This was most obvious in what we built in our cities, because when the West believed in “Heaven First,” the biggest building projects were cathedrals glorifying God. When we switched to the “Earth First” disorder, we began building skyscrapers, government buildings (that looked like cathedrals), and stadiums for sports. St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York was the last big project for God, which now sits under the shadow of so many towers, like the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center, the UN building, Madison Square Garden, and Yankee Stadium.

However, it wasn’t just the builders who shifted to “Earth First.” Truly, the intellectual class has relentlessly tried to invert Genesis and either cancel the idea of heaven altogether or tell us that we need not worry about this unseen realm. We are five hundred years into this process now. We have mostly forgotten about heaven, because we live as if it does not exist, yet at funerals we declare that every deceased person’s soul is there. We are godless in how we live, acting as if heaven is not a concern, then suddenly universalists at funerals, where God is just a version of Oprah Winfrey (everyone gets a new car just for showing up).

Yet, the upheaval of modernity’s blessing of all sins is revealing to people which side of the chasm they want to be on when the collapse comes. As the chasm widens between right and wrong, truth and untruth, Jesus and Pilate, people are reacting and changing sides while they still can. To be on the side of the Pythagorean theorem is to be on the side of “Heaven First.” Some feel that a “Heaven First” view is finally coming back. If that’s true, it’s happening slowly, but then there are wonderful, wild conversion events like with “Our Lady of Guadalupe” where the efforts of missionaries and evangelists hardly move the needle, while God re-enters our lives with a lovely picture presented by a peasant like St. Juan Diego, and suddenly millions once again recognize that the “Heaven First” viewpoint is the truth.

We are seeing the result today of a world that has rejected the spiritual mathematical formula of “God created the heavens and the earth.” Like the example of the architect drawing the Flatiron building triangle with invalid dimensions, a world built on bad math and untruth becomes visible. To use biblical terms, it bears “bad fruit.” We all know what bad fruit looks and tastes like. The error of “Earth First” is becoming more plain by the day. Look no further than the transgender craze to see modern Sophistry at work, yet even this craze is not new but has a history in the ancient cult of Cybele. If someone cries out, “The cult of Cybele was absurd,” that will not bring a mob to his house today. But for those who speak out against the mutilation fad of middle-schoolers invites active, living hatred. But as an advocate of both “Heavens First” and the Pythagorean theorem, it’s impossible for me not to speak or write about both, because I think Cybele’s followers were wrong just as I disagree with the living, modern version of Cybele’s cult that mutilates children.

Like Jeremiah, the prophet, I would like to stay silent to avoid the burning hatred of the world, but I cannot do that because to speak untruth feels dirty. It’s like drinking orange juice after toothpaste every day, instead of the other way around. It’s gross. Most of all, to speak untruth means I have abandoned God. I would rather abandon the Pythagorean theorem than God, but I can’t abandon the theorem either, because it came from God. This causes a problem for believers in both the integers and God.

Jeremiah, under persecution, wanted to stop talking about the truth of God to save himself some pain, but the burden of objective truth was too much and he had to speak or he would explode. He declares that he would like to stop talking about the truth of God to avoid the ridicule of others and save himself the headaches, but the fire burns within him to speak:

“I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,”then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones;I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” (Jer 20:9)

I can relate, although I am more cowardly than Jeremiah. Today, to argue against the media and professors, both of whom insist on a materialistic worldview, is to be a modern prophet. To be a prophet is not to predict the future, it is just to declare truth, like the Pythagorean theorem and God creating heaven before earth. Oddly enough, many atheists now sound like Jeremiah because they understand the implications of mathematics and objective truth. This has been a fascinating turn of events. I marvel as it unfolds, as atheists like James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson sound like devout Catholics. This is why I do appreciate atheists. God bless them. They cut away all the fluff that stands between the two options of 1.) God Most High or 2.) nothing. I feel that if most atheists properly understood the formula called “creation ex nihilo,” they would be suddenly re-attached to the tree of life and chugging God’s grace like a bong at a college party. I pray they are all at the next Easter Vigil service where they can join their terrific sense of reason to a newfound faith that makes them whole.

The prophets are not that strange after all, because they speak truth. The prophets arise at times of disorder because, like Jeremiah, it’s impossible not to speak of the order of God’s creation. These prophets are not the crazy ones, but the last remaining sane ones. Jonah, the reluctant prophet, must speak, despite wanting to hide like Jeremiah. He doesn’t want to, but he does. Why is that? Because he can’t avoid the truth. The prophets are like Socrates and Jesus, who are the most sane people in all of history, and both Socrates and Jesus were very much “Heavens First” in their theology. Plato’s Timaeus has a Socrates that sounds an awful lot like Genesis 1:1. This is sanity. Reading the tales of mythology is wonderful entertainment, but nothing to take seriously - they are like Marvel movies: fun to watch, but unbelievable, and not aligned with reality.

The reason Jeremiah may seem crazy is that he is speaking objective spiritual truth to a world of Sophists, to a world that worships the wrong “order,” like in the book of Judges that repeats the ominous line throughout: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

In an age of unbelief, however, it seems natural that people would be more concerned about the material world than the immaterial heaven. But this is only due to people not thinking deeply about their first principles, of which way is up (Hint: Heaven is up). They are flipped over because the advertisements spin them around. They are merely thinking about what they desire and calling it good. In other words, they have rejected God to do “what is right in their own eyes,” as the book of Judges repeats over and over. The naturalistic worldview, where God is not alive nor involved seeks all its answers in the chemical and biological, not in the spiritual. Yet not only the materialists do this - so do lukewarm spiritual people, where the desires of the flesh are projected onto God. Merely declaring “Heaven First” does not cure the error, but it is the first step on the path to wellness and sanity.

Many people today complain about the politics of “America First” while in the next breath, they preach sermons of “Earth First.” But I am a keeper of the old code, of “Heaven First.” This is probably why my social life is limited. I reject both “America First” and “Earth First.” I definitely reject “Self First,” which is the most sacred belief of our age. The “Heaven First” view isn’t a popular worldview today, but I grew up in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Listening to hundreds of hours of Nirvana’s Nevermind album ingrained in me an ironclad belief that popularity is for sell-outs.

The ancient religions are never far away. They don’t actually die. In fact, ancient people didn’t even know what the word “religion” meant, because the word was invented only a few hundred years ago. Religion is not where you go on Sunday for one hour, it’s how you live every day. It’s not just an add-on product or opinion or something done in private. We don’t really know what religion is today because we’ve tried to cordon it off like a coat room, and while we point at religion in the coat room, we are actually living our true religion and calling it something else.

Thus, with the myriad lifestyles and behaviors today, rest assured that everything from the Bronze Age is still here, but those ways and views have just taken on new names. While we may chuckle at stories about “Gaia” from the ancients, we do not chuckle about the chilling tales and dogmatic belief systems of climate change as handed down from those in lab coats and preached by the scribes of the laptop class. To challenge any assumptions about carbon credits (which are a parallel of what Protestants think Indulgences are in the Catholic faith) or sustainable planning is to invite a mob upon you. Attack the sacred things and you will be attacked. Why? Because the sacred things go back to the order of creation: who created what, when, and why. Thus if you subscribe to “Earth First” then you have a shield against spiritual things. Worse, you have an elevated sense of importance, also known as pride (as opposed to humility), and we will get to that nefarious inversion later.

“Earth First” is alive and well. Books about Gaia have been all over the place in the past decade. Mother Earth is worshipped by millions, and while our earth is very good, it was not first. Genesis in its boldness says, “Heaven First.” However, this does not mean, “Earth is not important.” All of creation is important, as the whole is greater than the parts. This is true in geometry, bodies, families, marriages, communities, and God’s whole creation. But there is an order of precedence, of how God created everything. If you error in this inversion, more errors will follow. This is why I’m writing this series on inversions, because the errors accumulate, where one wrong turn leads to another. The Catholic cosmology is not arbitrary or strange, it is just not understood or discussed because of the many layers of distractions that clutter our minds, due to centuries of misinformation about what the Church actually teaches, and what the truth really is.

Moving on, let’s look at the second inversion that comes with the words “the heavens and the earth.” Why is “heavens” plural?

Further reading:

On Earth as It Is in Heaven

Heaven - Catholic Encyclopedia

What is heaven?

Catechism 1029-1029

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“In the beginning God created…”

Creation was covered in the last inversion with creation “out of nothing,” but there is more to be said about the verb “create” and how God creates. At this point, I will venture beyond the first verse of Genesis 1 (finally!). Here are the first three verses of Genesis, which are worth committing to memory:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

The first thing to notice about this beginning, this creation, is that there is no battle or struggle. The maker here has no writer’s block, no hand-cramping. He’s not in a rush to complete the project. The painter doesn’t run out of paint. He isn’t interrupted by deliveries or doorbells or drop-ins. Neither is there any negotiation nor argument. No supply chain issues disrupt the critical path of keeping this building project on schedule.

The flow of creation is gentle, as God simply states, “Let there be light.” No laser show or fireworks are needed. No soundtrack. No music video.

God creates in peace.

Most of all, we should notice that God is not attacked or killed or overthrown in any way.

Why is that important?

This inversion of a creation story flips the Greek, Sumerian, and other creation stories, which contain a battle, a struggle, or a war in which the victorious god “wins.” There is no struggle in Genesis. There is not even a competition of any kind. This is unlike the Sumerian, Norse, Greek, Minyong, Cherokee, and just about every other creation story. In other words, Genesis is about simple beauty, not struggle. Creation is an unfolding, not a mash-up. Consider the difference between humans constructing a building with metal, wood, cranes, and hard hats, versus a seed in soil receiving rain and growing into a flower. Jesus spoke of this when he compared Solomon’s man-made opulence against a simple flower: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” All that we can make pales to one of God’s wild lilies.

In the gentle act of creation, God merely speaks. “Let there be light” makes all other creation stories violent and slightly ridiculous. The false gods seem to be trying too hard. Against the beauty of “Let there be light,” the Sumerian story of Marduk’s conquering of the primordial god reads like a cheesy TV drama, such as Game of Thrones or Succession.

This is the inversion: a “succession myth” is built into nearly every pagan creation story, where the primordial god or gods fight, and the first gods are overthrown. These other creation myths tell of a victory that never happened. Genesis declares that there was no fight whatsoever. There wasn’t even an argument or a dirty look. That’s because there is only one God, the God Most High, the Author, the Creator, the Artist. Once again, Genesis calmly calls all other mythologies absurd - because they are. They may entertain us, but so does a gladiator fight, which doesn’t make it right.

James Joyce, who rejected the very God who gave him his great talent to write, knew much about the creation of literary works. In The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce wrote about a version of God that seems quite right and quite wrong at the same time:

“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

There is something wonderful about this quote and something false. The God who creates in Genesis does indeed remain within/behind/beyond/above his creation. Unlike human artists, he does not struggle in the act of creation, as it is a labor of love. When he completes the creation, he rests, like Joyce’s image of the creator. I like the image of God seated in heaven “paring his fingernails,” even though he would not need to do so. Joyce is correct about God’s presence and about his resting, but he makes an error in the middle where he says that God is “refined out of existence” and “indifferent.” In other words, Joyce’s character is like Thomas Jefferson’s view of God. He envisions God in the Deist view, like a clockmaker, who creates the heavens and earth and then moves on, not caring at all what happens to it.

The God who creates in Genesis is not like that. He is not like the pagan gods who lust for power, nor is he like the Joyce version who creates and then drifts off distantly. This is indeed a central inversion to understanding the God of the Bible, in that when he speaks to create, he brings all things into being, and actively sustains the creation. While he could be “paring his fingernails” at rest, he is never indifferent or distant. He is an all-powerful creator who is also a loving Father, without being an overbearing one. Free will is granted to all, and free will often feels like a cross but is most assuredly a gift for those who read the Gospels to the end. In addition, the constraints of time and space, which seem a burden, are the teaching tools God uses to tame us after the Fall. The succession myths and science theories that throw out God only hurt us. God is fine whether we love him or ignore him. But when we do not conform our will to God’s will, it is we who struggle, not God.

In the Sumerian and Greek myths, the gods are paranoid about who will take their power. Even Zeus is sneaking around so Hera doesn’t catch him. But the God of Genesis has no threats, no challengers, no contenders, no scolds, because God is like Joyce’s all-powerful creator who is within/above/behind/beyond his creation. But he is not like Joyce’s “meh” version of God who could care less about his work. This is the difference between human works of art versus human life - as in children.

This is an important lesson for all those who dislike children but see their own lives as a work of art. The ultimate work of art is the generation of new life, and dying to self in favor of living to serve that life.

To write a story is to create, but it is not new life. When I was young, I was obsessed with writing and publishing a novel. I succeeded. It sold about 4,000 copies. That was nice. But that creation now sits on a shelf and only comes to life if I open it, and I rarely do. Then I had children and realized that writing a novel is a dead letter compared to the work of a family. In other words, to see God as merely the writer of a story is to misunderstand the living and the dead. And James Joyce, who wrote a famous short story about “The Dead” was himself flatlined because he thought “to create” meant only writing, painting, and art alone. The greatest act of creation is life, and not just static art, but life that respirates and moves and sings and suffers. In other words, the greatest work of art respirates - it breathes - and creation comes through relationships we have with the living God and with one another. In particular, the total gift of self means handing over your whole life to God. In marriage that means being open to creating new life and serving others instead of the self. The Church is said to be the Bride of Christ, and he emptied himself to bring new life to all its members. God does the same through all creation, as life springs from his word.

God calls us to life by speaking, not struggling. Jesus brought life to all the world starting with a small group of friends. They changed from ways of this world into saints by giving away their time and space to others, forgetting the struggle. With Jesus at the center, this shedding of struggle became possible. The only struggle in Jesus’ earthly ministry happened when competition against God’s will tried to insert itself: the Pharisees wanted control through rules, the Romans used brutal violence, James and John lobbied for top status in the kingdom, Peter was rebuked harshly when he tried to stop the path to the cross.

Whenever anyone wants to make a name for himself, a struggle begins. This is a spiritual law, it seems, from the Tower of Babel to Pontius Pilate and Simon Magus. The opposite of serving is gaining a name for oneself, and those who gain fame by doing God’s will tend to get new names, not from themselves but from God. Abram becomes Abraham, Jacob becomes Israel, and Simon becomes Peter. With their new name comes a mission of servitude, and status only comes with their dying to self.

When Jesus says, “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force,” he is talking about the status-seekers and the power-hungry who rule this world. To serve is to take the lowest seat, not the highest, and we should consider this whenever we admire celebrities, the wealthy, or the proud. When the guards strike Jesus, he opens not his mouth. Not once does Jesus attempt to make a name for himself. He repeatedly tells others not to announce what he has done. Healing in private he seeks no fame. This is exactly how God creates: in peace, in quiet. “Let there be light” makes no sound, it just happens. Thus, when the proud loudly mock God or take his name in vain, God allows them, for he has already won, and he just hopes his persecutors eventually stop trying to make a name for themselves and come to rest in his infinite peace. Surely when he watches us struggle, it must look foolish, since he wants us to partake in his divine nature, which does not struggle.

The creation of life that God gives to the universe and each human body and soul composite is an act of love. Mothers and fathers can know this to a depth that can never be understood by the childless. Dog owners often think they understand what parenthood means, but they do not, and they sound silly when they attempt to conflate dog ownership with actual parenthood. Artists will often talk of their work as like that of a mother’s love for a child. But they are ignorant of the depth of the Father’s love for his children, or a mother’s love for her child. The images of the Holy Family endure because that is the greatest work of art - a living family. We have a living family both earthly and spiritual. For we not only have an imperfect earthly father, we have the perfect heavenly Father who created our earthly father. Better still, we have our imperfect earthly mother, and our spiritual Mother of God, Mary, who Jesus stated from the cross for all people, “There is your Mother.” The God who created all is not an absentee deadbeat dad, he is near. Nor is he angry and controlling, he is simply calling us to listen and be listened to. In other words, there is no struggle in this relationship except for what we introduce to it. We bring the struggle. Because we chafe against our containment in time and space, we want to escape it and control it. Struggle ensues exactly when we deny God’s will and try to make our own will the authority and power. This is a fool’s game, but since the expulsion from the Garden we never tire of playing it until the invasion of grace enters our lives. When Jesus steps into our boat, as he did with Peter and Andrew, the struggle can end, if we let it.

The creator of a work of art struggles and can love his book, painting, song, or statue that they “bring to life.” But it can never be alive like a child. A book or painting cannot bind you in flesh and bone like another person that was generated by yourself and another person. And here is where the Trinity can first be discussed (but not too much yet), because when God the Father creates, the Spirit hovers over the waters. To create is the act of love, and that which is created and living will be loved by the creator.

I can be indifferent to a story that I wrote, or to a woodworking project that I complete, even if I am pleased with the result. But I cannot be indifferent to a child that is alive who came from husband and wife. This is why many parents seem somewhat insane: they love so deeply. They love so deeply that they err in strange ways. This is why the saying, “You’re only as happy as your most unhappy child” hits the nail on the head for many mothers and fathers. The living creation that is generated by parents, from their shared bodies, can never be separated in a child. Genesis and Jesus both repeat: “…and the two shall become one flesh; so they are no longer two, but one flesh.” In the same way, God loves us. The Trinity is a loving family of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the peak of love, at a greater depth, with rightly ordered balance. God does not try to control us, but allows us to err, with the hope that we will recognize the way back home. And since we are all children of God, can’t we imagine how he feels when we ignore him? (We can’t fully, but we can get an idea.)

This is why the other creation stories feel like entertainment rather than truth. They are accounts of struggle, whereas the true God never struggles. To read the “struggle stories” of creation in the ancient world is to see what they valued, which was power. We do the same today. In poker, the big bank takes the little bank. In geopolitics, big armies and big navies control the shipping lanes. In the office, the loudest voice drives the agenda. The proud and violent “win” here, and for it, we all lose. Disorder comes from struggle and squabbling over scraps from a zero-sum game that doesn’t need to be played. None of the power games we play come from God, but rather from our disordered will. What we consider creation is often destruction. Fortunately, Jesus shows us God: he is a humble servant, a loving creator, a living act of love who takes the last seat at the table. Real power is to be at rest amid the storm, like when Jesus slept in the boat that was about to capsize. The seas and the wind obey him. So should we.

In America, “wealth creation” is worshipped, and the creation of wealth is an endless struggle. Yet if Jesus returned tomorrow, he would not come forth saying, “We must get the economy back on track.” The only economy of concern to God is the economy of salvation for our souls. That is the plan, and to carry out that plan we must stop struggling.

But we celebrate struggle. Everything seems to be built around it today. We seek it out. Activists calling for permanent revolution crave a struggle. Sports is an endless invented struggle of those rising and falling. Cities and nations clamor for influence. We think we love struggle, but we loathe it because it is a trap. It is a container that we crawl inside, pull the lid down over ourselves, and suffocate under. We hate this competition and we want to rest, but for most of us, the draw of struggle pulls us into our own bad creation stories. Glory days and power plays are what gets remembered, not the quiet servant, the mother who made all the meals.

What we should do is notice who is not struggling. God is not struggling. He is seated. After creation he is seated, not struggling, but also he is not indifferent. When people come to know the living God, who created all things, a sense of active participation in that peace comes to them, which is why St. Augustine’s memorable line rings forever true throughout the centuries: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

In case you ever wonder why people like to kneel and pray in adoration chapels, or in the pews, it is because they are talking to the one that gives life, meaning, and rest. Once you come to see that the only place without struggle is at the center, at the source, from whom all things are generated, then the attraction of the struggle in this world makes little sense. Aside from needing our daily bread, the struggles of our world have come from sin. To sin is to struggle. Once again, Jesus said, “Consider the lilies of the field who neither toil nor spin.” We have rational souls, yet we should look to the lily, or the ant, for models of living in our bodies, and for our spiritual example we must look to God - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - for how not to struggle but to find peace.

How is it that God does not struggle? He is without pride or fear. Only we who have fallen know pride, vanity, and sensuality, and that is the source of all struggle. Sin is the absence of God. When we sin we reject God in favor of our pride, vanity, or sensuality. In choosing to sin, we choose disorder and struggle. But we do not harm God when we turn away. There is nothing that can harm God or overtake him. He does not force us to love him, but he invites us to do so.

God is not “containable.” The great error is thinking that he can be contained, tricked, or boxed in.

God is uncontained.

His creation is an unending relationship and conversation. He creates with a living, breathing, moving, open heart toward us all. He is uncontained because he’s not in competition with anything, including us.

When I was in high school, I was putting dishes away one day in cupboards and drawers, and it dawned on me that everything had a container. Forks go into a drawer, but within the drawer, there is an organizer. Within the drawer container, was another container for holding the forks. I began to look around and saw that everything I did was moving things from one container to another. The world seemed to one big Containment Management System, as I would wake up in the house container, go to the shower container (containing the water) and eat breakfast moving many containers to and fro, and then get in the car container to go to school, then go into the school container, in the classroom container, and with my backpack container, I would open up my books which contained words.

In this theory of containment, I realized that if I go very close with a microscope, there are smaller and smaller containers, from cells to molecules to atoms to protons. And all of these contain smaller things. Likewise, if I back up from my containers and look up, there are more containers, like the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe. So as far as my finite mind could understand, the largest container was the universe, and beyond that wall, our material selves could not go.

But then there were containers for immaterial things as well, like ideas, as we categorize things as Platonic forms or mathematical constants or schools of thought. There were numbers that had rules of containment from Euclid to Einstein. There were stories that had beginnings and endings, like virtual bookends. Even our imagination is contained by time and space. This fed into a period when I discounted all spiritual things, where anything immaterial was not real, like feelings or opinions. Only scientific evidence made for knowledge. Right around that time, I became very depressed as well, as I had rejected God’s existence. But I did have one realization at that time when I was looking at forks and drawers and atoms and planets. A question came to me:

What would it mean to be uncontained?

I felt as if this was like Zen koan, a question like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” To be uncontained was to be free, completely elevated outside of time and space. And who could be like that? Who could always be in that place of no struggle?

I know who it is.

Whenever I thought of what that must feel like to be truly uncontained, without the aid of mood-altering things, I recalled a day when I was working on a farm one summer, leaning on a gate at the end of the day after making silage, watching the cattle toss the fresh, green food up in the air and onto their backs, almost joyfully, as the sun set in the big orange horizon beyond the silo silhouette. It was one of those moments where the body was tired but fulfilled and I knew that dinner would be good because I’d worked for my daily bread, and the music of the spheres, and the harmony of nature, all seemed to be flowing in concert, and I’ve never seen anything so true, good, and beautiful in my whole life. That day I felt uncontained basking in the beauty of creation.

I had other moments like this, such as when my children were born, where the impossible occurred. There have been quite a few times like when I would be out on a long bike ride at dusk and stop for a drink of water near a cornfield, or when I would look at the stars on the hood of my car in high school with my friends, or when I hold my wife’s hand, or when I listen to certain songs, or when I look at certain Caravaggio paintings like “The Conversion of St. Paul.”

To be uncontained is impossible for me. I can not stay there. But I can be there from time to time. Like Mary Magdalene at the tomb, I can witness the glory, but cannot hold fast to it while I’m in this world. In these moments, I realized something that seemed profound (at the time):

God is that which is uncontained.

God is the only thing that is uncontainable.

This is why God does not struggle. This is why he rests. Can we ever be uncontained? The answer is yes. We can partake of the divine nature. What the Eucharist means in the life of a Catholic is just this. For those who believe, receiving Communion is just what it means: we commune with God. We partake in the divine nature. In other words, we partake in the uncontained wonder and awe of the creator of the universe. Critical to the understanding of the Eucharist is that we are not God, but we are made in the image of God, and our life is entirely about moving back into his uncontainability. The key is to remember that I am not God - I am contained, but by partaking in his nature, I can be more like him, and in heaven I will be fully with him again, for we came from the uncontained and can return there - and someday we will return if we remain in his grace, for “by your endurance, you will gain your soul.”

But like every original thought I’ve had, I found out later that my idea of uncontainment was not original at all. In St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book 1, Chapter 3, the heading is: “Everywhere God wholly fills all things, but neither heaven nor earth contains Him.”

Those who understand what the Catholic Church teaches have known about this notion of uncontainment for millennia. Sometimes I see Church Fathers use the term uncircumscribed, which is like saying uncontained. But most importantly for this inversion, this is why the God of the Bible is different from all the other gods. All of the gods of myth are within time and space. Even if they are in the heavens, they struggle. God does not struggle, he creates, even though he did not have to create. He chose to do so out of love, and it is only we, the fallen, who choose struggle. Because our pride, vanity, and sensuality fool us we believe that struggling against each other will gain us a higher place, but when we struggle we dig our graves. In making a name for ourselves, we will be forgotten by God on the last day. In struggling, we lose our peace and rest, because it takes our focus off of what is most good, what is the highest good, which is God, the uncontained creator who does not struggle, ever. Like the loving father in the parable of the Prodigal Son who runs out to meet his wayward son upon his return, he calls to us, he runs out to meet us, and when we return he fills us with a wealth beyond human understanding. And that is why we are here in this world as we are: we are not kicked out of the Garden as a punishment, we are kicked out for our own good, so that we may come to know God and return to him of our own free will. He invites us but never forces our hand. He calls, never coerces. He is beyond all things and sustains all things, which is why we cannot run from God.

All that we create that is not living becomes rusted, corroded, and overtaken by time and nature. Every ancient temple and city dedicated to the false gods has turned to dust, just as every skyscraper, stadium, and data center today will turn to dust. Every mascot and corporate logo will be as powerless and meaningless as the eagle of Rome or the oracle at Delphi. We are passing by on our way to an eternity in one of two places. Like a bird flying by a window, our time is brief, our stay here is short, and all that we create will fade, no matter how we struggle to maintain a sense of security. The pages in books we write will turn yellow, the machines will fall into disrepair and sit like rocks. But the life we create can create more life, as the generations continue.

This is why a child who plays a video game is disengaged, while a child who catches a fish is full of wonder. One is playing in the world that God created, and the other is playing in an artificial world that a programmer created. Likewise, this is why a reader of Joyce may experience something like transcendence, but a reader of the Bible (and especially the Gospels) experiences something alive. Joyce could write a book, but his book cannot generate life. But those who approach the Bible as the written word of the uncontained God who created all things and does not struggle will find life. Yes, it is a strange book that can bring a robotic modern person back to life. Interestingly, Joyce’s most famous short story was called “The Dead” which referred to Jesus’ saying, “Let the dead bury the dead.” This was a reference to spiritual death. When Jesus said that he is the vine, the bread of life, and the living water, he was telling us to plug into God. He was notifying us that struggling and floundering only happen when you desire something more than God. You will forever be searching and struggling until you come to realize that there is only one path to the end of struggle, and that is the path back home to God.

Jesus reminds us: “In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” He has created the world, overcome it, and rests, waiting for us to recognize his ever-present voice. When we find him, in those moments, we will want to stay there and never leave. In the Eucharist at Holy Mass we can partake in the uncontained. Jesus is there - truly present under the appearance of the bread and the wine. Again, Mary Magdalene at the tomb wants to stay with the risen Lord forever, but she cannot. She has to move forward, and moving forward she is full of life, she is changed. Her sadness is swept away upon seeing the risen Jesus. How can that be? Because she is no longer struggling, and her sorrow turns to joy.

She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her. (John 20:11-18)

And then, once we meet him, after he surprises us, we know beyond our worldly containers what is true, good, and beautiful. He invites us into that peaceful present. Then our pain and sorrow become strangely redemptive. Coming to know how he does not struggle, we can do likewise. We can go to the chapel in the heart even when a church is nowhere near. As St. Paul said, we can pray constantly, and thus be with the one that is forever uncontained by time and space while we work and live here - for the kingdom of God is among us - in relationships, not in art or status or stuff. Once we recognize our relationship to God, we know the Father, and we know our mother Mary, and we become connected to the angels and saints - including Mary Magdalene, who will pray with you if you but ask for her intercession. Then like God, we do not have to struggle. For God alone is uncontained. And God alone satisfies.

Further reading:

• The Bible’s Conflict-Free Creation Story

• How God Redeems Pagan Imagination

• St. Augustine and Cosmology

• Creation in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and the Ancient Near East: Order out of Disorder after Chaoskampf - “The background of the Genesis creation story has nothing to do with the so-called Chaoskampf'myth of the Mesopotamian type, as preserved in the Babylonian "creation" myth Enuma Elish. In Gen 1, there is no hint of struggle or battle between God and this tehom—water.”

• Chaoskampf - Good overview of myth systems that assume a struggle, but the article misses the inversion of Genesis entirely. God does not struggle. He just creates. He orders. There is no rival. Even Leviathan is God’s plaything or pet (Psalm 104). The ancient dragon, the devil, is cast down to earth like a swatted fly falling to the floor (Revelation 12:9). He was never a threat to God, never a contender, rather just a rebel and nuisance to the good of creation, as he still is for us today.

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Here is where we come to the inversion known as ex nihilo, which means, “out of nothing.” If you are like most modern people, Latin phrases may make you uncomfortable, which is why they are probably good for you. They can jostle us out of our spiritual slumber. But this is one that you should know about for mental health reasons.

Prior to God, there is nothing. This was discussed briefly in the previous inversion, but it is so important that it requires an extended look.

What does this mean? Consider a woodworker who wishes to build a birdhouse. To do so, he needs wood, nails, perhaps glue, a saw, a tape measure, and a few other things. To create, we need material that already exists. God, on the other hand, does not. He creates from nothing.

The book of Genesis states that God is the beginning of all things. Nothing is before God, not even chaos. There is a reference to a watery, formless void in the verse that follows, but God is prior to this amorphous blob. Also, this “formless void” does not get a proper noun like the Greeks give to “Chaos,” as if it were an American Gladiator. The formless void is just a watery meh. It’s nothing. But good luck thinking of “nothing” because we cannot with our finite abilities.

Nothing is incomprehensible to us. Ghostbusters did a nice job of showing that we cannot think of “nothing.” The monster tells the Ghostbusters to “Choose the form of ‘The Destructor.’” Venkman then tells his buddies: “Empty your heads! Don't think of anything!” But poor Ray can’t think of nothing. He can only think of something. That’s when he thinks of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and says, “It just popped in there!” Then the Ghostbusters do battle with a giant marshmallow and make cinema history (and flatten spiritual things into the material realm, but I digress - that’s for a later inversion).

We cannot think of nothing. We can try to contemplate it, but we can’t achieve it, because even if we believe we’ve found the nothing, we are either thinking of God or fooled, because nothing existed before God. He is first. The Buddhists aim their meditation at nothing and think of the self as god. Catholics do the opposite. Catholics focus prayer and meditation toward God, who created everything out of nothing, including us - and most importantly - perhaps the most critical thing of all to remember is this: we are not God. Repeat after me: “I am not God.” And this is why Buddhism and Christianity are incompatible at the very root; the first principles are in opposition. Buddhism rejects a creator and rejects creation ex nihilo.

That’s what this inversion is about, as are all the inversions. Not only does God’s creation out of nothing disagree with Buddhist thought, but it also rejects Greek and Sumerian myth systems, as well as many modern pseudo-scientific theories where the universe was created from pre-existing parts. Today, some will claim that the atoms have always existed, but the Jew, Muslim, or Christian rebuts this by saying, “I know who made the atoms. They did not always exist.” In ancient times, if some would say that water was first, Abraham would say, “I know who made the water.”

In the Sumerian creation mythology, water is first and the gods come later. It’s not surprising that we might think of water, the sea, as a primordial source of life, since water supports life, but water alone cannot bring life. The substance of water can quench our thirst or destroy us with a flood. It is a healer and a destroyer. But water itself is not “Being”. Water cannot create life. Water cannot create planets. Water cannot create the protons and electrons is requires to be water. The old myths fail in light of modern science, but creation “out of nothing” does not. Ex nihilo outlasts even science, because God made all things that make science possible. He created science by creating. All of it depends on his being and his act of creation. A scientist has no paper to write without the atoms, just as a woodworker can build no house without the wood that God made.

This idea of water is associated with Chaos in various myth models, and the modern arguments of “which came first” do not sound very different from the Sumerian and Greek disorder of where Being came from. Water is not Being, water is material. In other words, it is created by something prior to it.

There is nothing before God in Genesis. Not water. Not time. Not a chaos monster. Not an island. Not a pie shop. Nothing. God is first. We cannot describe God, but we can know what he is not, and he is not merely water. To mention something as being prior to God is to misunderstand why God tells Moses his name is “I AM”. In other words, God is “Being Itself.” This first Being must precede everything, even chaos and formlessness.

This is the road to mental health. Why modern psychiatry has not yet caught on to this is simultaneously sad and comical. Listening to the modern cures for mental health that exclude God is like watching a coach execute a play repeatedly that hits a brick wall of defensive linemen, when a simple bootleg rollout pass would bring an easy touchdown. When Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and when he says “I am the vine” and when he says “I am the bread of life,” he is saying, “I AM” just as God said to Moses at the burning bush. This “I AM” cannot be stressed enough, and if I fail in this series to fully hammer home the importance of understanding the radical transcendence of God, as in, “There is no being without God because he is BEING ITSELF,” then I too am like the quarterback running the failing dive play instead of the rollout bootleg for the touchdown.

For this reason, I do believe Big Pharma fears a comeback of creation out of nothing, but really, I wish they would sell a sugar pill called “ex nihilo” and use their marketing prowess to sell it, because they truly would change people's lives with something better than the dubious SSRI pills they sell. But the more people I meet who believe in the idea of “ex nihilo” have astonishing sanity and positivity toward life. Please, if you’re out there Pfizer, Merck, hear my plea: start selling ex nihilo, and make one of those ads where people are prancing about in clover fields, full of joy, but be sure to include a picture of them kneeling in humility before God, otherwise its just another snake oil. The same reason SSRIs fail to fix anything is the same reason that “whiskey ain’t workin’ anymore,” as the country singers say. Pills and booze are band-aids for a spiritual malady. The inversion of marketing with pills and booze is to pretend that something man-made can fill the void, the sense of nothing, when only one thing can do that, and it is God who created ex nihilo.

The many forms of nihilism today extend directly from this rejection of God as the first being, because we often think that nothing existed before God. Modern philosophers and psychologists got stuck in neutral over this issue, with the big names all being atheists, like Heidegger and Sartre and Freud and Jung and Foucault. Is it any wonder that depression is at an all-time high, when the replacement for certainty in the rock of God is a watery void of endless therapy and “vibes”? Can anyone seriously struggle to understand why the “Self” is a crappy god to believe in, when one seasonal cold or inflamed elbow joint can render us weak? When we are unsure that God was first, and before him there was nothing, then we have a gap in our consciousness that nothing cannot fill. In particular, the Self cannot solve it, nor can serotonin. I call this giant, gaping void the “Big Empty” (shoutout to Stone Temple Pilots). And the Big Empty can only be filled by God.

The inversion here is that God existed, has always existed, and will exist forever. Once again, the nature of time matters for sanity in knowing that there was a beginning, and being came from God, who preceded all things.

That God created “out of nothing” means that you can stop worrying about everything, because quite literally “he has the whole world in his hands.” The children’s song is not just a feel-good happy-clappy preschool ditty: it is the key to mental health - because God does indeed have the whole world, the wind and the rain, the little bitty baby, you and me brother/sister, and yes, even ev’rybody in his hands. Why? Because there was nothing before God, and so there is nothing without God. Thus, with God, who created all things, there is also nothing to fear, because he created all things and saw that it was good (more on that later). Because of this, even death is not something to fear, because he has the whole world in his hands.

This is also important because when the devil tempts Jesus to make bread from stones, Jesus answers, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Thus the Word of God feeds us, because it is the source of everything, the pipeline that nourishes all life. The tree of life is rooted in God. The tree of knowledge leads to death. A simple lesson in making choices is to choose the tree of life over the tree of knowledge. Knowledge is a like side hobby, whereas the tree of life is where the joy of connection to the source never ceases. There is nothing before God speaks all into existence.

This should comfort you. This should give you focus, not anxiety.

We cannot actually think of “nothing” so the closest thing is a formless void. This language is stunningly complex while using simple words, but “beginning,” “created,” “without form and void” - if only I could write so concisely and meaningfully, but I can’t. So let’s continue with the long-form non-academic journal style that a hack writer like myself loves to use.

One way I try, rather pathetically, to imagine the pre-creation nothing is a painter’s easel with a blank canvas on it. The canvas can be black or white to represent the absence of anything. But even then I’m not thinking of nothing, I’m thinking of a canvas. Or, I’m thinking of a space like that whitespace in which Neo trains against Morpheus in the movie The Matrix. Yet that is also not nothing, it is a three-dimensional empty space, which is something.

I can dimly understand what it means to say “out of nothing, God created the heavens and the earth.” Ex nihilo is a powerful idea that gets brushed aside too easily today by those who believe that atoms always existed, or that there never was a time when the universe did not exist. The bible says that God “created” the numbers, atoms, time, three-dimensional space, and every possible thing that we can think of (or not think of). He created the heavens and the earth, which means a material and spiritual realm, thus even that which we can imagine comes from God. Angels and Elves and Orcs and Fairies and Furies are attempts by us to think of something to explain the spiritual realms, the “heavens,” and as St. Paul said, we only look through a glass darkly now, but will someday see God face to face. But we aren’t prepared to do that now, not in our mortal state. To do so in this finite form would destroy us (more on that inversion to come).

As created things, as creatures, we can only think in terms of time and space, we cannot think of nothing, nor can we comprehend the infinite. This is why so many people err in an understanding of God in the bible because they think of him like an idol, as something that exists in space and time. God is not like Zeus who lives in a mountain. God made the mountain and everything else out of nothing. He is the Author of all things who lives outside of his work of art, called “Creation.” Famous atheists like Bertrand Russell swing and miss on this when they compare God to objects within the universe. Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins make the same category error. God is outside of time and space, because he created time and space.

Ideally, everyone would read the opening to the Catechism of the Catholic Church so we can get our terms straight, because like the word “Love” today, people mean very different things by it. We’ve flattened “Love” into one word when it can mean four different things - sex/passion, fraternal love, familial love, or agape (total self-giving). Few people say “Love” and clarify what kind.

We do the same thing with God and “create.” We are speaking in babbling tongues to each other even when using the same language of English, hence the confusion. When we create, we use existing materials. When God created, he did not. He made the materials - including the materials that make us and allow us to create. He made the immaterial things, too. Stephen Hawking wrote a book called God Created the Integers. This is a terrific title. I almost tip over with joy, for Hawking is so close to faith in the source of Being, but he worshipped the nuts and bolts of the creation that he studied instead of the Creator. He was in hot pursuit of the truth, and was close, yet so far. In his quest for the holy grail of the origins of time and space, he was bringing the language of mathematics so near to theology that he almost wrote a love letter to God. Math is indeed one of the places where our finite minds can get close to this idea of ex nihilo. To say, “God created the integers” is to realize that when God first spoke, he did include the number “1” because before that there was zero - as in nothing. For God to create the number 1 is to create “out of nothing,” and without the number “1” there could never be such a thing as the number “2”, or “3”, or any number beyond. All numbers can only come from God who is infinite, and like the infinite, is comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time.

Physics is not even far back enough in the chain, because its laws could be different than they are. But math basics cannot be different. God could have made the gravitational constant different and thus changed the universe. But the integers cannot lie, nor can God. 2+2 must always be 4, and that applies to both God and humans. Mathematics is one path to God, oddly enough. Who would have thought the nerds in math league could be mystics? With mathematics, to contemplate the Integers as a creation of God is to get close to the concept of ex nihilo - creation “out of nothing.” For even the Integers did not exist before God made them. Stephen Hawking, even if he didn’t believe, had so many gifts, that it always seems worth sending up a prayer for his soul (and for the many other seekers who never came home) just in case Purgatory is his residence. He appeared to pass away with the same rejection of Bertrand Russell on his lips, saying, “Not enough evidence, God, sorry.” Perhaps he sealed his eternity by the rejection of God, by dismissing the first commandment, but surely there is hope in his turning in the last hour, to confirm his belief in who “Created the Integers.” This is why the danger of knowledge can lead to pride over humility, and pride is the false guide of so many souls. St. Dismas and St. Gertrude: pray for Stephen Hawking, and pray for us all.

In short, we are finite - we are in a box called the universe, or space-time. Yet there is a spiritual reality that we can feel, know, sense, and even reach somehow in prayer. Because we are creatures, no amount of LSD or marijuana will allow us to escape our state of being, even though we know there is another dimension, or perhaps more than one. Although trippy drug experiences may seem transcendent, it can never grasp what it means to be God. Worse, drug experiences are all about pulling God toward the self, and not the reception of God’s grace. We cannot bootstrap our way to God, we have to be silent to let the still, small voice enter our ears. This is why prayer works, because when you pray, you need to stop trying and just be. Because what is “Being”? It is a connection to God. When Jesus said, “I am the vine and you are the branches,” he was telling us that “to be” is to connect to the source of all being. This is why Christians who are born again make no sense to unbelievers - they have a life in them that is inexplicable.

In other creation stories, matter exists before creation, which seems odd until you hear modern people say that “the atoms have just always existed.” This is an echo of the Greek philosopher Democritus who felt that atoms and motion were eternal. Thus the writer of Genesis shouts, “No! Atoms did not exist before God. Before God was nothing, not atoms, not photons, not electrons, not strings, and not even the greatest invention of all, not even ice cream.”

Again, we pass over this inversion with a yawn, despite the fact that like the first inversion, time, this inversion dumps a whole pantheon of gods and assumptions into the dumpster. Zeus? Get serious. Gaia? Take a number. All of the Canaanite, Egyptian, Greek, Sumerian, and Roman gods are booted out of the Biblical worldview. And I say good riddance, because it is much more fun to read Ovid as literature anyway.

However, the ancient writers of Genesis did not have the luxury of looking at Moloch or Zeus as literary figures that explained phenomena in the world. No, this was a deadly bet in the declaration of the creation story, because the people of Abraham, Jacob, and Moses did not go with the flow when it came to creation. They did not believe in the maxim, “When in Rome, do as the Romans.” (I realize that’s an anachronism). To say, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is to elevate God, the one true God, over all the human-like gods of their surrounding peoples. To give an example of what this would be like today, consider how people react when someone takes a knee during the National Anthem during an NFL game. Or, you can test this today, simply by posting on social media: “Abortion kills a human life.” This upsets the worldview of others. Overzealous patriots worship the flag, and those who worship the self do not believe in the souls of certain people groups, especially the unborn. To speak of God as a reality today still invites anger. The twentieth century had more violence than any century in history and repeatedly the Jews and Catholics were killed for their association with belief in God. Right now in Nigeria or Nicaragua or Israel, your declaration of faith is a deadly statement.

That is what Genesis is doing - it is giving a voice to that view, that opinion. It is inverting the idea of what God is. It is asserting a concept of God that makes all the king’s horses and all the king’s men look foolish for offering sacrifices up to absurd idols. Our current idols and religions are really not that different from Moloch or Zeus. What is most important in this inversion is that it tips over the canoe in which Zeus, Protagoras, and Richard Dawkins were all riding in, paddling backward in their fictions.

Why is this inversion so powerful? This is a threatening implication because creation out of nothing kicks the stool out from faulty origin stories and causes them to tumble. Most myths, including ones from modern science, are attempts to invert the worldview of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. They claim that water or atoms or a turtle was first. The Jewish and Christian origin story says that there was no-thing, not one thing, before Being Itself, and that Being is more commonly known as God. And how mighty a being he must be to craft such delights, like integers, atoms, time, gravity, the nuclear forces, light, water, earth, fire, wind, and (much later) pie shops - all out of nothing. That is a creator before whom we must kneel in awe and wonder and love and a healthy fear.

Poets like William Blake understood this wonder. When he wrote about the fierce beauty of a tiger with its stripes, we can get a sense of the power, depth, and stunning awesomeness of God’s ability to make things:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

He is asking: “Who or what could possibly create such a thing as a tiger?” The answer is God. Once this is understood, we can also begin to know why the Proverb says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” For it is only infinite power and glory that can do such a thing as creation ex nihilo.

Further reading:

Isn’t Creation Ex Nihilo Logically Impossible?

The Case for Creation from Nothing

Church fathers comments on ex nihilo

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

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With the fourth word of Genesis, the second inversion arrives. At this rate, I may not get far, because here a long pause is required on this word.

“In the beginning, God…”

There is no word more argued about, discussed, twisted, bargained over, or rejected than the word God. We all have some idea what it means. But more importantly, what we believe at this top level affects the heart and mind. What we believe about this fourth word of the bible ultimately directs how we live. This acceptance or rejection of God, and what that word means, acts like a compass along the journey of life. Where we end up depends on the compass we use as well.

We can have wildly different understandings of it, but let me stop here to address the most common errors: the word God means neither cop nor genie. Many bad understandings regarding God fall into either the cop or the genie category. For some, he is both a genie and a cop. But this inversion suggests to you that he is neither. He is several things that can be asserted with confidence, that is, with faith, which is what the word confidence means:

• He is one. He exists. He is first.

• He is the sheer act of “being” itself.

• He is an all-powerful Creator.

• He is a loving father, not a bully, who desires your return.

• He is true, good, and beautiful.

That is all you need to know for your mental health regarding this inversion. Good night! The end.

But clearly more must be said, even though we could (and should) just contemplate all of these in silence. There is much to be said, so starting from the top, this inversion will focus on the oneness of God.

He is not many. He is not none.

He is one. (Truly, he is three-in-one, but even then he is one. Later inversions will discuss the Trinity.)

Genesis is not a shouting match, but it is quietly entering a deadly serious argument at this point. Genesis is in dispute with every other culture and myth in the world. By this fourth word, the first book of Moses sets his belief apart from every culture - literally, every culture - that surrounds him. Before Moses, Abraham believed the same, but Moses and his scribes wrote it down. This is important, because had he not written it down, Jesus would not have said so often, “It is written…”

Jesus invokes the written word of Moses and the Prophets rather often, especially to rebuke the devil during the temptations in the wilderness. If you believe Jesus is God, and Jesus quotes what is “written” by Moses and the Prophets, then these words have weight - infinite weight - in how to view the world and, by extension, how we should live our lives.

Thus, what we think of God matters greatly in how we view scripture, the world, and the spiritual life. If Jesus is God, and Jesus quotes scripture, and God inspired scripture, then God used human authors to convey his eternal word. This makes for a simple waterfall set of conditions that fall with gravity into place:

If Jesus is God…

And Jesus quotes scripture as the word of God…

Then Jesus inspired the sacred writers…

Meaning Jesus authored the scriptures.

That was mighty kind of God, in my opinion, to give us the scriptures. Even more kind, he came down to us in the form of man to go ahead and make things more clear to the apostles so they could pass on the tradition and teach us. But this should give you some idea about why we all like to argue about scripture. We argue because we disagree about who or what is God. Further, we argue about how he reveals himself, and to whom. But most of all, we argue because we dislike authority and the Catholic Church believes it has the teaching authority. This is why we argue. Even atheists love to argue about all of this, but they come at scripture wearing a bent pair of glasses, because the word God means something very different if you reject the idea of God. Likewise, you cannot understand the cross of Christ and the resurrection without at least getting the foundational idea of God in place first, not to mention the idea of an ultimate authority in heaven and on earth.

Thus, it’s no surprise that the “word of God” only makes sense if you believe in the supernatural existence of God. Truly, reading the bible without belief in God is like reading a bike repair manual without believing in bikes. Even if you believe in God, the perception of it leads to wildly different conclusions, which is why we have such wide-ranging belief systems as Islam and Jehovah’s Witnesses and thirty-one flavors of Protestant churches. The bible is a difficult read, and this is why the “bible alone” is insufficient as a teaching authority, because we can see with our own eyes how different each group uses that teaching authority.

Where we are at in this opening line of the bible is the origin story of all creation. Every culture needs a creation story. Every culture has one, and even atheists have a faith-based creation story. We certainly have our stories about the creation of America, just as the Soviets did (or tried to), or the Italians, or the English, so this should not seem odd to anyone. Comic books have an origin issue. Businesses have foundation narratives. My favorite pie shop, Betty’s Pies (“The Best Pies in Minnesota”) has a founding story about Betty. Without a story, we are left stuck in a no-man’s-land. We’re like the orphan Annie who runs away from Miss Hannigan in search of her real parents.

As it turns out, the beginnings of things need a cause, a character, a maker, or doer, or a force. The choices for who lifted the curtain on this grand play called “Creation” come in three sizes: many, one, or none. Also, you cannot mix these - you must pick one, and only one. Genesis declares that the answer is one. And if you think you don’t have to choose, you are incorrect. Really, you have already chosen. You may think you have chosen in your mind, but you choose by how you live today and every day. Actions reveal the choice, as Jesus described in the great Parable of the Two Sons. Actions speak louder than words.

Every seeker must accept or reject God’s oneness. For the seeker, the treasure to be found is the truth, but only one choice is not fool’s gold. Every angsty teen, every doubting Thomas, every physicist, every Greek mythologist, every internet atheist, every Christian and Muslim - truly, anyone who is seeking truth must venture into the test of oneness.

Genesis is inverting the worldview that accepts the “many gods” and the “no gods” hypotheses. Genesis states that there is one God.

This may seem trivial but it’s not. Genesis declares a truth that many do not want to be true. And even those who say “Amen” often do not fully understand the implications of what this “oneness” means.

Greek myth has a story of creation. The old mythology is a search for the truth, just as astronomy, psychology, and chemistry are also deep investigations into aspects of truth. And we all want the truth, more than anything, except for when we want to do something that requires a different truth.

But what is truth? Ah, that is the question. Now we are getting warmer. Hamlet asked the great question of “To be or not to be,” and Hamlet was right. That is indeed the question. He was close to the answer just by using the word “being.”

What does it mean “to be”? We are getting warmer still.

Pontius Pilate, long before the fictional Hamlet, said it even better when he asked Jesus straight up: “What is truth?”

This question of “What is truth?” and “What does it mean to be?” are related. When Moses asks for God’s name at the burning bush, God tells him that his name is “I AM”. I found this rather confusing as a child. But just consider what “I AM” means. This is the verb for “to be.” God might have said it another way, as in “I BE.” In fact, that phrase sounds like it could be the name of a modern pop song.

“To be” is to have come from God. Being comes from God. Being and truth both come from the simple, beautiful, transcendent oneness of God. God is to be. John Keats said “Beauty is truth,” but God’s being and truth go together with beauty. Descartes said “I think, therefore I am,” but thinking is not being. No, God is “to be” and he created us, giving us our being.

In any case, it’s worth pointing out that Zeus is none of these things: he is not good, true, or beautiful. Zeus is an ugly power-hungry shape-shifting rapist. That is not the God of the bible. This inversion is easy to spot if living in the ancient world. Today, we have different versions of the pagan gods, but they are still around. They have moved into other forms, such as honor, wealth, pleasure, and power - but rest assured, for every god of the ancients, we worship strange versions of it now.

More important, however, is the subtle inversion regarding Zeus and every other contender god. None of the other gods are the act of “being.” Again, God’s name is “I AM.” In most stories about Zeus, he shifts into the shape of a swan or a bull, so he could say the opposite: “I am who I am not.” This is exactly what the shape-shifting devil presents to Eve: a lie.

Once again, like in the first inversion, regarding the nature of time having a beginning, a middle, and an end, there is one Creator, one “sheer act of Being,” and one source of all truth.

This, once again, is an inversion upon which you can rest your head, where your finite mind can focus. One true God is much better to aim your meditation toward than nothingness, and much more sane than thinking about the pantheon of Greek and Sumerian gods. However, when in prayer, you can easily find out which gods you worship, because your distractions will lead you there. The distractions reveal your fragmented understanding of God, as they pull you away from the oneness of God.

Knowing that God is one is an act of faith, because no amount of proof can sway the mind alone to accept it. But it is an act of faith anchored in reason. And reason can take you to the doorstep that there is one Creator, but faith is needed to knock on the door. As St. John Paul II wrote, faith and reason are the two wings that make us fly.

St. Anselm and St.Thomas Aquinas presented rational arguments of the “ways” to know that God is one, and that God is logical, and that God is beautiful. People can and will argue until the end of time over God’s existence - and this is a good thing because skeptics often come to believe in the oneness of God in a most profound way, such as Augustine, Dostoyevsky, or Antony Flew. To doubt the oneness of God is not a defect, it is part of the journey back to God. However, argument will only take you to the door. You still have to knock, enter, kneel, and pray. This is a mystery and it is wonderful. God seems to have designed it this way for our own good.

The most common doubt today is about God’s existence. But there is no existence at all without God, who is the act of being itself. When we doubt God’s existence, we are much like the “self-made” billionaire who thinks his fortune came entirely from himself instead of the complex set of circumstances that were needed to allow for his success. In his self-satisfaction, the billionaire ignores the whole and only sees himself. Sure, he may have worked hard, but he didn’t create the infrastructure, culture, opportunities, timing, talent, and need that led to his wealth. He did not educate himself or feed himself as a child. In other words, he sees everything in terms of the self. (Hint: we are all the billionaires in this metaphor).

The pursuit of wealth is a search for meaning, as are the pursuits of pleasure, honor, and power. But the real search is for the origin story, the place of rest, the giver of life - we are searching for home - but we confuse where that place is at. Seekers who are burdened with the burning need to find the truth will undoubtedly try on the differing hypotheses of “many gods” and “zero gods” before they really look into the possibility of “one God.” With the Zero hypothesis, this leaves only the self and the void to find answers - there is no soul to save. With the Many hypothesis, it leads to a flattening and scattering, a divided mind and separated body and soul, a rudderless chase.

With the One hypothesis, there is no confusion. There is a body and a soul, and one source, one origin, one beginning, one ending. This puts solid ground underfoot and a proper heaven overhead. It almost seems too simple of an answer, because there is no struggle. Mythology seems more exciting, more dramatic (but that is the next inversion after this one to discuss).

The One hypothesis of Genesis also shrugs off the coercive policemen concept, as God creates out of his goodness. He is the Artist who creates because he can create. Moreover, God creates and does not engage in transactions with his creation, but rather made everything for its beauty. He is a great artist who creates out of love and calls all of this creation to himself.

St. Anselm called the Christian search a way of “faith seeking understanding.” You might say that those who believe in Greek myth or pure materialism also have a faith seeking understanding. Even the atheist is a believer in no gods, and that a faith in nothing must seek understanding through reason alone.

With all texts, with all searches, we must take something on faith to find the truth. This is unavoidable.

To compare a creation story from Greek myth, from Hesiod, against Genesis, let’s take just the opening lines:

Here’s the opening from Hesiod’s creation story (after he finishes praising the Muses):

In the beginning there was only Chaos, the Abyss, but then Gaia, the Earth, came into being…

With that one line, we have a whole cast of characters to consider, and it only expands from there. With Hesiod, we don’t just have to bother with the Muses, now we have three more beings, and soon there are about fifty.

Genesis starts much cleaner, simpler.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Done. The writer of Genesis starts out with a roundhouse. He says, “Let’s cut the nonsense: God was first and created everything.”

So much is said in so few words. The first line of Genesis is a masterful sentence that never stops speaking. But what else is the fourth word of the bible saying? What is God? We know there are basically three options: no gods, many gods, or one God. If the bible is declaring one God, which it is, what does that mean for us?

Our idea of God has everything to do with where we came from and where we think we are going. I’m not yet talking about the big “why,” but just the where for now: where did we come from and where are we going?

I often think of the analogy of trying to fly a rocket to the moon. First, the rocket must be pointed upward, not toward the earth. The Zero gods hypothesis aims the rocket at the ground. That rocket is going nowhere. The One hypothesis and the Many hypothesis is aiming the rocket upward. But clearly, that is not enough, for even a rocket aimed upward must have precise calculations to reach its target. Missing by a single degree will leave the crew lost in outer space. This inversion is about calibrating and setting the sights on the right target, charting the destination. Declaring that there is one God, not many, and not zero, will get you going in the right direction (and later inversions will fine-tune the landing).

With this inversion coming so soon in sacred scripture, this sets apart the people of Moses from all surrounding families and nations. The Canaanites and Egyptians of Biblical fame did not have one God, they had many. Abraham must have seemed a strange man in the ancient world and even had to leave his home in order to follow the one God. His city likely worshipped a moon god, meaning their rocket was aimed at the wrong heavenly body. Abraham must depart because he knows that will end in disaster. His faith in God Most High is not the norm. It’s not popular. But he knows it is the truth.

Even today, Abraham would have to leave home, because we still have many gods. We have believers in no gods and believers in many gods, and then we have believers in the one God.

Mythology as we know it today is what we refer to when we want to talk about dead religions. When the Sumerians were worshipping moon gods or the Greeks were rocking out at a Dionysus fest, they were not saying, “Man, I love our mythology!” No, those gods and goddesses were real to them, or at least some of them. The household gods of Romans, which taught men and women to live virtuously, were not like Calico Critter figurines that didn’t mean anything to them. These were meaningful objects, symbols of unseen realities.

Genesis, in its quiet boldness, states out loud that all of these little gods are ugly babies. Really, the sacred writer just cannot pretend any longer - these are false gods. Thus, these are fighting words for people and nations who have entire lives, rituals, and power structures built around these gods. Every domain of life, from hearth and home to war and sex, all had a god or goddess. Genesis rejects all of them. We have them today too, which we will get to later.

Again, we have lived with the idea of one God so long that we cannot comprehend how hard it was for Abraham and Moses to say, “All of your gods are fake. Only one is real.” This is the inversion that brings much hatred against Jews and Catholics to this day. Yet while we nod along about the idea of one God, we often live as if there were Many or Zero.

But why? Why is it so irritating to believers in the Zero or Many hypotheses? Why does saying, “There is only one God” irritate us? Why does saying, “There are no gods” bother people? Why does saying “There are many gods” make us do a double-take?

The reason is that it matters immensely, because like our view of time, our sanity and cosmology rests upon:

1.) Does God exist?

And if the answer is yes, then:

2.) What is the nature of that being (or beings)?

The question of whether or not God exists is fundamental to how your life is lived, how your family eats, and how your government operates. This is where we build our lives. Like it or not, upon this rock we stack up all other things.

And this choice always requires an act of faith. Even if we select the Zero hypothesis, that is an act of faith. The internet atheists make an act of faith when they say, “There are no gods or God” just as much as when a Catholic says, “Credo in unum Deum” (I believe in one God). The “unbelievers” actually are believers, they just subscribe to the belief that there is only matter and energy. That is a creed, also. There is no proof for either side that can be used to win the other over by pure argument or technique. It is not pure geometry. Nor are feelings enough to prove anything. There is only an act of faith in the end.

The act of faith in One God, Many gods, or Zero gods comes down to an act of the will, where we submit our will and intellect to a choice. When I felt there were no gods, never once did I say, “God help me be willing to be willing to believe no gods exist.” Why not? Because I didn’t want to believe in God or gods. I wanted to mock the idea that God existed, crown Jesus with thorns, and be unburdened by the consequences of what it means to say “God exists.” Because if you say those words, then it follows that God is not just matter. Then it follows that God matters. Then it matters in how you live your life.

But wait - the bible just says “God” in Genesis 1:1, it doesn’t give any details. What kind of God is this one God? Is this the clockmaker God of the Deists? Is it a vindictive God? Is it a God merely made in our likeness? Is this an invented God to control people? Is this a God of convenience for power? Is this a God you can barter with? Is this a God who built the universe and then departed, or is he watching us with his many eyeballs right now?

These are the questions that the rest of the bible answers. But the Catechism of the Catholic Church has a nice little paragraph to help us here.

Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and thinking.

God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God--"the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable"--with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God. (CCC 40-42)

In this inversion, we can start small, without diving into the nature of God too far. It’s often easier to say what God is not than to say what God is, because being bound in time and space does not allow us the language to describe God, but it allows us to know there is a God. Once again, we are given all that we need for salvation and sanity, not every last detail that we want out of curiosity.

Just as hunger goes with our craving for food, and our thirst matches our need for water, so does our spiritual longing pair nicely with the God that created all things. Our hearts seek God, and God is all that can quench that seeking thirst. But mostly, in this inversion, what Genesis is saying is:

• God exists.

• God is one.

• God was first.

• God created.

This inversion marks a departure from all other creation stories. It casts out all myth systems and modern atheism.

In the Greek creation story, Chaos gets first billing and then mother Earth just pops into being, as if birthed by itself.

The point that Genesis makes is that the first mention of any “being” is God, who is “Being Itself.” Chaos is not first. Earth is not first. Nothing is first. But God precedes that nothing.

Surely it is proper for the first character of the bible to be God, from whom all being is sustained. “It is right and just,” as we say at the Catholic Mass. This is also why Genesis is so memorable. It’s simple. It’s beautiful. It’s good. No one memorizes Hesiod, not just because it’s longer, but because it’s not as good, not as simple. We don’t memorize Hesiod because it’s false. It lacks the three transcendentals of goodness, truth, and beauty. Many people know the opening line of the bible because it is terrific writing and speaks a truth that makes sense, even if many wish it wasn’t so.

We can’t look away from Genesis for a reason: it is a masterpiece, and masterpieces do something to us.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis cover massive territory, but there is nothing that says quite so much as the very first line. This is much like the Apostles’ Creed, with the opening line of “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth.” A lifetime can be spent meditating on that alone. To meditate on Chaos and the Abyss does not satisfy in the same way. In fact, Chaos and Abyss in capitalized letters sound like a couple of rollercoasters at Six Flags or Cedar Point. (What a strange time to be alive, when we name our fun distractions after the things that terrify us - Leviathan, Behemoth, Goliath, Medusa…I suspect an amusement park will just go all in and soon name a rollercoaster “Satan, the Accuser,” but let’s not get ahead of future inversions to be discussed.)

I realize that there are many differing accounts of the Greek, Sumerian, and Roman creation stories, so Hesiod’s writing is not the only version. However, all of them start with something other than one God. This is why the inversion of Genesis is so stark in contrast.

This inversion, of coming to know that there is one God, is not like the fleeting thrill of reading about Chaos and Gaia. This is no cheap Double-Bubble parade gum that grows stale after a short time, but rather it is endless food for the mind and the soul.

The idea of one God, on its face, does not seem as interesting as a tale that begins with Chaos, the Abyss, and Gaia’s spontaneous generation. If I had two movie choices to select from, I would choose the one starring Chaos in the leading role. But Genesis is not a movie. It is not about entertainment. Genesis is going higher and deeper than what Hollywood or Greek myth does. Genesis does not set out to titillate and persuade. So while Chaos may be more exciting in the short term, it makes far more sense logically and spiritually that before all things were, God is.

And merely four words into Genesis, the sacred writer has inverted the nature of time, and asserted the existence of one God, and declared the number of God is One.

This is why, as these inversions gather together, it becomes increasingly clear why the tribes of Jacob cannot help but be called “the chosen people,” because these differences are not small, not subtle, but glaring and sharp, like a knife that carves them out from a world of very different expressions of faith.

In closing, the mention of God in Genesis upends other worldviews.

We believe that God needs no pre-existent thing or any help in order to create, nor is creation any sort of necessary emanation from the divine substance.God creates freely "out of nothing":

If God had drawn the world from pre-existent matter, what would be so extraordinary in that? A human artisan makes from a given material whatever he wants, while God shows his power by starting from nothing to make all he wants. (CCC 296)

God exists. God is one. God is first.

Many people have gotten caught up in an academic distraction about the word Elohim being used in various lines of the bible. This is where personal interpretation of the bible can go wild, like college students on spring break. This is where deep dives into Giants and extra-biblical texts like the Book of Enoch and the Divine Council become unhealthy distractions. Interpretation of the bible should never be approached as a research exercise, but as an encounter with God, in a living tradition. If there are two books to keep on your shelf, or to take along to a desert island, to keep from getting lost or going insane, it is these: The Bible and The Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Many heresies start when the idea of the oneness of God is discarded or doubted. Rest assured, however, that God is one, even if he is three-in-one. The many and none hypotheses are upside-down worlds. The oneness of the Trinity has fingerprints all over the bible, even in the opening line. The Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is still one God. Yes, there are other created spirits, like angels, but there is no other God than the one true God, also known as God Most High. The Trinity is beyond full comprehension, and this is a wonderful mystery to pray on. As always, prayer is the key, as it pleases God and is offered like heavenly incense to Him. To embrace the certainty of God while letting go of the desire for all divine data is a liberating act for your mind, body, and soul. The certainty and mystery of God’s oneness is glorious.

With that, let’s move to the next inversion, which happens in the fifth word of the bible, which is the word “created.”

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When we open the bible and read “In the beginning…” we must stop right there.

In that short opening statement, we have already reached the first inversion.

The bible begins with these three words and tips over an apple-cart of worldviews. This idea of time having a beginning upsets various ancient and modern philosophies by saying, “I respectfully disagree: time had a beginning.” Many people then and now will claim that time has always existed, that there was no beginning. The bible inverts this idea.

Why is this radical? It depends on where you live and what worldview you have been taught. Many in the ancient world believed that time was a flat circle, or that time always existed, or that time is an illusion. Many people today also believe those same ideas, and have added more variations, such as that time is a social construct. Most people today accept the Big Bang theory, which mostly aligns with the opening phrase of the bible, but not everyone accepts it.

None of the ideas of “circular” or “cyclic” time fit with the Jewish and Christian view of time. The circular time models are kind of like the Ouroboros of a snake-eating its own tail. This image is a good metaphor for the view of time that many hold, such as believers in karma or reincarnation or Stoicism or The Matrix or Groundhog Day. “In the beginning” swings an axe to the root of these beliefs and philosophies. For instance, Hindus and Buddhists are on the outside looking in just from these three little words. Beliefs about “eternal return” and reincarnation suggest an infinite loop. Stoics, too, did not believe in “a beginning” but rather the idea of eternal return.

Genesis may have been written down before the Stoics or the Pythagoreans wrote down their ideas, but the idea of circular time was around long before the Greeks or Moses spilled ink on the topic. But the message of scripture is that Genesis clearly disagrees with the “eternal return” time loop.

“In the beginning” takes this declaration even further when we get to the creation story, because time itself was created. Another way of saying this is that time is a creature. Time was created just like planets and people. The same goes for energy or gravity. There is a beginning, and that beginning was created by God.

What the bible does not say is that there are multiple beginnings. Genesis does not start with “In this beginning…” or “In the current beginning…” or “In the 999th beginning…”

There are not multiple beginnings, there is one beginning. This time and space that we are living in had one beginning. Now if the Creator wanted to have more than one version of the universe, he could do that. Moreover, there may have been other beginnings, but we don’t know - nor do we need to know for our salvation. And here is a critical point of this inversion and all that follow:

The books of the bible tell us exactly what we need to know for our salvation - and no more. What sacred scripture gives us is all that we will ever need to do good works and seek the highest good, which is God. Worth noting here as well is that the word “salvation” is based on the word “salve,” as in healing medicine. The sacred books administer to us all that we need for our healing.

This is hard to accept for modern people. We want more data, more information. We want certainty. But the bible opens with one of the greatest mysteries of all, which is time. These mysteries, if you come to understand the inversions, are wonderful things to ponder without ever knowing the answer. This is what St. Paul meant when he spoke of seeing through a glass darkly: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” So it goes with our understanding of time.

What the bible says (without saying so) is what we partially know by instinct: if there are other time-space continuums, we cannot fully know it - not yet - because we can only know the time and space we live within now. Multiple universes? Yes, there could be, but it doesn’t really matter for our salvation. Could there have been a million beginnings before this one? Yes, but it doesn’t matter for our salvation. Once we know this, we can call our mothers or invite a neighbor over for a pop. Once time is accepted as having one beginning, we can move on and live happily without worrying about all of the possible other beginnings and endings. This universe is the only time and space where we eat, sleep, marry, raise children, and die. This is simple to understand and allows us to go ahead and get started doing just those things. Time is a gift to us - it is not a curse, but a cure. In the time we have, God gives us all sufficient grace to understand our purpose and place in time.

All of creation is something like a book that has a first page, or a movie with its opening scene. Consider a play like Macbeth, where the opening line is the First Witch in a deserted place saying: “When shall we three meet again / In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”

Surely, within Shakespeare’s pile of manuscripts, there could have been an alternative opening line. Perhaps in alternate manuscripts the witches would have decided to meet at the mall or in a nightclub. But in the book we have, they intend to meet again “In thunder, lightning, or in rain.” There could have been infinite other manuscripts, with infinite other opening lines, with wild versions like one where Macbeth makes balloon animals for Duncan, or where Lady MacBeth starts a food drive - but we will never know, and none of those other manuscripts are relevant for our understanding of the play Macbeth. In the play that exists, the one that we read, Macbeth is forever going to slay Duncan and Lady Macbeth always will be power-hungry. Whether or not Shakespeare wrote other versions, the version we have is what is. It has a beginning and an ending.

As for the ending, Jesus mentions a cliffhanger about the “age to come” without great detail, telling people that it is only for the Father to know when the world will end, and not for him to reveal it. He came to tell us what we need to know, not what we want to know. This confirms that sacred scripture gives us only what we need, and no more. Our curiosity is the cause of so much of our trouble and Jesus, who is fully human and fully divine, is all too aware of our catlike ways. Rather than give away the ending, Jesus is that good friend who already saw the movie but doesn’t spill the spoiler. The end is not to be announced, otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a climax.

A natural question for our intellect is: “What is the nature of time?” Who does not look into the night sky and ponder time? Who does not look at a fading photograph of past memories and consider the march of hours? Who has not been at a funeral of a loved one and wondered where did all the time go? But in this question, “What is the nature of time?” we can get lost. This question alone is enough to take us into a wilderness of intellectual drift. To simplify it, consider the two basic answers: Time is circular, or time is linear. The inversion states that the answer is a both/and. Time is linear, with cycles of events within time that appear to repeat but are unique. As a whole, what is needed for our understanding is simple: there is a beginning, and there is an ending.

Physicists speak of “the arrow of time,” which actually matches the idea of biblical time and salvation history. It is linear, not an endless loop. Yet there are loops within the arrow. We have lives that begin and end, like circles moving along the arrow. If you look at the shape of a nautilus shell or a galaxy or a hurricane, you may get a sense of this arrow of time and the patterns within it. There are loops within time of beginnings and endings.

We cannot think of anything without time and space invading our ideas, but God can because he created space and time. God is eternal. Eternal means “outside of time.” We, on the other hand, are not outside of time - we are temporal. God does not experience time like we do. Thus, he already knows the beginning and the ending. But we do not.

Now, this can spin us round and round until we fall down over the concepts of fate and free-will, but rest assured, both are true. God knows our fate, yet we have free-will. This is a wonderful paradox to embrace, not something to despair over. In fact, this makes reading a play like Macbeth, where fate and free-will are a heavy theme, much more enjoyable.

Thus, this first inversion of the bible about time prunes away many alternative worldviews. Socrates and Greek mythology are some of the last ideas standing after a mere three words. Reincarnation is out. Karma is out. Stoicism is out. The Matrix is out. Groundhog Day is out. Before we even reach the fourth word of the bible, every circular and illusory view of time is set aside as error. The worldview of Abraham, Moses, Ruth, David, Elijah, Mary, and Jesus declares a beginning, which means there will also be an end.

To say that “time began” is a declaration. It is a rudder for living in troubled waters and windy seas, for the journey's destination has a purpose beyond power, money, wealth, or pleasure. Moreover, it assures one in difficulty that “This too shall pass.”

Atheists ask, “If time was created, what was God doing before that?” But the answer is simple: the question makes no sense to the Christian view of time. They don’t understand what they are asking, because before creation, time did not exist. “In the beginning…” is before time. Only God was, because God is. He is Being Itself. This is why when Moses asks for God’s name, the answer is “I am.” This is mind-bending but worth pondering, for there is nothing without the Being of God’s Being. (More on this in upcoming inversions.)

When we misunderstand time and who created it, we can get in trouble as to who will conclude time and how it will happen. What we need to know is only this:

Time began. Time was created. Time will end.

As for “the end,” it is coming. The end will arrive when God’s will is done, not ours. When the end comes, there will be no time to modify our behavior or turn back, “for as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” Thus, there is no need to be concerned with when time as we know it will end, just as we need not worry about exactly when time began. Sufficient for our salvation and sanity is to know: time began; time will end. The best answer to this mystery of time is exactly as Job concluded about other gifts of creation: “the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

To experiment in the belief of eternal return, or circular time, is to go dancing on slippery rocks that may lead to a concussion and mental instability. The only answers on the circular loop of those slippery rocks is nihilism or the will-to-power. Why? Because when time is just a loop, God is not the one that gives life. If all will fade away and return over and over, self-destruction or self-salvation is the only means to get off the spinning wheel. Oblivion or victory: choose your escape.

For physicists and philosophers, it is an enjoyable task to argue over the nature of time, or string theory, or the multiverse, or other speculations, but for those who have to get kids to school and laundry to fold, “In the beginning…” is enough. Truly, a lifetime can be spent pondering the nature of time and its many theories. This is wonderful for those who can afford such a lifestyle, but not practical for most. And here’s the funny thing: this idea of “In the beginning…” is where the greatest philosophers and scientists have ended up anyway, such as Plato, Aquinas, and most recently Stephen Hawking. The conclusion that came to both St. Augustine and Albert Einstein, after spending years pondering time, was Genesis 1:1. They both said, yes, it’s true: “In the beginning” is correct.

But we do not need to be Stephen Hawking or St. Augustine to understand this, as the Word of God has the answer you need in the first three words. A child or adult can sleep peacefully knowing that “In the beginning” is the correct understanding of the nature of time. Time began. Time will end.

For those who have to live in the world, the declaration of “In the beginning” fits with reality, where we see beginnings and endings everywhere: of days, of meals, of classes, of jobs, of friendships, of automobiles, of diets, of seasons, of wars, of affections, of plants, of pets. Within the arrow of time we observe little beginnings and endings, and they are not purely circular and going nowhere or repeating without meaning; they are the same, yet unique, like every human life or nautilus shell. They may look the same, but they are all going somewhere and they cannot be repeated in the same way again, ever. Thus our time in creation is our one chance. This is not just a read-through or simulation or a scrimmage: this is the real thing.

The next inversion we will look at is the very next word that follows “In the beginning…” That word is God.

Further reading:

Horn, Trent. “Thinking Deeply About the Nature of Time.” Catholic Answers. 23 July. 2020. https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/thinking-deeply-about-the-nature-of-time

Barr, Stephen. “St. Augustine’s Relativistic Theory of Time.” Church Life Journal, 7 Feb. 2020, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/augustines-push-against-the-limits-of-time/.

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Penguin, 2008. Book 11.

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There is a reason that the Christian message and the bible have such staying power. There is a reason why the books of Moses are so radical and different from all other texts. There is a reason why the tradition of the people of Abraham is so strange to outsiders, and even angering, and why it makes perfect sense to insiders. Most importantly, there is a reason why everyone cannot stop talking about Jesus.

There is a reason why and it is this: the message of Christianity tips everything we think we know upside down.

But it is actually right-side-up.

The bible is full of inversions that disrupt our assumptions. Rather, it is a series of inversions, one after another. An unfolding of paradoxes and mysteries reveals how and why these inversions matter, including when and where and by whom. Some of the inversions will upset us, while others we may accept without bother. We will have certain inversions that rankle us more than others, and those are the best inversions to meditate upon.

The books of Moses invert the teachings and worldviews of the old Sumerian, Greek, Persian, Hindu, and Roman thinking. The books of the prophets continue the inversions. Christ completes it. But this is not only applicable to the ancient world. It is equally relevant now, or even more so, as a flip to the old ways seems to be happening.

For a long time, we understood the inversions and assumed these ideas were common sense, but as familiarity breeds contempt, we took standing on our feet for granted. But for about five hundred years now, we have been gradually reverting to standing on our heads. To get right-side up again, we only need to consider the inversions again, with fresh eyes. The old language may feel difficult to understand, too time-consuming, too distant in the past; but none of that is really true. If we make even the slightest effort to read the bible, we can see these inversions playing out clearly in our own lives. Further, we can observe these inversions right now in our institutions, assumptions, societies, and families.

The language of the old books may seem difficult, but with a small effort, it can be understood. Many cast out the book without serious review, calling the writings “Bronze Age myths.” The implication here is that those of us who own smartphones are surely more rich in wisdom than the old shepherds of the Middle East. But this is close-minded. The wisdom of the old books goes deep into the heart, and that is a place where we often do not wish to look. Yet if we are open-minded, we will do just that. Modern ideas may have muddied the water, but it can be made clear again with patience, if we simply stop thrashing about and let the words speak.

The reason Jewish, Islamic, or Catholic thought either makes total sense to you or looks completely upside down depends on whether you are standing on your feet or your head. And even if you are standing on your feet, the eyes and ears can still fool you into hearing what you want to hear, and seeing what you want to see. But the real benefit of coming to recognize these inversions is not about being right or wrong, it is about sanity. We speak constantly of mental health. If you live in this world and you sense that there is something “off about it,” then you are likely sensing that something is upside-down. And there is a reason why the message of Christ calls people from every generation - it is because people always sense the upside-down and wish to be right-side-up. In the end, every person chooses whether to stand on their feet or their head. Some come to recognize these inversions and afterward can never again view the world the same. They have a secret that nothing can touch.

No matter your genetics, culture, or experience, you can benefit by pausing to consider the inversions presented by the Jewish and Christian traditions. You have nothing to lose in doing so, and perhaps much to gain.

As for me in writing this, I pray that I lead no one astray, but only present that which can help unfold the wonders of this confusing book and worldview. I am not qualified to write this. I have no abbreviations to add after my name, no prior published works to present, and no status as a great thinker. I’m an IT troubleshooter, a hack writer, and often a maker of poor decisions. I admit these shortcomings to make a point: if I can see these inversions, so can anyone else. From here, I proceed with fear and trembling that I may teach errors, but having been brought back to life, to keep this all to myself seems a bit selfish. I have to share it and I will pray for forgiveness if I mislead anyone. I hope to share these inversions with charity and love for all who read them. Most of all, because I can’t paint or sing all that well, I try to write.

When my kids were young, they would trace their hand and draw a picture to give to me as a gift, and I would cherish it because they made it out of love. So I write this for God. This is my scribbling way of thanking God for helping me find true north again. It’s not Dante or Michelangelo, but since God is a loving father, I offer this to him, along with all of myself - out of obedience, awe, gratitude, and trust - hoping that he might magnet it on his celestial refrigerator for a day or two.

So let us begin. With the many inversions ahead of us, there’s no time to dawdle. And time itself is where we must begin, because that is the initial inversion. This may be the most important inversion of all, but then every inversion is the most important. That is because they all go together. Individually, these inversions may seem odd, but together the inversions reveal a whole. If you come to understand what these inversions mean, there is a solid chance that you will not only be inverted to right-side-up, but you may be healed and made whole as well.

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When I was fallen away, I thought Richard Dawkins was interesting. I recall the time I saw Dawkins speak at a bookstore (Powell’s in Portland, long ago). At the time I thought he was cool. I liked how he was undermining the new “Pharisees” of the modern age and sowing discord among the “Christian hypocrites” as I had yet to realize that we’re all sinners. But in watching and listening to Dawkins it dawned on me after only about ten minutes how miserable he seemed, even in his arguments. The smugness filled the room. In contrast I thought of my grandmother with her rosary and the joy in her that she brought to her family. I thought of the billions of people who found hope in faith. His uninspiring message made me leave that talk feeling empty, the opposite of how I felt around my grandmother and other Christians. I entered as a Dawkins fan, only to leave repulsed by his message.

Now, with that said I am somewhat grateful for Dawkins because without pure materialists like him, I may never have come back to the faith. It was like a prescribed burn in a field clearing the weeds so that the new life could spring forth. I do believe that is what’s happening today in the wider world.

Dawkins is the only one who really puts all his chips in the middle and lays his cards on the table. Atheists don’t buy the bluff that much of postmodernism is selling. He would reject transgenderism and Baal the storm god in the same breath — as would Catholics. Dawkins even knows that deists are just hedging their bets on a bad hand. The only card player left for atheists to play against is those who believe in the one God, the God Most High. The interesting thing about atheists is that they are closer to coming back to belief in the one God than they ever realize, or would ever care to admit, because they’ve seen through all the smoke and mirrors of the meaningless and dead gods. They actually are closer to understanding the God who sits outside of time and space — who created time and space — than they realize because they reject all of the nonsense and cling ultimately to mathematics.

However, I see this as a long process of preparing the seedbed for faith. Because I don’t think many modern atheists have read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or a study Bible like that of Ignatius Press or Word on Fire. Few people have read St. Augustine’s Confessions or the Imitation of Christ outside of Catholic circles. And they certainly have not read Veritatis Splendor or Fides et Ratio or Dignitatus Humanae. But if they ever did, they would find that the God we believe in in the Catholic faith is logical, beautiful, and bigger than anything we can ever imagine in creation. But of course, that revelation of a living God comes only by cooperation with God’s grace, which is always ready and waiting on a no-interest loan for those who simply ask, seek, and knock. The beauty of the Church is that you get to keep your reason, all of it, and faith makes it soar higher.

Dawkins just says what many have been thinking all along, which is this: God doesn’t matter. Thomas Jefferson went halfway, but Dawkins just comes out as openly apostate. He is saying that the Emperor has no clothes. He is also like the Emperor Napoleon, when an officer suggested that “God willing” they would take Brussels in the morning. Napoleon allegedly said, “God? God has nothing to do with it.” That’s the same answer Dawkins gives. To Dawkins, there is no God, or gods, living or otherwise, outside of our brains. Hence, he’s razed the weeds and prepped the soil for coming back to what Abraham and the Apostles and St. Agnes meant by “God.”

Of course, Dawkins’ grand bet on the selfish gene goes too far. He’s all in with all the answers, but he left out of the equation an important variable. He fails to solve for Y, as in “Y are we here?” That is the problem with this worldview, because in a world without meaning, you have to live in that world. So does everyone else, and everyone else is not necessarily an educated PhD who can spend a lifetime inspecting in all corners of science and history. Everyone else lacks the funds and leisure time to find meaning. Everyone else, for the most part, in the end, has to rely on what someone says is true. I take it on faith that germs cause disease and not fairies, even though I have never actually saw either of them infect a person. Dawkins and company can win arguments about how the world works, but what they cannot win an argument about is why a sunset is beautiful. When there is no satisfactory ultimate why, people spend a lifetime searching for that variable. In the end, what the world without a living God results in is someone else taking control by force and dictating that the value of Y must be what they say it is, simply because they said so.

So even though I’m not a Dawkins fan, at least he isn’t hedging his bets. He’s all in, and I actually think deniers like him are closer to finding God than the builders of Babel or the deists like Ben Franklin ever were. Having the door half-open to God is like letting the heat out of the house in winter. At some point, you have to make up your mind to go outside or stay inside. This makes me realize, truly, that we should pray for Richard Dawkins. He may end up bringing more people back to faith in God than we could have ever realized. He is almost at the top of the circle, since when we run away from God, we often find ourselves running right into the arms of God.

Today, we are witnessing the outcome of what happens when the ideas of Dawkins are taken to its logical end. The reason Dawkins is wrong is that he doesn’t understand what the builders at Babel and the deists like Ben Franklin understood well. The ancient emperors from history and American Founders knew that people needed religion, and to pull that rug out from society would cause the city itself to collapse. Now we are seeing funny religions pop up, because we pretend we don’t need one.

The root problem for Dawkins is that he has a middle-school concept of God that he never outgrew. He’s also operating as an autonomous speaker of “his truth” without a plan or concept of how to organize a world. He doesn’t have employees or mouths to feed or an economy to plan. In the walled-in academic world where the idea of “no souls” exists, Dawkins fails to realize something rather large. His theory of the “Selfish Gene” starts from the bottom, instead of the top, and therefore he cannot describe the whole. His answer of “Because of genes!” is too simple. A toe does not describe the wholeness of a person any more than a gene does, and genes cannot explain the totality of human nature. Dawkins is so smart, but he can’t understand what simple farmers and mothers and the poor with no education understand perfectly well. You would think an evolutionary biologist would be very equipped to understand the parable of the grain of wheat, but somehow he misses it completely. I find this to be marvelous irony.

We need religion. People need religion. Or they will find one. And it won’t be what you expect. In the clean, childless world of our universities, ideas sound good that lack depth. Dawkins’ answer is from the atomic layer, and he emerges from a quiet library to tell us that we are nothing but atoms. Meanwhile the bustle of the street doesn’t hear a word he’s said, because life is happening far beyond the atomic layer. When Dawkins’ burst forth from his library, he was telling a very different message from what the apostles told when they emerged from the Upper Room at Pentecost, after having received the breath of life, touched by tongues of fire. No, when Dawkins and his disciples emerged in their lab coats to tell us the good news, their message was that respiration is a selfish act to propagate our genes and that there is no meaning to any of it. The apostles had a message of eternal life, while Dawkins made us ponder suicide.

So while I commend Dawkins for his honesty, he is actually more foolish than the leaders of Babel or Jefferson. At least the leaders at Babel and Jefferson were offering something to believe in: “Look, here’s a tower. It’s a Gate to God. See?” And Jefferson and Franklin offer something, too: “Look, here’s a sacred document, a Constitution, where we make a nod to God — and also — over there — see the Statue of Liberty?”

Dawkins only offers the abyss. And our brains revolt at the idea. We all know the Big Empty is there, but we don’t really want to stand on the edge and look into it. We can’t. Not for long. The temptation to believe that Dawkins is right draws us all, as doubt is more natural to us than faith. So even if we dabble in disbelief, most move away from the edge in search of a Higher Power of some kind. The search for God, when thwarted or stifled or silenced, erupts like boils, in strange places and in uncomfortable ways. We are already seeing strange religions being born in America now, almost more strange than that of the pagan gods of Babel or America’s traditional worship of the rule of law, wealth, and the slippery thing called “Liberty.”The Tower of Babel or the Constitution may be an elaborate way to justify power, but it is a better attempt at meaning than what Dawkins offers the masses. But again, Dawkins is the only honest one, which is also why his idea is the most dangerous. He’s the anti-Jesus (I don’t want to call him the anti-Christ, because he lacks the charisma needed for that). Dawkins tells us that we are purely material beings without souls. He goes all the way.

Most people hold back and speak the old common language that dances around this fact, finding idols and obsessions to occupy or fence off the Big Empty. Dawkins has spent his life shouting this message and now we are seeing what fruit it bears, where we are in fact atomized, solitary beings (kind of like his selfish gene!). When we are just chemical machines, we do indeed act like the “selfish gene” writ large. Again, not only is this message the polar opposite of Christ, but it’s brings the polar opposite result. Where people know Christ, they form communities, families, and fellowship. There is warmth amid the struggle. It’s not perfect. But when suffering comes, there is a prayer, and a church, and a people, and the Body of Christ. Dawkins inability to get past a small understanding of God leaves him on the playground all alone.

As we watch millions of community organizations and church groups fading away in America, we are clearly becoming more atomized, as people sit at home watching TV alone instead of joining the Lions’ Club or a bowling team. What is worrisome about this is that Hannah Arendt, who dissected the rise of 1930’s totalitarianism, said that loneliness, a.k.a atomization, is a first step toward totalitarianism, because isolated people without purpose or faith are attracted to a powerful ideology that delivers some kind of meaning. Hence, the transgender craze we are seeing is not surprising at all. Those people are seeking God, but it’s a long way home. I sympathize because I did the same thing, but with liquor. That’s also a long way home.

To me, in the end, Dawkins’ worldview makes Kurt Cobain or Morrissey seem light-hearted.

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I was in a state known as “fallen away” for about 15 years, because I had never experienced what is known as interior conversion. I was going through the motions and so the purpose of religion and church felt like fishing with no hook and no bait. I wasn’t catching anything, and wasn’t learning how or why, and I didn’t know how it was supposed to work. So I stopped fishing and moved on, which I’ve come to realize was the best and worst thing that ever happened to me.

I fell away for similar reasons to most people. I felt it was a lot of rules, and I saw bad representatives around me with a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude. With that, it became easier to deny the idea of sin, which is precisely how I came to reject God. This is where I stayed for a long time, because once you turn away it takes a “compelling event” to be re-awakened to turn back. And from my experience, you cannot get to the resurrection unless you get to belief in God first. That has to be restored before you start asking for God’s help. To me the proofs for God must be shown or come to a person that has turned away before you can dive into the mysteries like the incarnation, resurrection, and ascension. Fortunately, an addiction provided the “compelling event” for me where I wake up in jail and did rehab and turned back to God. But not everyone is as lucky as me.

The gaze of our culture is toward earth, not heaven. There is an ambivalence and uncertainty about whether we have souls at all. We are conditioned that way now. A lack of depth in religious education and exposure for young people, at least where I grew up, didn’t help. Public school seemed to make an effort to steer around any idea of a spiritual life. I recall campaigns in school to build up our dignity and self-worth, but it was all body and mind, but certainly not soul-oriented. My idea around the soul was dead on arrival in high-school, indoctrinated to the public school’s dance around the spiritual. All things were taught as materialism.

Worse, I felt that I couldn’t ask questions about faith as a child, whereas in school I was encouraged to dig into every topic. Religious teachers from middle-school through college, take note: students want depth, not coloring books. They want a challenge, not busy work. It took me a very long time to realize the intellectual depth of Christianity. I had never come across or been introduced to St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas. Reading Augustine’s Confessions blasted at my assumptions, as did Word on Fire materials, from the podcast to the books. The wall of earthbound explanations became like Plato’s cave, where I was only seeing shadows on the wall while the real story, or the other half of the story, was in the spiritual life. But someone who is turned away from God has that wall up and they will not be receiving messages that are transmitted to them, because they have scrambler for anything that hints at God. That is why you have to get to reasons to believe in God first.

Misunderstanding how to read the Bible is an enormous blocker, and I don’t think the “Catholic” way to read the Bible is that well known. “How to Read the Bible” from the WOF Bible was eye-opening, as I’d lumped Catholics with Fundamentalist readings, which ruined how I understood it. I hated reading Genesis when I was in the scientism and literalism mindset. I could only read it like Carl Sagan on one hand, or like Ken Ham on the other hand. You can’t read Scripture like a science book, because it’s not a science book. It’s about the soul, not cells. Moreover, you can’t go deep in science classes and then come back and try to read it like a fundamentalist. That doesn’t work for people who take advanced science classes. You can’t tell someone who took literature classes that there is no figurative elements, because we know how to read. This isn’t elementary school where you could convince a child that Aesop’s fable of the “Ant and the Grasshopper” is just about insect life. We know there is allegory, we know there is interpretation. So we can’t read it literally or scientifically, but we need to use our whole mind to read it. Any one-dimensional reading of the Bible will fail, but you can read it in each dimension and then see how they relate. It’s not like other books. Most interesting to me now, is that I’ve realized that you can go very deep on science and read the Bible like Catholics do. You can learn about evolution and still find that Genesis makes complete sense. In fact, I think the deeper you go on science, the more that Genesis and the Gospels make sense, but I’m biased the other way now.

Once you start looking for the historical, allegorical, moral, and religious truth of what the Bible teaches, that is a game changer. But again you have to want to believe in God first. If you approach the Bible as fiction from the start, you will read it as fiction. If you start with doubt, you will be scoffing by the third day of creation and wonder how God said, “Let there be light” before he created the sun. I know because I scoffed. I didn’t understand that the “light” was faith, or the idea to create, or the power of God to make something out of nothing. Once you allow that light in, however, you can read the Bible and not get stalled on difficult passages. The catechism teaches that Genesis uses figurative language in places, and I came to realize that how Catholics read the Bible is deep, not shallow. Eventually you get to the point that you can read Genesis literally, figuratively, allegorically, morally, and how it relates to Jesus and the end of time. Even historically. Heck, even scientifically and it still works. I’m not kidding. If you think it’s just some old myth, you aren’t reading it deep enough.

One thing that helped me return is the example of faithful Christians I know – Catholic, Protestant – I saw their lives, lived in devotion and that probably did more for me than anything. It made me want to have what they have, because when you turn away you live in a restlessness. Experience is a pre-requisite for some of us to realize that “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” You may not know you are restless until one night you become fully aware of how lost you became in all that searching in wrong places. But when we are looking earthward instead of the heavens, we think the world has the answers instead of God who created the world. Somehow the flip has to happen, to turn your head upward. Refusing to pray or ask for help is rejection of God. But like the Bible says, we are stiff-necked, which I learned was an idiom about oxen that would not turn when poked by the farmer. The thing is we have to want to turn in the end, we have to want to receive God’s grace. Desiring God is where the flip happens but like St. Paul and St. Augustine, it’s often not a voluntary thing, it’s a gift. For Paul it happened all at once. For Augustine it was a slow-burning eight season HBO adult series. Either way, the result was the same because they ended up on fire for God. They were never the same again.

What you can do for someone who has fallen away? You can call. Send a text. Be a friend. Listen. But have faith and keep building yours up. I think those actions alone can be the compelling event, because seeing someone pass through life with faith is a powerful argument even without words. Praying a 54 day Rosary novena won’t hurt either. I’m not even kidding, since both of you will benefit. You have to love them and just pray for God’s will and recall that we need God, he doesn’t need us. He loves us and wants us to return, but only we are harmed in turning away. Prayer is powerful, more than I ever realized.

For me it took arguments for God, experience, the silent witness of others, and my own foolishness to want to know God. I suspect a few people were praying for me. In the end, you have to realize that you can’t save yourself. When you feel strong, there’s no need for a savior. Realizing how weak and helpless I was gave me the nudge I needed, and a life of worshipping the self and the world is depressing. Wealth, pleasure, honor, and power become boring. My generation grew up dreaming about rocking out with Snoop Dogg and the Victoria’s Secret angels on our own private yachts after winning the Superbowl. We wanted all the world had to offer, all these fruits and experiences that seemed to be liberating, but they ended up bringing spiritual death. None of that brings true happiness. Spiritual things come back to life once you become willing to ask for help. While science may have some cures, it doesn’t have THE cure. Pills and therapy can go part of the way, but not all the way, because the last part of the journey doesn’t come from a pharmacy or from a technique. The last leap has to come by faith.

People who turn away from God (which is everyone, unless you are Jesus, who is God, and if you are him, please contact me I’d like to meet for coffee ASAP)…let’s start this sentence over. People who turn away from God imagine they have found freedom because they only see the rules of religion as oppressive, but that’s because they don’t understand the interior conversion of the heart is what transforms. That’s the whole point of cathedrals and hymnals and candles and long Saturday night Easter Vigil Mass and stations of the cross and ashes on our foreheads and all the kneeling and standing. To give glory to God, once turned, makes total sense, because that’s all we can do to even try to give thanks for what God has done for us. Seeking humility before God means offering up our prayers, our money, our songs, our hearts - all of those things. If you haven’t turned back, it won’t make sense because it cannot make sense. You’ll see religion as a modern kind of Pharisee, all justice and no mercy and full of hypocrisy. You’ll see the sinners fall and point out that we are hypocrites, which is true. But we are trying. That’s the goal, to love God, to love others, and to keep his commandments. To do God’s will and give him glory is the game. What you have to show someone who is turned away is that the “rules” are not the endgame. The interior conversion is why everyone who comes to drink from this vine never leaves the party. If it were only about rules, Napoleon or Julius Caesar or Genghis Kahn would be the object of our worship, because they were very good about enforcing the law. Love of God goes way, way beyond the rules, but because of that love, the rules must be followed. People who turn away do not like those rules, because they think what the rules outlaw are what is enjoyable. Unfortunately, it will never make sense to them when you try to explain that getting drunk and having sex is not what they really want. That message is scrambled because they can’t get first to God, and second to the interior conversion. There is a joy that the fallen away are oblivious to. They have no idea it exists and think those who claim it’s true are liars. They think it’s boring and enslaving but it’s the ultimate liberation. And if you like excitement, if you like a good fight, spiritual combat is a sport that never stops.

How to read the Bible: https://www.wordonfire.org/videos/bishop-barrons-commentaries/how-to-read-the-bible/

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In some of the shortest parables, Jesus delivers the deepest of messages regarding faith and meaning to believers and seekers. Take for instance the parable of the Merchant and the Pearl, where in two sentences Jesus explains the priceless reward we receive through him. The Merchant, having found this one Pearl, sells all that he owns to have it because nothing else, nothing in this world, even comes close to the value of it.

The Pearl is like what many of the Saints find when they realize the reward and consolation that Jesus grants us through his death and resurrection. Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” Thomas Aquinas said, “God alone satisfies.” Teresa of Avila said, “God alone is enough.” Repeatedly, we see this peace settle onto those with faith. They undergo drastic change by their belief in God. This is not the superficial change that comes from other pursuits, like money or vanity. This is true change.

With faith comes a gift of joy, but the world wants to suppress it and smother it. If faith isn’t giving me joy, then I’m not understanding it correctly. Those that profess their peace in Christ will have their joy tested daily, because just as his life and teachings threatened the Roman order, so does it threaten the modern empire of the Self. Those who worship the self find Christian faith childish and openly laugh at it. I certainly did. I mocked the faithful while I was fallen away from belief. But Christians can celebrate being mocked. It is perfectly fine to be laughed at, and almost an achievement in itself. Jesus prepared me for these moments:

“You will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who perseveres to the end will be saved.” Mk 13:13

I should not be deterred by this, for I do not need others approval; the only approval I should consider is God’s. So I must return daily to my faith, like a child. If I recall how I lost my faith in the first place, it was because I grew cynical in adolescence and early adulthood. I thought there were no more mysteries in life, and no God except the Watchmaker kind. But having regained my faith, I don’t want to lose it again. What I realize now is that my faith as a child made more logical sense than my doubt in adulthood.

“Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Mt 18-19

Thus when people smirk at these words, or openly jeer belief, this is actually a time to be glad. That alone is a clear indication that I am oriented in the right direction, toward God. To endure whatever comes, be it mockery, condescension, indifference, opposition, or even violence - can I remain humble and peaceful? Keeping the faith, like a child, is the correct path. The reward of eternal life through Jesus’ death and resurrection cancels any earthly insult. Nothing else on offer in this world can fulfill my heart and soul in the same manner.

I have already tried all of the other options. They all disappoint in the end. They come up short. Why?

Because they are not God, which is what I was really hungering for.

I don’t put myself into the Gospel scenes enough. I need to feel the emotion of Christ in the words. I don’t put myself into the scene of his Passion, but I need to start doing it more. How would I act in those trials and struggles? Would I fold up like a chair and crumble? Can I hear the people around me? Do I sense the tension, struggle, and pain in the words and actions? Would I even be among the crowd around Jesus, or shaking my head at them? I bet I would be, because the Romans and Jews and people of all nations who gathered to crucify him were the same as us today, they just happened to live before us.

I often find confusion in the readings. I used to give up and assume it was primitive fairy tales, but now I know I must speak to wiser believers about it, or read the writings of the early Church. Every rebuttal and question that I can think of has already been asked, pondered, argued, even fought over. Ask, seek, knock: if I shutter my mind when I come up against something difficult, then I have despaired and turned away. When I’m confused, this is precisely the time to discuss the words with other members of the faith. Find real people to talk to about it, and avoid online comment pits of conversation on social media. There is little or nothing to learn on social media. I must speak with people of faith, as “iron sharpens iron.” Far wiser people than I have gone over these words and remained solid in their belief.

Jesus and his teachings are what my soul wants. I am the Merchant and Jesus is the Pearl. If I return to my treasure daily, as the Saints did, and read deeply, and yearn for the spirit of Christ, he will guide my day, and ultimately my life.

“God alone satisfies.” CCC 1718-1722

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Doing a root cause analysis of all rejection of God reveals the same underlying bug. The fatal flaw of every Goliath, no matter how large, is the same. It is pride. And the fig leaf of pride is covering up an inner fear. But for those who abandon all comfort to God, fear withers because there is more than just this life. The truth is the living God, maker of all things visible and invisible.

There is a lesson here, however, about fear, for which David and Goliath can provide the example. This lesson is as timeless as it is obvious, for David was instructed to be silent by his brothers, by his fellow countrymen, who were all trembling in fear of this large bully that seemed undefeatable. But David refused to be silenced.

He knew what was true, what was good, and he would not be quieted by muscle, shouting, or argument, because that is what the human heart must do when the Truth is being stifled. This is when the humble and simple turn bold just by standing up for what is beautiful and offering up all their worldly reputations, possessions, and lives for the glory of God.

“For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?”

A thorough understanding of that verse must be made in order to set your face like flint against what is popular and powerful. Because when faced with death or the loss of a job, some men and women will understand that those things mean nothing, zero, compared to the Truth, and they will willingly stand, even if they are the last, single, solitary voice on earth, to declare the Truth and go out naked and alone to fight the giant with nothing more than the Truth at their side. I would like to believe I could do that, but my fear is that I will be like Peter who was bold in the boat but timid on the water and started to sink as soon as the wind came up. Why did Peter sink? Because of fear. Because he didn’t trust in God like David did.

Keep in mind that Goliath came to the camp every day for forty days, challenging the whole army, and no soldier would stand, until the youthful David said, “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?”

Did you catch that? Not the insult about the circumcision, but the last part: the living God. He is alive. He was alive then, he is alive now. And David knew that he could be trusted, because he is the Creator, the Maker, the Artist, the Author. He is Being Itself.

And his brothers tried to silence him, because they were afraid of Goliath, afraid of fighting for the Truth. His brothers said:

“Why have you come down? And with whom have you left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know your presumption, and the evil of your heart; for you have come down to see the battle.”And David said, “What have I done now? Was it not but a word?”And he turned away from him toward another, and spoke in the same way; and the people answered him again as before.

David was not content to hear their defeatism, so he went straight to the leadership and asked them, and there too he was shut down and told not to speak.

When the words which David spoke were heard, they repeated them before Saul; and he sent for him. And David said to Saul, “Let no man’s heart fail because of him; your servant will go and fight with this Philistine.” And Saul said to David, “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are but a youth, and he has been a man of war from his youth.”

So he was told “No” once again, and what was his weapon? It was not yet the slingshot, but his voice, his words, for he knew what he was, what he was capable of, and most of all he knew what it meant to fully trust and abandon himself to God.

But David said to Saul, “Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and smote him and delivered it out of his mouth; and if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him and killed him. Your servant has killed both lions and bears; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, seeing he has defied the armies of the living God.” And David said, “The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.”

By speaking, by asking, seeking, knocking; by speaking, he was given the right to go fight, and it’s obvious that if he needed to ask again, or a hundred more times, he would have kept thrashing about the camp until someone listened to him and was awakened to the fight. But he would go it alone.

And Saul said to David, “Go, and the Lord be with you!”

So because they were thinking like men and not like God, they dressed up the boy in a man’s armor, too heavy to move around in, so that he would be “safe,” and in that safety David knew he would lose the fight. He needed to be naked and fearless in front of God in order to defeat Goliath.

Then Saul clothed David with his armor; he put a helmet of bronze on his head, and clothed him with a coat of mail. And David girded his sword over his armor, and he tried in vain to go, for he was not used to them.

Then David said to Saul, “I cannot go with these; for I am not used to them.” And David put them off.Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in his shepherd’s bag or wallet; his sling was in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine.

With basic tools, unexpected trust, and wild abandon in his faith, he went forth, to be mocked and derided, surely even by his own army.

And the Philistine came on and drew near to David, with his shield-bearer in front of him. And when the Philistine looked, and saw David, he disdained him; for he was but a youth, ruddy and comely in appearance. And the Philistine said to David, “Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?” And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. The Philistine said to David, “Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and to the beasts of the field.”

David did not need more. He did not need armor, nor sword, nor clothing, nor shield. He had all of these things on his side, as he invoked God, just as St. George before he slayed the dragon, just as Jesus rebuked Satan in the desert. You cannot go to war with evil alone, and you cannot go to war half-hearted. This battle is in the realm of spiritual combat. The battle for Truth, the one Truth, is always spiritual.

Then David said to the Philistine, “You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down, and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s and he will give you into our hand.”

The battle is the Lord’s. It is always so.

When the Philistine arose and came and drew near to meet David, David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet the Philistine. And David put his hand in his bag and took out a stone, and slung it, and struck the Philistine on his forehead; the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell on his face to the ground.

So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and struck the Philistine, and killed him; there was no sword in the hand of David. Then David ran and stood over the Philistine, and took his sword and drew it out of its sheath, and killed him, and cut off his head with it. When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled. And the men of Israel and Judah rose with a shout and pursued the Philistines as far as Gath… (1 Samuel 17)

Faith and works. Body and soul. Ask, seek, knock. If you must speak out, do it with charity. Remember that you are fighting with something beyond the humans who appear to be the enemy. They are not the enemy, they are just behind enemy lines. This is a spiritual war. For this a sword is not needed but rather faith, hope, and charity. By your endurance you will gain your soul.

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We’ve all been raised on heroes and politicians and athletes that feign perfection. But in the Old Testament, the characters are all flawed. They are also all limited, because they are human, not divine. Some do awful things. In fact, they are just like real people. Thus, we all have our limitations, in that the specs of our design cannot exceed various parameters. We may feel ten feet tall but no one has ever been near that height. We may feel bulletproof but every king who has ever lived has passed away into death. This is going to take me a while to get to it, but we are like NASCAR, in that we have predictable speeds and power. We all seek power, but because of our limited dimensions and parameters, dictators and bullies end up like stock cars passing by, with the same engines and spoilers, but with different decals on the exterior to pretend they are unique. Each car is different, while each is the same. This is a both/and scenario. You can see this positively or negatively, but the end goal of each makes all the difference. What are you racing toward? That is the only question that matters in the end. If it’s not toward the highest good, then even if you finish in first place, you lose.

The Bible also shows our limitations as a group, such as the scapegoating mechanism and tribalism. Biblical characters would be cancelled today in our unforgiving modern era (depending on what party they belonged to). We live in a similar time of scapegoating as the Israelites did. This is because the law of Moses actually understood the problem with scapegoats and had a day of Atonement for sin management. You could call this an SMS - a Sin Management System, to use modern IT language. But today…we just have sin. We don’t manage it, because we don’t believe in it. We sweep it under the rug and pretend it isn’t there. Sin is old-fashioned, so we think. To follow the stock car analogy, this is like ignoring wires showing on tires, where a blowout is imminent.

But to use a different metaphor for a moment: sin is best likened to a disease like cancer, where our past unconfessed sins remain with us and grow to enormous proportions. When we read a medical article about someone who had a fifty pound tumor, we all say, “How could someone not know they had a fifty pound tumor?” The articles usually have a picture of the person with the glaringly obvious medical problem. It’s baffling to us how someone would not realize something was awry.

But most of us walk around carrying fifty pound spiritual tumors, from sins never repented. The sins from one-night stands, burned bridges, anger, hatred, and self-loathing all continue to grow on our souls, and will continue to do so, until the disease is loosed in confession. If only we could see each other’s souls. Interestingly, others usually can see our sins better than ourselves, as it’s so easy to know why someone else is spiritually ill, but we cannot see our own spiritual tumors. And so much of our sin is about power, or gaining an edge over someone, or protecting our little grove that we consider the self to be the king of. We all have a grove, even if it’s only our social media profile, where we feel like the king. But we’re not the king. I’m not the king, and realizing that is the greatest relief I’ve ever had. Knowing I’m a sinner allows me to stop pretending, stop fighting, stop squabbling over the scraps. There is a king, and it’s not me, and surrendering to the loving, living God is like having the massive tumor cut away, and all that ugly growth from many years of power-seeking behavior can be put aside.

This is why I like the Old Testament. We can see the diseased state of sinful lives. It’s so obvious. The supernatural reading of the Old Testament changes everything. (Michael Heiser, who recently passed away, has a documentary for helping you get started in this. Unless you believe in God, and the devil, you will read the Bible like a 21st century American and miss the whole point.)

Whenever someone points out the shortcomings of the Old Testament patriarchs or prophets, I want to remind them that, yes, exactly, you are catching on: sin is narrated in the Old Testament for a reason, and that reason is that these people were not the incarnation of God, like Jesus was, but were struggling in the world to work toward his grace, but failing and often choosing sin.

The Old Testament, unlike other mythology systems, shows the ugly side of humanity, and if you disagree, go read about Samson again in Judges and see if you still think he was a model for living. If you think of Samson as a saint, please stop and re-read his story. St. Augustine famously said, “It is narrated, not praised,” to help us understand a guy like Samson. But rest assured, Samson is in there for a reason. In fact, the Good Thief who repents on the Cross next to Jesus in his last minute is in there for a reason, a very good reason. His name is St. Dismas, and wouldn’t we all be so lucky to turn and see Christ in our last hour, in our last breath? (St. Dismas, pray for us.)

There is much to learn from the story of Samson, it’s just not that he was a good guy who could do whatever he wanted because God said so. If you read the Bible in that way, such that anyone under the banner of the Chosen people is flawless, then you have spiritually drawn the Monopoly card that reads: “Return to Go, do not collect $200.” You need to start again. If you read about Samson and say, “Well, clearly he was predestined and chosen, so he could do whatever he want.” Just stop. Think about what you are saying. Does it make any sense at all? Samson was supposed to be a monk consecrated to God (a Nazirite) who doesn’t sleep around, drink, touch dead things, or cut his hair. And what is his story? It’s doing all of those things, and even when he destroys the Philistines, he’s not doing it for the glory of God, he literally asks for strength to get revenge. If anything, Samson proves the old adage of “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” and the reason the story of Samson is important is because we see the strangeness of history, of sin, of leaders, of salvation history. When you go to read the Old Testament with “Chosen People” blinders on, you miss the richness of the narrative. As I said, the “white hat/black hat” Cowboy story that Americans want to find - it ain’t in the Old Testament.

But perhaps Samson did repent in his last hour. Perhaps God used him in ways radically beyond our finite minds. God takes care of the particular judgement for each person, not us. Sacred scripture illustrates lives and the arc of salvation history, and we are like ants catching a glimpse of something so far beyond our understanding, like a rocket, or a surgery, that we must stand in awe of creation and continue on in our faith and work without full knowledge. And that is the mystery of faith - though we can never know all things, we can know some things, and catch glimpses of God’s glory and learn the repeated lessons of redemptive suffering, with the Crucifix showing us over and over, that there is no way to heaven but through the Cross. And even Samson can show us that story.

Trent Horn wrote, “The Bible is not a sterile collection of perfect people who always follow God’s will. It is instead a drama about how God redeemed imperfect people and used them, in spite of their flaws, to accomplish his sovereign and holy will for mankind.”

And thank God for that, because a story of perfect robots is not a human story, and is not interesting unless you are under ten years old. The Great Story of Israel has much more going on than Wyatt Earp’s showdown. There is indeed a good guy and a bad guy, with God reclaiming the world from the fallen angels, but that is what we forget while we zero in on the individual character or verse. Not only are there fallen angels, there are fallen people, but here’s the point: those people are redeemable. Arguably, even the Pharaoh of Exodus is redeemable. Thus, when people get fired up over the violence in Joshua, or 2 Peter calling Lot “righteous” after he offers up his daughters for rape, they are reading it in a way that we don’t read or watch anything else. Why are we so dense at reading the Old Testament when we can follow intricate narratives in a ten-season TV shows that shows the depth and nuance of individual characters in a slow-burning plot? Why do we choose to read it like children?

It’s simple. Most of us haven’t really read it. If we have, we have not since we were children, so we got the white hat/black hat version of it, which is fine…until you are no longer a child. We haven’t even had a tour of the adult version, which is a much more serious and dark version. The flood story alone goes from being a happy pack of animals on a ship to an utterly terrifying world-ending mayhem.

Another possibility is that we received a dumbed-down fundamentalist reading of it, which is great for becoming familiar, but not for depth and nuance. And when I say fundamentalist, I mean both the Fundamentalists and the New Atheists, because both read the Bible in a way that gets little or nothing out of it. I can’t stress this enough: reading the Bible using the four senses of scripture is how it opens up into a four-dimensional trip. So many people charge in and say, “I’m going to read the Bible in a year” and they get to Leviticus or Numbers and stop because it’s boring and appears to be unrelated to the modern world, when in reality, all of it is central to the experience we are living in right now. If you are going to read the Bible in a year, follow the Bible in a Year tour guide, Father Mike Schmitz, and it will go far, far better than doing it on your own.

But the main reason why adults read the Bible like cowboy stories is this:

We read the Old Testament like ten year old pro-wrestling fans because we don’t understand that we are living in a spiritual war. In our modern assumptions about the world, we forget that ghosts are real. We use the word soul but laugh at the idea of ghosts. But the word is the same. We just have a cartoon version of “ghost” now due to TV shows like Scooby-Doo and Caspar, but we still know that we have souls in the quiet places of our hearts and minds.

Our adult, data-driven minds forget that there is more types of knowledge than what can be graphed or measured. We don’t accept that there is more than just matter, but also spirit. Admitting that angels and demons are real does not often come from college educated lips. Why? Because we think we know better. Frankly, we don’t read the Bible believing that God is real. Thus, we don’t understand the overarching story that leads to Christ’s defeat of the devil, and thereby miss the entire point of the entire library known as the Bible.

If you don’t believe in the devil, then you probably don’t believe in God. If you don’t believe in God, you probably don’t believe in souls. If you don’t believe in souls, you don’t believe that you could spend eternity in either heaven or hell. But you can. And you will.

This is the root problem for many of our social and mental maladies as well. We have numbed the part of our brain that allows for belief in the supernatural. We have flattened God into “all religions are the same” when they are anything but the same.

This is why whenever I read about an academic paper that suggests “all prehistoric peoples were egalitarian” I know immediately that I am reading modern propaganda, because not only do we not know that, but the authors of such things also have an agenda and bias, usually one that matches either liberalism, utilitarianism, postmodernism, post-colonialism, or (most often) socialism and communism. In short, an anti-Christian bias.

And if you don’t think that is true, enroll in a modern University and test this hypothesis. Attend any class in the departments of anthropology, history, English, or really any of the humanities, and listen for commentary on organized religion or belief in the supernatural. Anything that poses as science denies the supernatural, as it should. But, many things that pose as science are not actually science. There is an ideology creeping in everywhere, and the goal of any ideology is power. Universities have a spiritual nature, too, but the spirit is not from God. And in denying God, they fear language that speaks of God. A bias against Christianity is dogma today in nearly every school, public or private. The only lens you as a student can choose is the tinted goggles of modern scholarship. The creeds of modernism demand a denial of the supernatural, which is odd, because in the end, the supernatural will deny the modern man and woman who doesn’t cooperate with the free offer of grace.

If a history professor in his hiring interview suggested that Israel was a chosen people by God selected to bring about the Savior of souls, it’s difficult to imagine a callback happening for a second interview. That alone would be immediate cause for moving on to the next candidate to find someone who assented to the belief that all cultures were equally un-chosen. In higher education, the era of Christendom is treated like a child, one that never matured, but now we know better. It almost seems like the academic world has tried to put Catholicism into a group home for the elderly, so that it could be ignored. But the primary reason it’s not talked about is not that Catholicism isn’t true, it’s that Catholicism is a constant thorn in the side of the polite power grab, and power requires its enemies to be silent.

The creed of today is more aligned with the religion of humanism or socialism than Catholicism, but it is every bit as religious in nature. Because of this, universities have become a self-congratulating, backslapping loops of nonbelievers, where the jockeys in the horse race for tenure require adhering to specific speech codes, and shutting out all comers. We are in the Grove. The nonbelievers have a standing army, and whoever comes to slay the slayer will be the next priest-king. But the thing about power is that it’s all the same. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

It’s like NASCAR (back to the main metaphor). Every power seeker is ultimately the same. It is only the king who is the Suffering Servant that is different. Every single other power-seeker preaches the opposite of the Beatitudes. Like race cars, ideology that seeks power is trying to win a race. What is the race for power? It’s the idea that there is a solution to all the world’s ills through a set of ideas, rather than through God.

In NASCAR, cars must be built a certain way. Mechanics and engineers can only massage and tweak the strict engine and chassis requirements so much before the speed tops out, as by physics there is a limit to what can be done. There’s a blocker on what can be done with these cars. It’s the same with ideology, because like stock cars, ideas cannot exceed their worldly dimensions. Materialism, in all its forms, can only use the things of this world. Thus liberalism, capitalism, socialism, scientism, techno-utopia, postmodernism, utilitarianism, and the rest all have “the solution” to win the race, to stave off pain, to bring worldly victory, to bring heaven to earth. But if there is one thing Jesus showed us is that suffering is part of our lives here. Even he who cured diseases and cast out illnesses still had to suffer, and suffer greatly because of sin in the world. The cause of all suffering is personal sin, not external enemies, and until everyone realizes that we will indeed have oppression and suffering. The remedy is to follow both Commandments, to love God first, and then to love others as Jesus loved us. This is the lesson: that we must first seek the kingdom of God, and accept what suffering may come. When God is ready he will bring heaven to earth, and not before.

The stock cars of auto racing are like the stock beliefs of ideology that block the supernatural from our lives. I do believe that there is half of us that love God (or think we do) and another half that loves others (or pretend we do), and both are firing on only three cylinders instead of all six. You must put God’s love and love of others together to exceed the restrictions of this world’s physics, and yet - and yet, like NASCAR, there are still rules to follow while doing it, called the Commandments, and the way to do so is spelled out in detail in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

But our modern gods of culture is limited by the constraints of unbelief. Unbelief in corporations, academia, and the media means we must assent to belief that we are alone, that God is not alive. So obviously, our efforts try to solve all suffering with ideas, and to break the physical and spiritual laws using ideology, which always ends up breaking all rules because it turns into a religion.

This is why we can all laugh (and cry) at the line: “In capitalism, man oppresses man. In communism, it’s just the opposite.” Power that defers to no Higher Power cannot accomplish what it sets out to do, which is to create heaven on earth. All of the kings of this world are the same people. What Democrats and Republicans in America often do not understand is that they are the same people, just as the Nazis and Communists were. It’s like any NASCAR feud. Take the skirmishes between Chase Elliott and Kevin Harvick at Bristol, for instance. Two drivers nearly duked it out over a race, while the crowd cheered it on. What are the drivers after? The Cup. The championship. The power. What does the mob want? They want whichever car they cheer for to get power, so by proxy they can feel powerful. That’s what fandom is, just like world politics. We only wave flags because we want our side to win, because our side, we believe, has the ideology that deserves to win. But whoever wins the power only matters in how they wield the power and to whom they give glory toward.

To follow this through a bit more: both drivers are pretty much interchangeable, just like the cars they drive. They have both been blessed to be in racing families and God-given talent and surely a convenient sets of fortunate happenings to get them into the elite and small field of NASCAR racing. They have, in a sense, hit the lottery of gifts in terms of auto racing. Now, if Kevin Harvick’s soul was swapped into Chase Elliott and vice versa, it’s likely the drama would be the same, because they would still be driven to win the Cup. But it would also make a good Freaky Friday style of movie, as after the swap, Kevin Harvick would realize that Chase Elliott and his mechanics are probably decent guys in the same pursuit of the Cup. Perhaps he might return to his own body full of love for his enemy and a new appreciation of the sport of racing. Better yet, a terrific ending would be when both resume racing for the greater glory of God, like the dude in Chariots of Fire, who ran for love of the game, not the trophy, as his angry opponent did).

The reason Jesus is so interesting to every generation is because he’s obviously different from every other power seeker in human history. Why is he so different? Because he’s not seeking power. He already has it. All of it. And so he’s giving it all away, all the time, and serving us all, who really don’t deserve it. He’s like the lowest guy in the Pit Crew who hands the lead mechanic the wrench and gets yelled at for doing it too slow, and then doesn’t object or complain despite being the inventor of the automobile and greatest mechanic in the universe, the Creator of all things.

Thus, reading the Bible in the light of power is illuminating, because we are living in a time where the West, that has been under the power of classical liberalism and humanism, is turning toward atheism and strange brands of Gnosticism, and quite literally every heresy since the Resurrection. For those who win power on earth, they will have their prize. They will gain the “Commanding Heights” of economies and governments - for awhile. Then when we tire of that driver, another stock car will come along, with a new ideology and flag, and will replace it. And whoever wins the Cup, inherits the fear of losing it. The shame and honor culture is ballooning now, and will continue to do so, and when power is lost, or perceived to be threatened, the scapegoats will be trotted out, as usual.

Power games are so predictable that it looks no different than the Daytona 500, except the Daytona 500 brings more joy to people, because the winner of a car race doesn’t promise heaven. As soon as the winners in society get what they want, and believe they have saved the world (if only everyone would fall into line with their plan), they begin to oppress the world in a new way. Some winners are better than others, and those are the ones that - at least nominally, like Thomas Jefferson - tip the hat to God for what they have been given here on earth. But the tip-o-the-hat to God can be used as a smokescreen for blatant power grabs, too. All ideas and movements that promise to bring heaven on earth are false. Because only God will do that, and he will do that in the last day, when Jesus returns. (Also, pro-tip: the “Rapture” as you may understand it was invented some 1800 years after Jesus. As I advise friends out of love, stop reading fiction by Dan Brown, and do the same for Tim LaHaye.)

When the Bible is read as it is not intended to be read, it becomes a dead letter. When it is read through the lens of NASCAR, you can easily see what the Assyrians, Babylonians, Herodians, and even what the Israelites are doing. But the lesson is this: no power is given here on earth except what has come from God above. This is what Jesus tells Pontius Pilate, who thinks his hard work and pluck has made him governor of Judea. This is incorrect, according to Jesus. This also explains the violence in the Old Testament, and how a tiny army could overrun Canaan, or how Abraham with three hundred men could overrun the Five Kings who capture Lot. Just as the nation of Israel gets its power from God, it is also taken away by God, through other people. Other nations appear to “take” the power, but God’s plan is somehow always working within this world, especially when we cannot understand it. In many ways, we are like a dog staring at a stock car race, having no idea why cars are going in a circle.

All power here in this world is given by God, and we should serve in humble gratitude if it comes to us, as we have free-will to reject or cooperate with God’s grace. He gives us all sufficient grace to use our intellect and will to realize that we need a savior, and no one in the end can say, “I didn’t have enough evidence to believe,” as Bertrand Russell famously imagined he would tell God after he died. Any political power or NASCAR champion must understand: the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. And the answer in both cases, winning or losing, is to become humble before God and to keep his Commandments. When Israel conquers Canaan, people fail to understand that God is granting power to Israel, and when the nation later sins terribly, and repeatedly, God takes away what was given.

This is not Prosperity Gospel interpretation, this is Humility Gospel. In the book of Job, after he loses his family and wealth, his buddies say, “Perhaps you just weren’t holy enough, and that’s why all this suffering has come your way.” That’s the Prosperity Gospel in one line. “You just weren’t holy enough to be rich.” To which I would say: who is more holy than Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate? And what happened to him? He suffered.

Even if you serve God, you may suffer in this life, and still the answer, as Jesus showed us, is to pray and bless the name of the LORD. Even in his agony, Jesus cried out to God, quoting the 22nd Psalm, which many people are confused about. I was confused. “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’” As a child I thought, “How could Jesus seem to think God left him if he is God?” The problem was that I had no idea that he was quoting the first line of a Psalm, which is a beautiful prayer for times of suffering. He was praying from the Cross, and even in his final words, he offered his spirit to God, and when he appears most defeated, most powerless, he is about to show what real power is on the third day when the women come to the empty tomb. Jesus doesn’t need power over the Romans, because he has power over what the Romans fear most, which is death.

Seriously, I urge you: get a good study Bible and read using the four senses of scripture. If we only read it as “Bible as Literature” or as breadcrumbs for cultural or archaeological or historical events (and we now define “history” much different than the sacred authors did), then it’s no wonder that confusion around the truth is making such a comeback. At least the fantasy of Norse gods addresses a need for the supernatural in people. People need religion, one that transcends this world. And if they don’t follow a religion, they will find one or invent one, and what it leads to is ideology, and always in the end, the will to power.

This is exactly what Jesus came to destroy. Because that kind of “power based” thinking is from the accuser, the divider, the father of lies. If we see the world as a power struggle, then we cannot yet say, “I was blind, but now I see.” The Christian way of seeing the world is not the same as Nietzsche or Marx or or Hitler or Stalin or Foucault or Kendi. You must put on the mind of Christ to step out of the circular “head that eats the tail” model of the world.

If you forget this, and think power is the narrow gate to heaven, you won’t see the big picture. You will forget that God exists. To forget this is folly. To forget God is the same as rejecting God. Because you will lose the context, and perhaps much else. If you are looking for single verses to mock, you may become more focused on the body than the soul, and though the body is important, it is not the only thing to be concerned with. When you lose awe, wonder, and reverence for the real power that created all things, you may forget the most important thing, which is the Creator. The danger then is to think that this world and your body is all that there is. Once that happens, you will be distracted, which is what the devil prefers. Jesus gave us clear instructions. He said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” If you think Jesus was just some nice guy, some dude who came to permit everything, you might want to re-read the Gospels carefully. We are not meant to be the king or the judge, we are asked to follow, in servant mode, as Jesus did. He is the one who can give us the rest and peace that we are really looking for, rather than the false power we imagine will bring us happiness. Don’t waste your life chasing the little kingdoms and title belts of this world, unless you are doing it for the greater glory of God, and even then, should you somehow be granted power, of any kind, remember gratitude to the real power. Because it didn’t come from you.

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For science-minded people, I think a good way to think of salvation history in the Bible is to consider it in the light of protein folding, where the same protein in “primary structure” is very different than that of “quaternary structure.” The same protein becomes something completely different in each stage, and until the “fullness of time” arrives for the Incarnation through Mary, the protein has not reached its highest state. Until a protein folds into a certain shape, it cannot perform its full function. This is a marvelous thing to study in science, and I have a hard time believing that people don’t recognize the genius of God in this amazingly simple yet incredibly complex topic of protein folding. But then I can look at a blade of grass and see the wonder and awe of God in it, so maybe I’m strange. But it is truly mind blowing that the same peptide chains can configure into different shapes that have wildly different purposes and usages. This same unfolding and folding happens in individual lives. If you ever have the joy of watching someone in addiction come to believe and receive new life, this can happen before your eyes instead of over thousands of years.

I realize this is quite a leap from reading the Bible in the light of professional wrestling, but protein folding may help us see that the world of Adam and Cain is different from that of Noah, and that of Abraham, and that of Moses, and that of Jesus. Each covenant is a “fold” toward the “fullness of time” that Jesus speaks of when he arrives.

I once heard a person describe his awakening from addiction this way: throughout his life he felt as if he was holding a piece of construction paper in front of his face, and was never able to see much. Somewhere on this sheet of construction paper were two eye-holes, and now and then, he would shift the paper so that the eye-holes lined up with his eyes for a bit. And he could see.

Once he began to pray and work toward a relationship with God, he could see more often, and now he can see, because he is in the right position. But really, he says that his sight was positioned for him. Something higher shifted him and the paper to allow the light. This is similar to how this protein folding metaphor works. The same chemical compound is present, but in order to become useful in a new way, a shift must happen. Although it is the exact same protein, it is not the same shape after the folding, and can suddenly do new things. It’s the equivalent of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Once we are turned into the right shape we unlock the next phase, or level-up, as gamers would say.

We can see this folding and changing in the sacred texts. If Adam is the primary structure of a protein, Moses seems to be quaternary structure in this metaphor. He unlocks new meaning in salvation history. Both are men, but they reach new heights as salvation history unfolds. And Jesus is infinitely beyond Moses, because it is he, God incarnate, who took on our human shape, but also made the atoms that form all proteins in the first place. He’s the second person of the three-in-one, the Trinity, who holds the gravitational constant in perfect position to allow such miracles of physics to happen repeatedly. Occasionally he even pokes his finger into the laws of nature to, say, walk on water or just walk with us in our trials, and we call these moments miracles.

In God’s plan, somehow the descendants of Cain helped lead to this fourth folding, and now we await the final folding when the marriage of heaven and earth happen. Of course we don’t understand it fully because we are not God, we are like dogs looking at humans and pondering their behavior, or like me observing the goose on the exit ramp and wondering why there are cars. Goose, dog, me - none are God, but the two animals in that list are living more in alignment with God’s will than I am.

Somehow, someway, cities and weapons and family breakdown is all allowed in God’s plan. Geese getting hit on the exit ramp is part of the plan. Our history from Cain onward of scarring and ripping God’s plentiful earth is part of the plan. The Chosen people, the Israelites attacked and killed the giant clans as part of the plan. Then they themselves were slaughtered by the Assyrians and Babylonians as part of the plan. Caesar killed a few million people in the Gallic wars as part of God’s plan that preceded the fullness of time when Jesus arrived. Since the Resurrection we’ve had ever larger wars and plagues and famines.

Personally, I can’t understand it all without the ideas of free will and redemptive suffering. I wish you luck if you are going to spend a life trying to reconcile suicide, addiction, murder, poverty, starvation, and rampant sexual sin without free will and a living God that allows us to sin out of love but yearns for us to return and repent like Prodigal Sons. It is quite clear that sin is the cause of all suffering. Yet a little voice is calling to us all, if we will pause to listen for it, and only when we do can we “fold” into the next phase, as a more spiritually mature structure, when we allow God to take control, and his will to be done for our lives. It is always the Cains of this world that create a living hell in trying to create heaven through power and increasing technology. It seems obvious at this point that the next serious famine will come when our machines stop working, or electricity fails, or we poison the water. Yet we look back at those who lived sustainably in the middle ages and “dark ages” as ignorant fools, even though they lived in harmony with nature and in small communities, like the goose family on the exit ramp (from the prior post). We rush in our cars on massive highways and if we happen to run over the goose, we don’t even stop. As William Blake said in the Proverbs of Hell, “The cut worm forgives the plow,” and also, “The busy bee has no time for sorrow.” These are not compliments, but highways to hell, and we willingly choose those paths. We assume the march of progress will save us but like Lamech and Cain, the wise of this age will be made fools. St. Paul was aware of this, as his own wisdom revealed itself as foolish.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. (1 Cor 1:18-21)

Cain never folded past his primary structure, but in the Saints you see the change, the shift, the turning, the folding - from primary to secondary to tertiary to quaternary. This is how and why people change once they fully see Christ as God himself. What seemed wise before becomes foolish once the light of faith alters the meaning of every moment and interaction, because the base fear of death is removed completely, and when that happens the kingdom of God is already among us. It’s suddenly visible even amid the suffering.

This protein folding metaphor can work on a social level or personal, because it seems that if we are stuck in sin, we have not leveled-up from primary structure. Or, if we have folded into an advanced structure, but then fall back we have gone through some “denaturing” process and need to surrender to God once again to level-up. (And of course, in the spiritual life we level-up by going down, like Dante going down into hell - by kneeling, we let go and let God fold us into the shape he wants, and prayer is the catalyst.)

As for the mark of Cain, which protects him, it’s disturbing to many that he is not killed. But the death penalty comes about when Noah’s covenant is announced, and again in the Mosaic law. The world is still in primary structure when Cain commits sin and allows it into the world. (Worth noting here is that in the book of Numbers, the Israelite law requires “cities of refuge” for accidental death (manslaughter) and wandering exiles, so God’s law shows mercy to those who haven’t committed murder in malice.)

But Cain then wanders as an exile, lost, in psychological torture apparently, turned away from God, it seems. Or perhaps he is saved? We cannot know, just as we cannot know who is saved or not, as the particular judgement of any person, besides the canonized saints, is known but to God alone.

So Cain’s descendants accomplish much, and seize power and wealth and pleasure. But there’s a problem with those pursuits. Power lives in perpetual fear of losing power. Wealth lives in perpetual fear of losing wealth. Pleasure lives in…ok you get the point.

We have a role to play in a much larger plan, and to play it properly our highest loyalty must be to Christ, not to a nation, not to a president, and not to an ideology. If you need a key to understanding the Old Testament, it is this: people sin, and things go badly, but it calls them to change, to fold into the next structure that leads them to their ultimate purpose. This is the password to unlocking the mysteries. Everyone sins. Everyone falls. But that is where the “folding” happens to allow us to fit into the puzzle of higher purpose. Abraham sins by taking two wives, and he even gives his wife Sarah to save his skin when he is fearful. He suffers for it. Moses sins, multiple times. He suffers for it. David sins so badly that even small children understand that his move to kill Uriah is an incredibly dirty mafia hit. For goodness sakes, Samson…we’ll get to Samson later, in some other series.

When the folding happens to us, where life and experience and time and age re-shape us, we can either become static in a unending prideful pity-party…or we can seek faith, hope, and charity. Even a protein like hemoglobin knows that when change happens, it works toward the purpose for which God created it, which is to carry oxygen to our cells. When it is disordered, you have sickle cell anemia and other maladies. And some proteins malfunction, just as some acorns never become oak trees. Such is God’s will. God’s way is beyond our pay grade of knowing, and even what we can know, we cannot fully understand. However, even a protein that malfunctions or an acorn that never germinates still is ready to attempt to live out its purpose. Even if deformed or broken, these “mindless” proteins and seeds know that to carry oxygen or to sprout a sapling is what they must do if the conditions are right. We are no different. Our primary structure is the joining of two cells, and then we fold into a process of mitosis in our mothers’ wombs, then we fold into the light, then we fold into childhood, fold into adolescence, fold into adulthood, parenthood, and old age. From the first cell all the way to the grave, we have the same soul. The protein in its folding does not change, but becomes capable in different ways. We are made to be human, with a body and soul, and we are made by God and for God, thus our ultimate purpose is not to make money or win honor, it is to return to eternal life with God, who is the only being that can satisfy our souls. The hunger we have for meaning is the same as our cells for oxygen. Our bellies cry out for food, and we know food exists, so we eat. Our tongue notifies us that water is needed, and water exists. And our heart yearns to have a relationship with God, with a holy family, and it too exists. When all of these other hungers, thirsts, and yearnings have corresponding solutions, so does the greatest desire of all, which is to be loved and to seek supreme happiness, which can be had, in this life and the next.

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Over the centuries an idea keeps popping back up to convince us that Jesus was just like any other teacher, that he was not divine, not supernatural, and that this myth is like any other old myth. It’s just the “dominant narrative,” so we are told, because it served the power structures of the West. But that tale doesn’t tell us much, because if it were only a story, then why didn’t any of the other myths come to “dominate” the landscape? After all, it’s just a story…right?

There was a famous book that killed the faith of many called The Golden Bough, which is a study on ancient religious rituals. C.S. Lewis writes about the impact it had on his dive into atheism in his own re-conversion story called Surprised by Joy.

Lewis’s atheism gained intellectual grounding when, at age 16, he came under the influence of a private tutor, W.T. Kirkpatrick, who was much enamored of a new work by Sir James Frazer called The Golden Bough.

The Golden Bough was the product of Frazer’s monumental survey of all the world religions and mythologies he could lay his hands on. In general, Frazer regarded religion as a human effort to make sense of the frightening and incomprehensible: thunder, pestilence, famine, death, and so on. In particular, Frazer found in human cultures a recurring story of a dying and resurrected god. This god usually was associated with agriculture and fertility—just as in the cycle of nature the plant is broken, the seed enters the ground, and life springs up, so is the god broken, buried, and restored. (From The Spiritual Odyssey of C.S. Lewis)

If there is one takeaway from Frazer’s Golden Bough book on ancient grain gods, it’s that he’s right: all religions are the same. Except for one. Just as C.S. Lewis discovered, there is one single religion that doesn’t fit the mold. Yes, they are all the same, except for the one, because there is only one true God. There are many grains of truth in most religions, but they all have a fatal flaw (or two, or five). Christ is the polar opposite of every other kingly sacrifice or grain sacrifice in human history.

If I may, briefly, take a short aside: The Golden Bough is a book that influenced many flatteners of faith, and it takes the “all religions are the same” approach to history and culture. And it’s very interesting to read. But the centerpiece of James C. Frazer’s myth argument is wrong. He is selling the very same story as the succession myth of Baal or Zeus, where the old god is slain by the new god. But if you attempt to throw Christianity into this melting pot, Jesus just climbs back out of the pot. He’s nothing like the rest of the religions, whether they are from ancient times or from our own modern cults that we pretend are not religious.

In The Golden Bough, there is a myth called “The King of the Grove” (or Rex Nemorensis) which is about a king who must be ever vigilant in fear of losing his power, because he will be killed. Someday, someone will come to the grove and take his power and his life. This should pique your interest, because national politics or office politics is the exact same thing as this ancient king of the grove, without the sword. The ruler of the coffee pot or refrigerator is the same as the ruler of a nation, just on a smaller scale. Winners must maintain a grip on power, or someone else will take it. And of course, no matter how long you hold onto power over the coffee pot or fridge, memento mori - “remember one day you will die” - and a new power will arise. Thus, to protect power beyond your own lifespan, you need more money, land, influence, supporters, cheerleaders, bullets, etc. In other words, you need to take and keep possession, and possession is the meaning of name Cain.

A few decades ago, after watching Apocalypse Now, I spent some days thinking about the myth that the movie is based on, which ties into Frazer’s myth around the king of the grove. The movie plays on this myth, even panning over a stack of books in one scene to shows what Colonel Kurtz has been reading, which contains The Golden Bough.

Now, when a movie shows a book in the background, it is a signal to watchers, with giant red flashing lights, to inform us, “This movie is somehow related to the themes of the book you see that is not so subtly displaying in the background.” There are no accidents in Hollywood. Apocalypse Now was based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, but also on Frazer and the King of the Grove myth.

Ancient kings were also priests, so the words go together in this context, because in the pagan world, religion and power go together. They still do, we just pretend we don’t have religion today. And Jesus came to shatter that illusion. Even the Israelites found out how lust for power plays out when there is an attempt to make it a religion.

The king of the grove holds power only because he has killed the prior king. This took a bit to wrap my head around at first, but here’s the verse from the myth that I sums up the problem of worldly kingship and possession of power:

Those trees in whose dim shadowThe ghastly priest doth reignThe priest who slew the slayer,And shall himself be slain.

Who does this sound like in the Bible? It sounds like Cain, or Lamech. It does not sound like Seth, who invokes the name of God. It does not sound like the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, who bore our infirmities. It does not sound like Jesus, who died on the Cross, conquered death, defeated the devil, and transformed our suffering. The last will be first. Jesus possessed nothing, and gave everything. He is a king unlike any other that has ever been conceived in myth.

Let’s break this apart. The priest-king of the grove who rules, is the murderer of the former king. In taking the grove, he had to kill the former priest-king, and now he is a “ghastly” murderer. And, this current ghastly priest-king will be killed by the next priest-king. In other words, it’s a vicious circle. When I was growing up, the “rat race” referred to people who were racing up the corporate ladder. You can see this same “king of the grove” or “king of the hill” in those pursuing the position of vice president at a company, or control of the local youth baseball board. But really, if you back up enough, this is pro wrestling in a nutshell. But it is also the story of politics, over and over and over, around the world, since Cain and his line to Lamech to Caesar to Trump and Biden.

The King of the Grove is much like King Woods of pro wrestling, and like King Woods, he was the ruler of a pathetic little fiefdom. (Interesting that “Woods” and “Grove” are kind of the same thing. Surely just a lucky coincidence.)

King Woods, the wrestler, did not need to murder to become the championship belt holder in wrestling, so he is less ghastly than the King of the Grove. However, in most wrestling matches there is some kind of cheating, so reaching the top and gaining power almost always requires moral flexibility. This is true in business, where a “being a good businessman” does not necessarily mean he is without mortal sin or good in any other way; it just means he’s good at chasing mammon. In most cases, gaining worldly power requires bending of the rules, or, in other words selling your soul. This is precisely what Jesus meant when he said, “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?” (Mt 16:26)

Why is the King of the Grove “ghastly”? It’s because he has lost his soul in gaining the grove. The base word of ghastly, appropriately, is ghost, and ghost means spirit. The bad spirit has taken over the soul of this murderer who won the grove. Those who seek and wield power in this world paint themselves into a corner. And unless those souls experience the metanoia of turning to Christ, they are lost forever. Metanoia means “beyond the mind” or “change of mind.” To escape the pursuit of power, you have to see the world differently, and to see it differently you have to put on the mind of Christ, as St. Paul says.

Whether your power is in the WWE title belt, the NBA Finals, the United States of America, the TV remote control, or a clump of trees, the game is the same. The king of the grove has killed the prior king, and the king himself will be overthrown, unless he can slay all comers. But truly, even if he keeps his grip on the grove or the title belt, eventually a new king will slay him.

This is the world of power that strives to reach the top. But getting to the top brings immense fear, unless abandonment to God is made and that power is offered up to the Creator. For the king who says, “Come at me, bro,” he has gained the whole world but lost his soul. The ghastly king can never stop striving. Even moreso, those in power must seek and sniff out enemies constantly rather than wait for them to come, because being king gives an acute sense of smell for anything that threatens the power over the grove. (If you don’t see this in America, then you need to ask yourself why do we have a massive standing army at the ready at all times, if not to maintain worldly power. Our grove is just larger, “from sea to shining sea.” We even have many songs about our grove and rules and movies and titles and flags, and ultimately we have a king, a kind of spirit, which we call a Republic, of which the current president embodies before passing it on to the next King of the Grove.)

Jesus is not this kind of king. He’s the opposite kind of king, because he is the Creator of all things. He warns us, “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” But we don’t listen. We want power over others, over nature, over God, and the addiction to fear grabs us by the chest like a monster.

Jesus is the king who simply allowed the enemies all to come, all at once, to slay him, but much to everyone’s surprise, the slayer did not become king. In fact, the slayers were all defeated. In Apocalypse Now, the dead Colonel Kurtz does not rise after death. He wasn’t a savior. He was just the current King of the Grove, or the King Woods of the WWE.

But Jesus does rise. This makes all the difference. This is the difference between him and all other religions. Yet, wait, there is one more utterly important step in understanding why he is different than all other power plays.

Jesus doesn’t “slay the slayer.”

He forgives the slayer.

He forgives his enemies.

And when the slayer comes again and attempts to kill Jesus, he rises and forgives again. And again. Every generation, the enemy whispers evil into the hearts of men, and they try to slay Jesus, the one true Priest-King, yet he cannot die. The slayers keep coming, but the true God, the living God, is never replaced. There is no succession myth. All of the kings who claim succession, or pretend at it, all of the gods of old, and all of the ideologies of today that claim to have killed god, are false. So yes indeed, all religions are the same, except for one.

They are fooling themselves. Thus, the selling must go on, the crafting of stories must happen, because God is not dead. If you want followers of your power, you need to tell people constantly in overt and subtle ways that God is dead, in ever-new messaging. Because if you stop convincing or coercing people for but a moment, they will instead listen to the law and love in their heart, and they will know that Christ is King and he is risen. Then they will follow Him instead of some Caesar.

Ok - let me leave that aside now. But my point is this: Jesus doesn’t play power games like the King of the Grove myth. He’s the anti-myth because he’s real, he lived, and he is risen.

So for our lives here in this world, where we are given a chance to re-unite with God, where we can purge our sins and pray for illumination with the light of faith, there is a greater concern than politics. There is a greater plan in the works.

So to tie this back to the goose on the side of the highway. What is out of place, and in disharmony, in the world is the difference between the brothers Cain and Seth. Cain strives to shape nature into his image, and Seth lives humbly, invoking the name of the Lord. We live in a world of Cain’s values, not Seth’s. As we have all been pulled into cities, and live in nations with weapons aimed at one another, in constant fear, we are living in a world made by Cain and his progeny. We live in the City of Man, not the City of God, which St. Augustine spent a thousand pages describing.

The difference is striking, as the goose family lives like Adam and Eve did before the Fall. The reason animals are not fallen, even if they are living in what Thomas Hobbes would call a world that is “red in tooth and claw,” the animals fulfill their duties of raising a family and seeking their daily bread (or bug). They do not have an intellect and will that lead to murder over envy and pride, as Cain did. They do not build weapons. They do not build highways and overpasses and retention ponds.

Seth seems to live like the goose. He prays, and presumably, works. Cain shows no sign of kneeling. In fact, when Jesus says “the ruler of this world” is coming, he’s referring to the devil, but he also means the Roman guards who will arrest and kill him. And the Romans, just like Americans today, truly have a lot more in common with Cain than they do with Seth. The leaders and business people and celebrities that we admire have more in common with “the ruler of this world” than with Jesus.

Which brings up perhaps the greatest question in Genesis 4, of why God protected Cain with the “mark” after he had committed murder. But the answer, I believe is simple, and it’s that God still loves Cain because he is worth saving. Cain has also created his own hell in separation from God, because he is a wanderer, an exile, and God’s protection is a penance. Furthermore, to show how God differs from much of our honor/shame ideas of justice, not only does he protect Cain, but he clearly uses him for a greater plan, as cities and technology come from Cain’s family. The punishment of being exiled to wander ruined Cain’s livelihood of farming, making it a lifelong punishment. His punishment is fitting and clearly agonizing to Cain, as he is terrorized by fear and stripped of his occupation. Most importantly, when reading Genesis there is an unfolding of events, an order, and people often look at Christ and say, “Why didn’t God act like Jesus in the Old Testament?” We’ll talk about this folding and unfolding in the next post.

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Recently, I was driving and took the exit ramp. In the grass on the left was a family of geese, a mother and her baby geese, who apparently had a home in the little retention pond at the center of the concrete jungle. The goose and its babies stood near the road of rushing traffic, and I thought, “Wow, that goose is really out of place standing there.”

Then it struck me that the goose was not out of place. The goose was the only thing in the right place. What was out of place was the massive highway and the car I was in, since the overpass had only existed for about twenty years. Cars alone have only been around for about a century. The goose was right where it was supposed to be, which was near a body of water, with grass around it, so that she could find bugs and weeds to feed to her babies. Everything but the goose was out of place. And to explain why all of the highways and cars and trucks exist is much harder than explaining the goose.

What has been a fascinating exploration for me is to go back and read Genesis regarding the expansion of technology in the world, and from who it comes from. Interestingly, it comes from Cain’s line, and Cain’s name means “possession.” This little story about Cain after the murder of Abel is one of those paragraphs in Genesis that you may feel it’s worth skipping because of the “begat, begat, begat” genealogy, but it so important to slow down or you’ll miss the bus into the next dimension of scripture. Because from Cain’s line comes cities and highways and cars and music and polygamy and swords and bullets. After Cain bashes Abel’s head in, he wanders restlessly in a land called Nod and starts his own family. On the face of it, Cain’s descendants have incredible accomplishments.

Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad; and Irad was the father of Mehujael, and Mehujael the father of Methushael, and Methushael the father of Lamech. Lamech took two wives; the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. Adah bore Jabal; he was the ancestor of those who live in tents and have livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the ancestor of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah bore Tubal-cain, who made all kinds of bronze and iron tools. The sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah. (Genesis 4:17-22)

This little section of Genesis 4 is anything but a yawner, because much else comes from Cain’s line down the road. The boring genealogies that we skip have treasures in them if you follow who begat who in the Bible. Furthermore, the names themselves have great meaning, as they are more than just some username chosen at random. I will consciously avoid diving into Genesis 6 here where the giant clans come from, because that will lead me astray. But let’s just explore Cain’s line a bit.

In terms of what we value today, Cain’s family accomplishments fit exactly what modern parents brag about to one another. From Cain’s line we get the first city, permanent housing (single-family tent homes), and domesticated animals. That alone is amazing. But then we get music, too: the arts come from Cain’s line. And lastly, perhaps most importantly, from Tubal-Cain, we get bronze and iron, which means blacksmithing for building tools and, more ominously, weapons. In other words, Cain’s line is where technology comes from, which most of us worship today. Oh, and we get the first instance of a bad marriage with Lamech, who has two wives. So polygamy enters the Bible initially here, without much fanfare. People often make the mistake in the Old Testament of seeing polygamy and thinking it’s a free pass, that it’s acceptable, and of course it never says that. In fact, it’s always a disaster. Whoever has more than one wife suffers disorder in their house, from Abraham to Jacob to David to Solomon. Never, anywhere, does it suggest that multiple wives leads to anything good. In fact, Isaac has the one model marriage of the patriarchs, and his story is quite happy (aside from the whole trick on Esau by Jacob and Rebekah). But the first polygamist? Lamech? Well, Lamech is a straight-up lunatic sociopath. More on him in a bit.

Now, you can pass this by and say, “How ridiculous - one family line could not create all of these things.” And in saying so, you will miss the whole point because you’re reading it like a science book instead of a soul book. This is what happens when you don’t stop and think: “What is this book trying to say here?” Because everything in chapter 4 of Genesis has many layers of meaning. In fact, every chapter of Genesis does. (I think what surprises me most today is that the same person who can see four layers of meaning in something like Squid Game cannot see past the surface level literal layer in Genesis. It’s like they can’t apply deep reading if its scripture, but can go full Jacques Derrida on rottentomatoes.com. But I digress.)

Let’s resume.

After Cain and Abel, Adam has another son named Seth, which is the line that leads to Abraham, and eventually Mary and Jesus. After Seth is born, religion becomes a thing. Notice that religion did not come from the line of Cain. This is important.

All we learn about Seth is that after his birth “…people began to invoke the name of the Lord.” (Gen 4:26) How interesting. Like so many things in Genesis a single phrase is freighted with meaning. Recall that all of these stories had to come down in oral tradition, so they couldn’t be as verbose as I am in posts like this that are way too wordy.

So from one branch from Adam we have technology, art, cities, polygamy, murder, and from the other we get…faith. Basically, we get humility before God in the line of Seth. That’s his only “accomplishment,” if we want to call it that.

Worth noting is that farming seems to be assigned to Adam, as he had to get his bread from the sweat of his brow. In the story of Cain and Abel we hear about farming of both animals and plants, because the thing that made Cain angry was Abel’s offering of an animal from his flock, which was chosen over Cain’s fruit “from the ground,” meaning some kind of grain. After Eden, we seem to have an semi-idyllic period of farming. Then comes the murder of Abel, and all hell breaks loose. Like, literally. After the murder comes the march of progress and technology.

You could say that Cain is a real go-getter from the start and there doesn’t seem to be much happening in his family around invoking the name of the Lord. He and his children are busy. They seem to have a lot of goals and they hit their goals. In so many ways, Cain’s family line is a model and ideal of all that modern high achievers seek for their offspring.

If you were talking to a modern Cain, you would likely say, “Cain, you must be proud of your children and grandchildren.” I suspect he would agree. He would be very proud. Don’t we all say that today? “I’m proud of you, son.” We are always talking about our pride over accomplishments. “I’m proud of you for working hard.” “Congratulations on landing on the moon, Neil, the whole nation is proud of you.” Or, “Mr. Oppenheimer, we at the U.S. Army are real proud of all you’ve done in helping us build the first atomic bomb.”

And being “proud” is the problem, because pride really, really likes power. This is one of the words that we mistake as a good thing.

One thing that always gave me a weird spidey-sense in the Gospels is when God says he is “well-pleased” over his son, Jesus. Even as a child, at Jesus’ Baptism and Transfiguration, God says “well pleased.” He does not say “proud”.

At his Baptism:

And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”(Mt 3:16-17)

At the Transfiguration:

While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved;with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” (Mt 17:5-7)

Why does God say “well pleased” instead of “proud”? Is this an accident?

It’s obvious that this wording is specifically avoiding the language we would normally use for a child that we are excited about. There is a very careful wording here to avoid using the word proud.

I could always feel in these events that there is something different about being well pleased versus being proud. And it seems rather obvious once you realize that the root sin of everything is pride that it is far better to be pleased about a person, than proud about them. The difference of being pleased about your team winning the Super Bowl instead of being proud is that in the first case, you’re content with the beauty of the game, perhaps satisfied with seeing a great game that happened to fit your taste. In the second case, with pride you feel superior for your team winning. This is subtle but enormous in consequence.

Because pride is what Cain has. When sin was “crouching at his door,” he did not master it by humbling himself, he opened the door and let sin inside. His hurt pride led him to wrath, and wrath, in turn, puts him into a holy terror. Cain also has a terror in him because after the murder of Abel, he feels cursed by God and expects to be murdered himself:

“Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” Then the Lord said to him, “Not so!Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. (Gen 4:14-15)

His terror is softened by God’s mercy. With God’s mark upon him, Cain is protected, but he’s not free of his sin, nor does he seem to be changed. There is no reference to repentance of any kind. Rather than repent and kneel, Cain’s descendants seem to show no humility for this gift of grace. Lamech, his great-great-great grandson, takes this exemption as a a license to kill. Because he brags about killing two men. Without remorse, Lamech says:

I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me.If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” (Gen 4:23-24)

Thus you have the full-blown sociopath in Lamech, who feels immune from morality altogether. He’s got multiple murders and multiple wives. Incidentally, this is what I see as the fundamental problem of “Once saved, always saved,” because if you are saved and need no further corrections to your behavior, then you can be Lamech. And by the way, Lamech is a perfect example of a Biblical character showing us exactly how not to act. If we need to have our villain wear a black cowboy hat, Lamech is one of those characters.

Once you go back and read about the Fall in Genesis, and follow the line of Cain, who first sought power by murder due to his wounded pride, a picture of a world full of pride, sin, sex, and violence begin to take shape. His descendants have an increasing urge to control nature via technology and knowledge. There is strong economic drive in the line of Cain to gain wealth and influence. Thus, eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is passed on to us all through some kind of cosmic inheritance, and yet anyone can reject evil. We are fallen yet not ruined. We are damaged but not beyond hope, because we see Seth on the other side of Adam’s line taking a very different approach to life: he is not hammering the world to his will, he is invoking the name of God.

So why does Cain’s line feel so compelled to invent, explore, study, seek, as opposed to say, kneeling to pray? Why do cities and highways and guns come from Cain but not Seth? It’s because of pride and the fear that stems from it. There is fear of the Lord, also known as awe and wonder, and then there is fear of losing what we have “won” here in this life. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom because it will bring you to kneel and pray. Fear of others, fear of losing what you have, is the beginning of a vicious circle, the rat race, and it is the gateway to sin.

Cain has “won” a license to sin, and his family uses this badge of honor to reject God altogether. But then his descendants attempt to “gain the whole world,” which Jesus warns us against, because it’s a trap. Whatever you gain you can then lose to another, and in the process you will lose your soul.

Whoever has much is fearful of losing it, and thus needs more power to push the fear away. Lamech laughs at God, saying that he will be avenged seventy-seven times by God if anyone tries to hurt him. Lamech’s comment is even referred to by Jesus later on in the Gospels. Jesus references this same number. It’s not a coincidence. Because in way, Lamech is right. God will forgive him seventy-seven times. God will forgive us all that many times. That’s exactly what Jesus tells Peter. But the whole point is that it shouldn’t take us seventy-seven times to wise up and stop committing the same sins. Imagine how depressing this must have been for Peter to hear:

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the churchsins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seventimes.” (Mt 18:21-22)

Unlike Lamech, Jesus tells Peter that he must constantly take the lowest seat, the humble place, and forgive. This is difficult to do. Why? Because of pride. Because we want to be Lamech or Tony Soprano, in our own way. We want to win. And you see this play out in the wider world, far beyond the individual.

Fear is why the wealthy nations must keep their foot on the head of weaker nations and peoples. Really, this explains any sin, from racism to theft to adultery to sodomy to murder. All sin is a lack of trust in God. All sin is a rejection of God for the pride of the self and fear of not getting what we think we want. But Christ is the king who trusts, rather than fears. So for everyone in the last century who wanted to flatten Christianity into “just another religion”, like Joseph Campbell or James C. Frazer or the New Atheists, they are missing the whole point.

This is why Jesus is different. This is why Christianity is different from every other religion. This is why God does not act like a professional wrestler or politician.

To say that all ancient religions are all just a replay of the myth of “the hero with a thousand faces,” or that ancient agricultural sacrifice was the same thing as Christ on the cross, is to miss the whole purpose. They cannot see yet because they haven’t asked Christ to rub the healing mud into their eyes so that they see what and who he really is.

Christ rules in love, not in fear. If you are being told that you must believe or else you’ll go to hell, you are hearing the completely wrong motive to believe. Because fear is not the reason to believe, it’s the thing that gets conquered when you come to believe. Fear of the Lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom, but love of God leads to eternal life, and that joyful life can begin today. And this doesn’t make sense until you have the experience of blind Bartimaeus, who only knows one thing, and one thing only, and that is that Jesus healed his sight and his soul. “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” (Jn 9:13-25)

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Do you know what I really like about the Old Testament? It’s what a lot of people hate about it. But I think most people hate it because they don’t read it with the four senses of scripture. Instead, they pluck out one-line and hold it up like a dead rat, and say, “Look what I found! Look at how awful this book is! Can you see this thing?” I liked doing this, too, when I was dead, before the change happened.

But readers do this plucking of the rat without understanding the larger structure, because rats exist even in the most beautiful buildings. The Chrysler building surely has some rats in it, but we don’t go to New York to see the rodents.

What I like about the Old Testament is that the characters are not portrayed as perfect. They all sin. Every one of them. In fact, they are portrayed as human, very human. This is why I think so many people stumble while reading the Old Testament. They are expecting spotless heroes, just like we expect in our politicians now. In the growing honor/shame culture of America, we forgot how to read. We forgot nuance. We are like children who need one cowboy in a white hat and one in a black hat so we know who is good and bad in the Bible. But the Bible is more like Shakespeare than your average network TV drama. Grey’s Anatomy and Chicago Fire have the depth of a baby pool, but the Bible goes down into the Mariana Trench in our souls.

This is why I see professional wrestling everywhere today. Every news organization has its saints and villains, just as the WWE does with its characters, such as the clean-cut John Cena versus the greasy Undertaker. This is also why I think of pro wrestling as a more serious endeavor than modern news and politics. Because wrestling doesn’t pretend to be what it’s not. It doesn’t pretend at any other motive than entertainment, and is a satire on our own prideful lust for power. Thus, it is pure. It’s pure in its absurdity. It’s ridiculous. I don’t watch it regularly, but I find it more authentic than what our media and politicians are pretending at. Pro wrestling is the Days of Our Lives soap opera for boys, and some men. Like me.

Maybe there is the fifth sense of reading scripture, in that you must read in terms of power. More specifically, you have to read it under the light of living in fear vs. living in trust. I’ll use pro-wrestling here to describe what I mean, but you could use whatever sport you like. Use Battlebots or professional pickleball instead, if that’s your thing.

But when your last day arrives, there is as much at stake in the outcome of presidential politics as there was when the wrestler King Woods (my personal favorite) lost his crown to the evil Roman Reigns.

I know this sounds extreme, but hear me out.

Modern geopolitics is every bit as much smoke and mirrors as Monday Night Raw or Friday Night Smackdown. No. Correction: geopolitics must use far more smoke and mirrors, since wrestling’s kingdom is in a patchwork of rented arenas around the country, and the TV broadcast uses very focused camera shots on small crowds assembled tightly so that it appears to be large. The illusion of importance is key.

This is a modern sacrilege to say, because I don’t venerate politicians. To say that politics is not that important will trigger people, because it is perhaps the most worshipped idol of the 21st century. But let me be the first in line to disrespect modernity’s sacred cows. If there is a list to be on for sedition against the current ideologies, I’d like to have a row in that database. I don’t worship politicians, celebrities, or movements that reject right worship and non-heretical faith in Christ. I may be many things, and have committed many sins, but I don’t intend to take my last breath as an apostate to the one true King.

When America goes the way of Sumeria and Rome and the Mayans and Imperial Spain, nothing will change in terms of who is the real power over us all, for there is only one. If the fifty states are balkanized and dis-united into fifty nations, the same King will remain. Division is ugly, but it will happen at some point, because we’ve already allowed the accuser and deceiver into our nations, cities, houses, and hearts.

The spirit of a nation can obey God or reject God. Nations choose their course just like individual people choose their actions. Free-will is the gift God grants for us to choose our own ending. In either case, for a person or a nation, the choice to turn to God must be made, and of course it all starts on the personal level. The more citizens who turn away from God, the more a nation will turn away. Thus, whether it is President Biden or President Trump (or whoever), they will have my respect as the manager of America, because I learned long ago to give respect to rank rather than the person wearing the rank. But no president is the ultimate authority. I can render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but I don’t care who Caesar is if he rejects God. If he or she leads us into temptation and delivers us unto evil, there we must part. A Caesar who thinks power is God or denies the existence of a living God cannot be followed when it comes to decision time, because the ultimate decision that we must make is not about this life, but eternal life.

If our social managers turn away from God, then believers cannot play the game of “follow the leader” any longer, for there is only one leader of all earthly leaders, and that is God. Jesus said, “Follow me.” This implies a choice, not a forced march. This has been established as the way, as Jesus said we must follow him, and not earthly power. The Bible is full of examples on how to do this as well when the times comes. From the three stubborn boys that Nebuchadnezzar threw in the furnace, to the Maccabee brothers, to every Apostle and martyr in Church history. We have many examples to review and emulate in the martyrology of the Church. Most obviously, Jesus himself showed the way. Peter, too, even spells it out in Acts 5 when they were arrested for violating the speech codes and thoughtcrime of first century Jerusalem. You should immediately see parallels of this today, as we are once again instructed not to “teach in this name” of Jesus, as it is said to be a micro-aggression or colonialist or offensive. Peter says, “Sorry, not sorry. We have a higher authority than human resources or the online mob.”

And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest questioned them, saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.” (Acts 5:27-32)

Understanding where the real power lies is critical. It is not in pro wrestling. It is not in presidents. It’s not even in the nation with the most naval destroyers and nuclear warheads. This is where a disconnect happens for people, in misunderstanding how to read the Bible.

There is a disconnect between those who worship the government and those who worship God. How you rank power structures changes everything in how you view the world, and for everyone who preaches on “power differentials” today, they almost always have their ranking out of order, because God is never mentioned in their ranking, the absence of which makes their entire preaching moot and empty of meaning. This is why every ideology fails in the end when it tries to assume authority and dictate its version of morality: it has no authority, nothing solid as a foundation. Oddly, we cannot know God fully or comprehend the idea of God, and we can’t fully know his ways, yet God still gives bedrock to our lives here in the material world. This is because we can know that he is infinitely greater than us and all his creation, yet we also know that he is wired right into our bodies and minds and souls. What the idea of God does for us is stop the nightmare of “infinite regress” where we keep asking, “What came before the earth? What came before the universe? What came before God?” It stops at God, the Creator. Interestingly, the band AC/DC had a pair of songs that I think illustrate this point. “Highway to Hell” and “Who Made Who?” are related, because as soon as you start to question the Creator of all things and who made you, then you will be on the highway to hell, which is just separation from God. I truly cannot stress enough how important the concept of God being the first thing is for your mental health. God created the world “out of nothing” (ex nihilo). If you’ve heard the saying, “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” it’s essential to know that fear in this context really refers to “wonder and awe,” which is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. If you lose that wonder and come to believe that chaos was first, then fear sets in, and everything else that comes along with it, like depression and lust and greed, well, you know - all the rest of the deadly sins.

But most importantly for this series, is the need for power. In our world, we think of power as rank in society.

You cannot make it through basic training in the military without coming to know what “respecting the rank” means. “Render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar,” as Jesus said. This sums up the idea well. We have a duty to obey the law. Paying taxes is right and just, so long as the nation is right and just. For a nation to be worthy of obedience, however, this duty only applies if the nation doesn’t violate the real law, the Commandments, or ask us to reject Jesus’ command to “Follow me.” You can even distill this down to natural law if you’re not inclined to religion, and plenty of atheists believe in natural law because it can be arrived at by reason. Natural laws should be the basis for national laws. But if national laws demand abandonment of natural law, which comes from God, the first thing, then we have an uncrossable chasm. At that point our loyalty must be unequivocally pointing toward God and not a President or any founding document, no matter how yellowed and venerable it looks. Within any nation, there is a battle going on, just as there is within every heart.

And this war is a spiritual one.

As for the concerns of the day (from the Covid tales about a bat, to “Who blew up the Nordstream pipeline?”, to how we should react to the Russia-Ukraine war) these are all secondary concerns to the kingdom of God. This sounds insensitive, but it’s actually the most sensitive thing you can do. Because all of the news of the day is not seeking the City of God, it’s seeking the City of Man.

The kingdom of God is among us, we are told. But are we looking for it? Are we living in it? The kingdom of God is here, but not yet. That’s a hard concept to grasp (maybe harder than ex nihilo). The kingdom will come, yet it’s here. What?

Clearly the worldly things impact bodies and souls, but still Christ says the kingdom is among us. That’s because HE is the kingdom, the way, the path, the gate, living water, the bread, the priest, the prophet, the king.

One of the strangest things is to realize that the promised Messiah would bring a kingdom to earth, here among us, and for those who look around and say, “He must not have been the Messiah? Where is this Kingdom?” But the kingdom is here. It is the Church. The Body of Christ exists. The Church is in all nations, as promised, and as promised, the violent and fearful try to topple it. In every generation, the Church is attacked, but it rebounds, retreats, reforms, repeats. Christ said the kingdom is under attack. From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence,and the violent take it by force. (Mt 11:12) The presidents and prime ministers and Caesars and educators can all take a number. Get in line.

This is the kingdom of the counter-culture, of Christ, because his kingdom is built on a different foundation from that of all other kings and clubs and governments. This is the kingdom where trust is greater than fear, because at the root of all power politics is fear. At the root all all pride is fear. The idea of fig leaves should ring a bell here.

This is the way that Jesus intends for us to see the world, in trust rather than fear, and any worldly king that doesn’t recognize the real king and source of earthly power must reject God in favor of his power, which requires fear to maintain. And who should our trust be in? Not in worldly power. Not in promises from people or serpents. Ultimate trust must be in one thing, and one thing only, and that the creator who made us for him and to be loved by him. When we understand that we are created, then we know that our needs will be met by God if we trust in him. This is why Jesus needs so little. He says, “Consider the lilies of the field” who are adorned greater than King Solomon (or King Woods). The beauty of creation far exceeds our human fashion and pomp and circumstance.

He reminds us that we only need to request “our daily bread,” which is Christ himself, the Bread of Life. Furthermore, he says, “foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Yet does Jesus sound concerned about his lack of money or shelter? No. This is radical. It’s extreme. And he’s right.

It’s stunning for us to hear such a thing, especially for those of us who grew up in a time of plenty, and learned about Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of self-actualization, or Tony Robbins’ will-to-power, or Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy’s argument that we can shape the universe into our own image and likeness.

Jesus says, “No” to all of them.

Jesus says, “Stop trying to create the world and trust in God who already created it.” But it’s worth noting that the fox still has to dig out its den, and a bird must create its nest. Abandonment to Divine Providence does not mean that you need not do anything. It doesn’t mean you can lay around all day so that you can be spiritual all the time. Rather, it means fulfilling the duties to your station in life and letting all other worries be offered up to God. It means living for God, like a fox or a bird glorifies creation by doing what is proper for them. A fox or bird has total trust in the Creator, yet these animals must still perform their work. A nest doesn’t build itself. A den won’t dig itself. Thus, work is good, as are the created things themselves, so long as they are used rightly. We are no different. This is at the heart of the teaching of the Church, based on what Jesus said to his followers. Bodies are not bad. Work is not bad. We are fallen and compromised, but can be redeemed, and all of us, every human being, has sufficient grace on offer - an open-ended gift - that can be the ladder we use to climb to heaven.

Fear is not what foxes and birds rely on, they live freely, like children, and trust in their Creator. Only humans fear and prepare to fight in a zero-sum game, because of the Fall. We can prove our fears by simply turning on the news, and see the fingerprints of Original Sin everywhere. Fear is why we build highways and bombs and smart phones, because we don’t think God will provide for us. If we cling to our lives instead of God, then we begin to be fearful, and that is when power becomes the game, and it is a game of total obsession once it begins.

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I think the day the canary died in the coal mine was when, in 1994, Dr. Jocelyn Elders announced to the world that masturbation was a good thing, even necessary, telling one of the greatest lies in history. Every man in the listening world was nodding along, because if science said the old morality was dead, men were more than ready to agree. I was probably eating a Little Debbie Nutty Buddy when I heard it, or drinking a 32-ounce Big Buddy from the local mini-mart.

Now, Dr. Elders lost her job for that after a big kerfuffle, but the word was out: chastity was a sin, not a virtue. The last, old fuddy-duddy rule that Christianity had lifted up regarding lust was being pulled down and paved into a parking lot. This commandment came from the tower of Washington D.C., from the anointed Surgeon General, who knocked down one of the last fences of morality. What Woodstock had not already opened the gate to, we had finally taken down the last blocker. (For anyone familiar with Chesterton’s fence, you can see that this relates directly. And if you are familiar with Chesterton’s fence and how we foolishly have removed all the fences because of our assumption of knowledge, then you may also see how the story of Chesterton’s wall relates as well.)

The fatal flaw of science is when it turns into a source of spiritual direction is the same flaw with every other ideology: it doesn’t believe in God. I mean, of course it cannot, because pure science is a study of the natural world. Science is beautiful and good at finding the truth when it sticks to experimentation and data. But once the crossover is made into morality, it becomes dangerous, because to misunderstand that souls exist means missing half the person. The ideology of “scientism” happens whenever you hear morality lessons starting with the words “Studies show...” The devil attacks the body, and places thoughts in our heads, because that’s all that he can affect. Without our defenses of prayer and fasting, we are sitting ducks. Science doesn’t believe in God, and therefore doesn’t understand the devil. But the devil understands science just like he can quote scripture. We all know the devil can quote scripture, so it follows that he can twist organic chemistry and molecular biology as well to his purposes.

What we all forget is this: the devil is smarter than us. All of us.

Angels and demons are pure intellect, and for us to think we “know better” is exactly what he wants. (Watch the movie Nefarious for an accurate portrayal of demonology.) He plants thoughts in our heads in order to deceive, distract, divide, and drive us to despair. And the best thought he can plant in our heads is that he does not exist, and neither does God, and neither does your eternal soul. This is like the reverse of the parable of the mustard seed. Instead of a seed being planted and growing into a great shrub that houses many birds, the devil just brings us the bird droppings. There is no growth, just death.

Now, the devil is going to devil, since that’s his job. God allows this, to give us temptations and trials, to make us choose. People don’t like this idea, because why would a good God allow this? The only problem with a purely material world is that you have no explanation for evil, and so we pretend that wealth and education and sexual freedom will solve the problem, but as I’ve just gone on at length here about, the abundance of food and sex do not solve the problem of sin at all. And eventually, no matter how much you eat, whether it’s sugar or protein, and no matter how much sex you have, the Big Empty God-shaped hole in your heart still needs filling.

Free-will is the manner in which we choose grace or sin, and when you have a Surgeon General come out like Moses’ on Capitol Hill to announce that sexual sin no longer exists, the people get the keg, the condoms, the Hustler mag, and the Golden Calf out of storage immediately. Once the gate is removed, the sheep wander, and wander we have. Jonah’s jaunt to Nineveh could be done to any average midwestern American town at this point, but unlike the king of Nineveh, no one would respond by wearing sackcloth and sitting in ashes.

So food can’t save us, and nor can sex. But like food, sex can be used for good purposes or bad ones, and the modern idea of sex as freedom has destroyed millions of marriages and families.

Ask anyone who has had many partners if its true that sex has brought fulfillment. Has lots of sex brought them peace? The answer is no. We all know these people. They are everywhere. The constant pursuit of the next partner makes for a life of lying and surface relationships. Sex by itself is basically as deep and meaningful as what the paint shaker at Home Depot experiences in its gyrations. I don’t know many people that would watch a video of the paint shaker at Home Depot, but that is essentially what pornography is. The same goes for one night stands and quickies with strangers. In other words, sex is removed from its actual purpose of making children. It’s really wild that this declaration, so obvious, is wrongthink today, but the purpose of sex is obviously reproduction, and it is pleasurable in order that we reproduce.

Try as you might to explain it away, the purpose of sex is reproduction. Pleasure is not the primary purpose. This is hard to accept today, but realize that you would not ever be reading this if pleasure was the only purpose. Immense amounts of money go toward papering over this fact, but every day, babies are born, popping out and wailing to prove the purpose of the act. “It’s me,” they cry. “I’m the reason you’re horny. Surprise!” The intention is to unite a husband and a wife, and to make babies. It’s funny that penguins understand this but people with smart phones do not.

In fact, anyone who continues this charade of trying to trade sex for meaning like it was a stock market finds themselves more lost than drug addicts in the end. The wreckages that follows a life of random sex is as bad as that of alcohol, and so often they go together. Surely we all know porn addicts and incurable strip joint patrons. Watching their efforts to find another partner is like Dexter, the serial killer, searching for his next victim. But the constant pursuit of sex makes for a pathetic chase scene, not that different from scenes in The Walking Dead where zombies pursue Michonne or Maggie. It’s just all so shallow that watching it makes you sad. It makes you sad for the both the pursued and the the pursuer when you know that the lies used in the wooing will all fall flat in the end.

How many country songs cover this state? Loneliness, it’s really something. There’s such different kinds of sadness. I mean, Old Yeller is sad, but not nearly as sad as loneliness that leads to sin. Requiem for a Dream is a drug movie that follows this arc of desperation for euphoria, but unlike Old Yeller, where you are sad about the wholesome doggy whose goodness felt nearly transcendent, you feel shattered and destroyed in the sadness of a life drugs and sex that walk the characters into a living hell, and ends with Jennifer Connelly reduced to a stage dog dancing for more drugs.

Sex becomes a closet pursuit for the addicted, really, worse than many drugs. It may excite the flesh for a bit, but sooner or later, like any fix, you need more, and the more you need, the more vicious the cycle gets, until it becomes a circular hell (which I’m certain is why Dante made the rings of hell circles, because we all choose the vicious circle that we occupy). After a while, the pursuit gets weird and strange as what formerly satisfied no longer delivers the punch that the lust requires to get off again. This obsession is the secret addiction of millions of American men, who should all proceed en masse to join an Exodus 90 group or a Strive 21 program to break these poisonous soul ties. Oh, and start saying Deliverance Prayers (for yourself and your immediate family - just don’t start dabbling in delivering others…bad idea).

Oh, you say you don’t believe in the devil? That is all childish nonsense. Well, that’s because he’s already got you. If you don’t believe in the devil, he’s already bought your soul. His first tactic, number one, is to convince you that he doesn’t exist. And while you do his bidding, he won’t bother you. It’s only once you start to fight it that you will begin to know that he is real, and so is God.

This idea of freedom by way of sex is the shiny apple we’re told to eat, with the promise that it will give us knowledge, make us like God. The reality is that we all find out that what we lost can never be restored, and sex is like a new car on the dealership lot, shined up and waxed. (It’s interesting how shiny things always seem to fit so well with sin.) Within weeks, a new car is covered in salt and dirt from the highways. Before long it’s like every other car on the street and we’re still the same body and soul riding around in it, often eating fast food while we listen to songs about sex.

So many are desperate to prove that sex can fulfill them, but like a man who buys a new pickup to turn heads, in a few years he will become disillusioned with that machine and need a newer, younger truck. Or if he can’t afford the newer vehicle, he’ll start adding aftermarket bolt-ons until it starts looking cartoonish. Or worse: from the start, the new car was a lemon, and it was never what he thought it would be, but now the debt is hanging around for years.

This is why virginity in the ancient world was highly prized. They knew what we have forgotten. Sex sells, yes, but it’s way oversold. There is more to life, and just as Plato and Socrates and Confucius and Marcus Aurelius and Jesus all told us, the higher pursuit of virtue far exceeds the desires of the flesh. Even the Epicureans taught that much.

The shiny apple is always an illusion. Good things come from self-denial more often than they do from indulgence. But because of media and a bad notion of freedom, chastity has been given a bad name. What may shock you is to learn that people pursuing chastity have greater friendships than people who see themselves as raging balls of desire in constant need of sex. Virtuous friendship, in fact, requires it. Once lust is removed entirely, virtuous friendship can soar. But how can you remove lust?

Let’s go to the replay. In Genesis, once Joseph goes to Egypt, and after he gets out of prison for his sweet dream interpretation, he has a job. But the boss’s wife wants him. In a predicament, she advances on him, and what does he do to thwart the advances of his boss’s wife?

He flees.

Now for most sin, you pray and fight, as the Spiritual Combat demands us to do. But for lust? No, you flee. You turn away.

Joseph illustrates the successful method of handling lust. In the Navarre Catholic Study Bible, there is a great comment about this story, from St. Caesarius of Arles, that is applicable today:

"Joseph flees in order to escape...Learn, therefore, to flee if you want to win out against the attack made by lust. Do not be ashamed to flee if you want to attain chastity....Among all the fights a Christian has to engage in, the most difficult are those of chastity; here the struggle is a daily one, and victory is difficult. In this a Christian cannot but have daily acts of martyrdom." (Sermones 41, 1-3)

Also, a note is shared on this same story from St. Josemaria Escriva, who is very much to the point: "Don't show the cowardice of being 'brave'; take to your heels!" (The Way, p. 132)

Joseph didn't have a smart phone or a laptop, but the same tactic can apply and work for lust today. Turn off the device. Block the site or the person. Flee from it.

Do you want to know a secret? People in monogamous relationships and single people practicing chastity have a secret. It’s really simple. No, it’s not that they are not tempted. Surely, they are tempted as much as anyone, or used to be. But the big secret is that they avert their eyes when lust arises, and this becomes a daily practice until it’s not even a challenge. Hit your knees and pray. When temptation comes, pray. Always. It’s the same for quitting drinking. Prayer works. Along with that, you can use St. Ignatius’ 14 Rules of Discernment. They are the Swiss Army knife of learning and putting this spiritual fight into practice.

When chastity is pursued, you stop sizing up everyone for sex. “Oh, look at her,” becomes, “Look to Christ.” Seriously, observe your horny friends. Do a little people watching. They are not at peace. The fruit of chastity appears un-shiny to the untrained eye. But once you put down the hash pipe of modern culture, with its sex obsession, and see people as made in the image and likeness of God, who deserve love and respect, the world looks different. Chastity, that old-fashioned idea, will free you in ways you never knew, because what you think you need is only something you want. The Buddhists understand what Lainey Wilson was saying in her country song, "Things a Man Oughta Know”:

“If I can’t have it, I can go without.”

Exactly, Lainey. That’s something George Costanza oughta know, and me as well. That is a thing we all oughta know.

Learning to live this way in all things is true freedom, because you leave your personal Egypt, no longer a slave to the passions. If you can sit in a room and not “want” something you are beginning to understand what the pursuit of holiness is all about. The substitutes we use in place of God are never what we really want. They can be good things, but not if they are the highest thing, the highest desire for our life.

The only thing you need is God. This is how you surrender to win. Sex? If it happens, great. If not, great. Job knows how this works:The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away: Bless the name of the Lord. As some recovering alcoholics like to say, “It’ll work out or…it’ll work out.”

In other words, you’ll be fine either way. Recall Job as often as possible, as he summed up the proper humble mindset of a believer in the living God.

Obviously, most of us learn this after eating the fruit. Much later, after eating from the tree of knowledge, we say, “Oh, I get it now. Yes, I should have listened to my mother or father or that old person who told me this earlier when I just wanted to ignore them.”

The problem today is that the elders have gone off the rails. Most of the Baby Boomer and the following generations grew up in a time of unparalleled affluence, which is like the express line to hell. Money and comfort lead to these ideas. If you are seeking religious truth from the Bible, follow the money. Follow the power. Follow the comfort. The Israelites get rusty real fast as soon as they are exposed to these oxygen rich environments of wealth, power, and comfort.

The indoctrination from schools and media assure us, even compel us, to believe that sex is the key to happiness, so that we act like the Bergens in the movie Trolls, who must eat a troll to be happy. The whole movie is about the Bergen prince unlearning the cultural lies he’s been indoctrinated into.

This is why we are at the point where the next St. Agnes will rock the world, because once teenage girls realize that the culture is lying, watch out. One Agnes can turn into a billion real fast.

This, I believe, is God’s plan with social media, because the mimetic desire of human instinct kicks in fast. Once kids realize that sex and identity politics is an empty cup, and after they spend another decade observing the results of their parents’ moral failures in pursuing their false “freedom,” the pursuit of holiness will become radically appealing.

But here’s the thing that the Catholic Church teaches that no one wants to admit: the Church teaches that sex is good. In fact, it teaches that all of creation is good, but that we misuse it. The world, and matter, is not evil. Not at all. One of the most mangled ideas of ex-Catholics is this equation that sex = bad. That has never been the position of the Church. Ever. What an eye-opener it would be if men and women would turn off YouTube and Hulu for a moment to read Theology of the Body, but I won’t hold my breath. It’s far easier to believe that the Catholic church hates women and sex. But if you want to understand the Church’s actual sexual teaching, and stop taking in the lies that people speak about the Church, it requires actual reading the sources rather than just assuming the lies. If I want to learn about a product, the last thing I would do is take the word of the competitor’s salesman, but that is exactly what we choose to do. FUD is a an acronym for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, and it is a tactic of sales to grease the customer with these three things in order to squeeze a purchase order out of them. Nowhere is FUD used more than in portrayals of Church teaching on marriage, sex, and the body. I would challenge anyone to give an honest reading of Theology of the Body and then say (without lying) that the Church hates sex or is anti-sex. The Church opposes sin. It does not oppose sex.

When we use our bodies in right relation to God, we find the good and the beautiful. This core concept of Christianity has been discarded in favor of our desire for the apple, a sugary snack that satisfies the body but not the soul. We’ve traded short-term arousal for drinking from the vine that gives life. The best advice I received was not to trust my emotions, but to follow the movements of my heart. The shelf-life of an emotion is brief, often just a few days. The movements of my heart, however, take me either away from or toward God, and that is where the discernment must happen. The longest trip we ever take is from our head to our heart, which seems to me another way of understanding that we must move away from the tree of knowledge and toward the tree of life.

Luckily, we get another chance. Jesus doesn’t shoot the wounded; no, he heals them, restores them, resuscitates them.

We can eat from the tree of life if we unlock that door and let Jesus in, as he is the Bread of Life and the bringer of the Living Water. That’s the buffet you want. Forget the Vegas spread. Throw out your beer bong. You really want to binge and chug? Jesus is the never-ending spring break in Cancun you always wanted, but without the hangover and the regret and the awkward walk home.

In the end of the episode of Seinfeld, George gets greedy, and he says, “I flew too close to the sun on the wings of pastrami,” comparing himself to Icarus in the myth. What did he do that caused his pleasure wings to melt? He tried to add a third love into his sex life. Food and sex just wasn’t quite enough anymore, so he brought a portable television under the sheets to have with his sandwich and girlfriend. He added technology and entertainment. In 1997, the internet was hardly used by most Americans, but we were well on our way to flying too close to the sun, with food, sex, and even though we had technology already, we were just getting our feet wet. We were on the verge of bringing the screen into every aspect of our lives, into every waking (and even sleeping) moment. George Costanza, it turns out, was a prophet of the 21st century. As anyone knows who has looked for happiness in those things, the reason George could never be happy was because he was treating people like things and things like people. His character is seeking joy, hope, and rest, but he’s looking in all the wrong places.

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I always wondered why monks put fasting so high on the list of things to do, and St. Benedict, who saved civilization from returning to complete debauchery, had specific rules for his monastery about food. It was known that the monk who could not be disciplined on food would fall to pieces on virtue.

I can confirm this.

Having grown up on Kool-Aid and Little Debbie (and loving every Nutty Buddy minute of it), the era of cheap food has created a constant feast. The elderly people who grew up in the Depression understood food far better than their baby boomer children and grandchildren. They certainly understood it better than those of us who, in our post-Kool-Aid college era, could pound cheap cases of Natty Light beer and wash it down with a Nacho Bell Grande at 4 AM. (Lest anyone feel I lean too far right, let me remind you I live caught somewhere between hippy and redneck, and the hippies and tree-huggers were right about fast food and fertilizer. But, they missed the second part. While pointing a finger at food and greed, they accepted sin and the overall moral decay as “progressive.”)

Here’s my theory on Genesis as a mirror of the Green Revolution and the Sexual Revolution:

No-fault divorce was caused by refrigeration. Nitrogen fertilizer led to mass-scale abortion. The combine harvester led to the current transgender fad. In short: just as food led to The Fall in the Garden, so did the food security of the last seventy years lead to the rejection of God all over again.

In Iowa, a man named Norman Borlaug is praised for feeding a billion people with his scientific agricultural management principles, but in producing massive yields and cheap food, we ate from the tree of knowledge once again and made the same mistake. There is a reason that The Fall starts with food. Taking food for granted leads to sin, lots of it. Food and sex are intertwined. Notice, please, if you will, that the story in Genesis 3 of eating is followed by an obvious sexual fall where they know their nakedness.

…the serpent said to the woman, “…when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked…” (Gen 3:4-7)

Stop. Do you hear how the food was eaten in this secure food paradise? It was eaten without God. Adam and Eve rejected God. Neither of them paused to say “Grace” before eating the fig (or the apple, if you prefer). No, they ate just like we do today, like we do at Culver’s or Applebee’s, we just dive right in because the food is taken for granted. Occasionally you see some weird family praying in public, but it’s rare. And right after Adam and Eve pig out on the fruit, they are naked, porning up the whole world. They are George Costanza.

How we think about food matters immensely in the moral life, and it’s no wonder that the mass rejection of God parallels the obvious fact that few people pause to say a prayer before eating today. As I fell away, I fell into free beer and fast food and the Age of Costanza swallowed me like the sea beast did Jonah, except I was in the belly for far more than three days. I was barfed out about fifteen years later.

Notice, if you would, that the Lord’s Prayer hinges in the center on the phrase: “Give us this day our daily bread,” signaling that food is important. In fact, food is so important in centering our lives around God, that the whole Lord’s Prayer links this line about food between the beginning heavenly things to the latter earthly things. Food is a gift from God and we should be acknowledging that simple fact as a blessing. But we think the food came from our own ingenuity and cleverness.

We assume that the Chipotle and the mutant-sized fruits at Costco all came from us, forgetting that the soil and water itself came from God. This is like someone entering a beautiful home, hanging their own 3x5 picture on a wall, and declaring, “I built this house.” The fact that we have mucked with some genes, figured out refrigeration, and spread NPK fertilizer around the earth in no way diminishes the reality that this created world is the foundation, the gift from God, from which every calorie we eat springs forth. In other words, we are foodless without God. The Great Hunger in 1800s Ireland was not that long ago, and for goodness sakes, Band-Aid and “We are the World” was a mere forty years ago when Ethiopia suffered from famine. The illusion of food security is strong because anyone alive in America today who remembers the Great Depression is now very likely in a nursing home, and those people tend to say a prayer before they eat.

A culture flush with food and wealth quickly falls into sin. I don’t know how, but the short and seemingly simple book of Genesis always has another layer to it. But then so does Exodus. In the prelude to the Golden Calf, what happens? A giant Texas barbecue, that’s what.

“…the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.” (Ex 32:6)

Food and booze are followed shortly thereafter by the most famous orgy in history, the scandal known as the Golden Calf incident. It makes Watergate or the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal look like a game of Go Fish. Furthermore, in Exodus, whenever the Israelites start complaining, they want to return to the “fleshpots” of Egypt where they were slaves, but you can see how strong food is, such that it goes hand in hand with the rejection of God. What they pine for is when they were slaves and “sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full.” Surely there were some hieroglyphic nudes involved as well, the ancient Egyptian version of Playboy or Penthouse. We’ve all seen the art - they had their porn on stone and papyrus instead of screens.

The more I read the Bible, the more I see how much food and sex come up, and why the seemingly odd acts of sacrifice in the Pentateuch make increasing sense, because it was aligning the people’s food toward God, and this is exactly what the Eucharist does in our lives at the Catholic Holy Mass. (Once again, two excellent books to help understand sacrifice and food in the Bible are Welcoming Gifts: Sacrifice in the Bible and Christian Life and Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist.)

Somehow, a kind of knowledge lies within our food, and it goes specifically with taking food for granted. There is something about being full, and having plenty of food, that leads to pride and the rejection of God. I think this is why Jesus says that it will be harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven. Why? Because the rich man has plenty of food. He feels fully secure and therefore thinks he can live without God. He assumes he has no weakness because his belly is full and he cannot imagine missing a meal because his bank account is also full.

All of this illuminates to me why so many of the saints fasted, and why the beatitudes elevate the poor, and why Jesus calls so many of his sheep from places where food security is unlike the American buffet. Those who appreciate food tend to appreciate God, because they know that God is the giver of food. “Give us this day our daily bread” is not a demand; it’s a supplication to God and a request made with gratitude.

Even today, wealth means food security, but we have so much food that even those in poverty are overweight, and statistics bear this out. Thus we have reached an odd point, where poverty does not mean hunger in many places. That’s great that we have food, except when it leads to the rejection of God.

So knowledge of good and evil, and the idea that we can be like God, comes after food abundance. It should come as no surprise that the modern “all-you-can-eat-buffet” started in Vegas in the 1940s in order to keep gamblers at the tables, as food and vice were married in true Vegas style.

When we feel full, we assume a strength and power that we don’t truly possess, and feeling strong, pride blooms and humility is trampled. Fertilizer brought the modern fruit in the garden but the fruit was Fast Food and cheap food, and we have eaten, and eaten, and eaten, like the Hungry Little Caterpillar. The only problem is, we’re not caterpillars, so we don’t turn into butterflies, we just become full and look for other things to do, like sinning. Sex is the most obvious one. Without food abundance, there would have been no Woodstock, because there would not have been a large population of idle college students of prime working age who could while away their youthful years on drugs and alcohol. Without food abundance and a sense of security in wealth, the Prodigal Son never leaves home and squanders his money on vice. I speak from experience, despite coming of age long after Woodstock, and millennia after the Prodigal Son.

Once we are full, knowledge is the great, tantalizing dessert that we desire, always calling to us. It is like the pie in the old diners that sat in the revolving glass case, spinning around, on display like some kind of jewelry near the cash register. The pie sat behind glass like forbidden fruit, and we only order after being already full. But the appetite continues, wanting the pie.

I remember looking at the pie and cake in those well-lit spinning cases and wondering, “What might the pie taste like? Will it fulfill me and finish off my meal? What if I could just have a bite?” I don’t recall a serpent being there at all, but if serpent actually means “Shiny one” as I have read, then I know what the sacred writer of Genesis was referring to.

St. Benedict knew something important. He knew that we cannot reach the wisdom through the mouth and stomach. The kind of knowledge that will satisfy our souls does not come through food, which is why Jesus tells the devil, “Man cannot live by bread alone.” It’s not through pie or Kool-Aid or the constipation that accompanies 200 grams of protein a day that we will find the peace and rest we seek..

In a bizarre twist, we must pursue a different kind of knowing, sometimes called the Cloud of Unknowing, and it comes not through food, but through self-denial and prayer.

The cloud of ecstasy, we’re told by the culture today, must come by a different kind of relationship, usually sexual or experiential, and we completely forget about food. If we haven’t fallen for the marketing of the sugar mafia, particularly Coca Cola, then we may fall for the fitness syndicate’s promises. If we are not overeating, we then go to the other side of food insanity, where we must know the caloric content and nutrients of every morsel that passes over our teeth. But in both cases, gross abundance of food is present. The foodies and the gluttons have one thing in common: a food obsession with the abandonment of God.

Hence, our current world of sexual immorality is a symptom of a prior fall, just as we really don’t see the sexual fall in Genesis until chapter 6, with the infamous Nephilim, which come after the eating in the Garden.

But one thing is certain. Wealth and abundance lead to the other sins of the body, the “warm sins” as they are sometimes called. And in my own lifetime, you could watch and observe this mood change about what is and what is not a sin, which almost coincided with the increased portions of food. The organic phenomenon is trying to correct the problem seeing food as the God, when food is in fact the gift from God, and so every crossfit and intermittent faster who is not measuring out their food-prep with God at the forefront has missed the point. Both the obese and the buff miss the purpose. It’s no wonder we don’t understand Leviticus, because it’s almost entirely about food and getting into the right relationship to God via food.

But we have moved on, thinking that the food abundance will last forever, and thus we’ve moved on to ever greater sins, knocking down walls and fences of morality and calling them old-fashioned. Why? Because we think this Garden was of our doing, and not God’s.

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In an episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza tries to figure out a way where he can eat his favorite sandwich while he has sex. So he puts a “pastrami on rye with mustard” sandwich in the nightstand drawer, so that midway in the act with his girlfriend he can sneak a bite and thus enjoy his two favorite things simultaneously.

The last seventy years of American history could be dubbed the Age of Costanza, because the sitcom character articulates the twin falls of our food abundance that led to the euphemism that we call today the “sexual revolution,” a term we use to describe our era of broken homes, drug abuse, sex toys, birth control, permanent adolescence, and endless soul searching. Really, what is the show Seinfeld about if not living a life of permanent adolescence? Jerry’s apartment is stocked with children’s cereal, they never cook anything, they eat at the diner, and the four main characters are childless, aging New Yorkers where lust and entertainment consume their lives. It’s like a neverending sophomore year of high school. Jerry and the other three are all grains of wheat that never die, but let’s set that parable aside for now.

Here’s what’s interesting. George Costanza put food and sex together. Long ago, St. Benedict recognized the connection between food and sex as well, except St. Benedict realized that overstuffed bellies forget God and proceed directly to sin. His motto of Ora et labora (Pray and work) set the basic rule for life in the monastery, and when I read this a few years ago, something stood out to me because I had lived life in the Age of Costanza, in the age of “all-you-can-eat” buffets and ubiquitous porn. St. Benedict wrote:

Above all things, however, over-indulgence must be avoided and a monk must never be overtaken by indigestion; for there is nothing so opposed to the Christian character as over-indulgence, according to Our Lord’s words, “See to it that your hearts be not burdened with over-indulgence. (The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 39)

As I’ve gone on at length in prior series about the decline and fall of how we read and understand the Bible, we have had a parallel decline in how we see and understand our food, of which I will go on at length about now. But I’m not going all Michael Pollan. I’m not going to ramble on about organic farming or paleo diets or whole foods or macros. I’m going to talk about food and sex as part of a spiritual reality.

George Costanza was so far gone that he doubled-down, thinking that more would be better and lift his spirits, but it’s a spiral to the bottom. His character was so blind, that while eating he also wanted sexual pleasure, and while making a great joke of his character’s entire selfish lifestyle, he sums up the entire post-World War II era of massive food production and sex as a “pleasure alone” obsession.

But St. Benedict figured out the problem. He put things together in the correct order. Food and sex go together, sort of like many of us 1990s bar patrons considered “beer and cigarettes” as a form of dark-side “bread and butter.” Recognizing this connection between the belly and lust, fasting in the Church has far more to do with virtue than it does with attaining six-pack abs. The modern saying of, “Abs are made in the kitchen” has the opposite purpose of the clean eating that happens in a monastery. In the life of a fasting monk, he probably has six-pack abs, but ideally, no one will ever witness them. For the monk with low body fat and sweet muscle definition, the goal is not vanity, or pride, or sensuality - it is humility. A monk that is successful in this would not even be aware that such a six-pack has been obtained, and would care even less if informed of such a useless, fleeting possession in this space-time called creation.

Most intermittent fasters today seek six-pack abs to have more sex, or be desired for sex, so like George Costanza, they are controlling their food, and really obsessing over food, in order to have more sex, or to be more desirable for sex. In other words, adultery of all varieties is the goal. I have never heard anyone proclaim, “I’m working on getting six-pack abs for God.” But a monk is doing exactly that without even knowing it. Removing the variable of sex from all equations allows for virtuous motives to flourish.

Here’s the dirty little secret about the obesity epidemic and the fitness-craze in America: they are the same thing. They are the same problem. They are both a kind of gluttony. Fitness goals dabble in lust and vanity and pride, whereas the simple overeater is just sitting in the hot-tub of sloth. Both of these problems can only occur in a time of excess food, where the overeater fails to stop eating, and the fitness crazed person has so much food that they can pick and choose to only eat what fits their “macros.”

Recently at the gym, I heard a man say, “I have a hard time eating 200 grams of protein a day.” I wanted to tell him: “That’s because no one in history has ever needed that much protein a day.” Ok, maybe Andre the Giant. But rather than start an awkward discussion, instead I just pondered my own motive for attending the gym, and wondered: was I truly there to preserve and sustain my body, or if I want to look good for other people, that I might be admired? Because even if sex isn’t the aim of exercise, to be desirable can be just a lusty, and Jesus was quite clear about how easy adultery is to commit. “But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Mt 5:28) This phrase I keep on echo in my head, because how many men today understand that adultery, a mortal sin, is always just a thought away. This is exactly where the spiritual combat must be fought, and fought, and it is a worthy fight to take up because once you can turn your eyes away from lust, real freedom begins, not to mention truly virtuous friendships.

The fitness dilemma, I won’t go too deep into it here, since I covered it in an earlier series. But I will leave it by echoing St. Augustine, who I feel suggested the best reason for exercise, which is to reasonably care for the body, for what God created is good, with the full awareness that we not only a body. As a member of the laptop class, in a sedentary age, we in the privileged information technology world are increasingly separated from manual labor: Thus heeding St. Augustine, I need to “care for the body as though I was going to live forever, and care for my soul as if I were going to die tomorrow.” Love God, love others, then love the self. JOY is spelled: Jesus, Others, You.

Back to the monks: a fasting monk aims toward chastity without a second thought of six-pack abdominal muscles. The fasting weightlifter aims toward adulation and maybe sex fantasies, or at the least, being desirable. No gym selfie has ever been posted on social media without the motive of getting laid or being coveted somewhere behind it. The monk aims toward God, and the other toward the self, or more particularly, the ego. The monk aims to tame the passions, while the other wants to inflame them by lighting a match and throwing gas on the tinder (and often using an app called Tinder). Much of the marketing will tell you that exercise is about body and mind, but will never mention the soul, making it yet another situation where we live out of wholeness, spiritually out of sync, in the amputated state of a body peeled apart from its soul.

We tend to admire the fit, just as we do the wealthy. But we look at thin, poor monks with a side-eye. Perhaps today we’d call those chasing virtue “try-hards” rather than “Jesus freaks.” But how you treat your food is really, really indicative of how you live your entire life. I say this as a sugar monster with the full realization that much of this post is about my own history of dating Sara Lee, Betty Crocker, and dear old Aunt Jemima (may she rest in peace). I really need to get started renouncing soul ties to these high-fructose ladies.

As a food monster, this has been one of the more eye-opening discoveries of my adult life. All of that Kool-Aid, it couldn’t have helped. When I think of the Kool-Aid man now, I can’t help but think of Bluto from Animal House, because like Bluto, Kool-Aid man barges into rooms, crashing through walls, overstuffed and ready to party. I was probably drinking Kool-Aid and watching Animal House at one point. I think I first saw the movie around age ten, which is one of the hundreds of movies that encouraged us all to drink the cultural Kool-Aid, and as I chugged sugar, Bluto chugged Jack Daniels and it was certainly cool. We all drank the Kool-Aid one way or another, since every 80’s and 90’s movie preached the Gospel of the self.

The Mountain Dew, the Lucky Charms, my beloved Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Jimmy John’s, and so much Taco Smell…is it any wonder that the era of “party ‘til you puke” was followed by the era of Spanx and Tinder and Drag Queen Story Hour? It is a literal echo of the Garden of Eden story, where immorality follows a bounty of food availability. The book of Proverbs specifically calls out the excess consumption of sugar as a danger!

If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you be sated with it and vomit it. (Proverbs 29:16)

Oh, we have found honey. We have found sugar. A book called Sweetness and Power covers the history of how Europeans took sugar by the sword, turning a luxury into a staple, and how it radically changed culture, diet, and even work. In other words, the Garden of Eden story, so concise in its telling in Genesis, has played out over the past 500 years in America since the fruit of the sugar-cane became an obsession. Somehow moving to “a land flowing with milk and honey” causes a falling away from God, in every case. The Biblical stories tell this repeatedly, as food abundance in Egypt leads to slavery, and food abundance in Canaan leads to worshipping other Gods. Without even knowing much about the Bible, we can see that Jesus was a thin man, who denied himself luxurious food, who didn’t workout for muscle mass, and didn’t desire sex, and didn’t sin. As always, he shows us how to live. Even when he feeds the masses bread, he doesn’t continue to do it daily, because he came to bring the living water and Bread of Life, which is the true food and drink that we seek.

St. Benedict knew this “sweetness and power” problem long before Columbus sailed. He has some outstanding insight about how the monks who could not maintain a fast were like fodder for the devil.

And oh, it hurts to read that because I know it to be true. It all makes sense. Peeling the onion of sin from a life results in many “Ah-ha!” moments, where we see through a glass darkly and then suddenly we see Jesus face to face and understand how and why the errors were made, but more importantly, how to remedy them through his healing atonement. Reading the early Church Fathers is always eye-opening, because we think of them as hicks and backwards, and then they prove in their wisdom that they knew the human heart better than billions of us do today.

So is it any wonder that the Fall in Genesis centers around food followed by sex? The fruit of the tree attracts, the rejection of God happens and the loss of innocence results. Taking the easy food, from the forbidden tree, leads to sin. When I think of the Green Revolution from the 1940s onward, which flooded cheap food to the wealthy West, and the undeniable moral decay of America that has followed, it’s difficult not to see the connection. In fact, of all the things that brought the West to a place of debauchery, I would not say it is the birth-control pill or no-fault divorce. No, I would say it is the combine harvester and nitrogen fertilizer.

Hear me out. I realize you’ve stopped reading after that last sentence, but hold on a moment.

The immense amount of cheap food that American ingenuity and efficiency has produced, and the sexual depravity that followed, does it not seem to follow, that this was the same course of tale told in the Garden of Eden? An abundance of food led to the elevation of our pride, bringing about the rejection of God, and soon after, the detonation of sin erupted like a bomb in our world? You don’t get to the sexual fall without going through a story of cheap, easy, and accessible food.

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There’s a movie called The Mission from 1986 with Robert De Niro, where two different approaches are taken to meet the natives and bring the message of Christ.

In the first attempt, a priest played by De Niro tries the sales approach and in his heavy handed messaging, he irritates the people, gets tied to a cross, thrown into a river, and sent over a waterfall.

Then the second man, Jeremy Irons, comes and plays his oboe. That’s all he does. A beautiful song, simple in its melody, softly plays in the jungle - a song never heard by the people before. The music intrigues the people, and even though they smash his oboe, they don’t smash his face. They take him into their village. The beauty of the song breaks down a wall. And suddenly there is an inroad to friendship, and more importantly, into the life of Christ, because it was beauty, not a sales pitch, that led to interest, and ultimately, a relationship. And beauty is how you bring the message of Jesus Christ to people. It is the beauty of the story, of the person and living God that he is, of who he is, what he is - that’s what needs to be shared, and it can’t be shared in a sales pitch.

The feeling that a sales approach gives is this: “Oh, so I am just a project to you? A notch in your belt? A credit for your way to heaven?”

It’s the same feeling of the Verizon salesman pushing unwanted products when you just want your phone fixed. Evangelism that feels like a one-night stand only lasts as long as a one-nighter. There’s no beauty, and there’s no relationship. It’s just a temporary feel-good, like eating pixie stix.

This is what hurts more than saves: “Did you really just pretend to be friendly just to make me convert?”

It feels dirty. It makes me want to run. Conversion can’t be treated like the old Highlander TV show, where Duncan McLeod slays his enemy and then he takes on their power. There is no sales commission or power gained if you convert someone to understand that Jesus is God. We are to preach the Gospel and “heal the sick,” and much of healing comes from befriending people - as in real befriending.

Becoming friends means having no ulterior motives, no commission, no bonus. Becoming friends does not mean hoping they will be baptized and then you move on. This has the relationship depth of a star football player at a college frat party ranging over the drunk and willing freshmen. Virtuous and real friendship requires the gift of self with no motives of a kickback. (Not coincidentally, this is exactly how we should approach God and the Mass.)

An ulterior motive gets outed quickly if you are only becoming friends with the hopes of converting a person, and then it feels like one party got duped into that one-nighter. Flattery and a few free drinks might get someone laid, but it doesn’t get them love. There’s no substance to it. There’s nothing underneath it.

Conversion by trickery or strategy of any kind is not what God asks us to do. Did Jesus do any of that? I read the Gospel often and I don’t see him tricking anyone. I see relationships forming and lasting, or if not lasting, an authentic experience happens where sin is outed and transformation begins. In fact, I always see that Jesus is non-competitive, non-gimmicky, but he challenges them at the same time - and that authentic challenge what attracts people to him. He’s not acting like a salesman, asking about someone’s mother just to establish rapport. Nor is he playing the game of the Romans, who go out and conquer people by the sword and then spin propaganda, crafting a message about how they brought “peace” to all that they threatened.

Jesus doesn’t play the stupid games that we do.

He isn’t a salesman. He’s not a bully or a genie either. He’s authentic. And that is what we are absolutely dying to find. Something real. Something beautiful that is just offered for his own sake. Something and someone who isn’t selling is what we want. And we want more than just something free, like free beer, we want beauty that touches our soul. In America, our idols known of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” pretend to give us this, but in this pursuit, we turn everything being into a sale, from sports to healthcare to news. Even religion becomes a sale with the prosperity Gospel and therapeutic Deism.

Loving Jesus doesn’t need to be cool. It’s not supposed to be, until you suddenly understand who he is. Then he’s way cooler than anything you’ve ever known or seen. Which is why he is cool. He’s cool because he’s not trying to be cool, he just is a living witness of how beautiful life can be, even when sin makes it ugly.

This is why the Woman at the Well story, and Peter’s “drop the nets” moment, and saint stories like those of St. Augustine and St. Teresa of Avila (and all the rest) make us step back and look at our own lives. We wonder what happened when those people met Jesus as the living God. And until it happens to you, it will seem fishy, suspicious, and too good to be true, because we are accustomed to being sold and told lies.

This is why attempts to make Christianity cool come off so badly to me. Most Christian music and evangelization feels forced. It’s the Robert De Niro kind of forced-feeding versus Jeremy Irons playing the oboe. Recall that people didn’t want to kill Jesus for being cool. No, he rejected all that the world considered cool. The world’s fads of money and power bored Jesus. It was for this very fact that they hated him. He didn’t want what everyone else thought gave their lives meaning. The real threat of Jesus to the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Romans was not that he was becoming popular. It’s that he inverted their whole world and made a mockery of their earthly wants and desires. Power, money, pleasure - he needed none of it.

While everyone is trying so hard to be cool, Jesus is just praying and being friends with people. No concert needed, no TED style talks, no cultural hooks like hot-monogamy, no parades, nothing but being himself. Being a follower of Jesus is not meant to be cool. It’s meant to make you conform your life to Christ, know you are a sinner, take up your cross, and very likely be reviled by the culture, and after all that still be joyful enough to give away money to the church and the poor.

See, it doesn’t make sense, does it?

But it does make sense.

Once you turn into the light, you can see all of it. The world is suddenly illuminated.

It’s not supposed to be cool. It’s supposed to be beautiful.

You want to follow him, because Truth is beautiful, and then you don’t really care about how it looks to the world. However, the wrong kind of friendship, the salesperson kind, is not going to bring the sheep back to the fold. It’s the same result as chasing sheep with a fiery torch. Hellfire scare tactics don’t work, and nor do sugary friendships, nor does flirty bait-dating. People are dying to find something authentic. And here’s the kicker: once they find Jesus to be authentic and follow him, they can no longer die.

A religion that enters into competition has to sell itself to win, and the moment that begins, it’s a product and no longer a way of life. The moment that selling begins, it is no longer Christianity. Evangelization is not about selling. It’s about complete transformation. If selling is required, then it needs a story, and how tempting it can be to craft a story around a product, just a wee bit here and there, and then pretend that the product matches a story instead of the product matching reality. The extreme push of corporations to sell mindfulness products today has the same rank odor on it that the door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses and beach evangelizers at spring break always had.

I have walked into many customer-facing situations where the story told by the salesperson did not match the reality of what the product could do. When reality can’t live up to a sales and marketing story, the jig is up. These are what you call “difficult conversations” where you have to explain, as nicely as possible, that the salesperson was lying, or at least committing certain sins of omission by not volunteering accurate information. However, a sales story that matches reality can be seen in the proof of the product. It can be seen in the continued used of the product. It can be heard in testimonies of those using the product. It can be seen in things built using the product. Proof of use and effectiveness can be seen and heard across the world for something that really works. Like for example, the Old and New Cathedrals of Salamanca, Notre Dame, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Peter square, St. Paul’s cathedral, and a million small churches. Like works of art and literature and songs and stories of saints. These are beautiful things, created in homage to a savior that heals. When I hear “Gentle Woman” and “Ave Maria” and “Immaculate Mary” every year in December on the holy day of Immaculate Conception, I have to sit in the back row because it brings tears to my eyes. It’s just so beautiful. I can hardly take it. I recall this happening with other songs, where the beauty penetrates so deeply that I can hardly stand it, as if my heart could be broken and healed in three minutes. It has happened to me with “No Woman, No Cry” from Bob Marley and the Wailers. The same with Andrea Bocelli’s “Con te Partiro.” Surely we all have songs that can cut us deeply and bring tears of sadness or joy. To hear the songs in Church, however, about Mary and Jesus, is still different because the Mother of God and God Incarnate are the ultimate healers. Every December, or whenever the Marian songs are sung, I can know the beauty and goodness of the Blessed Virgin Mary through song, through the glorious gift of music that God gave to some people. We all have gifts, but musicians have one of the most beautiful ones and they can share it with us to lift us up, just like the birds of the morning who call to one another from the trees, as if God is saying to the world through these amazing creatures, “Good morning.”

Birds aren’t selling their song. They are offering it up. They are giving their song to the world. They are using the gift that God gave them to reveal the beauty of all creation.

In other words, Creation is a product I can believe in, because I can see it, and it’s beautiful. An account manager with steady customers who believe in a product are a far more steady stream of income than customers that were tricked into purchase orders and contracts by a charismatic salesman. God isn’t a salesman. The tricks we play on people aren’t needed with real beauty. The cute smile, the witty rejoinder, the steak dinner, the sleek demo, the free stuff - shirts and pens and mouse pads and all the other crap salespeople unload on customers as if they were kids at parade - none of that sustains trust if the underlying product doesn’t work or isn’t authentic. A huge backlash is happening right now in the post-Vatican II liturgy that tried to “modernize” the Catholic Mass to keep up with the trendy ways of the world. This was a mistake that may slowly be corrected. It’s become increasingly clear to all that the irreverent productions were attempts by Catholics to compete with Protestant services. But once your faith tries to be cool, it’s dying. Who would want it, when it’s entertainment, because like every show or product that needs a lot of marketing to keep it going, it’s not really needed. Beauty doesn’t need to complete. Faith cannot win in the space of entertainment, because it’s more than entertainment. Because it is not made for that space. That space is the complete opposite of what faith and the Mass is about.

We have football stadiums and rock shows and music festivals and strip joints and TED Talks and drive-in movie theaters. All of those are more “fun” than Catholic Mass, but they are all selling something completely different. And none of those things last, as sports leagues come and go, bands break up, music festivals peter out, strip joints get condemned, and TED Talks is on its last days. Drive in movie theaters are barely hanging on. There are a thousand and one options for entertainment which all come and go over the decades. Even Elvis, the King, and the Beatles, will be but a blip in a history book soon. They are completely in the rear-view mirror already.

Given our short attention span that moves on from one form of entertainment to another, this makes the fact that a Church could be the dominant and lasting centerpiece of life for 2,000 years rather mind-blowing. True, there wasn’t the option of NFL football games and Country Jam festivals and Burning Man. But those things that draw millions of worshippers today will be long gone before the Church is gone. Why? How did it hang on for so long? It’s not like the Catholic Church was the only religion in existence. Why didn’t one of the other “religions” of the ages before Christianity rise up to replace it? After all, if it was so obviously a bunch of false superstitions of fearful farmers, then why couldn’t something other than Christianity have swept it away?

This is a question that doesn’t get asked out loud.

The answer is they haven’t replaced Christ because…they are not beautiful. Christ’s music makes life sing. He is the way, the healer, the maker of all music, the one who makes the invisible be visible. The reason we love art and music and stories is the same reason we love Jesus, and the reason is because we see the beauty of all creation in him:

Jesus said to Thomas, "I am the way and the truth and the life.No one comes to the Father except through me.If you know me, then you will also know my Father.From now on you do know him and have seen him." (Jn 14:6-14)

Once you hear the music of the original reasons to believe, it begins to make sense. All of the clanging gongs and noise are trying to convert you by beating you over the head, and many Catholics have tried the approach of Robert De Niro in The Mission. For those approaches that used guilt and ugliness, the Church was thrown in the river and sent downstream. And now is the time where we can hear the oboe finally, now that we’ve heard enough of the noise, so that we can be curious enough to take a second look.

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As much as I tried to pretend there wasn’t, there is a God-shaped hole in my heart. There simply is no answer that philosophy or theory or modern science or socialism or witchcraft or astrology or Buddhism or free beer can offer that fills this God-shaped hole in the heart. There is only a person that can fill that hole.

The problem and the solution are both odd.

In the last post, I talked about our need for certainty, and the “secret knowledge” that is often on offer for us. But most “secret knowledge” rejects God and the source of all pain and suffering, which is sin. The “problem of pain” is the all-time number one driver of sending people into the arms of ideologies offering solutions, but they are all fool’s gold. They offer all the answers on paper, but when put into practice, cause far more issues than they solve.

We don’t need to make sense of every last thing once we come to rest in faith. We don’t need every last answer. Continuing to pursue the goals of reason still go on, but we don’t salivate and lust for the answers to come, to fill in the big picture and bring about an earthly utopia, because we already have the answer. Via the Holy Spirit, we already know the ending. We get certainty through God’s will, not our own. The best part of this is that we don’t have to know all the answers any longer, because God knows. What’s odd about this whole “surrender to win” idea is that we get certainty by inheritance from God. While we don’t know God’s will, we know he is good and loving and alive in this world, and that in the end he wins. Even the progressives like to say, “Love wins,” and they are correct, but not in the way they think. Yes, love wins in the end because God is love, and God wins. And when you surrender to God, you win, because he wins. When you surrender, you are suddenly on the winning team and you just follow God’s lead. You no longer feel angry about the rules because you bask in his love. Sure, surrender means imposing limits on the self, but paradoxically this brings ultimate freedom because you no longer have the bondage of self and the onslaught of desires to contend with. You hand over the desires to God, because those thoughts never brought peace, only problems. He takes all the problems away if you ask. When you offer yourself up to him, he blesses you, just as you bless God with your life and actions. When you fight against God, he wins. You might say that when you are disobedient, he kneels you. You cannot fight with God forever. You can certainly wrestle with him, but eventually it becomes exhausting.

There is no idea or argument or award or pleasurable activity in this world that could provide what I was seeking. In the end, no intellectual pursuit came close to a solution, and it wasn’t for lack of effort. The left and right side of politics do absolutely nothing to solve this problem. They just give us all an excuse to kick the can down the road, to avoid the biggest question. Neither side will solve the ultimate problems or bring about any lasting peace. They are mirrors of the same restless mania, trying to win in Washington just as professors and theologians and pundits are trying to win our hearts and minds by reason in universities. The reality of politics can be seen in the online hellscape of continuous wrath. The millions of people squabbling think that rooting for their side gives them a sense of control, while their interior lives and personal relationships are in disarray. This desire for certainty and control is rampant today, particularly because a society of people that have every physical need satisfied now looks to satisfy spiritual needs, but in the wrong places. Partisan politics is an escape from the self for those that cannot surrender to God and find peace. Because we want answers, we try to find it in competition, in politics and in sports. Like drinking and sex, politics and sports provide an escape for those who suspect they are lost but don’t want to admit it.

What I didn’t see coming is that faith exceeds reason. We’ve spent hundreds of years trying to tell ourselves that reason exceeds faith, partially due to the great leaps of science but also because of the failures of those who profess faith to emulate Christ, but I am convinced that we must lead with faith. Yet it’s difficult to tell anyone that today, unless they have made the turn themselves.

All of the other ideas and sciences and ideologies fail simply because they cannot solve that problem. They are the wrong tool, the wrong material, the wrong instructions. What is not “born of the spirit” cannot fix spiritual problems. Ideas may guide us toward behavior and doing good actions in this world, but they cannot bring about the interior conversion of the heart that Jesus can bring. They may highlight our sins, as they should, and guide us toward God, but they cannot sustain us because they purposefully try to pretend God doesn’t exist.

Having tried and sampled these alternative worldviews, particularly the ones without God, I found that the Christian worldview is the only one that makes sense and the only one that works, for the same reasons that Dorothy Day discovered. I went down the other road, only to find Jesus at the end of it. But it’s not only Dorothy Day that found faith in this unexpected way. G.K. Chesterton and St. Augustine are two others who had a gift for articulating this path. They too found what Dorothy Day did. They came to accept one truth that makes all other arguments moot, just as have billions of other people have done.

The problem with Christianity, if you are doing battle with it in your mind and trying to knock it down, is not that it has the best argument. If you come to know Christ, it is the only argument that fills the God-shaped hole in your heart. Nothing else makes sense once Jesus enters your life, because somehow he makes complete and total sense of everything.

This is extremely annoying to people who haven’t experienced it.

Christianity is the best argument of all for living real life, and it is a strange yet beautiful paradox. In order to appreciate the physical realities and emotional struggles of this world that seem to have explanation, you must assent to the spiritual mysteries beyond this universe that cannot be explained. Like any good convert, I now love looking for connections in the Old Testament. I enjoy spiritual reading and - why not - looking for references that lead to the Cross. But that alone is not the cause of belief. It is not the arguments made on paper in the end. I can’t pile up enough evidence and suddenly turn on the light of faith. That’s not how it works.

I believe that Christianity is the best argument, but not because of the Gospels, or the surrounding Old Testament and letters of St. Paul, or the tradition of the church fathers, or the history of the saints. Sure, those provide compelling evidence, but they can also turn people away, depending on how you read them. All of those texts (aside from the Old Testament) did not exist when Jesus was first resurrected. Furthermore, very few people could even read, and if they were lucky they heard someone read from the scrolls from time to time. In my post-conversion life, I am all in on reading the Bible as God’s Word, from cover to cover, but I didn’t arrive at that belief through argument or decision alone. More importantly, none of the first Christians, not a single one, had anything beyond the Old Testament scriptures to base their belief in Christ upon. There was nothing written down in the form of a Gospel for some years. The letters of Paul came first and we can see vibrant communities springing up all over. There was no scrolls to unravel and read, no cross referenced Bibles, no study guides, no Catechism. There was only word of mouth and the power of his name. The founder of the religion wrote nothing down. Something lit his followers on fire in a way that cannot be described. I would say that the event cannot be repeated, but that would be false; the same fire springs up daily all over the world. It has never stopped catching fire since that day in the upper room when the apostles were baptized by the tongues of fire some seven weeks after the death of Jesus.

To get to God I arrived by reason and lived experience. But to get to the next level, I arrived my meeting Jesus Christ, the person. The fully human and fully divine person that walked the earth is what somehow reached me. The problem with Christ is that if this person calls you, life is never the same. That is how the argument keeps winning, by changing minds. Life cannot be the same once the fire starts because nothing looks, smells, tastes, or feels like it did before. This is not like stumbling across a good book that brings awareness to some fact of the world, some injustice, some unfairness. This is being jolted to life spiritually and having a new life infused into you. When your soul is brought back to life, it starts drinking from the vine of God, chugging grace like a college student at spring break. Warning: this rebirth can be painful initially, like physical birth. (Pace yourself, don’t drink too fast. Drink one water for every one wine.)

The reality of this power of Jesus, the person, is told by time itself. It cannot be ignored or denied. You may argue about Christians misusing his name, you can argue about the devil quoting scripture for his purposes, and I would agree with you in some of those arguments. But the fact is this: the Christian religion would have died long ago if it were only a good argument. There have been many “good” ideas throughout history, but we don’t build cathedrals for those ideas. We build jaw-dropping churches that produce no economic output whatsoever so that we can worship a man, a poor man, one who died with nothing, naked on a cross!

Putting the idea of “truth” aside for a moment, if an idea or argument doesn’t win hearts and minds, it cannot last. So clearly there is a good argument in Christianity. If it was total nonsense, it could not have lasted. But there is something greater than just the words of an argument. There are many good books and models on how to live life. Marcus Aurelius wrote a great book on how to live life, but there is no one tithing to the Marcus Aurelius society today or handing out pamphlets at the airport about why you should give your life to Marcus Aurelius. Christianity is not just a series of arguments. Jesus is the argument.

A quote in Acts of the Apostles from a rabbi named Gamaliel is telling, because this Jewish leader tells his fellows to let the Christian fad play out. Why? Because he’s wise. He knows that a cause will die out on its own if it’s not from God. Gamaliel refers to some long-forgotten movement started by a guy named Theudas, but this Theudas “…was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing.” He urges his peers to let this Christian novelty just play out, like how rolling your jeans or wearing Zubaz pants and Hypercolor shirts bloomed and faded in the 1990s. Zubaz pants and Hypercolor shirts were not from God, and so they both died out. Both were hideous actually. For something more recent, consider fidget spinners or Crocs or Heely shoes. Gamaliel said of these wacky Apostles of Jesus, “…if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.” (Acts 5:34-39)

That is why it never dies. Because it’s more than an argument. It’s more than a feeling. It’s more than a fad. It’s not from this world. The Holy Spirit is not of human origin. The truth that Christ represents cannot be rebutted or refuted. Once the spirit turns a non-believer into a believer, there is no turning back on the second conversion, or the re-birth spoken of by Jesus to Nicodemus in John 3. This is why the apostle Peter states the famous line, saying what everyone knows who has come to put their entire life and trust in Jesus. Jesus asks if Peter and the apostles will leave him, and Peter replies, matter of factly: “To whom else would we go?”

To whom else would I go? That is the billion dollar question. Peter is basically saying, “I’ve found what fits into this giant, gaping God-shaped hole in my heart, so I’m done looking.” Sometimes I wonder why I took so long to get to where Peter is. It’s like I was wandering around the beauty of Creation and pouring liquor in my mouth, saying, “I wonder what could possibly fit this enormous void in my life?” How strange it all is in hindsight. When I’m hungry I eat food; when I’m thirsty, I drink water; but when I was yearning for God, I looked everywhere else. I tried it all. All of it.

For the converted, the same answer applies. Once you land on the truth of Jesus, you realize that you are done searching. There is rest. There is peace. There is love. There is certainty.

That is the answer to why faith overrides reason for believers. That is also the reason the religion does not die. Because those who believe know that there is nowhere else to go. Unfortunately, the actions of many believers can drive others away, but don’t let it. Yes, there are crazy Christians, but there are crazy people in all walks of life and political parties and ideologies. Don’t lock yourself out of trying just because your uncle or co-worker is a hypocrite. (Always recall that Jesus hated hypocrites worse than prostitutes and tax collectors!)

This stubbornness of believers does produce a maddening state for those on the other side of the fence. Non-believers come with their wares, offering pleasure in this life, a life free from the guilt of sin. But whatever they are selling is second-best. It’s day-old bread. Jesus is the bread of life, the fresh bread. There is no person or idea or argument that can replace him.

The most difficult thing is making sense of this to other people who think you have lost your marbles, but they will never understand it unless they are turned by the spirit. The gift does not come to everyone.

Peter knows that no other person or ideology can fill the void in him, so his answer speaks the full truth. He has already looked elsewhere. He may not know exactly how Jesus is God, but he knows that Jesus is God and that’s all that matters. That alone is the entire argument. No powerpoint presentation needed, no notes, no talking points, no objection handling. The Apostles’ Creed sums up the entirety of the Bible, the tradition, the beliefs, and the reasons why. Those words can’t bring the spirit, but it’s the best summary of what people believe.

The followers of Nietzsche or Karl Marx or Michel Foucault or Richard Dawkins are the modern version of the followers of Theudas. In another hundred years there will be new names, new ideologies, new quirks, new fads, and who will be argued about alongside those new names? It will be the same name: Jesus. He will still be known by all. He will still baffle thinkers and anger intellectuals and bring joy to billions of simpletons like me.

Everything else is a replay. We’ve seen these shows before. The new academic arguments are not new. The latest theories and ways of looking at the world have been tried already. Found wanting, they were discarded. But we will try them again, and again. We insist on it, because we must attempt to define our universe and destiny. Every generation yearns to be free of God, and every generation fails.

The reality is this: these ideas have been dug out of the freezer and thawed out, then re-packaged ideas with new branding, kind of like what happened with consumer applesauce over the past twenty years. Applesauce manufacturers swapped out clumsy jars for single-serving squeeze packs. Consumer sales skyrocketed because the squeeze packs were fun for kids and perfect for school lunchboxes. But regardless of the delivery, when applesauce reaches your mouth, it’s still just applesauce. Yes, the container has a Disney character or a QR code (with a chance to win!), but it’s still only applesauce inside. The container doesn’t change the substance. The payload is apple slurry-goo, the same as it was in the old jar. The same happens with the many repackaged rebellions against God. We can call it paganism or atheism or positivism or Epicureanism or Stoicism or Jainism or humanism or wokeism, but it’s all the same applesauce in the end, because these ideas all reject the idea of one true God, a most high God, and that is why all of these things eventually grow tasteless. Worse, unlike applesauce, these rebellions contain nothing nourishing for the body or the soul.

Each generation tries to convince itself that this time the idea is something different. The ancient people already saw all of the things we are seeing today, they just didn’t have a TV or phone to watch it on. In our desperate efforts to be powerful or cool, we all become weak and lame. I learned the hard way that the boring way of life is not the pursuit of faith and holiness. The ultimately boring way of life is this constant searching for something, this constant rebellion against God. Life in Jesus just looks boring but it is the one source of true, authentic joy. He remains through all of these generations like a rock, a solid foundation of unending hope. He is unchanged and unphased, while the self-exalting educated classes of each generation lives and dies over and over again, falling over themselves, jockeying for position, like toddlers in an unsupervised daycare center.

There is a different type of knowledge in Jesus that exceeds all of the learning of the great philosophers and political thinkers and military leaders and scientists of human history. Despite numerous attempts to crush the faith, it returns. This is not disputable. Faith in Jesus may die in one place, but it grows elsewhere, like magic, almost as if there were some kind of holy spirit bringing it to people around the world.

Like dandelions in American yards, homeowners try in vain to kill this unwanted weed, but it cannot be killed, for even if you kill the local dandelions, or a million dandelions, the seeds have already spread far and wide, and the minute you stop killing the plants, within a year or two the dandelions will have returned in full.

The idea cannot be killed. It can be stifled and those who have the idea can be murdered or silenced, but the idea of Jesus is something that cannot be contained or stopped. Communism and fascism killed over 100 million people in the 20th century. Many of those killed were Christians. Yet the life of Christ still inspires people and draws them back. Like St. Thérèse of Lisieux said to Jesus, quoting Song of Songs: “Draw me and we will run.” This rebirth in faith comes from something beyond our understanding. It brings a complete and sincere adherence to Christ out of joy, not by argument or coercion. God only needs to call his followers and they come. How? I don’t know.

But now I don’t need to know every detail. The mysteries I place in God’s hand. The Divine Mercy image has the quote, “Jesus, I trust in you.” That’s the cure. I am more interested in the idea of “religious truth,” since that is what the Bible speaks most to me, and it’s easy to forget that if I forget to trust in God. I’m more interested in the mystery of interior conversion, because that is the part of Christianity I missed when learning about faith. Based on how many people in recovery meetings for addiction talk about how they formerly understood God, a lot of people missed the whole idea of “interior conversion.”

God doesn’t need to make lengthy arguments or offer worldly incentives. Even those who don’t believe can just utter the words, “Draw me, we will run,” or say, “Come Holy Spirit,” and the movement toward faith can begin. It’s so simple that it seems absurd to those who don’t believe. The seed of faith is planted where it is wanted and requested, and often it is planted where it is unwanted and unrequested. For some of us, we seem to have no choice in the matter (as was the case for myself). Other man-made ideas like feudalism or positivism or communism or humanism must be propped up with tremendous effort, but as soon as the driving force falters, the energy fades and the movement dies. But with Jesus, the energy continues, always sustained, because it does not come from man. The energy comes from God. He is the vine, the living water, the Bread of Life, the way, the truth, and the life.

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In college, I wasn’t aware for some time that various dogmas of the academic world were steering me. Wanting mostly to party and pass classes, I was easily walked into the secular dogma, to the point that I was converted to the progressive worldview. I recall English and History classes being full of new interpretations that turned nearly every literary or historical person into either an oppressed or oppressor class, (or queer/not queer). Groupings of people were very, very important, which flew in the face of my childhood clubbing of the idea that stereotyping by group was evil. Now it was good to group people.

Of course, these were the correct interpretations, at long last! One professor insisted that Abraham Lincoln, King David, Jesus, Billy Budd, and Queequeg the harpooner were all gay. We spent considerable time on that topic, despite it having little or nothing to do with the class I thought I had signed up for. How did we know their sexual preference? Well, the evidence was right there in the text: these folks all had close friendships with other men, therefore, gay. Friendship between men, I learned, always implies sodomy is happening. This was the secret knowledge, the Gnostic gospel, of a professor. We just weren’t mining what was being told between the lines, but with her magic reading goggles, we would be set free from the shackles of the Western Canon and sexual oppression. This professor, and other professors, gently nudged me toward ideas that undermined the worldview I thought I held. Critical Theory and Queer Theory were the latest things, so those worldviews were being evangelized to us students with nearly the same vigor as St. Paul telling about Christ in Ephesus.

As a paying student, I provided a captive audience to the message.

As I was receiving this instruction and the evidence was presented for these interpretations, I recalled that quote from Nietzsche, where he mocked Christian apologists and theologians for using the approach of “when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” He mocked Christians who found any stick of wood or twig in the Old Testament as a reference to the Cross. I know what Nietzsche meant, as the typology of linking Old Testament to New Testament does sometimes feel like a reach. But Christians are not alone in doing this. My professor obsessed with sexual preference was doing the same thing. From Sigmund Freud onwards, an obsession of finding sexual references in every possible shape, led to our modern priesthood of professors to seeing everything like a ten year old boy who had just discovered a Playboy magazine. Then there was Nietzsche himself, constantly finding his own thought as evidence for his own genius (his last published book was titled, Why I am So Wise).

While I was taking these classes and receiving the transmissions of modern secular dogma, I began to realize that the close readings of texts were as strange and stretched as anything a Christian interpreter ever came up with. Actually, they are more than stretched, they are now completely broken.

If Christians were finding the Cross in every stick of wood of the Old Testament, then the modern theorists were doing the same for sex and oppression. The problem is that there definitely are signals and references that exist regarding the Cross, but taken to the extreme they fall into a level of absurdity. But for my instructor that was looking for disordered sex in literature, any friendship, any handshake, any nod, squeeze of the hand, or look, or glance, any wink became undeniable evidence of a character’s sexual intentions.

The idea of friendship disappeared.

There was only one type of love and that was the kind where people must sleep with one another. There was not a separation of types of love, which anyone in the real world understands. There is physical love (eros). There is friendship (philos). And there is the highest kind of love, which is sacrificial, unconditional love (agape). But in modern lit crit circles, there appears to be only the erotic. These interpretations are a one-trick pony and after a while, the trick gets to be routine and dull. A never-ending obsession with sex as our identity becomes as pathetic as the pursuit of crystal meth, because it’s just one small part of life. In fact, the way we understand sex as an identity makes our bodies and lives so cheap, that it reminds me of the great quote from C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory.

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Mud pies in the alley are fun as a child. But they lose their appeal, when the totality of life is so wonderful and awe-inspiring that to focus on one small aspect of existence is to miss the forest for a tree.

The obsession with sex and oppression came off like a brain fever for two of my professors, because they could not speak for long without beginning to sound just like the overreaching Christian who grasped to link any wood object in the Old Testament to the Cross. The further the obsession became clear, the more thin the argument became. The linkages began to look like a crazy person’s conspiracy wall, where every bit of art, literature, and history was connected by red yarn, to prove that Western Civilization was just a grand scheme to oppress and to stop people from the false heaven of “sexual freedom”.

Instead, what I became convinced of is that the modern dogma is all one huge, ongoing protest to deny that sexual sin exists at all. The professors were doing exactly what every individual or group has done who doesn’t like the existing rules against sin; they break the rule and form a new group that allows and argues for the sin. People really, really think they hate the Catholic church because it consistently sticks to a well-defined list of sins, and doesn’t budge. But that is it’s job, to preach and defend the faith and morals set forth by Christ, and carried forward by the Apostles, and by the Bishops ever after. Thus, they see the church as just a set of rules that is hateful. But the church doesn’t hate anyone - they just won’t affirm your sins. If you see the Church as a list of rules, you don’t understand your sin. If you don’t know your sin, you are still in darkness, because you don’t know why you need a savior. And if you don’t know your weakness and need for a savior, you will never know Christ. Period. When Jesus asks the apostles after washing their feet, “Do you understand what I have done for you?”, he is talking to you and I. To each of us, God asks, “Do you understand what I have done for you?” If you do, then you’re life will radically change. Until you understand what the Creator has done for you, by coming here incarnate as a man - to forgive our sins, to transform our suffering, to defeat the devil, to regenerate our lives in water and spirit, and to raise us to eternal life - you won’t understand who he is or what he has done for you.

The main job of the Catholic Church is actually pretty simple: to speak truth, and speaking truth in love means saying no to sin. But even more so, it’s job is to ask you, “Do you understand what Jesus has done for you?” And if you understand what he has done, your sin and need for a savior will be blindingly clear.

Remember, Jesus wasn’t killed for affirming the sins of others, he was killed for calling out their sins. Anyone who considers their sin to be a virtue, is on the wrong side of history, because God is outside of time and space - all of this time that we live in has happened for God. It’s all done already. Thus, rejecting God and denying sin are the same thing. History is already done for God, and we have this glorious opportunity to cooperate or reject his grace right now. Accepting his grace doesn’t just mean you go straight to euphoria, if means you recognize what he has done for you, and then you begin to see your flaws. You must go through the purgative way before you get to the illuminative and unitive way. Today, people want to jump straight to the unitive, but there is no pill or magic spell or transporter to skip the journey, as Dante showed us so well in the Divine Comedy.

Five hundred years ago, protests against the rules formed new denominations, where our brothers in faith splintered into many groups that tweaked the rules to fit their desires for control and to allow some sins to be vindicated. But today, academics go to great lengths to go deeper to find that sin itself does not exist, that what we call sin is actually a feature of our DNA. Today, we don’t go by “faith alone” but much of our non-spiritual direction uses “reason alone,” and reason alone in the wrong hands is a slippery as faith alone.

A tendency toward alcoholism and same-sex attraction or gambling addiction are seen as genetic outcomes. But even if that’s true (and it’s very likely not true) the choice to drink to drunkenness or to have sex outside of marriage or gamble away the mortgage is still a choice. These are still actions beyond the temptation. “Lead us not into temptation,” is a prayer to ask for help in battling our concupiscence, also known as our urges to choose poorly. We all have our cross to bear. What we are tempted by does not require follow through in performance.

We really want to deny something is a sin because we like the sin, and we go to great lengths to find cheerleaders that will confirm our desire. Interestingly, the sins that we want to deny, those related to alcohol or sex, we can pin to DNA, but no one does this for racism, which is also a sin. There is a sense that we can deny sin that “doesn’t harm anyone but myself” but that’s the problem. Sin always harms other people, even if the action happens alone or with another consenting person. There is no other result of sin but harm to oneself and to others, which is why Jesus and all of sacred scripture prohibits these actions. For fans of the show Breaking Bad, Walter White lives by “reason alone” and he always has reasons that make perfect sense to him and he portrays his actions externally as “doing it for the family,” while he destroys lives around him like a human volcano throwing lava everywhere.

Chapter 7 of Mark shows a nice, short list that will save a lot of time, since people like to argue over what Jesus accepted and what he prohibited. He lists 13 things. It’s not like he hid this list. It’s right there.

“From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.” (Mk 7:18-23)

Drunkenness (licentiousness and folly), sex outside marriage between a man and a woman (adultery and unchastity), and racism (evil thoughts and malice and deceit and arrogance) are all covered here. It’s all very simple really. Jesus says, “Here’s the list: don’t do these.”

In fact, evil thoughts and unchastity are the very first two things he mentions, which apply directly to racism and sex outside of a valid marriage between a man and a woman. So cheer up, there’s a little something in Mark 7 for both of our American political parties and foes to soak up. Every human being is guilty of one or more of these thirteen things. The only person who is not guilty is Jesus. The greatest sin of all is to forget this. As always, pride is the gateway to sin, since it infects the heart, and the heart is where all the rest of these thirteen things take root.

But I have not come this far to merely complain about professors or excessive allegory in Christian thought. I get what is happening today. We don’t want to admit our sin any more than Adam or Cain wanted to. We want to divert the blame.

We are all arguing for our favored worldview and trying to recruit others to our side. We want to win. We want to feel righteous. No one wants to be wrong. This is all expected. This is what we like to do. This is not new.

My point is not to mock German philosophers or Critical theorists or Christian interpreters. The whole game of the tree of knowledge is “reason alone.” It is to argue your case against the will of God.

Sports team plan strategy and tactics to win games. So do intellectuals with arguments. This is also why so much ink is spilled in making the case for each side. We require reason to make arguments, and ideally the argument aligns with our experience and feelings, but this doesn’t always happen. This is why people switch sides as the phases of life unfold. Given enough time and grace, the rebellious teenager becomes a gentle grandparent. Even in our own lives, the lion lays down with the lamb, but it may take about eighty years to find a comfortable place to settle. Life experience and age carry great weight in determining what we believe is true, and in each phase of life we consider our experience to be the right one, the truth, the accurate assessment. Based on our experiences, we can use reason to determine what is true and good.

But there is a problem in relying solely on pure reason. The problem is that pure reason ignores that a spiritual side exists at all. As soon as we do this, we can reason sin right out of the picture, as if it was White-Out. But just like using White-Out, it doesn’t remove the ink or pencil mark beneath it, it’s only covered up. It’s still there. We know it’s still there, and the paper is sullied beyond repair, unless some supernatural favor can clean it up. Reason can argue and twist anything into what we want it to be. For Luther, he recognized that sin was still there, and like the White-Out metaphor, he said that Jesus’ redemption made us like a “dung hill covered in snow.” So he reasoned that we were still a piece of crap, but had some White-Out on us. He also pretty much tossed out free-will, and whatever he didn’t toss out, Calvin heaved out the window shortly thereafter. Both of these men were trained as lawyers and you can see how their “faith alone” argument stemmed very much from an underlying line of reasoning that laid the pavement for the truck of unbelief and bad interpretations of scripture to ram its way through Christendom for the past 500 years. Today, we have everyone arguing for “reason alone,” but this devolves quickly into a pursuit of power, because unless you are using reason like Socrates, subjective bias creeps in quickly. Thus, in my university classes, the “reasoned arguments” of my Critical Theory evangelist professor was unmoored from objectivity entirely so that every character with a friend in every book could be sniffed out and spoken of solely in terms of sexual identity. With reason alone, or faith alone, when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is the problem with ideology, and Catholicism is the antidote and counter-culture that cures this hammer/nail problem. Reason alone assumes certainty can be had in everything, while living with “faith and reason” allows for the mystery and nuance, which is exactly what makes life with this body and soul interesting.

If we only use argument to test our world, we cannot have a full game of life, because there is more to our body and soul than reason alone. There is a spiritual life. It’s like playing tennis against a wall instead of against a real person. Eventually it becomes boring, because there are no surprises. The ball volleys back at the exact angle you expect. It’s a game of Pong…forever. There is no spirit or life in the game. Also, you can never beat the wall, because it cannot fail to return the ball. You can never finish and shake hands with your opponent. When the spirit enters your life, then you can play a full game. Like Jacob: you can wrestle with God, but you can’t wrestle with him unless you first admit he’s there. Wrestling with yourself is even worse than playing tennis against a wall.

In the end, to my surprise, the root problem that I was trying to solve wasn’t an intellectual problem at all. There was a larger problem to solve. The problem I was trying to solve was spiritual, not material. It was not a mind problem, it was a soul problem.

The soul surpasses the mind. For non-believers, soul and mind may seem like the same thing, but the soul transcends the mind. Collapsing the mind and soul into one thing kills the spiritual life. If you think of mind and soul as one and the same, then you have walled body away from soul. You have placed the mind solely on the body, in the material world. But the mind doesn’t belong only with the body, nor does the soul disappear just because you built a wall. Souls can pass through walls.

If you must wall off the concept of mind, better to place it with the soul rather than the body, since the mind is where prayer happens. If the mind can only serve the body, then your thoughts can never leave the ground, and you will be stuck with the pursuits that end in the Big Empty - wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. If there is only Mother Earth, then nature with all it’s beauty is also the same nature that is red in tooth and claw. There is only competition.

Better yet, tear down the wall, admit the soul, and embrace the mind as the intermediary. The mind links body into the soul. The denial of an immortal soul puts a limit on life, and a soulless mind makes the body a robot. The connection to God is in the soul. A mind that doubts the soul must invent meaning. Then come the strange gods, because they must. The gaping hole where the soul sits invites the odd gods to move in and take up space. They makes themselves at home and eventually will evict you if you don’t evict them first.

We can pretend the soul isn’t in the room, but the elephant is still there. No matter how many blankets or tarps we use in trying to cover the elephant, it remains. Also, the elephant is too large to remove from the room, so it’s there to stay. You may evict the unwanted housemates, but not the soul.

The mind requires arguments as food for thought, but argument does not give life. Argument brings strife, not peace. To have peace, the mind needs certainty. To have life, the mind needs joy. This certainty and joy must come through the spirit, not from argument. The spirit is what animates and gives our body life.

We think we need all the answers, but accepting that there is mystery beyond our knowledge can settle the unsettled mind. In the end, it wasn’t an argument that won me over, just like it wasn’t an argument that convinced the illiterate masses of people who followed Jesus before the Gospels were even written. Yes, the story of Jesus provides an argument, but it is more than merely an argument. As any doubting middle-school child knows, there are flaws in the argument. The resurrection stories alone sow doubt with the inconsistencies and contradictions, so clearly the argument of Jesus’ story alone is not the only force in play.

Something beyond argument changed the early Christians. Something beyond explanation changes people today. There was no book or argument that clinched the deal for the converted. There were no books at all to begin with. There was the story that people heard, of the victory of Jesus over death, but even that alone was not enough. We know that the story alone is not enough, because scholars who study for a lifetime struggle to reconcile the story of Jesus with the evidence. Doubt over the resurrection and his life in general makes writers and preachers talk about Jesus as much now as they did in the first century.

Yet a person who cannot read at all can completely understand. People make radical life changes, as they are impacted so profoundly that it was clearly more than an argument that reached them. A poor person or a rich person can be equally affected. People from different nations and backgrounds can kneel beside one another as brothers and sisters, in complete unity on the basic facts laid out in the Apostles’ Creed. The contradictions in the resurrection stories do not bother them one bit, to the great irritation of unbelievers. How is this possible?

A touch of the spirit goes beyond reason. Something reaches down and turns the heart, sets it on fire. This cannot be explained except by the supernatural. I realize this sounds like UFO conspiracy theorists who seem to say, “When in doubt, it must be aliens.” This is bigger than aliens. The truth is that aliens would also be creatures of this universe, meaning they were created. This is bigger than any created creature and more strange as well.

The difference between unbelievers and believers is where reason is placed in the order of things. For many people today, reason exceeds faith. If reason is the highest good, the world of spirits dies. Reason alone cannot tolerate mysteries.

But for those who place faith higher than reason, there are mysteries and they are glorious mysteries. The odd thing about placing faith higher than reason is this: when we live purely in reason, we want certainty and no hocus pocus. But when we live in faith, we get certainty but can also keep reason. The Christian biologist can believe in the certainty of the resurrection while exploring the depths of the physical world. The Christian astronomer can believe in an immortal soul while studying the pillars of creation in the night sky. The atheist biologist or astronomer must find all the answers in the cells, atoms, and universe. For the believer, reason is still maintained, but it submits to faith.

Something strange happened when I came to understand this hierarchy. I realized that there are different types of “knowing.” Those who have little worldly wisdom or factual knowledge can hear the name Jesus Christ and come to understand that he is God, while the wisest and wealthiest people cannot understand. Where the light of Christ shines, the problem is solved. This awakening changes lives, to the point that all prior experience becomes illuminated in a new way. All the problems are solved through the life and cross. This world of chaos and order, of suffering, of pain, of joy, of peace, all suddenly make sense. The puzzle is solved.

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There is a saying that one man’s hero is another man’s traitor. In the battle of ideas, one man’s apologist is another man’s propagandist. But how can you tell the difference? In the world of ideas, what sounds good on paper may not work in practice. So the right interpretation of the world, both spiritual and physical, matters immensely in the pattern you choose for living, because action reveals the person, and action is often driven by belief. If the wrong ideas and interpretation is adopted, then the wrong compass for finding meaning is selected. Consider how important the compass is. A rocket headed to Mars that is off course even by one degree will miss the target and become space junk. At close range, the mistake of one degree won’t seem to matter, but over a long distance, the error becomes more obvious. So the ideas you subscribe to are important, but even moreso, the hero you choose to follow matters most of all, especially if that hero is one that never misses the mark (because he created the mark and everything else).

For example,The Communist Manifesto sounds like a good idea on paper, but in practice, in the real world, we all witnessed a century of unthinkable slaughter over that little book. The degree of error may have appeared small, but from the revolution in Russia to the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was the undeniable bloodbath. I remember reading that little book in 1996 and thinking that it made a lot of sense. What shocks me about that is that I was reading the book after millions of people, possibly as many as 100 million, had been killed worldwide because of that book. Yet somehow it still sounded good on paper. The body count was still tallying up, but the words on paper made me forget the very bloody history that had occurred partially in my own lifetime. After I shook my brain awake from the spell, I realized that words on paper do not translate to real-world applications. Not all good ideas are good ideas.

The interpretation game can be a dangerous one, especially today, and unless we act as gatekeepers of our thoughts, we allow others to steer us. Clearly, as children we take what our teachers and parents tell us to be a fact, for why on earth would they mislead a child? Today, media has unmatched power in entering our minds and conjuring thoughts, far more than parents or teachers. Unless you grew up in an Amish community, you have been blasted from birth by a continuous firehose from advertising and argument, all the way from Sesame Street to Stranger Things. This is not some conspiracy theory, this is what we are all aware of but accept as part of modern life. There is deliberate implantation of ideas in our brains, and for the most part we seem to enjoy it. We are passive to it, opening up our minds like house showings. Most families have multiple TVs, laptops, smartphones, radios, and home assistants listening and guiding on what to listen to or what to watch next. We certainly go along with it. There is minimal protest. (If you have four hours to kill, watch the old BBC Documentary called The Century of the Self. Be prepared to pause for reflection on how your life has played out, as past choices may appear under a different light.)

A massive flood of inputs is aimed at our minds, making noise and distracting us. This is exactly the goal, because the noise keeps us gyrating and moving and distracted. In silence, the biggest questions roar back to life. When these real questions about meaning and purpose arise, that’s bad for business. For me, the Covid lockdown opened up the silence, so I could hear, finally, those questions in full.

We live by narratives and if we don’t choose the narrative, the noise chooses for us. The interpretations that we assent to often become our real-world practices, and thereby have real-world consequences. But what we accept as our chosen interpretation is not always what is best for our lives. In our worldly minds, we feel wired for competition. Every sporting event and reality show and drama is presented as a contest. We love to take sides. In victory we can gloat, and in loss we can paint ourselves as a victim. Even when things are going well, we like to complain. If anyone doubts this, consider that America in 2023 is the most technologically advanced and wealthy country in human history, yet millions are depressed and worried about the future. To quote Junior Soprano, we are “…like the old woman with a Virginia ham under her arm, crying the blues cuz she has no bread.”

The choice of which worldview to use in interpretative decoder ring for life is not my main focus here, but I wanted to mention it because our American academic and business leaders have shifted their worldview over the past century, moving away from ideas founded on Judeo-Christian thought toward liberalism, socialism, and utilitarianism while keeping the profit motive much intact. This has happened gradually but in recent decades has reached a tipping point where the old ideas of a living God are being sidelined, along with the related ideas of spirits and sins. All are being boxed up for long-term storage. In the coming decades, what this means is that the new radicals will be Christians, so Europe and America will have gone full circle. The pesky Christians will once again be marginalized, at least for a little while.

Moving Christianity out of the public sphere has already led to a very different America. Perhaps being Christian had become too easy, because it was never meant to be. When Jesus talked about the narrow gate, it didn’t sound like he meant taking the exit ramp to hit the McDonald’s Drive-Thru. “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Mt 7:13-14) Then later he deciphers it for us, saying, “I am the gate!” on John’s Gospel and we all know what gate he had to go through for eternal life, which was abject suffering on the Cross.

The term Christian has been too easy to throw around, and too easy to be abused. Wearing a cross is a fashion symbol while the commandments are optional. One of the main reasons I fell away was the hypocrisy that I saw, and the lack of conviction and contrition among believers. The salespeople who were selling this product called Christianity made it appear ridiculous. But over time, thanks be to God, I realized that everything that I thought was Christianity was just Protestantism and liberalism dressed up as “the Way” of Christ.

The coming future will test the mettle of Christians because we will be living in a world similar to the day before Jesus was crucified. Christians will be outcasts and increasingly persecuted. Real persecution will happen again, and not the “persecutions” that we hear about annually like the marginalization of Christ and Christmas. This will be the kind where people lose their job for adhering to the statement of the Nicene Creed and declaring obvious truths, like saying that marriage is between one man and one woman.

What is most interesting is that ideas that came from Christ are being used among all the competing ideologies. Ideas of equal dignity, social justice, charity, serving the poor, and loving one another have been co-opted by humanists, atheists, socialists, and modernists. The only difference is that Christ has been removed from the picture, as if he were just some rich uncle who passed away and left us his best stuff. This leads directly to the second main difference, which is that there is no longer such a thing as sin. There are just oppressed and oppressors. The only sin left is that of the ‘oppressor.’ A trade has been made: Original Sin for Pandora’s Box. With Original Sin, we pin the blame for society’s ills on our own personal built-in flaws; with Pandora’s Box we get to blame someone else.

Not every Christian interpretation of the Bible is a good one. Fundamentalism and Young Earth Creationism may sound good on paper to some people, but anyone with even a mild understanding of science knows intuitively that the idea of a 6,000-year-old planet is flat-out silly. On the flip side, there are those who remove all spirits and miracles from the Bible, like Thomas Jefferson, and end up with nothing but Moral Therapeutic Deism. In both of these cases, too much is amputated, as one cuts out reason and the other cuts out the spirit. Then there is the justice vs. mercy spectrum. Some see God as the angry father who seems over-eager to punish us for every error. Others see a God that just affirms sin, or stranger still, a God that denies sin even exists. Wherever you see a Pride flag outside of a Church, you see a re-enactment of Henry VIII’s re-invention of Christ happening, as sin is being formed to fit the sinner, not the sinner formed to Christ. In either case, these are definitely bad interpretations. There is justice and there is mercy. But there is never only justice or only mercy. There is one way back and that is to repent and believe the Gospel. It is Christ and his Church that must conform to my desires, it is I who must change and conform to Christ and his Church.

As for me, I side with St. Augustine, who said, “Any interpretation of a biblical passage that militates against the love of God and neighbor is necessarily a bad interpretation.” (WOF Bible, 21) Love of God and neighbor is “the ultimate criterion for correct biblical reading.” But then I align with St. Augustine on most things, because he weaves justice and mercy, faith and reason, and in his world faith has a slight edge over reason that makes all the difference. This means that the interpretation of loving someone is where the interpreters have a field day, because most people today see love as simply affirming everyone’s favorite sin. But Jesus never affirms anyone’s sin. That’s because he’s against it. For all those who just see Jesus as a “nice teacher,” he sure talked about hell a lot, and even if he spent time with sinners, I don’t see the sinners continuing to sin. They are converted, because they all repent and believe the Gospel.

But how do we know who to listen to? Who can interpret? Who has the right to do so? How can we trust any interpretation? How can anyone know what is the right interpretation? How can anyone know anything?

This leads right into the rabbit hole of that branch of philosophy known as epistemology, and as far as interpretation goes, and what to believe, you can really get lost, especially in someone else’s thoughts. The reason we end up relying on ourselves and our own experiences as the final authority is because it seems like our head is the only fortress left, the last temple. This is true, but the problem with that is we’ve let too many spies into the fortress, and we’ve invited a circus into that holy place.

The pursuit of truth becomes paralyzing. There are more subjects to study than flavors of ice cream. Philology and archaeology and history and philosophy and psychology, to name just a few. No one can understand all of these subjects, or not deeply, and especially not if you keep a job or have a family. We give up and open the gate.

No wonder people flee from religion. The conflicting messages from the media and the faithful become too much. As for the Bible and Christianity, it’s too hard to understand. Given that I have a day job and commitments, it’s impossible to chase all of these things down. There is too much to sift through. Who can fully understand the Trinity or fathom the Virgin Birth? What about the resurrection of the body? Even among Christians, these mean vastly different things. There are too many arguments and ways of looking at these things.

When every ideology and religion and denomination is trying to pull us in this or that direction, Netflix seems so much easier. Facebook and Hulu don’t push anything on us, right? We just want to make it easy. Disney and the NFL make it easy, and fun, because they just provide entertainment for us. Then we don’t have to think about all of this stuff. It’s easier to just ignore it all. I just want to be entertained and passively watch the screens in front of me. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? Can’t I just let someone else do all the interpreting? They aren’t trying to shape me or change me. Right?

Right?

Wrong.

Unfortunately, no.

While there are many people and organizations who will gladly “volunteer” the right interpretation and the correct narrative of life for you, what is easiest is not best. What is best, what is true, cannot be passively received from a TV or phone. It requires some effort. Anyone who has tried to lose ten pounds or learn a foreign language or master a musical instrument the “easy way” knows that it doesn’t work.

Nearly everyone is willing to sell their worldview to you, if you let them. The best salesperson is the one who sells you something you don’t need, and then you thank her for it. Likewise, the greatest evangelists are those who don’t appear to be evangelizing at all.

The more you sit back and let the images pass before your eyes, the more you are shaped and formed to an interpretation chosen by people who have plans for you, and they are most likely in an office building in New York or Los Angeles, and certainly not anywhere near an upper room in Jerusalem.

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Bad ideas are like the many-headed hydra. When one head is cut off, two more spring up. Just when Arianism is getting cured, Nestorianism boils over, and when that pimple is taken care of, Monophysitism appears on the body of Christ, and when the ointment for that is applied, a side effect called Monothelitism develops. And even after resolving these things, they come back, but at least the Church has a cure on the shelf for each of these conditions. They come back in odd and interesting ways, and some heresies like Arianism or sola scriptura take many centuries to fade out. Sorry, did I say fade out? They never fully disappear. Arianism was addressed in 325 at the Council of Nicaea, and a modern version of it is visible in humanism. Sola scriptura was addressed in the Council of Trent in the 1500s, yet the circular logic of that idea keeps every dog chasing its tail.

Today, a person could spend every waking minute refuting heresies because it’s all over in the language of believers and non-believers. Arguing over these errors make little impact, since those who openly reject official Church teaching have adopted their own authority, either in scriptural interpretations, or in their own mind. The old errors are so commonly held and pronounced, that I can’t listen to modern music for an hour without recognizing at least one heresy. I think Luke Bryan is the Pelagius of Country Music, but he is just one of many. A good series would be doing a close-reading of errors in Luke Bryan’s greatest hits, because you can find so many heresies passed off as wisdom or truth in his lyrics. It’s not just him, so I don’t mean to single him out. But we live in an age of various common errors, most commonly, Protestantism, Gnosticism and Pelagianism, which are big words, but with basic problems when we examine them as practiced in the real world.

This is why the word “Christian” is so smashed up, misused, and abused that it now looks like the car in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles at the end of the movie. If you think this is false, check out /r/Christianity on reddit.com. It is chaos. That subreddit should be changed to /r/tohu-wa-bohu, which is the Hebrew word for chaos before God created order in the universe.

Pope Pius X famously called modernism “the synthesis of all heresies,” and the Protestants posting on social media does us the favor of proving it beyond the shadow of a doubt. You could play Heresy Bingo and have a winner before finishing the first post’s comment section. Reddit’s generic /r/Christianity feed is like a slop bucket. It’s remarkable to read comments there from self-professed Christians, because few seem aware of the first fifteen centuries after Christ’s death, and it’s not clear they realize that there was a Church operating before the year 2020.

So there are many bizarre versions of Christianity floating around, and I used to think that nothing could outdo the “snakes and orgies” crowd that 60 Minutes did a show on many years ago, but I’ve been proved wrong repeatedly in recent years, as the heresies have erupted in denominations that once seemed to have a reasonable grip on doctrine. But churches like the ELCA and Methodists and even the “cool” Catholic churches have been caught up in the spirit of the times, and thus they will die like dandelions when the autumn of this culture comes, which is always sooner than we think. You cannot get to liturgies featuring drag queens or celebrating the worst sin of Pride without first abandoning Christ and the faith of the apostles. However, the long labor of creating and carrying the church through the gauntlet of time has happened, and for the Church that sticks to those teachings, it will outlast this current chaotic summer, and in the autumn and into winter, the redwood will outlast them all once again and arrive in spring stronger still.

So while this makes a lot of people feel worried and lost, or scared that the Catholic Church will fall into error, it should actually give much hope. Because the only Church that will last is the one which remains in full orthodoxy with Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. The only Church that is interesting or compelling is the one that keeps the Deposit of Faith and rejects all doctrinal errors from 33 A.D. until today, because it is the only Church led by the Holy Spirit.

When the breathless apostles first came to Jesus and reported error being used in Jesus’ name, he said, “It’s ok.” Well, he actually said:

John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward. (Mark 9:38-41)

To break that down a bit, Jesus was telling the apostles that the others may cast out demons in Jesus’ name. That’s wonderful. He didn’t say, “Go out and club them until they stop.” The Church has occasionally errored in that. But Jesus also didn’t say, “Terrific, bring in these outsiders as the new teachers.” They did not become apostles. Jesus didn’t adapt his teaching to the outsiders. The thing about Jesus is that you don’t get to tell him what to do (unless you are Mary), you come to him on his terms and surrender to him. Pride need not apply. Jesus didn’t declare one of these other healers to be “the rock” on which he founded his church. He didn’t make these others the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. He allowed other interpretations, but he didn’t say they were correct. All directions and corrections are provided to the apostles, which is why they were the chosen ones and the leaders.

Even when I was fallen away and considered myself atheist, I knew that if I ever returned it would only be to the Catholic Church (with Greek Orthodoxy as a dark horse in that race), because the only Church that made sense historically, logically, physically, or spiritually was the one that Jesus founded on the rock of Peter, because it was the only one that had fought and outlasted the intellectual, physical, and spiritual march of empires and ideas, and it was clearly different from all other Johnny-come-lately denominations. The non-Catholic denominations may heal people and cast out demons, and that is truly wonderful, but they are wildly prone to poor theology, teaching, and lack the all-important taproot of Tradition to the person of Jesus himself.

The original, the real deal, actually still exists if you look for it. I was quite surprised to find holy people still striving for holiness. It may have been the biggest shock of my life when I returned. The first time I saw a grown man kneel for communion and receive it like his life depended on it, I knew I’d been missing the point. When I started meeting with people that studied and strived for holiness, I realized that the lukewarm representations that I had held as standard was a very low standard indeed.

Like General Motors, modern Christianity built a lot of models that didn’t last. We had spinoffs of spinoffs so that most of those claiming the label “Christian” today would confuse the heck out of Peter, Paul and the apostles. Dostoyevsky famously wrote in the Grand Inquisitor that if Jesus came back to life, the Catholic Church would kill him again to retain its power. But as the Church lacks the power today that Dostoyevsky imagined, the story has not aged well, despite being a terrific read. It’s more likely that if Jesus returned as Dostoyevsky imagined (which didn’t match anything that Jesus actually said), Jesus would see that most of Christianity outside of the Catholic Church has turned into Imagination Land from Disney’s movie Inside Out, starring Bing Bong, the pink elephant, as the high priest.

Fortunately, the original model is still in storage and is ready to roll. It has some dents in it, for sure, but it runs fine and those scratches can be repaired. The apostolic Church, the body of Christ, that has had plenty of fallen leaders and brokenness over the years, but the heart is alive. The deposit of faith remains, and as long as the head is Christ, it cannot bless sin, because he did not bless sin. He said to “Go and sin no more.” The faithful cannot elevate the self or feelings in replacement of God. The denial of sin is a no-go in the driver’s manual on how to go to heaven.

Embracing orthodox belief is how we answer the question, “What is truth?” It is also how communities and individuals get restored to health. From the Body of Christ, life springs forth, age after age.

We will not find salvation in heresy any more than we will in our youth sports teams or in a Tinder tryst or in an online mob or in our endless entertainment options. Restoration and the path to salvation will come back from where it began, through the Real Presence in the Eucharist, in gatherings of prayer, in speakers witnessing their conversion stories, in Bible studies, in adoration chapels, in Mass, in retreats, in recovery meetings, and anything that forges community away from the false gods propped up by modernism.

To be awakened, we need a massive Ezra moment of deprogramming and teaching, where someone breaks open the scrolls to remind the lost people of a past they know nothing about. In Nehemiah, the people hear the word and understand, and know their sins, and know how they fell into the state of sin, little by little, by departing from orthodoxy.

Ezra opened the scroll so that all the people might see it, for he was standing higher than any of the people. When he opened it, all the people stood. Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people, their hands raised high, answered, “Amen, amen!” Then they knelt down and bowed before the LORD, their faces to the ground. (Neh 8:5-6)

When the people bow their faces to the ground, they have surrendered. But we have not done so yet. We are still in full competition, both with one another, and even more so with God. And this is what every heresy in history does: it competes with God. Most heresies, from Simon Magus to Nestorius to Henry VIII, had a person with a large ego, often a king, who wanted to hammer the Church into his image and likeness, instead of making the Body of Christ in the image and likeness of God.

How are we going to solve this competition problem? How can a culture built on competition, capitalism, winning, and getting whatever we want possibly break that addiction? How can we possibly turn away from serving our desires?

That’s the easy part.

You win that game by not playing. You win in the same way Jesus won it the first time. You win by living in the culture while still being set apart from it. You win by being “called out” of the culture. You go to the desert. You pray, fast, and help the poor, like Jesus. You leave the place of idolatry, like Abraham. You exit the corruption, like St. Anthony to the desert. Like St. Benedict, you reset, apart from the world in the wilderness. Like St. Cyprian, like St. Augustine, like St. Ignatius, like St. Francis, like St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross - you swim against the current, because the current is taking you the wrong way. You reset and then re-enter the fray, washed anew in the blood of Christ.

You win by accepting this sinful world as it is, and while still living in that world, but not being a player in its game. You win by entering into the suffering of others, with love, not affirming their sin, but by witnessing another way. Stop honoring and envying what other people hold as worthwhile. Money, houses, luxuries, sex, entertainment, food, alcohol, cars, boats, drugs, vacations. Stop wanting what the world wants. The entire problem is that you want the wrong things, and this is what leads to every error.

How do you step out of this culture? How do you stop wanting garbage in favor of the Bread of Life? We follow the advice of the Truth himself. Jesus said, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off…And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” (Mk 9:42-47)

The good news for us about this brutal metaphor is that we have something we can rid ourselves of without actual amputation.

What causes our sin in most cases today is what sits between our hands and our eyes. The phone. Our culture is the phone, and envy, lust, pride, sloth, greed, and wrath all reach out to your throat through that device. We can cut off the source of at least half of our most common ways of straying with not a single drop of blood spilled. But few of us will choose this, because hugging our sin is the easier path. Narcissus dies by staring into the mirror, forever, in love with himself.

The easier path is always the one that doesn’t pay off with interest. The easy path is that chosen by Lot, it is the path chosen by those Israelites wanting to return to Egypt in the desert, it is the path chosen by Peter when he denies Jesus, the path chosen by Judas in betraying him, it is the path today of affirming sin rather than fighting it. It is the path chosen by Marcion and Arius and Nestorius and Luther and Calvin and Henry VIII and Joel Osteen. The easier path is always the road to ruin. And who wants to be part of a religion that demands nothing of us, that demands too little, when Jesus has given all to his bride, the Church?

We must surrender to win. You certainly do not win by joining the side that appears to winning, or that you think will win, because even if you win, you are still stuck in the game. In fact, if you win, you may be more stuck in the game than before, like how the proverbial quicksand pulls you deeper the more you struggle. How many aspiring employees who climb to Vice President suddenly find that their wealth and prestige now “require” a bigger house and a finer car and better schools for their kids? How many French and Germans and Russians traded in the humble truths of Jesus Christ for the toxic truths of a political party? How many Democrats and Republicans are doing the same in America right now exactly as they were in Dante’s Florence so many centuries ago, or in Rome during the glory days of Caesar, or in the last days when the collapse of the Bronze Age? All of these past peoples have turned to dust, but the living God remains, and the Holy Spirit carried the Church along in this final Messianic Age.

You do not win by surrendering to the bulldozer of earthly power, on either side. You win by surrendering to the power of Jesus. He is the real ruler over all things. Your way of life will need to change. Your life itself may need to be given up in professing the Truth. But the only way to win at this most important thing is to surrender everything. Ego, pride, self-elevation. Let it go. Otherwise, if your game is here on this earth, whatever you win today, you will need to defend tomorrow, and someday in the future after long years of fighting, you will turn around and see that you have been defending a pile of rubble. When you reach that moment, know that the one Truth is waiting for you to turn your face all the way to look at his sacrifice on the Cross.

Rather than dishearten you, this should ignite you. You have been wanting the wrong things. Desires that you had, items that you wanted to own, experiences that you sought to remember - these were the distractions from the real answer to the one test question. How strange I thought it was for Jesus to say, “Rejoice, for the kingdom is among you.” But it is here. It’s here, but it’s the opposite of the competitive nonsense and little trophies we have been seeking all our lives. This is an incredibly exciting time to be alive, because once again, the world has regressed into the same shape as in the first century, when the apostles lit the fuse for the dynamite of the Gospel. The fuse is once again just waiting to be lit with the fire of the Holy Spirit. The kingdom is here among us, and it is the Catholic Church, with all its flaws. The Church: founded on a rock called Peter, the sinner and the saint, the fallen one transformed into a bold healer. The same answer to “Why did Peter sink?” for an individual is the same answer for the Church founded on the rock called Peter: taking the focus off of Christ and the fullness of him is to sink. To look at him constantly in trust is to experience the unending miracle of walking with God. The kingdom is here, the Church - in the world but not of the world - defending the faith from errors until he comes again.

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The word “Christianity” may need to go away for a while, like on a desert retreat. It needs to go off to a sweatlodge with St. Anthony of Egypt again for a while so it can figure out what Jesus intended. Few Protestant denominations remain that teach what “Christianity” really entails or demands. The familiarity of it has bred contempt and complacency, which has led to extremely watered-down versions. This is exactly why St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers exited the culture in the third century. Even back then it had been diluted into a cheap BBQ lighter fluid instead of the 100% explosive ethanol it was on Pentecost. Today, it can be restored to be highly flammable once again, but it won’t be done by being “cool” in the culture or by flopping around speaking in tongues or doing fake healings or by affirming sin or denying that the devil exists. It will be restored to it’s original strange potency by the same old proven methods: prayer, fasting, and charity.

But once again, like in the time of the Desert Fathers, the errors that led people away from proper worship and correct doctrine must be re-visited, because they have been allowed back in. All of them. It almost as if a busload of old heresies showed up at the pool, and barged right in without checking their floaties, food, weapons, and drugs at the door. Many of them don’t even bother to wear a swimsuit, as modesty and sin are old-fashioned. Now the pool is in mayhem. Only a few lifeguards (in red hats) are shouting while others have joined in the orgy. Fortunately, the party is almost over, since it has become a pool no one wants to swim in. The newcomers and families who would like to swim take one look at the chaos and decide to stay home - after all, they can setup their own pool - who needs the community pool? Thus we have many trying to claim the main pool, and millions of little pools where people isolate in their own anti-social backyard. The heresies have stunk up the water to the point that the “Christian” pool is more like a swamp lagoon. Now it will require a lockdown for cleaning. After draining, it needs a full sandblasting before a refill.

The intense, long battle against errors about who Jesus was, what Jesus said, and what he taught, waged over centuries, needs to be waged all over again. Today, it’s not even clear that people understand the word heresy. And to be fair, it is an ugly word. “Heretic” combines two sounds that make Minnesotans like me shiver: “hair” and “tick.” This sounds like a burrowing insect at the base of my hairline. Where I live, ticks raise goosebumps on people more than snakes. Whenever I’ve discovered one engorged on a dog’s belly, or see one climbing my shirt after a walk in the woods, it gives me a case of the heebie-jeebies. But perhaps this strange association is apt. A tick buried in skin kind of fits well with what heresy does. Because a tiny corruption like that caused by a tick lodging in your skin is much like how a heretical idea poisons and corrupts individuals or entire nations. Heresy is not unlike Lyme disease in that it often has a subtle entry point but leads to an insidious devastation of the body as it spreads.

The idea of heresy is something people don’t even like to talk about, but I think it needs to be. I doubt that the average Joe Christian has ever heard of Marcionism, or Pelagianism, or any other heresy, but many certainly speak those heresies openly. Ideas long ago denounced as un-Christian are mentioned as if they were orthodox in casual conversation. But this isn’t surprising, given the past few centuries of rejecting all authority. Most everyone now is their own Pope, so even if I mentioned the basics of a heresy, my listener would respond, “Who made you the Pope?”

To which I would answer, “Do you see a funny hat on me? Long ago, after a big todo, the Church declared…”

And that’s exactly where the conversation would end, because the appeal to authority beyond the “Self” would outrage the listener.

“The Church has entered the chat.” When that happens, the modern American, Protestant, public school brain exits the chat. It’s over. Authority? Are you claiming authority? Are you kidding me? We have hundreds of years of literature and philosophy and theology crammed between our ears, where the only authority is in national power and the self. America itself is a rejection of old-world “authority.” But this continual march of rejecting authority has put the West in an odd state. Because once the highest authority of God and his Church was thrown out, and the Pope put in his corner in Vatican City, the nations must act as the moral authority. They have been doing this for about three centuries now.

Mentioning the Church’s authority leads to an automatic response. Like a trained bear that can dance, the hearer waltzes off stage on cue. Or, more likely today than ever, this “tamed” bear attacks and mauls the trainer.

What’s most interesting today is that in our rejection of authority, so few today are called to the priesthood, but nearly everyone is called to the pontificate. Worth noting here is that “pontiff” means bridge-builder. But with a billion mini-popes in the world, we end up having a lot of bridges to nowhere, because all of the bridges lead directly back to the self.

This isn’t just an issue among Protestants or agnostics, it’s rampant within the Catholic Church, too. So many people don’t know what the teaching of the Church is that you can hear the echoes of ancient errors every day, even among bishops. Imagine: a bishop that doesn’t understand errors that have existed for thousands of years. You don’t have to imagine it. This is happening all over Europe and the United States. This is the equivalent of an NFL coach not knowing what is a “first down,” or what a “nickel defense” is used for. Could you imagine a coach who worked for thirty years to reach the top, and then have it be revealed that he thought the game was soccer? No. This seems almost impossible, unless somehow you have cronyism or ideology (or both) interfering with the proper promotion of educated and competent bishops.

And this of course is exactly what we have. The creep of heresy gets in like a tic. It’s like Soviet Science or modern American sociology, where ideology has replaced the goal of seeking the Truth, the highest Truth. And it replays over and over in history. It’s Plato versus the Sophists. It’s Athanasius versus Arius. It’s Augustine versus Pelagius. It’s Marx versus Pope Leo XIII. Heresy is ideology that bleeds into faith and skews the right understanding of God, the Trinity, Jesus, the Sacraments, and the whole Church. And it always starts with the rejection of God, in some form, and the elevation of what a person wants. “Blessed are the heretics,” said Stanley Hauerwas. What he meant by this was that without those pushing errors, we wouldn’t see the Truth so clearly. So luckily we have Marcion and Pelagius and Nestorius to illustrate the errors. Their ideas act like bugs on a windshield, where you don’t need to stop until it gets really bad, and then you must pull over at the nearest service station and squeegee like a maniac with elbow grease to get the encrusted scum off. Sin works this way; sin is not a big deal, until it is. Until your sin is going to cause a major accident and maybe even kill you, you don’t take action to fix the disorder.

When you hear a bishop defending an old heresy, often with new words, that was called a heresy long ago, it leads to confusion for the team. Trust in leadership is undermined, especially when the waterboy understands the game better than the coach. You cannot have the offensive coordinator telling the running backs they must run backwards from now on. If that ever happened in the NFL, a firing would surely occur. Yet we are not seeing the firings despite wild errors in “coaching” from those in charge in the Church. This is likely because the Church moves slowly, which is good, since they operate like the Ents in Lord of the Rings. Anything worth saying, is worth taking a long time to say it. This is one of the great features of the Church so that they don’t jump to conclusions.

There is something called “The Peter Principle,” which has nothing to do with St. Peter or the Church, but simply states that people will be promoted in their career to one level higher than they should be, right to the point where they are incompetent. This doesn’t apply to all bishops, obviously, just a few, but whenever you hear a high-ranking person espouse an idea that was jettisoned as an error many centuries ago, you have to scratch your head and wonder how or why God is working through this.

But rest assured that God is doing just that. Errors about Christianity are ever-present in both the culture and the Church, and I suspect this has been the case since Peter finished his first speech on Pentecost, as surely strange interpretations began immediately. There are many bishops sticking to doctrine and the Truth, with Bishop Barron doing a beautiful job of articulating the faith, following in a long line of great articulators, like Saints Cyril, Maximus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Damascene, Newman, Sheen, and many, many others.

Teaching Wednesday night religion class recently, a kid raised his hand and told me, “My dad says that Jesus is the good God, and the God of the Old Testament was the one that would squash you.”

“Kid,” I said, “You’re dad is a heretic.”

Just kidding. I didn’t say that.

“Kid,” I said, “Have you ever heard of Marcion?”

Just kidding. I didn’t say that either.

How many adults today have heard of Marcion? Who has ever heard of Marcion, or Menander, or the Cathars? Few today have heard of these old names except for geeky Catholics who know about the ecumenical councils where the early Church had to settle these disputes. These old heresies argued for exactly what this kid’s dad was teaching. This idea springs up repeatedly, and if we haven’t heard of Marcion, we’ve certainly heard of Nazi Germany, which was rife with Marcionism as an offshoot of its hatred and ethnic cleansing of the Jews. (Tip: Marcionism always goes hand in hand with anti-Old Testament thinking and makes a beeline toward anti-Jewish thoughts and behavior.) Any time that Catholicism lacks respect for the Jews, it is in error, and this is why the document known as Nostra Aetate was sorely needed, as a reminder that the Church “recalls that the Apostles, the Church's main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ's Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people.” I also must add here, that if Jesus is God, and you believe that as I do, then he inspired the entire Old Testament, including the parts that are confusing, and Jesus was a devout Jew, as was Mary and Joseph. So for any Catholic to misunderstand the intensely deep meaning of the Jewish roots of Christianity is to be like the sower’s seed on the rocky path. If Jesus is God, and if Scripture is inspired by God, and all of the prophecies of the Messiah were foretold by God, and the story of the chosen people is God winning back the world, then throwing out the Old Testament seems a bad idea.

The kid’s father who taught Marcionism was doing the same thing that writers like Dan Brown does in his novels. He finds an old heresy and dusts it off as something fresh and new. Then it’s presented as a fact, as a new “orthodoxy” and then believers have to spend lots of time re-arguing what has already been argued and ruled upon. But this is one of the strengths of the Church, actually, in that it has a structure that can do this. We can all see the Protestants lack this authority to rule, which leads to heresy proliferating like a cytokine storm. Truly, if there is one weakness in the Eastern Orthodox churches, it’s that they cannot resolve disputes like the Catholic Church can, because the Bishop of Rome can speak from the Chair of Peter, as Christ gave Peter the keys, which is to say, the authority.

What’s old is new, but none of the heresies are actually new. You can go read St. Irenaeus who wrote Against Heresies in the second century, and most heresies today were already in play. Over time, new errors have come about, and over the centuries others have written books to define these errors, and why they are errors, like St. Alphonsus Liguori with the History of Heresies. There are many. St. Hippolytus of Rome. Denzinger. Belloc. Fortunately, we don’t have to go read all of these, we can just read the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It’s the Reader’s Digest condensed version of about a million pages and scrolls from Adam to Pope Francis.

There’s a reason these ideas come back to life, and it’s because we default toward doubt, not faith. And faith is a gift. With the eyes of faith, the heresies are clear, as the scales fall away from our vision once we see Christ for who he really is, and that is God. Once you can see Jesus and hear the word of God, then it’s clear why none of the heresies work in practice. This is why they don’t stick. They come and go like an Old Navy shirt - sure, it feels good for a bit, but you can tell how cheap it is, and you’ll throw it out after a few years.

The heresies sound good when you first discover them. They seem to make sense. This is why it took me a while to figure out that everything that Dan Brown writes is actually a spoof-comedy, not a drama. Because his send-ups of heresy as truth and adventures in bad history lessons made me re-arrange my video shelf so that The Da Vinci Code sits right next to Dumb and Dumber. When I need a light hearted night to let loose, I can choose either movie.

The reason heresy is declared and marked off as incorrect is not about power and control. It’s about what heresies do, and what they don’t do. It’s about how they misunderstand Jesus and salvation history. It’s about a false way to know God. The reason heresies are declared is simple: they do not work. They do not work logically or spiritually. They do not work in the mind, in the soul, or in the body.

This is the thing I’ve been saying in this entire series in talking about sales and practical application. There are many shiny things that seem real, but like advertising on bad products, those things wind up being a mirage in the desert. What works is not just that which sells. Consumers and voters may select bad choices. Mistakes play out over time, long after the sale was made. What becomes heresy is not based on popular opinion, but based on what happens when an error is chosen. There is perhaps nothing more vindicating in the Church’s slowness than in its rejection of the birth control and abortion, as both of these “cure all” remedies of the techno-utopian evangelists have blown up spectacularly. What was supposed to solve divorce, unhappiness, and family issues has exploded in divorce, unhappiness, and family issues.

What works is that which lasts and endures through the ages. What works isn’t always what seems easy, but what works satisfies the intellect, the will, the body, and the soul. Virtue works. Chastity works. Humility works. Faith works. Hooking up with random sex partners and pretending it doesn’t matter? That doesn’t work. Shouting your abortion? That doesn’t work. Believe in yourself instead of something higher? That doesn’t work. Perception is reality? That doesn’t work. All of these ideas run into the rock of life, the true test, where bad ideas run aground.

But we forget this every generation, and we re-learn it in every generation. We forget the Truth because we want to be new and clever, but the bad ideas are always old and warmed-up leftovers. This is why someone like Jean-Paul Sartre can be celebrated for a hundred years for saying, “God is dead,” when he’s just saying the same thing every middle-schooler has said since the beginning of time. But when you do so with a Ph.D. it seems to have weight, despite the long-winded argument being the result of never growing past high school rebellion. What happens then is that everyone else also stuck in that ninth grade rejection of authority, clap their hands and say, “Brilliant!” because it satisfies their egos and excuses their sin.

This is why the same heresies pop up and die over and over again, because heresies are exactly like dandelions. Orthodoxy, however, is like a redwood tree. Hardwoods grow slowly, apparently weak as saplings, while the wild and fast-growing grasses spring up quickly. But what is apparently hale and hearty in spring dies in the autumn. The hardwoods always win in the end, because they are built to last through the seasons of life, and that includes the winter of suffering.

To go back to the sports metaphor, Catholicism is a fourth-quarter faith. It’s not for the first drive down the field, or for the halftime show. It’s built for the last drive that wins the game. It’s for the long haul, made to last, not for showing off and fading away.

So, to bring this back to heresy and Marcion: you have to read about Marcion to understand why his idea of “the Old Testament God is not the same as the New Testament” is an error all by itself, and a very dangerous one at that because it twists scripture into a wildly different shape. In the early church, Tertullian and others took up the battle and won the argument, closing the door on Marcionism forever as an error in what the Church founded by Jesus believes. And it’s not a “because I said so” argument and defense, it is well-reasoned and logical, and worth exploring. Many of the “Jesus as the dude” arguments are a form of Marcionism, just as much as anti-Semitism has a taproot in Marcionism. But if I don’t stop here, this post will turn into a lengthy discussion on this particular heresy, so let’s move forward. More to come in part 2. Perhaps a whole series on heresies is needed, but that may require a more focused mind than my own, like those who have already written books on it.

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The wool has been pulled over our eyes for about seventy years now (or maybe 500 years), where we think that we have liberated women, but really we have walked into a trap. I’m not talking about women’s sports or women having careers traditionally held by men here, I’m talking about the real things that separate men from women.

Men have walked into the trap as well. We’ve all walked into the trap, each into our own separate trap, claiming freedom while the snare tightens around us in our solitary “liberty” cages. Yes, there is a well-known trap, called the “Two Income Trap,” but there is a worse trap, called the gaping maw of the underworld (better known as hell). The trap is that we think we can hammer morality into any shape we like, but we can’t. The trap is that we think motherhood and fatherhood are not particularly important, and that men can be women and women can be men, but they can’t.

Some things are not changeable. When balancing a wheel, the more we try to hammer a wheel into the shape we’d like, the more unbalanced the wheel becomes. The more you hammer, the worse it gets and whole wheel eventually throws the bearing and destroys the machine.

We’ve seen this movie before and Catholics are always the “jerks” that stand athwart certain truth claims made by voices in the culture. But Catholics are only jerks in this case because they must teach what was handed down. It’s either abandon the faith and bow to the Golden Statue, or set your face like flint against the world, the flesh, and the devil and continue to preach what Christ and the Apostles taught.

What is a sin has been defined since before Jesus taught the Apostles, and then Jesus clarified and refined it. It cannot be changed. When people get angry at the Church, it is solely because the Church repeats what Jesus said and the Apostles taught. This is why the church that Christ founded is the one with authority, which really makes people bristle. But the fact is this: morality cannot be legislated, it cannot be papered over, it cannot be coerced, and it cannot be softened to fit the mood of middle-schoolers, no matter what kind of emotional hostages they try to take.

What is sin and what is not sin, is not up for debate. There are Cardinals in the Catholic Church today who do not understand this, and they certainly do not understand Matthew 5:17-19. But the teaching of the Apostles is as timeless as God in heaven. Our own consciences can inform us that the natural law is right if we could only sit in a room quietly and listen to that small voice without reaching and scrolling on the phone. Our smartphones today make us less wise than ancient people, who were more likely to understood their need for a savior far better than we can, because they understood suffering, and they knew what Jesus’ redemption meant for their bodies and souls.

Americans today don’t like this idea of rules set in stone, such as Commandments, which is why we continually try to interpret the Bible on a personal basis, which twists all into destruction. Personal interpretation of the Bible is precisely how the devil re-crafts the bad sale from the beginning of human history to infect the Messianic Age that we are living in now. The devil has lost the war, but he can win some battles along the way and take souls, and he does this by twisting morality and re-naming sins as holy things.

Throughout American history, from supporting slavery to selling consumerism to pushing the various evils of the Sexual Revolution, sola scriptura has been used to give sin a divine mandate, and thereby entrench it ever more securely in the culture. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, provides a solid foundation for doctrine and morality and has stood strong in the face of each attack. (from Don Johnson at Catholic Answers. For insight into our current fiasco of Biblical interpretation, read Don’s book: Twisted into Destruction.)

Without a doubt, men failed women before seventy years ago, but because of that failure that started in the 1960s with the lies of the sexual revolution, men have failed women even worse by allowing the current mania to thrash about so wildly. I realize that sin has been around since the Fall in the Garden, but the sixties gave it a boost, like a five-hour energy drink that lasted nearly a century.

What’s funny is that having received this unbridled, bursting sense of liberty, depression has hit an all-time high. But how can that be? I say it’s funny, but it’s not. It’s sad, because we are sad. We are reliving these Garden stories, over and over. When Eve took the fruit, men followed, and both ended up sad as they were cast out of the garden, keeping God’s image but losing his likeness. (For a good read on the fallout from the sexual revolution, read Adam and Eve After the Pill.)

The initial lie from the devil led to a bad relationship. And the lie started with a false sense of food security, leading to curiosity for knowledge, working against trust in the Creator, all of which preceded the sexual fall and made the people believe that they no longer needed God, or each other (much more on this in an upcoming series on food and sex).

Since the Fall, we just can’t learn. Men refuse to love women properly, and the mess begins all over. The enmity between man and woman repeats, and it only is combatted by humility and submission of husband and wife to each other. The backlash against toxic masculinity is appropriate, because the cartoonish ignorant version of manliness that marketing departments preached to men was an absurdity, and it was the least Biblical idea in history. Trucks, sports, money, and sex do not make a man “manly.” A man driving a truck in a lift-kit doesn’t look manly, he is just wearing a giant fig leaf. And a man who kowtows and removes himself from all responsibility to defer to women is pathetic. Healthy masculinity buys a truck if he needs to haul stuff around. Healthy masculinity doesn’t buy extra horsepower just to bark his tires at a stoplight, he buys extra horsepower because his job is pulling heavy things.

Material things, when presented as necessities to manliness, make him into a buffoon. Do you know what actually makes a man “manly”? This will come as a shock, because it’s the same thing that can make a woman “womanly”.

Acting like Jesus makes a man. Imitating Christ is how you become a father, a son, a brother, a nephew, a cousin, or a friend. Likewise, imitating Christ is how you become a better mother, a daughter, a sister, a niece, a cousin, or a friend. Dying to self makes a man manly. Dying to self makes a woman womanly.

There is right masculinity, and Jesus exemplified it. He lives it. He did not take a wife, but he shows us how to live whether we are single or married, man or woman, rich or poor, Jew or non-Jew. And although he did not marry, he made it utterly plain that having a wife, one wife, through all the hard times, makes a man masculine. Gathering notches on your truckbed can only make a man into a fool and an enemy of God.

But the backlash against the absurd form of macho manliness has swung the pendulum into what girls today are told is liberation, where they are essentially being taught to act like men and want the things that men want. I have not seen any ads teaching girls to desire a family and loving husband, but I have seen many holding up sports glory, money, and sex as the highest goods. The funny thing is that many boys are now realizing that sports glory and money will not bring happiness, and are pulling away from those pursuits. The false idols are showing their sandy bottoms. They are washing away and will continue to erode over the next generation.

However, in telling girls they can be men, we declare they have been empowered, but have they? Mocking motherhood and marriage has not been empowering, and since women cannot actually be men, but can imitate them, they have shunned their nature for man’s nature. And once again, due to this disorder, God will allow us to be taught by disorder, by our own choice. When the formless void that God created and filled is not filled in the way he designed, disorder erupts.

But we have done more than mock motherhood and the family unit. We have spent the past forty years mocking fatherhood, with sitcoms fathers, particularly Homer Simpson, leading the charge. Now the latest fad is to replace fatherhood with the government, the State, and we’ll learn that social workers make for an even worse husband than Homer Simpson in the long run. The Soviet Union discovered this and the fallout from that was worse than ten Chernobyl incident. At least radiation poisoning only affects the body, not both the body and the soul. The United States has a long stretch of disunity ahead, and we have chosen it.

C.S. Lewis once said that hell is always locked from the inside, and people who choose to live in hell, in sin, merely refuse to turn the lock, because they think sin will make them happy. This is especially true in a marriage that is viewed as a temporary contract rather than covenantal joining of two people into one flesh. If marriage is not a fully binding and joining of the flesh, then why bother? This is the same argument that we have for the Eucharist. If it’s just a symbol and not the Body and Blood of Christ, then who cares? If marriage is just a symbol of the State, of a legal contract, then who wants it? We want the sacred, and that’s what Sacraments are, and sacraments are the path to God, to uniting our will and lives and marriages to God. In marriage, a man submits to his wife and his wife submits to him. This is the least anti-woman idea in human history.

If the Woman at the Well doesn’t tell the story of an awakening by turning away from sexual sin, then I don’t know what does. New life comes when the Woman at the Well rejects her personal sin and understands God’s forgiveness. She realizes that men have used her as an object, and perhaps she has used men in the same way. Leaving the well, drunk on the living water, she knows that sex is a bad substitute for God in the temple of her heart. She is suddenly unshackled from her own past and the identity lies she has been led to believe. She is healed after meeting God. Coming to know God’s will for her, her brokenness is suddenly made sense of. All is clear. She was blind but now can see. The vice that she pursued, her weakness, is the very thing that purifies her in the end into holiness. We are a world of individuals, sad and depressed like the Woman at the Well just gasping for thirst, to taste this living water and return to a life of virtue.

The Apostles had a group of women in the center of Church formation. Mary, the Mother of God, and Mary Magdalene could not have more important roles in the founding of Christendom, and they still hold those roles. Martha, Joanna, Photini…there are hundreds upon hundreds of women saints that are venerated, with buildings and churches and feast days named after them. There is no Church without women, because without Mary, the Mother of God, we have no incarnation, and without Mary Magdalene and the other women, no one is at the tomb on Easter morning when they first discover that Jesus is risen. To this day, it is more likely women that hear the voice of the living God. They are the ones that often lead men to this glorious mystery. Go to any parish and take a look around. Who is leading the Rosary before Mass? Who is managing the office and records? Who is organizing faith formation? Who is prepping the altar for Mass? Who is leading the choir? Women are everywhere in the Church. They are valued far beyond what the secular world tells you, because the secular powers doesn’t want you to know this, and they certainly do not want you setting foot inside a Parish, lest you might become a Catholic. That is why the drumbeat of oppression and “Dark Ages” talk never ceases. There is an old saying among lawyers: “If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the law is on your side, pound the law. If neither is on your side, pound the table.” That is the game being played whenever you hear that the “Church hates women.” It is neither a fact nor a doctrine. It is a fabrication.

Here’s an excerpt from an article called “Does the Catholic Church Really Hate Women?”

Apparently the justice of Christian morality offered a refreshing perspective to women in the ancient world accustomed to husbands who cheated and left at will. The number of women who converted to Christianity in the early centuries after Christ indicates that women were attracted to this new way of life. Indeed, they were among the most zealous converts and defenders of the faith:

Christianity seems to have been especially successful among women. It was often through the wives that it penetrated the upper classes of society in the first instance. Christians believed in the equality of men and women before God and found in the New Testament commands that husbands should treat their wives with such consideration and love as Christ manifested for his Church. Christian teaching about the sanctity of marriage offered a powerful safeguard to married women (Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, Penguin, 58–59).

In light of this history, does anyone seriously believe that the Assyrian or Greek or Roman or Mesoamerican world respected women more than followers of Christ did? Can people argue that position with a straight face? Does anyone really think that the long era before Christ, and further back, before Abraham, was a “better” time for women? Aside from Christianity, did any other religion take over the world in this way, where women and marriage sounded the battle cry into the culture? The answer is a simple but loud, “No.”

This is exactly why marriage is the hill to die on for Catholics, and I’m referring to Sacramental marriage, not courthouse contractual marriage, as deemed to be marriage by the U.S. Government. Government marriage is as meaningful as an Apple end user license agreement. It does nothing spiritual, it’s only legal. Unjust laws do not change God.

And frankly, why would anyone care what a government thinks of marriage? Every government in history falls into the abyss of after a few hundred years. Is that really the arbiter of truth? Jeffersonian Democracy will not outlast God, so whatever is decreed from Congress is utterly useless for eternal life, which is what the concerns of the body and soul need to be aimed toward. What is the point of religion? It’s eternal life. It’s rebirth here and being raised to heaven hereafter. It’s not getting a legal document. It’s not winning power from a Supreme Court that will be a rusted out ruin, a weathered artifact, or a tourist stop in a hundred or a thousand years.

The only marriage that matters is that which is eternal in the eyes of God, in which two people become one flesh. All others are just certificates of participation and “pieces of paper,” as modern people like to call it. Marriage defined by government is meaningless, because government is not God. Men today will say, “Why do I need a piece of paper to prove my love?” The answer is: “You don’t.” The piece of paper isn’t a Sacrament. The Sacrament is the Sacrament. For this reason, whenever someone says, “I don’t need a piece of paper to prove I love you,” they are right, because a government piece of paper not only proves nothing, it does nothing. It should be called Garriage, for “Government marriage.” Or Narriage, not “Not Marriage.”

Sacramental Marriage changes two people into one. Two bodies become one, and two souls are bonded, which are only parted at death, as Jesus said there is no marriage in heaven. “When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” (Mark 12:25).

You can hold this belief that the Church hates women only if you choose to completely ignore the actual facts of pre-Christian society and the incredible spread and long-lasting nature of Christ’s message and his Church. Christian marriage has outlasted empires, fads, intellectual movements, cosmic models of the universe, and it will outlast all versions of “government marriage” we currently pretend are real. After all of the current fads of open marriage and same sex marriage and polygamy fail, as they always have failed, the value of Sacramental Marriage will still be with us. It is not by accident that the Commandments are what they are. They were not invented at all, they were arrived at. They were not set forth to control people, they are what sets you free.

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Something that gets buried today is how the pagan or secular world treated people, and it’s buried for a reason. We like to pretend the “Dark Ages” were full of witch-burning psycho priests but that pre-Christian societies were joy-filled lands where all joined hands and sang songs like the Whos in Dr. Seuss’s Whoville. But nothing could be further from the truth. A good read on how much people have forgotten our Christian roots is a book by Tom Holland, titled: Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. We have forgotten how much Christianity has improved the lives of everyone in comparison to the “good old days” of paganism. We are so accustomed to hospitals, universities, libraries, and non-profit charities that we forgot where they all came from. They didn’t come from Caesar or anyone in his time. People like to think there was some utopia before the “evils” of Christianity stamped out the fun. We will get to find this out soon, however, since we are lurching backward toward that “fun.”

We forget things easily, not just over long expanses of time, but in single generations. The book of Judges illustrates this well, where each fall into sin has a savior, but within forty years, the people resume their errors and forget why they needed a savior. Our era is similar to that which preceded World War I when nations celebrated the beginning of the war, holding parades, cheering, wishing the boys well in their lovely uniforms and flags, only to find out a few years later that the war was a meat grinder of unprecedented levels, thanks to progress in technology and science.

As we whisk God out of the public arena and out of our personal lives, we forget what the world was like before Jesus walked this earth, died on a cross, and rose from the dead to take away our sins, transform our suffering, and defeat the devil.

One of the primary lies told today about the pre-Christian world is that women’s lives were better without the Church imposing restrictions on them. But this is not true. It has never been true. It never will be true, no matter how many professors and bloggers keep writing about it.

Disrespect of women was not a Christian doctrine or idea, but it was indeed a core doctrine of the secular powers of Rome, actually quite similar to the lyrics of Snoop Dogg. You could sum up the treatment of women by the wealthy of the ancient world in Snoop’s hit song, “It ain’t no fun, if the homies can’t have none.” Women were objects, pure and simple. The interesting thing about reading the Old Testament treatment of women is that today we think it sounds barbaric, when in reality it was the most progressive treatment of women in the ancient world. We read with Western eyes, blinded by time, through which we are blocked from understanding, nuance, and history. With the Church, women achieved a radical leap forward, one that the pagan world mocked for centuries. Many of the women who fought against the old ways were martyred for it. Strange that they would be willing to die for such “oppression.” We are taught and bonked over the head repeatedly with this “Dark Age” myth in every university course. By design, we are not taught the reasons why Christian life appealed to so many women, because it undermines the sand foundation of modern life, which will ultimately undermine itself because it is spiritually dead.

Here is a summary from Mike Aquilina of how women were treated before God revealed himself to us through Jesus. I should note that none of this was covered in my university history classes, nor was it ever mentioned in the Women’s Studies class I had to take:

Pagan and Christian sources agree that the Church grew at an astonishing rate in the first three centuries of its existence. The modern sociologist Rodney Stark estimates a steady growth rate of forty percent per decade during centuries of intermittently intense persecution when the practice of the Faith was a capital crime. Pagan and Christian sources agree that women made up the majority of converts.

The most effective opponent of Christianity from this period, the Greek philosopher Celsus, mocked the Church for this. Around A.D. 178, he accused Christians of not daring to evangelize women when their sensible husbands and fathers were present but rather getting hold of them privately and filling their heads with “wonderful statements, telling them to pay no attention to their father and to their teachers.”

What kind of statements were those? They no doubt involved the principle of equality of the sexes before God. “There is neither Jew nor Greek,” said St. Paul, “there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

The apostle wasn’t denying sexual differences, nor was he claiming there should be no difference in the roles that men and women played. Rather, he was claiming for women—and slaves and foreigners—a dignity that no one in his world, not even a philosopher as brilliant as Celsus, could recognize.

A woman in that world was seen as having little intrinsic value. She derived her identity from the males in her life—first her father, and then her husband, and then her sons. The law recognized little for her in the way of natural rights or protections. Women were not permitted to testify in a court of law because their testimony was considered unreliable. The law treated them like children.

The value of their sex was nowhere more evident than on the day of their birth. Infanticide was common in the Greco-Roman world. It was practiced mostly for economic reasons, to limit family size and to maximize the future return on the father’s investment in childrearing.

Thus, children who were “defective” in any way—i.e., disabled—were usually drowned in a bucket of water at birth or left exposed at the town garbage dump. There they might be claimed as carrion by vultures and dogs or taken up by pimps to be raised as prostitutes. All the documentary and archaeological evidence indicates that the most common “defect” for which children were abandoned was femaleness.

Nowhere is the matter expressed more shockingly than in a “love letter” found in the excavations at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. The husband, Hilarion, closes his missive to his wife, Alis, by saying: “If you happen to be pregnant again, if it is a boy, leave it; if it is a girl, throw it out.”

In the economy of antiquity, a girl was an expense, an economic liability in ways that a boy was not. A boy would one day be an earner. A boy might provide for his parents in their old age. He might even improve their status by his accomplishments.

A girl, on the other hand, would need to be fed and clothed for more than a decade before she was married off—and upon marriage her father would have to pay a sizable dowry. For these reasons the Roman playwrights referred to girls and young women as “odious daughters.” It’s likely that the dialogue in their works is an accurate reflection of common turns of phrase.

The ideal daughter, for pagan Romans, was physically beautiful, for the beautiful would be married off the soonest. The typical age for her arranged marriage was twelve, theoretically at puberty, but many girls were given in marriage at eleven to a man much older. And the marriage, it seems, was consummated whether the girl was physically ready or not.

It appears there was little expectation of a loving relationship. Adultery was common, as was divorce. Abortion was common, as was infanticide. Marriage was a transaction established for the continuation of the customs of family and society for another generation.

A woman’s role was to produce a son to be heir. If she suffered the misfortune of widowhood before bearing a son, she might live the rest of her life in poverty.

The laws and traditions of the Greco-Roman world had been refined over centuries to communicate the value that society placed on women. It was very low.

If not held back by faith and morals set on the rock of objective truth, people will treat women like objects and objects like women. (This is sin in a nutshell, by the way: choosing the wrong goods.) And there is no one more in danger of being treated like an object than the crown of creation, who is called woman. If you were rich and powerful in pre-Christian times, you could have as many objects called women as you could afford or capture, including the wives of those less powerful than yourself (see: every King that ever had a harem. Also see: David and Bathsheba, as well as Solomon’s sex life with hundreds of wives. These are two Biblical falls from grace for this behavior, where sin is being narrated and not praised…notice that wherever there is polygamy, you have a mess, and that includes Abraham and Jacob. At least Isaac kept it together with Rebecca, and they are the true model of marriage in the Old Testament).

We are moving back to that era now, as calls for the bad idea of polygamy have resurfaced. Utah is no longer the only place we associate with this term. This is just one form of sin that is being presented as a good today, as slippery salespeople twist truth into the shape of bad ideas that women finally escaped through faith in Christ and living the Christian life with Christian men. The arguments today are no different from the Romans and Greeks. Is your baby possible defective or just bad timing? Kill it. Abort. Marriage has a minor difficulty? Divorce. Want immediate pleasure instead of commitment, responsibility, and love that requires work and action? Porn. Got a mother-in-law you don’t want to deal with? Park her in a home.

The reality is that the only reason we have nice things at all is because of Christianity. And that is the spiritual struggle that we are in, where advertisers and intellectuals preach from the screens, telling us that progress means going backward to pre-Christian insanity, which always ends in “might makes right.” If you are not pursuing objective truth as your ultimate goal, as the end of all things, then the desire for power is the substitute. I don’t care how you try to sugar coat it; when God is no longer the foundation of truth, you end up with “my truth” and that devolves into groups dictating “truth” by coercion, eventually at gunpoint. Whenever the church has gone astray, they fall into this same trap, of power politics mixing with the faith. The eye can never stray from Christ, who is the truth and foundation of all things. Nor can his words be twisted, as he says of the Commandments they are not malleable to fit the decade we live in:

Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Mt 5:17-20)

To understand the difference between the pre-Christian era and the “Dark Ages” of Christianity, let’s compare two buildings, arguably the two greatest buildings in the world, which happen to be in the same city, just a few miles apart.

When people travel to Rome, they mainly visit two places. One is the Colosseum, where hordes of bloodthirsty fans got drunk, gambled, and watched men fight one another to the death. The other is St. Peter’s Basilica, a Church, where a fisherman was crucified for telling people about a carpenter who was God incarnate. It’s stunningly beautiful, but the real purpose is that St. Peter’s is a place where the Sacraments take place: Baptism, Confession, Holy Matrimony, and the Eucharist. Holy Mass happens hourly, even while the tourists mill about. The purpose of St. Peter’s, and any other church, is humility and surrender of your life to God.

Do you see the difference?

Both are architectural marvels, visually stunning, spectacles to the senses, but their purpose is in direct opposition to each other. Notice that America no longer builds beautiful churches. This should tell you something, as we build billion dollar stadiums for gladiator games. St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City was built in 1858 and dedicated in 1910. The rise of the modern stadium started in the early 1900s, and exploded after World War II. We are moving away from St. Peter’s and back to the Colosseum, and so are our human relations.

What I am getting at is: without humility before God, we see competition and strife as the great entertainment, the great game. Suffering is something to avoid and shun at all costs. Winning is all that matters, because winning removes suffering. We completely lose the point of redemptive suffering. This is because most of us don’t really believe in the afterlife or eternal life any longer. We have no meaning in our lives, so we look for it in athletics, sex, money, and power. Our simple functions as fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters no longer excite us because we have traded eternal life for the plastic trophies of this world. One thing that always amazes me is that within three months after the Super Bowl or NCAA Tournament, I can’t even remember who won, because it really doesn’t matter. But I never forget Christmas or Easter or Pentecost or the Ascension days, because those matter immensely.

Nothing angers unbelievers so much as the idea that you were made for a higher purpose, made by a living God who resides outside of time and space but speaks to us here. The purpose is to serve him and serve others, and the primary way we do that, if not married to Christ or his Church, is marriage between one man and one woman. Having a marriage and family is the great purpose of our earthly lives.

Why is that message so bothersome? Because it doesn’t allow us to follow our base instincts, which is to pleasure ourselves constantly. It requires abandonment to a higher power and a higher purpose, neither of which is the self. Sometimes we confuse this, thinking that our “sacrifice” for work or school is the offering we make to God. But those things are ultimately for the self, not God. Offerings to God expect nothing in return, because there is no transaction to be made when dealing with God, and if your offering is contingent on receiving something from God, you are actually talking to the devil.

Yes, some people are not fertile, some will live a single life, some will adopt, some will never have children. Abandonment of the self means conforming your life to God’s will, not despairing over what struggles he has given us, because we are all given struggles in order to draw us closer to him. Until you realize this, suffering will seem arbitrary and unfair.

As for sex, the great call to chastity is pursuing a life of virtue whether you are married or single. They are both chastity, just different types. How can anyone understand the parable of the grain of wheat without looking at the formless void of creation and seeing that in order to fill it, it must be done in the right way, which is to fill this void in the form with families? God didn’t say, “Subdue the earth and form a government, and have the government raise the children.” No, that’s what Karl Marx said, and all of his flunkies that followed him, who now occupy your employer’s human resources department and local school board.

The form we are given by God is called marriage, between a man and a woman, and the void is filled with new life, called children. That sentence there is enough to get me fired, but the truth must be spoken and the truth will remain whether I say it or not. Because not only does marriage and family fulfill the physical form of this world, but it fulfills the heart. Dying to self means maturing into a greater purpose to serve God and others. Only then can we be spiritually reborn here. Then in physical death, if we choose God’s will and not our own, we will we be brought back to union with God in eternal life. That’s what we want, both here and hereafter. We don’t want what HBO is telling us to want. We don’t really want what Apple is selling. It’s not just sex that we want. Not just career. Not a threesome. Not four wives. Not soullessness. We want God, as it is in heaven and on earth. Psalm 128 is the model for fulfillment.

Your wife will be like a fruitful vine

within your house;

your children will be like olive shoots

around your table.

Thus shall the man be blessed

who fears the Lord.

FYI: “Fear” of the Lord means wonder and awe, a healthy fear, not the kind of fear where you simply pay your taxes to avoid jail. This is a kind of fear that grows out of love, wonder, awe, reverence, and it all starts with knowing that you are a sinner in need of forgiveness, in need of a savior. Recognizing your status as a sinner will free you, because it sheds all the fig leaves we wear. Then once we have bore our souls before God, and become honest, open, and willing, then we can return to the faith of a child and let the ego wither away as it must. Recall that Jesus died naked on the cross. All was stripped away, and his death showed us the result of our sins, for what we did to Jesus we do to one another every day.

This doesn’t mean it’s easy, but if you fear the Lord and are grateful for your daily bread and want nothing beyond the grace of God, only then will the blessings of a wife and children satisfy you, because you will share all of it with the Creator. And if some tragedy occurs, like in the book of Job, and all is taken away, even then you will still have the grace of God, as that is the rock of your life that can be clung to when everything else fades away. When your life becomes an offering to God, and God’s endless offering of creation is accepted by you, then what more could you possibly want? Conforming your will to God’s is how you level-up in this world, and you do this by praying.

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In sales, when you have to sell a lemon, and you know it’s a lemon, and the buyer knows it’s a lemon, then as a salesperson you must re-craft the story for the second sale. Bad products require a good story, and one that gets told and re-told often. How else could Coca-Cola make an entire nation obese and continue to sell the same product without relentless marketing? How else could Bud Light sell a watered-down tasteless slop without funny ads that convince children it’s cool? With a good story, and one that is constantly updated, no one has to feel like a fool for buying it the first time, or the thousandth time. The trick is keeping up the smoke and mirrors so that the buyers feel “in da club.” People don’t want to admit, undo, or take action against prior bad decisions, so a fresh, shiny story helps re-affirm a poor choice. An ever-changing, shape-shifting narrative is essential to this strategy. Rather than feel stupid and admit something is a bad product and bad choices were made, we just modify the story. Surely, the crafted story will insist, something just wasn’t quite right the first time around. This time it will be better. This time, the bugs are fixed. Version 2.0 is improved. The installation was done incorrectly. The product wasn’t tuned properly. This time, the springs won’t break and the bottom won’t rust out.

The first time a terrible idea was bought happened in the Garden of Eden. Eating the fruit, it was said, would make the people like gods, but it didn’t. So this was a bad sale. It was a faulty product. It was a bad sale, based on a lie, for a product that couldn’t deliver what was promised. The fruit only led to sin. If the devil had been a vendor on Amazon, Eve would have written a one-star review.

But the devil is a relentless salesman, with an apparent quota and target number, so he comes back with new pitches for the same old awful product. Since we are humans, and curious, and because we hate to admit that we are suckers, we give him another chance. In re-crafting the story, he returns with something of interest, something different than a fruit, to sell us the same rotten garbage.

In modern times, a reverse Garden of Eden happened, where for men, women became the fruit. Consuming her would make men like gods. The same Fall happened all over again, because when you eat from the tree of knowledge instead of the tree of life, you get sick. Instead of loving, respecting, and supporting women, through sickness and death, for richer or poorer, until death do us part, men opted for quickies and no responsibility. But we did not become like gods. We became estranged from them because we forgot that they are the crown of creation, the finishing touch on this world. We became islands instead of joined together with them. And because of this choice, many men became divorcees, isolated in apartments, separated from our wives and children in broken homes, lost because we or our parents bought the lie that monogamy and chastity could not make us happy, when it is only virtues like these that can ever make us happy, because they bring us closer to God.

When men stopped believing that they are joined in the flesh with their wives in marriage, they stopped leaving their families and cleaving to their wives. I don’t think most men today have even heard of the “leave and cleave” idea. I certainly hadn’t. No one ever gave me a “leave and cleave” sit-down chat, because most people had forgotten it, or never heard of it. The TV certainly was not teaching it. If anything, the TV was shouting for divorce and birth control. There are so many stories of men coming drunk to their weddings in the 1970s that it is no wonder the state we are in, since treating the Sacrament like a bachelor party invalidates the ceremony.

This is why American culture is dying. But this is not a bad thing in its current form. You can tell which way a nation is heading by whether it leads its citizens toward God or away from him. If cultural practices and laws attempt to block or silence God, then God will indeed withdraw from the nation. God’s grace is available, but when media and politicians actively put up smokescreens, God will allow it. He’ll just pop up later once the chaos ensues and say, “Here I am.” The only thing a culture can do to God is attempt to hide him, but his Presence punches through regardless to those who he calls. And as for our faltering society, which is bent on self-worship: it’s not much of a culture to speak of anyway when the American centerpieces are money and power (which we mis-label “liberty”). The pitch, demonstration, and sale of Americanism has played itself out. The shiny product of Jeffersonian Democracy turned out to be a lemon, just like the fruit in the Garden, and the only thing propping it up for the past 250 years has been Christendom. The last days of America will be chaotic, because that’s the exact result of life without God.

The funny thing about this attempt to normalize and celebrate immorality is that it just brings us back to an old familiar place. The next generations will come to know the same conditions that made the world ripe for Jesus and the Apostles to change the world, and perhaps the most radical thing of all that was preached was chastity.

Chastity is not a flaw in Christianity. It is one of the main reasons why early Christianity took off. It is self-denial, not self-affirmation, that frees us from slavery.

In the birth of Christianity, women led much of the charge. Starting with Mary Magdalene at the tomb, women are first to find the risen Jesus, before the stubborn and fearful men do. Like Mary Magdalene, they lead men to faith, or like Eve, they can easily lead men away. Why? Because we want women and follow them. Women tend to find the meaning of Jesus before men, and this is how millions of men end up in churches to this day. Rest assured that many men are in the “sexist” church on Sunday under orders from their wife. They are rousted from bed to get dressed for getting to church, because women often understand Jesus and need for a savior more readily than men.

The sanctity of marriage was real among practicing Christians in the first centuries, and still is. In the Roman world, marriage was a joke, as it is in secular America now. No-fault divorce is one of most anti-Christian developments in the Western world, but it is nothing new. Jesus admonished his own people in his own time for disrespecting marriage. Whenever I hear that “Christianity doesn’t respect women,” this is a statement that is a naked rejection of facts from history and the story of the gospel. My own college history textbook stated that Islam treated women with more respect. The main thing I learned in college was “Christianity Bad,” especially for women. But reading the history of the Church, that doesn’t fit at all.

I mean, the thing is, you actually have to read. You cannot just ingest a video from YouTube influencer who hates the church because his uncle was mean, or nod at a modern academic’s portrayal because he had to pick a thesis on Marxist theory that would get accepted by the humanities journals.

The Church was led by the Apostles, but it was filled by women. It’s worth noting that the creation story follows a pattern, where the “formless void” from the very first sentence of the Bible has a three day period of making a form, of construction and architecture, and the second three day period fills that “house” with beings. The Church was a formless void, which needed structure first, and then it had to be filled with people. Pentecost is the “let there be light” moment, and the structure of the Church is then formed in the shape of the Apostles, who appointed bishops and ordained priests. But a church of merely bishops and priests would be a empty and lonely place, just as the creation of galaxies and stars and planets would be boring without something living in the void. A beautiful church has an architecture and form, but without people inside singing and worshipping, what’s the point? For the same reason, outer space is boring because there is nothing in it. Only the stars make it interesting. The same goes for planets, where a rock spinning in space without life is nowhere we want to visit. Empty churches are great for contemplation of God’s greatness, but solitude is not the primary purpose of any Church.

Now this is important: notice that once God completes the first three days of architecting things, and after filling the earth with plants and animals, he creates man. In the first chapter of Genesis, he creates man and woman at the same time, but in chapter two, there is a critical thing to notice about how he completes and caps this great project of creation. The last thing created is woman, like the finishing touch on a great work of art. In other words, all of the architecture of the first three days, and all of the creatures and things in the second three days, including the man, Adam, are incomplete without the glorious master stroke of God in creating the woman. This is important to understand, because if Jews and Christians hated women so much, then why is the crown of all creation Eve, a woman? The problem we have is that we don’t venerate woman nearly as much as we should, and anyone that misunderstands the veneration of Mary in the Church is missing this point, that womanhood and the gift of motherhood and marriage are utterly sacred parts of humanity, the likes of which we cease to exist without.

You have to ask yourself a few things.

If the Church hates women so much, then why was the early Church inundated with women converts?

If the Church hates women so much, why did so many women in the early Church want to have a Christian husband?

If the Church hates women so much, then why was marriage to one woman for life so important to men of the Church?

If the Church hates women so much, then why did women get to participate in Christian worship, from the beginning, when they didn’t get to in any other religion?

If the Church hates women so much, then why are they involved with so many parts of administration and education at churches?

If the Church hates women so much, then why are so much of the liturgical calendar days every year dedicated to women saints and martyrs?

If the Church hates women so much, then why do we have so many saints that are women?

An answer to all of the above questions is simple. The answer is that the Church does not hate women. The idea of complementarity is anything but hateful. It’s reality and it respects women far more than second and third wave feminism ever did. First wave feminism was just the secular re-assertion of what the Church had already been teaching, but obviously men had failed women terribly in practicing it. What the Church teaches and what people actually do in life rarely match up. That is the case today, too. The later stages or “waves” of feminism were all about abortion and divorce, at which point the Church must part ways, since the goals from the 1960s onward did not deal with human dignity, but rather centered on the blessing of murder and adultery. Jesus was against those things, and it wasn’t popular to say so when he was alive, nor is it today, yet it must be said. The modern stage of feminism, like stage four cancer, is pure delusion. The great irony today is that men wearing women’s clothing have moved in and hijacked the ship of feminism because the ship shifted from Platonic, Aristotelian, and Christian ideals over to Sophist, Enlightenment, and Marxist ideas. This is how all good things fall apart. In case you wonder when and where the shift happened, it’s easy to spot. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a Christian, schooled in a seminary, steeped in classical philosophy and she had a healthy fear of God. Betty Friedan was schooled as a Marxist and God was nowhere in sight.

This is the most modern story you can tell, because this is the story of America as it sheds God’s graces and runs with Lady Liberty’s hair flowing in the breeze as she rushes into the arms idolatry of the Self and the State.

The difference between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Betty Friedan is that the former was arguing for “The Truth” and the latter was arguing for that slippery and shape-shifting serpent known as “My Truth.” It’s literally Socrates against the Sophists all over again.

What Betty Friedan really meant to say was this: “Men failed women.” And she was 100% correct. I actually like Betty Friedan quite a lot, but not nearly as much as I crush on Dorothy Day. Because Betty saw birth control and smashing all men as the cure for the yearning of the bored mother and wife. Yet now women have all the opportunities of men and the yearning continues, but is worsened because of the degrading state of motherhood and marriage. Dorothy Day saw the errors of Marx and the beauty of motherhood and marriage. In fact, it’s ironic how these two women passed like ships going in different directions. Dorothy Day started with an abortion and had two marriages, only to find Jesus and the Church. Day then proceeded to feed about a million homeless people and restore thousands of families to health. In contrast, Betty Friedan had one husband and one family, but her ideas advocated for divorce and abortion and led to more broken homes than the family tree of Genghis Khan.

The thing about “The Truth” as opposed to “My Truth” is this: Imagine a man standing in a pool that is just deeper then he is tall. He has two beachballs, one large and one small. “My Truth” is what you see him holding above the water, but underwater he is desperately trying to keep the other ball, the giant inflated beachball, between his knees, so that it doesn’t pop up and reveal “The Truth.” It is an awkward state to be in, because it takes so much work and struggle to pretend that “My Truth” is “The Truth.” This is why people who see Christ for who he is are so relieved. Augustine saying, “My heart was restless until is rested in Thee” is the admission of the man in the pool who has stopped trying to keep the giant beachball submerged and pinned between his knees. It’s a relief. For goodness sakes, even finding Socrates is a start if you can’t find Jesus yet. Read Plato, today if you can, and then the Gospels, if you can’t quite stomach the miracles.

Men stopped treating marriage as a covenant, and Christianity became a joke. But this all goes back to sin being blessed and allowed in the culture. The heresies that deviate from Catholic teaching is the root cause, and men were hearing the shape-shifting voice of “My Truth” long before Betty Friedan ever started arguing in favor of abortion and pornography. I could drop a long list of male names who heeded the devil’s voice before her, starting around the year 1500, but I’ll resist the urge.

The other reason why men treat women poorly has a simple answer. It’s actually the same answer. That answer is this: sin is real. And so is the devil.

Fallen men find bad patterns of living, and one of those patterns is the overly macho persona that spawned Burt Reynolds in the 1980s, as he marked the pinnacle of the Playboy era. Today, at the end of macho men, we are naturally rebounding into an excess of macho women.

If you’ve ever balanced tires or watch a mechanic do so, you can see how this happens. If I’ve used this metaphor before, I apologize. When an unbalanced tire spins on the balancing machine, they get violent, and as we all know from Newton, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. To resolve the unbalanced tire, you stop the machine, reset, hammer the weights onto the rim, and restart it. You don’t just speed up the machine and hope it balances itself. It takes work to fix the unbalanced wheel, not just faith. It requires evaluation and action. The mechanic may even hit his thumb with the hammer, causing a little pain when stopping to fix things. But you have to stop the machine or it will throw out the bearing.

We’re nearing that point where the whole machine breaks down because we’re spinning violently and blaming each other when the problem is the lack of balance in our relationships.

If you understand the concept of the Fall of Man, you will understand why we have sin and suffering. If you think that the Church invented sin, or that sin isn’t our fault and came from Pandora’s Box, or that people are all good with no flaws, then you cannot understand Christ. But if you understand the Fall and come to know our own weakness and poverty comes by choice and by our putting evil thoughts into action, you will humbly understand that there is sin. There are two types of sin as well, ones that offend God like lust and greed, and there is also physical sin that causes suffering and pain. We tend to only focus on the physical and mental suffering, while we completely ignore the massive tumor of spiritual sin that weighs us down.

Whenever women are disrespected, as in our modern culture today, we have forgotten that every human is made in the image and likeness of God, the imago Dei, and more specifically, we have taken our eyes off of Christ. We’ve started to sink in the water, just as Peter did. The great question of “Why Did Peter Sink?” that this entire blog is centered around applies to this.

To accuse the Church as being anti-woman is to ignore history as well as Christ’s life itself. Yes, many men in history have disrespected women, but “disrespecting women” is no more of a Church doctrine than geocentrism ever was. Just as Copernicus and Galileo didn’t disprove the faith and morals of the Church, neither has your angry uncle’s treatment of his wife. Disrespecting women is not a position of the Church. It never has been. The fact that the Apostles were men is not disrespecting women, it’s just that Jesus formed his church this way. If he had selected twelve women as his Apostles, then the Church would be structured that way. If you go back to the “formless void” of creation, which is a critical two-word term in the Bible, note again that in creating, God first makes structure and then populates and fills it with living things. In the first chapter of the Bible, we see the mode of creation that God uses, which is to architect and build the house, and then he fills the house with plants, animals, and people. Whether you believe in 6-day Creation, theistic evolution, or even atheistic evolution, we all know that the world was created before living things filled it. Whether you believe that the first bacteria came from an asteroid or from the finger of God, there is no denying that the structure in which bacteria could live had to exist prior to bacteria performing it’s first act of mitosis and splitting into two bacterias.

The formation of the Church happens like this as well. Jesus creates his Church by choosing Apostles, and suddenly there is a structure - a form. But with a mere twelve people, this form has no living things in it. Bishops and Priests alone do not make up the Church. It doesn’t even seem a stretch to me to see Pentecost, the day that the tongues of fire touched the Apostles and Mary, as the moment of “Let there be light” in the universe. I’ve often felt that the “light” made much sense in the idea of the Big Bang, in the concept of fire, while simultaneously meaning “light” as in the act of creation itself. Pentecost was the Big Bang of the Christian story, as it exploded from Jerusalem, as critical mass was reached in prayer in the upper room when the tongues of fire touched the Apostles.

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If you don’t believe in heaven, then you have to try to find it here on earth.

And you won’t. But you will spend a lifetime looking for it.

You may think you found it for a minute, but it’s fleeting. There is no metaphor used more often as an illustration of heaven than sex, and there is no more apt metaphor for the illusion of an earthly heaven as well, because no matter how much sex you have, you still have most of the day where you are not doing it. After the ecstasy, the march of hours awaits. You might even say this is the difference between Pop music and the Blues, where Pop suggests that good feelings set you free, and the Blues (and Country) confirm the aftermath. Belinda Carlisle sings “You make heaven a place on earth” and Bill Withers reports from Act II of life, after you’ve made a lover your idol and she fails to live up to it, “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.”

What we substitute for God is the definition of an idol, and sex is the #1 greatest hit substitution of all time. It’s not the only thing. There are others: there is the next big thing, the exotic, the new, the sensory high, the perfect partner, the perfect society, the flawless family, a career, a new spouse, a life where we are never offended or hurt, or sports teams, or cars and boats. But all of these substitutes prove to be empty trophies in the long run. Why? Because they are substitutes, like Splenda or Equal instead of real cane sugar. They taste similar but they are artificial replacements that lack nourishment.

All of our substitutes for God are attempts to arrange the world in a way that we want it, in a struggle with how God set this world up for us to live in. Like it or not, we are here, and even the mystics and mindful have to come back to earth to eat and go to the bathroom. There is no substitute for the needs of both the body and the soul. This is why our relationship to God must be personal for the good of the soul, and our relationship to food, drink, sex, and all of creation must be personal for the good of the body.

You will never arrive at heaven here in this world. Good feelings do not equal heaven. I don’t care how hot she is; I don’t care how delicious the cake is; I don’t care how high the drug takes you: you will never find peace in any of those things. Billions have tried it. And billions have come down that mountain empty-handed. The illusions fade. The high wears off. Youth, beauty, power, and wealth fades. In the 21st century, nowhere is this illusion more obvious than in these areas: sports, careers, relationships, and entertainment. Everyone is squabbling over these scraps as if they bring eternal life.

So no, you will never arrive at heaven here in this world. But you can get a peek of it. It’s just not via the ways that the world promises, and the media today, most of all, from Disney to Victoria’s Secret to OnlyFans, pretends that sex is the key to unlocking heaven here on earth, but it’s a mirage in the desert that offers no living water to those who pursue it.

You need something more substantial, steady, rock-solid, and unchanging to provide the food for your life, your hope, and your peace. That food is from the Bread of Life, both divine and human. That peace comes through a relationship in prayer, in humility before God. Any other angle or technique and it’s not going to happen. As long as you try to be the potter instead of being the pot, as long as you try to shape everything into the shape you want instead of conforming your will to God’s, you will be searching for something that did not exist in the beginning, is not now, and never will be. There is only one that was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever.

I know many, many people, including myself, that have tried to find it the quick and easy way, and didn’t get what they wanted. Worse, many have got what they wanted and found that it wasn’t really what they were looking for. It’s interesting to watch people get what they want and then start chasing the next thing. I did this, repeatedly, for many years, until I finally landed on the one thing that fulfills all desire.

What’s interesting is that sex became a centerpiece of what we think of as “fulfillment” and chastity has become the dirty word. That which dare not speak its name is not not adultery or homosexuality or pornography. No.

It’s chastity.

Is anyone surprised by this? I can recall watching a thousand TV shows, from Doogie Howser to Desperate Housewives to Game of Thrones, and hearing a thousand songs, from Led Zeppelin to Snoop Dogg to Rihanna, that suggested that virginity and chastity were not something to celebrate but something to be mocked. Virginity was to be removed, as quickly as possible, like a malignant tumor.

That is the environment and message that anyone growing up with a TV in the last fifty years had to experience. Most men have a story of the first Playboy centerfold they witnessed, or other magazine, that opened the door to artificial concepts of women and sex. Upon sight, those images were embossed into the memory, seared like a steak on a blazing hot grill. You cannot unsee pornography. Millions of men are stuck in that rut forever after, because women have become objects of pleasure and nothing more. Today, thanks to science and technology, billions of children who are raised on iPhones have this capability to discover what cannot be unseen, and they can see it whenever they wish.

Here is my thesis on all of this.

Men have failed women.

More precisely, men have failed to grow up and take responsibility. We tend to think of education and career as signs of maturity, but these are false signals. A career is not “growing up.” Nice possessions do not indicate maturity. A mortgage does not make a man. A laundry list of experiences do not lead to wisdom. All of these things have been promoted as giving purpose to life, and none of them do that. These are all selfish things, which are not bad by themselves, but when placed as the highest thing lead to the abandonment and rejection of women, who become just another object to obtain, use, and discard.

If you read the history of the sexual revolution, it was not driven by women. This is probably the greatest myth of our era, more damaging than the UFO mythology, and less fun as well. The sexual revolution was driven by men, by so many Peter Pans who weren’t stuck in innocent childhood but were stuck in perpetual adultolescence, playing adult while acting like college sophomores forever after.

Here’s something you need to consider and examine very seriously to understand and de-program yourself from what you’ve been sold:

The birth control movement was not about women.

The abortion movement was not about women.

Neither of those movements was for the benefit of women.

It was always about men.

It was about men getting away with treating women like objects, like single-use throwaway humans, and taking no responsibility for the sex that they wanted to have without acting as fathers and husbands. That’s the dirty secret of the whole sexual revolution. It wasn’t about freedom for women. It was about freedom for men.

The fact that everyone bought into it doesn’t justify it any more than slavery was justified by bad-faith interpreters. No, the argument of “Fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong” doesn’t hold up, especially when it comes to issues of faith and morals. The fact that Americans and Europeans buy the modern identity lies just illustrates how well the sales pitch and demonstration was, but we are now all witness to the real world application and the disaster it has brought over the past fifty or seventy years. As I’ve mentioned in this series, there are three parts to a sale: the pitch, the demonstration, and the real world application. The pitch and demo looked good, but now we see the fruit of buying a bad product. And this should be where the second sale fails. It should fail, because the product and idea that was sold didn’t work.

When the first sale had a good pitch and initial demonstration, but the product is a flop in the real world, the second sale should never happen unless the buyer is a sucker. We will find out in the Generation after Z if the suckers are really suckers, or if the world turns back to the truth. One thing is certain, written about from Plato’s Republic to the Book of Judges to The Fall of Ancient Rome to 20th Century Nationalism: calamity must come from a bad idea that has taken hold of a people before they are awakened to repentance. There is spiritual combat on a personal level and a group level, and of course the only way to win on both levels is to fight the spiritual warfare starting with oneself.

Now, a good salesperson can ram that second sale through. They often do. I’ve watched them do it to customers who should absolutely ditch a software product. But eventually, with a bad product, the employees, buyers, and users revolt. No, let me rephrase that. They don’t so much revolt as simply withdraw support. Employees leave the company, buyers write bad reviews, and users find a new method of doing their work. In other words, in seeking the good, people go elsewhere when bad ideas are selected and insisted upon. You can see this today in public schools and police forces, where bad ideas have been selected by the governors and administrators. It is rare to talk to a teacher or police officer who is not praying for the day they reach twenty years of service so that they can lock in their pension, and then quit, or find a new way to increase their years in government service. They are withdrawing. As we are made in the image and likeness of God, we act in ways that mimic God without even knowing it - in some things. In choosing sin, we do not act like God, but in pursuing the good, true, and beautiful, we do act like God, and why is this? Because what we are really pursuing is God himself. Heaven. To be with God - that’s the whole point of all of our actions, we just don’t usually realize it.

For those who think God “causes” bad things to happen, he does not. He acts just like employees, buyers, and users of a bad product. He simply withdraws and allows the chaos to re-enter. Recall how the Bible opens, where God stretches his hand out over the “watery chaos.” We are never that far from chaos, and all that keeps us from it is God’s hand. The universe could be snapped out of existence now if God merely tweaked the gravitational constant by a hundredth. Many do not understand what the Great Flood story is about, because we don’t teach it properly to children, so we just think it’s some folklore about animals

and a localized flood in the middle east. But it’s not about that, not at the deeper level.

God does not send the flood, he simply withdraws his protection over sinful people, because they have adopted a substitute for God, and since they refuse to turn back to him, he simply stops holding the chaos back. The deluge happens on its own as he no longer graces creation with order. He allows the full disorder to occur again - the watery chaos. I didn’t understand what “watery chaos” meant until my near-drowning in the Ironman race, but once I was floating in a stormy lake, the penny dropped on the meaning. This withdrawing of God also happens at the Tower of Babel story, where God withdraws from sinful people and scatters them. He doesn’t send us sin, we create it, and then he lets it play out, like the loving father in the Prodigal Son. God says, “Yes, I’ve given you free-will, so if you want to drink and w***e around, you can, but you can’t do it with my blessing, so you’re on your own.” Notice that the father in the Prodigal Son gives the wild child his money and the child leaves - he doesn’t bring the prostitutes into his father’s house. God remains perfect, and we go chasing foolish substitutes. So you could say that either we withdraw from God, or he withdraws from us, but either way, he is good and loving and the choice of rejection via substitution is always, always one that we make.

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So we are back at the start. Or we are back at a kind of start. Like Abraham. Like Agnes. We are back to the place where Abraham was called out of Ur of the Chaldees. We are back to the day that Moses was called out of Egypt. We are back to the Annunciation where Mary said Yes to Gabriel. We are back to Christ going into the wilderness to defeat the devil. And we are back to Agnes rejecting her culture and choosing a life of chastity and marriage to Christ over the chaos and immoral culture surrounding her. We are back to the place where the calling comes to say “No” to the culture and “Yes” to God.

We are back to where professing Christ’s Crucifixion and membership in the Catholic Church that Jesus founded is the ultimate counter-cultural act. We are back to the time when obedience to God and his Church are the best way to lose friends and alienate people. And thank God for that!

The time of Agnes has, once again, arrived. It seems clear to me that Agnes and Abraham would have much to speak about if they ever ran into each other at a waiting room. But it might be a short conversation.

Agnes: “So, Abraham, I hear you had to leave your family and your city and your entire way of life?”

Abraham: “Yes, the culture…I just had to leave it.”

Agnes: “Oh, I completely understand,” (Her phone starts buzzing, and she picks it up) “Sorry, Abe, someone is calling.”

Abraham: “I know who it is.”

Agnes: Hello? God? Yes, it’s me, Agnes!”

Fist bump.

The struggle today is to come up for air, because the culture has a pole that tries to keep us shoved underwater, gasping for air. But truth always rises. So no matter how much dancing and singing we can see underwater, we are meant to breathe easy. We eventually come up for air and have to fight off the pole, by necessity. Hardship, suffering, or a death in the family will make us sick and tired of all the gasping. What we really want, most of all, is to rest in the truth, and his name is Jesus.

As they say in recovery circles, we become “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Enough nonsense, give me something real. Enough TV, enough books, enough beer, enough video, enough news. At some point you just want to stop pretending that what is not important is important. I want to rest in something more. Let me be free to love God and follow him and not care who laughs. Let me be open to the Holy Spirit and let it transform how I see everything. For many years, the saying of Jesus, “Let the dead bury their dead” confused the heck out of me, but once you experience the conversion of this earthly life, “the dead” makes incredible sense. This life is not all there is. There is so much more that we cannot see but can somehow know, because God is impossibly far but infinitely close to us. Who can possibly explain it? Not me. But I can tell you that once it happens, you will know what St. Paul meant when he spoke of seeing dimly through the glass, because the reflection of the self will be gone and the world, both physical and spiritual, will be seen:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13:11-13)

What amazes me the most is that some saints come to know that as teenagers. Others have to wait, and some have to wait until the moment of death, like St. Dismas, the Good Thief, who is crucified with Jesus and finds him in the final hour.

When you see someone come up for the air, and they completely change their life, you will witness a miracle. They are no longer dead in their sins. When we do come up for air, we get an opportunity to see that the underwater world we thought was real was only an aquarium. The plants are fake, the rocks are artificial, even the scuba man at the bottom is plastic. Reality must be faced, and powerlessness against time and space is a fact that we are all dealt at some point. At these moments of inflection in our lives, God is speaking to us, and we get to choose: will we play against him, or with him? But we all have to learn this our own way, on God’s time. Nothing can be coerced.

Wealthy men, academics, and for-profit media has preached and prayed for us to submit to the false gods, the sex god, the money god, the self god, the sports god, telling us that the only way to fulfillment was through our achievements, affiliations, and our reproductive parts (which we try not to ever use for the actual purpose of reproduction now). Bank accounts and awards and entertainment try to console us in our pursuit of false happiness. Pills and plastic devices have been engineered to un-engineer the nature of our organs. We are told that the design of our bodies is not for unity and procreation with the obvious complementarity of man and woman, but instead only for our temporary pleasure, not much different from a bowl of delicious Cinnamon Toast Crunch (which I no longer keep in the house).

What’s most strange is that in our separation of body from soul, the most scientifically minded fellows, who harp on the need for objective reality and truth, willingly abandon that noble goal of objective reality like a Soviet scientist in order to be fashionable for the cultural zeitgeist. Fads that lack basis in objective reality silence otherwise serious people. Even what is known through the naked eye somehow befuddles modern scientists, as the idea of womanhood has proven too hard a nut to crack for academic cowardice and timidity. For 30,000 years of evolution, this required no diploma to articulate. For most of us who can see the naked emperor, we just say it out loud, but many academics, even those trained in the hard sciences, insist that the Emperor’s clothes are glorious.

Something is amiss. “Follow the science” has become as amorphous as “Support the troops” or “The future is female.” What we now call “the science” is a moving target, because real scientists, actual biologists, refuse to tell us what a woman is, for fear of reprisal.

This is why another Agnes is coming.

I am fairly certain that babies know what a woman is better than professors today, because they know their food comes from a woman, a mother, not some man dressed up as a woman or mutilated to play the part. Putting away childish things means living in your body, which is a gift from God, for the purpose for which you are. Anything else is fantasy, as much as wishing to be born in another place and time, or taller, or better looking. When I saw dimly through the glass I only saw a reflection, but when God calls you no longer see the reflection of yourself but the Imago Dei, the image and likeness of God, in yours and every other face, and then you can go forth, reborn, without the self.

What’s sad is seeing so many adults willingly donning the shock-collar of fear. Afraid not to look “progressive” enough, we turn into clams. Growing up in America, I heard the propaganda that only in the Soviet Union would adults have to conform their data to the party line. Surely such a thing could never happen here! Yet here it is. A kind of quietism is happening as universities today, but unlike mystic meditation where you seek God, the great thinkers are afraid to step anywhere or make a peep for fear of stepping on the devil’s toes. Of course, this fear has a lot to do with the loss of employment and missing mortgage payments, because job loss is the cudgel the party-line uses instead of Siberian prison camps.

That’s why Agnes will triumph again. Teenage girls have neither the baggage of adults nor the filter. When the next Agnes discovers who and what she is, she will reject the culture and the culture will attack her because the culture cannot look upon its sins honestly.

Most wonderful is the irony. Catholics are mocked for faith in the Eucharist as the Body and Blood of Jesus, but modern people have more faith in things that cannot happen or do not exist at all. Many highly educated people believe in magical transformations of boys turning into girls by putting on a skirt, or in the mysterious bat in China that caused Covid (an animal that will never, ever be found because it came from a science lab). For this reason, the truth claims of our culture need to be examined and re-examined because many of the claims require as much faith, if not more, than believing in the 37 miracles performed by Christ.

Frankly, believing in Jesus walking on water is far easier for me to believe than that teenagers can transform into a cat, simply by the act of posting on social media and declaring a feline transformation.

The pitch for this sale is weak. The story is so bad. What stuns me, especially after my own falling away and returning, is the staying power of the Gospel story. Why is that? Because it is a better story. It’s the greatest story ever told, and I’ve read a lot of stories.

The awful story that comes from the modern universities, the media, and influencers, and the dull hook of it all is that through some sexual act we will reach the mountain of knowing. Through some pile of money, we’ll be happy. Through some act of the self-will, we will “manifest” or self-actualize.

But we won’t.

Let’s use a quote from Fight Club to round this out.

“We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

But there’s no need to be angry. Once the post-adolescent teenage angst wears off, the solution is waiting. This is the Good News: there is a solution. There is an answer. No, it’s a not a Fight Club, or a bank account full of money, or an orgy, or a pill. No, it’s far stranger than that. The answer is a person. He’s a person and you can know him, but you have to talk to him. You don’t need to be angry, or join a Fight Club. But you do have to do one thing. All you have to do is give up everything you thought you knew. And very soon will come another Saint Agnes, who will show us exactly how to do that. In the verse below, substitute “teenage girl” for “man”, and female pronouns for male pronouns, and you will hear once again the ancient message of St. Agnes that cries out to our world today.

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life? (Mt 16:24-27)

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I recently had the misfortune to witness a middle-schooler, in public, playing a game on a VR headset, punching at the air and talking about all the blood coming out of the imaginary character he was fighting, and then he started making sexual motions with whatever was left of the imaginary bloody character. This spectacle went on for too long. It dawned on me that we don’t even have to pretend there are invisible demons any longer, people are openly engaging with them. Honestly, watching this kid on the VR headset made me want to call for the nearest exorcist and psychiatrist, although I would guess only the former could truly help.

The world is starving for authenticity. Everything we see on a screen is paper thin. Everything we see in virtual reality is vaporware. A maddening search is happening today for authenticity and the witness of the next Agnes is coming who will jolt many from their slumber and others will attack the authenticity. Those who God calls, hear his voice, and he does indeed call his sheep in mysterious ways.

Already in schools we hear from kids coming home that are being bullied for not being open enough to sex, or ideas about sex. Chastity, and the goal of chastity, is the sin of our age. The occurrences and teachings happening at American schools everywhere would make the Romans at an orgy do a double-take.

While this may seem a tragedy, this may actually be a good sign. It may actually be part of the great comedy, because, as you know, comedy ends in a marriage, and only tragedy ends in death. The marriage of heaven and earth is guaranteed to follow a trial before the passing of this world happens, and all is God’s will. The victory is already won.

(Quick reminder: God is outside of time and space. Only we are within it. Our job is to cooperate with God’s grace that is freely offered. We can reject it, too. The Catechism of the Catholic Church covers all of this. It is truly essential reading, so much that if I am ever exiled to a desert island, I will take three books with me. The Bible, The Catechism, and The Imitation of Christ. If I get a fourth book, Moby Dick, since it is inscrutable and I’d be in a sea setting.)

We are guaranteed a wild fourth quarter before the final buzzer sounds. Whatever you do, do not follow the crowd. The wisdom of the crowd is a myth. Sure, it’s a good title for a book, but Jesus said the opposite when he said that wide is the road that leads to destruction, and the gate is narrow that leads to eternal life. Agnes found the narrow gate.

So whatever is in store for the years ahead, be like Agnes. Be like Mary. Don’t fall for the coming AI bot or VR headset. The great religious deception will claim billons, but, spoiler, God wins in the end. As always, in the end, God gets the victory and the glory. Like all romantic comedies, this all ends in a wedding, because he loves us.

Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

…

The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven.God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world. (CCC 675-677)

Cosmic upheaval? Brace yourself. Find a rock to hold onto.

This world is passing, but before it does we will see more saints like Agnes.

We have reached the final end of this era, where unless you are fully committed to unchastity, you are evil. The inversion is made but like a buoy, the right-side-up will bob back into view once we stop trying to drown that which forever floats and can never be sunk.

We’ve gone all the way down now, which means the only way left is to go up, just as Dante shows us so well in the Divine Comedy. From John Wycliffe to Machiavelli to Rene Descartes to Thomas Hobbes to Karl Marx to Michel Foucault to Richard Dawkins to Steve Jobs to the currently trendy Yuval Harari: with all these intellectuals shoving God off-stage, we have reached full selfie-mode and the final stage of “my truth,” which is the descendent of the twin killers of faith called sola scriptura and pure reason.

Getting rid of God did not produce the glorious society, it did not free us from sin, and it did not disprove any Catholic teaching. The Pollyanna ideas of Steven Pinker and Yuval Harari will be as historically comical as the certainty of Hegel’s, Marx’s, and Fukuyama’s claims about “The end of history.”

Rest assured, in case anyone wonders: history as we know it, in time and space on this planet, will be over when Jesus returns. Not before. Not after. For those with concerns about being “on the right side of history,” the right side is that of Agnes and Mary, and Philomena, and Perpetua and Felicity, and all of the other teenage girls who changed the world in the name of Jesus Christ, son of the living God.

After all of the attacks and misinformation and corruption and abuse, the truth of Christ still stands, and will forever stand. And so does the Church. It stands on the triple foundation of Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the Magisterium’s authority. We were taught that all the wars of the past were over religion, but then the twentieth century happened with religion nowhere in sight, which gives us great opportunity to review what we were taught about things like the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War as well. What we learn if we look back, and look hard, is that these were wars of nationalism, of kings and mercenaries, not unlike the World Wars, which were over resources and power. All wars are unlike Christ, but we tell ourselves fibs to blame religion, when it is always powerful and prideful leaders, who may or may not use people’s faith as a tool, to wage wars. The reality is this: religion in Europe and America has been placed under the state for a long time. Even Luther and Calvin traded their budding churches for state protection, and both found early on that to protect their ideas, the sword was needed in carrying forward their interpretations. Once they and so many others took up their personal vocation to be Popes, they then found that putting the toothpaste back in the tube could not be done when the peasant revolts started, because the peasants realized that they also had a vocation and calling to be a Pope. Everyone became a Pope.

Everyone became the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, thus it was no longer sacred. The claim of “My truth” today is how we all crown ourselves Pope. We all want to be King and Pope, and in rejecting the Pope, the Reformation crowned Kings, who hired biased interpreters to argue and sew their desires onto the word of God.

Eventually we all became kings of our own flat, secular lives. “Whose realm, their religion" is a phrase that came out of the 1500s when kings were hammering scripture to fit their needs, and it wasn’t just Henry VIII, it was every realm that realized they could act like Jack in Lord of the Flies and invent their own religion. I have written about this ad nauseam in two long series, one about Abraham and Uranus and one about the Tower of Babel. None of this rejection of God is new.

What is always new is Agnes. The rejection of the rejection of God always stuns us, because we forget that we can say “Yes” to God.

Rejection the oldest cliche in history. It’s boring. It always needs a new name. We just pretend every generation that it’s new, but it’s trite and lame. Thinkers like Descartes (or Dawkins, or Harari, et al), they are not doing anything particularly deep, even though we pretend they are. They are just bad ideas with modern jargon that resurrect the moon god religions of old. They expand and expound the moon god with more words, a thousand fold more, all to reduce the authority of God. All they want, really, is to take up the mantle of God, but they can’t. (Sorry creatures: you are created. I know it hurts to hear it.)

So rebellion seems original but it’s like watching re-runs. It’s boring. Every power grab in history is the same, as it is universally a rejection of God and neighbor. When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” he declared “thinking” to be the first principle, which is precisely the fall in the Garden of Eden as the devil places a thought into Eve’s head that she will be like God, and then Adam follows along (and then blames her). The reason Mary’s Fiat, her “Yes” to God is such a big deal, is because it reverse Eve’s “No”. This is why we call Mary the “Undoer of Knots”.

No, Mr. Descartes: thinking is not the first principal of all things. Being itself, a.k.a. God Most High, is the creator. Descartes’ great mistake was to assume that thoughts come from us and are not put there, and he managed to strip away everything but his mind, and in excessive thinking, he became a mouthpiece of the one (hint: it’s the devil) who forever tries to tell us that the soul does not matter, or…or at the very most, if the soul exists at all, is disconnected from the body.

Descartes was an amputee, too. I can relate. Through a long series of academic arguments, I amputated my soul using the methods of Descartes, and so have many others today. But it bears repeating: the good news is that the soul didn’t go anywhere. It’s still linked with the body. In fact, it’s inseparable in the long run. We just “think” it’s been amputated, just as we “think” the devil doesn’t exist, and “think” that God doesn’t exist, or “think” that God isn’t a living God who knows the number of hairs on our heads.

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They say America is a great melting pot, but on a local level it’s Walmart. There is no place where every walk of life, every occupation, every ideology or religion, every fashion choice, every body type or disability, can be seen and shared, at least on the surface level. But what is more amazing is this: all of these people, mingling and bumping carts into one another, shop in relative peace. (Ok, so occasionally there’s a police car outside, but I’ve seen it at Target or Costco, too…just not as often.) Perhaps this general peacefulness is because everyone in the store is focused on getting what they want and then planning on promptly leaving. As long as no one pokes a thorn in the side of our consumerism, apparently we really can get along.

For as long as I can remember, Walmart has been slammed as the angel of small-business death. Walmart holds a unique place of anger in many hearts on both the right and left sides of American politics. I’ve even heard one hyperbolic person say they would rather walk over hot coals than enter a Walmart store.

We really enjoy arguing, especially about politics, economics, and religion, but even things like retail stores. There was an old saying “Arguing with an engineer is a lot like wrestling in the mud with a pig. After a few hours, you realize the pig likes it.” To that point, about ten years ago, I sat in a meeting room for an entire week of product design listening, and occasionally contributing, to a battle between front-end web engineers over which javascript library we should select for use in our product. Yes, an entire week of arguing about a part of a product that customers would neither see nor care about.

But no matter whether you love it, hate it, or just secretly go to Walmart on vacation when you need something and think you won’t be seen, Walmart is the only place on earth where you can get a fishing pole, frozen fish, a fish piñata, and a pet fish, all while getting the brakes fixed on your fishing boat.

From my years of listening to disdain for Walmart, the problem for many consumers is not the global supply chain or the treatment of workers or the environmental impact. The real issue shoppers have with Walmart is that they don’t want to mingle with “the people” who shop there. There is a subtle implication toward something awful when a voice laments, “I had to go to Walmart,” as if they just used a port-a-potty on the third day of a rock music festival.

The phrase, “people of Walmart,” is a modern wink between folks that hints at the dregs of society, bordering on a modern version of Biblical uncleanliness. The “people of Walmart” in modern America is analogous to the “lepers of Molokai” in 19th century Hawaii. This superiority complex happens not only among my more educated and wealthy friends, it is also expressed among my blue collar friends. I’ve heard the sentiment from various ethnicities and races. There doesn’t seem to be a single “group” of people that have this condescending feeling about Walmart. I cannot discern who will hold the sentiment. The disgust for Walmart transcends our usual tribes, so I can never tell who will start to show symptoms of illness when the word Walmart comes up in conversation.

In any case, I come neither to bury Walmart nor to praise it, but mostly stand in observation of it as the modern marketplace, like the agora of classic Athens but with light-speed logistics, rock bottom prices, and no coupons needed.

Aside from the military, a hospital emergency room, and maybe a waterpark on a hot summer day, there is no place of greater diversity slammed together and in constant interaction than at your average Walmart. College campuses and corporate America are the two least diverse environments in America that I have been a part of, despite their constant trumpeting to claim that prize. In my university and corporate travels over the past 25 years, I have yet to see a hillbilly wielding a dry-erase marker in front of a whiteboard or a man with gold teeth refining his powerpoint presentation. However, I have seen both of these people at Walmart. Real diversity is where you have every class, every race, every religion, every level of education, every disability, every propensity, and every shape of human being imaginable pressed into one place.

Walmart teases out our prejudices. I would go into Walmart and see someone and shake my head. I would comment: “Look at that guy…what a mess. What an absolute mess.” Perhaps you know what I’m referring to. I suspect you do. There are websites dedicated to the people that I’m referring to, like www.peopleofwalmart.com, which I’m not even going to hyperlink because while the site is funny, it’s mainly for sophomores in high school, especially the daily “Feature Creature.”

I realize that comedy can be mean, as there are various ways to get a laugh, such as thwarting expectations, shocking the sensibilities, or good old fashioned body humor that we humans have perfected over thousands of years. And I’m not going to pretend I don’t laugh at those things. As I’ve said before, don’t let this blog/podcast fool you - I am flawed in more ways than one. Yes, I laugh at body humor. For instance, have you seen the trilogy of movies known as Shrek, Shrek 2, and Shrek the Third? I enjoyed those movies. But those movies do not exist without body humor. Here’s a quick summary…Shrek: he’s ugly and overweight. Prince Farquaad: he’s short and dandyish. Prince Charming: He’s a good looking rich prick. The end. Roll credits. That’s the whole movie.

People never tire of height and weight and fart jokes because - and this is modern blasphemy to say today - our bodies are funny. There’s just no way around the fact that human bodies make us laugh, and we all know they make us laugh, but some of us today are getting very good at the art of taking offense. But surely even those folks have to stifle a laugh when they see America’s Funniest Videos classic clips of “man getting kicked in the crotch.” To deny that bodies are funny is to deny one of the better parts of our nature, but we are denying it and as a result comedians are declining to book shows at corporations and college campuses, which are, as I’ve mentioned already, the least diverse places in America, as much as they try to tell us otherwise. Consider classic books that use body humor, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; it’s the skinny guy and fat guy buddy adventure story. Or A Confederacy of Dunces’ main character, Ignatius Reilly, who is a stream of endless body humor. Or the movie The Princess Bride - it would not even be a movie worth watching without the six fingered man, Andre “the Giant,” the albino hunchback torturer, the old hag with warts, and the many speech impediments the characters have, in particular the priest who mixes up the letters “W” and “R” and “L”.

Unlike books and movies and Shrek, Walmart is of the flesh and brings out the type of superficial judgment that I also like to pretend I don’t make. Why does this happen at Walmart? Because in that store lives the full array of rednecks, hippies, preppies, snobs, slobs, spinsters, bachelors, gangsters, w*s, studs, duds, broods, dudes, litters, critters, fops, goths, sloths, freaks, geeks, and even some that give me the creeps.

Luckily, I fit right in with many of these groups. I feel right at home. These are my people.

Back in college I read about a morality test, in a marketing class of all places, coined the “TV Test.” The TV Test goes like this: when engaging in an act of questionable ethics, if your actions were being broadcast to the world, like the movie The Truman Show, you should ask yourself this question: would you still perform the act if the world was bearing witness?

This was a fine test for me to consider in 1997, as at that point I didn’t have time for God, but any religious person knows that this test should be called “The God Test,” which requires no studio or camera, since we are always under the oversight of God. The TV Test is a secular test of morality. If you wouldn’t cheat on your partner while being watched on TV, you probably should just skip hitting on the waitress. If you wouldn’t stuff twenty dollars bills in your pocket while running a cash register and being observed on TV, it’s a good idea to put the money into the drawer. Stealing, cheating, getting drunk, lying, acting rude, watching porn - the TV Test is indeed a good test to reveal unchangeable moral rules. (For the record, shopping at Walmart is an act I would do while being filmed on TV, so that’s how I know it’s not really a wrong action, although I would be embarrassed to be seen buying so many sugary snacks.)

The TV Test works well for determining right and wrong. Take these two actions: smoking cigarettes vs. watching pornography. I would be willing to be seen smoking on television. I would not feel my conscience eating at me. On the other hand, watching porn is something I would definitely NOT want to be seen doing. So it’s easy for me to tell which one if these acts is immoral. One is bad for my health, but the other is bad for my soul. But oddly, many people see smoking as a modern sin while watching porn is no longer considered to be wrong at all. Eating sugar for many is a modern sin, but I would eat a whole bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats on NBC’s Today show and not feel ashamed. I wouldn’t be proud of it, but I would not feel my conscience telling me that eating the added grams of sugar is morally wrong. Clearly, if you don’t want to be seen doing something in public, you can be certain that it’s not right. The internet age has attempted to flip various acts from vice into virtue, but the “small voice” within whispers the real answer to us.

The TV Test has its merits, but there’s one problem, a rather large problem. This kind of test relies on external feelings of how you would act if being observed. This goes directly to our need for approval and our sense of honor and shame. What this test lacks is internal motive. The TV Test is all about what others think about you, not what you think about yourself or how you see the world.

(Oh God, not again, here we go…on to the religious stuff...)

Yes, that’s exactly where I’m going.

The problem of the “TV Test” is the underlying motive. Let’s take the example of the temptation to eat grapes in the produce aisle. Doing the right thing is a wonderful thing in itself, since if you know someone is watching, you probably won’t snatch grapes in the store as you slip through the cool and concealing fog of the produce misters. But that decision to do the right thing and not eat the grapes is a change in behavior that comes from fear of being caught, from someone holding up your immoral act and showing it to the world. In other words, it comes from coercion of outside forces. And make no mistake: Walmart and Target will prosecute, as many errant teens have discovered the rule of law in this way. No one wants to be outed in the local police blotter as a grapelifter. But don’t we all want to eat some grapes at the grocery store? But we don’t eat the grapes if there is fear of getting our hand slapped. (Note: Just stay with me here for a minute on the grape metaphor as a surrogate for all temptation. Replace “grapes” with whatever vice you have such as “do drugs” or “steal” or “cheat” or “get drunk” or “gossip” or “have orgies” or “watch porn all day” or “reject your family” or “hate your mother in law” or “flirt with your ex on Snapchat”…you get the point.)

True change in behavior does not come from fear, it comes from inner change, and trust is another word for faith. This comes from a change in the heart. In other words, doing the right thing can be done by a robot that is programmed to act on certain conditions. This is what totalitarian societies strive for by attempting to convert people into robots based on fear: If this, do that. If not this, then proceed to jail. If still not obedient, flog twenty times, then loop back into society. If still low morale, send to re-education camp. Finally, on error, terminate the defective bot.

We program machines to “do the right thing.” But we are not machines. (Well, I take that back. As a former atheist, I did believe that we were just machines, or merely large organisms of randomly selected chemistry lurching about the earth. I’ve since abandoned that.) For those who still gaze with wonder at the universe and accept mysteries beyond nature, even if only from watching Lord of the Rings or believing in the Lucky Charms leprechaun, there is something special about the ghost and the machine.

To not eat the grapes is righteous, truly, as everyone in their heart knows that stealing grapes is wrong. No matter how plump and tender they look, stealing grapes is wrong. Really, the more plump and tender the grocery store grapes appear, the more you need to resist the urge, as the temptation is greater. No one would ever argue against stealing being wrong unless they have completely lost their mind, or they are perhaps starving. The TV Test teases this out. If stealing was ok, we would just do it and not care. But we do care. So external pressure to follow certain rules works for many things, but this is the robotic kind of decision. This is doing right by external pressure to avoid consequences.

However, there’s a second and very different kind of reason to do the right thing that comes from an internal change. This kind of change does not come from external pressure. In fact, it’s not coerced at all, in any way. It is chosen. Yes, you can be “good without God” but there is still something missing, and true change comes from the one thing that fits the God shaped hole in the Big Empty of our heart. (Oh, here it comes…faith stuff…oh, God, please spare my non-religious readers, help them bear this next part as I start to pontificate on the internal change of heart, the metanoia.)

It comes from faith. And it comes from grace.

As usual, I find something in the Catechism that shows me that 2,000 years of thinking about faith has produced some excellent distillations of the problems we humans face.

To be human, man's response to God by faith must be free, and. . . therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act. God calls men to serve him in spirit and in truth. Consequently they are bound to him in conscience, but not coerced. . . Indeed, Christ invited people to faith and conversion, but never coerced them. For he bore witness to the truth but refused to use force to impose it on those who spoke against it. His kingdom. . . grows by the love with which Christ, lifted up on the cross, draws men to himself." (CCC 160)

Forget about the “TV Test.” I have a new test called the “Walmart Test” and you can do this test even without being a Christian, but it’s much easier if you are one. Upon entering the mart, or even before you enter - you can start this test while you are in the parking lot - pin this single idea on your brain’s bulletin board: that every person you see is a child of God, that every person there is important, and that you can see Christ in each person’s face.

There’s a saying I’ve stolen from a guy who signs his emails with “See Christ in others, be Christ for others.” Somehow it’s always those short proverbial sayings that stick the best in my brain and make the most sense. They cut to the chase. This may be because I’m in my forties now, so phrases of eight words or less are necessary.

This includes seeing Christ in the person that would win “most likely to become Hitler” in your mind’s yearbook of societal characters. You probably already know who I’m talking about. You know who it is. How do I know? Because everyone has a scapegoat, an archetypal villain that we brook own own ego against, to affirm to ourselves, “I’m good, that person is bad.” If any behavior smacks of evidence for original sin, it’s that humans seem wired to seek something or someone to hate. We want approval, we want love, and we’re capable of much love, but we also gravitate toward hate all too readily. We need that opposing force to support our own yearning for righteousness and self-love.

Honestly, don’t we seek out anger? Last night I sat down in my chair, quite content for a moment, and then a minute later, I looked at my phone and saw an article, and I clicked on it and then became instantly agitated. And I realized afterward, did I not perform that act myself? Did I not just become angry by own volition? And for what reason other than I was feeling content and happy! I sought out something to irritate me and disrupt the peace.

We seek agitation, and the phone giveth. Oh, it giveth. Why do we want to dislike something? Despite all the love memes we post on Facebook, there is the equal and opposite force pulling us the other direction. One of the most fascinating phenomenons to watch on Facebook is to have a friend that posts a picture of his or her family followed an hour later by a vitriolic partisan article about a lightning rod political topic. Love - hate - love - hate. It’s like they are saying, “Here’s something I love” and later “Here’s something I hate.” The happy and loving posts almost seem to act as counterbalance to claim their image back from the stronger yearning to communicate how angry they are. I hide these people’s feeds because I can’t handle the constant love/hate, not because I don’t like those people, but because I have to deal with my own tendency toward love and hate along with theirs. One at a time people, get in line. I’ve got my own flaws to fight before I can handle yours. This is where the internet’s poison gets nasty for society, because instead of just dealing with our own extremes we get to observe and react to everyone else’s internal monologue too, and frankly, I am not equipped for flaws beyond my own massive problems and insecurities.

This shame/honor culture and love/hate firehose of opinions lives rent-free in our heads, and in many of us has taken up permanent residency with the fusion of social media into our lives. Even before social media, comments to articles on web pages were rife with this extremism toward honor and shame. This is exactly why I don’t have comments enabled on Why Did Peter Sink? Have you ever, in your online life, read the comments of an article or a social media post on social media and felt better? Have you ever moved on from typing and commenting with a good feeling? I have not. Typing online is a good place to use the “TV Test.” Would I type this comment if the world were watching me? Anonymity is a seductive thing online, since it allows our cruelty to go unchecked.

So back to the “Walmart Test.” This test must be done with all shoppers, but especially against those who personify your most vilified group. So whether that person you would like to wish away is a Republican or Democrat, fat or thin, black or white, immigrant or citizen, gay or straight, on welfare or paying cash - you need to do this test on that person. You need to see the dignity of every person.

This is the imago Dei test. Every human being is made in the image and likeness of God, with a soul granted at the beginning of their life. “The notion of the imago Dei is also that which gives each and every human being an equal share of human dignity. And this is the game changer. Catholic Social Doctrine is based principally upon this notion.”

If you do this correctly, going to Walmart may become the greatest experience of your life. You may find yourself spinning around in the pet food section, proclaiming loudly, like John Dryden after reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “Here is God’s Plenty!” This may even be euphoric for you when you look at that Trump supporter or drug user or person on food stamps or that woman with five children or that rich snob and say to them in your head, “This is a child of God. Someone loves this person. This person is valuable and meaningful. Jesus died for that person’s sins just as Jesus died for mine. I am no better than that person. I see Christ in that person’s face and they are a miracle.”

But…whatever you do, don’t hug them. Say hello, or maybe pierce their bubble to start a conversation. Just don’t hug them. That’s how the police car can suddenly appear in front of Walmart.

I say this without being silly or trying to provoke anyone. You must do The Walmart Test stone-sober, not high or drunk, because it’s very easy to feel the whole “I love you, man” mood when you are intoxicated. That’s not really “Seeing Christ in Others,” that’s a false elevation, a vacuous happiness. Drug users often have this “I love you, man” attitude, but that’s not a valid test, because they have already escaped the world in the high of the drug. I remember a person from college that would get stoned and go to the local zoo to look at animals for some kind of zen. That is not what I’m talking about. This is a sober test. A test of internal change, not external change, not to be created by coercion or chemicals. This is a test about choosing to orient your life toward Christ and to see him everywhere.

True change is internal. It requires a turning toward God.

This is the part that I never understood about Christianity for the first thirty-some years of my life. I saw it as mostly rules, as buildings and rituals, as a path to righteousness through actions. That’s not what it’s about at the root. All of those things like rituals and buildings help us stay on track to the true destination. But it’s not only about the laws and the rules. That’s not the main purpose. The primary purpose is to change how you see. The purpose is to make change from the heart which changes your entire vision of the world. For those that think Jesus was a great moral teacher, that’s a key part but not the whole. It’s about sin, forgiveness and acceptance, and number one above all: about seeing the world as Christ saw the world. It’s about entering into the suffering with others, not against them.

Christianity is, above all, a way of seeing. Everything else in Christian life flows from and circles around the transformation of vision. Christians see differently, and that is why their prayer, their worship, their action, their whole way of being in the world have a distinctive accent and flavor. (Centered, p 37)

How else could the martyrs be burned to death while still praying for the one who lit the match? That sounds like drug-induced behavior. For someone about to be killed and still see Christ in the face of the killer, this is such a radical idea that goes against all instinct. Drugs like liquor and politics could never give that much of the “I love you, man” feeling.

What happens is that the faithful sometimes forget to see Christ in others. There are millions of Christians who do see this way, they just don’t make the news. We only hear about the ones who lose the vision and need to get back to the hospital for sinners. When that happens, when someone falls, the media pounces. Non-Christians rejoice when the righteous fall. They see the Pharisee in those Christians that judge others while self-justifying their own behavior with the presumption of salvation. The meek inherit the earth, not the proud, right? But while the media dances on a fallen figure’s grave, what they forget is that in being humbled, the fallen figure usually realizes the mistake and comes to a stronger and more appropriate faith through humility. Having faith is not supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be hard.

The second part of my stolen saying is to “Be Christ for Others.” This means letting go of the zero-sum game, of needing something for every action you take. You have to let go of the self and the never-ending "wanting” of more. Hasn’t that exhausted you? More money, more recognition, more likes, more house, more car, more sex, more drama. It becomes so repetitive always wanting the next thing, the new shiny toy, the next experience, that it’s like a hamster on a wheel running for no reason.

This letting go means you go into servant mode and wind up receiving more than if you had gotten what you wanted.

Someday I dream I will walk into Walmart and see two people, perhaps a Republican and a Democrat, gripping each others ears with both hands and saying simultaneously, “How did I not see this before?!”

I won’t hold my breath.

The Walmart Test is where you can choose to mock those you feel superior toward, you can choose to disdain your perceived enemies, you can mock them with body humor…or…or…you can choose to see Christ in each person’s face. This is not meant to be easy. It never was meant to be easy. As a Christian you are not even meant to be loved. Jesus even warned us that we will be hated for his sake. If someone hates you, take heart, because you’ve found the perfect subject for your Walmart Test. Can you love the person you hate the most? Better test: can you love the person that hates you the most? Can you pray for your enemy? I bet you can.

“[God] will have us learn to bear the burden of one another’s faults. Nobody is faultless; each has his own burden to bear, without the strength or the wit to carry it by himself; and we have got to support one another, console, help, correct, advise one another, each in his turn.

Meanwhile, there is no better test of a man’s quality than when he cannot have things his own way. The occasions of sin do not overpower us, they only prove our worth.” (from The Imitation of Christ. p 47)

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Around the year 300 A.D., a teenager named Agnes was killed because of a choice that rejected a culture that elevated sex and power over the wholeness of body and soul. She represented a major threat to a sick empire because she would not play along. And simply by using the word, “No,” like a pin she punctured a gaping hole in the puffed-up and bloated world that she lived in.

As punishment, Agnes was forced into prostitution and eventually murdered for not partaking in the expected behavior of her time. This is heroic. This is real heroism, not the Marvel kind, and not the self-declared kind done by those carry their sins on signs like a trophy.

The teenage Agnes stared down the peer pressure of an entire empire. This was not like a crafted Greta Thunberg media story. This was not manufactured by a massive marketing campaign that pretends to be a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness. This is not like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. This is not like a young Marlon Brando in The Wild One who is asked, “What are you rebelling against?” and replying, “What have you got?”

No, this was real. This was one single girl, saying “No” to personal sin in a fallen world.

By sticking to her convictions, Agnes was killed, but in doing so she gave the bully a black eye. The ego of a bully that celebrates sin never recovers from these kind of heroic refusals to submit. The courage of Agnes is pure and beautiful, and she is not the only one. There is also Philomena, Lucy, and the thousands of others all the way to Joan of Arc and Maria Goretti. A multitude of the early Christian martyrs were teenage girls. There are so many of them in the four-volumes of Butler’s Lives of the Saints that it should give you pause to ask: if Catholics hate women so much, why are so many of our churches and hospitals and universities named after them? Seems an odd brand of “hate” to dedicate buildings and millions of prayers to them. But let’s move on.

Agnes’ simple act needed no explanation or intellectual interpretation to understand. It’s power is in its simplicity. As Jesus said, don’t worry about that which can kill the body - worry about that which can destroy the soul. Death in this life brings you home if you believe in Christ. The body will follow the soul. We can worry about that reconnection later, in the last judgment. After all, governments and peer pressure cannot kill the soul. They can only kill the body and maybe delete a row in database. The modern “cancelling” does not kill the soul, because souls do not abide in the cloud or in databases. As for the body of Agnes that they thought they killed, it will be resurrected on the last day.

Agnes understood this perfectly well.

(Note: Is there anything more difficult to understand in Christian theology than “The Resurrection of the body”? Ok, fine, maybe “He descended into hell…” and “The Communion of Saints.” I will need to have whole series on the twelve lines of the Apostles’ Creed at some point.)

Here’s a prophecy:

A teenage girl has changed Christian history many times. Probably more than we even know. And another will be along to do it once again.

I suspect this will happen soon, once the youth tires of TikTok and other current fads, which all have the shelf life of a can of soup; it’s good for a few years, but then you forget about it, and eventually just throw it out. The only difference is that soup is actually good for your body. The sense of permanence that people have about our current cultural fads should give us all a good belly laugh.

Mary, the Mother of God, was also a teenager, who most famously changed the world. How did she do it? She said “Yes.” She said “Yes” to God, not to the world, the flesh, or the devil. So did Agnes.

Saint Agnes is another one of these teenagers from the early Church that rocked and shocked the world because chastity is always counter-cultural. The reason people resent and mock chastity is the same reason we resent anything: resentment masks our own guilt. Resent rhymes with repent. To all that you resent, you must repent. That’s kind of like a Johnny Cochrane line, one of OJ’s lawyers, who said “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

The increase in American anger over the past seventy years is in direct proportion to our sins, because the conscience knows our past, and we resent the outside world because we can’t resolve our sins alone. Did I say we? I mean “I”. “Me”. Let me stop projecting. Because of sin, I have the vitriol and blame, honor and shame, because if I cannot honestly forgive, I must have an outlet, and that outlet is fear, the resentment of institutions, God, and other people. I have to blame something to drown the conscience.

It’s not rocket science. This is why the most vociferous pro-abortion people have usually had abortions, and why the loudest conservatives against sexual immorality have an immoral sexual past of their own. National pride and Gay Pride are both forms of the worst sin, which is…pride. It’s so basic that it’s comical. If you merely read the Bible up to Genesis chapter 3, you can stop and know that sin leads to fig leaves. Sin leads to hiding, blame, anger, and suffering.

The modern declaration of “Don’t tell me what to do” is the new version of “I will not serve,” which is what the devil uses for a motto (Non serviam). Humility is the antidote, but who wants to hear about the way of the Cross? We don’t want to listen to the conscience. All of the noise in the culture is cranked up so that we can’t hear the “still, small voice.” But soon a St. Agnes will come along, and her little “No” to the culture, and her “Yes” to God, will pull the plug on the babbling nonsense coming out of the speakers. Only in silence can the conscience again be heard. This is why regret for what happened at the party only comes to the party-goer in the quiet of the following morning. (I will resist re-discussing the Prodigal Son.)

We tend to resent most what we ourselves have done, and if we never openly repent, it eats at the heart like acid. Did I say “we” again? I mean, “I”. Me.

Consider your most vocal online friends, and I would be willing to bet that what they are ranting about is a spiritual mirroring of their own sins, which they have yet to confess. Don’t laugh, because it’s difficult work to do, and it takes years, or a whole lifetime to process. Humility is the most difficult virtue. The onion is thick on so many lives grown in the inorganic fertilizer of the 20th and 21st centuries, where we have been told to love ourselves rather than to love God and love others. The cult of “self-love” is strong and it is an education that comes from the father of lies, not from God.

Sin is disorder, and we want order, and unless we address our sins, we remain disordered. In our strange attempts to find the good, we talk ourselves into sin. No one sins thinking it will lead to disorder. We sin with the hope that all will turn out well. No one lies thinking, “I reject God.” We lie to protect ourselves, thinking that it will keep us safe from harm, criticism, insecurity. But sin is like an illness that moves us away from the good, and becomes a disease that always results in tragedy over the long term, particularly if you persist in it until death.

Refusing to address our sins leads to strange outlets, and one way or another we want to take control, because we think we can order the world. Our woundedness terrifies us. Thus, control of people and the world is born of our desire to play God. And we are not God. Hence, what I hate is most often a symptom of sins I have never confessed, and the conscience is the one thing that cannot be controlled. I may be able to have some control over finances, friendships, family, companies, politics, food, news, sports, and even the weather, but I cannot control the conscience. Yes, I can pretend it’s not there, and even believe that I am not burdened by it, but I am, and the more I deny it, the harder I am trying to play God. This is exactly what the devil wants, and has always wanted of us all. The term “hard-hearted” used so often in the Bible is just what we call today “self-love”. But self-love is not healing if it’s merely a smokescreen for unrepented sins.

Modern culture yearns for authentic voices, but we doubt such a thing exists, and mock purity and weakness. The condemnation that erupts when we hear of someone’s error or fall is a massive chorus of people who have not addressed their own brokenness. No matter how many Oprah magazines or mindfulness sessions we attend, our sins will not be forgiven outside of Jesus.

So the sick culture coughs and ambles along like an angry tyrant. But another Agnes will arrive and the world of sex, drugs, and anything-goes will be stunned by her authenticity, by one young woman who refuses to agree to the lies about sex and power. And she will be martyred for her choice.

She already may be alive today.

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I was once watching Monday Night Football at an airport while I ate a quick dinner between flights, and a man from the UK asked me what exactly the teams were trying to accomplish on the field. Briefly, I tried to explain American football to him, and the ideas around moving the football ten yards using four “downs.” After a few minutes, he finished his beer and said, “It looks like a stupid game to me.” I laughed, since I didn’t really disagree. Most games are kind of odd, even stupid if you step back and really think about them. In basketball, we try to throw a ball through a metal ring. In baseball, we use a stick to hit a ball and then we run and touch things that we pretend have magic powers of safety. And whoever is good at these games, we treat like the gods of this world.

I didn’t point out to the English dude that rugby and cricket look just as stupid to me as American football did to him, because I assume there is far more nuance and art to those games, and I just fail to appreciate them because I grew up watching football and baseball. Once when I was in London, I watched cricket in a bar and observed people getting excited and, yes, it seemed ridiculous to me. Likewise, I don’t understand hockey, despite living in a state where many are obsessed with it. Hockey bores me, but I understand there is far more happening on the ice than I understand or appreciate, because many people assure me it is beautiful if you understand it. I know what they mean by that.

What we don’t understand, we like to mock. Especially if it has a border, or a fence around it. Sour grapes is a phenomenon that I’ve certainly known personally, where if I don’t understand something, I downplay it. Or perhaps, if I’m not allowed into something, I will consider it not worth striving after.

But for that which we don’t understand, we’ll mock it as stupid or childish. I’ve written about this a fair amount here, especially in terms of prayer, where the modern doubter mocks prayer as silly, while never giving it a try - a real try - and therefore never learning to understand or play “the game” of prayer. The funny thing is that we end up locking ourselves out of beauty when we refuse to try prayer, or when we actively mock what happens at a Catholic Mass.

There is a bad idea in the Church to make Mass more exciting, more engaging, and on this topic a longstanding debate over how the Holy Mass should be conducted has raged for a decades. Arguments over Vatican II can be found everywhere online, as the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo provoke fierce commentaries. As a child of the 1980s and 1990s, I have attended various Masses that seem to lack reverence, so I appreciate the complaints of the defenders of the Mass of the Ages, because when I first witnessed a High Mass, or Latin Mass, I thought I had walked into the wrong Church. I had no idea what was happening but knew that something was different, and that something had been lost in the reverence used in the Tridentine form of the Mass.

But I have not come to talk about Latin Mass here. I will save that for another day. (Before I move on, I must admit that attending a High Mass had a profound effect on my sense of what the liturgy could and should be in terms of reverence. Attending the old mass, with its seriousness and grand silences, exuded sacredness in every moment. Receiving Communion on the tongue, kneeling at the rail, made it obvious that this was indeed the proper posture for coming to meet the Creator who welcomes us to the sacred meal of Thanksgiving. The hundreds of Novus Ordo Masses that I have attended never came close to that evening, where I witnessed the most reverent Mass of my life, on Epiphany 2020, in Pine Island, MN. This was no Mass pretending to be entertainment, this was a group of joyful sinners in love with a welcoming God. That was the first time I understood why we have these “Liturgy wars” and it makes it difficult to understand why Pope Francis seems intent on ending this beautiful Latin Mass, but as I mentioned, perhaps I will write on this another day.)

What I mean to focus on here is the Mass itself, and why it is neither intended to be entertaining nor should it ever be the main goal. If you want entertainment, you can watch Monday Night Football or the hundreds of available streaming services.

The Holy Mass is not entertainment, nor should it ever be considered as such. For anyone who thinks it needs to be more exciting, they are merely asking for trouble because that is a losing game. The world outside of the Church is in constant battle for entertainment and drama. We specifically go to the Mass for a meal with God, for non-competition, for communion. Now, I will say, it is always appreciated to have a good speaker who can deliver a good homily, but again…even that is not the main purpose of the Mass.

Religion cannot be entertainment. If your religion sees itself as a competition with the culture, where the number of people attending is the mark of success, it becomes just another sideshow, a form of entertainment, and one that will lose. In short, faith in Christ is not a popularity contest. I don’t even think faith can fully be authentic if you are only there because it’s cool, because Jesus assured us that people would hate his apostles and disciples. The cool people of the ancient world were the Herodians, the Romans, the Pharisees, and the Sadduccees, and they all got together and killed Jesus because he was a buzzkill to them.

The non-religious world has ample options for entertainment. Sex, money, power, victory, contests: now that’s what most people call entertainment. The Super Bowl is entertainment, a full deck of sex, money, power, and worship of pseudo-demigod athletes. It is the most pagan feast in the history of mankind. If that’s what you want, then go get it. But that is not what the Mass offers. The beauty of the Holy Mass is that you do not go there to get something, to be entertained. You go there to give something: you go there to give thanks. (For a good primer on how to attend Mass, watch Father Mike Schmitz’s Pray the Mass like never before. In fact, go watch his video and forget about this blog, if you want greater insight.)

Any religion that tries to be cool or trendy has a short shelf life. No one needs it. No one wants it. Fireworks are not needed. A thousand options exist already in trendy entertainment and fads. For anyone that believes the Catholic Mass must be more modern and hip, they have missed the point entirely. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Catholic Mass is about if you are attending in order to get something for yourself instead of to give yourself to God. Even the structure of the Mass walks this out for us if we pay attention. This is the Mass in nutshell:

1.) We bring our sinful selves and ask for God’s mercy, giving all glory to him.

2.) We listen to God’s word and try to understand the message.

3.) Then we recite our beliefs and offer gifts. Bread and wine comes forward and we donate money if we can.

Then we test our faith. Talk is cheap. And your money is no good from here on out.

4.) The act of faith in the Eucharist is where the leap must be taken, weekly.

5.) Then we give thanks for God. Eucharist means “thanksgiving.”

6.) We are commanded to go forth, to love God, and to serve others.

To observe the consecration of the hosts and step forward and say, “I believe this is the body of Christ” with your Amen - that is the test of faith. To believe that you have ingested the glorified and risen body of God requires a total surrender of the intellect and free-will. That is now faith is defined in the Catechism. (CCC 143)

This kind of surrender of self to God brings real freedom. Total freedom. The reason people who try to use LSD or alcohol fail to really get freedom is because they are like Evel Knievel trying to jump the Snake River in Idaho on a rocket-powered motorcycle. You can’t blast your way to God. Experiencing God cannot be bought or achieved with enough mind-altering experiences. The spiritual life requires the journey into the valley, into humility, and kneeling is the only way to reach God and know him.

The whole idea of kneeling is to deflate the ego entirely, shoving it aside in favor of God. To be blessed by the Creator means submitting to him. I know a man who says, “I don’t kneel” and he has a very worldly idea of what God is, and as for me, I know that either I will kneel to God each morning and night, or God will kneel me. I’ve said this before on here: humility is when you kneel to God, and humiliation is when God kneels you. The resulting outcome is the same, but how you get tapped by God differs greatly in the choice.

Modern people don’t like kneeling. We’ve been indoctrinated to “believe in yourself.” But kneeling purposefully lowers reason and ego in order to elevate faith in God to the highest place in your mind, body, heart, and soul. The beauty of Catholicism is that you get to keep your reason, as science and the Church are fully compatible (don’t let people fool you about this) and by surrendering to God you get to love yourself as God loves you. This is the great paradox of faith and the rule of spiritual physics. In order to go up, you must go down. In order to be re-born, you must die to self.

In short, we go to Mass to give ourselves to God. But, lo and behold, in return, God gives himself to us. That is the only “transaction” I will ever need from God. Not money, not fame, not food, not my job, not my health, not people, not anything. All of that can be taken, and my prayer is that I will only stay close to God, and will do so through communion with Him in the Eucharist. You know, people should be clamoring to receive the host, the Eucharist, because it is God sharing himself with us. When you go to communion without the baggage of your intellect and free-will, you will know what it means to have the faith of a child.

When I stop trying to mold God to my plans, I am molded into His plans. This is letting go of everything but God. As for earthly things, we must think like Job, who after losing everything could still say: The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Bless the name of the Lord.

That is the daily miracle of the Mass. It is never to be entertained. Witnessing an irreverent Mass may be a leading cause of dying faith, because it’s like a bad sugary syrup that leaves you unfulfilled and feeling dull all over. If you go to Mass without knowing what is happening, you will be like the man from the UK watching Monday Night Football or me watching cricket.

This is why those who understand the Mass and believe do not like applause or cool new introductions to how worship is done.

Those who say, “I left the church because I wasn’t being fed,” never understood the Mass in the first place, because you don’t go to Mass to be fed by the priest’s sermon. First of all, the Mass is not about you. That’s critical to understand.

You go to Mass bringing what little you have, nothing but your sins and a willingness to believe, and deserving nothing you get fed by God himself. This is the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes in replay, every week, where we bring very little to the table, and God provides the rest.

If it’s entertainment you want, you can get a sermon on YouTube or from a podcast. There are many great ones to hear. But those speakers are not the Eucharist. Your computer or airpods cannot serve up a host to your ears at the end of a sermon. Nor can technology consecrate a host, since phones are not ordained in the only church that has the succession of the apostles. Body and soul are required for the mystery of the Mass. The Sacraments require an in-person experience. You cannot get the Eucharist anywhere else but at the hands of an ordained priest, who is in the line of grace from the apostles right up to today.

This is where people get off the Catholic bus. Transubstantiation? Laying of hands to pass on the power of consecration? What is this, a magic act?

No. That is the faith. That is the leap. That is the formula, that is not magic, but it works. “We do not believe in formulas, but in those realities they express, which faith allows us to touch.” (CCC 170)

We believe because it endures, it works, it lasts, and by placing faith slightly over our reason, we get to keep both. Keep your science and have your Eucharist, too, as long as faith edges out reason by a smidge. When faith takes the wheel, reason provides the navigation. It’s a beautiful thing to have both, but as soon as reason tries to take the wheel, the car goes off the road.

The world laughs at faith as backward and superstitious. But this is a faith that works and has lasted two thousand years. This is the faith that withstood horrors beyond our imagination in the first three hundred years, suffering martyrdoms beyond imagination. The rituals of this old religion exist for a purpose. There is a reason for the ritual. It is an act of faith. There is proof of its power to move people, as seen in the beauty of every cathedral and small town church. Entertainment was never the point. Sermons are not the bread of life. And entertainment ages badly. Go watch any comedy film from the 1960s or 1970s and see how funny it is now. (Spoiler: don’t watch them, they are no longer funny)

This is why devout Catholics don’t like clapping and hand-waving at Mass. This is why we like silence before and after Mass. Noise and clapping and hooting and hollering are fine elsewhere, like at your Bible study or a retreat or in evangelization. But not at Mass. Here’s a quote from Pope Benedict, a fellow who really understood the value of a reverent Mass:

Wherever applause breaks out in the liturgy because of some human achievement, it is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment. Such attraction fades quickly - it cannot compete in the market of leisure pursuits, incorporating as it increasingly does various forms of religious titillation. (On the Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Ratzinger)

But then why does it have to be so boring? Kids worldwide have wondered this while attending Catholic Mass. It’s boring when you don’t understand it. It’s boring when no one explains to you what it’s about. Consider how it feels to watch a sport you don’t know, like when Americans watch cricket or British people watch American football. What you see appears pointless, until you know what’s happening, and that every single word and action is loaded with symbolism and meaning.

Many people observe a board game being played with suspicion, but once they sit down and enter the game, the nuances become interesting. So like sports and card games, and other forms of entertainment, the Mass only makes sense once you start playing and understanding it. You have to play to appreciate a game, not read the rule book or watch in confusion.

However, sports and card games do not address the gaping, vacuous, never-ending pit in our souls for purpose and meaning. They can plug the void for a bit, but eventually you need something more. Something to hang onto when you are no longer playing but perhaps: staring at a bedroom ceiling at 4 AM or sitting in a hospital waiting room or after having a miscarriage or losing a pet or when you are drowning in anxiety or you can’t stop scrolling porn or keep yourself from drinking to inebriation.

The thing about sports and entertainment is that they don’t address the core problem. Moreover, they require a good deal of energy to stay in motion. The NFL has lasted over fifty years in America, which seems a long time. But it has only lasted because of immense marketing and sales efforts to make it cool and sexy. The moment the marketing fails, the TV contracts will fade, and the stadiums will empty. The bread and circuses of modern America only survive because of peace after World War II (at least within the country), our incredible affluence, and our desire to fill spare hours with distractions. Our efficiency has allowed odd things like the NFL to spring up and flourish, but like Elvis, it will eventually fade away.

Anyone who has worked in sales knows how hard it is, how much smoke and mirrors is needed, how much bending of the truth is required, to keep up the numbers, especially when you’re selling a bad product. The product, in the end, must sell itself. The NFL requires a marketing machine that the ancient world could not fathom. But there’s a reason so much advertising and endorsing and imagery is required, just as there is a reason that boring things like Arm & Hammer Baking Soda doesn’t need a lot of clever pitching. A person buys Arm & Hammer Baking Soda one time and it works, and then keeps buying the same product for forty, fifty, sixty years. Wealthy or poor, attractive or ugly, tall or short, college educated or “deplorable”: they all trust in Arm & Hammer Baking Soda and don’t need reminders plastered all over the TV or in their mailbox or on their phones.

Some things just work. It fulfills a need. Baking Soda doesn’t oversell its basic capability by promising that you’ll be taller or better looking, or that all of your dreams will come true. The NFL is selling that story. If your team wins, you win. If your team wins, you will be fulfilled. If your team doesn’t win, somehow you have lost. To be happy, your team must win. The NFL reminds me of the Bergens in the animated movie, Trolls, where the Bergens think the only way to be happy is if they eat a Troll. Likewise, I know people that may only be happy if the Vikings or Jets win the Super Bowl. You hear this line: “I can die happy if the Vikes win…” Give me a break. Go eat a troll.

Addendum: eating a troll is not like eating the Eucharist, for anyone who might like to link the idea. Receiving the Eucharist does not implant “happiness,” it brings us into Communion with God, and in eating the consecrated host we do not kill God, as a Bergen does to a Troll. God cannot be killed. We’ve already tried that, and it didn’t work because he popped back up on the third day. The Eucharist is the Risen and Glorified Body of Christ. Receive Him frequently, as frequently as you can.

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For the record, I don’t care about Han Solo or whether he shot first in the cantina scene in Star Wars. I care about Matthew. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Mark, too, and Luke, and John. It’s just that Mark didn’t shoot first. Mark shot second.

Like Mark Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral, it started with a line such as, “I’ve come to bury Matthew, not to praise him!” This scholarship to remove Matthew as the first Gospel writer started in anti-Catholic Protestant universities in Europe, using biased textual criticism that ignored all historical testimony in writing and Sacred Tradition.

But why would they do that?

Why would anyone do that?

Who benefits?

Let me beat this topic a bit longer…

First and foremost, knocking down Matthew to second or third very clearly elevates the Protestant argument against Peter as the first Pope and apostolic succession. This cannot be understated. If there is one position to attack on the Catholic Church, it’s to get the Papacy in check-mate, and when the direct assault of the Protestants didn’t work, a long “march through the culture” happened in the universities. People today can observe the socialist writers doing the same thing, as the workers of the world did not unite to overthrow capitalism and religion, so now the long atheist “march through the culture” is happening. Spoiler alert: at the end of both of these marches, guess who will still be there? Yes, the answer is the Catholic Church.

As we watch the fragmentation of Protestantism, we can observe this process of atomization unfold. We can read about the annual splintering of the Baptists. Even this week, as I write this, the United Methodist Church will soon be no longer United but Wedged instead. On the other side, the unbelievers form factions that come and go, like the Masons, the humanists, the woke, the freethinkers, the Brights, and they come and go, because none of them are from God. We are in the last days of the Masons because they were always just a reaction. The humanists can’t get along, because they worship the human, and that makes for 7 billion gods. The woke are already destroying one another. One thing that always plays out is the breakdown of unity among unbelievers.

It’s ugly.

It’s not beautiful.

It’s ugly…because it’s not from God.

The tragedy, however, in doing this teardown of Matthew, is that these well-intentioned Pope-haters (which is a virtue in some Protestant circles) managed to undermine all of sacred scripture, not just the parts that affect the Catholic Church. A nice summary of this tragedy is in a book by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker called The Decline and Fall of Sacred Scripture. Why does it undermine all of the Gospel? Because if Matthew is written after the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem, when the Romans laid waste to all things Jewish, Jesus’ prediction about the temple being disassembled becomes really, really weak. If Matthew wrote this after 70 A.D., which all “modern” biased scholarship suggests, then it makes no sense.

As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. Then he asked them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” (Matthew 24:1-2)

Now, faithful scholarship believes Matthew was written between 42 and 68 A.D., which makes sense with this statement (and everything else above). However, scholars who lack faith place Matthew as being written after 70 A.D. and only that Matthew drew from “earlier sources,” but the problem is that the suspicion is already branded on the text and when scholars refer to “earlier sources” they are not referring to the Hebrew version of Matthew that tradition speaks about.

And here are the suspicions: 1.) That the prediction of the temple destruction was added after the fact to make Jesus look prophetic. 2.) That the pro-Catholic verses about Peter and the Sacraments were added later to shore up the case for Catholic authority. 3.) That all of the Gospel is dubious at best because so much time passed that an eyewitness account is impossible.

What I can never fully get my head around is this. The main argument for Mark being first is that…:

Mark is shorter.

The second reason is that Mark is…:

Mark is a weaker writer.

Both of these arguments can be turned around and argued against to say that Matthew was first because Matthew is longer and Matthew is a better writer. These arguments for “Mark shot first” are inventions and bear no weight whatsoever on facts, and you can argue it until you are blue in the face without it getting anywhere, and scholars have done just that. But somehow these arguments have great staying power because scholarship has anointed these two ideas with the ink of published papers. Never mind that the journals are biased toward “Mark shot first” to begin with. Never mind that you probably can’t get a job teaching Biblical studies if you objected to these arguments (read this fascinating article about 19th century German hiring and firing of those who didn’t toe the party line).

The following may come as a shock to the modern person who likes to “follow the science” and assumes that science and experts would never lie: scholars and scientists are every bit as prone to simping, scapegoating, and “dry-labbing” facts as are religious and business people, and correcting an error in scholarship or science is like turning a super-tanker around in the ocean; it takes a long time, and a lot of energy, and a lot of convincing, because usually no one wants to admit things are going in the wrong direction. There’s too much money, time, and sunk costs to change direction. The Titanic didn’t sink because an iceberg hit it. The Titanic sunk because it ran into an iceberg. The problem of pride in the mind and assumed perfection preceded the collision. The iceberg just happened to be the reality that smashed a false idea.

In praise of science, it usually will self-correct over time because sooner or later someone calls out the lie. The researcher who produces false results will be outed, even if it takes a century. However, Biblical scholarship is not biology or physics, so there is much more room for bias, just like in sociology or history or literary criticism, and the will of whoever is in power, whether it’s a king or department chair, can skew the results dramatically toward the desired outcome through wordsmithing. Even in hiring, the bias for the desired outcome of future research is accomplished, because if an academic researcher would like a job but shows inclinations against the status quo, then their application will be passed over. This is no different than the Church, where an atheist cannot become a priest. But the faith is laid out in full display in the Church, where the preachers and teachers must profess the faith. In academia, this is hidden. Under the guise of “free speech” there is anything but such a thing, and therein lies the problem: the lies. Thus is a bias and motive protected, fenced off, in the walled gardens of academia, and there is no place more fenced off in the modern world than the university. They are the modern Levites, the experts who hand down the truth. As we try to downplay Moses and religious ways, our modern academic experts act more like Moses on Sinai than Moses himself, even wearing lab coats in their TV interviews, or being interviewed in rooms with walls bearing diplomas for the lay people, or giving TED talks from on high to the plebes watching at home on YouTube.

So, back to the absurd argument of “It’s shorter.” If I want to argue that “Mark shot first” because “it’s shorter,” if I stare long and hard enough at Mark, I will find a case and enough evidence for the outcome I’m seeking. This is the beauty of textual criticism - it’s an interpretive dance based solely on internal evidence, and therefore a fantasy.

On the flip side, if I want to argue that Matthew is first because “it’s longer,” I can do that, too. After all, you can spin a text into whatever you like, if you just use internal evidence of the text itself.

The difference, however, is that a scholar most likely cannot publish the findings for an argument that “Matthew is longer, therefore first.” In secular academics, to get a job teaching such things, or to get accepted in a graduate program, is unlikely. This is the problem with modern academia; it is as rigid as the Pharisees in what you are allowed to say or believe. The book 1984 was written in an era of totalitarian governments, but today it applies very well to American universities and public schools, and this is exactly why so many teachers are leaving the profession. No one enjoys living a lie.

As a former English major, I will say this pointing at myself: This spin problem is why you never want English majors being the navigators for your nation. They can spin gold into straw very easily, but they cannot spin straw into gold. They can only spin. They spin and toil and undo things, but by and large they do not create anything. A career is made of unpacking and teasing out meaning, calling out prejudices, pointing out oppression - but never producing or making anything. Lit-crit and Biblical-crit at the modern university is full of morality, guilt, and finger-pointing, to the point that three modern academics were able to publish several hoax papers on grievance studies that were accepted mainly because of their use on ridiculous postmodern jargon. “The trio set out with the intent to expose problems in what they called ‘grievance studies’, referring to academic areas where they claim ‘a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed… and put social grievances ahead of objective truth’.”

Now, with the humanities in free-fall, the jig is up on modern scholarship, since it’s reaching the tipping point, the last phase, where the head becomes too heavy for the body to carry it any longer. Now we reach the point in a society where the workers of the world unite, but not the way that intellectuals like Marx think. The workers unite because they are tired of pulling the cart and being told they are the evil ones.

So for the most part, I try not to worry about this long attack on Matthew. Jesus warned us not to worry. One thing is for sure: even if Matthew hadn’t written at all, and we were still simply rolling by oral tradition, the message of Christ would still be growing, because it is from God, and nothing on this earth, nothing in this world, can halt what is from God.

Jesus warned us about spinning and toiling, using clothing as an example, and clothing is even a metaphor in the Garden to hide our nakedness. Our reputations and opinions are kind of like clothing, where we fashion these elaborate fig leaves to cover ourselves. Jesus warns us to knock it off, and quit worrying: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin.” He warns us about men of little faith: “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.”

So I should really just stop bothering about the fact that “Matthew shot first,” because I know that tradition tells us his Gospel was first, and having faith means trusting in Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium of the Church. I know that.

And yet, sometimes I let it bother me, because the real reason behind all of this is not a search for the truth, but the search for an outcome.

The obvious aim of this kind of scholarship from the start has been to undermine the Church, and it remains so to this day. Whether it comes from the cynicism of unbelievers or the broadsides of Protestants, the desired outcome is the capitulation of the bishop of Rome, a.k.a. the Pope, who is on the chair of Peter, on the rock of the Church that Christ founded. And clearly scholars will not destroy the church, because Jesus promised that the “gates of hell will not prevail against” his Church.

So they can certainly try to undermine it, but ultimately will fail, and they are failing now. It will play out exactly as every other attempt to destroy the Church, in that it will be messy, but the Church will remain when the dust settles, just as it has outlasted every other heresy and empire.

This campaign has produced thousands of papers and articles on the Synoptic Problem, which was not a problem at all until modern scholarship made it into one, in the same universities that brought us the sad philosophy and ideas that conjured 20th century Germany, China, and the Soviet Union, and all of the horrors. These things are not unrelated. The stoking of the “will-to-power” didn’t just happen in political nationalism and social Darwinism and Marxist revolutions. It happened most definitely in Biblical scholarship as well. Now, they meant it for bad, but as always, God will in the end, use it for good. This is how God deals with folks like Julius Wellhausen and Gottlieb Storr. He will do so with modern doubters too, like Bart Ehrman and his atheist disciples.

The funny thing about scholarship’s search for “truth” that wants to debunk Christianity is that they often end up organizing and collating information better so that new insights to Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition can be found. In other words, the unbelievers and anti-Catholics help faithful writers write better books on the truth of Christ. The anti-Catholics are like Joseph’s eleven brothers in Genesis that throw him down the well and sell him into slavery, only to find out later that Joseph ended up thriving while they starved.

In short, there was great incentive to crush Catholicism in Lutheran Germany from the time old Gottlieb Storr first whispered the idea of “Mark shot first” in 1786. For any philosophy aficionados, this connection will be interesting: one of Gottlieb Storr’s students was none other than Hegel, who was the muse of Karl Marx. You have to marvel at it really, how these connections lead down the path of unbelief. The mess we are in today is the product of a lot of cross-pollination and rebellion (I wanted to say inbreeding but that would be uncharitable). What’s interesting to me is these Hatfields and McCoys are actually all in the same family, as Protestant Storr begat unbelieving Hegel, and Hegel begat atheist Marx, and Marx begat Nietzsche, and Nietzsche begat Sartre, and Sartre begat Derrida, and Derrida begat Foucault, and Foucault begat the many-headed monster of wokeism. These are the names. This is how we’ve come to live in the book of Judges again in 2023 because “in those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” (Judges 21:25) The path of denying that sin exists starts small, but balloons into the denial of God. In hindsight, this all should have been as predictable as a stock market bubble, but the prophets of doom, those annoying gnats, are never heard until afterward.

When Bismarck and company were consolidating power in Germany, this little snowball of Biblical criticism rolled, and rolled, and rolled, and the re-shaping of the Bible into a secular book has been so successful that when I attended a Catholic University for a year (from which I want my money back), I learned about “Marcan Priority,” which is a fancy way of saying that “Mark shot first.” I was also told that “We don’t know who wrote the Gospels.” Both of these statements are false.

If only that were the worst of it. The “Mark shot first” theory is not only taught in Catholic colleges. No, no, no. “Mark shot first” is taught in the American bishops’ official Bible footnotes, in the “New American Bible,” the NAB. The Bible translation itself is fine. It’s the footnotes that destroy faith. I am not alone in this feeling. Many others, like Jimmy Akin and Trent Horn to name just two of them, do not like the footnotes, or even the translation very much. You cannot read a page of Matthew in the New American Bible without the writer of the footnotes mentioning the hypothetical “Q” source (a document that doesn’t exist and was probably Matthew in Aramaic or Hebrew if it did exist). Further, the footnote author mentions Marcan priority, and Mark as the source.

So the footnotes of the New American Bible disagree with 1800 years of Tradition. How interesting. Someday I hope to learn who the author was of these footnotes.

The root problem here is a lack of a supernatural view of the Bible, of which I may do a whole additional series on, because it’s so important, but I can’t dive deeply on it here without getting way off track, as I tend to do.

This Bible, this New American Bible, with these heretical and faithless footnotes, is given to confirmation students across America. It is everywhere. They are given out like a medal, a right of passage at Confirmation.

I’ve thrown mine in the trash. So should you. (Get a Word on Fire Bible or Ignatius Study Bible instead, or if you don’t want a Catholic study Bible, get an ESV Study Bible that has faithful footnotes.)

I guess I can breathe a sigh of relief here because most Catholics don’t actually read the Bible. (Boom! Score one for the Protestants. See - I don’t always pick on the protestors).

Worst of all, the USCCB, the United States Catholic Bishops’ website, uses these same footnotes. I weep. Here I weep.

This is a travesty that must be uprooted and ripped out of the Church. I wrote a letter to the USCCB requesting that the footnotes be taken down, or better, printed off and used for kindling. (“But that’s book burning, you Nazi!”) Fine, let’s just delete them and use the Ignatius Study Bible footnotes instead. Now there is a Catholic study Bible that is faithful to the Scripture and the Tradition.

Again, the New American Bible is fine, but the footnotes must have been written by my liberal arts professors who hadn’t been to Mass in a long time - probably ever since they received their New American Bible with the footnotes about Marcan priority!

Matthew shot first.

As I’ve mentioned before, in the Bible, in the Commandments, and in the story of Creation, order matters, and the order of which the four evangelists wrote also matters greatly. The ordering of them in the form of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John doesn’t just roll off the tongue. It’s also the order in which they came to be on paper. And even if Matthew was translated from Hebrew into Greek, he was first, has always been first, and the early Church had no reason to pretend this was the case, unlike the scholars who tried to upend history by twisting words.

One thing that should be an immediate head scratcher for you is this: if Christianity started in Jerusalem, where Christ was crucified, effectively on Pentecost, and most of the initial arguments were with Jews and Christ’s followers, then why would Mark, written in Greek, be the first?

Warning: if you attend a university, almost any university, you will never hear these arguments. This is all hidden from you, as the modern Biblical scholars have buried these. In 1995, I was taught only Marcan Priority…at a Catholic college, of all places. The great thing about truth, however, is that it cannot be buried forever. My hope is that someday, just as the Dead Sea Scrolls were found by some kids throwing rocks in caves, that another jar will turn up in Israel, and inside it will be Aramaic Matthew, and all of this false scholarship, and I mean all of it, will turn to dust.

Matthew shot first.

The following is from a biblical site where people argue about these things, copied in full. (From https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com).

What are the arguments in favor of Matthean Priority?

External Evidence

• Matthew is almost unanimously testified as the oldest gospel by the church fathers. Clement of Alexandria even supported both Matthew and Luke as before Mark. This is significant because Mark is said to have founded the Coptic branch of Christianity in Alexandria, Egypt. If any place were to argue for Markan priority, Egypt would be the most likely. A sampling of the church fathers' testimony follows:

• Papias “Matthew wrote in Hebrew and others translated.” (HE 3.39.16)

• Origen said the first gospel was written by Matthew in Hebrew. (HE 6.25.4)

• Irenaeus (grandson in the faith of John by Polycarp of Smyrna) said the first gospel was written written by Matthew in land of Hebrews in their own language. (Against Heresies. 3.1.1)

• Eusebius — Matthew had first preached to Hebrews and wrote in their own language (HE 3.24.6)

• Jerome “Matthew was the first to compose in Hebrew and his text is still available in [library near Bethlehem].” He even challenged his critics to go see it if they doubted. (Lives of Illustrious Men ch. 3)

As the church rose out of the mission to the gentiles, it is interesting that the church fathers supported the Judaic gospel of Matthew instead of Mark. Also consider that they testify that Mark was the companion of the Apostle Peter in Rome which became one of the five sees of the early church (Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, Egypt). Unless the tradition of Matthean priority were very early, it is unlikely that they would all arrive at it independently. In fact, the slight differences in their testimonies provide evidence that they came from different sources.

• Even though one of the main arguments for Markan priority is that Mark is shorter and "later authors would be more likely to expand than contract," such is not always the case (see, for example, the Reader's Digest Condensed Library). Summarizing a longer work is well known and has been for a long time. There are even ancient works which name their sources and state, "this work will be a shorter, more understandable account of the events than X."

• The Didache clearly relies on Matthew. While the date of this document is debated between AD 50 and AD 150, the earlier it is, the earlier Matthew has to be.

• When you examine second-century Christian writings, Matthew is quoted far more frequently than Mark. So is Luke. If Mark enjoyed a period when it was the only written gospel, it seems that it should have been more popular. Likewise, Matthew's Gospel enjoys a more central place in the second century liturgy than any other gospel or even Paul's epistles. (see, for example, Massaux's extensive treatment of the subject here)

Internal Evidence

I am separating textual evidence from internal evidence. The difference is that internal evidence will be themes or concepts while textual evidence deals with specific words and phrases.

• The fall of Jerusalem is completely missing from Matthew. This event rocked the Jewish world. Matthew, who so often points out when a prophecy is fulfilled, does not add an editorial comment to Jesus' prophecy that Jerusalem would be overthrown. Not a single "and this prophecy was fulfilled" about the fall.

Some have pointed to Matthew 22:7 as referring to the fall of Jerusalem as an event happening in the past. In fact, this verse is almost universally accepted as such. However, sending in troops and burning a city with fire were quite common ways of dealing with troublesome cities in the past. In fact, it is so common in Near Eastern, Old Testament, and Rabbinic writings that its occurrence here should not be thought to refer to a single event.

Moreover, for an after-the-fact prophecy, Matt 22:7 is very inexact. While the walls of Jerusalem fell, it was the temple that burned. In fact, post event "prophecies" do make this distinction.

We have overthrown the wall of Zion and we have burnt the place of the mighty God (II Baruch 7.1). [I.e. the temple. For this sense, cf. II Mace. 5.17-20; John 11.48; Acts6.14; 21.28; etc.]

They delivered ... to the enemy the overthrown wall, and plundered the house, and burnt the temple (II Baruch 80.3).

And a Roman leader shall come to Syria, who shall burn down Solyma's [Jerusalem's] temple with fire, and therewith slay many men, and shall waste the great land of the Jews with its broad way (Sibylline Oracles 4.125-7).

It seems to me that if this were being written post AD 70, then the prophecy would have been altered to distinguish the fates of the city and temple. Christians did come to see the burning of the Temple as God's judgment on the Jewish leadership, but the events do not correspond closely enough to require Christ's parable to be a reference to it or the wording to be an after the fact description. A final note on Matthew and the city can be found in Matthew 27:8 ("For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day."). Matthew seems to view the city as still intact when he writes that.

Likewise, the cryptic statement in Matt 24, "let the reader understand" need not mean the "this prophecy has been fulfilled." Whenever Matthew wants to say that a prophecy has been fulfilled, he says so (for example, Matt 1:22; 2:15; 2:23; 3:15; 4:14; etc).

I understand Matthew 24 to be referring to the parousia. Matthew states that the distress of those days will be followed immediately by the coming of the Son of Man (24:29). This did not happen in AD 70. If Matthew is trying to portray Jesus as an unmatched prophet, he failed by including material that did not happen.

• While Matthew contains a high Christology, this by no means means it has to be written after Mark who does not present such a high theology. (Easily explained if Mark's Gospel is meant for an audience who is new in the faith.) Paul's letters contain a high Christology, and most scholars date Paul (died ~64) before Mark (who they place ~70). Moreover, Paul's letters show that Christian traditions even earlier than his had a high Christology.

• The same can be said for Matthew's high liturgy. In fact, one of the verses that is brought out to show Matthew came late in the first century or beyond is Matthew 18:17 based on the word "church." However, this ignores that the Greek word used there, ecclesia, enjoyed wide usage in the Septuagint to translate qahal, "sacred assembly," and was used by diaspora Jews.

Textual Evidence

• There are a significant number of places in Matthew where the parallel account in Mark makes more sense to have been edited down than for Matthew to expand. It is possible to read Mark with the hypothesis that it came from Matthew and run into no redactional problems that challenge said hypothesis. However, reading Matthew as a redaction of Mark does cause such problems.

• There are places where Mark uses a certain word but Matthew does not, even though he used that word in other places (for example "pherein"). This makes more sense with Mark editing Matthew than of Matthew copying Mark.

• There are places where Matthew has phrases he likes and uses them consistently. Mark has parallels of most of these accounts and is very free in his translations of the phrases. It makes more sense for Mark to be free styling from Matthew than it does for Matthew to be forcing the phrase into his wording whenever he sees it in Mark. One of these phrases is opias de genomenes, found first in Mt 8:16 and Mk 1:32. Markan priority has to conclude that Matthew copied the form exactly as Mark had it the first time, then always and consistently used the same grammar whenever he found a similar phrase in Mark and introducing it himself in Mt 20:8 which has no parallel in Mark.

• There are places where Mark combines details from both Matthew and Luke. An example of these duplicate expressions can be seen in Mark 1:32 compared to Mt 8:16 and Luk 4:40.

Mk 1:32 When evening came, after the sun had set, they began bringing to Him all who were ill and those who were demon-possessed.

Mt 8:16 When evening came, they brought to Him many who were demon-possessed; and He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were ill.

Lk 4:40 While the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various diseases brought them to Him; and laying His hands on each one of them, He was healing them.

In these parallels, Mark combines the introductory phrases from both Matthew and Luke. In this case, Markan priority would require that Luke know of both Matthew and Mark and consciously choose to use the exact phrase that Matthew does not. However, if Matthew writes first and Luke second, there is no such problem.

• Matthew leaves semitisms in place where Mark smoothens them. This includes wording and patterns that Mark breaks. Yes, Mark has eight semitic words, but Matthew has many more semitisms (so does Luke, a plethora of semitisms). Many of Mark's semitisms seem to be added for drama while Matthew's flow naturally.

Adding to the semitisms are 12 times where Matthew (and Luke) uses the participle of a verb while Mark uses the past tense. Using a participle for the second verb in a set (and he answered, saying) is well-known when coming from a semitic language (all over the Septuagint) but is not used in normal Greek. Mark also uses these participles but not as often. It would be more likely to edit them out than to edit them back in.

Many more examples exist where Matthew and Luke agree with one another in wording and Mark is different.

• Matthew and Luke both record 8 healing miracles. Mark has 10. The two left out of both Matthew and Luke are the saliva miracles (Mark 7:32-35 and 8:24). Did they both decide to skip the same miracles independently or did Mark add them from another source?

More details can be found here and here.

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Star Wars nerds have an argument about Han Solo, and whether he fired his gun first in the bar scene of “A New Hope.” There are t-shirts that say, “Han shot first.” I am here to tell you of a similar argument, one that has far greater importance and consequence for anyone that believes Jesus is God incarnate, also known as the Creator of the Universe. This one matters immensely because your spiritual life may depend on how you answer it, and the truth about this matters much in the founding of Christ’s Church. This question is about which Gospel was written first, and I am here to tell you:

Matthew shot first.

Matthew wrote the first Gospel.

He wrote it in Hebrew first before it was translated into Greek.

He wrote it before the year 70 A.D.

And it was Matthew the Apostle that wrote it, not some random Matthew from Accounting.

Why does any of this matter? Because for two centuries, people have been spending incredible amounts of ink to disprove this Tradition, because it undermines the Church.

According to Sacred Tradition, from Papias and Irenaeus, to Ignatius of Antioch, all the way to St. Jerome and St. Augustine, Matthew was known to be the first Gospel. This is documented in various writings from the Church fathers. The whole tradition of the Church said so for nearly two millennia. For a terrific read on this, check out Brant Pitre’s book The Case for Jesus which cuts through two hundred years of fog spewed from anti-Catholic scholarship and atheists. For anyone who attended college in the 1990s, brace yourself and be seated when reading this book. Much of what I learned in my freshman year of college turned out to be false, it’s just unfortunate that I can’t get a refund from Viterbo University for it. (Note: there’s a video series on formed.org of Pitre’s The Case for Jesus).

Matthew happens to be the Gospel with the most pro-Catholic references. But that is not the reason I believe it is important to believe that Matthew shot first. Not at all. Rather, it is the overwhelming evidence of history and testimony of the early church that indicates that Matthew, the apostle, wrote a Hebrew or Aramaic gospel first, and no one batted an eye about this claim until 19th century scholars decided that Matthew a.) didn’t write it all, and b.) wrote it much later, and c.) maybe didn’t even exist.

All of Christianity, for 1800 years, knew that the gospel of Matthew was written first, hence the ordering that we all learn as children: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Until the 19th century, in Germany’s “culture war” (Kulturkampf) against the Catholic Church, Matthew shot first. Then, magically, by textual criticism, in mostly Lutheran academic circles, suddenly Mark became the first Gospel.

You have to marvel at this sudden change, when you consider how much Catholics and other faithful talk about Jesus, and things related to Jesus, and anything that could possibly even relate to Jesus. People talk about Jesus and the Gospels like breathing air. But we are to assume that for 1800 years, no one had really thought about which Gospel was written first? And, stranger still, only when the Protestant era and Enlightenment humanism arrived did the topic finally come up?

I find it difficult to imagine that the early Church members, from bishops downward to the lowliest lay person, didn’t constantly discuss these things. Moreover, you have copies of Matthew scattered about the known world with “According to Matthew” written at the very top of the scrolls, indicating very clearly that the authorship was not in question. But suddenly in modern times, the question erupts: “Did Matthew really write Matthew?”

There is literally no copy of Matthew that does not have his name written at the top. Zero. The only question of authorship comes from those who do not want it to be written by an apostle and an eyewitness of Jesus’ life.

Further, there is not a single argument in the writings of the early Church that dispute that Matthew was written first. When scripture first started being read in liturgy, the Church would still have been almost entirely oral tradition. In other words, spreading the word of Jesus was not done by handing someone a Gideon’s Bible or leaving a pamphlet on the bathroom sink at the airport. No, the word, was all passed on by the spoken word, and through relationships. Anyone still remember relationships? This is hard to remember for us now, but relationships and human contact was a pre-Internet phenomenon when people got together and talked about things that really mattered to them instead of watching cat videos, sports, and porn by themselves.

In the early church, there was no printing press, and most people were illiterate. So if you wanted to learn about Christ, you had to talk about Christ with others, listen, repeat, retell, and revisit. No podcasts were available, no wordy blogs like this one. Yet clearly the copyists and the Church fathers knew that Matthew existed, wrote the first Gospel, and wrote it first. This is what is called Tradition in the Catholic Church.

It is beyond my ceiling of credibility to imagine that no one during the Apostolic era stopped to ask, or thought to discuss, or bent anyone’s ear about which evangelist wrote first, or who wrote it. We are to believe that we had to wait some 1800 years for English and German Protestant scholars to come up with these questions.

Now, I can watch just about any fantasy or science fiction movie and let my ceiling be raised to accommodate the director’s or author’s imagination, but I cannot imagine that no one said, “Hey guys, which Gospel was written first?”

In addition, the one Apostle who most certainly knew how to write was the tax collector, Matthew, who worked in Jerusalem and would have obviously needed to know multiple languages to merely do his job. Yet, we plant this stamp of doubt upon it and ask, “Did Matthew really write Matthew?” as if no one ever asked that question.

But there is good reason for enemies of the Church to argue that Mark shot first. There are extremely compelling reasons to take up this banner and fight against “Matthew shot first.”

The motive to remove eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ life is strong on the atheist side of the fence, because it increases doubt and alleviates their conscience for not believing. If you push Matthew out to 90 A.D., then a sixty year gap from Crucifixion to writing the Gospel makes it more of a legend than a biography.

On the flip side, for Protestants, moving Matthew to a much later date elevates the argument against Peter as the first Pope. Matthew is full of references to Peter as the founder of Christ’s Church, as well as the Sacraments of confession and marriage being defined exactly as the Church still teaches them in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In both cases, the Church is attacked. This is nothing new, and every heresy and battle the Catholic Church ever faced comes from the same places, going as far back as Marcion, Pelagius, Arius, Celsus, and every other would-be Pope-slayer.

But here’s one of the funny things about all of those historical heresies: not one of them, not a single one, ever challenged the idea that Matthew shot first. This only came up relatively recently, starting in countries with kings and politicians that hated the Church, who were either Protestant or unbelievers.

But most interesting is that in both writing the author as Matthew and declaring the order with Matthew first, the early church had no motive or reason to lie about any of this, because neither the specter of atheism nor the idea of future Protestantism in the 16th century would have occurred to them.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how every scribe in the world wrote “The Gospel according to Matthew” on top of the scroll, when as this thing was spread out it was like feathers flying out of a pillow from a rooftop. Yet, we are to believe that every scribe who caught a feather was somehow in on a conspiracy to mask the authorship of some random writer by tricking everyone into believing that the apostle Matthew wrote it. Perhaps more amazing is the minor, miniscule errors in copying that the scribes made as this document flew around the world.

To follow this a bit more, we are to believe that those first Christians who were willing to preach in the streets and be martyred for proclaiming the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, had some kind of massive, Orwellian, bureaucratic memory-hole operation in place to bury any copy that could have unwound the conspiracy. This is beyond comprehension, because it assumes that rather than just trying to spread the word of Jesus, the apostles were master manipulators, like Machiavelli, or Iago from Othello, and somehow these fishermen cooked up a story so profound and so life-changing, that not only were they willing to tell it to everyone, but they were willing to be boiled, clubbed, beaten, stabbed, flayed, and crucified for it.

The “synoptic problem” was not a problem until it was a problem for unbelievers and Protestants, especially kings who wanted to have their own form of religion and morality, like every mythological cult that ever got started. The problem with allowing kings and power into your religion is that in that very moment, that instant, you’ve lost your religion. This is, essentially, what paganism is. It’s the hammering of God’s law and natural law to fit the goals of the king or the State. And re-writing history to remove Matthew is one of those methods of “winning” that modern kings and governments and academics have attempted to use.

But the motive of the Apostles motives was evangelism, as they were on fire with the Holy Spirit, literally, from Pentecost onward. Things were moving at a pace far too fast for creeping conspiracies, and the Word of God was spreading even without them, because as soon as they told someone, that person told the next, and the next, and the next.

It’s worth pointing out that the Apostles and early Church Fathers didn’t have TV or YouTube, so they had immense amounts of time to ponder these things, and they knew the scriptures, not to mention Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, far better than anyone alive today. They lived far closer to the oral tradition and the texts themselves, and St. Jerome even wrote that he saw and read from the Hebrew version of Matthew in Alexandria.

What scholars do with lines like that is find an error in the writing, unrelated to the claim, and then cast out the author as “unreliable.” Or they look to the motives and say, “This Church father was a propagandist for the Catholic Church.” This is classic hitman work, but if that is the case, then this cancel culture should be applied equally to modern scholarship, where if any error is ever made, the Ph.D. should be rescinded. As for who I would rather trust, I would take saints Jerome, Augustine, Papias, Irenaeus, Polycarp, Ignatius of Antioch, and Matthew himself over the 19th century anti-Catholics and 20th century atheists. After all, a lot of the Church Fathers and the Apostles died for their proclamations, and none of them, not one, cracked and cried out in the fires or at their beheadings, “You’re right, I lied. We all lied! In the seven weeks between the Crucifixion and Pentecost, we came up with a grand conspiracy, and we would say that Matthew wrote in Hebrew first, and that he wrote it after the Temple was destroyed so that we could make it look prophetic, and actually Matthew didn’t write it all, it was Matthew from Accounting - he wrote it! We hired a ghost writer, just please, please don’t kill me!”

No, they go to their deaths. They go boldly, without apostatizing or recanting. They die saying things much different than what I just imagined.

"Eighty-six years have I have served him," Polycarp said on his way to the fire, "and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my king and my savior?"

Ignatius of Antioch, dragging his chains, spoke defiantly to the Roman emperor Trajan. He said, “You are in error, emperor, when you call the demons of your nation gods. For there is but one God who made heaven, earth, the sea and all that are in them. And one Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God.” Church tradition even holds that Ignatius was the actual kid that Jesus held in the Gospel stories. (Mt 18:1-5)

In other words, guys like Ignatius of Antioch were alive when Christ was alive. He met Jesus. So here’s the dilemma, the choice: am I to believe a 19th or 20th century scholar who spent all of his time in a library reviewing fragments of paper and letting his imagination soar, or am I to believe the testimony of Matthew, Ignatius, Papias, Irenaeus, Jerome, Eusebius, Augustine, and all the others, who lived and died in the era when the Church was forming and when many were being slaughtered by kings and governors in professing that Jesus is the son of God?

I choose the latter. Sorry, C.H. Weisse. Sorry, Bart Ehrman. It requires more faith to believe anything that Ehrman claims than it does to believe in the Resurrection of Christ. Here’s the thing: these scholars have sacrificed nothing and only sown doubt, and led millions to the death of their faith. It is not difficult to destroy faith. It is difficult to be in the counter-culture and live a life of faith. Ehrman and the others may be searching for truth, but they are doing so in the darkness, willfully choosing to reject God, which is what God allows us to do. Each of us has the choice to turn toward or away from God, and the effort of scholars to spurn God requires that they reject hard historical written evidence in order to produce and uphold their faith in nothing. But then of course they must do this - when all you have is this world, and no spiritual life, it’s imperative that you recruit others to your worldview, because we all need our cheerleaders, and standing alone in the abyss without God is a lonely place to be. We get to choose our own hell, but some of us like Ehrman want others to choose it as well.

St. Thomas, the doubting apostle, was told, “Blessed are those who have not seen and believe.” (Jn. 20:29)

This is, of course, the great test, the final test, the one we get to answer on our deathbed. It’s the one that Ehrman and Dawkins have already answered, but could still change their mind. It’s the kind of final exam you really don’t need to study for, but you do need to prepare for it, because how you decide will crystallize your eternal state.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for me to believe is that we have several different writings from Church Fathers which mention that Matthew first wrote a document in Hebrew, but because we cannot find that document today, we assume it doesn’t exist. Here’s a news flash for modern people: paper crumbles. Time decays paper. If you don’t believe me, go find your grandmother’s photo album and inspect it. There’s this odd sense that if we don’t dig up the original draft that it didn’t exist, when we know full well that paper falls apart, and copyists had to copy and yes, even translate the texts. There is a reason scribes were called scribes, and that was to copy texts so they didn’t disintegrate. Yet many deny a Hebrew writing by Matthew exists because we haven’t found it.

But this leads us to the best part, the most fantastic and ludicrous thing of all about 19th century German scholarship and 20th century atheist scholarship, which has even bled over into Catholic teaching at universities like the one I attended. You cannot make up the next part, except that they did make it up…

Of all things that confound me, replacing this Hebrew version of Matthew, we have scholars who have invented a fictional document called “Q” for which there is no evidence, no scrap, not a letter of, but which is assumed to exist. So we have writings that mention Matthew’s earlier writing in Hebrew, which is discarded for a hypothetical document that is not mentioned anywhere, has never existed, and will never exist, that takes its place. We even have St. Jerome saying that he saw a Hebrew version of Matthew in Alexandria. We have testimony of eyes on the Hebrew version of Matthew. However, this fairy Q document has nothing, but is treated as if it were the first Gospel.

So the next time someone tells you that Matthew was written after 80 A.D., you should assume that they are referring to the Greek translation of Matthew, because there is clearly a Hebrew version of Matthew, of some kind, of some format, written long before that. Because if the scholars can “prove” that a Greek translation of Matthew was written after the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem, and that someone other than Matthew translated it, that’s not a terribly big deal. The point of massive significance is that Matthew wrote first, that Matthew wrote a Gospel, and he wrote it first in Hebrew. He was the only apostle that certainly had to be literate because of his occupation as a tax collector, and even if he dictated it to a scribe, that’s no different than any other author speaking to a secretary that types a memo.

It should come as no surprise that copies and translations had to be made, and my New Testament college professor acted as if the Gospels had to a.) either fall from the sky, b.) or had to have the finger of God directing the hand motion on the paper, or c.) if neither of the above happened, then it was just a game of telephone that only academics and the Jesus Seminar unbelievers could decipher. To this day, I am stunned, really beyond stunned, that a Catholic University was teaching and guiding students to read the output of the Jesus Seminar from the 1990s.

The same attack on Matthew has been done to the point of insanity on the books of Moses, with the same batch of motives, which is to reduce the sacred texts to “nation-building” lies, or worse, to deny the existence of Moses altogether.

When things come up like this you have to look at the motives of the scholars. To quote the Dude in The Big Lebowski, who quotes Vladimir Lenin, before his stoner mind drifts off: “You look to the person who will benefit…and ah…”

Walter Sobchak:

The Dude: It's all a fake, man. It's like Lenin said: you look for the person who will benefit, and, uh, uh, you know...

Donny: I am the walrus.

Who benefits from this scholarship that removes Matthew as author, as the first author, and pushes his writing back to 90 A.D.? It’s quite simple. Protestants and atheists benefit, and they benefit in different ways. The Church’s authority is undermined, which is what Protestants wanted, but funny thing about that, in their zeal for undermining Catholic authority, they undermined scripture altogether, because as soon as they finished their sprint around the track, atheists took the baton and ran so that today people don’t even believe that Jesus existed.

Now, I can go on for days about this railroading of Matthew, and I probably will, because one of the greatest attacks on the Church, sustained now for two hundred years, is this effort to force Matthew down from it’s chronological position as the first Gospel. The goal is multi-faceted. The attack has various prongs, but first of all, his writing clearly elevates the Catholic Church, and most of the scholars on this topic truly hated the Catholic Church. They still do.

Second, removing Matthew as an eyewitness account of Christ makes the miracles seem fishy. Hence, you get unbelievers like Ehrman calling it all a “telephone game” rather than eyewitness accounts of God in the flesh. What’s funny is that there is a telephone game happening, but it’s among academics starting in the 1500s right up until today in 2023.

Third, pushing Matthew’s writing to beyond the year 70 A.D. after the temple was destroyed in Jerusalem, makes the prophecy of Christ about the temple destruction seem more like a statement from Captain Obvious than the Son of God. Moving the goal posts on the chronology of the Gospel writers has a clear motive, which is to remove the eyewitness nature of the accounts and play up the “telephone game” nonsense. There’s just one major problem with this,

Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect,while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome and laying the foundation of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia. (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3:1:1)

Peter and Paul were martyred before 70 A.D. So was this a vast conspiracy by Irenaeus and Papias and the various other writers to befuddle us all until we were blessed with Protestant German scholars and atheist academics? I think the QAnon people have a more plausible conspiracy theory than this one.

So who are we to believe? Some random professor today? Or Irenaeus, who was taught by Polycarp, who knew the Apostle John, who stood at the Cross during the Crucifixion? Which of these two people are more likely to have known when and by whom the Gospels were written? Here’s the pedigree of Irenaeus, who today’s random professor has written off as unreliable:

Polycarp was a bishop of the early church, a disciple of the apostle John, a contemporary of Ignatius, and the teacher of Irenaeus. According to Irenaeus, Polycarp “was instructed by the apostles, and was brought into contact with many who had seen Christ.” He lived from the latter half of the first century to the mid-second century. Polycarp was martyred by the Romans, and his death was influential, even among the pagans. (from gotquestions.org)

I choose Irenaeus.

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At the company where I work, an employee posted this on a public Slack channel for all to read:

“Catholics believe that they are actually eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus during communion. The priest says the magic words and the cracker and wine are magically transformed into the ACTUAL FLESH AND BLOOD of Jesus Christ. Ok, maybe I am stretching, but there is no denying that it is RITUAL cannibalism.”

Now, if this kind of language was used on any other religion or identity, the person would have been fired. If I had written a half-truth about Islam or sexual identity, I would be looking for work. But let’s be honest: this type of language is as common today as it was the day Jesus said the words we find in John 6. In fact, the Bread of Life Discourse and the Last Supper alert us to this mentality and misunderstanding even during Jesus’ ministry. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once said that anti-Catholic hatred is “the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people.” But it goes much further back than that, literally all the way to Judas, as his faith stumbled after Jesus mentioned the requirements of eating and drinking of his body and blood. Normally a knife separates bread, but with Christ, the Bread is the knife. The Eucharist is central to faith and it separates people, whether they be non-believers or Christians. Even with the Catholic Church, it divides people, as many fall into the mistaken camp of “symbolism,” and everyone likes to quote Flannery O’Connor here, who famously said, “If it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it!”

Amen, Flannery.

But here’s the thing I want to talk about: my co-worker is halfway to the truth with his accusation. He’s just missing some very, very important distinctions.

He’s close to being correct with this insult, but misses the most important part of the Eucharist. Yes, the Eucharist is literally the body and blood of Jesus Christ, but it is the risen and glorified body of Christ. Notice that the saying, “He is Risen” uses the present tense.

From the first time Jesus mentioned that we must eat his body and drink his blood, it has divided people. The attack on the Eucharist has been going on since the Jesus’ first gave the Bread of Life Discourse, and Judas first turned away. The attack on the Eucharist goes hand in hand with persecution, and seems to resurface often, almost every time Christians are mocked or violated in the Lives of the Saints.

“They…accused us of feeding on human flesh like Thyestes and of committing incest like Oedipus, as well as other abominations which it is unlawful for us even to think of, and which we can scarcely believe ever to have been perpetrated by men.”

These same accusations are happening today. You can hardly go online without hearing that Christians are a bunch of inbred, ignorant fools. And as for the attack on the Eucharist, this has been happening since the first days of the church. This happened in the Reformation with Luther and Calvin. It happens now.

So as I said, my co-worker was close to being correct. There’s just one problem with his insult: it’s not cannibalism.

Because Jesus isn’t dead.

What my co-worker forgot, perhaps willfully, is that Jesus rose from the dead. It’s just such a fundamental error, but somehow people always miss it.

Jesus has never been eaten while dead.

He was not eaten on the cross after saying, “It is finished.” He was not eaten while he was in the tomb.

He was eaten as the Bread of Life at the Last Supper, while he was alive, and he is eaten now, after the Resurrection.

Never, not once, was Jesus eaten while he was dead.

People get all these images of The Walking Dead and zombies in their head, and miss the whole point, mostly because no one reads the Bible. But we should take note here - no one went into the tomb to eat him or try to drink his blood before it congealed. He experienced a real death on the cross and no one, not Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimethea, are recorded as eating him on the way to the tomb.

For those who have forgotten, Jesus was only dead for a short time. He’s alive now, even more than he was at the Last Supper. Here’s a take on it that may help folks like my co-worker:

“The early Church…was accused of cannibalism…. It’s not cannibalism. He’s not dead. He’s alive in glory with power for us…” In order to practice cannibalism, the cannibal must kill his victim, and then the cannibal’s body converts the dead flesh into his own living flesh. That’s not what happens when we consume the Eucharist. When we receive Holy Communion, Christ remains alive. We don’t change Him into us. On the contrary, He transforms us into likenesses of Himself. We become like Him whom we consume, and in so doing, we become the selves God intended us to be. (Apology Analogy)

This is mostly a problem of how we view space and time, because we struggle think of it outside of our limited, finite brains. God lives outside of space and time. Jesus is God. The risen Christ lives outside of time and space, seated in heaven. “God’s life has no end (it’s interminable), and that he possesses all of that life all at once (in a simultaneously-whole manner). He does not experience it moment-by-moment, the way we do. God’s life thus is not spread out over time the way ours is, meaning that he is outside of time.” (For more reading on the theological view of time and space, please read Jimmy Akin’s three-part series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 or listen to Trent Horn’s podcast. I’m trying to distill it down a bit here, because to understand the Eucharist, the key point is knowing that God, the Creator, lives outside of time and space).

It’s critical here to point out something that is so obvious that almost no one ever points it out.

At the Last Supper, Jesus was not dead.

He was alive when he said, “This IS my body.” In the Bread of Life Discourse, before the Last Supper, Jesus spoke on this in detail. He even repeated it to drive the point home, telling his followers that we must eat his body and drink his blood to have eternal life. There is nothing metaphorical about it. This isn’t like him saying, “I am the vine” or “I am the living water.” We get exposition on the metaphors from Jesus himself, but in John 6 and at the Last Supper, he hammers this point home.

So if you believe that Christ is the son of God, and you reject the Bread of Life Discourse as metaphor, and call the words of the Last Supper nothing but a symbol, then you are thinking too small about God. A man living in time and space may have limits. A God that enters that same time and space does not. If we think of Jesus as dead in the Eucharist, then why would we waste our time on it? No, he’s alive. The reason the Jesus prayer says, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” He is a living God, not a dead one. Thomas Jefferson and Richard Dawkins can have their dead Clockmaker God. I am not interested in that God, because, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, that God does not matter to us living here in matter. The only God that can change your life is the one that knows the number of hairs on your head. I feel that one of the biggest impediments to belief today is a bad concept of God, because once you turn and see him as a Living God, then every event in life begins to make sense.

It’s the point of the Resurrection, in case we forgot. Jesus did not stay dead. He defeats death by rising. Rigor mortis and decay sets in for our bodies when we die, and he died a real death, but then took up his life again just like he said he would. So he’s not dead. The Resurrection really is forgotten, I think, because what it means is that death does not contain our souls, nor in the end will it even claim our bodies. We tend to just think of the Resurrection as some kind of fairy tale, but the believers of the last two thousand years did not build beautiful and immense cathedrals for Little Red Riding Hood, who died and was cut free from the wolf’s belly. No, they built them for a living God who loves each of us and can give us spiritual re-birth here and eternal life after our body dies.

I think the flatness of deism crept into our Enlightenment brains, because if God is not alive, then why would we care about him?

He is the Creator of the universe, the author of all things, who knows your little league batting average and where your first kiss took place. He knows your weaknesses and burdens. He is alive. That is the Creator and Living God that I understand and love, and he has shown his infinite mercy for us in coming into this story, this world, this game. “Oh, we say, then why did he create this game with all this suffering?” I don’t know. But knowing that he is alive and with us changes the game, the entire game. In our age of gaming and puzzles, I don’t know how this hasn’t caught on yet, because we love games. If he has indeed written each of us into this story, he has a purpose for each or us, and to win this game we must cooperate with his grace, and to me, rejecting his words on the Eucharist means turning away from Him, Jesus, the second person of the Trinity. Rejecting the Eucharist is treating God as if he was the absent Clockmaker God, and I reject that entirely. He is the living God, and he is alive in the Eucharist. The creep of doubt and half-hearted faith starts with the rejection of the Eucharist.

Wasn’t it exactly after Jesus’ Bread of Life Discourse, that many disciples left him? Do you see the parallel? Crowds abandoned him because they couldn’t deal with his crystal clear teaching about the Eucharist. Jesus announces Judas’ path to betrayal. Judas had doubts about the Bread of Life at this point.

After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him. Jesus said to the twelve, “Will you also go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was to betray him. (Jn 6:64-71)

So there is no surprise when someone attacks the Eucharist that they were looking for something more than Jesus. He wasn’t enough. Judas wanted a king, a social climber, a celebrity. His faith is gone because Jesus isn’t popular and powerful. Thus he lacks the gift of faith. Judas and those who leave demand a greater sign from Jesus, which is a game Jesus will not play, as he says that if we won’t believe Moses and the prophets, or the miracles he has already performed, what will we believe? He literally just fed 5,000 people right before the Bread of Life Discourse.

So if someone says the Eucharist is “a cracker blessed by magic,” then that is his or her own testimony before God. We must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling before God. Thus there is no reason for me to be upset with those who say cruel things about the Eucharist, because if Jesus is our model for living, we should notice he did not get angry at those who departed from him. The lost sheep always are most in need of forgiveness. For goodness sakes, even on the cross, Jesus prays for those who know not what they do. He only seems to get sad when they leave, or beat him, or mock him, or crucify him. Profaning the Eucharist is the most shameful act we as humans can do, and yet people do it brazenly thinking they have overcome God, spiritually cutting off their nose to spite their face.

The amazing and beautiful thing is that even after we do all of that to him, he still wants us to come back. He still loves us. I have done all of those things to Jesus, denying the Eucharist, denying his divinity, mocking his name. In my own falling away, I said things much like my co-worker, and I have crowned Jesus with thorns of mockery, calling his life a hoax, a myth, a fantasy, a crutch. The only hoax, myth, and fantasy in the end became my truth about the world, heaven, and hell. I was the fraud, not Christ.

Then he asks his next question to the apostles, saying, “Do you also want to leave?” And that is when Peter shows his faith, where grace floods over him, and he submits his intellect and will to Jesus.

“Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” (Jn 6:68-69)

In my life, I have read those lines before. I had heard them before. But there came a night in my life when they were no longer words, but a fact as sure as the sunrise. I cannot read those lines without feeling like I am there. This response from Peter are convicting lines that cut to the heart. He knows. He has looked everywhere else. He knows that Jesus is God. How? I don’t know. But he knows. And so do I.

When you put that question to yourself, you will have to answer it. When Jesus asks, “Do you also want to leave?” what will you say? Will you deny that he is the Bread of Life? Will you follow him? Or is something else your master?

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This has all happened before. It is happening now. It will happen again. Our command is to endure, as those who came before us.

And he said to them, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what can a man give in return for his life? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” (Mark 6:34-38)

The Church did not last 2,000 years by crumbling under duress, or abandoning Jesus in favor of comfort.

In our age of the Victim Olympics, where both Christians and non-Christians try to claim to the prize of the Most Outcast, Most Vilified, and Most Excluded from society, I’d like to share a story from history, from the year 177 A.D., that may be helpful in putting into perspective what anyone in America in 2022 has suffered, Christian or otherwise.

This will seem extreme at the outset, but will make sense once I read this story from the second century, and I’m just going to say it: we have no idea in America what it means to suffer for Christ. We have no idea what heroes of the faith look like any longer. We just haven’t seen it happen in our lifetimes. We think we do, but we don’t. People in Nigeria and Nicaragua are witnessing this kind of conviction in Christian witness today, but Americans are not, and thus we take it for granted what has been done for us.

Most of us haven’t been tested. Not yet. Yes, we’ve been tested in ways, but not like the people I’m about to tell you about. I’ve had struggles, but not like Blandina and Attalus.

My point in re-telling this event from history is to remind us of the tradition that we inherit, that we mostly ignore. We sit comfortably in the 21st century and grumble at the obligation to attend Mass, where we can openly receive the Eucharist. No one is there to stop faithful Catholics from gathering in groups. No one is rounding us up. These are luxuries that we ignore. These luxuries were bought with blood, and the first 500 years of the faith have stories that would make the disturbed author of Game of Thrones wince.

What we are led to believe right now is that the persecutions of Mark Zuckerberg and the Silicon Valley emperors are like the persecutions of Diocletian and the Roman Empire. This story I’m about to read is actually from France, where the budding church was being brutalized. If anything, this story should assure you that the deletion of an imaginary online life is nothing like what the early Christians suffered. They were meeting in secret out of love for Christ, and changing hearts and minds in flesh and bone meetings, one soul at a time.

Now, these moderns “cancellations” should be of concern, because they do indeed mirror what happens repeatedly in the history of Christianity, especially in the early stages of persecution. But in America we are not yet reliving anything remotely close to what was happening with early Christians, meaning those who lived before we even had a New Testament. We are only at the stage of the early Soviet Union so far. Words are being re-defined and scapegoats are being sculptured, but so far the only deaths are virtual.

But these martyrs met in the flesh and told the story of Jesus to one another, risking their necks to do so. There was nothing virtual about their secret meetings, nothing meta about their willingness to do anything to keep their faith alive, nor was there anything simulated about the path they took on their journey from social outcast to martyrdom. Let’s walk through this example from Lyons in the year 177. The first part should sound very familiar. This is from Butler’s Lives of the Saints, volume 2.

Saints Pothinus and his companions, the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne (A.D. 177)

The persecution began unofficially with social ostracism-" we were excluded from houses, from the baths, and from the market"; and with popular violence-stoning, plundering, blows, insults " and everything that an infuriated crowd loves to do to those it hates". Then it was taken up officially.(p 454, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, vol 2.)

This parallels what we see today, ominously, but not surprisingly. Social ostracism is underway, as Christendom is now seen as the enemy. But is this anything new? It’s not. It’s anything but new, it’s the way it always begins.

Witnessing to your faith is now a good way to lose your job, to lose your friends, and most likely, to lose your internet accounts, and maybe even your money as banks have now joined the game of cancellation. It is routine where I work to hear some kind of mockery of faith and to hear exclamations of “Jesus Christ” in anger. The name not only means nothing to most people in the IT world, it’s something to be openly joked about.

However, as anyone who finds Jesus knows, careers don’t satisfy. Money does not fulfill you like God does. God alone satisfies, as Thomas Aquinas said. Money, friends, reputations, and jobs? Those are just nice-to-haves. They are not must-haves. There is only one must-have and that is faith in Jesus Christ, because he is the redeemer and path to salvation. The one who understands that redemption would be a fool to throw it away, and would be raked with regret to abandon the one person who ever saved them. But as we continue through this, we can recognize that there is much more to lose than friends or internet accounts.

The story continues with an attack on the Eucharist, as has been going on since the Jesus’ first gave the Bread of Life discourse, and since Judas first turned away. The attack on the Eucharist goes hand in hand with persecution, and seems to resurface often, almost every time Christians are mocked or violated in the Lives of the Saints.

“They…accused us of feeding on human flesh like Thyestes and of committing incest like Oedipus, as well as other abominations which it is unlawful for us even to think of, and which we can scarcely believe ever to have been perpetrated by men.”

These same accusations are happening today. In my next post, this is the topic, because where I work in 2022, the same accusation has been made. This “Catholics are cannibals” is one of the laziest attacks on Catholicism possible, but it makes for good scandal, so every generation trots it out, and every generation of Catholics have to explain it. The Eucharist may be the most hot-button issue of all time, because it requires faith, which is the whole point.

This has been going on since the beginning, where even St. Paul said those who did not believe in the Eucharist could not receive Communion. This is a never-ending line in the sand for Catholics, because the Eucharist is the “YES” to the whole Paschal Mystery, which is the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Acsension. The linkage from the Last Supper to being seated at the right hand of God all flows through the Eucharist.

For anyone throwing the accusation of cannibalism around today, you can bet with certainty that those people have never read, possibly never even heard of, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The charges of incest and cannibalism go way back for non-believers. Why? Because it’s great slander for sensationalism. It still gets much tread today. People love a scandal like that. Those who haven’t heard it clutch their pearls and exclaim, “What? Catholics eat people. Lord save us!”

And you can hardly go online without someone associating Christians with inbreeding. So these same charges from 177 A.D. are happening today. These accusers would probably be shocked to learn that the practice of inbreeding and incest actually went away because of Christianity, as the Church outlawed it in sixth century, making it extremely strict, so much that it had to loosen the rule in the 1200s because…well, let’s not go down that rabbit hole. I’ll just leave a link if you want to read Canon Law and it’s history on Consanguinity.

Social ostracism and mockery of the Eucharist is just the beginning of this story. So let’s go back to the year 177 A.D. and follow along what happens next in attempts to kill off Christianity in France.

When these things were made public, all were exasperated against us, including some who had formerly shown friendliness. . . The fury of the mob, the governor, and the soldiers fell most heavily upon Sanctus, a deacon…, on Attalus, who had always been a pillar and support of the Church, and on Blandina "-a slave"…When we were all in fear, and her mistress according to the flesh, who was herself an athlete among the martyrs, was apprehensive lest Blandina should not be able from bodily weakness to make her confession boldly, she was endued with so much power that even those who in relays tortured her from morning till evening grew faint and weary." All marveled how she could possibly survive, so torn and broken was her body. But in the midst of her sufferings she seemed to derive refreshment and peace from continually repeating the words, "I am a Christian, and nothing vile is done amongst us.” The deacon Sanctus also endured cruel torments with unflinching courage. To all questions that were put to him, he only replied, "I am a Christian." When all the ordinary forms of torture had been exhausted, red-hot plates were applied to the tenderest parts of his body until he appeared a shapeless mass of swollen flesh. Three days later, when he had revived, the same treatment was repeated. (p 455, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, vol 2.)

There was…a woman named Biblias, who was known to be frail and timid. Subjected to torture, however, she "woke as it were from a deep sleep, and directly contradicted the blasphemers, saying, "‘How can those eat children who arc forbidden to taste the blood even of brute beasts?' From that moment she confessed herself a Christian and was added to the company of the martyrs.” Many of the prisoners, especially the young and untried, died in prison from torture, from the foul atmosphere and from the brutality of their gaolers, but some who had already suffered terribly and seemed at the last gasp, lingered on, confirming the rest. Bishop Pothinus, in spite of his ninety years and manifold infirmities, was dragged before the tribunal amid the railing of the populace. Upon being asked by the governor, “Who was the God of the Christians,” he replied, "If you are worthy, you shall know." Thereupon he was beaten, kicked, and pelted until he was nearly insensible. Two days later he died in prison. (p 456, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, vol 2.)

…Maturus, Sanctus, Blandina and Attalus were exposed to the beasts in the amphitheatre; Maturus and Sanctus ran the gauntlet of whips, endured mauling by beasts, and bore everything else that was done to them at the suggestion of the people. Finally, they were placed on the iron chair and roasted until the odor of their scorched flesh filled the nostrils of the crowd. But their courage never faltered, nor could Sanctus be induced to utter a word except the confession he had made from the beginning. After they had throughout that day supplied not merely the varied entertainment demanded in the games, but a spectacle to the world, they were offered up at last in the sacrifice of their lives. But for Blandina the end had not come yet. She was hung from a stake, to be the prey of the beasts let loose upon her. The sight of her as she hung with outstretched arms like one crucified and the fervor of her prayers put heart into the other combatants. None of the animals would touch her; so she was taken back to prison to await a further contest. Attalus, a man of note, was loudly called for by the crowd and was led round the amphitheater with a tablet borne before him on which was written “This is Attalus the Christian.”

…

From the outset the confessors had given extraordinary evidence of their charity and humility. Though ready to give an explanation of their faith to all, they accused none, but prayed for their persecutors like St Stephen, as well as for their lapsed brethren

And then what happens? Surely all of those Christians who ran in fear, or abandoned their faith, stayed hidden, right? This type of spectacle of torture that pleased the crowd surely made every other Christian cower in fear.

No. The opposite happens. It encourages others, as they see plainly the faith in the heroic fallen, a faith far greater and more meaningful than anything the secular power could offer, and something worth infinitely more than this life here on earth, as dying for Christ’s name echoes in the words and actions of Jesus himself as he told his followers exactly what was to come: “This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends….It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you…If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first…you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you…If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you…And they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know the one who sent me…Whoever hates me also hates my Father.” (Jn 15:13-27)

A doctor then stands up, and by doing so enters this river of torture, abandoning everything. Suddenly his reputation, his career, his family, his good name no longer matters.

Those who had formerly denied now boldly confessed Christ and were added to the sacred order of those who bore witness. Only those few remained outside who had never been Christians at heart. A physician named Alexander, a Phrygian by birth, was present while they were under examination. He had lived many years in Gaul and was well known for his love of God and for his boldness in spreading the Gospel. Standing close to the dock, he so openly encouraged the prisoners that no one could fail to notice him. The crowd, incensed at the profession of Christianity by those who had previously abjured, raised an outcry against Alexander as the instigator of the change, and the governor asked him who and what he was. "A Christian," was the reply. He was summarily condemned to be thrown to the beasts.

And there’s more. The defense of the faith and the Eucharist continues. The woman named Blandina undergoes ongoing torture and her children are killed before her.

Attalus, when he was being roasted in the iron chair, exclaimed, "This is in truth a consuming of human flesh-and it is you who do it. We neither eat men nor commit any other enormity!" "After all these", continues the letter, "on the last day of the single combats, Blandina was again brought into the amphitheater with Ponticus, a boy of about fifteen. They had been compelled day after day to watch the torture of the rest, and were now urged to swear by the idols. Because they refused and set them at naught, the multitude pitied neither the age of the boy nor the sex of the woman. They exposed them to all the torments, endeavoring unsuccessfully from time to time to induce them to swear. Ponticus, encouraged, as the heathen could see, by the exhortations of his sister, nobly endured every torment and then gave up the ghost. The blessed Blandina last of all, like a mother of high degree, after encouraging her children and sending them on before as victors to the King, hastened to join them-rejoicing and triumphing over her departure as if she had been summoned to a marriage-feast instead of being cast to the beasts. After the scourges, after the wild animals, after the frying-pan, she was thrown at last into a net and exposed to a bull. When she had been tossed for a time by the beast, and was completely upheld by her faith and her communing with Christ as to have become insensible to what was being done to her, she too was immolated, the heathen themselves confessing that they had never known a woman to show such endurance." The bodies of the martyrs were cast into the Rhone that no relic or memory of them might remain on earth. But the record of their glorious victory over death was quickly borne over the sea to the East, and has been handed on by the Church throughout the ages.

The martyrdom of the rest took various forms. In the beautiful words of the letter: "They offered up to the Father a single wreath, but it was woven of divers colors and of flowers of all kinds. It was meet that the noble athletes should endure a varied conflict, and \vin a great victory that they might be entitled in the end to receive the crown supreme of life everlasting."

Notice, before I wrap this up, that these martyrdoms were not done to be part of the “cult of martyrdom,” where people rush into the fire because it became cool. The “cult of martyrdom” is not from God, but rather the devil, because as soon as it becomes fashionable to be a martyr, it stops being martyrdom. But in days where Christianity is the enemy, like it’s becoming again now in America, witnesses to faith will arise, like Blandina and Attalus. Another Alexander will step into the breach. God doesn’t play our games. He doesn’t pursue being “cool” or seeking worldly status. He ignores those things. The martyrs that get celebrated are the ones that had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, who clung to God in the great storm of their life as representatives of the faith, to show others that the things of this world do not matter, not when compared to the joy of finding peace with Jesus.

A comparison in the Bible is made to silver or gold being purified in the fire. The “dross” leaves the gold or silver when it is heated into liquid and cooled into pure bullion or coins. The dross gets burned away in different ways for different people, as we each have a temperature that we can handle, and God knows exactly that temperature, and will only give us what we can endure. Your temperature is likely much lower than Blandina and Attalus. But recall the words, “By your endurance you will gain your soul.” That is the call to cling to Jesus when everything else burns away, and everyone gets that opportunity, to stand in the furnace, whether it is dramatic or not.

Yes, some people’s dross may be getting burned away by the social ostracism of their workplace, or by getting kicked off of Twitter or Facebook or TikTok. Corporations are asking us to bow to idols and many have done so. Burning away the dross is an ongoing process, as you are conformed to the life of Christ. Mockery and social ostracism and forced agreement is certainly the beginning, and a harbinger of more to come.

What else is new?

The current culture may even be a blessing to Christians in many ways, because it puts us into the same situation as Abraham, who was called out of his homeland. He had to make a choice. To follow the culture or to follow God. That is yet our choice today, the very same as Abraham.

A calling comes to those who God chooses, as the sheep hear his call. “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” (Jn 10:27) Being called out of New York, Los Angeles, or Silicon Valley is a gift. A step in opposition to the culture is the first step toward God, in joining his fold. Even getting kicked off a social media platform can set you free from the chains of technology, and ultimately, the lies of media. Few people today realize the immense campaign against Christianity that has taken place, but once the light strikes you, the billboards and alarms appear everywhere. Only through a massive, coordinated effort has the message of Christ been diluted, and still it rings out to those who hear the call.

Technology gave anti-Christians a tool that Nero, Diocletian, Lenin, and Mao would have loved to have in suppressing the Word of God. They resorted to murdering Christ’s followers, but it is far more effective to talk a person out of his or her faith, than to create martyrs. This is why the main effort now is to silence anyone who speaks the doctrines of the Church, of Christ, because the only other option is to kill them, and that is bad public relations. The bloody option has been tried over and over and failed miserably, and will fail again. One martyr makes a hundred new Christians, like the many-headed Hydra of Greek myth. Many nations have tried the killing spree as the solution to ending the message of Christ, and it has proved ineffective. Governments throughout time have tried to kill the idea of Christ dying on the cross to take away our sins by killing the followers. The governments of Rome, the Ottomans, France, the Soviets, Mexico, and countless others have tried to murder Christ - right up to today in Nigeria where the threshold of genocide has been passed.

The message of Christ persists, despite the massive efforts of the sword. The greatest error any Christian ever made was to think the message of Christ would be delivered by the sword, and any leader that ever claimed otherwise was as confused then as those today who claim that Jesus didn’t command chastity. The spin of Jesus’ words changes with the desires of the era, thus when the lust for conquest and gold seized the minds of men, the false Gospel of the sword seemed a good tool for bringing civilization to savages, just as America has done with the Gospel of democracy, which is yet another false Gospel. So today, the intention of the enemies of the Church is to silence it, to ostracize it, to make it appear evil, because that is all the enemies have. In their attempts to silence and ostracize, they don’t realize that the truth always comes out. It cannot be suppressed by the sword, but neither can it be silenced by the government, for the moment it is prohibited to be Christian, the sheep will again hear his voice. In short, there is no way to suppress God, because, well, he’s God. If God wanted for this to play out through violence, he would, and Jesus even says so.

“Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will die by the sword.Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Mt 26:52-53)

St. John in writing the apocalypse echoed this, mentioning that prison and death must sometimes be the way that we adhere to God:

“Let anyone who has an ear listen: If you are to be taken captive, into captivity you go; if you kill with the sword, with the sword you must be killed. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.” (Rev 13:9-10)

The culture we have now pretends to have sheathed the sword and is trying to defeat the message of Christ with words, with arguments, and often with well-dressed lies and shiny campaigns. To make matters seem worse, we have fallen men and women in the Church, which is not surprising for anyone that understands The Fall and Original Sin. But every tool in the box is being used now to stifle and remove the full message of Christ from society, and to the unbelievers, silence means victory.

The silencing of Christians is the name of the game, not the killing of them. The cancelling of them is the cure. But this will also fail, as this method, too, has been tried time and time again. While the culture attempts to delete and cut out the parts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that don’t fit with the marketing of “Sex sells” and “To each his own,” Christianity is once again having the dross purified from it, and new saints will emerge. The problem with knowing that Jesus is the truth is that everything else that is being sold becomes a cheap trinket, and only those who do not know Jesus would make that trade. The knife of the cancel culture will end up cutting its own arteries because it is wielded by a maniacs, not a skilled surgeon. Napolean and Diocletian and every other emperor has tried and failed, so the internet activists sitting in their houses who can’t leave their phones for five minutes certainly aren’t going to succeed where armies failed.

But as for us who know that the victory is already won, we are free from the honor and shame culture that is re-emerging. No matter what lies and tales are told, the truth stands. This is why merely saying that an unborn baby is a person, a human being, sets the maniacs ablaze with hate. A simple truth such as that exposes the fragility of the lies. In the same way, saying that “God created them male and female” is the new flashpoint, because it is true, for all ages and all people who ever lived.

The mob rule taking shape in America precedes a much larger battle ahead, as spiritual blindness releases the scapegoat mechanism from its pen. But we should fear nothing because God has already won. Our reputations are not our bodies, nor our souls. Reputation is like a third entity that Jesus clearly was willing to let die. In fact, he was even willing to let his body die. What was the one thing he taught us to worry about? Losing our eternal soul. Our bodies are good, but they will be resurrected in the last day. The loss of our reputation can lead to infinite gains. Losing the body, if done for Christ, can do the same. But losing the soul - that is what we must fear losing the most. That is the only one that separates us from God. So in our decision making, the question must become: will the choices I make today draw my soul closer to God, or push me away?

The idea of “cancelling” is just another term for scapegoating, blaming and shaming a perceived enemy for words or ideas. Even the use of word “cancel” speaks much of our age of indifference, as if people were just magazines. But the idea of cancelling does give us a major clue about what our online lives really are: they are not real. In fact, if we are giving an ordering, or primacy, to what matters in life, reputation should be at the bottom of the list, at least if we listen to the words of Jesus (and actually read it and not just the hippy Lebowski version of Jesus). Soul is first. The salvation of souls is why he came here. He did not come to save reputations, otherwise he might have come as Nero. Soul has primacy, then the body, then, time and weather permitting, we can have our reputation. But only if it is ordered to the two Commandments, which have the all-important order of loving God first, and loving others second.

The most notorious scapegoat of all time went by the name of Jesus Christ, and he showed us how to suffer, how to experience a reputation ruined, how to absorb the spread of lies, the false accusations, the mockery, and even whips, beatings, and crucifixion. Much of the time, the death of our reputation is the step we need to be re-born in the spirit, because reputation clouds what truly matters. Our ego, our self, is what gets in the way. You might even say that if we are not getting cancelled from Twitter or Facebook, we are not using those evangelization tools correctly, because the Christian message will not be praised if it’s told properly and with boldness. The only Good News that is from Jesus and the apostles is the one that will get you killed, which is why the Church continues to be so hated.

After all, how much more clear could Jesus be? He warned us. “If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first…you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you…If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you…And they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know the one who sent me…Whoever hates me also hates my Father.” (Jn 15:13-27) So whenever the question to go left or go right arises, the right answer is to go up, to lift your eyes to the cross. Jesus preached chastity, poverty, transformative suffering, and even in the face of all that, love for your enemies. That is the answer, the same as it was for Jesus, as it was for the first martyr in St. Stephen, for Peter, for Paul, for Blandina and Attalus, and for us today. When the mobs come from the left or the right, the answer is to carry the cross as Jesus did, and not cave in to the ways of this world, because the freedom that Christ brought is to not fear physical death. Rather, we must fear spiritual death, which is separation from God. “And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Fear of the online mob is the beginning of eternal punishment. The Christians who came before our era suffered far more - economic exclusion, slander, alienation, and horrific torture - so that we can sit in our churches and complain about a ten minute homily being too long.

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In recent posts I’ve been down on technology, but before I go off and join the local Amish community, I want to discuss one of Aesop’s fables. This one is called The Dog and the Wolf. Here’s the story:

A starving wolf meets a healthy dog and compliments him on his sleek appearance. The dog describes his life of ease and invites the wolf to join him. As they go on their way, the wolf asks why the fur about the dog's neck is worn away. The dog replies that it is merely caused by the collar he has to wear at home. The wolf then leaves, declaring that a full belly is a poor price to pay for liberty. (link)

Aesop’s lesson is: “Better starve free than be a fat slave.” OR “There is nothing worth so much as liberty.”

Could there be a more real world example of this exchange than in dogs themselves that we see today? Pets today are in a strange state. Comfort and ease has proven a slippery slope for those first wolf pups, as the table scraps they consumed led to a transaction that could never be undone. The temptation to lay by the fire has resulted in pugs and chihuahuas being dressed up in costumes and carried around in handbags. Suffice it to say that future generations will look back at the American moment in history in confusion, as pet obsession must be one of the strangest episodes in human history.

I can just imagine the history textbooks in the future showing a picture of Paris Hilton and her handbag animal, or of Boo the Pomeranian (the World’s Cutest Dog, R.I.P.), as exemplars of the values of early 21st century America, as an era of surplus that allowed a massive unhitching of the mind from reality. That modern marvel is less about dogs than the people that own them, but one last distraction: I recall in my history textbooks such sidebars like Marie Antionette’s cake or the debauchery of Roman binge-and-purge parties. Surely a dog dressed up as a flower or hot dog would make a good visual instruction of what Americans valued most.

As history repeats, we see that same story of the Dog and the Wolf. The wolf struggles, but never has to wear a sweater or booties, nor does a human follow him around with a leash. The wolf doesn’t have to listen to a human talking to it, or wonder why the person is waiting to pick up his poop as soon as it reaches the grass.

This fable is about free-will and two different kinds of freedom. Moreover, this fable is about which master do you serve, and it throws one of the great questions into the mix, as who you choose to serve.

What do you serve? What do you choose to do with your time and days? To what have you surrendered? Where does your money go, or what are you saving for?

You must surrender to something, because that’s what free-will entails. You cannot be a wolf and a dog at the same time. As always, you cannot go both left and right. You cannot go both up and down. Choices must be made. This problem teleports us right to Jesus in his words: “Man cannot serve two masters.” The wolf can be fat and warm by serving the human master, or live true to its nature but be free and hungry. Likewise, if you surrender to God, you reject the world and give up its table-scraps. If you surrender to the world, you reject God but get to lay by the fire. In either case, only one option can be selected.

What the wolf sees is that if you surrender to comfort, he would be turning away from its natural self. Every choice requires a selection, and making a choice means making a rejection of the alternative. If you surrender to perceived pleasure, you are rejecting a perceived pain. But sometimes our perception of what is pain and what is pleasure is in error. That’s the never-ending game we play. How can we avoid suffering? But the more important question is this one: How do we perceive or receive suffering?

The great trick here is being pulled on the dog. What is perceived as an escape from pain and struggle does not actually remove pain and struggle. The trade off for table scraps results in being kenneled or leashed for about twenty-three hours a day while the pet owner lives out his or her life. The perceived “freedom from suffering” leads to a new kind of suffering, and it’s a spiritual suffering because the essence of the dog’s purpose gets buried inside. A dog that is a pet is never truly a dog, because every instinct the animal has is scolded or molded as the owner desires. The dog has the shape of a dog, the mind of a dog, but must live out an artificial non-doggy lifestyle. The instinct thumps in the heart of a dog when the doorbell rings or when the urge rises up to hump a pillow or when a suburban rabbit darts out from behind a garden gnome. But none of these actions of the dog are allowed. The only action allowed is the adoration of the master in exchange for a treat, as that is the transaction that has been signed and agreed to between pet and pet owner. In trading one part of dog-ness, that of the desire to eat, all other parts of dog-ness have been given up and suppressed.

Now, when Aesop was writing, I can only assume that people were not trying to fulfill their dog’s life as if it were a human child. I don’t think the Greeks were spending thousands of dollars on pet hotels and medical insurance, and building elaborate dog parks and doggy daycare centers so that the dog could attempt to have the best of both worlds, of both dog-ness and pet-ness. (I should note that in Chapter 8 of Plato’s Republic there is a curious paragraph about how in late-stage democracy, right before democracy devolves into tyranny, that Socrates mentions that “pets begin to take on the likeness of their mistresses” and that animals in the street will not be ordered to move out of the way for people, as animals have been elevated in status to that of people and everything is “bursting with liberty.” This may be prophetic for us today, as at Halloween there are many pet-owners with matching outfits of their dog, and just recently I saw a dog in a cart at the grocery store where a child is supposed to be. Plato may have nailed it for 21st century America.)

The Dog and the Wolf fable is a relevant parable for our time, because as technology has satisfied our every sensory desire, we now suffer the spiritual malady of slavery to comfort.

One thing that fascinates me in this respect is the nature-lovers that I know. The rednecks and the hippies are so close to one another, but they just don’t realize it, and one tends to think of the other as a monster, or a fool. The “Bambi-killer” and the “tree-hugger” both understand something very deep in our instinct. They are both trying to remove the collar of modernity and technology. They are both trying to un-modern themselves. If you could sew them together somehow, you have the hunter-gatherer. More specifically, together they are the wolf, choosing the kind of freedom that brings suffering, but a suffering that fits our nature. Hunters will choose to go off-grid in a pilgrimage for an elk or bear. Eco-gatherers will seek out thirty day hikes on desolate trails. This is an attempt to take off the collar, as many hunters and gatherers live on cul-de-sacs and sit tethered to desks, basking in the unnatural light of screens that suck their soul. Spiritual ennui and lack of meaning is the suffering today.

To insert Jesus here, in all cases, the question of suffering is not “Why is there suffering in the world?” but rather this one: “What am I doing to do with this suffering?” I’ll refer you to Father Mike Schmitz and Bishop Robert Barron to tell you the meaning of suffering. But in summary: Jesus came to transform suffering. He did not come to end suffering. Not yet. He came to show us the redemptive part of suffering. Once you understand that this is possible, your perception of suffering is completely inverted from what modernity tells us, from psychology to marketing to internet influencers. They are clueless as to what Jesus accomplished on the cross, because they have an inverted worldview compared to Jesus.

The simple commandments to “love God, and love others” never contained any promise of zero suffering. The saying, “You deserve to be happy” is not from Christ. If you think that’s what he meant, please refer to the brutal death of Jesus himself and his immediate followers. He does not take away our suffering, he takes away our sin. This is the important distinction to understand, and if you don’t believe in sin then you can never understand the message. A pre-requisite to the Gospel is knowing that you are a sinner, and as our academic and marketing experts keep taking things known to be sinful off the shelf, this leads many people away from the joy of finding the message of the Gospel. Why? Because if you don’t think random sex or lying or cheating or hating or presumption or despair is a sin, how on earth can you understand what Jesus is doing for you spiritually? The message that “he takes away our sins” only makes sense at all if you realize that you have sin to take away. A lifetime of slogans and campaigns elevating the self and denying any wrongdoing gives cataracts to us. We are way beyond seeing the speck of dust in another’s eye while ignoring the wood plank in our own, because we think we have no sin unless “it affects someone else.” Among the things no longer considered a problem are masturbation, watching porn, getting drunk, and getting high because we have been duped into the belief that “if it doesn’t hurt anyone else, how is it bad?” This is despite the fact that all of those things most certainly hurt ourselves and every relationship we touch. Since nothing is deemed profane now, we see no need for healing, which is the root word for “savior.” Instead, the enemy of our lives becomes discomfort. Whatever upsets our feelings or blocks our desires is the modern definition of sin. It is not our own thoughts or actions at fault, it is those who differ in opinion. We can lust all day long and no longer consider it adultery, and you can claim to be Christian and at the same time completely ignore this:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Mt 5:27-28)

The only way a professed Christian man can allow his hand and eye to scroll porn on his phone, after knowing those words from the Gospel, and if he is not making an effort to stop scrolling by seeking confession and doing frequent examination of consciences - the only way this is possible, is if his profession of Jesus as God is said without belief. In other words, he can only be scrolling porn if he is merely professing faith for expediency and social acceptance. Because if you know and truly believe that Jesus is God, then those sentences from Matthew should convict you where you sit. A man can only be professing faith in Christ as the second person of the Trinity and simultaneously scrolling porn without remorse if he is lying about the profession of faith. This goes for various sins, but the most prevalent among men today is this addiction to porn. And many, many men with this problem will bemoan the state of the world in regards to other sins, while the plank of Matthew 5:27 juts out of their eyes, as their “harmless act of scrolling” causes the slow death of their marriage, as it withers and dies while they scroll in the night.

I failed to understand why regular Confession (and doing a proper examination of conscience before stepping into the Confessional) was important until I began to understand that what sins you must keep admitting in confession becomes a burden and saying them out loud every month or week is a great incentive to stop doing the thing you wish you wouldn’t do. I’m reminded of Jim Carrey who plays a lawyer in Liar, Liar. When he has to take a phone call from a criminal client who is once again in jail, he screams his legal advice into the phone: “Stop breaking the law, a*e!” When you hear yourself going to confession time and again to admit a fault that you just can’t quit, eventually it begins to register, that I need to clean up my side of the street. I tire of cleaning the same street of the same garbage that I myself put on the street. Speaking the words out loud to someone else, even if the sin can be absolved, is an enormously powerful incentive to stop breaking the law. God’s law, that is. Part of the miracle of the Sacrament of Reconciliation is that the grace of God grows, and even if it takes years, or decades, if you keep trying, you will stop doing the thing that is so difficult for you. Prayer, Confession, Eucharist. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

“In this world you’ll have trouble, but take courage, take heart.” This allows us to give our selves up as an offering to God - just like he did - without making sense of all suffering. I feel like most miss this point. In taking away our sin, we are then free to be our true selves. We can drop all the fig leaves we wear, which are all elaborate ruses to hide our fear and our pride, to cover our wounds.

In the fable, the wolf is naked. No collar means no fig leaves. The wolf chooses his true nature. Thereby, the wolf lives a kind of redemptive suffering, while the dog chases a mirage: a life without suffering. There is no life without suffering. Obviously, wolves in real life don’t know they are choosing a redemptive suffering, but the wolf in the fable is not about a wolf; he is a stand-in for us, for humans with free-will who face the choice of comfortable slavery versus purposeful living. This should set off Old Testament alarm bells because the entire book of Exodus is here. The exact struggle being faced in the desert is the desire to return to the comfortable slavery of Egypt. And lastly, might I add, that non-believers never get bent out shape when animals start talking in Aesop, but they sure get irritated when the serpent talks in the Garden of Eden. I have many thoughts on why that is, but I’m already off the beaten path.

I’ll just leave a link here for the Catechism paragraphs 385-409. It says a lot, and fills in the gaps of this problem that I’ve left out regarding the decision over who with our lives we choose to serve.

Speaking of what we choose to serve, the wolf and the dog both have it wrong. Why? Because neither of them gets to the heart of the matter, as far as humans go. In the dog’s life a bargain is struck to become a servant of a being in the world, a human being. In the wolf’s life, the wolf must be entirely self-reliant, or perhaps reliant on a pack of wolves. Fortunately, we are neither dog nor wolf. We have intellect and free-will. We have a third option. But it must be chosen, it cannot be taken by force or shoved upon us by fear. This third option can only be granted with your consent, and not by bargaining and not by self-will, skill, or merit. You make a choice.

What you choose to follow and believe is not just a head game or wordplay. It manifests in you. Even if you think you are only a dabbler or taking a casual interest, that which you consume will merge into you in ways subtle and unforeseen. You start to act like who you admire. You become what you worship. You are what you eat. You are what you drink. Choose wisely. Enough of me talking about it, let’s just look at what Jesus himself says about this topic:

“Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.” (Jn 15:4-5)

“I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst…” (Jn 6:35)

“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.” (Jn 6:53-38)

What does all this tell you? It’s a simple set of instructions. Drink from the true vine. Turn and believe. Receive the Eucharist as often as possible.

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As for the failures of the Church: the faithful and the faithless have failed to be perfect in all eras and situations and nations since the beginning of time, and on that all groups agree. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t read the Old Testament or the Greek epics or even Native American myths, because all takes are full of fallen man. The news from last evening where I live was full of overdoses, murders, and domestic disputes.

We cannot keep the Commandments, not without help from above. This is kind of the whole point of the person of Jesus, and why he came, in case you didn’t know, and many today don’t know. It’s an interesting time because millions of people have not heard the Gospel, or have no idea of what it says.

He brought us the second part of what we need, called the Beatitudes, but people are less aware of these than they are of the Commandments. The Commandments are like a beam we have to walk on above a shark filled tank. But the Commandments with the Beatitudes is like a nice sidewalk with a guardrail above the shark tank where we can relax, be joyful, and not be constantly worried about falling off the beam.

We cannot live the Beatitudes by themselves either. We need the Commandments with the Beatitudes, otherwise we just discard the idea of sin altogether. We need to use the cheat code. There is a cheat code, but it’s not as easy as what video game developers build into their systems.

The way to win is to stop trying to cheat. We have to take up our cross and follow Christ.

I think what people fail to understand is that Christ showed us how to live. In the devolving of Christendom, through our obsession with knowledge, we have to unlearn and invert nearly everything that our American teachers have taught us to value, from public school, to Hollywood, to government. Christ way of living is an inversion of Americanism, which is why Americanism was called out as a heresy by the Church in 1899. Pope Leo XIII didn’t just go on the offensive against the errors of Karl Marx in Rerum Novarum (a prophetic encyclical that predicted all of the horrors of Communism), he also called out the errors that Thomas Jefferson gave birth to with his mistress, the “pursuit of happiness.” This might be a news flash to some: the Church is neither capitalist nor socialist. Instead, the Church is for both the Commandments and the Beatitudes. Again, Catholicism is a both/and religion, except for when it comes to ideologies - then it is neither/nor.

Sometimes I think we focus on the Commandments too much and forget about the Beatitudes. A common critique of Catholics is that they are “too dogmatic,” and act like Pharisees. But oddly enough, while, yes, Jesus does scold the Pharisees frequently, the reason he does is telling. In Matthew 23, Jesus says, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; 3 therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.”

Now, this can be passed over easily, but Jesus says something really important here. The Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat. The Church today refers to “the seat of Peter,” or “the chair of Peter.” The Pharisees, according to Jesus himself, have authority to interpret Sacred Scripture. This, dear reader, is why the Pharisees bear the brunt of Jesus’ anger in the Gospels. God chose Moses. He chose Moses’ successors, and they are the Pharisees. It is not the Sadducees, or Jesus would have said that they sit on Moses’ seat. This idea of Moses’ seat must be attended to. Later, in Matthew 28, Jesus says before ascending to heaven something extremely important about that authority.

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

So the Pharisees held the seat of Moses, and Jesus was given all authority in heaven and earth. But what about when he’s gone? Then who has authority to interpret and defend the Word of God? Who will the Holy Spirit be with? Well, that was covered in Matthew 16:18-19. Simon was given a new name, Peter, the rock, upon who he would build his church.

“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

Let’s recap here. Jesus states plainly that there is to be a Church. One Church. Peter is the leader. This is a direct commission, by name. There’s not even any wiggle room on this for interpretation. Further, nothing will ever defeat the Church that is founded on Peter, even though that Church may be attacked by Hell itself.

There is only one Church founded on Peter. That is the Catholic Church.

Ok fine. So we know there is to be a Church. We also know that baptism is important, even critical to salvation. The Eucharist is as well, which Jesus spoke ample words about at the Last Supper and in the Bread of Life chat after feeing the 5,000. And in this verse above, we know that Confession is important because in order to “bind” and “loose” sins, you have to speak them out loud to someone. As far as I know, the Apostles could not read minds like Jesus. (Although Peter does seem to be able to in Acts with Ananias, but that’s another story).

In Matthew 18:18-19, Jesus also states this “binding and loosing” power. He also says that his followers must gather in Jesus’ name, meaning there should be what? A meeting.

“Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Now, this brings me to a point about the Gospel of Matthew that has led me to many hours of pondering and displeasure, which I will write about later or this will never end. I am teeming with words here, so I need to resist commenting on the lies of 19th century German scholarship and their intentions of tearing down Matthew because of these important phrases.

Let’s get back to the Commandments and the Beatitudes, and why both are needed.

Living by the Commandments and the Beatitudes can only come through following Jesus. You can’t have one without the other. Otherwise you end up a Pharisee, a legalist on the one hand, and on the other hand you are all free-love and dope and Jesus becomes the Big Lebowski, the dude. In fact, if you watch the Big Lebowski, you can see the problems of Pharisees and libertines rather plainly. Walter is a jerk obsessed about the rules, and the Dude cares for no rules. One is all justice and is a hypocrite, and the other is a buffoon that stands for nothing. Donny, the forgotten third character, is a kind of Jesus character, and indeed, he is indirectly killed by Walter and Dude’s dispute with the nihilists, which wouldn’t have happened had they not both been so hell-bent on justice (Walter) and mercy (the Dude). Donny is martyred for their sins.

So we need to be like Donny a bit. Humble. Peaceful. Seeking righteousness while following the rules.

Ok, now forget Donny. Be like Jesus.

When you wake up in the morning, surrender to God, be grateful for breath, and ask Jesus, “What are we going to do today?” To follow him requires surrender and obedience. Freedom requires forgetting the self.

Let’s cut to the chase: nobody loves a list of rules. Rules alone do not inspire. No one ever built a Cathedral because of a list of rules any more than the local swimming pool was built to hang up a sign of “pool rules.” Kids do not go to the swimming pool on a hot summer day to celebrate the rules. They go to the pool to play and cannonball and scream and splash.

This to me is the fundamental error of the Pharisees, and Catholics can become Pharisaical quickly if they think the early Christians were gathering just to celebrate a list of rules instead of cannonballing into a pool with Christ. They came for community, beauty, joy, truth. St. Peter’s Basilica and Notre Dame were not built so that we could hang up a sign that read, “No running. No glass bottles.” They were built because people experience a union with God that unshackles them from life and makes them free, in a way that the pool, or drinking, or sex, or money, or trophies can never even come close to reaching.

The funny thing about the rules is that once you find that key that opens the door, and you follow Christ, only then do the rules make total sense and you actually want to follow them. You even yearn to follow them, because it would please God to do so. In fact, the pool was built for joy, but if there were no pool rules it would be chaos and no one would want to swim there. Lawless pools with loud drunks and kids running wild end up as empty pools. Suddenly, once you believe, the joy singing goes right along with the requirements of fasting. The prayer where the heart surges toward God goes right alongside Confession. That’s the miracle that happens, which I will keep repeating it on this site until I move to my cave someday, following the leads of St. Benedict or St. Anthony of Egypt, where there is no internet.

We’re all “failures” to some degree and we deal with our human flaws in different ways. This is the problem of sin. In order to feel better, we need to elevate our side. Out of this competition, scapegoats are born. We want to scapegoat and point fingers at the failures of our opponents. The notion to blame is always inserted into our heads, put there as a thought from somewhere. I can tell you where that somewhere thought comes from. For many years I assumed thoughts came from myself, but the conception of thoughts have outer origins. It is from the devil, who is the divider and the distractor.

There I said it. The devil is real. What a relief. It’s nice to stop dancing around these things and just say it.

The favorite, perennial scapegoat for all sides is the Church, as in the Catholic Church, because it’s an easy target, and it is the main target. And I mean all sides are on the attack. Even Catholics attack the Church relentlessly, from both the liberal progressive side and the Rad-Trad side. After a while, when you see how much hatred is directed at the Church, it should start to make you wonder. Why?

Why is there so much hate against the Church? Because they say that abortion is wrong? Because they say that marriage is between a man and a woman? Because they reprimanded Galileo? Because of the Crusades? There are hundreds of these reasons, but none of them are the real reason.

The real reason is because God granted the Church authority on interpreting faith and morals until Jesus returns, and we really, really hate anyone telling us how to live. We hate authority. But that is exactly what Jesus claimed, and he deputized the Apostles, with Peter as the leader. Even “scripture alone” interpreters have to dance around the fact of Jesus giving the keys to Peter, and Peter being the rock of the Church. Furthermore, you have to pretend Peter never lived in Rome, and do all kind of “textual criticism” and other rain-dances to try and undo the fact that the Church was founded on Peter, and Peter’s took his seat in Rome.

We hate authority so much that we’ll do anything to tear it down or avoid it.

And this is precisely what the devil does. It’s really the first line from the serpent over and over again, as he said to Eve: “Did God really say…?” That is his opening phrase and his unending hymn of rebellion.

When Jesus gave Peter the keys to the Church, he chose a leader and gave him and the Apostles the authority to bind and loose sins. This is really irritating to people because it means that someone has the authority, and the reason we dislike that idea is because we, each of us, wants to be king. Thus, the claim to authority over faith and morals becomes a target just as it did in the Garden of Eden, when the authority of God was questioned and rejected.

Now, I know for any of my Protestant friends who read this, they will disagree, and will assume that for 1,500 years the church was in the wrong, and only the Reformation brought Christianity back to life. But that assumes that all of the spiritual battles and bloodshed by every saint and martyr from 30 A.D. onward was for a Church on the wrong track, which to me is ludicrous. The early church was the Catholic Church, and the more I read of early Church history, the more it’s clear that the doctrines in the Catechism we use today matches with what Jesus and the Apostles believed. As John Henry Neumann said, "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant."

But, even Protestants should be wary of this urge to blame Catholics, because if they pray for the demise of the Church and the Pope, you can bet that the next domino to go is your local Bible-believing neighborhood church, because the only keeper of doctrine is then in the pastor’s head, or three-ring binder, or the next vote at the annual conference. Chastity is currently on the chopping block for many Protestants, and the faith of the early church is being flung aside for the spirit of the age.

The long history of half-truths being told about the Catholic Church will only blow up in the face of anti-Catholic Christians in the end. Why? Because we are all, at the root, brothers in Christ. We are all drinking from the same vine. But here’s my belief: the last stand of Christianity will be made in the barque of Peter, the Catholic Church, not in your local pastor’s three-ring binder, or in the Southern Baptist Convention or in one of the Lutheran Synods or in the First, Second, or Third Baptist Church. And if the barque of Peter goes down, then so shall all other boats, because the focal point of the anger always lands on the Church. If the gates of hell were to prevail against the Catholic Church (which can’t actually happen), then all of the denominations that came after the Catholic Church will lose the boogeyman. Then they will become the boogeyman and would crumble quickly under the weight of the world. The Church, I believe, is in the world, but is not of this world, and Jesus guaranteed that his followers would be hated, and they most certainly are. But that only encourages us to keep speaking, to keep partaking in the Sacraments, and to keep “praying to Mary and our statues” as the detractors like to say.

As for the unbelievers, the “love of others” has taken precedent over the first commandment of Christ, which is to “love God.” And here’s the problem with that:

When love of God and his word gets put into second place and given the silver medal, then love thy neighbor attempts to take the podium, the gold. Unfortunately, this never works. There is a reason for the order. The imitation of Christ is not a game with optional modes of play, it’s guidance for the salvation of your soul. So much has been forgotten in the distractions and fragmentation of modern thought. This is why you now see Pride flags outside of Methodist and ELCA churches that would make the Wesley brothers’ and Martin Luther’s heads explode. It’s honestly hard to imagine a greater insult to their names and legacy than what has happened in their churches, but because their own step to form these churches was one of protest, it’s not terribly surprising that the protestors are now protesting the earlier protestors. This again, goes back to the beginning and illustrates exactly why the odd story of the Garden of Eden has such lasting power.

Obedience to God must be first. Not flags, not clubs, not organizations, and certainly nothing national or political. None of those things can provide the foundation needed. If Jesus said that not one letter of the law would be undone, meaning the Commandments, then how on earth can you skip Sunday Mass for youth sports or claim that sex outside of marriage is allowed? You can only do that if you are ignoring what Jesus says. And the Church was established to defend and follow his example. To argue against marriage and chastity means you have to throw out the Gospel, and if you start throwing out parts, you’ve thrown out all of it. It comes as a package. Moreover, it only makes sense as an entire package. The baby and bathwater are both out on the lawn now in those churches because they have rejected the Gospel and called it “love.” What they really mean by love is “lust.” Many people have forgotten that Jesus was a celibate man his whole life and ardently, clearly stated that there is to be one marriage in life, and if you aren’t married, no sex. No one wants to hear that, but it’s incredibly loud and crystal clear if we would just take a minute to open up the book and actually look at the words. The only thing the Church is saying to make people so angry is the exact words of Jesus in Mark 6. It’s remarkable really, that just repeating the Gospel words, as they are written, can cause such madness among us lusty moderns. That is how you can tell that we are under a kind of slavery to the passions. The same happens when you try to take away an addict’s drugs or when a wealthy person’s finances collapse. When the devil finds the right bait for each of us, he keeps using it and sets the hook deep.

In our era, methinks the Protesting hath gone on too long and each protesting generation tries to remake the world anew in its own desires. This is why the saying rings true that “A church that marries the age it finds itself in will find itself a widow in the next.”

This is the logical conclusion of sola scriptura and sola fide. By faith alone, you can do whatever you want because you were saved fifteen years ago. With sola scriptura, you can interpret the book yourself, however you like, which is being proved out right now before our eyes. Want to throw out chastity? It’s gone! Poof. Want to sacralize greed? As you wish, says Kenneth Copeland. Want to rid yourself of the Eucharist and just focus on preaching? Welcome to the party, Zwingli and all you other random people who wants to start your own church. Every heresy since Christ rose from the tomb has played out again and again, thanks to the five solas of Protestantism, but mostly because of two: sola fide and sola scriptura.

You can argue yourself into any position, because, well, why not? If you’re saved by your faith, actions don’t matter. If traditional interpretations of scripture doesn’t quite match your wants, then you can hammer it intellectually into the shape you like. Works? Works mean nothing. Works are optional. As soon as you cut out the physical, as soon as the Sacraments are not needed, you’ve cut the body from the soul, because the body is what carries out “works.” In fact, if there is one damning bit of evidence against Protestantism’s shedding of the Sacraments it’s that Covid proved that church attendance is not necessary. The internet and streaming video seems to be God’s humorous way of proving that “four walls and a sermon” make not a Church, because now everyone can stay home to watch it online. Covid presented this fact in full, because a community gathering to hear a sermon is only as compelling as the speaker, and if the mouthpiece can be piped into the ear alone, then getting dressed and driving to church is not needed. With the Catholic Mass, attendance is required. You cannot do confession over Zoom, and you most certainly cannot receive the Eucharist through an iPhone. Again, body and soul are required in the Catholic Church. This is a great feature of the Church.

It’s worth noting that Jesus isn’t here in the flesh. He is risen. So that means that we must act as the arms and legs now. He is the head of the Church, but the mystical body is important, too. We can use our individual bodies like cells of the mystical body. Our bodies can move around. We can use our bodies to feed the poor or to carry out sinful actions. Ideally, we move toward using it for God’s purposes rather than our own. Socialists understand that the body is needed to do good things, so they have half of this whole thing figured out, except they deny the soul. Protestants have the soul and faith part figured out, but can’t quite factor in the body because it’s not really needed. Put them together and you have something more whole, body and soul, and it’s called the Catholic Church.

I don’t believe that scripture alone or faith alone jives with the Gospel. Otherwise, when you are on your third marriage or looking at porn or having extra-marital sex, you get angry when the Church merely points out the words that Jesus said. Simply reminding others what Jesus said about marriage gets people fired up. It’s not like the Church made any of this up. Jesus said these things and the Apostles wrote them down. Merely saying what Jesus said invokes rage from many unbelievers and Protestors, because they have already decided that Jesus is some watered down hippy teacher. But he’s a knife that divides people. He was clearly offensive. Nice people don’t get crucified.

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You do not end up in the Catholic Church by accident. Even for the cradle Catholic who strays, a full return cannot happen without a deep search. For most people that convert or revert, it’s a long story. It’s a battle. The truth is: we resist the Church. We struggle with it. But many end up in the Catholic Church because they wrestled with faith and reason for a long time before having the moment that they understood why Jesus started this Church. They suddenly stop hating the Pope, as they were often instructed to do, and submit to that authority. We dislike authority. That is our nature. That is the story in the Garden. It is often the story of our lives. Coming to love God and his Church means letting go of our preconceived notions and cultural teachings about power.

The idea of being required to go to Confession and attend Mass weekly (because skipping Mass is a mortal sin) seems ridiculous to non-Catholics, but the reason for it is solid. This is a pattern for living. Further, partaking in the Sacraments does what they actually claim they do. They make the invisible visible. This is a mystery, but a glorious mystery if you can move from doubt into assent. Not everyone can do this. For some it seems to come naturally. For some it takes years. For some, they can never fully give up the love of self, or take the leap of faith and “know” that the Eucharist is indeed the body and blood of the risen Jesus.

God bestows this gift of faith on those he chooses and who cooperate with his grace. All are offered grace but many simply refuse to cooperate. We are all given time and multiple opportunities to react to this offering, to reject it or surrender to it. This is a centerpiece of our free-will, this choice to cooperate or refuse God’s grace. So for anyone that seems to lack access to that grace, or rejects it, it is our duty to pray for them, and a good practice is to do a 9-day or a 54-day Rosary novena for your most beloved unbelieving friend. It will probably just irritate them, so you don’t even have to tell them. But praying for others is important. Prayers matter. They work. I have watched people change through prayer that goes beyond explanation. Thousands of hours of therapy fail, and suddenly a healthy prayer life heals. Yes, it’s bizarre.

Oddly enough, knowing God is like knowing any other person. The infinite and unexplainable Creator must be known just like your next door neighbor: through conversation, visits, shared experience, the journey of life, and shared meals. It’s very important he be invited to meals, and that is what the Eucharist at Catholic Mass is: a thanksgiving meal where God and his family come together. We get to have thanksgiving every week, or even every day if you live somewhere that daily Mass is offered.

Through the years, a relationship develops, but only if you develop it. No relationship in the history of mankind has flourished by two people ignoring one another. No relationship can be made with mere thoughts either, because we are both body and soul. Hence, Sacraments. Hence, the spiritual and corporate works of mercy. Hence, prayer. Prayer is essential and it works, just as conversations and phone calls and get-togethers work with real people. Action, also, is essential, as faith without works is dead. Catholicism is a “get off the couch” religion, if you’re doing it correctly.

This relationship with God: it cannot be explained fully. It is a mystery. Like the Trinity, we can never really understand it. And rather than frustrate us with uncertainty, it is a great letting go of the need to control, of the ego, of the self. While this drives modern people crazy, resting in that mystery can “unmodern” your misshapen plastic brain all by itself. This requires the step where you go into the unknown, the uncertain, the un-Google. Call is mysticism if you like. Whatever it is, it’s better than that THC or Fentanyl everyone get so excited about.

Kneeling and asking for the willingness to be willing can change everything. It’s also free, and still legal. Even simply saying, “God, please help me. Give me strength and direction today,” has altered people’s entire lives. That was the first prayer I said on my road back to building the relationship with God. And I hope and pray that you, reader, will ask, seek, and knock on that door to find out. Because it will change your life beyond any drug or experience that this world can give you. What you “know” today may change into a new kind of “knowing,” especially if you have been ignoring the one relationship that can restore you to health and make you whole.

In short, I was disenchanted from all things supernatural like the priest-hunter in the Graham Greene novel. If there wasn’t a rational explanation for something, then I decided it was absurd. Praying for people? My response to that was: Sending money for therapy would be better, since prayer is just talking to an imaginary friend. Belief in Angels? Give me a break. Devils? Sure, if they were just people with pitchforks dressed up in Halloween costumes.

Re-enchantment doesn’t mean jumping into the deep end of the pool and booking a vacation to where a Marian apparition occurred. It all starts with one prayer, a simple reach, to a power outside of yourself. You may even begin with a generic “spirit of the universe” and later get to God himself, the Creator, to Jesus, the Word, and the the Holy Spirit, the breath of life. I had to jumpstart my dead heart with the idea of an absurd “Streetlight God.” Hopefully most people don’t have to go that far downward, but it does work. If you can, just pick one person of the Holy Trinity to start with. But try all three. Some people connect with one element of the Trinity better than others. You’ve tried every flavor of ice cream, what have you go to lose? You’ve probably gone through the kama sutra trying sexual positions, but that didn’t satisfy you any more than eating Snickers bars “satisfies,” as the advertisements claim.

This time, and in the future, try a new position called “kneeling.” That is, kneeling before God. It does wonders. Surely on a sleepless night you can take five minutes to start a new relationship that isn’t centered around your phone. You are not a moth, so you stop acting like one. Stop buzzing around bright lights and screens, as if that’s all you were made to do. If you are like most people today, you are mesmerized by the dancing light of a screen. After all, entertainment is not your end goal. It is a distraction from your fears: of death, rejection, abandonment, and shame. All of those fears come from a lack of relationship with God. You’ll sleep better once you start dialing up God in the middle of the night, because he’s always there and doesn’t need sleep.

The thing is, once the relationship begins, you learn that you are never alone, or rejected, or abandoned. You have a perfect family that you’ve been neglecting. Sure, your earthly family has flaws, or isn’t perfect, or makes mistakes. That’s because they are compromised humans. They are compromised, but not broken. All of us were ejected from the Garden for our own good, so that we would not remain in a permanently fallen state. The family that you have here is the earthly family that has been given to you to love. That is the trial and test, of course, and as soon as you start seeing those people as redeemable, compromised creatures that God loves, they look different. But even if those people are not around, you are never alone, and here’s why…

You are never alone because God is always present and available. If he does not feel present to you, then he is letting you walk, just as a toddler who is learning is allowed to fall. He wants you to walk and carry the cross, but he has not abandoned you, ever, just as a loving parent doesn’t let their toddler destroy herself. The parent will pick her up when the time is right. God is doing that in your life, in different ways.

If your earthly father is controlling, you may have a problem with the idea of a heavenly father. Thus, kneeling may seem too much to give up, since submission makes your blood boil. But the father in heaven isn’t like your earthly father. He doesn’t coerce. He doesn’t force. He invites you.

If your earthly father was a “deadbeat dad” who abandoned you, you may not like the idea of forgiving a father. But again, this father has never and will never abandon you. Only you can abandon this father.

The father that we all want is this kind. He is the father who runs out to meet the Prodigal Son. He is the father that weeps when his children disobey but allows them chance after chance to come back. He is the father that never leaves you but also won’t coddle you, because he wants you to grow. Don’t confuse your earthly father with the Father in heaven.

So you have a loving father, but you also have a brother. If you are baptized and believe, or if you ask for belief, you have a brother in Jesus. He will pray with you. He will be beside you in prayer if you ask. Like the St. Patrick prayer, he will be in you, around, above you, below you. Further yet, you can “put on the mind of Christ” and let his thoughts become yours, and if that seems impossible, open the Gospel and see his words and life, or do Lectio Divina in the Hallow app if you don’t like to read. So now you have a loving father and a loving brother (also your savior), both who are perfect, who can help you fight the spiritual fight. They will show you how to live. One will father you and one will guide you. You have navigation from headquarters and boots on the ground to walk with you.

There is more. What family is complete without a mother? The beauty of Catholic complementarity is that we don’t have to pretend men and women are the same. Sometimes we need a mother, and sometimes we need a father, but we need both. We are whole when we have a relationship with both. We know that men and women are not the same, despite what the modern media tells us. Sanity is sometimes as simple as stating the obvious. The genius of femininity is that it is not male. It is something different and wonderful.

The Blessed Mother, Mary, is your mother. You have a perfect mother and she will pray with you, any time, any where. And her prayers go straight to the top, as no one intercedes ahead of Mary. From the cross, Jesus looked down and said to Mary, “There is your son,” referring to the Apostle John. To John, he said, “There is your mother.” The Church has always held that Jesus, right then and there, from the Cross invited all faithful into the holy family. If we are brothers with Christ, then God is our father, and Mary is our mother.

There is more. There is another earthly step-father for you other than your biological one, and his name is Joseph. His moniker is the “Terror of Demons” because of how he protected Mary and Jesus, taking action when the dreams and warnings appeared. People often consecrate themselves to Mary and/or Joseph. Why? Because they love their family and want to grow closer to them.

“What does it mean for a person to be consecrated to St. Joseph? Well, it basically means that you acknowledge that he is your spiritual father, and you want to be like him. Total consecration to St. Joseph means you make a formal act of filial entrustment to your spiritual father so that he can take care of your spiritual well-being and lead you to God. The person who consecrates himself to St. Joseph wants to be as close to their spiritual father as possible, to the point of resembling him in virtue and holiness. Saint Joseph, in turn, will give those consecrated to him his undivided attention, protection, and guidance.” (from the Consecration to St. Joseph)

And lastly, the saints. We have the saints, a larger family, who can intercede and pray with us. I ask for St. Peter and St. Anthony of Egypt to pray with me, as well as St. Dymphna and St. Mary Magdalene. It’s a co-ed team of prayer, every day. And there are thousands of saints to ask for intercession, and even Rafael and Gabriel, the angels that we have come to know through Sacred Scripture.

When navigating this world, sometimes you need a father to guide to, sometimes you need a mother to help you, and sometimes you need your brother to fight off a dragon. And still, sometimes, you need just to be still with the Holy Spirit - that unexplainable breath of life. The simple prayer of “Come, Holy Spirit,” opens us up to God’s grace. No matter what you need, you need to be open to your heavenly family, because that is your perfect family, your family without wounds, without identity lies. Knowing and building a relationship with that family will help you grow in relationship with your earthly family.

You are never alone. When I heard someone say that in the past, I assumed they were schizo, but today I know exactly what they mean.

Having been re-enchanted, the invisible spiritual world is now as real and palpable as that rock in my shoe. If you come to believe in Jesus, then you come to know, and one thing that comes along with it is the awareness of your own sin, but rather than being a horrible thing, it can be a liberating thing. You can’t get found unless you were once lost. It’s an entirely new kind of freedom, but not a freedom to do what you want, but a freedom to follow God, as best as you can. And you want to do it. It’s not forced! Never forced. That is one of the miraculously weird things that happens once you know you are a sinner and come to love and know God. Sooner or later, you come to know that angels and demons are also as real as that rock in the shoe. Once that happened, I began to see why and how the world and individual people behave as they do. The faith of an atheist doesn’t allow for miracles, or spiritual lives, or souls, or partaking of the divine nature.

The faith of an atheist really offers only half of life. It offers nothing that I want to take back, because I have discarded my anti-depressants, I haven’t drank in almost seven years, I have zero desire to scroll porn (because people have souls and are not objects), I pray for my enemies and enemies of the Church. Daily, I meet with whole people of faith that astonish me in their own miraculous underdog comebacks. I start and end my day with prayer and gratitude to God. What more could I possibly want? (If you’re an atheist, you scoffed there, and that’s ok. If you’re a Protestant, I probably lost you back at my “faith alone” rant. To both - I’m sorry, but this is my blog site, and this is my body and soul story. There are many things I admire about Protestants, but I believe that Christ’s Body in the world is the Catholic Church.)

The strangeness of it all is this: it all fits together. All of it. Somehow, someway. The bizarre storytelling and miracles and parables and Marian dogmas and relics and Sacraments - they all bake into something perfect and unendingly satisfying - a bread that never stops feeding you. That is, I believe, what Jesus meant when he said, “I am the bread of life.” Hence, the Eucharist at Mass is food for the body and the soul. It is food for the faithful. It is a meal with God himself. The tie that binds is Jesus. “Love God. Love others. Let’s all get together and eat my body. Do this in memory of me.”

I recall reciting the Nicene Creed as a teenager and skipping certain elements, mostly the ones that required supernatural belief, which means a large portion of it. As the years went on, when I had to attend a funeral or wedding, I started to notice that certain elements had become less difficult to accept, as a rudderless life had tossed me about so much that I reached a state of openness. Through the use of alcohol, I had moored my ship on many rocks, on islands of ideologies and empty pursuits. Of course, this process of getting to shore meant getting both the rudder and the sail working together, not against one another.

Switching metaphors, I’ll move over to Chesterton’s “lock and key” example. For me, it was not that one single grand moment made all the difference, but many small moments that carved away untruths and honed edges down. I could not open the door using the key I had, because the key just hadn’t been fully prepared yet. At first the key was just a cylinder that did not fit the keyhole at all. But over twenty years, with many books and life experience, the grinding of the search shaped the key, until one day I tried the key again, and I felt the thunk of the lock as it sunk into the center.

A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key. (From Chesterton’s Orthodoxy)

Perhaps you know the feeling. When the key fits, you think it’s the right key, but if haven’t yet turned the deadbolt, you’re still not certain. I’d had that feeling before, but the key wouldn’t turn. A key seemed to have the fit, yet I still couldn’t open the door. With modern versions of stoicism and epicureanism and humanism, I felt I’d had the key before, but none of those could turn the bolt. But then this time, when I twisted, the bolt moved. Then I had to decide, did I really want to open the door? Because I knew that opening the door meant the change of everything in my entire life. This is what Catholics call “cooperating with grace.” Even if the key has been given, and the door unlocked, each of us must still choose to open that door. The mystery of why God gives us trials and temptations in life is clear to me now: they key that we need to unlock the door needs to be shaped, and God shapes the key using these struggles.

Of course, I had to open the door. After all, I’d spent a long time looking for that key and having it shaped. So what other choice did I have? How could I go back to the prior attempts that left me locked out? None of them had made me happy.

If you have been given the key, you may think there is no choice but to use, but God does not coerce or force us to do anything. He wants us to open the door voluntarily, but he doesn’t fling it open for us. He just gives us the key. And then opening the door, the treasure is there, the one that makes sense of all the struggle and searching. This is the key we are all looking for. If you haven’t gotten the key fully shaped yet, you still might, given more time and experience. But you have to come back to the door now and then to test the key, because that is the game that God is playing with us. He’s doing something in your life, but you may not understand it until much later.

So that is my take on coming to faith. As Jesus said, we are only drawn to God if God draws us. This is confusing, but if you feel drawn, you should set down your busy life and try the key again. Free will is a powerful thing, because God beckons us but we have to take action. If the beckoning happens, then you are likely being called. If you ignore the beckoning, you may miss the opportunity. “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day.” (John 6:44)

Now, most people today have a real beef with the Catholic Church, so let me take some time to comment on that. Everyone seems to have this in common, especially Catholics themselves.

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From Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, set in Mexico during the Communist persecution of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century, there is a great line from an atheist, who fully embraces his “faith.” It’s interesting, in hindsight of my own experience: to not believe in God takes every bit as much faith in the end as does believing in God. However, the outcome of how you see the world is radically different.

The character is an angry man who is hunting down the “Whiskey Priest,” a drunk, corrupt, unheroic hero who needs to be snuffed out, because snuffing out the priest will kill off God for good (this is another Herschel Walker Trade, which I’ll discuss in future posts). Of course, this “kill ‘em all” approach has been the error of anti-Catholics since Nero first blamed followers of Jesus Christ for the fire in Rome.

An unbeliever writhes at the stereotype of the faithful fool. He loathes the idiot who prays and believes in angels and demons. Why? Because he knows better. He knows that religion is all smoke and mirrors. It’s all b*t, and he knows it. He knows* that sees the wizard behind the curtain. These words could have come from my mouth or mind, even though I wasn’t physically hunting priests to kill them:

“It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy – a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.”

Yes, he knew. I knew. But I know now, too. Don’t we all know? That is, after all, the point of the “tree of knowledge” in the garden. When we eat from that tree, we know, and we think we know better than God. We turn away from God. Genesis, what a timeless old thing it is! How on earth did the sacred writer know how to craft it so elusively and accurately throughout all the ages? Oh, right. I forgot: it’s because God inspired the sacred author of Genesis (and I’ll refer you to Dei Verbum for expansion on that idea, which is a worthy read for Catholics and anti-Catholics alike, and I would recommend followups of Faith and Reason (Fides et Ratio) and The Splendor of Truth (Veritatis Splendor). And if you’ve gone that far, you might as well read the Prologue and Part One of the Catechism).

What the atheist “knows” is not known any more than what the believer “knows,” but assumes a similar kind of faith. In other words, to quote The Big Lebowski, you can say to either one, “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.” But of course, one is right and one is wrong, but neither can ever prove it. After adopting the ideas of unbelief for about fifteen years, I realized that I do not have enough faith to be an atheist, particularly after witnessing addiction recovery miracles and seeing, literally, the power of prayer in real people’s lives, including my own.

The unbeliever’s belief requires a kind of assent that is not at all different from the person of faith (and I’ll refer you to John Henry Neumann and G.K. Chesterton for expansions on the idea of assent). We are assenting to a faith, like it or not, whichever way we lean, and the reason endless debates rage over the existence of God is because both sides “know” they are right and have ample arguments to defend their view. Yet only one can be right. Only one will be proven correct, and the test date is usually unscheduled, kind of a pop quiz, that happens with the final beat emitted from of our hearts. This makes for a lot of anger between the tribes of believers and unbelievers, because both “know” they are right.

However, the unbelievers should never be mocked, because that is their job: to mock us believers. They get to keep that for themselves. They don’t have much else to hold onto, so mockery and condescension remains theirs. To be mocked for having faith in God should not bother any person of faith. Seriously, faith is a gift. If you’ve been to a party where everyone received a gift except for you, the feeling results in sadness or anger, but the wound of being left out leads to envy. Sour grapes, insults on intelligence, accusations of inbreeding, and variations on the phrase “I don’t need a crutch” are just some of the results of envy. The error of envy plays out in toddlers and adults in interesting ways. You’ll notice that Jesus never exhibits any behaviors related to envy. Believers, as always, should imitate him and pray for strength daily. All adversity should be received as exercises in humility and for every insult for faith we should give thanks to God for the opportunity to be tested and grow in faith.

The meaning of life is wrapped up faith in God. It fills the Big Empty. Those without faith cannot grasp this. It’s impossible. If I try to explain that I believe in miracles to an atheist, the wall around them is built up so tall that they cannot even hear a word I’m saying. I had the same wall. The atheist will often say, “I just need more evidence,” meaning a sign, like the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, but even if Jesus flew around in the sky in front of them, they would start explaining the physics and asking for a video to review if he was wearing a jetpack. In fact, I had this very conversation about miracles recently with an atheist, and we spoke about the “calming the storm” miracle, and his answer was that science can do that, it can control the weather now. But I have yet to see a meteorologist reach out his hand and stop the wind and waves instantly. I didn’t bother to ask, “What about the walking on water?” but surely he would have had a material cause, like a reef beneath Jesus’ feet, or a first century paddleboard. My point is that you must take a leap of faith on miracles in order to believe. The alternative is to find material reasons for divine things, or deny the stories altogether. Many modern people have done all the way in trying to solve the problem, denying that Jesus ever existed. The problem with that is, like the ostrich, God still exists even while the head is underground. The walling-in of our wonder is what keeps us from opening up, from filling the God-shaped hole in our hearts.

(This is where I start praising Protestants and Evangelicals if any are still here...)

Many believers of non-Catholic faith are enriched and filled with the Holy Spirit, and many understand the faith part better than Catholics. I’m talking about Evangelicals and Protestants. (Here is where I even praise “faith alone” a little bit…) The great thing about “faith alone” is that people meet Jesus this way, without having to assent to the whole Catechism of the Catholic Church and go through an RCIA class for six months. Luther lowered the barrier of entry, and Jesus certainly criticized the Pharisees for keeping the kingdom of God from the people. Catholics can trend toward Pharisaism, and this is a well-known charge against the Church. Rules and regulations are needed, and must be adhered to, otherwise the whole thing falls apart. After all, Jesus said he didn’t come to throw out the law but to fulfill it, and he also said that we must do more than just pray and say “Lord, Lord!” There are things that must be done. There are works like “Be baptized and believe” and “If you love me, keep my commandments” and “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.”

While I don’t believe that ease of entry into salvation is true with sola fide, that idea certainly gets people through the door. The ball gets rolling very quickly when someone is ready to change. So if someone is drawn to Jesus through a concert-style service or an altar call, there are far worse things I can think of people doing. I just don’t think that it’s the fullness of the faith. I believe that there is more to it, and that the Tradition that goes back to Peter is the Church, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church that is guided by the Holy Spirit.

The simple invite of “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” has always seemed too easy to me, but I have seen it change lives in dramatic and stunning ways when someone takes it to heart, when it is not coerced or faked. I know Evangelicals and Lutherans who are on fire for God, and even though they say “works” are not necessary, these on-fire believers are engaged in mucho works, body and soul, helping people pray and get along in this world. And that is a beautiful thing.

But the problem is that it leads to the Pink Cloud too often. What is the pink cloud? Addicts who get sober can experience a Pink Cloud after about thirty days of sobriety, and everything is wonderful. Life is amazing. Love is everywhere. And then the euphoria wears off. Many relapse because this new high of sobriety has dulled. The new feeling of being reborn in sobriety fades as real life plods along with the march of days. Thus are newly sober people warned, “Beware of the Pink Cloud.”

In a similar way, the euphoria of an altar call or instant conversion lacks long-term staying power, because it’s too easy. Having attended a few services in my life where sinners feel moved to come up to the altar, I watched with skepticism as it felt too dramatic. Perhaps too emotional, as feelings do not always last. This is why watching Marcus Grodi’s “Journey Home” conversion stories is so compelling. These are five year or ten year or twenty year conversion stories. There is meat and potatoes in these stories, of life, learning, hard knocks, and revelations.

Recently, a celebrity, Shia Leboeuf, did an interview on his conversion and said that “It didn’t feel like they were trying to sell me a car.”

He nailed it. He nailed the problem of cheap and easy evangelization. It’s too glossy, too polished, too impersonal, too much sugar. Let me give some examples of this problem of feeling “sold” instead of assenting to Church teaching through a process of both reason and faith, as Chesterton and St. Augustine did.

I can recall several attempts by people to evangelize me to Christianity while I was fallen away that repulsed me and pushed me further away from God than if they had scourged me with a whip. It was the sell. The approach. I think of these often now that I’ve returned to believe in Jesus, because they make me realize how obnoxious it is to sell religion to someone like it was soap or a gadget.

Example #1: I was on a beach during spring break, drinking heavily, just like any good useless college student raised on Nirvana and Sublime, when a few attractive college girls approached. They wanted to hang out, but then within a short time, they asked if I had accepted Jesus as my personal savior. I said, “No,” and returned to the comfort of liquor.

Example #2: I had paid $50 to do an “ejector seat” ride where bungee cords shoot you up into the air for three seconds of bliss, and right before we were about to eject, the operator said, “I can only hit this button if you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior.” And rather than say, “No, let me off,” I said “Yes,” because I had paid $50 and didn’t want to get off the ride. But it irritated me and ruined the experience because at that time I was still happy on the side of the devil.

Example #3: I recall retreat groups coming to church as a kid, with super motivated adults and teens who wanted to stir up the spirit in us. But I didn’t get it. I also didn’t get it when some kids would apparently feel the spirit and start crying and want to give their life to Christ. The retreats just kind of hit me like pie in the face. I just wasn’t ready to eat. The thing was, the people were trying hard and probably did convert some people, but I just couldn’t buy in.

Example #4: I attended an “all-night party” as a kid thinking it would just be bowling and basketball and movies, but then it turned out to be a Christian rock concert and an altar call where the singer needed, “Just ten more of you to come up to the stage and give your lives to Christ.” All the hand-waving and teary eyes didn’t phase me, as I eyed the pizza from the open side doors.

Example #5: I remember Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on the door and running an elevator pitch at me while I was hungover and watching football. It reminded me of when I had to sell candy bars for the local booster club as a kid, and I hated it then, and I knew the candy bar buyers hated forking over a dollar for sub-par milk chocolate. Likewise, I cringed watching these people try to sell religion to me when I was not yet in the market. I also knew just enough about Jehovah’s Witness theology to realize that it would be betraying my reason altogether to engage with them, so I said goodbye.

Now, with all that said, I can tell you this: every single one of those people who tried to convert me had a lot better grip on life than I did, since drinking was my escape, my idol. Drinking and goals was the game, I thought, and despite having a decent sense of Biblical stories, I had zero idea why anyone was pushing these old tales my way. All I saw was a bunch of rules. I felt like Cool Hand Luke, when he said, “I ain't heard that much worth listenin' to. There's a lot of guys layin' down a lot of rules and regulations.” I’m pretty sure I actually wanted to be Cool Hand Luke, come to think of it.

At the start of this series I talked about selling, because that is what people do with their worldviews. What’s so strange about the Catholic Church is that it does not feel like a sale, because much of what they teach runs against our desires and instincts. What an awkward pitch it is. It’s almost an anti-sales pitch, which is why we have to wrestle with it for so long. Just as Jesus confounded us and refuted our expectations, so does the Church.

But for those of us who end up buying Catholicism, it’s eventually purchased because it works. It is proven to work. People arrive at this place because nothing else has worked. Peter famously said to Jesus, “Master, where else will we go?” The Catholic Church is the last stop after all other sources of “truth” have been tried and found untrue. This has been the conclusion of people in every generation for 2,000 years.

We may not like the pitch or the demonstration, but the application of it works. It offers sanity in a world of half-truths. It requires elevating faith ever so slightly over reason, but just barely. The beauty of Catholicism is that you get to keep your reason - all of it - and add on the mysteries of faith to it. It enriches reason because it tears down the wall of needing material answers for everything. It throws out religious fundamentalism while keeping the laws of physics, the Commandments, miracles, and the richest trove of literature and stunning architecture the world has ever known.

Also, it’s not forced upon anyone. It doesn’t feel like trickery. How could it? The pitch takes away things that we perceive to be pleasure, so the gloss is off the flyer. The pitch is not easy, not a quick solvent or pill to swallow, but more of a tough love. It’s like a stern but loving family that sits you down to say: “This will be difficult, but you can be holy. First, grow up and take responsibility, and second, be humble and return to the faith of a child. Now start praying and serving others.”

What bothers me about saying “I accept Jesus as my personal savior” and being done with progressing to salvation is this: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

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I always sensed that something wasn’t right.

I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse. But even as a kid, I knew that something didn’t feel right. It was a sense of incompleteness. Heck, I’m not sure if anyone did. But something was amiss. Something was out of order. I couldn’t put my finger on it so I went looking for who might know the answer. I thought maybe Protestants knew, or atheists, or academics, or Buddhists, or workaholics, or athletes, or bums, or wildlings who closed the bars down. The search went on and on. But no matter where I explored, something wasn’t quite right.

What seemed to be happening all around me was a big show, a play, or a circus, with everyone in masks, and they were all pretending there wasn’t a giant hole inside them. This giant hole, the Big Empty, is what drove me to search, and when I found that I couldn’t fill it, I tried to fence it off, ignore it, yell at it, mock it, throw stones at it, drug it, intellectualize it, and weep at it.

None of that worked either.

And none of the solutions on offer could solve the disease either. Until I began to separate the tales of Hollywood, media, my teachers, my college professors, my Christian friends, my non-Christian friends, my co-workers, and my own reading, only then did I even begin to parse what the heck was missing. And a giant portion of that was figuring out what the heck the word God even meant, which required prayer, reading, and action to even get a match burning in the Big Empty.

I began to understand the uneasy feeling when I realized I had been ignoring half of myself. Really, I was missing both halves of myself, because they were like estranged spouses, living separately but in the same house. They certainly weren’t talking. The two halves I’m talking about are body and soul.

The post-mortem of my first death revealed that I’d undergone a common pair of modern surgeries, which go undetected in many. These surgeries happen without us knowing, as the surgeons serve in unsuspicious places, often as helpers and guides rather than body snatchers or soul stealers.

I had undergone the twin amputations.

My soul had been surgically removed by a careful materialist unbelief, using the scalpel of what I thought were logical arguments. The other amputation came more like a dismemberment. My body had been ripped away from the spirit and the spirit ripped away from the body.

Being amputated two ways obviously left me incomplete, and I was crawling about like the Terminator’s hand in the final scene of the movie, where Linda Hamilton tries to crawl away from the crazed robot, animated by a programmed compulsive mania. I was that crazed robot-hand, intent on living, not knowing why, except for goals, going on seek and destroy missions. I was half a human being. I was a robot arm, bent on destruction, clamoring toward Linda Hamilton.

The slicing and dicing of body and soul left me fragmented, because in atheist unbelief I was all body. Without the supernatural, we really are just a “clump of cells” or a “bag o’ chemicals.” The mantra of our time is self-determination and “my truth.” Why? Because if we’re just a pile of cells, then we are nothing but matter, and therefore, nothing matters. That’s the ugly secret of pure reason. The real reason that abortion is no big deal to some people is because they don’t believe in a soul, and it was no big deal to me when I lived in body-alone robot mode. Euthanasia? Shoot, shoot me up, doc. What’s the big deal? Of course it doesn’t matter if you kill yourself when there is no afterlife. The only life worth living is a life without pain, since pain is the great evil. Suffering - now there is a reason to doubt God! And when the body is just a bunch of wriggling, jiggling atoms, dumping that body has as much meaning as turning off a light switch. Here today, gone tomorrow. As the always depressing Albert Camus once infamously said, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” On the flip side of that, you had Archbishop Fulton Sheen, in the same century, telling the world that, “Life is worth living,” and he seemed much happier.

When materialism and unbelief forms the centerpiece of your worldview, life is kind of like how men see college girls in Girls Gone Wild videos. There’s no humanity in a clump of cells because it’s only body - there’s no soul, so what’s the difference if it dies? Pleasure becomes the only good, and pain the only evil. Epicurus and Marcus Aurelius lived in this space, with quite different interpretations on how to live with that problem. Camus himself decided that suicide was no good because…well, who cares?

Honestly, when that is your number one philosophical problem, you know something is horribly wrong. The Big Empty owns you. When I think of how much ink has been spilled over Camus and this problem, I shudder more than I do after a full day of ice fishing.

On the other side, there was a different problem. It was called faith alone. I’ve belabored this terribly by now. When I dabbled in that, I felt like I was all soul, or worse, mind alone, and that is a lonely and awful place to be. I recently read something from the celebrated atheist and transhumanist evangelist Yuval Harari, who said that Jews and Christians were only worried about the soul. Classic attack angle, Yuval! Except for it’s the same old attack that never works. Like Judas, he is disappointed that Jesus didn’t solved all earthly suffering. Like the Jews, Yuval wanted a political and military messiah. It’s hard to believe people are still making this same error, but they do every day. Clearly Yuval and others have never read the Apostles’ Creed or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, because God refutes our expectations. See, God can be postmodern, too! This world is not yet transformed, since we are in the messianic age. But the body will be resurrected. The glory will come. And in Catholicism, the body is good, our suffering here is transformed, and when we die, that isn’t the last day of these bones.

Mr. Harari has the same incomplete understanding of Christianity that I once did. If we are only worried about our souls, then we really don’t need arms and legs, because salvation of the soul is the primary concern, and we’re not required to carry out any actions in this world. Yuval’s disappointment is in Christians that don’t do enough here in this world. This is why Catholicism has the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. We are body and soul, hence we must pray and act. That is not a requirement in the Protestant world. I mean, it’s cool if you do nice things for people, but always optional, because “Once saved, always saved” absolves you of works.

And that in a nutshell is why Protestantism never sat well with me. Really, it’s the same reason that Yuval dislikes about Christians. It’s just too bad he doesn’t understand Catholicism. As I’ve mentioned, a brain in a jar can satisfy the requirements of “faith alone.” A printer can spew out a message saying, “I accept Jesus as my personal savior,” and if that is the only requirement, can we really argue that the printer is any more sincere than a bad Christian who claims the same?

Thank God we are not robots. Thank God we are not just bodies, and not just souls. The whole idea of the imago Dei, of being made in the image and likeness of God, means that God made us like him, body and soul, and that all that he created….…is good. Jesus is God. Jesus became a human. The Protestant idea of total depravity or that we are a “dung hill covered in snow” - that doesn’t dovetail with Catholic doctrine, be it the imago Dei, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, or John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.

I think the letter from James (the one that Luther tried to throw out of the Bible), contains the sentence that distills the truth of this lengthy article about what makes me whole:

“For just as a body without a spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.” (James 2:26)

Dead.

Body alone = death.

Spirit alone = death.

Faith alone = death.

Works alone = death.

This is why pure reason or pure faith, with either one on a lonely island, leads to the same thing: death.

To me, that is the summary judgment against both Protestantism and atheism (and its subtypes like liberalism, humanism, Marxism, scientism, positivism, or wokeism). Both of those great trends of the last 500 years slice us in right in half, separating body from soul.

That’s what I’m trying to get at, in my excessive and overly-verbose manner.

A separated body and soul results in death.

It doesn’t matter which way you slice, one without the other means that both are dead. (This idea will help a lot when you get to the most confusing line in Catholic theology, the second to last line in the Apostle’s Creed, which is that we believe in the “Resurrection of the body.” This confusing and often-overlooked phrase cannot be skipped or left out, because…

This is why I am Catholic: it makes me whole, both body and soul.

That is the short summary.

What I always felt was missing, that critical missing piece, that could never fulfill the Big Empty - that hole is gone, because I am once again whole. Returning to the faith of a child seems to be figuring out how to become whole, and it means believing in both body and soul. But it’s more than a feeling. The band Boston sang about it, but didn’t quite capture what I mean by “more than a feeling.” This wholeness comes from reason, experience, feelings, body, blood, soul and divinity. (Useless aside: No wonder the lyrics of the Boston song are so depressing: “More Than a Feeling” mentions only feelings, experience of loss, and sensory things; not once does the song mention body, blood, soul, and divinity.)

The faith of the Apostles, in its fullness, is something total and beautiful.

The Catholic Church appreciates both body and soul, faith and works. It believes in both the divine and the human. We seek to know both nature and grace. Faith is an act of submitting both our intellect and our will. The Eucharist is both bread and wine. It is also body and blood, soul and divinity. We are both fallen and redeemable. There is a visible and invisible world that we live in. We must live with both faith and reason. I am both a sinner and can be saved through God’s grace. We are both matter and form. We have fasting and feasting. Baptism has both a physical action and a spiritual effect. Forgiveness requires both confession and penance. There is song and prayer. There is silence and celebration.

What I’m trying to say is this: Catholicism is truly a both/and religion, not an either/or. And having gone on the wild goose chase of life, I reject the separation of body and soul as much as I reject that Jesus was just a wise teacher rather than both fully God and fully man. This is the key, of course. But once you spend time reading or hearing the Gospel, the day may come when you suddenly know, as much as you know that 2+2=4, that Jesus is God. As an unbeliever, I “knew” that Jesus was not God, and now I “know” that he is.

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People don’t really hate the Catholic Church.

They hate what they’ve been taught is the Church, most of which is untrue. This quote from Fulton “the quote machine” Sheen sums it up:

There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing. These millions can hardly be blamed for hating Catholics because Catholics “adore statues”; because they “put the Blessed Mother on the same level with God”; because they say “indulgence is a permission to commit sin”; because the Pope “is a Fascist”; because the “Church is the defender of Capitalism.” If the Church taught or believed any one of these things it should be hated, but the fact is that the Church does not believe nor teach any one of them. It follows then that the hatred of the millions is directed against error and not against truth. As a matter of fact, if we Catholics believed all of the untruths and lies which were said against the Church, we probably would hate the Church a thousand times more than they do. If I were not a Catholic, and were looking for the true Church in the world today, I would look for the one Church which did not get along well with the world; in other words, I would look for the Church which the world hates… Look for the Church that is hated by the world, as Christ was hated by the world. Look for the Church which is accused of being behind the times, as Our Lord was accused of being ignorant and never having learned. Look for the Church which men sneer at as socially inferior, as they sneered at Our Lord because He came from Nazareth. Look for the Church which is accused of having a devil, as Our Lord was accused of being possessed by Beelzebub, the Prince of Devils. Look for the Church which, in seasons of bigotry, men say must be destroyed in the name of God as men crucified Christ and thought they had done a service to God. Look for the Church which the world rejects because it claims it is infallible, as Pilate rejected Christ because He called Himself the Truth. Look for the Church which is rejected by the world as Our Lord was rejected by men… If then, the hatred of the Church is founded on erroneous beliefs, it follows that basic need of the day is instruction. Love depends on knowledge for we cannot aspire nor desire the unknown. (Fulton Sheen on Radio Replies)

The Church that is rejected by men is a Church they rarely know or understand. The attackers have not read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is clear because most of the attacks don’t even make sense once you crack the cover of that book.

Thus, it’s useless for me to feel offended by atheist attacks any more that it is to feel offended by Protestant attacks. Yet I do feel offended sometimes. Why? Because I fail to fully surrender to God and his Church, hence the need for daily conversion, to fight the spiritual fight, and to submit my will and intellect completely to the care of God’s grace. His will, not mine, will be done. This blog is just a journal of my reasons for believing, and if I didn’t feel such a need to express these words, I wouldn’t do it. Jesus commanded us to tell the story of the Gospel, and that his sheep would hear his voice. Seems like a small task for me to at least tell of my reasons for faith, with the hopes that perhaps someone else will undo their own Herschel Walker trade.

Now, Protestants did not make the full trade, abandoning God, but they did abandon the Mother Church, the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ, the barque of Peter (and any other pseudonyms you like). In Luther’s defense, he was living in and around a period of time when frauds like the Donation of Constantine came to light, which called for questioning, correction, and improvement, and the Church was under heavy attack from all sides. It is also under attack today, from all sides. In Luther’s time, the New World had been discovered, science was advancing, and there were three concurrent Popes at one time not long before. Add a few greedy clergy using “salvation for money” schemes that would make Bernie Madoff blush, and only a match it need to start a conflagration. It’s just too bad Luther’s exit ended up watering down the doctrines instead of shoring it up, because he really wanted to protect doctrine in the beginning - even the Eucharist. After all, he was an Augustinian monk, and the most “Catholic” Protestant there ever was, at least in the beginning, until Zwingli and the hoards came after him.

I haven’t come to bash Luther as much as I have come to bash Voltaire and Jefferson and the fruit of their legacy of unbelief. I routinely bash the 19th century German scholarship that tried to elevate Biblical scholarship and instead cut the trunk out from the tree.

Even though things look bleak, I have to think of Joseph, Jacob’s son, in Egypt. After getting tossed in a well, then sold into slavery, then living in prison after being falsely accused of seducing a powerful man’s wife, Joseph had a winning streak. When he met his brothers again, many years later, he said, “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.” (Gen 50:20) All of this, all that has happened in the past 500 years is part of God’s plan, even the awful parts. We just don’t know how yet, but we do know that the name of the game is adhering to Christ, his words, his commandments, and imitating him, which means sticking to the doctrines and not affirming every sin that feels good or sounds good. It means saying, “No,” to the culture, to popular opinion. Slavery was once popular opinion thanks to sola scriptura. Why? Because you can make the Bible be whatever you want it to be with “scripture alone.” The Church put out anti-slavery documents and statements early on. Just like today, that doesn’t mean every person adhered to the teaching. Consider how poorly the laity adhere to birth control and admonitions of greed. There were hardly any Catholics in America until the Irish came, which was around the Civil War, and guess what? They were hated, too.

It’s almost a guarantee.

Catholicism is the punk rock of all ages, because it is always a counter-culture. But unlike punk rock, Catholicism has a shelf-life that lasts longer than a decade. All of the fad counter-cultures disappear like smoke, like figdet-spinners and rolled jeans and pet rocks, they are passing fashions that mean nothing to the next generation. But Mary and Joseph do not fade. The impact of the saints and martyrs carries on. The Gospel does not fade, even if the books and scrolls wear out over time. The printing press was not necessary for Christianity any more than the internet is now. Only Jesus and a community of believers was required: Jesus and the Mystical Body of Christ was needed. It’s also quite nice that the Church has a way to settle disputes with the Bishops as time and history introduce new issues regarding faith and morals. No other Church has that capability but the one that Jesus founded on a rock named Peter, who happened to setup shop in Rome.

Somehow the faith starts a new fire every few years. And the fire always irritates the culture, and oddly enough, what irritates American culture is not the same as what irritates African culture, where in America the Church is hated for it’s sexual teaching on chastity, and in Africa it’s appreciated for it’s sexual teaching on chastity. Americans, in classic form, just assume Africans are childlike. This has not changed, folks. Progressives in America preach sermons that treat Africa as less advanced because they adhere to traditional marriage and family arrangements. The condescension toward Africa today is as bad, if not worse, than it was from the 1500s through the Enlightenment. So which nation is more lost? Is it Nigeria or Uganda? Is it America? The answer is: all of them. America is a sheep that’s fallen into a gorge in need of being found. But it’s not special in that sense; every nation has its sins, just like every person does.

If anything feels good, it is to be counter-cultural. What teenager doesn’t want to rebel? But what is odd is that obedience to God is the ultimate rebellion, but it’s against sin and the world. Rebellion against God is easy, undemanding, cliche. Rebellion against the flesh and the devil? That’s freedom. That is timeless. To remain fully alive, body and soul, and seek union with the Creator is a fad that never dies because at the root, we desire God like we desire food. Jesus and his Church have been the unlikely underdog from the beginning and these two still are today. God has set things up this way. Why? I don’t know, but what a joy to be a part of the team that calls itself sinners, who eat and give thanks together, who receive the Eucharist, the Body of Christ.

The Reformation, the Enlightenment, the German anti-Catholic culture war, French existentialism, Americanism, Marxist atheism, Postmodernism, and technocratic utopianism - these are all different versions, different ways, of rejecting God. Our desire to eat from the tree of knowledge manifests in many ways, with each generation in competition with the prior one. They are various sides of the same set of dice.

In my own confused journey through the chaff of modern ideas, of all these, I find that the Enlightenment did more permanent damage than anything else. Why? Because that is what killed our idea of the soul and all things mysterious. It denies the supernatural. At the very least, the Reformation still held on to the soul and God, but the unbelievers told us there was no soul, and it’s hard to argue with dead people and academic scholarship that preaches more than it teaches. The bias in academia becomes glaringly obvious as we shove off from the shore further from the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a laziness in academics now that assumes historical and textual criticism is unassailable, that tradition has nothing important to say. The Reformation’s disgust with tradition led to the dumping of all capital-T “Tradition,” and if I learned anything at all from Fiddler on the Roof, it’s that Tradition is valuable.

The death of wonder and enchantment is the greatest tragedy of the last five hundred years of human history. Death of belief in the soul is tragic for atheists because even if you fell for the lie, you still have a soul and just need to get back in touch with God to have him pull the string and turn your light on again. You have to get your soul out of coat-check and write a bad review of the devil’s bar service. Recall that the devil is allowed to tempt and test us, and it is on us to muster the courage to leave the casino. That is what God wants us to do: to ask for help, to fight for faith, goodness, and truth.

If you haven’t experienced soul death, or the perception of soul death (because your soul is there even if you don’t believe it), consider yourself blessed. You are blessed with the gift of faith. Literally. You are in cooperation with God’s grace, and he has chosen you, and you have answered. Faith is the greatest gift we can receive, but it requires surrender and action.

The good news, really, the greatest news, is that soul death is not a real thing. Just as atheists mock God as a kind of Santa Claus, I mock atheists’ unbelief in the soul, because the joke is actually on them. It’s just not a funny joke, it’s sad.

You have a soul. You may not believe it. But that’s because much time is spent in convincing you that God and the devil are not real. You may accept the idea of a soul, but reject God and the devil. But all three exist.

Losing your sense of the soul is the greatest tragedy of a life. If you’ve already lost that connection, I’m sorry. Start today in earnest to get it back, beginning with the simple prayer of request: “God, help me be willing to be willing.” Or you can say, “God, I want to believe, help my unbelief.” In your de-programming from the modern cult of unbelief, that’s the diet you have to start on in order to get you back on solid spiritual food.

Because God has a sense of humor, if or when you reconnect with your soul, it will be the greatest awakening you can possibly have. With all spiritual physics, you have to do down to go up. You have to die to be reborn. This is how it works.

The non-believers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Whitman, and Jefferson severed the soul from the body. For many years, they kind of pussy-footed around the issue, with people like Descartes still clinging to belief while he killed the soul. Then later Hume and others just came out and said, “There is no soul!” That’s why we have bold atheists today just declaring it, like Yuval Harari and every middle schooler on TikTok.

If there was ever a “spirit murder,” as anti-racists like to talk about today, it is not what happens in public school with white male teachers. But it did happen by white men. They are right about that. Truly, the modern scapegoat, a.k.a. White Males, performed the greatest spirit murder of all time. But I’m not talking about what modern atheists are talking about when they talk about “spirit.” I suspect that most modern people don’t even know what a spirit is (to find out yourself, listen to this Lord of Spirits episode).

No, the real “spirit murder” happened from the white guys of the Enlightenment. The “death of God” declarations from the 19th and 20th century all came from white Europeans and Americans and Russians, so as far as I’m concerned, a spiritual genocide happened that is still being felt across the West.

But then there was a “body murder” as well, which happened in the Reformation. What do I mean by that? I’m talking about the idea of “faith alone.”

When “faith alone” became the basis for salvation, the body was cut off from the soul. So we had one group deny the soul in the Enlightenment, and the Reformers kill the body with faith alone.

How? What am I talking about?

Because we no longer needed a body. God was all in our head and heart. We can be saved just by laying on the couch. A brain in a vat kept alive by electrodes can be saved by “faith alone.” A software program can emit a string of text that fulfills the requirements of “faith alone.”

With “faith alone,” our soul doesn’t have much need for this lump of fat, muscle, blood, bone and cartilage. With faith alone, religion moved out of the physical world and took up residence in the ether, the mystical mind. There is much I’d like to go into right here about the Eucharist, but briefly, let me just say that the reason Protestant churches are dying is quite different from the drop in attendance from Catholic churches. The reason Protestant churches are shrinking is because they have always just been “Four walls and a sermon,” and if there is one thing that the internet has shined a light on is that, “sermon alone” does not make a church. It makes for a show. It’s just entertainment. Whereas physical Sacraments, like Confession and the Eucharist, require the body to come along. But faith alone requires no works, so why leave the house? Why bother, when you can watch the best preacher in America from your house? Literally, a brain hooked up to a computer can do all that is required of a Protestant. I’m sorry if it sounds cruel, but we’re not that far away from brain-vats and wetware, so let that by my prophecy. See, a brain cannot consume the Eucharist, which is why Jesus is so amazing - no matter how we try to box him in, he always rises over us.

However, let me back up from bashing the Protestants. The Reformation axe caused less damage than the Enlightenment. Again, I have not come to bury Luther, nor to praise him. To me, the loss of the soul was far more damaging, because as soon as the soul is gone, so is God, along with the devil, and so is the meaning of life.

After I had moved on from Catholicism, I wandered about, but the situation felt precarious, as if I were living on a ridge, with infinitely steep sides. Along the ridge I saw a tiny table and a chair at a mysterious little two-dimensional restaurant. The menu had two options. The first option on the menu was simple. Atheism. It had some fancy garnishes, like agnosticism or positivism, but atheism was the entree.

The second option was Faith Alone, but it came with a million options, none of which appealed. I could see other people at their little tables, trying to decide, and trying not to look into the Big Empty that was on both sides of the ridge. Many wanted to choose Faith Alone, but the description of it went on for miles. A scroll rolled out of the menu and dangled over the cliff edge. It wasn’t clear what Faith Alone was. It seemed like it could be whatever you wanted it to be, and I never saw any food delivered to those who ordered it.

Eventually, I realized that there was nothing to eat. It was a trick. There was no food. This was a two-dimensional restaurant. There was no bread at all. Everything on the Faith Alone menu was a symbol, not real food. Some people were pretending to eat from empty plates, laughing, and taking drinks from empty cups. Many ended up ordering Atheism because of the confusion, and then the waiter just came and dumped the people off their chair, over the cliff into the Big Empty. That, too, provided no food. At least falling into the abyss provided an initial thrill. But there was still no food, there was just waiting to hitting bottom and feeling lost.

It took me a long time to realize that there was a second restaurant, one with art on the walls and music, even statues (again, not for worshipping!) and there was actual food, real food there. There were four walls and a sermon, but also a meal. It was three dimensional, too. Actually, it was four dimensions. Maybe five. Honestly, I don’t even know how many dimensions there are yet. That’s the exciting thing about it. There’s just so much to discover, and it’s timeless, endless, eternal. It’s better than any drug. It’s wholeness.

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Before getting too far in this post, I want to start out with an admission. I am under no presumption of my salvation. I do not subscribe to the “Once saved, always saved” life insurance plan. To me, that is like saying, “I’m a marathon runner,” because I ran one two years ago. But I probably couldn’t even finish one today. There is work that must accompany the claim of being a marathon runner if I intend to use that label in the present tense. God may be outside of space and time, but I’m certainly not. Thus the assurance of salvation that Protestants cling to is not for me, because it doesn’t fit in with real life. It’s like saying, “I’m asleep” when I’m awake, or “I’m eating” when I’m just chewing gum. The proclamation doesn’t match the reality, especially if I’m living a life of sin and not efforting toward holiness. Wait - am I saying that works are required for salvation?

Yes. Because that’s what Jesus said. It’s even what Paul said, and it’s what the Apostles said, and it’s what the Church said for 1500 years, going through centuries of martyrdoms and suffering and arguing and hammering out doctrine before the idea sprung out of Mr. Luther.

That is the issue, of course, or one of them. How are we saved? How can we know? That’s really what drove Luther to protest. It wasn’t church corruption, because that has always existed. The idea that corruption was the cause is a myth, because corruption in the Church has been around since Judas. So please put the “paying to get to heaven” financial corruption on a shelf. Disgusting behavior by some priests was not the main cause of the protest. Not even close.

He wanted to know he was saved, so that he could live his life in peace. He was obsessed with sin and grace, with salvation. He wanted assurance. But he fell into the trap called scrupulosity. This is a problem can lead to despair, so he tried to pole vault to salvation, and solve the problem. But he ended up on the other side of despair, which is called presumption.

I get it. The moral life is hard. It’s a difficult thing to deal with sin. But working toward holiness means not obsessing over sin but picking up the Cross every day and carrying it. The thing is, we’re not complete with this life until the last breath, and along the way, we have to avoid presumption and despair, the twin pillars of error, represented perfectly in the two brothers in the story of the Prodigal Son.

With faith, hope, and charity, I aim to work toward being in a state of grace, as best as I can, through the Sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist. This working toward grace becomes the great “undo button,” the “un-trade,” where I sent Herschel Walker back to the Dallas Cowboys, in a sense. The good news is that with daily conversion, I can undo that trade every morning, every moment. Rather than be a cause for despair, it’s a pattern for living that works. Faith and works, body and soul. They go together like peas and carrots.

I returned to God and found a manner to live that removed the fear of death, making it not a cause for worry but a future occasion that brings hope. So much of our underlying fears are of death. The fear of hell is real, since Jesus spoke of it about thirteen times. But death and the void affects us all in different ways. This is why we wear fig leaves.

We wear fig leaves of wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Why are we wearing them in the first place? Because we fear death and the unknown. Happy Christians seem so odd, or even irritating, because death is no longer fearful to them. They don’t make sense because they have indeed pole-vaulted the main problem of life. You sometimes have to wonder, “Do they want to die?” Well…in a way, yes, they do, because it means going home. But the gift of this life, even with its struggles and pain, is the way of the Cross, and you cannot get to heaven unless you go through the Cross. This life is our second chance after the fall in the Garden to choose the tree of life. I often wonder why video game fanatics are not on-fire Christians, because figuring out the game of life comes through Jesus. He has the codes and weapons that we need in the spiritual life. Forget Fortnite or Call of Duty, this life, both materially and spiritually, has enough slings and arrows to dodge and fight against. Having Jesus alongside to slay all dragons makes everything suddenly exciting.

I recently met someone who was living at a homeless shelter, who has terminal cancer. She lives in pain, in a terrible situation, who has battled addiction her whole life. No one would envy her situation. But she told me how good that God had been to her. She was overjoyed that she might get her own apartment for this year, with her own bathroom. When you meet people with true faith like her, and then you go interact with someone who has a beautiful house and family but is miserable and faithless, you know which person has been given the real gift. It’s not money. It’s not stuff. It’s not status. None of that matters if you have faith, which is why Jesus said that the prostitutes and tax collectors will recognize the kingdom of heaven before the wealthy and the Pharisees. The “winners” of this world are the ones that lose in the end. And that it by choice. Free will is granted to us for this very reason. What we trade, what we put in our hearts where faith should be, are all the crappy Herschel Walker trades of this world.

The Church and its teachings provides the greatest framework for living that I have found after searching through worldviews and trying them on like I was thumbing through racks of clothing at Macy’s or a Goodwill store. Nothing comes close. The pattern of life provided in the Church makes sense, but only if you live it. Striving for holiness may seem foolish, but only if you never try it - and I mean really try it, not just mail in a half-effort.

The word “orthodox” scares people because it sounds radical, but it means “right path.” It even refers to feet in its root word. These “oppressive rules” are not intended to make you suffer. They are to help you walk toward God, to move away from sin, and toward grace.

Now, I have much to say about the other worldviews that I tried on. Stoicism seemed a close second to Christianity, but without Jesus becomes a miserable facade to pretend to like. Epicureanism had the same problem. Atheism - that takes more faith than Christianity. What’s most interesting to me now is how I got off the orthodox trail in the first place.

Oddly enough, I was steered away from faith at a Catholic college, almost like I had paid for it to happen. But interestingly, in my falling away from Catholicism, Protestantism didn’t attract me. Not at all, as the “faith alone” felt too easy and “scripture alone” (or “sola scriptura”) was too corruptible so that I knew immediately that I could make Jesus whoever I wanted him to be. After all, I was the authority. John Calvin ran into that problem almost instantly and sort of made himself a new Pope. You can even see how Luther’s denomination have splintered in so many ways because if you don’t like the current interpretation, you can just as easily make up a new one, just like Luther and Calvin did. (Here I should refer readers to my series About Uranus which covers how gods and religions come to be, and why Abraham is so important.)

So, seeing other worldviews as unsatisfactory, I went straight for the answer of mighty Science, just like many young people are doing today. Unfortunately, I didn’t even get a funeral for my spiritual death, although I did pass out quite a few times from alcohol use and may have missed it. Those blackouts always concerned me, for what I might have missed, or lost, only to learn much later that I had lost something, at least temporarily, and it was my soul. But turning back to God made me realize that the devil must give it back when you want to stop sinning. The devil is like both a coat-check service and bartender who holds onto your soul and pours drinks until you are ready to leave the party of sin. But he can’t lock you in forever. He must let you leave, even though you have to fight him to get out the door. Hotel California is only a song, not a real place, but the devil would very much like you to believe you can never leave him. (That is, once again, the sin of despair).

I have not come to bash Martin Luther, because he was right about some things, like corruption in the Church, and wrong about other things, like “faith alone” and “scripture alone.” Those two ideas are awful, no doubt, and I have much to say about it, but his initial motives were right. He despised corruption in the Church, but there has always been corruption. The Reformation was not about corruption. That’s a myth. Corruption was part of it, but corruption has always been part of the Church, just as it is in any human organization or family. But in starting the Reformation, he released far more corruption of doctrine. Luther was a very smart man, but you can see how it all unravelled and grew beyond it’s original scope, especially since he was a true defender of the Eucharist. Calvin was brilliant as well. However, there are many smart people in every age, but that doesn’t make them correct on everything. St. Augustine was wiser than Luther or Calvin, and he stuck to the Apostolic teachings. He recognized the need for the authority of interpretation, because obviously if we all become our own Pope, then Jesus just becomes a sidekick rather than our master.

Because of Luther’s great step into the world of sola fide, and even more so from John Calvin, today in America the word Christianity means whatever you want it to mean. If you want to handle snakes and have orgies and call it Christian, who is anyone to judge? Sola scriptura! The arguments of slavery came from the anti-Catholic, heavily Protestant world of early America. How? Because you can read the Bible however you life with sola scriptura. Plus, you’re saved no matter what. Today we have the sexual unravelling, which will be seen in the same way that we view 19th century horrors today.

This explosion of resurrected heresies has happened because of the Reformation. A thousand denominations has helped spread the word of God, but it has also flattened the message of Jesus. The Reformation spread the word of God not like light but like butter. We are all our own authority now. Unbelievers with their doctrine of “reason alone” could not have pulled this off. Now the doctrines of the Apostles gets conflated and mashed up with every fundamentalist and Jehovah’s Witness and Prosperity Gospel churches’ interpretation of the Bible. Copeland and Osteen are the bad examples of faith that drive people away from faith.

I try to make sure to use the word Catholic so that people know what I mean, since the word “Christianity” has been smashed into the atomic level, such that every Christian is his own authority now. What’s strange about this is that the two thousand years of trying to understand the life of Christ is cast out for our own interpretation. As I’ve said, every age has had brilliant people, but brilliance alone is not a reason to follow someone to false teaching. Using the word Catholic ensures that most people I meet probably recoil with horror immediately. It’s like a modern leprosy to those basking in the light of modern media, but given that Jesus assured us that his followers would be hated, it pretty much confirms that I’m on the right track.

But there’s a funny thing about that, too. People don’t really hate the Church. They think they do. But they hate the cartoon version of the Church that they have in their mind, which looks like a construction paper, glue, and crayon creation from kindergarten class.

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One day it dawned on me, after the long journey of having fallen away and then returning to the faith of a child.

I made the worst trade imaginable.

I had doubts about a few people and some political issues, so I ditched God. I had doubts about something of this world, so I turned away the Creator of it. I saw the faults of some human beings or current events or pain, so I decided to throw out the baby with the bathwater. After all, I wanted knowledge, so I put science in God’s place.

I thought I’d made a good trade.

In hindsight, this is baffling to me. The Herschel Walker trade, which destroyed the Minnesota Vikings for years, was a better deal than what I got in return for my trade. Why? Because I didn’t even get an aging football player, I got a false freedom and false self, or in other words, literally nothing in return. I traded wonder for nihilism. I traded mystery for a fake certainty. At least the Minnesota Vikings had that first glorious day where Herschel Walker ran for monster yardage over the Green Bay Packers, before everything fell apart. The Dallas Cowboys used the trade as the cornerstone to building one of the greatest sports dynasties in NFL history. (But enough on modern sports idolatry before I digress again, let’s move on).

I suddenly knew why there were two trees in the Garden of Eden. One was for knowledge, and one was for life. Somehow I made a bad choice. I passed over the “tree of life” in favor of the “tree of knowledge.”

Out of the ground the LORD God made grow every tree that was delightful to look at and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil…

God said, “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat; when you eat from it you shall die.” (Genesis 2:9-16)

What a shame. To think that we were allowed to eat from the tree of life…and chose otherwise. We traded life for knowledge. This has to be one of the worst trades in history.

The “tree of life” and the “bread of life” seemed to leap out at me from Genesis and the Gospel. It’s like we were given a second chance at life. We were shown a way back to that first Fall, where a new choice could be made by each person, and not just Adam. Once again, we could choose. We could trade that Bread of Life. Or we could believe. We could eat it, and believe it, and live.

That is exactly why the world caught fire with faith in Jesus. He brought back the tree of life, and, oddly, he was the fruit. He offers a new life, and I’m using the present tense on purpose. The presence of a living God is the only one that makes a difference, because a living God can be known and interacted with. A relationship can be formed. Once that occurs, every single instant of your life then changes, because once you believe and eat the Bread of Life, every decision matters and you are no longer just a mind, or just a soul, or just a body (a clump of cells). You are fully alive, activated and full of meaning. You get to undo your personal Herschel Walker trade that the Minnesota Vikings never could!

Clearly the message of Jesus has a staying power unlike anything else, and it’s because of this discovery, this re-do, this leveling-up. With the Enlightenment, the focus on the human, rather than the divine, took giant leaps forward, in revolt against that strange success of Christianity, which had produced the world’s greatest art, music, and architecture. Collectively we’ve chose the tree of knowledge over faith. Faith leads to life, and knowledge leads to the enslavement by our desires.

Like most things, success leads to pride and corruption. Familiarly breeds contempt. The message of Christ became so familiar that it bored us, I suppose, so we sought knowledge. Seeing bad examples of Christians flattened out the message. Seeing hypocrites preach morality extracted the gunpowder from the cannon. It’s no wonder that God says, “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.” (Rev 3:15-16) Just as lukewarm coffee lacks it’s reason for existence, so does the Church. The joy of discovering this source of life cannot be served lukewarm.

Given that human beings have always made up the Church’s body, it’s no surprise that pride, envy, greed, lust, and such things infected the Church whenever it came too close to power. Also, these things invaded whenever the church became undemanding of its followers. No one really wants an undemanding Catholicism. It’s ridiculous to watch if it’s not demanding. It’s sad to observe the lukewarm Catholic who is indifferent to the Eucharist, indifferent to Confession, indifferent to the Resurrection. But it is a thing of beauty and joy to see humble man or woman living in observance, who approaches the faith with reverence, obedience, and the faith of a child. If you don’t believe me, you probably haven’t met any yet. These people do exist, and the joy is real.

There is nothing appealing at all of a Church with drunk, horny, and obese followers who live a life of debauchery while they store up treasures on earth. I’m sorry if that sounds crude. There is great appeal, however, to a Church where the rich and poor worship side by side, who fast and pray, who believe in chastity, and who stand equally in line for Confession and the Eucharist. There is great appeal where there are joyful believers working for the kingdom of God, even when - especially when - they realize that their efforts are pitiful compared to what God can do.

That is why you have the repeated cycle of reformers like St. Benedict and St. Anthony of Egypt, and a thousand others, who retreat to a desert or a cave or a monastery to start over. When the culture and the Church turn away from God, God calls his sheep and they hear his voice. The message gets lost in the culture and needs a reset button to return it to what made it grow in the first place, and that is the demands of orthodoxy that led nearly every Apostle to a brutal end.

Once I started to read more from the early era of Christianity, it became clear that what I had known as Christianity did not match up. Not at all. Later, I found that these people still exist - quite a few of them, I just hadn’t met them yet. The undemanding faith I observed around me was not what the early church taught or experienced.

In addition, I learned that this idealized world of Greece and Rome was left behind for a reason. There was nothing ideal about the pre-Christian world. It was a brutal slugfest of might-makes-right. Something better had been found in the Trinitarian God, in Jesus, than that of the serial rapist god named Zeus, who was a useless fertility storm-god. The will-to-power, that awful idea that German philosophers resurrected from the past, was not just a bad product that the Romans were pitching, it was a bad product in every age, wherever it was applied. The will-to-power is always pitched as a solution to our problems, as if it would get our dishes clean, but it’s not a solution at all, it’s a pure acid that eats through whatever it touches.

Other religions in the ancient world didn’t offer anything close to what Jesus did. The same goes for our modern religions. The reason Jesus won over the world is because he has a far better story than Buddhism, Islam, humanism or anything else. But it’s much more than a pitch or a product. He, himself, is the product. He is way, the truth, and the life. That is what is so radically strange about Jesus. That is the whole point of every article on this site/podcast. It’s just so odd, all of it. The pitch, the demo, the purchase, the application, the usage, and the result. All of it is strange. And all of it works as advertised. It does everything. It just works. What else can I say? He is The Way. In his person is the Truth. Through him we get new Life.

(Sorry Mandalorian fans, Jesus was referred to as “The Way” long before Disney tried to make it a Star Wars thing, with proof in Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22. But, then again, cultural appropriation and fake plastic faces is Disney’s whole game, so nothing to see here…moving on.)

In the last few centuries, we were fish swimming in a water called Christendom. We’ve taken for granted that our current ideas sprung to life out of the Renaissance or the Romantics or modern science. But it’s actually the opposite. All of those things only sprung forth because they drank from the river of life. Our modern ideas could have only come to life in the world that Christianity created. We look at the flaws and call it ugly, without realizing how far we have come. Worse, we look at the flaws and lump all Christian actions over the last 500 years into a blob called “Christianity” when there were clearly denominations poisoning the well. We pretend that faithfulness in relationships, helping foreigners, building hospitals, educating youth, being humble, and loving your neighbors came about in spite of Christianity. But the truth is that none of these things existed in the ancient world because of the lack of Christianity. All of the things we celebrate as fruits of modernity only exist because Jesus came here to show us how to live, and inspired joy in millions of his followers to love their wives, to pray for enemies, to heal the sick, and feed the poor.

None of those things came about from any other ideology, except for Judaism. The reason people hate reading the Old Testament is because they think the laws of Israel were brutal and cruel, but in reality they were by far the most humane in the ancient world, not only to women, but also widows, orphans, and foreigners. And Jesus put all that in hyperdrive as he corrected and encouraged all of the good things that modern atheists and agnostics assume came from Enlightenment thinkers.

Taking this Christendom for granted has brought us to a strange place, where we speak like Puritans but sin like Samson. We want our world to be like Burger King, where their slogan is, “Have it your way.” But there is only one king, even over Burger King, who I now consider to be as significant as any other President or Prime Minister. The real King is the one who created Burger King and every other atom in this universe.

While we swim in the waters of Christendom, we have started to deny there is water. First, the mistake of “faith alone” clipped the wings of authentic body and soul Christianity, and now even Faith itself has became the taboo, as many have switched over to “sola ratio,” or “Reason alone.” That is the new sola that our age manufactured. We are like goldfish speaking with our mouths full of water and pretending there is no such thing as water. Faith cannot be admitted, not at work, not at school, not in polite company. Why? Because it means signing our names to superstition and belief in the supernatural. No, we can’t do that. That would be a betrayal of modernity, where psychology and sociology has all the answers, as long as you’re willing to take enough pills and shell out for therapy and adhere to corporate human resources doctrine. Admitting you believe in ghosts and spirits and the Devil is social suicide. Death is, once again, something to fear and by reason alone we must stave off that monster.

We made a crappy trade. Because death no longer brought fear. We only have this life in the “reason alone” worldview, thus we have to save ourselves. It’s always the same problem. Control. We want control, because we can’t surrender to God and trust in the promises of Christ. That is the Herschel Walker trade. We choose knowledge and this life instead of trusting in God, instead of moving back toward the tree of eternal life.

I fell for all the modern fruit. The sales pitch and demo really took me in, and I bought the product. I presumed that everyone from the year 30 A.D. and onward, until we finally got to the Renaissance and Voltaire and Newton and Martin Luther, was little more than a God-fearing idiot under the cruel yoke of power-hungry Popes and bully Kings.

Now, that is not entirely untrue. Corrupt Popes and Christian kings certainly existed, and will exist again. They are human beings. The falls in the Church have been significant and should not be swept under a rug, ever, as the Church must be held to a higher standard because it is the Body of Christ in this world.

The failings of individuals and leaders come as no surprise, however, at least if you understand what “The Fall of Man” actually means. Most people don’t today, as groupings of people get assigned flaws like elitist, racist, ignorant, hateful. The not-so-hidden secret of Original Sin is that everyone has it. All humans have flaws. All people abuse power. All people find scapegoats and cheerleaders, and the only person that didn’t was Jesus, so we try to imitate him. Some, or many, have used God as a means to malicious ends. I’m talking about the televangelists and charlatans that prey on souls under the guise of Christianity. But that doesn’t negate the reason for faith. God exists whether or not someone commits a crime or has a flaw that we don’t appreciate. That’s where we make the bad trade. A clerk who steals from the cash register doesn’t mean we have to burn the whole store down. Or for a more crude example, a pimple on a nose doesn’t mean the nose should be cut off, or that all noses should be removed because they may get a pimple.

The faith and morals of the church still stand, and are true. They are right and just. Time does not alter these truths. What the Church lays out as the guidance on faith and morals remains true, and for those angry about the Church’s position on these matters, the Pope and the priests are simply echoing the words of Jesus and the tradition of the Apostles. Everyone likes Jesus, as long as he doesn’t demand anything from them. But he does demand action from us.

Popular opinion does not alter these truths. No matter what modern French philosophers and internet influencers tell you, the purpose of sex is to create children, and marriage is a divine Sacrament. If you believe Jesus is the son of God, fully divine, and fully human, you have to actually read the words that he says and not invent interpretations. Jesus and the Apostles took care of that for us. The urge to twist and manipulate the words only happens because we want to sin.

Those who dispute what the Gospel says, and the Apostolic interpretation of it, they will all be forgotten within a century. Maybe one or two names will stick around, but all of the noise is much ado about nothing. If you find your way through the multi-media mine field to the truth, and see Christ as God, then all of the hubbub no longer matters. But the reality is that God will find you, and if you are a seeker of truth, and I believe many atheists and agnostics are exactly that, if they read the Gospel with an open mind and heart, and ask for willingness to be willing, God will call to them. But it requires action on our part to cooperate with God’s grace. We are the ones that must lay our guns on the table, and undress, and turn to face God, full naked, flaws and all.

Of course, we will all be judged within a century, and God will take care of the judging. I am as concerned for myself as any atheist, due to many sins committed, and even confessed some still linger and bother me. While the Sacrament assures me those things are forgiven, I believe that the effect of those sins still dart about the world, for which I will be purified “to the last penny” in purgatory (see Mt 5:26).

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One great thing about our age is that humanism and scientism have sown the seeds for the return of faith. Let me explain.

One of the mantras of modern education, especially in America, is: “Question Everything.” This has become a commandment, right after the first commandment of “Believe in Yourself.” Surely, the first commandment of modernity is “Thou shalt have no gods before Thy Self.”

Through life experience, study, and observing others who follow this commandment, who believe in themselves, I have found this first modern commandment to be a tragic falsehood. Twenty years of personal research proved it to me. I really, really tested that commandment, and believing in myself led to every one of my problems. So that one had to go.

But the second commandment of “Question Everything” remained stuck in my head for a while, and since God gave us brains to use, I did. Instead of subscribing to what academics and celebrities said, I started looking beyond what had been spoon-fed to me my whole life, starting with the history of the early Church.

Reading material from the early Church is extremely enlightening, much more than anything I learned from the Enlightenment thinkers.

In fact, because the first commandment of our time is false, this second commandment of questioning all that we know, led me right back to questioning all of the things I learned from teachers, professors, television, and even coaches. The funny thing about commandments is that there is an order to them, and badly ordered commandments make the whole structure crumble.

Growing up, we are forced to listen to the sales pitch and watch the demo for the product that educators and screen magicians want us to buy. All children must go through this, even through their college years, and the aim is like any other sales pitch: to conform our minds and thoughts and ideas to the pitch and the demo. The Church once held this role of indoctrination of children, but the government took it over, really wresting it away from believers entirely, and making sure that anyone with faith was locked out of the school building. The new sheriff in town didn’t believe, and it was imperative that parents or children that did believe, keep quiet about it, and like every modern HR department, the order to “shutup” is done using a very honeyed voice, with sugary arguments and niceties. However, the result is the same as if a drill sergeant has shouted it in your face. You are not to discuss faith, because the supernatural is not real, and speaking of such things will not be tolerated - not in public schools!

The reason for the shunning of the supernatural is because that product has attributes that the school’s product lacks. That product may appeal and detract from the mainstream sales pitch and demo. In the sales world, salespeople study “kill sheets” which is a list of arguments to kill questions about a competitor’s product. I’ve seen these kill sheets and added notes to them, about why my company’s products are superior, and that choosing the other company’s product surely leads to the road to ruin. This is basically how apologetics works for Christians, Protestants, and atheists as well, where one side has it’s “kill sheets” when someone starts suggesting another option, like for example, “What about Mormonism? I’ve heard that’s good.” The salesperson goes to his kill sheet and says, “Yes, that is an option. Here’s fifteen reasons why it’s not for you.”

The point of having a public education is supposed to be about enabling a workforce to build a strong nation. But it’s become more about buying the school’s product. As I said in a long post before, you will be indoctrinated to something. That is unavoidable. Moreover, after your indoctrination is complete, much of your life will be figuring it out and wondering if what you were indoctrinated into is the actual truth. Most people will never even learn how far down the indoctrination rabbit-hole they are, unless they turn off their devices and take a hard look back at the guidance they received. In case you are unaware, the purpose of the devices and the dancing images is precisely so that you do not begin to ask those questions. The commandment of “Believe in yourself” precludes the second commandment of “Question Everything” if in your questioning you come to question the first commandment. This is kind of like Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics.

First Law

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Likewise, in the laws of modern indoctrination, since the human self is a god, questioning everything is permitted, so long as questioning the principle of “Self as god” is not questioned. There is even a third law, which I have to marvel at. Asimov was an atheist, and he kind of nailed the worldview that I was taught.

Third Law

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In these laws, a human is sacred and the robot is a slave. The sacred thing must be protected at all costs, even if suicide of the slave is needed. Finally, obedience to all orders from the sacred things must be followed. Likewise, the first commandment of the “Self is god” is unassailable by the lesser laws, such as “Question Everything.”

The goal of any indoctrination is to build a wall around you, so that you become a disciple who will not even consider other products. Because if you buy the product that the pitch and demo are indoctrinating you into, you will use it for the rest of your life. If you believe that the Self is a god, then the hope is that you will stick with that idea for the rest of your life.

It’s pitched to us as the only option, like fear-based advertising for life insurance. “Believe in yourself” is pitched in the same way that a salesman will suggest that there’s nothing else in the warehouse and this is the only one in stock, so you’d better take it; and that the other models have been discontinued and are all recalled as defective. That is exactly the message taught about Catholicism - that it’s no longer for sale, because it stopped working for people.

The odd thing about Catholicism is that it was never pitched or demonstrated in the same way to me. There is no smoke and mirrors, even if there is incense sometimes at Mass. It’s all laid out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the Church doors are often not even locked, even when no one is around. It was the opposite of robotic. There was nothing coercive about it. There is not even any trickery. It’s not a car that is being sold, it’s something different. It’s not my “Self” being sold to me, it’s bigger.

To be human, "man's response to God by faith must be free, and. . . therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act." "God calls men to serve him in spirit and in truth. Consequently they are bound to him in conscience, but not coerced. . . This fact received its fullest manifestation in Christ Jesus." Indeed, Christ invited people to faith and conversion, but never coerced them. "For he bore witness to the truth but refused to use force to impose it on those who spoke against it. His kingdom. . . grows by the love with which Christ, lifted up on the cross, draws men to himself." (CCC 160)

So once I bought the product of the “Self,” after high school and college the product, I had to put that product into usage. I suppose I knew early on that the product from the pitch and the demo wasn’t working very well, but teachers and elders and newsmen and movie stars kept assuring me that this was the way. Perhaps I was just using the product incorrectly. I just wasn’t believing in myself enough. Quite honestly, everything did go well for me, but luckily I had one glaring flaw in alcohol usage that revealed to me the gaping hole in my indoctrination of the “Self as god.”

Once the professors faded away, and I finally started to turn off the screens around me, the product I had bought proved to be a real lemon. For all of us, life is the proving ground. Life is not a book or a lab experiment or a demonstration. It is real. Bad ideas and bad patterns of living surface eventually. They cannot be hidden forever. No matter how shiny, no matter how many people are nodding at you in assurance, a bad product tattles on itself. When you go to use the product that promised strength and direction on a dark and cold night, and it doesn’t work, you know the truth because you are sitting in the dark and cold, and the “Self as god” can do nothing. The Self proves to be a useless god.

But it wasn’t only personal experience that showed the broken springs in the lessons of humanism and scientism. The problems were everywhere. I actually tried to ignore the obvious problems, because I wanted to believe my indoctrination. But observing macro issues happening in the wider world, which seemed to mirror my personal micro-revelations, I saw the same gaping hole happening on a larger scale that I discovered on the dark and cold night .

Many of our current problems, particularly the threat of nuclear war, the disintegration of the family, the numerous eco-disasters, and the Covid virus itself, are a direct result of our choosing the way of Prometheus over the way of Christ. (Yes, I for one am done pretending that the virus didn’t come from a lab. That “wet market” pitch didn’t win me over from the start.)

There was no doubt that a free-will choice happened before I was born, on a national scale. I use the Atom Bomb as a point of inflection. It’s a fine explosion to mark the change in direction, where technology became a god to us. Honestly, I think the fire started much earlier, even way before 1776. The explosion happened when we ate the apple or separated from apes - however you want to interpret it, the difference between animals and humans is clear, and the “Fall of Man” is the best answer available. You can deny God all you like. The fact of sin remains, and is truly the one provable fact in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. There was a Fall. Something is wrong with humans. Everyone has a flaw, a struggle, a dysfunction. Even Billy Joel acknowledges this in his history lesson called, We Didn’t Start the Fire.

So who did start the fire?

Prometheus did. Or he is the one of the stories we use for where our problems came from. Sometimes his theft is portrayed as good thing. He was the ancient symbol of technology and human advancement. In the Bible, it’s Cain, whose descendants built the first city and weapons. Both of these guys believed in themselves. When he chose to steal the fire from the gods, Prometheus certainly believed in himself. He may have even questioned why he shouldn’t have fire. Oddly enough, questioning everything is exactly how the serpent in the garden lured Eve into eating from the forbidden tree.

And even if Prometheus’ intentions were good (I’m unconvinced), those scientists in Los Alamos who tinkered with physics to produce the atom bomb also believed they had good intentions. But like Prometheus, what was loosed into the world led to far greater problems, the biggest of which was fear and doubt. Fear and doubt lead to disenchantment. Fear of man overtakes fear of God. Doubt over God leads to faith in the self, or groupings of selves that will remove the fear.

That was the mistake. And it’s a huge error. It’s the error that leads to all others. Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Mt 10:28) The mantra of “Self as god” and “Question Everything” gets its wings in every age, just as surrender to Christ does. Affluence doesn’t save you from fear. Pleasure doesn’t either. Power? Not even close. If you have power, you are more fearful than the person with nothing. Because with the atom bomb, the United States had found power. But so did others, and it led to a fearful era in the fifties, leading to the hedonism of the sixties, the aimlessness of the seventies, the greed of the eighties, the nihilism of the nineties, and the internet age of narcissism and isolation today.

And now we need a way out. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner, a lonely corner, where the light of our device only lasts as long as the battery.

Technology went into hyperdrive and the message of the “Self as god” became louder and louder, because the technology carried the message, suggesting it at every waking moment, asking us the whole time the classic phrases from Genesis 3: “Did God really say that? Are you sure God said that?” and “He just doesn’t want you to become like him.”

Thus came the long march to meaninglessness that Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre and other philosophers saw coming. Meaninglessness is simple to explain. It’s Godlessness. Meaninglessness happens because the Self is not a real god. It’s a fake.

The funny thing, however, of all this messaging and indoctrination is this: questioning everything is exactly what will lead you right back to the truth, and that truth is God. The truth is that the self is not-God. As the saying goes, the farther you run from God, the more likely you’ll run right into the arms of God.

The goals of the Renaissance, in its attempt to re-invigorate the world and ideas of classical Greece and Rome, were human-focused rejections of the long, successful, sustainable journey of Christianity through almost every culture in the world. The success of Christianity is hard to fathom or explain, given what it appears to offer externally, which is self-denial and humility. Its great sales pitch was the life of Christ and the demonstrations came through martyrdoms, which hardly seem appealing to humans who shun any and all discomfort and pain. Yet it drew people to Jesus. Self-denial instead of self-determination drew people in droves, because they saw something worth living for, and death, the great fear, no longer mattered because something greater was being given to all.

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I bought into a kind of mentality for a few decades where I would shake my head at the portrait of the faithful Christians as a bunch of superstitious, inbred fools. For quite some time, I could not revert to belief, because it meant letting go of many of my assumptions and biases. I wanted certainty. I had ingested from years of education, television, and gobs of self-help new-age fluff. Having lived some forty years, it became increasingly clear that a long campaign to bash and re-write Christian history has been the motive of many of my educators and most of the media that I’ve consumed.

There was a clear villain, especially in public school and (oddly enough) the Catholic university I attended for one year before transferring to a public university. I lost my faith at a Catholic university. Today I feel like I paid $14,000 in my freshman year to have my soul amputated, which was an unexpected surgery.

The enemy in classrooms was the Church. It wasn’t always said directly, and was often more like a flank attack on every single teaching of the Church. But behind the “teachings” was always the Catholic Church. I put “teachings” in quotes because most of what I was taught turned out to be very loose on details and often directly dishonest. The accusation was not always made directly at the Church, but when the direct inverse of faith and morals was being taught, the wind from my professors, which I was paying for, was set on full sail toward anti-religion. Honestly, I have to wonder for a few if it wasn’t kind of a thrill to teach history or philosophy at a Catholic university and actively try to kill a student’s faith. Everything that the Church held sacred was discarded, and seemed almost a part of the core curriculum, literally, on nearly every doctrine of faith and morals. This may sound like exaggeration, but if I have enough time I will go into it further, and I have covered it in some degree in prior posts.

Obviously it wasn’t only the college experience, but television and the internet as well, and my own need to rebel and get buck-wild as much as possible, from Thursday to Sunday night if I could swing it. Four dollars bought a plastic cup at “all you can drink” house-parties, and with a fake ID, three beers for a buck at the bars. I could get hammered on the cheap. I took school seriously, but the extra-curricular of drinking was a close second. I often wonder why I even went to college because I could have learned to program and code myself, but instead I paid a lot of money to read books (that I could have read at home) and lost my faith and meaning in life. But I do love learning and reading, so I lapped it up, but the fruit of my education was full of worms for a long, long time, until I finally slipped on my own rotten banana peel and hit bottom.

Somehow I was seeking answers and oblivion at the same time, and by the end of my freshman year, I had all the answers I needed. There was no God. Jesus was just a human teacher, like Buddha, or Bill Nye. The divine never broke through into our world. Miracles were ludicrous. The universe has always existed, and evolution explains it all. Now it was time for Metallica and shots of Blue 100 and Aftershock, Jag-bombs, straight whiskey. Eat, drink, and get wrecked, for tomorrow we die! Oh - and make money. Everyone assured me that money was very important, and that my American pursuit of happiness really, really needed money.

So I really only saw oblivion and self-determination as the road ahead to any kind of meaning. And that is how I purchased the product that the culture and college were selling.

There was a sales pitch happening with much fanfare and intellectualizing and it felt a lot like how I came to take my first drink, which was by peer pressure and wanting to be cool and counter-cultural. While the cheerleaders of the modern world assured me that “justification by STEM alone” and the unending song of “Believe in yourself” promised a glorious future kingdom on earth, the progress toward the utopia, whether by science, humanism, capitalism or socialism, didn’t match the sales pitch. In the end, the shiny product I bought to be cool turned out to be Ford Pinto that exploded when life rear-ended it.

When you are selling a product, you craft a story. This is critical in sales, and academics and business people have gone to great lengths to craft and hone their tales, and if you don’t think so, if you turn on a radio, TV, or open your phone, within seconds you will be ingesting a crafted story, professionally made just for your eyes, ears, tongue, and stomach to desire.

However, the crafted sales pitch is only one-third of making a sale. The second part is the demonstration, and the third part is proving it. Now, a “demo” can be every bit of smoke and mirrors as the pitch, and often is. For a company I once worked for, I was tasked with creating a “demonstration” for a keynote speaker for our companies largest annual event. To show how great our software was, we created an app that showed meters and gauges wobbling and measuring temperature and wind speed. It looked amazing, useful, cutting-edge.

And it was all fake.

We used fake data and the app was connected to no real world hardware, no wires, no live data. For another demo, I had to create a long series of click-through screens to show how well our product worked, with transitions to mimic a mouse click, so that the presenter could appear to be using the actual app. But there was no app. It was all just images appearing to look like the application. The demo was a magic trick. But it looked good. When a keynote speech is delivered, nothing can go wrong in the slides or demonstration. That was made clear to me, hence the need for the fake app and the click-through images. Nothing could go wrong. Even with the fake data, I was assured that if the demo errored or failed somehow, I would be looking for a new job.

When I left that company, I joined one that didn’t play the same games and it felt much more authentic, because we were showing and selling the actual product, without smoke and mirrors, or as little smoke and mirrors as possible. Customers appreciated this. Employees appreciated this. Being a “demo-dawg” means having to dance in front of the customer, but it’s far more enjoyable when what you are showing actually exists and if it fails, you speak honestly about the problem.

Authenticity: that is what people really want today, but the smoke-and-mirrors of the screens attract us like moths to the bug zapper.

The third part of selling is the proof that it works. This is of course the most important part of all, because repeat sales do not happen with this piece, because in the end it’s the only thing that really matters.

A good salesperson can sell a piece a junk one time, but then he had better move on to the next town, because the jig is up when the product fails. Charlatans get caught, because reality always test and proves out the claims of both the story pitch and the demonstration.

Remember the old Castrol GTX oil commercials? They showed engines running at high RPMs with a low quality oil. Of course, the engine with the lesser oil seized up in a dramatic clunk (while an engine with Castrol oil clearly would have kept hammering the piston like a sewing machine). The story was that Castrol protected your engine “from viscosity and thermal breakdown", which turned on every car guy and armchair engineer, and presumably even men who had no idea what those terms meant. (These were shown during NFL football games, as the target audience was men and boys who liked gladiator games and powerful engines as a substitute for their own insecurities and feelings of powerlessness…but I digress.)

The demonstration in the commercial recorded engine breakdown at high RPMs, which made for a compelling story for the Castrol claim, which was: “Our oil is high quality and performs under pressure.” But the real test was always in the real world, not the advertisement or the demo. No one knows what engine was used, or if the gauges were even real. In other words, to keep selling a product, there has to be something more than words, more than just the demo. It must actually do what is promised. Marketing acts as the prophet, demonstrators (a.k.a. “demo-dawgs”) perform the sign, and the usage is the proof, the fulfillment of the prophecy. If the ball is dropped anywhere along the way through this gauntlet of sales, you don’t make the second sale. Sure, for a while you can fool people, because companies can and do step up their marketing and sales games, but it cannot last forever. The cracks eventually show. We consumers may be stupid, but we are not completely stupid. Sometimes a failed idea that sold well can even take a few centuries to play out, as the marketing story sounds so good you just can’t believe your eyes that it failed. (Here I am alluding directly to the stories and pitches of Karl Marx, the absurd demonstrations of Potemkin Villages, and the proof of the utter and complete failures of organizing a society around anything that even touches his ideas. Yet, we want to try it again…but I digress.)

We are seeing the cracks today in four ideas that have dominated the past two centuries: socialism, capitalism, humanism, and scientism. All four of these, in their actual testing, have proven flawed beyond repair.

The reason is simple.

They all push God off the stage so that the sacred Self can be the center of all things. That alone is the flaw.

These ideas in these ideologies alone are not bad, but anything that fails to include God as the highest good will fall into disorder. There is no other way. Order and disorder come from a cosmic, theological law of spirituality. There are laws of physics, yes. Then there are the higher laws: the laws of spirits. God is the author of life, of this book, so he chooses the ending, and any mere mortal that fails to follow the Greeks advice to “Know thyself” is writing himself clear out of the book. Knowing thyself means knowing humility before God, and as I’ve said before, most people don’t seem to have a problem with that idea. Humility before God and thanksgiving to God is the point of religion, the purpose of all prayer, but we so easily forget that.

Most people today would say I’m wrong. They would say that the one thing that has proven flawed is Catholicism. It’s backwards, they say, forgetting that universities and hospitals came to be without it. It’s sexist, they say, ignoring that women make up more of the Church and had more to do with starting the Church than any other religion in history. It’s racist, they say, while it is in every country with every type of person imaginable who join together daily worldwide for Mass.

They accuse it of many things. Its enemies are everywhere. But what I’ve come to learn is that few people, not even most Catholics, understand Catholicism very well. Much of what is known covers only the scandals of the church itself, which it certainly has its share of. Most people think it’s just a list of rules, for a bunch of guilt-ridden fools. But by far the most divisive and false beliefs about the Church come from active campaigns of misinformation, libel, and slander. And lastly, millions of fallen away Catholics had a bad example as their icon of faith, who screamed and hollered and obviously misunderstood the whole thing, too. The common chorus is “I am a victim of Catholic Guilt.”

Dear readers: Catholic guilt is not a doctrine of the Church. Joy, however, is. What a shame that no one knows this. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the word guilt appears four times. The word joy appears forty-six times. Something has been lost, or misinterpreted, in the translation and delivery of the Church teaching.

Here’s my point: no one ever built a cathedral out of guilt. No one ever did the unnecessary toil of lugging massive amounts of stone across the ground in order to hang up a set of rules on the wall. No one built statues or made sacred art or wrote hymns because of their guilt. All of these things were done for the joy that Christ gives to his followers.

This association of guilt with the Church is the greatest tragedy of modern times, because it’s so utterly incorrect, and it is largely a manufactured fib that has now been passed down generations. People who treat the faith like just another Elk’s Club or Costco membership have completely missed the point. Costco followers have not yet built a Notre Dame or Salamanca Cathedral. It’s far more than an identity, it’s salvation, rest, peace, joy. (And by the way, feeling guilty is the correct emotion if you did do something wrong. It’s appropriate. But if that’s all you learned about Catholicism, you know nothing, just as I did not.)

Now what floors me, over and over, as you comb through the history of the Church, is that through all of the persecutions and attempts to stifle it, it does not die. It returns. This is maddening to its enemies. Every earthly kingdom that has put resources into destroying it, whether by sword or tongue (which are often used as synonyms) have failed to complete the job.

Why?

How can the nearly unlimited resources of emperors and kings, with their armies of soldiers and intellectuals, fail to destroy the Body of Christ?

I can tell you why. It’s because they already tried it once on the Cross, and the same resurrection that happened with Jesus happens with those that he calls. It cannot be killed.

But why?

The reason is joy. The reason is that once you are lost and found again, the joy cannot be replaced by anything else in this world. For those who God calls, there is no replacement, no backup plan, no second option. All of what was desired before becomes absurd once Jesus finds his chosen followers. The question of “why?” doesn’t have an answer beyond “joy.” The rest is the mystery, and the mystery is glorious.

So the reason that it has lasted is because orthodox Christianity is the one thing that has worked for bringing joy to the world. It has worked for 2,000 years. It will work for as long as God keeps our story in the Messianic Age that we are now in, the third act, as we await the return.

It has been proven to work. This is the product that has reviews from every generation, shouting that “This Jesus really does what he promises!” Tested repeatedly through the centuries, the results show through clearly. For those announcing its demise today, they will be disappointed just as every other group or king that tried to kill it by violence, propaganda, mockery, and indifference, and there have been many: Napoleon, Nero, Diocletian, Julian the Apostate, Suleyman, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, the Vikings, Henry VIII, Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mao, Robespierre, and even Thomas Jefferson. That’s just a short list of names.

Christianity has been pronounced dead before. During the siege of Constantinople (A.D. 674–678), some were crying that the last days of Christian Rome had come, and that the armies of the Prophet would soon wipe out Christendom, as they had already destroyed Sasanian Persia and its ancient religion. In the thirteenth century, as Machiavelli observed, trust in the Catholic Church, mired as it then was in corruption and infested with heretics, only survived thanks to the holiness of Sts. Francis and Dominic. Prognosticators foresaw the collapse of Christian Europe after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, but two centuries later, following the Battle of Vienna in 1683, it was the Turks who were driven out of Europe. The French Revolution tried to de-Christianize France, but that campaign lasted less than a dozen years. (First Things)

Nothing lasts like faith in Jesus. We know this God can’t be killed. From history alone we know this is a fact. From the Cross to the tomb, we know this. It is a repeated and ever-present truth of The Way, with the uncomfortable reality being that Jesus isn’t dead. God is a living God. So even though many today like to point to the flaws alone, the scandals, and call that the totality of Catholicism, there is something far more going on. At some point it doesn’t even make sense that this thing would continue given all of the energy put forth to snuff it out. If that seems like I’m generalizing, read about the martyrs and the saints. Read about how the Church nearly died, time and again, only to re-emerge again. In real time today, I’m witnessing the onslaught of the world against the Church, from professors to internet atheists to national governments, all who go out of their way to attack and blame Christianity for all the world’s ills. It almost feels like a game, or a joke, as the blame and accusations pile up. At some point, when considering it all, I even laugh, because the dogpile is so uneven and absurd. And that absurd imbalance leads to questions, as the resilience of this Church surpasses any other institution in human history. The big question that began to stick out like a sore thumb had less to do with the Church than with its enemies. The more you see a someone or something being attacked, the more you start to wonder about the attackers.

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People today believe that Christianity is being put back into its cage. That it’s being snuffed out. But what those poor folks don’t realize is how the release of the old pluralistic religions into the world, like that of Rome in the first century, is creating the exact same conditions that allowed Christianity to take hold and win hearts in the first place.

What kind of world do we imagine the twelve apostles woke up in each morning? There wasn’t even a single church for them to go to. They had nothing but the life and words of Jesus, and even that wasn’t written down yet. They didn’t have pamphlets to hand out or crosses to give away. They only had faith that Jesus was God, and with a rudimentary liturgy from the Last Supper, they built the church from that. They lived among the most hostile of worlds to the idea they were selling. It inverted everything that the Romans and Jews and every other culture held as truth. Yet the message of “Surrender your life to the crucified Christ, the humble carpenter, and you will find peace!” took the world by storm. For the apostles, there wasn’t even so much as an Adoration Chapel to find refuge in, unless you count the Upper Room where they huddled in fear until Pentecost.

Those who wish for the death of the Christian faith or the Catholic Church may be in for a rude awakening when the conditions are re-created so that this dynamite can erupt once again. The watered-down, lukewarm, stale versions of Christianity has turned people off, as familiarity breeds contempt. The merger of worldly desires with the goals of Christianity has repulsed people. But the more that we retreat from the ideas that Jesus brought to us, we will begin to realize what we had, and what we lost, and why it won so many hearts and minds in the first place. The Way, as it was originally called, long before it was called Christianity, was a life of total surrender to Christ; to Jesus himself, the risen and glorified God-man. The Way, long before the Mandalorian borrowed that noun, meant abandoning all possessions and goals and desires to be reborn in life through Christ.

As we separate into our homes, hovering over our devices, in isolation, the communities of real people that form around Christ and his Church will once again remind us how his victory was achieved without sending down fire from heaven. That’s the freedom that Christ gives. That’s the relationships that he creates. That’s the whole secret. And that’s the recipe that has been put into storage and is waiting to be re-introduced, and will be in spectacular fashion once the “Big Empty” of this world’s pleasures becomes felt again. As it was in the first century, so shall it be again. I’ve said it more than once on this site but I’ll say it again. We are lost in the morass of modern desires because of a simple fact:We want the wrong things.

In this age of comfort we have the extreme luxury of being able to assume that we are in charge, that we humans don’t need a healer or savior. However, anyone who has gotten drunk a thousand times trying to find heaven can tell you (pick me!) that the next thousand times turns into hell. The same goes for sex or anything else, because the initial high wears off and the addiction takes you by the throat. We may not need a cataclysm to find the need for God, but we will have signs along the way even in days of comfort. One sure fire way to remove all doubt of our need for God is when food prices triple and fuel runs out. Then we may be reminded of what the pre-Christian world was like, and what type of people and powers occupied it. Affluence can provide a mask of control over our affairs, when in reality we are just a few weeks of broken supply-chain away from total desperation. Even without something dramatic we will find the same conclusion. We control nothing in the end.

There are two great tests in life. One is not getting what you want, and the other is getting what you want.

For those of us who have lived in the West our entire lives, we don’t know what it means to live in a fully godless society, but we should remain under no illusion that our chance to learn isn’t nearing. Within the last century, Mexico and Russia have had extermination campaigns to kill off every priest in the land, and both have failed. This has happened before. It has happened in all of Europe during the early centuries of Christianity. It has happened in Japan. Priests are getting killed every week in Nigeria even today. There are thousands of pages of martyr stories from every corner and country in the world. It is happening now in Nicaragua. It will most certainly happen in America at some point. Rest assured, there is a new Miguel Pro right now, already born today in one of the fifty states. There is a St. Lawrence and a St. Joan of Arc, already attending faith formation classes somewhere. They are out there, praying, on their journey toward God.

St. Paul went to Athens, the place of sophisticated non-believers, and stood on the Areopagus long ago, but we are reaching a point where it will happen again, because most people today don’t even know the story of Jesus. We are traveling backward in time. Few kids today could tell you who Moses or David was or why their names are known.

This whole yo-yo effect nearly has a Big Bang feel to it, like how the universe is said to expand and contract. It’s like there is a parallel in human history, as the expansion of sin ran amok from Adam to Noah, then contracted in the Flood. Then sin expanded again, from Babylon through Rome, and then contracted once Christ’s message was rolled into the cosmos from the center-point of the ancient world in Jerusalem. The false religions started backpedaling into hiding. And today, as promised by Jesus, the devil would be let free for awhile and sin would seem to rule. The devil has been released for his time, and clearly the twentieth century was part of his allowance.

If you don’t believe the message of Christ is divinely inspired, then you have to at least consider the fact that the story of Christ is far more compelling to people than that of Zeus or Wicca or the other stories of supernatural explanations. The fact is that Christianity has a far better story, even if you don’t believe in supernatural things. We have just stopped telling the story because many of the tellers can’t separate themselves from the Word of God. The reason the message is diluted is because you have everyone claiming the message and welding their favorite sin onto the message, whether it be love of money or sexual sin. We are lacking heroes and authentic lives. We don’t yet have our St. Benedict or St. Sixtus or St. Anthony of Egypt. But that person will arrive. The false prophets are loud, but they will fade away. And even if they continue to make noise and draw followers, the way of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving is already known to those who seek to follow Him.

People have forgotten that demons exist. Now we are emboldened by a false sense of security, as the chaos of the world seems gone. We can walk into dark basements and tell ourselves that no monsters exist. Feeling so bold, we have even started seeking out those demons once again. But we are only bold because we know the light switch is near. The comfort of technology and electricity acts as a security blanket. After all, monsters aren’t real, or so we tell ourselves. So there’s nothing to be afraid of. Right? And yet people still go out into the countryside, or woods, or a basement when the bulb is out, and they start to wonder…what if they are real? The boldness shrinks when the lights go out, or the engine fails, or the boat starts to take on water. People who are glued to screens do not understand what prior generations did. As soon as the chaos peeks its head out from the darkness, we’re not so sure that those monsters are gone.

This is the result of people trying to live on reason alone. Stuffing our sense of the supernatural into a box doesn’t make it disappear. The ghosts and demons come out of hiding once God is forgotten or ignored. Since the demons cannot destroy God, the next best thing is to destroy his beloved creation, and that means you and me.

The best way to destroy a person is to tell them there is no God. It’s also the easiest. We are wired for God, but we are wired for desire and rebellion as well. The wiring for God urges us, via our consciences, to seek God, as doing the wrong thing leaves us empty. No one wakes up from a one-night stand and feels fulfilled. No one wakes up after a food or drinking binge and feels it was a good decision. If they do, they are already long down the path of denying that sin exists. Habitual sin acts like blinders on a horse, keeping the soul going in the direction where the devil wants to take you. The good that we are after is not the stuff or substance that we want. It’s something far better, but we have to give up our self to obtain what is truly good.

As soon as there is no God, then we can not only do whatever we like, but then we must solve all of our problems by ourselves and using things in this world. Or, if we can’t solve them, we at least must shove our problems out of the way. This can be seen in basic data points, like how non-religious doctors are much more likely to hasten and accelerate death of terminally ill patients. The reality of the denial of God and rejection of the idea of sin rises up like swamp gas.

Once the flip of the switch is made where God is not something to be taken seriously, then something must take its place because we still need salvation, a healer. If you don’t think you do, examine where all of your free time is spent and you will find your surrogate savior. For many, it’s sports. For others, it’s politics. For the more obvious sinners, it’s drugs, alcohol, and sex. In all cases, the person of Jesus takes a backseat, or is kicked out the car altogether.

For those who remain on a strict diet of Enlightenment thinking, they have tapped technology to play the savior. They have turned to science, because rejecting spirits and God leaves no where else to turn. At least the seekers who summon spirits are trying, unboxing that supernatural feeling. Reason alone leaves you as half a human. The body and the soul must be put back together, as is done to Peter in John, Chapter 6. When all other options have failed, when flat reason and unbelief leaves you flat, and the false religions are outed as nonsense, you will have nowhere else to turn. Consider this exchange between Peter and Jesus, but replace the word “Jesus” with “Science” or “Technology” or “Wicca” or “Astrology”.

Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” (Jn 6:67-69)

Now the modern version:

Science then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” Simon Peter answered him, “Science, to whom shall we go? You have the words of material life. We have come to believe and are convinced that there is no God.” (Jn 6:67-69)

Technology is the modern master, but it’s an odd one because it’s an amorphous blob of knowledge, not wisdom, that is so specialized that we just grunt and accept it as the one true god, like cave men who “knew” that the sun god or big oak tree held all the secrets of the universe. For 99% of us, if tomorrow we were told that electrons were found to be very tiny acorns, we would take it on faith as a fact, because in no way or scenario could most people ever test or prove otherwise. Now, we have to take it on faith that physicists and chemists would not lie to us like that. Yet often they do. Science takes bad paths that require a long time to undo, plus a massive waste of time and energy as good money follows bad science. (If you don’t believe me, see the 2006 Alzheimer’s research, or dry labbing, or the history of phrenology, or cold fusion in a coffee cup, or Piltdown man in Sussex, or many, many other cases).

Unsurprisingly, scientists are as susceptible to the deadly sins like anyone else, much of which is prompted by the shiny tempting apple that promises to get their paper published and make them a science god. You can see that Genesis 3:1 verse playing out in those stories just like any other story. Can’t you just see how the wheels turn in a brain to lie, to fudge the truth, in order to get a paper published? When the serpent says to Eve, “Did God really say you can’t eat from the tree?” This is how that question plays out:

“Did God really say…I can’t alter this image to match my experiment results?”

After all, we only sin because we perceive a good thing and want it, and decide that skirting the next right action will be acceptable, as the perceived good thing we want won’t hurt anyone if we just cheat a bit to get it. We want status and recognition, that is the perceived good thing. In order to get it, how easy it is to be convinced that our ideas and interpretation of the data is correct, and that we just need to fit things into our mind’s image of the world, instead of resting our in God’s world.

Faith is submitting our intellect and will to God, which means that unbelief is the opposite: it is submitting our will and intellect to our selves.

So science has its own falls and corruption. It advances and retreats and advances again. Science can do so much, but only so much. The limitation to science is the fact that it can’t get outside the universe, nor can it tell us why a sunset is beautiful, or why Shakespeare’s stories are timeless, or why seeing a baby born can change a person’s conception of everything in creation. In fact, this is exactly why so many people like to quote Hamlet when he says to Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” There is more to this world than science and technology. In fact, the dullest things in this world is the way we treat nature like it was a cadaver to be dissected.

Consider Horatio to be like a Mark Zuckerberg, or any agnostic or atheist. Hamlet and Horatio have just seen and spoke with the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Horatio is the archetype of the Enlightenment world-changer.

Horatio, a model of rationality, is still having a hard time swallowing the whole business. Ghosts are not the sort of beings his "philosophy" easily takes into account. We know that Horatio is, like Hamlet, a student at the University of Wittenberg, a notable outpost of Protestant humanism. The philosophy he studies there is probably classical—a compound of ethics, logic, and natural science. The emphasis on everyday phenomena pretty much excludes speculation about talking ghosts. (From enotes.)

So Horatio is just like a modern person, like me not that long ago, who must rely solely on reason and rationality. He is one of those poor folks sliced in half, by their own volition: all body, no soul. Because like our alternate version of Peter, anonymous internet user, where else can Horatio go? Peter can say to Jesus, the living son of God, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

The purely rational person cannot ask for any spiritual explanation, ever! Because even cracking the door to the reality of souls and spirits leads to a flood of what-ifs. To someone trying to live in a world of pure reason, the only thing holding back the chaos monster is science and technology. The odd thing about this position is that while you lampoon the religious as superstitious fools who puts his fingers in his ears and makes noise to drown out the reality of the material world, on the flip side, the rationalist must put his fingers in his ears and make noise to drown out the possibility of ghosts and spirits. Anything beyond the material world must be stuffed in a box, because if even a single ghost story is true, if a single prophecy of the future was proven legit, or if any being’s soul is real, or any miracle has ever happened - even a single miracle - then the closed door of reason is suddenly flung wide open.

Thus the savior of technology must be clung to, because to what else can the non-believing materialist turn? All spiritual things must be deduced to a chemistry problem. Many people can claim to make their decisions based purely on reason, but like many a Christian who claims to be in a state of grace while receiving the Eucharist, there is a lot of not-so-devout rationalists. But they believe that when push comes to shove, they will side with science, just as even the most lukewarm Christian will declare that their alliance falls on the side of faith. But these types of declarations are for grouping and identifying oneself, where the science-fan does not wish to align with the ignorant believers and the half-hearted Christian will side with believers to avoid being called a heathen. Marketing departments make healthy profits relying much on our instinctual reaction to divide ourselves among declarations. Selling cars and nail polish is not terribly different from selling a worldview, but the worldview you adopt has a far greater impact on your life and death than the color of your fingernails on the steering wheel.

The promise of freedom through a gadget or technology leads to a kind of reliance, and ultimately a kind of slavery. But this servitude cannot easily be seen except by some unfortunate prophetic Cassandra who know of problems to come, yet can do nothing to halt its progress. Also, it should be noted that once Prometheus had stole fire from the gods, no one ever suggested that he put it back, even if it turned out the we weren’t even ready to handle fire properly. The entrepreneurial maxim that “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door” holds true whenever we discover something new and shiny. But these are all distractions from the truth. And all of those shiny things will leave you empty, all of those experiences will end and require another chase down the next rabbit-hole. There is always something to keep looking for, until you trip over the treasure in the field, and find Jesus, the crucified carpenter, and discover that it was him you were looking for all along. Then like St. Augustine you can say, “My heart was restless until it rested in Thee.”

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There are seven stages of empire. America has leveled-up, careening around stage four, past stage five, and we don’t really fully realize it yet but we are already leaning over the cliff of stage six. While everyone gets worried or excited about the coming decline and collapse, let me be the one yelling, “All is well!” A century ago, the Austro-Hungarians were the winners, and now their capitals are lovely little tourist stops on a river cruise. We are going the route of the City of Man, which is to collapse, just like what happened at Babel. In fact, in our arrogance in denying God, we have worshipped and enabled the demonic powers to guide us, and thus the nation must be reset and humbled. This is basic Spiritual Physics.

The seven stages of empire are:

• The Age of Pioneers

• The Age of Conquests

• The Age of Commerce

• The Age of Affluence

• The Age of Intellect

• The Age of Decadence

• The Age of Decline & Collapse

We will go this path because the decline must play out. It must. The last season must come. This cycle is not anything new or surprising, or it shouldn’t be, as Plato wrote about this process long before Edward Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Collapse of empire’s gone wild is as old as human writing.

We are in the last days of Babel, and it’s worth noting how we got here, and why it’s happening. But this fall of empire is not something to worry about because it is inevitable. The loss of your soul, however, is not. For that you have a choice to make. Free will is the great gift, from a God who will not coerce his followers. And joy is the gigantic secret that Christ shares with his followers.

The real question for our time is: how will you endure the coming change? How will you persevere? How will you stay sane? How can you stand strong when the world starts to burn around you? How?

The answer is: “By your endurance you will gain your soul.”

Never take your eyes off of the truth. Never look away from Jesus when the wind comes up on the water. Never forget your own sin. Never forget your need for redemption. Never forget why the Cross had to be the way. Never look away from his love for you.

By his life, by his death, by his resurrection, by his ascension - tunnel your gaze to that truth. Forget “my truth,” surrender to the the way, the truth, and the life, who all happen to be the same person. That is how you endure. When Jesus said that a follower of Him must follow him and even hate his own father and mother, his own family, he meant it. Because if anything can sway you to look away, to make you turn back to something of this world, then you have not endured, and you will not gain your soul. There is only one way to be free, to have certainty, and that is to never look away from the truth of Him. Today’s president is tomorrow’s dust. Today’s billionaire is poor if he lacks faith. Today’s popular opinion is tomorrow’s joke. There is only one who rules the real kingdom, who wields real power, and who deserves all glory.

The Tower of Babel is a warning about a bad way of thinking for a nation or a people. The rejection of God at a social level, where sin is selected as policy, is the problem in Babylon. Empire alone is not the problem. The word “empire” is not bad, just as word “sex” isn’t bad. However, it all depends on what the thing is used for and how it is used.

The story tells of everyone speaking the same language, but language in this case does not necessarily mean grammar and vocabulary. You can read it that way. But there is another way to think of language, and language here means worldview. And the worldview that is a problem is the one where money, honor, power, and pleasure become virtues, replacing actual virtues. The language of Babylon is that of most of our modern thinkers, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, David Hume, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, right up to Ibram X. Kendi. The language is the denial of sin and the rejection of God in favor of man’s Tower. There is a fundamental difference that everyone misses between Catholic theology and all other “solutions” like liberalism, Marxism, Protestant theology, liberation theology, Prosperity Gospel, modernism, and all the other -isms.

The problem isn’t people or government.

The problem is spiritual and we are in a spiritual war.

We have been in the spiritual way since the first two humans. Genesis does not disagree with science as much as people like to think. Even on an evolutionary path, somewhere along the two people’s genes and souls were altered into something radically different from all other creatures. Just as the Big Bang matches with “Let there be light,” and as archaeologists keep confirming Biblical geography locations, and as the last ice age coincides with the ubiquitous worldwide stories of the Great Flood around 9000 B.C., we know through reason that something changed with humans that separated their way of life and worldview from neanderthals. The desires of humans have no bottom. They cannot be filled. There is a darkness in humans that does not exist in apes or any other creature. Thoughts and ideas come to human brains that make no sense and serve no purpose, aside from evil. That is what the spiritual war is about; keeping evil at bay, casting it back into the pit.

If we fail to fight the spiritual war, we lose track of the problem. When we take our eyes off of Jesus, the devil embodies whatever we are looking at. If we see government as the solution, then the devil moves there. If we see sexual identity as the solution, the devil goes there. Even if we become too fixated on the Church as the solution instead of as a means to holiness, then the devil will occupy that space. The enemy is cunning and shifts shape, always waiting for you to forget about him.

The number one enemy in the spiritual war is pride. This is why it’s so telling that “Pride” is a celebrated virtue today, when in every possible case of hubris, pride leads to destruction. Always. Invariably. Every fairy tale, Bible story, fable, and even in stories like the Titanic or the Theranos fraud, pride always leads to destruction. There is no other outcome for the balloon of pride than to be deflated. It is a fact that even pure rationalists understand: what goes up, must come down. The interesting thing is this: if we wonder why God allows this evil, you have to realize this key secondary effect: to be reborn in the spirit, you have to go all the way down. God allows us pride in order to find our way to the truth and be reborn.

Pride is the language we costume our ideas in, using intellectual arguments about how to organize an economy or how your identity is oppressed. Getting what you want, when you want it, and how you want it is what is considered “good” today. The unofficial virtues of America are those advocated by Gordon Gecko and the Marquis de Sade. The Marquis says, “Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy. Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.”

As for helping yourself to all thing, “Greed is good,” says Gecko.

This language is all over our culture. “If winning isn’t everything, then why do we keep score?” says the sports god, Vince Lombardi.

“Winning isn’t everything; it's the only thing,” says UCLA coach “Red” Sanders.

So say we all!

Competition and money and self-justification are the vocabulary and grammar, the pillars of the American language. That is how we speak, it’s what we respect, what we aspire toward, what we aim our children at, how we measure success, how we measure someone’s worth. For us, competition is the way, the truth, and the life.

And it is the utter opposite of the message of Jesus Christ.

“You justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts; for what is of human esteem is an abomination in the sight of God.” (Lk 16:15)

In other words, the Lombardi trophy is an abomination, as is Gordon Gecko’s wealth. Mark Zuckerberg’s billions of dollars and users will be used against him in the court of God. Trump will have to answer for his gold toilet seat and various wives. Michael Jordan’s championship rings will be gravel to be tossed aside. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos may be first in line today, but the first will be last in the world to come. Those who cling to identity lies will be easy cases in the Last Judgment, because their language of self-assertion is the rejection of their real identities as sinners. Whatever we have think we have won or gotten power over in this world is perfectly useless and powerless in the next. If you are playing this game of fame and fortune and pleasure and striving to outdo your neighbor by elevating your desires, you are shoveling dirt out of your own grave.

You cannot serve God and mammon. Mammon is a strange term. Mammon is the ego and all it’s baubles: money, sex, drugs, power, diplomas. We are all about the mammon. It is fitting that Ben Franklin is on the $100 bill and he is now the symbol of the Benja-mammon. He is the idol of those seeking the “Benjamins,” the graven image that everyone is serving.

When we are serving ourselves, we are serving our sins. This alone tells the tale. If any political issue concerns you more than the person of Christ, you have completely missed the message of Christ. He is the message. If you want to see some of kind of sin erased through political action, you don’t understand what sin is or that you are a sinner. The language of Babel is the language of competition and the elevation of the self over God.

Conservative Christians want to thump the commandments and liberal Christians forget that sin exists. And what are they all arguing about? “Stand for the flag and kneel for the Cross” vs. “Love is love.” Could someone help me find those in the Bible? God is over all things, and God is love. These equally empty platitudes of the political world have no meaningful grasp of Christianity, as they ignore Christ and ignore the spiritual battle entirely. What I have learned is that you can wear a cross and have no idea who Christ is. I’ve learned that you can call others scriptural cherry-pickers while holding a basket of picked cherries.

Because in my reading, Christ does not endorse America, nor does he endorse greed, nor does he endorse racism, nor does he endorse same-sex marriage, nor does he endorse carving up your body, nor does he endorse Pontius Pilate’s language that states: “What is truth?” He endorses chastity, marriage, humility, compassion, obedience, patience, and charity. He utterly rejects sin and all self-serving motives.

As the Incarnation of the Living God, He is the Truth. If you cannot see this, then you may not know him as well as you think. Ask for help to get there. Go to God’s information booth, otherwise known as prayer, because unless you come to know Jesus, you will not know the truth, and without him you cannot fight the spiritual combat. You can get win all you want, get all the laws passed through Congress that you think will save the world, but if you are not rooted in Christ, you will lose your soul.

And once you do come to know him, the experiences and toys you desire here in this world will seem like trifles. They become like trinkets from gum-ball machines once you compare them to the value of faith granted from God. Worthless trifles will be set aside, just as Peter set aside the largest catch of fish he ever had and “dropped the nets” to follow him.

Whatever exotic sexual fix you are seeking, or your desire to own the latest Tesla, those ideas will seem like distant memories of a childish phase of life. What once made you proud will suddenly be embarrassing. You will laugh at how you idealized the wants of the caterpillar after you are flying as a butterfly. You thought the creeping, crawling phase was the end, and whatever you got while still a struggling inchworm was all there was. Then you learn that you were far too easily pleased, as C.S. Lewis pointed out:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. (“The Weight of Glory” p.26)

So before you start defending that sin you love the most, like getting high or having one-night-stands, read the Gospels again.

You want the wrong things.

Remind yourself what Jesus endorsed: humility before God, serving the poor, healing the sick, partaking in the sacraments, and obeying God’s law - including, and especially, one marriage in this life being between man and a woman.

To take up our cross and follow him means to endure the struggles and burdens and problems of our lives, not to affirm our problems as our identities. Our crosses are made to be carried, not re-interpreted as virtues and carried as trophies. Your cross can become a gift, but only if it is carried with Him.

This ancient language of Babel is what we still speak today. It is the language of twists and turns, like Odysseus, who lies and cheats and pillages his way through the Greek epic to get what he wants in all cases. It is the language of “me first,” of taking what I please, of justifying my desires, of shaping God to fit my sins. When speaking that language, I am the potter on the wheel, not God, and I will shape the world to fit my desires.

The reason that Pentecost marked a new day in the world is because from Babel onward, God confused the language and scattered the cultures of the world. Literally or metaphorically, this is important. The various cultures could not coalesce into a sin-rejecting juggernaut, but they were still competing and scrapping for pieces of this world. The language was still competition, but the death match was happening in the ponds, not the ocean.

So when Peter stepped out on Pentecost and spoke, everyone understood him. The apostles all started speaking and the people of “all languages” understood. Why? How did they understand? Again, literally or metaphorically, it works either way. Their message was getting through. The message was heard. And what was the message?

“Jesus the Nazorean was a man commended to you by God with mighty deeds, wonders, and signs, which God worked through him in your midst, as you yourselves know. This man, delivered up by the set plan and foreknowledge of God, you killed, using lawless men to crucify him…

God raised this Jesus; of this we are all witnesses…

Exalted at the right hand of God, he received the promise of the holy Spirit from the Father and poured it forth, as you (both) see and hear. God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” (Acts 2:14-41)

Was it the words? Or was it the change in Peter and the Apostles that was seen? Was it the message seen, as they lived it out in their lives? Or was it heard by language, as God briefly “unscattered” the tongues of people. Somehow I think it was something bigger than Google Translate. I don’t think it was only hearing the words.

The language of Babel was that of competition and ego. The language of Peter was the opposite. His message was the un-Babel. He gave the world a non-compete clause, that you could follow through Christ. There was a way out of the fighting pit, the one-up-manship could finally end. There was a way to live that didn’t require all the fake nonsense and puffery that we are used to living among.

The reason Peter’s message was fluent to all observers, is because the non-compete clause was given to us all. To stop fighting is what we all want. To stop competing with one another. We want peace. We want rest. We want healing. We’re tired of being offended and wanting revenge.

When Jesus appeared to the apostles, his first words were, “Peace be with you.” He gave it right then and there. Peace. All goodness and rest comes from a life in Christ, not through our own efforts to win or achieve. Peace does not come through our instinct, or through our competitive culture, and not via coercive policies. There is only one way to heaven and Jesus showed the way. He plowed the way to daylight through this blizzard called life.

Still, for the science minded, how could they really understand what Peter was saying? How to get past this miracle? It’s too miraculous to conceive as possible. I would just say, “Ask for belief,” but do you even need to ask in this case? We can understand it without a miracle.

Did they even need to hear the words? When someone is free, can you not tell? When a child starts playing or singing or dancing, does it matter if you are the same nationality or speak the same language as the child? No. Any English speaking person can interact with a Chinese, Spanish, or Kenyan child and see the innocence and joy in the child. The listeners who heard and saw Peter could see it on his face, could tell by how he was preaching. How? Because he was open. He was no longer hiding. The fig leaves were dropped. The fear was gone. The pretenses were gone. The fake promises of a salesmen were nowhere to be found. He had returned to the faith of a child.

This is why Babel is the opposite of Pentecost. God withdrew from selfish people at Babel, but he enkindled the fire of his love at Pentecost. Babel turned the world gray and the color came back at Pentecost. It’s like the horrible movie Pleasantville, except in Acts of the Apostle, it’s not the embrace of sin that adds color the world, it’s the conquering of sin.

The only way to heaven is through the cross. You can’t avoid it, you must carry it and voluntarily let your ego die upon it. Then you will be like a child, like Peter, closer to Jesus. If you follow him, all the way, you will be a brother of Christ and son of God.

When you observe the angry banter online today, if you can stand it, take notice that the person of Jesus is rarely mentioned unless it’s to score political points. We have turned Jesus into a basketball, or a weapon. We’ve taken Jesus’ non-compete clause and used him as a club to compete. It’s the opposite of what he told us to do. Surrender to him. Surrender the need to win. Do you need to comment? Do you need to reply? When they come for you, and accuse you, and slander you, do you need to win? Jesus, using his non-compete, shows us that you do not need to reply. You do not need to get angry.

Though harshly treated, he submitted and did not open his mouth; Like a lamb led to slaughter or a sheep silent before shearers, he did not open his mouth. (Is 53:7)

This is the forever the permanent danger of shifting our focus from Christ as the fully divine and fully human second person of the holy Trinity. The minute you look away, you sink. You return to the pit, gladly leaping in and entering the fray. We just can’t resist the language of Babel, and take up jockeying for position because we fear for our ego, our reputation, our loss of self. We think somehow this time it will be different, but when the fear strikes us, we begin…to sink.

Must we do ask this same question again?

Yes. We must. It’s why this website is named what it is.

Why Did Peter Sink?

Because he looked away from Jesus.

How was he saved?

He asked for help. He said, “Lord, save me!”

Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand and caught him, and said to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Mt 14:22-33)

Why did we doubt? Why did we jump into the fight again? Why do we do what we do?

Because you think you got this. You assume superiority. You want power and honor. But let it be known: you ain’t got nothin’. Jesus is seated in heaven, waiting. He is not cheering for our ego. He is not waving the flag of America.

Or did we all fool ourselves into thinking that it was Jesus that helped Jefferson craft the Declaration? I think we did. This “City on a Hill” tale is an invention. America does not have divine guidance. Let go of that fairy tale. Thomas Jefferson was a Deist that completely denied the divinity of Christ. Or do we imagine that Jesus got us walking on water like a toddler in 1776, and then we learned to do miracles alone without him, while we still kept slaves and were westward-ho steamrolling natives? Does any of this sound like the work of Jesus Christ that he performed in this world?

The greatest fib of America is that this is a Christian nation, as it wasn’t in the beginning, is not now, and never will be. There has always been many, many Christians in America, and that is why the nation has had such success. But as for the Founders and their ideals, it is a foundation built on sand from the Enlightenment. The fact that Lincoln and many presidents were believers does not mean that Christianity ruled in Washington. Without millions of Christians as bedrock, the Deist ideas collapse, as we are now seeing with liberalism and modernism. It was families - black, white, or in-between - rooted in Christian values that provided the glue the entire time. It was not politicians or businessmen. If anything, the wealthy used Christians as instruments to get what they wanted, because, after all, “God helps those who help themselves.” Following God’s will is a goal of Christians, and nefarious forces are always at work to use and abuse that. Those who “help themselves” throughout history have looked at other people, especially Christians, like a shovel to be used for their own projects, not as tools to carry out God’s will.

Not everything America has done is evil, and not everything it has done is good, but America is not the marker or sign of the last days any more than was Imperial Japan or the Spanish Empire. We are in the final age, the messianic age, and it was not called or named the “American age.” Unhitch your nationalism from the message of Christ, otherwise you are taking up Jesus’ non-compete clause and using it as a club. Jesus is not cheering for America any more than he is the Dallas Cowboys. He is cheering for us to carry out his Great Commission, to spread the word, to believe, to keep his commandments, to be joyful sinners, and move toward holiness by keeping practice of the Sacraments.

Jesus rules over all of the nations, all of the powers and principalities of this world, which includes the United States. This current moment is just the latest empire in a long list of empires. We are just another Babylon, another Rome. They all crumble, but God’s kingdom is here and being slowly worked out. The slowness is the hard part, since we are accustomed to getting what we want immediately. We think the world is under our control, but it’s not, and we tire of waiting to we help ourselves and forget about God.

That’s how we fall into the water. That’s how a nation sinks. We get cocky and forget of our frailty. We get rich and comfortable. What happens to nations, happens to the Church, too, just as it does for individuals, just as it did for Peter on the water. There is no way to be saved but through him, with him, in him, in the person of Christ. The focus must remain on him. He is the question, the answer, the truth, the way, the light, the life. Neither our selves nor the Constitution of this country can save you. Science can’t save you. Money can’t save you. Only He can.

We are the people of a lost empire that thinks it is has been found. Individuals within this empire have been found, but the empire itself is foundering. The whole structure has been long held up by believers, but their arms are fewer now and fatigue is setting in. Shortly after World War II, somewhere in the 1960s, the soul of nation turned away from God. Then the fall began, as we began to value sex, drugs, and “the college experience” more than the gifts of the Holy Spirit. All authority began to tumble. As Satan said in Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” That became the national motto and adolescence began to creep past its sell-by date. Duty was replaced with honor for the derelict. Now we move into a last phase, where the drunk sailors are in the command center, guiding us to destruction, assuring us that desires alone make for a meaningful identity, and they are assuring us of this, even as we run aground.

Thank God we can get lost. Part of his plan is to find the lost sheep. If we follow Jesus’ own ministry on earth, he plays the shepherd the entire time, right to the last moments on the Cross when we converts the Penitent Thief. Getting lost is the only way to get found. There is much hope yet. God’s plan exceeds our understanding, but he has allowed billions to stray. Could his plan for the smart phone be to reach every last soul on earth? Many end-times writers like to focus on Matthew 24:14:

“And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the world as a witness to all nations, and then the end will come.”

Since God is outside of space and time, he moves salvation history along on his schedule, not ours. Just as Abraham did not begin forming a nation until languages and cities were established, and Jesus did not come until writing had advanced considerably, who is to say that God’s allowance of our scrolling on our phones is not the next phase of his plan. Surely most people today has heard of Christ, but not everyone has yet. What better way to reach all people than through a common language, or better yet, a common protocol like http. It’s entirely possible that DARPA and Tim Berners-Lee and Steve Jobs were unlikely instruments of God, and by serving themselves (a.k.a. mammon) they will end up serving God.

In the meantime, confusion spins our people around as we seem to directing our lives, and our children’s lives, with a misaimed compass. To realize that the needle has been sitting next to magnet and steering you off course is terrifying, but it’s a relief to even discover that you were going the wrong direction, because then you can take action to change course.

Once you finally turn, you can find true north. A person who strays can still be saved. A nation that gets lost can be born again. The word “blessing” means to be “kneeled,” so we should keep saying, over and over, “God bless America, and God please bless me,” because a kneeling is exactly what we need to find peace. How is that to be done? The same way it was done to the Roman empire and every other empire. The nation will be exorcised when people turn to God. When Jesus said, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand,” he meant it for you, not an abstract thing like America or China.

God’s salvation plan continues, in ways that we cannot understand, but we know what to do. We need to believe. We need to surrender our lives to God, and be joyful, and keep his commandments, and give to the poor. Forget about the evil that others are selling and focus on the words of Jesus - all focus on all of his words, not just the ones you like. Love God. Love others. Be joyful. Volunteer. Read the Gospel. Tell others about it. Read the Catechism. Go to Confession. Go to Mass. Kneel. Receive the Eucharist. Repeat.

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Think of the Tower of Babel as like the Manhattan Project, which is a great example because in the 1930s and 1940s everyone on earth was speaking the same “language” of hyper-nationalism. Immense projects among the nations took place in this grand competition. Through that period we found better ways to kill one another than ever before.

If you struggle to believe that demonic forces are at work in the world, I don’t know how else you can explain what happened in World War II. You can ask, “Why did God allow it?” but you should be asking, “Why did we?”

The problem of pain is always with us, but never was it so obvious as in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s still here, right now. We can choose to sin or not sin. I would guess that if we had lived in the era of the great Assyrian empire, or any empire, we would observe horrors and atrocities, but the scale could not have been so massive as what was on full display in World War II when clearly demonic forces took over Germany. The goal to get rid of Jews is the first sign of demonic forces at work, just as it has always been. To get rid of God requires getting rid of those who speak of God.

To overcome the great evil happening in Germany, another effort sprung up to create a massive bomb. After all, we have to fight fire with fire, right? That is the common language of Babel. So in order for us to stop one country from engaging with demons, we had to all get together and do something that introduced and even larger problem into the world.

In New Mexico, a mini-Babel story happened, but this one ended with a horrific boom.

Scientists came to Mew Mexico from different nations and spoke different languages, but they all used the same language of English for this one project, rallying around science and competition to defeat a common enemy. However, as we all know, the nations all speak the same underlying language, the common language of Babel. But in this case we had this brotherhood in arms to defeat a common enemy, making it like a pre-Babel party in the southwest.

These thinkers put aside their nationalism and joined together to take on a great project, a project unlike any other before it (except for the Tower of Babel where we invited the demons into the world).

Total war across the world led to a recruitment of the world’s greatest minds to the desert. However, this is one instance where “going to the desert” did not result in purified spirituality. The great minds - Oppenheimer, Fermi, Fuchs, Teller, Lawrence et al. - did not go out to the desert like Moses and Jesus did. In fact, these scientists went to the desert to say yes to the devil instead of do battle against his temptations. They joined, speaking a common language, to build a new Gate to God. They went to the desert to find out how God’s universe works, but not out of curiosity regarding creation like the flower-cataloguing naturalist might, but rather to immolate and destroy those flowers. As God says in Genesis 11 while observing the Tower construction: “…they have started to do this, nothing they presume to do will be out of their reach.” Could we not also imagine God saying the same thing as he allowed Oppenheimer to tinker with atoms in Los Alamos? As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so did our “American Prometheus.” And by the way, the myth where Prometheus is portrated as doing a good thing by stealing fire, is propaganda from the Silicon Valley of the ancient world. We have this idea stamped on us today that technology is good, and we just pursue technology for technology’s sake. This is what the Tower of Babel was doing: trying to extract the secrets of God and the universe for our own dirty deeds. As Jesus said, “by their fruits you will know them” (Mt 7:15-20). The fruit of the Enlightenment is a world of nuclear weapons, among other things like carbon-dioxide-gone-wild. In the meantime, we call the old sustainable world of agrarian Christendom “The Dark Ages,” while we scramble to figure out how to block or undo the problems created through our dogged pursuit of God’s secrets.

There is a fascinating exchange about this from two Orthodox priests that I’m stealing at length here about Prometheus, which also applies to the Manhattan Project. This is from the Lord of Spirits podcast, a great source for breaking through the walls of the modernist propaganda that reigns in the media. They take it all the way back to the fall of Cain, and draw out the things we fail to notice in the dense meaning of his fall. Just as you can’t get to heaven without going through the cross, you can’t get to Babel without first going through Cain.

Fr. Stephen: Cain founds the first city. The major figures in Cain’s line who are named, it talks about the technological innovations that they produced, which are weapons of war, all of these things. So this idea is, yes, these spirits gave technology to man, but it was not to benefit man; they were giving man technology that humanity wasn’t ready for, but for destroying themselves.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this same story is played out in multiple other ancient mythologies. The one that probably most of our listeners are familiar with is Greek mythology, and you’ve got the story of Prometheus, who gives fire from the gods to mankind. But of course in that story, it’s depicted as Prometheus… It’s correct in the sense that Prometheus is sort of rebelling, he’s doing something he’s not supposed to be doing, but it’s presented as positive, like: look at this wonderful gift that he gave mankind.

But the problem, of course, is that, again, it’s propaganda. This is these demons saying, “Look at all these good things that we gave you. Why don’t you just go ahead and bow down and worship us?” If you think about that, isn’t that the same thing that’s happening when Christ is tempted by the devil, that the devil offers him stuff? “Look what I’ll do for you if you just bow down and worship me!” Even in our own lives, right? There’s this promise of being great, being smart, being beautiful, being popular, being wealthy, being prestigious—if only you would serve whatever it is that you are asked to serve. It’s a trick. As you said, it’s for their destruction. Notice whom this technology is given to; it’s given to Cain, the first murderer, and to his descendants.

But the problem, of course, is like, you look at this stuff, and you’re like: What’s so wrong with iron-working and with music? What’s wrong with that stuff?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it gets expanded firstly in the book of Jubilees, to include all kinds of things in terms of pharmaceuticals and sorcery and means of seduction of the opposite sex. But even if we’re just talking about raw technology, again, it’s not that it’s evil any more than the tree of knowledge of good and evil is evil in and of itself, but it was wisdom for which humanity wasn’t ready to use it appropriately. So it comes to these men as: “I’m giving you this knowledge so that you can use it to gain power and to conquer your neighbors, to set yourself up as a king, to seduce members of the opposite sex, so you will have this power and wealth and authority,” and that’s what humanity uses it for.

In New Mexico, Prometheus returned with fire again, and we were instructed in public school what a marvel this discovery was, where science and engineering “saved us” from Germany. I even recall watching Fat Man and Little Boy in science class as a kind of celebration of science. But science makes for a bad savior if it wins a battle by setting the stage for a much bigger and far worse war in the future. That’s not a savior at all. That’s a captor. We are in the same boat now with other problems stemming from our rush for technology, like cars that spewed carbon dioxide for a century, and a generation of lost souls who were raised on iPhones. You might even argue that we haven’t even figured out how to handle fire properly yet, let alone nukes or smart phones.

The great scientific and engineering minds proved that the secrets of the atom were not out of their reach. What they presumed was possible, became a reality. Like Geppetto, the dream to will an idea into existence turned Little Boy into a real atomic bomb. But it did not open a Gate to God. The Gate of Fission was opened, bringing down a new kind of demon. The solution created a short lived peace as the arms race and space race began. We found one of the great secrets of how God’s universe functioned. The great minds had “pulled” God closer to earth and elevated humans, or so we thought, in the process.

The payoff was to be endless free energy, but it didn’t pan out. We were just left with the bombs. Most of the nuclear power plants are being shutdown today, while the warheads remain ready to fire. So in cracking the atomic code and creating what seemed like a gateway to the power of God, we ended up more like toddlers playing around with grenades in a crib. At the end of the project, the scientists disbanded and returned to their universities, but the knowledge stayed and proliferated to “the nations” and we now have the modern doctrine of MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. This is the language of Babel fully articulated.

Competition and greed lead to a prison-like behavior among the inmates, where you must dominate or be dominated, and as Ghandi may have said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

After the Tower of the Mushroom Cloud was built successfully and displayed to the world in its awesome terror, the scientists’ newfound instructions for building the Gate trickled out to all corners of the world, and now we have about ten nations who have these giant firecrackers ready to destroy billions of people, hinged on the decision of fallible people in leadership roles.

So we came together for a while under a common goal: to defeat nations clearly under demonic possession. How did we solve it? By inviting demons to possess us. To defeat one powerful nation speaking Babel, we got together and spoke Babel to create something even more awful. Then once the war ended, it seemed that nothing like that dramatic or awful could ever happen again. The nations proceeded to ensure that it will happen by building many, many more bombs. The nations are now nervously smiling at one another, meeting in uneasy groups, wearing the fig leaves of NATO and the United Nations and the European Union, while holding loaded revolvers to each others’ heads.

Something interesting began to happen after the war. Nationalism became a dirty word. The pendulum had swung to peak nationalism, and the reality of what the nations were capable of doing to one another began to look like a bad idea. Another way of saying it is that the idea of “the nations” itself looked like a bad idea. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way, back toward the pre-Babel world where all the world was one nation. We are going back in time, to the days of Noah. There is a sense of inversion and reversal happening in quite a few parts of the Bible. Most of the Christian message is an inversion of the pagan, pluralistic world, which is exactly what it means to unlearn the language of Babel.

The separation of nations was reduced somewhat in the aftermath of the war, as large conglomerates formed. There was a period where the opposite direction of Babel seemed to happen, where nations were kind of congealing, in some cases by force, and others by legitimate healing. While Russia used the sword, the West seemed to be in a state of repair, for a while anyway.

After the war, Western nations thought it was obviously a bad idea to get caught up in nationalism and patriotism. Boundaries began to be removed or reduced to help foster cross-border trade and travel. While the Eastern Bloc was being beaten into submission, the Western nations were coming together, all while keeping a cold steely eye on its enemies. There was a pre-Babel impulse called globalization that took shape, and is still underway now. The lingua franca of the world became English. But underneath English was still the really old common language, that of competition and control. Even if the world became one nation again, as some suspect is happening, control would still be the underlying game.

Was all of this a part of God’s plan?

Apparently it was.

Rather, it is. His plan is still happening right now.

As Peter said to Jesus about the Eucharist: This is a hard thing to accept. But accept it we must, if we are to trust in God’s will, his plan. If we are to make progress in the Christian life, total trust in Jesus and the Body of Christ, his Church, is needed. We float on the sea in the ship of the Church, singing songs and sharing the sacred meal, while the storm rages around us. We just have to stop fighting in the ship itself. We must stick to sound doctrine, proper worship, and unwavering focus on Jesus. The great trial is coming, but we already knew that.

To stop speaking Babel, we have to start speaking Pentecost, and I’m not talking about making nonsense noises. I’m talking about the process of letting go, forgiving, and not needing to win. I’m talking about doing what is right even when the world says it is wrong. I’m talking about turning away from the game.

We now face the same pluralistic world that the apostles did, with the added threat (bonus points?) of nuclear annihilation and cyberwar. This should not make Christ’s followers angry however; we should be overjoyed, as always, because death has no sting. As I’ve mentioned, Jesus did not get angry at the lost sheep; he went out to save them. That is the task now, and it was the task then. If the world intends to blow itself up, then that is God’s will for reasons unfathomable to us. Our commission is not winning the war with guns, ours is in fighting the spiritual war. The same weapons are to be used: to believe, to be baptized, to pray, to fast, to sin no more, to keep his commandments, and to go make disciples of all the nations. The harvest is enormous but the laborers are few. What else is new?

Today we are all speaking the same language in both English and that of Babel. The language is that of competition and pride, shame and honor. Whether or not capitalism or communism won, this language of the culture would be the same. Communism just has a higher body count.

We don’t seem to have been scattered again…not just yet. We have the means to self-scatter now through weapons, but there will be a different kind of scattering soon, and it seems there is a scattering or atomization as we lose focus on our families and the nation, and we move into the isolated world of technology where we live in the cold kingdom of “My truth.”

We are living right now in the post-Manhattan Project, post-Cold War, era of globalization, and as the world comes together in consolidating nations, we grow further apart in our families and communities.

We are going backward, toward the Big Bang that happened at Babel, before the scattering, when everyone spoke the language of Babel and understood each other. We are going back toward the era before the nations, but I don’t think it will be what we expect or want when we get there, and I know it won’t be if we try to do it without God’s blessing.

You might say that technology is the tool that allows us all to communicate with the same protocols today. What this means, however, is that we are returning to a state of pluralism.

Thus we are not only going back toward the time of Babel, but we are going further back, returning to the time of Noah. In fact, with the advent of the Internet in 1995, you could say we have already passed the time of Babel, and are now hurtling toward the state of the world when Noah and his family were the last ones standing after the flood. And if we go that far, we may be going back further still, to the state of the world where God saw the flood as necessary to cleanse the world. As God said in the flood story, he would never again drown the world. He said he wouldn’t use water the next time. But he didn’t say anything about fire.

Jesus on the other hand said something concerning, as we observe our world spinning into chaos, becoming more and more like the days of Noah before the flood.

But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. For as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away. So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be out in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken, and one will be left. Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come. (Mt 24:36-44)

Stay awake. If you are short on time, you really only need the first three chapters in Genesis to get the main point of the fall in the Bible. Many people of great faith can stop at Genesis 3 and take a time machine to leap ahead to the Gospels. Many understand all they need for their faith to thrive with that alone. This saves them the burden of trying to slog through Leviticus and Numbers, too.

All of what you need to know is in the first Fall in the Garden, and while the living God may be hard to make sense of in those early pages of the Bible, the clarity of that living God comes fully alive in Jesus, in the Gospels. If you read the Gospels, and re-read them, and read them for the rest of your life, you will see that that Jesus is God. Or you at least have to wrestle with Jesus as God, because he says it over and over. It’s important to actually read the Gospels and not take what a YouTube personality says it is, especially one that doesn’t know what sin actually is. You have to read or hear the words of a man who cannot be explained, who can perform miracles, and who doesn’t sound crazy somehow when he claims that he IS the living God. This can be done alone, but is best done in groups of people, with those who are trying to unlearn the language of Babel. You unlearn it by spending time with the Gospel, and pondering lines like these:

“Whoever sees me, sees him who sent me.”

“I and the Father are one.”

“Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?”

You have to decide if he is God. If you have heard the words of the Gospel, you must respond to it. While Jesus is making these claims, you have to compare his claims against the fact that sin and disorder and suffering are in the world, and compare his message to that reality.

What do you make of a God who came here to suffer like us? To partake in the same pain and suffering that we experience? That to me is far more powerful than some self-help book that peddles worn out platitudes of “Be yourself.” If you want your suffering to be transformed into something meaningful, Jesus Christ is the only God that can show you how that is actually possible.

The reason why Genesis keeps striking people as true in each passing century is because of observable facts of history, and more importantly, the experience of our own journeys. The story of life is on repeat. We all suffer. It’s unavoidable. The question is: how are you going to deal with it? Will you take revenge? Will you run away? Or will you look to Christ for the answer when you cannot stand another day?

The chaos waits to rise in our lives. We see order in nature, but disorder in people. What is the answer to handling this chaos? Let’s just summarize the whole Bible in four lines:

Nature is ordered.

People are not.

We need a savior.

Enter Jesus.

The end.

Or maybe this one is better:

Nature is ordered.

People are not.

We need a savior.

Jesus is God.

The end.

There, that gives us the creation, the fall, the problem, and the solution, without the need to carry around a large book.

The ordering and disordering of our world is a constant obsession with us, especially when we think we are the ones putting things in order. Dictators and ‘Tiger Mothers’ have an extremely high sense of order, but while both attempt to cram their world into a box, everything they stuff inside gets damaged. Why? Because they are not God but they are assuming that role. The root motive for every dictator is the same as every sports-obsessed parent: to win, to be the best, and thereby be justified, and thereby be proud, and thereby feel loved. Actions taken out of pride are cries for help to be loved and approved. If only they knew that the love is available without all the struggle, that they can be loved without winning, without any effort at all!

No matter how you chop up the story, the root problem of disordered choices is pride. Adam, Cain, Babel: all three “falls” stem from pride of self over humility before God. The worldview of Babel is simple when you burn off all the slag on top of it: the word is competition. Now there is competition in nature, but not like that of humans. “Survival of the fittest” does not explain the Empire State Building. It does not explain the heart of darkness in humans that goes far beyond that of plants fighting for sun or wolves scrapping for alpha. Plants and animals stop consuming and fighting when they get the food or the high ground in genetics. When nature becomes unbalanced, they balance out. Whereas we do not. Jeff Bezos continues amassing wealth long after he had enough, long after he could have stopped. Coca-Cola didn’t stop spewing out plastic bottles once we all noticed it has created a horrid mess, nor did they stop shoving sugar at people once obesity became the norm. To win, you have to maintain the attitude of “to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs.” Money, fame, sex, power, honor: these are a few of our favorite things, and once tasted and chosen, there is never enough. Addicts don’t quit wanting the thing that makes them miserable. The competition is on. If we are not playing ourselves, then we cheer it on. The language of empire speaks of victory, winning, getting a better deal, finding a loophole, getting away with something. When this is your worldview, it devolves gradually into “rules for thee but not for me.”

Why? Because winning. Because we want to get what we want. Because the need to win overrules morality and fair-play. That is the whole game. Once you start to realize the winners are cheating, then the jig is up. Hasn’t the Olympics and Tour-de-France races taught us this repeatedly in recent decades? Hasn’t every hero-athlete who is later revealed as a dope user shown us this fact? Didn’t the Houston Astros show us how winning the World Series has less to do with talent and hard-work than finding a way to cheat? Didn’t inflate-gate and spy-gate and every other “gate” scandal show us that the culture of competition leads to a downhill slide?

Likewise, hasn’t every empire that ever existed cheated and brawled its way to success painted itself as an honest, plucky hard worker? The Romans picked Virgil to write the legend of their path to glory. America had Lincoln and Washington and Jefferson to sell the narrative. There is a maxim that behind every fortune lies a great crime, and that applied to nations as well. What does all of this tell us? It does not tell me that we need to overthrow the government or adopt a socialist government, as it does to some today. No, it tells and re-tells me that the “shiny one” whispers ideas into our ears and we agree. We nod all too willingly, eager to win, with a chaser thought close behind of how we’ll craft our mischief into an obstacle that we had to overcome. We sell sin to ourselves as a virtue. The secret sauce of all success is to tell a story that spins our sin into gold.

You can hear this in small-talk everywhere, and even though I may only hear it in America today, the same choice of wealth and pleasure over humility before God was obviously the attitude in Babel. The line in the Tower of Babel story states it like the unspoken intention of every LinkedIn profile: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” (Gn 11:4)

How do you make a name for yourself? By winning. By getting ahead. By stepping on the guy’s head who is directly beneath you and pulling on the lady’s leg who is directly above. By using whatever means necessary to get something more than the guy in the next cubicle. The language that was used in Babel was that of competition. You might even say it was more of a feel or vibe than a language. America was not founded entirely on the principle of competition in the pit, but along the way, the “City on a Hill” morphed into the “Tower of Babel.”

Every person and people must make a choice. This is a choice that defines their life in the end. We think of choices in belief as small, as not mattering all that much, but what you believe factors into nearly every decision you make. “How you do anything is how you do everything.” That quote causes me to shudder, as I know how my lack of attention to detail could land me East of Eden forever. Belief matters and the quote could be, “What you believe drives how you do everything.” Belief drives action, and action drives belief. Let faith in Christ become the center of all events in your life. Do not waver, do not look away. Peter sinks in the water because he gets scared when the wind comes up. He looks away. Stop being yourself. Put aside the modern nonsense of your own specialness and be special for someone else. Call your mother. Go visit an old person. The only thing that is holding you back is your personal goals. Stop chasing pipe dreams. Be like Christ. See Christ in others. Let the rituals of the Mass guide your days, and revel in the fact that you can partake physically in the Body and Blood of Christ. Not only can you imitate Christ, you can be physically formed to him. The choice of who we believe in can be seen in the language we speak and the actions we take. Remember that most of all, this choice is not shown externally. This choice must be made in the heart. Pray to God that he reaches to you, asking for his spirit to be sent to you. The only thing you can offer to God in trade is your whole life. He wants you to ask. He likes you. He’s waiting. You can either ask, or he will ask you, and it usually works out best if you ask first. Humility is when you ask him, and humiliation is when he is done messing around hinting, and asks you directly. Shoot for the first option.

Ask him to find you: “Draw me, Lord, and we will run.”

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So how do you stop speaking Babel?

You open yourself to the Holy Spirit. Literally, you ask for it to come, and keep asking, and it will show up.

When God scattered the nations, they still held the culture and worldview of Babel even if they spoke different grammar and vocabulary. A new language came to the apostles at Pentecost, one of non-competition and fearlessness through Christ’s victory. And again, like God’s messenger of Gabriel comes to Mary, the Holy Spirit comes to his apostles and disciples. We do not pull him down with a gate or tower. He comes to us.

The old options of fight, flight, or freeze are suddenly lame compared to the new option of faith in Christ. This is what always scares people and leaders about followers of Christ. They don’t want the ordinary things of this world. They fast and pray and don’t care about money. Even sex becomes less interesting. Power is a fool’s game to them. How can this be? This is terrifying to those who play the game of Babel constantly in their lives.

They have spent a life squabbling for honor, to be mildly comfortable, and any threat to their position in society or the system that they sacrificed for to get that honor and status is terrifying because it exposes them. They have sacrificed so much for the promises of the world. If they are wrong, their entire way of life is a fraud, a waste of time. If the poor, the lepers, the insane, the criminals, and the outcasts are finding joy in their poverty, with no status whatsoever, just by believing in this man named Jesus, then everything that they hold sacred will be proved as powerless. To consider this possibility is too much for them. This mirror is too difficult to peer into because the reflection will betray the truth.

What scares them the most, more than anything else, is witnessing people change and convert to worship a man, one man, named Jesus, and seeing these people suddenly find total joy and meaning. This rocks those in power because for the first time they become aware that their foundation is built on sand. They have no idea how it can be possible and don’t want to hear that it is possible. How could happiness possibly come without competition and victory and power and money and pleasure? (from The Fountain of Youth series)

Total openness to the Holy Spirit brings the gift of peace even while you are being persecuted. The old game is powerless over the apostles and people can see it even if they don’t speak Hebrew, Latin, or Greek.

The new language is victory over judgment. Victory over scapegoating. Victory over needing approval of those with more money or power. Victory over suffering. Victory over vice and false pleasures. Victory over death.

When the apostles emerge at Pentecost, the opposite of the scattering at Babel occurs. The apostles are understood by everyone because they stop speaking competitively. A miracle happens, yes. Whether you read this story in Acts literally or figuratively, either way it remains a miracle. This is a story where I can read it literally because when you meet someone who is open, and obviously is channeling God’s grace, you don’t need to speak their human language to understand. The joy is springing from the person. Speaking the language of Pentecost is a fearless posture, a hopeful posture, and the complete opposite of the fight, flight, or freeze faces that our instinct makes.

Keep in mind that it was all of the nations who crucified Jesus. It was not one group, but all groups. The nation of Israel handed Jesus over to the gentiles, led by the Romans, who are emblematic of all nations. It was also all of the people not just the people of Israel. Christians have missed this point throughout history and pinned the death solely on the Jews, which is absurd if you actually read the Gospels. The Roman soldiers and the crowds represent everyone, as in, all of the nations. They came back together for this event, to kill God. It’s like a second Tower of Babel attempt, where in the first one the people all speak a common language to manipulate and control God. In the death of Christ, they come together for his assassination, speaking the common language of Babel, again in the title match of man vs. God.

In the Tower of Babel story of stairway was erected to create a gate to bring God down to earth. In the story of Jesus, God voluntarily comes down to earth and the people try to kill him. Building a huge expensive structure to pull God downward failed and resulted in a mess. Then God surprises us and comes down for free, and he is raised up on a simple piece of wood. But rather than take control of him, he sets us free.

When the nations all come together to kill God we see the common language in action. The common language is that of sin and hatred and violence and manipulation and scapegoating. What is not said in the Tower of Babel story is is that the language is in our heart, not in our mouths. The common language is that which tries to kill God, and the literal attempted murder happens on the Cross.

The idea at Babel was for us to be elevated over God, to allow our sin to be acceptable. The shouting crowd on the Way of Sorrows shows us the common language, the ugliness of the fallen world.

Then we see something completely different when the apostles emerge on Pentecost. They spoke to the crowds and people of all nations understood them. The crowd that crucified Jesus all spoke the old language. The Cross is Babel, part two, and Pentecost is the world being set free. Just when the demons think they have succeeded in taking down God they only have to wait until the third day to realize he has not been defeated, and that he cannot be defeated, and fifty days later, the new language of the world is introduced for one and all to learn and repeat, and two thousand years later, this new language of fearlessness is still being shared and taught.

The common language of the old world was that of competition, anger, pride, and winning. The next time your school brags about its mascot or celebrates pride in a fight song, you should know that this is the language of Babel. In politics you see it more clearly. As people get closer to real violence, that language becomes more fluent. The evil in our common language is hidden with niceties and uniforms and mascots, but that is the glossy cover on a horror story.

We all speak the old language and unlearning it means coming to know Christ. God separated us into the nations for a time, and then brought us a solution once we were prepared to learn a new way.

At the Cross we see the fullness of the common language in the outpouring of every sin onto Jesus. Then at Pentecost we see the reversal, a new common language introduced that everyone understands. The openness of truth and the freedom that comes through an emptying of the self. The old common language was based on fear, on walling in the self, on looking out for number one, and the new language is based on Christ himself. And this language, this person, is unstoppable.

Today we live in an era of rapidly fading faith, and innately we know both the language of Babel and the language of Christ. People are turning back to the old common language of Babel. The old language is seducing billions of souls, and once critical mass is reached, God will return to do more than scatter us. We will be crystallized in our sins, locked forever in that state of accepting or rejecting God’s grace. We will be stuck with the language we chose, either that of Babel or that of Christ, with no more chance to ask for faith. The only time we get to ask for tutoring from Christ is now. Today. This very moment is when we need to say, “God, give me strength and direction. Give me faith and hope so that I may forget the old common language and learn to speak the language of Jesus. Send forth your spirit to me, help me open up my heart to receive the Word.”

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The theme of Spiritual Warfare is all over in the New Testament. Even the word “Gospel” means to bring news of victory. Gospel is a proclamation of victory over the enemy. Most people do not realize that there is a war happening, so they are not aware of the skirmishes around them. The Great Commission that Jesus gives his followers is to go and “make disciples of all nation.” To be commissioned is a military action. How is this to be accomplished? By telling the story of Jesus, the man without sin who was unjustly condemned, crucified, and rose again from the dead before ascending into heaven. This message is not to be brought by the sword or the gun, but by awakening people to the truth about how they can be set free from the slavery of the powers that whisper in their ears, crouch at their doors, and rule the nations.

To be unshackled from these bad spirits it to stomp out the fire of competition in your heart and kindle the fire of the Holy Spirit in its place. Stop looking at other people as the enemy, and start seeing them as POWs. They are prisoners in the greatest war of all, a war that makes all human war look like a game of patty-cake.

There is a way to set people free, and it’s not by strong-arming, mocking, selling, tricking, or bribery. We cannot “compel them to come in” because Jesus said that “no man can come to me except the Father draw him.” That means God is working on people in his time. We who have found Christ and are fighting the demons must also resist the urge to play God. If we try to force people, we instantly revert to the language of Babel, which is competition, envy, pride and wrath.

The strange solution that we must use to fight the spirits that seek to dominate our lives and our nations is this: we opt out. We reject them. We stop fighting. We stop taking offense at every little thing. In order to gain control, you must give up control. In order to go up, you have to go down. The great paradox here is that in order to gain control over the spirits, you must give up control to God.

Surrender to win.

The Tower of Babel story is about control. It’s about winning. It’s about playing God and making God surrender to us, which is impossible. The building of the Tower is man’s attempt to control God, which always fails.

The miracle, however, is that our failure to pull God down leads to him coming to meet us. Through Abraham, through Mary, we get Jesus. God reverses the ask of the Tower builders, and he comes to us when he is ready, no gate needed, no bricks and mortar. We don’t control God, we just live in his world. He comes to us when he is ready, and however he sees fit.

In the man named Jesus, he comes down. Under terrific spiritual attack, God is then raised up on the Cross, and by surrendering, God wins. The same works in our lives.

He defeats death by letting the humans overrun by fallen powers think they have overpowered God once and for all. Then Jesus rises again on the third day. In our own daily battle, we surrender, giving up control, and only then can we fight the Spiritual Combat. We must let go of our self and put our entire confidence in God, because if we try to go halfway, we are still allowing spirits to guide us. Going only halfway allows the whispers to still be heard and sin is still crouching at the door.

If we only go halfway, we haven’t left the competition. We are still speaking Babel. If we do not fully hand over our hearts to Jesus, we cannot fight the spirits, because they will always find a way to chase us once again away from the herd. The shepherd comes for those who seek him, and for whatever reason, he chooses who he draws and chooses when he draws them to him. On God’s time, people are drawn, but in our daily spiritual battle, we can pray for those souls who we know, and even don’t know.

This is a mystery.

Accepting that not all are drawn right now, today, should give no cause for anger or alarm, because God’s ways are not ours to understand, and the moment we get angry at another person, then we have lost our way. We’re playing at God, into the hands of the spirits. Never forget that sin is crouching at your door.

We are commissioned in the service of the Lord to “Go and make disciples of all nations.” That means that while God will draw people on his own time, we can pray and teach and speak and spell the story of Christ and the Cross. We are God’s instruments, and his weapons, but we are weapons of kindness, not those of fear.

So why are the nations still at war? Jesus has ascended, but the story is not finished. His victory over the nations is complete, and we merely await his return now. In the meantime, we are his arms and legs, his voice, so we need to tell the story of Christ today, with full charity, to those who don’t know of his death and resurrection. We can imitate Christ while God works out his plan of salvation. Billions are unaware of this combat that encompasses them. They are locked into ways of life that enslave them, and they do not yet know that there is a way out.

This naturally raises the question of “Why all the drama?” Why doesn’t God simply snap his fingers and fix the nations? Why is there a need for Mary and Jesus and this drawn-out solution to the problem? Doesn’t it seem like God allowed this to happen at Babel by letting the demonic powers rule the nations in the first place?

We are in the Messianic age, the last age, and God will again make himself known, on his time, when he wishes. Do not try to be the potter at the wheel, just be the pot. Let God shape you, do not try to shape God. This is a great time to be patient and pray, especially when it may seem like the whole world is caving in to the temptation of pride and wrath around you.

Some notes from the Catechism can guide you here on how to swim and, better yet, how to float peacefully when the waters rage and the storm hits:

670 …We are already at "the last hour". "Already the final age of the world is with us, and the renewal of the world is irrevocably under way…

671 Though already present in his Church, Christ's reign is nevertheless yet to be fulfilled "with power and great glory" by the King's return to earth. This reign is still under attack by the evil powers, even though they have been defeated definitively by Christ's Passover. Until everything is subject to him, "until there be realized new heavens and a new earth in which justice dwells, the pilgrim Church, in her sacraments and institutions, which belong to this present age, carries the mark of this world which will pass, and she herself takes her place among the creatures which groan and travail yet and await the revelation of the sons of God." That is why Christians pray, above all in the Eucharist, to hasten Christ's return by saying to him: Marana tha! "Our Lord, come!"

672 Before his Ascension Christ affirmed that the hour had not yet come for the glorious establishment of the messianic kingdom awaited by Israel which, according to the prophets, was to bring all men the definitive order of justice, love and peace. According to the Lord, the present time is the time of the Spirit and of witness, but also a time still marked by "distress" and the trial of evil which does not spare the Church and ushers in the struggles of the last days. It is a time of waiting and watching.

673 Since the Ascension Christ's coming in glory has been imminent, even though "it is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority." This eschatological coming could be accomplished at any moment, even if both it and the final trial that will precede it are "delayed". (CCC 670-673)

Be prepared then. Love God, and love your neighbor by knowing they are suffering prisoners in this great spiritual war. See Christ in them and pray for the whispering and the crouching sin to leave them alone. Stay with the Church, stay with the faith. Stay with Christ. Fight the urge to strike back, the need to win, and surrender your will and intellect to God, and you will have victory. Hold fast to the ship in the storm. The weather is about to get bumpy. We can pray not to be brought to the test, but the final test is yet promised for the Church.

Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth…

Then will the conduct of each one and the secrets of hearts be brought to light. Then will the culpable unbelief that counted the offer of God's grace as nothing be condemned. Our attitude to our neighbor will disclose acceptance or refusal of grace and divine love. On the Last Day Jesus will say: "Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me."…By rejecting grace in this life, one already judges oneself, receives according to one's works, and can even condemn oneself for all eternity by rejecting the Spirit of love. (CCC 675-679)

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Let’s recap and roll through the cast of characters, the who’s who, in the three falls of man, and see if we can identify who is the baddie.

First, Adam and Eve lose paradise by allowing the whisper of a demon to enter their thoughts. This is the “shiny one,” the tempter, the accuser. A demon guides her actions by suggestion, planting thoughts and deceiving her about who and what God is. Who is the enemy here?

A spirit. A bad one.

Next, Cain lets sin master him, being told that “sin lies in wait at the door: its urge is for you, yet you can rule over it.” But he submits to that demon by not battling it, not ruling over it. This is the first mention of the word sin in Genesis, and we think of it as an action we take. But consider this way of thinking about the word sin:

This description of sin is striking. The Hebrew word translated as “crouching” in Genesis 4:7 can indicate lying down, as in resting, but also refers to lying in wait like a predator lurking for its prey. The same verb is associated with an ancient Semitic term for demons that were believed to guard entrances or doorways to buildings. Thus, the text characterizes sin as a demonic presence or a predatory animal waiting to pounce on Cain.

So in the second fall, who is the enemy?

A spirit. A bad one.

Then we get to Babel, which means “Gate to God.” The nations already exist in chapter 10 of Genesis. But in a few places in the Old Testament, we learn that each nation has its own ruling spirit, that God has assigned angels or demons to the nations. Divine beings exist, literally called “sons of God,” also called members of the divine assembly. These creatures are assigned to oversee the nations. But these spiritual “sons of God” are creatures like us, with intellect and free will but not bodies. What seems to happen is that the creatures become the “local gods.” Humans begin to offer worship to these gods instead of the real god.

The tower is a ziggurat, which is a holy place where pagan gods are worshipped. And just who are the pagan gods? They are not God. They are idols. I would have believed that they are figments of the imagination, but Jesus seems to imply, repeatedly, that these ruling demons are real. These fallen spirits are overseers employed by God to watch the nations. Somewhere along the way, people rejected God, and started worshipping the overseers. Worse yet, the overseers starting accepting worship from humans, and also rejected God. After all, they are under the same Commandments as we are.

The Gate at Babel is not meant to send humans up to heaven, it’s meant to pull God down from heaven. But in Babel, the people have been tricked. The watcher, the guardian, has become a fox in the henhouse. The nations have been duped by egotistical fallen angels who crave worship. The Tower is built to these demons, not God. Humans that build towers to anything but God Most High have been sucked into a power play, fooled by vending machine gods. And thus the being set to guard and watch the nation has become corrupt itself. He or she or it has fooled the rulers into idol worship. Who is at fault once again?

A spirit.

A bad one.

Not only can we be fooled by spirits at an individual level, but we can as well at the group level. Trying to replace God, usurp God, or disobey God at any level leads to division and strife. This is the daily battle for ourselves, and for the nations that we occupy.

The war that we are in is not against other people. It’s not even against other nations. It’s against spirits. Other people are not the enemy. This will come as a shock to internet users. The real enemy of Democrats is not Republicans, and vice versa. If you understand this properly, it may open a door to understanding suffering, understanding the state of our world, and understanding Jesus.

Observe in the Gospel how Jesus reacts to those who treat him terribly.

If someone attempted to kill me, I would probably get upset. But Jesus does not get angry at the people that try to throw him off a cliff. Nor does he get angry at the soldier who punches him or the plural soldiers that scourge him. All of the mockery? He just takes it. The cruelty pours over him like water and he utters not a word in self-defense.

Why?

Because these people are the lost sheep. They are the ones fallen into ditches and ravines. Under a constant spiritual attack they struggle, but their time has not yet come to ask for help. The shiny one is whispering in their ear. Sin is crouching at their door. A false idol has their attention. They don’t recognize Jesus right in front of them, but he is inviting them to see him. In other words, all of these people need saving. Jesus is here to save them. That’s why he doesn’t get angry at them.

He shows us how to save people. It’s not by competing with the cruelty of others, returning jab for jab, wound for wound. He shows us another way. By not competing, he appears to be losing, but he is winning for us all, and showing us how to win.

Those throwing insults are the ones following the advice of the demons. Jesus points the way for us on how to opt out, how to to reject their game, how to cancel our subscription to the whispers. He doesn’t lash out at the demoniacs, he doesn’t lash out at those who beat him, he doesn’t lash out at those who mock him.

However, he does lash out at those who reserve God for themselves, who block the “little ones” from coming to him, and who, in Peter’s case, try to impede his path to the Cross. Of all people, he lashes out most at the Pharisees, and he tells us why they are scolded. He holds them to a higher standard because:

“Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.” (Lk 12:48)

His sustained anger at the Pharisees suggests that they have been entrusted with much, but they have failed to live up to the demands. This is a bit terrifying to read. Anyone who lives in comfort today should read this “given much” phrase and immediately see themselves as the recipient of much. If you have a house, you have much. If you have a refrigerator full of food, you have much. If you have faith, you have everything. And if you have faith, “more will be demanded” because you have been blessed with a gift like no other.

Jesus expects that those with the gift of faith will give that gift away, because it is a bottomless gift that keeps giving, like the basket in the story of the loaves and fishes. However, if you hold the gift of faith to yourself, then it is pride and greed that do you in. The whisper of righteousness is coming from a spirit, and you are not fighting back. If you have the gift of faith, then you are a warrior intended to help turn the tide back toward God in this long saga of salvation history. In our small role in the great war, we all have a part, and the only weapon we need. Faith can guide free will to the right place. We are the gatekeepers of our thoughts and must slam the gate shut when evil attempts to enter. If the evil thoughts have already breached the castle walls, then you have to turn to God, pray to heaven, and fight off hell to re-take the castle. This is another great trick of the devil. He takes several angles at defeating us, like an army testing the lines of the enemy, checking for the weakest spot. First, he tells us that demons don’t exist. Next, he’ll tell you that your desire is not really a sin, but a culture of oppression or a phobia invented by man. Then he convinces us that we are “born this way” and helpless to our sins. Worse, he will throw Bible verses at us, and you can see plenty of Christian preachers today acting as his puppets, advocating for the sins of pride, greed, sodomy, adultery, lust, and sloth.

The demons are real. God allows us to be tempted. That is our test, to stand up to them and keep our eyes fixed on Christ.

St. John of Damascus reminded us long ago that we are not helpless in this battle.

But while the liberty to attack man has been granted to them, they have not the strength to over master any one: for we have it in our power to receive or not to receive the attack. (De Fide Orthadoxa, Book 2, Chapter 4.)

It is always worth repeating the question: Why did Peter sink? We know why. He looked away.

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The reason I found it impossible to understand anything in the Bible when I was fallen away is because of one simple fact: I did not really believe in God. Once I had re-admitted that God was real, I still did not really believe in spirits.

This blocks all understanding of what Jesus is up to, in nearly every interaction that he has. It’s not surprising people get nothing out of the Bible today, since our Present Bias considers spirits to be the mere superstitions of uneducated fools. Our long march through the Enlightenment left our souls behind, and now we have to turn the bus around to go back and retrieve the other half of our selves.

Notice that whenever Jesus heals someone, he cures by removing something and/or making something whole. He often drives out a spirit. And spirits are everywhere in the Gospel. They seem to not only rule the nations, but they overtake people. A general observation of mental health in today’s world suggests that little has changed since the time of Jesus.

These healings happen without full explanation, but there is clearly something spiritual at work, something supernatural. Let’s run down the list:

Jesus drives out a spirit in Capernaum, he drives spirits into a herd of pigs, he heals a demon-possessed child, he heals a boy with an “unclean” spirit. That’s just for starters. He re-infuses the spirit into dead people, re-animating them. He does this to Lazarus, Jairus’ daughter, and a widow’s son; garden-variety miracles of resurrection for Jesus, not the Resurrection that Jesus does to himself that conquers death.

Next, consider the numerous healings of blindness and deafness. There are seven of these alone. Plus, he heals deformities, skin diseases, and even paralysis. Then there are the mystery illnesses that, like Peter’s mother-in-law who has a fever, the chronically ill woman in the crowd, the many healings at Gennesaret, the dropsy cure on the Sabbath, and the healing of the official’s son in Galilee. None of these medical cures require a scalpel or a prescription. He even re-attaches an ear in a split second without any plastic surgeon in sight (or proof of insurance).

Without understanding that Jesus came to a spirit-filled world, how can you possibly understand or relate to anything in the Bible? I don’t think you can, because the awareness of God, spirits, angels, and demons is fundamental. In our disenchanted scientific model, we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, we live in the boringest of all possible worlds. No wonder every libertine becomes so dull as they age and end up looking ridiculous in their luxury cars.

Our scientific obsession has sliced our ability to understand scripture by shifting our thoughts into a pancake-flat rationalism, into “nature” alone, ripped clean away from the spiritual life. We’ve lost a whole dimension of understanding by cancelling our souls and God. The funny thing is that cancel culture cannot cancel what is true, and God and souls are real. We can hear them knocking on the culture now, quite loudly, while we put our fingers in our ears and try to talk over it.

Oddly, in our collective transition from beings with body and soul into just a body and mind, we have become less and less connected to nature. This may be the greatest irony of all: in our obsession with nature as the answer to all things, we have moved further and further from the woods. We believe nature is the only thing that is real, but in our actual lives we mostly experience nature on TV, not outdoors. And if we do finally get outdoors, we make sure to bring plenty of hand sanitizer in order to quickly makes ourselves clean again. You can’t make this stuff up. I think the ancient Israelite cleanliness rituals have nothing on today’s materialist germophobes. Covid protocols doubled the fear for those already afflicted. The bright side of Covid is that people started to realize that nature must be experienced, not merely narrated by David Attenborough. The exodus from cities and throngs of people cramming into National Parks attest to the fact that a change in mood about those “flyover states” and rural living is happening. There is a transition happening as the candle of the Enlightenment has begun to flare out, particularly as its pursuit of “truth” through pure materialism and liberalism has led us directly into postmodernism, the poster-child of relativism and antithesis of truth.

Let’s briefly revisit the pre-Enlightenment era, known as the the Dark Ages.

First, you need an Enlightenment propaganda decoder ring. It’s pretty simple:

Christendom = Dark = Evil.

Modernity = Light = Good.

The name alone, Enlightenment, broadcasts the propaganda as much as “woke” implies that the pre-woke world was “sleep.” We have the same game being played out again and again. Marx tried to do a takedown of the bourgeoisie, with his villain as Christianity and the class system. In the Enlightenment, the enemy was the same: Christendom. In the latest manifestation of Marxism, guess who is the enemy? Christianity. The long-term Nazi plan was to stamp out Christianity. Is anyone yawning yet? We can keep going if needed, all the way back to Julian the Apostate to Marcus Aurelius to Nero. The common enemy of worldly power is Christianity, always. And guess who remains after all of these ideologies flame out? Jesus. I’ve heard people say, “We are finally getting out from Christianity and the patriarchy.” Today men, and white men in particular, are the enemy. It’s hard to tell these true believers that, no, you are not, because Jesus is the ruler of this world. The misapplication of the doctrine of original sin happens ad nauseam, as the underdog and the oppressor fable plays out. This is why we cannot get to the Kingdom of God, because the whispers of the evil one keeps this loop of pride happening.

If we consider the era of the Enlightenment, which is now being replaced, we can track the language of “Dark Ages” rather easily, all the way back to Petrarch in the 1300s, but the label really took off with the French Revolution. See, people were not free until they rejected God. Here’s another clue for your decoder ring. Freedom = Rejection of God. That’s how the story goes. Ignorance and error only comes with obedience to God, or so we’re told, and given that we want to taste all the flowers of life, we are easily sold.

But that story is always a lie. It’s the wrong kind of freedom. People find this out in their own falls and redemption just as nations do. Repeatedly. Israel itself found this out the hard way, repeatedly, until it finally was kicked out of the promised land entirely for 1900 years. Choosing the freedom of the self versus the freedom of obedience to God takes you down very different paths. This is the story of the decline of Christian values in the west. Taking the easier path is the lesson of Lot going to live in Sodom instead of taking the less arable land that Abraham chose. In our current state, we constantly choose the easier path, and have done so with massive encouragement from writers and media, from the Renaissance era right up to the iPhone today. The perceived gains in efficiency and leisure come with a cost. It’s been long observed by writers like Neil Postman that we are Amusing Ourselves to Death. But not only does entertainment take our eye off the road of life, it breaks our connection to nature entirely, to the point that people become disconnected from even the sources of food that we eat.

During the “Dark Ages,” we lived in far greater connection with nature. When we had no radios or phones, when we shivered near wood stoves, when we lived near animals, near the woods, near pastures, we had a far better idea of “spirits” than we do today. I suspect it was far easier to talk about spirits when you could hear the blizzard whipping at night outside the hut, or even the castle, than it is today where we watch TV in our Snuggie in front of the gas fireplace amid the humming white noise of forced air furnace heat and walled within airtight spray-in insulation and drywall. No, they did not have hot tubs or cold beer or vibrators, but they had something much greater, and that was a spiritual sense of life.

The many advances that came through engineering and science proclaimed that unending progress in technology would bring freedom. Now, I don’t want to experience a Minnesota winter without a forced-air furnace if I don’t have to, but a furnace does not bring salvation, and faced with the choice of losing God or losing my furnace, I would choose to remain with God, and ideally, I pray, avoid living in the eternal furnace.

My point is that people were far more in touch with nature and its awesome power, and likewise were more connected to the world of ghosts. We don’t experience either now, as we lean over Chromebooks and live out the myth of Narcissus, staring into the mirror of a screen. Unless the storm breaks into our lives somehow, we don’t get to recognize our weakness and need for something greater than ourselves. And God still does find a way to invade our lives, it just takes longer than it did in the “Dark Ages.” God still has a way of breaking in to our world, even with all of our engineered comfort. A storm can strike even while you lay on the couch and the sun is shining outside. Jesus climbs into our boat, invading us with Grace. How you react to it will be the climactic moment of your life. Never coercive, God lets us choose, and we do. One way or another, we say yes or no to God, whether we think we have or not.

Many people today say, “Nature is my church,” and I know why. Those who spend time in the woods sense something out there, something awesome. You don’t need a sequoia tree to appreciate the awesomeness of nature. A sapling will do. An acorn or a pine cone will do. You can spend time in amazement looking at a blade of grass if you hold it close enough.

My point is that we do not experience nature reading papers in the journal Nature. Knowing how nature works is not an experience of nature. We experience the awe of nature by participating in nature, being out in nature. Being able to summon from memory the Latin names of plants is not experiencing nature, it is bottling nature for our consumption. A child jumping in a pile of leaves understands nature far better than a naturalist collecting beetles in jars. There is more nature experienced in slapping a single mosquito around a campfire than reading an entire book on microbiology in a library.

This is exactly how the prayer life works as well. It’s how speaking a foreign language works, or playing a musical instrument. You don’t experience things from books, you experience things by participating. I have a book about the science of swimming, but I don’t take it with me swimming.

The reason people feel churchy in nature is because they are no longer watching Planet Earth on the discovery channel, they are discovering earth and creation itself. When we disconnect from cities, books, screens, traffic, noise, ego-dramas, TV shows, and every other pornish eye candy we have invented, something incredible happens. We become more whole. When we become whole we become more spiritual, because we are both body and soul, and whenever we deny the soul we becomes less human. We become only half of the image and likeness of God when we downplay the soul.

Whenever I am on a hiking trail and come across someone blasting music on his smart phone, I say to myself, sarcastically, “You know what this walk in the woods is missing? Top 40 music. Thank you, Justin Beiber. You’ve made it complete.” The silence of the woods - the bird songs and the babbling streams - recalibrates the soul to the tune of God. Bieber does not do that. By no coincidence, fairy tales mostly occur in the woods, since that is where spirits are felt. Being in nature re-enchants us, giving us a sense of the spiritual.

We feel whole in the woods, and thereby a sense of holiness. Here’s a hint: these two words are related.

The reason the woods doesn’t need Justin Bieber is because it is already complete by itself. What people find in the woods is creation, and like God when he finished making it, we all can see: “It is good.” Even if we come across death in the woods, of plants or insects or animals, we can see the circle of life without the need for Elton John to sing about it. Like the woods, we feel more whole because a spiritual presence can be felt, and it can be stifled and ruined by simply pulling out your iPhone to take a selfie. Gadgets and phones in the woods is the guaranteed way to lose the wholeness, because they have all the temptations of the city, the world, and the nations. All the falls of man are present in the phone, so that every time you place a screen before your nose, you are less whole. This is because the self gets in the way of the soul. The mind is meant to connect body and soul, but the mind becomes the self, and even the word “Selfie” gives away the essence of the problem.

We can even sense that our bodies are good in nature. I don’t think a hiker looking at a grove of trees is likely to think, “I need to lose weight” or “I should inject botox into my face this week.” But if they are taking selfies, holding up the mirror to their face, those ideas leap to the forefront of the mind. Or maybe I’m wrong. Carrying a mirror of our thoughts everywhere we go doesn’t give us connectedness, it reduces our wholeness.

In the woods, the wholeness seeps in, the joy of something profoundly close touches you in the brush of a fern, while the sense of something higher and unreachable calls out to your soul. This is the paradox of the transcendent (farness) and the immanent (nearness) nature of God. The reason nature feels spiritual is because God made it, and he made you. Of course it feels spiritual. In the woods, you are closer to home than ever. When out among creation, you are reminded of your own creation.

The spirits identified by the ancients are still in the woods. They are still everywhere but we ignore them, walled in by the sound and light produced by artificial gadgets. Distraction is the best angle the devil has to make us forget not only God, but to make us forget the devil, too. He is counting on us doing that, and every time your reach for a device, he is rubbing his hands in lieu of taking your soul on the last day.

Through our obedience to science we have decided angels and devils are too childish to accept. Those ideas were for the primitive minds of people before the year 1500. Those ideas are for the fearful, we think. Surely, we are more sophisticated. Our sophistication is our paper shield against all superstition. Hence the need for cartoon Tinkerbells, Caspars, and red devils. It assures us that there is nothing to fear.

But there is something to fear, and we all know it, and it’s called death. The whole reason for the walls we build is to push that fear aside, down the line, away from our present. Our society reviles death to the point that open casket funerals are nearly a thing of the past. No one wants to see a body. A neat cremation is preferred - it’s cleaner - much like our dinosaur chicken nuggets that bear no resemblance to the once-living chicken.

This is the irony of our alleged sophistication. It isolates us the realities of life and death. We openly mock those whose lives still occupy the spaces of nature. The hillbilly with his trout, the hunter that we call savage, and the farmer who delivers piglets all have a far closer relationship to nature than the billions who live in cities. We mock what we fear.

Having had a chance to work on farms, I have noticed that those who live among palpable nature, with daily chores that involve blood and manure, who see life and death as daily occurrences, have an understanding of things that books can never provide. This is why I turn the volume down whenever someone from Silicon Valley offers instructions for living. I have gained more in five minutes watching a calf being born, delivered by a farmer with an eighth grade education, than I have ever gained from one hundred hours of human resource training videos on how I should think. The birth of a calf, let alone a human being, is watching a sacred miracle of life bursting forth. Watching an HR training video is a mandatory brain-death march at the bayonet of my paycheck.

The spiritual flatness we have allowed into our lives is stunningly obvious to an increasing number of people, but the pleasure of making money lures and keeps us in this trap. I was nudged, even coached into the office life, despite the movements of my heart telling me from my very first hour in a cubicle: “This is a birdcage. Escape now!” The language of Babel kept me there. After all, I speak Babel. “God helps those who help themselves.” “Get rich or die trying.”

This wall against the possibility of spirits is built and shored up with mockery as mortar. We’ve forgotten that spirits can pass through walls. Disney is freezing spirits in time every time they portray another fairy tale. By bringing fairies to the screen, fairies becomes less believable. Science has decided what is reasonable to believe and Disney has killed our imagination. Disney is in the business of turning imagination into a science, even calling their engineers, “Imagineers.” They are quantifying and qualifying the intangible. Cinderella was once a fairy tale for each of us to imagine, and now she is cast into a single image, in her blue dress, as if her image was hammered onto a stone tablet in Orlando. Science and Disney have denied the spirits by reducing them to engineered cartoons. In the former we downplay it, and in the latter we play it up as quaint fantasy.

So I’ve taken a huge detour into the woods here, but now let’s bring it back to the desert, to Jesus and that third temptation.

Jesus has three temptations in the desert, and in Genesis there are three falls: Adam, Cain, and Babel. (Again, I’m skipping the Nephilim story in chapter 6 of Genesis. There is a fall there as well, but I’ll stick with Adam, Cain, and Babel, or this series will never end).

In all three falls, spirits are involved. In all three temptations of Christ, spirits are involved. The falls all occur due to our failure to accept God. In all three falls, humility before God is lacking. Pride reigns. Pride cometh before the fall.

The whole Bible is about mastering yourself by tamping down pride. To keep from being deceived, we have to ignore the questioning whisper that suggests to you that God is lying, that he is not real. To keep sin from pouncing on you, like Cain, we have to mash our pride into a slurry and send it down the disposal. To keep from trying to manipulate God, we must offer him gratitude and praise, not sacrifices for a transaction.

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The entire Old Testament after Babel is the preface to God’s return, with the pivot point being Mary. Through the Incarnation, we learn that God will restore his rule, and remove the evil powers. Tolkein fans should recognize this immediately because we are living in part three, “The Return of the King.” We are living in the Messianic Age now. Also, for anyone who wonders why Mary is such a big deal to Catholics and Orthodox folks, it’s because without her there is no return of the king. She is the turning point in this story, the Mother of God. She’s kind of a big deal, as in, the biggest deal ever, as she is the true gate that brings God to us.

Christ came to do several things: to take away our sins, transform our suffering, destroy death, and ultimately defeat the demonic powers. He came to wrest power away from those spirits that rule our lives and the nations. Again, he did not come to remove all suffering. We still have to deal with that for now.

As for the pain and suffering that doesn’t make sense, the only God that ever came down and suffered with his subjects is the God of Israel, the God who came to us. This is how and why suffering is transformed in Christ. A common question is: How can God allow suffering? How could he do this to me? That is exactly when we can look to Jesus, to God himself, who came here in the flesh and suffered a brutal and terrible death on the cross. Until you understand this, and how Christianity works, suffering will probably never make sense to you. You will cry out, “Why, God, why?” even as you stare at a crucifix with Jesus looking right back at you.

Not only Christ suffered, but his own mother did as well. Those closest to him suffered. His immediate followers, his chosen twelve, almost all suffered horrible deaths. They were so hungry that they ate barley right out of the field. Mocked and scorned, they had to hide and endure prison. Millions of his followers have suffered, not in fear or self-pity, but with strength, and some even with joy. All of them have imitated Jesus and experienced profound meaning in that suffering, giving incredible hope and rebirth to people who were once spiritually dead. That is why Christianity does not die, nor will it ever. The only God of any religion that came here to suffer like one of us is that of Jesus Christ who voluntarily carried his cross and showed us the meaning of redemptive suffering. This is the only religion that even makes sense when we can see how much pain is in the world. It is only the person of Christ who can turn a cross into a gift. Self-salvation is a fool’s game. The Under Armor marketing team almost has it right, even though they just shoplifted their slogan from Christianity. The t-shirt and shoe company assures us that “The only way is through.” The way to what, Under Armor? A trophy? A scholarship? Forget such trifles.

If you want to get to heaven stop trying construct a gate or a tower of yourself. Stop chasing drugs and sex. Quit wasting your time on something that will impress your peers or massage your lonely ego for a few hours. The original saying is from St. Rose of Lima and a hundred other Christian writers. The only way is through the cross. Says St. Rose of Lima: “Apart from the cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.” (CCC 618)

We will all get to learn on the last day where the gate we are looking for is located, and it is not a gate or a ladder or a tower. The cross is the narrow gate, and following Christ is the way.

The spiritual rebirth found in Christ happens every day. These are modern miracles. You can watch it happen when the penny finally drops and everything connects. Our modern mental health crisis has a single cause: it is taking the exit off of the Via Dolorosa to hit the drive-thru at McDonalds. The cure is to be re-enchanted with life, with struggle, with purpose, and the therapist needed is available for free, any time, any where, and so is his mother, who can take notes for you and deliver them to the therapist for you.

When people are released from their bondage of self, something happens, and you can hear the reborn person tell you, “Something was lifted off me,” or “I don’t know how to explain what happened to me, but I am no longer the same.” What they are describing surpasses science, as no pill or therapy can explain what has happened. But once you see it enough times, you know there is something spiritual happening, and when these miracles occur, a prisoner is being released from the enemy, returned from exile to the side of God.

What we don’t realize in our day to day movements is that we are in the middle of a war.

This is difficult to accept for modern people because much legwork has been done to confuse and steer us away from this fact.

We are in a war. This is a war far bigger and longer-lasting than any human war. And this war has claimed billions of people already. We have been in a war our entire lives, just as your parents were in the same war, and your parents’ parents were as well. The sooner you recognize this, the sooner you can do something to change not only your life, but your entire “language” of life. Once you recognize this war, the lens through which you see everything changes dramatically.

This war is not with people. In other words, people are not the enemy.

If you were lucky enough to be baptized, you are already armed for this battle. But the battle is not against other people. In fact, if you think the war is against other people, like Democrats or Republicans, or Packers fans versus Bears fans, you don’t yet understand how this war works. You are still in the darkness, being distracted, diverted, divided, and deceived by a spirit. The prison still has you.

Consider this question: When and why does Jesus get angry in the Gospels?

He does not show anger at the lost, the mentally ill, the blind, the diseased, the fools, or the poor. For us today (take note Republicans) that means: Jesus shows no anger at the crazy, the ignorant, the legitimate people in need, the immigrants, the addicts, the prostitutes, and the working poor. But notice (take note Democrats) that Jesus also doesn’t get mad at the middle-class, nor does he talk down to the uneducated, or those who carry swords, or those who work in construction.

Even if no one wore collars in those days, we know that Matthew maps to a businessman today while Peter maps to a tradesman. Jesus lives among both the wealthy and the poor, the soldiers and the pacifists, all within his Chosen twelve apostles. That alone should speak to you. The women of his inner circle - take Joanna, Martha, and Mary for instance - were all different, with varying personalities, wealth, and backgrounds.

Jesus shows sadness for those who suffer. But he only shows anger at certain people.

Most obviously, he shows anger at the religious hypocrites who love their self and reputation over God. He gets angry at the money changers who defile God by using the Temple like a Wal-Mart. He also tends to scold the wealthy often. And he shows anger at Peter, even calling him Satan, when Peter tries to stop Jesus’ from going to the Cross. In light of this, it’s not surprising that Jesus doesn’t get mad at Judas when he learns of his betrayal. I guess it should go without saying that Jesus, fully divine and fully human, knew everything that would happen.

Given that he knows everything, and reads everyone’s heart, when Jesus gets mad at someone, he is sending a message. Notice that he doesn’t stay mad at anyone either, but only rebukes them.

So what is it that Jesus gets angry at? Is it the people? Does the Pharisee, who is a body and a soul, anger him?

No.

He is angry at their failure to fight the spiritual combat. He expects more of them because they have been given much, but have beed led astray, blinded by worldly things. First, he wants them to love God, as they do strive for, and second, he wants them to help the orphan and the widow, to care for the weak and the poor. They have caved into pride, and pulled the old trick of worshipping the self while calling it God. It’s so easy to do, and most tempting for those in the elite or wealthy classes of society. Here’s the thing: God loves the Pharisee just as much as the tax collector and the prostitute, but he expects the educated and comfortable Pharisee to do more, to reach out, to go all-out Mother Theresa on this world.

The spirits of darkness has overtaken those at whom he expresses anger. They have failed to convert daily to God in their Spiritual Combat. Jesus does not mince words in saying that those who are given much will have much demanded of them. The Pharisees are those blessed with intellect, education, and the ability to interpret scripture and preach God’s word, but they have forgotten their own orders: to be servants. That is the problem. They serve themselves under the guise of loving God.

They are Ben Franklin saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” That is the spiritual lie whispered in their ear that they have not rebuked and cast out. The Pharisees can cast demons out of others, but the ones that Jesus’ scolds have not yet cast the demons out of the themselves, because they are not fighting the spiritual fight. Jesus can tell immediately who is lying, because he knows their hearts. He knows all hearts. Those who have not been given much - the poor, the refugee, the addicts, the mad - don’t have the capacity to serve, because they can barely survive with what they have. But the Pharisees and the wealthy have the capacity to serve, and choose not to.

The people that Jesus scolds are supposed to know they are living in a combat zone. He gets angry at those who have been granted the gift of faith, but do not share it with others. They reject their duty as servants, trading up for the fool’s jewels of ambition, reputation, honor, and glory. Pride is the root cause of everything that goes haywire in the Bible, from the Garden to the Cross.

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Through insights from the saints we can come to understand the nature of angels and demons. We cannot learn anything from Dan Brown, who clearly channels demons when he writes the endings to books like Angels and Demons. But from writers like St. John of Damascus, we can understand just enough about spiritual beings to realize our need for armor.

First, about angels:

The angel's nature then is rational, and intelligent, and endowed with free will, changeable in will, or fickle. For all that is created is changeable, and only that which is uncreated is unchangeable. Also all that is rational is endowed with free will. As it is, then, rational and intelligent, it is endowed with free will: and as it is created, it is changeable, having power either to abide or progress in goodness, or to turn towards evil…

…They are not hemmed in by walls and doors, and bars and seals, for they are quite unlimited. Unlimited, I repeat, for it is not as they really are that they reveal themselves to the worthy men to whom God wishes them to appear, but in a changed form which the beholders are capable of seeing.

…they have not a bodily form by nature, nor are they tended in three dimensions. But to whatever post they may be assigned, there they are present after the manner of a mind and energize, and cannot be present and energize in various places at the same time…

They are mighty and prompt to fulfill the will of the Deity, and their nature is endowed with such celerity that wherever the Divine glance bids them there they are straightway found. They are the guardians of the divisions of the earth: they are set over nations and regions, allotted to them by their Creator: they govern all our affairs and bring us comfort. And the reason surely is because they are set over us by the divine will and command and are ever in the vicinity of God.

(De Fide Orthadoxa, Book 2, Chapter 3)

On the first pass, that sounds like terrific news. The angels guide us and our nations, govern our affairs, and bring us comfort. They guard us, and saying the “Angel of God” prayer is a good reminder of what they are actively doing for us at all times. When this prayer is said, take heart to consider what it means.

Angel of God, my guardian dear,to whom God’s love commits me here,ever this day be at my side,to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.

So we must pray for their intercession, their guidance. We ask the angels and the saints to pray for us, just as we ask Mary to intercede and pray for us. We are in a spiritual battle, so enlisting help must be done daily. There is no such thing as a one-person army (which made the U.S. Army’s ad campaign of “An Army of One” very odd to me, as it targeted the self over the team). This is also why “spiritual but not religious” makes you a one-man-band as opposed to a member of a massive force of people and angels working together. As Pink Floyd asked, “Did you exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage?” The cage is your self, and that is what you trade when you give up the community of faith for the solitude of “I’m spiritual but not religious.” A bird in a flock makes sense. A bird in a cage does not.

Unfortunately, many have been driven from the church, thinking that it feels like a cage, when it should feel like a flock. This is evidence that we have failed to teach the faith well, especially key things like the joy, the mystery, and the aim of holiness and humility before God. This has chased the baptized out so that they look for holiness in other places, like concerts and fitness centers, and they will never find what they are looking for in those places.

Being a standalone believer, with a “lead role in a cage,” makes for easy sniping for the devil and the demons. As any addict knows, the devil wants you alone. He wants you isolated so that you pick up again. Whether it is a drug, a drink, a porn site, sports gambling - or whatever unhealthy attachment haunts you. Never forget that the devil is the divider, the accuser, and solitude is what he requires to re-employ you for his work.

What does St. John of Damascus have to tell us about demons? Can he help us articulate what they are and how they came about? He can.

He who from among these angelic powers was set over the earthly realm, and into whose hands God committed the guardianship of the earth, was not made wicked in nature but was good, and made for good ends, and received from his Creator no trace whatever of evil in himself. But he did not sustain the brightness and the honor which the Creator had bestowed on him, and of his free choice was changed from what was in harmony to what was at variance with his nature, and became roused against God Who created him, and determined to rise in rebellion against Him: and he was the first to depart from good and become evil…along with him an innumerable host of angels subject to him were torn away and followed him and shared in his fall. Wherefore, being of the same nature as the angels, they became wicked, turning away at their own free choice from good to evil. (De Fide Orthadoxa, Book 2, Chapter 4)

St. John of Damascus has more to say about this, and this should probably scare and encourage you at the same time. God lets the demons prevail when he sees it working for our salvation:

…they have no power or strength against any one except what God in His dispensation has conceded to them. But when God has made the concession they do prevail, and are changed and transformed into any form whatever in which they wish to appear.

This makes for a profound claim, because it re-introduces the old line, “The devil made me do it” and seems to suggest that we do not have free will after all. This is the timeless question about free will: If God wills all things, then whatever I do is willed by God and I have no agency, no free will. Likewise, if God lets the demons prevail over us, then we cannot be culpable for our actions. This plays into the hands of the Lady Gaga “Born this way” argument and also the classic plea of “The devil made me do it.”

But how about an option that treats you like a grown-up instead of some damsel in distress? Is there an option that makes for a hopeful sinner instead of a helpless sinner?

Yes.

God gives us trials that lead us to the truth. We are tested. As fallen beings, we are compromised but not broken. We may be born with the urge to sin, but we do have free will. I would think today’s gamer culture would love this option to level-up. For all the motivational speeches, from TED Talks to Peloton commercials and Nike ads, the idea of “born this way” seems a bit pathetic. We are told to achieve our goals, to strive, to work toward progress, in just about everything - except for holiness. Receiving a trophy or showing off fleeting six-pack abs pales in comparison to the pursuit of partaking in the divine nature and seeking eternal life. Once you awaken to the fact that what you want in this world is rather pitiful, the joy of pursuing a life that imitates Christ becomes the only career that even makes sense.

Trials we face become different when seen in the light of Christ. Once you realize this path forward is guided by the Holy Spirit, all tests and trials suddenly become fortifiers of your faith:

The Holy Spirit makes us discern between trials, which are necessary for the growth of the inner man, and temptation, which leads to sin and death. We must also discern between being tempted and consenting to temptation. Finally, discernment unmasks the lie of temptation, whose object appears to be good, a "delight to the eyes" and desirable, when in reality its fruit is death.

God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings.... There is a certain usefulness to temptation. No one but God knows what our soul has received from him, not even we ourselves. But temptation reveals it in order to teach us to know ourselves, and in this way we discover our evil inclinations and are obliged to give thanks for the goods that temptation has revealed to us. (CCC 2847)

Not only do we have choices to make, but so did the angels, and some of them chose poorly. Yet we can fight. We have a role to play, like the smallest character in the saga of Middle Earth, we are cast in the great play, and we can stand in the light of Christ or hide with our fig leaves in darkness. This is powerful knowledge.

And we are culpable. We are responsible. One of our mistaken thoughts is to assume that we alone are the center of the universe, and that God’s will is only for us. There are billions of people here on earth. God’s plan is for all people and all nations. Tim Keller uses a great metaphor in Rediscovering Jonah about how a general commands his army in battle. He doesn’t go to to each soldier and have a sit down about what the battle plan is, and he doesn’t encourage each one with a therapy session. The general sets the plan and says, “Charge!” and those on his side go, while those against him desert the regiment or join the enemy. His plan and ways exceed our understanding. We know the rules of being in his army, and to follow him we need to turn (recall that to repent just means “to turn”) our eyes back to Christ. He is the general. There is no such thing as an “Army of One.” An Army of One is an individual, not an army.

When we turn our eyes away, we slip up. When we fail to surrender, we try to win alone. This is what the demons count on, and their whispers to us cause us to slowly turn away from God, often even telling us that we are looking at God when they are just holding up a mirror to our faces. The devil can quote scripture and coax us into bad ideas, bad patterns of living, and he can do it repeatedly if we don’t do daily battle in prayer and with others in the faith. Demons suggest that we worry, they make us afraid, and they tell us to wall ourselves in. A quarter they like to put in the arcade of our minds is: “You are not good enough, you are not lovable.” They remind us that we are naked and exposed and vulnerable, so that we need to gather fig leaves from the bushes of wealth, power, pleasure, or honor. They speak Babel to us, telling us that we must fight, flee, or freeze, and we know that common language all too well.

More from St. John of Damascus on demons:

God reveals the future to the angels and commands them to prophesy, and so what they say comes to pass. But the demons also make predictions, sometimes because they see what is happening at a distance, and sometimes merely making guesses: hence much that they say is false and they should not be believed, even although they do often, in the way we have said, tell what is true. Besides they know the Scriptures.

All wickedness, then, and all impure passions are the work of their mind. But while the liberty to attack man has been granted to them, they have not the strength to over master any one: for we have it in our power to receive or not to receive the attack. Wherefore there has been prepared for the devil and his demons, and those who follow him, fire unquenchable and everlasting punishment.

Note, further, that what in the case of man is death is a fall in the case of angels. For after the fall there is no possibility of repentance for them, just as after death there is for men no repentance. (De Fide Orthadoxa, Book 2, Chapter 4)

I’m not sure if this is a terror or a comfort to know, but knowing that demons have been granted “the liberty to attack man” means that our trials have meaning. The seemingly trite comment from your aunt or crazy Christian friend that “Everything happens for a reason” becomes less crazy the longer you live. As experiences stack up and hindsight comes into view, the trials make sense, but only if you repent - that is, turn toward God. Trials make no sense when we are turned away.

By surrendering to God, we become citizens in a new nation. As immigrants must take a test to become “naturalized” in America, we merely need to turn over our hearts and minds to become members of God’s nation. By giving up all control to God, he takes us under his watch, with St. Michael as our bodyguard, and a guardian angel to follow us everywhere we go. This becomes a far better defense than the U.S. Army. You have protection and overwatch at all times. I can think of no good reason why the Prayer of St. Michael should not be said daily, like a pledge of allegiance to God Most High, where we ask for help from the warriors, the elect, the angels.

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle;be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.May God rebuke him, we humbly pray;and do thou, O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God,cast into hell Satan and the other evil spiritswho prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

People today are uncomfortable with this language, because it is taboo to talk about spirits. This is exactly what the devil wants. In the movie, The Usual Suspects, this quote says it all: “The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” That’s where we are at, where polite society shies away from any kind of Jesus talk. Why? Because polite society has rejected him and winks at every story where he “casts out a demon.” They have turned to other answers, like psychology and medicine as the only answer for the mental illnesses healed in Jesus’ ministry.

The word Jesus is now a litmus test to find out where someone is at, of which side they are on. This is a door that must be open or closed. God does not allow the door to be halfway open. If the door to sin is cracked open at all, the door is considered fully open. Given our endless battle against evil thoughts and spirits, we can only shut the gate to hell with the grace of God. Grace stops sin in its tracks. The door to hell is heavy, and only with God’s strength can it be closed. The reason the door to hell is usually portrayed as a gaping mouth is because sin will eat you, it will swallow you, like a dragon or monster. St. George can only slay the dragon and not get eaten because he fights with God at his side. How does he do that? Before George kills the dragon with one thrust of his sword, he makes the Sign of the Cross and asks for God’s help. That’s how it’s done.

When Jesus said he was a sword, he wasn’t kidding. His name splits groups in half, with those who believe on one side, and those who become uncomfortable hearing the word on the other.

After Babel, God allowed spirits to rule the nations, delegating control to them. This is something we gloss over today, because we don’t really believe in spirits, and for most cherry-picking Bible readers, because we don’t even really believe in God, if we’re honest. Remember, we don’t just speak English, we speak Babel. We want competition and pleasure all the time. Ain’t nobody got time for nonsense about spirits, angels, and demons. In fact, if someone were to admit in a business meeting that they believe in angels, they would be considered an idiot. Fortunately, this is one of those promises from Jesus, that being mocked for faith in Him and all that comes with Him is a sure sign of being on the right track.

This denial of spirits is why we miss so much of what is happening in the Bible. Our modernist ears and eyes are so disenchanted that we give more credence to Harry Potter magic spells than to the religious truth of the Bible, because whenever a spirit enters the story, our reason drives our belief out. This is a shame because there is far more going on in the epic story of the Bible than what’s happening at Hogwarts. But you have to believe in God first, and believe in Jesus as the second person of the Trinity, to really understand what is happening. It’s much easier to accept the fantasy Harry Potter because we know he’s an invention sprung from a writer’s head. Choosing to believe in Christ as the living son of God means changing every single aspect of our life. So to play it safe, we put words like Jesus, God, spirits, souls, etc. all on a shelf.

When you read Genesis, it’s important to understand these points about “the nations”:

• the Tower of Babel is the last thing that happens before we meet Abraham.

• The formation of the people of Israel begins with Abraham.

• The nation of Israel is in a world that is fully fallen and lives among nations that are ruled by demonic powers.

• The nations dislike Israel because they will not bend the knee to false gods (Well, some of the Israelites won’t bend the knee, but plenty do - repeatedly.)

• The remainder of the Old Testament is God guiding and leading the Chosen people from Abraham to Mary.

• All people will be “blessed” through Abraham’s descendent, meaning Jesus. All people = All nations = Both gentiles and Jews

A lot of death and genocide happens in this journey as the sole people of God Most High must fight, scrap, and survive among the 70 nations, which are ruled by demons, or another way of saying it is that the nations worship false gods. For those who dislike Israel’s warring, they forget how many times the nation of Israel is on the receiving end of brutal warfare, and experiences enslavement and genocide on the wrong end of the gun, so to speak. As for the hard sayings in the books of Joshua and Judges, regarding total war and the genocidal commands of God, I would refer you to look into a book by Michael Heiser called Unseen Realm. The commands to the Israelite army in the conquest of the Promised Land is unique and strange. Joshua and company cannot simply waltz into the Promised Land because there is something already there, something much darker than what we can easily discern from the text. Nations that worship fallen angels, a.k.a. demons, are the only targets of God’s heavy-hammer of genocidal war. The doctrine of Just War applies only to these specific clans in Palestine. How God deals with enemies in Joshua and Judges must be compared with how he deals with other nations. Reasons for the brutal warfare in these books are alluded to regarding what these nations are doing. An ethnic cleansing is the literal reading here, as the Chosen nation of the God Most High works vigorously toward the fulfillment of the covenant to take the land. This occupation of the land is a pre-requisite to the Messianic age that we are living in today. If you cannot stomach the Promised Land struggle, I would suggest combing through the Six Approaches on the website Reason and Theology. Much ink has been spilled on this topic, but I feel like Heiser and others, like Fr. Stephen de Young, are catching onto something deep and important from texts unearthed with the Dead Sea Scrolls that we are only beginning to understand, and it requires reading the book of Enoch alongside the Old Testament. I can’t dive into this here because it would requires another set of articles and episodes of its own to fully explore.

One thing is certain: it is a lonely world to be staying true to the one true God. The same is a fact today, as anti-Jewish and anti-Christian sentiments are rising in America. But like any life lived with conviction, Israel’s formation as a nation requires great sacrifice, struggle, and often battle for both establishment and survival. You cannot get to Mary without the conquest of Canaan. Later, when Israel squares off against the mega-armies of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome, they fail to win. Being the only nation that worships Yahweh makes for difficult passages wherever they go, but amid this whole story there is an all-important plot playing within the larger narrative.

This huge story is zeroing in the entire time on a path to the home of a teenage girl, where:

“In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you.” (Lk 1:26-28)

Gabriel comes to Mary in the fallen world where the nations are still ruled by demons. All of the nation-building narrative, all of journeying in the desert, the wars, the kings, the captivity, all of that is preface to the moment with Mary. The chaos, the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, are preface to Abraham. Genesis from chapters 1 to 11 are explaining how the fallen world came to be the way it is. From Abraham to Mary: that is the story of how the nation of the chosen people delivered and lasted through centuries of struggle to protect and guard the lineage that brought forth the Mother of God.

And that’s where the story starts to get really interesting.

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Clearly the construction project at the Tower of Babel went sideways, as in, the biggest disaster possible. When the people tried to put God on a leash, instead they unleashed demonic powers. Think about that next time before you try to make a deal with God. You may be in for a surprise. An ancient salesperson could have sold t-shirts that read, “I built the Tower of Babel, and all I got was this lousy demonic power.”

The devil doesn’t hide the fact that the nations are ruled by him and his demons. So given that the “scattering” happens at Babel, we come to learn through various books of the Bible that the nations are currently ruled by demons at the time of Christ. When Jesus goes out to the desert we hear this directly from the devil in the third temptation. Here’s how it reads in Luke:

Then the devil took Jesus up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. The devil said to him, “I shall give to you all this power and their glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me.” Jesus said to him in reply, “It is written: ‘You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.’” (Lk 4:5-8)

This story of unintended consequences of performing transactional rituals of sacrifice may sound familiar to some, but it seems fewer and fewer people know the stories of Genesis these days. For a modern retelling with some elements of the Tower of Babel, recall Ghostbusters from 1984, where rooftop worship goes bad. The plot climax hinges around a gateway on an apartment tower rooftop from which demons are summoned. Hmm…sounds familiar, except in the Tower of Babel the builders were at least pretending they were trying to leash the one true God. So they thought. And put simply, that’s why you don’t muck around with demon worship. In Ghostbusters, Ray says, "The whole building is a huge super-conductive antenna that was designed and built expressly for the purpose of pulling in and concentrating spiritual turbulence. Your girlfriend, Pete, lives in the corner penthouse of Spook Central."

Ok, enough about Ghostbusters, since that era marked the beginning of the end of belief in spirits for Americans. Surely the cute and cuddly cartoon Slimer didn’t help, because like Caspar the Friendly Ghost, we stopped fearing spirits altogether, and then just forgot about them entirely. Dawkins must have loved it. Carl Sagan would have been pleased, too, since his book The Demon Haunted World sought to rid our culture of such nonsense as spirits of all flavors, friendly and slimy. Surely if we all just stopped believing in demons the utopia would arrive much faster. It’s always the Christians holding us back, saith the venerable Sagan. We need to just give up our belief in the spiritual world, saith esteemed Dawkins. They sound much like Screwtape giving instructions to Wormwood:

“Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves…I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that ‘devils’ are predominately comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.”

Before I got to far afield with Ghostbusters and Carl Sagan as two screws in the coffin of our beliefs in spirits, I need to reel it back to Babel and Jesus in the desert.

It is really important to understand that the overarching story of the Bible is about the comeback of the one true God, the Most High God (or God Most High, however you like it). God is returning to restore his creation, which is this world and ourselves, or at least those open to his grace. Spirits are like us in that they can choose to follow or reject God, so their fates will be similar, or so the Catechism tells me so.

Because of our “falls,” we invited the demons in.

In other words, the demons are real. All those structures around the world to pagan gods - those “gates” did what Ghostbusters was talking about.

The real shock can come when you realize that God, who controls all things, allowed it to happen. Why would he do that? He loves us, right? God is love?

God’s will is being done, so if we are allowed to choose, he knew beforehand what would happen, but the people and spirits that rejected God did not. Free will is hard. But it’s much easier if you adhere to this line:

“Thy will be done, not mine.”

The key to living in this fallen world is that line. We can ask questions all day long why things are not the way that make sense to us, but when we ask, we must remember that we are not God. His ways are not our ways. So you can complain about it, or conform your will to God’s will. Some people see this as defeatist, but it is anything but. The way of the Cross is the path to true freedom. To suffer and endure is to follow Christ, who defeated death for us. I’ve heard it explained this way: God is playing seven billions chessboards at once, and we are somewhere among them. Just as Joseph went into Egypt as a slave, that hardship led to the saving of his people, and ultimately the nation of Israel, who Moses led out of Egypt. Likewise, the numerous hardships of the people in the desert led to the Promised Land. And so on, and on and on. Mary could not have given birth to Christ without all that prelude, with all its tears and glory.

Like an individual soul, a nation can conform to God’s will and be humble. Or a nation can reject God and try to go it alone. Abraham was born into that fallen world, as were we, but now God is restoring his world and his creation to how it is supposed to be, how he intended it to be.

In the meantime, we live in nations ruled by demons. Yes, that’s what I said: every nation is ruled by demons. So when we say, “One nation, under God,” this creates an interesting dilemma. Many of us want to think of America as “under God”…but is that what Jesus said? Whatever the case, it makes sense to pray. We’ll wade into these waters of angels and demons a bit here, but not all the way, because the most important thing in the spiritual battle is to do the one thing that helps, and that is to pray.

If you believe that Jesus is the son of God, the second person of the Trinity, you get as a bonus package of all that comes with him, and Jesus believes in angels and demons very much. He spoke of guardian angels that never take their eyes off God and are always ready to hear our prayers. Jesus said, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father.” (Mt 18:10)

The Jewish tradition believed in angels who stayed with God and demons who rejected him, and these beings have a large role to play, larger than we can comprehend, and one appears at Jericho before battle. This may be the most truly badass moment in the Old Testament, if you like badassery, as most Americans seem to (a current bestselling book on how-to-self-worship is titled: You are a Badass).

Joshua and the army are camped near Jericho, having just celebrated Passover. The drums of war can be heard in the pages, and suddenly this happens:

While Joshua was near Jericho, he raised his eyes and saw one who stood facing him, drawn sword in hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you one of us or one of our enemies?”

He replied, “Neither. I am the commander of the army of the LORD: now I have come.” Then Joshua fell down to the ground in worship. (Joshua 5:13-14)

This commanding angel of the army of God flat out says “No” when Joshua asks him which side he’s on. Neither Arnold Schwarzenegger nor Sylvester Stallone could play this role. Is this an angel? Is this God himself? The entire Bible has angel footprints all over it. So what are they? We don’t really get a hint in Genesis about when they were created, but Jewish tradition and the church fathers seem to think it’s somewhere between “Let there be light” and the creation of Adam.

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The question still arises as to why God would come to us without fixing this problem of the tension between nations. Why would Jesus, God himself, come to earth through Mary and live for thirty-three years if he didn’t intend to fix this problem of the warring nations?

Well, he did. He has. He’s doing it right now. But we have to keep going. There’s more to understand. Let’s resume:

In the desert, the devil says that he rules all the nations and can give them to Jesus. I don’t know about anyone else but that always jarred me when I came across it, even as a kid. The devil owns the nations?

Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence, and he said to him, “All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.” (Mt 4:8)

Jesus doesn’t disagree, nor does he rebuke the devil and cast him into the sea. I was kind of hoping Jesus would just use his hand and make a crushing motion and the devil would wither and die, just like I imagine he did to the fig tree. But that is not at all what happens in the desert on the third temptation.

Jesus responds without argument about the devil’s claim to owning the nations. He doesn’t deny that the devil rules all the nations, or has the power to give them away. This is kind of mind-blowing when you grow up singing “God bless America,” and pledging “One Nation, Under God.” There is some interesting reading around this where the nations were granted oversight by demons.

Before Jesus is arrested, he mentions this again. “I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me.” (John 14:30)

There are various places where this message is said in both the Old and New Testament.

The LORD said: Listen to whatever the people say. You are not the one they are rejecting. They are rejecting me as their king. They are acting toward you just as they have acted from the day I brought them up from Egypt to this very day, deserting me to serve other gods. (1 Samuel 8:7)

There seems to be ample evidence that what was happening with the Ziggurat at Babel has happened worldwide, among all the nations. And while I have been saying that the rulers are just telling a big lie to coalesce their power and authority, there is more happening here. God is saying in the Old Testament what Jesus is saying in the Gospels: that this motion by people toward evil is more than just a rebellious power move. God and Jesus both say that the nations are actually ruled by evil spirits; that these false gods are actually demons that rule the nations.

This is a chilling thing to consider, especially for materialists, who only see demons as ridiculous cartoon devils, or men in tights who carry pitchforks.

Jesus’ reply in the desert suggests that, yes, without a doubt, it is a fact that the devil controls the nations and has power over them. Instead of crushing the devil, Jesus quotes scripture to him, which makes the devil fold up like a lawn chair. As always, the devil’s game is to create competition and lust for power, honor, wealth, or pleasure.

Jesus doesn’t enter into the game. That’s how he wins. That’s how we win. This is important. Having authored the Ten Commandments, not to mention all sacred scripture, Jesus simply reminds the devil that the Commandments also apply to devils, and throws some Deuteronomy at him.

At this, Jesus said to him, “Get away, Satan! It is written:

‘The Lord, your God, shall you worship

and him alone shall you serve.’” (Mt 4:8-9)

Wait.

Wut?

I read that various times in life without really thinking about it, but then it struck me. What this response from Jesus suggests is that the devil has free will just like people do, just like you and I do, and so it seems the granting of power over the nations was a kind of employment for angels, who failed the leadership test and became demons. Or, more likely, as punishment for rejecting God in the Garden and at Babel, God placed fallen angels, a.k.a. demons, over the nations on purpose because we could not behave even when we had our “common language.”

When the devil is reminded that he is also subject to God’s law, and commanded to love and serve God, he flees. This is kind of a stunning moment when you stop and consider it, for multiple reasons.

This means that the Commandments are not only for people, but also for angels and demons. Spirits are also created beings, and therefore must adhere to the same regulations as other creations, such as people. Animals and plants just do what they do because they don’t have the same type of souls as us, but we have free will and intellect, like angels and demons.

We can’t leave this point behind yet.

If we know that demons rule the nations (and we do based on the conversation in the desert) and we also know that these demons have free will like us, then it seems that some spirits might follow God more closely than others do. This should also scare the hell out of you, because then the Tower of Babel story is more than just a big lie meant to scare the citizens or to give them meaning. No, instead, the Tower means that the nations worship actual demons. The people are literally selecting to worship a real demon instead of God. This means that not only is the demon fallen, but he is taking down the nation with him, starting with the rulers of the nation, the elite. This does seem to match reality, since it is always the affluent, the famous, the popular who reject God, while the poor, the outcasts, and the weak tend to embrace God. In the Gospels, the Romans, the Sadducees, and the Herodians are all more interested in their little fiefdoms than they are in God. Most interesting is Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees, where he gets more angry with them than any of those other groups, because the Pharisees are supposed to know better. It’s like he writes off the other groups as lost sheep, but the Pharisees get scolded for failing to be shepherds.

In light of this, is it any wonder then that Jesus has come for the poor, the outcast, the diseased, and the weak? They are indeed the only ones who know the one true God. They are the ones that hear the voice of God first, because the sheep will know his voice. The rich, popular, and powerful cannot hear any voice but their own, because they worship pleasure, power, honor, and wealth.

If you understand that what happened at Babel is not just symbolic of worshipping demons, but is the actual worship of demons, it becomes a much bigger story and problem than just some ancient Napoleon telling the “Big Lie” to the masses through large public works projects. No, if the demons rule the nations, this means the nations are not “Under God” or blessed. They may only be using the word God, like Franklin and Jefferson, to amass power, to make themselves look better. I recall when I was fallen away from faith how I admired Franklin and Jefferson, but after being called back, I think they need our prayers far more than any admiration.

Free will implies that spirits can choose to follow God or reject God. It seems conceivable that if the demons that rule the nations are anything like us, then their pride will get them into trouble, just like us. Every now and then, it seems that one nation gets quite full of pride and starts bullying others, and like individual people, this bullying usually goes on until the bullied either fights back or other people step in to assist and knock down the bully. The rise and fall of nations plays out like the rise and fall of prideful people, and to those full of pride, humiliation hits hardest. This is why America in its current state seems poised for an ungraceful dive and splat.

Likewise, if demons are like people, then they may go into depression, despair, and indifference. They may want to be alone for periods of time, or even periods of self-destruction.

Where am I going with this?

There seem to be two main ways that people reject God, both stemming from pride, and nations seem to follow this cycle as well. One way of rejecting God is through presumption, and another is through despair. The two brothers in the parable of the Prodigal Son represent this pattern. One brother is elevated by his self-righteousness and legalism, and the other is brought low through self-destruction and lawlessness. People go through these cycles, just as nations do. Germany went from Weimar debauchery to full fascism due to a wild imbalance of spirit. It will happen in the United States now, as Weimar America is obviously underway. There are forces at work that can be sensed in the winds of change, if not openly observed as we stare into the widening mouth of chaos. The world of our common language is one big zero-sum game, where if I win something, you have to lose something. We can observe this happening all the time, not only at the national level, but all the way down to toddlers on the daycare floor grappling over a bottle.

What’s interesting here is that the Tower of Babel story doesn’t explicitly mention this hand-off of the nations to demons. But clearly it has happened, or Jesus would argue the point. So when did this happen? Where? How?

When the Most High allotted each nation its heritage, when he separated out human beings, He set up the boundaries of the peoples after the number of the divine beings… (Deut 32:7)

So God separated the nations, and set boundaries according to the divine beings. This is pretty clear declaration that spirits are assigned to nations. The books of Moses say so, Jesus says so, and Paul says so. In fact, Paul states plainly that other people are not the problem at all, but the world rulers and evil spirits.

Finally, draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power. Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens. (Eph 6:10-12)

That’s an incredible bit of information.

Here’s some more. I’m sure that Psalm 82 and 58 have caused people’s heads to explode over the centuries when they grasp what is being said:

…the pagan gods are seen as subordinate divine beings to whom Israel’s God had delegated oversight of the foreign countries in the beginning (Dt 32:8–9). Now God arises in the heavenly assembly (Ps 82:1) to rebuke the unjust “gods”, who are stripped of divine status and reduced in rank to mortals. They are accused of misruling the earth by not upholding the poor. (from Ps 82 footnote)

…the Bible sometimes understands pagan gods to be lesser divine beings who are assigned by Israel’s God to rule the foreign nations. Here they are accused of injustice, permitting the human judges under their patronage to abuse the righteous (from Ps 58 footnote)

Now, this is a place where you can really go down a rabbit-hole and start digging. Instead of doing that, you should go sign up to help the poor, or pray, or fast for God. But since I started digging, I will continue…

Be advised, this tidbit of information about the “sons of God,” the Divine Council, being assigned to the 70 nations goes deep and requires a lot of reading. You even have to go into other books of Jewish history to really understand it. So unless you can quit your job and focus on it, you may want to just take Jesus’ word for it, that yes, spirits have been granted power over the nations.

This is one of those places where you can learn about scripture and get farther and farther from the kingdom of God. Whenever I reach these points, I have to step back and recall that I do not need to know everything, but I do know without a doubt that evil exists and that God apparently allows it to happen. Rather than get lost on the mechanics of it, I return to my standard home base, which is in Jesus’ instructions to: be baptized and believe, and keep my commandments. Serve the poor and heal the sick. I even made a little poem to help me remember it:

Repent and believe and sin no more.

Pray and fast and feed the poor.

But I do think that to understand anything that happens with Jesus, you have to realize that there is more to this world than just chemistry and physics. The dragons are real, and they are driving this world, and they cannot be defeated without the help of God. This is the paradox of control. You have to give up control to get control. You have to admit your weakness to slay the dragon, because you cannot do it alone, but you can with God. And that goes for temptations in your own life or enduring injustice in the world.

We can’t possibly know the “why” of everything, and this is the classic blunder of those who reject God. Wanting to know the mind of God leads to bad patterns and pride. The problem of pain and suffering is the obvious perennial question that people ask about God, causing millions to turn away. However, if you come to see that Jesus is God, then his every word becomes fact. His every step to the cross becomes the answer. There is no other answer, or not one that satisfies. Forgiveness and transforming suffering into good just simply works if you work the program, if you believe when it is hardest to believe. We are allowed rage prayers, so let it out. Psalm 88 is one for those days where nothing makes sense.

If Jesus agrees that the nations are ruled by evil spirits or the devil, then the believer agrees. That is the act of faith in action. Yes, this is a stumbling block for those just dipping their toes in the baptismal waters of the Christian life. But surrendering your self to Christ requires this leap.

However, I don’t think it’s that difficult of a stretch to believe that something evil drives the nations, that something is rotten in the state of Denmark (and all the others). The unending treachery and division among nations makes for a permanent game of chess, and where one nation oversteps, another is all too pleased to play the victim whilst the victim does the same overt or underhanded work elsewhere. This is, after all, the common language of all people - competition and greed, anger and wrath. We all speak Original Sin. We all speak Babel.

If spirits are subject to the same laws as we are, the same commandments, then it would seem that some nations might have a more balanced spirit guiding them than others. Or if these spirits are warring, then we are within that war. The lesson is something strange, but something liberating and powerful, because it gets you fully outside of the box, the wall, and into the fullness of time and space, and even a bit beyond without going cuckoo.

We are living within a Spiritual War.

The seasons of a person’s life can lead to great heights of presumption, or self-righteousness, which can then lead to great, public falls. When a truly self-righteous, presumptuous demon rules a nation, can’t we almost see it? Don’t we even kind of celebrate it? They are all the nations that we talk about the most in terms of history. Ancient Egypt, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Macedonian Empire, Rome, Nazi Germany, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, the First French Empire, the Spanish Empire, Imperial Japan, North Korea, America, and now rising China. We don’t seek out Polish history like we do the Roman Empire, even though Poland has been in the middle of many wars. Could it be that the ruling spirit of a nation is real? I always thought it was just lazy titles, but when The Economist runs a story every two years with the title, “The Battle for Latin America’s Soul” (or England, or Mongolia, or Canada) they may actually be correct. A spirit is in fact ruling each nation, and like people, these demons are playing out the same zero-sum games that we do.

Well, this is hard to deal with at first, but, if you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, then the exchange in the desert with the devil must be taken as fact.

And that is yet another life changing revelation from the scripture. I used to think people were crazy to believe that praying the Rosary could help our country, or help stop a foreign war. But no longer. Now I believe it’s crazy not to pray, because once you believe in a soul, in God, in Jesus, you know that there is much more happening in this world than what we can see. Hamlet knew as much. He told Horatio that the ghost was real, and Horatio’s rational Enlightenment mind was blown apart when he saw it.

We know that we have guardian angels, who, we certainly hope, are good spirits. The word angel implies that it is a spirit in God’s army, not aligned with the devil. Demon implies “evil.” Ain’t nobody want no demon watching over them. If anything, the demon waits for our guardian angel to look away and hopes we slip.

Now, if spirits have free-will, then the spirit that is appointed to each nation can make a huge difference in the direction of that nation. A nation who is ruled by a demon that rejects God should then be easy to spot. Furthermore, if spirits are like people, they may go through phases, or periods where they follow God’s commandments more closely than at other times. Like drunks that fall off the wagon and get back on, spirits may be able to slip and recover. But given that the word demon implies “evil,” I think it’s safer to bend negative here. I would like to believe that some nations have a gentle guardian watching them, like Egypt or Poland who keeps getting steamrolled across the centuries. Could it be that the nations we do not talk about are cursed? Or are they rather like lambs, ruled by more meek and humble spirits, while the superpowers are ruled by “those who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls,” as we say in the prayer of St. Michael?

The idea of a “national spirit” will never be the same again to me because of the Tower of Babel and Jesus’ dialogue in the desert.

All of this brings up the next point, which actually begins to explain where I fit into this “hierarchy.” I thought I held a higher rank, like a Captain, or at least a Sergeant, but I didn’t realize that I am not even a Private in this story. There is something far bigger happening around us than that what we can see with our five senses.

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As I mentioned, this story of Babel can read like a fable or “just-so” folktale to explain where languages and nations come from. But there is far more in this brief story than what the literal reading offers. I’ve said it before: literalism kills. That type of fundamentalist reading will slam the door on modern readers getting anything out of the Bible. Every story, every verse must be read using The Four Senses of Scripture to even get started on unpacking the meaning. These senses are: literal, allegorical, moral, and lastly, anagogical, or how it relates to Christ.

Those who stop on the literal reading think the earth is 6,000 years old. Now, let me pause to say - you can believe the earth is 6,000 years old, because it really doesn’t matter for your daily life. You can also believe the earth is flat and it won’t change much in your real life. The church doesn’t say you cannot believe those things. But if you only use one of these Four Senses to read scripture, you will miss out on a lot. In addition, faith and reason are the two wings that make us fly, as St. JP II said. So it’s best to take in what reason, including science, has learned, so that you don’t flap in circles with only one wing. Those arguing purely for reason vs those arguing purely for faith is the battle of two flocks of birds flying in circles due to their single-wingedness.

You may get what you need with the literal reading, but it’s like looking at a two dimensional picture. If you use all four senses of scripture, it suddenly become three dimensional, more alive and real than anything Meta can fake with a VR headset.

This is why study bibles are important. The footnotes help a great deal in getting the at literal, allegorical, moral, and Christ-facing points. My recommendations are: The Word on Fire Bible, The Didache Bible, The Navarre Bible, The Ignatius Study Bible. For Protestants, there are some terrific study Bibles as well are faithful and useful (the NIV and the ESV and the MacArthur). There are others, but if you struggle to read the Bible and want to heave it across the room, you may want to try one of these. Read the notes as you go. There will be difficult passages to your modern ears, but that’s good. That’s where you can put a question mark and come back to it. I have learned more from the Hard Sayings than from the easy parts.

Now, the bad news. Even if you read with the “four senses of scripture” and use a study Bible, you will hit dead ends because of translation issues on specific words. So let’s talk about one of those words: “gentiles.”

A major point of understanding that I whiffed on for years was that “the gentiles” refers to “the nations.” While this may seem insignificant, I believe it makes an enormous difference to our modern ears. The origin of the nations came from this scattering event in the Tower of Babel story, but when Jesus is alive he speaks of “the gentiles” and my mind always just assumed that this meant “The Romans.” When the “gentiles” means all “nations,” like Ethiopia and Egypt and Libya and the Irish and the Chinese, I can start to see how the event at Babel overarches the Bible as whole. This event at Babel speaks to a larger theme than just scattered tongues. Rome is just the dominant nation at the time Christ is born, but there are many other “Romes” along the way that ram into the nation of Israel.

Obviously we have linguistics and anthropology and archaeology to help us understand where languages and nations came from. We know of the Indus River valley and of Mesopotamia and of Mesoamerica. We have lots of scholarship and science to help us with those things, and I’m glad that we do. Thank goodness for the Enlightenment, as they spent two hundred years finding reasons to deny the Bible that are oddly, repeatedly, confirming events of the Bible. Science seems to be working in mysterious ways.

But I do not go to Genesis for science. I don’t know why anyone would. Sure, the Big Bang fits right in there with “let there be light” but to expect Genesis to fit with modern linguistics is ridiculous and it blocks readers from seeing the deeper wisdom of these words. I go to scripture for understanding the soul, and if I really want to know how one language morphed from one place to the next, I’ll enroll in college courses. They key to remember is that the wisdom of Genesis is about the spiritual and physical world, whereas the finite studies of scientific research remain in the physical. Science is stuck in this world by design. Science, when done correctly, does not attempt to build a “Gate to God,” but focuses on observable nature and repeatable experiments. That is its strength and reason for existence and usefulness.

Ok, now back to the words gentiles and nations. What the outcome of Babel is describing is our constant state of tension that we have in the world between nations. Every time the word gentiles or nations is used, it’s referring to this scattering of people. The separation of languages leads to separated groups of people who misunderstand each other. Misunderstanding leads to fear and fear leads to…oh hell - let’s just let Yoda say it:

“Fear is the path to the dark side…fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering.”

You nailed it, Yoda.

That’s what the Bible is telling us here, because the Tower of Babel is the third fall of man. Maybe the fourth. There is a sexual fall of man that clearly happens with the Nephilim story, but I’ll never finish this if I add that one in here as well. So I’m sticking with three falls for now: Adam and Eve fall, Cain falls, and Babel falls.

This third fall is the origin story of the separation of peoples, and the confusion that drives a wedge between people is the inability to understand one another. Pride swells up quickly when misunderstanding gives offense, and between peoples or nations this is the cause of violence and war. We still have the “common language” however. No, the common language did not go away. In the post-Babel world, we still understand competition and greed and envy and anger. We still know that “God helps those who help themselves” whether we say it in Akkadian, Greek, or English. The common language came from our first two falls with Adam and Cain, and if you add in the sexual fall into immorality from chapter 6, you get the full recipe for disaster that leads to the Great Flood. Then the world gets reset. Truly, “The Great Reset” was not Covid, but the Great Flood. The problems, however, being soon after the flood when Noah gets hammered with liquor. I dare to say there is a fall there, as well, but that puts my up to five falls. Perhaps we should call Noah’s fall a stumble.

When we finally get to Babel, the idea presented is that people who work together in a common language can have harmony, or at least it seems that way in the story. But a key problem stands in of the story like an elephant in the room. The common goal of “making a name for ourselves” reeks of the smell that came from the prior falls of Adam and Cain. To “make a name” for oneself is to reject God. To desire one’s name to be spoken in awe is a temptation that hardly differs from the shiny one’s temptation in the garden when it tells Eve that she “will be like gods” if she eats the fruit. Moreover, if everyone intends to make a name for himself, then everyone wants to be a god. This results in too many gods, and ultimately chaos, because gods don’t like to be told what to do. This should sound familiar because that it the state of America today, where we used to say, “For God and Country!” we now focus on the individual, as in, “Don’t tell me what to do!”

The common language of fallen man can build an empire, but it cannot hold the peace, nor can it join us together in endless song, because power attracts others who might also like a taste of it. In fact, the empires that have “made a name for themselves” have done so through violence and coercion, not love. This is why Jesus is so radical, and unlike Babel, his radical self-emptying becomes the very thing that conquers the world. In not trying to make a name for himself, he makes the greatest name in history.

This rejection of God repeats over and over, causing further problems, and as far as Biblical messages go, that is the Old Testament in a nutshell. Adam and Eve’s pride lead them to reject God. Cain was mastered by sin that was “crouching at his door” because he failed to rely on God, and tried to rely on himself. Finally, we get scattered into nations that distrust one another. Our fig leaves just keep getting bigger. We went from using fig foliage at first, to drones and cyberwar in today’s U.S. Army.

Once again, pride brought about the plan to build a Tower to overtake God, and as punishment, just as we were banished from the Garden of Eden, and Cain was kicked out to wander, in Babel we are separated from one another, and therefore pushed further still from God. Another way to think of it is that God retreated from us for our arrogance. We are in this state for a reason, as he waits to return and set things right.

Just like Adam did, nations also have fear. When they build armies and play games of espionage, they are like Adam, saying to God in the garden, “I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.” The nations hide behind guns and tanks and jets and missiles, because being open to our neighbors is terrifying. If tomorrow Russia and the United States said, “Let’s just dismantle all the bombs,” and they actually did so, they would then be naked and afraid because they are not the only countries with nukes. The only way the nations stop hiding behind defenses is if all nations decided at once, without pretense or falsehood, to defuse all bombs.

Now, aside from divine intervention, does anyone believe that will happen? The disarmament talks stalled and even if the superpowers said they had defused all bombs, they would surely have their fingers crossed behind their back while announcing it. Is anyone so naive as to believe that either nation would actually get rid of all the missiles?

Throughout history, the nations constantly resort to violence when squabbling over territory and resources. Many modern readers cannot stomach the Old Testament because of the violence. Brutal and ruthless warfare is described in a good chunk of the Old Testament. It confuses modern people that the sacred scripture would contain so much bloodshed, which is odd because we can literally watch it happening on TV today. We can watch World War II or Gulf War or Iraq War footage. We can see newscasts from Ethiopia or Sudan or Syria. It has not gone away, it’s just gotten more impersonal. I used to say that gunpowder killed the classics because in a swordfight you could have some dialogue and drama. No one ever has a good conversation in a gunfight.

In the Old Testament, there are even places where the Most High God, the living God, is instructing his chosen people to commit atrocities. In light of this, it seems the single nation before the Tower of Babel would have been better, right? Scattering the people into nations seems to have led to a lot of awful, disgusting butchery that could have been avoided. This is a huge stumbling block for readers today who look at the bloodshed and ask, “How could a living, loving God allow it?”

Keep in mind that the story of the Tower of Babel and all that follows in the Old Testament is telling us about the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.

The origin of “the nations” is probably less important than realizing that the state of the world that Abraham is born into is one that already has “the nations.” A fact is presented to us. The world of Abraham is full of warring nations already, and the first 11 chapters of Genesis are describing how the fallen world came to be. Imagine a voiceover that splits chapter 11 and 12 saying, “We now join our fallen world already in progress.” Much time has passed since Noah and Babel. We are joining the story in the middle as soon as Abraham is introduced in chapter 12. Living among “the nations,” he is called out to form a new nation.

The LORD said to Abram: Go forth from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. All the families of the earth will find blessing in you. (Gen 12:1-3)

To understand what is happening here, we have to remember that this declaration is the first thing we hear about Abraham (who is still named Abram at this point). We have just left the “scattering” of peoples into diverse nations, which describes how the world became a bunch of warring tribes and states, and the very next thing is God telling Abraham that he will form a new nation, one that will eventually bring all families under God’s blessing once again.

Every bit of the Old Testament that follows is the process of forming that nation, all driving us toward Mary, where she can give birth to Jesus. The walls between the nations do not move until Jesus comes, and really not until Pentecost, when the inversion of Babel happens.

However, Jesus doesn’t ride out to the nations and shout down the walls, as it happened in Jericho. In fact, Jesus’ ministry is very much confined within the walls of God’s nation, the nation of Israel.

But in chapter 8 of Matthew, we see something significant happen where he first goes outside the nation, just a little bit. Jesus heals a Roman centurion’s son, who is not a card carrying member of the nation of Israel, but he did help build a synagogue. The elders lobby to Jesus for healing, on behalf of this man. Upon hearing the centurion’s faith, Jesus performs the healing of his son. (Lk 7:1-11)

This is quite radical, as he is now healing outside of the lines of the nation of Israel.

Then in chapter 15 of Matthew, we see Jesus take another step outside the wall of the nation. He heals the daughter of a Canaanite woman because of her faith in him. At first, he tells her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” This line tells us a great deal about his ministry.

In a kind of test, she passes by persisting in asking for help. She calls to Christ for help and won’t let him go. She is a model of faith, of daily conversion, for after having been called, she will not depart him. In other words, she persists, endures, perseveres, and as we know, Jesus tells us that “by our endurance we will gain our soul.”

This is a great lesson in prayer and perseverance, but for our purposes here, the Canaanite woman’s persistence almost seems to open the door to all nations. At that point, even though Jesus has just said he only came for the children of Israel, he seems to be healing people from all over the place. No, it doesn’t say this explicitly, but right after the Canaanite woman’s daughter is healed, he heals crowds of people, and it doesn’t tell us if these people were all Jews or if it included those from “the nations.” Lastly, to top it off, at the end of chapter 15 in Matthew, he feeds four thousand people with the loaves and fishes miracle, and the only pre-requisite to getting some bread seems to be hunger - no passport or ID needed. But again, here it does not list out the members of the crowd. We get the Table of Nations in Genesis but we don’t get a Table of the Hungry in the loaves and fishes miracle. For these Gospel stories, we don’t get the luxury of a Book of Numbers where long lists of names are presented. In any case, everyone who comes to Jesus is fed, and those who need healing and persist in asking for him, Jew or non-Jew, is healed.

The key is to keep asking.

The origin of nations in the Tower of Babel story is a critical point to understand because references to “the nations” and “gentiles” are everywhere in the New Testament. “Gentiles” has to be one of the most confusing words in the entire Bible to modern ears, just like “kingdom” is to our ears as we abide in modern democracies.

For me, “gentiles” is much easier to read as “the nations” or “foreigners” or “non-Jews.” This helps me understand how radical the healings of Jesus were, because accepting foreigners was not something ancient people did. The family and the culture was your whole identity. Even until recent times, this was the case, and really still is for people who live in the real world and not in online in virtual groups.

Jesus starts chipping away at the walls between “the nations.” By accepting women into his inner circle, he’s chipping away at other walls, too. In our age of diversity celebrations, we have completely forgotten where this notion of acceptance and breaking down boundaries came from. It is from Jesus Christ, a carpenter who is God. Lest we forget: without Christendom, we do not get to our current buzzwords of diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Tip: none of those are new ideas, they are just repackaged parts of Catholic Social Teaching, and CST is far more comprehensive, if anyone ever actually read it. In our Present Privilege and Enlightenment Fragility, we ignore wisdom that was gained long before our era, so we have gurus who “re-discover” it. But there is nothing original in our modern moralists, except for that they drop God out of the equation and pin Original Sin on certain groups and excuse it from others. As Fulton Sheen said, “There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing…As a matter of fact, if we Catholics believed all of the untruths and lies which were said against the Church, we probably would hate the Church a thousand times more than they do.”)

The origin of nations is important because it explains the state of the world that Abraham and the nation of Israel are formed within. This tension between nations is clearly the cause of massive suffering in the world, just as it is today. There are various important passages about who rules the nation with perhaps the most important one being when Jesus is tempted in the desert.

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The common language of those at Babel is the worldview that comes from a universe emptied of the oversight of God, and replaced by a lower-case god. As a result, the idea of sin gets a total makeover. The Gate is a big trick to turn ourselves into the god. This is not just how pagan worship worked, it’s actually how all habitual sin works. It works exactly the same today as it did for Sargon of Akkad. Perhaps I am Sargon and so are we all.

In a universe where we are the god, we can do whatever we like. In fact, in that universe, we’d be fools not to go get our full share of pleasure, power, wealth, and honor. You can make all the appeals to morality you like, but there is no reason for the lion to lay down with the lamb if the nature of the lion is to dominate the lamb. To dominate then becomes divine. History is written by the victors. The innocent lamb stands no chance because it is there for the taking, and it is delicious. All arguments about fair play and human dignity become academic. In the animal world, the lion will only eat until its full and content. But in the human heart, the lion cannot be contented; it wants all lambs that ever existed and ever will exist to be his own forever, and no one else’s. Animals do not have this problem. This is the broken spring in our machinery, as described in the Garden and in the wrath and envy of Cain. This is what Richard Dawkins’ doesn’t understand. The Selfish Gene in a four-legged mammal plays out very different from those of us walking on two legs who happen to suffer from Original Sin.

A universe that lacks a living God is one where sin makes far more sense than repentance. In that universe, man is above God, because God is no longer watching. If you frame your life in this language, you speak Babel.

And you speak Babel.

We all speak Babel.

The state of the world today is mostly the same as when the story of Babel was being written. I say mostly, because there is one major and all-important difference, from an event that happened to a construction worker who was executed around the year 30 A.D. Have you heard this one before? This man did not stay dead. He returned from the grave in a risen and glorified form that could be touched yet could also pass through walls. In other words, he defeated the ultimate secret fear that is sunk deep within every one of us. He defeated death. As a bonus, he takes away our sins and transforms our suffering.

That little event changes a lot of things for all of us who speak Babel, and it’s extremely important that we understand how the world of Babel was changed by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In the Tower of Babel story, God observes people building a tower that will “reach the sky.” Once again, ancient people were not dumb enough to think that a Tower could be built tall enough to reach heaven, and anyone who thinks that’s what this story is about needs to put their Unconscious Bias aside. We have a lot of Present Privilege and Enlightenment Fragility that we need to face when we encounter the Tower of Babel story.

The Tower is meant to be a place where the supernatural can be pulled down to earth, like a magic act. Our presentism mindset asks, “How could anyone be so primitive as to believe that?” Yet, we know that millions of people today, if not billions, read horoscopes and pay for people to interpret Tarot cards. We have faith in many odd things today. We check our fitness watch “body battery” and go to GNC to buy pseudo-science fitness supplements. We get lost in our fantasy worlds of Dungeons and Dragons and Hogwarts. We watch sports and pray to the TV as the football soars through the air toward the uprights as time runs out. Suffice it to say, we have ample superstitions and spirit worlds circling all about us yet today, they just aren’t always as obvious as a Tower or a Ziggurat. Some of the worst examples are in our own backyards - literally; there are Catholics who bury a St. Joseph statue upside down in the yard to help sell their house (please stop this superstitious nonsense, Catholics, and immediately go read CCC 2111-2117).

At last, let’s get into the Tower story a bit more. Seeing this project underway, how does God respond? He confuses them. In trying to access heaven, he stops them from proceeding. What’s interesting is the approach to God. Because the builders at Babel are trying to manipulate God, he stops them. But God, uninvited, reveals insights into heaven later on in Genesis, and those who he offers a glimpse of heaven to react very different from the builders of the Tower of Babel.

This is the hilarious thing about our attempts to manipulate God. Whenever we yell, “Why God, why?!” he shows us later on. When we demand God listen to us, he ignores us on purpose, but when he wants us to know something, he reaches down and taps us. The difference between humility and humiliation is this: humility is when you voluntarily surrender to God. Humiliation is when God does it for you. This is gold in addiction recovery meetings, and everyone laughs together, knowing exactly what that means.

This stairway to heaven is being built for the people “to make a name for themselves.” Contrast the Tower of Babel to Jacob’s experience later in Genesis, chapter 28. Jacob is tapped by God, but he hasn’t built anything yet. In a dream, God sends him a vision. Jacob merely sees a ladder upon which angels are ascending and descending to heaven. Rather than build a staircase on a ziggurat and try to reach God, Jacob is freely given the vision.

What does Jacob do? He does not wake up and start building the ladder, or the stairway to heaven. No, what he does the very next morning is the opposite of what happened at Babel. Jacob builds an altar, to worship God, with humility. He even calls it the “gateway to heaven,” but it is not built to “reach the sky.” It is about three feet tall by the way it’s described. His response of humility is nothing like the builders at Babel. This act by Jacob happens at Bethel, which means “House of God.” Now, “House” has a very different connotation than “Tower” or “Gate”. There is very different symbolism in a house than in a massive Ziggurat. Jacob says:

“How awesome this place is! This is nothing else but the house of God, the gateway to heaven!” Early the next morning Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head, set it up as a sacred pillar, and poured oil on top of it… “This stone that I have set up as a sacred pillar will be the house of God. Of everything you give me, I will return a tenth part to you without fail.” (Gen 28:16-22)

Jacob sees the stairway to heaven, or the “gateway to heaven” that the Babylonians were trying to build! Also, notice that he is able to pour oil on the altar or pillar, so it’s short. He’s not trying to reach the sky. But he doesn’t try to build a tower, he offers what little he has, gives praise, and asks for nothing in return. He even promises to tithe, just for the glory of God, for the rest of his life. The difference may seem subtle, but this is central to the theme and story of the entire Old Testament and how it ties to Jesus in the Incarnation and the Resurrection. We bring what little we have, and God provides the rest. He comes to us, we do not lasso or wrangle or capture him. God came to Jacob, while the rulers at Babel tried to go up to seize God.

What’s happening at the Tower of Babel is not praise or worship of the one true God. It’s an attempted coup to replace the Most High God.

The Tower is an attempt to leash and control God, ultimately to dictate rules using God and thereby remove all “sin” from whatever those in power desire. The people are using their minds and hands to perform the ultimate merger of magic and science, so that they can get God to come down to earth. This would be like all the characters in Macbeth building a giant staircase to kill Shakespeare.

With that image you can recognize the absurdity easily in what Babylon was attempting to do with this Tower, or Ziggurat. It is a ludicrous project from the start. Even if Macbeth and Banquo and the rest of the dramatis personae were building a a tower in the story, the tower would be as flat as the page itself, and Shakespeare would still be the author who wrote the tower into the story. If anyone ever tells you they know the mind of God, prepare to run. They could be playing Babel games, or they might be a real prophet. In either case, be very careful. Remember, Iago seemed nice at first, too, before he ruined Othello’s life, and that was all done on purpose by Iago’s and Othello’s creator, Shakespeare. God knows our path, we do not. We must follow his will, or conform our heart to whatever outcome. Repeat after me: I am not the author, I am a character. I am not the potter at the wheel, I am the pot. I am not the Creator, I am a creature.

What the Macbeth characters would fail to understand is that building a staircase cannot escape the pages and the story they are inside. They live in two dimensional paper while Shakespeare lived in three dimensions, in our world. Shakespeare is on a different level, a different plane that cannot be ascended to, and furthermore, Shakespeare is the Creator, so anything the characters do was allowed by Shakespeare in the first place.

Likewise, the Babel construction company doesn’t realize that God cannot be pulled down, and what the people are actually doing is a self-destructive stunt that will pull the Tower down upon themselves because of their arrogance. The lesson here is that you cannot control God, because he created us. He’s not on the same plane as us, but he lets us know he is there in some mysterious way. But he doesn’t need us, we need him. We cannot reach up and pull him down, we can only reach up.

So the story of Babel goes on and gives us God’s response. Keep in mind that figurative language must be used here because the sacred writer is conveying something that goes beyond this Tower project.

Then the LORD said: If now, while they are one people and all have the same language, they have started to do this, nothing they presume to do will be out of their reach. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that no one will understand the speech of another. So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. (Gen 11:6-8)

This scattering is the origin story of where the idea of “the nations” comes from in the Bible. In the previous chapter, the nations were listed in the Table of Nations, so there’s this odd sense that everyone was living together in harmony until this event. But we already know that Noah’s sons were at each other like a family on Jerry Springer before that. This is one place where the sacred writer seems to be instructing us on a few things:

• The nations formed when they took up false gods. (Straight outta Lord of the Flies)

• The different languages created different cultures, triggering communication breakdown.

• Thus, the nations do not like one another.

• Instead, we have hatred, distrust, treachery, and war.

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Why were the people building the Tower of Babel? What was their goal? They were trying to “make a name for themselves” but more subtly, they are building a Gate to God. The root word of Babel means “Gate of God.” Think of Stargate or a science-fiction Portal if it helps you.

The Tower is a gateway to bring God near, to control God, to pull him down to earth. There is metaphor here in the Tower, obviously, but metaphor is how we remember and re-tell stories of great meaning. If we were robots we could just use zeroes and ones, but a Tower or Gate to heaven is meant to invoke the image of man overtaking God, which is the reverse of humility before God. Since God made us in his image and likeness, with a body and soul together, God is obviously not a robot. Thank God for that. I, for one, am glad, because staring at code all day at work does not stir me like hearing a well-told story does.

Here’s the central theme of Babel. If we can pull God down, and lift up ourselves, then we can become god. We can then make God into a kind of pet.

That is quite a different idea of God from the great quote from St. Athanasius about why Jesus came to earth. “God became man so that man might become God.” That is a great quote, but wow, it can be easily misunderstood. This makes it sound like through prayer we can become God himself, and hardly sounds different than some of the modern meditation practices that are being used.

Karlo Broussard says of this quote: “According to the original Greek of St. Athanasius, the phrase, “that we might become God” is better translated as ‘that we might be deified.’…The idea of sharing in the divine nature means we share what philosophers and theologians identify as God’s communicable attributes (goodness, holiness, and love) as opposed to his incommunicable ones (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and absolute simplicity).

St. Athanasius could have made it easier for us and just said that we can become like God, with the full understanding that we can never become God. That distinction is enormous to gaining understanding of what it means to work toward sanctification and holiness in the Christian life. You can never be God. That’s off-limits and impossible. But, you can partake in God’s divine nature, particularly through prayer and receiving the Eucharist at Mass. But we never, ever, become God. Not with a million prayers or pushups or a perfect college entry exam score. The addition of the word “like” in his quote has critical meaning, because without it, we might as well be chasing after our divine selves in New Age religions. We are creatures, not divine, made like God - but must never forget that we are not God. That may have been the greatest discovery of my life. What a relief!

What Babel is attempting is to justify our behavior by making God into an idol that performs vending machine operations. This God has an LED screen that reads, “Insert two dollars. Press B12 for a sandwich. C36 for drunkenness. F25 for group sex. G31 for an orgy.”

At Ziggurats, the priests sacrificed people or animals, but with our vending-machine god we can just use quarters and get whatever we want approved. It’s the same thing. People who assume prayer will direct God to take action are making the same assumptions of those at Babel. Prayer is powerful, but not if it’s meant to control God, or if it’s perceived as controlling God. In fact, again, the atheist may be better off than this person who misunderstands prayer, because prayer used in this way could just as well be a child sacrifice to bring the rain. What’s the difference? Both are attempts at controlling God. We can pray for requests, but we must pray for God’s will to be done, not ours.

The vending machine god of Babel is just as powerless and useless as the absentee God of the Deists. While it probably looked exciting watching sacrifices on those altars at Babel, it was really just the denial of the one God, the God Most High. This is why when Jesus came, he corrected the record and said, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” What a statement! What about all those sacrifices in the Temple of Jerusalem? What about all that stuff in Leviticus and Numbers about the goats? I would like to go there now, but I’ll continue with Babel or I’ll never finish. (If this topic of sacrifice interests you at all, I highly suggest listening to the Lord of Spirits podcast - all of it, from the beginning to the end).

The builders of Babel, and the deists like Franklin, and the atheists like Richard Dawkins are all doing the same thing in the end. They are speaking the common language, but Dawkins is the only one who really puts all his chips in the middle and lays his cards on the table. Atheists don’t buy the bluff about Baal the storm god and know that the deists are just hedging bets on a bad hand. The only card player left for them is those who believe in the one God. The cool thing about atheists is that they are closer to coming back to belief in the one God than they ever realize, or would ever care to admit, because they’ve seen through all the smoke and mirrors of the meaningless and dead gods.

The reality is this: the builders at Babel are trying to appease a god that is a convenient projection of their own power and desire, while the Deists of early America are tipping their wigs at a dead or fully absent version of God. The ziggurats in America are courts and the Statue of Liberty. Next time you see the Statue of Liberty in New York, you can ponder our worship of “Liberty” and consider the Tower of Babel.

Dawkins just says what everyone else in power was thinking all along, which is this: God doesn’t matter. He is saying that the Emperor has no clothes. He is also like the Emperor Napoleon, when an officer suggested that “God willing” they would take Brussels in the morning. Napoleon allegedly said, “God? God has nothing to do with it.” That’s the same answer Dawkins gives. To Dawkins, the only towers or cathedrals that ever existed were in the mind of those built by mitosis. There is no God, or gods, living or otherwise, outside of our brains.

Of course, Dawkins’ grand bet on the selfish gene goes too far. He’s all in with all the answers, but he left out of the equation an important variable. He fails to solve for Y, as in “Y are we here?” That is the problem with this worldview, because in a world without meaning, you have to live in that world. So does everyone else, and everyone else is not necessarily an educated PhD who can spend a lifetime inspecting in all corners of science and history. Everyone else lacks the funds and leisure time to find meaning. Everyone else, for the most part, in the end, has to rely on what someone says is true. I take it on faith that germs cause disease and not fairies, even though I have never actually saw either of them infect a person. Dawkins and company can win arguments about how the world works, but what they cannot win an arguments about is why a sunset is beautiful. When there is no satisfactory ultimate why, people spend a lifetime searching for that variable. In the end, what the world without a living God results in is someone else taking control by force and dictating that the value of Y must be what they say it is, simply because they said so.

So even though I’m not a Dawkins fan, at least he isn’t hedging his bets. He’s all in, and I actually think deniers like him are closer to finding God than the builders of Babel or the deists like Franklin ever were. Having the door half-open to God is like letting the heat out of the house in winter. At some point, you have to make up your mind to go outside or stay inside. This makes me realize, truly, that we should pray for Richard Dawkins. He may end up bringing more people back to faith in God than we could have ever realized. He is almost at the top of the circle, since when we run away from God, we often find ourselves running right into the arms of God.

At Babel, the builders may think there is a God at the end of their staircase, but if they think God can be extracted somehow, or pulled into the universe, then they have actually rejected God. They have invented something new that is not God, not the one true God. I will be coming back to this, because there is something happening at these temples, it’s just not what the builders think it is.

The God of Israel is outside of time and space. He cannot be accessed via a portal, or gate, or tower. The living Creator God is beyond our understanding. He is transcendent and immanent, near and far. We can know he is living, that his will is being played out at all times, but we cannot control or change God. I don’t know how, but even children can understand that God is alive, that he is real. What is being done at the Tower of Babel is the creation of idols, which replace God, reduce God, and substitute God with man-made ideas and desires. An idol is the god of a cynic, not of one who has the faith of a child.

When the concept of God nosedives from a living Creator God outside of time and space, it becomes nothing more than a local god that can be manipulated through a gate or a tower. What inevitably follows is that there is no longer sin, or rather, certain sins are approved while others are outlawed. It just depends on who holds power. This is happening before our eyes in America today. An elaborate ritual in a ziggurat is just a big ruse, a power play, but what is really happening is the attempt to control the concept of “God,” because gaining the upper ground on that idea is required to justify whatever behavior those in power want to dictate as acceptable behavior. In our case today, an already bad concept of God is being reduced further as Redditors and public school administrators go to great lengths to ensure that even the word God is removed from our mouths. You can’t even say God today at work or at school without potentially losing your job. Interestingly, talk of “sin” is becoming less common at church, which is a clear sign that there is a widespread lack of understanding of the God of Christianity, because you cannot understand your need for God unless you understand your own weakness in sin. The affirmation of sin is the voice of the culture today, and where sin is denied, ziggurats of the mind are constructed.

Today, we are witnessing the outcome of what happens when the idea of Dawkins are taken to its logical conclusion. The reason Dawkins is a fool is that he doesn’t understand what the builders at Babel and the deists like Franklin understood well. The emperors and Founders of history knew that people needed religion, and to pull that rug out from society would cause the city itself to collapse.

Dawkins has a middle-school concept of God that he never outgrew. He’s also operating as an autonomous speaker of “his truth” without a plan or concept of how to organize a world. He doesn’t have employees or mouths to feed or an economy to plan. In the walled-in academic world where the idea of “no souls” exists, Dawkins fails to realize something rather large. His theory of the “Selfish Gene” starts from the bottom, instead of the top, and therefore he cannot describe the whole. His answer of “Because of genes!” is too simple. A toe does not describe the wholeness of a person any more than a gene does, and genes cannot explain the totality of human nature. Dawkins is so smart, but he can’t understand what farmers and mothers with no education understand perfectly well. You would think an evolutionary biologist would be very equipped to understand the parable of the grain of wheat, but somehow he misses it completely.

We need religion. People need religion. Or they will find one. And it won’t be what you expect. In the clean, childless world of our universities, ideas sound good that lack depth. Dawkins’ answer is from the atomic layer, and he emerges from a quiet library to tell us that we are nothing but atoms. Meanwhile the bustle of the street doesn’t hear a word he’s said, because life is happening far beyond the atomic layer. When Dawkins’ burst forth from his library, he was telling a very different message from what the apostles told when they emerged from the Upper Room at Pentecost, after having received the breath of life, touched by tongues of fire. No, when Dawkins and his disciples emerged in their lab coats to tell us the good news, their message was that respiration is a selfish act to propagate our genes and that there is no meaning to any of it. The apostles had a message of eternal life, while Dawkins made us ponder suicide.

So while I commend Dawkins for his honesty, he is actually more foolish than the leaders of Babel. At least the leaders at Babel are offering something to believe in: “Look, here’s a tower. It’s a Gate to God. See?” And Jefferson and Franklin offer something, too: “Look, here’s a sacred document, a Constitution, where we make a nod to God - and also - over there - see the Statue of Liberty?”

Dawkins only offers the abyss. And our brains revolt at the idea. We all know the Big Empty is there, but we don’t really want to stand on the edge and look into it. We can’t. Not for long. The temptation to believe that Dawkins is right draws us all, as doubt is more natural to us than faith. So even if we dabble in disbelief, most move away from the edge in search of a Higher Power of some kind. The search for God, when thwarted or stifled or silenced, erupts like boils, in strange places and in uncomfortable ways. We are already seeing strange religions being born in America now, almost more strange than that of the pagan gods of Babel or America’s traditional worship of the rule of law, wealth, and the slippery thing called “Liberty.”

The Tower of Babel may be an expensive lie to justify power, but it is a better attempt at meaning than what Dawkins offers the masses. But again, Dawkins is the only honest one, which is why his idea is the most dangerous. He’s the anti-Jesus (I don’t want to call him the anti-Christ, because he lacks the charisma needed for that). Dawkins tells us that we are purely material beings without souls. He goes all the way.

Most people hold back and speak the old common language that dances around this fact, finding idols and obsessions to occupy or fence off the Big Empty. Dawkins has spent his life shouting this message and now we are seeing what fruit it bears, where we are in fact atomized, solitary beings - kind of like genes. When we are just chemical machines, we act like the “selfish gene” writ large. Again, not only is this message the polar opposite of Christ, but it’s brings the polar opposite result. Where people know Christ, they form communities, families, and fellowship. There is warmth amid the struggle. Dawkins inability to get past middle-school in his understanding of God leaves him out on the playground all alone. As we watch millions of community organizations and church groups fading away in America, we are clearly becoming more atomized, as people sit at home watching TV alone instead of joining the Lions’ Club or a bowling team. What is worrisome about this is that Hannah Arendt, who dissected the rise of 1930’s totalitarianism, said that loneliness, a.k.a atomization, is a first step toward totalitarianism, because isolated people without purpose or faith are attracted to a powerful ideology that delivers some kind of meaning.

So yes, Babel may be called a fool’s game, or superstitious nonsense, but in our “common language” we already play a fool’s game, and are happy to do it because Dawkins’ worldview makes Kurt Cobain or Morissey seem light-hearted.

We don’t want to mope about in atomized solitude knowing that we are nothing more than chemicals, a bunch of matter mixed together. Even if we suspect we are “just a clump of cells” we don’t want to live like a meaningless mass of molecules. We want meaning. We want to kick ass and take names. We want to win the Super Bowl and go to Disney World and sleep with all the cheerleaders. We want to fight, or at the very least, to watch the fight. We want stories, winners, losers, heroes, and goats. We’ll believe in that Tower of Babel or Statue of Liberty if it allows us some sport, some entertainment, a full belly, and a chance to get a little action on the side. Dawkins was honest, but even crazy Nero understood human beings better.

The Tower of Babel could be summed up in the saying, “If you tell them a lie, don't tell a little one, tell a big one.” This saying has been attributed to Lenin, Hitler, Goebbels, and various other dictators, but this saying precedes those infamous names by thousands of years - probably tens of thousands of years. The “Big Lie” is old; it was just perfected in the 20th century and is now being refined. To maintain power, great narratives must be upheld, and Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington knew this. They understood it better than any ruler in the time of Babel, but the ancient leaders also knew it or they wouldn’t have started building a Tower in the first place.

The pyramids in Egypt are probably the most famous form the big lie. They were not a Gate to God, but a tomb that said the Pharaoh was god. Caesar was known as a god and built great structures to prove the lie. The Eiffel Tower is a Tower built in an era of denying God, built to celebrate our modern obsession with technology and engineering. In an odd reversal of Babel, the Eiffel Tower is almost like a Tower to keep God away. You might say it was the next logical step after the Statue of Liberty. Then you have, finally, the degradation into modern art structures that have absolutely no meaning whatsoever, like the Bean in Chicago or the Cherry on a Spoon in Minnesota. These are as meaningful as the world’s largest ball of twine. The modern structures and buildings have no meaning because, well, you guessed it - there is none! The National Endowment for the Arts is on full Richard Dawkins’ mode. You can easily see how things get uglier in art and architecture as we move away from the era of Christendom. This can also be observed in modern churches, which Bishop Robert Barron has appropriately titled “Beige Catholicism,” in a lament at the drabness of churches built in the latter part of the 20th century.

Countries still build structures to symbolize their chosen-ness, their righteousness. They still try to convince citizens of blessings from above, even after they have stopped pretending that the power of the state is really just from the status quo. If you walk through the Washington D.C. mall or the Roman Forum, you can still feel awe at what the builders of Babel were intending to achieve. They were offering what the band Poison was searching for when Brett Michaels cried out, “Give me something to believe in.” Unfortunately, you will get spoon-fed poison if you are looking for some “thing” to believe in that is not the living Creator God, because he created all of the “things” that you might be offered.

If you have a Gate to God, then whoever owns the Gate can conceivably talk to the god and tell us what god wants. Oddly enough, the god always wants what the owner of the Gate wants. What luck!

But in reality, a Gate or Tower or Altar or Pyramid that grants access to God, like Delphi in Greece, is really a trick that those in power use to sell their claim to the crown. All of these structures are a way to kill off the true God, the Most High, the one true God, and replace him with a human who pretends to have the ear of God. What happens is that there is no longer a living Creator God. As long as the economy is looking good, most people don’t really care, and bread and circuses do nicely for keeping the masses pacified. Still, it’s nice to have some kind of feeling that the god has blessed the nation, even if you suspect it’s all nonsense. That’s the genius of the ancient kings, and that’s how the “Divine Right of Kings” went off the rails in Europe. The bogus claim to power as “God-given” was abused so horribly that the French Revolution was bound to happen. Louis XIV even called himself the Sun King while simultaneously claiming to be a practicing Catholic. I will resist the urge to comment on Joe Biden here, but I will say this: those who use Christianity in the same way that the pagans used their gods, are pagans themselves. In other words, paganism never really died. As for all who would like to say it simply moved into Catholicism, I would suggest reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church before repeating what others have said and judge for yourself.

The great casualty of this trick about god and power is that there is no redemptive suffering, no forgiveness, and no reason to love one another. If there is no living God, then of course there is no ultimate truth. The obvious answer is to take power for yourself and for your family. People who lambast the faithful for only behaving out of fear of hell suggest that believers would be robbing and looting if not for God. They argue that you can be good without God, but they are making that argument in the days of plenty, when famine and economic meltdown have not yet hit. The rise of atheism has coincided with the most bountiful era of food production and wealth in human history. That is not a coincidence. When the economic winds change and the grocery stores shelves are empty, we will see how “good” people are without God. After all, God helps those who help themselves.

Let’s now return to the Bible, to Genesis, to look at the world after the Tower of Babel story. There is a key difference in dealing with God in the post-Babel chapters, when Abraham and Jacob show up.

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The common language of Babel is a more subtle message than the idea of language as we think of it. The mention of the Table of Nations right before the Tower of Babel is a key connection to make. If we want to know why did Russia invade Ukraine, or Caesar cross the Rubicon, we can step back and ask ourselves, what common language do all nations speak? Or closer to home, what common language do we all as individuals speak?

The common language is not only seen in war, but that is the grossest and most full expression of it. The bombs being lobbed into apartment buildings in Kiev are shouting the language right now.

But really our common language can be heard in the nicest of phrases, and spoken from the kindest of faces. A few good examples of the common language are as follows: Benjamin Franklin, in the 18th century, said, “God helps those who helps themselves.” That is one version of the common language. A more blunt version of the common language is from the 21st century rapper, Fifty Cent, who said, “Get rich or die trying.”

Ben Franklin and Fifty Cent speak the same language. Yes, they both speak English, but more importantly, they speak the original common language, the ancient one, the same as those who were building the Tower of Babel.

Franklin and Fifty are expressing the same idea in different words, separated by a few hundred years. Ben and Fifty are fluent in the the pre-Babel language of “making a name for themselves.” Both orient their lives toward the goal of gaining money and taking power. Gordon Gecko’s famous line spoke the language, fully dropping the facade of Franklin, when he said, “Greed is good.”

Franklin invented a proverb that almost sounds Biblical, but rest assured, it is not. God does not help those that help themselves. He would much rather that they imitate Jesus and give their lives to prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. For all the contributions Franklin made to the founding of America, he did not in any way imitate Jesus. Moral perfection was an interest of Franklin, so long as it was achieved without the Christian God. He tackled the subject in a truly modern way, even using a paper version of a spreadsheet to track his progress, working on one virtue at a time. Father Scupoli was a few hundred years ahead of Franklin, when in 1589 he said, “Virtues are to be required one at a time and by degrees,” except Scupoli’s project included God and required no spreadsheet. In many ways, Franklin’s paper project was attempting exactly the same thing that was happening at the construction site in Babel, just without masonry or mortar.

Let’s talk more about Benjamin Franklin, the gentle old bespectacled grandfatherly figure of American history who graces the front side of every one hundred dollar bill in print. He is a fascinating character who embodies much of the American character and the best intentions of the Enlightenment.

First, Franklin was a Deist, not a Christian. The same goes for George Washington. Franklin was also a practicing Freemason. Even if Washington and Franklin publicly claimed to be Christian, as practicing Freemasons, they likely just found references to God useful for advancing their own public lives among the peasants. This is important to understand, as this is the same root motive that drives an ancient people to build a Ziggurat. The ancient people went to great lengths to justify their power, requiring a lot of stone and labor. Nations needed an awesome structure to control the people, while the Deists of the Enlightenment just declared man and his mind to be the tallest. The modern temple is intellectual, existing in the mind, but still requires assent of the masses. There is just no need to build a tower to reach the sky now, because no lower-case gods need ritual sacrifices or transactions. (We actually do have plenty of rituals and sacrifices still with us, but they are not as obvious now, and I’ll need a whole separate series to discuss that topic.)

Instead of building towers, the Deists kept the upper-case God in our mouths, but tried to move him off-stage, kind of like giving a lifetime achievement award to a good actor that never won an Oscar. Jefferson threw God a medal in the Declaration of Independence and then asked him to kindly step aside and retire.

To this day, a nod toward God goes a long way for politicians, even as they completely ignore him in their policies and personal lives. Of course, everyone is a sinner, so it’s not surprising or even noteworthy that people fall down and appear hypocritical, so I’m not pointing out the failure of politicians to be “good” Christians. What I am suggesting that very few of the Founders were Christian at all, because a practicing Freemason like Franklin or Washington cannot be a Christian any more than a practicing Jew could be a Hindu. They do not go together. Attempting to claim co-existence of Christianity and Freemasonry requires a lot of spinning plates and hula hoops and tambourines and fireworks. Freemasonry is an open rejection of the living God of Israel, and certainly the Trinitarian God of Christianity.

Franklin believed in a Clockmaker God, a being who set the stars in motion and left the lights on before retiring into the beyond. He’s like a gamer who started a video game on auto-mode and went to bed. The Deist idea of God is a Creator that requires no worship and demands nothing. In other words, it’s an absentee father who left long ago and left us free to do whatever we like. The Clockmaker version of God has no relation whatsoever with the living God of Christian faith, because that Bible ends at chapter two of Genesis. Nothing more is needed beyond creation.

Why am I picking on Ben Franklin here? He is the poster child of the common language spoken by the architects of Babel.

Franklin spoke the language of Babel, because the language of Babylon is declaring a deity that either serves us, or doesn’t matter, or both. A Ziggurat is an expensive, fancy way of trying to communicate with and manipulate a god. This required a lot of ritual and song and dance and smoke to sell the idea. But what happens with a Ziggurat is the same thing that happens with Deism. The human, the self, bubbles up as the new deity. Pride rises like hot air and overtakes humility, and the virtues get swapped. Pride rises, humility sinks; it very much matches the behavior of hot and cold air masses. Humility kneels, while pride tries to grasp God.

Franklin did not try to deny that God exists, but rather to deny that God matters. This trick makes for a dead deity instead of a living God still present with us. The Clockmaker God opens the door to this. The result of the long onslaught of Enlightenment thinking is a polite depositing of God in the dustbin of history. If you punch your vote for the Clockmaker God, like Franklin did in his weekly Masonic meetings, then there is little or no difference from denying the existence of God entirely, or making bogus sacrifices in a Ziggurat to justify your power. The false gods of Babel were made in the image and likeness of the ruling class, and the Clockmaker God’s image and likeness doesn’t matter at all because he’s on permanent vacation.

More importantly, the Clockmaker God is not needed to forgive anything, because just like the rulers of Babel, the rules are decided by those in power, or in other words, “those who help themselves.” The pagan god who demanded sacrifice was not alive, but at least the illusion was more lively than that of the Clockmaker God. When the authority of the living Creator God who sustains all things is gone, then there is nothing holding back “those who help themselves.” The proverb of Franklin is essentially a nice way of arguing for will-to-power, as in, win at all costs.

In Franklin’s cosmology, there is no cosmic justice, no everlasting judgment, and the conscience is just a nag that you need to stifle. The cookie jar is just as open and unattended with the Clockmaker God of a deist as it is for the atheist who says there is no God at all.

In fact, the atheist is really the only honest one. This is why I think our age of atheism has a lot of people coming around, the long way, back to belief in the true God, the living Creator God. All of the other trick gods are so obviously false (Zeus) or pointless (deism), that the only God that makes sense, the only one that can even satisfy the intellect and give purpose to our lives, is the transcendent living Creator God. All the other gods don’t matter or are total frauds. In any other cosmos than that of the God of Abraham, we can do whatever we like, and like Franklin, we can help ourselves to whatever we like. A dead or silent God leads directly from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Michel Foucault.

A pagan god can at least command fear, but without that new methods are needed. The thunder god who throws lightning and causes storms only has power through fear. The storm god keeps the lightning nearby to strike if he is disrespected, as he is the one who unleashes havoc on the world. He must be appeased with worship, otherwise he will show us who is boss. The storm god that oddly matches worldly power, in that he is in competition with creation and craves adoration as payment. If he gets what he wants, you will receive a reward. There are many modern Christians who understand God in this way and need to break free from this model, because they are playing the same game of Babel as well.

On the other hand, a Clockmaker God commands nothing. He is the god of indifference. A God that created matter and exited the stage, doesn’t matter at all. It’s like a teacher who leaves the classroom and tells the students to behave. He’s a powerless joke. The hall monitor is gone, so what’s the difference between an absent God that created the universe against a pre-existing universe with no God at all? There is none. The latter is just much easier to live with, except you need something called “the rule of law” to assert control by pretending at objective truth. The funny thing is, however, that the ground for objective truth starts to shake when it’s just a set of rules etched in stone outside a courthouse. Eventually people see through this game as well. What we call “the rule of law” is our new storm god, in the form of courts, police, and in its most full form, SWAT teams and the National Guard. As the masses come around more to match Franklin’s idea of God, or worse, Marx’s idea of God, the jig is up. The pretense of objective truth gets jettisoned for “my truth.”

In either case, there are no rules except what we decide. Ziggurat or no Ziggurat: the god of Babel and the God of Franklin is the one that “helps those who help themselves.” The only thing that comes to matter in this worldview is power. That is the common language of Babel. That is what we want.

However, a living God that knows the number of hairs on your head matters a great deal. That God is the only one that can change our behavior out of love. There is a reason that the God of the Bible has lasted so long. This God satisfies our souls. He fits our lives. He explains everything. He is also the only real one.

The God of Israel, who we have come to understand better in the revelation of the Trinity, is the only one that can make all of our difficulties in life suddenly fall into place, just like he did in creating the universe. Once this concept of God is understood, both suffering and love begin to make sense. The main reason this happens, and keeps happening in every generation, is because, this God is real, and this God is alive.

The language that is being spoke in the Tower of Babel story is not really referring to Sumerian or Akkadian or Greek or Latin. No, it means a worldview that celebrates a culture of competition, power-seeking, comfort-seeking, possession-seeking, and pleasure-seeking. What we really want is God to approve our desires, but our conscience is God’s messenger that lets us know in subtle ways that he will never approve of those things. The worldview or common language is the little voice that tells us otherwise, that suggests that we elevate our pursuits over the glory of God. What we want, instinctually, is salvation independent of God. A Ziggurat is built to pull the gods down, to shape god to match our human pursuits, to justify ourselves. The correct approach to God is to stop trying to manipulate him, because he cannot be manipulated, and rather we need to conform our human pursuits to the will of the one true God.

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In the Tower of Babel story, a common language is being spoken, allowing all people to work together toward this project of pulling God down to earth through this gate to the sky. Let’s talk about that common language, because that too has layers to soak through and scratch off.

Babylon was a world center, a superpower, like New York or Beijing today, or London or Vienna or yesteryear. You can read as such, where perhaps a common language was indeed spoken, a lingua franca, as that has happened repeatedly in history wherever cities and centers of power emerged. The nation in power dictates what language is used, because it’s the language of business and trade. This movement toward one language is not even dictated so much as gravitated toward, because where there is money to be made, people come running. You can watch this happen whenever oil is discovered, or a company is started. Money is honey that draws us like flies.

The most powerful nation tends to steer the world into speaking its language, and right now that language is English because America still, for now, holds the tethers of power. In Rome, Latin was the lingua franca. In Greece, it was Koine Greek. At the time when the story of the Tower of Babel was written, it was likely Akkadian.

But if you want to get to the deeper meaning of this story, you need to think of the “common language” being spoken as not necessarily Sumerian or Akkadian or English or French or Chinese. The common language is about something much deeper. It is a language that explains why every nation, even every family, is in competition, right up to our time, even shedding light on why Russia and Ukraine are in open war this very instant.

How can I explain this?

The common language is a mindset, a way of life. If you read this story at a deeper level, the common language is not Sumerian or Akkadian. It is a worldview.

Just prior to the story of the Tower of Babel is the Great Flood story, and as soon as the flood subsides, we have a world of Noah and his family left as sole survivors. Obviously they spoke the same language or dinner would have been awkward. Now, a literal reading of this may not jive neatly with our modern concept of history and archaeology (although science is now finding that the Flood story actually does merge surprisingly well with ice age data), but that’s not what Genesis is about. As I’ve said before, you don’t go to the Bible to learn about rocks and history, even though there is something to glean there, too. This is a book about the soul, not the cell, nor is it about subjects like geology, anthropology, or philology. It can be useful for those subjects, but it’s not about those topics. This is where the disconnect happens for people as we tend to read it with “Google brain,” like machines, instead of people who consist of both a body and a soul.

Soon after the flood, we learn of Noah falling into sin (getting drunk and naked like a college student) and that’s when the family drama begins, which leads to the splintering of his sons into “the nations.” This idea of “the nations” requires a lengthy digression because of its importance in the understanding the rest of the Bible that follows, which is a thousand pages or so.

The last thing we read about before the Tower of Babel is the “Table of Nations” where all the known people groups of the world are listed. So I lied, there are subjects like geography and history in Genesis, but that is not all there is.

The “Table of Nations” in Genesis 10 is not just a purely mythical and ethnocentric story made up by an early Hebrew tribesman many hundreds of years “after the [alleged] facts.” It exhibits throughout a genuine knowledge of ancient Near East geography and culture. (Patheos)

So who cares about a list of nations that don’t match up with the names we use today?

Well, I do. But so should you. However, without a tour guide on these boring sections and lists in the Bible, my eyes just glaze over. I would have never known that Javan is Greece, or that Mizraim is Egypt, or that Ashkenaz might have been the German people. We need guides here (I recommend Fr. Stephen de Young and Fr. Andrew Damick: Orthodox priests, Bible scholars, and mythology nerds.) You need a guide or it’s too boring and abstract. We use tutors and guides like this for other things, and we should definitely find a guide through the Bible or we will miss why time itself is measured around the birth of Jesus Christ. For instance, if you go to Rome and walk through the Roman Forum, you will just see a bunch of ancient rocks that look mildly interesting and give you a sense of passing time. Without a guide, you will never realize how much history is represented in the weathered stones of say, the Temple of Saturn (which is kind of a Roman version of the Tower of Babel).

All of those boring sections in Genesis actually have more happening than we have time to learn today, which is a shame because it’s so rich in meaning. Our attention spans have shrunk dramatically. Unless you are a Bible nerd, you can’t comb through this stuff without a guide, or multiple guides, and your guides need multiple disciplines of knowledge to even traverse the vast field of information.

One great outcome of our modern academic deep dives into science and history is that we have more light shed on obscure texts. At the same time, however, we are in great danger of missing the purpose of the ancient texts when we reduce it to academic research. Studying myths and religion like academics often shoves God right off the stage. While we look for needles in the haystack, we forget that the purpose of the haystack is to feed a flock. We can easily skip over the spiritual part and just turn it into a never-ending study session. If that happens, then you forget that reading the Bible is an encounter with God. To get anything out of the Bible, you have to remember that point.

The main point that I’m trying to get across with the question of “Why Did Peter Sink?” is that he falls when he takes his eye off Jesus. Peter sinks in the water because he allows his fears and doubts to take over. In other words, he tried to walk on water independently of God, which he cannot do. He loses his peace and control because he tried to take control, allowing his fears to take over, taking back control that must be given up. This is the great paradox of faith. You must give up control to get any kind of control, to have any kind of miracle happen in your life, as Peter illustrates for us.

One last unnecessary metaphor: if we become purely academic in our reading, we will consume scripture like a stale Little Debbie snack instead of savoring it like the rich french silk pie that it is. The same goes for the Eucharist. If you don’t believe that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ under the appearance of bread, then it is just a flavorless wafer. It’s just a symbol, and then what’s the point? Why bother? It has to be more than a symbol, just as the word of God has to be the actual Word of God. So please, ask for faith, and keep asking. Keep walking toward Jesus. As we go, Keep your eye on the Savior, not the Baal (Ball. Get it? Stupid joke. Fine, I’ll stop.).

Noah’s family spoke the same language. The nations all came from his sons according to the story. In other words, Noah’s family history is way, way back in time. Instantly, our Google brain would like to say, “No, the first homo-sapiens were from the African savannah and they spread out over thousands of years, etc, and the nations formed from tribes and people groups, etc.” To which I would reply: is the narrative of science, at its core, all that different than the story of Adam and Eve in a garden (savannah?) as the first two human parents? And as we have much evidence of ancient flooding from ice ages, is it not reasonable that civilizations were wiped out from rising seas and rivers? Sometimes I think we are talking about the same things when we argue about science and religion, it’s just that the sacred writer of Genesis didn’t have terabyte storage to give all the details, so the writer crammed all of pre-history into eleven short chapters. Of course we have more data today. Yet somehow archaeology keeps affirming things in Genesis as we go, just as science keeps affirming the Big Bang theory, which came from a priest, of all people, and fits insanely well with Genesis.

If you are following the 30,000 year timetable of when modern people emerged across the world, then this story of Noah must be considered deep in history. My money is on 10,000 B.C. since that was the last big flood of the ice ages. Clearly “the nations” took time to develop. The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 indicates that long before the Tower of Babel was built, the worship of One God, the true God, was established, because Noah had been chosen by God to build the ark.

If Noah and his family were the only people, and Noah worshipped the Creator God of Genesis, then something dramatic begins to happen after the dispersal of Noah’s sons into the world, as in, the worship of other gods. This is where the famous succession myth begins, where a god like Zeus or Baal overthrew the ancient god, the first god. In other words, along with “the nations” come the idea of local gods, because if you break off from the original, you have to create a founding myth and a god that supports the myth. In other words, the schism that forms “the nations” also is the impetus that forms the gods. In the same way, companies are formed, such as how two fired executives of Handy Dan went on to found The Home Depot. You might even say that the stone that was rejected from Handy Dan became the cornerstone of Home Depot. (I’ve gone into this succession myth stuff a lot in a previous series called About Uranus so I won’t belabor it here.)

There is a time gap in between Noah’s drunk night and the Tower of Babel. A lot happens in one chapter. It’s not clear how much time. Perhaps one hundred years, perhaps 15,000. When construction finally began on the Tower of Babel, the nations exist, but everyone is speaking the same language. Clearly, an academic or scientist will have trouble computing this: how could languages not have developed if the nations already had? That doesn’t make sense. Put a pin in that idea, because there seem to be two types of “language” being referred to here.

This is where the Tower of Babel story gets interesting. Here is where you can take the simple path of understanding it as a fable, a tale of how languages and nations came from. Or, you can read the “common language” in a different way that opens the door to far more understanding of the Bible as a whole, and why Jesus came to the earth at all.

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The Tower of Babel story is a strange one. It’s strange enough that I’m going to spend a lot of time on it, to the point that you will surely switch over to YouTube in about ten minutes. My hope is that this blog/podcast does not drive you back into the arms of the politics, porn, and video games, so I’ll do my best to keep it moving. I may have already lost most of you just at the mention of those candies. After all, if the Sound of Music was remade today, the lyrics would have to change to make sense to anyone. Here’s a sample clip from the new version: “Netflix and porn and football on Sundays, these are a few of our favorite things.”

On the surface level, the Tower of Babel reads like a tale of where languages came from, in the same spirit of fables, such as, “How the Tiger Got its Stripes.” You may pass over the text and think, “Isn’t that cute. A story of where the many human languages came from.” Like the Garden of Eden story you can read this one literally, yawn, close the book, then return to your sportsball and Door Dash. And doing so you will miss the entire point of the story of the Tower of Babel.

There is another layer, much deeper than the literal, and you can scratch the surface using your fingernail and realize that there are multiple layers of paint. This is why it is a timeless story. First, understanding that “Babel” means “Gate to God” or “Gateway to God” should tell you there is more happening than a simple tower construction project. You could even call it a “Stairway to Heaven” but I am not here to talk about Led Zeppelin. Still, that song title is a phrase that is relevant, or even possibly a reference to the Tower of Babel. If you ask five people the meaning of the lyrics, you will get five answers (my money is on the Lord of the Rings interpretation being closest to the mark, since Led Zeppelin band members were Tolkien nerds). However, even if “Stairway to Heaven” is about Arwen and Aragorn, the Lord of the Rings is the most Catholic novel ever written, so in a wide circling way, from classic rock back to Genesis all the way to the rock of the Church, we have to drive by the Tower of Babel story anyway.

The same variety of interpretations that happen with “Stairway to Heaven” can come from readers of the Tower of Babel story, and I think if we called it the “Gate to God” story we would probably be at a better starting point.

The Gate being built is a Ziggurat, which is a pagan temple. The location may have been Eridu, in modern day Iraq. Or it may have been elsewhere. It’s not particularly important where it was built, because lots of these Ziggurats existed in ancient times, and they are remarkably similar in shape and purpose, even across cultures that had no contact.

Now, if you have the idea of some giant tower that touches the sky, you need to first stop and understand that ancient people were not stupid. They knew that a tower could not be built to the sky, probably better than we do, since they didn’t have steel and even one hundred feet in height would have been an engineering marvel.

So if you want to get anything out of the story, you have to put aside your presentism and unconscious bias. Presentism is the modern bias and assumption that people that didn’t have smart phones were only slightly higher than baboons in terms of mental and intellectual acumen.

What is a Ziggurat? It is a temple built as a home base for rituals and sacrifices to gods of the lower-case mythological variety. Archaeologists have found these structures with staircases to a central altar, where worship and sacrifice was made to gods. The most famous god of the ancient world was the storm god, or sky god, like Baal, or Marduk, or Zeus, or Jupiter (who are actually all the same god just shifted from one culture to another and that, too, is important to keep in mind as we go along.)

At the core of the story is God observing the construction of this Gate to God, and the people in charge are intending to build it “to reach the sky.” Why the sky? Because that’s where the sky god lives. Sometimes he lives in a mountain, but the sky god throws the lightning bolts.

Along with the sky god, there is a whole list of other gods, like the moon god, the sun god, etc. There is even “Father Sky,” who was a more primordial god in these same cultures, but this elder god was knocked out by the storm god in a battle on the spiritual realm. This too is important to keep in mind, as the tale of Zeus defeating his father Uranus plays into the story of the Tower of Babel very much.

The interesting thing about mythology is how celestial objects, like the moon, and natural phenomena, like storms, get translated into spirits. This is mythology in a nutshell, and we assume the ancient people were just trying their best to explain away what could not be explained by science, since there was no such thing as science. There were no telescopes, so in our Present Bias we look at these tales as explanations in a pre-scientific age. These are cute tales from primitive people, who, if they were around today, we would pat on the head and send away with a dum-dum sucker.

What non-believers and soul-deniers today have use today as a shield against all things supernatural is a saying known as the “God of the gaps.” The idea is that we only assume God exists for things that we cannot explain yet. This is full blown presentism. If you are not an anti-presentist, you are a presentist.

For example, the reason the Irish no longer believe that fairies bring illness is because we know what germs are. We can see germs under microscopes. Until we knew about germs, we blamed fairies. In other words, since we couldn’t explain illness, we pawned it off on fairies and God. However, right now, in 2022, science is still claiming to look for a mythical “bat of the gaps” in the Covid story, while we all know that there was no bat, but there most certainly was a very large virology lab. The great irony is that a bat that doesn’t exist has been invented and mythologized now by the very same people who mock any idea of fairies or spirits. We could get lost here in talking about scapegoating and human nature, but let’s stay on track.

The “God of the gaps” idea is a modern argument to reduce all religion to superstitious nonsense. It’s an idea that modern writers like Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins have campaigned hard to sell. There’s just one problem with both the fairy stories and Carl Sagan.

Neither of them match the concept of the God of Christianity.

A quote from Carl Sagan illustrates the problem perfectly, and he was very close to understanding the God of Christianity, but he was bothered by fairy believers who kept moving God into the gaps. This illustrates the problem with how bad conceptions of what the Christian God is brings so much confusion:

“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed’? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’“

In other words, Carl had clearly never read the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Carl is actually very close to understanding the awe of God in the way that Catholics understand God. Whoever he is talking about in that quote has no understanding of God as he is understood in the Catholic Church.

The God of Israel, is unique, in both conception and power, as Yahweh does not live in the universe like the pagan gods. The God of Christianity, the Trinity, is complete, a whole, that encompasses both the universe and our hearts.

God is far simpler to understand than Zeus, in that he is One God, existing forever, outside of space and time. At the same time, he is infinitely more complex in that we can never understand him at all. We can understand God, and we can never understand him.

There is another jarring quote where Carl Sagan showed that he was talking about believers that did not understand the Christian God. He said, “Your God is too small for my universe.”

To which anyone who spends time in the Catechism can tell you, “No kidding, Carl.” That’s been a known fact for 4,000 years. Cave people knew that, and they didn’t have telescopes.

What amazes me most today is how science assumes that all religious people are merely superstitious buffoons, but when they begin to talk about God, they are describing a pagan concept of lower-case gods, not the understanding of the God of Israel and certainly not the Trinity. This is where bad instruction of the faithful leads to a mess, and as far as bad training and catechesis goes, Catholics have a lot of explaining to do. We have dropped the ball horribly for about three generations now in teaching something as basic as, “How can we speak about God?”

God is bigger than Carl’s universe. The universe alone can't explain Carl Sagan. As Peter Lawler said, “Physics can’t explain the physicist…Physics, by itself, simply explains away the physicist—and much else.”

Far bigger than our conception or intellect can handle, God transcends our minds. He is not in the gaps, he created all the gaps, and no matter how many gaps we figure out, there will be more gaps. Like Sagan, who seemed to think that we have overtaken God in terms of knowledge about the universe, the brightest minds of the middle ages thought God kept the planets afloat with crystals. Sagan and company are no different than the confused thinkers of the “Dark Ages” who thought they had figured everything out.

But here’s something important to realize: the incorrect concepts of the universe was never doctrine. The idea that the earth was at the center of the universe was never part of Christianity. That’s only what the intellectuals of the middle ages believed. This is why the Church moves and decides slowly, like the Ents, the trees in Lord of the Rings, who take a long time to decide anything. This is also why the Church doesn’t leap in when economic and tech fads offer utopia. The wisdom of the Church plays out in a couple of ways, one in its patience, and second by recognizing heresies and bad ideas long before they are proven to be bad ideas, such as the theories of Marx or calling out Transhumanism (before it gets started).

The truth comes out over time, and science is a small part of revealing God’s world to us. It’s one kind of knowledge, but it’s not wisdom. It’s worth noting that in a hundred years we may realize that much of modern science is wrong. This happens repeatedly in our history. What is a solid “known” today could be laughable later. Phrenology had its day as a serious science, when people interpreted bumps on our heads. Now it is a joke. (Sociologists beware!)

But God does not change, nor does the proper concept of God. To assume otherwise is to be exactly like the intellectuals of the middle ages, who were surely certain of their ideas, too. To assume all is known today is the classic mistake of the falls in Genesis, too.

What often seems to be the case is that non-believers have a bad concept of God, stemming from various causes. I think the main problem is that they just don’t understand the Trinitarian God properly. I certainly didn’t. The reason we don’t is because the loudest voices proclaiming God today confuse the right meaning of the word. In fact, I don’t think most Christians know the meaning of the word God, because he just seems to be a vending machine to so many. (Here is where I resist ranting about the message preached in the “Prosperity Gospel”. )

If you think Zeus and the God of Israel are the same thing, you cannot read the Tower of Babel story. Don’t do it. Don’t even try. Why waste your time? You cannot understand it if you don’t even understand what the writer was talking about. If you don’t have the proper idea of God in place, you will fail before you start. It’s like beginning a calculus problem when you only made it through Algebra II. It’s like interpreting a modern biology book using the theory of the four bodily humors from Galen, the ancient Greek physician. It doesn’t work. You will be lost on reading the first sentence.

To understand the God of Israel, you have to backtrack and realize a few things. First, you have to rip out your modern assumptions and biases and reset, because all of the noise around God in our media has created a windstorm in your head. Everyone is trying to put their spin on what God is, and until you find the right language, the crazy interpretations will continue to spin. In my own surfacing into the light, I slowly realized that I had cut myself off with a little of help from my friends and much help from the media around me, not to mention a giant pool of Captain Morgan. I had sliced myself off, walled myself in, because of various reasons. In trying to “find myself,” I got lost, and the reasons I lost God was because of exactly the list of reasons listed in the intro of the Catechism. I had forgotten the right concept of God, overlooked what I knew was true, and rejected the entire idea of God.

…this "intimate and vital bond of man to God" can be forgotten, overlooked, or even explicitly rejected by man. Such attitudes can have different causes: revolt against evil in the world; religious ignorance or indifference; the cares and riches of this world; the scandal of bad example on the part of believers; currents of thought hostile to religion; finally, that attitude of sinful man which makes him hide from God out of fear and flee his call. (CCC 27-30)

Yes, all of those things. The pain and suffering of this world confused me, I was ignorant of what the word God really meant in the Bible, I was drawn to pleasures like drinking, I saw many bad examples of believers that made me question faith entirely, and my education, along with movies and books I read, was purposefully leading me by the nose to a path of belittling and laughing at those with faith.

I remember trying to read Genesis and thinking, “This is ridiculous,” and only fifteen years later did I realize that my understanding of God was all wrong. I had to reset completely. Life has a funny way of beating you into a state of reasonableness so that you can try again.

To reset, I started with this:

God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God--"the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable"--with our human representations.16 Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.

Admittedly, in speaking about God like this, our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity. Likewise, we must recall that "between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude"; and that "concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him." (CCC 39-43)

He transcends all creatures, including myths like Zeus.

He created everything, including our ability to invent myths like Zeus.

We are continually learning more about creation. We are not done learning or discovering wonders here, because we are not God. This should be a cause for awe - Carl Sagan is correct. If he met people who understood God in this sense, instead of reducing all Christians to knuckle-dragging fundamentalists, he could have had terrific conversations about that very fact.

God is nothing like the pathetic Zeus. He’s way beyond us, transcending our world, while at the same time reaching down to us and saying “Boo!” from time to time. He alerts us that he’s present.

Most importantly, we cannot control God. This is critical to reading the Tower of Babel story. The pagan gods are far more mundane and limited than the God of the Trinity. The pagan gods live in mountains or in the forest. They are the moon. They are the stars. They are within the universe.

The classic blunder of so many non-believers is that they assume God is an object in the universe, like how we think of Zeus. Whenever you hear, “All gods are the same,” you know immediately the speaker does not understand the Christian concept of God. Sagan’s “small God” comment and Bertrand Russell’s famous “teapot god” betray their fundamental misunderstanding of what the word God means to Catholics. The architect of the universe is not standing in the solar system like a tour guide; he transcends all creation. He transcends all tings, but is still a living God that can reach us on a very personal level.

So when you read the Tower of Babel story, the important things to keep in mind are:

• The Tower is a Ziggurat built to “reach the sky.” Babel means “Gate to God.” The ancient cultures believed that these pyramid temples made a connecting point between heaven and earth. They often have a stairway to an altar on the top. These exist across the world, even in Aztec and Mayan cultures that never had any apparent contact with Mesopotamian cultures. (This should start raising hairs on your neck but resist the urge to blame aliens here.)

• Ziggurats were built to worship gods of mythology, most commonly the “sky god,” a.k.a. storm god, a.k.a. thunder god, a.k.a. fertility god, a.k.a. the rainmaker. This god goes by various names in history: Baal, Marduk, Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, and more (Perkūnas, Perun, Indra, Dyaus, and Zojz). This god was usually depicted with bull horns and/or holding lightning bolts. In mythology, the sky god “defeated” the primordial god (or gods). This tale is called the succession myth and it gets repeated in Babylon, Greece, Rome, and many other places. This god is a shape-shifting rapist who can appear as a bull, a serpent, a swan, an eagle, or even a shepherd. As Éomer says in The Two Towers, “The white wizard is cunning,” so is the fertility god.

• Satan is the storm god. Yes, the “S” word. This came as a shock, since I enjoy reading Greek and Roman mythology. But really, how did I miss it for so long? The horns often depicted on Satan are exactly like the bull horns of Baal. And Baal = Marduk = Zeus = Jupiter = Thor = Satan. Baal is Zeus. Baal is also Satan. They are all the same character. Jesus even calls Satan ‘Beelzebul,’ which is a version of Baal-Zebub, the Philistine deity of Baal/Zeus equivalent. Better yet, Beelzebul is actually a mocking name that riffs on Beelzebub. “Prince Baal” or “Lord Baal” is modified by Jesus to mock “Baal of flies” or “Lord of dung.” This mockery also took me aback, because if Jesus mocks the sky gods, it proves that God does indeed have a sense of humor. There is word play going on. Jesus again mocks the sky god a second time when he gives the nickname “Sons of Thunder” to James and John (Mk 3:17), which means sons of the sky god, a.k.a. Zeus. Like most nicknames, it is not a compliment. When they call for revenge on those who oppose Jesus, James and John are acting like Baal or Zeus or Satan. James and John ask, “Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?” Jesus turned and rebuked them. (Lk 9:54) Jesus is the polar opposite of the cruel and vengeful sky god. In other words, Jesus is God, and God is love. This is the opposite of the fallen angel named Satan, who shape-shifts and goes by many other names. (Yet for some reason God allows Satan to divide, distract, and deceive us in this world, which is the great head-scratcher for us all and takes a lifetime to understand.)

• Keep in mind that all myths are victory tales and founding narratives. They are written and told to justify for the current state of affairs in the world. When you read any myth, you have to read it from the perspective of the myth-makers. Babel is part of Israel’s story, but if the other side told the story of Babel, it would be a very different tale, where the temple at Babel would be seen like St. Peter in Rome or Notre Dame in Paris.

• The intention and goal of building the Tower of Babel versus the intention building St. Peter or Notre Dame is starkly different. The “Gate to God” is being built up to “the sky.” The Tower is meant to bring god down to earth (just like in Ghostbusters - more on that later) and make a name for the people. St. Peter and Notre Dame are built to give glory to God, not to people. This fundamental misunderstanding of God makes all the difference, both in our individual lives and in the pursuits of nations.

• The God of Israel cannot be controlled. He does not need us. We need him.

If you read the Tower of Babel at only the surface level, at the “How the Tiger got its stripes” level, where it’s only about how the various languages came to be, you will get something out of it. That is a valid, literal reading, but you will miss the greater significance of the story.

Know before you start: God doesn’t make transactions with his creatures. Praying for what you want can work out in strange ways, but it always works out in how God wills it. He gets the last laugh, you might say. Even the great destroyers of faith, Marx, Voltaire, Hume, Russell, Dawkins, et al. are part of God’s plan somehow. He allows doubt and struggle for reasons we cannot understand, but like Joseph in Egypt, when we realized that all his struggles had a purpose: “Even though you meant harm to me, God meant it for good.” (Gen 50:20)

Without this understanding of God, we are trying to manipulate him and make him dance. But he is the one who makes us dance, and it’s much easier to dance with him than to try to lead. He is Tolkien and we are Frodo. We are his characters. We cannot reach up and grab the author, and that is exactly what the builders at Babel are trying to do. This is a really, really bad idea for us to try, both then and now.

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Each individual faces a trial, and the trial consists of one question. We face this trial today and every day of our life.

At some point, we all get to play the part of Pontius Pilate when he is forced to face Jesus. In the trial of Jesus, it is not actually Jesus who is on trial, but the world, and Pilate is the stand-in for every one of us.

Now, most of us know there is corruption in the world. We’ve heard all the stories of the wealthy getting away with murder (sometimes literally) and corruption within both political parties. We know of suffering and pain that doesn’t make sense. We observe many religious Pharisees acting like hypocrites and we see wealthy American Herodians being morally corrupt in every way. America, like Pontius Pilate, for all its claims to virtue, real and imagined, must confront Jesus someday and will have to decide on how to answer the test. We all get to stand like Pilate, not giving the trial, but in the chair of the defendant.

When Jesus said, “Lead us not to the test” in the Lord’s prayer, he didn’t mention that the test is only one question, and it only has one answer.

“Do not bring us to the time of trial,” is another translation. “Lead us not into temptation,” is the most common one we hear in English. Trial, test, temptation - in all cases, we ask God to help us steer clear of it. And what is this test?

We are there. We are taking the test, every day. But we only come to understand the test when we come to forks in the road, decision points in our lives. In good times and in bad times, the trial comes out to meet you. We ask God to lead us not to this test, but because of our desires we like to go looking for it, and we all find the test eventually.

How we answer this test question says everything about us. How we answer it guides our day, our choices, our feelings, our reactions, our heart, our family, our career, our evenings, our mornings, our meals. Judgment day will be so easy for God to carry out, because we answer this test every day. The test question is the one that Pilate asked to Jesus, which is ironic, because Pilate is the one actually on trial. This is the only question on the test:

“What is truth?”

That’s the whole test.

It requires a response. Not just verbally or mentally, but in our actions. It’s both an oral and a practical exam.

In our age, that single question draws many responses. “What is truth?” brings long responses, based on logic, and even illogic, with sweeping topics of historical analysis, tales of heroes and villains and victims, windy arguments, appeals to emotion, appeals to reason.

But God can stop all test-takers after the very first word out of their mouths, because the only answer he is looking for is Jesus.

You can tell how fragmented a person is, how compromised, how scattered, how lost, by how that one question is answered. If you ask someone, “What is truth?” and they start rambling, they are the lost. Pray for them, and pray for yourself, and pray for us all, because even if we think we are not lost, that we are found, even if we answer correctly, we very likely fail the practical part of the exam, which is our lives. This is important to recognize. Even if you answered with the name of Jesus, it is your actions in life that answer for you.

By the time you arrive at judgment, God already knows your answer. You gave it already. And anyone who claims or claimed verbally that Jesus was the truth, but rejected him in spirit, and did not actually follow him along the way, will be exposed. We are more than our mind. We are the God’s instruments with a mind, but also with arms and legs. Did we just assert belief in our mind or do something about it? Did that belief animate our body or just sit boxed up in our head? There is no weaselly appeal to be made to a higher court. The Creator God is the final stop.

Like the rich man in hell who begged for Abraham to go back and tell his brothers to repent, the request will not be honored. We have had our chance. We already have been told, warned, and we choose to ignore the Creator. Even if we acknowledged that he exists, we probably only acknowledge it like we acknowledge everything else. We grant God the same significance of other facts like existence of gravity. Gravity exists. So what? Admitting God exist is just like admitting any other fact that you might accept. Seasons change. Cats are funny. We can declare that God exists and even say that Jesus is the truth, and then we can proceed to give it the same level of respect that we give to any other fact. God exists. Water exists. Now back to cat videos. Agreement to the notion of a Creator is not the question. This is a pass/fail test, and “God exists” is an automatic fail if that’s all you got.

If you feel unsure about “What is truth?” then you are adrift. You are either in the camp of the whitewashed tombs trying to save yourself with some long-winded answer, or you are in denial, thinking that some of your sins are acceptable. If you are unsure whether you are a sinner or not, you are waffling on the fence, and that fence is electric - at some point the power is going to get turned on and you will feel it.

You cannot answer “Jesus” to the test question if you do not come to know your sins and that you are a sinner. That means all of your sins, including the ones you’d like to keep and defend as honorable.

This is the slippery slope of how dishonoring God moves into the mainstream of your life. Straddling half-measures and partial surrender is how the bad patterns spread its feelers through your own life and through an entire nation. This is how the values of Mardi Gras move into Lent. This is how the sandbox database becomes the production database. Chaos is near when the sacred cannot be separated from the rest of the world. When the playground of the red-light district becomes an acceptable way of life, then prepare for impact. America has even gone so far as to give a place of honor to behaviors that only belong in the red-light district. Put your head between your knees, and…no…don’t kiss your ass goodbye; put your head between your knees and pray.

The conscience is silenced by celebrating your desires, and the conscience is the little voice of God, the great gift of the good guardian angel.

You may have answered this question correctly long ago, but have slipped.

This is how habitual sin works.

The pioneer stage of turning away from God is that first sip of beer, the first toke on a joint, the first kiss, the first bribe that you get away with. Taboo is removed and a further step is taken. Retreat and advance, and once you start to enjoy the sin, the conquest begins. Then you get into regular commerce with the sin, transacting your moods on it, trading your body and soul for it.

After that the slide quickens. The drink or the touch or the bribe becomes an expected luxury, a common occurrence, even an expectation.

Once it starts to bear itself out as a problem, you intellectualize it, rationalize it, justify it, saying some version of “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Science, especially genetics, makes a good brush to paint it as a virtue to be embraced, using deft strokes of psychology, sociology, and nature and nurture arguments. When asked, “Is doing X a sin?” you have a paint palette at the ready, just like you do when faced with the ultimate test: “What is truth?”

In the last phase, you settle into the sin, like Gollum with his Ring, the precious, like a ghoul who cannot see himself moving into decline and collapse. This whole cycle happens to individuals and to groups of people and to nations. If no chainsaw miraculously cuts you free from these growing vines, then the decline and collapse process will keep covering you until it becomes a grave.

You need to break free. But you can’t without help. If lucky, a forest fire will burn the brambles away. Often the only way out of habitual sin that has taken root in your body and soul is to be burned free. Like a prescribed burn is done to refresh a prairie with fire, to remove the weeds and the invasive species, we must feel the fire of the spirit to re-awaken our hearts to be generated anew. To return to the faith of a child, to start again, to be reborn - we must become awake to the fact that the things that we thought we wanted were all wrong. Otherwise habitual sin will remain just that: a habit.

American culture has ceased approving of the prescribed burns that renew people. We’ve silenced the voices that speak the truth. We’ve done a wondrous job intellectualizing most of our sins.

We are no longer afraid of God, because we think he’s not real. Unsurprisingly, we no longer worry about sin, because we think it too, is not real. These things go together. The reason the Hebrews said, “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” is because you won’t understand God until you know how pathetically weak you are. Living in a bubble of affluence, we misunderstand how weak we are. But we will learn. We all get to learn this. Affluence is an illusion that turns you away from God and the truth because you assume that the comfort and strength you feel is all under your control somehow. This is the same reason that strong young men are cocky while hunched over old men are humble. He is fooled by muscles as his undeniable strength. But the decades roll along and atrophy instructs with reality.

Only when the plane is about to crash can some of us awaken. That is when poor choices of who we chose to follow in life get outed as frauds. Those who follow Jesus do not have this problem even when the plane crashes into the mountain. This is because they know the answer to the test question, and if they really know that answer, then they have imitated the man, as best as they could.

Whatever rock you hit, whatever end you arrive at, there is no need to worry if you know that Jesus is the truth. Fear of the Lord will get you started on the path to the truth, and Jesus will remove that fear. First you have to know your weakness in order to understand what is really meant by God, because once you see the dragon, you will know the need for God. Fear of the dragon will lead you to God, who is far, far more powerful that any earthly or even spiritual dragon. But the dragon is real and the dragon will kill you. Then you surrender, and Jesus will slay the dragon for you. He will lay it down like a kitten. But you can’t tame the dragon alone, and Jesus won’t do it with you until you recognize and accept your weakness and sinfulness. Surrender is the only way to enlist the army of angels and saints.

We are in the climate of the last days of Babel where the clouds are darkening. The Tower seems nearly complete once again, as there seems to be nothing we can’t do as humans, and our lives bear out our own paper-thin “truth.” We deny ourselves nothing. We are told that we can do anything, we can be anything, and we proclaim this loudly…and that is exactly how every fall of man in the book of Genesis happens.

Everything is permitted when truth no longer exists except in the mind. Everything is upside-down and inside-out and the only real truth that comes out of it in the end is the same pre-Jesus bulldozer of “Might Makes Right.” You hear this message today of “taking the power,” and while some lament the old power fading, of European “whiteness” as the old ruler, you now hear of the ascendant “wokeness” replacing it. What neither side of this volleyball game realizes is that whichever side in this struggle wins, it’s the same outcome.

The underlying rejection of God will result in one side on top and the other complaining. We will again be living in a world of “rules for thee, but not for me,” just like the Epsteins and Trumps and Clintons and Bezos and Gates families do today. Do not let power fool you. Those who think that their oppressor has been “Christianity” have no clue about Jesus, the living God. Evil done under the guise of Christianity is the same as evil done under any other ideology.

Don’t let anyone distract you from the test. Because it’s rather easy, when you stop and think about it. You already know the answer.

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Public service announcement: While the world may seem to be falling around you, all is well.

There is understanding among citizens of what is happening. The center is slipping. A poet need not articulate the state of America. We do not need a literature class, or William Butler Yeats to explain it. Anyone living today can grasp what the poet was trying to say in “The Second Coming,” even if he did misread the tea leaves on the end times.

Yeats wrote the poem in 1918, after World War I, during a pandemic known as the Spanish Flu, in the twilight of the British empire. Sound familiar? The power structure was fading into decadence right along with the British rejection of God, just as it always does. When people lost their way, God retreats and the center falls apart. Three hundred years of lusting for power and wealth surfaced into the lust for pleasure and corruption. The “stable” world of London, built by wealth won through violence, was falling into the chaos to which all empires succumb, as America is now. The evil done to “gain the world” led to a collapse of belief and with it went morality. Gaining the world, as always, means losing your soul. When the mask of a godless social order slips away, people scramble for safety like insects exposed under a lifted rock. Here’s how Yeats saw it happening:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Weeks could be spent on these lines. But do we need to spend time on it? We do not. We can just go on social media and see the best people lack conviction, while the worst people hurl invectives and spew anonymous hate in comment boxes. We don’t need Yeats, not when we are living in the time when this is happening before our eyes.

We can feel the center slipping and await the “blood-dimmed tide.” A small match will set this dried tinderbox ablaze. We don’t need Yeats to explain the poem now because he was a product of the same era that we have lived in for fifty years, where a people who rejected God fell into the spell of habitual sin, and then wondered what happened. Yeats soaked in the same tub that we are in. He lived a life of late-stage empire just as we have, trying to make a name for himself.

As Democrats and Republicans blame one another, and Right-wingers and Leftists hurl stock insults back and forth, and fascists and communists label each other with only a vague understanding of the actual meaning of the words, what is happening is the scramble for cover. Preparations are being made for the coming war as God retreats from the land, just as he did for the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Israelites, the Romans, the Germans, and the Soviets. The “passionate intensity” that we see online is just individuals placing their bets, finding their foxholes to hide in, with the hopes that the chips fall their way, that they have chosen the winning side. Fig leaves are being tried on and fit for size, in hopes that it marks them as an accepted teammate on the victorious side. With luck, their name won’t make the roster of the new enemies of the state.

What is happening is that people are trying to get out of the way of the swinging axe when it comes for blood, and it will swing. They think getting out of the way of the axe is by moving further from the center. A fragile state is felt. The pendulum appears most dangerous in the middle, and perhaps it won’t slice those who move off to one of the corners, away from the center. Moving far left or far right seems to be the only escape. So one side will cling to a version of “tradition,” claiming they want law and order (but with certain cheats allowed) and the other side wants to smash tradition and allow all things, where the only “sin” is whatever the old authority wanted. In either case, both sides are riddled with the same problem of pride and competition driving their choices, and by choosing a side they harbor anger and resentment toward the other. The zero sum game board is set and the only thing holding back the reign of terror is that that the grocery stores are still full of food today. The first rush to hoard during the Covid pandemic was for toilet paper. The second rush will be for guns and grain, and unfortunately, those who have the most guns can always just go ahead and take the grain.

Why am I mentioning all of this? Is this some sort of prophecy of pandemics, war, riots, and lies? No. Yes.

God knows all this is happening. He is allowing it to happen.

Is this God’s will?

Of course it is. It’s his world. It’s his universe. Christians are not called to solve all problems. They are called very explicitly to believe and be baptized and keep God’s commandments. Then, after that, to preach the most important news: that there is a savior who can transform our suffering. Jesus did not come to be Caesar or President, but to feed the poor and save souls. He did not come to save the rich and powerful, he came to save the poor and lost.

It’s important on election day to recall the lessons on why Jesus died. He came to take away the sins of the world. He did not come to end suffering. No, suffering is still here. We still have to deal with that. Even atheists have to deal with that problem. Jesus came to forgive our sins, but it wasn’t to remove all suffering. He didn’t come to make life easy, to put our feet up and order take-out. It was so we could understand suffering, and transform our suffering into something greater. He came to take away our sins and defeat death. He showed us how to live.

Most importantly, he came to defeat the devil. This is probably the least talked about reason that he came, which is odd, because this message is strewn all about the Gospels, from the temptations in the desert to the casting out of demons to his descending into hell. We do not get to eternal life without this victory over evil. Taking away our sins is great. Transforming our suffering - even better. But defeating death and evil - that is why he is the savior.

We still have to live out our lives here in the meantime, and with Jesus by our side, we can have total gratitude for every injury and insult that comes our way. That is the power of the Gospel. He was crucified so that we might live. The kingdom of God is among us. Be a joyful believer and pray for his grace, with the faith of a child.

Resist the urge to lay blame. The sinners are here, and you and I are among them. We are them. We’ve taken the same bites of fruit as Adam and Eve. The loss of innocence at an individual level plays out similarly to that of a whole nation. The world is always going to have suffering until God says otherwise, and there will always be dabblers and fools and seekers and lost souls. Just pray for them and give thanks that you might be found again every day. If our nation tries to crown itself as King and Creator, it will fall. There is only one truth, and that is the life of Christ, the lessons of the Cross, and the glory of the Resurrection.

If others assume their invincibility, their divinity, that there is no Higher Power or eternal justice between them and God, then there is no longer a distinction between heaven and hell. Let them have their beliefs, but never abandon yours. All that glitters is not gold.

When the constraints are all gone, when the police and planners can can no longer hold back the riot, know that God’s will is playing out. Money and power can play games with perception for a while, but the truth will always come out in the end. As Jesus warned us, the yeast of the the Pharisees is hypocrisy and the leaven seeps into the whole of the bread. Once everyone catches on to what the top people in society are doing to win, then the middle class follows suit. That is where the personal resistance must happen. Do not follow. Do not pursue. Stay with the Gospel and reject all polished apples presented to you.

When right and wrong becomes blurred, what will you do? What happens when the drag queen becomes the preacher? (I’m not making this up, this has already happened. In that case, you find a new church.) When sin is brought to the center, what happens to the center? What happens when the strip joint is elevated over holy places? What happens when our leaders don’t believe in sin? What happens when they no longer believe in God? What happens when marriage is no longer about a sacrament, a man and a woman becoming one flesh, but just a contract? What happens when we just rename things?

Fortunately for us, we don’t have to ask these questions, we will just get to observe it in action, in living history. For those who believe, that is where the test will be. The test will be how you reacted when the world fell down around you. When the chaos comes, like the Great Flood, will you be in the ark, or will you be squabbling for the last high spot on a teetering sandcastle amid the rushing waters?

Will you rush to take up the sword? Will your main concern be winning a war? Will it be power you are ultimately after, or humility before the Lord? Because on that day neither Democrats nor Republicans will be there to save you. More than likely they will be there to kill you, and like St. Paul, St. Timothy, St. Lawrence, you can meet them with joy.

You will know if you followed Him on the last day, right after the last exhale of breath from your lungs. Because it’s not what you win here, but whether you endured in the faith to the end. The toys you have here, the boats and the cars and the conquests and the political victories, will be as useful as the toys you gathered in your crib as a baby. Jesus asked us to take up our cross and follow him, not gather up comforts and settle. You will know your faith meant something, not if you win, not by the number of men you outlasted; you will meet Jesus if you do what he asked: if you prayed, believed, fasted, gave to the poor, and carried the message forward. If you healed the sick and kept his commandments. He did ask you to worry about who is governor, or state representative, or senator. He explicitly said that he did not care about Caesar or Pilate, as their power here was only given to them from above. So it is with any election outcome here today.

The Great Commission was not given to the apostles to gain earthly power. It was done to heal the sick, to bring the message of salvation. Those who need Him know Him. He calls them to him. Rest assured tonight that the winner of the election will not offer salvation. The winner today will offer some cheap trinket instead of the Pearl of Great Value that Jesus offers. In fact, if you follow Him correctly, the earthly powers will come to hate you and mock you, not love you. We can see it happening now. And for Christians who are wringing their hands right now about the comfort of a Christian society slipping, they have confused their comfort and wealth with Jesus Christ himself.

Be reminded - the God who came to live among us was without a place to lay his head. He served the poor and found the lost. He died on a Cross, hanging in public for three hours naked, suffocating with nails driven through his hands and feet. We are Sadducees and Pharisees, not Christians. We seem to have forgotten that to be Christian should not be cool, and a cross is not a fashion symbol but an instrument of execution. A church that follows this culture to fit in with the times will be orphaned in a short while. The churches that change their doctrine to fit the moment are just another fidget spinner or social media app. They come and go. They are as far from Christ as were Herod, Caiaphas, and Pilate. To buy into the zeitgeist is to forget the lessons learned from two millennia of being vilified and attacked from all sides. Whenever we mumble our way through the Nicene Creed we forget the blood and tears that forged those words, starting with St. Stephen all the way to the martyrs in Nigeria this week.

To fall into the trap of politics is to forget the entire purpose of God’s incarnation as a fully human and fully divine person named Jesus. Those who claim to be powerful here, whether it’s the Democrats or the Republicans, whether it’s Trump or Biden, or whatever name comes next in the list of presidents, they are not ruling. They have their scraps here, but no real power. Jesus ascended into heaven and he rules from there. Never forget that God is ruling this world and whatever temporary suffering we have here is prelude to the great joy that awaits us.

After all, what’s the worst they can do? Take away your social media? You should be so lucky. What’s worse than that? Take away your money. Yes, and set you free.

The worst they can do is kill you. And then the joke is on them.

The person who loves Christ and belongs to Christ, the worst they can do to you is kill you, and when that happens you go to rule and reign with Him... That’s the promise that we have in this vision.

So if we really understand what the Ascension is about, this should give us a lot more confidence in the way that we live our life. This is where St. Paul got his confidence, despite the shipwrecks and the beatings and the persecution and the hatred and the mocking he took. He knew that for him to live was Christ and to die was gain, and so he didn’t have to be afraid of anything or anyone. Anything anyone did to him would ultimately work for his benefit, for his blessings and his glory, and blessings and glory that are eternal, over against sufferings that are temporary, even if they go on for our whole lives here on this earth.

If we really have this vision before us, then all of a sudden we don’t have to worry about who’s president. We don’t have to worry about whether certain bills pass Congress. We don’t really have to worry about anything any more, because we serve and more importantly are loved by the God who rules over all of it. (Fr. Stephen de Young)

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Let’s check out a famous City of Man. Let’s go to Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is the most famous red-light district in the world in the Netherlands, where people can tour and observe prostitutes showing their wares in single stall bedrooms. I’ve been there. It’s very odd, as you have naive tourists walking around as if we were wandering at Costco in the meat section, except in Amsterdam you can make eye contact with the meat while it’s still alive. Or perhaps more similar, it’s like the cattle judging at the county fair, where the judge pokes at the young heifer and says, "Well, this rump is marbling nicely - this one may get a Reserve Champion ribbon," or "I bet she’ll draw a good bid at the auction."

The experiment that the Netherlands has done is to permit everything with the underlying goal being that it would reduce crime and drug use overall. This is meant to be merciful, as heroin addicts and sex addicts just need a little outlet, and if allowed they could be productive members of the city and not harm others. Mercy is the goal, and the flip side of mercy is justice. Surely allowing people to let their wild side out for a run around the yard is more merciful than locking up every casual drug user and dirty john. The same merciful motive created wet houses for hopeless alcoholics, or free apartments for chronic homeless. This is intended to be the flip approach to the “War on Drugs” approach, the heavy hammer, which imprisoned a lot of people but may not have actually quelled drug use. However, wide open policies haven’t seemed to work either, as the famous Platzspitz experiment in Zurich played out in a very public way.

The TV show The Wire has great episodes about this, where a place called "Hamsterdam" is allowed to exist in Baltimore, in an attempt to fix a city overridden by crime and drugs. The show portrays the experiment as a success, but politics in the city disband Hamsterdam because it makes them look like they are promoting the destruction of the city rather than being merciful. Oddly enough, the roping off of an area does allow the majority to live outside of the influence of the chaos of drugs and red-light vice, and done with the understanding that suppressing all vice will lead to an explosion, allows the edge of society to live in sin while families and careerists can pursue their own dreams. In the TV show, a man named Bunny Colvin wants to save Baltimore by creating a vice district:

Colvin wondered if there was a way for drugs to be made safe for low level users to take them without facing punishment; comparing the city's drug problems to the illegal public consumption of alcohol, which was circumvented when people began keeping their beer in a paper bag. After the attempted murder of Officer Dozerman, Colvin finally decided that he would independently set up three "free zones" in his district where addicts and dealers were allowed to conduct their business under supervision but without interference. This would move the drug trade into a controlled, uninhabited area to protect the rest of his district.

What happens in end is that the vice district is removed and the crime and drugs moves back into the neighborhoods where parents, children, and elderly live. To quote the band, the Offspring, "You gotta keep 'em separated." Mixing the innocent with the fallen must be done with caution. Any caring parent raising a child will try to steer his or her children toward good choices, just as any bird does not build a nest where predators can climb. Taken to a wider level, a city or nation that embraces the disorder of the Prodigal Son and places it at the center will suffer. Las Vegas, and increasingly Nashville, act as the main outlets for American party, like a neverending Saturnalia or Fat Tuesday. Vegas even advertises this in its moniker of Sin City and the motto, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." The message is: come here to sin and get wild. This is the outlet for the Groundhog Day kind of life that people feel, where you get up and go to work and raise kids and do laundry and do it all over again the next morning.

The idea of "setting apart" a time or place for letting loose and celebrating pleasure has been with humans for a long time, but the overall governing idea on how a city or group should be formed has been battled about just as long. Plato’s Republic is around 2,400 years old, but the Code of Hammurabi is close to 4,000 years old. The Laws of Israel in the first five books of the Bible was written about 3,000 years ago. But that doesn’t mean these discussions and ideas were not taking place long before they made it to paper.

We are lucky to have the preservation of these arguments, because for some 20,000 to 30,000 years people have been discussing and observing how we should organize our world. Along with those descriptions of law and governing philosophies, we have ample evidence of festival and party weekends that acted as part of the fabric of a culture. Before Mardi Gras and Oktoberfest there was Saturnalia, Kronia, Purim, Chinese New Year, the Festival of Drunkenness (in Egypt), and a thousand other small festivals around harvest and marriages and victory. We still have these today, and even dedicated places where people can go to have their own festival whenever they choose.

Las Vegas is a place set apart for rejection and rebellion from the typical rules of society, and most certainly against the idea of a watchful God. If anything, Vegas is modern shrine to the Greek or Roman god of wine, Dionysus (or Bacchus for the Romans). Vegas also worships the gods and goddesses of sex, Eros and Aphrodite (a.k.a. Cupid and Venus), since people go there specifically for nude shows and strippers and red-light action. Much like an altar, the stage at a strip joint presents a ritual gathering place where men offer money, eat, and drink in front of it. Even the dance that strippers do acts like a ritual, since they all do the same things in luring dollars out of pockets. The same can be said for the Sports Book areas where people gather in the dark, around TV screens, and make offerings of money, sacrifices, in the hopes of the sports gods granting a wish. Again, food and drink is present, and the ritual of watching and praying to the screens happens at every table.

Vegas is set aside for a kind of ritual pilgrimage for those in rebellion. The idea of drinking, gambling, and partaking of bodily pleasures makes Vegas clearly a place where Holy and Sacred things are not welcome, or not the traditional Holy and Sacred things. There are substitutions which take their place. The reality is that while in Vegas, the holy and sacred things are sports, sex, food, and drink. Once you see the ritual and sacrificial aspects of what happens in Vegas, you see a religion in process. It’s difficult to see it as anything but a pilgrimage. When you hear someone say, “I go to Vegas every year,” they have identified their offering of sacrifice (money, brain cells, liver tissue), their veneration of the warm sins (of gluttony, lust, and greed), their place of pilgrimage (Luxor, Excalibur, Treasure Island), their liturgy ritual (repentance by hangover, spa rebirth, poolside libations, slot machine offertory, nude dancing adoration, and communion by all-you-can-eat-buffet with chocolate fountain chaser). It’s all there, it just not called “religion” and no overt human sacrifice is raised up to unmask what it really is (except Nevada actually is one of the leading states for human sacrifice to Moloch per capita).

There are places set apart for where the party never ends, like Las Vegas or Key West or Bourbon Street. Then there are established weekends for celebration in every town and city, known as festivals and block parties. Both of these set-aside places and events allow people to feast, to let loose, and to reset their moral compass. The letting down of morality for a day or weekend is intended to allow recalibration and grounding of the party-goers greater purpose. By letting the masses off the leash, they get to run wild for a bit before returning to productive and ordered living. The festival weekend mimics the fall and the redemption, which is why it makes sense for every culture and city and town to hold these events. An allowance for rebellion is made, even in the most strict cultures in order for people to see why the norm of order is so valuable. If the celebration doesn’t center on alcohol, then it’s a feast of some kind. A touch of gluttony is added to the calendars in the form of feast days in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions.

One of the greatest paintings of this block party rowdiness was from Pieter Breugel the Elder, known as The Peasant Dance, and while the fashion of the peasants may differ greatly from today’s attire, the characters and actions within the painting can be witnessed wherever heavy-duty drinking takes place. Unrestrained dancing and haggard drunken faces own the foreground. There is a couple in the background sneaking into a barn for solitude and a presumable tryst. There are tankards of liquor everywhere. Lust, gluttony, and wrath are present, just like any nightclub today. The unrefined people of the peasant world engage in everything that happens annually today at Coachella among our elite, privileged, and “refined.”

Most interesting in the painting are two subtle elements that are shoved aside in favor of the tavern. On the right-hand side of the painting is a blurry picture of the Virgin Mary, tacked on a crooked tree. She is fully ignored by the peasants. In the background, at the center of the painting, is the church, the centerpiece of the town, ignored for the day. The celebration is thought to be the feast of St. George. This feast day is like other days surrounding holy days in our time, like Fat Tuesday as a feast before the Lenten season of fasting, or Halloween before All Saints’ Day. There is a season for fasting and for feasting. The Peasant Dance shows a lack of morality, yes, but it also shows the allowance of a sanctioned escape from the ordinary churn of days where the townspeople, whose rituals of work and worship, are dispensed for a time.

The idea of having a Liturgical calendar is designed with this in mind, because if all days were fasting, then fasting would lose its meaning as an offering and be mere drudgery. Worse, if all days were feasts, then civilization would collapse. The calendar of the Church did not balance feasts and fasts by accident or dumb luck. It is designed to move with the seasons of life. This reminds me of an old Huey, Dewey, and Louie Christmas special, called “Stuck on Christmas” where the duckling boys think it would be great to have Christmas every day. Getting their wish, they soon discover that after about five days of feasting and toys, they are miserable. Christmas and endless feasting grows into a burden, just like any addiction.

The error happens when this feasting is made the center of life. This goes to the core issue of our mental illness outbreak today. The fact that every day can be a feast now is why so many addictions seize lives. Pair this with declining belief in the one true God, and you have a problem that science cannot solve alone. Because there is no longer a concept of “sacred” time and space, all days are flattened into Groundhog Day. The idea of sacred places and things and days is no longer recognized in culture, which leads to a kind of malaise in all the days. We can overeat and get drunk and find a sex partner any day we like. Or we can do some New Age prayer routine, but only in a yoga studio or our living room, because we have no sacred place to go to. After all, “Everything is sacred,” which of course means that nothing is sacred.

For replacements, things like Super Bowl Sunday and Fourth of July Parties have overtaken the prominent places of Easter Sunday and All Saints' Day. I think this over often, as it’s clear that most Christians put far more preparation into Super Bowl Sunday than Easter. That alone tells you how secularism and the new pagan “holy days” has come to dominate America. There should be a widespread outcry among Catholics to boycott Super Bowl Sunday, because it is literally the new “holy day” where we not only gather in a ritual, but also eat in front of the liturgy presented by the TV. There is so much pagan cult ritual in Super Bowl Sunday, it’s hard for me to fathom that it has slipped past every self-proclaimed Christian as “just a social gathering.” Super Bowl Sunday is one of the only set-apart days that Americans share, and it is anything but holy or sacred. If you watched Jennifer Lopez’s halftime show in 2020, you will know that you were watching something demonic or perhaps the greatest satirical wake-up call of all time to every Christian in America. In the show, she did an imitation of the three crosses at Calvary using stripper poles, where she was lifted up on a center pole and appeared crucified in the center. What other word could be used for this than demonic, as the entire imagery was the inversion and mockery of Jesus Christ? If you believe that Jesus is God, then what do you make of this image, which took a lot of planning and practice to perfect for a live show? There are no accidents in Hollywood.

Few Americans even batted an eye, but I knew then that something was rotten in America.

Sometimes an image or a moment jars you awake. You suddenly realize that that what you were living in, is not at all what you thought. It’s like when you get sucked into admiration for a group or company, only to find out after joining that the exterior is just a cheap veneer and the inside is completely rotten. That’s America today, and when J-Lo was lifted up like Christ, I knew that a threshold had been crossed long ago, but I was only seeing it then.

We would all be wise to back away from sports, entertainment, and wealth worship in general, but I have a feeling we won’t, since those are the values of the elite. Now that we know how much cheating takes place in professional sports with rampant steroid use and sign stealing and deflating footballs, we know that professional wrestling is every bit as honorable. We know know that the media companies are hell-bent on mocking all things Christian. As far back as 2005, NBC’s Committed did a full episode mocking the Eucharist, where in the end, the consecrated host is flushed down the toilet.

Wealth and winning and comfort are what we worship, so we have just gone ahead and merged stripper poles and soft porn into our halftime shows. Why not? Let’s just stop pretending we aren’t living in a Roman orgy. I’d personally like to thank J-Lo for lifting herself up to be the new Christ, because I’d like to think that she was doing it in satire, using stinging ridicule and wit, and subtly yelling at us all to turn off the TV and get right with God. That’s the best charitable answer I can give, because if it was anything other than that, we need to pray for Jennifer, who once assured us in “Jenny from the Block,” while she was nearly nude in the video, that she, “Put God first and can't forget to stay real.” J-Lo is a very common specimen of modern Christianity however, which is a quick nod to God while you ignore every single thing He ever said.

The crucifixion of Jesus was mimicked using imagery from a strip joint, with an extremely wealthy woman being lifted up, alive and well, claiming the image of Christ on the cross. Moreover, notice that everyone is falling at her feet in worship below her. Yet, this passed by the viewers and we all went back to eating wings and talking football and gossip and getting drunk. Sinead O’Connor’s act of tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II brought an outrage, but this was more subtle dig at all things Christian, and there was hardly a bark because everyone who sets aside time for the Super Bowl is, let me say it here first, a modern pagan. There is no other explanation for it, and J-Lo just helped point it out. A good conspiracy could be made that J-Lo was actually calling us to be awakened to our faith, because she was pointing out how far we have fallen. Somehow I doubt it, but if she is ever reborn in the faith, this image will require some explanation.

The problem with our new holy days is that there is nothing sacred about football, and Super Bowl Sunday has all the hallmarks of a Roman feast day for Dionysus or Zeus.

What happens when the belief in the transcendent Most High God fades is not just that we don’t feel guilty, it’s that nothing is elevated into sacredness. We remain on the flat earth, never reaching up to God. Rather than being lifted up into sacredness, the reverse happens, and everything falls into the profane, the ordinary.

What this leads to is a search for the sacred, because if it’s not built into the calendar, into the week, into blessed objects, then the heart must go to seek it. With no restrictions or guidance, the search can go on at any time, any where, and thus what is best reserved for special days of feasting becomes a daily “Stuck on Christmas” that depresses the hell out of people. This falling and rising action of our life stories is built into the Liturgical calendar, and it’s even built into the seasons of the plants and animals around us. Fasting, feasting, and ordinary time; suffering, thriving, and holding steady - these are the ups and downs and in-betweens that make a life whole.

When the Prodigal Son's errant lifestyle becomes the norm instead of the exception, there is a problem. Escape from real life is not meant to be permanent. Anyone who reads the parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11-32) knows that his choices are poor and the story resonates with people exactly because we can understand the character arc. The prodigal wild son begins the story whole, but in living in escapism, his version of Christmas every day turns to misery. He falls, and now he’s stuck. He threw away the sacred for the profane. Then he is brought to his senses and restored. He surrenders to his Father, and his Father rushes out to greet him with love. The end. Roll credits.

Notice that the fall in Act II did not become the final act for the Prodigal Son. Act II is not the happy ending, nor even a place anyone wants to stay. The point of the fall is to stand up again, just as Dante must go all the way down through the bottom of hell to emerge on the mountain of Purgatory, just as any addict must hit a bottom, soft or hard, in order to rise up, and in case you can't see where I'm going, it's why Jesus must go to the cross to be killed in order to be raised and resurrected.

This story of falling and rising is not just for us humans. God himself goes through this, which is what makes the story of Jesus so compelling and strange.

But why? I mean, isn't that always the question? Why would God have to come to us in order to die and be raised again? I didn’t understand this for a long time. It’s still difficult sometimes, and I know why cynics make fun of it, but I think it because it’s not easy to understand. Of course, it’s much easier to belittle the story with a meme like this one. I once thought this was clever.

Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. Makes perfect sense.

There’s so many things in this that are misunderstood, but it is effective at destroying people’s faith, especially if the person has spent no time trying to learn the faith and spends no time in prayer. I mean, for goodness sakes, zombies eat people, people do not eat zombies. If this insult can’t even get the basics of zombiedom right, it’s pretty sad. And for the record: Catholics do not symbolically eat his flesh. We actually eat Jesus. And his glorified and risen body exists in the Real Presence of the Eucharist, under the appearance of bread. Yes, his body, blood, soul, and divinity is in the Eucharist. So please, fix up your insults before posting them. At least get the mystery correct. The Eucharist is everything and I feel sad for you if you don’t understand what the word theosis means.

Destroying faith is easy. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Most of us had little or no education on faith or religion, or if we did have some, it was sketchy and full of holes. If anything, it was some mashed potatoes of Catholicism, 50 shades of Protestantism, and a glued-and-taped-together Hollywood portrayal of Christians-gone-bad. I was so under-catechized that I couldn’t have defended my faith against a light breeze. And that’s exactly why my faith blew away like a leaf in the first rustle of wind at an outdoor keg party.

When you practice something you don’t understand, it’s just like doing busy work for no reason. I recall in the Army when a drill sergeant would make soldiers move a pile of rocks from one location to another, for no reason other than to keep us busy and to assert his power. Similarly, I recall doing hundreds and thousands of quadratic equation problems in math that I didn’t care about or understand. This is exactly what practicing a religion without understanding it feels like. Doing the Rosary without understanding why is much like moving a pile of rocks from point A to point B and back again, or like doing easy quadratic equations repeatedly. It is pointless. Without knowing how or why it’s done, you cannot grasp its purpose, usage, and application to your life. A kid who was told to read a book in Arabic when he can barely speak English would get about as much out doing the Rosary if he has no understanding of prayer and meditation.

On the other side, there is understanding without practicing, which is like telling everyone you are in shape and ready for a marathon, and knowing all the details of stretching and training, but when race-day arrives, your gut is hanging over your shorts. You have zero stamina and lung-strength for the race. To understand Christianity, you can’t have rules and no understanding, nor can you have understanding with no rules. You must practice the faith to be fit for it, and you must learn the faith to make sense of it.

Without faith, prayer, and understanding, of course it seems like nonsense. Without the interior change, it means nothing. And without the rules, it changes nothing. This is the body and soul needing both parts of faith and reason. This is where the leap of faith joins the mouth with the action of the hands. It’s not just about rules, and it’s not about living without rules. The whole thing is about humility before the one God, and when the change of heart happens, you don’t care about the rules or the vices, because everything begins to fall into place and make sense.

Even after the change, you still have battles with vice and wrongdoing, but you are eager to remove them from your life. Strict legalism and unbridled lawlessness no longer make sense, because neither can satisfy you. They can actually unite into a single thing called love, and that is the love of God first and foremost. But you have to understand forgiveness first, to know that you are loved, and to understand it, you have to kneel and say it out loud. You have to practice it to keep it, and to practice it, you have to be forever open to it. The change starts with a choice of “being willing to be willing,” to take that first step of asking the Holy Spirit to come and fill your heart with a flicker of light. Without opening up to that, you cannot expect the change to happen. Say yes to being open, and you never know where it will lead.

The sandbox and the red-light districts allows you to grow and get lost. What you thought you wanted turned out to be vapid and empty promises, like a cheap knockoff of the real thing. When you stop chasing the cheap things, the base things, you’ll know that you were crawling on your belly. But there is a way to think of this that can help make sense of time lost in the alleys. The caterpillar inches furiously on the ground, seeking forage and shelter, seeking something that it cannot possibly realize. And then one day, when it’s ready, it begins to transform, and after so much crawling and struggling, it undergoes a radical, difficult transformation, one that must be painful, but that suffering is transforming the caterpillar into a butterfly. And when the cocoon splits open, the new life begins, and what was once a caterpillar chasing things on the ground, is now a miraculous and beautiful being that flies.

All of those desires that occupied so much of your time, all the days of being lost, are the formation of your story guided by God, the growing of your soul toward meeting Jesus, and if you let the suffering transform you, you will never be inching on the ground again, you will be aloft with Him.

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The red-light district in a city is meant to be an outlet for the restless to blow off steam, for lawlessness to play out, within acceptable limits. The unwritten rule is this: if you want to be risky and maybe destroy yourself, just go do it over here in this corner. It’s a silent agreement. Town festivals are just small versions of Fat Tuesdays for the locals. A culture or society needs a Purim or Fat Tuesday or Carnivale or a parade or a keg party or Prom to let it all hang out for a bit, because it keeps people sane.

However, the allowance of the rowdy night or weekend only makes sense if a return to normalcy and rules happens after it’s over. Notice that Halloween is followed by All Saints Day. Fat Tuesday is followed by Ash Wednesday. Lent, a period of fasting and prayer, is followed by the feast of Easter. What's interesting in the Christian liturgical calendar is that these outlets are built into the year, every year, because there is an awareness of this “need” to sin, to burn off the slag, as if perhaps we have actually learned something over time. Maybe from the thirty thousand years of human history we have learned something. Maybe wandering the African savannah to the caves of France to crossing the Bering Strait and living in the empires of Sumeria and Mesopotamia and China and Egypt and Greece and Rome taught us some things. Maybe the smart people passing down oral tales figured a few things out and warned us in stories about why full lockdown and full license are both not great ideas. Perhaps, maybe, just maybe, there is some wisdom passed down to us through these silly myths and oral stories that came from these toothless flyover illiterate goat herders from ancient times that we sophisticated internet and smart phone users might benefit from if we can take a break from our Netflix and porn.

One of these stories is the play, The Bacchae, by the Greek playwright, Euripides. This tells the story of Pentheus, a man who tries to defeat the god of wine and partying, Dionysus. To make a long play short, Pentheus gets ripped to pieces by the Maenads, the wild women, because he tries to peek and disrupt their annual ritual celebration where they let it all hang loose. The whole point of this play is what I’m talking about in this post.

The Bacchae depicts a struggle to the death between the twin forces of control (restraint) and freedom (release), and permits Dionysus to provide an answer to this question. The god's implicit message is that not only is there space within society for the irrational, but that such a space must be allowed for that society to exist and thrive. By denying or opposing the irrational, as Pentheus did, the person who opposes it, or the society that denies it, will be torn apart. (taken from Sparknotes)

So you see, database design and Greek tragedy can be discussed together.

While this play may seem to go into some strange notions, the point is clear, and the United States congress should have read this play before passing the Prohibition of Alcohol amendment, as that marriage of law and excess order gave birth to a Mount Saint Helens eruption named Al Capone and organized crime.

In more recent history, we were able to observe the lockdowns for Covid where the state put very strict rules on people, but left liquor stores open as “essential” business, which seemed to be the one element of minor rebellion allowed. IN response, people took to drinking during the lockdown as a coping strategy. However, staring into screens and drinking did not help very much, because soon many of the cities in the United States were in flames and rioting went on for month after month. The lockdown led to the upside-down. On the one hand we had complete control, while in other areas there was total lawlessness. And this happened with both the left and the right, so it’s not like just one “side” went crazy in the state of legalism.

The decision to leave liquor stores open is one thing. But then another decision came. Churches were closed, but strip joints were granted the status of being “essential businesses.” This, to me, is the summary statement of the Covid era in America, because it highlighted how upside-down our leadership and culture has become. Or rather, it simply revealed a reality that was already in existence, but just hadn’t been made fully known, at least to me.

The upside-down world had finally shown its true face. Was it God’s will to have liquor stores and strip joints and abortion clinics be open and celebrated while churches were closed? Apparently so. And most likely it was done so that we could observe the madness that ensued and then choose how we want to live our lives. The nation had long held the word God on its lips, but never had it been so clear that it has long been only lip-service.

If there is one common thread in the stories of the Bible, it is that turning away from the living God leads to disorder. No sooner did churches get shuttered in California than massive riots erupted. Correlation is not causation, but what strange luck for the devil for those two things to happen in succession. A moment in 2020 struck me when suddenly I understood why Abraham was called out of Haran. He had to leave the culture behind.

For three months straight, cities across America belched smoke into the sky, night and day. I saw places that I formerly frequented in Portland, Oregon being burned to the ground. Then we saw the capitol building invaded by a hoard. It was difficult not to see the events that played out as Biblical, because the pattern matched eerily well to those old Bronze Age myths from those smelly, backward goat-herders. The dilemma of the ancient people was suddenly shoved near to each of us. The illusion of the nation that we had been living in disappeared. It was like a glossy polish of a tabletop hiding a rotten and termite-eaten wood structure.

Like makeup removed from a hideous face, we saw the what America really had become. The empire was finally, fully unveiled. And as an empire can only come by elevating human desires to be higher than humility before God, like all empires, the pursuit of power and wealth and pleasure and honor eventually drives itself off a cliff. Empire is an attempt at self-salvation. Empire is the direct ambition of pride. But in the end, like a cell that refuses to live and die in its seasons, empire is a massive, unspoken suicide pact made among millions of people. Empire is the story of a cancer cell writ large. In making itself the most important thing, above God, an empire ends up killing the nation. A wise nation has its seasons and abides with fear of God. An empire ignores the seasons and thinks it will never die.

As soon as a nation or a people justifies its decisions by the wrong kind of “freedom,” the unravelling begins. There is “freedom of indifference” and “freedom for excellence.” This is extremely simple and ties into everything else I repeat here. We can choose the fruit on the forbidden tree or we can choose to obey God. That’s the dilemma: which type of freedom do you choose? Choosing the former, the wrong kind of freedom, precedes disorder, chaos, and eventually war, which America is hurtling toward. Order spins into disorder quickly when the wrong definition of “freedom” takes hold of a people.

You can witness this on both sides of American politics. The pendulum swings, but unlike a clock pendulum, it swings with a knife, an axe, slicing into that which occupies the middle. To avoid the knife, sides must be chosen. As the pendulum is lowered, the knife gets closer, and the sides must flee further apart. After all, the one thing we know we want is self-preservation, not death. To avoid being cut down, we huddle on the left or the right to hide. Political parties are modern fig leaves, and as Adam said to God, “I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid,” that is what we are saying when we rush into the mob of our chosen political party. We hid behind the elephant or the donkey, using those affiliations to protect our nakedness, but neither of those will save you or anyone else in the end.

The Greeks had Alexander, Persia had Cyrus, Rome had Caesar, Germany had Hitler: all of these model the same problem that is told about Babylon and Egypt in the Bible. These are the stories of empire and power. We tend to idealize the ancient emperors but see the most recent ones as monstrous. We speak of Caesar with strange admiration and despise Hitler, even though these two were doing the same thing, warring and enslaving and killing people in pursuit of power. Rest assured: the conquerors are all monstrous. These famous names are the “strongmen” of history, but they are all symptoms of an underlying disease. They only come to power because of mass fears among the people, growing out of eras like we have in America today. Hyper-polarization, distrust of authority, scapegoating, economic problems, failed attempts to overthrow the government, lies being spread, pandemics, propaganda, inflation. The canary in the coal mine for nearing the “strongman” phase of a nation is easy to spot: it is the collapse of sexual morality. America has been inching in this direction for sixty years and the snowball is now tumbling downhill.

No sociologist, historian, or political scientist need explain it, as people feel the fragmentation happening today. The lust for national power brought a lust for everything. The desire for money and power created dirty deeds and deals, compromised morality. Secret wars brought affluence, and affluence brings entitlement. The bad example in our national leaders of how power and wealth was gained leads directly to the desires of individuals that need no more justification than “I want it” and “don’t tell me what to do.” Here’s the thing: if the winners cheated to get their spot on the podium, so shall we all. If the winners cheated, so can we. And we see it everywhere. We see it in business: Enron, Wells Fargo, Theranos. We see it in sports: Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones and Barry Bonds. We see it in the wealthy: Epstein, the Panama Papers, Trump, Gates. We see it in the church: McCarrick, the 300 Pennsylvania priests, the Jay Report.

None of the models and heroes follow the rules. So we begin to ask ourselves the fatal question: “Why should I?”

And that is exactly the question that must be resisted. “If they can do it, why can’t I?” That is the temptation in the Garden. That is the voice that you must reject. In the Spiritual Combat, you must distrust that voice, and put all of your confidence into God alone, praying for Jesus to give you strength and direction, and the breath of life, the Holy Spirit, to guide you away from the easier path. Be Abraham, not Lot. Be Peter, not Judas. Aim to be a saint. The bad examples of this world should not open doors for you, but rather represent police-tape of where you do not cross, as the only cross to be concerned with is the one which Jesus will help you bear and carry.

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The fringe can always be found. Just pop into your corner bar or nightclub, it will be there tonight. Likewise, In our own individual lives, we have an exploratory fringe phase, or phases, plural. Or maybe you lucked out and went straight from middle school into grandmotherly virtue. But I didn’t. And if you doubt that we need to explore, and the corner bar or nightclub doesn’t prove it to you, just stroll through a humanities building at any university and witness future moms and dads who are actively calling for revolution. These same world-changers, in less than a decade, will be climbing corporate ladders, carting kids around, and defending and protecting the very institutions they want to see collapse. They may even be worshipping in a church and witnessing to you. (Like…ahem…hypocrites like me.)

The “age of reason” or “loss of innocence” demands exploration, for if we don’t at least taste the fruit of the forbidden tree, then the desire to gorge will likely emerge twisted and deformed later on in life. I cannot help but see this in the Garden of Eden story and in Jesus’ own repeated reference to being “reborn” and returning to the faith of a child. Maturing in plants and animals requires massive change and emergence, and for us it requires asking questions and facing the great questions of life, as in: “Why am I here, where am I going, where did I come from, what is real, what is true, what is good?” Then once you get through that post-adolescent idealistic period and wake up a parent, you know why you are here. Parents confuse childless adults in this, and the childless adult can never fully understand what it means until they themselves have a child. It is a bridge too far to cross.

The great questions in life are answered by doing what you are supposed to do. It’s really simple in the end and Jesus said things that were so obvious that it seems bizarre that God himself had to come here and tell us. The secret is this: to grow, to marry, to have a family, and to return to our Creator. In the beginning, our body reaches while our soul is quiet. In the end, our body quiets while our soul reaches. The little clones of yourself called children provide the answer in the middle. Staring up at you with big eyes, they need you to provide dinner. While you cook you might grumble, but that is the meaning of life. There is a very simple saying from Jesus that captures it:

“If a grain of wheat dies, it bears much fruit.”

The wheat must die to fulfill its purpose, which is what? Obviously a wheat plant is not intended to live forever, or there will be no more wheat. If a wheat plant remained locked in adolescence, no wheat seeds would form on top. That’s called a dud. Now there are very different causes of failure to bloom in plants, some of which are not the plants fault but have more to do with environment, soil, timing. Those plants suffer the same burden as people who cannot reproduce, and for people this is an awful realization. However, today we have many healthy plants who choose not to flower, who refuse to bloom by choice. This is a very different kind of problem than those who cannot bloom because of a physical or environmental reason. Those who want to have children but cannot must bear a kind of suffering that the perpetual adolescent-by-choice cannot understand.

The purpose of a wheat plant is to give up itself in order to make wheat. That is the answer. That is the secret of life. It’s not what Faith Hill tells us in the country song, “The Secret of Life,” a song that has always eluded me to having a single insight into any secret. The secret of life is not Monday Night Football and a good cup of coffee. The secret is living to maturity and then dying to self. The secret of life is giving yourself away in the end for your spouse, family, country but ultimately for God. Monday Night Football hasn’t even been around for fifty years yet, but for 30,000 years humans have survived and replicated without football. Even the idea of a “good cup of coffee” is only about 500 years old, so there is no case to be made that the secret of life has anything to do with Starbucks or Folgers.

Our lives have the exact same purpose as that of animals and plants and even skin cells, in that we are to grow, survive, reproduce, and die. Hard to hear? Yes. How can death be something to celebrate? Because we forget this rudimentary fact. Jesus had to remind us of something so basic that the simplicity of his profound message is incredible all by itself! The reason that pride is the root sin of all disorder is because it drives us away from our telos, our purpose, so that we think our life is about our moment in the sun and not our children and living through the seasons of life. The reason the shiny one convinced Eve to eat the apple was by telling her that we would become like God. That’s the whole story of sin. When we desire what is not ours, what is not our purpose, we get out of season. We become a cancer cell, which is a little structure that rejects that there is a season for all things.

"There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens. A time to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to reap." (Ecc 3:1-2)

Forgetting the last part, the dying to self, the reaping, is arguably missing the most important part, otherwise you just remain a self-absorbed overgrown child. And in terms of biology, a cell that doesn’t die when it should becomes a cancer cell. Cancer is the refusal to complete the cycle of life. Perhaps instead of telling someone to “act your age,” we should advise them not to be a cancer cell.

A cancer cell happens by missing the signals that should guide its tiny life. By missing prompts, by receiving incorrect signals, by evading messaging, and by “sticking” to a phase that it should move on from, a cell becomes cancerous. Like plants, this can happen due to environment and nutrient issues, but the story is the same. You can blow up this metaphor into the life of a person that refuses to grow up or gets stuck in a rut or is forever seeking or thinks he will live forever. A “normal” cell knows that “unless a grain of wheat die, it cannot bear much fruit,” but a cancer cell declares, “I am the fruit!” And by losing its telos, its purpose, in the body, the cancer cell proceeds to kill the body.

This is what sin does. Cancer is disorder. And sin is our spiritual cancer, founded on our pride, telling us that we are the fruit, we are the good thing, we are the god who should live forever. Pride is always what causes us to miss the signal, to evade the message, to get stuck in a phase, and to think that the ego is what life is all about.

The simple "falls" of Genesis, that seem so childish, so mythical, are apparent in our own lives and our own neighborhoods if we take a minute to observe. The more we try to pretend the “fall” doesn't exist or, conversely, the more we affirm ourselves as being beautiful in every single way, the worse it gets.

I hate to say this, but the Prodigal Son actually needs a place to go get drunk and try to hookup with the ladies. So does the Woman at the Well. If we never get lost, we’ll never be found. In the end, both of these people, the Prodigal and the Woman at the Well, are cured by their excess. But they can't be healed until they either outlive or fully explore their empty desires. The illusions offered by pleasure, honor, wealth, and power seduce us all, and some come to realize the falsity faster than others. Those who go astray may be the first ones found. Those who never leave may never realize that they are lost. You can lose sight of God in a one-room apartment just as easily as you can as a highway drifter.

Yes, the Prodigals could pray it away, but they don’t. They won’t. Some seed of rebellion and exploration is planted in their minds that must be explored and then exorcised. Most of these are guided down the wrong path, but some go searching for it. This is where Jesus warns those who mislead the “little ones.”

As far as learning to pray, how many are even taught today? So few have any exposure to it, and the closest thing to prayer being mass marketed now is yoga class, which teaches self-worship. The Prodigals can’t get to prayer because they don’t know the way. And for many who are lost in the search, even if they did know how, they won’t until they are ready. As St. Augustine said, “Lord, let me be chaste, but not yet.”

We have many books and media marketing in place convincing us all that happiness must come through a product or experience that will fulfill the self. Our desires, we are told, is who we are. This is the worst advice imaginable. Sure, another trophy will do it, another notch on the bedpost, another million dollars in the bank, another drink, another toke. How can we take any of this seriously? Of course more of the same will not satisfy. It’s more…of the same.

The cruel trick or glorious revelation, depending on your point of view, happens to the Prodigal Son and the Woman at the Well. When they get what they want, they learn in the end that what they wanted...wasn't what they wanted at all. What they wanted was love, and the drinking and the sex failed to give it. You can see this happen the same way in people who buy a new boat or house. The experience or the possession fail to deliver. A 350 horsepower boat is not as fast or powerful as a twin-engine 400 horsepower boat. But neither boat will fill the hole that the boat is trying to fill.

Both the Prodigal Son and the “Woman at the Well” end their stories in a “drop the nets” moment like Peter and Andrew. When they catch all the fish that they thought they wanted, they suddenly realize it was not about the fish. And they drop the nets and the fish like a bad habit. They leave everything to follow Jesus. Because He is what they were looking for. Finding him, they were done looking. Forever. They could suddenly rest and stop searching. They wanted something greater than their desires, more than things or experiences of this world could ever provide, and they found it in a fully-human and fully-divine person named Jesus. Who would have thought - they found it in a construction worker. Perhaps we should all think of that as we drive by these invisible men in hard hats and dirty clothes who stand on scaffolding and roofs and trusses in our cities and towns.

Rebellion plays out. But it always leads to the same end where the vapid false freedom of “doing whatever I want” proves empty and meaningless. Given that this exploration will happen, whether we like the idea or not, there is reason to allow an outlet for people to go and explore this rebellion, because all must explore, and some are going to do it much more than others. Law and order is required to keep it within reason. One thing proven over and over is that the more you clamp down on this balloon of rebellion, the stranger the manifestation of rebellion that squirts out. There is no reason to encourage rebellion, but there is also no denying it will happen. Bad desires are like infections that must be treated early, ideally by talking rather than doing. Many are guided and pointed down a wrong path and may not have known of other choices. Some will have a good guide and be pointed in the right direction, and even many of these will not heed sound advice because the call of the Fall is so strong.

You can’t keep Rapunzel hidden in the tower in the woods forever. The argument against censorship of children preaches this, and like most fairy tales, it rings true to some extent. However, there is a reverse story happening today where the Prince takes Rapunzel out of the tower too soon, when she’s about five, and drops her off at Hastings Avenue in Vancouver, B.C. at midnight. The argument against censorship has created our current state of the world, where ideas arrive in children’s brains via the wild west of smart phones long before those brains are ready for it, and now it has been blessed by policymakers in the public schools. This, too, is very Biblical. We have seen this before. Whenever I hear someone toss out the Bible as bronze-age nonsense or goat-herder tales of yore, I am instantly assured they have not properly understood it, and they are likely reading Genesis, Exodus, Judges, etc as science books or history books rather than as a tour through the heart of every human who ever lived.

Giving dangerous things to humans before they are prepared is one of the primary ideas in the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve are told that they can skip all the steps of growing to be like God. No, they are promised a shortcut. And who doesn’t want that? That is our nature. When faced with preparing a proper dinner or microwaving a frozen pizza, I have often chose the latter. I want what is easy, and available…like right now. This is what the fruit represents to Adam and Eve. This is the first example of our modern obsession for instant gratification.

They can leap ahead in time by eating the fruit, without any need for maturity at all. This is the same defense people are offering today for psychedelic drugs as the way to transcendence. The drug is promised as the superhighway to God, but like every shortcut it comes with unintended consequences. The superhighway does not provide the same journey, as you only see the billboards and gas stations, whereas the slow path through the woods gives intangible rewards like grace and wisdom. The difference between reaching for transcendence through, say, magic mushrooms versus doing the Rosary is that in the first one you are the subject and in the second one, you fade away completely in favor of God and the Blessed Mother.

The serpent offers them the fruit as knowledge of good and evil so that they may be like God. But what happens surprises them. They do not become like God. They become fallen. They would have been better off locked in Rapunzel’s tower for a longer period, as they were not ready for the devil’s tempting. Their bootstrapping has led to them being strung out, just like every drug does, and they are now in a bad state, kicked out of the garden for disobedience, and ultimately for their own good as they cannot be in the place of holiness, as the Garden of Eden translates to “where God is.” Thus, they have to suffer because they cannot handle living “where God is” just yet. They need time to grow.

We have the two extremes of total censorship versus total exposure. As usual, a balance is somewhere in the middle, because total lockdown of Rapunzel leads to a wild child who can tell lies really, really well, and total exposure puts her at risk of growing up way too fast for her brain chemistry to catch up. In either case, the fall happens. Every person “falls.” But you may be able to soften the landing.

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For database administrators, the term “constraints” comes up often. It refers to rules placed on what types of data can be stored in the database, and where it can be stored. Relational databases are containers that organize information into tables, columns, and rows, like a spreadsheet but more powerful, with linkages and relations between the tables. This logical organization of data led to billions in profits over the past fifty years. I spent a decade working for Oracle, one of the database heavyweight contenders, so I had a good amount of exposure to products built on both good and bad database design.

Having worked on products that used minimal constraints in database design, I learned the hard way that front-line support teams must do daily trench battles against customer issues that could have been avoided by proper design. A lack of proper “constraints” on the database, or having no limits or rules, leads to a mess, a bunch of noise, that eventually turns into a jumbled heap of garbage data. The saying, “Crap in, crap out,” is used to describe this scenario. If anything can be put into the database, a problem lurks. When you go to use that data to extract reports, you can be fairly certain the data will be badly formatted and unfit for consumption.

Unexpected errors spring up due to the disordered mess that has been allowed into the data tables. The result is spending a lot of time in dangerous database surgery, crafting INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements to repair the mess, and mistakes can kill a business application. Fortunately, working with software does not involve actual living things, so if you kill a database or application, people don’t die. Unless of course that database or application is supporting medical procedures or critical inventory systems. Then it is very possible that the death of the database can lead to pain elsewhere.

You can see where this is going.

There is an obvious parallel to database management and our lives, both individually and socially. Database design is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.

Ordering chaos is what most of human life is about, and because so much of our lives is about ordering chaos, it is exactly why the opening in the book of Genesis is about bringing order to chaos. This point should not be missed if you ever open your Bible to page 1 and read the first paragraph.

This may seem a stretch, but the urge to create a spreadsheet, which is to bring order to chaos, has a parallel to the greatest mystery of why our universe and world exist at all. The act of “creating” is to take material and thoughts and try to give them a shape that makes sense. A painter at an easel with a blank canvas is much like the spreadsheet creator, or woodworker, or musician, or even someone trying to organize a closet-gone-wild. They start with resources in a disordered state and an idea in their mind. In creation they merge the physical with the spiritual, just as we are body and soul.

The act of creation starts with an action, an idea, and organization, and that is why the saying, “Let there be light” does not refer to the sun. Whenever someone gets hung up on the sun being created on the fourth day instead of the first, I feel that this act of creation is misunderstood, as the “light” is the action of merging of physical and the spiritual, body and soul. “Light” is the first step toward ordering the chaos.

There’s a saying in the software world that “every product started out as a spreadsheet.” A spreadsheet is often started by someone in the office to try and make sense of what is happening in the business, or with customers, or even with something as simple as coffee machine duties. There’s usually someone who is bothered by the disorder just enough to take action. The same sense of chaos that leads someone to file for running for city council is the same notion that drives an office worker to open a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets and start naming columns and entering data in rows. When the artist first touches her brush to the canvas, or when the spreadsheet creator clicks the File → New option on the menu of a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, an act of creation is underway. All of our acts of creation are contingent on God’s creation, as without gravity and matter, our spreadsheet would not be needed.

We want order, because chaos becomes unbearable, and you can do three things to deal with chaos: you can fight the chaos, you can flee the chaos, or you can live in the chaos. If you choose to live in it, you may handle it in a few ways, some of which will lead you to peace or others that make you insane.

The saying, “There’s a spreadsheet for that” long precedes the saying “There’s an app for that.” Once various entrepreneurs realized the data they were tracking had relevance to a wider audience, the spreadsheet turned into a database and then eventually a user interface is added, and suddenly you need salespeople to go forth and tell the world. In this way, a product is born. The idea is conceived in the inventor’s mind and willed into existence by tools and skills. There is a “let there be light” moment followed by taking action and creating.

A single spreadsheet managed by one person is not a workable solution for large problems. Once the spreadsheet creator leaves the simple shire of the spreadsheet, he or she faces numerous questions around access rights and restrictions. Updates can cause chaos without proper locks, requirements, and referential integrity. In database design these are known as constraints, which are like the castle walls controlling what data comes into the database, or like laws regarding what types of data are allowed to live in this little kingdom of data. People have become billionaires in finding ways to represent data effectively, as without organization, data is a pile of chaff that cannot even be burned for heat. Data is utterly useless without organization.

Too few constraints or too many constraints both create problems. If I get started on database talk, this could be a long episode, so I’ll keep this part short. I’ve spent a career poking around in databases and log files looking at error codes and messages. Not a very glamorous life, and I have often joked about being in “log file hell,” when a customer dumps 2 gigabytes of log output into my lap for troubleshooting. This blog/podcast could easily change from the topic of falling, recovery, and reverted faith into one about troubleshooting databases and software error codes. Why Did Peter Sink? would be about error stacks, bug fixing, and system stabilization. The interesting thing, however, is even if the topic changed from restored faith to database troubleshooting, the main message would still be around order, disorder, and re-ordering, which is what the book of Genesis and the Gospels are really all about.

To deny this yearning for order results in collapse rather quickly, because if there is no desire for order, or no faith in the system, data systems can turn sour as quickly as milk. There is a kind of faith needed in a product for it to last. The data must provide a sense of order, and meaning to the users. Otherwise someone or something will replace the system or employees will just leave, if they have any means whatsoever to do so. There is faith required even in the purely material world of software and data, because in the end the users are human. But faith in a product to assist keeping order at a job or corporation is different from the kind of faith needed to order your life.

Staring into chaos can be done for a long time, when times are good. Non-believers and pure materialists have obviously always been part of society, and surely they rolled their eyes at the religious nuts back in Jesus’ time as much as they do today, but they are typically the fringe of society, not the center that holds all things together. The rules and need for order get sidelined when affluence and plenty seem to have solved all problems. You’ll see this in business when times are good, where there is largesse and generosity, which leads to abuses and corruption. Then the recession hits and the disorder and lack of discipline is called out. Layoffs happen. Hiring is frozen. People suddenly have to justify their purpose. The comfort of good fiscal quarters leads to corruption and laziness, and when the belt gets tightened, the fringes get squeezed first. But the fringe doesn’t go away. It just goes into hiding for a bit. The heart always wants to explore the fringes.

Wise societies allow for this searching, leaving small openings in life open to the wanderers. Even strict nations have dedicated days for wandering and loosening the rules, because holidays like Halloween and Mardi Gras and Carnival and Purim offer release valves for rebellion and rowdiness. These festivals came out of the need to allow some pressure out of the balloon. Mount Saint Helens blew its top off because there was no escape for the pressure. Hawaiian volcanoes have lava dribble nicely out the top because the pressure is not bound up as tightly. This is the tightrope that cities have to walk. How much disorder should we allow? Towns and villages have annual festivals for drinking and staying up late, because it grants a hall pass for the standard of work and faith in something greater. This is to avoid the Mount Saint Helens type of explosion.

Cities have streets or districts where vice is allowed, or at least ignored. Driving or walking on these streets can make for jaw-dropping tourism for the uninitiated. I recall driving down Hastings Avenue in Vancouver, B.C., in broad daylight, where someone was using a toilet that was just sitting on the street (no plumbing). Prostitutes in ripped fishnet stockings were seeking clients. Various lost souls smoked crack openly. Every boarded up doorway housed a body or two, apparently sleeping.

It seems that all cities have this street: Prospect in Kansas City, Langstrasse in Zurich, or Hastings in Vancouver, etc. Every city has a neighborhood like this, just like every small town has a bar or house where the fringe can gather. People drive down these streets for a kind of Poverty Tour (a.k.a. Poverty Porn) of how the other half lives. These places make for a kind of living cautionary tale, like that which parents can use to cudgel children away from drugs and other bad patterns. “Do you see what happens, kid, when you do drugs?”

Small towns make for interesting interactions because a full variety of vices, worldviews, and systems of belief are shoved close to one another and must interact, whereas in larger cities you can live in one area without ever touching or interacting with those different from you. In a small town, you do not have that option of isolation. The town drunk and the mayor may be in the same diner or grocery store or church. But what I’m driving at is a city or a country thing, nor a race or class or national thing. It's a human thing.

The "fringe" element in small towns and cities are granted an outlet to avoid an eruption, as complete suppression results in a blast. This is same reason that sandboxes are placed outside for children rather than in the kitchen. Individuals and societies allow exploration to play out, because it’s going to play out whether you allow it or not. Even the most repressed societies have rebellion in secret underworlds. But this is not due to the repression or the rules, as some would have us believe. This exploration and rebellion happens. Why? Because we are fallen creatures.

We need a sandbox to play in, a development area, a place to thrash about. Just as cities cordon off a street for this exploration, database administrators create non-production environments, sometimes called “sandboxes” where any wild-child programmer can go play, break things, try on data, running through rows and flipping tables. The key thing for keeping organization is that you do not experiment with what you already know works and is running the business. You allow the skunk-works stuff over in the fringe, the development database, but never, ever in the database which puts dollars on the balance sheet.

This may seem a geeky metaphor to compare to cities with their red-light districts, or to our lives with their periods of rebellion, but it is hardly different. Cities allow the inevitable rowdiness, within reason, and database designers provide a romper room, and if the city or the database admin had their way, they would prefer to have as little of this disorder as possible. Yet it’s allowed, because to completely stifle all experimentation and rebellion leads to the spread of mayhem to the entire city. In businesses, the rebel programmer forces will just start their own shadow IT. Users and party-seekers stop asking for permission altogether.

God allows us some rope, to wander and explore, otherwise we may never learn what the rules are for in the first place. The forgiveness of sins is not a get out of jail free card so much as it’s an understanding and loving Father who knows of our need to seek out the dragon. God is not the rigid Pharisee, who is like a city administrator that cracks down on every last jaywalker in the street, or the database administrator that allows no access and no data for anyone and kills all creativity. He is the loving Father that prefers we stayed but knows we’ll stray, and when we return from our dragon-quest beaten and broken, he will not even say, “I told you so.” That is the Father of the New Covenant. The words of Jesus speak of this type of Father, and this is Our Father, meaning yours and mine and everyone else’s.

For some reason unknown to us, God allows sin. This is the perhaps the most confusing thing of all about the Creator. This drives many away from belief because we know sin is the cause of suffering, so how can it be allowed? Yet we can see the same pattern in our world happening all the time, which seems to confirm that we are indeed made in the image and likeness of God. When we try to bring order, we also allow the fringe, and just as the city allows a small red light district in order to preserve a wider peace and order. The IT department grants a corner for chaos so that the business can operate and maybe benefit from creative ideas that come out of the fringe.

In all cases, good things can come out of the allowance for rebellion. The rebirth of a city, a business, or a person can happen out of this model. Beautiful things can come from those drifters and dreamers, as long as they don’t get stuck there forever in despair. The key is to grow, to learn, to come back, and with God, the key is always to surrender, and rather than defeat the dragon, you accept self-defeat, you accept the mystery, and God defeats the dragon for you.

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Ideas that looks good on paper often don’t work as expected. Compare a football play drawn in a playbook to what actually happens on the field. These two things rarely, if ever, match perfectly. This problem is the cause of many gray hairs among coaches as their plans fold like a house of cards when put into action in the real world. We live in a time where many ideas look good on paper, or more specifically, on screens, and our mind is easily convinced, that things we’ve tried and have not worked out well, will work if we just try it one more time.

“This time it will be different.”

For example, we know that heavy drinking is a bad idea, but perhaps we’ll try it this weekend. Or, we know that dating multiple partners results is gunpowder and kerosene that results in relationship explosions, but what if, just maybe, everyone who ever lived through a tumultuous love triangle is wrong? Or on a wider scale, we have all observed socialism’s train-wrecks that invariably result in brutal dictatorships, but let’s give it another whirl (this time with feeling)! We get fooled by the fruit on the tree without remembering what happened after the first bite.

We need a plan, a starting point, a model to follow, and everyone is selling a playbook. Many of these plans have been proven to be bad ideas, even in our own experience. Yet we keep trying them, even after we know the likely outcome. In our lives, we know the patterns that fail, but like the stubborn coach we can’t accept that the X’s and O’s in our mind are bad ideas even after repeated attempts that prove it. We’re still convinced our rag-arm quarterback can complete that bootleg rollout cross-body pass despite the last five attempts when it resulted in a pick-six touchdown for the defense. The coach who says, “Let’s run it again,” will be searching for new employment soon.

We privately know that the best model is the one used and put into practice by sober, boring coaches, not wild rebels, but it’s hard to admit. There is a reason that Nick Saban draws the best players to Alabama year after year. He’s sober, he’s boring, and doesn’t run dumb plays. In his sober, boring way, he wins a lot. It works. It has always worked, since the beginning of time. Adam and Eve didn’t like being bored, and that’s where things went south really fast.

Even while we are out testing theories and researching ways of living, we can see that the boring people keep the wheels on the bus. We even rely on it. No child who is out playing wants to come in for dinner if mom or dad is a hot mess that serves a cold meal but forces the family to call it delicious. No, we want a balanced, tasty meal, served hot and on time, by a largely boring cook who follows the recipe, and executes the recipe well. Or, for another example, my accountant may be an alcoholic, but I don’t want him drunk while he’s doing my taxes. I would prefer that he is sober and boring and careful.

In the IT world, compare the sober, boring, careful database administrator who says “no” to everything versus the fresh-out-of-college wired programmer who wants to rip out the old, stodgy system with the latest fad tech pulled down from GitHub. Or, consider a business manager who patiently reviews expense reports versus the lavishly-spending salesperson who is wooing a whale of a client. These roles are all important players on the roster of a business, but the reality is this: someone has to be the jerk, or the business will fold. Someone has to tell the creative person to reign it in, or there will be no business. You need the creative people and the boring gatekeepers. If everyone is nice all the time, and no one ever says, “No,” then the production systems will collapse into disorder and the expense reports will swell until bribery and embezzlement become side-channels of compensation. The moment the lock is removed from the safe, someone will start calling it “petty cash.”

The lawmakers of revolutionary America knew this, and for their various faults, they knew that allowances were needed for those wild-eyed rebels to explore the edges of the frontier, while also realizing that tripwires needed to restrain the majority so that no more Salem witch burnings might ignite. Oddly enough, we’re nearly back to witch hunting, but the witches being cancelled are the Christians. (This may sound shocking but Christians being burned makes a lot more sense. Christians are supposed to be converting witches to the faith through the joyful witness of their lives, and not burning anyone.)

The founders also knew that the morality of the Christian tradition was the bedrock that a stable country could be built upon, even if they were only Deists themselves and Christians-in-name-only. They knew that humans needed some rope, some allowance for both creative and destructive rebellion, but not too much rope. They knew that when the fringe becomes the center, the center becomes the fringe, and that arrangement does not work. I’ve used the sandbox and kitchen metaphor before. When a child’s sandbox is brought into the kitchen, dinner is never the same. Sand gets into the food, hands get burned, the floor gets filthy, and the cat may use it as a litter-box. This is not sustainable. The place for “fun” is not in the operations center of the house.

The dabblers having fun in the sandbox - the tourists, the experience-seekers, the addicts - are trying on ways of life. They are trying to run plays from a playbook that is full of bad ideas. But even if told, they will run those same plays. To err is human. We know people will go there, and if you take away the playbook or the field they practice on, they will find a new place to play and invent new plays. Explorers explore. We want to taste and try things on, and we’re steered to drinking, sex, and the pursuit of money daily by the images set before our eyes. We are tempted to seek, and told that our desires are our identity. The manufacturing of seekers (consumers) is the primary goal of advertising and Hollywood writers. “Try everything” by Shakira is suggesting kids really try everything, from skydiving to fantasy football to sodomy to Fentanyl. Go for it! You are only the sum of your desires! That is how you will find rest, or so we are told. Next time you hear Shakira’s song, substitute the word Fentanyl for Everything.

There is an alternate option here, offered by Jesus, which we tend to consider last, where he says, “Come, follow me, and I will give you rest.” What’s interesting is that Jesus not only “looks good on paper” like a shiny product or football play in X’s and O’s, but he can execute the play and give a proper meaning and shape to your life, while he also gives you rest. He also has many friends for you to meet, both here and hereafter. The only problem is that Jesus gives it for free, so marketing and Hollywood are not needed. Shakira would have been wise to add a third verse to “Try Everything” that provided the proper ending to what she’s suggesting.

I tried it all, God, why am I still so lost?

Now my fears are here, and there’s nowhere to turn.

I tried it all, to fill this hole inside,

Help: Draw me, Lord, and we will run.

Country music, and some rap music, is better about tying up the loose ends of story songs. Pop music tends to pretend that there is no Act III to their stories, but there is always at least three acts in every story, otherwise it’s not much of a story.

In producing a nation of consumers, also known as seekers, we have hit peak depression because people bought the tale that a life that resembles a hedonistic rave will be fun forever. This is why you see people bouncing like pinballs from one wellness idea to the next, one diet to the next, one “way of life” to the next. You see it in Christians who bounce from one church to the next because the Pastor isn’t “feeding them.” (Again, if you are going to Mass to get something instead of to give, and that is to give glory to God, you don’t understand why St. Peter or Notre Dame or any other church was built in the first place.) If you are expecting to be fed and be constantly entertained, you will always be in the pinball machine, bouncing around, never at rest.

What we really want is meaning, purpose, and community, all of which are given, all at once, when faith in Christ settles into your bones and into your soul. Then you will find rest. When you follow him, the person of Jesus, the construction worker who is God, you will get what you really wanted, especially when you realize that you wanted all the wrong things. Bonus: you get community and people who will open up and talk about real things. These people tend to talk about more than how many reps they did today or how many grams of protein meets their macro requirements.

Entertainment and consumption are the great distractions today. These are patterns that need to be shattered, and Jesus will do all that for you - for free - you just have to ask him, and keep asking. These habits are hard to break, but they are the shackles you put on every day by choice.

Seekers get to learn the hard way because the school of life and hard knocks is brutally honest. There comes a day when the Netflix binge no longer brings joy but crushing sadness. That’s the finger of God pressing on you while you lay on the couch.

Fortunate souls learn by watching others’ bad behavior. Take for example: Those who grow up with drug using parents who “Try everything,” following Shakira’s advice, often conclude that trying everything leads to a thousand nightmares and years of therapy. This is why both AA and Al-Anon exist. The first is for those who “Try everything” and keep burning their hand on the hot stove. The second is for those who had to figure out how to live with those who “Try everything” and keep burning their hand on the hot stove.

If you never leave the land of play, you get stuck there. The longer you play in the sandbox, the more the voice of the conscience becomes muffled. The sandbox plays by different rules, often no rules, which is exactly why the sandbox is out in the yard and not in the kitchen. The education of a child in the sandbox teaches valuable lessons that may not be taught while helping prepare dinner in the kitchen. In places without established order, you learn to fight or flee. You learn to lead, follow, or get out of the way. You learn your strengths and weaknesses.

However, you can’t live your while life in the sandbox, because imaginary games and child’s play are not intended to become permanent ways of life. Eventually, if you are sixty years old and still playing in the sandbox, it becomes pathetic to see a grown man or woman still making mudpies and calling it cake. Other adults no longer think it’s cute or funny. If you’ve ever seen a sixty year old man in a college bar checking out the sophomores, you know exactly what I’m talking about. A sore thumb sticks out because it’s not healthy. A fish out of water is out of place. The presence of an old person in a young person’s environment draws eyes because it doesn’t make sense and we know it by instinct. There is a popular lie going around claiming that, “Age is just a state of mind,” which is exactly what the middle-age creep in the nightclub is claiming while he sucks on the straw of his rail drink. Age is an immutable fact of time and space, while mind is malleable to a mood or desire or how much sleep you had the night before.

Once, while training for a half-marathon, I convinced myself that running a pace of seven minute miles was a “just a state of mind.” When the race began, I kept telling myself, “It’s just a state of mind, pace is just a state of mind.” Then I learned in the race, around the fifth mile, that I was a liar, and I crashed. I gasped, “Nope, it’s biology. Pace is related to biology.” My mile pace might be somewhat related to what my mind had decided, as I could motivate myself with encouragement, but my VO2 Max was where the rubber met the road.

As we’ve become more accustomed to virtual lives through screens and interfaces, we put far more credence in our imagined states than reality can support. I had trained hard for the race, thinking that what I decided in my head could be realized, but physiology had a different fact, presenting reality abruptly to my mind, compliments of my lungs and legs.

This is the same thing that happens in pursuit of bad ideas tended to in your mind, usually extending from some sickly tentacle from a seed of advertising that fertilized your desire for money, power, escape, or sex. We can not live as just a soul, nor just a mind, nor just a body, because none of these make up the whole of our self. We are watering and feeding whatever our is planted in our mind, what we are told to like, and we are surprised when the fruit is rotten at reaping. The reason for the rottenness is that we have elevated the mind over the body and soul, which are who we actually are. Our desires are not who we are. That is the great lie. We must seek to be whole, body and soul, with mind as the point of connection. When we focus too much on “mindfulness” we can easily forget that we have a body and a soul, and that is who we really are, made in the image and likeness of God.

As I’ve mentioned before (quoting Peter Kreeft), the reason that horror movies focus on either ghosts or corpses is because in the first, the soul lacks a body, and in the second, the body lacks a soul. These terrify us because body and soul go together. Mind is where we connect body and soul, and staring in a phone we end up a zombie, neither body nor soul. The reason zombies need to have their brain destroyed to die is because they are staring into their inner phones, drooling over their desire, and neither body nor soul. They are just rotting bodies without a soul, lumbering toward their insatiable desire. Can anyone deny that someone staring into their phone looks like a a zombie?

With luck or divine intervention, an awakening occurs, or a savior arrives. Rescue operations need to be present at all times to accept those with casualties returning from the sandbox, but some will reject any hand offered, and some never reach for the hand. Until someone is ready to quit the sandbox, they do not understand the need for rescue.

Getting lost in the imagination is the cause of our mental illness pandemic in the age of screens. When we separate our body from our mind, we are no longer whole. The great irony is that the solution being presented is “more mind”: more apps, zoom meetings, more interactions with technology.

Whenever we look at the screen, we sever our mind from our body and soul and enter into a false reality. This happens with any gadget interaction, including virtual reality, which is where we are now headed, compliments of our tech overlords. The isolation of the mind happens whether you are scrolling websites or on a zoom with real people. The mind engages with the screen and the screen reflects the self. The person on the other end of the screen could just as well be a robot or software application. But what looks good on paper, or screen, doesn’t often play out well. Unless you follow the patterns of tried-and-tested usage, practice in time and space, with body and soul, you are winging it by following only words and feelings. The testing grounds for ideas is in the world, on the court, on the field, not what the X’s and O’s show on the screen. Any gray-haired coach can tell you that.

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So in hindsight, I most certainly did have a religion. When I thought I had none, I had one. A religion is defined by your actions, not your words. Although I thought I was a member of something called “no religion,” it was actually secular humanism. But this is not surprising because the entire public school system was geared toward the religion of humanism and actively steered American children toward it throughout the 1980s and 1990s. What’s strange is that we banned “God” from public schools because it was a religion. But we brought in humanism which is a religion. This religion is one that pretends that it isn’t a religion. The Supreme Court even named it as a religion in 1961 (Torcasso v. Watkins), which is just stating the obvious. There were even humanist churches that sprang up and withered away. Few object to humanism being taught in schools because we pretend it’s not a religion, but it has a manifesto with fifteen principles that sound a lot like commandments that defines the origin of the universe as it’s first item of business.

FIRST: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.

This is literally the direct inversion of the three major world religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. If you start with this premise, your worldview flips completely to a pre-Christian, pre-Hebrew mindset. I spent many hours yammering about this in the About Uranus series. If you remove God as the first cause of the universe, who created the universe “out of nothing” (ex nihilo), then you have a lot of explaining to do. In fact, if you start with this first point of humanist manifesto, you are already in the pagan world of Zeus, you just use different terms for it.

The idea of a creator God never came up in public school. In a subtle way, the tenets of humanism are stamped on every American child. Unsurprisingly, I learned much later, after soaking in the bath of this humanist water for some thirty years, that one of the signers of this declaration of independence from religion, this humanist manifesto, was none other than the founder of modern public schools, John Dewey. Like Freud, the father of psychology, Dewey hated religion. Both of these founders saw their purpose as replacing religion with something else.

From the book Atheism for Dummies, Dewey is a described as a kind of hero for doing a bait-and-switch on religion:

Few people can claim a greater influence on American culture than the philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952). In the course of a long career, Dewey practically reinvented the American system of education from the bottom up.

Dewey was also a key figure in the rebirth of modern humanism. But his approach was controversial, even among humanists — partly because he wanted to keep using the word God, even though he didn’t believe such a being existed.

Today we are living in a period of time where everyone is scratching their head and wondering why our world and nation is slipping into disarray. The fragility of nations and institutions is being felt across domains. Once you get out of the tub that you have been soaking in and look at the water, it’s no longer confusing to see what has happened. The water is filthy. A billion people are soaking in that tub and not realizing how soggy they’ve become. They can’t understand why they feel like dirty dishwater. They wonder how they can be in a tub and yet not feel clean. We don’t feel clean because we are living a lie.

Thus we have the “strange rites” that occupy so much of our modern life, particularly in sports, entertainment, health, fitness, technology. To quote the blurb from Tara Isabella’s book on this subject, Americans are “embracing a kaleidoscopic panoply of spiritual traditions, rituals, and subcultures -- from astrology and witchcraft to SoulCycle and the alt-right.”

It’s all a substitute for God. All of it. For me it was the pursuit of experiences. Alcohol, woodworking, triathlons, sports, skydiving, military service, career - you name it, I probably tried it. A quote from Joshua Mitchell sums up the state of this constant seeking of meaning through the self:

Homo sapiens is devolving into Selfie Man; and it is therefore to the manner of his falling into illness that we must attend, and to his experience of illness that we must appeal. I cannot prove it, but I suspect this is the path Selfie Man must take to recover an understanding of human nature. The Prodigal Son returns home only after he realizes the husks of corn on which he has been feasting nourish him not (Luke 15:11–32).

The story of our times is one of spiritual crisis, because not only has the word God become taboo, but most people who say the word don’t truly believe in it. How can I be so bold? We need to merely look at where the faithful spend their time. Drive by any gym or baseball field on a Sunday morning, or simply look at how empty the churches are. Their pajama shirts say “Faith” or “Jesus and coffee” and then they turn on Netflix and blithely violate the third Commandment to keep the Lord’s day holy.

How can these faithful be so bold? Easily. It’s because we don’t really believe in the idea of “sacred”. They have been programmed. When nothing is sacred, everything is sacred. When everything is sacred, nothing is sacred. This is why we can believe that laying on a couch and thinking about God for a split second is as good as going to church and spending one hour with God. This is the great flattening that has occurred.

This bait-and-switch that occurred is exactly as Dewey wanted. We say “God” but smirk inside. The pioneers of America who lacked internal combustion engines and lacked Netflix and youth sports, somehow found the energy to saddle up or walk to church. The test of our time - a test that appears to have been failed - is that we have incredible ease in getting to church, yet we choose not to.

The number one reason people hate Christianity today is because of hypocritical Christians. And so do I. What a scandal it is to see a believer who speaks the language of devotion and piety but whose actions suggest otherwise. This is why people roll their eyes at Catholics that sin on Saturday night and go to confession on Sunday morning (actually, few Catholics go to confession now, and therefore should not even be receiving the Eucharist, but that’s for another episode).

The hypocrisy scandalizes and drives people away. We all hate a hypocrite.

So did Jesus.

The problem is that we are all hypocrites, no matter how holy, perceived or otherwise. The hypocrites once drove me away, but I will never let that happen again. Why? Because I’m one of them. And as I frequently like to quote: “The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum of saints.” The church and its doctrine and sacraments and liturgy provide the path to remembering this. If I am confused about this, then righteousness or despair will begin to seep into my thoughts and action, and that is precisely when I’ve fallen into the trap, where God is on my lips, but not in my heart.

This was the goal of John Dewey. To keep God in our mouth, but not in our heart. Once you awaken to this fact, you can get out of the soggy tub and pull the plug to let the dirt drain away. Then you can take action, and get God out of storage once and for all.

The great achievement of Dewey and the humanists is the flattening of the sacred. They managed to make all things the same, to make all things sacred, and therefore making nothing sacred. This is the outcome of Unitarianism, which places all religions into the same the psychological basket. There is nothing set apart, nothing sacred, yet we still have the word God on our lips, just as Dewey wanted. And then you live in no-man’s-land, the wasteland of T.S. Eliot, because you are saying the word God but living like a humanist. You speak as if you have ultimate meaning, but you don’t live it out - hence the emptiness of our modern age. You must make your own meaning then, and this manifests out in a thousand ways, and all of them are dead ends. What is lost with God is ultimate meaning, and the vacuum is felt, the void, the onslaught of meaninglessness that drives the pursuit of self-destruction and self-salvation. Why? Because if we cannot find meaning we must either escape the problem or solve the problem. You can go toward nihilism like the French philosophers or you can go toward the will-to-power like the German philosophers. A third option, compliments of Karl Marx, is that you get to become the savior of the world. In all three of these outcomes, you can still say the word “God” and the word can mean absolutely nothing to you while you speak it. That’s the state we are in today. God is everywhere in our speech and nowhere in our actions. By design, most of us live out lives that have nothing to do with Christ. Only when we come close to the edge of a cliff and look down do we look up.

With God put into storage, we will go dust the idea off when feeling nostalgic or lost. When we are in a period of adjustment, between pursuits, we will look to God. But the moment a new distraction or experience or partner or job arrives, God goes back into storage. We only want God when we recognize the need for a real savior. We only want Jesus on the cross when we need forgiveness. Christ is treated like a 401K fund, where we look at the cross like a number of dollars that will save us in our old age, after we are done sinning. The penitent thief on the cross, who is promised entrance to paradise, is our secret wish for ourselves. It’s the get-out-of-jail free card on our death bed, and the card that allows us to live as we wish today, so that we can ignore everything Christ said before that moment on the cross. Most interesting, however, is that I hear self-professed Christians saying, “That doesn’t sit well with me,” regarding the penitent thief’s late change of heart in Luke 22. In reality, those of us with the name of God on our lips but whose actions lack follow-through should be begging and hoping that the salvation of the “Good Thief,” St. Dismas, will be a possibility for us, too. We rack and stack up mortal sin after mortal sin and ignore the sacrament of Confession, and at the same time cast our eyes down at others for their sins. We should be lucky if the same mercy is shown for our own hypocrisy that we ignore.

Any encroachment of traditional religion into the public sphere bothered me. I was wary of any form of Christianity creeping back into my life. In my mind, I thought, “Christians just can’t leave anything alone. They just have to shove it down our throats at every opportunity.” I felt like the Grateful Dead’s song Truckin’, where Jerry Garcia sings about getting busted on Bourbon Street, ratted out by nosey do-gooders who called the police: “They just can’t let you be.” The irony is how the flip has happened, where modernism is shoved down our throats. The old religion of hearing a one-hour Sunday message (plus maybe an hour on Wednesday nights) stood no chance against the full blast 40 hours a week of public schools preaching mainline humanism. We have been indoctrinated, without a doubt. We have been indoctrinated to modernism.

If you want to be free, you have to take the first step in opposition of the current. The new rebel is not the person that embraces sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. It’s the person who embraces chastity, temperance, and silence. The new rebel is the one who un-moderns himself. I suspect as the result of a century of humanist education comes to an end, the next Abraham will be called out of California, the next St. Anthony of Egypt will find his way to the desert, and a new St. Benedict will find his way to a cave, and we will rediscover all that has been lost and lied about. This is the way it happens. It always has happened this way. The world tries to crush God, to remove him from all public spaces, and God seems to go away, and then he returns. Jesus also went to the desert. He also went to a tomb. But he returned. He is returned now. He is as alive as ever, and will once again be the healer that we are looking for.

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I was caught between the lukewarm and the deists and the atheists and the fundamentalists and the humanists. I was half hippy, half redneck, half preppy, half nerd, half metalhead. I say there were many “halves” because what this modernist input and media blast does is make you confused. That is the state of most people today, especially if your main hobby is screen staring.

Jesus cures a demoniac who has this problem of a fragmented identity. The person says, “I am Legion” which means, “We are many.” The story of this Legion dude in the Bible never made sense until I started examining my own thoughts and worldview once I got out of the fog of modernism. Then I realized, “Holy st, I was Legion.” No wonder I was so off-centered. Legion is a story about someone who has too many forces struggling for control in his head. It’s actually shocking to read the two lines of dialogue from Legion in light of my own life, because I had a similar reaction of anger and revolt when someone approached me about making Jesus my personal savior. I didn’t use the same words, but pretty close.

“What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me!”

Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “Legion is my name. There are many of us.” (Mark 5:1-20)

This is exactly the same condition of our heads today drowning in media. Anyone that has a visceral reaction of anger to the name of Jesus is in this state. The funny thing is that Jesus heals. Savior means “healer”. And he does heal. He heals people of mental problems and anxiety issues a million times a day. But the modernist teaching cannot admit that. In fact, psychology, which is intended to heal, purposefully avoids any talk of Jesus. Western medicine in general has the same allergic reaction to the name Jesus. I can’t help but wonder if the updated translation of Modernism is Legion.

There are all kinds of external voices from TV and TikTok leasing space in our head. They are Legion. And if the media is sponsored and paid for, you can bet it is not borrowing ideas from Christ. You can tell if a show is Christian, because the production quality is usually bad and nearly unwatchable. This is not surprising because fireworks and glamor is the polar opposite of Jesus. Well, on TV anyway. Once you meet him, then it flips completely. But the goal of any image or sound the emits from your radio, television, or internet is to keep you distracted, to keep you divided, and to keep you watching. The more you watch, the more ideas are planted into your head. If only you could track this history of grooming your thoughts that’s been done for you, compliments of Hollywood writers. It’s not unreasonable to say that the idea that abortion is not killing a human probably came from an episode of Felicity that you watched college.

In my first attempt to escape the madness of the crowd, I leaned secular because I felt that those were the non-hypocrites. Only the religious people were crazy. That’s what I told myself.

Upon further review, like an instant replay in football, which took twenty years, I have come to understand with glaring clarity that I leaned secular because of eighteen years of heavy schooling on the humanist doctrine. I was drinking from that vine, like every other public school child, like the pods in the Matrix. We were being kept alive in a vat of sugar water with re-runs of The Cosby Show and Night Court. (Through those two shows alone we learned a valuable lesson: we thought Bill Cosby was the upstanding citizen and John Larroquette was the pervert, only to wake up twenty years later and find out it was the opposite. But let me leave that path into the woods right there, before I get lost.)

All the while, the truth of Christ was there for the finding, but it was buried under hours upon hours of youth sports and late-night math assignments and writing reports, which all boiled down to despair, in the form of party-til-you-puke. The message of Christ barely stood a chance, and yet somehow it still emerged. His light is the one thing that cannot be extinguished. Somehow it finds a way to reach people, despite massive attempts to stifle and kill it off. He finds us when we aren’t even looking for him.

The end result of this anti-spiritual education was to slowly but surely kill off God in our lives. This isn’t hidden or a conspiracy, it’s plainly stated in the writings and manifestos of the founders of modern education.

The problem is that if you do try to kill God, you don’t kill God. You wound the child. How? If you tell a child there is no God, he has no meaning for existence. So he must invent one. Kids recognize this meaninglessness early on. They are more aware of this loss than adults are, and you can observe when the light is going dim in middle-school age children. Unless the child has a hobby or goal or sport or some kind of self-invented worth, the loss of God will be felt early and often. For those that have some kind of meaning without God, it will soon fade and need a replacement. Sports and Pokemon will turn into the pursuit of money or sex or mental escape. The search begins, and it never ends. With the onslaught of tech and screens distracting the mind, the searching starts even earlier now, as non-believing indoctrinated parents don’t even have a badly formed concept of God to offer their children, but even that is better than nothing.

The promise of a utopia through social justice sounds great and is a worthy goal, but there is a flaw with this as a standalone solution for finding meaning in life. The problem is that it doesn’t strike the heart or address anything related to the needs of the soul. If you deny the soul, you can never get over these issues with the ultimate questions. That is the whole problem with humanism and socialism; these are philosophies that can score some points for finding meaning, but they are shooting the ball at the wrong basket.

This is the whole reason why Jesus continues to win hearts and minds. With Jesus there is a plan for all things, and authority, and a reason, and it allows for suffering to make sense, at least to some degree. But these other philosophies that lack God are a team with no coach and no plan, other than a constant “progress.” It leads to chaos, because an endless search means you are always lost. Even if you hit a goal, you immediately need a new goal. Why? Because the heart and soul are restless and aimless without God. Ships need both a rudder and a sail. The attempt to indoctrinate us away from God may seem to work for a while but eventually leads us directly back to God. “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.” (CCC 27)

The spiritual death that these education reformers aimed for succeeded in my life, but they failed to bring about the utopia, unless a massive problem of broken homes, drug abuse, isolation, and identity crises is what they had in mind. If it was, then mission accomplished. The greatest period of wealth generation and higher education in human history has already happened, yet the utopia is nowhere near. Yes, we need to work for a better world, but with the soul denied and God excluded from our lives, that better world will never arrive because we have to invent new enemies and problems to solve. We cannot be satisfied.

I was fully won over to the side of Dewey and the other educators that sought my spiritual death. I even wanted to see the spiritual death happen in everyone else, which is what you want in disciples. You want dedication so that they too will convert others. This is the essence of evangelization. It’s a kind of sales. First you get the person to trust, to believe in your goodness and authority, then once they are interested and seeking, you set the hook. It’s fishing. This is why the metaphor of St. Peter being “fishers of men” makes so much sense. Communists and Fascists and Humanists also go fishing for men, but they do it through public schools instead of the pulpit.

When something encroached on the culture of secular humanism, I reacted exactly like Christians or Muslims or Jews reacted when a film or book blatantly mocked their religion. Apparently, I considered movies and literature of modern culture sacred in some way. It’s the great flattening of our age, where there is confusion about what is sacred and what is not. This is the “spiritual but not religious” era where you’ll hear “everything is sacred” and as soon as you hear that, you know that nothing is sacred. If everything is sacred, nothing can be set apart as sacred, hence the flattening. This is the same problem with treating every news story as a conflagration. Sooner or later you realize that none of the bated-breath urgency of the internet people matters at all and that they are merely hysterical and addicted to news. If every news story is earth-shattering, no news story is earth-shattering. In the same way, the claim that all places are sacred rots the floor out and collapses everything into the profane, because when everything is sacred, there is nothing sacred. It’s a neverending string of days with a vanilla cone, eaten by oneself, with artificial sweetener. What the “spiritual but not religious” crowd fails to understand is that that the reason altars and churches were ever built was to create places that are set apart from the rest of the world, to celebrate what is sacred, together with others.

The religion of individualism demands flatness and the collapse of the spiritual into the material. The spiritual is reduced to nature, and is therefore no longer spiritual, because the true meaning of spiritual means beyond nature, beyond this universe, beyond the senses. Humanism cannot allow for that transcendence, otherwise its own dogma falls apart.

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The “born this way” argument doesn’t help you to resolve anything but just affirms your problem. If your “nature” is to drink or look at dirty websites, then that makes you helpless in combating it. If there is no stopping or altering this behavior because you were born a certain way, then you either accept the problem as final or pursue a science-based solution, like pharmaceuticals or a technique, to deal with the issue.

What you will not try, if this is your worldview, is prayer or divine assistance. Why not? Because prayer appeals to magical nonsense that you don’t believe in, and to engage in such an act would be admitting that a spiritual realm may exist, which is for gullible simpletons. I know this feeling well.

The denial of the spirit or soul actually blocks you from accessing a treasure of knowledge that the mind and heart are capable of reaching, but not if you don’t believe it.

If we come to believe in the soul, or in something beyond ourselves, we open up a new possibility, and we can access something that hardly makes sense. In that worldview, you can have both free-will and rational thought and faith in mysteries, because in that worldview you are allowed the full range of mind, body, and soul. It’s like a buy-one-get-two-free offer. If you allow belief in the soul or God, you automatically receive the other. If you allow an eternal soul, it can commune with a God who knows all outcomes. But the key twist here is that while God knows all the outcomes, we do not. We still have to make decisions here.

This is an incredibly weird thing about human beings. To believe or not to believe makes a world of difference in how you live, and this is why the battleground for indoctrination spends so much time on this spiritual space, denying it or confirming it.

The whole reason the various religions and “varieties of religious experience” exist is because we can access a kind of knowledge that science cannot explain, and never will explain. Spirits cannot be put into beakers or centrifuges or equations, so scientific papers about spirits cannot be submitted to journals for peer review without the submitting author sounding like a lunatic to other scientists. Any undergraduate student knows that science cannot co-mingle with any kind of mysticism.

But mysticism can co-mingle with science. You can study the brain all you want and still retain mysticism, because science will help explain the physical processes and properties of what happens in the neurons during thought, but will never explain where thoughts come from, or what truly happens in prayer. No matter how many CAT Scans are done or electrodes placed on the forehead, this spirit world is impenetrable by nature, because it is not part of nature. Supernatural means beyond nature.

Thus, whether thoughts are generated or received is answered by which side of this fence you sit upon. If spirits do not exist, then you internally create your thoughts. If spirits do exist, then your thoughts can be created externally. For the most part, the idea of thoughts being created in you can be proven, while the idea of yourself creating thoughts cannot be proven. Suggestion is a simple way to illustrate this.

The power of suggestion is well-known by parents guiding children, or teachers guiding students, or salespeople working leads. One example of this is a salesperson planting a high price in your thoughts and then offering a discount shortly thereafter. Planting the high price first in the mind makes the second price after the discount believe you are getting a good deal, even though the salesperson was targeting the discount price the whole time. Another example is the loss leader, where a free item, say a box of delicious Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, is offered to get you to spend much more on a whole shopping cart full of other items. In both cases, the idea of saving money is planted in your brain, which brings about the action of commerce. Whether this planting of thoughts is done by a salesperson or by an advertisement doesn’t really matter, because you receive these thought from external sources, via the portal of the ears or the eyes, and the decision is made in your head and heart on whether to buy or ignore the thought.

This same power of suggestion happens continually in our day, in every waking hour, as you cannot drive down a highway without a bombardment of messaging and offerings from road signs, from billboards, from businesses, from your radio, from bumper stickers, and even from other drivers. Driving from home to work will result in hundreds of planted thoughts which you either choose to allow or reject. This sorting is so common that we do it unconsciously and in rapid succession. But we do not conjure the idea of a billboard. We receive an image through sight, and that image enters our mind. Then we have to determine what to do with the image, and quickly decide: What does a personal injury attorney have to do with me? Do I need a Coors Light? Do I like the candidate on that bumper sticker? Did that person just cut me off?

Some images turn into sticky thoughts while others are discarded, and some that we think are discarded come back later, which is what the Coors Light company and attorneys are counting on. They are planting seeds for when the time is right, when thirst arrives or that fender bender happens. Planting “thought seeds” is the entire point of advertising so that when desire or need is perceived, you load the image from storage for re-processing.

What’s interesting about all of this is that you don’t create these images, they are created in you by external inputs. The thought of a lawyer or a beer is just like any other thought, and just like advertisers and salespeople, ideologies and religions use the same power of suggestion to attract believers by telling and selling messages that mostly come through the ears and eyes. Jesus even speaks of a mustard seed as a metaphor for planting faith in minds, which is quite a different thought than planting seeds to sell beer or acquire clients, because the mustard seed grows into something glorious. The beer will get you drunk and the lawyer may get you rich. Faith, on the other hand, will likely make you sober and it certainly won’t make you rich, yet it somehow appeals to billions of us. (Quick reminder here: I loathe the Prosperity Gospel.)

This concept of where your thoughts come from is fundamental to understanding how your “personal” set of beliefs came into formation, as the formation did not come from yourself but from various influences, like teachers, parents, writers, coaches, actors, celebrities, pastors, preachers, siblings, friends, salespeople, admirers, heroes, and advertisers. Then there is the greatest source of modern thought planting: shows, books, billboards, ads, commercials, songs, podcasts, news, blogs, videos, and video games.

All the things that come through screens present thoughts and at a far more rapid rate than say, looking at a tree, although a tree may provide much deeper and more meaningful thoughts. Examining even a single blade of grass may take you to far broader and deeper thoughts than anything on your phone, because the grass is simple, true, and real.

The thoughts you hold are not as “personal” as you think, but is rather a confluence of thoughts received from your experiences, and from sounds poured into your ears, and from images painted before your eyes. These can be from natural sources in the world or from artificial sources on screens. Obviously, smell, touch, and taste factor in as well, but all of these feed thoughts to our minds. We don’t create the thoughts ourselves.

What we think of as thoughts generated from within are actually received from outside. We filter and interpret them, but we don’t generate thoughts ourselves. This is where you can get to the high-minded places of the idea of Platonic forms or meditation or transcendentalism or the Holy Spirit or bad spirits. Since this could be a rabbit-hole that can never be fully explored, I’m going to steer away from it and focus on the idea that thoughts are either received or generated, and I am of the belief that they are received.

Although our conscience somehow knows right and wrong, we do begin life as a mostly blank slate, like an empty apartment, where outside influences move a lot of furniture and knick-knacks into the space between our ears. Eventually, every few years or so, we have to clean house because it starts looking like an episode of Hoarders. Confusion reigns when conflicting doctrines and thoughts co-exist, to the point of it being a fire hazard. When you reach this point, you have to throw out certain “junk” thoughts and what you decide is junk are the thoughts that you were indoctrinated to dislike. They are the thoughts that go against what you were successfully indoctrinated into accepting. However, there are times along the path of life where you will look at the furniture you kept in the apartment and realize that you kept the wrong things, and that is when a potential flip of accepted doctrines can happen.

This is one of the key elements that separates the various doctrines, and I use the word doctrine because to be indoctrinated there must be specific doctrines that are taught to you. For some doctrines, you must accept that thoughts are generated from within, and that there are no such thing as spirits. To believe these doctrines, you have to deny all things spiritual. This is a requirement, but moving all of the spiritual furniture out of the apartment is very difficult to do, if not impossible, so the doctrines that require spiritual denial must go to great efforts in order to stifle it. Some of this furniture is permanent, or can’t fit through the doorway, so it has to stay in the apartment. It can only be removed if the apartment is destroyed. Because of this, indoctrination processes require covering this spiritual furniture up by burying it under piles of dirty laundry or using stacks of books to make it less obvious.

My post-high school set of beliefs aligned incredibly well to the tenets of the Humanist Manifesto. This was the set of beliefs adopted by many people involved in education strategy of the 20th century, most notably, John Dewey, the philosopher who spent a lifetime writing about how to do a takedown of religion through the education system and replace it with secular humanism. “In the course of a long career, Dewey practically reinvented the American system of education from the bottom up.” (from Atheism for Dummies)

To understand that I was indeed indoctrinated was a difficult thing to realize and even admit. But then that’s the idea of indoctrination; the intention is to perform a total eclipse of the mind so that you don’t realize that it’s happening. While I was under the impression that I grew up with faith, I was actively being conditioned to recoil at all things religious and see God as something oppressive that I needed to shake off. The soul itself was excused from my worldview. Since ghosts were not real, neither was the soul. This conclusion was arrived at by design. The system was guiding me to this end.

This isn’t even hidden from us, although if the voting public actually knew about it, they would have objected and never voted for such a scheme. Those who fought against it were mocked and set aside as crackpots. But the plan was exactly to kill off God from public and private life, and as far back as the 1930s this was openly mentioned as part of the plan. Charles Francis Potter said, “Education is the most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday Schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching.” (from Humanism: A New Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930), p. 128.)

The deck was stacked, and the funny thing is that many of us who were indoctrinated toward humanism, now point back at religion and that one hour a week we spent learning about Jesus as the malicious indoctrination program.

In other words, this is very well-done indoctrination because we blame what did not successfully indoctrinate us as the thing that indoctrinated us. It’s so rich in irony I can hardly stand it. But until the scales fall from you eyes, you can’t see this. The bait-and-switch is performed on children and parents in an underhanded way, so that neither parent nor child realizes it has happened, and you blame the lamb as the lion. We blame the Church for an indoctrination that never even happened.

This is also why so many fallen away Catholics have absolutely no idea what Catholicism even is, let alone teaches. But you will hear people blaming the Church for all of their adult maladies and mental issues. Cradle Catholics have long been considered clueless by converts to the faith, and we are. I was living proof. Most of us just get through Baptism, Reconciliation, First Communion, and Confirmation, and know next to nothing, especially in terms of doctrine, and head for the exits.

That is not successful indoctrination. It’s the opposite.

How you live your life is how you are indoctrinated. You can find out easily. Just compare whether you are living your life more closely to the Ten Commandments or to the Fifteen Principles of the Humanist Manifesto. I would be willing to bet that if you are an American living today, and you honestly examine your conscience, you cannot get through the first three commandments. However, I bet you can nod blindly along through all of the Humanist principles because that is the dogma you actually live by. That is how we live, as we have been indoctrinated to live.

The greatest bait and switch is how we came to blame the Church and parents for indoctrinating us when most fallen away Catholics had no concept of anything the Church stood for or against, but we were quick to name our “Catholic Guilt” as the cause of our depression and self-hatred, even though it was manufactured. Anyone that uses the phrase “Catholic Guilt” is guilty of never taking time to read the Catechism to realize that this is a concept that never had existed for two thousand years, but is rather the idea of a campaign to shudder the church as the enemy of the state. I challenge anyone to read the Catechism and find that idea. The label of Catholic Guilt is a lazy way to anoint oneself as a victim, and it is a direct outcome of brainwashing by the media and the public school system, not of the Church itself. Today, as always, the biggest threat to worldly power is Jesus Christ, as it was then, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, until He comes again.

Now when I hear someone mention how they hate organized religion, I nod along because I was once programmed that way, in that same headspace of humanist indoctrination. The fact that I had any knowledge of the Bible is actually quite amazing given I was growing up in a Christian-in-name-only nation and taking part in the humanist public school curriculum of the 1980s and 1990s. The reality is that aside from my occasional experience of witnessing a devout person in active prayer at church, I had never lived a single day in a truly Christian culture. Nor had most Americans, as we had been nudged along a path to atheism, through sports and news and money and self-worship, while keeping God on our lips with no understanding of the word.

We were craftily spun around to face away from God but taught to keep saying the word God. This explains the intense confusion in people today. We are trying to reconcile two worldviews that cannot be reconciled, ever. This is like fire and water trying to repeatedly burn and douse the same material over and over. You either have to pick one or the other, because to try and balance both is insane. What we do then, to maintain sanity, is to choose whatever suits our wants and desires at the time, and only turn to God when he will seem to satisfy our needs. Even then we pray for our will to be done, not God’s will to be done.

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Do you ever get the feeling that you have been indoctrinated?

If you answer “yes,” you are correct. You have been indoctrinated.

If you answer “no,” then you have been successfully indoctrinated.

The interesting thing about this is as a child you don’t seem to get much of a choice in the matter. But as an adult you do. However, it can take years to realize that you have been indoctrinated, and even if you realize it, you may misunderstand unto what you were trained like a dog to like and dislike.

The power of indoctrination looms large over every decision. There is a strong chance that you will come to believe you were indoctrinated by something other than what has actually indoctrinated you. This is the most well-done type of indoctrination. This is the type that plants a deep-rooted worldview that is difficult to cut out, like an oak stump, because the mantras and slogans and ideas are sown when you are young. Once you have done the care and feeding of certain ideas over a lifetime, starting over with a new doctrine may feel far more difficult than just remaining under the shade of whatever oak you watered, even if you sense it’s not quite right.

One thing is certain: when there are multiple doctrines doing battle, you will have confusion, and whatever indoctrination took full root will at some point choke out the other one. You will know which indoctrination won when the crisis points and moments of decision arrive.

There is a wrestling match happening in your head. Thoughts and ideas are elbowing for space in your mind, and it happens throughout your life. Much of the indoctrination programming of our world goes to great effort to convince you that there is only one kind of knowledge, that of the material world and the laws of nature. The aim is to deny that there is a knowledge that is born into you, a spiritual knowledge that transcends human knowledge or the laws of nature. This argument about the spiritual realm is one of the main battles of indoctrination that each individual faces, in a larger war for the hearts and minds of all people. To deny or accept that there is knowledge that goes beyond the intellect, that there is a knowledge that can sense and experience a higher power at work in the world - this is a critical fortress for all sides to claim, as much of the remaining arguments rest upon winning this fundamental battle.

So I grew up thinking that I had been indoctrinated into a Christian mindset and worldview. I was convinced that this was the case. Upon further review, this was not the case. In fact, I didn’t realize for some fifteen years that I was so successfully indoctrinated that my programming led me to believe that I was indoctrinated by a different set of beliefs. This is like the movie Inception, where dreams and sub-dreams plant seeds to convince the sleeping person of an idea. This is depth level 3 on the dream-bubble-up theory of the movie. In the movie, ideas are planted deep in the subconscious mind, so that you assume ideas came from you, but they didn’t. This is what makes the movie interesting. If thoughts do not come from ourselves, then where do they come from? Inception is playing around with the idea of where thoughts come from. Do they come from us? Or do we receive them? Thoughts come from somewhere, and I am going to argue that they come from outside, through the ears and the eyes.

Consider that whatever noun I say will conjure a thought of that item or idea in your mind. If I just say “beach ball” or “umbrella” you will briefly think of that object. When I say “Beach Ball,” you say “Umbrella.”

Beach ball.

Umbrella.

Beach ball.

Umbrella.

Thoughts of beach ball and umbrella in this case did not come from you, but came from sound or sight, prompted by me. You can read the words of hear them, but in either case the thought arrived in your mind from somewhere else. Maybe the combination of beach ball and umbrella brought forth some image of a beach, since they tend to go together. Or maybe it brought out some other scene from your variety of life experiences where beach balls and umbrellas made a connection. Maybe it caused terror for you if some clown carried both of these things, like Stephen King’s IT and the red balloon. Whatever the case, the thought came from outside of you and combined with past thoughts that also came from outside of you, mixing a cocktail of memories and thoughts. This same idea is a billion dollar industry, as billboards for Coors Light and Personal Injury Attorneys rely upon this imagery and perception to trigger your thinking about the desire for a beer or lawyering-up after a fender bender.

We spend a lifetime of receiving images and sounds, starting from the moment we enter the world. Thoughts are driven into our minds through the senses, but some thoughts we imagine as starting from within our own head. But perhaps we don’t create thoughts on our own. Perhaps we receive them - all of them. This is something I had not considered until I started peeling the onion on my belief system. Once I started doing a post-mortem autopsy of my spiritual death, I began to realize that the thoughts I carried and adhered to were things that I didn’t come up with on my own.

There are thoughts of tangible or visible things which we can explain through sensory perception, like the beach ball. But then there are things that are not tangible, like to go up or to go down, to go left or to go right, to be or not to be, which go into a different space that we can’t see or hear. These things also have mutually exclusive options, as we cannot go both down and up or both left and right. We must choose.

We cannot take a shot of whiskey and also decline the offer. We must choose to drink or not to drink. The thought to go down or to go up may be presented to us by situations, such as an escalator. The presentation of an escalator prompts the thought, “Which way?” and a decision must happen to take action. The decision to take action is a critical point of inflection as to your worldview, because for these thoughts that become questions, where you can do one thing but not another, you must decide that there is either free will as the driving force or that your actions are pre-determined and unavoidable. Thoughts, wherever they may come from, result in the need to choose or take action.

“The devil made me do it” is often mocked as old-time religious nonsense. If you agree that it’s religious nonsense from the dark ages, this is in itself an interesting thought, because if you find the devil to be absurd, you may already know which side has won the indoctrination battle. If you don’t believe in the soul or spirits, then of course you don’t believe in the devil or spirits guiding you to make decisions. If souls don’t exist, then by definition thoughts must come from the material world, from your brain itself, which interacts with the senses.

If no mysterious spirit is at play in the world, then we are reduced to the laws that govern nature. This worldview means truncating or slicing all possibility of the transcendent or divine from being the generator of thoughts. No angelic or demonic guides can be said to be helping make decisions. You are then the only thing responsible because you generate your own thoughts and make decisions without any nudge or assistance from outside. The cheese stands alone, so to speak.

The interesting thing here is that these two worldviews, one that denies spirits and one that believes in spirits, are opposites. For those acknowledging a soul and spirits, thoughts are received and decisions may be guided, but the final choice must be selected in order to take action. For those denying a soul and spirits, thoughts are generated and decisions are unavoidable because of genetics and/or circumstances. Free will must become a casualty of pure materialism. There is also an extreme spiritual worldview that can kill free will, where all outcomes are God’s will and no human choice is needed, to the point that even the slightest decision is pre-determined by God’s will.

A purely material human with no soul would perform actions and decisions because he was “born this way.” But a purely material human would then be a robot. In this worldview, all decisions are not so much decisions as pre-determined results based on biology and physics. If all is scientifically explained, then outcomes cannot be altered, and then you get the luxury of justification for any action that happens where you can say, “Not my fault. I was born this way.” Take for example, if you spent last night scrolling through porn websites before bed, it was not a choice but just the way you are. It was bound to happen.

But few would go that far. On the other side there is the spiritual person who declares that all outcomes were God’s will with no human input at all, to the point that selecting Parmesan Garlic or Asian Zing sauce for chicken wings becomes a manifestation of God’s will. This is a kind of predestined spiritual robot with no actual choice in matters.

We have a mushy middle where we deny the soul for the most part, but still want to cling to free-will, especially when someone commits a crime. The odd thing is that if you believe in free-will but reject the idea of “the devil made me do it” then you still have to explain decisions where people choose to do evil instead of good. The irony of believing that you did something because you were “born this way” is the exact opposite of saying “the devil made me do it.” In both cases, it’s not your fault personally, but something beyond you.

The usual villain for those holding this view of free-will without spirits is that the choice to do evil happened because of circumstances or other people. In other words, something exterior to the person caused the bad act. In all cases, evil must be explained, and explained away, because it’s here in the world and not going away, at least not yet. The problem with “Born this way” is that there is no fixing the problem, while at least with the argument, “The devil made me do it” there is a way to battle that problem.

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Some of life’s tests may have already passed you by, but another will come, and even if you responded poorly in past tests, you can react differently in the future. You can change. Lady Gaga is wrong: she was not “Born this Way.” She was not born wearing a meat suit and starved for fame; she chose that path. She was born with an amazing talent, yes, and I enjoy her songs. But the meat suit did not form on Lady Gaga in the womb, that was a bolt-on after-market addition.

Likewise, you were not born a drunk or sex obsessed or not-good-enough or quick to anger or food-crazed. You allowed all that to happen. You chose those patterns, just like I did. God did not make you surf porn or drink Jack Daniels or post mean comments online. We are being guided to that idea, however, that we are “born” in these states, which is the greatest lie our world today is selling, with massive reach and power through media.

While you may have done bad things in the past, and yes, we are fallen creatures, we also have free will. If you are convinced that you can’t change, that you can’t control what thoughts enter your mind, then you have lost what it means to be human.

We are the gatekeepers of our thoughts. While we are born with the instinct to do the wrong thing, we don’t have to do the wrong thing. We choose it, and we do so because someone or something is suggesting and inviting us into temptation. That is the job of modern marketing, in case you were unaware. The notion to pick up your phone and go to a porn site is a thought that you allow to enter your consciousness. Because you are convinced that it’s harmless, that it doesn’t hurt anyone, and that it’s natural instinct, you have walked your free will right into the trap. The choice is made, but a different choice could have been made. There is nothing “natural” about picking up a phone and looking at nude people having sex. There is nothing so objectifying and cheapening to human beings than to see them as nothing more than gyrating pleasure monkeys who can titillate your base desires. And there is nothing so damaging to your existing relationships than to satisfy your need for interaction with images on a screen, while real people who want love and respect sit in another room, occupying the same house or apartment as you do.

We can rip out the old thoughts and plant a garden of good thoughts that lead us to Christ. But first you have to choose it. What you have been told is that you were “born this way” because the entertainment and advertising worlds transmit that thought to you constantly, because you are a consumer, a customer. You are not a person to them. Convincing you that you do not have free will is a full-time job. You are a data point, a row in a database, an object. They will never try to remind you that you were made in the image and likeness of God and that you have free will. They will never tell you that what you are searching for is rest, for peace, for something to fill the emptiness you feel on Sunday nights. If they tell you that, you will likely stop pursuing the accumulation of goods and services and achievements. They want you walled in with your fear and pride, because then you receive their transmissions. What you receive, what you allow to enter your thoughts, becomes what you believe. If you doubt this, sit quietly in a room with no sound, no phone, no book, no TV, and see what thoughts enter your mind. What enters your mind will be telling: a song, an insult, an idea, a political issues, an issue at your kid’s school, a grudge, a product, a TV show, a news story that irritated you. Distractions will come because the thoughts you allow in are what your mind and soul are gnawing on.

To be free today, to be the curator of your own thoughts, you must take action. It requires effort. Believe it or not, a lifetime of pop-culture and subliminal messages can be boxed up and moved out. But you have to take action.

The best way to break free is to start now. Say and repeat the Jesus prayer, constantly: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Say it now.

“Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Say it again.

Pause your reading or listening, and say it fives times slowly.

Ok, welcome back.

Make that prayer the default thought in your head, a rolling meditation, and it will be like Jesus is in your mind, cleaning up your soul. When you say that prayer, he is flipping tables in your temple. He’s like ServPro restoring a house after a fire. That little prayer alone can chase out the cattle, shame the money-changers, and soon, you will be sweeping a tidy floor. All of the garbage begins to leave when that prayer becomes the song you hear at all times. And for God’s sake, literally, for God, put down the damn phone. Leave it behind.

You have to keep doing this practice. Just like any shop floor or school hallway, there is a lot of traffic in your temple. You must be sweeping every day. Like with fitness, you don’t get fit in a single day. You don’t get saved one day and never have to think about it again. If someone believes they were saved five years ago and he needs no work today, that is like someone who ran a half-marathon five years ago and tells you that he’s still fit, but you can see his beer-gut hanging over his pants. There is work to be done. Always. Humility and conversion and working on salvation is an active, daily task. Don’t be fooled, because that is how you slide backward. Thinking you are done is how the cattle and money-changers re-enter the temple. Pick your metaphor. You must weed the garden. You must stay fit. You must sweep the floor daily. You were not born to sin. You choose to do so, and you’ll do it again as soon as you become complacent.

Humility is a derivative word of humiliation. Humility sounds better, but the full experience is humiliation and no one wants that. That sounds really bad. It feels really bad. Why would anyone want that? We don’t, but we get to experience it whether we want to or not.

This is why this is so hard for Nicodemus and the characters in Jumanji, because no one in their right mind wants to be humiliated. No one seeks to become helpless, despised, ill, cast out, hated, diseased, beat up, kicked, laughed at, mocked, or excluded. Nicodemus is none of these things. As a Pharisee he is admired, wealthy, even healthy. In terms of today, he has it all. A job that is respected, status in the community, a fine education, good prospects for the future, and like many of us today, because of all this he will never be born in the spirit.

Who will be? The prostitutes and the tax collectors. Jesus is inviting Nicodemus to change, but he’s not sending back the RSVP. Nicodemus could take up his cross, but he won’t. He could reject his status and power, but it’s not registering and probably not the least bit inviting. He believes in his own righteousness too much, just like the Israelites before the snakebite, just like the Jumanji characters before the game begins.

What the story of the bronze serpent “raised up” and the story of Jesus “raised up” on the cross have in common becomes apparent after you compare the two stories. I find that it helps to think of both of these images. This is why I don’t like bare wooden crosses, ones that lack the body of Christ. The risen Jesus was never hanging on the cross. You’ll see these images of a Jesus with his arms out, rising up, kind of hovering outward from the cross. I understand the artist’s vision, or I think I do. They want to merge the death with the resurrection. The symbol of torture becomes the symbol of hope. Yes, I’m totally with that. I get it. There’s no way to heaven except through the cross. There is no resurrection without the death. I get it, the artist wants to merge the pain and suffering with the hope and glory. I don’t mean to imply these are bad. Bring on the scared art! There are so many amazing portrayals of Christ. Yes…it’s great - these are beautiful statues. But…to see the purpose of his death, I think we are meant to see that death.

The crucifix with the crucified Jesus, with the nails in his hands and feet, with his sagging body, with the crown of thorns, with the spear gash in his side, with the whip marks on his legs and back, with the emaciated and dehydrated body, with all of that suffering and pain - that is what sin looks like. As I’ve mentioned before, you can imagine the writhing and squirming that happened on that cross for three hours. The image almost becomes like a serpent if you meditate on it, because the ugliness of it is undeniable. It is a sickening image to press into, but that is where we have to go, into that suffering and pain. That’s three hours, 180 minutes, of brutal pain and mockery and thirst before getting to the words, “It is finished.”

That is what we must see, it’s what we have to look at, and witness. Like the Israelites looking up at the cause of their pain, so must we look up at the cause of our pain. Did Christ cause our pain? No. Sin caused your pain. God did not cause your pain; our sin, yours and mine, caused it. We are all in this together. We are all made in the image and likeness of God, and we are all fallen. It’s incorrect to say that my sins only affect me, or that I don’t do anything to hurt anyone else. We all hurt each other. There is a popular saying going around today that goes like this: “Hurt people, hurt people.” And it’s true. It’s accurate. The only problem is that we’ve all been hurt. We usually trot out this line to explain someone else’s behavior, to project a reason onto their apparent flawed actions. But all of us have been hurt. All of us hurt others. The great mistake we are making today is to pretend that our actions are sinless and that we have no flaws. We like to act like Nicodemus and the Israelites before the snakebite.

To make sense of this need to see our flaws, we must look up and accept our shortcomings and defects and weaknesses, because what we thought was strength was weakness.

If we acknowledge our weaknesses and sins, we must stare up at them. To feel them staring back at us is a good start. On that cross with the body of Jesus we can see what has bitten us. What is it? What’s bitten us? Sin. The serpent is sin. The body of Jesus shows us our sin.

What has brought us pain and suffering? What is the cause of our struggle? We are never too concerned about God when our strengths are getting us what we want, but we are quick to blame God, and we become desperate for a solution from God when our usual fixes and band-aids stop working. To be re-born, you must look upon the weaknesses and you must nod in agreement. True self-knowledge is this: you are not perfect. You will never be perfect. More importantly, the day is coming when you cannot save yourself and no one around you can save you either. That coach was lying about how strong you are. That advertisement about you being flawless was just selling product to hit a quarterly goal. That song about the fierceness and the fight in you didn’t account for your weakness. But life will raise them up for you to see, someday, somehow, somewhere along the way.

The instrument of torture that the Romans used is a piece of wood, but what was raised up and put on the cross is the embodiment of our sins. God came to us here in the form of Jesus, and he allowed us to see what sin does, what it looks like, how vulgar and ugly it is. We were able to see true goodness in the life of Jesus, in the holy family. Then we were shown the wretchedness of what our sin does, through his passion and death. God came here to make clear what we cannot easily see. In the Catholic church we believe that the Sacraments make what is invisible, visible. Jesus on the cross makes the invisibility of our sins fully visible. When we deny that we have sin, we deny God. God doesn’t disappear when we deny him or deny that sin exists. No, he’s still there. We go down the path of self-harm, thinking we have no flaws. Then the flaws flourish and lead us directly to the place where we have to acknowledge what we attempted to flee or ignore.

The funny thing is that we can talk about God all day, like Nicodemus, but if we deny that we have weaknesses, then we cannot know God. That is what God came here to show us, because the other signs and metaphors and prophecies weren’t getting through. The pain and suffering of Jesus, who is God, must be witnessed, because he was everything that was good, true, and beautiful. And we killed him. And we’d do it again. Except we won’t get a second chance because the second arrival will be like lightning across the sky, with no time to react or respond. We cannot fathom how the second coming will be, just as no one, aside from the prophets, could have imagined how the first coming would happen.

God walked among us, and in our sins we rejected him, just like we do every day, and to be healed we must look upon our error and admit it. Without this admittance, we cannot be healed, we cannot be born in the spirit. We’re like Nicodemus looking at God like he’s our little brother instead of Our Father. We want to pat him on the head. We think we are in charge, but we’re not. In order to love God and to love one another we have to see our own failures and weaknesses in their fullness. Believing requires that we admit our flaws. This is why Jesus tells the Pharisees that the prostitutes and tax collectors will enter the kingdom before anyone else. The ones who are in open rebellion against God and despised by the world, are dangerously close to hitting bottom, to reaching the state of helplessness that is required to be born in the spirit. Today the prostitutes and the drunks and the mentally ill are still the ones that find the kingdom, and many of those people that you hate today will find the kingdom before you, because they are, like Dante, heading all the way down to the bottom, all the way, and as long as they don’t get stuck on one of the rings of hell and stay there, they will make it. The mistake most of us make is to cling to one of those rings of hell and think we’ve made it to the bottom, and so we just remain in hell without falling to feel the full impact of helplessness, which is what we really want and need, because once in that state, you will pop out the other side. You cannot get to the mountain of Purgatory without going all the way down into the Inferno, just like you cannot get to heaven without going through the cross.

That is what the end of the movie Jumanji shows in the transformation of the characters. They entered detention as mostly unlikable people. They went down into the Inferno. Through the ordeal, the characters have all been re-born into the world. They are changed. They will never be the same. Why? Because they went all the way down, all the way to the bottom, and saw their hideous flaws in the light of their vulnerability. All of them died in the game and received a second chance. They experienced the fear of death, came to understand loss. Through that journey of pain and suffering and rebirth, they came to believe. In their helplessness, they found the jewel of faith. They believed in the mystery and the miracle and they made it back. When someone says they don’t believe in God because of the pain and suffering in the world, you can assure them that no one ever comes to believe in God until they have suffered. The faith of a child becomes lost in adulthood, and only through pain and suffering can we return to that childlike faith and be reborn in the spirit. Spiritual birth comes by pain just like physical birth. That is how you are set free. That is how you come to know God. That is the only way that anyone is ever set free.

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The reason Jesus tells this to Nicodemus is because poor Nic doesn’t know that his perceived strength is his weakness. Nicodemus in the Gospel is like the “Fridge” in Jumanji. He lives in a position of power and status in the world. The Pharisees cannot “enter the kingdom” of God, they cannot put the jewel in the mountain and yell Jumanji! because they believe they have no weaknesses. You can’t be healed unless you understand your limitations, your weaknesses, your failures. No one with the snakebites in the desert with Moses can be healed until they know that they cannot save themselves. No one in the desert knows how pathetically weak they are unless a snake has bitten them. No one knows that they cannot save themselves unless they reach a level of suffering and pain that has no solution beyond that of a savior beyond understanding.

Jesus says, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” (Jn 3:13)

The Israelites’ snakebite can be seen as literal or a metaphor - take it however you like. Either way it works. Because I didn’t find my weaknesses, not really, until I felt helpless. I would’t even admit weakness until I reached a point where a savior was needed, where my own efforts and outside human help couldn’t provide any comfort or healing. This is strange contradiction, the one that you see in the desert, in the conversation with Nicodemus, and yes, even in Jumanji. This realization happens in hospitals and in churches and in recovery meetings around the world every day. Unfortunately, this light doesn’t come unless we suffer, unless we have pain.

We are going to have pain either way. But you can ride it out to the end, to the last breath, never admitting weakness. It’s a choice that you make. The suffering, we think, is to be blamed on God, but when we are successful or comfortable, we never once think to thank God. We only want a God that makes life easy. That’s not how it works. God wants to draw us toward him. Signs and clues and breadcrumbs are everywhere once you start to look, but for me, it took the full snakebite treatment. Because without it, I would not have turned. I would not have looked at the bronze serpent on the pole unless I felt desperate for help. I would never have asked for help. I would never had believed that strength was my weakness, and I never would have come to the light.

“For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed. But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.” (Jn 3:20)

For context, this quote is near the end of the Jesus’ discussion around with Nicodemus being “reborn.” I’ve gone into that at some length in other episodes, but there’s a side of this discussion that fits here, that goes with the strange scene in the desert with the snakes.

Creation is painful. You cannot make new wine without cutting the vines and crushing the grapes. Birth is painful. There is no question that birth is an ordeal for both mother and child. Anyone who has even been bedside at a birth knows this is a fact, that the pain and suffering of childbirth is second to none, and yet…and yet the moment a baby is born there is so often the onset of uninhibited love. I realize there can be more suffering, medically and mentally, but when a healthy baby and mother unite, there is a joy that cannot be hidden or recreated. This is the type of joy that nothing else in life can match, or even come close to in comparison. Creating a new life takes immense pain to break through to joy. New life cannot come forward without pain.

This is what Jesus is telling Nicodemus, and it’s what is happening in the desert, and of course Jesus is talking about the spiritual birth, not physical. He says multiple times that you must be born in the spirit. This seems like some cryptic stuff here, but you need the secret decoder ring, and you don’t get to send in box tops for this ring. You have to live it. To be born of the spirit requires getting bitten by the snake. Likewise, Fridge has to go into Jumanji as Mouse and lose all his physical advantages. To be helpless is to be bitten by the snakes. While there can be physical pain that we experience, there can be mental or spiritual suffering that matches or even exceeds pain in the muscles, bones, and nerves. All who are born physically must be born “of the spirit,” which may come easily for some, but for many can only come through pain and suffering like that of childbirth. This is why the metaphor of “being born” and “coming to the light” makes sense to those of us born to this world. Babies must come “to the light” and the spiritually dead and blind must come “to the light.”

Jesus answered, “Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of flesh is flesh and what is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I told you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (Jn 3:5)

We are body and soul, not one or the other. We are this merger of both, fully enmeshed together, and although from Descartes onward we’ve tried to separate them, they cannot be separated. If we attempt to separate them, then we lose half of our being, we deny our fullness. The body and soul go together, but each must be born in different ways. All of the characters in Jumanji were physically born, but they were not spiritually born until they entered the spirit world of the video game and did combat with their weaknesses. They had to wrestle and suffer with life after losing all that they believed made them strong. They had to look up at their weaknesses, to see their flaws raised up before them (literally, as Mouse’s character traits are raised up on a virtual billboard or card for him to see). Before entering the game they were puffed up with pride hiding behind protective shields, and thrusting swords out at the world. But those shields and swords led them to prison. They all ended up in the same place and their only redemption came from being rendered helpless, recognizing their flaws, seeing true value in every face, and ultimately believing in something greater than them could set them free.

All of the Israelites writhing in the desert were physically born already, but they were not spiritually born until they were bitten and weak. In their confidence, they rejected God, using their own words and strength as swords and shields. They didn’t need God, since they felt strong. Then came the bites, the fiery snakes, and the pain and suffering, for which no cure or medical treatment could solve. Once helpless they had to look up at the image of what bit them, what caused their helplessness. They had to look up at the serpent on the pole? Why a serpent? Because that was the cause of their weakness. And what does the serpent represent in the Bible? Sin. A snake or serpent or slippery, shiny tempter that bites is always and undeniably the representative symbol of badness in the Bible. The bitten, the fallen, had to look up at what caused their weakness and acknowledge that fact. The thing that caused their weakness was the snake, which is to say sin. And only then, in the desert, when they awakened to that truth were they healed. Then they “lived,” they were healed, they were re-born in the spirit. Only by looking at the mysterious pole that held up what ailed them were they restored to health and good order. Why did they have to look up at the serpent? Why does this matter?

They had to admit their sins. They had to pass through the fire to be burned of their imperfections. Interestingly, they are said to be “fiery snakes” that bit them. This is critical to understand about this weird story in the desert. The Hebrews have to stop denying that they have weaknesses, that they have sins, in order to be repaired. To deny that we have weaknesses and sin is to reject God. It’s really that simple. The denial of sin is the rejection of God. That is the story in the Garden, where the first people are tempted away from God, persuaded that they will become “like gods,” only to find out it was a lie, and that they can never become God by taking the easy path. Like Adam and Eve, the bitten Hebrews cannot elevate themselves to be God without humility. This is one of the odd contradictions of Christian wisdom that you hear over and over, where to go up, you must first go down, and “the last will be first,” and “he who exalts himself will be humbled.” It’s not like trying to find Waldo, this message is all over the Bible. The second son is chosen over the first, the poor receive the spirit before the wealthy, the uneducated understand more than the teachers, and the suffering servant is the king.

To return to God requires admitting our weaknesses and letting down our guard. Then you will begin to move toward the light. To not admit weakness is to stay hidden behind the wall you have built. The wall that you believe is protecting you, this strong front you put up, is not made of brick. It’s paper. It’s just paper that you imagine is brick. And it needs to be punched through. The funny thing is that we build up this wall with diplomas and cars and careers and fitness and fashion and we think others admire us for these things, but they can see the paper thin veneer we’re wrapped inside. We just can’t see it ourselves because it’s hard to admit we don’t have everything all figured out.

I think I read this “bronze serpent” story years ago and considered this to be some kind of magic or voodoo going on, and felt that it was odd for Judaism and Christianity to say that the Canaanite fertility rites were bad magic while this bronze serpent story was healing by God. But was this some kind of magic healing by the bronze serpent?

No. Here’s the difference and it’s so critical to understanding the Bible and reading it. They are not healed by the statue of the bronze serpent. They are healed by their humility and their belief. The statue is just an object. It has no power. God is the only one with power. But those who believe, are healed. Those who get relief, do so by belief. Belief enters when they admit their faults. The door to faith opens up when you surrender. The magic rites of other faiths believe that the statue, the object, or the incantation has power. The sacrifice to false Gods is making a transaction. The one God doesn’t play that game. Moses is calling the bitten people to repent, to turn back to God, in order to be healed. How will it heal them? By their surrender to God they will be healed. The statue is as dumb as the rock its made from. But the surrender to God changes people from the inside out. Surrender must happen in order for the medicine, the Holy Spirit, to take in your soul. Faith is the submission of the will and the intellect to God, and if you are only trying to make a deal with God, you aren’t submitting, you are wheeling and dealing.

This is why Nicodemus doesn’t understand what Jesus is saying. The idea of surrender may bounce around in his mind, but he doesn’t do it, or he doesn’t understand it, or maybe he can’t understand it. I think that’s it. He can’t understand it. Why not? Because he doesn’t believe he has a weakness. Pride is can seem a nearly immovable block, and it takes the unstoppable force of the Holy Spirit to dissolve it. Or if you’re lucky, you just get the experience of St. Paul, knocked off a horse by a bright light and it’s all taken care of in a flash. But that’s not how it usually works. Nicodemus did not see the light, despite sitting right in front of it.

His righteousness blinds him. So he cannot be born in the spirit. Sadly, his education, wealth, and deep knowledge of scripture will never produce the pain and suffering that will lead him to admit that he has weakness. Like Fridge in Jumanji, his weakness is his strength, or his strength is his weakness. You can say it either way. Nicodemus just doesn’t know it yet.

His pride will never allow him to be humble, even though both may attempt to act humble in public. Humility usually comes by pain and suffering. You can’t force it. You can try to get it by self-denial, by fasting or forgoing sweets and TV and soda, but it’s not the same thing. Denying yourself food and entertainment will help, and should be done for practice, but it will not likely produce the full effect. Mortification has its purposes and can most certainly draw you closer to God. But self-denial alone to achieve humility is like using a flight simulator versus flying a real jet. The former has no real consequences when the plane crashes, and the latter one kills you (and perhaps many others). To use another example, using self-denial to achieve humility like using virtual reality to “walk” through New York City on a summer day compared to feeling the heat of the sidewalk on your shoes, smelling the garbage, and hearing the traffic noise. Virtual reality is no substitute for reality.

Don’t let me mislead anyone here: self-denial is worthwhile. Self-denial is training for the real thing. If you want to kickstart your prayer life and spiritual awakening, there are tools and events that can ignite the fire. Exodus 90, silent retreats, Ignatian spirituality: go and do these things, as the spiritual fruit is real. These things are not replacements for the tests in life, but they prepare you and guide you when the tests show up at your door, and rest assured the test or tests are approaching.

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I’m going to do something annoying. Or rather, I’m going to do something that I found annoying when I was fallen away from belief. This won’t be annoying to those who have faith, but it will to those who don’t. I am going to take a non-Christian movie and talk about it in terms of Christian redemption and rebirth. That’s the annoying thing I’m going to do.

As I said, this won’t irritate everyone, only some. Those in the choir won’t mind, but those outside the church will find it irritating.

While I was cavorting in the fields of unbelief, after falling away from faith, if I heard someone interpret a movie as a Christian film or explain how a character was a “type” of Jesus figure, I cringed. During that time, I felt that the Christians encroached on pop culture by twisting characters and plots into parallels that didn’t actually exist. I felt the Christians were desperately trying to remain relevant in a culture that had moved on. Furthermore, I felt that the pop culture should not be interfered with in this way. Now I see irony in this reaction. When I believed that I had no religion, I was offended that the art and film of secular culture was being somehow attacked.

Every hit movie that came out would soon result in some Christian “zealot” interpreting the story as a suffering and redemption plot that explained why we needed a savior. (Notice how we only call religious people zealots, but we reserve the term for when they observe their actual beliefs? We never call secular people zealots, even though they follow their set of beliefs openly and browbeat others who don’t as wrong. This may also have to be a topic for future episodes.)

In particular, I recall this interpretation happening with the movie, The Matrix. As soon as Christians watched this movie, articles about the parallels between Neo and Christ emerged. The Christians seized upon it, borrowing the movie’s success for use in evangelizing sci-fi fans.

This irritated me a great deal, mostly because the parallels were obvious, but I didn’t want to admit it. Let’s look at the high points, without going too far into it. The name Neo is a scrambling of the word “One.” Neo is the savior of the world. His sidekick girlfriend is named Trinity. The place they are trying to get to is called Zion. The ship is named Nebuchadnezzar. There’s a small band of believers, a betrayal, and an evil force. There are demonic agents that can appear and disappear. There is a death and even a resurrection. There are so many other Biblical references that it doesn’t take a genius or even a stretch of the brain muscle to map the Matrix movie to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

Christian writers have always looked for signs of Christ in works of art, and will always do so, just as atheist and humanist and scientist and communist writers will try to do the same for their worldview. For every author that supports Christianity, there is another trying to tear it down. All is fair in love and war, but also in ideology and propaganda, as every side will have defenders that cross lines of decency and employ every logical fallacy and stoke fears like a furnace. Not every debate is as charitable and honest as say, Jimmy Akin vs. Bart Ehrman, where we get to see the best of the defenders sparring in kindness and putting forth their best argument.

Let’s get started. In the next few episodes, I’m going to talk about the movie Jumanji! (the 2017 version) and the character named “Mouse” Finbar, and somehow I’m going to tie that over to Moses and Nicodemus.

Anyone annoyed yet? I hope not. I have a long ways to go. Let’s get going.

In the movie, Jumanji!, four high school kids of different cliques are magically brought into a video game where they must survive by collaboration to escape. Jumanji (2017 version) is where The Breakfast Club meets The Hunger Games. In fact, it’s worth pausing here to mention that if you want to write a hit book or movie, you might do well to combine several prior hits in a new way, but you must use high school age kids or no one will buy it or read it. Jumanji did a nice job of this, as did The Hunger Games, which to me seemed to be a remix of The Most Dangerous Game and The Lottery. High school age kids make more interesting characters than middle-aged men and women, because everyone has their own coming of age story, whereas not everyone has their own mid-life crisis story (yet).

I’m going to focus on Kevin Hart's character. In the video game, Kevin Hart’s character “Mouse” is upset to learn that “strength is his weakness.” This comment is tossed off as a comic one-liner in the movie, but I would like to suggest that this is what the whole movie is about.

Kevin Hart's character in the video game is the opposite of his real world self. In the real world, the actor Ser'Darius Blain plays Anthony "Fridge" Johnson, who is a high school football stud. He's handsome, he's got youth, he’s got looks, and most of all, he is strong. Even his name and nickname sound powerful, and he only selects his video game character because he misread the nickname as “Moose,” only to learn that the actual name of the character is Franklin “Mouse” Finbar. A pixelated TV screen made the word difficult to read, causing him to misread Mouse as Moose.

Once inside the video game, Fridge is in disbelief upon discovering his character's skills and weapons. One of his weaknesses is “strength.” He says, “Strength is my weakness. Hey, can I...quick question. How is strength my weakness? Somebody explain that to me.”

The whole movie goes on to explain that to Fridge, so that when he returns to the world, he understands that line better than he ever dreamed. He’s changed. He’s not the same person. It’s like he has been re-born.

We’ve heard this story before.

That is what the movie is about. The movie is explaining this to all of us. While we laugh at Kevin Hart's perfect timing and way of telling jokes, the message of how strength can be your greatest weakness is being broadcast and decoded to us through body humor.

Strength is his weakness. Why? Because in the "Fridge" character we see a high school life where he uses his strength as a hammer to get what he wants, to have his way. He has a weakling do his homework for him. He is above the crowd because of his athletic prowess. All four characters in the movie have something similar happening, but Fridge is my focus here, even though I can relate to any of them. The story is a process of purgation of the high schoolers’ flawed thinking.

Jumanji is a story about recognizing our weaknesses and coming to live with them, to embrace our inadequacies, to be at peace with our flaws without celebrating our flaws. In religious terms, this is called sin. Yes, we’re already going there. The movie is explaining to us why we need redemption, why we need salvation. Sorry, I had to go there - to the “s” word - sin. But if you’ve listened to any of this series, you know the “s” word is going to come up every time.

We don't like the word "sin" today, but whatever euphemism is used, the best word to describe our weaknesses and flaws is sin. Why is that? Because these weaknesses all drive the behavior of the high school students to do things that they don't want to do. They are all hiding behind some smokescreen to tell themselves and the world that they have no weakness. None are being honest and open, none want to be exposed, and these weaknesses bring all of them to after-school detention, which is a metaphor for how we put ourselves in our own prisons through our identity lies. We choose to live in hell because of what we cannot give up, or refuse to admit. Jumanji is similar to Dante’s experience in the Inferno. The characters must go all the way down, all the way to the bottom of self-knowledge, in order to get to the mountain. They cannot discover their weakness, their flaw, their fig leaf, unless they experience humiliation and learn that what they have been gripping so tightly is a handle attached to nothing.

Finally, I can get to the Jesus part, because obviously I’ve been leading up to it for some time. Yes, Jumanji and Jesus. We’ve arrived.

There are two scenes that I’m going to tie together where the question of “how is strength my weakness?” is answered. The first is with Moses in the desert, the second is with Jesus and Nicodemus.

In his clandestine meeting with Nicodemus, Jesus explains what he is here on earth to accomplish. This is the conversation which surrounds the famous verse known as John 3:16, perhaps the only Bible verse that many American football fans have memorized or are at least aware of by chapter and verse. Keith Urban also has a song quoting this verse, titled John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16, so it’s the kind of Bible verse that both cafeteria Christians and diehard Biblical scholars can chat about together. It’s good common ground. The Moses story is less well-known, but it goes directly along with the conversation with Nicodemus.

In this conversation, Jesus drops a reference to a scene from the Old Testament book of Numbers. The story is one where the people of Israel have rejected God, and God has sent fiery snakes to bite them as punishment. So we’re off to a good plot right away because we have whining, rejection, anger, conflict, betrayal, complaining, and writhing pain. The Israelites in the desert have similarities to the video game exiles in Jumanji.

Since Nicodemus is a well-read Pharisee, he knows the story. Jesus just has to mention this snaky scene and he knows what the reference means. But we need to go into it a bit, since it’s not as well known today. This snake biting story in Numbers has everything that makes for a good HBO series, but it’s much better because all of this happens in about five to ten sentences. Also, there are only three characters, so we don’t have to waste twenty hours of our lives getting through a three year slow-burning series that could have been one episode. I think that’s what I like about the Bible more and more. So much is said in terse, short verses, because the ancient sacred writers didn’t have endless paper or scrolling screens to waste words on. The sacred writers had to be concise, unlike me.

In their suffering, the bitten people ask Moses for help. The snake bites are killing them. Moses is instructed by God to put a bronze statue of a “fiery serpent” onto a “pole,” and the pole is lifted up for all to see, and those who look upon the statue will live. Now a pole in ancient times had to be wood, since they didn’t have steel or aluminum, so yes, it’s a piece of wood….like…the cross. But I won’t go there. Let’s just leave that part alone for now. Moving on.

Lifting a bronze serpent on a wood pole, hmm…this seems strange. This feels like an idol of some kind. We have a statue lifted up on a pole. The people look to a statue, and it’s a statue of a snake, and they are healed. We’re all quite familiar with what snakes tend to represent in the Bible. A serpent is the evil one in the Garden of Eden, although I’ve read that a better translation might be “shiny one.” Whatever animal talked to Eve, the best representation of it seems to be a snake or a serpent. And now Moses is telling people to…look at a snake to be healed?

This scene in Numbers was very confusing to me. But when read along with the conversation of Nicodemus in John 3, I can start to understand the layers of meaning in both of these stories. I’ll probably spend far too long (as usual) linking Jumanji to Nicodemus to Moses, but here we are, and now I have to keep going.

First, what is happening in the desert with Moses and these fiery serpents? (Numbers 21:4-9)

The fiery serpents bite and kill many of the Israelites in the desert, who were complaining about God, and were wondering (once again) why Moses has brought them to the desert in the first place. This is like the leitmotif of the Old Testament, like a background song on a long movie, singing, “Why God? Why Moses? Why didn’t we just stay in Egypt and eat and drink and remain slaves?”

The people forget quickly, like they always do, because the draw of comfort and ease makes them angry at God. Whenever any difficulty arises, they reject God or they blame God for their troubles. However, some of the people appeal to Moses for help, because these snakebites are killing them. It’s really bad. But they appeal to Moses in an important way. God shows mercy, and tells Moses to construct a serpent out of bronze and raise it up on a pole. Those who were bitten by snakes are to look up at the pole, and they will be healed.

What? Come again?

This is one of the strangest Old Testament stories of all to me. This was one of those bizarre stories that eroded my faith because in about two paragraphs, this story seems to toss out a lot of magical, confusing, weird, and conflicting messages. Its seemed as stable as Uranium-239. I just could never make sense of this bronze serpent story.

This “serpent-on-pole” is often depicted in art as a cross with a snake draped over it. This could make sense. To hold the serpent on a pole, if it was just set on the pole, it would need a kind of crossbar to hold it, or obviously it would just fall to the ground. However, it's not clear because the text says, "set it on a pole." This could mean literally a long stick that the serpent is wrapped around, but could also mean a cross shape. Obviously, in my bias, I would prefer to think of this image as a cross with the serpent hung upon it, but I'm not sure that the book of Numbers says that. In any case, I don't think it matters, because the meaning of what the story is about dovetails with what Jesus talks about with Nicodemus. That is what's important.

The shape of the pole is speculation and not necessary for me to dwell on. This is a common danger for me, to start interpreting things when I have no language background and not enough Biblical knowledge. Sometimes I can get drawn into symbols more than I should, because digging into the religious truth is where the Eureka! moment usually happens. These discoveries of meaning in the text are more important than certain details. I enjoy the allegory and historical and literal reading, because all are necessary to read the Bible, but to me those often are arrows and clues to the timeless religious truths, and perhaps most importantly as the pointers to Jesus, and our ultimate need for a savior.

When the Israelites are bitten by the poisonous snakes, they suffer. Many of them die. In pain, they cry out for help. The venom is in them, causing fever or swelling or some kind of medical emergency. They are stuck in a kind of hell that has no escape and no cure.

The snakes were sent as a punishment from God, which modern people always loathe to read because it seems like the petty punishing God, and not the merciful magnanimous God. What I love about these stories is the movement along the slider bar of justice and mercy, where we can see both in play. We want the God who tells us, “It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.” Of course we do! Who doesn’t want that? I remember eating a freezy-pop as a kid before asking if I could have one. Or I would have a cookie halfway eaten, and then stand near a hall corner to ask for permission to eat a cookie, holding the cookie behind my back like crossed fingers. Plus, I was going to eat the rest of it regardless of whether or not I had permission to do so.

However the situation came to be for the Israelites, there is suffering and they are desperate for relief. Let’s just focus on that. There is pain. There is suffering, and this is just like the world that we live in. We can relate to this pain, even if ours did not come from a snakebite. We are in the situation of suffering and pain. We all experience this, we feel it. We wish things were otherwise. Some pain is more acute, some is more chronic, but we all have it.

The question is: what do we do about it?

There is no escape, there is no free pass, and there is pain enough for all. This is what the characters in Jumanji come to realize, very quickly, once the game is eating them. They can’t escape, they can’t hide behind their muscles, or phones, or education, or uniqueness. They can’t hide at all. To do nothing is to die. They first learn that their instinct for survival is strong.

Of course, this problem of pain is the number one argument against believing in a loving God, which is the same today as when the Israelites were bitten in the desert by the fiery snakes. This has not changed. Suffering makes us question a loving, creator God just as much today as it did 3,000 years ago. So what happens with the snakes?

The snakes bite the people and there is much suffering. The people go to Moses and they ask him for help. What's important is to realize how they ask for help. They say, "We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord." In other words, they ask with humility. Recognizing their error, is the most important step here. The suffering in the desert has shown their weakness in faith for God. So that is the first weakness. But the snakes have given them far more pain, and renders them desperate. They are weaker than they ever realized. When they were in comfort, they were able to be bold and bossy. When they felt strong, they rejected God. That’s what we tend to do. When we have success, we congratulate ourselves on our good deeds and skills. When there is some discomfort, we lose patience and blame God. But when the real pain begins, we realize how small and helpless we are. When the surgery fails, we need help beyond human hands. When the plane is about to crash, we need a savior. When our best laid plans fall to pieces, we realize that our former struggles were like mosquito bites compared to the deadly snake venom. What seemed difficult before appears minor in hindsight. The hardships in the desert were discomforts. The snake bites are death. We reject God when we feel strong enough to carry on by ourselves, but we run to God when we have nowhere else to turn.

In the desert, it is their perceived strength that causes them to reject God, but oddly enough, it is the awareness of their weakness that draws them to the truth, to the light. Knowledge of our weaknesses can become our greatest strength and, unfortunately, suffering is sometimes the only way to become alerted to the illusion of strength.

All of the characters in Jumanji must become opened to their shortcomings. They must shed their idea of personal salvation, of their illusory faith in pure individualism. I would go so far as to say it dives into the problem of an old heresy called Pelagianism, because what the characters learn in the game is that they were hiding in the real world. They believed their imagined comfort was protecting them, but it was really a kind of prison. They thought their strengths were guarding them but they were shackling them. What they valued in the real world of high school was perfectly useless in the video game. They learned that they cannot save themselves. They are suffering…but they are not suffering alone. They are together. Each person finds that his worldly strength is suddenly his biggest weakness. This is what happens to the Israelites who are bitten by the snakes in the desert. They cannot save themselves from suffering. No one can do that.

How can they be saved? First, they have to believe that the game is real. They have to have a faith that this is life and death at stake. They have to realize that this game doesn't require registration and fees. No, this game will eat them if they don't play. They are in the pit and the dragon is real. So by the threat of losing their lives, they begin to play, particularly once they learn there is only a few do-overs. There is mercy, but only three times. They have three lives before they are stuck there forever, or dead and gone completely.

Second, they need to work together to be saved. There are several turning points in the movie where instead of trying to dominate each other, they submit to one another. This is where they stop hating each other and start to slowly love one another.

But there is a third thing, something beyond their own willpower and skills. There is something beyond their cooperation. Even as a group they cannot leave the game without some mysterious force to grant them their exit.

Jumanji is not only about self-discovery of flaws. It's not only about loving one another. The key element that is less obvious is that there is a mystery. There is something higher and unexplained in the movie. Even when they are able to restore the jewel to the sacred mountain, they can't save themselves. In fact, it's not even really clear how the magic works that brought them into the game. There is something else at work.

Yes, they have to perform heroic actions to escape, but more importantly they must believe that the actions will save them, that the steps they follow will return them to their high school real-world lives. They cannot get out of this hell without faith in whatever created the game. They must believe in some power that is never fully known or shown in the movie. They must truly believe that they cannot reach home again unless they get a sacred jewel to a religious shrine on a mountain. Once this single jewel is in it's rightful place, it's proper place, then they have to shout a sacred word. They have to believe it, do it, and only then will they be saved. The game is the same as life and we cannot be our own saviors, neither by ourselves, nor in a group. There must be something higher to save us. But we’ll never know that unless we experience suffering. Without pain, we never see the way, never understand the problem.

Jesus tells Nicodemus: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”

Could this statement not also be swapped with “fiery snakes”? Because in the desert, God sent the fiery snakes - it explicitly says that God sent the snakes to bite the people, to cause them to suffer. Why? Because otherwise they would never understand that their imagined strength was their biggest weakness. They must be weak, and know it in their bones, in order to believe, in order to escape the pain. This is what is so hard to accept today, but it was just as hard to accept back then.

God sent the snakes, which seems kind of cruel. But then he tried a more direct method. He came down here himself, not to bite us but to show us. He came to save us. The painful snakebite method worked, but we so quickly forgot that he had to keep sending signs and prophets, and still we failed to understand. He tried telling us through various efforts and signs. The snakes in the desert is just one of his attempts to reach us, but we always choose to reject him as soon as things settle down. The fear model works, but was not effective for the long term.

The plan all along was love. He showed us the way, and it was intended to reach everyone on earth. He sent his Son to show love and mercy. Instead of him biting us, he allowed us to bite him. And bite we did. He came to us in love, like the loving father running out to meet the Prodigal Son. We learned that it’s far easier to understand this message through seeing Jesus on the cross than through trying to understand snakebites in the desert. But instead of embracing God when he came to us, like an angry mob, we arrested and tortured and killed him, only to realize that whether he bites us, or we bite him, he loses no power. He cannot be defeated. Whether he is the biter or the one bitten, in either direction, God is always the healer, the redeemer, the savior, and the answer to everything we are searching for.

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Abandoning the idea of one God leads to the invention of other gods, because the invention of meaning must happen. And if you can invent gods and meaning, then you can invent anything. This slope becomes slippery fast, like a Minnesota sidewalk on the first autumn sleet when the temperature hovers around 30 degrees: you may be falling down soon.

Once you reject a singular God and make a golden statue or animal or mascot into a god, then it's no longer something to be taken seriously. Why? Because a statue or animal is ridiculous as an object of power. Yes, an eagle or cougar or lion is cool because they are strong and wild, but that doesn’t give them divine powers. It just means they are good hunters for fish and rabbits and wildebeasts and it’s fascinating for us to watch them. They cannot ponder ideas like justice or mercy or the best way to organize an economy.

The idea of God as something contained in this world is too small and not worthy of worship. It's a completely different concept of God from the idea of “being itself” or the creator of the universe. This is why when Moses asks what is God’s name, he gets the answer, "I AM WHO I AM." God is. He is existence itself. I guess the Bible translators like to put that in all capital letters, because without him nothing else exists. There is nothing before God. We are only because he said so, and he can unsay so whenever he wants, too.

We don’t believe that Zeus really exists. We just wink and repeat the tale because it's a fun story. But Zeus is more like a mascot, because he doesn’t demand anything from his “followers.” In fact, Artemis in Ephesus is basically like the modern day worship of the Bulls in Chicago or the Giants in New York. It’s funny that many of the modern team mascots can be mapped to old world idols or myths. These small gods are much like the sports teams of the ancient world, or you could say our sports teams are much like the idolatry of the ancient world. Sports fans today give as much time and energy to their animals and icons as the old world did to lower case gods. I’ll probably do a future episode on this because sports teams and mascots match up too well to old city-state idolatry. We even have statues and clothing and rituals for our worship of these sports franchises and teams that represent our cities and schools.

The problem with these small gods is this: if you can make a statue into a god, then a trophy or a diploma or a team or a house or a woman or a drug can just as easily become the object of worship, the giver of meaning. Many say that Catholics worship statues, so I should point to a correction here. We don't worship statues, we have sacred art and pray for intercession, but rather than get derailed, here's a good article about statues in Catholic churches. The point of all sacred art is to elevate the one true God, the Trinity. The object has no power or force or spirit, but aids in worship.

What about spirits? What about the attacks and spiritual combat and all that jazz? Isn't this just about monotheism versus polytheism? If there is only one God, then what's with the spirits and demons and angels?

It's not just a word game if the one true God is real. Both the Apostle's Creed and Nicene Creed begin with words about believing in God, which means it is the most important statement of faith, as it leads the charge for the remainder of the creeds.

Since the cultures surrounding Israel tell the tales of other gods, its like there are warring propaganda campaigns happening. Just as the the Bible argues for the one god, the Egyptians and Greeks and others argue for the many.

It is critical that the Israelites protect and worship the correct God, otherwise they will fall into the trap of those cultures around them. And that’s exactly what happens whenever they fall for idols; once in the trap, they tumble into disorder. The story of Noah is about falling into mayhem, sin, and disorder. The Golden Calf incident happens when the people abandon the one God. The book of Judges is full of these cycles of order, disorder, and re-order as the people believe, then rebel, and then return to the one God. It's the story of the Prodigal Son on repeat, but instead of one man it's a nation.

The whole story of the Bible is a re-assertion of the proper order where the Most High God, the one God, rules over the people and all creation.

The story of Jesus is the story of the one true God, the one power of the universe, coming back to reclaim his creation from the lesser gods, to steer the whole thing back to the start, to the simple beginning.

The "turning away" from God reached all nations. The city-states and tribes believed that this was the proper state of affairs. For example, the Greeks had statues of Athena in Athens, as she was the patron goddess of the city. As should come as no surprise, Athens saw itself as wise and strong, like Athena. The city modeled itself after its selected gods. Athens and Athena do a spiritual mirroring, just as the 115th Psalm explains to us how idols work. The creator of the idol becomes like the idol. “Their makers will be like them, and anyone who trusts in them.” (Ps 115:4-8)

Corinth, a sea-port city, venerated Poseidon. Not exactly a shock, since a port city hugs the sea. Rhodes had it's famous giant named Colossus and worshiped Helios, the sun god. A more interesting story around the old world of patron gods is Ephesus, a city that is in modern Turkey.

Ephesus held Artemis as the goddess. St. Paul shows up and causes a riot when he starts converting people to Christ, away from Artemis. Interestingly, the local silversmith is upset because he will no longer be able to sell trinkets and worship material if everyone becomes a Christian, so the riot is more about money than devotion. (The silversmiths probably didn't realize they could start selling all kinds of new souvenirs, as people today like to buy and sell Christian souvenirs, and I’m not going to dive into that question right now, but I will say I am all-in on sacred art.) The riot upsets the balance of the city, as there is a perceived order around the goddess Artemis. Introducing a new centerpiece of faith and culture scares the people because they are already settled into their existing structure. Where there is order, any hint of disorder will cause worry, and when the riots begin the disorder has arrived. When the anchors for our life are in place and the wind is calm, we don't want to pull up anchor and move. In the case of Ephesus, the city was comfortable in its undemanding idolatry.

You can see this happening today. A power struggle between those who believe in one God is underway. There is a third column in the battle with those of no god, but they were certainly present in the past as well. The gods of modernity are not as obvious to us, but they are there.

This is the story of human history. You can read about it in the mythology of peoples, just like you can read an allegorical unfolding of it in the novel, Lord of the Flies. The first humans, when we first stood up in the Africa savanna, in that first garden, we became aware of our difference from the other animals. We had to discover how to live, how to act, and how to rule. Eventually, we had to figure out what to worship. We had to spend a lot of time mulling over the idea of origins. Most importantly, we had to decide if there were no gods, many gods, or one God, because only one of those things could be true. We have tried all three options. In thirty thousand years of human drama, the experiments surely happened more than once and maybe several hundred times. The story of the Bible is the story of a nation that has cast their vote for the one God, while the story of the Greeks, Romans, and Babylonians is the story of nations that followed many gods.

Surely the claim sounds dramatic. To say that every nation but one has fallen prey to the devil or spirits makes the claim extreme. But that is exactly the claim. That is what the story of the Tower of Babel describes, as the scattering of the peoples of the world led to the invention of strange gods. The reason the Tower of Babel is the last story before Abraham’s entrance in the next scene is because the scattering explains the world that Abraham is born into, which is the pagan world of many gods.

In the Tower of Babel story, God withdrew from people when they attempted to pull him down to earth, which is just a way of saying that they tried to become God. They wanted to become god or make a deal with God. When neither of those plans worked, they turned from god and the nations were born. With the nations came the lesser gods. That is how the first half of Genesis concludes, which leads to Abraham. This is where things start to get interesting, if the ancient language and lists of names don’t make your eyes glaze over. I can quickly lose focus when I dive into the begat, begat, begat paragraphs and miss the gold in them “begats.”

I’ll do a brief and possibly bad retelling of Abraham’s life, hitting only the important points that may help me tie this together with Uranus.

Abraham lived in a place called Haran, named after one of his own relatives. Haran is believed to have been a place of a moon-cult, meaning Abraham’s family likely worshiped a god of the Mesopotamian or Sumerian pantheon. In other words, Abraham is born in a world that is fully pagan and worships many gods. His people are not believers in the one true God. No, his people are like everyone else. They have rejected the one true God. That is why Abraham’s story is so important in the Bible. When Abraham is born, Uranus and Osiris and all of the other primary pantheon gods have been overthrown by child gods. There are god and goddesses and idols all over the place. The rebellion has already occurred and the one true God is not in the ballgame. Abraham is living in the age where mythology is everywhere. These events occur somewhere around 1800 or 1600 B.C.

The story of Abraham begins when he is called by God to venture out from his home, leaving his relatives, his country, and his father’s house, which includes leaving the old familiar moon-god behind, too. When called, he goes without questioning the call, in a kind of “drop the nets” move like that of Peter and Andrew when the call from Jesus happens, or like Mary’s Fiat when the angel Gabriel visits her.

This break from Abraham’s family starts a new life for him, one of total trust in the one God that he hears speaking to him. This is a radical change from the human pride that happened just one chapter earlier in the Tower of Babel story. Without a doubt, this marks a turning point of Act I of the Bible. Since the word repent means to “turn” you might say that this the point of repentance, the return to the one God. There is much to go into on that, but I only want to go into one more thing here about Abraham.

The reason why Abraham is the Patriarch, the big P, is because he represents the return of worship to the one true God. No one else is doing this. It’s not cool or trendy at all.

So God promises Abraham land, descendants, and fame. Abraham sojourns in Canaan, Egypt, and Bethel. After various adventures and material success, he gets caught up in a local war. We learn that he has some money and a small army by now, as he takes his soldiers into battle to save his nephew. With only 318 men, he defeats four local kings.

Victorious, Abraham returns from the war with all kinds of loot, not to mention glory. Local kings come to meet him. A mysterious king arrives, the king of Salem. Now wait a minute, I’ve heard of Salem before. Where have I heard this? There is Salem, the setting for Days of Our Lives, the soap opera, where Bo and Hope live. Then there is Salem, Massachusetts where the famous witch trials happened and the setting of Henry Miller’s play, the Crucible. But wait, no, I’ve heard of Salem in another place before, but part of a larger word: Jerusalem.

Not only do we have the one God coming back into the game of human life, but we have the city of Jerusalem being introduced. Oh, and what’s this? He’s brought food and something to drink. But he hasn’t brought the usual barbecue pot-luck goat or bull, he’s brought something different to this celebration. He has brought bread and wine. Yes, bread and wine. Now we have Abraham in Jerusalem with a king that brought bread and wine and it’s starting to feel eery and weird because we know all of these elements from the life of Christ, but that happens nearly 2,000 years after this event.

Then it gets weirder and more eery. This king lived in the time when a king was also a priest. Those job titles were one and the same, so even more interesting, he comes to meet with Abraham and offer this bread and wine as a sacrifice. (This might begin to raise the hairs on your neck at this point if you haven’t heard this before.)

But that’s not all that’s interesting about this dude with the long name of Melchizedek. He is not just a priestly king, he is a priestly-king of the “God Most High.” This is important. He is not a priest of a moon-god, no, he is said to be a priest of the one God, the true God, the only God, which is referred to in the passage as the '“Most High God” or “God Most High.”

And if that were not enough, there is more to this little verse, something that my blind eyes passed right over every time I saw this passage, is that this God Most High is directly referred to as the “creator of heaven and earth.” In other words, this ain’t Uranus. This isn’t Osiris. This isn’t Odin, or the moon-cult, or Hawaiian Pele, or the Spirit Horse, or the Great Pumpkin. This isn’t any of the primary gods of any pantheon. This is clearly a reference to the God of Genesis, Chapter 1, Verse 1. This guy came to Salem with bread and wine and he wants to praise the one God.

This priest-king of Salem just shows up out of the blue, and he is either one of the last people on planet earth along with Abraham that speaks of the “Most High God,” or, perhaps he is God himself visiting Abraham. I don’t know what to make of it, but that is one option for interpretation. Some people believe this is a theophany, an event where God reveals himself, like in the burning bush or in the Transfiguration. I’m not sure about that so I’ll leave it to the experts and many centuries of more well-versed thinkers. Either way, whether Melchizedek is an ordinary man or a manifestation of the God Most High, this is the moment where Abraham is blessed and where Jerusalem becomes the sacred site of the chosen people. (Note: he’s still called Abram at this point, not yet Abraham)

Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine. He was a priest of God Most High. He blessed Abram with these words:

“Blessed be Abram by God Most High,

the creator of heaven and earth;

And blessed be God Most High,

who delivered your foes into your hand.” (Gen 14:18)

This is huge. I know it probably doesn’t seem like it, but this is huge. This is the moment where Jerusalem becomes tied into everything to follow, where bread and wine become important for future references regarding sacrifice, and where we hear this interesting term, God Most High.

There’s more here too. There’s always more.

Briefly, I need to point out this last line where Melchizedek blesses Abraham and praises God, saying he “delivered your foes into your hand.” This battle that took place is the compelling event that brings Melchizedek to make this blessing. Interestingly, the battle was a rescue mission. Abraham’s nephew is Lot, who lives near the infamous cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which have not yet been destroyed. Earlier on in chapter 13, Lot and Abraham went separate ways. The buddy movie ended when Lot moved to the fertile Jordan Valley, which is the best land, and Abraham takes Canaan. But later, the local tribes invade Lot’s land and he is captured. This is the first of three times that Lot finds himself in deep water.

Abraham’s entry into the war is for the purpose of saving Lot and his people, which he does. After saving the people and goods of Lot and Sodom, Abraham refuses to receive a reward, having sworn to the “Lord God Most High, maker of heaven and earth” that he will not profit from this war, and instead Abraham gives ten percent of his property to God. This means that Abraham went to war, won the war, received nothing, and ended up giving away his own property. Immediately after Melchizedek brings out the bread and wine and makes the blessing, Abraham becomes generous and magnanimous. When Melchizedek states that it was God that delivered the foes, Abraham seems to be changed because generosity flows from him.

I’m just going to leave this episode with this thought: Lot chooses the easier path and ends up suffering for it. The land he chose was fertile and lush, but it leads him to a hard life and eventually his own kidnapping. All that glistens is not gold, it seems. Abraham must save him, but only wins the battle with God’s help. The cities that Lot occupies return to corruption and lawlessness, as does he. Abraham pleads with God for another rescue, for mercy, but this time God obliterates the people and the cities. This is the angry God, the hellfire God. The rescue mission for the sinners of Lot’s world happens only once. Mercy has already been shown with the rescue mission, and in the second round comes judgement. That is food for thought.

The hard thing about reading the Bible is that you can so easily pass over something like a phrase, “God Most High” because we’re thinking in the 21st century instead of 1600 B.C. That little phrase refers to the God that was first and foremost and came before anything that existed, including Uranus. This is the one God, before Uranus or anyone or anything else. Nothing exists without this God speaking up and saying so. (Literally, God spoke and made all things.)

Reading mythology can get confusing real fast. Each ancient storyteller has a slightly different take on the tale, along with different motives. The mythologies of the ancient past can lead into endless caves of exploration because it becomes complicated, as the family trees and interactions cross into one another. Then there is war and culture clash, which leads to re-writing and re-purposing conquered gods and neighboring heroes into the dominant myth, and of course the dominant myths of the ancient world were Greek and Roman and Egyptian, but even those mythologies are extremely complicated. There is a overarching theme of might makes right, of the powerless overthrowing the powerful, like a food chain or pecking order that keeps changing and squirming around.

This leads me to a point that I’ve taken far to long to arrive at, but it’s a quote by a famous physicist named Richard Feynman, which goes like this:

You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right—at least if you have any experience—because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in.... The inexperienced, the crackpots, and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but you can immediately see that they are wrong, so that does not count. Others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated, and it sort of looks as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.

This is exactly how it feels to discover, or re-discover, the “one God” theory. The one God makes sense, while the mess and tangle and overcomplicated tales of mythological systems lead to confusion and endless searching. There is a restlessness, like that of Odysseus, a constant searching and changing and shape-shifting.

If you go down the rabbit-hole of mythology, you can spend a lifetime digging for the truth and be as confused in the end as when you started. I’m not saying myths are bad, because they exist as stories because we like stories. We are all people defined by stories. There is a story and a myth for everyone. We each have one that fits us. However, the myth that suits us will change over the five act play that makes up our life. The myth that describes you in your childhood will not be the same myth that describes your teens, and the myth that fits will shift again in your twenties. This happens with every decade of life, as the view changes when you change roles. But these stories we use to explain ourselves are still only stories. They are explanations but they are not the truth. The truth is always simple and pure and beautiful. That is what the one God provides. The creator of heaven and earth is simple and beautiful and gives you rest.

Why?

Because the one God is the only explanation that can cut through all the decades and give focus. What we lack is focus, which is a central point, a point of concentration where all rays of light meet. We need something simple and beautiful to look through, something clear of cobwebs and dust and grime. The myths are confusing and changing. The one God cleans up and gives meaning to all of creation and all of time, because only the one God is the God that can make sense no matter what part of the five act play you are in. A child, a teenager, a twenty-something, a worker, a father or mother, a grandparent, a retiree, and especially someone on their deathbed: all of these stages of life can understand what the idea of one God means.

You cannot do that with Uranus.

Simplicity and beauty: Einstein and Feynman knew that the truth had those qualities, and these were scientists, some of the finest ever. The Big Bang Theory is oddly simple. More odd still is that the Big Bang Theory was discovered by an astronomer who was also a priest (of all people). Oddest of all, what really takes the cake here, is that this same theory supports the universe being “created,” and by that, I mean it points to the universe having a beginning which fits with the cosmology of Genesis. When you consider the Big Bang Theory versus the complicated instructions that come along with string theory or the multiverse, it’s clear that the Big Bang is far more simple and beautiful. After awhile those other explanations begin to look like Uranus’ family tree.

Yes, we are small and finite and cannot know the mind of God, nor fully understand, I get that. But we can recognize beauty and truth and goodness. We can see those things in a baby, in a tree, in a bird nest, in Einstein’s equations, in Shakespeare sonnets, or in the simple and humble carpenter who showed up two thousand years ago and offered us some bread and wine. (Kind of like Melchizedek, huh? Right? Right? Who’s with me?!)

The thing about our minds is that we fall. We fall. We hide. We lie. We cheat. We do all of the things that go against what is simple, true, and beautiful when we serve our selves. Our default setting is to sin, to turn away from the one God and the truth. What the simple stories of the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel are trying to convey is how we find ourselves always returning to a state of sin. That’s it. What the rest of the Bible is attempting to tell us is how to get out of the muck.

The good news is that the devil always overplays his hand, because he has to bluff. He has no real power over God, so the spirits try to destroy God’s creation, which means us. The humbling reality is that we are children taken hostage in a larger battle, or like pawns in a cosmic game of chess. We are attacked by temptations and face spiritual combat all the time. Spirits seek our attention in many ways, with strategies and tactics. They can steer us at any time toward the wrong choice, as free will gives us ample opportunity to stray.

You can see this happen in the chosen people, where the nation declares its position of fidelity to God, but individuals stray and often the whole nation wanders. Even leaders cannot uphold the belief when tested, such as Solomon who builds temples for his pagan wives. Yes, Solomon, the wisest king, even makes the classic blunder. But there is always the remnant who remain, who believe, and who follow the Commandments.

To declare belief in one true God is easy, but to live out that statement of faith is difficult. This is exactly why people leave the one God, because sticking with the demands of God is difficult. Why did Adam and Eve turn away? Because the fun things drew them away, tempted them. They wanted to be like gods, as advertised by the shiny one.

Most of the “fun” things are not allowed, but the problem is not the rules but what you consider to be “fun.” The problem is in the heart. Jesus could not be more clear about this, but everyone skips over these parts where he forbids something to get to the “fun” part of “judge not” where he appears to affirm the exact sins he denies. We really want the hippy Jesus because that version is more like Zeus and Dionysus and Eros. Obviously Jesus teaches forgiveness, but he most certainly does not say, “Boys will be boys!” or “Here’s some money for beer, have fun” or “A little pornography never hurt anyone” or “Ignore those Puritans, sex is no big deal.” We want the undemanding version of Christianity, we don’t want the actual Christianity that has difficult requirements. The reality is that we all turn from God because we have favorite sins. It’s going to happen, it will happen, and anyone who pretends it hasn’t happened or that they have risen above it are spewing pride like the Bellagio dancing fountains in Vegas. We all decide somewhere in life, often daily, that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, because Jesus does not grant permission. He knows this, knowing that we would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. He knows our hearts have a problem and he even lists the problems out for us.

“From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile.” (Mk 7:18-23)

Perhaps it has always been this way, but America in the 21st century chooses to ignore these difficult sayings of Jesus. It’s pretty safe in most groups to bring up the cool version of Jesus. But mention quotes like this and you may get the stink-eye. People don’t want the hard sayings, because that’s where the going gets tough. If you stick to the forgiveness parts, you make more friends. Yes, Jesus forgives sins. Yes, we will sin because we are fallen. Yes, we must turn back to him to receive the forgiveness. But nowhere does it suggest, in any terms, that the laundry list of sins that he mentions are to be blessed or affirmed. What he is trying to tell us, in metaphor, in teachings, in literal words, and in his life itself is that you must recognize that you are a sinner, that your interior self has a fatal flaw, which is why you sin. Somehow we twist this around and say there is no such thing as sin, which is the opposite of what Jesus is trying to say. We’re just so good at finding arguments to eat of the fruit of the garden and inventing reasons to build the Tower of Babel. This is the point. It’s the point of Israel preserving the faith in one God and the point of Jesus as the one God coming here to straighten us out. He has to chase out the bad spirits, because they are everywhere and reigning supreme.

These spirits harass and bother us in order for them to have power over God’s creation. Since they can never defeat God, they try to destroy us, God's most beloved creatures. For a long time, as the mythologies openly tell us, the powers of the world had turned away from the "Most High God," and only by the path of the chosen nation did we return to worship of the one true God. Without Israel we would be engaging only in tree worship and building golden calves.

The story of Israel is literally the story of a people setting their faces like flint and stepping into a storm of slings and arrows to return the true God to glory in this world. His glory was never lost in reality, but the nations, the "powers and principalities," had distracted us from the truth. The salvation history of Israel is a noble story of suffering and hope, a fight for truth, against an onslaught of falsehoods and cruelty. Yes, the Israelites committed many war crimes themselves in this journey, which is why all of it is recorded. They slaughtered and were slaughtered, but all of this history was for the greater glory of the God that the world wanted to kill once and for all.

What God accomplished through the people of Israel is so powerful that I have yet to fully appreciate it, because it is a long and forbidding act of faith, hope, and love for the one true God that allowed for the savior to come to us, and while I know the will of God obviously guided it to completion, much heartache and suffering traveled with them in those many years of swimming upstream. The real ending to the story, as I see it, is this:

The cultures surrounding had already moved on from the one God. He was considered dead, something from the past, an artifact of history. Only one group of people knew that he was real, that he was still present, that he was alive, and that he was tending to his sheep. The world wanted to kill God, just as many do today, and the declaration of Nietzsche that "God is dead" is as false when he wrote those words, as it was in the desert of the Exodus, as it is today with the New Atheists claim. The truth is that people who have rejected God want the comfort of believing that God is dead. Those in rebellion desire certainty that God is dead. Oddly enough, the Pharisees who were trying to protect the one true God, also wanted God dead, and in the twist of all twists, the chosen people and the pagan polytheist Romans banded together to do just that. They literally killed God.

Or they tried. They tried so hard. They nailed the incarnated one true God to a cross and then to be certain he was dead, they ran a spear into his side. They got what they wanted.

But that's the funny thing about getting what you want. In the end it's what you want the most that will purify you, will burn you, will leave you empty, will destroy you, and finally will set you free. Because just when the Romans and Pharisees got what they wanted, in killing God, they wiped their hands and considered the task taken care of once and for all. Three days later, they discovered that they could not kill God.

Getting what they want did not play out as expected, because it never does. Instead, like it always does, it purified them. The Romans, hoping to avoid religious disputes and stick with the easy, non-demanding false gods, were complicit in God's murder and soon after were converted away from their polytheism, back to the one true God. The death of Jesus unwound thousands of years of false idols. The Pharisees, thinking they would gain power, saw the temple destroyed 40 years after the crucifixion, and with it their power and influence faded away. Those who converted, like Saul who became Paul, found new life. The rule always holds. What you desire most, if you get it, will take you somewhere very unexpected.

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The bets we place on the roulette wheel result in different patterns and outcomes. This occurs for individuals. The same happens for nations. The answer you choose to the question of one God, no god, or many gods, dramatically alters your destiny. Depending on your choice, the heroes become different. The goals change. The heroes of ancient Greece, Odysseus and Achilles, are unlike the heroes of Israel, Moses and David. The foundation story of Rome, through the founder Romulus, is very unlike the founder of Christianity, a carpenter named Jesus. The story that gives structure to your life or nation guides choices toward different ends.

Our selected worldview leads to various pathways because the decision tree steers us in different directions that we cannot revert from or modify easily, like a train switching tracks as it leaves the station. Once on the wrong track and moving, it’s not always easy to undo.

The belief in one God leads to very a different path for Israel than that of Babylon or Egypt. The Hebrews openly reject all other gods like Baal and Zeus and Marduk or Ra. They declare them all to be false gods. Likewise, they don’t believe that human emperors like Ramses or Caesar Augustus are actual deities. They don't believe in a pantheon of many gods. Their entire worldview centers around one creator God, and not on any sub-deities. In other words, they have not abandoned the first God. All of the surrounding cultures tell stories about how the first, primordial god or gods, was killed or rendered impotent. That is the main point of contention.

None of this is hidden from us. The mythologies of ancient cultures tell these stories of how the first God or gods died. Hesiod's Works and Days tells how Ouranos was replaced. Egyptian tales explain how Osiris was overthrown. They have abandoned the idea of one God. This is exactly why Israel is alone, different, set apart, and yes, chosen. In fact, they are the only ones that have chosen to return to the idea of the one true God.

Anyone that likes mythology already knows these stories. I’m not stumbling onto something secret or esoteric. In the myths, chaos is almost always the starting point, which is a condition that any parent, artist, office manager, or software architect is well aware of. We can all relate to the idea of a shapeless mess. There is this watery nothing, an emptiness, which is sometimes called a chasm, or a void, or disorder. You may think of it as something like the upside-down in the mind of Eleven in Stranger Things. Then out of the chaos comes a creation story, the family tree, and then follows the saga of the gods, with entire genealogies and top-notch treachery. There is rebellion among the children of the initial gods that explain the past and present state, right up to the current state of the world. When Israel is writing its story of salvation history, so are the Greeks and others, since writing has suddenly become possible. But what’s curious is that as they are writing this, the only people who don't have a hierarchy or genealogy of gods and goddesses is the Hebrew people. Every other group has plowed the initial God into the past, while the Bible declares him to be alive. They alone have held a candle for the one true God in the mind of humanity when all others have declared him snuffed out.

This is what makes the Hebrews so different. They are not like any other people. They do not and will not bow to these other gods. They won’t play nice just to get along. They reject the myths as mere stories. If there is only one God, all of these myths and stories are just that: stories without any real power.

Why would this matter? Who cares? Why can’t they just get along and pour out a little liquor for these other gods?

Because they can’t. To play along will blow out the candle. It makes an enormous difference in meaning about who and what God is, what the idea of God means, and how we are to interact or worship that God. Having only one God makes every other god into an idol, a false god, and reading the Bible you can see how that irritates and enrages the surrounding cultures.

Why?

Because the Hebrews won't bow or bend to any of these myths. Rest assured that no one, today or in the ancient world, enjoys mockery or belittlement of that which gives them purpose. I don't care what era you live in, or who you are, or how your sense of meaning comes about, but if someone or some group tries to tell you that the center of your life, the meaning of your life, is false, then anger will result. There is hardly a person alive today who can stand strong when their purpose or sense of meaning is mocked or called out as a joke. Hence, the chosen people, in choosing to follow the first God, the one God, are hated throughout history because they will not bend to the world around them and call these sub-gods equal to their God, because they can’t. The lesser gods are not worthy of worship.

This leads to a whole can of worms being opened, because if you read the Old Testament with this understanding, it shines a light on many stories. The hostile world that Abraham lives in begins to make sense when you see the conflict, when you see how deep and fundamental this division is between them and the surrounding cultures.

Why are the others so angry? Why are these events so weird and violent?

The Hebrews are living in a time when their tradition is the only odd one, the only one that cannot and will not adapt. To the rest of the world, they have chosen to go backwards. For polytheistic cultures, to offer prayer or sacrifice to another city's god, or to another group's deity, is not a problem, because their concept of "god" is small. If Athens can have a patron god and Corinth can have a different one, then the power of a god is limited. Visitors can go to either place and worship or sacrifice without betraying the home team. They can make offerings and pray for sweet deals. This is what is meant by, “When in Rome, do as the Romans.”

It’s easy to fit in with the local people if you don’t mock or belittle the hometown god or team. I’m sure there were cities like Philadelphia back then, where even if you didn’t mock the hometown Eagles, the drunk locals might still have beaten you up. However, in a world of many gods, it’s not the end of the world to change your allegiance. Like any timid Minnesota Vikings fan, you could get through an ancient Philadelphia by faking your fandom and maybe wear an Eagles jersey, just for the day, without feeling like you had betrayed the Vikings franchise. The Vikings after all, will break your heart come December, so to deny them in public in trade for saving yourself a black eye is ok. Denying the Minnesota Vikings is not the same as denying the foundation that gives meaning to life.

So for Israel, this cannot be done. They cannot put on a Philadelphia Eagles jersey for the day. There can be no worship of any of these small gods, because it immediately disrespects and de-thrones the one God from the highest place. The stakes are much higher than Monday Night Football. The polytheists have already de-throned the one God, and they have no qualms inserting and dropping gods like rows in a database. Israel cannot do that, and thus the problem exists. As long as they maintain that there is only one God, they cannot worship any other god, because to do so destroys their entire worldview. In other words, how they derive meaning from existence is directly opposed to the surrounding world, which puts them always at odds with their neighbors. They have no choice but to call the Philadelphia Eagle what it is: an idol.

This makes the choice to worship the one God a demanding and difficult way of life. It’s not like being a Minnesota Vikings fan is challenging. I can buy a jersey and turn on the TV. By that ritual act alone I’m a member of the club. One thing I will say for Eagles fans is that they actually seem willing to die for the team, and not only through self-inflicted alcohol poisoning but by actual human sacrifice. Or maybe I’m still bitter over the 2018 beat-down the Vikings received from the Eagles in the NFC championship game. I was riding the high of the Minneapolis Miracle that happened the week before when that debacle happened. But I’m fair-weather fan anyway, and I personally think the sports obsession in America is a symptom that is preceding a major illness.

The Hebrews, however, make Eagles fans look like fair-weather fans. You can see this in many stories, where the Israelites will not bend a knee to the false gods. In Daniel, one of my favorites of the entire Bible is when King Nebuchadnezzar has built a giant gold statue and wants everyone to pay homage and worship it. He calls in all the nations and cultures for the day of dedication. Everyone falls in line. Everyone, of course, except for the Jewish representatives. Why? Why can't these three guys just toe the line? Why must they rock the boat of Nebuchadnezzar?

They don't worship his gold statue, because they can't. Or they could do it, but they won’t. If they do, they have rejected the one true God. If they do, then they have abandoned their faith. If they do, their lives lose all meaning, because they know that the one true God is the truth, thus there is nothing more precious and worthy than keeping faithful to the one true God. Not to mention, there is a good precedence in Exodus for why "golden" statues should not be worshiped, since the Golden Calf incident ended with a lot of corpses, and those involved had to literally drink the melted and powderized metal calf as punishment.

So King Nebuchadnezzar is told, "they will not serve your god or worship the golden statue which you set up." The King is livid and orders the three men to be burned in a furnace, demanding that the furnace be stoked to the highest level of heat possible. He gives the three dissidents a chance to change their mind, but they refuse. They respond with one of the ultimate comebacks in execution history, as they tell the King (using my translation here), "Our God may save us. But just so you know, even if he doesn't, we don't really care. But we will never worship your stupid statue."

This is a badass tale, like most stories where people stand up for the truth. This is the stuff of legend. They are saying, "Go ahead and kill us. Your god is a fake. Yes, we may burn, but we won’t die as apostates."

Then Nebuchadnezzar grows even more angry and has them thrown into the furnace. But they do not burn. Something is shielding them from the fire. The book reads (not my translation here), "They walked about in the flames, singing to God and blessing the Lord." They are singing in a furnace like it was a warm shower. Something or someone has interceded so that "the fire in no way touched them or caused them pain or harm."

They sing a long song worshiping God, the one God. Then the best part of this story arrives. Nebuchadnezzar looks into the furnace, and sees these three men walking around in the fire, but there is another person. There is a fourth body. Something strange is happening. A fourth person or being is inside the furnace. The King says, “I see four men unbound and unhurt, walking in the fire, and the fourth looks like a son of God.” We don't find out who the fourth person or angel or being was (but there is lots of speculation if you want to research it). The three men emerge unburnt and not even smelling of fire. This leads to a kind of conversion for Nebuchadnezzar, as he is shocked and amazed. He gives orders that everyone must now praise the "Most High God", the one God, going so far to add that anyone who disrespects the one God of these three Jews "...shall be cut to pieces and his house made into a refuse heap. For there is no other God who can rescue like this."

This example in Daniel shows what the chosen people are facing and how their declaration of faith enrages the world around them.

The chosen people are set apart because they are attempting to re-enthrone the one true God. The lesser gods are all false, so they can never defeat the real God in battle. The demons and lesser gods have only taken power over the minds of men, but they have no true power. This is why lesser gods and demons are said to attack humans; it is the only way they can gain power. They cannot defeat God, but they can corrupt what he loves, which is his creation. To say that a god is powerless will also enrage those who elevate lower, invented gods. This is like going into a diehard Green Bay Packers fan's basement where he has collected years of posters, ticket stubs, team souvenirs, and signed jerseys and then telling him, "The Packers suck!" It's going to sting. It's not how to win friends and influence people. Sticking with the one God, and telling people that whatever they elevate to give them meaning in life is a false god, is inviting conflict, hatred, and wrath.

This story in Daniel kind of sums up the problem with why the Jews face so many difficulties. They have chosen a path of difficulty, a tradition that has been left behind by other cultures. If you consider the story in Daniel in comparison to the story of Odysseus, the Greek hero, their way of interacting with the world could not be more different. Odysseus is a great character because he slips through tricky situations. He adapts and maneuvers to make his way home to Ithaca. Odysseus is like a chameleon who can say whatever is needed to survive, which is why we love him and haven't stopped talking about him for several thousand years. He's crafty, clever, slippery. He's cool. He's even kind of like the snake in the garden a bit. When faced with a difficult situation, he shifts. The open line of the Odyssey has various translations, but the Robert Fagles one I like the best: "

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course..."

He is a man that can change, quickly, to ride out the days of this crazy world. Like various successful salespeople I have interacted with, Odysseus sees a setback as an opportunity and the truth is always fuzzy and grey. I get the sense that Pontius Pilate had some attributes of Odysseus, because when beset with the trouble of Jesus' trial, he maneuvers to save himself, his image, his power. Better yet, when Pilate hears Jesus talking about the idea of "truth" he gives a telling answer, an answer that betrays his worldview.

So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."

Pilate said to him, “What is truth?"

This to me is the root issue that the chosen people are constantly fighting, and it is that of sticking to the one God, because once you depart from the truth of one God, then you can begin to dabble around in declaring anything to be true. Odysseus isn't terribly concerned with what is true, unless it helps him get what he wants.

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This may sound like I’m pulling this out of thin air, but this story is told not only in Genesis, but in all of the surrounding mythologies of the ancient world. They tell the same story but from a different viewpoint.

The myths written by the surrounding cultures are telling the story from the other side. Star Wars is told from the perspective of the Rebel alliance, but the Empire’s tale would make them the righteous protector of freedom. Lord of the Rings is told from the vantage point of hobbits and elves, but the orcs would tell a completely different tale.

That is what is happening in the mythology around Abraham. The Bible is telling one story, and the myths are telling the other. The mythologies have rejected the idea of one God and believe that this the righteous state, a version of progress. This is all over the place. In myth after myth, the heroes are the ones that kill off the primordial creators and gods. The initial gods, such as Uranus, Osiris, and Anu are all killed off by their children, as if this is just normal. The slaying of the higher, older gods is told as a story of progress, in a sense.

The Bible is a book making a different argument. This book is telling us that the most high God created all things and is still the ruler of all. The world all around Abraham is polytheistic and is thus turned away from the idea of one God. In the mythologies, it was not the devil that was kicked off the patio in heaven, it was the one God. The rebellion and overthrow of the original gods by a child god is where the disconnect happens. Where you stand on this point of view is critical in understanding personal and cultural interactions, because it is foundational.

In Star Wars, we enter a world in the middle of history, Luke Skywalker overthrows his father, Darth Vader, a play on “Dark Father.” The Jedis worship a mysterious, uncertain, unknown thing called The Force, a power greater than any god or man. The Jedis are considered fools for following an ancient religion, and Luke has come to restore order through the power of The Force. The Rebel alliance of Luke and the ragtag X-Wing fighters is the people set apart from the rest. The real “rebellion” is that of the Sith, who have overtaken the world, thinking they have deposed The Force. But guess what, Darth? You can’t depose The Force. Your reign is temporary, because the real power is what will be restored through a savior. The rescue mission is on its way. Luke destroys evil and restores the world to health. There is a power greater than the Sith or the Jedi, or Luke, or Obi-Wan Kenobe. Star Wars has the elements of Abraham against the world, and it has the elements of the opposition like that of the pagan cultures around him. This is why it’s a great story: these two things cannot co-exist and must war against each other, so the conflict happens naturally.

In the surrounding cultures of Abraham, the Sumerian gods have slain the top god. It’s done already. The Mesopotamian leaders believe that the rightly ordered world is many gods. Leaders who govern with solid explanations in place would be insane to shake up the game board. Even false gods need to have good backstory, otherwise people will go insane.

Abraham cannot play that game because he knows it’s not real. He is like the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes, where everyone else is pretending the false gods matter, but Abraham can’t stand it and must speak up and say, “The Emperor has no clothes.” He shakes up the gameboard.

The rightly ordered world according to the Bible, is one God. These two positions cannot abide together peacefully unless one of the positions is abandoned. There are irreconcilable differences between these worldviews, as what grows from these foundations is radically different ways of life. One thing you can see for sure, through both worldviews, is that people are incurably religious. We just are.

The reason why we can't see the big picture is because we've been living in Christendom for so long we have forgotten the tales of the other cultures that surrounded Abraham. We don’t even know what that means in America. Our equality and social justice motives spring directly from Christian ideas, not mythological systems. There is no celebration of selflessness in mythology, aside from a few minor gods and goddesses. There is the idea of sacrifice and ascendency, but not of humility without some kind of reward. In mythology, dogs don’t do tricks unless they get the treat.

We have the script so close to our noses that we can’t even read it. We know the lines by heart, so we can fudge it and maybe we get some details wrong, but the widely accepted dogmas around love and dignity and charity did not come from Uranus. Peace and love most definitely did not come from a world governed by Zeus. No, Zeus was like Jeffrey Epstein in terms of showing us how to live. The mythological systems show no respect for the weak or frail or poor. They celebrated power, not gentleness. They wanted to win, not surrender. The mythological gods were prayed to like NFL coaches, who were to provide a game plan to bring victory. They represented strength, not peace and love. Peace was for suckers.

The chosen people were thus chosen by their choice, but it’s important to keep in mind that the chosen people does not mean they were themselves God. They were keepers of the flame. To keep a flame alive requires a fight, which means violence and bloodshed, which is exactly why people freak out reading the Old Testament, especially people who have been living comfortably in the Pax Americana for the last one hundred years. We just have no idea what it means to have to fight for something. We have no idea how hard it is to keep a candle lit the dark amid a storm.

So yes, the idea of the "Chosen People" seems bizarre to us, as I used to wonder why couldn't the Egyptians be the chosen people? Why couldn’t it be the Amalekites? Or the Hittites? Or the Canaanites?

But that's the whole point. The other people could not be the chosen people of the one God, because the other people have already thrown that idea away, long ago, in a galaxy far away. The other peoples are telling the story of Darth Vader, who is like Zeus. They have not chosen one creator God, they have chosen sub-gods.

Since there is only one group of people that worship the one true God, the description of them as choosing each other makes total sense.

This is another one of these revelations that felt like a club over my head. Rather than looking at this question from my 21st century eyes, you have to look at this story from their perspective, just as you have to look at the Greek heroes through Greek eyes. The story of Abraham was written around 1500 B.C., and Abraham lived around 1800 or 1600 B.C. By choosing to believe in one God, he took a direct step against the grain, he started swimming upstream - whatever metaphor for struggle you prefer - that is what happened. And so the covenant between his people and the one God becomes plain to see. He will not leave God even if the whole world hates him. God will not leave Abraham, even if the whole world rejects God. They have each other. They are alone, but they are together. God uses the people, and they lean back, on God, like Forrest Gump and Bubba in the rain in the Vietnam mud.

Bubba to Forrest: I'm gonna lean up against you, you just lean right back against me. This way, we don't have to sleep with our heads in the mud. You know why we a good partnership, Forrest? 'Cause we be watchin' out for one another. Like brothers and stuff.

God and Abraham’s people are Forrest and Bubba: like brothers and stuff, suffering the slings and arrows of the universe and world. (Except in this case it’s like father and his children, or a shepherd and his sheep.)

The Egyptians and Hittites and Canaanites cannot be the chosen people of the one God because they have already abandoned the one true God, the Most High God, the God that we think of as the monotheistic God.

How do I know this? Assuming I’m not crazy, as I’m sure some family and friends are assuming by now, this wasn’t some kind of private revelation that I had, where I am pretending that something woke me and spoke in the night, like young Samuel. No. I’m not having some kind of experience to realize this, aside from reading both the Bible and mythology. This is all public domain material. I didn’t go to the grotto and hear a voice, I didn’t have a dream, I just read the books. The stories practically shout the situation that Abraham was in when this whole journey to Jesus begins.

The story of these other cultures clearly tell the story of their turning away from the idea of one God. The myths of Egypt and Greece literally tell the story of how the original deity was overthrown by sub-gods. The monotheistic God of old was removed from power, and if you believe that the stories were written to reflect the culture, then that is what the writers are telling us. There are no accidents in Hollywood, nor in propaganda (which is like saying the same thing actually). The idea of one God was abandoned, which is why they write about the many gods, to prove their point. They claim to have it correct. Their argument is no different from modern people who say the same thing, that God is dead. And of course, they are as wrong today as they were 4000 years ago.

This is exactly why the Bible is so different from any other book. It’s why the readings and lessons are so strange to us. Israel is telling the story that no one else is telling. The difference in storytelling alone shows how different a people must be to remain faithful to a single God versus many gods. They are, to put it crudely, the weirdos of the ancient world, and Christians joined them in that weirdness and restored the one God in the mind of human beings to its former glory. I hope this makes sense. The Christian story, in a nutshell, is the victory over the lie that God is dead. The life of Christ is the re-assertion that the one true God is real. The resurrection is the proof that all other gods are false.

For some reason it takes a long time, at least in how we see time, for this to play out. People ask why couldn’t God just tell us this and send a great sign. But he did do that. In fact, the parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus is the exact response to this question from people of “why couldn’t God have just sent us a sign?” We could talk about that parable for hours, but the point here is that Jesus says that signs have been sent. They have been sent repeatedly and were ignored. So what good is another sign? We ignored all of the prior signs, so what sign would get the message across? Those who choose not to believe, will choose not to believe whether there is a sign or not. When you are turned inward, you cannot believe because you refuse to ask for faith. When you are spiritually blind, you wouldn’t even see a flashing billboard advertising “free beer” with your name on it. The rich man in hell asks, “Why wasn’t there a sign?” and interestingly enough, the speaker from heaven in this parable is none other than Abraham himself, which is just so perfect. This parable blows my mind both literarily and spiritually. Abraham tells the rich man that he ignored all the signs, and that “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.” (Lk 16:19-31) This parable surprises in so many ways that it may have to be a future episode.

Keep in mind that God never lost any power or glory through all of this turning away by the people. He is no less because people just didn’t give him the glory and honor. No, it’s the people that have become fooled into trading the ultimate being, God, for the entertainment of a false object or a fallen spirit. They are praying to dolls and dummies and expecting miracles.

I am sorry to say that I have prayed for free-throws to be made late in games, as if there were a basketball god, even though I sent my prayer to the one God. In reality, I was praying for a basketball god to exist, as I fell for the most classic error in worship, which is to ask for something other than God’s will to be done. Not my will, God’s will. In fact, if I pray for anything other than God’s will to be done, then I need to go back and study the Lord’s Prayer because I’ve clearly forgotten that it doesn’t mention anything about getting what I want, including a free throw to be made, and really, why on earth would my prayer be for an orange ball to go through a metal ring? We have lost our minds when that type of prayer comes from our heart, because that is the entry point for false gods to insinuate themselves into our lives. That is where they get a hold of you.

The density of Genesis in chapters 1 through 11 is profound. Genesis was written around 1500 B.C. That may seem long ago, but 3,500 years ago is not that deep into human oral history and in God’s time is a blink. The ideas in Genesis did not suddenly spring into being in 1500 B.C., as they were oral traditions of people, long before the sacred writer took up a pen.

From the beginning, in the first sentence, the reason the Israelites are so different is because they reject the idea of a heavenly rebellion that succeeded. From that first line, they refuse to adopt a worldview that conflicts with this truth.

The hard thing about truth is that only one argument can be true, as there is no such thing as “my truth” and “your truth” as we like to say today. Either there is one creator God of the universe or there is not. Either there is one God, no god, or many gods. Only one of those can be true. So you have to choose.

If you choose “many gods,” then either Zeus sits on Mount Olympus or he doesn’t. Then you can drive a few hours away and ask the same question: either Marduk exists, or he doesn’t. You have to do this with all the gods. This gets really repetitive once you have to do these same questions for every culture in the world. This is why it’s so easy to throw them all out and declare all gods to be fake.

The argument that atheists and agnostics use today is, “I just believe in one less god than you do,” because the modern non-believer has fully rejected the idea that there are many gods. And so have I. Some people think they have rejected the many god world, but if they are into astrology or divination or all that stuff, then they have not. If you believe in crystals and reiki and witches, then you believe in gods. You have chosen and it’s not the one God of Christianity and Judaism.

But for those that do reject the idea of gods altogether, they should pause and ask themselves about the one God first. Either one God exists, or does not. The question is not about Zeus or Flying Spaghetti Monster that occupy this world and universe. This is a question of whether there is one God who existed before everything and created everything, before the chaos, before empty space. This is where we tend to argue today. You can argue forever if you like on this question, but only one outcome can be true, which makes it a very high-stakes game of roulette for those who put their chips in to play, and we all have to play this game whether we like or not, no matter how long we stand in the shadows trying to bide our time or hide in the corner. The choice here is whether you believe that we are nothing but material, pure chemistry and physics, or if there is the possibility of a soul. You can believe in a soul if you believe in many gods, but you cannot believe in a soul if you reject the one God and the many gods. If you choose that there are neither gods nor the one God, you don’t get to have a soul. You can’t have the cake and also eat it. So if you believe in a soul, you have chosen one God or many gods.

We can’t wish these questions away, because it raises the deepest concerns of our lives, which is to extract meaning and purpose from our senses, from our days, from our experiences, from our education, and most importantly from our hearts. These are high-stakes questions, so naturally we don’t want to bet too brashly or recklessly. People try to hedge their bets on this, but you can’t. You can’t play partially because your life here and hereafter is what’s at stake on the table. That’s why this game rouses anger and strong feelings, because we know that choosing incorrectly can lead to disaster. If I’m wrong my whole world, and what I hold to be most meaningful, falls to pieces. If I’m wrong, I’m a fool.

The choice of choosing the one God requires leaning into the void, looking at the mystery, and opting to allow for mystery. The reason faith is so hard to ask for is because it requires giving up control and knowledge. You can’t achieve faith. You can’t google it. You can’t order it. You can’t even work for it like money or fitness. You have to ask for it. And who likes to ask for things any more? Who wants to be weak, or vulnerable, or exposed? That is where the bet must be placed, on that razor blade. The choice cannot be split. If you are down to the decision of whether to have faith or not have faith, you have to choose God or the self, because if there’s no God, then the only person who can save you is yourself. If there’s no God, then the only person who can give your life meaning, is yourself. And that is exhausting.

So it’s very big bet to place but you have to place it before you die, because your chips go back to the house if you don’t play.

If you answer “no” to the question of God, then you can stop playing now. The rest of the quiz doesn’t apply. You can proceed to the bar and buffet. Enjoy!

If you answer ‘yes’ to the idea of one God, you have to play further. You’re not done after the question of God. There is another decision tree that must be traversed.

If you bet that there is one true God, then you have to consider a followup question, which is every bit as high-stakes as the one before it was. The next question is this: “Did Jesus rise from the dead?”

You could ask a slightly different one, and ask: “Was God incarnated as a human and did he live among us?” But I think the better question that gets to the heart of the matter real fast is the one about the resurrection. This is where we waffle today. This is where we make the choice of whether Jesus was a teacher or God. There is no better place to ponder or loiter than the tomb itself because this is like a light switch that you can either turn on or off. If you turn if off, if you bet against the resurrection, then Jesus was a teacher. He becomes an ordinary man. You can then proceed to the bar and the buffet as well.

Either the resurrection is real, or it was made up. Only one of those two things can be true. There is no “my truth” for this because the roulette wheel either stops on black or red. The wheel stops and your bet cannot be changed once the wheel comes to a halt. I think the better metaphor here is “the light switch is on of off” because this choice either puts Jesus to sleep or brings him to life.

St. Paul states the risk of this predicament openly and plainly. All is at stake for Paul in his bet. Paul’s own life, his own death, the meaning of his life, his hope, his faith - everything sits on the table with this question. And if he has chosen this strange and (seemingly) restrictive way of life, when he could be gorging at the bar and the buffet with those who bet on ‘no,’ then he says that he is a fool to be pitied. And it’s exactly right.

…if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins…If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all. (1 Cor 15)

If you bet that the resurrection is false, then you can ignore the Commandments. If the resurrection is false, the parables are just forgettable fables. You can get all of the ethical stuff from other writers. If the resurrection is false, then you need self-help books, not Jesus.

But if you accept the resurrection, then the Commandments are required. The parables become instructions for living. Every word he said explains the universe. If the light switch is on, then you cannot go to the bar, you have to ask for faith. Many people, like Paul, like Augustine, never wanted to turn that light switch on. I didn’t want it to. I spent many years doing everything I could to avoid that switch. But once this switch is on, you can’t turn it off. In fact, maybe this whole “choosing” about the resurrection is not really your own choice in the end. I may have led you to this choice incorrectly. Because this is the one choice that seems to choose you. It’s very strange. Very, very strange. I think perhaps you can get here on your own, if you try, if you ask. But this is a gift. Yes, I lied. This one is not a choice. This decision is a gift that comes to you, as if made for you. But this is the one gift where it is not rude to ask. This is the kind of gift you have to ask for. Then we have to come and stand in the empty tomb. We must be like Mary Magdalene, peering into that empty space, and decide whether the light will be on or off.

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We all love a showdown scene. We want to see the good guy stare down the bad guy and see who flinches first. In this case, in Jerusalem with Pilate and Jesus, we all know who is who, but what each person represents goes all the way to the top, meaning beyond this world and into the heavens. Jesus facing Pilate is the flesh version of the true God versus Zeus, and we can see the stark difference between these worldviews in this brief interaction. This is like a face-off of the two opposing forces coming to a climax, as Abraham started the path toward this showdown long ago. One of them will be revealed as a fraud. The backstory of this showdown starts way back with Abraham. So we need to backtrack a long ways and talk about him.

The reason Israel is so strange, and so hated, is because they believe that the one true God was never defeated. That is the reason they do not fit in with others. Let me qualify this, however, because the nation of Israel is constantly falling into worship of the many gods. The draw of the world around them is strong, so it’s incorrect to suggest that there was this group of people walking in lock-step, arm-in-arm, from Abraham onward. Within the people of Israel, there was a subset of people that kept the faith. From Abraham to Mary, there always remained some percentage, some handful of devout people, who kept faith in the one God even when the chips were way, way down. Within that special line, even many of them faltered. They strayed, some further than others. This is the true underdog story, because this journey took nearly 2,000 years in order to get to Jesus and it’s full of twists and turns and progress and backtracking.

This leads me up to the idea of a “chosen people,” which always seemed so odd, if not arrogant. To think that God had selected a group of people as “chosen” rankled me because, like everyone outside of a group, it’s irritating to be among the un-chosen. Being un-chosen seems to imply that you are the damned. This upsets people. Being told you are going to burn in hell because of who you are is like hitting someone with a pie in the face. Not a fresh apple pie, but like a fresh cow pie, right in the face.

If you hear a message that makes you feel lesser or damned, anger is the only response. This can be enraging. No one wants to hear about their inability to be saved because of the family he belongs to, or what nation he lives in, or what language he speaks, or what skin color he is, or who he is married to, or that he’s done something in the past that cannot be forgiven. If someone is telling you that they are chosen, but you are not chosen, that puts up a wall. And if you are not chosen, then you are not equal, not worthy, not good enough. Maybe you even feel that you are somehow bad without any possibility of fixing or altering the situation. (This is getting dangerously close to the correct answer of why we need a savior, but for now let’s just stick with the problem of being un-chosen.)

The unchosen feel attacked, and the best way to stop an attack, is to counter-attack. Newton’s third law of motion applies well to the ego in terms of equal and opposite reactions when you start claiming chosen status. So on the outside looking in, the idea of being self-declared as the “chosen people” seems like a move that Jack might make on the island in Lord of the Flies, but you have to look closer.

Our pride rises up against the idea of being left out. Today we might call this FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. Anyone that claims a special status will have outsiders react in several ways: they may want to join them, they many want to reject them, or they may want to destroy them. Everyone feels this sense of rejection in some area, and attempting to make peace in our heart, we must find a group or ideology that includes us. Atheists and non-believers feel rejected because they are told they are not “saved,” which sounds like another way of saying “chosen.” Surely we have all seen believers use this idea of being “saved” like a trophy and it often chases more people away from the tent rather than bringing them in. But Abraham and his people had a reason for being called chosen that is different from what we think of today as “saved.”

Abraham is said to have been called to leave his home by God. He becomes a nomad in old age, leaving his home. Why does he leave? Because he doesn’t fit in. Everyone at the party is drinking from the cup of the moon god and he cannot take a drink without betraying his conviction that there is only one God. There is a parallel here to being called out into the wilderness like other great figures, like Jesus, John the Baptist, Moses, St. Benedict, or St. Anthony of the Desert. Genesis just mentions this casually, but Abraham is called away from the place he lives because his people do not worship the one God. His hometown worships an idol. Due to his belief, he separates and excludes himself from the mainstream. He does this not because he wanted to be left out, not to be alone, not because he wanted to be a nomad, but because the worldview he held required that he evacuate the city or be swallowed up. He has chosen to worship the one God. Because of this, he can’t live among the people. I’ll do my best to explain what I mean by that.

I think the hard question is this: How could any group think they were special? Were they not humans like the rest of us?

The answer of course is: yes, they were just ordinary people. Abraham was an ordinary man who ate and slept and committed sins like any other person. But he made a choice to believe something that no other people believed.

If you believe in the creation and rebellion stories of Genesis, in the one God who defeated all contenders for the title belt, then you must reject the wider world of idols. This is the situation the Old Testament covers in detail.

The reason the wagons are circled in the entire Old Testament is not because the Israelites enjoy or seek conflict. The conflict seeks them. The wagons are circled because they are the only culture hanging on to the idea of a single God. They are the sole believers that the one true God existed before everything else. They alone believe that the first Being was never defeated. Every other people around them has granted assent to the death of the primordial god or gods and now have lesser gods for everything.

Creating a club may cause an angry reaction among those uninvited, but a guaranteed way to animate hatred is to tell someone that their god is fake. Telling your neighbor that their way of life is false makes for fightin’ words. Like Merle Haggard said, “They're walking on the fightin’ side of me.” That is how you get punched in the eye.

But as anyone knows who holds a dear belief or conviction, there is no way to preserve that belief or way of life unless you are willing to proclaim that belief and then live out that way of life. Otherwise you are just a fan or hobbyist. It’s easy to click the Like button and call yourself a believer. It’s much harder to put down the phone and take action. If you declare a belief but don’t take action, then you probably don’t really believe it. You are a tourist or maybe just opinionated. If you truly have a conviction in the belief, then you cannot just “fit in” with everyone else. The only way for the Hebrews to “fit in” with a pagan world was to abandon your belief in the one God, which instantly discredits and devalues the one God. In terms of faith in the one true God, everyone else on planet earth has already done that.

This kind of situation is not foreign to our own experiences. We have all felt peer pressure. Anyone who has been to high school or college parties may have been in this dilemma. Or maybe a boyfriend or girlfriend put you into a dilemma where you had to make a choice that tested your beliefs. For example, no child has ever said that they would someday like to be addicted to drugs. Children know it’s a bad idea. But someday that child will grow up and be in a room at a party where everyone is partaking in something they have sworn to never do, and only then will they find out if what they declared is true or false. The same can be said for drinking, where a child will declare, “I will never get drunk,” but someday at a party there will be a chance to find out if what they declared was true. As the plastic Solo cup is nudged at them, they will be urged to take a drink: “Everyone does it, it’s no big deal.” “Don’t be such a stick in the mud.” “Trust me, you’ll enjoy it. It’s so freeing.” The argument is made to join the ways of the others. The prosecution makes it’s case, through temptation to fit in and have fun, the defense sits at rest with it’s past declaration of belief. In the end, the person will make his decision and either drink or not drink. If the person decides to reject the offer, they choose a harder path, because it often means being alone for the night. By rejecting the offer, he is himself rejected. But that is the price of having convictions. The reject must leave the party, because he doesn’t fit in. He has to find new friends. To fit in can mean giving in and accepting something that you cannot do without betraying your beliefs.

Abraham is where the tide begins to turn back against the grain, against the world. Tupac had a song “Me Against the World.” He should have featured Abraham in the video, but unfortunately these two lived 4,000 years apart. But Abraham really could have said, “It’s just me against the world.” I don’t know that we’ll be talking about Tupac in 4,000 years, but we will likely still be talking about Abraham.

When people wonder why the common denominator in Biblical wars and squabbles seems to be Israel, it’s because of this belief. They do not bend or conform to the gods and the idols around them. The moment that they do, then they have abandoned the one God. Whether its the gods of Sumerian, Egyptian, or Greco-Roman culture, they must reject them all. They don’t give up their belief for anyone or anything, right up until today, whether it’s modern paganism or Christianity or Islam or atheism. This hatred remains today against the Jews and Israel, because they still won’t bend in their faith and conform. There is a same loathing for Christians, for the same reason, as they refuse to “just fit in” with the culture, because the moment you change your beliefs to fit the culture, then you have no beliefs; you are just like everyone else. This is what drives non-believers crazy, because they think: why can’t these people just get with the program? What can’t they just fit into the culture? The answer is very simple: they reject the program because the program rejects the one true God, and that is the one thing that the believers cannot reject. Believers argue it the other way, wondering why the culture, the program, can’t just believe in the one true God. So you see the problem.

There is a bizarre scenario in here that I have to go into briefly. Some Christians hate the Jews and we have ample historical evidence of that. This should baffle anyone with even a modest understanding of salvation history, because without the people of Abraham, the savior would never have arrived. Jesus could not have come from any other group of people, for the exact reason that all other peoples had rejected the idea of one God.

Even within the nation itself, the savior had to come through a very specific line of people because they, for the most part, stuck with faith in the one true God. Through one set of people alone could Jesus have come into the world, as they were “chosen” because they chose God. They kept the faith. This is why Christians who hate Jews make no sense at all, as without the Old Covenant and line from Abraham to David to Jesus, there is no salvation. As Paul says, we would still be in our sins.

I need to stay on track here though, because this is the big moment.

The whole point of the Bible is the story of bringing back worship to the one all-powerful creator God in order to rescue us from the world of the many gods. After the Tower of Babel, the world was pagan and polytheistic. The rest of the Bible is the “return of the king,” the return of the one God. That is the overarching story of the Old and New Testaments. Whenever you go get stuck in a single line of Old Testament violence, recalling this big picture idea is a good idea, because you can easily miss the forest for the trees.

In the Old Testament, starting with Abraham, the one true God is worshiped and defended. In the New Testament, the one true God returns to glory, bringing an end to the world of false gods, all for the sake of rescuing us. This happens through a very specific process of selection, from Abraham all the way to Mary. It’s important to remember how focused and targeted this selection of people really is. The story narrows and narrows toward one woman. Clearly the whole nation of Israel did not gather in Mary’s room during the Annunciation and consent to Gabriel. No, only she said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” She was chosen by God from the chosen people, but this selection, this precision laser-targeting, had to come through the only people on earth who believed in the one God. Could it have happened otherwise? Of course. God can do whatever he wants. But he didn’t. This is one of the mysteries of God’s ways, and while the rational brain wants to rebel at this idea, it is fitting that God chose to rescue us in the way that he did.

Were there other people in the world who believed in the one true God? Possibly, but we don’t know. There are no known groups of one God peoples, so just as Abraham has chosen God, it seems that God really has also chosen Abraham. There is at least one man who worships the one God, as we see in a cameo appearance from Melchizedek, which I’ll talk about later. He just shows up to bless Abraham, but aside from Melchizedek, the world seems completely empty of people that worship one God. There is a sense that “God is Dead” by the time you reach the end chapter 11 of Genesis. The whole Bible after that chapter is about the restoration of God through this unique line of believers, which is why Abraham is so important to the all three of the major religions of the world today, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

The path to salvation returns via Abraham and his dedication to the one God. For Christians, this beginning by Abraham is fulfilled in Mary, mother of Jesus, mother of God. Jesus of course is literally the God-man, Son of God, Son of Man, the incarnation, fully-human and fully-divine. Jesus is the one true God in human form.

Of course, the irony is that after all the wars, setbacks, journeys in the desert, time in captivity, and staggering hardships, only some of the Jews convert and join the apostles. Many of the chosen people do not choose to believe in Jesus as the Messiah. But in reading the Old Testament, this is hardly anything new or even surprising. The chosen people stray from the one God in nearly every book of the Old Testament. Being a member of the Israelites, or even being of the line of Judah, or David, or even being a cousin of Mary, doesn’t necessarily mean you have chosen to believe in the one true God, and so it also will not mean that everyone will convert to Christianity. Having a social security card doesn’t mean you love America, it just means you are in the tax system. Where you live doesn’t dictate your faith, even though many nations have tried that and still try to force-feed faith today (all countries do this, not just Saudi Arabia, Iran, Cuba, and China. Every nation demands a kind of faith or it could not stand, some just force the narrative harder).

Every Hebrew had free will, just as we have free will today. None of that changed. Peoples of ancient times were not homogenous in their beliefs. They were not one giant blob of uniform ideas, but we tend to think of them like that. The same goes for Romans or pagans. Clearly there were “virtuous pagans,” as Dante calls them in his journey through hell. You can find loads of writing on virtue from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Cicero, Virgil, Plato, Socrates, and many others. So it’s absurd to pretend that all Israelites lay prostrate daily before the one God, while all Romans or Sumerians ate their children like Saturn.

They were just like us, with some being more devout, and others being less devout, and still others not believing at all. For a specific example in our world, you can go from one end of a city and find a strict Catholic church that the Pharisees might even find homey, and then go to the other end and find a church that appears to be unaware of all doctrine. Yet both consider their parish to be fully Catholic, part of the Mother Church. There is gray area between churches, but specific statements of faith are non-negotiable, such as that there is only one God (plus everything else in the Nicene Creed).

What I’m getting at is that faith cannot be forced among the chosen or the un-chosen people, and even among the devout believers there can be significant differences in what “devout” actually means.

To break this out of religious terms, consider the rewards card at your local gas station or grocery store. Having a rewards card doesn’t mean you love the gasoline or groceries from that store. You may get gas and groceries daily from the store, but you have no real loyalty to it. You may only have signed up for the rewards card because of a discount or because it’s close to your house, but whatever the reason you are now a member. The moment a better deal arrives, you may dump that rewards card.

Membership is not a good indicator of belief. It can be a mere matter of convenience, or mutual benefit, or tradition, or dumb-luck. (I will say, however, that I have met some very devout Costco members, making it seem like a religion for some.) Membership does not equate to conviction. Likewise, the chosen people have many members that wander into other religions of the surrounding culture. They may keep their rewards card for when it helps them, but the stories of the Old Testament has many, many instances where Israelites get caught shopping with pagan reward cards at Baal’s Golden Mini-Mart.

St. Paul had rewards cards (membership and citizenship) in both the Jewish and Roman worlds. This helped him to get his trial moved to Rome, but it didn’t spring him from jail. No, the verdict was death for him because he had joined a third club. The new club essentially offered joy in this life and eternal joy in the afterlife. It’s a very different kind of club, one that ultimately got him beheaded. This rewards club can bring a lot of anger upon its members.

Many Jewish people did not join the new faith, since they did not believe that the messiah had come. This has led to so much confusion and anger over the past two millennia, which is uncharitable, to say the least, and led to downright horrific cruelty. Many Christians seem to forget: the story is not over. We are in the messianic age now, the final age. In this age we are to love God, love one another, and do God’s will by keeping his Commandments. We do not know the time when the end will come, and we can ignore the claims of “end-times” authors and apocalyptic highway billboards who proclaim that they have “cracked the code.” All we can do is prepare without knowing, because the day will come when God decides the day has come, not when any person has predicted. This is very plain to see in the Gospel, when it says, “For just as lightning comes from the east and is seen as far as the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be.” (Mt 24:27) In other words, it will happen in an instant, and we will not be able to repent when that day arrives. This is why I feel that the “Doomsday Preppers” may want to stop hoarding canned goods and stockpiling bullets, and instead, they would be more wise to pray and give to the poor (the canned goods, I mean, since no one can get nourishment from bullets).

Each person’s salvation is for that individual to work out with fear and trembling, just as my own is. The saying among addicts is to “Worry about keeping my own side of the street clean.” That is good advice for a store owner and a spiritual person. If I judge anyone, I have immediately lost a sense of humility. Pride is a very difficult animal to cage. So there are two important factors here: first, the story is not over, and second, it’s not for me to hand out judgement as I am sorely in need of mercy. As for the chosen people, it is enough for me to know that the Old Covenant was not revoked by the New Covenant and that God’s will for them will be done, just as it is for the rest of us (CCC 121).

By the time you get through the thousand pages from Genesis to the Gospels, you might think that’s the end. It’s not. We are just in the third act now waiting for the finale, the climax to happen, around which there is much disagreement and speculation. (If interested in more about Israel, the Church, and the end of Act III see this article from Jimmy Akin that dives into it.)

As I mentioned earlier, the heroic tales of ancient Greece read like persuasive arguments for justifying the way of life chosen by the empires of the age. You might say, the stories tell the journey of the people of Zeus, the people who chose Zeus. When you look at the opposing stories in this way, the idea of the chosen people of Israel makes more sense, because the only reason God “chooses” Abraham is because he has “chosen” God. Every city-state around where Abraham lives has chosen some other god.

This is kind of a big deal, because again, it’s the big picture of the entire Bible.

God did not lose any actual power when the nations turned away from him. The story of salvation in the Bible is a big wide turn back to the one true God, to true power and not the power of objects. He was never defeated, but was only defeated in our minds and hearts. The rebellion against God failed in heaven, but we simple humans turned away. Failing to overthrow God, the fallen spirits instead attack his creatures, which is us. These spirits are watching us watch Netflix and sports, as we have once again become distracted from the one God. Now the spirit only has to suggest, “Play next episode?” and we choose to click a button in the affirmative, allowing us to space out and pay homage to the TV god for another hour.

Back to Abraham, Israel, and the gang. All nations and peoples have turned away, except for Israel. And even the chosen people struggle to keep this single truth alive of the one God, the all-powerful God, as they suffer repeated, constant temptation and do battle with the worldly influences around them. Not only do they have to fight this battle spiritually, but they literally fight to the death for this belief, which is why there is so much bloodshed in the Old Testament. People consider the Israelites as the warmongers without considering that they are under constant duress for this polar opposite worldview to every people and nation that surrounds them, and survival in that environment requires battle.

The alternative is surrender. But for them the only surrender that can happen is to the one God, not to other cultures who believe in false gods. The world tried to squash this one, last, final remaining culture that believed in the one God. They refused defeat and went to war and they slaughtered and they were slaughtered because this idea was worth keeping alive.

I think that’s what I failed to understand for a long time, that what the people of Abraham are fighting for is the very existence of the one true God in the hearts and minds of men and women. I so often mention that surrender is the key, but there is surrendering to the way of the world, and there is surrendering to God. The surrender must not be to the world, but to God. The good news for those who love competition (I’m looking directly at Americans) is that when you surrender to God, you stop fighting your fellow men and women, so this may sound like rolling over and giving up, but there is a never ending spiritual combat happening and all hands are needed on deck. And this combat is more intense and powerful than playoff football or the free market or presidential politics.

The whole point of God “choosing” a people to restore faith in him is to point everyone back to the one God. It’s like an English Pointer freezing stiff as a statue and lifting a paw to point to where the hunters needs to go. And we’re all seekers, we’re all hunters for the truth, but we’re easily distracted and confused. We ignore the pointing, thinking we’ll get better directions from our phone or by instinct. That is how the fall happened and how we became “scattered” into many nations. The story of how we came to ignore the one God is fully covered in the falls of mankind that occurs in Genesis, in chapters 1-11, and everything that comes after is the return of God to his rightful place. The dramatic ending comes in the interactions between Caiaphas, Pilate, and Jesus in his trial.

The conspirators take steps to separate themselves from the deed. As for Pilate, he washes his hands with water, literally, in front of the mob and tells the people, “I am innocent of this man’s blood. Look to it yourselves.” But he can’t wash it off. He can’t extract his role in the death of Jesus any more than Caiaphas can, because they are both stuck fighting in the pit. Jesus even tells Pilate that Caiaphas is more guilty, since Caiaphas handed him over, but Pilate’s attempt to wash his hands of the verdict cannot help him. Pilate is still guilty, if only slightly less than Caiaphas who led the campaign to have Jesus killed. The blood on Pilate’s hands sinks in like a tattoo. It’s never coming out.

Choices made long ago set Pilate’s life in motion to lead him to the exact spot where he is presiding over the trial of Jesus. Once you have taken the wrong turn, you often can’t quit the trail. You must go to the end, or so it seems. The woods is thick. To get on a different trail requires going back to the trailhead, and choosing the right path, but for those far along on the wrong trail, starting over seems impossible. The pressures of the life you choose boxes you in. Sometimes there appears to be no way out, but…there is a way.

You must be reborn. You must become like a child again. You must take up your cross. Pilate doesn’t have time for repentance during the trial, because his entire life has painted him into a corner. Caiaphas has no interest in being reborn, whereas you can sense this odd tension in Pilate, kind of like Nicodemus. They both seem to want to ask Jesus for help, but they don’t. They could all be reborn and change their ways, but they won’t. For Pilate, being reborn in the spirit would probably mean he’d be killed by the Romans. To be faithful to the one God requires rejection of the false gods. Pilate, Nicodemus, and Caiaphas all love their own lives too much. They can’t change because they don’t want to. Giving up their path seems too hard, so it’s easier just to keep going. This is exactly how habitual sin works.

You can’t just easily wash it off. You can’t wish it away. You can’t stop doing it. You can’t quit it. It requires a hard turn against the current, like Abraham did, in order to escape the false gods. Eventually the sin you love the most will paint you into that corner where there is no help, and that is where you will get the chance to make the turn. It’s painful and scary, but so liberating. There is only one person who can extract you from the situation you walked yourself into. All three of these people, Pilate, Nicodemus, and Caiaphas, reject the hand that offers help when they need it most, because their position on a tiny pedestal of power seems like too far to fall for their ego to survive. They don’t realize that it’s exactly the ego that needs to fall and be shattered.

So Pilate’s attempt to “wash his hands” and remove his involvement of overseeing this kangaroo court in Jerusalem fails miserably. To this day, a billion people utter his name every week when they recite the Nicene Creed, right after the Sunday homily. Caiaphas actually got off pretty easy, in that sense, as we don’t recite his name.

Pilate is a representative of a world that has chosen many gods over the one God. It’s probably safe to say that Pilate, at the time of the trial, would have found the idea of one God ridiculous. Every culture in Pilate’s time had bought into the belief that one true God didn’t really exist. But Pilate and Rome is not unique in this sense. What happened to Pilate after the trial is unclear, as he may have been executed, or committed suicide, or may have even converted to be a follower of Jesus. His wife may have converted, and is honored in the Eastern Orthodox church as a saint. As for Pilate, it’s not really clear. But whatever his end, he played the role as the standin for the existing worldview which ruled from the time of the Tower of Babel until the resurrection of Christ. The nations had created and bowed to fictitious gods for a long time, but this interaction with Pilate is where the tide turned against the false gods for good.

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The Gospels writers somehow plumb the depths of meaning with simple phrases and stories, such as Pontius Pilate’s response to Jesus: “What is truth?” These words coming from a Roman governor to the arrested carpenter could not be more loaded with meaning. These are like Easter eggs dropped into the text without any fanfare. They don’t even appear suspicious on first pass. There’s no exposition or discussion. In this case, it’s a simple question, but it speaks volumes. The writer just moves on. It’s like a James Joyce kind of move, except James Joyce did it on purpose, while the Gospel writers don’t seem to craft these intricate, concise jaw-droppers intentionally. The lines are just there. The lines are there because they are writing what happened, as as the saying goes, “The truth needs no rehearsal.” That’s the strange thing about reading these events and teachings and parables, because the words never stop revealing further depth. You skip over these lines and come back ten years later and see something new. You read them the third or fourth time, and your eyes pop out of your head, as a new angle on a phrase appears lit up, under a glow that you somehow never noticed before.

Those three words from Pilate sum up the question that the entire Bible is answering, because Pilate speaks to the truth, whose name is Jesus, and tells him that there is no such thing as truth. The statement reads like a confession, or maybe a statement of faith, as Pilate is looking at the truth and doesn’t recognize it. Pilate does recognize that there is no sin or crime in Jesus, but he’s not interested in justice or mercy, he’s interested in keeping the peace. He’s in the dilemma of a position of power, where doing the right thing must be sacrificed for the proverbial “greater good.” But he is nervous and unsure. The whole situation has both his wife and him rattled. They know something is different about this man, and it seems that the ones in power are slowly becoming aware that the return of the king is near. The Roman foundation of life is for the first time feeling shaky. The false gods are being put on notice.

In his position of power, Pilate stands face to face with Jesus and seems for a brief moment drawn to the truth, before his worldly power yanks him back. Nicodemus, the Pharisee, had a similar interaction, where he was drawn in to the truth, but his status in the community pulled him back in, like Michael Corleone in the Godfather. Neither Pilate nor Nicodemus can reach escape velocity from the orbits their lives have settled into. For Nicodemus the situation is even harder because he wants to believe, but can’t let go of his pride of position and his legalist vision of God. The transactional version of God is a false god just like Zeus, so Pilate and Nicodemus both live under a false god. The one who seems to fully recognize Jesus as the savior is Caiaphas, the high priest, because he knows that Jesus must be killed in order to preserve his worldly power.

Caiaphas tattles on himself, about his worldview, and about his love of power, even more that Pilate does. Pilate is kind of a stooge here, representing the fallen world after the Tower of Babel. He is one of these “scattered” kings, a symbol of the nations who scratch and claw for worldly power. But Caiaphas is meant to be the high priest of the temple in Jerusalem, the leader of those who are set apart for the one God. As the high priest of the Jewish temple, Caiaphas has been appointed to his position of power by Pilate’s predecessor. In other words there is a major problem here.

Do you see the problem? I know this gets weird with the old names, and who is in charge of what, and who or what is a Sadducee or a Pharisee or a Roman, and all of that. But here’s the diamond in the rough. Caiaphas is in bed with Rome.

Just like Solomon, just like Ahab, just like Lot, just like Jeroboam, so is Caiaphas. What has he done? He has rejected the one true God. Of course, he thinks he has not, but he most certainly has, since his job was given to him by the pagan rulers, the Romans. The reason Jesus flips out in the temple and chases out the money lenders and the cattle, is because Caiaphas is a stooge of a stooge. He claims to represent God, the one God, but he’s turned the temple into a Roman beer hall, Texas pit barbecue restaurant, and outlet mall. In other words, he has let the culture in and by doing so rejected the one true God. We all know that Pilate is in bed with false gods; he’s a Roman, so of course he is. But Caiaphas, of all people, cannot be playing around with Uranus! (I’m sorry…I had to go there. I had to. It needed to be said.)

Caiaphas might as well put a statue of Uranus’s grandchild, Zeus, right in the middle of the temple, on a pedestal, because that is what he’s done in spirit. He has allowed the many gods to take over, making the Jews no different from the world. The temple is no longer treated as sacred for the one God. Instead, it’s a place of transactions, just like the any other false slot-machine god of the pagan world. Caiaphas and the high priests have corrupted the temple. Abraham’s steps toward restoring faith in the one god has been steered off course, right into the arms of the many gods. Caiaphas has led the people to stop swimming against the current, and he has turned them around to flow with the mainstream. This ruins the whole project of the chosen people, because the word chosen means choosing the one true God. The moment they stop choosing God, there is no specialness about them. They are just another tribe or nation who prop up objects as gods and project their own desires onto that god.

I hope this makes sense. No one expects Pilate to worship the true God, but Caiaphas is supposed to do just that. The question of “What is truth?” could have come from Caiaphas just as easily as Pilate, because Caiaphas is only after earthly power as well. They are both painted into corners by their lust for power and glory, and neither can get out of it. But Caiaphas recognizes the danger much earlier and takes action to protect his power, to deny the true God, and goes all the way. Once he recognizes Jesus as the messiah, Caiaphas knows that he has to make sure that Jesus is killed.

The Pharisees have a meeting with Caiaphas, who is a Sadducee, and these two groups don’t much care for each other at all. The fact that they meet at all speaks loudly regarding their fear of what Jesus represents. It’s hard to imagine that a wandering carpenter who is healing people could generate such concern, but this is exactly what happens.

In this meeting, the holy men discuss the raising of Lazarus from the dead. For us today, we don’t know what to make of the idea of Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life. It’s a bizarre and almost unbelievable story. This would have been just as unbelievable to Caiaphas and Nicodemus and Pilate and everyone else in those days. Just because they lived in that time doesn’t mean they were stupid, it just means they didn’t have smart phones. If they thought Jesus raising Lazarus was a hoax or a lie, they would not have gathered. If he was just some nutjob wandering about, they would have ignored him. This is always the best way to handle a conspiracy theorist or crazy person: you let them make their own case, because discerning people will eventually see them as nutjobs. No intervention is required by government to convince people that the crazy uncle is crazy. Organizations and powerful people who despise one another don’t convene meetings to discuss how to handle a problem, unless they legitimately see a problem that will threaten their way of life.

The Pharisee and Sadducee meeting in John 11 is like the meetings of the five families in mafia movies, where they gather to set aside differences in order to devise a plan to take out a common enemy that presents an existential threat. Anyone who reads or watches mafia movies knows this is exactly what these meetings are for. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” (Another famous one is “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” which is a line that could almost make Nicodemus suspect in his clandestine meeting with Jesus, but that’s the kind of speculation that I need to leave alone, because I can invent my own conspiracy theory very easily if I go down that rabbit-hole.)

The meeting in John 11 is critical to understand in terms of the scope of the entire Bible, because that is the moment where the decision is made to pursue execution of Jesus. The leader of the meeting is Caiaphas, but they all clearly understand what is happening with Jesus. “If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation.” (Jn 11:45-53)

Do you see what they are trying to protect? They don’t care if Jesus is actually the messiah, the savior. No, they are worried about “our land and our nation.” In other words, they want stuff. They want power. They are operating under the assumption that their role is not serving the one true God, but rather the land and the nation. This shows their cards. They give away their motives.

Why does this matter? It matters because the covenant of Abraham was not only about land and nationhood. If that’s all it was about, then the Bible could have been wrapped up in the book of Joshua. The promised land was to be the sign of the greater promise. The greater promise was to bring a blessing upon “all peoples on earth.” The promise to Abraham about the land and nation has already been completed long before the meeting between Caiaphas and the Pharisees, but they are still clinging to that, instead of the greater promise to bless all people of the planet earth. The land is the sign of the covenant, but not the main payload. It’s only the toy, not the Happy Meal. If the promise was only about land and nationhood, that’s already been done. The book of Joshua even states that the sign of this covenant is complete (Joshua 21:43-45). The cheese stands alone in Joshua. All is well. They have the land, the nation, and it even says, “Not a single word of the blessing that the LORD had promised to the house of Israel failed; it all came true.”

So what’s left? If it all came true in Joshua, what is the rest of the Bible about? Because Joshua is pretty early on, being the 6th book of the Bible. What are the rest of the books about, if the land and nation is the whole point?

To understand what the rest of the Old Testament is about, you have to read the actual terms of the Old Covenant, which Caiaphas and the Pharisees seem to have forgotten about. So it’s worth reading so that we can see there are parts to it, in order. The order matters.

The Lord said to Abram: Go forth from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.

That’s part one. Abraham needs to get out of town. He needs to leave the pagan world of his family and become a nomad. He cannot live among the culture of his hometown where they all cheer for the false moon god on Friday nights. He must set his family apart from the culture of the world. Keep in mind, these lines directly follow the Tower of Babel story, which is the story of how the nations have been scattered and worship false gods. To worship the one God, he must not mingle with cultures who worship false gods.

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

That’s part two. God makes Abraham a great nation which comes to fulfillment in Joshua. Also, Abraham is clearly famous because I’m sitting here thinking of him about 4,000 years after he lived, making him the greatest influencer of all time. TikTok and Instagram fame is pathetic in comparison, no matter how many followers they have. Abraham has literally had billions by now. The checkboxes for part two of the covenant have been checked. This part of the covenant marks the “sign” that God is serious and that he will do all that he says in the third part. This is how covenants seem to work, where there is a sign for us to see and know, and a greater promise, a spiritual promise that transcends our puny desires and goals.

I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. All the families of the earth will find blessing in you.

That’s part three. That’s the big promise. And this promise extends way beyond land and nationhood into the spiritual realm. In fact, God implies that nationhood might not be so important in the end, because he’s talking about “all the families of the earth” finding a common blessing through Abraham. Somehow, someway, there is going to be a unifying blessing through Abraham.

So the blessing is what the prophets are all talking about. This blessing, this mysterious blessing is what everyone is pondering from the book of Judges onward. All the talk of the the messianic figure is about this blessing. The blessing in the last part of the covenant is not about land, or nationhood. This is about something spiritual and higher than the small cookies we want to eat here on earth.

Caiaphas may know all about the prophecies of the coming savior, but he doesn’t care. He knows his power will be lost if Jesus is allowed to live. In his external life he pretends to know and worship the one God, but he is actually in love with his power. He is just like Pilate and will do whatever it takes to keep that power. At the meeting, he admits what he is really after, and that is power for the nation, not the blessing for “all the families of the earth.”

Caiaphas…said to them, “You know nothing, nor do you consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish.” (Jn 11:49-50)

Caiaphas clearly doesn’t think Jesus is crazy. If he did, there would be no motive to want him dead. This is powerful testimony by Caiaphas to show how serious people were taking these miracles and signs that Jesus was performing. If Jesus was an obvious charlatan, they would have left him alone. He would have been like any street-artist in Vegas who wows the tourists. The threat he presents goes way beyond someone who wows people for tips. If he was a political agitator, the words of this meeting would have been different. As it reads, there is zero concern about Jesus rallying an army or seeking glory as a political leader. Someone in the meeting says, “If we leave him alone, all will believe in him…”

This is a huge distinction to be aware of, because this threat is not physical or political. The speaker does not say, “all will take up arms” or, “all will fight for this man.” No, the voice says “all will believe in him.” What the attendees of this meeting are worried about is that Jesus is winning the hearts of people and completely changing their system of belief. And what is it exactly that this shift of belief is about? It’s about him. They will “believe in him.” Every word of this meeting is full of meaning. The people are not converting to some new kind of political ideology or national patriotism, they are converting to believe in him, only him. Why is that a concern? Because Jesus is not them. He is a sole, single person that stands outside of the Roman and Jewish world. What scares them all is that the belief in him means the rejection of the existing power structure, a turning away from that which currently holds sway in the world. And that is, of course, exactly what is happening, because this is the whole point of the story of the Bible, which is to turn people away from the false gods back to the one God.

The attendees of this meeting truly do see what’s happening, and Caiaphas does most certainly. The belief in him will turn the existing world upside down, which to them is right-side up. Pilate thinks the world of many gods is the right-side up. Caiaphas thinks his dabbling with Uranus is right-side up. Nicodemus thinks his legalistic punch-card version of God is right-side up. None of them can see that they live in the upside-down world. They are spiritually blind, like most of us today. They understand the threat, because at this meeting they admit, in fear, that belief in him is what is going to flip the entire world around. The shocking part is that two of these groups, Caiaphas and the Pharisees, think they are the ones that are keeping the flame alive, that they are the watchers who are looking for the one who will bring this blessing to “all the families of the world,” but when that blessing shows up they immediately want it to go away.

The threat comes from what they can see happening, as the converted make no sense. The people who believe in him no longer live like the mainstream. They have a kind of faith and hope in the person of Jesus, that neither the Romans nor the Jews could ever muster by force or through incentives. They can see people changing completely once they believe in Jesus. What is the change? People stop responding to fear and start living for love of Christ. The greatest threat of all here is that this cannot be explained, because Pilate, Caiaphas, and the Pharisees are all accustomed to living in a world that makes sense. They cannot explain it, which scares them, and the reason it scares them is because they haven’t actually thought about the one God in a long time, because no one can explain the one God. That’s how you can tell when someone is full of hot air about knowing God today, because they claim to be on his level. No one can overrule the one God. No one can fully grok the one God. We can sense his presence, through this strange mix of nearness and impossible distance, but we cannot fully know or explain it, because when we contemplate his glory it exceeds our imagination by infinity, yet somehow he reaches us. When you tune in to the one God, you experience a fear and love that result in utter humility before such power. What the powers of the world fear is uncertainty, the unknown, the void, the chaos, the infinite. That is also what we as individuals fear. They want control, total control, and because they see people surrendering their lives to Jesus, they see that control slipping away, that their false gods are powerless, meaningless. The conch shell has the same power as Pilate, which is none. The pig-head on a stick is as weak a god as whatever Caiaphas worships. That is why they know that Jesus must go. Just like Jack on the island in Lord of the Flies, this meeting is just like Jack saying, “I'm warning you. I'm going to get angry. D'you see? You're not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island!”

What Jack, the Romans, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and every other nation and group fail to admit is that they are not having fun. They are all miserable.

They are trapped in a world of sin and see no escape. Seeing no exit, they know they must fight. They must fight because they must save themselves. For those following the mythology, the stories of the gods themselves express the reality of the world where god is an invention. They see only one choice in that definition of the world: fight or die. You band together for safety or you wander alone. The people at this meeting are the ones who have scratched and fought their way to the top of the dunghill.

They have spent a life squabbling for honor, to be mildly comfortable, and any threat to their position in society or the system that they sacrificed for to get that honor and status is terrifying because it exposes them. They have sacrificed so much for the promises of the world. If they are wrong, their entire way of life is a fraud, a waste of time. If the poor, the lepers, the insane, the criminals, and the outcasts are finding joy in their poverty, with no status whatsoever, just by believing in this man named Jesus, then everything that they hold sacred will be proved as powerless as the conch shell that shattered on the rocks. To consider this possibility is too much for them. This mirror is too difficult to peer into because the reflection will betray the truth.

What scares them the most, more than anything else, is witnessing people change and convert to worship a man, one man, named Jesus, and seeing these people suddenly find total joy and meaning. This rocks those in power because for the first time they become aware that their foundation for life is built on sand. They have no idea how it can be possible and don’t want to hear that it is possible. How could happiness possibly come without competition and victory and power and money and pleasure?

They are scared because the poor rejects of society suddenly have more joy and love than they do, and they believe that their choices have been right, that they have followed the rules. Seeing this other way points to the truth that their entire way of life is based on falsehoods, false gods, and identity lies.

This is as transparent today as it was then.

What we sacrifice our time, money, and life for is shown in our actions, not in our words. We act out what we believe will save us. It’s not what we post online or say out loud, it’s what we do. If you doubt this is true, just look at what we sacrifice for. We must punch our tickets with good grades and extracurricular activities, spend thousands of dollars on youth sports, take advanced placement classes, get high test scores, and perform volunteer work quotas in order to get into a good college. We do all these sacrifices so that we can get a good job, so that we can have a comfortable income, and in the job we live in a perpetual state of “what have you done for me lately?” to please a boss or manager, like little Pontius Pilates, who scrapped their way to their positions. To find a suitable mate to match our desired status, we exercise and create clever profiles in search of bedroom experiences. We desire to travel or own things that will fulfill our pursuit of the exotic and the luxurious. We do all of this so that we can eventually raise a family who must also make these same sacrifices, run this same gauntlet, with the idea in mind that someday, if we’re lucky, we can retire and rest. Then in the end, we can tell ourselves, “I did the right things. I followed the rules.” It’s the same problem as Pilate and Caiaphas. We must be our own savior.

The ultimate shock comes when you realize that you don’t have to be your own savior. The reason Jesus must be killed is that he is telling people that they no longer need to be their own savior. He is the savior. He is the one. He is the blessing promised to Abraham. He is the one God. And he is all they have ever wanted or needed and all they need to do is trust in him.

A career oriented person often seems the wise one today, because of his or her car, job, or even their hygiene. But they are so often the lost. They are polished and smooth and say the right words, but there is a gaping hole in their heart.

We think people are crazy who do not take the same path that we are on, because it’s so painful to look down and realize that it is the wrong path. What we sacrifice our time to is the god of our lives. If this seems doubtful to you, consider who you like to mock, to hate. Who is that person or group? That is the language of your own self-salvation. That is the language of the Pharisee praying, “Thank God I am not like that tax collector,” while the outcast tax collector prays, “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.” If you don’t see this, you aren’t looking very hard, because everyone is guilty of it. Mothers who have many children are mocked by career women, and mothers with many children mock career women. This plays a thousands ways. Blue collar/White collar. Black/White. Asian/European. Rich/Poor. Urban/Suburban. City/Country. Educated/Uneducated. Democrat/Republican. Public school/Private school. Fit/Fat. Christian/Muslim. Believer/Unbeliever. Jew/Gentile. Single/Married. Extrovert/Introvert. Sales/Engineeering. Look close enough and you will find the god you actually worship. The path chosen defines your salvation, your god, as you must justify all that has been sacrificed or chosen. This is the constant hunt for meaning, which morphs in desire and changes its targets but always remains the same in its need to craft a story that explains your choices.

It is not what you say or post or proclaim, it is what you do. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. A cross around your neck can be as meaningless as the conch shell in Ralph’s hands. The cross cannot be just near your heart, the cross must become your heart. It is all about surrender. You can stop trying to save yourself. That’s the story, that’s the message. It’s not “be yourself” or “you deserve to be happy” or “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” The message is: surrender to win.

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It’s time we talked about Uranus. It’s not easy to bring up Uranus, but Uranus is an important topic, more than you realize. No, no, not the planet. I mean Uranus. I’m referring to the god of Greek mythology, also known as Father Sky, born out of Chaos by Gaia, Mother Earth. He’s one of the top gods of the lower-case ”g” variety.

The greatest coincidence in word history for any eight year old boy is the collision of modern English with the name of this Greek god, Uranus. By sheer passage of time and happenstance of language, a child can mock and blaspheme a word that the ancient Greeks thought held power. Uranus wasn’t always a funny word. There was a time when the word was spoken with seriousness, as Uranus and his offspring provided meaning in the ancient world. That’s where we’re going in this multi-part episode.

I’m not sure how many people know the story of Uranus. He is also called Ouranos, which is not nearly as funny, but I’m going to switch to using that version now, so I can shove off from the dock of toilet humor before this turns into Captain Underpants fan fiction.

An interesting thing about mythological systems is the order of how creation happened, or what came first. In Greek mythology, as written by Hesiod, the order of creation goes like this: Chaos was the first thing to exist. Followed by Earth (Gaia), then Tartarus (Underworld/Hell), then Love (Eros), and only after all that do we get to Heaven with Father Sky (Ouranos).

So the God of heaven, Ouranos, is the fifth thing to come into existence. Notice that this mythology does not have a pre-existing God. Ouranos is fifth so he didn’t even medal in this contest, or get to stand on the podium. Chaos and the Earth were first and they somehow begat the Heavens. This order of “begetting” is important.

I know what you’re thinking. This probably seems rather unimportant. It certainly did to me. After all there are many world mythology systems. Osiris in Egypt arrives in a similar path. Often the primordial first gods of other mythological systems arrive in a similar pattern.

When I read this years ago, I marveled mostly at how similar concepts seemed to crossover with the creation story of Genesis. In particular, the idea of chaos stood out. As I read more myths, the origin stories use of this idea “chaos” continued to appear and it fascinated me, but led me down a classic path of doubt where I began to see all religions as being the same thing with different names, different recipes of formless chaos mixed with different characters. There is always a flood story, too, in many cultures’ mythology. So like many people exploring our past and origin stories, I came to believe that various cultures arrived at a similar, solid story that satisfied our searching hearts and minds. This pulled me toward classrooms instead of churches, as the project became comparing religions, looking for parallels to explain away the truth claims, rather than looking closely at what the truth claims are saying.

After enough nights of looking up at the stars and wondering, I imagined the ancient peoples found their way to an origin story that helped them sleep at night. I recall doing this myself, leaning on the hood of a car and smoking cigarettes with friends, staring into the Milky Way on humid summer nights. Between drags, we would ponder the depths of the sky, just like any ancient person might. Underneath the billions of distant fiery stars, the cherry red end of the Marlboro would burn brighter than them all, and sooner or later someone would bring up the fact that staring into space makes us seem small, or better yet, “You ever wonder what’s out there?” or worse, “You ever wonder what the purpose of all this is?” That to me seems like the perfect leading question into the beginning of myth. Rather than dig too deep though, we’d move on to talk about something else, usually girls we liked, which was at least a topic closer to earth.

Once I started reading the old stories, perhaps made up by ancient smokers laying on the hood of their chariots, I started to see a remarkable similarity in the stories around the world. So I thought it was all quite simple. We just needed a story to make sense of the unknown.

But as I returned later in life to those stories, some things began to stand out that seemed insignificant as a teenager. Having decided that the stories were nothing more than entertaining fairy tales from ignorant bushwhacking cavemen, I ignored the fact that these stories were told over and over again for thousands of years and these stories did not provide mere entertainment, but actually formed the rock of meaning in their lives. These stories attempted to give people something to stand on and make sense of their thoughts when they peered out onto the vast ocean, or looked into a gaping night sky, or survived a howling storm, or mourned the death of a child.

These stories had more depth and meaning to them than we tend to understand, because we consider our ancestors to be simpletons, at least until the Enlightenment. Many of us, including me, think that our current generation is the only one that is finally onto the truth. We still have origin stories, like the Big Bang Theory, which seems to be the most solid model that science has found. Science is always trying to chase down new origin stories, like the multiverse, or the idea that we live in a computer simulation like The Matrix. In essence, we are still staring into the sky and wondering the same questions, making us not all that different than the ancient storytellers.

The story of Ouranos being born out of Chaos, however, stopped me in my tracks one day, because I realized how different Hesiod’s Greek creation story actually is from the book of Genesis.

As usual, I’m late to the game. I don’t think I’ve kicked over any new rocks and found treasure but this struck me as significant. The key difference between the Greek story of creation and the Genesis story of creation is what came first. In the Greek story, it’s Chaos. In Genesis, it’s God.

I passed over this various times without thinking it mattered, but it does, because the root of the origin that the universe grows out of results in a different path. The order matters a great deal. If God was made, there is always the question of something before God. If God was first and made everything, including the chaos, then God is the final stop for all questions of existence, meaning, understanding, and purpose in this world. If God is first, then he is the answer to all questions. The buck stops with God, so to speak.

The order of which came first is critical, but so is the life of Ouranos.

Ouranos did not have omnipotent power. Nor did Gaia. Nor did Chaos, or Eros, or Tartarus. None of these gods were omnipotent. Ouranos is treated as the top dog, but he suffers defeat by his own children. He could not withstand a rebellion and is toppled by sub-gods. Ouranos is sat on the bench. A new god, in this case his son Cronus (or Saturn), takes over. The idea of an infallible, omnipotent god fades, because if Father Sky can be beaten, then so can the new god.

Again, you may just hear these stories and think this is minor, that it’s not a big deal, that it has no impact on our lives today, and you will move on. You may think these are just stories like “How the Tiger Got Its Stripes” but they are not. These are much bigger stories because they are foundational for the meaning of life. How the tiger got its stripes doesn’t affect how you feel when you lay back and look at the stars. But if you live in a world where chaos spawned the gods, instead of an omnipotent God creating order out of chaos, the foundation you build your life upon will lead to different patterns of living.

I think we naturally want to respond to these ancient myths like silly fables, like those of Rudyard Kipling or the Brothers Grimm. These old stories seem so distant from us, and even childish, but I think we are fooled about our level of sophistication by our indoor plumbing and iPhones. We are not unlike the ancient storytellers nearly as much as we think, and even the simple fables by Kipling and Grimm and Aesop have far more depth than we’d like to think.

The story of the Bible is different from that of mythology, and it’s also unlike any fable. Why? Because of the origin story. God exists first, and nothing defeats God. It’s actually quite boring in terms of drama, which is why studying mythology is fun. There are more characters, more variety, there’s love, there’s violence, treachery…it’s like the Sopranos or Game of Thones or Lord of the Rings.

Since the one God of the Bible never suffers defeat, there is never a power struggle at the top. There is a rebellion, but it is squashed and we hear about it only briefly. The books of Ezekial and Isaiah and Revelation discuss this rebellion a bit, but God is never defeated, and seems to never have been in any real danger of defeat. Why? Because he is the omnipotent creator God who created everything out of nothing. He brought all order to the chaos, doing so by his voice alone, and of course if he wanted to he could speak and destroy as well. God created the earth and everything else, and this is unlike the Sumerian, Greek, or Egyptian myths. The famous opening line of the Bible says it best:

“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth — and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters...” (Gen 1)

God is first, not created from something prior to him. God creates the heavens and earth out of nothing (also called ex nihilo, to sound fancy). The Greeks have it the opposite way. So do the Egyptians and Babylonians, as the gods are born out of chaos. The God of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity is not born. He just is. He is existence itself. This is why when Moses asks for God’s name, the answer is, “I AM.” There is no name, because he is being itself.

The funny thing about this is that I felt drawn into the Greek and Egyptian and Norse mythologies because of the characters and the conflicts. For a long time I thought the book of Genesis was boring because it lacked an exciting storyline like other mythological hierarchies, but there is a reason the book of Genesis doesn’t read like the Game of Thrones mythologies of the Greeks. The reason is that the rebellion is smashed. In the Bible, there’s no underdog upset. You might say that Cronus doesn’t win. Why? Well, the sub-gods don’t win, because they were never born. They don’t exist. Whatever rebellion happened, it’s over. God has no problem defeating it. We move on as if God had swatted a mosquito. The rebellion seems more like a nuisance event among God’s created beings, the angels, than something he is ever concerned about.

The great image of this is that God is like an artist, and the characters in the painting or book may attack one another, but they cannot attack the creator, because the creator is not in the painting or book. He’s outside of it, he’s bigger than the work of art. The example I’ve heard told is that you don’t see Shakespeare show up in one of his plays. Macbeth can’t kill Shakespeare, because Macbeth is a creation, not the creator. Macbeth cannot even fathom Shakespeare, let alone attack him. That’s like us with the one God. Fortunately, we are more than words on paper, so we can see hints and breadcrumbs that God has laid down for us, which is more than Macbeth could ever do. We also get to make choices, and Macbeth is stuck.

Rather than disturb God, the angels squash the rebellion. They remove the disgruntled leader, the shiny one, along with his other rebellious snaky friends. The rebels are heaved off the deck of heaven while God relaxes on the patio with some iced tea.

And this, finally, is what I want to discuss in this episode.

Cultures all have a creation story, and ancient mythologies also have a rebellion story among the gods. However, the order of creation is not the same, nor is the result of the rebellion, and these two things make a difference in how you see and interact with the world and other people. These foundational things can change how you find meaning in the world and how you explain events that happen in the world.

There is line from Jesus that is jarring in Luke 12, because only an actual divine being could even say these words: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” So there is a rebellion, but it’s over.

Nothing happened to God when the rebellion occurred. He is still the Most High God, the only God with any power. Now consider what happens to Ouranos in Greek mythology:

Uranus (Ouranos) was Father Sky, the Ancient Greek personification of the heavens and, for a while, the ruler of the known universe. Fatherless, he was conceived by Gaea alone, with whom he formed the primordial couple, thus becoming an ancestor of almost all Greek gods. However, he was a cruel husband, and he didn’t allow any of his children to leave the womb of their mother, which eventually led to a rebellion and his demise at the hands of his son, Cronus.

What is interesting is that Ouranos is mentioned as the ruler of the universe, before we was replaced by sub-deities. His own children replace him. This is common plot in myths. In most mythologies, an initial god, seemingly all-powerful, has his throne usurped by a more youthful and virile god, proving that he never was all-powerful. This is exactly what does not happen in the Old Testament.

Let’s just walk this path quick so we can jump ahead to Zeus and the time of Caesar, when Jesus walked the earth.

The pagan stories of a higher god being replaced by the other gods is a common one. Ouranos is overthrown by Cronus (a.k.a Saturn). In turn, Cronus is eventually overtaken by one of his sons, Zeus. We all know Zeus as the god who threw lightning bolts and acted like the Harvey Weinstein of Mount Olympus. When the Greek epics are written in the heroic age, Zeus is the ruler, and his children rule the cities of mankind (Apollo, Artemis, Hephaestus, Athena, etc). In other words, full-blast polytheism is in place, and the old primordial gods are all on the bench. Ouranos is dead or impotent or just missing in action. A similar story happens in the Sumerian stories with Anu and in the Egyptian stories with Osiris. They get toppled in a coup.

Why am I telling you this? Why on earth do I spend any time thinking of this?

In the story of Greek mythology, the portrayal of the overthrow of the elder gods by Zeus reads as a kind of progress. Zeus’s victory reads like a good thing. The successful rebellion of Zeus reads like a freedom-fighter story, like a Braveheart of the heavens, where William Wallace overthrows the the evil Edward the Longshanks. There’s a sense of propaganda in the stories, and obviously you can argue that for the Bible as well, as it’s advocating for the one God, and we’ll go into this shortly.

The gods of myth are seen as heroic. Some, like Hercules, are even called heroes, so of course the rebellion that brought the heroes must have been a righteous act. Heroes are to be worshiped because they are righteous.

But there is a story in here about the gods and heroes that is easily missed amid the victory champagne and backslapping hoopla. The ancient people, somewhere along the way, seem to have changed from worshiping one God to worshiping many gods. This is the opposite of the story of Abraham and his descendants, because they are going from many gods back to the one God.

This results in a major issue and fundamental discrepancy between cultures. To this day it impacts individual and national interactions. The difference is staring us in the face through the stories of the cultures themselves. The defeat of the rebellion makes the original God all-powerful for Jews and Christians. Conversely, the success of the rebellion in other mythologies makes the original God or gods weak.

In the case of Jews and Christians, this belief in one undefeated true God results in a different morality and expectations for life and the afterlife than that of the defeatable Ouranos.

Once I realized this, much of the Christian story started to fall into place and make sense, even the difficult parts.

The rebellion of the gods is actually a rebellion of the people, because the moment the people kill off the creator God in their stories, then you have a vacuum of meaning that must be filled with a sub-story. The lower gods are inventions, stories to explain away the uncertainties and unknowns of life. The reason we shrug off myth today is because its so apparent that these gods are invented. A child who laughs at the word “Uranus” doesn’t concern us, because we know that the myth was just a powerless invention of the past, like Zeus or any other deity. Uranus is a joke today, just like Zeus, because they never had any power to begin with.

When we kill the idea of “one God,” humans get creative. We pull the idea of god close to us, just like the people were attempting to do in the Tower of Babel. They wanted to reach god, but what they really wanted, the real goal, was to become gods. They wanted to make the one true God serve man, and if that was not possible, then they would make new gods. And that is what happened. It’s what happens today, in more subtle ways, less obvious ways.

When those building the Tower of Babel could not bring the Most High God down to the people, God “scattered” the people. Another way of saying this is that when they failed to control the one God, they withdrew from God and invented their own gods.

The reason why the Tower of Babel failed is not because of engineering limitations. The whole “tower” idea of a metaphor, but the meaning of the story is an explanation of how humans rejected the idea of a single God to rule them all.

The problem for people was that God doesn’t bow to human will. He carries out his will. Being human, that’s not a satisfactory answer to us. Thus, learning that we could not become God or make him do our will, we created new gods, ones that serve us. These gods don’t care what is in our heart. No, these gods only want sacrifice and we want control.

The problem with one God, with only one, is that not everyone can get what they want. If the one God made everyone happy, he would be a constant contradiction. Consider it this way: if two children are arguing over the same cookie, only one can eat it. Both cannot eat the cookie. They could split the cookie, but let’s just say it’s a small cookie, or if you want, change it to a paper dollar bill, which is something that cannot be split apart.

One will leave happy and the other will leave pouting. To take this into religious terms, one will win and presume God loves him. The other will lose and assume that God loathes him or has cursed him. One will feel righteous. One will feel victimized and abandoned. And both are wrong.

The history of the Yankees and Red Sox franchises illustrate this, as Boston fans assumed for 86 years that the team was under the “curse of the Bambino,” as it was believed that the baseball gods had smiled on New York and abandoned Boston after the trade of Babe Ruth in 1920. The Yankees received the cookie; Boston received a “curse.” While this was mostly considered a joke, people believed it and even asked modern witches to reverse the curse, and I would guess millions of prayers went up to God from Boston in those years. If any franchise appears to have been chosen, it is the New York Yankees, which is why many fans across America loathe the Yankees, because the Yankees have won the cookie (known as the World Series) twenty-seven times, with the next closest team, the St. Louis Cardinals, being at a mere eleven cookies.

We spend a great deal of time praying for sports teams to win, not unlike the ancient prayers and sacrifices in cities where they worshiped gods and goddesses. Interestingly enough, the ancient gods often had a mascot or animal representation like our sports teams do. Since sports is a way of life in America, when my team wins, I feel satisfied, as if the world is somehow right and just, as if God had directed things correctly. But that is not how I am supposed to understand the world if I believe in one God. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. This is how pagan gods worked, where they received prayers and answered them.

God’s will is not like this. His will is done regardless of which team wins, and it has nothing to do with my feelings on the matter. Whether I get the cookie or someone else gets the cookie, God’s will is done. That’s the way to understand the world and universe that has only one God. The correct response is to give thanks whether you receive the cookie or not, which can be difficult to do but is critical in understanding how the one God differs from the many gods.

To praise God for getting what I want is to slip into a worship of the slot-machine God, which is as false as Zeus. On the other hand, if I blame God for not getting what I want, then I’ve moved into rejection mode. I can slip into a passive-aggressive mode in order to fix or justify hurt feelings. When I perceive suffering, or perceive abandonment of God, I might reject God, wanting to hurt him by turning away from him, but it only ends in self-harm to me. Or I may go in search of a new or a different god that will support my desires. One way or another, I want satisfaction, which is not the same as praying for the one true God’s will to be done.

This split happens in Lord of the Flies, as the boy Ralph keeps order on the island initially with the symbol of the shell, the conch, holding it up as a representation of authority. The conch, beautiful in itself, represents the old world that the boys came from before their plane crashed on the island. This old world seems to be a kind of heaven in their minds, where adult authority held a stabilizing, centralized force in their lives. They have this past civilized world represented in the conch. The conch is like a sacred object, but it is only an object. Yet it seems to have power as when it’s produced, order is brought to the meetings. However, as soon as division begins, Jack and his pack of choir-boy hunters decide that they want to live by a different set of rules. They want new rules, but really, they just want to rule, to win, to be in charge. They don’t want Ralph and his appeal to an empty authority that no longer exists or has any teeth. The weakness of Ralph is exposed, as his authority has no actual power to discipline or enforce rules. In other words, the conch is exposed as a mere symbol, or idol, with no real power, and soon it’s tossed onto rocks where it shatters into pieces.

Jack and his hunters move away to the other side of the island and create a new god, a god that encourages competition and hunting, mainly because Jack likes hunting. Whatever Jack likes becomes what the god likes. He has created a new god out of thin air, without having so much as a online bachelor’s degree in theology. By the mere speech of Jack, the power of Ralph’s side of the island is declared dead. If Jack cannot break the rules, then he will make the rules. His power is ensured by making sacrifices to the new god. Of course, Jack’s god also has no power, because as soon as someone else wants to break the rules, they can go and create their own god. This is how gods come to be. They are power moves. They take power by force. What Jack offers the young boys is safety and strength, through the willingness to commit violence to retain power. This calms the fears. His idol is a dead pig’s head placed on a stick that has been “sharpened at both ends” which is emblematic of what Jack will do to anyone that crosses him.

This is how gods of myth come into existence. This is also how organized crime comes into existence. Weakness and fear and rejection of existing authority leads to an overthrow. The old authority must be replaced, so human or divine gods are invented, conjured naturally by our desires and fears, in order to explain the universe and the world we live in. Most of all, we want something to restore a sense of order to calm our nerves about the unknown. This is why chaos is at the beginning of all creation stories. Chaos scares the hell out of us.

These gods have no power, except in our minds, because they only exist in our minds, with perhaps an object that we venerate as the embodiment or personification of the idea, like a golden calf or bull that we read about in the Bible. But like the golden calf or bull, the conch shell and the pig’s head are objects that have no actual power. They work for a while, until the next disgruntled group or tribe or nation takes over by force. The void cannot be stared into for long without a guardrail, or you will fall into the chaos and die. We need a story, a reason, a meaning, a vision, a protector. You can choose the one God, or you can choose invented gods. People will choose that which serves their desires and assuages their fears.

These guardrails, these minor gods, are still with us today, perhaps even more so than they were in ancient times. We just don’t use golden statues or bloody sacrifices. (Well, we do actually, but that’s for another day).

In the end of the book, Ralph is the only boy who has not converted to the new idol on Jack’s side of the island. Ralph is the only believer in the old system who is willing to stand up for the world symbolized by the conch, the rightly ordered world, as he sees it. He ends up being hated and hunted because he will not join Jack’s side. Most interesting in the end is that he is saved by a Navy ship, an officer, and while this seems to vindicate his appeal to the authority of the old world, the author makes this closing scene a masterful conclusion, because the larger world is in a nuclear war, a world war. The same battle that is happening in microcosm on the island is playing out in the larger world. The conclusion shows us that the island is no different from the adult world, because the Navy ship is on its way to destroy other people, other nations, when it stops to save the boys on the island. The naval officer seems to bring back civilization, but in reality he is doing exactly what Jack was doing to Ralph, which is hunting other men, just in a more polished and “civilized” way. Power justifies itself through whatever means necessary.

Of course, everyone who ever read this book in middle school or high school is told that the weak boy, Simon, is the Christ character, and before Simon is killed, Jack tells him, “You’re not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island.”

That’s exactly what rejection of God sounds like, from the Garden of Eden to the death of Christ in the Gospels. Adam and Eve reject God because it’s more fun to eat the fruit. The Pharisees and the Romans reject God because it’s more fun to be in power than to surrender. The cold reality is that to have “fun” and to eat all the fruit, the one true God must be rejected or killed off, even though in reality God can never be killed off. God doesn’t go away or diminish because we pretend he’s not there.

To believe in the one true God leads to a different set of rules, ones that are not as fun, which is exactly why it irritates us so much. It chafes us to know that there is only one answer, one truth, because then we can’t always get what we want.

The rules of the one God disallow the “fun” things, calling them “sins,” but the rules are all there for good reason and not arbitrarily. This is the root difference between worshiping one God versus many. The one God has specific rules, while the invented gods can have whatever rules the inventors choose, and even then the rules are malleable.

The invented gods can spin off into many new versions, like spinoffs that get worse and worse. We have all seen how spinoffs devolve into madness. Anyone that watches TV knows this. Think of the shows that flung out like radioactive isotopes from Law and Order and All in the Family and Happy Days. They become progressively worse, further from the inspired original, with only a profit motive as the muse for the writers. This is what it feels like when you read some of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Don’t get me wrong, I love the stories, but you can’t take it seriously as coming from the heavens. By the time you get to Arachne, the spider, goddess of weaving and sewing, you have then entered into the same realm as Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill or Goldilocks or Little Red Riding Hood. I’m not making fun of the story of Arachne, I’m just saying that the mythology is so obviously invented that the whole tree is poisoned if you are trying to sell it as divinely inspired. This is what makes the Gospels so different, because there is no sense of fairy tale or fable about it. The Gospels are not written like tales, they do not read like fables, and in the overarching story of the whole Bible, the more you read it, the more strange and more connected it becomes.

This has an enormous impact on how you interpret what is truth. The response from Pontius Pilate to Jesus is the great example of this difference in cultures and worldviews. After Jesus states that he has come to testify the truth, Pilate’s response is the perfect summary of someone living under the pantheon of Rome. Pilate says to Jesus, “What is truth?” (Jn 18:29-38)

This line could be the thesis statement of a culture that worships many gods. A better line could not more fully describe the Roman worldview of Pilate’s era. Really, most Americans today might give the same response. Pilate speaks “his truth” in that the truth is kind of gray, kind of movable, kind of like a Protean and shape-shifting god of ancient mythology. For Pilate, there is no truth but what power declares it to be. Truth is the first casualty as soon as we rule against the one God in favor of many gods. There is no truth except what we decide, and who decides? He who holds power. But, for those that believe, there is truth. There is one undeniable truth. And Pilate is looking at that truth when he tosses off this line. It’s so rich in meaning. Pilate is staring at the truth. He’s telling the truth that truth doesn’t exist. There is a sense of comedy and tragedy all at once here. Pilate is lost, but he’s so close to the answer. For Christians who believe in the one true God, Jesus is the truth. He is the way, the truth, and the life. He is the complete and total truth. But Pilate cannot see it, because he is spiritually blind. He is blind not only because he dwells in the indoctrination of a Roman world with many gods, but more likely because he is blinded by his own ambition and earthly power.

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Somewhere between the grunt of a meat-head lifter and ogling the spanx on a passing lady, I realized that the fitness center is a daytime nightclub. The college house parties and bar crawls moved on to the suburbs, where the cover charge is a monthly fee. Rather than drunken people grinding on each other, no one talks or interacts due to headphones. Mostly, it is a place to be seen and admired, like a zoo, except these animals do not stare at the visitors and chew their cud, these animals stare into mirrors and brood.

Socrates hung out at the gym, but he didn’t perform any miracles. I don’t care how much Socrates could deadlift, it would still not be considered a miracle. Socrates’ church was the gym. Jesus’ church was…the Church.

This meant that I was dedicating more time to Socrates’ holy place than to the holy place of the Creator God. I had replaced one goal with another. I had replaced one prideful thing with another, and another, and to quote Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes.

This realization came after I found out that marathons and triathlons would neither save me nor satisfy me. Drinking hadn’t solved anything. So it goes. Endurance racing hadn’t done it either. So it goes. Self-destruction and self-improvement were both fool’s gold. Indifference was just bouncing around in the middle and after enough time, even less satisfying. I really thought that pursuing massive amounts of mileage in running, biking, and swimming would cure my sickness. I mean, reading Born to Run made running sound like a map to the Fountain of Youth. An ultra-marathoner named Dean Karnazes had said, “If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon. If you want to talk to God, run an ultra.” So I tried all that and found out after an Ironman race that I was like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, still searching. This realization was a signal, yet another signal, that merit and effort would not save me or bring me rest or peace or freedom at all. But I still enjoyed working out, even as I was awakened to the need for prayer and continual conversion to Christ. Like hitting bottom for drinking and self-destruction, the completion of an Ironman was like hitting the ceiling for self-improvement, and both of these experiences were like guardrails to point me in the right direction, at last, toward surrender and letting go of any attempt to steer my way to heaven.

So with this awareness, I still enjoy going to the gym.

There is a hilarious book called the Swoly Bible written by a weightlifter who makes videos to mock the culture of modern fitness centers. He calls the gym his “Church of Iron” where he goes to get “swoll” and to take selfies in the mirror and to drink dubious “bro-science” supplements. He talks about doing “Reps for Jesus.” I was dying laughing while reading the book, but again pausing in my laughter whenever I realized that this comedian’s take, as only comedians can do, revealed the truth of what these modern buildings represent: they are modern cathedrals of devotion to the self. The mirrors on every wall are a not-so-subtle indicator. There are no grains of wheat dying in the gym, or if they are it’s very abstract. No, this is the adult playground where we are looking for the waters of Bethesda in the drinking fountains and pouring mysterious powders into the water, to plump up our muscles and elongate our telomeres. This is where my character with the cursed bananas would be spending most of her day. Like my fictional character, I’m at the gym nearly every day. The scary thing is that fitness can become a religion and basically replace faith. Was I doing that? To some degree, yes. If it came down to praying or getting thirty minutes of supersets, I would go for the latter. The laughter stopped, as I saw The Swoly Bible eclipsing the Holy Bible.

Another layer of the onion peeled away, as I once again saw that rebirth must happen. Nicodemus and I could probably go to coffee together, just like Eve and Little Red Riding Hood. Maybe all four of us would make a good support group. We’d have a lot to talk about. We all needed to be reborn.

In this world we have the Sacrament of Baptism to be reborn, to enact the form of spiritual rebirth. We know that Jesus never needed baptism to remove sin, and John the Baptist protests, “Wait, I can’t baptize you,” but Jesus says, “Do it. I have to show these rebels how to return.” He has to show me a lot of things, in various ways, because being stiff-necked and voluntarily deaf comes so natural to me.

Back to the grain of wheat, the fountain of youth, and rebirth: Jesus said he could take his life up or lay it down whenever he wanted, so he chose when his “hour” had come. That choice required the painful death of his earthly body and mind.

The grain of wheat idea is powerful when you realize that the parable is about both the life of Christ and our own lives, but then Jesus goes and exemplifies this parable in his own life and in his brutal death. Nothing in history can compare to this declaration and following through to the end, he carries the suffering to the end in front of many witnesses. This commitment is what makes him different from any other religious founder. Socrates fails to rise from the dead (but to his credit, he never claimed he would). Jesus chooses to die, to not live forever, in order to bear fruit for the rest of us. Then you have not only the Resurrection but also the Ascension and Pentecost.

What always makes me do a double-take on Christianity is the levels of depth to this whole thing, because if it were a lie, maybe you could get away with one thing, but you cannot possibly get away with all of it together. I mean, the Incarnation alone is the greatest event in history, so if it were made up, a crafty writer would have stopped there. But they don’t stop there, they add the Resurrection, and as if that weren’t enough, the Ascension and Pentecost happen, too, and then there’s the historical proof of twelve uneducated rubes from Galilee spreading it to the corners of the world. On top of that you add in the Annunciation and the Transfiguration and wedding feast at Cana and the loaves and fishes and walking on water and the thirty-seven miracles in total - it’s all too much. Then you pack on top of all that the wisdom and the trial and the execution. There’s just too much to invent and sell unless it really happened.

Clearly he has already shown us the metaphorical way to live in denying his “self” and living out his faith like a child. Every Gospel story shows him healing and helping others. He’s feeding people, weeping with them, visiting, teaching, comforting, and saving people. So we know he is selfless already in how he lives his life.

Then he takes it even further. He has shown us the first metaphor of the grain of wheat. His life is never about him; it’s about the weak and vulnerable and meek and persecuted. His ego dies so he can live for others. Then he throws all his chips in and shows us the literal message, too, in case we missed the point. Jesus does us literary types a favor so we can satisfy our need to unpack sentences, to pore over words, and search for hidden messages. The funny thing is that the illiterate understand this whole story much faster than people like me that need hand-holding to arrive at the obvious.

He loses his physical life in order to gain eternal life for us all. He lives his spiritual life showing what it means to be “reborn” in this world. We have both examples. In the garden, on the night before he died, he suffers the same temptation to choose his human life over his divine life by praying, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done.” What is this sentence all about? What cup? What’s with all the cups?

This “cup” he’s talking about here relates to the cup of sorrows, of suffering and death. He shows us his own human desire to preserve life, like those of us who want to find the fountain of youth. Now, this is a second place where I get the urge to interpret, like an itch that must be scratched. Jesus knows everything. He knows he will die on the cross the next day. This is the most powerful scene in all of Holy Week to me because of this anxious struggle in the garden. Here I believe that the yearning for a life without pain invades and vexes him, and his upcoming torture wracks him with anxiety in that garden. He is showing us that this temptation is great even for him. He wants to hide because his human self is afraid, so he’s looking for a fig leaf. “Is there any other way to handle this?” he wonders. We can relate to him in the garden so well because we see the human side of Christ. His human self wants to hide, but being fully divine disallows him that option.

So what does he do? He rejects his human desire and accepts the suffering by turning his will over to God, to his divine side, even though it opens his human side to the crucible of pain before dying the following afternoon. His human self wants to overrule his divine self, but he denies the instinct, taking the correct action that Adam failed to take in the original garden (notice that there is a garden in the moment of the Fall and another garden in the moment of the Redemption, both involving decisions to accept or reject God).

But the difficult part here for me is that I wonder if Jesus is showing us the way to deal, how to handle anxiety, when in fact he is completely calm in his inner divinity. I guess it doesn’t matter in the end to me, because for me, just like his baptism, he is showing us how to live. In fact, this lesson on prayer to combat anxiety and mental pain is the greatest life lesson that I have ever gained from religion, so it doesn’t matter whether Jesus’ divine self was utterly calm in that garden. I am not divine, so I will only know the human experience, and in his actions to pray and turn his will over to the father, I see the answer key to literally every single sleepless night and how to walk with God. For a book that will knock your socks off on real-life application of turning your will over to God, I cannot recommend highly enough He Leadeth Me, by Father Walter Ciszek about how he survived the Soviet prison camps for two decades.

Try to imagine how difficult it would be to have the power to save yourself and choose not to use that power. Again, this is Jesus living by example. Superheroes in comic books and the heroes of mythology die for various causes, but not like this, and not for our sins. The ability of Jesus to endure pain and humiliation during his trial and death while knowing that he could escape, or destroy his tormentors at any moment, seems impossible for someone like me. I cannot even keep a proper fast for a day without eating some forbidden fruit, but instead of fruit mine comes in the form of a bowl of Cinnamon Life cereal.

The great thing about realizing you are a sinner is that as soon as you have peeled away one layer of dirt, you find there is another layer, and beneath that are layers of lies that you can’t even see yet. You turn back to God and suddenly see a new world, but you also begin to see how filthy you’ve gotten. But eventually you come to find that the last layer cannot be removed. It’s permanent, and it’s called pride.

The body and soul that we have go together, but there is a fundamental flaw shared between them. That flaw is in the original skin, the original sin, and it cannot be removed or hidden.

The fountain of youth that we want is called paradise. But there is only one way to get back to paradise here and hereafter, and that is not through our own effort or ability. No matter what corporations are selling or what Disney is storytelling or the news media is yelling, there is no way to get to paradise by ourselves. There are plenty of paths to go astray, mirrors to look into, cure-alls to drink, products to apply, ideologies to adopt - but the only way to the fountain of youth is to throw out the map and put all your trust in God. All he asks for is our entire mind, body, and soul.

Whoever loves his life will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be. The Father will honor whoever serves me. (Jn 12:25)

The happy ending for all of seekers is rather simple in the end. The peace they are looking for is not in holding a published novel, or wearing a championship belt, or having unblemished skin, or hearing a round of applause, or taking a trophy deer, or winning a state title, or being forever young. The restlessness has a solution. It’s available. It’s free. It’s here now. It can be delivered today, to anywhere, faster than Amazon. And it goes like this:

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” (Mt 11:27)

That’s paradise. That’s what we want. To rest, and to be content, and to be protected by the one who loves us the most, no matter what. The funny thing is, in the end, the thing we thought that we wanted is not what we wanted. We want to be free, to rest, to return to being like a child. The Fountain of Youth is available. It has been available for 2,000 years. The kingdom of God is within you. Return to the faith of a child, exposed and vulnerable. We bring what little we have to him, and he provides the rest.

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The desire to look and feel young goes back a long way, as in all the way to the beginning. Death is our primary fear that drives so much other behavior, we will do anything to stave it off. Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, said, “…what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” This attitude might have made Socrates a good match for my fictional woman with the cursed bananas, although he was not recorded as being attractive at all. She may have swiped left and passed on him.

If you doubt that we are chasing youth, just read or watch advertisements. Yesterday I was on the treadmill, chasing my own fountain of youth, and I could see a TV in the distance. (FYI: I signed up for a second Ironman back in 2019, before I realized that marathons or mileage on a bike would never fill the God-shaped hole in my heart. The race was punted twice during the Covid era, so I’m now swimming, biking, and running again, making me every bit the seeker of the people I’m about the judge (and of course measure for measure will I be judged). But I’ll circle back to my own hypocrisy in a minute after I recap the TV sequence that I must regurgitate now.)

The TV in the distance had a series of advertisements and infomercials: An infomercial with the late Larry King showed the incredible life-saving benefits of “Prostagenix,” a prostate supplement. Like any good snake-oil, having the letter X in the name goes a long way, as many supplements go this route, especially those marketed to men who are either obsessed with strength or desperately trying to hang on to the glory days of youth. Here’s a sampling of ‘X’ named companies and products that might give me eternal youth: Nugenix, Bodydynamix, NO XPLODE, Nitraflex, Oxide Booster, Vapor X5, XTEND, Shotgun 5X. All of these ‘X’ names sound technical and give me the impression of deep science revelations that could very well conquer death. Cellucor C4 is literally named to sound like an explosive made by a biomedical lab. Then there are things like Total War and Bucked Up, which sound like supplements that the Greek gods Ares and Priapus would take, except the Olympian gods don’t need to supplement anything because they are myths that don’t age. They are not real. The myths of ancient Greece are not even written like the Gospels where clearly Jesus and the Apostles lived in a specific time and place. The Greek gods were obvious stories meant to match specific phases of life, and seasons of the year, and human experiences. But as men, we would really like to be pinned to certain gods as if it were a permanent buddy-system, so we can stay in our twenties and thirties. The problem is, one day you must switch from taking pre-workout biotech chemistry elixirs to “please just keep me alive” prostate health supplements. Talk about humbling, but it comes for us all sooner or later.

The next infomercial was an ad for a battery-powered device that sprays tanning dust onto skin, and apparently this is targeted to women. The “Breeze” device ad showed middle-aged to elderly women being transformed into young flowers of the field by an application of orange dust. The ad itself was so airy and bright that I had thought perhaps this infomercial had been recorded in the same room that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about in the The Great Gatsby, when Nick the narrator first goes to East Egg and realizes how the rich, young, beautiful people live:

The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. (from The Great Gatsby - Chapter 1)

That was the look and feel of the infomercial setting. However, the spraying of this paint on faces seemed very unnatural amid the hyper-natural, if not heavenly, atmosphere of the white-clad studio. As the women sprayed the dust onto their faces I eventually thought of the phrase, “From dust you came and to dust you shall return,” but I never considered the dust would be orange.

Finally, someone turned the TV to ESPN, the channel that dedicates all of it’s time to celebrating youth and glory. The first advertisement that I saw was about low testosterone, with two aging legendary sports figures pitching the sale. In their obvious post-retirement leisure time, having achieved much success and notoriety through physical prowess but clearly not enough money to avoid getting lured into endorsements, the athletes casually stroked golf balls down the driving range, looking confident and strong. Their faces were slightly weathered from the march of time and, of course, their gritty play on the baseball and football fields. wink One of the greatest baseball sluggers of my lifetime, Frank Thomas, discussed the need for testosterone supplements with Doug Flutie, the plucky underdog quarterback who threw arguably the greatest Hail Mary touchdown pass in history. Their nonchalance and openness about aging signaled that it was no big deal to admit their bodies were changing. Sagging energy and muscles - that was normal! Floundering virility in the bedroom did not get mentioned openly but between the lines the word “flaccid” seemed to hide. The closed-captioning read like a parent talking to an adolescent about puberty. Paraphrasing the message, I read this: “Hey bud, it’s ok that you can’t hit home runs and drink hard and have sex all day any more. Neither could we. That is, we couldn’t until we started taking these pills and powders. You can do it, too, friend, with this product.”

In the 1990s, the snake oil and cure-all elixirs were not so dressed up and well-marketed. In fact, I think the 19th century hawkers of cure-alls, like those portrayed in the Little House on the Prairie had a better story for selling than what I recall in the 1990s. The horny goat weed and aphrodisiacs, not to mention “energy boosting” ephedrin, not only sounded like snake-oil but even looked like it. You could buy things at the gas station, either in the bathroom vending machine, or discreetly at the register. There was the courtesy at the checkout line where the cashier would kindly not make eye contact as the customer said, “Just the soda and candy bar,” as he furtively snatched a packet of horny goat weed and added it to the pile. But today, the sale of Dr. Porkenheimer’s Boner Juice is wrapped in very attractive marketing, with legendary, fatherly ex-athletes doing the shilling. Going back to that difficult reference to “boiling goats” from an earlier episode - isn’t it fascinating that the book of Exodus prohibits Canaanite fertility rituals that also involved goats, which we consider to sound archaic? Yet in our sophisticated, enlightened time, many people still take something called “horny goat weed” to preserve youth and virility, and it can be found in various supplements under more gentle names today. Now we have official pharmaceuticals from major corporations stamping approvals on snake oil to increase virility. Pfizer has replaced the ritual of the boiling of the baby goat with lab work, and again, if Exodus were written today, the warnings about joining the surrounding culture would be different.

I think we all owe an apology to used-car salesmen, because everyone knows that the used car salesman is trying to make a dollar and will try to squeeze blood from a turnip, or more appropriately, a contract out of a lemon. But the real snake-oil salesmen today are very polished, very smooth, with terrific stories and targeting and know exactly which insecurities we need to feed. How do they know? Because our private thoughts have been purchased from our phone data. In fact, I think that used car sales is now one of the few honest trades left amid the whitewashed tombs known as corporations, where externally virtue is portrayed through marketing, while the real business operation ruthlessly seeks wealth and consolidation of power. The polish and shine of Google and Amazon advertising is like putting a silk hat on Jabba the Hut.

Let’s get back on track.

What’s interesting, once again, is that the Garden of Eden story can be seen in advertising. Did you know - the word “serpent” could alternatively be translated as “the shiny one”? The shiny one is slippery and deceptive. I think this would help people get over the stumbling block of the “talking snake” problem, because when we are talking about something difficult like temptation and sin, we don’t necessarily think of a serpent, but everyone knows deceptive, slippery people, and that is what the enemy really is. The snake works great for children and people who have returned to faith, because the understanding of the serpent as a slippery, deceptive being makes sense. But for the fallen away, the idea of a talking animal makes them raise their eyebrows in doubt.

Marketing departments knows exactly which wound to poke for each of us, and we all have one or more. We have been carrying along lies our entire lives: that we are unattractive or stupid, or we have fears of powerlessness or shame or rejection. What we want is to feel loved and respected, healthy and safe. Thus, the best way to sell something is to remind us that we are none of those good things, that our wound is still a major problem, and that we could get over that wound if we just bought or ingested a product. This is exactly why you don’t get Superbowl ads simply showing Jesus hanging on the Cross for thirty seconds - it’s just terrible for sales, even though he is the only thing that actually can heal every single one of those insecurities and wounds.

But let’s go back to Socrates for a moment, as he is perhaps one of the most admirable people to ever walk the earth. By his own words, he felt that celebrating health and physical accomplishment while pursuing wisdom made for the most worthwhile pursuits. That seems difficult to disagree with for a modern person today. Diet, health, and exercise - these are the obsessions of so many now, along with knowledge. So for a moment, I just want to compare Jesus and Socrates, as both of these men changed the world, but in quite different ways.

The fact that Socrates was recorded as being unattractive is interesting. Someone felt the need to write down that he was a “squat, unattractive, barefoot man… with bulging eyes, large lips, and a pot belly.” We never hear anything about Jesus, as to whether he was handsome or what his eyes looked like. Every portrayal of him shows the effects of poverty and fasting, and rather than physical attributes, the one thing we know for sure is that he is universally depicted as having humility. The reason I bring up Socrates here at the end of this series is because there are similar parallels in the lives of him and Jesus, but Socrates saw bodily health and wisdom as the heights of human pursuit, whereas Jesus advocated for humility and prayer, with the body only needing its “daily bread.”

Most interesting of course, is that both of these men became martyrs, but Jesus’ choice to accept death was very different from Socrates. On the night before he died, Jesus talked about drinking from “the cup” that symbolized his suffering. This is a curious word choice, as 400 years earlier, Socrates chose to die by drinking from a literal cup of tea containing deadly hemlock. Jesus talked about drinking from the cup, but his cup, his trial and death, was far more brutal and awful. Socrates’ death came like a deep sleep, while Jesus’ execution came in wave after wave of pain and abandonment. At seventy years old, the death of Socrates happened like a sophisticated modern euthanasia, where he was chilling with friends and giving a fine speech. Jesus accepted a much different cup, not with one poison in it, but with every possible poison in it. The cup Jesus consumed contained all the ugliness of human sin. These cups could not be more different, despite both cups leading to the same ending of death by execution. Socrates gives a hopeful speech in the end, with honest words about his uncertainty about an afterlife: “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.” Then he drinks the poison tea. He goes into death almost fearlessly, it seems, and those around him are struggling more than Socrates.

Jesus on the other hand is abandoned and in a suffocating agony for hours. He doesn’t have a speech, but instead has the “last seven words” from the cross, which includes his prayers for his tormentors (“Forgive them, for they know not what they do”) and he gives total certainty about the afterlife to the the good thief next to him. He tells the thief, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

These two endings are only the same in the martyrdom, but not at all in the details or message or expectations.

So how did Socrates feel about the self, the body, and growing old? His own words (or the words of his student, Xenophon, who wrote the words) tell us that Socrates may not have fully bought into the “grain of wheat” parable. The Greek was a caretaker of his body, and a lover of exterior beauty. Socrates was a man who spent the day at the gym and arguing about wisdom. Frankly, it sounds like a great life. Lifting, praying, and intellectual pursuits? Sign me up.

Years ago, the realization dawned on me that Jesus never attended a gym. There is not one parable about lifting rocks on leg day or running a 10K, and he never advises anyone about a low-carb diet. In fact, he’s always talking about carbs, not protein. Bread. In particular, he says he is the “bread of life” when he introduces the institution of the Eucharist. But Socrates is known to have spent much of his time at a gym. I’m just guessing here, but Socrates was likely jacked if he spent all his time at the gym. Perhaps he had sweet traps and triceps, like the people you can observe at every gym in America who carry around gallons of water and grunt while bench pressing six plates. Jesus is often portrayed as a thin, nearly sickly looking man, and the idea of him even entering a gym to exercise is laughable. There is just no way Jesus would be a gym member.

So I laughed. And then the sense of humor wore off. I stopped laughing because I realized I’d stumbled across a major problem.

I realized that every time I go to the gym, I am not dying to self. No, not at all. At the gym, I am watering and fertilizing my wheat plant, as if I were going to live forever. I’m supposed to be letting the seed die and fall to the ground, but I’m spending lots of time on a dryland version of the Fountain of Youth. Every moment spent at the gym is not living in line with the Gospel. The gym is all about me, and truly most of us attending the gym have vanity and lust scribbled all over their bodies. For goodness sakes, the walls are covered in mirrors! Then I realized: I am just like the woman with the cursed bananas! (Bet you wonder how this all tied together, right? So did I.)

I enjoy the gym. I like going to the gym. But as I imagine I’m aiming to live a Christian life, I’m fooling myself. The trick I always forget is that just when I think I’ve escaped the devil, that is, the “slippery one,” that’s when he’s probably steering me exactly where he wants me to go. Best to assume that he is somehow tempting me, and pray for God’s mercy, and since I always need help, it never hurts to ask for the angels and saints to join me, or to ask for Mary to intercede and crush his nasty head with her heel. The spiritual combat we all have to face has far better moves and more skill than both professional wrestling and Ultimate Fighting Championship combined, so it is wise to call in the whole crew, even if only a false alarm in the end. Perhaps it’s only a cat stuck in a tree, but I call the fire department, ambulance, and police. To ask for God’s will to be done often requires it, especially when my own will wants attention.

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So how exactly do you return to the faith of a child?

How can you get over these textual difficulties? How do you even make sense of your “rebellion” against your childhood faith, when it may not seem like a rebellion at all, but rather an awakening to truth?

Asking questions can be the very thing that drives you away from faith, as reason alone seems to call for finding truth elsewhere. You have been lied to, and now the time has come to correct it. The authority over you has been revealed to be a fraud, just to keep you in your place.

Do you know what this is? Do you recognize where you have heard this before?

This is the temptation and the fall of man. The serpent tells Eve this exact message, persuading her that God is hiding the truth in order to keep humans lower and lesser. The snake says, “God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil.” (Gn 3:4-5)

I’ve said this many times, but if you had told me back in college that in my forties I would be quoting Genesis and telling others about how the serpent talking to Eve makes total sense, I probably would have jumped off a bridge. I’m not even exaggerating. Ok, maybe a little. But I was in full-blown Thomas Paine mode, and teetering on Richard Dawkins’ atheism. Any book I picked up regarding Genesis would have been to argue against it or mock it as fairy tales, because I was completely convinced that evil portrayed as a talking snake was only a scare tactic for those in authority wanting to keep control over people.

But then life happened. In those days of life, I came to realize that there are falls that we must pass through. Every person who has ever lived must pass through the fall, or falls. If you don’t think you’ve encountered the fall, you either haven’t reached it, or you may need to hike longer yet. The third option is that you have had the gift of faith, like a child, from the beginning and never lost it. Those are the most fortunate people, but the rest of us must reach the fall.

The fall is the oldest trick in the book, the oldest temptation, which is exactly why it’s in the beginning, right after the creation stories. Adam and Eve are you and me. They are these naive childlike humans who reach the age of reason and start to ask questions about the world. The experience of Eve describes my own thoughts and feelings once I reached middle-school age. No longer content with the answers I was given, I started wondering about the narrative and rules that had been handed to me, and once I started down that path, the fall happened. I didn’t eat a literal fruit, but asking questions and getting unsatisfactory answers I veered into doubt, thinking much like Thomas the Apostle and Thomas Paine the revolutionary. The lack of logical explanations increased my doubt, shaking the foundation, and coupling that doubt with the weight of hypocritical adult behavior that I could observe, the rock teetered toward tumbling down the hill. The last nudge came simply from my own desire to push the rock over the edge.

The flow of the fall goes like this:

There is something I want. I know I shouldn’t do it, as I’ve been told not to or advised not to. The idea occurs to me that the rules don’t apply, that I see others breaking the rule, and that the rules are really only for “bad” people. If I really want to do it, I’ll find someone to do it with me, or research for some book that tells me it’s ok to do. But really, if I see others doing it and not being struck by lightning then it must be fine; others have already jumped the fence and the bull has not gored them to death. Then the temptation comes more alive. Why am I prohibited from this thing? What’s the big secret? I am coaxed into moving the desire outside of my head and into action. With nervousness, the threshold is crossed. The fall is complete. Now I have knowledge. The knowledge of those who were already doing it suddenly belongs to me.

The musical Into the Woods has a song by Little Red Riding Hood called “I Know Things Now” that dives right into this fall. The lyrics contain all the good stuff from Eden. She rejects motherly advice as she falls for the wolf’s seductive invitation. After being swallowed by the wolf she realizes that mother was right, and then needs someone to save her from the darkness.

Mother said, "Straight ahead," Not to delay or be misled. I should have heeded Her advice... But he seemed so nice!

He seemed so nice! The wolf and serpent in the Garden of Eden seem to have something in common. Almost like these are parallel tales instructing us with an allegory here. Little Red Riding Hood and Eve could probably go to coffee together and hash this out for several hours. “Wait,” says Eve, “did you say a talking wolf? That’s so weird! I ran into a talking snake.” Little Red Riding Hood replies, “In the woods?” Eve says, “No, a garden.” Anyone overhearing the conversation would assume they are baked or tripping, as the two of them would be in total unison once they got into the details.

Back to the song from the musical, Little Red Riding Hood continues:

I really got scared, well - excited and scared - but he drew me close and he swallowed me down, down a dark slimy path, where lie secrets that I never want to know, and when everything familiar seemed to disappear forever.

Oh, Little Red, I don’t think the sacred writer of Genesis could have said it better. Paradise lost, innocence swallowed up. She took the plunge and the fun wore off. In the fairy tale, her mother tells her to run nice and straight to grandmother’s but the wolf distracts her, and uses the same tricks that the serpent in the garden uses, and those are the four D’s: Deceit, diversion, division, and lastly despair. The wolf distracts her, showing her all the lovely flowers of the woods, and Little Red thinks that perhaps granny would like a bouquet. The wolf suggests that she pick some flowers in order to deceive her about his real aim, which is to eat her. So Little Red is diverted from her path and suddenly divided from her mother’s instructions, she is acting against the one that loves her, thinking the kindly wolf means well. A few hours later she is betrayed, swallowed up, and in a dark and hopeless place - despair. (The musical Into the Woods has a lot of searching for fulfillment, as characters fall into despair over their unfulfilled desires…I could talk about it all day because fairy tales and fables tell us more about ourselves than we would ever suspect, just like the book of Genesis).

Little Red Riding Hood finally comes to knowledge, and not just the knowledge of the fall, but knowledge of the solution. She knows that someone must set her free. In this case it’s the huntsman, who slices open the wolf and sets the girl and grandmother both free.

So we wait in the dark until someone sets us free, and we're brought into the light, and we're back at the start.

What a great line, and the writer of it is not a Christian. This is where these “seeds of the word” are all over the culture, even in the most secular places like Disney films. What is happening in this fairy tale? She falls, she despairs, she is saved by someone who undoes the mistake. He slays the wolf, and from her darkness she is “reborn” into the light of the world. I mean, she is literally reborn, cut from the wolf by C-section, and then she is “back at the start.” What is the start? She is once again a child. She has returned to childhood. Does any of this sound familiar? She has fallen and is reborn into the light, saved by a savior, and once again a child. In fairy tales, we are close to touching scripture stories and don’t even know it, but this is why fairy tales and fables never die.

Little Red goes through the fall and restoration rather quickly, while we may linger long in the belly of the wolf. This is because once the falling sequence begins, it becomes comfortable, the action can quicken, because the authority, now exposed as a fraud, holds no sway. If we believe our mistaken path is good, we will follow it for a long time. Unfortunately, the act that you believed would “open your eyes” to knowledge and make you into a god, can never deliver because it was based on a lie to begin with. But we will tell ourselves there is always a next action, a further step, something a bit more extreme or different, that may be the key to seeing the fullness of life, where we will unlock the god level.

The quote of Thomas Paine saying, “My own mind is my own church,” is simply his self-deception carried to its logical conclusion. He has elevated his own thoughts, temptations, and desires to be sacred and godlike. To call your head a church is to proclaim yourself a god. There’s no other way to interpret that statement. Even though I always mention how shocking Jesus’ declaration of his divinity is, that calling himself God is incredible, in reality billions of us do this daily, just in our own minds. Thomas Paine is a terrific author to read because he celebrates his fall so openly that it’s like a dissection of doubt, splayed out for us to review. I like writers who do this, because they show what the mind is like without the gift of faith. Never forget, that faith is a gift, one that is given to us, but we must ask for it, and Thomas Paine lacked the gift and I suspect he didn’t ask for it, because he thought it was for suckers and fools, just as I did before I came up against difficulties that could not be overcome without help outside of myself. Maybe he never felt boxed in, trapped, or in the darkness like Little Red Riding Hood, Eve, and me. Whatever the case, for someone like Paine, or other writers who clung to an open rebellion against God, such as Charles Bukowski or Christopher Hitchens or Karl Marx, I suspect that power, fame, and recognition had something to do with it, and the root of all that is pride.

The secret that you learn once you turn is this: the thing that took you into the darkness, is how you will be purified. I’d really like to claim that idea as my own, but St. Bernard (not the dog) said it, and if you go to recovery meetings this is only a revelation to newcomers, as those who have passed through the bottom come to realize that without their vice they would never have reached bottom and been reborn to become free of the vice.

The great contradiction for us follows the path that Dante took in the Inferno, in arguably the greatest writing of all time, where midway through his life’s journey he found himself lost in the dark, and the only way to get to heaven was to pass through hell, and of course once he gets to the bottom of hell, seeing all the vices and sins human beings can commit, he emerges onto the mountain of Purgatory. Yes, he has to go down in order to go up. The trick of the serpent and wolf is that their false promises lead you to believe that sin will make you level-up to be like god, but sin actually takes you down, in a spiral, that slowly circles around. You can get stuck in that spiral for a long time thinking that the rock or crack you cling to is where you want to end up. Some stay there forever. But life has a way of pushing you down that spiral once you begin circling the drain, and ultimately you need to let go and pass through the drain, through the darkness, or you can never get back to the light.

This temptation in the garden that Eve faces is the moment before we depart from our childhood faith. Modern literary people would call this a “coming of age” story or “loss of innocence.” The moment in the Gospel of Luke where twelve year old Jesus is in the temple ‘asking questions’ seems included for a specific purpose. There are no other childhood stories of his life. So while I laser in on the fact that Jesus was “asking questions” in the temple as a signal of his coming of age, of the moment where many of us would take the first fall, the rest of the chapter in Luke tells us something important, as Jesus doesn’t take the fall (as I did).

When his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.” And he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart. And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man. (Lk 2:48-52)

The worried mother, Mary, reminds Jesus of the parental authority over him. In the response there is a whiff of rebellion in pre-teen Jesus. He instructs his mother about his purpose, about who he is, about who his real father is, but the critical turn back to obedience is made before he overrides his parents’ authority. The temptation of a normal person to rebel is strong; imagine being God, with infinite power, and having to obey a human. However, having already selected Mary to be the mother of God, he relents and obeys, and doing so, Jesus shows us how to avoid the pitfall of the fall of man. He keeps his childlike faith intact by listening and asking questions. When his mother gives him instruction, he obeys. He shows us how to live. There’s so much more to go into here, but let’s stick to the fall, that root sin of pride and the rejection of authority.

As for us regular humans, we want to disobey, so we do. We toss out authority and faith, sometimes at the same time, or sometimes gradually. Even if we don’t fully throw out faith, we only keep it nearby for when a lifebuoy is needed, because to live with the open faith of a child in a teen or adult world would make us seem like a freak. Consider how a high school senior would be received if he came to school excited about Santa Claus. He’d be treated like a moron, like Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin in the The Idiot. When I first rejected God, I had this notion of God as a myth like Santa Claus or Zeus. The problem here is that this is an immature understanding of what Jews and Christians mean by “God.” If my concept of God was so small that I could compare the creator of the universe to a man that brings gifts and lives in the world that he created, then I had no concept or understanding of the God that is being itself. The reason God says his name is “I AM” in Exodus is because there is no name for him, he is beyond our labels, but we need a word so we say God.

To protect ourselves, even if we still believe, we have to keep it hidden. After everyone else has stopped believing, we would hate to seem like a gullible fool, so we dust the small concept of God under a rug, thinking it will go away. One of the most surefire nudges toward the death of faith is when one of your closest friends, someone you trust, or an older person you admire either expresses their own doubts or makes fun of your gullibility.

I can think of several people that pointed out how gullible I was, not about faith, but about other ideas or notions. Once you have the wound of feeling like a gullible fool, you need to find a fig leaf to cover that. Cynicism is a giant fig leaf that can cover entire bodies - it’s like a frond more than a leaf. More people hide behind cynicism today than just about anything else because the cynic doesn’t trust and doesn’t hope. Wonder and enchantment have left the building. The cynic sees the conspiracy and ulterior motive in everything, because once bitten they are twice shy. The idealist who is exposed as gullible or foolish can retreat rapidly into cynicism as a defense move. The cynic appears bold but the fool who admits his faith and takes on insults for trusting in God has far more courage. Why? Because he is exposed. Openness to God means exposure and vulnerability, while cynicism is easy and effortless. The difference between the two can be seen in any classroom in America, where the student that raises his hand to ask a question is exposed and vulnerable to the back row cynics who mock the question and he who asked. But the cynic is the one riddled with fear, which is why the fig leaf is needed.

The cynic is a visitor who will enter your life on a “speak and destroy” mission, like a heat seeking missile, pretty much like a serpent in the garden or wolf in granny’s bed. The person may not intend to be the catalyst for your fall, but they will provoke you toward the rejection of authority, God, and all things sacred. The abandonment of the childlike faith is nearly unavoidable, but this fall can be the greatest blessing of your life if you do eventually return, if you get up again. Rising from this fall may take five years, twenty years, or you may be on your death bed before you can overcome it, like the good thief on the cross next to Jesus, or the many people who call for Last Rites after having fallen away from their faith.

Overcoming the fall takes time. We don’t go through this fall like Eve or Little Red Riding Hood in just a few pages. But once you fall, you may have to fall all the way down.

Jesus tells the Parable of the Two Sons, which I think applies to the return to faith. A dad has two sons. Dad tells the first one, “Get to work,” and the first son replies, “Up yours, Dad!” and doesn’t move, but then later he feels bad about it and goes out to the field to do the work. (In case you didn’t notice, I’m paraphrasing the dialogue here.) Dad then approaches the second son and says, “Get to work.” The second son says, “Yes, sir, right away, Dad, you betcha, I was just about to go do just that,” and then he doesn’t move at all and sits on his butt and doesn’t feel bad about lying to his father. What’s the message? The first son will be chosen. The second one is just trying to look good, just saying the right words, and talk is cheap. To Jesus, talk is always cheap because he knows your heart. Jesus actually tells the Apostles and Pharisees that the prostitutes and tax collectors will find heaven before those who say all the right things in the temple.

Wait. What?

The reason why the worst sinners find their way to Jesus is because their fall is so far and they hit the ground so hard. Wham! Drunks and addicts know this. They come to realize that they have rejected God because they feel his absence. God doesn’t provide the safety net, he lets them hit in order to jolt them back to life. The people who go wild in their fall, their coming of age, who throw out God completely during their age of reason, who choose their pride of life over God, these are the ones that become brutally aware of what has been lost. How do I know this? Because I lived it. As I said, the sin you like the most, will start the fire that purifies you. By falling I became aware, and addicts worldwide tell this tale. Addiction is a way to fall, and recovery is the rebirth, the return. Many are the ways to the path of addiction: drugs, alcohol, sex, success (or vicarious success through your children), gambling, lying, co-dependence, stealing, setting fires, inhalants, nicotine, gaming, shopping, cutting yourself, gaming, pornography, tanning, coffee, work, fitness, social media. Any addiction can get you there. You can fall to the bottom and hit the ground hard through any of these channels.

If you have an experience that mirrors the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the story of returning to home is powerful. For those who think of Santa Claus as the same as God, I have never met anyone who hits bottom and wakes up to realize that it all started when they rejected the jolly old elf. No, the comparison of Santa to God is for immature atheists, not for serious doubters. The awakening begins when you are cut out of the belly of the wolf by a creator and savior called God, big ’G’, not by a fat mythological character. But in order to be set free, you must give up, surrender, to give back authority to the loving embrace of God. And many people refuse to do that, claiming that they cannot, or are not ready.

My point in all of this is that in order to return to the faith of a child, you have to have abandoned the childlike faith in the first place, otherwise you would never have left that state. The faith of a child is what you see when the child sings and doesn’t care who is listening, or dances in springtime puddles. It’s having loud conversation in quiet waiting rooms, or running around outside naked without awareness that it’s illegal. The faith of a child means to be exposed and vulnerable and free, and to believe that Goldilocks really did eat the bears’ porridge. To return, you must be open. You must not care about your exposure and vulnerability, and trust that God’s will is being done regardless of what mockery comes your way.

Also, you can only return to something that you left behind.

I so often look at the Gospels and think of Jesus’ own life as the model for living, the perfect example of how we should live. What I’ve often wondered about is the eighteen year gap between twelve-year old Jesus being “found in the temple” and his baptism by John, which marks the beginning of his ministry.

Could it be, perhaps, that Jesus gives us the example in his own life, staking off a period of time when we venture out, when we mature. Aren’t these middle years precisely when the wheat plant is growing but not yet ripe? The grain of a wheat plant doesn’t exist until it is mature, therefore a grain of wheat cannot yet die. To mature and produce grain, a plant must go from childhood to adolescence and finally adulthood, and only then can grain fall to the ground.

To me this eighteen year gap in Jesus’ life story is speaking something to us. We know that Jesus did not sin in his initial temptation to rebel. He obeys his mother and keeps his faith. Of course he does; he’s God. But that temple story shows us how we were supposed to live to avoid the fall. Then the story goes dark for almost two decades, where we can assume he is working construction jobs with his earthly father, Joseph. Somewhere in there, Joseph dies and we know little else except for that around the age of thirty, Jesus emerges, and begins to speak and heal.

The baptism of Jesus is the first metaphor for us to observe in the grain of wheat parable, as baptism is being “reborn” in the water and spirit. As I mentioned before, the “unless a grain of wheat dies” message has two metaphors that can apply, if not more. The first is to be reborn, and the act of baptism fits like a puzzle piece.

The second metaphor is the literal death of the body and resurrection. The first death and rebirth is something we can carry out now. Only Jesus can lay down his life and take it up again. But baptism is the action we can perform here and now. In fact, we can be reborn every day. In fact, the purpose of the Sign of the Cross is to renew our baptismal vows every day. It’s not just a cool hand motion we Catholics do for kicks or to get attention. This is one of those things, so ancient in the Church, that we don’t even remember what it’s for, so we need to remind ourselves now and then. Check out the free e-book from Word on Fire on the Sign of the Cross for some illuminating insights.

Dare I venture into further interpretation? (I wish someone wiser than myself was here right now, like Trent Horn or Father Mitch Pacwa or Saint Pope John Paul II, to guide me back from the precipice of bad interpretation.)

Jesus knows that we are going to fall and turn away. He practically implies that you are lying if you can’t admit that you have turned away. Jesus, who knows our hearts, fires shots at the Pharisees for false representation. The accusation he makes at the Pharisees centers around them being clean on the outside but filthy on the inside. Nicodemus becomes confused with Jesus during their conversation about “rebirth,” unsure of the meaning. It’s so easy to bash on the Pharisees as Jesus points out their error, since they are so legalistic in following rules that they think that is all that matters, that no change of heart is needed.

The Pharisees are the protectors of the culture, so their behavior is following God’s will of the Old Testament. The Jewish people are always being hemmed in by other cultures, from the time of Canaan boiling their goats right up to the infiltration of Rome. The Pharisees are doing their best to keep the covenant, to save the traditional culture, to keep the Jewish people “set apart” from the pagan, polytheistic world that surrounds them. What great lengths Nicodemus and company go to in their defense of that culture. Then suddenly John the Baptist shows up and says everyone must repent and be baptized, and then Jesus shows up and takes it even further saying a full rebirth is required. None of this makes sense right away to Nicodemus or his colleagues because they feel that they are righteous, that they have never rejected God. Jesus comes to tell them, “Oh yes, you have.” The fact that Nicodemus doesn’t know he’s taken the fall means he is still spiritually blind. Why? Because he is so bloated with pride, whereas the prostitutes and tax collectors and Prodigal Sons of the world are all too aware of their own fallen nature so that they understand what Jesus is saying long before the educated and wealthy classes begin to understand.

What I’m trying to say is this:

How can you return to something unless you have gone astray in the first place? Jesus knows we will go astray. He knows that we already have gone astray, and that we’ll not just do it once, but repeatedly. It’s not just a middle-schooler or drunk college student problem. The problem is shared by all, in all ages and all phases of life. Again, if you believe that Jesus is God, then you must read everything he says as coming from God, and God knows everything written in Genesis because he himself beamed it down somehow to the sacred writer. He knows about the Fall in the Garden, he knows about our rebellion, and he’s all too aware of our attempts to hide from him.

So if Jesus, who was sinless, gets baptized at thirty years old, despite not needing to be baptized but to show us how to live and be re-born, might we not suspect that he is deliberately telling us (and here by us I mean myself): “Yes, I know you spent many years rejecting me. I know you turned away from me, and I saw you closing down all those bars and acting the fool. At least Little Red Riding Hood was only picking flowers for grandmother, but you were totally out of control. I also know how you mocked me, and said I was just an imaginary being like Santa Claus, just invented to control people. Oh yeah, I saw all of that, and more, especially the things that only you know about. But as you know now, I’m real. I’m here. I came for you as one of my lost sheep. I waved many signs in front of you that you chose to ignore. But I’m glad you are listening now, and that you can see me again. So follow me. From now on, I will lead you. Be baptized and believe.”

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Perhaps you’ve noticed, in his earthly life, Jesus did not live to be one hundred years old. He didn’t even live to be fifty years old. He lived to the age of thirty-three, or thereabouts. Thirty-three is a nice, medium, mature age, and he chose to die. At the age of thirty, be began this journey toward the cross. Now, I am about to go off the orthodox trail here, but I feel like there is a signal to us, a message calling from the silence of his years between being found in the temple at age twelve and his public baptism around the age of thirty. The fact that Jesus began his ministry at thirty is curious, because he talks often about spiritual rebirth. He talks about returning to the faith of a child. After the infancy narratives of Jesus are completed, the only glimpse we see of Jesus is when he is in the temple in Jerusalem among the elders. This is one of my favorite parts of all the Gospels:

“After three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions, and all who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers.” (Luke 2:46)

Jesus was twelve years old at the time, so to read this in 21st century American terms, he would have been a middle-schooler. As many parents know, and many of us may remember, middle school is roughly when the “age of reason” begins, not to mention puberty. A litany of questions and doubts enters the mind of a middle-schooler. Around age twelve, the tooth fairy and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are all deceased. The myths begin to be seen as scandalous lies used as a carrot-on-a-stick to lure kids into good behavior. And do you know what else can easily become a suspected fraud when a child attends the funeral of Peter Cottontail? Yes, the answer is God.

The “age of reason” is when we enter into a greater understanding of the world around us and begin to grow toward adulthood, which means that is when we start ‘asking questions.’ For the Church, the age of reason is when we are said to be morally responsible for our actions, since we can no longer play the ignorance card regarding knowing what is right and wrong. Interestingly, the Age of Reason is also the name of a book attacking Christian doctrine and the idea of miracles, written by one of America’s founding fathers, Thomas Paine, who argued for Deism, not atheism. What Thomas Paine questioned in his book is many of the same topics any middle-schooler with a curious mind will come across, as the mind, body, and soul go searching together for meaning in this world. Paine didn’t come up with anything new, he just articulated the doubts about miracles and his discomfort with difficult sayings in the Bible, and he wrote the book in his fifties, meaning he could organize his doubts much better than a twelve year old. Paine spent a life of rebellion, gaining fame in America for his pamphlets titled “Common Sense” which called for revolution, and then he went revolution shopping in France and thought it might be nice if they, too, overthrew the government and all Church involvement in society. From his own words, he said that churches and religions “…appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

Furthermore, he hated the Bible, calling it demonic: “Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.”

This is a perfect definition of the two-fold set of doubts that those coming into the age of reason and adulthood will be tempted by and want to investigate. First, the imposition of authority irritates, especially when the rules seem arbitrary. As teenagers grow and learn, they see adults that do not live up to the rules set forth, as hypocrites abound in all spheres, whether in work, church, or family life. The idea that authority is invented solely for purposes of control becomes an easy leap to make. If the models for authority are bad, or you have been repeatedly told are bad, then the association of authority as an evil oppressor can be enticing because it turns the doubter into a victim and a freedom fighter. In the years of doubt and questioning, the urge rises in all of us a stepson feels to scream at his stepfather, “You’re not my dad!” when it comes to any institution or any person that holds authority over us that constrains our behavior and thought.

The second onslaught of doubt comes from, yes, that same Old Testament that Marcion and millions of others throughout history have disliked. Every child reads the happy stories of the Old Testament. Children’s Bibles go from creation (wow!), to Adam and Eve and the cute serpent (they’re naked, lol!), to Noah’s saving ark (happy animals!) to David killing Goliath (the underdog wins!). And that’s about it. That’s the summary of the forty-six books of the Old Testament. I think both parents and children are ready to move right on over to the New Testament, to the non-judgemental, loving God, manifested in the person of Jesus.

The child has faith in these primary stories about Adam and Noah and David. Children believe them. This is the “faith of a child” that Jesus talks about returning to, where there is wonder and willingness to believe. Parents and children can have amazing discussions and talk through life lessons solely from these top-ten greatest hits, through these highlights of the Old Testament. Kids learn these stories because they aren’t yet ready to tackle confusing lines like, “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” (Ex 23:19) A child that hears a line like this may have some concern about what is for dinner, but will not likely care or even pretend to understand, even if you explained it. That this line has more to do with protecting Israelite identity so that they avoid becoming like neighboring tribes, in this particular case the Canaanites, who boiled a goat in its mother’s milk as part of a magic fertility rite, would not even enter their developing brains. Actually, it’s not that the child will be unable to understand it. No, the problem is that we adults don’t understand it. We can’t make sense of it ourselves, so we dumb it down and shove it to the back of the bookshelf.

Few adults can interpret or explain the backstory of the goat. It raises questions. Let me just consider a few of those questions that I can think of off the top of my head.

Why would anyone boil a goat in the first place? Who boils a goat at all? This is America. Beef won long ago, we don’t eat goat, so let’s go back further: why a goat? And who boils meat? I mean, boiling hot dogs and bratwurst makes sense, but no one would boil a steak unless they were mentally ill, and they certainly wouldn’t admit it. Have they considered a grill or a smoker? The taste would be much better. Where is this strange culinary event taking place? Is this in France? Why would you boil milk? What’s with the goat being “young”? Seems kind of cruel. I could see PETA being all over this. Was the goat alive before it was thrown into the pot? Is the goat boiled with hair? Are the hooves still on, or do those get lopped off? If so, what happens to the hooves? If it’s alive, does the goat bleat while boiling? I imagine it would make a really sad sound. At least you can’t hear a lobster bleat as it dies in boiling water.

Then there’s the context of where this line appears in the book of Exodus. The chapter is talking about harvest parties and bringing in “first fruits” from the fields and pastures to honor God, so that’s all fine and dandy. Makes sense: bring in offering to honor God, got it. But then it jumps right into a line about boiling goats! This line feels like some addendum or amendment to address a one-time event, like a version of the curse of the goat on the Chicago Cubs, where a man showed up with a pet goat showed up and said, “Them Cubs, they ain't gonna win no more,” which caused them to suck for decades, but in this case the man showed up, boiled a goat, and said, “That Israel, they ain’t gonna be Chosen no more.”

How would the average parent talk about this boiling goat verse with a child? Parents just want children to go to bed, not partake in Biblical interpretation by nightlight. The load of laundry, the permission slip for the school field trip, the dental bill, the property tax, the summer vacation plan, tomorrow’s meetings, the need for personal hygiene - all of these questions and issues outrank the problem that a boiled goat represented to the Israelites and the sacred writer of Exodus. We just can’t go into the details, so we stick to the easy things, the big things. There is a reason why the “main” stories are simple ones and it has to do with the same reason that fairy tales and fables are short and sweet with lots of imagery. It’s so we can remember them, while the details and the layers of these stories go far deeper, into places that a parent and child cannot easily venture into, but over the course of a lifetime, we encounter versions of these stories and takes in our very real world and experiences. But I’ll get to that later, because first we have to deal with the boiling of this baby goat.

These confusing lines are actually important, however, because every line has a purpose in the Bible. So for the record, now that I’ve expanded on this long enough that the goat could have finished boiling, what is the purpose of this line about boiling goats? The reason Israel does not boil goats in it’s mothers milk is actually quite simple. The fertility rite of the Canaanites goes against their worship of the one God. So this line, bizarre as it is, directly supports the Ten Commandments that Moses received just a few chapters earlier in the text. This interjection about the goat is about the first commandment: you shall have no gods before me. This prohibition of boiling is literally called out because these are the types of rules that keep God’s chosen people set apart from the pagans. Israel worships the one God, not the Canaanite or Egyptian or Persian gods. So not only do they outlaw boiling goats, but this line can be read as outlawing any pagan ritual or magic or sorcery.

But no child or middle-schooler will likely dig into the underlying meaning of strange verses like this. Most adults will never even consider looking (unless they enjoy it like I do), because it takes too long, the information is hard to find, and there is a game on TV or fingernails to polish. There’s not enough time! Isn’t there a fountain of youth we could drink from?

We lack the time and energy, so we abandon the strangeness of this cultural quirkiness. After all the goat was boiled some three to five thousand years ago, if not long before that. We feel that this goat has no relevance to us today. The Children’s Bibles present a kind of God that Disney could have come up with. In fact, the cartoon Bibles of today are likely the result of desperate Christians attempting to hold back the flood of Disney’s secular religion, as it aggressively evangelizes the world and steamrolls actual cultures and traditions, much like the Roman empire and Spanish conquistadores did, but without the sword. In fact, were Exodus being written now, I suspect it would have lines like, “Don’t worship your smartphone” or “Discard all Disney movies,” because the point is not about the specific ritual with the goat, it’s about any ritual (magic or otherwise) that tears apart the fabric of the Israelite community. Anything that diverts focus from the one true God is prohibited, therefore using magic to try to conjure up fertility is not allowed.

So that’s the first set of questions the budding doubter has to deal with, but the main hangup about the Old Testament is the violence, and by hangup I mean, we just disconnect the call. Click. Bye!

After we have passed through the dumbed-down gauntlet of tickly feathers in our modern Children’s Bible, we are in for a shock if we go searching in the actual Bible. If we ever go to the actual text (and most of us won’t, especially Catholics) we’ll find the snake in the garden of Eden, but he won’t be cute. The animal rescue story of Noah’s no-kill shelter ark becomes something much darker. And the peaceful and loving Jesus who passes from this world to the next requires massive pain and suffering to fulfill the new covenant.

The reaction for the light reader is to retreat or ignore the Old Testament because of the bloodshed and violence. This might be a wise move to preserve your faith, because many non-believers dive into the horrors and read deeply, only to determine that they cannot resolve a loving God with violence and suffering. The top objection to God is the existence of suffering in this world, since this seems converse to any argument against a loving God. Not diving into the pit and studying the Old Testament is sometimes a shield for people who put their complete trust in God. They know the truth, they have fully turned to God, and nothing you can say or tell or show them will disrupt that trust in God. This may seem like an ostrich, with its head-in-the-sand, but there is a reason for people who have been reborn to do this.

Why would someone appear to choose ignorance? Because they have received the gift of faith and will automatically tune out any reading of the Bible that does not enrich that faith. They will reject any reading that does not celebrate the “encounter with God” that the word represents to them. Many atheists have more Biblical knowledge than believers because they dig in and look closely, they have more education, and they are truth seekers. Truth seekers read deeply and believe that the only way to read is objectively.

Formerly, in my days of disbelief, I was fully on the side of calling out these ostriches. How could anyone not inspect the Bible and see the problems within it? Even when I wanted to give a reading the benefit of the doubt, it was felt too glaringly ignorant and foolish to believe, and after a few of those experiences I stopped reading the actual book at all and looked for authors like Thomas Paine, or writings from the Jesus Seminar, or John Dominic Crossan - authors who would confirm my suspicions. I recently spoke with someone whose faith was waning, and he told me he wanted to go find books that would cut through the apologetics and defenses. He wanted to find historical analysis and books that delved into the likelihood of the Gospel realities. He wanted a kind of “Bible as literature” approach and scientific approach to the Bible. I told him that his faith will go into hibernation or die if that’s the approach he takes, because he’s already decided. What he wanted was total confirmation for his faith, like Thomas the Apostle, and the entire prospect of having and keeping faith rests on the idea that you will never have that certainty. This is the great contradiction of faith and what makes people so crazy. Once you accept and adopt the mysteries of faith, or the grace of God gives you the gift of faith, then the leap is taken and people will defend and guard that faith with their lives, literally.

This is why the faithful seem so dense and dumb to non-believers.

Now, having come back, I completely understand why the ostriches act obtuse in defense of their faith. Not everyone has time or ability to do deep readings, but they know the faith is real, that the book is the truth, and even if they can’t understand everything they have total trust and will not allow anyone, especially someone that aims to destroy their faith, to even allow the words of doubt to enter their ears. Most of the re-born believers have already been down the road of doubt, so they know where it ends, and no argument or persuasion will trick them into falling again. Yes, they will fall into sin again, but they will not doubt God again.

This seemed crazy to me. I never understood it, until after I returned to believing and started reading a book that I could feel undermining my belief. I stopped reading that book, immediately, only finishing it later once I felt able to return. I actually recall feeling something urging me to stop reading the book. Then I knew I had crossed the leap into land of the ostriches. Since that experience, I recognize when the need to stop or to pray is near, when it must be done. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this one of the signals that the saints refer to when they talk about Spiritual Combat. Yes, it sounds crazy, but perhaps you know about this combat already, as you may have tried to quit doing something that you would like to remove from your life, only to find that you cannot, so you justify it as a cost of life, that every one must have a vice or two. After all, no one is perfect, right?

The truth is that the devil never bothers you while you are carrying out his will, but he will aggravate you terribly once you attempt to stop. For me, this has a real life illustration in tobacco usage and addiction, as I could not stop with my own willpower. In fact, tobacco was way ahead on inventing the self-driving car than Tesla or General Motors. What do I mean by that? Well, whenever I had decided to quit using tobacco, I would have built-up my resolve to quit and would even be telling myself in the car that I would not drive to a gas station to buy any tobacco. But to my utter surprise, soon I would be standing in line paying for tobacco products of one form or another. My car seemed to drive itself to the store. These almost felt like out-of-body experiences except I was clearly turning the wheel and signaling to turn into the gas station or grocery store. No matter how firmly I resolved to quit, I could not. No matter how fully dedicated to stopping this practice I proclaimed myself to be, the addiction took over. In the end, the only way I managed to stop using tobacco was the same method I learned and applied to stop drinking, which was prayer. Asking daily for strength and direction from a Higher Power is how it started, and it works, and still works. My car no longer drives itself. This power to change through prayer made no sense. Nothing made sense, after all of the extended efforts and books and nicotine gum and pills and therapies - none of that worked. The one thing I never thought would work not only worked for one type of vice, but works for all types of vice. If this experience happens and you begin to believe in that Higher Power as having real, inexplicable power, you may make the leap from generic Higher Power to believing in God and soon the entire Apostles’ Creed. And then you’re in trouble. You know you can never go back, nor do you want to go back, nor will anything, come hell or high water, separate you again from the loving God who came looking for you, reached out, and scooped you up.

This is why believers may not read as deeply as educated doubters. They never want to lose the gift of faith again. No Old Testament story can dissuade them. Take Samson, the maniac from the book of Judges. Even if Samson slaughtered 1,000 Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone and acted like a total jerk before and afterward - even that will not deter the faithful, because they may not know exactly why it’s important, but they know that story is important.

Once you start asking for the Holy Spirit to help you read the book, and you read the book seeking faith, thinking “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.” I have to repeat this often, but faith is a gift. Those that don’t have faith literally cannot read it as an “encounter with God.” This is not to irritate or mock either side of this question, it’s just a fact that the gift of faith changes your entire approach to how you read the word of God. If you are coming in to find doubt, you will find more reasons to doubt. If you are reading to boost faith, you will boost your faith. It’s like the saying, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”

Various anti-Christian websites have done the work of extracting the most cruel scenes of the Old Testament so that we don’t have to do any scrounging around. These lists are posted online for even the most casual doubter, from middle-schooler to full-blown Thomas Paine, so that he or she can confirm their suspicions, that yes - the Old Testament violence is in there. If you are looking for the angry God who tortured Job, or the Judges who slayed the enemies of Israel, it’s all there, and if you want to decide that God was an invention propped up to keep us in line, then you can pat yourself on the back for locating the cherries you want to pick to support that theory. This is the lazy person’s kind of Biblical reading.

What we fail to realize is that the stories may tell of a violent event to make a point. I often think that is the whole point of many of them. They show us the errors of humanity, within and without the circle of the Chosen people. St. Augustine, who seemed to have been sent from the future to help us all learn to read, said, “Narrata, non laudata.” This means, “It is narrated, not praised.” An account of an event in the Bible is not automatically a celebration of the event. This is a key point that the armchair doubter misses completely.

The presence of a story does not make it good or holy solely by its membership in the pages of the Bible. God’s judgement is not always explicitly stated, so we must read for the religious truth of the book, the scene, or the sentence. This is difficult, but worth the effort for those that take the time, if you can find time. The book of Judges is so littered with violence and morally confusing events that any reader who was looking for direct practical life guidance would probably end up in jail. Many of the characters, such as Samson in Judges, is not so much a model to imitate as a way of life to be avoided. When Samson uses a donkey’s jawbone to slaughter the Philistines and then brags about it, he goes even further and demands that God give him a drink. That is not advice on how to behave. Samson’s gift of strength, however, does become his curse. There is religious truth hiding amid the jawbone story if you read the rest of the story of Samson, because he is purified by his vice. His strength becomes his weakness, and this is exactly how sin works. But the average reader isn’t going to find that if the only part of the story plucked out is the slaughter and war. Samson dies due to his violence and arrogance. Reading with the eyes of faith and knowledge of what sin does to a human being will tease out the religious truth. Moreover, a Christian reader should always be looking for how everything relates to the coming redemption of Jesus.

The account of Samson in no way suggests his behavior is admirable. In fact, when we read the Bible in the light of Christ, we can see that all of this jawbone slinging behavior of Samson is exactly the opposite of how Jesus lives his life. So the message is practically a flashing red light telling us, “Don’t be like Samson! He’s a violent, arrogant brute who lacks humility.” St. Augustine has also said that any reading of the Bible that pushes us away from faith, hope, and charity is almost certainly incorrect, since that is what Christ came to tell us while he simultaneously came to fulfill the prophecies and uphold the law of the Old Testament.

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Before the the final test, a good question to ask yourself is this: “If I get everything I want in this life, but I lose my soul in the process, what good is getting what I wanted?”

Maybe we need to backup even further and ask the more fundamental question. “Do I believe I have a soul?” I mean, I really had to stop and ask myself that question a few times in my life. If you do believe in a soul, then the question of “What do I want?” needs to be studied, because the final test is all questions about that topic.

If there is no soul, then of course you don’t need to study. What else is there but this life? You can pay lip service about ultimate meaning but if death is final then there is no final test and no need to study at all. Hakuna Matata. Carpe Diem. Try everything. You define your destiny. Perception is reality. After all, it’s just like Pontius Pilate said, summing up the modern worldview: “What is truth?” So good luck to you! I suspect you’ve stopped reading about now, so thank you for listening.

If an adult lives only for himself, but never commits to anything beyond his own goals or dreams he will wind up being like a firework instead of the wheat plant we were discussing in part two. A firework amazes us, briefly. Well, it amazes us if its not a dud. Katy Perry assures us that we are all fireworks, but anyone who has lit July 4 mortars knows that not all fireworks pass by the quality assurance team before being boxed up and sent out the door. But even for the well-packaged and manufactured fireworks, even the best one will produce but a brief wonder that quickly fades and disappears into a smokeless void in the dark. That’s it. It’s over.

In comparison, the wheat plant story seems like a dud compared to that of the firework, with its blaze of glory through the night. Dylan Thomas said it best in his famous poem, which sounds a lot like a firework.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

He went out like a firework, too, with a life of heavy drinking that likely killed him at age 39. Great writer, heavy drinker. Bad relationships, miserable most of the time. But he got what he wanted! He amazed us and burnt out like a firework, like Neil Young’s line, “Better to burn out than to fade away.” Better to burn out early like Natalie Portman in Black Swan than later like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.

The wheat plant is not like a firework. The advice for living from Jesus points to a polar opposite life, even though Jesus died at 33. The blaze of glory of a rock star like Dylan Thomas is a kind of self-sacrifice but for glory, fame, and recognition. The kind of life and death Jesus refers to repeatedly leads to a humble or even hated, loathed, mocked, and tortured death, but one that ultimately leads to salvation.

A mature plant creates seed, and each seed will fall and create more life. There’s a double-metaphor here, one for your life and death, and one for your life and spiritual re-birth while you are still alive.

By dying to itself, by not trying to preserve its present mature state, by not trying to live forever or gain notoriety above all other wheat plants, the proper life of a wheat plant lives through the death of its self. This metaphor can have a third meaning about having a family, but the heart of this wheat tale isn’t about having children or a family. Jesus did not have children and he is the ultimate grain of wheat.

The parable is about returning to the spirit of childhood and having a childlike faith. It’s about spiritual re-birth. It’s another way of saying, “Be baptized and believe!” It’s about forgetting the self and living for others. This “dying” applies to married or celibate or barren people, with or without children, young or old, black or white, man or woman. It’s for everyone.

The death of self is about living a life of faith, hope, and charity. Life is not lost, but rather is restored to health by returning to a childlike faith. We gain nothing by living forever in adulthood. Have you seen any vampire movies where the vampire is happy? No, of course not. The vampire has found the fountain of youth and is perfectly miserable. Do you know why? Because without time or age or bodily breakdown to worry about, a vampire can do whatever it desires.

If I were a soulless vampire who lived forever, do you know what I would do? First, I would rob a bank so I had plenty of cash for tuition. Then I would enroll in a university and take physics, biology, chemistry, and math courses until they ran out of offerings. Simultaneously, since I would have unlimited time as a vampire, I would take language courses in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and ideally I’d spend a decade learning Eastern and Western philosophy. Then I would cap it off by applying to a ultra-nerdy Dominican school of theology. With all of that knowledge, I would feel like I had a start on what I’d like to soak up. Unfortunately, even after all that, I’d still have the rest of eternity to figure out what to do here on earth, other than find my daily rodent for sustenance. I guess I could do the weekly New York Times crossword, because I’ve never been able to finish one. I’m glad I’m not a vampire, however, because I don’t want to live forever. I don’t even like the taste of blood when my nose bleeds for no reason in the Minnesota winter, where skin becomes like the surface of Mars. So based on the diet alone, Bella can have Edward. No thank you, I’ll pass on that lifestyle.

Without limits, life becomes meaningless for the same reason that waking up to Christmas morning every day would become pointless to children. This leads right up to the same problem for adults who believe they want no constraints, and then living in that boundless world finds that the limits have a purpose.

But back to the idea of living forever: like the mythical vampire, we think we want to live forever, but eternal life on earth would become a living hell. To wish for endless life here on earth is like hoping to win the lottery. We think all problems disappear with enough time and money, but we forget our fundamental flaw. The yearning for both of these is a kind of escapism, and what we really want is heaven, and heaven is to rest and stop searching. My imagined scenario of “what would I do as a vampire” betrays my treasure and where my heart is at. Notice that what I considered worth doing with unlimited time (and stolen money) was to pursue endless education.

Notice that I did not wish for faith, hope, and charity? My “lottery” fantasy, my goal if I became limitless, was not to love God and love others. It was to love myself and increase me knowledge - literally to become more like God. The fountain of youth and lottery fantasy will tattle on where your treasure it at. Few people would say, “If I could live forever and had unlimited money, I would give glory to God, pray for salvation, and give all my time to widows and orphans.” I didn’t say that. My mind does not gravitate toward others when asked, “What would you do if you had unlimited resources?” My desires were all for the self. My treasure is not youthful skin, mine is actually worse. The first thing that sprung into my mind was to elevate my knowledge, like the first sin to eat from the tree of knowledge, and just like Eve I was tempted for more knowledge with the idea that I might be more like a god. No snake was present in my house when this happened.

So my first instinct was to eat from the tree of knowledge. The point here is that pride, even if hidden away, waits to emerge whenever opportunity appears. It’s always waiting. As soon as the door opens, as soon as constraints are removed, we slip into patterns that the ancient stories of Genesis warn us about.

To give oneself away instead of elevate oneself is best shown through the life of Christ, because he chose death. He chose faith, hope, and charity, despite the fact that he could have shown us his limitlessness whenever he wanted. God could have chose to be incarnated with the intention of instructing us on sustainable energy or better farming techniques or the ultimate skin care routine. He could have held seminars about microbiology and germs and surgery and neurology to help us leap forward in medicine. He could have delivered a model of the solar system and walked us through the geological strata of the earth to help us make sense of our world. He could have come however he wanted and lived forever and produced a world of plenty where no one lacked any food or shelter. He could have sent us robots to serve our every need. He could have infused us with complete knowledge so that we could converse with him on the patio in any language, whether it be Arabic, English, Japanese, or even the Gleep-Glorp language from the planet Zoltan. Heck, he could have just decided to smite us all in a rain of fire and terror just for kicks. But he didn’t. No, this time, for this first visit to us, he showed us how to live. He showed us how to live with humility by example. Rather than kicking down doors and dropping bombs, he comes in the most unexpected manner, which is why it’s so confusing.

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The pursuit of happiness plays out in strange ways, and the vice or obsession that seems like the answer leads to bad patterns of living. As readers and watchers we hate didactic stories that feel like moral preaching, but a tale well-told can sneak lessons in like a subtle spice in a dish, where we know we liked the meal but can’t explain why. We can usually sniff out a morality play from a mile away, so we look for the next show to watch or book to read. Aesop’s Fables are so obviously trying to tell us something moral that we tire of them quickly, but we’ll fawn over Moby Dick or Hamlet or Finnegan’s Wake for generations because we can’t easily discern what the heck is going on. We love the hunt. We could find all that we need in Aesop but it’s too simple; the lessons are too obvious and characters too one-dimensional. So here’s a couple of movies that I like where this hunt for meaning and purpose and happiness play out somewhat like the woman with the cursed bananas, as the main characters follow their vice or obsession right to the bitter end.

There’s a dark crime thriller movie called U-Turn starring Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez, where a cocky hotshot that is addicted to pills becomes stranded in a desert town in Arizona when his car, a convertible, breaks down. The movie did not do well and critics didn’t love it, but the main character’s self obsession and his undying conviction that “he is lucky” make his fall through the acts disturbingly comical. In the end, after being involved in two murders, after being thrown from a cliff, after breaking his leg, after being beaten, and when he is nearly dying of thirst, he claws his way back to his car, in the middle of nowhere under the dead heat of a midday Arizona sun. He is an utter mess and barely alive, but he looks in the rear view mirror and says to himself, “You’re still lucky!” right before he turns the key and a hose bursts in the radiator, rendering his car useless. His luck has finally run out. He will die in the desert, as the scavenger birds gather around his convertible. I have to admit, I laughed out loud, even as this movie careened from comedy into tragedy in that moment, because I think the director, Oliver Stone, meant for it to be funny. And for some reason I connected this darkly humorous scene to St. Paul when he was locked in the prison with his traveling companion, Silas. The two of them had been dragged and beaten with rods in Phillippi, and after all that the two of them were “praying and singing” until midnight. Paul is like the devout version of Sean Penn, saying to himself, “I’m still lucky!” but Paul is talking about being lucky in Christ, lucky to have Christ, whereas Sean Penn is still talking about his luck in his disordered pursuit of money and drugs and sex.

The greatest moment of this movie, is that after the glaringly obvious error of his ways, and his continuous pursuit of drugs, women, and money that has led him into this mutilated mess, he still clings to his fool’s gold, his oak tree, his false idol. He clutches his sins like pearls right to the end only to have it all blow up in his face just like the rubber hose on his radiator. The movie didn’t win any awards. It wasn’t received all that well, but it stuck with me because it illustrates the saying of “where your treasure lies, there will your heart also be.” In the beginning, Sean Penn is driving a slightly beat up convertible car with the top down, which is like a symbol for how he lives his life: loosely in the breeze. He’s just having fun, he’s got neither conviction nor compunction, he’s just letting the wind blow him wherever it takes him. And in the end, this top-down way of living is exactly how he is exposed to the desert birds and vultures that will eat him in that same convertible, as if he’s been put into a desert oven and served open-faced to the brutal reality of nature, red in tooth and claw (and beak).

Other movies and stories follow this path as well, with two of my favorites being The Wrestler and Black Swan. I feel like these two movies tell a similar story but from very different worlds. Pro wrestling and ballet are rarely compared or even spoken of in the same breath. However, Natalie Portman in Black Swan is obsessed with a rage to master ballet, to be the best, to succeed at all costs. And she does. She becomes perfect, and in doing so dies in the final act having reached her goal, but it cost her everything. She sacrifices her future, the possibility of family and love and friendship, even her innocence. Everything is put at the foot of the altar of her burning passion for mastery of ballet. In The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke has outlasted his glory days but floats about in a wake of disastrous relationships and drug abuse, unable to adjust to regular life. His need for fame and glory in the ring is never put to bed, so unlike the Black Swan, he does not die in his glory, he has to live beyond his moment of greatness. The Black Swan character dies at the height of her success. She has performed the perfect dance and died for it, but her tragedy is sacrificing all for a dance that perhaps only she appreciates (this reminds me of The Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, but I’m already spreading out this comparison too far, so maybe in another post). In The Wrestler, there are two tragedies. First, he outlives his success. He has been to the top and held the title belt. He’s basked in adoration of fans and taken the trophy home. But now, that’s all over, and he must live as an ordinary man, as he takes a job at a deli in the grocery store and must serve every regular joe who wants a pound of sliced ham. The earthly glory has been tasted and cannot be removed from his mouth. The need to return to that state of honor lingers, it follows and haunts him daily. In the last scene, the wrestler has joined a local semi-pro wrestling troupe that performs in local gyms. He wants to ride out into the sunset one last time. Unlike his glory days, he is a cartoonish figure of both body and soul, with his muscles pumped full of steroids and supplements, and a face tattling on years of drug and alcohol abuse. The fans cheer and jeer him, recalling his better days but not respecting him any longer as his hour has passed. In one last jump from the top ropes, the wrestler leaps for glory, to hear the cheer one last time, to be noticed and seen and loved. He dies of a heart attack in the air. There is a sense that he is at peace, as he has once again received the glory, he has been the flying acrobat, the show, the centerpiece, the entertainer. He is loved, sort of, by the crowd. But the crowd doesn’t really care about him. It’s not a real love. Those that he should have loved, his daughter and former wives and girlfriends, are all gone from his life. Repeatedly, he has chosen glory and drugs and sex over those closest to him. He has failed to love them, trading real love for the false love of the crowd. Thus the sense of peace in his death is not so much of achievement, but rather a putting to sleep the neverending dream that could not die, the need for the approval and cheer of strangers that never came close to real love at all. The ballerina’s death comes in her prime, and the wrestler’s death in his twilight, but they both suffer the same illusion.

So how does that relate to cursed bananas or dreams of writing fame?

One of the reasons I don’t write fiction any longer is because I gave up the “dream” and realized that fame or glory would never have satisfied any more than getting drunk did. Perhaps there’s an element of sour grapes, too, since I chose not to pursue it fully, and I didn’t get glory, so I put on the fig leaf of “I didn’t want to be a success anyway because it would make me shallow.” That notion I’ve dug into a bit, but in one of those life moments like what I had in the office cubical, I had another one when I read a poem by John Keats. In a little library at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, while all the other combat medics in training were engaged in less nerdy things, I spent my free hour or two reading. After dismissal, I would rush off to the library and pull a book from the shelf of the classical literature section. One day I read his poem called “On Fame.” I remember it feeling like I was reading instructions from an experienced artist to forget about fame, to give it up. The poem reads:

Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy

To those who woo her with too slavish knees,

But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,

And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;

She is a Gipsey,--will not speak to those

Who have not learnt to be content without her;

Keats, who gained fame in his short life, was saying that to pursue fame almost guarantees that the pursuer won’t get it. He’s talking about motives and desires. If the desire is for fame, then the pursuit is all wrong. So I knew when I read these lines, that if I did not write for the love of writing, then it was like a business pursuit or cheap trick for the love of strangers. I knew I loved literature and writing, but there was never enough. I always wanted more books and more time to write. I was chasing a goal, like the characters in Black Swan and The Wrestler. The “rage to master” something comes to most of us in some form, where we want to be great at science, or programming, or gaming, or a sport, or cooking. But the motive underneath that rage must be examined, because the root of the rage may not be joy but a kind of anger or even hate. Keats tells us to kiss fame goodbye before you even start, because if you don’t, that butterfly will never land on you. He compares fame to a goddess that chooses some “thoughtless boy” who has a heart at ease. So say goodbye, and if she likes you, she will follow you.

Ye Artists lovelorn! madmen that ye are!

Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,

Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

Whatever our “treasure” is we must be able to live without it. We also must make sure that it’s not the main treasure, otherwise we may learn the hard way that the treasure is actually a mirage. Is the desire to publish a novel or succeed in business or get 10,000 followers or win the state title actually driven by joy and passion? Or…is it one of the seven deadlies causing all the trouble underneath? It comes down to the question: are you worshipping an oak tree, or God? Are you panning for fool’s gold, or seeking eternal life? Is your daily ritual and life being sacrificed for fame, glory, wealth and honor, or do you offer all of those up in exchange for humility like Christ did on the cross? This is not an easy topic to dig into, and there are layers to unearth.

I believe that God’s will may be made revealed slowly to us. He knows the ending, but we don’t. There are crossroads in this life where free will makes it difficult, and choosing which direction to take is difficult. Eventually, we must make decisions, as sometimes I want God to shine a light on the path forward, and there are times it almost seems like he has done that. But to expect to hear God’s voice for decisions is not how it works, and we must choose a way. I think I made many of the “wrong” choices, because I knew when things were wrong. My conscience ate at me when I chose those errant paths. Jesus says to enter by the narrow gate. He didn’t say it’s located in the alley behind the bar. Wide is the path that leads to destruction, he says, but to follow him we must take up our cross daily. But that sounds hard, doesn’t it? Isn’t that hard? You would think so. But it’s not once you begin. Recall the simple phrase: Surrender to win. The gentle mastery of Christ in life is what Keats was talking about, and it’s what the young woman with the bananas needed. It’s what Sean Penn needed in U-Turn (maybe in real life as well). This is what ballerina needed and what the wrestler needed in those films. It’s what the hunter is hunting for and the seeker is seeking after. What are they all trying to find?

They are seeking something that is good, true, and beautiful. The best stories are of restless souls seeking redemption through strange sacrifices and pursuits. This is a story as old as time, literally, as what else is happening in the Garden of Eden? It is the story of lost innocence and the subsequent pursuit of what the belly and mind want. The “journey” we talk about today, the journey that we are all on: that journey is the root idea of the Fall in the Garden, where people journey away from God, rejecting his rules, in pursuit of knowledge and finding that sin leads to death. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of someone who was once innocent getting lost and trying to find their way back to God. It’s so simple it’s absurd. What drives me nuts about Genesis is that taken literally it’s every bit as good as allegorically. Honestly, one of the reasons I don’t write stories any longer happened when I realized that the greatest stories had already been written, and everything else was a re-hashing. As the saying goes, “All philosophy is footnotes to Plato.” I would echo that and say that all literature is footnotes to the Bible, and I would add the Greeks in there too. All modern stories are retelling of old stories, and the idea that the ancients were ignorant betrays our own arrogance. What we reveal in discounting old stories is the revelation of our own biases and worldviews. My bananas story is like the Garden of Eden story, and also the same story of Narcissus. Trapped by passion for his youth, Narcissus stares into the water until he dies, still gazing at his reflection in the river Styx as he makes that boat ride into the underworld. Both of these stories say much more than my Bananas, or U-Turn, or The Wrestler, or The Black Swan, and in far fewer words, with much greater meaning and application to my daily life.

But the happy ending for all of these seekers is simple. The rest they are looking for is not in holding a published novel, or wearing a championship belt, or having unblemished skin, or hearing a round of applause, or taking a trophy deer, or winning a state title. The restlessness has a solution. It’s available. It’s free. It’s here now. It can be delivered today, to anywhere. And it goes like this:

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” (Mt 11:27)

What Jesus is trying to tell us is that the fountain of youth is available, but it’s through him. The pool is open. I think the old language of the “the kingdom of God is within you” can be confusing, for a few reasons, one being that the word kingdom is dated to a different time than ours of American democracy. The word itself - “kingdom” - feels strange. A better translation is probably “the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” Jesus is always talking about water, and the Fountain of Youth is a magical water that restores, like the waters of Bethesda where the crippled and lepers attempted to receive miraculous healing. But it’s simpler than that. Einstein and other scientists have expressed a kind of surprise at how the simple formulas can describe the cosmos, and yet allude to greater complexity than we can fathom. When Jesus is talking about himself being the “living water” he is literally telling us that he is the fountain of youth, that he is the place of renewal. When he says, “I am the vine and you are the branches,” he is saying we must drink from his living water, from his life. The water is always a metaphor for belief in him. We baptize one another in water to help us get the point, that the living water is Jesus. We put holy water on our heads and fingertips to remind us that God is the way to health and renewal. He turns water into wine. He walks on water. He calms the water. He saved the sinking Peter from the water. There’s just so much going on with water that you have to realize that these similes and metaphors are alternative ways for Jesus to say, “To be saved, you must be baptized and believe.” What’s interesting here is that he says it flat out with no metaphor. But it’s like that’s not enough. We’re too picky to just hear the words: “Be baptized and believe” and take it at face value. But if we don’t like that one, he says the same thing to Nicodemus: “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” For some reason, we need more. The literal version fails, so we need a metaphor, a story. Then we get the metaphor and the story and we start checking for malleability so we can shape it into what we want to hear.

Must we choose to be beaten over the head? How many stories, Biblical or otherwise, tell this same tale? We want something deeper, because we must keep eating from the tree of knowledge. The fruit of that tree never fills our bellies, or not for long. We are intellectual gluttons, such that if the simple answer is given, we reject it for it’s simplicity because we are not yet like God, just as the snake promised Eve. The reason it is called the tree of knowledge is because we hunger and thirst for knowledge far more than we hunger and thirst for the righteousness that Jesus’ mentions in the beatitudes. Google has accelerated this gluttony for knowledge into the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet at an all-inclusive resort in Cancun with an all-night open bar.

I share the same malady as The Hungry Little Caterpillar, which is gluttony, for both food and knowledge. The caterpillar’s gluttonous consumption transforms him into a beautiful butterfly, as that is how his life is intended to unfold, but my hunger for knowledge leads to intellectual gluttony and spiritual diabetes. The caterpillar eats everything until it’s stomach hurts, but this gluttony is toward the right goal of becoming a butterfly. My gluttony for knowledge leads to isolation behind a stack of books, to the point that I start to study the Bible instead of just read the Bible. I heard a comment somewhere that made the point: “Many of us would rather attend a seminar about heaven than actually go to heaven.” This is true because like the fountain of youth, the pursuit of knowledge is unending and can never be complete. To gain all knowledge is to become like God, which is precisely the problem just like wanting to remain young forever.

Knowing that many of hunger for knowledge, Jesus throws us a lifeline, offering us both the straight-shooting literal version of his message and a bonus metaphorical version. He does this multiple times, in multiple ways, and still…somehow…still we struggle to receive the transmission. How can it be so hard? Is this why he calls us a “stiff-necked people”? What a great insult. I had a stiff neck from a pinched nerve recently and had to turn my whole body to look at people, which made me think of this idiom, which I learned came from oxen that refused to turn when lashed or poked by the farmer.

Yes, we are stubborn. No argument there. A second line that I always smile at when reading the Gospel is when Jesus says, “Let the person who has ears listen!” I’m sorry, but there’s an element of humor to it because I think of a public school teacher who is trying day after day to deliver lessons, but has twenty out of thirty kids screwing around and ignoring him. When the test day comes, the kids who weren’t listening complain, “But you never went over this stuff! We’ve never heard of this material! It’s not fair.”

Apparently we have stiff necks and no ears. Why are we diagnosed as stiff-necked and earless by Jesus? It means we are prideful, rebellious, and stubborn. We’re jumping around in the back of the classroom ignoring the teacher and expecting the test to be open book, or that if we fail we get a second or third chance to re-take the test. While the teacher instructs, we’re having spit-wad wars and showing off. We’re passing notes and checking our phones. In short, we want a different kind of wisdom than what he offers because we want to make a name for ourselves, to be seen, to win, to be approved. The snake suggested this idea in the garden to Adam and Eve so that we cannot hear the truth, so that we cannot be simple and exposed, we cannot be naked before God. The simple answer doesn’t satisfy us, because the suggestion that we can “be like God” still lingers in our ears that listen to what they want to hear. We choose not to believe that what is ultimately good, true, and beautiful could be so simple, because the enticement of something secret and deliciously complex seems more exciting and inviting.

Even as Jesus tells us that the children understand “the kingdom” better than adults can, we scheme and plan our way to outdo each other. Paul states it quite plainly: “Has not God made the wisdom of the world foolish?” Indeed he has, and that lesson is hard to learn, as it seems the best students learn this lesson early and the rest of us take the wide path to destruction, and many of us never learn at all. Unless you return like a child to faith, you can never have it, and for those of us that cannot bear something literal, here’s the related metaphor that Jesus offers: “unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”

A grain of wheat doesn’t form until the plant reaches maturity. It is “wheatless” until adulthood. So the grain of wheat, in its youth, grows, but the intended purpose of the plant is to grow and make more wheat. The point of the plant isn’t to just live forever, or outlast the plants around it, or use up as many resources as it can to be the largest wheat plant. The point of the plant is to reach maturity, and then return to the earth - to give itself back, to produce more wheat. In other words, to become like a child again. The wheat plant started from a seed of wheat. It must return to become a seed of wheat, like a child. The adult must become like a child again to be complete. The child must grow, mature, but must become like a child once again. It’s so simple but so complex, like Einstein’s formulas.

“Whoever loves his life will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.” So do you want the fountain of youth, or eternal life? (Trick question: the fountain of youth is available, if you stop looking in the wrong places, and stop thinking it’s all about you.)

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When I was in my twenties, I wanted to be a fiction author. The germ for a story idea would jump into my head, through some observation, and then would multiply and merge with other broodings and books I’d been reading. Hopefully, you are trying to go to sleep right now, as perhaps this episode will take you there, as it’s going to be a long one. I’m going to summarize a story idea that I never wrote. The germ of this story popped into my head at the grocery store when I observed an elderly woman and a young businesswoman approach a fully stocked banana stand at the same time. That was it. Here’s the short version of a story called The Fountain of Youth.

A young businesswoman is rushing about to collect the items on her grocery list, while at the same time, in the same store, a thin, old woman, hunched over and unattractive, rides in a mobile cart. They both shop the produce aisle, and the elderly woman is slowly driving her cart toward a table that holds the bananas. Only a single bunch of green bananas remains. The young woman is swinging her basket, grabbing peppers and lettuce, while chatting on her phone. Before the old woman reaches the table, the young woman swoops over to the banana table and grabs the last bunch of bananas, unaware that the old woman is reaching for it.

The old woman says, “Excuse me, but could I have a few of those bananas?” The young woman at first ignores her due to her phone conversation, but the old woman keeps talking. Annoyed, the young woman pauses her phone call to interact with the old woman, and upon hearing her request for the bananas, the young woman considers her strict diet of smoothies, her intermittent fasting plan, and her rigid exercise schedule and says, “No, I’m sorry.”

The old woman pleads, “I can only get a ride to the store twice a week and I’m out of bananas, and my doctor recommends them for my heart health.” Then she coughs and wipes her mouth with a flannel shirt sleeve, which causes the young woman to recoil.

The young woman cannot find the charity to give the old woman any of the green bananas and tells her, “Sorry, I got here first. Better luck next time.” She puts the phone back to her ear and attempts to resume the conversation with her friend, but she hears a response from the old woman. The young woman puts the phone down again. She can sense the old woman has said something rude. She asks, “I’m sorry, but what did you say? I didn’t hear you.”

The old woman says, “I said, may you age with those bananas.” The young woman is stunned at first, but then laughs out loud, and with condescension says to the poor woman, “You are adorable. Pathetic, but adorable.” And with that the two women part ways.

The young woman drives home in her BMW 3-Series and doesn’t think about the comment any further. She hits the gym, engages in some hot sex with her manscaped boyfriend who lives with her, and ends the day watching a TV show while perfecting her presentation for work. Over the next few days, she eats a few of the bananas, which have now turned golden yellow. Everything in her life is perfect.

But five days after the interaction at the grocery store, she is in the bathroom and notices a spot on her hand that she has never seen before, a small brown spot, slightly irregular in shape, and she makes a mental note of it but rushes off to work. The following day she goes for a run in the hot sun with her hairless boyfriend, and they talk about family and kids briefly but veer off into social issues and political problems that face the future of the world. When she arrives home, her boyfriend says to her, “Wow, look at those freckles! It’s like they just appeared on your nose and cheeks.” She has never had freckles, and doesn’t believe him until she goes to shower and looks in the mirror. Her face now has freckles. Very normal freckles, but unexpected freckles that were unplanned and unwanted.

Then she suddenly remembers the little spot on her hand, and notices that it has grown ever so slightly. In a scoff, she remembers the bananas. She remembers the comment from the old woman, but laughs nervously, and while showering she walks out of the bathroom dripping in her towel to inspect the bananas on the counter. One of the bananas has begun to show spots.

The next day the spot on her hand has grown splotchy, and she is no longer laughing but considering the possibility that the old woman has somehow cursed her. She begins to find ways to preserve the bananas, first trying to keep them at an exact temperature, but eventually finding so many spots forming that she has to freeze them, and her skin becomes more blotted. She attempts to find the old woman at the grocery store, returning at the same time each day but never meets her. A doctor’s visit diagnoses her with “Bronzing,” and she begins seeing a dermatologist and two separate skin specialists.

Her obsession with preserving her youth becomes maniacal, as she feels her destiny is now somehow linked to the bananas. After a year, a succession of maddening events causes her to unravel. Her boyfriend’s mother asks innocently about potential grandchildren. Feeling badgered, the young woman admits she does not want children due to the effect on a woman’s body and alludes to a “miscarriage” in her past that creates a rift with her boyfriend. He breaks up with her, and soon her friends drift away into family life.

She has a horrible scare when her mother housesits for her while she is away on a business trip. From the airplane, after landing, she calls her mother and amid the obnoxious sounds of screaming infant on the plane, her mother tells her that she is “making banana bread with two of the frozen bananas,” leading to a frantic freakout on the airplane that nearly gets her arrested. She drives home in a panic, unloading her anger and long held resentments against her mother, while fanning the banana bread and wrapping it in plastic. A falling out between mother and daughter happens that is never again healed.

The years begin to pass by and she maintains a youthful look, managing the skin condition with great care and vigilance. She spends large amounts of her earnings on skin-care and aging products. As she enters her fifties, she is still spending most of her time with twenty to thirty year olds.

Her career soars and by the age of fifty-five she moves into the role of Vice President of People Operations.

Fast forward: she is sitting alone in a one bedroom apartment at age seventy-five, her lips and face full of botox, with bottles of prescriptions and hormones spread out on a coffee table. She is mutilated by plastic surgeries, wearing excess makeup, and living on shakes, powders, and supplements. Childless and friendless, with few family connections remaining, in her living room chair she scrolls on her phone, researching therapeutic cloning techniques. She sets down her phone and gets out of the chair, to sit on the floor to do her daily meditation and mindful breathing. In the silence, an electric hum from the corner of the room permeates the air, but somehow this sound comforts her. The soft buzzing comes from a special freezer, with a backup battery. In the corner of the room is a mini-freezer that holds the last remaining moldy and cursed banana, frozen and sealed in extreme cold. She smiles in her meditation, proud that she has proved the old woman wrong, and has preserved her youth.

The end.

I never wrote the full story. I thought about the story for days until I could see the story unfold to where it wanted to take me, or where I wanted to take it. Sometimes I’m not sure how the flow happens.

This is the strange thing that happens once you start writing. If the urge to “be a writer” bites you, then you will start writing stories and you will spend a lot of time thinking about stories you want to write. The urge came to me in 1999 when I started typing out poems and short stories. I remember reading books and feeling disappointed in the plot or characters and decided that perhaps I could write better than those authors. In 2000, I went for a run one day and decided halfway through that I needed to return home to my house and begin writing, and I ran home with urgency and did just that. Thus began an obsession around writing. Then I began to realize that writing stories is more difficult than I thought, but the urge to produce and create consumed my days and nights. This continued for about fifteen years.

Thinking of stories is one thing. Writing them in a compelling way is far more difficult. The idea for a story is the simple part, because many people have ideas for stories and novels floating around in their heads. Consider how many people have great business ideas or inventions in their mind, but cannot or have not put them into physical form. With stories, it’s the same. To flesh out and write the story is difficult because it moves from being a dream into a grueling task, like when you go from thinking about getting in shape to actually joining a gym or counting calories. It’s much easier to imagine a result than to work for it, because the work is neither glamorous nor easy.

A significant amount of time is needed to write the actual stories. Writing requires dedication and resolve, but when I was writing and doing the work, I felt compelled to get the story out, to the point that I needed to get it out of my brain and onto paper or computer screen. This same notion began anew once I found the urge to do marathons and triathlons. I needed to get out and run or bike. The need felt unstoppable because of the desire for the goal of completing the upcoming race to the best of my ability. Both writing and racing brought about this mania.

The story just had to be written, making it almost like a lust, or a sickness. This baby had to be born. Creative desires can be like any other addiction. Watch what happens to someone who is clearly addicted to their phone if he or she cannot find it. The phone-addict will begin to get antsy and squirm, and start looking, searching, until they get irritated and cannot live in their skin until the phone is found. Or think of a regular marijauna user or daily drinker you know who is “not addicted” but turns into a completely different person if their drug is taken away. They assure you that they can quit any time that they want to, but for some reason never do, because they actually cannot. The sickness demands the underlying need to be fulfilled.

While nowhere as dramatic, this urge to write and “get the story out of my head” reminded me of a story about Caravaggio, the great Italian painter, while he was working on the Raising of Lazarus. Whether or not true, the tale reports that Caravaggio had a dead body exhumed for the painting, and told two of his models to hold the dead body so he could paint it. When they objected, he pulled out his knife and told them to stand still or he would make them just like the corpse they were holding. Clearly, this level of obsession shows that he had to get this painting out of his system, since he was willing to kill (and dig up bodies) in order to get the picture out of his head and onto the canvas.

What’s interesting is the urge to write can become an addiction, but as a creative pursuit never seemed like a problem. Oddly enough, when I talked to hunters, they would describe a similar “sickness” - a need to get into the woods, to be in nature in pursuit of a deer or a turkey or other small game. This description was strangely like the need to write or drink or smoke. There’s a common thread in all of them. Initially, in those conversations I could not relate to hunters at all, but when I considered my own need to find a silent library to flesh out story ideas or to immerse myself in reading, I think my need for that refuge was not different from a fisherman seeking a quiet trout stream or a hunter hiking into a valley floor. Although hunting is shunned by much of modern society, the hunter feels and connects to something deep and visceral in our nature. The hunter is seeking what the artist or drunkard is seeking. What are we all after?

We are searching for paradise. We are seeking something that is good, true, and beautiful, but with different ideas about what that means and how to obtain it. Everyone is after those things, but some are unaware of why and if the “sickness” is not driven by the right motives, the pursuit becomes ugly. Some hunters are just out for blood. Some artists just want fame. Drunks (that are not like ordinary, calm drinkers) are seeking a direct escape to heaven, without the work of creating or capturing. Drunks and drug users want to take the elevator, not the stairs.

At the root of our pursuits is the desire to reach something higher, because those three nouns - the good, the true, and the beautiful - are the only things that will ultimately satisfy us. But in our pursuit of these three things we can easily mashup temptations, distractions, and pride with that purity. The real reason hunters are hunting at all is to find meaning in their life, to experience fellowship with other men, to get approval from a group, to connect to their ancient instincts, and to stand in awe of nature and creation. I am not a hunter, but what I see in hunting is a kind of sacrifice and thanksgiving. While writing a story is creative, and hunting is for killing, there are curious parallels to the passion guiding both pursuits. To some degree, the published book is not unlike the trophy deer. In the end the book sits on the shelf, and the stuffed animal is displayed on the wall. The same happens with diplomas and exotic photos from vacations or medals from military service or even private memories of sexual conquests. We are chasing a desire that is difficult to describe, but we want to display it and let it be seen, to make a name for ourselves, to feel worthy, to amass a list of accolades that will in the end be mere phrases in our obituary as the world continues to turn without us. (I have to resist the urge to dive into the Tower of Babel story, but it’s so relevant to this.)

The banana story is about clinging to something, to a dream or idea, to a concept or want, and expecting that dream or fantasy to bring fulfillment. For the woman in the story, it’s youth. For me, it was writing and being considered smart or creative. This idea of sacrificing your time, money, and energy to save your most beloved thing, is not a new story. I recall choosing to give up friendships and social gatherings in order to read or write, believing that the creation I was working on would bring fulfillment. I felt that for anyone to succeed or reach a goal that everything must be sacrificed. Marriage, children, socializing, weekends, nights, television, dining out, running errands, folding laundry - those things were for others, for those without a “noble” pursuit that I had. Full of myself, I was like Leona Helmsley when she said that “Only the little people pay taxes.” My inflated self wanted to believe in my invented mission. When pride of self takes over the mind, everyone else and everything else become “little” compared to the dream.

Whenever it felt like the goal of writing the great novel was getting further away I would isolate with books or a laptop. “Wherever your treasure lies there will your heart be.” Thus I was willing to forego friendship and fellowship to be alone with the imaginary treasure. Unfortunately, it took years to realize that the treasure was actually just a warning light.

The young woman in the story clinging to her youth is just a metaphor for my own obsession from age twenty to thirty to be “a writer.” What I didn’t know is that crossroads would find me at three places in my life: marriage, children, and addiction. The avoidance to commitment to anything beyond my goals had to be shattered. But it didn’t happen all at once. I still clung to the dream and goal of writing even after marriage and kids, which means my treasure was still in the wrong place. I was keeping things together, but when you have one foot in the fantasy world, the commitment to real relationships cracks. I could publicly declare myself as committed, but privately hedge my bets. But thankfully there was a day I recall sitting in a cubicle and realizing my future, where I could have a wife and family and dog, or I could remain alone and possibly get a book or two published. This realization changed my life, and I don’t know how else to describe it except that there was a kind of guidance happening on that day, as I recall the cubical and the lighting and the place of business where it happened. Whether it was a guardian angel or good orderly direction or just plain sense clocking in for duty, I am grateful for that startling jolt, because it meant the first step away from my “self.”

The goal of a quiet house with two or three books on a shelf suddenly seemed selfish and even foolish. At the same time I relished the idea of being like one of those lonely scholars or curmudgeonly writers who pursue their craft with such a rage to master it that they let their obsession rule their days. I worried that time would pass and that the creative years were short. I knew that the high energy of my early twenties would fade, as I saw my co-workers in their forties and fifties who had dreams of pontoons, cabins, and retirement. The evidence of creative atrophy was all around me in programmers whose white-hot urge to invent had burned down to the wick. Discussions of 401K and TV shows replaced the intensity of youth. I was judging them all, yes, but I was most often judging them for what aging and family life had seemed to strain out of them. They seemed like decaf coffee beans, washed out, with very few milligrams of caffeine left in them (which explains why so many of us drink so much coffee as we get older). I felt that two years in my twenties had to be worth twenty years of the old, tired, expired later years.

What I failed to see is that my reckless living in my twenties was less fulfilling than what these middle-aged mothers and fathers felt about their own lives. They had raised families and done the long work of putting food on the table and doing late-night math homework and attending numerous music or sports activities and essentially giving up their goals to bring another to successful adulthood in the world. These fuddyduddies, who I thought had done so little, had done more than my imagined solitary writer would ever accomplish.

That was the temptation that I yearned after: youth and fame. This was stoked by reading biographies of writers, which I treated like hagiographies. But the writers I admired were not like the saints, not at all. A misguided admiration of Hemingway and London and Fitzgerald only helped me justify alcohol abuse as if it were a virtue, and made it a sacrificial offering to creativity. If I was destroying myself, it was for the creative act. If madness was the price for creative grace, I was willing to sign my life for that loan. In fact, I sought out writers that were known drunkards, thinking that those authors had more depth, when in reality many of them wrote completely forgettable books. This is the temptation I accepted, as drinking and writing seemed like fitting accomplices. The urge to create is the germ, but piggybacking very closely on that positive goal is the fungus of desire for fame and approval. Sometimes I wonder what comes first - the desire to create, or the desire to be noticed, like a chicken-and-egg scenario. I think the “desire to be noticed” came first, because the desire to be noticed is really a desire to be loved. Thus in some cases the desire to create is a fig leaf we wear to mask the desire for love. We want to be noticed, because we think it will make us loved and respected.

So what I really wanted was a stamp of approval for my behavior, but way underneath that was a desire for appreciation, stacked under layers of other manure and dirt. The manifestation of the need for love became visible in the pursuit of writing, but the inability to stop drinking once I started was the cry for help from underneath the pile of garbage. I wasn’t interested in tattoos or piercings or coloring my hair or weird sex. We have different cries for help, and mine was just drinking. I convinced myself that heavy drinking was a righteous burden of all writers.

See the trick? Did you catch it? A swap happened.

The need for approval and love gets transplanted with some strange idea like this. I felt that drinking hard was the cross that writers must bear, and even something to be proud of. Perhaps this desire to drink guided me toward writing in the first place so that I could justify drinking, since writers and artists get a free pass for their madness. Writers who were not alcoholics, I felt, lacked the “gift.” Oddly enough, drinking is a cross to bear, not a gift, but when dealt with it ends up becoming a gift. What shocked me in the end is that these crosses can become a gift. This is why so many recovering addicts and alcoholics introduce themselves at recovery meetings saying, “I’m Jane, a grateful addict,” or “I’m Joe, a grateful alcoholic.” They realized when they turned back to God that the cross they took up was the greatest gift they ever received because it is the exact thing that forced them to change.

How upside down we are once we re-name the vice as a virtue. This can be observed in our world all the time. We “flip the script,” to quote the TV show Cobra Kai, and make our fig leaf the identity of our life. I don’t want to dive into the character of Hawk from Cobra Kai, but his “flipping the script” is his journey into his vice, which kills his virtue, until he returns to his true self and flips things back to right-side-up. The very thing that we are using to cover our nakedness, our fear, our feeling of inadequacy is what we need to remove in order to be healed. The wound hides beneath the vice and until it is exposed, there can be no healing. How can a physician heal something that cannot be seen? Cue up the Jesus words! (you knew it was coming):

The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? He heard this and said, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” (Mt 9:11-12)

The whole solution is right in those two verses. We want to turn our “sacrifice” into a virtue. Jesus says, “No, I don’t want sacrifices, especially not bad sacrifices. No, I want your whole life. Now show me the wound!” He’s practically shouting it like Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire. “Show me the wound, Jerry!” These verses from Matthew make Jesus the undefeated and defending champion of both religion and psychiatry for two thousand years. I remember taking a class called “The Psychology of Adjustment” in college and not once did that textbook mention faith as a possible solution to problems “adjusting” to change. What a shame, since it could have been a short class. I can see the need to avoid mentioning this, since it might put a large amount of psychology majors out of work, which is already an issue for a field that provides most of our nation’s baristas. Jesus is a bigger threat to the therapy industry than self-driving trucks is to the logistics industry. Who needs truckers if can trucks drive themselves? Who needs expensive therapy when you can read Matthew and talk about it with others for free?

Yes, I’m simplifying and generalizing to make an editorial. I also empathize with psychology majors as I pursued computer science and English majors, and only one of those fields is sought after for employment. But it cannot be denied that faith has been shoved into a corner by medicine, by our schools, by government, and most of all by our media, yet the open secret is that faith can be, without a doubt, a proper and effective cure for many mental issues. The head-scratchers in the media wonder why suicide rates have increased and depression is at an all-time high, while church attendance and affiliation plummet. The cry goes out daily to do more for mental health, while we ostracize people of faith like lepers to the fringe of society.

The gift of faith heals, but it is exactly that: it is a gift. This odd thing called faith can be more effective than a lifetime of depression pills or affirming therapy, and it costs nothing. But, it’s not so simple. It cannot be prescribed or ingested or bought or sold. There is no insurance needed for it. Unfortunately, people can walk the corridors of modern pharma and therapy for years and not once hear that there is another way, but honestly even if they are told, they may not “hear” it because the time has not arrived for the hearer’s ears to be open yet. The timing varies for each person. So I understand why it’s not talked about, but it’s a shame because many people would benefit. Therapy is a modern version of “faith-healing,” but the faith must be in the techniques and drugs, not in God. The faith must be in the science and the credentials on the wall. The efficacy of the therapy is measured and studied to find improvements. All of this is great. But there’s something fundamentally missing from this equation. Science was never intended to replace faith or morality, because those are not parts of the observable and testable universe. You can see the sacred being replaced with science, but it’s not the right tool. The trend today is moving toward a merger of science and morality, which will ruin science. Just like religion merging with state power ruins religion, the same will happen to science. For those not paying attention, the Soviet Union and China have already done this experiment and it doesn’t end well. Papers and research must conform to party doctrine, making it a leap of faith, not a study of nature. Worse, if you put morality and faith into the halls of state power, brace yourself for bad weather.

We’re all talking about mental health today, constantly, as if mental problems just started happening in recent history. The only cure offered comes in the form of pharmaceuticals and paid therapy. The healings that Jesus does in the Gospels are mostly related to mental health. Yes, there are the skin healings of the many lepers and the withered hand and the woman who bled for many years and re-attaching the Roman’s ear (ok, so there are a lot of physical healings), but the majority of his healings are the same soul-wracking mental problems that we have today. When it says he “healed many people that day,” those are just the ordinary everyday miracles that he did, while the bigger miracles get a full telling, like raising Lazarus from the dead or restoring the paralyzed man’s legs or healing blindness. These ordinary “healings” don’t only happen in the pages of the Gospels. You can witness them happening today in recovery meetings, for all kinds of mental health issues, and these are attributed to a Higher Power, to God. This isn’t like the TV evangelist pulling some audience plant on-stage so that he can heal a man so that you wire him a check. This is happening in back-rooms of office buildings and churches and government centers, where no one is watching, where the smell of burnt coffee acts as the incense, and the liturgy consists of the Serenity Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer with real, open honesty in between.

This can be witnessed right now in a meeting in your own town. The wildest thing about the healings that Jesus performs is that I have seen these very things occur in people, in real-time, in the 21st century. Even for myself, for all the times I tried to quit drinking, through willpower or using science or techniques, none of those things worked. Nothing changed until I asked for God’s help and started to pray. Full stop.

Other people I have known, they have seemed so far gone that there was no hope for restoration, much like the Gospel stories of the Gerasene demoniac or the boy with an unclean spirit. Yet they get clear and clean, and a year passes and they are still clean. Then another year, and another, and they are bright-eyed and flourishing. There are Mary Magdalenes among us. There are former demoniacs walking around in our midst. These souls are everywhere, rubbing shoulders with you, interacting with you, but you don’t see them because they are healed and restored.

As I’ve said before, I discarded pills when I turned back to God and I am extremely doubtful that I ever needed them in the first place. Had I followed the steps prescribed by the physician in Matthew 9:11-12 and from the doctor named Luke, I might have learned this sooner. People that don’t believe in miracles scoff at tales of healing unless a double-blind study was used, and peer-reviewed papers support the evidence. But you can meet people who have restored their mind, body, and soul through friendship with Jesus. As for the re-attachment of the Roman’s ear, I understand the difficulty for some to believe in stories like that, but given the incredible real-life healings I have seen, I’m willing to say, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” Nothing is impossible for God, and if Jesus could multiply bread and fish, I doubt that surgery presented much of a challenge for him.

So in living in my world of the flipped script, I felt that alcohol made for authenticity. “In wine, there is truth”; In vino, veritas. Truth had to be conjured, raised up from within by being uninhibited, so that I could speak like a jester before a king. Liquor was the secret potion to unlock the hidden “truth” within. The wild and awful alcoholic lives of the writers I admired seemed to be the required gate fee for entry into greatness, as the wise fools, I thought, were the ones that must hold up the mirror to society. Oh, the lies we can tell ourselves. This is not the sound of one hand clapping, this is the sound of one hand slapping its own face.

In reality most of the writers I admired lived terrible lives. They burned bridges constantly. They had multiple marriages that fell apart in dramatic fashion. They ended their lives in suicide or slow death by addiction. But they reached their goal. Yes, they got what they wanted. They had their treasure, a skinny volume or two on their bookshelf with their name printed on the spine. Did that make them happy in the end? Did it fulfill them? I doubt it made any of them happy or content. It probably fed their pride, making the dragon even bigger.

This is why my woman and her cursed bananas had to be a caricature in the end. I thought a woman character would work best for the story because I could juxtapose her youth, beauty, and vigor against a twisted gargoylish solitude in the final scene. I wanted to display the inside, unseen, gnarled experience of misguided pursuit on her character. A male character would have required a different path, but I could have done the same story with a male bodybuilder or womanizer who has his trophies gathering dust on a shelf, and the notches in his headboard being reminders of many broken relationships. In the closing scene, he could have been a freakish, wrinkled body sitting hulking and damaged in a recliner, and for added effect I would have him spray tanning his orange arms while he sipped from a cocktail of branch chain amino acids and collagen peptides.

Anyone who has felt a sense of transcendence, or the temporary “greatness” we all get to feel on occasion, yearns to recreate the moment. If you can’t experience it again, then you may feel like a “one hit wonder” or “a flash in the pan” or “a fluke” or “an intellectual lightweight” or whatever else the outer doubters and inner critic can hurl at you. Ex-athletes have a rough adjustment to the world because they peak so young. Likewise, an inventor whose idea catches on must try to invent again to catch lightning in a bottle a second time. An artist who catches the eye of a patron must continue producing desirable work. These blessings of success can become a curse, unless you surrender the ego. As life teaches us all, the two great tests we will face are success and failure, and success is sometimes the more difficult test.

To give up a dream may seem like defeat. But to surrender, which took years and stages to happen for me, led me to the greatest elevation I could have hoped for or ever imagined. Every phase where I had to make a choice to chop away at the false god of writing and imagined glory led to the ultimate death of that idol. It’s like St. Boniface cutting down the oak tree that the pagans worshiped. If you can chop down a god, then that’s a false god. I always thought it was incredibly rude of Boniface to cut the tree down, but in reality, what was he doing? He showed them the absurdity of a tree as a god. He exposed the false treasure. To have a false treasure revealed as fool’s gold is the greatest gift to give someone, even if it initially enrages them. People only get mad at the death of false gods because they are still in denial about its value. If a man is never told or shown that what he worships is phony, he will find out in the worst way of all when he tries to cash it in at the end. Like Narcissus, he will keep gazing into that illusion right until his death.

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There’s a saying that, “God has no grandchildren.” A parent’s faith does not necessarily cascade into children. But it certainly helps to see good examples, and the power of the Sacraments do imbue marks of faith in people, marks that remain with them forever. There is no better gift for a person than Baptism, as this gift, even if kept wrapped for many years, never decays or withers. The treasure granted in the moment of Baptism awaits the receiver’s decision to open and accept the gift. It waits for them, untainted, like gold. We may teach our children about Christ, and they may accept the gift, but their children, our grandchildren, will be beyond our reach. If not given the gift, they may have to find faith by the breadcrumbs and signposts on their path in life, picking up the seeds of the word, or even discover a way to God on their own. Somehow, and rather amazingly, even grandchildren who are never taught about the carpenter from Nazareth can find their way to this treasure, even if no one tells them about Baptism or teaches them the faith. Grandchildren of no faith background can find this treasure, because it can be found by anyone. If you walk enough of this earth, traverse enough experience, if you chase wealth or power or pleasure, you will eventually trip over this treasure at least once. Your pride will find the uneven earth to trip upon, one way or another. Whether or not you choose to “buy the field” and be filled with joy, that comes down to the individual, and it is a choice. Our intellect and free will make for wonderful and sometimes awful companions in this journey.

A great mystery is how the Church continues through the ages as the empires rise and fall. Hope fades in earthly superpowers after a hundred years, but the Church stands. It withstands assault. It surges. It falters. It is persecuted. It retreats. It persists. It is restored. Even through all of this scandal, what seems impossible, is possible with God. For those who think we are fools to remain, we can’t explain it very well. But perhaps this will help a bit: we can never quit the Church because we know the words that the childlike Peter admitted to Jesus are true, as I quote like a broken record:

“You have the words of eternal life. To whom else would we turn?”

For those that believe God established his Church “upon this rock,” on Peter, and thus believe in the authority and interpretation of the Church, then there is no choice but to remain, to fight for it, to make it better, and to someday be on your deathbed receiving the last rites, if God wills it. The Sacraments are real, they make the invisible things visible. The Eucharist is the “source and summit” of the Church and partaking in that sacrifice, along with regular Reconciliation, makes Jesus alive. I cannot adopt the “Once saved, always saved,” because I believe that the Sacraments are real. To quote Tim Staples, being “Saved” is ongoing. We should say: “As the Bible says, I am already saved (Rom. 8:24, Eph. 2:5–8), but I’m also being saved (1 Cor. 1:18, 2 Cor. 2:15, Phil. 2:12), and I have the hope that I will be saved (Rom. 5:9–10, 1 Cor. 3:12–15). Like the apostle Paul I am working out my salvation in fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12), with hopeful confidence in the promises of Christ (Rom. 5:2, 2 Tim. 2:11–13).”

If we are just saved by a one time declaration, then the inevitable corruption and sin that follows is a problem. Consider that Judas was chosen, perhaps even saved, before he wasn’t. Consider also, that of the original twelve Christians, eight percent of Christians were Judas. This will always be the case. It’s probably much higher, since these first twelve were chosen people who surely received high-dosage grace. Further, Jesus himself says that few will find the narrow gate but many will find the wide path to destruction. He added the most chilling line of all when he said that all those who call out his name will not be saved, but instead he will tell them, “I never knew you.” It is not enough to declare faith and then not do God’s will. Jesus said that, I didn’t make it up. You must walk with him all the days of your life, to the end, because “by your endurance you will gain your soul.”

This failure of Christians to live up to the high standard set forth by Jesus and the saints has made it remarkably easy for modern people to doubt or laugh at followers of Jesus, because we create scandal quite naturally. The Church is taking a beating by its own failings, but in reality Christians have been hated from the outset, from the first day the word began to spread on Pentecost. Surely if 3,000 people converted that first day Peter preached in Jerusalem, the rest of the world began hating those same 3,000 shortly afterward. The strange thing about Jesus is that he promised his first followers suffering and hatred, as he himself suffered and was hated. The funny thing about that is how many of us hear those words and say, “Great, where do I sign up?”

All religions have their heroes, villains, false prophets, and horrors. Science has its own laundry list of evil experiments done on real people, as you can read up on studies performed that are every bit as awful and disgusting as what St. Bartolome de las Casas was reporting back to Rome about the Spanish explorers. No one would say, “All scientists are evil,” but you will hear, “All priests are evil” or alternatively “Religion poisons everything.” There are different reactions to different religions, and the reaction to Christianity is typically a total and angry rejection. There are a few reasons for this anger, as I see it.

The first reason is because of the lofty goal of holiness in the Church. The Church pronounces its holiness and then falls short, time and again. Expectedly, its opponents have a party over its demise, thinking surely this scandal will be the event that ends the faith of every follower. The old familiar insults are hurled (such as the classic w***e of Babylon, which is really a great name for an insult, even if ridiculous). You see the atheists and everyone else piling on top, rioting in the aftermath of the bad news. Unfortunately, those partying on the potential grave of the Church will be disappointed.

The Church must be held to a nearly unattainable standard, always and forever, because it can never aim lower than the life of Christ and the mysteries of faith without losing everything else. After all, Jesus is the incarnation of God, fully human and fully divine, and he is the founder and his words the foundation and his apostles and bishops the teachers and keepers of the tradition. Yet these members were, from the start, only human. While striving toward his excellence and perfection, they never achieve it, or not for long. As I’ve mentioned before, “perfection kills” but the never-ending work of “progress, not perfection” must be carried forward when we fall, just as Simon the Cyrene carried the cross with Jesus. Even his fully human self needed help once, and miraculously one of us normal humans had a chance to provide it.

Second, this anger goes right back to the old issue of Jesus being divine. Either he was God, as he said he was, or he was a lying lunatic. If you believe that he was God, then you have no alternative but faith, and if you choose lunatic, then the correct response is anger. This is why the response is so vitriolic against Jesus among those who reject the resurrection. When his followers turn out to be weak and fallen, opponents take it out on Christ by proxy of his hypocrite followers, which feels good when your own religion needs to have a winner and a loser.

What people always forget is that the Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum of saints, so they struggle to understand why it is that people return to the Church even after it experiences an embarrassing failure. Those who understand what a hospital is for go there when they need help, as a hospital is to a church, as sickness is to sin. Anyone who expects to only find saints attending Holy Mass will be seeking a Church that doesn’t exist now, has never existed before, and never will exist. They would have better luck finding the saints they expect to find in an art history book, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, or perhaps a graveyard.

Third, Christians are playing a different game altogether than non-Christians, which causes confusion. As humans, we are wired for competition, strife, and victimization, as that is the religion our instinct wants us to have: a fight, a blaming, a competition, an “us vs. them” mentality, and using whatever means available to get an advantage. That is where we naturally tend to go. It’s why Jesus is so radically different than what we expect from a savior. We expect Thor to come down with the hammer, but we get a carpenter with a regular claw hammer. No, we’re like Bonnie Tyler in 1986 singing, “I need a hero,” asking, “Where have all the good men gone? / Where are all the gods? / Where's the street-wise Hercules / To fight the rising odds?”

We need a hero because we want a loser. For those who worship politics or youth or money or power, there is always a winner and loser in those realms. For science, there is a right and a wrong answer. The most radical thing about Jesus is that he shatters the zero-sum game of the winner and the loser. He takes the impact, he is the scapegoat. He is the clear winner of all things, but he loses on purpose. He takes the burden of our incessant blaming and fighting upon himself. The scapegoating ends with him. Correction: it is supposed to end with him. Quite a few of us Christians have missed this message. We killed God on the Cross. Sadly, we would likely do it again today if he returned in the same manner. But he won’t return in the same manner though, as he has assured us with his own words.

His resurrection should have ended the need for a scapegoat. The victory over death by Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection amends our initial fall from grace. We are no longer in the zero-sum game of winners and losers because Jesus took one for the team, the whole team, for all men and women, so that we may be forgiven for what our creaturely instincts guide us toward. This makes it confusing to those outside of Christianity, because it doesn’t fit the normal mode of how we see the world. It’s radically different.

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For anyone that tuned into the first part thinking this would be about marijuana, I apologize. Part two also uses the title as bait so that I can talk about the near-stoning of the woman by the Pharisees, and also discuss the famous comment of Jesus in the center of that dusty circle. I won’t be sharing any insights about bongs or blunts, or the perils of unwanted stems or sticks, and I won’t be going at all into the pros and cons of spliffs versus fatties, nor will I make any witty rejoinders about schwag or kush or hash. I may talk about eating cereal and sugary snacks, as I often do, but as a fair warning, it will most likely talk about my ongoing battle with the very-American sin of gluttony and unrelated (in my case) to marijauna.

So where was I? Ah, yes, I left off on the uplifting topic of hellfire and brimstone.

As I have mentioned in other posts and episodes, in my slow conversion back toward faith, the hellfire and brimstone speeches never moved me, and even drove me away further. But in reading and re-reading the texts it’s clear that hell is something very real to Jesus and he mentions it often. When you are turned away from God, the idea of hell becomes repulsive for the exact reason that you want to remain turned away, and to face the reality of the word “hell” is scary. Clinging to the modern idea of being “Good without God” means that you must reject the idea of hell, because to consider it as real shatters the worldview. But the cool, non-divine hippy version of Jesus sure talks an awful lot about hell, and readers of the cool hippy version have to consciously skip those hellish parts to keep their non-divine chill dude from throwing people into the unquenchable fire of hell for all eternity. I think some people see Jesus as a first century version of the Dude in The Big Lebowski. Jesus could not be more clear what is at stake, however, and he says the he is the way. He himself. This is a shocking claim. He is the way. The Big Lebowski, the Dude, doesn’t demand much of anything from anyone, aside from his stolen rug to be returned to him. Jesus demands we give everything to him. We must surrender much more than a rug to Jesus, we must surrender our heart, mind, soul, and body to him. He requires our time, talent, and treasure. He asks that we pray constantly. He asks that we graft our branch onto the vine of his life. So Jesus implies that being “Good without God” will get you exactly nothing, as that way of life is basically works without faith. So we have Catholics saying “faith and works” and Protestants saying “faith alone” and non-believers saying “works alone.” Only non-believers hold that faith without works is the way, which Jesus clearly does not support. The both/and of the Catholic Church makes the most sense to me, as Jesus asks for all of us, both our faith and our works, and neither can be faked. We must “believe and be baptized” and also “Do God’s will.” I would say that faith and works go together like peas and carrots, but no one uses that combination any more. So instead I would say that faith and works go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Peas and carrots are not even familiar to most Americans today, so a peanut butter cup of faith and works might make a better example. I think they go well together, kind of like faith and reason, (to quote JP II) where both faith and reason are the wings we need to fly. One quick aside here. Most of my closest friends are Protestants, and we usually don’t go into this division around faith and works. In fact, all the arguments around faith and works tend to put me to sleep, because the Catholics and the non-Catholics I know who love God are usually out there doing charity out of love for God. The people I admire most in both Catholic and Protestant circles are those that never even bring up the argument surrounding faith and works. These people are witnessing their faith in ways that require no argument or apologetics. I’m not even sure it occurs to these silent witnesses that there is an argument, because the people that move me toward more faith are the ones that believe and are baptised are are doing God’s will. I think we can go around in circles on this argument for years while the poor go un-fed and the elderly remain un-attended and the convicts sit un-visited. I’m not belittling that the argument exists and there’s a place for charitable argument around the topic, but it seems that it can become a stumbling block of pride and anger between people who otherwise can say the Apostle’s Creed in its entirety in total agreement. I suppose the main problem with works is when we are doing it solely to get our card punched toward salvation. Eternal life is not like a pizza punch card, where we get a free pizza after we’ve purchased ten, nor is it like Burger King where you can “have it your way.” The turning to God requires sacrifice, but it’s a sacrifice that you will want to do once the invasion of grace storms your life.

Now back to the line that is so rich in meaning:“For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”

That little addendum about measuring adds major spice to the chill flavor of the prior sentence. The recipe goes from being bland Midwestern American fare into a Thai kitchen five alarm fire. A great deal changes when those who have already swallowed “judge not” gets that after-kick of “measure for measure” heat. Suddenly “judge not” does not contain the whole message. We would like it to be a nice, neat, standalone package; a two-word pithy tweet. But with the measurement phrase that follows in Matthew, it’s no longer simple. Not judging was the answer a moment ago, but now Jesus lets us know that we will be judged. All of us. My concern is that the understanding I once held of “judge not” really boiled down to indifference or, again, the philosophy of Poombah or the Big Lewbowski, which is “Who cares? Ha-ku-na Ma-ta-ta!” This is just a variation of the idea that “all things are permitted,” which, in itself is a judgment. If you judge that nothing is wrong, then you have judged that morality is not objective, which is making a judgement. So you have made a judgement and will likely apply that same notion to your own life and actions. Even if we take care not to judge others, we will still be judged, and we will be judged by our actions, which are guided by our free will to judge. That sounds like word salad. To sum up, you will be judged, and even if you don’t think you’re judging others, you are. Poombah has judged, just as Jeffery Lebowski has judged.

If I “judge not” because I believe nothing is wrong, that there is no true right and wrong except what each person decides, then I have made a judgment. Logic, rhetoric, and debate are not in my field of experience. Surely, I’ve committed some fallacy here. Surely this site is littered with fallacies that I’m unaware of. These words of Jesus are nuanced and I’m not quite equipped to describe the depth of these verses, but meaning rises up suggesting that our simplified understanding of “Judge not” is incomplete without considering the whole of what Jesus says, particularly about his first commandment over all to “love God” and secondarily to “love one another.” But first, always, is his urgency for us to love God. There are three parts here that must be taken in and absorbed together.

First, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” meaning that it is not just a set of ethics that bring salvation but he himself. Second, Jesus says “You must love God with all your heart, mind, and soul,” and he says this is the most important rule of all. Lastly, putting a ribbon and bow on his message, he refers to himself as “I AM” four times in John’s Gospel, which is the most clear declaration of saying “I am God” that a first century citizen of Palestine could possibly understand. They knew of Exodus 3:14 where God said to Moses, “I AM.” Then there are the myriad instances of Jesus calling himself “the Lord of the Sabbath” and “Son of Man” and various other nuanced references and especially the interaction with Pilate in Mark where he admits to being the Messiah. He could not be more clear that he is declaring himself to be God than if he ran up and down the temple aisle playing the bongo drums and shouting, “I created the universe, I’m God.” Sometimes I wish he had performed an act like that to make it more clear to us gentiles, but to Jews the words “I AM” and “Son of Man” was effectively that same metaphorical bongo drum.

He clearly states that salvation is through him, that God must be worshiped, and that he is God. These all point to him as God, in the flesh. We think of John the Baptist as slightly “off” by eating grasshoppers and wearing a hair shirt, but he never declared anything even close to this outlandish. Moses didn’t go this far, and he went far. He met God, but never declared himself to be God. Elijah riding off to heaven in a fiery chariot? That’s a wild story, but it doesn’t touch the grandeur of this claim.

There is more to this declaration of Jesus, and this is one of those sentences that cannot easily be put aside, especially if you believe in the incarnation and resurrection and ascension. Heck, even if you can only get your head around one of those mysteries, you can’t set these words aside. Certainly the apostles and writers could never have concocted this story on their own, as they were not equipped. Who would be crazy enough to claim it unless they believed it? Virgil and Homer could not have come up with an epic quite like this. The profoundness of Jesus’ words is like nothing else in literature, which eliminates the notion that he was a lunatic and leaves me always turning back to him being divine. Even a great liar cannot have this kind of wisdom and also perform miracles like multiplying loaves of bread and bring himself back to life and ascend into the heavens. There are plenty of lunatics in the world, but they can’t walk on water. There are plenty of people who have claimed to be God, but they haven’t changed the world. There are plenty of people who have died trying to advance a person’s legacy or cause, but those efforts have not inspired an ever-burning movement that has outlasted every human empire and draws people to give immense amounts of time and money toward belief in the idea.

I think this is what makes it difficult for skeptics, because doubting miracles is something that comes naturally to us, especially today in the age of science. I also think people of the first century were not as gullible as we would like to pretend. However, his words have such depth and punch so hard that we see something extreme and strange happening in Jesus and in the people around him, something different from any other sage like Buddha or Confucious, so strange, in fact, that the miracles require a second look. Even once denied, these stories leave a lingering effect on us, one that causes us to look back over our shoulder now and then at the miracles even as we walk away, as if we need to re-assure ourselves, “Nah, there’s no way he fed the 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish.” “No, of course he didn’t walk on water.” Because if we are wrong and even a single miracle is real, then the weight of these words becomes infinite on our chests.

Some people come to believe via the miracles and others via the teachings. Those gifted with faith can get to the miracles quickly, while those gifted in reason must approach through the teachings and the parables. Still others must come by experience. I think many must come by all three avenues to get up the mountain.

Setting aside this story of the men awaiting to stone the woman (I’ve already parked it for a while here) if we remove the wisdom of his words and also remove his claims to divinity, and are only left with miracles; if he only walked on water, or if he only fed the five thousand, or if he only healed the withered hand, or if he only calmed the storm, or if he only raised Lazarus…what then? What if he only gave us the miracles and no wisdom?

I hate to say it, but then he is even more so God than if we only had his teachings.

If a miracle occurred at all, even once by his hand, this decides the case emphatically and completely, far more than if he was a good teller of tales or claimant to divinity, because we already know that no one can walk on water. But if you take even one miracle, perhaps walking on water, and you pair it with his wisdom and then you add in his claims about his being God, then we have a hat-trick of difficult information to handle.

For anyone that believes Jesus did not say he was God, they must surely exclude statements where he most clearly said exactly that. Consider: "Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.” There is no statement that could possibly affirm more emphatically and finally that Jesus declared, “I’m God.” To Jews who grew up hearing stories of Exodus, God’s answer to Moses about his identity was, “I AM.”

What never ceases to amaze me is that people today, after two millennia of scholarship, on the heels of the thousands upon thousands of deep thinkers who pored over these books, believe they have suddenly unearthed the secret meaning of the Gospel accounts and it somehow matches whatever side-ideology that they happen to be selling, usually some unoriginal heresy that gets warmed up again, kind of like leftovers in a dirty microwave. I’ve heard it said that “the plain things are the main things, and the main things are the plain things.” This is why the Apostles’ Creed is a masterpiece, because it distills the story and purpose to the points that both children and adults, of all education levels, can memorize and understand. There will always be plenty of doubters who come along and announce their discovery of the hidden “truth,” but as the letter of Timothy warned, “…the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”

His miracles, words, and claims overwhelm our puny minds with a question, and force us to consider the supernatural as an answer, even when we don’t want to go there. You can skim the text and pretend it doesn’t matter, but if you read closely and study his life, a higher form comes into focus and presents something strange, appealing, and other-worldly. This problem of his life, logic, and mysteries is that it all makes sense in the totality of the Bible, and I believe the Catechism of the Catholic Church is the handbook for understanding it all. I believe the Sacraments of the church make the invisible things visible to us and put the marks of faith upon us, and that the Holy Mass is Sacred and that the Eucharist truly is the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus, and that through Confession our sins are forgiven as the priest acts in the person of Christ. When the Sacred becomes real, there can be no substitute for Baptism or partaking in the Eucharist at Mass. Somehow it all fits together, and in the strangest way it is the Mysteries that act like the glue to hold faith and reason together. The whole picture is there but we can only see parts of it at a time. It is the totality of scripture and tradition and the very clear presence of the Holy Spirit in this world that make Jesus a magnet that we cannot peel our eyes away from still today. There is nothing quite like these scenes and stories, not to mention the parables, in all of written literature and recorded history.

Ok, finally…back to the circle of stoning: when the woman sat in the middle, Jesus drew his finger in the sand, doodling while the “righteous” men warmed rocks in their hands. Some assume he was writing the men’s sins in the sand, as he already knew their hearts and their errors while they proudly lied and prepared to kill the woman. But it doesn’t say this explicitly in the story, so this is only speculation and Jesus may just literally be keeping his cool, ignoring the tension. In fact, since he shows calmness amid literal storms, that seems most likely - he is simply doodling in the sand, like the shortstop in little league, ignoring the stress and anxiety of the nattering small-souled adults around him. But that doesn’t mean that he is writing off adultery and sin as inconsequential.

We will be judged. He may not be writing our sins in the sand, but he already knows them. That’s guaranteed as nothing can be hidden from God. We will be judged. Just not by each other. I can almost hear him saying, “I’ll take care of the judgment, but thanks for offering to help.”

Strangely enough, anyone that I’ve heard utter the words, “Judge not,” usually goes on to spend the next breaths judging others. That includes Tupac Shakur in his song, Only God Can Judge Me, and come to think of it, Metallica’s song Holier than Thou. “Measure for measure” will we be judged, and the great warning about the unforgivable sin is the one that makes me shudder.

There is a moment where Jesus says, if you do not have the change of heart, you will get to the day of judgment and God will say, “I never knew you.” (Mt 7:21-23) This means you can appear to love God, you can do all the right things, make all the right moves, but God knows what you are really all about. That pizza punch-card will be thrown in the trash. He knows my interior state. I can’t fool him. Without interior change, I’ve made no change, and I can’t fake it. Fooling people is possible. Fooling God? That’s fooling yourself. Superficiality in actions and appearance is much like unrighteous judgment. You cannot fool God, just as those ready to stone the woman could not fool Jesus.

Those men wielding rocks who walked away: I always wonder if they were changed. We don’t know what happens to them afterward. Perhaps some were changed as Jesus spun the accusation back at them. Perhaps knowing the woman is guilty but not condemned struck them as profound on the way home, and they realized forgiveness is possible. Wouldn’t we love to know what happened to those men? It’s like the other nine lepers. Or what happened to the rich young ruler? We have all these cliffhangers where we have to wait for season two, but season two got cancelled due to crucifixion, so we’ll never know. Or someday maybe we will, but not today. Perhaps they seethed with anger and helped put Jesus to the Cross, but later realized their sin and turned, like St. Paul after he was out torturing and killing the first followers. We don’t know. But we don’t need to know, because we are those people. We are the Pharisees and the nine lepers and the rich young ruler. That’s the funny thing I realized when I thought about what happened to those men. I realized that wondering about them is the same as wondering about myself. Those men who came to stone the woman represent all of us, the readers, the people, the fallen souls of this world. How comical then that I read the story of the adulterer and the stoning and I spend so much time reflecting on my judgement of the Pharisees! If it didn’t cause me fear and trembling, I’d be laughing.

Jesus impacts this scene using few words. The woman, the target of the stoning, is not condemned. So we wonder, how can this be if Jesus has come to fulfill the law and the prophets? How can she be guilty, but not condemned? How can we be guilty, but not condemned?

And that question right there is the secret sauce of the Gospel accounts. What is that secret? That all are guilty. We deserve condemnation, but forgiveness is available. Forgiveness is possible. Redemption is possible. All are guilty, but all are not condemned, as redemption can be found in the person of Jesus. Forgiveness comes through the immense sacrifice of Jesus. The fallen (hint: that’s you and me) can still win because by his own choice, God chooses to be sacrificed. He comes down to earth in human form, and stands in the scene at the end, alone with the rock, and no one gets stoned to death in this story. But then at the end of his own human life, he is once again alone, in the center, but this time on the cross. There again, he is alone, abandoned, humiliated, accepting his fate. He is condemned, not us. He is guilty, though without sin. On the cross we see our own sins on full display in the agony of his torture as his life blood drains, his mouth goes dry, his lungs collapse, his muscles and tendons tear, his feet and hands rip against metal as he tries to shift and support his body on the cross. He cannot lean his head back on the wood for the thorns on his head slice him, and he cannot lean his head forward as it shifts his weight ahead and thereby wracks his feet with pain. He cannot press himself upward or his feet will dig further into the nail, and he cannot let himself be lowered or his hands will gape further on their nails. This unbearable pain must be endured for 180 minutes amid the noise of jeering and shaming and hatred and envy and malice and slander. And undeservingly, it is us who are rewarded. For his pain, we receive the gift of knowing our own weaknesses and being offered the chance at life, as he descends and spends the next two days conquering death and hell, until he returns in his infinite risen glory.

So judge not, yes, but remember: you will be judged.

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Everyone loves the famous line of “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Even better, today people love the line “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” That may be the motto of our era. These are some of the most popular lines from the Gospels and are used as often by non-believers as by believers. These lines can be interpreted to fit into almost any shape you like, and can be raised to affirm any faith or ideology. These lines, when cherry-picked as standalone zingers, behave kind of like what we do with chicken today in the grocery store. We shape these lines to fit our needs and wants. How are these lines like chicken? Well, in the past, we just cooked the whole chicken and broke it apart in the separate parts: chicken legs, wings, breasts, and thighs. Life was simple then. Now we mass produce the chicken and carve it up and pluck out the white meat and blend up the dark meat, and run it through machines and slicers and shapers until it looks nothing like the original chicken. We can shape and press chicken into any bun-fitting shape that we like. There’s chicken patties, chicken strips, chicken nuggets, popcorn chicken, dinosaur shaped chicken, chicken in a can, chicken fries, and chicken burgers. There are even vegan chicken products that have no chicken whatsoever in them, yet are sold under the name of “chicken.” From this poor bird we have created The Island of Dr. Moreau in the frozen food aisle.

We pick out the parts we want and make it fit our own yearnings. We want the bloodless version. If you think of the idea of “the Gospels” and are never disturbed at all, you are missing some major sections. You might be reading the Gospel like you shop the frozen food aisle. In the grocery store, we push our carts and listen to elevator music and pause in the air conditioning, all in complete comfort. We open a glass door and feel a blast of cold air to pick out a bag of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, thinking how cute they are. But that product in the freezer has no resemblance to a chicken. It has sealed us off from all the realities of the life of a chicken. There is no feed, dung, or blood anywhere near our shopping centers. We don’t see anything but the clean, happy ending of the cartoonish dinosaur nugget. There is no evidence of a chicken at all, let alone the sacrifice the chicken made. But the chicken is there, and the sacrifice was most certainly made.

Few people read the words that come before or after the “don’t judge me” parts of the biographies of Jesus. Why is that? Well, for one thing, it disrupts the comfort of feeling safe and nourished. There is no shortage of confusing and disturbing lines that came from the mouth of Jesus. For anyone that accuses believers of cherry-picking lines from the Bible to suit their beliefs, there is an equal amount of cherry-picking done to suit non-beliefs as well. For this latter group, the two lines about judgement are leveraged heavily in the ongoing effort to make Jesus into a non-miraculous, non-divine but cool hippy instead of the incarnation of the creator of the universe who took on our sins for the greatest sacrifice in history.

For the life of me, I will never understand why any non-believer would care for anything said by a non-divine version of Jesus, since then he would be a lunatic and a fraud. Anyone who denies Jesus’ divinity but is still quoting him as a moral teacher should ask themselves: “Why would you care what he said at all, if he’s lying about his primary claim of being the messiah, of being God?”

But let’s continue. Let’s look at these famous lines where Jesus told us not to be ‘judgey’. Let’s go get stoned. Here’s the cast of the scene: Jesus, a bunch of angry Pharisees, and the adulterous woman.

When the Pharisees want to stone the woman who was caught in adultery (Jn 8:1-11), they try to corner Jesus on interpreting the law. They know that he is a follower of the law, that he is a devout Jew. Let me stop right here, since this is probably the main point people miss right out of the gate.

The Holy Family of Mary and Joseph observed Jewish law with devotion. That is, they were devout. So was Jesus. Thus to understand Jesus at all requires understanding that he was very Jewish, and to be a devout Jew means understanding what “the law” means. This also means that to understand Jesus at all means you have to understand the Old Testament, the bloody and gritty parts of the Bible. This is the part of the Bible where the chicken was still on the farm, not in your freezer. The classic mistake people make, from Marcion in the second century to the Third Reich in the 20th century, is thinking that you can understand Jesus without diving into his Jewish heritage. Marcion wanted to get rid of the Old Testament just like many modern people do, and it’s one of the oldest heresies we have to look back on for guidance. People have always tried to throw out the books of Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Why? Because they want to unhitch the train of Christianity from the Jews, but you can’t. Even if Leviticus does sound like your angry old uncle who lacks spiritual bedside manner, you can’t kick him out because he’s part of the family. Without the whole family of books, hardly any of Jesus’ life and teaching makes sense. Without the history that precedes his life and ministry, half of the Gospel of John would not make sense, and most the Gospel of Matthew would confuse the heck out of us. We need the whole, not just parts of it. You know, eventually if you eat enough dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, you start to wonder where the dinosaur came from, and once you start digging into the ingredient list and the supply-chain you will arrive back at the whole food: the chicken. You must have the whole, not just some industrial product in a shiny wrapper.

“The Old Testament is an indispensable part of Sacred Scripture. Its books are divinely inspired and retain a permanent value, for the Old Covenant has never been revoked. Indeed, ‘the Old Testament was deliberately so oriented that it should prepare for and declare in prophecy the coming of Christ, redeemer of all men.’ Christians venerate the Old Testament as true Word of God. The Church has always vigorously opposed the idea of rejecting the Old Testament under the pretext that the New has rendered it void (Marcionism). (CCC 121-123)

So I haven’t gotten very far yet on this story, and no where near the attempted stoning of the woman. But Jesus cannot be understood without the old books, nor can any part of this story. Moreover, this need for the old books doesn’t only apply to Jesus, but how could anyone understand Peter or Paul or John or the various dudes named James without understanding the history of the Chosen people? You have to understand Adam and Abraham and Moses and David and Jeremiah all the way up to the Maccabees and all the rest of the Hebrews in between to get to any sense whatsoever of what is happening in the circle of Pharisees. If you just rush to find the line, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” you have just gone for the dinosaur shaped chicken nugget and pretended that it spontaneously grew in the freezer via the debunked scientific “theory of spontaneous generation.” Nuggets come from somewhere, they don’t just happen.

(Ok, I’m unhitching from the chicken metaphor from here on out, so as not to beat a dead horse. I wanted to say horse-shaped chicken nugget, but I don’t know if it has been invented yet.)

Jesus stated that he came to “fulfill the law and the prophets,” which is a statement forgotten by those who want to carve the hippy version of Jesus away from the Old Testament laws of Moses. So what does “the law” mean? Jesus is talking about the Ten Commandments and the Torah. Now, I don’t want to get into whether he is talking about natural law or specific ceremonial law or cultural law of the Hebrews, because that’s more than I can handle. You need a Trent Horn or Jimmy Akin or Jim Blackburn to break all that down. In his ministry he corrects some of the old law, and does away with some. The good news is this: we know that Jesus perfects the Old Testament law. But while he makes these corrections, he still has immense respect for the old law. He also said, "Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place."

Why did Jesus believe in the old law so much? How could he be so deeply dedicated to the old law? Talk about dramatic, too. He defends the old law so much that he says not only will every letter be fulfilled, but even the smallest part of each letter.

I can think of one reason.

There is one reason in particular, one primary reason that really sticks out to me. And it seems to be very clear, and make perfect sense once you consider it.

It’s because he made the law. He wrote the law. He’s God. So yeah, he’s down with the law. He’s the author. Again, for anyone that forgets that Jesus is claiming to be God while reading the Gospels, these statements will make no sense. The chill teacher version of Jesus would not speak this way of the law, but the divine author of the law, who used human authors to record his will, would speak this way of the law.

He gave the law to his chosen people. If he is God, then he certainly agrees to his own law, because he is the author.

The mistake people make when reading about Hakuna Matata version of Jesus is that they have already rejected him as divine, and therefore nothing he says makes sense, because he is actually speaking as God himself. To read his words as a profound teacher makes little sense when he starts dropping lines like “I saw Satan fall like lightning.” Wait what? If he’s just a dude with peaceful ideas, then he didn’t witness Satan fall from the sky. Surely someone has already tried to fit that into their desire to legalize drugs. “Oh, that must mean that Jesus was on psychedelics.” No, he wasn’t. He was high all right, but that’s because he was the highest being, incarnated into the flesh to walk with us.

Here’s another question: how do you reconcile a purely human Jesus with a line like: “No one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.” How is an entirely human Jesus going to raise anything up? And on what day? If he’s not God and claims this power, then he’s crazy or an arrogant liar. If he is God, then it makes sense but it’s also terrifying. No wonder Jesus gets irritated with the people around him and says, "O faithless and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I endure you?"

Sometimes I wonder if he would say that to me at least once a day. When I imagine Jesus living with me, it’s a good mental exercise, because when I pour an oversized bowl of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran from the MEGA-sized box, and then cut up a banana to throw on top, I just have to wonder - what would Jesus think of such a food spectacle? Worse, what would he say when I ate that bowl, and then poured a second bowl? I suspect he might say, “I never knew you…were such a pig.”

So for everyone today that throws out the Old Testament and Ten Commandments, I wonder if they have not just seized on the most culturally shocking lines of the ancient texts and got stuck there. Some of the old books are difficult to read, without a doubt, and the cultural differences and scientific understanding of the universe creates a gap in understanding, but focusing on those things clouds the religious truth of the texts. To toss them out is to lose the whole backstory of Jesus’ life and his purpose. Jesus does not sound like someone who rejects the past and the law when he says “not one letter of the law will pass away”? Further, he says not even one part of a letter of the law will pass away. Then he later says, “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” meaning we should follow the law of the land where we live, as long as it doesn’t conflict with the law, the real law, the natural law, God’s law, which is the Ten Commandments and those obvious laws which we can know in our conscience.

If you do not read Jesus words as if it were God speaking, then you will get a very odd interpretation of what the Gospels mean. You will have to skip over many parts because they make no sense, and all of the miracles. You will have to throw out all of those completely if Jesus is not divine. If you read his words as the speech of an ordinary man with wisdom, you may just as well go to the airport bookstore and pick up a self-help book full of vanilla maxims on being yourself and pursuing happiness. You can stay in the comfort of ignoring the many times Jesus talks about separating the sheep from the goats, or the wheat from the chaff that will burn for eternity. Because if Jesus is not God but is only claiming to be, then it doesn’t matter and your ego can run buck wild. But if he is God, then the only way to read the Gospels and make sense of them is with the understanding that he is speaking as God himself. It is precisely when you make this turn that you may experience fear of the Lord, which is a good thing because it means you are on the right track.

The self-help gurus say something different than what our carpenter, who is God, tells us. He’s saying something very different. As God he is showing and telling us in every word and action the exact opposite of the feel-good books on the airport bestseller cart. He does say, “Be yourself.” But he doesn’t say it at all like the books of affirmation at the airport do. He said, “Surrender to me because you are a sinner. Then you can finally be your true self.”

He also says (paraphrasing here into bro-speak): “Only I can save you because I am God. I’m not giving you some self-help tips here for kicks, but for eternal life, so take up your cross daily, crucify your ego, and follow me. Oh, and you will find happiness in me because I am God. But - fair warning - you will get mocked and possibly murdered if you do this thing correctly, and I’m about to show you what that looks like.”

Jesus questioned few of the existing laws of his people, slicing only those ceremonial, cultural laws that strived for outward cleanliness. He only corrected the laws that needed correction, the ones that blocked the interior conversion of the heart, the rules that stifled mercy and humility. (For a great listen on this story, check out Tim Keller’s podcast on “The Humility of Jesus.”)

According to the law, adultery was illegal and stoning was the punishment. So the situation was this: the Pharisees have a woman in the middle of the circle. With rocks in hand, they put the question to Jesus on what should be done to her as a violator of the law of Moses. However, before he answers with his famous line, Jesus squats down and draws in the dirt with his finger. No one knows what he was drawing in the sand or dirt, or why he does it, although there is plenty of speculation. Perhaps he was doing something profound in the sand, or perhaps he was just bored with their games and like a nine-year-old shortstop drawing in the dirt during a boring baseball game he found something more interesting in shaping the sand. Regardless of what he drew in the sand, Jesus stands up and delivers the ultimate one-liner, the greatest microphone-drop in the history of life and literature, saying the famous line, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Then he bends down once again and draws in the dirt, again doodling like the detached young shortstop or writer of something profound and creative. Whatever the case, it causes the Pharisees’ pride to crumble.

Stunned, the men with rocks fall silent. They slowly fade away, leaving one by one. Hungry for blood and justice, they suddenly lose interest as the one-liner from Jesus seems to annihilate their motivation to kill the woman. Their goal of trapping Jesus in a legal argument snapped upon themselves. The comment seems to turn the mirror onto the men, showing them their own sin, and they drift away leaving the woman and Jesus in the center of the disappearing circle.

This is often how God works in my own life, where something will happen that bothers me, gets me all wound up, and slowly, gradually, I come to realize that my perception of the problem is not exactly right and that I’m probably more prideful and lacking humility than the person I’m upset with. This whole “drawing his finger in the sand” is like a metaphor for God taking his time to correct us, stirring up our consciences, awakening us to our own flaws and failures. What a shame that I am so talented at seeing others’ failures first before my own, as this talent does me little favor. Perhaps I should have pursued being a judge on American Idol or at the county fair or bodybuilding competitions, because I’m so keen on finding the flaw in others instead of myself. Perhaps I missed a career opportunity. Seeing my own flaws is a brutal process of introspection, and God does seem to walk me to that place. He lets me burn off the passions before showing me my own faults.

Everyone takes this quote from Jesus and runs with it. This one gets mixed right in with his other comment about non-judgement. “Don’t judge me,” we say. Or maybe, “Only God can judge me.” But I would argue that those who say those words don’t understand what Jesus is saying. He’s not saying we won’t be judged. He’s saying, if you have no sin, you can judge. But who has no sin? Only one person can say that, and it’s Jesus. It’s God. He is the one that can judge. In this case, he can judge the woman, but he’s not judging her. Not yet, but he will.

In these cases, he’s always indicating that the judgement is not happening right now…but it will happen. Judgement is coming, but there is time yet. These lines are about mercy on living persons, but the final justice is 100% guaranteed for every person upon their last breath. His mercy does not affirm violations of the law, but rather corrects behavior and offers a second chance.

That’s why the last verse of this story is the most important of all. He tells her to “Go and sin no more.” The implication is that she did sin, but she has another chance. She’s forgiven. This is the most important line in the story and has parallels to the story where Jesus heals the paralyzed man. In that story, Jesus considers what is more amazing: that he can make a paralyzed man pick up his mat and walk, or that he can forgive the sins of the same man. Obviously the medical miracle is amazing, but the claim that he can forgive sins jumps infinitely ahead in terms of wonder. The people who witness the event are more amazed at the medical healing, but truly the forgiveness of sins is far more profound and meaningful, which is what he’s trying to convey to the people.

This forgiveness brings up two questions. Who can forgive sins? Well, obviously only God can do that. A cool hippy cannot forgive your sins, and I know a few cool, aging hippies who still believe in peace, love, and dope but they cannot forgive sins. A drug user on psychedelics cannot forgive my sins. If one of these types told me that he forgave me for all the evil things I’ve done, I would buy them another beer (or whatever their drug of choice) because I would consider them already intoxicated.

So why do non-believers and deniers of Jesus’ divinity read these lines and consider that an ordinary man has any power to forgive sin? I think it’s more likely that this forgiveness question is ignored, or glossed over, or not looked at very closely. Actually, I think many people do feel like Jesus is divine, but they don’t want to think about it too closely, because once you really dive into the Gospels, or stare at the crucifix for a long time, you start to see your own sins and feel the need to change. In fact, this is why I feel that crucifixes should have the spent body of Jesus hanging in defeat, so that when you look upon it - and really look at it - you see your flaws in the wounds of Christ. A bare and clean cross doesn’t deliver the message like a cross with the mangled body of Jesus fully exposed does, with his bloodied head, punctured hands and feet, the many cuts and bruises from the scourging, the scuffed joints from falling three times on the road to Calvary, and the gaping hole in his side by a spear that rammed into his heart. On that cross, the cross with the body, you can imagine how the sinless man squirmed and hung and suffocated under his own weight, while being jeered at and mocked for all his goodness, while he thirsted under the heat of the sun, for three hours, dehydrating and struggling to breathe. He had no sleep the night before and had been beaten and ripped apart with Roman whips. That is the cross I need to see, not the empty cross with no nails and no body. I do not want to see the “before” cross, I want to see the “after.” I don’t want to see the cleaned up Disney version of the cross. The ugly cross is where the life of Christ makes sense and the mystery of his sacrifice can just begin to make sense to me. Then I can begin, just barely, to see how my own sins and fallen nature put him there in that horrible place, and somehow, strangely, how that awful sight shows the greatest act of humility and love the world has ever seen and becomes the ultimate example of how to live, and the ultimate symbol of hope for our souls.

The second question is: how can he forgive her sins, or anyone else’s sins? How can that be? What is happening? How can there be no consequences for breaking laws, when he says no part of the law, not one letter, nor a part of a single letter, will pass away?

That’s the question the Pharisees want answered, and in a clever way Jesus does answer it. He answers it by showing the men that judgment is not taking place that day, not by them. There is so much more to this story.

For starters, did the woman commit adultery alone? No. That’s not possible. So where is the man and why isn’t he also in the center of the circle? Surely he too committed adultery. Shouldn’t he also be stoned? Where is the man that committed the act with this woman? Why is she the only one being accused and tried for adultery? This is one of those moments where you can see Jesus treating the dignity of all people equally, woman or man. He cuts through the double-standard. He subverts the culture. Wait…is he…wait…what? Is he smashing the patriarchy? He is establishing some kind of equality in eternal judgement here, as Paul realized a few years later: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” So there is that. But if you believe Jesus is God and he is speaking as God, and he speaks highly of the first and most famous patriarch, Abraham, and does the same about many of the others like Moses and Elijah and Jacob and Isaac, then he doesn’t seem real keen on “smashing” them, since after all, he chose them.

Next, who are the men that want to stone her? Jesus implies something incredible here: the men that want to stone her are adulterers themselves. At the very least they are guaranteed to be sinners of some kind, breakers of the law, and likely worthy of stoning as the fullness of the law prescribes. Should they be stoned themselves for the same crime, or for a different crime? I would bet they are guilty of it, just as most men today are guilty of it, nearly all of them as they pore over the porn in their phone and degrade the women in the images and then clear their browser history and then pretend they haven’t committed adultery. I have been as guilty as any in that regard, as the websites beckon us, tempt us men, into easy-access lust and defile our marriages and relationships while we project our sin onto those performing the act on the screen, instead of looking at our own behavior. How many millions of men have partaken in looking at porn, only to go online afterward and lament the fallen morals of our society? The Pharisees are still encircling the woman today, as we sinners act as spotless as a lamb. We do this while the Lamb of God squirms in agony on the cross for our fallen hearts, to forgive us, to give us a second, third, seventh, and seventy-seventh chance.

And what happens to the woman then? She is not condemned. But saying “Go and sin no more” implies that she was guilty of the accused act. I feel it’s safe to assume the woman is forever changed after this moment, like so many others that Jesus comes into contact with, as he fundamentally re-plants them in rich soil. He rips out the roots of old ways out. But that redemption, that re-planting, comes with a huge caveat, one that I feel most people miss when they throw around the “Judge not, lest ye be judged” one-liner as if it were a shield.

This redemption that Jesus preaches only happens in the Gospel stories to those that have the correct humility before God. He cures people who have faith. In some cases, he cures people but not all of them change their ways, such as the ten lepers that he cures and only one comes back to thank him. (A Samaritan, of all people!) The one leper comes back to him, and Jesus tell him:

“Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine? Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?” Then he said to him, “Stand up and go; your faith has saved you.”

Faith has saved this one leper. What’s the implication? His sins are forgiven. This implies the other nine may be healed from leprosy, but they are not changed. They have not changed. The other nine are back in the arcade of life, living without their physical malady, but afflicted with the spiritual malady, and not giving any thanks and honor to God. This is what happens when you make God a transactional being for redemption only when you think you need a lift. You cry out for help when you need it, but turn away as soon as you have what you want. That is where the judgment will come down, and this cleansing of the ten lepers states it pretty plainly, in my opinion.

The change is what must happen. Without the change, the condemnation will come. Forgiveness entails expected duties that follow, otherwise there is a lack of understanding about what the forgiveness meant. Fortunately, we get repeat attempts here. God is well aware of our weaknesses, and I believe he wants us to know and embrace our own. If you don’t know your weaknesses, how can you be prepared to fight off the temptations that will cause you to fall? Knowing my weaknesses becomes a great gift. Gifts and crosses come to us all, and sometimes the cross is the gift that awakens my faith.

If we receive forgiveness, it must really be received, and not as a “Get out of jail free card.” The one unforgivable sin the Jesus alludes to is the rejection of the Holy Spirit, which is the rejection of God. So anyone that rejects God, inside their hearts, will not receive forgiveness. That sends a chill to me, as I often wonder about that. Obviously, nothing can be hidden from God, as we are an open book to God, and how easily our petty pride can rise up and knock us off course, tipping us right back to a subtle rejection of Jesus, making him into a personal redemption center where we go when we need to exchange our token prayers for forgiveness.

Those who receive the Holy Spirit see their whole life change. Those that understand, change their ways out of joy. Those that do not understand, do not change. The “Judge not lest ye be judged” line is shortened by most people, to the detriment of the concept, as there is a key line that follows it elsewhere when he mentions the idea of “judge not.” In this story of the stoning, Jesus says nothing of judgment, as she appears to have a clean slate. “Go and sin no more.” Like the lepers, she is starting fresh, but as we saw in the ten lepers, only one is actually saved. Curing or forgiving should arouse faith in the healed or forgiven, but this doesn’t always happen. But elsewhere Jesus does say “Stop judging, that you may not be judged.” (Mt 7:1-2) Everyone loves that line. But the very next line in Matthew after that is this: “For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”

I’ve never heard anyone add this part when quoting this line: “measure for measure will you be judged.” We just say the first part because it makes a good comeback, and then allows us to agree to disagree, or more likely just permits us to make up whatever rules we like. “Judge not” alone allows our own pride and disobedience to continue un-chastised and unchanged, but it doesn’t account for the next words that Jesus says, because a judgement is coming, in full measure, and that includes our choices that we make. So even if you, or a co-worker, a friend, a schoolmate, or a relative doesn’t get to have the final word on judgement in this world, someone or something does in the next.

So who is doing that judging? Is it the cool hippy Jesus? No. This is the fiery Jesus, speaking as God. We forget about this Jesus, who killed the fig tree for not producing fruit. We forget about this God-man who said, “The son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.” (Mt 13:40-42)

In fact, if you don’t believe in God, nor believe in Jesus as God, but you read the line “so will you be judged,” who exactly do you think Jesus is talking about as doing the measuring? For those that do not believe, but who quote these lines, how can this idea of cosmic judgement still mean anything? Yet these lines resonate, because even when reminded of the measure for measure, non-believers nod. Even while claiming atheism and disbelief in heaven or hell, people still want some kind of ultimate payback or justice. An infiltration of “karma” seems to have wafted into the room, but it doesn’t fit into Christianity. Judgement is to karma as an apple is to an orange. Jesus shares no concept of karma. He’s talking about a final judgement, and he will direct you to heaven or hell. He mentioned hell many times. He mentions it all over the place, and souls are going there. Does that sound like the cool hippy allowing us to do whatever you want? Does anyone remember a verse that says: “That’s cool; get drunk, trash the place, lie, cheat, steal, be prideful, commit adultery, have random hookups. Do whatever you want, it’s all good, I’ll just save you at the end.” No, there’s nothing like that. Maybe that will turn up in the next version of the Dead Sea Scrolls that is found in a cave in Qumran, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

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When things are going well, we consider ourselves in charge. But the minute things go sideways in our relationships and expectations, we transplant the blame owed to people onto anger at someone else, and that someone is often God. If I am mad for something that I was not given, or about some thing that was “taken,” or at someone who did something to me, or at someone who did not do something to me, then perhaps my concept of God is too small. In fact, that concept of God is so small that it makes the creator into a creature of the creation (and that only happened once, a few thousand years ago). God does not make deals and does not bargain with us. In fact, that’s exactly the devil’s occupation. If God is the creator and the mover of all things, the devil is the dealmaker who tempts us and accuses and divides and sows doubt. This is what the classic play Faust and the country music song The Devil went Down to Georgia both point out. The devil is “willing to make a deal” and he dangles a million varieties of the “golden fiddle” in front of each one of us. God does not deal in transactions. He has no need of us. It’s us who need him. His moves are beyond our understanding, yet we must make choices in this world to do his will the best that we can. On the flip side, the devil needs us, so he offers bargains, persuading us to trade our souls for golden fiddles or honor and prestige. We gladly barter temporary shiny poisons of this world over eternal life of our souls and think we came out on top of the bargain.

Human flaws are a common blocker among many of the fallen away. For me it was a huge blocker. For Catholics, the sex abuse scandal made it very difficult to justify continuing on with the faith. But God did not commit those acts, people did. Right now, today, there are adults committing those same horrors - literally, right now, these things are happening. I suspect in twenty years, tales from the pandemic will begin to seep out of locked-down households. Where secrets live, sins hide. There is no question that these sins revolt us, every one of us, but God did not commit these sins. People did these things. People do awful things when no one is watching. It is not the first time and won’t be the last time. No matter what religion brings in the faithful, or political party takes power, no matter what ideology wins the culture, these same sins will continue. These things flourish under secrecy and isolation. For humans, there is no other way. As a child will steal a cookie when a parent walks away, adults who have full reason can conjure far worse actions than pilfering food - but the root cause remains the same as the child. When no one is watching, the self and ego take over. When authority disappears, the apple re-appears. The genius of the story of the Garden of Eden is that you can witness it every single day happening like clockwork as the human heart, wired for God, is so easily short-circuited by temptation and evil. This is not the sole problem of just one culture or skin color or religion or political party or nation or family or age group or parenting style or diet or climate. The same flaw exists in every person who has lived, is living now, or will live in the future. And likewise, regardless of time, place, or physical attributes, there is but one cure for it and that is turning back to God. To do so can be humiliating, but it fixes the short-circuit and restores the heart.

For me, the abuse scandal of the Church shoved me away from God more than I already was, as I had focused on the people who had committed the acts. I did not think of the billion people worldwide that did good things with their faith, who found meaning, who did great works of charity, and who loved God first and foremost. I saw the trees amid the forest, the sick and twisted trees, as representative of the whole. I felt that all the trees should be torn down if such a forest allowed such horrors to grow. But then I realized that thousands of school teachers a year are accused or convicted of the same crimes as those disturbed clergy members, yet I never called for the end to all public schooling. Families all over the world commit abusive acts against one another, but I never sought the destruction of the family. I had reserved my worst anger against those who failed at holiness, and I tried to corral God into the same pen as those men who failed, the people. The abuse scandal of the Church horrifies and sickens me to the core, as the Church holds a higher standard, as it must, as it is meant to do, which makes the abuse of trust that much worse. If a claim to holiness is made, then departures from that claim are magnified. To think of the Cardinal McCarrick story or the 300 Pennsylvania priests’ abuse brings forth a rage in me. Ugly realities should and must be held up for all to see, to ridicule the hypocrisy, as the awful reality of child abuse will forever be one of the primary reasons for lost faith in a creator or loving God. The hypocrisy of false holiness is the greatest scandal of all! It’s a scandal to be a holy fool and scare people away from God with manic literalism, but far worse is to be a holy pretender who is rotten at the core. You know who else hated hypocrisy? Jesus Christ, that’s who. And as far as children goes, he said this:

“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of things that cause sin! Such things must come, but woe to the one through whom they come!” (Mt 18:6-7)

Pain and suffering will remain with us, for reasons unknown, but the Church is God’s light on earth. Thus the horror of the abuse scandal damages the victims plus millions more, to the point that the faithful should be and must be the most outraged. We should be the most angry, both clergy and laity. The worst part of it is that the small percentage of predators in the Church through the era of abuse have sullied and destroyed the work of the many good and uplifting priests and bishops and deacons and believers. Priests that I have known and interacted with, who create joy and guide people, suffer from the choices of criminal colleagues. Clearly a culture that allowed it to happen must be gutted and ripped out, while remembering that God did not do this, nor did the Sacraments, nor did celibacy. It was a subset of corrupted human beings who shrugged off authority for ego and pleasure. While the disgusting wound keeps healing and re-opening, it is the work of those who believe to eradicate the problem, from stem to stern, so that the trust of the faithful, and especially of children, can never be used against them again. As of now, steps are being taken, too late for those victims, but the addition of zero tolerance policies, training for all volunteers, Safe Environment training, background checks, Codes of Conduct - all of this and more will be needed, forever going forward. For a good read beyond my rant, read Bishop Barron’s A Letter to a Suffering Church. Prepare to be sad and disturbed. But there is hope. There is always hope.

Until I finally set aside my own anger about other people's sins, perceived or imagined, correctly or not, I could not let myself be open. I had somehow forgotten: we don't pray to people. We pray to God. And I think of the moment when people left Jesus after they were disturbed about his teaching, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” This revolted some disciples and they left him, and Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” And Simon Peter says the words that those of us who believe still know to this day: “To whom shall we go?” We know he is the way, the truth, and the life. Peter says the words we all feel: “You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” And so we must remain and carry on and restore the Church, since we believe it is his Holy Church passed on through Peter and the apostles. That is a short yet complete summary of why we’ll stay, and run into the burning building to save it instead of fleeing the flames. The root cause of this failure is not God, and never was God. Nor was it Jesus or the Holy Spirit. It was human beings, flawed and fallen, but allowed to sin and abuse trust. So the fix must be made not with the Trinity, but with humans, as it was in the Garden, as it was at the Crucifixion, as it is today, as it will be again tomorrow, as it ever shall be until the Second Coming, on the day we cannot know that will arrive like a lightning flash across the sky.

That was the problem for me. I conflated humans with God. As a child, we are not taught to pray to a person. No, we are taught to pray to God. So now it makes no sense that I doubted God when it was always a person or my expectations that let me down. What a revelation to learn that people will always let you down if you put your entire faith in them. There is a saying among recovering addicts: An expectation is a planned resentment. I find that to be a fact repeatedly as I gain hindsight on past decades and phases. If a person or persons drove me away from God, then what in the heck was I expecting of them to begin with? I can tell you, I was not even considering God during my drift away from faith. I was focused on people, places, experiences, and expecting the impossible from flawed creatures, resenting the world when people did not act a certain way.

If people are not the thing keeping you from faith, here’s another common possible fence that’s keeping you out: you are too busy. Career or school or raising a family may be exhausting you. I took this route. (I took various wrong routes.) The weekend became something for social gatherings and parties, but never, never for God. I felt too weary to consider Church because the world of the weekday siphoned the energy from me. The weekend became about relaxing and mingling and recovering for the week. Then the weekend was never about God, not even for one hour. For one hour I couldn't rouse myself from the couch. How many us married couples have elevated our children above our marriages and even over God? How many youth sports tournament and leagues and practices have overtaken Sunday mornings? Then there is just the lazy pajama morning. How many Netflix and video game marathons have swallowed the hours of Sunday? The amusing distractions of sports and media carry us smiling toward our own spiritual deaths.

There was time, but never enough, so I thought. But it wouldn’t have mattered if had unlimited time, because I claimed that I was too tired and too indifferent. For one hour a week, out of the 168 hours in a seven day week, I could give neither the time nor the energy to offer up a single prayer of thanks. World weary, with a heavy heart, I slumped in the couch to restore myself. Like the apostles in the garden who could not stay awake with Jesus for one hour as he approached his torture on the cross, I could not give one hour. I could not move from the comfort of the couch. But I made sure I spent multiple hours watching sports, or going to the gym, or the brewpub, or shopping, or engaging in pleasure - but I could not give that one hour, or even a single minute.

I fell asleep instead of giving that one hour to God, which is where the heart wanted to go all along. I stifled it and told it to be quiet. “I'm too busy for that, I need to watch this three hour football game. I need to stare at this phone to finish reading this editorial.” The hard truth was that the screens were draining me, never restoring me. Even writing requires a screen, so here I sit a hypocrite, as usual. I imagine that what I’m doing on the computer or phone is important, but it’s just being busy. Reading news or information seems important, but it’s not. "Learning something” is wonderful, but it can feed the ego more than the soul, depending on what you are learning. If I’m learning about a new programming language or how to build a birdhouse, then there is benefit, but if I’m reading about the latest news story, then it does nothing but agitate me, and we can all name people whose news obsession has infected and overtaken their actual lives. This gossip and garbage information empties me out of the all vestiges of grace, and kills off any sense of sanctity that I might have carried with me into the virtual realm. Holy, sacred, sanctity, hallowed - those words meant nothing to me, until the turn back to trust in a Higher Power happened. Those holy things and ideas were words to be mocked and reviled because they blocked progress, knowledge, and efficiency in getting things done.

Yesterday I heard someone say that art class in elementary school is a waste of time because it would never “get kids anywhere in life.” But where are these kids going? Where is a child going that art, religion, music, or literature classes won’t get them? I think it will get them exactly where they need to go. For a time, I was in agreement with that sentiment. Too busy for foolish things. Too busy for unproductive pursuits. What happens then is that the busy schedule becomes progress itself, until after performing that act for several years you discover that foolish things and unproductive pursuits are often the very spice of life if those things even touch an edge of art, music, religion, and literature. Business and industry replace the sacred. Sitting still becomes the enemy. Being busy pretends at being “good” behavior: working, taxiing children to activities, exercising, politicking, watching the latest TV show - that was a list of what seemed “useful.” This pursuit of all these things made for a constant chase of knowledge at a thin, surface level.

Like the narrator of The Great Gatsby, I aimed at becoming “that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’” This goal of being versed in all subjects or having knowledge in all areas is a fantasy. Consider how people sit around fires with friends today compared to before the invasion of the smart phone. Conversations dug up questions that had no answer in the present company, and when the answer was unknown, we made up stories and jokes about the possible answer amid the firelight. Today, the moment a question is introduced, hands reach for phones to pull back the answer, the “truth.” All of the imagination and joking is killed off instantly, as the spark upon such kindling for conversation has water drown it immediately. There is so much less wonder, imagination, and conversation because Google exists, although software companies spend much in advertising to assure us the opposite. The fireside story or tale has become someone who loves their phone reading a Wikipedia article to those seated at the fire, and the dead imaginations nod and say, “TIL: Today I learned.”

But as for me, the pursuit of knowledge was a thinly veiled pursuit of approval and acceptance and self-justification. I can hardly see it as any different from the constant cleansing of the Pharisees, or like modern Muslims who wash many times a day for prayer. This “cleansing” is also done to our modern obsessions, those things we want so badly, that knowledge or sex or money or power. What we want is love and respect, to be seen, to be relevant, and desperate for the approval we will try to “wash” ourselves constantly. Then there is the possible horror that I’m still pursuing approval, among readers, in writing a blog and recording a podcast. The horror here is that I’ve learned nothing, and this very writing that you are reading is only the latest pursuit of approval. Yet I feel I have to share the story, as the experience of surfacing from a drowning state into drying out compels me to write now. The change from pessimism to optimism happened. Slowly at first, then seemingly overnight. There were markers along the way of how I lost my trust in God, and markers where I took turns to come back. The last turn I took led to radical trust, and now nothing is the same.

The change struck me so hard that the “fix” made total sense. That I could suddenly stop seeking approval in all of the old places jarred my entire sense of universe, earth, self, soul, meaning, and purpose. Realizing that putting my trust in that old “sky-fairy” was the key to the door that opened to peace shocked me so much that this sentence proclaims it here and now. The abandonment of any need for pharmaceuticals confirmed to me that the God-shaped hole in our hearts is a real thing. And so I am almost grateful, in a way, for the culture today that silenced and hid God away from me, lured me away from this secret, discouraged talk about the subject, encouraged me to look for answers elsewhere in work and physical ability and alcohol, coaxed me explore all the avenues of self worth, only to make me so fully aware in the end that the one glaring omission of meaning sat sidelined through it all. Sitting on end of the bench of my roster of meaningful pursuits sat Jesus of Nazareth, the last player to enter the game. The humble one, ignored, avoided, mocked, sat patiently while all the other flashy players (who talked a big game) limped back from the field of life. I finally turned to that one remaining person, and said, “Ok, Jesus. Let’s try this. I’ve tried everything else.” Only to find, of course, that the last player is the the greatest of all time, and now he is the only one needed. All along, he was the only player, coach, owner, and fan that I ever needed, and the joy of gaining this valuable knowledge would seem a shame not to share.

For anyone else that might be thrashing about in those same waters and not sure where the life buoy is located, I feel that I should share it, as it took me so long to reach for the hand that was waiting to be grasped the whole time.

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Many people today say they are unaffiliated, or don’t have a religion. They are against organized religion, and distrust historic institutions or hierarchies, so they feel that they have no religion. But everyone has a religion. There may not be weekly meetings that are attended at traditional brick and mortar churches or mosques or synagogues or ashrams or hermitages or monasteries, but there are worship services that outperform traditional liturgies and there are pilgrimages that would rival the Canterbury Tales. People will drive across the country to see Mickey Mouse, or wait outside bookstores for the next Harry Potter book. They will meet up for costume and role playing parties where the fantasy is accepted as reality. They will sleep outside on concrete to get the next iPhone. They will fly ten thousand miles to hear the keynote speech from the Apple CEO. The sports pilgrimages that men make to football stadiums is spoken of with hallowed tones, as if to stand where Joe Montana or Joe Namath or Joe Theisman once threw a hail mary pass is a more highly regarded holy ground than where Gabriel said the actual words “Hail Mary, full of grace” to the Blessed Virgin Mary herself.

As a non-believer, when I reviewed my worldview, I realized I’d found a similar replacement for what I’d had before in traditional religion, with curious parallels. A trick of the mind happens when we abandon our idea of religion. When we declare that we have “no religion,” we have already replaced our concept of religion with something different, but the parts are all there.

To sum up the modern view that I held - my worldview that I felt had removed all religion - it went something like this:

The universe was formed from a massive explosion of pre-existing matter, and gradually over time we evolved from single-celled organisms into fully sentient beings, assembled from far flung star parts and activated by solar power. Whether any pre-existing power or intelligence existed is unknown and unimportant. The creator acted as a clockmaker or artist, and he crafted 100 types of atoms and various physical laws to govern the universe, finely tuning key variables like gravity to keep the dance of atoms and chemistry valid throughout the ages. The laws governing the behavior of matter and energy cannot be broken; the creator cannot or chooses not to poke his finger into the game to disrupt nature and produce miracles. We inhabit a speck on a speck, known as the planet earth, which may be one of many habitable planets in the universe. Pursuit of knowledge and progress is the way, as knowledge is leading us toward a promised land of equality and plenty for all. Against the forces of superstition and ignorance, progress moved forward. From the first living organism, our earliest ancestor, until today, the accretion of knowledge is leading to higher life forms. This progress creates stepping stones of knowledge toward when we will be fulfilled in our understanding by advances in science, engineering, and technology. The rapid leap forward we are experiencing today should have, could have, and would have happened much sooner, but free thought was kept imprisoned by religious institutions until the age of the Enlightenment dawned on the dark ages. Embattled by its enemies, science has finally been unshackled to reveal the truth of the universe. We were only kept from this future by the backwardness of traditional culture, childish superstition, patriarchy, powerful institutions, and primitive tribal structures. In the near future, planetary death will occur through climate change unless we repent of our wasteful ways and adopt a purely rational, scientific view. Through green energy we will be saved. The day is near when we will be able to transfer our conscious mind into a digital immortality. One day we will escape death, shake off our bodies, and have limitless knowledge and pure freedom. Finally, in the distant future, the solar system will collapse, the sun will swallow the earth, and the universe will consume itself into a singular dense spot of matter, and explode once again to restart the cycle.

This modern view has it all. By “all” I mean this worldview contains everything that constitutes a religion. I was taking part in a modern religion that has all the trappings of any religion that has ever existed. This modern religion also has its own vocabulary and language and revelations and sacrifices. The priests of this religion even have uniforms or vestments called lab coats and, in the software world, hooded sweatshirts. There are monks and priests in today’s secular religion as much as there ever were in Islam, Buddhism, or Christianity. Not only that, but this “Scientism” has the key elements that form a creed: a beginning, an ending, a progression, a hero, a villain, and an apocalypse. I realize the word Scientism sounds strange, but what else could it be called? The only thing missing from it is God. But then it is we ourselves that take his place, so it certainly does have a god, but it’s just an evolved ape who wears clothing and stares at screens all day.

This realization was an unexpected discovery to me, but so obvious once examined and dissected. We cannot live without some kind of religion. Everyone walking this earth has a religion, whether he or she knows it or not. Consider how people will wait outside for three days for a Harry Potter or Star Wars movie, or will camp out all night on Black Friday for a sale. Consider just how devout members of the Democratic or Republican parties can be, how they will spend hours a day trumpeting the good of their own party while calling out the evil of the opposition. Monks could hardly show such dedication in a cloistered desert hermitage. Fashion and musicians and car companies and cosmetics and guns and pornography have their constant followers, ever faithful in defense. The willingness to defend these modern things makes traditional religious defenders and apologists appear to lack zeal in comparison.

While I pretended not to have a faith, I most certainly did have a religion. We are wired for it, and if it's not Christianity or Islam or Buddhism, a religion will surface in something else, like money or health or technology or Harry Potter or socialism. Science, Post-Modernism, and Socialism are religions in disguise. The body itself can become a kind of religion. Literally, millions of devout gym members are attending their worship services on treadmills and leg press machines right now. Everyone is living according to some kind of ultimate faith, whether they admit it or not.

As someone who once found that science and religion could not co-exist, I now reject that division. In fact, I find it to be the opposite, as faith and reason are both needed if wisdom is to be found. I’ve mentioned this several times, but faith and reason are the two wings that make us fly. A bird with one wing cannot leave the ground. To find meaning and purpose in this life we need both reason and faith. The imaginary battle of faith vs. science that has been heated and hammered into a modern worldview is pure invention, but children are being steered to believe that invention. Those driving us in this direction have a clear agenda, and they don’t know it, but it’s an agenda that will backfire. This way forward will backfire, because a worldview that lacks an ultimate meaning results in a lifetime of trying to fit square pegs into the God-shaped hole in the heart. There is another blowback that is coming, but this one is for those who guide children away from God, as words directly from Jesus stated plainly: “Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the person through whom they occur. It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.” Note: this blowback is coming for those with and without faith.

The first commandment of Jesus was to love God, thus the very first sin, the worst sin, is to reject God. American culture has fully adopted rejection of God, and I fell for this bait, hook, line, and sinker, for about fifteen years. Unfortunately, there is a blaring warning about this for our souls from Jesus, as teaching children to reject God or causing them to lose faith is called out specifically as a guaranteed path to hell. Turning away from God violates the first rule - not just the Old Testament rules - but of the two commandments of Jesus. The first sin in Genesis was a rejection of God, hence the name original sin. Funny how things all tie together in this strange book. This theme of “turning away” and “turning back” is a story arc, a loop, a core truth, a central point of it all. And of course, the point of the entire body of scripture and church and worship and faith is to remember to have humility before God.

I don’t think I know a single person who doesn’t believe that “humility before God” sounds like a bad idea, and that includes atheists and scientists and rednecks and hippies. Most of the atheists I know say they don’t believe in God, but scratching the surface a bit you come to realize that they mostly hate arrogance in religious people and, therefore, they hate God, as if God were some sidekick of a certain person, or group of people. This is an example of throwing out the baby Jesus with the bathwater. It can be a newsflash to some people that Jesus himself also hated religious hypocrites, which may shock people because they realize that they are not that far from God after all.

That's the joke on us moderns who mock traditional religion and “organized” religion: we think we've shrugged off religion, like it was a dirty shirt, because we are now too smart, too busy, and too enlightened. But turns out that we had another shirt on underneath, with the same brand name, titled: religion. We run from one religion right into the arms of another religion. Why? Because we have no choice. We must. Our hearts require it. We cannot help it or hide from it. If we get rid of our Rosary we’ll go find crystals and horoscopes. If we discard daily reading the Gospels, we’ll do daily readings on politics or sports or technology. We want meaning. We need reasons for belief, and we need a sense of right and wrong, and like it or not, the built-in urge for religion surfaces in every person in all ages. This feature of human experience cannot be stifled, or not for long, and even when stifled it’s still peeking out though we may be unaware.

“God and country” provided the old banners that gave people meaning, and all of history has shown how those can be abused and twisted into cruel and unusual manifestations of evil. God, country, and even family are being replaced with a variety of distractions today, but this will not last long. A time of plenty and peace leads to diversion and distraction. The period of relative peace held now will fade, and along with it, so will these new religions. The new religions revolve around the individual. The old standards, with all their flaws, provided a sense of purpose and meaning in people’s lives. The book of Genesis did not take shape by accident. It is the result of thousands upon thousands of generations of understanding how human life and society stay together. The story begins with God, then leads to a family, and finally that family forms a nation. Literalists miss this because they are not looking for it. This order matters, because as soon as we attempt to ignore God, we begin to destroy the family, and as the family goes, so goes any nation.

The 20th century smashed the notion of national pride as always being a good thing, as disorder and death can drape itself under a flag. The nations of Germany, China, and the Soviet Union all tossed out God as the first casualty and followed that attempted murder with millions of actual murders of human beings. Today it’s less fashionable to have national pride, but if you doubt that national pride still exists, you don’t need to look for a redneck with a jacked up pickup on the gravel roads of America. Watch the opening of any World Cup soccer game, when the national anthem rings out for each team. Look at the faces of the players, eyes wet with tears, their cheeks and foreheads steeled like flint for the coming match, their arms linked in solidarity with teammates and somehow even the crowd. The bond of nationhood cements the people through the playing of the song. The crowd sings at the top of their lungs to give strength to the men on the pitch, like soldiers set to fight a 90 minute war by sport, as proxies for the hordes of citizens at home; to win glory for the symbol of their common flag; to bring honor to that shared patch of dirt that the nation calls its home, where all its dreams and feats and failures and hopes and history, good or bad, has tied them together. That nationalism and tribalism is very much still there, just as our sense of religion may appear hidden but is ever-present.

National pride must be checked by the higher power of the divine, but whenever the policy of “God first” slips, nationalism becomes a brutal god, and so now we are rightfully wary of leaders who promise the moon and stars. Even family pride must be checked by the divine, or the same problem arises. Further yet, even when “God first” is replaced with “religion first” then the religion itself becomes a God, and God gets shoved to the side. This can happen with Catholics or Muslims or Jews. Anything replacing God marks the end of truth and results in guaranteed chaos, because there is no ultimate truth or justice. Nationalism is good, in the right dosage. Individualism is good, when kept beneath the Creator. Religion is good, when humility before God remains the focus. In other words, all of these things are good, when ordered correctly and not in themselves the ultimate goal. Religion is best when it does not wield state power, but rather acts as the moral compass of state power. This is why the arguments for religious freedom, from Tertullian and Justin Martyr to Thomas Jefferson and Dignitatus Humanae, remain critical for future generations, perhaps even more today than when those writers first shared their ideas. Any attempts at coercion of faith upon people will fail miserably, and cannot avoid devolving into a horrifying totalitarianism. This applies to nationalism, individualism, or religion. If this sounds like exaggeration, you need look back no further than 100 years at the many dictatorships and attempts to crush all forms of dissent. And again coercion has re-appeared, with its current manifestation in America taking up the banner of individualism as the ultimate good. The saying, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it,” is not true. We will repeat history whether we know history or not.

Today, politics and career often take a front seat over God, family, and flag, as we attempt to provide meaning through votes and jobs, and at our peril ignore the crusty old dangerous ways of nationalism and organized religion. The idea today is that we must smash the old. “Smash the patriarchy” is as meaningless a phrase as “Support the troops” or “Defund the police” but all of these work as slogans because of their vague intention and unfocused aim. All three of these slogans pretend to preach virtue, but only make the speaker feel superior for selecting a side. What we have today is a situation of personal feeling as truth, which means that we clamor for a stamp of approval for whatever is we want to do, and in doing so we deem our desires themselves to be good and just. Why? Because we want them. Whatever we want is right. At the end of the book of Judges, the final line matches our times today: “In those days there was no king; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

That is where we sit today, and history will play out what the old civilizations and peoples found out the hard way, from thousands of years of mistaken pathways through war and peace and seasons of change. In the book of Wisdom chapter two might have been written today, in our age of rising atheism and indifference, as the sacred writer uses the voice of the culture of the self to describe its beliefs. There is nothing new under the sun. The author of Wisdom states plainly what those without faith in God seek: to craft a world to satisfy delights and to never stop partaking of those delights, right up to the last day, since if there is no afterlife, judgement, or resurrection, then what else is there but food, drink, entertainment, and “fun”? Virtue is for suckers.

For by mere chance were we born, and hereafter we shall be as though we had not been; Because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason a spark from the beating of our hearts, And when this is quenched, our body will be ashes and our spirit will be poured abroad like empty air….Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that are here, and make use of creation with youthful zest. Let us have our fill of costly wine and perfumes, and let no springtime blossom pass us by…But let our strength be our norm of righteousness; for weakness proves itself useless. (Wisdom 2)

This is summing up the “will to power” three thousand years before any German tackled it. All of this chapter of Wisdom sounds familiar today. We have middle-aged men gulping testosterone pills and protein shakes, worshipping the god of youth, with the enemy being old age. Marriages are sacrificed for pornography every day, as the sacred desires of our fickle minds must be satisfied. Technology is a god that promises to solve all of our problems, even though it actually created the problems that it now needs to solve (see: Climate Change, the threat of Nuclear War, Cyber attack, mega-earthquake from fracking, Coronavirus). Consumerism presses forward with the latest fads, gadgets, vehicles, and fashions to occupy our wants and desires. Rampant self-indulgence runs riot as “to each his own” plays out in real time before our eyes. Sin is seen as only that which could harm another, which is the masterstroke of our egos to allow us to keep us clinging to the seven deadlies because they only harm ourselves, and even self-harm is denied, as the addictions cut so deep that even senior men cannot give up habits that should have died as they passed adolescence into adulthood.

At least the Greeks gave names to the gods. We pretend there is no god while we live out full lives worshipping them. Hephaestus, Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Eros. I challenge you to watch TV ads and see if you can tell exactly which god is calling for worship in each commercial. There may be a good opportunity for a board game or Bingo cards for finding which Greek god is being dialed in each advertisement.

This religion of “science” is not the only modern replacement for religion around, it’s just one of the better and most complete candidates because it has a full cosmology. By definition it cannot extend into matters of faith and morality, but for many followers it does. The role of science is to observe and explain the natural world, but when it extends past that it becomes philosophy and often bleeds into religion.

Our modern cosmology and understanding of the universe looks back on that of the book of Genesis with a sneer, but a thousand years from now it’s just as likely that our understanding will look equally silly. Our concepts of black holes and quantum physics and string theory could sound as ludicrous as the “firmament” that held the waters above and below the earth. It’s even possible that the firmament theory of Genesis will seem more wise, should the next round of cosmological definition be something completely strange to us moderns. But in either case, the structure of the universe that we “know” at different points in history tells us nothing about faith or morals, and advances in telescopes and computing cannot mine truth any better than the old thinkers and storytellers. Plato and Paul and Confucius and Buddha and Shakespeare and Dante have deeper insights into truth than all the scientists in history, even if they had never heard of calculus or chemistry.

Science makes for a good religion because it can explain so many things, make sense of our world, and provide an answer for all questions. Ever since Voltaire’s lifelong relentless attack on religion made headway, legions of science apologists stand at the ready to take up arms in defense of Nature to act as a check against the slightest whiff of religious fanaticism. It has become every bit as religious as religion, as can be seen in the long crusade of ink and letters from Voltaire to Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud to John Dewey.

The claim is that we are creatures caught up in a cosmic accident, where knowledge can only be ascertained by the scientific method. Only what is observable, repeatable, and testable is real. Consciousness is merely a result of evolution. Our morality and stories are but guardians and guides for our own self-preservation, learned through a cruel history of pain and suffering. Art, literature, and religion are side-effects of overactive imaginations of weak and primitive tribes that invented magic, superstition, God, gods, and goddesses for psychological and sociological survival.

This modern god of science has a scapegoat for blame, for redemption, for justification, just like the old religions. A religion must have an enemy, as all gods promise approval, cheerleading, and ultimately righteousness, which means someone else must lose. Christianity has the devil, The Fall, and Original Sin. There has to be a loser, an opponent; you cannot be a freedom fighter today without an oppressor. You cannot be freed without overcoming a master. For the modern gods, the enemy is still there if you look for it. The other political party must be wrong. The ravages of age and deterioration is to blame. Diet, sugar, fat, and high-fructose corn syrup are to blame. The anti-intellectuals are to blame. The hillbillies are to blame. The immigrants are to blame. The rich are to blame. Those on welfare are to blame. The capitalists are guilty, squeezing blood from the workers. No, the flip-side, the communists are causing the problem by killing all motivation. There is a hero and a villain.

My favorite quote about the grand left-right argument of economics is from John Kenneth Galbraith who said, “In capitalism, man oppresses man. In communism, it’s just the opposite.” While that is funny, it’s also a true statement. But it’s also worth noting that one of those ideologies has proven repeatedly to embrace wholesale slaughter of humans much more readily than the other, and I don’t even have to mention which one for you to know the answer, and it is the same one that inherently denies God as one of its core tenets.

And then there’s the most popular villain of all: the Christians. Science fundamentalists tend to take aim most pointedly at Christians, and often Muslims, too, but in this cultural moment it is the Christians. Never mind that fact that modern science would not exist without Christianity, or that most of the great breakthroughs were made by God-fearing people. Let’s set aside those minor names, like Mendel, Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Mendel, Pasteur, Kelvin, and Einstein. Ignore those thinkers for a moment.

Because there is some truth to the accusation of blame, of course, as many readily point at the Spanish Inquisition and behavior of “Christian” explorers in the New World that followed on Columbus’ heels. Yes, Europe has horrific segments of history, as religions can be abused and twisted. For instance, read the letters of St. Bartolome de las Casas to hear about what Spanish wealth-seekers were doing to natives in the Caribbean, some under the banner of their supposed faith. It is revolting. Were it not for de las Casas writing in the 1520s to alert about the horrors of the Spanish running amok in the New World, the Church would not have written Sublimus Deus in 1537 condemning all enslavement and re-asserting the fact that natives are created in the image and likeness of God. And even then, could a letter from the Pope suddenly halt the evil of men running wild who want nothing more than gold, violence, and sex? No. But it does make me wonder how much longer and how much worse this state of butchery would have continued if no one like Bartolome de las Casas had been present to witness and report on the evils, because he was one of the few voices crying out from the literal wilderness of the New World.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated event in human history restricted to Europeans, as you can read stories of the gulags in Russia or the lengthy list of massacres in China or find numerous accounts of similar gruesome events coming from the Ottomans or Romans or Zulus or Mayans or Incas or Hawaiians or First Nations or literally any culture that ever existed, try as we might today to gloss over the shared flaw in our hearts, which has always been with humans wherever we have lived. Thanks to the 20th century, when nationalism and socialism reigned, Europeans lead in all body count statistical categories for brutality and inhumanity, but to assume that only one continent of people is capable of atrocity is to ignore reality and all of history. We want to plug our ears and close our eyes, but to pretend that one group of people has this flaw while other human groups do not carry this same disease is to bury our heads in the sands of a version of history that would be more aptly called fantasy.

One undeniable fact is that as we gain knowledge and mastery over science and technology, we become increasingly deadly, as each invention increases the death toll, from the longbow, to the broadsword, to the stirrup for riding horses, to the musket, to the cannon, to mustard gas, to the atom bomb, to the inter-contintental-ballistic-missile, to biological weaponry, to whatever unexpected coming attack will slay our modern energy grids and supply chains and water supplies. The reason why is that with each advance, the greed of opportunity is seized by people. The question is always, “How can we make money or benefit from this new knowledge,” and rarely “Should we be doing this at all?” I have seen this firsthand in product meetings where the ability to do something is adopted, such as spy on shoppers, or install keystroke logging software, and the uneasy question usually arises about ethics from mousy engineers, but is quickly knocked down by an executive or manager who wants a good fiscal quarter. To observe this human tendency to exploit others does not require a war to observe. We are all seeking to find an advantage using whatever tool is available, just as a younger sister learns to cry tearfully to thwart a bullying older brother, because she learns it can summon a father or mother to arrest the bully. If the younger sister had a taser that proved more effective, they would just use that.

Christians never needed any extra assistance from its own followers to earn the hatred of its enemies. No, they are hated even when they are preaching the Good News with humble hearts and mercy in mind. But rest assured, any atrocity or horror committed under the banner of professed Christians never came from Jesus Christ, the founder of the faith. Anyone who says it does, doesn’t understand Jesus, and needs to start again on Matthew 1, verse 1 and proceed to John 21, verse 25.

The evils people do in Jesus’ name have never come from Jesus. This is something quickly forgotten. Whether or not those who acted in God’s name as a wolf in sheep’s clothing were true believers does not even matter, because the bloodstain remains. The wound of scandal brought by someone professing faith remains for a long time. The lion is supposed to lay down with the lamb, not eat it, no matter how delicious the lamb. The believer is supposed to give unto Caesar, not become Caesar. Christians in error have become the example held up in pop culture. Many TV shows today have the villain as a Christian. It’s easy to see who the villain of American society is by watching movies or reading books from a specific year, as once the Soviets held all the roles of villains, then it was middle-eastern Muslims, and today it’s almost entirely Christians.

Yet Jesus still remains risen up, glorified, and no matter what evil men carry out, he himself can never be sullied. This is why Christianity can be stood up time after time, after every apparent deathblow. It rises again with Jesus himself. Because of the high standard set by Jesus, we can never live up to it, not fully, and often not even minimally. For this reason the sex abuse of children by Catholic clergy hurts all the worse, because Jesus’ Church on earth is meant to be the keeper of the light of faith, and “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” yet for all the truth, beauty and goodness that the faithful see in our Church, in its essence and meaning, its buildings, its art, its Catechism, in the history, the mysteries of the Holy Mass, in the Sacraments, in the Rosary, in the Real Presence of the Eucharist, it hurts terribly when the attack comes from the Church itself, when trust has been eroded from the inside. Still the beauty of all those parts can never be destroyed or diminished, no matter how far fallen followers have gone in the ruination of their own souls.

Betrayed trust among non-Christians brings bruises, but among the faithful, from inside, the betrayal gives a nearly fatal wound. The saying, “There is no honor among thieves” is meant to be intended for non-Christians, which is why the sex abuse scandal provides endless firepower for powerful guns aimed at the Catholic Church. For the billion people who have known and trusted good priests, this was especially painful, sometimes too hard for words, to the point that excuses were made, and sometimes even excuses for the excuses for the behavior, when there is no excuse that can be allowed. The pain of the victims supersedes all guilt and shame. But it was not God that committed the crimes, nor the Church, but corrupt men who abused their power and violated every precept of the faith and caused immeasurable scandal.

For the many that would like to see the Church wither and die, thinking that this event will surely be the final death of Christianity, they will be sorely disappointed. Scandal has rocked the Church for 2,000 years and each of those looked like the last punch, but the Church will never die because it cannot die. I’m not claiming this to be arrogant. I’m not writing this to be rude. I’m saying it because it is a fact. In every age, Jesus somehow gathers a people to his Church.

Every generation of humans rediscovers the power of the same man from Nazareth, over and over, again and again, because nothing comes close to its power, nothing touches the completeness of the life of Jesus, and nothing overcomes the resurrection once you come to believe it. Clearly, I have no right to speak for anything regarding the Church. I have no status. I’m not even a very good Catholic. I should probably just shut up and not share my opinion on these topics. But I know what I’ve found, and it’s something quite different and far more meaningful and powerful than what my old religion of science could offer.

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Coercion and fear repel more people than it brings in. Societies that attempt this eventually collapse under the weight of constant coercion and fear. The Church failed to produce believers when some of its members used force or fear to gather followers. Short term successes gained by fear result in long term losses. Consider people you know who may have attempted to bully others into belief. How did that work out? Not well, I suspect. This is why someone like St. Francis is still loved today while the Grand Inquisitor of Spanish imperial power is reviled.

The underlying reason someone has faith makes all the difference. Forcing people into faith is like forcing a dog to read. It cannot happen. Even if the dog attentively stares at the page, he is likely only doing so in lieu of a treat for making the effort. If the dog will be beaten for not trying to read, then he is only doing it for self-preservation. If he is only staring at the page for a treat, then the brief sensual pleasure is the motivation making it worth the wait. What I’m getting at is that if faith is solely attempted for the treat of heaven or the fear of hell, then it is not really freely chosen. This is called out very clearly in the Catechism of the Church.

…"man's response to God by faith must be free, and. . . therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act." "God calls men to serve him in spirit and in truth. Consequently they are bound to him in conscience, but not coerced. . . This fact received its fullest manifestation in Christ Jesus." Indeed, Christ invited people to faith and conversion, but never coerced them. "For he bore witness to the truth but refused to use force to impose it on those who spoke against it. His kingdom. . . grows by the love with which Christ, lifted up on the cross, draws men to himself." (CCC 160)

So that is the difficult part for non-believers, to find reasons for faith without fear or force or trick or treat as the driving factor.

Love must be the magnet. A magnet is a perfect metaphor for the experience of those who despise religion, as fear or force is often what repelled them in the first place. Most often it was not God that repelled them but a personal interaction. Someone or something attempted to force the wrong end of the magnet at them. This never works, or not for long, since it takes much effort to hold two opposite poles of a magnet together and they separate as soon as that force is released.

Religious invitations can act exactly like holding a magnet to metal with the wrong poles facing one another. Fear and force repels. But if you turn the magnet around, so that the right magnetic field is displayed, the attraction is immediate. It just feels right. There is no fighting or struggling because the attraction is natural and fitting.

The exterior paint job known as “Good without God” means nothing by itself, and however you try to twist Jesus’ words, the Gospels cannot be interpreted as supporting this idea. I believe this is the biggest hurdle for modern people, as the new commandment of “love thy self” must be conquered and knocked-out to make spiritual progress. I think this is why my favorite self-help book, The Imitation of Christ, doesn’t show up on bestseller lists, since the message of humility and total detachment from material goods is not what retailers and marketers want us to be considering in a consumer society.

The parables that stick to me and re-surface daily in my mind are the one liners, The Treasure in the Field and The Pearl of Great Value. Perhaps I’ve stumbled over the treasure. Maybe I have by some lucky circumstance obtained the Pearl of Great Value. I believe I have, and I hope and pray that this lucky stumble happened by grace.

I marvel at the longevity of this story of Jesus. The same Pearl and treasure that is found by every generation, by people who are born-again, by those who turn back to God. For most of my adult life the term “born again” raised the hair on my neck, as something to dislike and be irritated by. Seeing “Promise Keepers” raising their hands and closing their eyes made me feel awkward, because I felt they were hypocrites and actors. Now I could be standing among them. At the time, I felt that these Christians were the very Pharisees that Jesus had come to depose. Oddly enough, when the “turn” happened for me, I was not even thinking about the phrase “born again” but that is an accurate description of what happened, since there is really no other way to describe the change. The verse of Amazing Grace never made much sense either, until it did: “I once was blind, but now I see.” Suddenly, I was the hackneyed, rehashed, repurposed convert that I formerly loathed. It’s almost comical in its predictability, I suppose, and yet I’m happy that it happened to me, and I wouldn’t have believed it ever could have happened. Except that it did.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a hypocrite. A huge one. You should really find other blogs and podcasts to listen to, from more convincing, holy, and saintly types. Listen to Trent Horn and Father Josh and Father Mike. Read material from Thomas Merton and St. Augustine and Scott Hahn, not my words. Go away, go to them. All of my ideas have been said better, by wiser and more devout people.

One concern I have is that I have turned back but not had a true interior change. While I can see things that have changed, my pride and fear still run rampant. Vices of the flesh may go away, but the underlying flaws of the Fall remain, and just as St. Thomas Aquinas said, I’ve come to know that the first and worst sin of pride leads to all the others. Again, if the Garden of Eden is littered with “metaphorical truth” on how to live, both the literal and metaphorical reading lead to the same conclusion, which is to love God and obey him out of loving duty. This propensity toward pride will remain in me regardless, in all of us, always, but to despair is the wrong answer. It’s this pessimism that killed my faith the first time, and if allowed it will kill it again. Thus to keep faith, this quelling of pride and goal of humility must be a daily goal.

The scandal of hypocrisy among Christians can cause others to loathe people of faith. When those who lack faith see sinners who are trying to be saints, they roll their eyes and find it ludicrous, particularly when the sinner’s past is an open closet of public skeletons. As a result, those who find faith and then pray in public (say through a blog or podcast exactly like this one…ahem) can cause those fallen away to stay away, and worse yet, cause people to leave their faith rather than come toward it. The concept of “scandal” in the Catechism of the Catholic Church is defined as not only those falls from grace that Christians often have, like when a Protestant preacher gets caught cheating on his wife or, worse yet, the sex-abuse scandal of the Church. These public failures or scandals can make Christianity look like a sham. This is the type of scandal we are familiar with. But there is another kind of “scandal” that can be committed, one that is equally revolting to non-Christians. This is the one that turns people off today even more than the fall from grace. This type of scandal comes in several forms: being righteous without humility, acting like a religious nutcase, obsessively discerning demons where rational explanation will do nicely, speaking in tongues for attention, or in general fanaticism that forgets the point of religion. The point of religion, of all the buildings and Sacraments and liturgy and prayer is this: humility before God. The point is to love God, to let his will be done, to be humble, to follow his rules, and to love others. Scandal is not just some religious person getting caught up in debauchery, it is anything that can wedge someone’s chance for faith away from God.

Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense. (CCC 2284)

There are those people who are “Good without God” that are still better citizens and more altruistic than I am. Don’t misinterpret or confuse my ability to jot down words or read from a script with holiness. As Shakespeare said, “The devil can quote scripture for his own purposes.” So even while I feel changed, most of my life is still the same, where I go to work and overeat Frosted Mini Wheats and carry out much of the same activities as I did before. I commit plenty of sins of the heart and I’m nowhere near where I could, should, or would like to be. Pride runs amok. For anyone who would tell you that the change happens, and you never feel blue or downcast again - that person is lying. The difference is that you have a transcendent hope that lifts you up, and that is the one thing the doubter lacks who is good without God. They can prop up work or political views or money or relationships or bedroom conquests or accomplishments or family as a replacement lower-case-G god for a while, but none of these can go the distance because they are the fleeting things of this world.

But the change does happen to people, and the change is real, and the change is undeniable. Many things become easier once the change happens, as there is strength and direction to be drawn constantly whenever I turn back to God for help. God is the continual and endless vine of life that provides, and I realize that I only felt dead inside when I had voluntarily separated myself from that vine. This doesn’t mean there is euphoria, or that enough prayer will make me rich and healthy and grant all my wishes. No, that’s the con game that the Prosperity Gospel plays. Instead, there is a sense of possibility and endurance, best summed up in a John Henry Newman quote: “Ten thousand difficulties make not one doubt.”

As I’ve mentioned before, the day my sleepy faith was wakened, I was suddenly re-connected to the vine of life and jolted into respiration. A fallen branch laying in the grass was somehow taken back up to the tree and revived. I would like to say that I willed this to happen, but I only willed myself to ask, seek, and knock on God’s door in prayer. I know that others had prayed for me, like St. Monica did for her son Augustine. God had been nudging me all along with situations and guidance, and certain people in my path illustrated such faith and goodness that I had to take notice, and still…still somehow I managed to congratulate myself, as if it was me that made all the difference. I could have broke my arm slapping my own back in self-praise.

I had forgotten that I had help. In fact, I recently recalled how when I was fallen away from faith, I used to jokingly say to myself, “Jesus, help me,” and I would sometimes even mockingly say the lyrics of a Carrie Underwood country song and say out loud when struggling, “Jesus, take the wheel.” I found the song’s sentimental chords and verses to be a bit ridiculous. Yet now I can’t help but wonder if whenever I uttered those words, they were like little prayers, and the receiver of those words was taking them quite seriously the whole time, and responding slowly, revealing the path back to faith in my life, and helping me when I most needed it. Somehow, even when I did not believe, I still knew there was power in his name.

(For two good reads on the idea of religious freedom, read The Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatus Humanae), a fascinating document. Spice is up with a reading of On the Development of Peoples (Populorum Progressio) while you’re at it.)

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I recently heard about an atheist who prays to Jesus because “there is power in his name.”

Can you imagine anything more strange than that statement? A person that denies all things divine or supernatural, prays to a 1st century construction worker because of a mysterious “power in his name.” This makes no sense. Logically, it is indefensible. If one believes there is no God, there can be no “power in his name.”

Except he is right. There is something about Jesus. There is something about him. There is something about his name. We cannot stop looking at his life and talking about his words and thinking about his otherworldly-ness. Strangely, this is especially true for many who have turned away. They feel compelled to look again over their shoulder while walking away. They have to check now and then to make sure he’s not who he said he was. Reading atheist message boards, there is much discussion of Jesus in a constant effort to explain away his divinity. Why is that?

Because there is power in his name.

An atheist can stumble onto religious truth without even trying, as Jesus himself said, “All things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” (Let’s pause here for a quick aside, so I don’t sound like I’m on the Prosperity Gospel bandwagon. This doesn’t mean you will receive money or power, it means you will receive spiritual gifts. Recall Jesus praying and fasting in the desert, rejecting the three great temptations: 1. material comfort, 2. fame and honor, and 3. power.)

A non-believer can still feel the urge to ask for God’s help. The notion to pray is the part of religion that we can’t shake even after we turn away. For modern people living in comfort, the idea to pray only arrives in desperate times, in a transactional model, where we want to put in a coin into God to get a drink when we’re thirsty, only to toss God away like an empty can once satisfied. Many of us today who live in a normal house with modern appliances live in greater comfort than any king or queen throughout our entire human history, but we don’t consider that when we watch Netflix and eat ice cream from the freezer while sitting in front of the gas fireplace on a winter night. We are more likely to unearth this desire to pray when comfort is taken away. A time of uncertainty is where many discover the need for God, but like the parable says, the seeds of faith can be sown on a barren path, or on rocky ground, or in seemingly good soil that is riddled with thorns and thistles. Our prayer may start and end with a crisis, or it may continue through suffering but later wither and die under a new kind of stress. The urge may carry us a long time, through much growth, but then amid success, weeds can spring up and choke us before we bear any fruit.

Both suffering and success are equal tests, and depending on how they are received, each can either heighten or reduce our relationship with God. Hitting bottom can provide a spark for the light of faith, and can be a great blessing in hindsight. As many reverted atheists and addicts come to learn, there is power in Jesus’ name when you have no where left to turn. Success on the other hand can make you forget to give thanks, as a sense of self-sufficiency can shove aside any idea of grace or blessing. Wealth and honor are the weeds that convince us we did it all ourselves, or that we pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps, and just as suffering and struggle can cause us to ask, “Where was God?” so too can prosperity.

In suffering, we blame God. In success, we ignore God. We have even tried to kill God, only to find out he rises again. We can blame him, but we cannot ignore or kill him. And that is why the strange notion to pray comes back to the non-believer, because his heart is wired for it, try as he might to rid himself of the one thing that will satisfy.

When Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” even a great doubter can sense that something is different about Jesus than anyone else who ever lived. Great ascetics, seekers, teachers, and storytellers have lived in various eras, but we don’t pray to those people. We don’t pray to those persons, but maybe we adopt their ideas or methods of living. We don’t pray to Buddha or Confucius or Socrates or Isaiah or Moses as being infused with the divine, but we see them as souls who could reach out to the divine, or the divine reached out to them, or both. They sensed the Higher Power, they communicated with something beyond the world, and they articulated something that we can all feel. But we don’t consider them to be supernatural beings themselves.

Take John the Baptist, for instance, who fasted and prayed and preached repentance. He was a great ascetic and inspiring spiritual leader. But no one gets fired up and angry and denies the existence of John the Baptist. Families don’t split over him. No one’s life changes radically once they read about John the Baptist, except in the light of Christ. Believers and non-believers alike do not feel even a fraction of the push or pull toward the name John the Baptist as they do to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. We do not cry out to John the Baptist, or for that matter any other human being, like Albert Einstein, or Martin Luther King, or the President, or any other earthly name. There is only one name in which we believe God took human form and walked with us here on earth.

So yes, there is power in Jesus’ name. It is undeniable. He said he would bring a sword that divides us, and sure enough we see this every day. Families and countries are divided over who Jesus was, because if his words are true, then the world changes radically. Concern about John the Baptist and his beheading is not a daily conversation across the world. The death of Socrates does not stir us to hold ritual celebrations worldwide. There is only one person that causes such devotion and change, and it is because he said, “I am the way.” He did not say, “Here’s the list of things you need to do to live a good life.” He showed us how to live, yes, but that is secondary to the belief in him as the son of God, which he repeatedly stated as the prerequisite. “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”

When I think of these moments where doubters discover the notion to look toward Jesus (and especially for one who take the next step to pray to him), the thought that comes to me is the quotation that unnerves me the most, even as a believer. An atheist who prays to Jesus would surely enjoy reading the line: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”

For non-believers, that line sounds pretty positive at first, as it calls out religious hypocrites as not being saved. The second phrase, on the other hand, should concern us all. Only the ones who carry out the will of God will be saved. In light of Jesus two commandments to “Love God” and “Love one another,” this means we have a two-part task. That line gives me a shudder, even as a revert, particularly when I go on to Jesus’ followup line: “Then I will declare to them solemnly, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you evildoers.’”

For the modern people that enjoy the idea of the “chill” Jesus, this is one of those difficult passages where he plainly suggests that hell is a real thing, and some of us are going there. Who am I kidding, he actually suggests that many of us are going there. But as we cherry pick the hippy-Jesus lines that suit our culture of Hakuna Matata, we forget about this declaration and the other ten places in the Gospel where Jesus talks about dividing the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, and assorted other obvious metaphors regarding souls being judged and sent into heaven or hell. When we do not live in line with the Gospel, with faith, while doing God’s will, it seems we may hear that line on the last day, “Depart from me, you evildoer.”

I will admit: I know various atheists who live virtuous lives, more so than some professed Christians. The idea of being “Good without God” is true, it can be done and is done all the time. The problem is that if you read the accounts of Jesus’ life, the one thing he criticizes repeatedly is the outward appearance of “goodness” when the interior state is godless. The “good without God” mantra of today is attractive because what it really translates to is “all things are permitted.” It aligns perfectly with the idea of “if I’m not hurting anyone but myself, it’s ok.” This belief is held by millions, and I’m not talking solely about drug addicts on the fringe of our society, but men who condemn others’ sin while they browse porn daily instead of investing in their marriages. In fact, the state of the world today is edging toward a place where all is permitted but nothing is forgiven. Looking good, acting righteous, saying the right things, paying taxes, volunteering, doing charity work: not one of these “Good without God” ways of life satisfy the commandment of Jesus, explicitly stated, the very first commandment, to “love God.” This first commandment is a non-negotiable, and there is no kingdom of heaven for those that disregard it, whether you are “good” or not. This is a difficult concept of faith, but the critical step. And for many to “love God” seems a bridge too far, so they fall back to the fortifications of self. If I had a nickel for every time I walked that route…I’d have a lot of nickels.

This is a hard pill to swallow for those who cannot cross the river of disbelief. This is the port to faith that first must be reached, or you can never find the narrow gate that Jesus speaks about. Heck, I’m still groping around for the narrow gate. But one thing is very clear to me: people cannot be coerced to faith. This is not possible. I don’t think that human beings can even be scared into faith, which is why the hellfire and brimstone only can get a heart so far. I do believe, now after turning back, that the saying “fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom,” but without question that fear of God must be rooted in love of God. Consider children who are constantly shouted at and always face stiff consequences for all bad behavior. They do not learn love, they learn how to lie, and act virtuous solely to avoid punishment. However, when meted out properly and well, a loving parent’s discipline instills a different kind of fear, which might more properly be thought of as duty. A loving God inspires a sense of duty, and a joy in fulfilling those requirements. As I’ve mentioned before, I once thought the devil and hell were not real, until I found that I could not escape my flaws and walked like Dante all the way down into a hell. And it was there and then that I discovered, to my utter astonishment, that prayer could solve my most difficult challenges. I was stunned. Having tried everything else, it was this simple and free act of taking action as if I had faith that granted the gift of faith itself. What a surprise to discover that this is one of those “learn by doing” things, not that different from thinking about playing piano versus actually playing the piano, or like imagining yourself doing woodworking instead of getting some lumber and a saw. Of course, I only took those actions because it was a last resort, but when people say that “faith is a gift,” I formerly rolled my eyes, and now I nod in agreement. Oddly enough, that devil and hell that I did not believe, I now believe in, and the fear of hell never pulled me toward God until I was fully immersed in the pit and snares of this same devil. Catching a glimpse of another way, I could see the escape. Now, let me pause: for non-believers, you may call this cosmology and belief as being merely a “metaphorical truth,” that the devil or hell are metaphors that provide simple-minded folks like myself images on how to behave. The scientist may consider these metaphors as a kind of behavioral therapy. Call it what you like; as for me, I am sticking with the Trinitarian God as the solution to battling demons, avoiding despair, and falling into the fire.

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The pandemic opened a gap in time. Like a two year layover, the plane was grounded so that we could hop off, sit quietly in the concourse, read the map, and adjust our itineraries. For some, the opening of this gap in time caused the vacuum to fill with old habits, often bad habits. For others, a re-prioritization of life occurred, but the order of those priorities varied dramatically between people. Politics, technology, porn, drinking, and material possessions seemed to take the top place for many. Liquor store shopping sprees and shiny things captured much of our time, talent, and treasure. Having deleted all social media accounts for much of the pandemic, I missed the online drama, but now having been drawn back to social media for community and school event information, I see now that I didn’t miss much.

This time has caused a great deal of sorrow for many from the virus. But far more have felt a mental sickness from the isolation. We are told that the world is changing, but it is the same world that it was before. Human nature did not change. A trend toward disorder and chaos is clearly happening, but this is not a new thing or even original, as there is nothing new under the sun. This has happened many times before. We are living in a time best described in the book of Wisdom, chapter 2. These seemingly novel ideas pumped by the media are as old as time. The narrative around a post-Christian, post-American, post-9/11, post-colonial, post-2008, post-capitalist, post-Cold War, post-modern, post-truth, post-Covid, post-everything world are as credible as the sugary calories I get from my favorite Post cereal (which is no longer Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but Honey Bunches of Oats (with Almonds)). Today, I find that the back of a cereal box has more reading depth than any of the the major news outlets. At this point, I grant professional wrestling a higher level of seriousness than The New York Times, CNN, or Fox News, because at least pro wrestlers have the courtesy to wink and admit they are pretending. The falseness of pro wrestling is obvious, and therefore far more honest, which today gives these steroid and drug-fueled wrestlers a higher integrity than the smoke and mirrors surrounding the veiled ideologies disguised as news from our media companies. To see this madness in action, just login to Facebook or Twitter and scroll through your friends’ postings. The vociferous progressive and angry conservative will sway like a reed to whatever is popular today. Remember Kony 2012? Remember Cecil the Lion? Remember the wet market? Remember flattening the curve? Remember that insulting tweet? Remember the thousand other daily crises between then and now? Look at today’s headlines and you will see today’s Cecil the Lion. Everything is a crisis. And here’s the thing I’ve learned: when everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis.

To illustrate what I mean by that, here’s a real world tale of what happens when “everything is a crisis.” A software company had a model of measuring the severity of customer problems, which went from 1 to 7, with severity 1 being the highest, or worst. A severity 1 meant that the system was down and the customer was losing money. For a long time, this model worked, until a series of especially vocal customers began to realize that if they lobbied to get every support issue elevated to level 1, they received instant and premium support. The most talented troubleshooters would come running to their aid, since the skilled employees were always in demand for difficult issues. Thus, the customers began ranting and raving about every case until they received the recognition and label of severity 1 on all tickets. These customers saw this as a good thing.

What happened in reality is that more customers began to realize how to game the severity model, and soon many issues were in the high-priority, house-is-on-fire queue. So while customers imagined this was a good thing, the support staff that I was part of burned out and realized that if every incoming case was high priority, then all tickets were actual normal priority, regardless of the assigned severity. The skilled engineers began working longer hours and grew frustrated. If every ticket requires all hands on deck, then eventually you run out of hands. It’s like when a freshman keeps pulling the fire alarm in a college dormitory over and over, night after night; eventually people stop getting out of bed to go outside, and discover they would rather die in the fire than waste their time freezing outside at 3 AM for no good reason.

In the end, the support issue severity system became so meaningless that a higher level of zero was added. Yes, for real. A new status was invented quietly to address the problem. Within a year the skilled employees started to depart the company looking for greener pastures where they were not running from one meaningless task to the next. Customers eventually realized that “severity 0” was the secret internal status that they now needed, and believe it or not, the company had to add a negative status, “severity -1”, to hide yet another level for actual crisis tickets. As time went on, the product support grew lazy and cynical and tickets lingered without anyone really caring, while customers continued to scream on the phone about their “severity 1” or “severity 0” ticket that wasn’t getting addressed. Everyone suffered, until the whole severity system had to be re-ordered when a new boss came in and shook up the whole severity triage. It was kind of like Simba returning and replacing Scar in the pride. The new boss, Simba, fought for the engineers and we battled to reset the severity of tickets to their proper places. But the sad ending here is that this boss eventually left, because in cleaning up he stepped on a few toes of the hyenas (a.k.a. cynical engineers) who enjoyed the status quo. Why would anyone prefer a bad system to a disciplined and logical system? Because when everything was a crisis, no one had to do any work. It was a state of gridlock where engineers could complain about the state, but then just go home at five o’clock. The result of “everything is a crisis” is a kind of despair or paralysis, which can even become comfortable in its dysfunction for those riding the current. In chasing every problem, no problem is addressed. In sounding the alarm, we become living examples of the boy who cried wolf. I suspect the wolf is near, if not already here, but we stopped expecting him to ever appear.

This watering down of what the word “crisis” means will eventually make a real crisis strike us like lightning. I suspect it is only a high level of material comfort and extended time of peace and prosperity that could allow us all to have so much time and energy to spend online seeking a daily problem to get excited about. We are somewhere in the seven stages of empire, as after the fourth stage of affluence comes the age of intellect, followed by decadence, and soon afterward, decline and collapse.

The pandemic held this state of constant crisis in front of our eyes, since we were all shut indoors and kept separate. Early on I realized that I could react in one of two ways to the noise. I could embrace the cage match of fixing the world’s problems by thumbing responses on my phone. (I was slow to realize in the early days of social media that clicking a “like” button will not bring about a utopia.) Or…I could turn the phone off and change myself. At least, I could try - not sure I can really change, but an effort can be made. This goes back to my use of the Serenity Prayer. This little prayer is the great knife that cuts through issues and helps discern which road to take. And as far as that utopia goes, I look forward to the incredible time ahead that the partisans are promising, but in the meantime, while I continue to witness the result and reality of Original Sin in every human being including myself, I will try to live for today with hope for the future. I’ll try not to think about actual crises that could happen, such as the launch of the ten thousand nuclear warheads aimed at every major city across the world, or the possibility of a giant solar flare frying every electronic circuit on earth, or the dollar being dumped as the world’s reserve currency creating exponential inflation, or drought and famine across world agriculture, or biological warfare that would make Covid look like a sniffle.

In this two year pandemic, if you haven’t made a change yet but have considered making one, or want to make a change, this opening in time might have been the greatest opportunity of your lifetime. The question to ask yourself is this: did you waste this time? Did you let it slip by? Did you freak out over every 24-hour news cycle? Or did you turn off the TV? Did you put your phone down or cling to it every waking minute?

I hope you didn’t waste it, or that you don’t waste what is left of it. There will never be a perfect time, but if you did squander this time, these many months when the world slowed down, then the perfect time to change is now. The old Chinese proverb holds true: the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago; the second best time is today. This isn’t some new age idea. It is ancient and cross-cultural. But it comes with one warning: when you “seize the day” make sure you what you are seizing is something worth reaching for.

When I think of the lost years of my life, I think of hiking experiences where I’ve stopped to look at trees growing in strange places.

Warning: I’m switching metaphors now.

On cliffs and rocky paths, tree roots cling to impossibly small cracks, nooks, and crannies. The tree itself twists and bends, growing sideways or curling toward a sunny spot. How these trees survive bewilders me. They seem to have nothing to hold onto, yet they live and grow. Some even appear to thrive, but the weight of the tree growing sideways will eventually fall due to its own weight fighting against gravity. They struggle, yet live full lives. With their improper footings and nutrients they become stunted as the roots grope along cliff and rock edges in a desperate search for water and minerals. The will to live, to survive, shows itself in the exposed roots. You can see this intense yearning to live in plants and animals everywhere you look in nature. This is never a question in nature. The will to survive and reproduce are the two driving forces for all living things, unquestioned among all species from largest to smallest.

With people, I often can’t tell who is like the thriving tree on the craggy precipice, who is out of place, who is out of sorts, or who is growing sideways but seemingly fine. They may appear to be thriving, but have no footing, and rather than a physical search for sustenance they engage in an unseen mental and spiritual search, only to have their roots grasp at rocks and sand that give no nutrition. They slowly starve trying to draw life-water from a swamp of politics, sports, porn, liquor, or possessions. Others seem to have access to an untapped source that defies reason. An unseen wellspring feeds the taproot. These strange trees are often the ones that make the woods and the cliffs beautiful.

If every tree was in solid soil and growing straight and true, I’m not sure a mountain hike would be as interesting. What’s strange is you often see a tree that appears to be on solid footing, on good soil, but is actually sick, while the strange tree on the cliff protrudes sideways from the rock, yet appears to be healthier than the tree in rich soil. There are healthy looking trees that are hollow inside due to beetles or disease and you don’t know it until the day a strong wind snaps the trunk in half or uproots the rotten base.

The difference between trees and people is that we can change our footings. We can move, whereas a tree cannot. We can ask ourselves questions and react. We can change. Here’s a list of questions for asking yourself:

How did you spend the first year of the pandemic? What were you doing for the last 22 months? Did you grow or did you shrink? Did you get older or were you reborn? Did you scroll on your phone constantly? Did you discover the power of silence? Did you look inside and ask the real questions that you want to ask? Did you live online? Did you comment online? Did you stew about politics? Did you rage quietly or publicly about how the virus was being handled? Did you swipe left or right all day? Did you stare at your favorite porn each day? Did you get drunk often and lol about it?

You may have wasted the greatest opportunity of your lifetime, and that might have been the best chance to change your footing.

When is a good time to find true meaning? Now is a pretty good time. The present seems like a good opportunity. Yesterday was better, but today is a good choice. You can try to get back to where you once had meaning, or if no such place exists, to find that place. If no place can be easily found, ask, seek, and knock. Pound on the doors of new places. Search for the right path and place to plant yourself. I would suggest you stop shopping at Amazon and start shopping where people meet in flesh and bone and talk about real things. You will not find it at the bar or liquor store. You will not find it at the mall or on an app. Millions have looked in those places, and millions have never found it there. You will not find it in yourself, either, despite the convincing claims of New Age religion and modernism. The “self” is exactly the stumbling block that needs to be looked away from to experience a true change.

There is something in you that aches to be aroused, and believe it or not, it’s not sexual. There is an assumed obsession around that subject today, where happiness is thought by many to only come through something to do with titillation and body parts. This is probably the greatest distraction of the current age, maybe only matched by the desire for possessions and shiny things. But there is something deeper in the center of you that wants and demands something greater to believe in.

I think an honest question to ask oneself who has become a cynic or doubter is this: why did you stop believing? What is the real reason? What crushed you? What stole it away? What political position made you stop believing? What intellectual argument? What hypocrite turned your stomach? What jerk or cruel act twisted the good into something bent and broken? Why did you abandon belief? Was it something you did to someone else? Because there is a reason it happened, or multiple reasons. Something made you doubt and maybe even stop believing.

Or perhaps is it just indifference. You stopped caring. Someone talked you out of it. We can very easily be talked out of belief by clever argument if we’re not careful, and there are many arguments that try to convert you away from your true belief. One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that anyone who insists that you not talk about your religion to others, is preaching their religion to you in that very ask. What they are saying is actually this: “My belief is that you shouldn’t speak about your belief.” In other words, they are converting you to adopt their non-belief and indifference toward faith. Then out of concern for niceness and offending the other person (who, by the way, may have just effectively silenced you or even caused you to abandon your convictions) you grow quiet as if your principles were mere suggestions for living instead of the bedrock of meaning in your life. The religion of the self is the de facto religion of this age, but this is an unsatisfying way to live. An age of doubt is here, temporarily. If you don’t realize this fact, you have already been converted, or are being converted to it, or have allowed it to silence you. Many people are having their faith euthanized right now, slowly going to sleep in our culture that acts like carbon monoxide on our spiritual life.

Every day that you actively doubt is a day that you aid and abet your own de-conversion and willfully turn away from God. The great trick of this era is that government and corporations and schools and media companies pretend to act for our benefit instead of their own. We are instructed by all of these institutions that it is somehow intolerant or bigoted to proclaim the life, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus in public. The irony is that all of these institutions will pass away before long, from the U.S. Senate to Amazon.com to the Teacher’s Union to the Washington Post. These are all temporary things trying to silence something that can never be silenced, no matter how much noise is made, or how much smothering of people’s faith is attempted. In reality, there is nothing intolerant about having convictions and principles to live by, and at least in America this right to hold religious belief is protected. Nor is there anything bigoted about being open about your faith, as anyone who reads the four biographies of Jesus can discover rather easily, if he or she decides to crack the cover of the book and stop accepting what the culture is preaching. The culture of the self is very hard to turn away from. It’s everywhere. A society that pushes a religion of no-religion doesn’t like to hear anything about parables or miracles, and therefore today we are being told that the God of love is suddenly, a God of hate. This is not a failure to transmit on God’s part, this is a failure to receive on our part. We only want a God that affirms what we desire, and that remains the case unless you experience the invasion of grace.

In the idleness of the past years, in the pandemic, some larger questions of life must have jarred you from time to time. If these questions haven't sprung up, then you will just continue on the road of indifference that ends in the land of Blah. I don’t want to be in that gray place. That road requires no action and no vigor and offers no real satisfaction, unless the next TV show or case of beer or oversized meal or one-night hookup can somehow fulfill the deepest concern inside you.

Call me a skeptic.

Many of us walked away from God for a reason, somewhere along the way. There are many possible reasons. If the problem is intellectual, that God cannot be real, then there is reading and listening, as you have probably spent much more time reading and listening to reasons not to believe and have never given the spiritual way a fighting chance. I have gone over my own struggle in detail in earlier chapters of this journey. Ideas and reason blocked me, as I wanted to learn everything, to know, to appear smart, wise, and most of all, consider myself above superstition and myth.

But ideas are just one cause of spiritual blindness. Often a human drives us away. Someone brashly shoved religion on you, and failed to deliver the message. A confluence of things drove me away. If it wasn’t only ideas about God, then what other cause pushed you away?

Perhaps it was one of these things:

Someone hurt your feelings. Something crushed you. Something distracted you. Someone annoyed you. Someone did something to someone that you loved.

What do all of these have in common?

All of these are reasons that have a person or a group of people at the root. Notice that the problem in any one of those reasons was not God. The reason is always something else.

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For many years, I thought it seemed boring to have faith. There didn’t seem much shine to it, unless you watch some of the more charismatic preachers who go to great lengths to make it appear like a performance art, but then it becomes ridiculous. I thought the struggle of life was the fun, only to find out that everyone clawing their way up the hill is silently miserable. Miley Cyrus’s song “It’s the Climb” makes me shudder as she instructs people to believe that the clawing and scratching on the slippery teflon hill is the way. No, Miley, I’m sorry: “It’s the Slide.”

"Faith will tell me Christ is present when my human senses fail." That’s a statement I believe, but the senses do have their moments. Three things tell me God is present. Silence can suggest to me that God is present. Words can make me believe. In both of these, hearing is the sense that can make me believe in the invisible. Silence is often the best way to hear. When there is no silence, I can go to silence in the “chapel of the heart.” When I’m in the world, among all its noises, I can often hear God’s love in a voice, a song, a sermon, or even reading text. I can hear. Hearing is the only sense that can really prove God’s presence to me, with seeing being a fine complementary sense, as the “argument from beauty” may not prove God’s existence, but it sure does when you are watching a sunrise or hearing a baby laugh or beholding a giant oak tree or seeing a deer or fox in the wild. But hearing can touch reason and faith all at the same time, through prose or verse, from sermon or song, and even spoken words. I can “hear” by reading, too. When you hear the words that move you, they cut you to the quick. The truth shuts out all of the nonsense, if only for a moment, and the yearning and struggle suddenly makes sense.

In any given day I can flip the triangle over the wrong way. When I remember to turn it back into a bowl, then I can slide down into the center again, if only for a bit, to the place where I can turn toward God. All of the busy noise disappears for a bit. The things that cause hurt or anxiety, perceived or real, no longer matter when you are in the center. The word of God strikes at the center of you and resonates. The notion that faith is boring becomes preposterous. Life without faith becomes a far more boring existence. The empty life is that of constant struggle. The life without meaning is the one that climbs without ever resting. That life without faith is the one that must “do something” and never stops to pray. When you hear the right words, and you turn to God, there is nothing so exciting in your entire life because you have the cheat code to understanding while retaining the mystery itself. You can revel in the mystery, as suddenly the center is not so far away. But you can only reach that center and stay there if you let go of yourself.

A few years ago, I discovered some hard questions that needed to be asked. The death of ego is a difficult thing, and I’ll probably never keep it down for more than an hour at a time. Some of those questions were as follows:

How much silence did I have, or could I have had if I had turned off the phone in my pocket? Did any of the time I spent in the past year bring the world’s troubles to an end? Does anything that I do today give me control over problems that are already unleashed across the world? Does anyone seriously think we will eradicate all that we dislike? How much time spent worrying have I wasted? How many nights sitting up with anxiety have I spent over this past year? Did I spend the day angry and frustrated or did I let go of control and offer it up to God?

Most of us wasted this year's opportunity. For most of us told to stay home during the pandemic, who were not in health care jobs, that time was a gift squandered. To hear, to listen, and understand what was missing in our lives. Most of us just continued more of the same things we did before the pandemic, that is, “doing something,” without realizing that the great gap in time offered us a chance for reflection and change. Most of us heard nothing in the silence because we sought out the noise of the busy world of social media, especially in America, as political turmoil and elections drowned out a glorious silence. Alongside that, excessive buying and selling of hot tubs and cars and houses and appliances consumed us. These consumer things, these material things, they consume us, our time, our value, our worth. As the saying goes, the things you own end up owning you. Then there was the drinking and eating to excess, or conversely the furious diet and exercise in response to previous overindulgences. This yo-yo of thinness and obesity happens to so many of us that we might just consider walking on a treadmill while we simultaneously shovel Oreo cookies and ice cream into our faces. We may have changed our pursuits and wants in the pandemic, but many of us traded one unfulfilling desire for another. The best things in life are free. There are very few things that are free, but they are there: prayer is one of those things. Will it change the world? Maybe not. But will it change you? Without a doubt.

I will say the pandemic opened up a listening post for me, like I was given a chance to climb to a cliff overlooking a valley that contained the world. And I could look down and see the world, and when I shouted down into the abyss I would only hear the echo of myself, nonsense, nothing, just my own voice coming back to me in a weaker form. My voice, thrown down into the valley of the world, could do nothing but either be drowned out or be bounced around the rocky walls before returning to me as a pathetic powerless echo. Or, instead, on that cliff I could turn my head upward, I could look upward, toward heaven and without opening my mouth, in silence, there I could hear everything. Suddenly, everything, as if I had found the Aleph from Jorge Luis Borges short story, where he saw infinity from standing in a certain spot in the cellar of an old house that was about to be demolished. He wrote something that sounds nearly Biblical: “I shut my eyes - I opened them. Then I saw the Aleph…”

“On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished.”

Borges and William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman were all writers that seemed to have found that infinite spot where they could see the world all at once, and then even past the world. They could look beyond the world. Dostoyevsky, to me, must have had an Aleph in his cellar to be able to see so many worldly and otherworldly perspectives. But this gift isn’t only available to writers or artists. The artists may be special in their ability to articulate this infinite place, but everyone can get there. A painter or writer is not needed to experience the same thing, as no artist can capture what each person can feel and know in their own experience of reason and faith. The great philosophers often become famous for recording ideas that have bounced around in most people’s heads at one time or another, and their fame is for spelling out the idea in official jargon. Everyone has the gift, and philosophers and artists can only attempt to reproduce it, and they never do it justice in their drawing or writing. The most un-artistic person in history has access to God, because they can come to rest in the nest of the presence of the Trinity.

“God’s kingdom lies within you…You must turn to him, the Lord, with all your heart, and leave this wretched world behind you, if your soul is to find rest.…you must make room, deep in your heart…it is for the inward eye, all the splendour and beauty of him; deep in your heart is where he likes to be. Where he finds a man whose thoughts go deep, he is a frequent visitor…if you really direct your gaze inwards, and rid yourself of uncontrolled affections, then you can turn to God at will, lifted out of yourself by an impulse of the spirit, and rest in him contentedly.” (Book II, The Imitation of Christ)

This is available to every person, and knowledge or skill has nothing to do with finding this place.

The Sign of the Cross represents this perfectly, as God is above, in heaven, Jesus came here, to earth, and the Holy Spirit enters and fills your heart. In fact, the Sign of the Cross by itself can be an amazing prayer, said slowly, as you contemplate God above, using your intellect and will, your reason and faith, and then to your heart, to the son, to Jesus, who shows us how to live, you can imagine him sitting next to you or in front of you as you pray and know that he came to earth as one of us and knew every suffering plight and struggle that we do, and lastly, moving across your chest, you can request the Holy Spirit to come and be with you, as Jesus promised, that he would not leave us orphaned, that we would have the Advocate, the presence of God, the third person of the Trinity, here with us always. All of that from the Sign of the Cross, that short sacramental that we rush through so we can start another prayer. Slow down - that motion is a prayer all by itself, and maybe one of the best.

The great questions have an answer when you turn away from the world. The world doesn't have the answers. Once I realized that silence and listening was a possibility, I realized that I could find the quiet whether I was alone or in a crowd. The silence is always available, even when standing among a hundred other souls. When you turn away from the world toward God, what is happening around you no longer matters.

I was facing the wrong direction. For most of my life, I was facing the world, facing the crowd, seeing the action and the excitement as attractive, when it was more like a pit of entrapment. Only in listening did I come to hear the Word, and understand what “The Word” actually meant. Three ways of listening helped me. 1.) Through silence and listening to God, 2.) through spending time with faithful Christians who live their faith, and 3.) by reading, by contemplating, and by being moved and challenged by the four Gospel accounts.

In seeking, I came to accept the mysteries and see their power. There was meaning in there that I had glossed and skipped right over, of a depth far beyond any pagan myth or scientific fact. Then in the Sacraments of the Church I saw the invisible become visible. Sacredness became real again. To me that was a miracle all by itself. You won’t understand what I mean unless you have lost all sense of what is sacred or never believed it in the first place, and then suddenly the Sacred shows up as real you cannot be the same person.

There was the end of competition, too. There was Jesus. In the center of all this was Jesus, waiting for me to wake up and notice him, to recognize his sacrifice and his risen glory. I’m reminded of James Joyce’s description of the artist, “…the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Jesus is seated - he is sitting - next to God. He is there, always. He has already done the work, taking on the sins of the world, and has been tortured and killed for us. Yet most of us aren't even bothering to look up to him because we are so fixated on our own pride and schemes in life. Jesus is resting, not jumping around, not yearning for your favorite football team on Sunday, not willing you to choose the right diet. He is seated, next to the living God, hearing our prayers, until he comes again. Perhaps he is paring his fingernails, as Joyce guessed, although that seems a bit too specific an action, but I understand what he means. God is love, and he is at peace.

Unless I can get to the middle of the triangle between the points of self-hatred, self-righteousness, and indifference, I can’t see the light of faith. If I flip my perspective, make the turn, repent, then I may get to that center. But I often easily drift past the place or turn back to myself completely and suddenly begin struggling once again. Sometimes I cannot hold my position for long, but knowing that center is there, where the turn can be made, means I have to strive not for the world, but to turn away from the world.

Like Peter and James and John in the garden, I could not stay awake for one hour with Jesus. For two decades, I could not stay awake for one hour. I could not hear either. I was deaf. I could not understand what his incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension meant until one day, suddenly I could. The dominoes fell one by one, with finality, as I listened and learned from the Gospels all over again the life of Jesus, along with powerful words from ancient writers like St. Augustine and modern speakers like Robert Barron and Mike Schmitz and Fulton Sheen and Scott Hahn and Tim Keller. The more I ask, the more I seek, and the more I knock, the more the door opens. “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” I find this to be true. I can flip the world over, and easily, gently, roll back into the center.

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We must have a winner and loser. We want it. You can’t have the biggest boat without someone having a smaller boat. You can’t have the most knowledge without someone else having less knowledge. You don’t win a poker game without the other hands at the table folding. Your country can’t win the World Cup without the other 31 countries going home defeated.

What a shock it can be then to find out that there is a way to live where keeping score doesn’t matter. The game is over. Your money, health, possessions, experience, and knowledge are useless and meaningless to your salvation. You don’t win or lose. Someone has already won by taking the onslaught of all of the world’s problems and competition upon himself for us.

When I turned away from belief, I needed a winner and a loser. Only by turning back could I see what exactly it was that I had turned away from. In many cases, I never really examined God in the first place, because it appeared boring. This problem of boredom was one of the worst blockers to my turning back. An extreme dumbing down of instruction caused this, as I failed to understand why religion has lasted. The misunderstanding of the big picture and the details left me with a caricature, a grotesque version of religion as painted by a secular media and entertainment industry that so clearly loathes religion and religious people.

But I can’t blame cultural steering nearly as much as I can blame myself, because lacking all conviction I let the wind move me, the mood of the hour, and failed to grasp the need for both reason and faith, thinking one had all the answers and the other was nothing more than a complex child’s fantasy. As the saying goes, reason and faith are the two wings that help you to fly, and I attempted to fly with a single wing, and crashed into the mountain, struggling to maintain direction, exhausted from so much one-sided flapping.

I realized that there were three planes or points that my life careened between when I used only one of those wings. These 3 points made a triangle and each day my location on that triangle moved, and the walls were formed by connections between one of these three states:

1.) self-hatred

2.) self-righteousness

3.) indifference

These three blockers form walls, making a triangular pyramid. Like a video game character, I was stuck on this pyramid and the object of the game was to find equilibrium in the center, at the top. But that was the problem: I could never get to the center. I could only pass over the apex now and then, and then slide down one of the three sides again. I thought this triangle was a flat two-dimensional shape where I could just plant myself wherever I liked, but with enough experience I came to realize this triangle had a shape to it, a peak. The center was elevated.

I think of this triangle or pyramid as a curved surface. The game, I thought, was to get to dead center, to balance in that place where I didn’t despise myself, didn’t worship myself, and wasn’t indifferent about life. This is difficult because the triangle exterior is made of teflon, so that getting to the top and balancing in the middle, could never last for long, as I would roll down to one of the sides again. Gravity pulled me downward to the edges.

To remain in the middle, I had to be perfect, or to have the perfect circumstances to generate enough energy to get there. But being imperfect, I could never get there, or if I did, never stay there for more than an instant. I strived to get to the top of this warped shape, but the gravity of my instincts pulled me back down the incline.

When I reached the peak, that centered state, when my aim was occasionally on target, I was able to feel a brief sense of peace. But I couldn’t stay there. So I wanted to get it back again. Once you know there is a center, and that the center offers goodness and beauty and truth, the urge to return to that place becomes the goal. The only problem is the means you use to get there once, often stop working on subsequent attempts. The peace in that center is what I wanted, so I would attempt to take steps that had worked before, only to find out that the action plan didn’t work the second time around. But stubbornly, I would keep trying that worn out method, the recipe that worked once but never again. Those methods I’m talking about are a variety of avenues to the same conclusions: drinking, endurance sports, woodworking, studying, writing, and career accolades. All of these things are good in themselves, but cannot keep and hold the peace since they are finite actions and goals attempting to replace and fill an infinite desire.

People are always trying to find the center of this warped triangle, and they use various kinds of fuel to get there. This is why drugs and violence and sex ad gossip and fitness seem like the way to get to the center, because those activities they make us feel alive, and these things summon energy in us, so that we can create enough force to can roll ourselves uphill on the side of this pyramid, and maybe temporarily reach and roll over the glorious peak. When feeling high, or when doing something new for the first time, you pass over this mountaintop. There is a sense of transcendence, for a moment, for a minute, for an hour. After you slide away, you know the peak is still there, so close to you, but so far away again. The nearness of it summons you to seek, yet the place can never be held when attempting to climb the pyramid in this way.

Getting to the top, the center, appears to be the goal of the game of life. We strive and try to self-actualize in the middle of this curved shape. I can see people I know struggling to get to this center, scrambling and grasping and charging up that slippery hill. Millions of people today are playing this game, clawing and scrapping toward it, somewhere between despair, superiority, and indifference, and there are millions who have settled into the edges, stuck on the walls, who have stopped trying to climb, miserably accepting a default state of self-love, self-hatred, or most commonly now, indifference. Many have just stopped trying.

But there is a cheat code to this game.

You can turn this pyramid over.

We are foolishly climbing on the outside, when we can be reclining on the inside.

When you see the world differently, this hill-climbing goes away. Instead of a hill in the middle, this triangle shape becomes a bowl. When it is no longer a hill, it becomes a nest. The center is no longer a place you struggle toward, but a place of rest you gladly occupy, through no merit or effort. I realized, slowly, that I’d been looking at the wrong side of this shape all along.

The turn toward God is the cheat code. It flips this triangle over. The difficulty of navigating this curved triangle changes when you change your perspective. The Stoic idea of “the obstacle is the way” no longer makes sense, because you come to realize that there is no obstacle. Now it becomes easy to get to the center. You no longer fight gravity, you come to rest in gravity and you only oscillate from the center when the world shakes you up, and then you get jostled about, but with surrender you easily slide back into the center, restfully. You give control over to God and put your trust, a radical trust, in his guidance and direction, and the struggle ends because you no longer need anything else.

The world tells you that you need to climb the hill, that getting to the top is where you need to be. When you are trying to get to the top, trying to get to the center the hard way, you can experience that fleeting joy only briefly as you miss the mark and roll away. You know the center, the sweet spot is there, but you can’t reach it, or if you do reach it, you cannot stay there. You know there is a euphoric state in the middle of this triangle but the effort required to get there exhausts you and is unsustainable for a lifetime, which is why those of the worldly view end up settling into the edges, standing about like wallflowers, until they realize, if they are lucky, that they have been looking at the world the wrong way, and after trying everything else arrive at the secret code that turns the world upside down.

In my younger days, days of high energy, I would roll from the wall of indifference toward the wall of sin without remorse, and on that day’s journey I could pass near the center. Charging uphill took immense energy. For me, I would confuse the experienced high of the center with the power of myself to willfully create peace and contentment. Note: you cannot truly “will” peace into existence, into your heart. You cannot will it but you can pray for it. And then, with continued effort, peace happens. Contentment happens. Neither of those two things can be willed or forced or created. Peace and contentment require rest and letting go, not doing or acting.

I recently saw a bumper sticker that said, “There is no God, so stop praying and DO SOMETHING.” A better example of the problem could not be crafted. This sticker summed up the main problem of living, but not at all in the way that the owner of the car imagined. The entire problem is this idea to “DO SOMETHING” instead of surrendering. I could not have articulated my former problems better than that bumper sticker’s imperative, because that encapsulated my worldview. In a godless world, we must act, we must do, we must run around experiencing everything. An imagined utopia with no problems at all awaits just around the corner, if only we would “do something.” The distracted and agitated state means we cannot sit still. However, in that same godless world, once you run around long enough “doing something” to better yourself and justify your life you realize that it doesn’t matter what you do, so you might as well eat, drink, and be merry, and after you “do something” long enough, you realize that pleasure also isn’t the way to live, as all pleasures become dull once enjoyed too many times, and eventually the conscience comes calling, as the still small voice in your head knows that something is lacking. When you run out of energy “doing something” you fall to the wall of indifference, out of energy, cynical and pessimistic. In a godless world, where nothing matters but what we imagine, the wall of indifference or the wall of despair is the final resting place. The problem of a world without God, once you’ve convinced yourself that we are but a speck on a speck in the universe, that we are so small that we do not matter, and that there is no purpose to life, the problem is this: now you have to live in that universe.

That universe of meaninglessness is the one where you absolutely must “DO SOMETHING” to keep from going insane. Drinking certainly fooled me with the sensation that it could transcend the problem, but this problem cannot be escaped so easily. I would start from indifference and disappointment, become intoxicated, and careen past a brief state of temporary tipsy joy, until I fell back down between the walls of self-righteousness and self-hatred. In my peripheral vision, as I pinballed between the triangle of sin and self-righteousness and indifference, I knew there was something better, something more, an elusive state of peace and joy. There was something in that middle, in the center, so I wanted to get back to it. But I could never stay there with this approach, because the physics was all wrong.

But when you flip the triangle over and change it from a hill into a valley, from an uphill to a downhill, you need very little effort to get back to the place of joy. Humility lets you roll right down into the center, to the nest, where you are no longer restless and striving, you are no longer tired and angry. As St. Augustine said, “My heart is restless until it rests in Thee.” He knew that he had found the bowl, the cup, the nest, the place of rest. Once he flipped this triangle over, he passed through the plane to the other side, then suddenly he no longer needed to struggle to get to the center.

In fact, one of St. Augustine’s great realizations was when he saw a drunkard on the street who seemed happy. The drunk appeared to be at rest in his excess, and Augustine actually envied the drunk. In all his success, Augustine was miserable, while the drunk seemed content. But Augustine forgot to realize that the drunkard would wake up the next day and be miserable, back in one of those corners of indifference or self-hatred. Augustine was bouncing back and forth between the corners or self-righteousness and self-hatred, until he flipped the triangle over and came to rest in the center for good, once and for all.

Finally, there is one more level to this change of worldview. This triangle shape is like an escape room. Once you flip the triangle over, once you see the triangle differently, and once you come to rest in the bottom, in that center you can experience a lasting peace. But there is one more hidden treasure to this shape.

Once you are stable and steady, once you bask in the comfort of not struggling. You can turn and can see further because it’s not just a 2-dimensional curved surface after all. Along this curved triangle, there is a spot that reveals a z-scale, a third dimension. This is the spot that the millions are looking for and don’t know it. This is where Jesus left his guidepost, a sign for us. He points us to where the wholeness of God is, to where he is seated next to God. This turn is difficult to see, but we can sense this dimension. He called it the “narrow gate”. “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many.”

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What strikes me most about the two commandments of Jesus of Nazareth is two things. First: there are only two, so remembering them is easy. Second, that they have an order, and Jesus even says this clearly, even explicitly.

“Which is the first of all the commandments?”
Jesus replied, “The first is this:
Hear, O Israel!
The Lord our God is Lord alone!
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul,
with all your mind,
and with all your strength.
The second is this:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:28-34)

I think most people today agree with the second commandment. We reflexively grant our assent to that idea. This is because that appears to be common sense, and on the surface level, appears to be the easy one, but it’s only easy in the way that we interpret it today. The second command to "love one another" is what the modern world has kept, but we have forgotten about the first commandment to "love God." But these ideas only work if done in the right order. "Love God" has to be primary to make "love one another" work at all. I’ll try to explain what I mean.

There is a chapter in my favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky, called "A Lady of Little Faith." In this chapter is a story of a doctor who says, "...to my amazement, the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love individual people." The doctor adds that he would visualize the great sacrifices he might make for mankind, but in reality he admitted that he couldn't stand to be with anyone for two days without coming to hate the person, "…because he eats too slowly or keeps blowing his nose." This is reminiscent of many Seinfeld episodes, as Jerry is often driven to loathe his girlfriends for minor flaws such as: “She eats her peas one at a time,” or “She’s a low-talker,” or “She has man-hands.”

You can see this happening today, where the online individual "loves" the world. It’s declared widely and openly online. We all claim to love all people, but it's a distant and sanitized "Love one another." It is not the up-close and gritty kind of love for actual humans. It is a clean, separated, pie-in-the-sky kind of love. It is imaginary love.

In the same Dostoyevsky book is a monk named Father Zosima, who gives a response to the doctor's dilemma. The monk implies that to love humanity but hate individual people is a great bait and switch we do to ourselves to feel better. The monk says, "A true act of love, unlike imaginary love, is hard and forbidding. Imaginary love yearns for an immediate, heroic act that is achieved quickly and seen by everyone...as long as the ordeal doesn't last too long."

So what is the answer? What is the difference between the Facebook kind of "love one another" and a real "love one another"? For many people, their heroic act is seen as a vote for the “right” party, or sharing a video, or clicking “like” on certain posts. The monk explains the real difference in the next line.

"A true act of love, on the other hand, requires hard work and patience, and for some, it is a whole way of life."

And what are the consequences of that kind of love? It is harsh. It drives you into despair. There is not usually a reward. No transaction takes place. People that enter into the true acts of love get mocked, or ostracized, or called extremists. They grow quickly tired or humiliated and want to give up. They are gossiped about. This kind of true act is not typically fun, or brief, or even uplifting. A week of volunteering can cure people of the urge to love individuals, because their volunteer effort may not be recognized, rewarded, or even acknowledged. It takes labor and can usually only be carried out by someone who seems slightly crazy to the rest of the world. Dorothy Day, servant of the poor, warned volunteers: “There are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell, and they are ungrateful.” This is from the same woman who poured her entire existence into helping the poor. She was warning the generic lover of humanity who came to help about the reality of what they would face in individuals, and that the utopia ideas about charity, about loving humanity, could be checked with their coats at the door.

Before I say the next sentence, let me qualify this it by saying that charity done by corporations is a wonderful thing. And now let me just say it: corporate charity that have employees volunteer for a day is an attempt at the grand imaginary act, the “immediate, heroic act that is achieved quickly and seen by everyone,” as the employees get t-shirts printed and take selfies and post on social media, so that all know that they made an effort, and they claim their honor publicly. Every corporate volunteer day I’ve been involved in is more about boosting employee morale and t-shirts than it is about entering into the suffering of individuals. Often the company name is emblazoned in self-congratulations every step of the way. And we all know it’s about the company’s public image and employee morale, not the actual act of charity. Now let me again follow my insult by saying that a great deal of money and time is given by corporations and corporate employees, which is great, but to pretend that the motive is similar to the “love one another” that Jesus speaks of is to be played by sentimental advertising and marketing, which is often internal and aimed directly at employees. Anyone with a discerning eye who has worked inside a large company can feel the blast furnace of internal propaganda regarding the mission, which is always to make the world better by selling whatever it is the company is selling. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps oil companies really do love the environment (as their ads remind us).

The monk adds that true acts of love will never be noticed, never reach the goal, and perhaps never even appear to make progress:

"...at the very moment when you see despairingly that, despite all your efforts, you have not only failed to come closer to your goal, but seem farther from it than ever - at that very moment, you will have achieved your goal and will recognize the miraculous power of our Lord, who has always loved you and has secretly guided you along."

To me, the order of Jesus’ two commandments is of the utmost importance, as I know plenty of atheists that love humanity, but simultaneously hate most individuals that they meet, especially religious people. On the flip side, I know quite a few Christians with the same problem. They love humanity as a whole, and they love individuals - but only those that love them back or agree with their worldview. I fall into this trap often, before and after I was re-converted to faith. And this is the key element of the second commandment of Jesus that goes unnoticed or ignored on purpose.

How easy it is to love a distant blob called humanity or mankind, and likewise how effortless to love someone who is a friend or lover or ally. This is not what Jesus it talking about.

To love someone who is not like you, who hates you, who disagrees with you, and has habits that you don't like, and revolts you politically or morally - this is extremely difficult. That is what Jesus is talking about. He’s not talking about loving your friends who already love you. He’s not talking about loving some distant blob of people. He’s talking about loving those near you, especially those who don’t like you.

When you attempt to love those which you loathe, you will not last long. If you must deal with a person who rubs you wrong for any extended period of time, you cannot maintain any kind of “love” without the love of God shoring up the foundations. Most people will irritate you, given enough time. Our phones and computers now provide the perfect escape for returning to the distant love of humanity, because people drive us insane. For those who enter into the gritty and thankless kind of love, I believe that the only way they can maintain it, is through the first commandment of Jesus, which is to love God. Only God can hold you fast to the idea of forgiveness and giving over of oneself to others. As we know, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and it is only through him that we can reach the kingdom of God. “You must take up your cross daily and follow me.” There is a popular phrase today which hearkens to Stoicism which states, “The only way through is through.” The problem with that is there is nothing to go “through” to reach or arrive at. But Christians know that the only way through…is indeed through, but it through the cross. The cross is where Jesus was crucified before being risen, and so must our own selves die before they can be reborn.

This is where the three rules from Word on Fire work so well in keeping us between the lines.

Faith: Christ must be the unwavering center of my life.

Hope: Remember I am a sinner who needs saving.

Charity: My life is not about me.

This neatly keeps Jesus' two commandments in the right place - and just as importantly, in the correct order. The order is critical. Love God. Love one another. I think you can "love God" without "loving one another," but I don't believe that you can truly "love one another" in the trenches of real life without loving God first. The second commandment withers and dies rather quickly if the first commandment isn’t watering and shining God’s light upon it. You can try to keep the facade of “love one another” going, but it fades, because God is the only supporting structure that can make sense of the idea. Once God is forgotten it is very easy to justify making life about yourself instead of others. You can pretend to “love mankind,” when you really don’t.

This is the struggle, and it is a struggle to keep these two rules because our instinct fights against it. Without faith, we despair in the trenches and revert back to serving the self. The answer is to fight back. That's the challenge, and following the life of Christ is the weapon. I never understood the idea of "spiritual warfare" but at the bottom, the battle is against turning back to myself, and it will never stop being a battle. To quote Dorothy Day again, she was an updated version of Dostoyevsky’s monk. And she was a real person, not imaginary, and she didn’t make t-shirts about her volunteering or take selfies and post them online. She followed the two commandments, always, and probably not perfectly, but as perfect as anyone possibly can:

“…my own sins that give me such clarity. But I cannot worry much about your sins and miseries when I have so many of my own. … My prayer from day to day is that God will so enlarge my heart that I will see you all, and live with you all, in his love.”

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As easily as I can fall back into old habits, when I’ve quit old habits I can fall into righteousness. Correction: I can fall into a false righteousness. There’s no sugar coating this. Here’s the sequence of events: once I stop going in the wrong direction, I will do the next right action. I get on the beam and walk, steady, as she goes. I’ll ask for forgiveness. While in that state I will understand the need for love of God and others over myself. In tune with a Higher Power while I’m in the recovery zone, I feel the good. Fresh from the rut of doing the wrong thing, I am refreshed, restored, raised up from the gutter.

But then, the danger comes. I will pass over that middle ground of understanding and humility and slide right over into a feeling of pride about my own goodness in this newfound recovery. Pride, in all forms, is the direct opposite of humility. As I’m doing the next right action, I begin to think that I am right, that I am good, better than others. I’ll think that I have knowledge, and that now I am standing on the high ground over the valley of the deadly sins. This can easily beckon me onward to the belief that everyone should act like me. Suddenly, I am the model. Everyone should be standing on the mountain like I am.

This is the great danger of getting “clean.” Funny, we still use the word “clean” as in cleansing, or bathing, when we have won in battle over an addiction or vice. As Jesus pointed out about the Pharisees, they were always washing to be clean on the outside. We are still constantly scrubbing today, trying to be clean. We can get equally lost being clean as we can being dirty. Pride suffocates any sense of mercy or humility.

There is a plateau that exists between the where the Prodigal Son eats with the pigs in his valley of despair and where his upright brother, the Righteous Brother, stands at the peak of presumption. Despair and Presumption: both are wrong. Even the climber high on a mountain can fall into a giant glacial crevice that will swallow him in darkness. You are not safe from falling just because you are higher in the mountain. No, in the rarefied air near the peak there is less oxygen and more cliffs to tumble down.

The parable of the Prodigal Son is not just about the wastrel brother who comes back to God. The popular part of the story is about the drunk, foolish brother. We all love the idiot brother, and we read it sympathizing with him and his father for forgiving him. Why? Because mercy rings out in the story as a right action. We’re sentimental to stories of mercy, rightly so, since we all need mercy. But we kind of hate the older brother, the do-gooder who judges his returned brother and complains to his father that the grand reception of the foolish brother isn’t fair.

But this parable is every bit as much about the older brother, the one who does everything correctly. And I am both of them. I have been both brothers and probably will be both of them again in the future. We are all, I suspect, both of the brothers at different points in our lives. Even today, in small ways, I may be both brothers.

I stray away from faith, away from trust in God, in different ways now than I did as a teenager. When I was in my twenties or thirties, I strayed in different ways than I did as a teenager. In fact, today, I am more likely to stray in the manner of the older brother than I am to stray like the Prodigal Son. The older brother wants some justice against his younger brother. He wants fairness. He’s been holding down the fort, running the estate, keeping the business together all these years. He wants some recognition, and really he wants to feel superior and even get a little revenge. All this time he has been showing up, doing the work, staying on target, never wavering. If his father doesn’t punish the younger brother, but instead celebrates his return, then why hasn’t the father ever celebrated the older brother’s work? He’s been doing the right thing and being responsible for so many years, how can this not be recognized?

He’s right, it’s not fair. Or, according to our instinctual sense of justice, it’s not fair. This happens at work all the time, where someone who doesn’t put in effort receives the same bonus or raise as those who do. Everyone knows this isn’t fair and it often destroys morale. Employees have a very sensitive feel for exactly how little work must be done to achieve the most benefit, and high-flying achievers often quit or complain when someone who doesn’t work gets the same rewards. The interesting thing about the parable is that so many of us dislike the older brother’s reaction, but that is exactly how we tend to react. If anyone gets anything more than us, and especially someone who seems undeserving, outrage is inevitable, anger rises within us. I have seen co-workers outraged at someone for receiving a coffee mug that others did not receive. And the parable is talking about eternal life here, not a porcelain mug that cost two dollars.

The drunken, foolish brother so clearly needs help that the parable often seems only about him. Really, the foolish brother has an easier and more joyous experience in returning to God because he has fallen down on his face and is forced to change. His need for change is obvious. His burden requires that he let go of his ego to return to God, utterly humbled. Humiliated is the right word. After choosing vices and sin instead of good behavior and trust in God, he needs forgiveness and mercy from God. His burden and need to return is easy to understand. But it’s not as easy to understand for someone who has been following all the rules all along. This is the difference between disobedience and pride, where the former shows up in obvious errors made, often externally, while pride robs us of the proper interior state that is needed. This can be seen all the way back to the Old Testament versus the New Testament, where Adam disobeys God in pursuit of worldly pleasures, while Jesus obeys and denies himself any form of pride. The old teaching was to obey, the new teaching is how to fix your heart. The brothers of the parable show us both the exterior and interior problem of all humans, and the fix for both is shown in the life of Christ.

When I screw up, I know that I have to turn back. This is the easy part. Well, this wasn’t easy for a long time, but once I realized the lies that culture sells us, and that turning back to God is the way, the recognition of being on the wrong road happens more often. The trick is to remember to turn back every day, every hour. The saying that “God writes straight with crooked lines” is a common refrain in recovery. Those that overshoot the true path, the right way, can always turn back. So even a truly righteous person, like Peter or Paul or Mary Magdalene, zig zags through life. Only by effort can we return to the path, and only Jesus ever walked on the straight line the entire way. As for us, we are all too ready to justify our gossip or drinking or drug use or swearing or jerking off as normal, acceptable behavior, because we have chosen the modern religion where all things are permitted. Thus we think we we don’t have to deal with it. But for every “whatever” or “meh” we say now while selecting these actions, we will have to deal with the choices made, someday, right after we exhale our final breath, in the long moment known as eternity. If this doesn’t concern you, in the end it will burn you.

The younger brother turned away from God and lived wildly, only to find himself eating with the pigs at their trough. This seems easy to turn away from. But it’s not. Not at first. I’ve spent many chapters or episodes of this journey describing how hard it is to turn back to God once you have gone the other direction. When on the wrong path, stubbornness over bad choices can make it difficult to even admit there is a problem. Once your wrong path is seen as correct, an immense change of heart is needed to turn back again. However, each time you turn back, and try, and ask, and seek, and knock, and cry out for help - it gets easier to do so. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the foolish brother is fully restored, and perhaps, we like to think, he never turns back to his wayward lifestyle. This is a “happily ever after” parable.

But I can tell you what the danger is for the Prodigal Son once he has repaired his life and found his way back to God. The danger that awaits him is excess righteousness, like that of his older brother. In the parable, the older brother is coached down by his father from the peak of presumption to join the despairing brother on the plateau of understanding.

The older brother cannot fathom how his father rejoices over the idiot son that squandered his fortune and sullied the family name. The older brother could be from our world today, striving in our merit-based economy and chasing the accolades of the honor culture. He is disgusted by the fool he must call his brother. “Look, all these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders.” But his father explains that the true glory of this world is finding the lost brother. He explains that the older brother does not lose anything by rejoicing in the return of his brother, who is restored to health. And the righteousness melts away from the older brother once he understands. He has been doing the right thing for the wrong reason, and he has to change his heart from righteousness into understanding, returning to loving his brother instead of clinging to his own merit and clutching his pearls of self-worth.

By doing the “next right action,” I can go from being the younger brother to the older brother, and neither is in the right place. Since today we all worship ourselves, the older brother is everywhere. We all think we are right, or righteous, that our opinions and decisions are the correct ones, and we love to stone people online who fall outside of our worldview. Our world has billions of righteous brothers and billions of foolish brothers.

This middle area between the ruts is the right place. That is the place the brothers need to strive toward, to be on the plateau where Jesus taught us to stand. The ruts of pride and disobedience both suck you downward and further away from the light of heaven. The younger brother, once he has found his good sense and received his dad’s love again, he may very easily perch himself upon that same cliff of presumption that the older brother occupied, and he will fall headlong into the ditch of pride. There is much to say about the older brother of this parable, but I will return focus to the problem child, the foolish brother, as at the end of the parable he is now in danger of becoming the older brother.

The trick to fixing yourself without become overly righteous and without dwelling too much on the past takes some practice and if you’re like me you will fail. You’ll fail. Just remember the two quotes: 1.) “Progress, not perfection” and 2.) “Perfection kills.”

Somehow, someway, you must preserve your mistakes and keep them ever ready to hold up in front of your own eyes, like nightcrawlers in a glass jar under your arm. Otherwise you may forget about those mistakes and soon pretend you never held a jar full of nightcrawlers. But at the same time you can’t cry and grovel for forgiveness and wear the jar around your neck like a millstone. If you have sincerely tried to make the change through conversion and penance then you start from there and move forward. You take a picture of that jar of nightcrawlers and keep it in your wallet, or put a poster on your wall. To never forget those mistakes is important, otherwise self-justified righteousness will swallow you just as easily as the urge to do the wrong thing pulled you off course in the first place. Preserve and remember those times.

Yes, I’m referring to those awful nights that will keep you from ever running for public office. Yes, those mistakes should stop you from ever considering the idea of starting a blog or podcast because you are such an extraordinary hypocrite. And yes, you should have those mistakes dangled in front of you now and then by someone that doesn’t like you, because being humbled is the best possible thing that ever happens to you in this world. Embrace the mistake. Don’t deny it. If anything it should keep you humble, because the error of becoming “perfect” means you presume that you have no sins, which is a sin. The sins are well-defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and even if you don’t like what it tells you, it is very logical and consistent. Despair is the sin of thinking that you cannot be forgiven by God, which is what the Prodigal Son does. Presumption is thinking you are already perfect, which is what the older brother does. Both of them are block us from proper humility before God.

Never forget the mistakes, but move on. Move on because you cannot wallow and dwell in that worm dirt forever or you may never grow out of it and you’ll only be compost. The time of supplication and mourning must lead to the next phase of the heart, which is the interior change. By suffering we grow. By challenge we change. Without suffering and challenge we would always be children or adolescents. Without suffering or challenge we would continue on wrong paths until death. Most importantly, without suffering, Jesus would not have conquered sin and death.

He told us quite plainly, as Jesus is so good at doing: “Unless a wheat falls to the earth and dies, it will bear no more wheat. But if it dies…it will bear much more wheat.” Thus it is not some exterior appearance that must change. Penance is a dirty word in our times, but I believe that’s only because we don’t understand it anymore. Here’s a hint about what it means:

Jesus' call to conversion and penance…does not aim first at outward works…but at the conversion of the heart, interior conversion. Without this, such penances remain sterile and false; however, interior conversion urges expression in visible signs, gestures and works of penance.

Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life… (CCC 1430-1431)

When I believe I have made the conversion of the heart, I can easily fool myself. There’s a movie called The Devil’s Advocate with Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves, where Pacino plays the devil and works on the vanity of his target, a lawyer played by Reeves. The devil dangles the bait of glory in front of the lawyer, aiding him to become the best lawyer in New York, helping the lawyer win case after case. Despite defending guilty and repulsive clients, the lawyer revels in the glory, while rejecting the needs of his wife and mother. The devil is eventually rejected by the lawyer, who has a change of heart. The lawyer’s free will wins as he chooses the next right action which separates the devil from him. So the lawyer is freed from the temptation and he appears to move on with this life. A happy ending is in sight. He’s very humbled, and once humbled he becomes quickly satisfied with himself. He’s like me, he dusts off his hands, thinking, “Well, I took care of that problem of evil and found the Lord!” But at the end of the movie, Al Pacino returns in disguise as a newspaper reporter who wants to do a story on the “lawyer with a conscience,” who lost a case for choosing to do the right thing, following morality over glory. And suddenly the devil, once again, has the lawyer chasing a new lure of fame, a different kind of glory, but still the same vice. The devil, Al Pacino, all toothy and smiling, says at the end of the movie, “Vanity: definitely my favorite sin.”

The lesson? When you are led astray, you get yanked off course by one of these vain wishes or addictions, by the desire to do the wrong thing. Worse yet, even when you are pulled back to sanity you can get lured right over to a different desire. Glory, honor, pleasure, wealth, power - there are more disguises over these hooks than you’ll find in a bait shop. In other words, the desire for one thing may seem conquered, but that doesn’t kill off the problem. It returns in a new form, using a new method, in a new manner, unsuspecting but just as cunning. It never stops. This problem isn’t something to beat and put on a shelf like a trophy. No, it returns. Unceasingly, it finds you and you find it. The only way to combat this constant pursuit of you is that you must have the interior conversion. You must receive God to believe and believe to receive God, every single day. There is no day off. You never get to dust off your hands and hang up your hat. There is not an end of the road at a truck stop named “faith” where this problem stops. Interior conversion is an active, living, breathing, idea you must pursue. To believe is a verb. To pray is a verb. Prayers use present tense, not past tense. You don’t need help yesterday, you need it now and tomorrow. Choices you made yesterday have come and gone; your free will has already played that hand. But today and tomorrow have many choices yet to be revealed, traps to watch out for, and sufferings to endure. Some examples of powerful prayers are as follows, all using present or future tense:

Prayer of St. Michael: “St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil…”

Hail Mary: “Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou…”

Prayer to the Holy Spirit: “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in them the fire of your love…”

Prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love.”

Jesus Prayer: “Lord, Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Prayer is to give glory to God and ask for help now, today. We’re not stocking up prayers for next week or when I’m eighty years old. The power of prayer is that is gives strength, direction, and orients us back toward God, which means we receive the gift of humility.

But once I correct myself from errors, and after I find that humility, what can happen is that I shove off the dock of those sins and think I will never see or experience that shore again. I say, “Adieu, Prodigal ways, it’s back to the trough and the pigs with you!”

As that place of sin recedes on the horizon, into days past, I grow smug and quickly righteous, thinking I’ve escaped my weaknesses, only to wake up one morning surprised to find that the problem is back in bed with me. Like Jonah, I can’t outrun myself. How hilarious to find yourself in these ancient Biblical stories. Except it’s not so funny when you first go through it, because you realize that the allegories and characters are more than old writings, they are a fact of your very real life.

“Wherever you go, there you are.” That’s a saying I know well. I travel with myself wherever I go. The dock and shore, the time and the place - those things never held or harbored the problem. Those are just places and things. I have the problem. It’s part of me. The dysfunction travels with me. Things are just things, but I am the carrier of the disease. Watch the news today and you will see the evidence that all men and women carry this problem, not just a few.

This interior conversion then must be renewed constantly, or the proper placement of self starts to wander, or my compass to true north gets skewed by the magnetism that draws me into the wrong thing.

Humility is the right place to be. The elevation of the self is how both brothers in the parable make their error, one by chasing pleasure and the other by assuming honor. The middle, between them, is where they both realize they are not God, that they are both sinners, and that they need and love each other.

There is one other kind of error, not in righteousness, but in challenging God in arrogance. To think that God owes you something, that he is a personal Genie or sugar daddy, is a great mistake. How small we make God out to be in our minds.

Consider Jesus on the cross between the two criminals. The first criminal is not like the older brother in the Prodigal Son. No, he’s in an even worse state of mind. He hasn’t acted righteous, not at all, but he is deriding Jesus and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’

Not only is he mocking Jesus, but he’s expecting some kind of transaction from him. He’s saying, “Well if you’re so great, why don’t you show us.” How many people today are like the first criminal on the cross next to Jesus? This is how a lot of us pray. We give nothing to God because we don’t believe in him, and then say, “Well God hasn’t done anything for me.” He owes you nothing, and if you have rejected God because you didn’t get something, you are the first criminal on the cross. He’s not righteous, he’s not sorry, he’s not humble, but he wants a miracle and worst of all, feels that he deserves one.

Put that against the humility of the second criminal, the good thief, who has committed the same crime as the other criminal but reacts in a completely opposite manner. The first shows arrogance to God, while the second shows humility. And although he is late to the game of conversion, he’s now in the stadium and he’s staying, as Jesus recognizes true faith when he sees it, no matter when it comes in a person. He tells the second criminal, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

The danger of humility is that it can be in the right place, only to switch into righteousness or arrogance in the blink of an eye.

This is where faith, hope, and charity must be prescribed. I’m not a doctor, but a doctor today would offer some cocktail of pills as a cure. There is a better pharmacy, and it’s free, and it’s called a church. Faith and humility go together. In fact, they are inseparable. Likewise, faith and joy go together. These too are inseparable. No, I’m not a doctor but I wish doctors had suggested these three things called faith, hope, and charity to me years ago, as I might have saved two decades of searching. Then again, even if they had suggested it, I doubt I was ready to hear it. I would have demanded the pills anyway, I suspect.

After you screw up, take the next right action, ask for humility, and pray for hope. Pray for the willingness to be willing. If you lack belief, say this awkward sentence: “God I believe, help my unbelief.” That always sounded ridiculous to me, but it works. If you want belief, if you say, “Come Holy Spirit,” it shows up. I’m not selling anything here. I’m not advertising anything that I will make money on. This is all free to anyone. I don’t want your money or praise, I just want you to know that there is hope and if you pray for willingness to be willing, if you try to believe while you are riddled with doubt, something will happen to you. There is so much hope, even when you doubt, but you have to try to receive it.

What is hope? Here’s a definition.

Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit…

The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men's activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity. (CCC 1817-1818)

As St. Paul said, "So faith, hope, charity abide, these three. But the greatest of these is charity." I could have ten episodes on these three virtues and never cover it. Others have written about it much better than I can anyway, such as St. Theresa of Avila’s Interior Castle or St. Francis de Sales Introduction to the Devout Life.

When the next mistake comes around, don’t throw up your hands and stay in the rut. Step out of it. Stay out of the twin ruts of disobedience and pride. Pray for humility, pray for hope to keep your spirits up, and recall that your life is not about you. Remember that one? “My life is not about me.” Make it about something built to last and those somethings are: faith, hope, and charity.

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As I’ve mentioned in earlier episodes, when you find the drink or drug or vice that suits you, you know it immediately. Even if you didn’t recognize it happening, it happens. For people with addictions, which is pretty much everyone, the substance or experience was pinned on their hearts so long ago that they don’t even know it’s there anymore, nor do they know when it happened. The addiction merges into you, sometimes gradually, but is so ingrained into life that it’s unseen. Like mixing two different paint colors, separating the two is impossible. Well, impossible for us humans anyway. Unless you somehow get jolted awake, no recognition happens, the paint is just mixed into you and you are now both colors of paint.

To illustrate the point, take most men today as an example: they will keep popping beers and opening porn sites and feeding political/personal hatreds, without ever noticing they’ve been overtaken. They will do this while they simultaneously complain about the immorality of everyone else. They are not wrong about the immorality of everyone else, but they don’t recognize the massive plank in their own eye. And I include myself in that entire accusation. I am the foolish brother in the Prodigal Son parable, but I am the other brother as well.

When you find the thing that “does it for you,” you can be conquered quickly. You will embrace it and know that this - yes, this - delivers something that was lacking before, something what you sought, what you had been looking for. You didn’t know you were seeking it, but you found it. Once you found it, now it’s part of you, unless you do battle to remove it.

The most visible examples of this comes with meth or heroin addicts, as you can watch it happen so fast, where the first high elevates the user to such great heights that they are lost in the first experience, after which we get to watch their ungracious collapse, their meteoric crash into the mountain of life. But for most people, for our accepted and private addictions, it happens slowly. The drug or experience hooks you, but you dabble, silently and out of sight. Over time you assemble your cheerleaders to support you, the enablers that must be found to allow continuing on further down the path. Then you keep dabbling at it for the rest of your life, stuck on the problem, but keeping up appearances, thinking that it’s not a problem. The meth or heroin addict reaches the conclusion fast and publicly, like a short violent film, but the rest of us require a full five-act tragedy to play out over 75 years. We make drug users and criminals our cautionary tales, our modern outcasts, as their illustration provides such an obvious error that even a child recognizes the mistaken path. Their suffering gives us a sign of one road to avoid, but there are many well-lighted paths that take more circuitous routes but end up at the same place.

I have heard this notion of “instant addiction” from users of opioids, marijuana, meth, sex, gambling, and porn. I’ve actually observed it happen in a gambler once, as he acquired the “taste” for the win. The pleasure of winning a bet spread across his face like The Grinch as he hatched his evil scheme to steal Christmas. When the right wrong touches you, even if you aren’t looking for it, you will know. At that moment, this wrong will then gather its belongings and take up residence inside your head permanently, like a bad tenant that you cannot evict. Just ask anyone who got addicted to oxycodone or other narcotics by accident after receiving pills for pain from a doctor. They didn’t know they were looking for that thrill, but they found it by pure accident. For most people the pills won’t cause a problem, but for others their entire life self-destructs into a pursuit for more prescriptions. To those observing other people with theses vices, especially with vices we do not share, this behavior is bizarre. Yet for most people there is a something like an opioid that draws us in like bugs to a trap, and we just can’t help but taste that sweetness. I recall a night out long ago when I was at a bar with two others. One was a man obsessed with sex. The second was terribly overweight and still obsessed with food. Then there was myself, who just wanted to drink to drunkenness. And as I looked around our table in that bar, I thought to myself, “Aren’t we quite the trio.”

As for me, drinking beer took a bit of getting accustomed to, but as a teenager I had acquired “the taste” and never again lost it. But I wasn’t really after the taste. None of us are after the taste, not really. We want the effect. I’ll take the result, not the taste, thank you very much. The idea that we love the taste is a cool trick. We dress up beer and liquor in a thousand flavors. Ethanol tastes terrible, so it has to be disguised for us to ingest it. We want the buzz. This is the little secret of wine “aficionados” and “craft” beer drinkers and whiskey “connoisseurs,” but they will defend to the death that they love the taste, and surely they do believe it, once alcohol has merged into their life and taken up residence. But without the buzz there is no reason for acquiring a taste.

I am not trying to say that drinking is bad. This is not a teetotaler tirade. I needed to remove the tap from my own life, but I don’t ever pretend that drinking is bad for all people. Drinking provides much joy for people. We are all just wired for different problems, and mine happens to be alcohol, which is why I babble on about it here, but I feel that one addictive experience can help understand other addictive experiences. Most people can handle a few drinks, although there are many who think they can, but really can’t. What I aiming at is this: people lie about why they drink, because no one does it for the taste. This is how we justify our sins, with simple and sometimes elaborate lies. For the record, drinking is not a sin, but drinking to drunkenness is a sin most definitely. I didn’t make that up, but I think it’s fairly obvious that a large portion of the awful things that happen in our lives and in many families can be traced directly back to drunkenness. Generations of families are ruined by drunkenness, sometimes stemming from a single night that a father or mother was drunk, which begins a domino effect. A good rule is the G.K. Chesterton line, “We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.”

But for those of us that do drink too much of them:

An impulse to do the wrong thing can conquer me. Even knowing something is wrong doesn’t provide enough reason to not to take the wrong action. Reason need not apply. Like the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey, the high is wanted again and again and the mind never tires of it because it appears to put anxiety, suffering, and mental pain to rest.

Except it doesn’t. The Lotus flower doesn’t fix anything, not at all, but the sailors want to believe it has solved their problem. They forget other things, like where they were going, their home, their families, replacing goals or hobbies with the substance and experience that they now treasure. Odysseus’ men gladly forget all things important to them:

“…those who ate of this honeyed plant, the Lotos,

never cared to report, nor to return:

they longed to stay on forever, browsing on

that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland. (from the Robert Fitzgerald translation)

The Lotus replaces the men’s motivation and direction. There is also the loss of innocence, which is part of everyone’s journey, and this personal pathway is different for all but there are similarities between those who find the Lotus in achievement or status or gambling or drinking or sex, or some combined cocktail of those things. The sense of right and wrong is still present after the first few times, but begins to diminish the more the wrong thing is chosen. Soon the wrong way becomes increasingly normal and eventually becomes a permanent fixture that you don’t want to have judged or reviewed. Then you will not care one bit that some guy named Isaiah ever said, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” because you will want to be with your precious. Remember, Gollum started out as Smeagol. He was a cute and happy little hobbit before the ring transformed him into a ghoulish murderer.

The echoes of this desire to do the wrong thing is sometimes subtle and you may or may not notice when it happens, but you can hear it plain as day in songs, like One Republic’s Counting Stars. The lyrics cannot be heard but as a yearning to do what his conscience tells him is wrong. This guy gets it.

I feel something so right by doing the wrong thing
And I feel something so wrong by doing the right thing…
Everything that kills me makes me feel alive

The strange twist on those lyrics is not just his desire to do the wrong thing, but his repulsion at doing the right thing. His is an advanced case of lost innocence, but common, as once the decision is made to “call evil good and good evil” then wrong behavior becomes the standard, not the exception. There is even a death wish in these lyrics of wanting to be on the edge of life and death merely to feel alive. You can see this path of destruction in a one-liner from the Parable of the Prodigal Son: “…the younger son collected all his belongings and set off to a distant country where he squandered his inheritance on a life of dissipation.” Surely he knew it was wrong, but he chose that path anyway. He wanted to live wildly and riotously. That was his drug.

There is excitement in doing the wrong thing. Fun and pleasure can come from good things, but the devil plays on the other side of that fence in the activities that we know are wrong. We think, or want to believe, that’s where the fun is at. For me, coloring outside the lines appeared to free the soul from the tethers of morality and furthermore seduced me with the promise of creativity, which I saw in others who had traveled the road of excess. For reference: see every dead rock star. Janis Joplin to Jim Morrison to Bradley Nowell to Amy Winehouse to Scott Weiland to Chris Cornell. Flawed people, but creative souls who achieved a kind of greatness in music, as a side hobby all had major drug or alcohol problems. The result is that we mashup creativity and freedom into one bowl, thinking they go together. This opens the gate to choosing actions that our conscience tells us not to do, like a nerdy hall monitor. When the conscience tells us to “No running, go back and walk,” we decide we are tired of listening to this fuddyduddy, that running in the hall is more fun, so we beat up the hall monitor and take his lunch.

This same “freedom” I saw in writers that I admired. They all seemed to disregard common rules only to make their own and become more creative because of it. Many of these favorite writers also ended up losing their marbles and soon after their life by their own hand, like Ernest Hemingway and Jack London and Hunter Thompson and Sylvia Plath.

Extracting myself from this rut going in the wrong direction, required extra help. Far more motivation and direction was needed to get out of this rut than I needed to get into it. Anyone who has found themselves in a literal rut, whether by plowing a field, driving a car on a gullied out dirt road, or even while using the tow-rope at a ski resort, you can find your way into the rut much easier than you can pull out of the rut. In fact, when watching the tow rope ferry skiers up a hill at a ski resort, I have watched kids fall down in order to get out of the rut, and that matches my own experience. Falling down is sometimes the only way to get out of the rut, otherwise you just end up following the rut to its end. Wiser folks than myself just avoid putting their skis into the rut, or having dropped into the rut, carefully step back out of it. I applaud them on their good sense.

When I was, at long last, able to step out of the rut, I reached a point where I assumed that the problem was solved. “That was easy,” I thought, shaking the snow off my hands, “Problem solved. I’ll never do that again.”

But as I’ve mentioned in earlier episodes, my first attempts to stop drinking failed after a month, or after six months, or even after a year. I had to try and try again. And it’s not impossible, not by a long shot, that even after five years of sobriety I won’t fall headlong right back into the rut again. It happens all the time to people. The rut is always there, if we only choose to put our ski back into it.

Switching metaphors here, let’s move from skiing to dragons. The dragon doesn’t go away. There is a decent chance I will revert back to the same mistakes of the past. But beyond that, even if I may have penned the dragon of drinking, there are plenty of other dragons to face in the world and nearly every day these cause struggle and trouble for me, or rather I allow struggle and trouble into my life. Some days are better than others. Some days I feel that there is nothing that can derail me from doing the right thing. On other days I struggle from the moment I awake in the morning. Those are the days when I forget about God. Why Did Peter Sink? Yes, again, the same answer. He took his eyes off God.

Without a doubt, as creatures we will never be perfect. It’s impossible. The lizard brain is strong, but we can strive away from its wiles that seduce us. Rather than go toward it, we try to resist it. But there are times that we fail. Two sayings I like about perfection are as follows:

Progress, not perfection.

Perfection kills.

I can’t claim either of those quotes, but I will steal them for my purposes. Now, these quotes could be interpreted as license to do whatever you want and then seek forgiveness afterward, making them half-hearted enablers of the vices. After all, you could distill “Perfection kills” to mean “I’ll never be perfect, so why try at all?” But that is reducing it to an all-or-nothing scenario where our efforts toward the good are nullified. Even though we will fail, we must strive toward goodness. When we fall it is by choice. Adults are just like any child who wants a cookie, who knows that it’s often easier to get forgiveness for eating the cookie than it is to get permission. So we often perform the act and then the supplication is made later.

This is what often bothers people about Christian forgiveness, as it can come late in a person’s life. However, if there is one thing Jesus makes clear, repeatedly, it’s that God doesn’t care if the change of heart comes late in life, he only cares that it happens. There is the parable of the laborers, where those laborers who worked only an hour in the field received the same pay as those that worked all day. “It’s not fair,” they complain. But nothing is lost for those who worked all day. The eternal reward is the same and just as great. There is no keeping score on who turns back to God, or when they turn back to God. Those already turned should have joy now, and when others turn they should share in their joy. The expectation of getting more than others is one of our human flaws that must be shed if we are ever to understand the idea of salvation. The death row confession and plea for forgiveness angers people. Yet that forgiveness is precisely what the penitent thief on the cross next to Jesus receives in his final hour. An overarching theme across all the Gospels is “the first will be last and the last will be first.” As a reader, I almost feel beaten over the head by that concept, which is good, because that’s the only way I remember anything. The idea goes against our instincts, especially in our merit-based society.

So what happens when you do screw up and revert back to old ways? First of all, there was a saying in AA meetings: “We don’t shoot our wounded,” which always seemed like the right answer for those who struggle but keep trying, who need a hand. For anyone who started drinking again, but returned to the meetings, an acceptance was there but no one was offering a sappy “poor me” attitude. There was acknowledgment from the group but not praise.

Obviously, the goal should be to avoid the error at all times. Obviously. But who among us can say they don’t make mistakes? Wait, I forgot: we have Facebook and everyone’s life on there is perfect. But just for an instant, imagine a world where people didn’t pretend to be perfect, like say, well, in the real world, the non-digital world, on a planet called earth. Imagine our actual world where people are flawed and screw up all the time and say they will do one thing but do another.

We mess up. That is what we do. We think that we won’t mess up, but then we do. So let’s say you start eating the Lotus flowers and then by some miracle you stop eating them. Then after a while, you may forget why you stopped eating the Lotus flowers because life was easier with them. Life was more enjoyable while you were escaping to eat the flowers. Then what do you do? Wouldn’t it be easier to just go back to old habits?

I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve had some good advice given to me.

The first thing to do is this: take the next right action. That is all you can do for starters. Stamp it on your forehead. “Next right action.” And after that action, you can take the next right action. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I can’t fix much, but I can fix one thing. One thing at a time, one day at a time. The “next right action” idea must be volleying around in my head just like “surrender to win” and “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner” and “Why did Peter sink?” These phrases are the way back. One step at a time, one cheesy little quote at a time.

There is a second danger I need to share, and this is just as dangerous as the wayward ways of the Prodigal son, the foolish brother. You get into the first rut through disobedience to what your conscience knows is right behavior. But there is a second rut that can be fallen into, on the other side of the screw-up, after you’ve corrected the first error. This other rut is carved by righteousness, and in that rut lies the other sin, the oldest and greatest sin of all: pride.

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What’s wrong with cute little manger scenes? Nothing. Nothing at all. They are terrific…if you’re under 10 years old, and perfect if you have already returned “like a child” and believe. They encapsulate the major events of the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus for those two groups of people.

However, for those who are doubting, for those who have never believed in the first place, and for those who have already turned away, the cute little manger scene can appear as childish nonsense. Worse, the cute little manger scene doesn’t tell the story that is in the actual texts. Even the Charlie Brown version takes out all the pain, terror, suffering, and glory of what happened in these events.

The cartoon version has its place and purpose for telling the overall story of the infancy narratives, but for people today who have never read the books, or don’t want to read Matthew and Luke, these simplified images gloss lazily over the real struggle, challenge, and fear that cries out subtly but constantly from the understated biographies of the infant who came to be known as Jesus of Nazareth.

Welcome to the airing of grievances. After complaining for a while, then I’ll tell you why I love cute little manger scenes.

screenshot from dreamstime.com

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How many times and in how many ways does Jesus say, "What difference does it make if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?" How many ways does he say, “the last will be first”? He just can't say it enough. It’s everywhere in the parables and the miracles. Lazarus, the woman at the well, the Gerasene demoniac, the blind, the deaf, the withered hand, the tax collector, the many lepers, the widow, the wedding guests, the salt of the earth. And he never, never says you just have to turn back for a little while, he says, "By your endurance you will gain your soul." He means endurance in faith, in fidelity to God. A permanent turn is needed. Daily orientation is the ask. But believe it or not, it becomes less difficult the more you play the game of interior conversion. The magic happens one day, when you no longer want to turn away. You want to remain turned, and you completely forget about the old ways.

This is not like endurance in a marathon, or perseverance at work, or dedication toward achievements, or leadership in family life. This is endurance in turning toward God all the days, right up to the last day, to the end of your life, to the final hour. Knowledge, money, and self-mastery do not give you any endurance for this task. They usually turn you the wrong way.

Seven hundred years ago, in Book 1 of the Imitation of Christ, the author says something that our modern ears don't want to hear, since we hold knowledge so dearly today:

“As for knowledge, it comes natural to all of us to want it; but what can knowledge do for us, without the fear of God? Give me a plain, unpretentious farm-hand, content to serve God; there is more to be made of him than of some conceited University professor who forgets that he has a soul to save, because he is so busy watching the stars. To know yourself—that means feeling your own worthlessness, losing all taste for human praise. If my knowledge embraced the whole of creation, what good would it do me in God’s sight?” (Book 1, “Imitation of Christ.”)

Seven hundred years later that same conclusion can be found. What good is all this knowledge if I can't answer the bigger questions about life itself? What good is Google if there is only how and no why? If I know everything about the world, what good is that knowledge to me if I am without meaning? What good is money if I can only buy more stuff? In other words, what good does it do me to gain the whole world if I lose my soul in the process?

There is no way to turn back while our eyes are glued to phone and computer and TV screens and our ears only hear voices from the current culture of disbelief. If you are hung up on politics or gossip, you will remain turned away, indifferent, starving for meaning while your bite closes down again and again on only air. How difficult it was for me to break away from the trance of modern distraction and vice. I think of the movie The Matrix, where the computer cursor types out to Neo, “The Matrix has you.” It has us all. We believe we have the control, the power, that we are the rulemakers of our own lives. But that’s the trick. We are the controlled, the ruled, the servants of a sad and depressed culture, stroking our ego with beer and porn and memes and videos, pretending we’re not desperate for something more. As the old saying from Charles Baudelaire goes, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” The only way to break free is to shatter the illusion that you have control, and that will free your head to turn. The only way to freedom is through obedience to God, and the only way to the kingdom of heaven is through the Cross.

If you are angry at Christians, as I once was, about a rule that they follow, you might want to ask them, why aren’t they angry about the rules. How can religious people be so happy with so many rules? You can be assured that every Christian has vices, that there are rules that he wants to break. Without any mental strain at all, I can think of five rules right now that I like to break. There are temptations enough to satisfy even the most devout person. But instead of being angry about temptations and the rules, the convert does battle against them, knowing that the model that Christ provided is the way, the truth, and the life.

This acceptance of the rules is similar to why basketball players and fans are happy with the game of basketball when it’s played correctly, within the framework that it is intended to be played. Without rules, a basketball court would be chaos. It is exactly the rules that allow something beautiful to occur. Would you rather watch a badly refereed basketball brawl or a well-officiated basketball game? The latter of course, and you'll enjoy the game more because you aren't thinking about the rules. No, you are enjoying the game because there is agreement on the rules. Where no rules exist, you have lawlessness, you have chaos, and you have a mess. Where there are rules, you still get arguments, but you also get harmony. Without rules, you don’t even get to have a game. How baffling to think that rules bring happiness. Why? Forgiveness, hence, joy. With that joy, the rules are fine because those rules outlaw things that we humans have already tried, experiences that have already failed to fill our cup of life. Like St. Therese said, the rules are small inconveniences once you are drinking from the vine of Christian life.

It's not cool to be obedient, not in America. But now I don't really care what will make me cool for 40 or 80 years on earth, I want to know what God finds worthy for eternity, and the answer is in the four Gospel accounts of Jesus' life, the letters of Paul, and the lives of the saints. I don't care if a neighbor or a friend laughs at my faith. I don't care what arguments science or philosophy uses in attempts to tear down the Bible or the faith. I am the Merchant in the parable who has found the Pearl of great value. I am the one who finds the treasure in the field, who in his joy sells all to get the field. There is nothing that can disprove that Jesus is what he said he was. He literally is the way, the truth, and the life. I have to laugh when my former problems with literalism were resolved to the point that there are miraculous events in the Bible that I now receive…literally. And one of those literalisms that I believe is that "No one comes to the Father except through me." There is no study or syllogism or theory or axiom that can separate me from this Pearl.

Here’s what we don’t want to hear. The self must die to reach the goal. This is what keeps us from turning back to God. For our whole life we are told to promote ourselves, to work on our selves, to believe in ourselves. And then Jesus decides to tell us that the self must die. If you find the Pearl, you are strangely willing to let the self decrease and, ideally, disappear. “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." Once you find the Pearl, the rest of the rules make perfect sense. That is why Paul can say without batting an eye, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ that lives in me." His old self is dead and gone. Saul is no more. Paul is reborn, like a child. He has turned back to God and found new life. Nothing is the same.

To cling to the self is the road to serfdom. To return like a child to faith is the road to freedom. To honor God above the self is the key to breaking out of your prison cell, and the key is already in your hand. To say yes to God, like Mary's consent to Gabriel - her great fiat of "Let it be done to me"; to let God's will take precedence over your own - "Thy will - not mine - be done" - as Jesus said in the garden the night before he died on the cross; to be selfless and honest in prayer like St. Therese in her "Little Way"; and most of all to be like a child saying his or her nightly prayer, or looking upon a manger scene at Christmas, or gazing at the crucifix at the wounds in Jesus’ hands, feet, and side; and finally to know, without a doubt, that God joined us here on earth as a helpless baby, weak, vulnerable, suffering like us, that he entered our world, came into this world with us to share our pain in order to take it away...this is how you find your way back to belief and find the innocence that you lost.

You will never find it in a book of facts. Your job will never give it to you. Your partner or spouse won’t deliver the fullness that you seek. Knowledge and status and politics will never come close to where you want to be. But as long as those things consume your thoughts and your time, they will distract you and keep you from ever receiving belief, from experiencing the change. You will sit far away from the joy that your heart desires, bristling at God, in denial, secretly afraid that those parables and miracles might be true, clutching this world's pleasures close to you as if they have any value, and calling those who pray to the heavens fools.

All of this keeps you away, because you don't like certain rules. Because you can’t let go. Because surrendering feels weak when it is the only act that truly requires strength. And in the end, you won’t experience the joy because you were too afraid to be open, too angry about the rules, and at last alone because you never even attempted to play.

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The solution is so simple and yet it seems like a mountain that cannot be crossed. The solution is so basic that it almost seems absurd. And yet it is the solution, the only answer, and it's what St. Therese knew so well, as did St. Matthew:

"Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven."

To turn.

“Unless you turn,” it reads. The word turn shattered my assumptions. I often would see a crazy Christian on the street corner yelling, "Repent!" and thought “What a nutcase.” The word “repent” has so many strange connotations for me of people who seemed a.) to be insane, and b.) to mismatch the message of Jesus as I understood it. But to turn - this sounded different. To turn my life, to turn my mind, to turn: wait…what does that mean? To turn means to re-orient the direction I was facing. That made more sense. Repent sounded like fear-based correction. "Repent and avoid the fires of hell!" In “Repent for the end is near!” I can hear that old-time Jonathan Edwards in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God delivering hellfire and brimstone to a country church in the year 1741. You have to love a good Calvinist sermon for the fire it can light under people. But that never motivated me. You’d think it would. Fire hurts. The pain of burns is worse than anything I’ve experienced. But that message wasn’t really Good News to me. That sermon could never cause me to turn. I could not even hear that message. In fact, it drove me away, and so it was the opposite of persuasive, it was repulsive. Hellfire sermons are powerful to some people, but that’s not the honey that draws this fly into the Church door. No, that message was vinegar. Good behavior driven solely by fear seemed an absurd path to salvation, and once again, seems to make us more like dogs than humans with intellect and free will.

Comedians like George Carlin and the New Atheist writers latch onto that notion of "You will burn in hell for all eternity and your flesh will boil and melt and you will scream forever, but…remember, dear child, that God loves you." Modernity mocks this idea, and just as God has been reduced to an optional Santa Claus, the devil has been reduced to a Halloween costume or horned clown with a pitchfork, to the detriment of millions of people’s faiths.

By luck, I am just dumb enough to have hit bottom without having the terror of a fiery hell. By luck, I found hell. And only then did I return to the Gospels, but this time with proper guidance and a study Bible. Then I found something deeper than that old fear-based motivation of avoiding hell. To become fully awake, I was struck on the head repeatedly, as I had been dense to the meaning of "repent" for most of my life. It means to turn back to God. To turn away from sin. How does someone turn back to God? You just do. You turn your thoughts, your heart, and your mind.

It’s difficult to explain. You can’t turn until you are ready. You can try anytime you like. The old saying of “You can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink” works well here. You cannot turn until you are ready and listening. Turning does not work until your mind becomes open. Turning sounds so easy from people that have turned already, but for those not ready they will feel like their spine and neck are fused together. Ideally we could all just have Jesus stick his fingers in our ears and say “Be opened,” like he did to to the deaf mute dude in Decapolis. Barring that miracle, we can try to “Be open” by effort, by asking God for willingness to be willing. I have come to believe that this “openness” is the single and only question on the entrance exam to getting accepted into Christianity 101 and starting on the journey of faith.

There’s the Gospel story about the prostitute who is washing Jesus’ feet while he was at a dinner party with the Pharisees. This surely created a scene by her behavior and her very presence in the room. I suspect prostitutes and Pharisees didn’t ordinarily hang out, at least not publicly, if you know what I’m saying. The picture of this dinner party where a prostitute is on the floor washing one of the guests feet is, quite honestly, bizarre.

A word in this story jarred me, as so often one single word in the Gospel stories can do to people. Someone told me that once that “Books don’t change people, paragraphs do.” In this story, a single word changed me.

After Jesus briefly discusses the woman with his host, a Pharisee, Jesus goes on to tell the parable of “The Two Debtors.” One debtor owes 500 days of wages and one debtor owes 50 days of wages. The creditor, seeing that neither debtor can pay it back, forgives their debt. Jesus says, “Which of the debtors will love him more?” The host of the dinner, a Pharisee, says in reply, “The one, I suppose, whose larger debt was forgiven.” Jesus replies to him, “You have judged rightly.” (Luke 7:36-50)

Then a powerful word suddenly occurs in the next sentence, a life changing word.

“So I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven; hence, she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”

In this sentence the behavior of the woman is explained. There is a keyword in the middle of the sentence: hence. This is the turning point, the swivel on which the change is made. The turn happens on that hence.

She loves Jesus because she has been forgiven. She does not love him in order to obtain forgiveness. She is forgiven first. She realizes this forgiveness. Then she loves him. Forgiveness comes first, then the love. In fact, I’m not sure how it can be any other way.

The power of these little realizations repeatedly unlock the doors and windows to refresh my belief. I go from holding my breath to taking a deep inhalation of amazement. As usual, Bishop Robert Barron illuminates these things better to me:

It is most important to note that Jesus does not, strictly speaking, forgive her sins; rather, he notices that she has been forgiven. And the evidence for it is her self-forgetting love. She loves so passionately and so courageously…precisely because she has been so graciously and abundantly forgiven.
It is decidedly not the case, Jesus implies, that love precedes divine forgiveness as a sort of prerequisite; on the contrary, forgiveness precedes love as the condition for its possibility. It is not the case that one’s moral life must be upright in order to win divine favor; rather, the sheer gift of God’s favor tends to produce an upright moral life, a life of love.

(For more on this dinner party see pages 347-349 in the WOF Bible, the best $30 I have ever spent.)

Realizing that forgiveness is real and present for us, for all of us, results in the un-fusing of the neck and spine which allows us to turn, which then, afterward, results in the joy. With this combination, we can then annoy the world by running around telling everyone about the Good News of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and the forgiveness of sins.

That “hence” is the Good News. You are flawed yet forgiven, hence, happiness. Simple words.

Forgiveness, hence, joy.

That is sum of it all right there in three words. Notice the sentence is not “Fear, hence, joy.” No, it must be “Forgiveness, hence, joy.” This turning, however, does not happen without the right order of events. Maybe the sinful woman and I are just the fortunate ones, as we owed 500 days of wages that we could never pay back and somehow stumbling along in the dark, we suddenly understood that forgiveness is possible, hence, great love was found.

This is the same as the parable the man who finds the treasure in the field and sells all he owns to buy the field.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. (Mt 13:44-46)

The treasure in the field is forgiveness. Then “out of joy” he sells all that he has. Notice the placement of that qualifying phrase “out of joy.” The treasure is forgiveness, hence, in his joy he sells everything for it. He trips over this treasure called forgiveness, and only then is he joyful. He’s not joyful and then trips over the treasure of forgiveness.

The woman washing Jesus’ feet at the Pharisee’s dinner party has that joy. Why does she have it? She has found the treasure. What is the treasure? Forgiveness. She knows forgiveness is possible, hence…hence…hence, she is joyful. Forgiveness, hence the turn. Forgiveness, hence, joy.

Why didn't anyone tell me about this? How did I miss this?

To turn means to have an interior conversion, to be open. To turn does not mean throwing myself on the ground in fear. Love is a far stronger pull than fear. Observe a child that gets screamed at for doing anything incorrectly, versus a child that is taught and coached to do things correctly. Which approach do you think a child will respond to better in the long run? Screaming and fear, or teaching and love?

Just as a better understanding on how I should be reading the Bible awakened me, so did this idea of turning back to God. Suddenly the lunatic shouting on the street corner made sense, but I wanted to go and correct his sign. I want to stop my car, get out, and ask him, "Hey buddy, can I change the wording on your cardboard sign? I just need to change repent to be turn."

Repent means to turn. But what motivation is there to turn? Oh right, forgiveness. Yes, forgiveness, the treasure, the pearl, the whole reason for the Incarnated God of Christianity in the person of Jesus. Redemption, wow, what a concept. Oh right, that small detail of dying for our sins, of taking our sins upon himself, of entering into our suffering and not flinching so that he could defeat death and thereby set us free. Right, just that part, that minor detail.

I know the answer to some of life’s great questions, the hardest questions. When I look at the story of Peter walking on water, I can see it all there.Why Did Peter Sink? Because he took his eyes off God. What does Peter do? He cries out to Jesus for help. Why did Peter fail? Because he’s a flawed human being. Why does Peter cry out? Because he has faith. Why does Jesus save him? Because Peter is forgiven. Hence, Peter is back in the boat, with the treasure of all treasures, the forgiveness of Jesus. Once forgiven, hence, Peter is later witnessing to all, sampling Psalms like a rap artist, preaching “you will fill me with joy in your presence.” (Acts 2:28)

We can only enter this game of belief and faith if we turn back to God like children. Sometimes it takes a near drowning to make that turn, to cry out, to reach for the hand of God. Fairly often people just trip over the treasure, like the man in the parable, walking in the field. Surely it can happen by effort, but more often we seem to find it by accident or by bad choices. Faith certainly does not come by knowledge. It certainly does not come to he or she who has the most money. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet will get nothing for their knowledge and wealth, not an ounce of faith comes from those things. The poor have more potential than wealthy people. Likewise, doctors and professors get no more ability to communicate and pray to God than someone in prison, or someone in poverty, or someone with no education. The rich and educated may even receive less ability for faith, often because their own success, deserved or not, make them blind and deaf instead of open.

Rather, it’s the person that comes back like a child, that turns back, who will find the hints about the next world. He who orients himself toward God can regain the innocence that was lost. Turning back like a child creates understanding, and no, it will not restore all that was lost, and you won't be suddenly given all you pray for, but you are given more than that. Jesus never said suffering will go away. God is not a winning lottery ticket. We were given Jesus and his example. He did not watch our suffering from afar, but entered into the suffering with us. His mother suffered, his apostles suffered. They suffered more than us, and yet they had joy. That's the gift. That’s what we are supposed to imitate. Consider how crazy this line from Acts of the Apostles sounds. Paul is in prison, in chains, with his fellow believers, after being beaten and bound hand and foot. And what is Paul and his pal doing? Here’s what they are doing: "About midnight...Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God as the prisoners listened." (Acts 16:25) They are singing songs like they were at a nightclub. This is the baffling joy that drives non-Christians crazy.

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It's funny that so many people say they'll try anything. "I'll try anything once." They will eat any food, try crossfit, try hot yoga, pilates, therapy, support groups, meditation, fad diets, essential oils, herbal medicine, surgery, intermittent fasting, drugs, mountain climbing, buying boats and cars and RVs and motorcycles, second houses, threesomes, foursomes, every kind of strange sex imaginable, tattoos, piercings, mutilation, more horsepower, more acres, a thousand bottles of wine and whiskey, younger women, older men, hunting exotic animals, deep sea fishing, gossiping, inhalants, designer drugs, cliff-jumping, extreme sports. We will try anything. Anything at all. But we will not try one thing. Many of us will do anything, except for one thing. There is one thing we will not try. We will refuse to try turning to God. We will not try prayer. No way. Not a chance will we try that one thing.

Why?

Because it’s different from all of those other activities. The reason we won’t try it is because of the word control. Because it means letting go of something else. What is that thing we can’t let go of? It’s called the self. Because letting go means we are no longer in charge, no longer in control. We've been told we create the way ahead, we create our own reality. Me. You. I.

I get to be the one who decides how my life plays out. I get to pick all the things. I am in charge.

I used to say: "I'll try anything once." But not prayer or faith, or an honest reading of the Gospels using a study Bible. That I would never try. I would try anything except peering into my own heart and possibly facing the fact that maybe, just maybe, I was wired for God. Hell no, I won't go there. Not there. Anywhere but there. Like Sam-I-Am in Green Eggs and Ham, I will do anything, but not that one thing. No, never. No way to that one thing that could actually help. Absolutely not.

I was too afraid to ask for help, to need God, to want God in my life because it meant that I might be wrong about my wager that God was not real.

Here’s another saying: "If it doesn't kill you it will make you stronger." We are fooled by our own "strength." We think strength is what we need, when what we need is to admit our weakness in order to be free, in order to be strong. Our human strength quickly fades. Only an illness or an accident, which is one day coming for every one of us, on a day that we do not know, either of these is all it takes to sap our glorious strength. Anyone who exercises regularly and then misses a week of that exercise know how fast muscles atrophy and weaken. Anyone who feels strong today can surely remember the last bout of the flu they fought off where it made them a puddle of weakness.

My social media feed teems with wonderful stories of people overcoming obstacles, striving to be better, hurdling disabilities, and doing amazing things - These are inspiring and courageous stories. I love to read them. Getting a degree, running a marathon, hitting a sales goal, climbing the ladder. Outstanding. There are so many terrific stories of people’s lives. But never, not once, do I see anyone mention God or a blessing or a grace that helped the person achieve that of which they boast. I was the same in my pursuits of writing or triathlons or accolades at work. Always we hear about the power of the person, the drive of the achiever. We are instructed that only the achievers’ grit and skill earned the prize, and maybe some extra motivation or anger came from someone who told the winner they couldn’t do it, so they climbed that mountain to prove those naysayers wrongs. Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, in his Hall of Fame induction speech mentioned the names of those who had snubbed him or denied him along the way. Even in his success, Jordan was holding onto that list of names, using it as motivation to anger him, to drive him, to strive, to win, to achieve. And wow did he ever achieve. In this world, he has achieved a greatness and fame that few in history could match. We admire his tenacity and talent and merit, and for it he has glory attached to his name. But then you have to wonder why he wanted to prove them wrong so desperately, and it’s clear that he wanted those people to approve of him. Having not received the approval he sought, he showed them what “His Air-ness” could accomplish without them.

Today, God is considered absent from so many lives. Someone once said (I’ve heard it attributed to both Thomas Merton and Joseph Campbell):

“People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

My accomplishments are pitiful compared to these people on LinkedIn or to Michael Jordan, but that quote is a bullseye for the misdirection I discovered in climbing toward my own goals.

Long ago in his book Confessions, St. Augustine realized his ladder was on the wrong wall. Striving, winning, doing, achieving, pushing the limit, obtaining all that this world has to offer - that's what Augustine was doing. He began to see that those actions were the wrong verbs. Slowly he realized that his ladder was up against the wrong wall. Even after he knew that the goal was incorrect, he struggled to admit it. For years he battled what his heart already was telling him. The tug kept pulling at him until he had to answer.

What we seem to be telling ourselves today is “I'll be happy when...” That's the mindgame that keeps us in our slumber. I'll be happy when I retire. I'll be happy when I graduate. I’ll be happy when I get that next degree. I'll be happy when my kids graduate. I'll be happy when this school year is done. I'll be happy when I get a newer car. I'll be happy when my team wins the SuperBowl. I'll be happy when I get a raise. I’ll be happy when I get laid. And the joke around all of this sleepwalking is that we won't be happy when any of those things happen. We’ll just be done with those things, and we’ll look busy and feel important in the process, but still asleep regarding the bigger question.

When you get the thing you're after you'll have contentment for a while, maybe a month. If you’re lucky, a year. Three things can happen then. The first outcome is this: you get what you want and find out it didn’t fix anything, so you need another something, the next experience, the new thing. Second outcome: you get what you wanted, but you'll be anxious and worried that something will take it away from you. Or the third outcome, you'll lose the desired thing and then be miserable because you had it once; you were happy once but the world stole your happiness away. Then you be the person who says “I was happy when…” Most likely, if you still believe things and experiences will fulfill you, the process will start again. Because it must start again, as that is the flaw in our hearts. "I'll be happy when..." We cling and clutch to "I'll be happy when...dot dot dot."

I tried that. For about 20 years. Because I had already turned away from faith over religious rules that I did not like. Well, that and scientific facts that I knew but Isaiah and Daniel and Jeremiah did not know them.

What bothered me was the Bible, like the covenant of Noah and the rainbow, or Adam being 930 years old when he died. A literal interpretation turned me away entirely, so that I couldn't even read the book. Thousands of years of wisdom, and I discarded it because the book said Adam was 930 years old when he died, when I should have read that to mean, "Adam was very old when he died." I was looking for a book of scientific fact, and that is not what the Bible is, that is not what books of the Bible are. On my bookshelf I have a title named The Big Blue Book of Bicycle Repair. When I need to fix my bike, that is the book I open. Another book title on the shelf is Molecular Biology of the Cell. If I want to understand the inner workings of mitochondria or DNA, I can read that text book. I cannot look in the Bible for information on bikes or biology, just as I can’t look in a book about bikes or a book about cells for answers about the soul. If I read scripture like a rule book or a repair manual or a science book, I will never find what is actually inside it. It will never work. The cell does not explain the soul as much as the soul does not explain the cell. To make it even more interesting, each book in the Bible is a different kind of book so I have to know what I’m looking at before I know what I’m looking for.

To take a different example, Moby Dick is written somewhat like the Bible. The different chapters are written in wildly different styles, so that the novel almost seems like a collection of separate books, but with an overarching story. Melville seems to be playing at this and even confessed to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne that he had written a “wicked book,” a comment that I’ve not yet fully come to grasp, but I have my suspicions why he may have said that.

However, in this novel he wrote chapters in a variety of genres: a sermon, a hymn, a scientific treatise, and a Shakespearian drama. There are opening sections of the book called “Etymology” and “Extracts,” which are definitions and quotes about whales. There are parables and prophecies and mysterious allusions throughout which give literary critics eons of material to fuss over. But here is the funny thing: the chapter called “Cetology,” which is the study of whales, gives a factual, scientific account of whales. This Cetology chapter reads like a dull encyclopedia entry and I can hardly get through these pages. In fact, I have only read it once. I have skipped over it in subsequent readings of the book. A whale biologist of the 21st century would shred this chapter due to its scientific inaccuracies. The 19th century understanding of whales pales in comparison to what marine biologists know today. So if we try to read Moby Dick like many read the Bible, we would throw out the masterpiece because of the errors regarding the science of whales. If Melville’s book is a novel about whaling, but gets so much wrong about whales, then how can we trust anything about whales in this book?

But here’s the important part: no one ever reads Moby Dick for the chapter called “Cetology.” Herman Melville wasn’t writing a book to expound on facts about whales, despite the book being so much about whales and whale hunting. We read this novel because it speaks toward the deepest truths of the human heart, much of which we can’t even put our finger on, hence the literary critics and scholars submit an unending stream of papers and dissertations on this novel. Moby Dick is like the play Hamlet, where the argument over whether Hamlet was insane or only pretending to be insane has produced endless discussion and always will. The question of “Was Hamlet mad or just pretending?” is a battle taken up by each passing generation. In fact, there is so much discussion and writing around the potential insanity of Hamlet, that Oscar Wilde asked a different question: “Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad, or only pretending to be?” Of course, parallels to this arguing can be drawn to the same question of whether Jesus was either insane or who he said he was. “Lord, liar, or lunatic” goes the argument, and the answer we choose for that question has far greater consequences for our lives than whatever we may decide about poor Hamlet’s mental state.

The same happens with Moby Dick, where people scour and search for the meaning, oddly enough, just like Ahab in his search for the white whale. The irony is wonderful. Ahab hunts for ultimate meaning in the whale, while we search for ultimate meaning in Ahab’s hunt. This is why summaries of books about the themes or characters don’t come close to touching the actual experience of slowly reading these works of art. It is the totality of Moby Dick that pulls readers in, decade after decade. Readers attempt to grasp what this book is actually about. The novel is almost impossible to reduce into a tagline or list of bullet points, which is why literary types will likely remain interested in it for centuries to come. In fact, this is one of those books that I read every ten years or so and find that it is a completely different experience each time I come back to it, as the words have not changed, but I have changed. What I think is true has changed, so the book reads differently. This same perspective finally dawned on me about Scripture. Reading it as a child I revered and read the stories in awe, but then I dropped the sacred and it became lower-case scripture, and then later it became mere literature like Moby Dick, and then lastly into a dull history and bad science book. Only when I returned to it once again like a child did I see the profoundness of it and thereby regained reverence for it.

The Bible is a library of 73 different books, of different genres, but all with deep religious and human truth captured like lightning in a bottle. Like Moby Dick, there are wildly different genres and themes and characters. The flaws of humanity are exposed in great detail, so if you want to find ugly things, you can find them in there. In fact, I think the ugly parts are in there because they are supposed to be there. The Old Testament makes Game of Thrones look childish. Bloodshed and sex and the seven deadlies are on full display. Amid those Old Testament books are rules, laws, teachings, tales, and yes, many scientific inaccuracies. But if we only see the rules and facts then we may as well be a dog trying to read a book, because a dog can understand "No" and can be obedient without the added burden of learning to read. Likewise, if we are only looking for rules, then we might as well be a robot reading the book, as a decision tree can be followed by a robot via conditional programming. A robot could also discern whether scientific principles of the modern age are met as well, which we know that they are not. But fortunately, we are neither dogs nor robots. We are complicated human beings. Even if we evolved from other species, we know in our heart and mind and soul that there is something more going on, and that’s why Moby Dick and Hamlet and the Bible capture our attention. We are not just apes wearing clothing. We're not just slightly higher in intelligence and cognition than other animals and plants. We have intellect far beyond the rest of our fellow creatures, so far beyond that we determined how to control or capture every species of plant and animal in this world long ago. Our dominion over this planet is painfully clear, and we have been bad stewards, which actually violates one of our first appointed duties according to the Book of Genesis, but that is a topic for another day.

More importantly, no other animal creates music and art or studies philosophy and math. And no other being builds nuclear weapons or skyscrapers or hospitals. And no other species betrays and fights and envies and kills and shames with such cruelty. And no other species strives and accomplishes and helps and supports and teaches and loves like we do either.

There is something deeper in our hearts and minds happening than in the other living residents of this planet (sorry, pet lovers). Even if science, for all of its awesome findings, discovers life elsewhere, that will not change what we know in our hearts, that there is something beyond this universe, beyond the entire universe. When we reduce the idea of God to be a “Flying Spaghetti Monster” or Bertrand Russell’s teapot or my own “Street Light God” what happens is that we make a gross reduction of God into something knowable and therefore not-God. The fact that ancient Hebrew cosmology held that there was a dome or firmament over us instead of a galaxy, and pillars holding up the earth instead of gravity, does not reduce God any more than our limited understanding of the universe does today. Knowing the shape of this world and universe does not get to the bottom of the greatest questions. Moreover, any attempt to reduce God into being a teapot or plate of pasta or a street light, or any thing of this world, only buries the great questions once again in a childish mockery.

If we find another creature outside of our planet, that doesn’t remove our own question about the union of our body and soul. The suspicion about a sense of divinity touching our souls will not suddenly recede. We will still have the same questions and yearnings whether or not alien life exists. There is clearly something beyond the trifles we chase here on earth, as most of us can smell, touch, taste, see, or hear that calling. Something will also lie beyond what any other creature on another planet might be chasing, because they too live in the same universe that we do. I’ve heard this idea is only a “God of the gaps” theory, where people of faith just keep finding a place for God to hide even as science knocks down walls where God was hiding before. The cosmology of the Hebrew firmament was replaced by Ptolemy, Ptolemy by Copernicus, Copernicus by Newton, Newton by Einstein, and so on. Yet none of these illuminations about the universe resolves anything about the great “whys” of our presence. If anything they should make us more humble before God, more in need of mercy, since we are so small and vulnerable.

For those who feel the tug, or have awareness of a soul, we want to be joined to something higher, beyond nature, beyond cells and atoms or stars and black holes, something that we can't ever touch but constantly yearn to reach. To be indifferent about that yearning is one thing, but to consciously deny the yearning is to say quietly, “I don’t believe” and then the replacement must become "I'll be happy when...," or "I'll try anything once," or "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Those are all ways to ward off the calling in our soul toward a Higher Power.

That is why this idea of "love one another" and “love thy enemy” cannot stand alone without God. There is a reason that Jesus gave two commandments, and the second one, not the first one, was to "love one another." The first commandment from Jesus was to love God. First rule: love God. And the order of these two commandments matters immensely, as the second rule is useless without the first rule. Wealth, honor, power, and pleasure are fine things, if, and only if, they come after the two commandments given to us by Jesus. Everything rests on the keeping the the two commandments of Christ, and these two rules must be followed in order to work.

If you say you'll try anything once, what could possibly stop you from trying prayer when the tug comes? The only thing stopping me was myself. Once I amputated the enormous cyst, the chip on my shoulder, I could at least bow my head. What I thought made me special was what made me plain. When I kneeled to pray, my life began to change.

There is nothing so liberating as admitting weakness and recognizing how finite I am, and to say that "I am not God." To know that I don't have to create the truth, or solve the riddle, or define the meaning of life is like setting down a giant sack of bricks. To say, "Help me, God, I am lost and I don't know why." To say, "I can't fix this myself, I need you, God." It's a hard word to even say today: God. We've attempted to reduce him to a "sky fairy" or "flying spaghetti monster" or "Santa Claus,” all because we wanted to make him small like ourselves, or smaller, or even into a cartoon. And the funny thing is that in trying to make God small, we've made ourselves small. God is so much more than us, so much more than this universe that we can't even fathom it, but the tug in our hearts lets us know that God is there. We make up silly names for him because we can't explain it away, and mocking God is how we shield ourselves from what our hearts already know. So instead of listening, we live in a state of spiritual death, fighting over the rulebook instead of playing the game; picking apart facts and words rather than experiencing what faith can do. We want noise instead of the power of the wordless silence where we can reach for God and he reaches for us. St. Thérèse of Lisieux said:

“For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”

People love and respect St. Therese of Lisieux, the "Little Flower," who died in France at age 24. Why? Because she got it. She knew both the question and the answer. She understood the tug better than anyone. In her book, The Story of a Soul, she wrote:

“All the great truths of religion, the mysteries of eternity, plunged my soul into a state of joy not of this earth. I experienced already what God reserved for those who love him (not with the eyes, but with the heart); and seeing the eternal rewards had no proportion to life’s small sacrifices..."

She had a simple, joyful, deep faith that wasn't quibbling over a passage or rule that she didn't like. She learned by playing the game. She was living her faith and getting more contentment than anything this world could ever give, even calling those dreaded rules of prohibition "life’s small sacrifices." It was St. Therese's famous "Little Way" that amazed people, where "she obediently and graciously served others no matter where she was or what she was doing." This surge of heart toward God, this pure act toward faith, this constant receiving of grace, and this selflessness granted her freedom to be fulfilled beyond anything that we strive for in this world. She was the servant of God and others, just as Jesus commanded us to be. She embodied those two commandments in her entire life, in every action. The modern rock stars who died in their twenties will fade to anonymity long before St. Therese of Lisieux is last spoken of, because she tapped into the fullness of life through humility and it came pouring out of her into this world.

Only two commandments were given, and for many of us we can't even lower ourselves to speak the word "God." We can't even attempt the first commandment because we can't let go of our own pitiful power. Meanwhile, we can see someone like St. Therese who did not start with the rules, but started playing the game, and ended up a starter on varsity, All-American, Olympian, and All Around Champion Gold Medalist. She was and still is the ultimate rock star.

The problem and the solution is simple. The problem is caused by replacing God with ourselves, because we think we know better. Somewhere along the way, after we lost our innocence - maybe in our teens, maybe as a child, maybe as an adult - we decided God was not real. The pain and suffering we've experienced could not possibly be allowed in a just universe, so we killed God off in our mind. But he never left our hearts. We can never shake that presence, that nagging feeling that God might still be there. So we keep looking elsewhere while he stands right behind us, waiting to be recognized again. He's just waiting for us to acknowledge him.

God doesn't need us. He's not the lost one. We are. We are the ones that need God, not the other way around. But we have decided we can't see him while we search everywhere else for a replacement, and these sideshows are pathetic surrogates in the end for what we are really seeking.

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Two things that scare us are corpses and ghosts. Peter Kreeft wrote about this, noting that these scare us because they are separated things that belong together. When apart, dead bodies revolt our senses and spirits terrorize our minds. Horror movie plots depend upon our disturbance at this separation of body and soul, or if not total separation, then the disordering or the dismemberment of bodies and souls. Without the soul the body is not animated, and without the body the soul is as invisible as a passing breeze.

Now, I am not a trained philosopher, but it seems fairly straight forward that if God doesn’t exist, then our soul fades away with him, and along with those things, so goes our free will. Worse still, in a godless universe where we are happenstances of chemistry, the “do unto others” notion begins to unglue. Things we hold in our minds fall apart quickly once the soul is denied. The soul is like a binding agent, like an egg in a recipe, that keeps the flour of matter held together. Remove either part of the recipe and the whole cookie crumbles.

This presented a real problem for me, as the idea of the Golden Rule clung to me even after falling away from faith. The concept of “do unto others” is found in various religions and cultures throughout history. However, the further step of “love your enemy” is unique to only a few. Jesus was quoting the Old Testament in his two commandments to “love God” and “do unto others.” He did not invent it himself, he was quoting Moses and Proverbs, but taking it even further into forgiveness. To make the point stick, he claimed to be God, the actual one and only God, the living God, and then he lived out this practice of loving his enemies, all the way to his final breath on the Cross.

This is the trouble with Jesus.

He raised the bet so high that even if other books of wisdom say, “love your enemy,” none of them declare that the speaker or author of the phrase was God himself. This claim that he makes cannot be understated. He says he is God in the flesh. Imagine hearing someone say that to you. What is most unbelievable to me is that I believe him when he says it.

More strange still is the fact that even non-believers quote and paraphrase Jesus, when they should be rejecting him entirely as a liar. Many atheists are obsessed with Jesus, but only to disprove him or mock him. Yet they can’t look away. They can’t stop talking about Jesus. The trouble here is that what he says is insane to us, but then he doesn’t act insane. Instead everything he says and does becomes convincing that he is not lying, which is why we cannot stop reading and arguing about him, and naturally, those who deny him wind up hating his followers. Oddly enough, Jesus predicted all of this, telling his followers that they would be hated. Wow, was he right about that.

If Jesus is not God, then what else would Jesus be but an arrogant and insane person? That’s why the response from deniers comes like a hammer. If you don’t see the God in Jesus, then the response could only be anger. Really, who could possibly be taken serious saying, “I forgive your sins,” unless the person saying it was God? Who could possibly have the nerve to speak it, and expect to be believed, save God himself?

The Thomas Jefferson Bible is an attempt to circumvent this problem of Jesus’ divinity, but Jefferson missed the point from the start. Jesus is not only instructing us about God. He is very clearly telling us that he is God. Jefferson cut out all miracles and supernatural events of his Bible, keeping just the teachings of Jesus. As a Deist, Jefferson believed in God, but not in the divinity of Jesus. But why would anyone, let alone the wise Jefferson, keep the teachings of an ordinary flesh-and-bone person that claimed to be God but was lying about it? If Jesus is not God, why would anyone care what he said about anything, on any topic?

When I was a non-believer, I thought Thomas Jefferson was onto something, but at some point in my struggle with faith in the Resurrection I realized that if the miracles are not true, then Jesus is not God, and that would make the teachings a complete waste of time. Buddhism has great teachings, so you can get that there. Stoicism has all the morals and self-denial you’ll ever need, and a ton of great sayings to use in place of prayer. Greek mythology has more characters and better drama. We don’t need or want an “ethical teacher” who says he is God, unless he actually is God. If he is truly the incarnate God, then yes, we want that. We want that very much. More than anything in the world. There are plenty of people in history who have believed they are God. But we don’t believe any of those people. We only believe this one carpenter who made the claim.

If the miracles and Resurrection did not happen, then Jesus is a fraud. But if the miracles are true, then the teachings matter. No, it’s more than that. Then everything he ever said or did matters immensely. Quite honestly I would rather Jefferson had carved a version of the Gospels that kept the miracles instead of the teachings, because while the teachings are wonderful, the Resurrection is why a billion people occupy pews every week. They do not get dressed up for church on Sunday morning because he told the parable of the talents or upbraided some Pharisees about the meaning of the law. The Resurrection is everything. The teachings interpret the rules we are the live by, but they do not provide the reason for belief. The reason for belief is the miracle, not the parables. I don’t like rules. But I love the miracle. Thus, I love the parables, too. If the Resurrection didn’t happen, then those rules don’t matter. But the more I read the Gospels the more I realize that I can not help but see that Jesus is God. There is just no other way around it. I cannot read it any other way.

So as a result, if you see that Jesus is the incarnate God, his “do unto others” and “pray for your enemies” become real commands. You don’t have martyrs of other faiths praying for their enemies while being tortured and killed, as Jesus did when he cried out, “Forgive them for they know not what they do." Then you have the many saints doing the same thing, like St. Stephen or St. Maria Goretti or Good King Wenceslaus. For a believer the right answer to every situation is to imitate Jesus, but this proves very difficult. This is like reading fan fiction, where the imitator never lives up to the original writer.

Sure, praying for your enemies sounds good on paper, but that idea is not natural to us. Love my enemy sounds reasonable when I am comfortable and full and warm. Most of us live in greater comfort than any king who existed before the inventions of refrigeration or indoor plumbing. In a stable society, with well-fed people, in warm houses, and plenty of jobs, then, yes, “love your enemy” seems entirely possible. But many people today can feel how tenuous and fragile this order of our modern society actually is and no prophet is needed to announce that we are likely occupying a temporary state in human history.

This problem of being only a creature, only chemistry, is troubling, or should be troubling to us all. If we have intellect but no real free will, with no goal save that of our next meal or personal achievement, hope and charity sink like stones. If we lack souls, then we are solely creatures, and creatures forget “do unto others” when resources grow scarce. When it comes time to eat, a wolf does not think of the good of the pack until its own belly is full, nor does a blade of grass consider its neighbor when searching for water in a drought. Plants and animals do not divest of their resources or pray for their enemies, they merely strive for self-preservation and reproduction.

These ideas would sometimes corner me when the “noonday demon” of depression would arrive unannounced, at any hour, not only noon. Then, as a creature, I had few places to turn, but none of those places could really help.

Yes, there are pills and therapy, but I could not cry out, "Help me, science!" to answer the deepest longing of my heart, which was never fully satisfied with what this finite world can offer. I could read about Cognitive Behavioral therapy, but that was an arrow still aimed at the self. Mindfulness was another self-buttressing solution, and was a bit warmer to the problem but still faced earthward. Then there was talking to someone, but the talk would give guidance toward lifestyle changes, yoga, hobbies, and offer pamphlets and especially pills. Psychiatry since the time of Sigmund Freud has loathed faith so a nudge never came from there. After making all the lifestyle changes and trying all the suggestions, it always seemed that pills was the actual answer.

Doctor: Any tobacco or alcohol or drug use?

Me: None.

Doctor: So you have a healthy diet and exercise regularly?

Me: Yes. Except for daily breakfast cereal with 9 grams of added sugar per serving.

Doctor: What about yoga?

Me: Yes. I’ve done that.

Doctor: How is your job and family relationships?

Me: All very stable.

Doctor: And you have hobbies and friends.

Me: Yes.

Doctor: What about financial difficulties?

Me: I have a good job.

Doctor: Are you overstressed?

Me: Only when I drink too much coffee.

Doctor: And you’ve read those pamphlets I gave you?

Me: Yes, and many other books.

Doctor: (pensive, coming to the end of his WebMD list of suggestions) Have you tried prayer?

I’m kidding. Of course the last comment didn’t happen. No, here is what the last comment was:

Doctor: (pensive, coming to the end of his WebMD list of suggestions) Well, I guess we can increase your dosage. How many milligrams are you taking? I’ll write a new prescription for you.

Always pills. Always pills. Hooray for pills! I felt like the scene in the movie Dumb and Dumber where Jim Carrey is stuffing rat poison pills into a man’s mouth and telling him, “Pills are good. Pills are good.”

Science, that trusty tool to fix all the things, could offer facts and instruct me about neurotransmitters and receptors and synaptic clefts. Better yet, science could do some magic with those pills that seemed to provide a solution. But in the end I realized that pills did not resolve the problem any more than getting high or drunk ever solved a problem. Taking pills to address spiritual problems is like taking Advil to heal a compound bone fracture. It’s the wrong treatment.

So science wasn’t the solution.

Nor could I say, “Help me, self!” when the well inside was already dry. The cistern was cracked, my tank was empty, so I could not draw up the strength needed to restore myself, as my self lacked the necessary mortar to seal the drain. In fact, my self was the problem, so I only could pretend for a while to “suck it up” or “man up.” As an employee of large corporations, I was very good at keeping up the adage “Fake it until you make it,” as that is the lifeblood of office culture. But faking takes a toll. At some point, unless you are especially gifted with the twin pillars of pride and vanity, faking it becomes hard to maintain. Along with drinking issues, this is another stop in life where I discovered the flaw in willpower, as the self has its limits. Both science and willpower eventually run into finite walls. What a surprise then when I discovered that the Holy Spirit not only seals the cistern, but it fills it too, and as a bonus it can pass through those finite walls.

No knowledge or possessions or status or science or self-assurance could help me with the underlying questions. “If you’re felling depressed,” I was told, “it’s because there is a chemical imbalance in your brain that requires medication.” Whenever I heard this I could not help but think of Brave New World and the drug called soma, where the characters would take this wonder drug to bury any uncomfortable feelings or questions about their life and the universe. The narrator even says “…that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.” In fact, various lines from the book says it all. Soma had “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”

What I heard from my fellow atheist friends and my doctor was what Huxley’s sex-obsessed character Lenina says in the book when Bernard is feeling blue:

“…why you don't take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You'd forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you'd be jolly. So jolly.”

So I did. Or I tried to be jolly. I pretended for periods of time to have conquered the problem, but it never truly disappeared. I tried to answer the yearning, to fill the void with sand, to pulverize it, to medicate it, to cure it with therapy, to use mindfulness, and to ignore it through chasing goals. But science and my personal autonomy proved inadequate in fastening any kind of lasting meaning to existence. Science did not satisfy the heart, nor did my own attempts at sculpting truth suffice.

Science feeds our need for certainty, for actual answers, and science is excellent for finding truth in certain spaces. I should qualify that; the hard sciences are reliable at finding truth through measurement and experiment. There are various other “sciences” that do not share the same rigor as chemistry and biology and physics, but even these three fields are beginning to have bleed-through from non-scientific political and social ideologies. Yet, even solid science cannot get us all the way to the goal, to the full “why.” The “whys” I am speaking of are all simple sentences: the why of existence, of being, of knowledge, of gravity, of time, of beginnings, of endings, of justice, of truth, of goodness, of beauty, of righteousness, of suffering, of forgiveness, of redemption.

The real questions were these subtle “whys.” Like shadows behind a wall, the shapes were papered over, kept in hiding by small talk and distractions. We could all see the shapes but we avoided talking about them. Instead we talked about these things: “Have you seen the ?” “Did you watch the game yesterday?” “Can you believe what President said?” “Have you seen the new ?”

Those were not the questions I cared about. The main question underneath, that I was seeking, is encapsulated in this quote:

"Man will always yearn to know, at least in an obscure way, what is the meaning of his life, of his activity, of his death." (Gaudium et Spes, 41)

I would go to great lengths to find answers to these questions via ideology in a book or through the lens of my self and my experience. But sooner or later, a little tug would come back to me. As it always does, I’d feel the tug, like the nibble of a fish biting a hook.

This electric feeling of “the tug” was like that which comes through a fishing pole, when the tug of something on the hook alerts the mind, while simultaneously quickening the heart. Anyone who has gone fishing and had the luck of getting a nibble, or better yet, catching a fish, knows this feeling. The tug of the fish brings full awareness. You become awake to what is happening in the water, where you cannot see, but you know full well something is there because you can feel it. We only have our senses to know anything, but this kind of tug that I’m talking about goes past our usual senses into something deeper, to a sense in the heart that cannot be quantified, captured, or tested like other things.

Old ideas would come into motion. Something would hint to me that there is more than just work and paying bills or having sex or drinking beer. But I would shut those thoughts down because I did not want to open those archives. I was worried that what I had denied might be true. That was the real fear. I believed that I had control and that God was not real. But then on occasion the tug became a strike, a direct bite. A fight. Suddenly then I’d be wrestling with the question: what if it is true? What if I am not the creator of my destiny? What if there is something more to life?

For anyone who knows what I’m talking about - this feeling of a tug - if you doubt or deny God, you will probably ignore that tug, like I did, and continue onward. No shortage of TV series and movies and hilarious cat videos await, so you can carry on for years with staring into screens. But sooner or later in life you may not want to ignore it. You may not be able to ignore it forever as some event will force the issue. The beauty of free will is the choices we get to make. The path we are being guided to walk is to ignore the tug. That’s what we are being told by every part of society: TikTok advertisement: “You are the good thing.” Christina Aguilera: “You’re beautiful, in every single way.” L’Oréal Paris: “Because you’re worth it.” Nike: “Just do it.” Harley Davidson: “American by birth. Rebel by choice.” Reebok: “Cheat on your girlfriend, not your workout.”

I guess the slogan, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner,” will just never do well in sales. Memento Mori sounds better as a slogan, but the translation, “Remember one day you will die,” also probably won’t sell widgets. “Take up your cross and follow me” will probably not be a Bud Light Super Bowl ad any time soon. Well, I guess these slogans aren’t for the short term. In the long run, however, as in eternity, these slogans work wonders.

How funny it is to me that I refused to take orders from anyone, but all the while I was being told, guided, instructed what to do by advertisers and businesses and governments and influential people. As the doctor guided me toward pharmaceuticals, the political parties and ad agencies and sports leagues and social media were going to great lengths to keep me distracted from addressing the tug, from calling on the aching question that was raising its hand. While the world was selling me on freedom and autonomy, they were telling me what to do every step of the way. They were telling me, “Don’t be a fool. Don’t look into it. Whatever you do, do not ask the hard questions.”

But the tug was summoning me to something bigger, to this much greater question, far bigger than what Apple product to buy or Netflix show to watch. And I didn’t want anything like God to be true. I did not want it to be valid. Because then someday I would have to revisit those rules, those old bronze age edicts that I felt so unfair, so out of touch with our modern world, and that bothered my sense of freedom because they said “No” to my behavior. I didn’t want to be challenged.

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A few years ago, during a basketball game that I was watching, a player leaped forward for a loose ball and landed on his knees. He gathered the ball and while doing so he slid across the floor, as he wore kneepads which allowed him to coast along the hardwood for a yard or so. With only a two point lead in the game, this “slide” caused an eruption of fans yelling “Traveling! He traveled!” The referee ignored them and the game continued.

When a timeout was called, the coach approached the referee and, as I was in earshot, I overheard the argument about whether or not the slide constituted a traveling violation. The referee argued for the slide’s innocence and the coach raged about the ruling. So when I went home that night, I had to look up the rule.

From the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) rulebook I found a full page on the violation of “Traveling.” I read it looking for this “slide” scenario to see if the coach or the referee was correct. In rule 25.2.2, I found the answer:

25.2.2 A player falling, lying or sitting on the floor: It is legal when a player falls and slides on the floor while holding the ball or, while lying or sitting on the floor, gains control of the ball. It is a violation if the player then rolls or attempts to stand up while holding the ball.

The referee was correct. A player can slide with the ball, provided he or she doesn’t roll or standup during the slide. The momentum of the slide does not constitute a step. While holding a basketball, you could slide from one end of the gym to the other and not be called for traveling. A slide only becomes a traveling violation if the player in mid-slide or post-slide tries to take a step or roll over.

That was the first time I had ever cracked open a book of basketball rules despite having enjoyed years of playing this sport as a kid. The fact that I had never, not once, referred to a basketball rule in an official document struck me as interesting, because I felt that I knew a solid amount of detail about the game, but never once had I studied the rules. The idea of reading the rules never occurred to me, but playing for hours in driveways and open gyms drew me in like a moth to flame.

Playing or watching the game of basketball, or baseball or football, interested me naturally, and made me grow to love the sport. I could talk endlessly about the sport. Reading the rulebook, however, does not interest me. Aside from referees and coaches, there are probably few people that do read the rulebook.

When kids learn to play a sport, you don't give them the rulebook. No, they first start playing the game and learn the rules as they go, and soon find that the rules are there for good reasons. Take kickball, for instance, where nearly any kid can play and while having fun, learns the rules. By playing kickball, a kid learns most of the rules of baseball and softball, too, since kickball is largely the same game. But no one stops a kickball game to describe how a force-out works by pulling out and referencing the rules of USA Baseball.

In other words, I became interested in a sport by playing the game. The love of a sport grows by practicing the sport. It is the same with faith. Here you may roll your eyes and many will stop reading, as I’ve made the comparison that will drive most readers or listeners right to the “unsubscribe” button.

But consider this. No one gets to faith by reading Leviticus. Likewise, no one reads the Ten Commandments and throws up their hands in prayer. Instead, they throw their hands up in prayer first, and later, perhaps much later, become interested in the Ten Commandments.

This I did not understand. I was hung up on faith and religion due to rules or positions around policies like abortion or immigration or taxes or the welfare state - pick a card, any card. I had opinions and comments for anything and everything, like we all do. But just as I didn't get any closer to faith in my failed attempts to "read the Bible" because I didn’t like certain phrasings and rules, neither did I get closer to faith by reading the daily news, which in large part is always about our modern laws and societal rules.

I believed I could never be a Christian due to Catholic and Evangelical ideas around laws. And I was right. I could not be one. I would never be a Christian because I didn't even understand what it meant to be a Christian. I wasn't practicing. I wasn't playing the game. No, I was scouring the rulebook for things I didn't like. Doing so, I banned myself from the stadium, and so I couldn't play or even be a spectator. I was like a baseball fan who didn’t like the designated hitter rule, so I quit watching the game forever. This reminds me of a quote by the biologist Herbert Spencer:

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

Through my contempt, I was barred from the information and truly stuck in everlasting ignorance. I only saw a stack of rules, and from my angle it blocked any view of the bigger picture.

The faith of Christianity disallows many activities and choices that we desire, like watching porn and getting drunk and having meaningless hookup sex and hoarding money, so yes, there are rules. People really don't like that Christians fence these activities out via their rules. I hated rules as much as the next guy because I loathed having any rules lorded over me. I wanted to be my own boss.

Thus, an impassable mountain sat between me and faith. It is impossible to have faith in the state I occupied because contempt prohibits any attempt. But the rules of the Christian faith were not the problem. I thought the rules were the problem, but that was not the problem. No, it was my yearning to be self-sufficient in all things that blocked a much deeper yearning. I did not want to give up an inch of ground, territory that I imagined I had fought for and won by rejecting the traditions and stories of older generations. Here I was, the modern hero, uprooting the tales of what I considered to be a 2000 year hoax that had somehow duped eighty generations of men and women. Me against the world. If someone had told me, "Freedom comes from obedience, not rebellion," I would have raged at them and spat, "Don't tell me what to do!" That was my motto.

As long as the goal of my life was centered on drinking or money or sex or work, then of course I didn't want any rules. How could I? In private, I wanted to do whatever felt good. In public, I wanted to do whatever made me appear cool to my peers. More importantly, I didn't want to be challenged by anything, ever. Especially, I didn't want to be challenged by rules passed down from ancient, superstitious goat herders who didn't even know that the earth went around the sun. What possible value could I get from bronze age wanderers that had never heard of natural selection or calculus or atomic weight or absolute zero?

That is how the shield formed around me. I bristled at laws that appeared to go against the mantra of "love one another," while crowning myself with the knowledge gained by human ingenuity (not my ingenuity, mind you, but others), I felt that progress through scientific revelation, not religion, would rectify the problems of the past and usher in the glorious future.

There was one devastating problem with these positions. This future utopia through science and economics required me to have a massive amount of faith in humans as a group. In fact, I think it requires more faith to believe in humans than it does to believe in God. After all, we have immense evidence of what humans do to one other, from all ages. Even this week, horrors permeate the news, even while we are right now at the greatest heights of technological prowess and scientific progress.

So this drive for progress that seemed like the answer to fix ourselves and our world, has not done it. Conversely, for all its wonders, progress has simultaneously led to many unanticipated problems. "Every kind of progress is a two-edge sword." This can be observed repeatedly in history, where science or invention introduces or discovers something about the world we live in, and that knowledge can be used for good or evil, usually both. You don’t get fireworks without someone in China first playing around with mixtures of sulfur and saltpeter, but the fun of that first sparkler was quickly recognized as gunpowder for weapons. In the same way, you don’t get to billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide spewing in the atmosphere without hundreds of small accretions of knowledge, take for example Alessandro Volta’s toy pistol that fired a cork when hydrogen touched an electric spark. There is always this give and take with the word “progress", but today the pull of it draws us further away from meaningful questions and has us instead cleave to facts and facts alone, with the idea of God being sidelined ever more each year. This makes the The Big Empty inside us yawn even more and reveal its bottomless chasm.

Faith in science and faith in atheistic ideologies means having faith in humans over God, but here is the devastating problem with that brand of faith: to love one another goes directly against our instincts and those ideologies, without God, cannot claim any kind of foundation for morality. No matter how much knowledge we have, at our core we are flawed with jealousy and hate and lust and greed. This idea about loving one another didn't come from post-Enlightenment thinker like Immanuel Kant or Karl Marx or Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs, it came from Jesus, a carpenter from the first century. This is the underlying problem of everyone who is claiming “love” for their cause. Even atheists like to talk about Jesus and his message of “love one another.” Every group wants a piece of that second commandment. But all of these “loves” quickly contradict each other and we’re left in a pickle. The public campaign of secular and religious groups relentlessly bangs the drum that “love is on our side.” But the secular side only wants the second of Jesus’ two commandments. They reject his first commandment completely. Definitely, we all want the second one, but absolutely not the first one. They want Jesus on their side even while they deny God.

This might be the most fascinating thing of all to me about Jesus.

Even atheists and Marxists somehow want to claim Jesus for their argument. They want Jesus in their corner, but only if he’s got nothing supernatural or transcendent about him. What they don’t seem to realize is that if Jesus is not supernatural, then he’s a liar and a lunatic, which I talked about in my own struggle to come to faith in the Resurrection (known as the Trilemma from C.S. Lewis: Jesus is Lord, lunatic, or liar - and you must pick one).

But there is this magnetism to Jesus, even among those who say they reject God. This is utterly confusing to me. Even those who despise the idea of God will still quote the words of Jesus. Even the atheists say, “But Jesus loved everyone. He loved the murderers and the prostitutes. He wouldn’t judge. Judge not lest yet be judged.” Everyone, believer and non-believer, wants Jesus on their side. I wonder why that is. Why is he so powerful of an idea to us? Why can’t we stop talking about Jesus? What is going on? Somehow, someway, despite every effort of this world to stifle and crush the fire of faith in this carpenter, it fails every time, in every generation. There is a story of Napoleon telling a Cardinal Consalvi that his armies would destroy the church, to which the Cardinal replied: “If in 1,800 years we clergy have failed to destroy the Church, do you really think that you'll be able to do it?” While amusing, it is indeed a fact, one that we are living through once again today. Why is it that nothing can destroy faith in this man, or in his Church? With all these hated rules and prohibitions, where generation after generation fights against it, why does Christianity remain standing?

I have some ideas about that.

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In my slow conversion, the deadbolt that barred me from faith was always true belief in the resurrection, since the entirety of Christianity depends on it, as St. Paul himself wrote. Without it, the whole story falls apart, and none of the other miracles matter. The resurrection of a sinless human opens the door to the forgiveness of sins and new life for us all. If there is no resurrection, then Jesus is simply an insane charlatan that deserves no respect or worship. This situation of the resurrection puts everyone into a decision point about whether to believe or not, and this is exactly why Christianity is so challenging. The leap of faith all comes down to the resurrection.

To me the proper response if you do not believe in the resurrection is rejection of all of the Christian faith. Literally, none of it is worth the paper it is written on if he is lying, even the teachings and parables, because to claim divinity without it being true really would be a mental disorder. There is no other response but rejection if the resurrection did not happen, as the teachings of Jesus become moot if the miracle is false. There are lots of teachers in history we can use that didn’t claim something so outlandish. Especially today with all the meditation and self-help books, we can find maxims and aphorisms to live by that do not require belief in miracles.

On the other hand, if the resurrection happened, then you have no choice but to fully embrace Jesus as the savior. This is why belief is hard, because if the resurrection is true, everything is true. All of it, and yes, that includes the hard parts. The resurrection truly is an either/or selection that we have to make, and if the default is choosing doubt and ignoring the claim, the much more difficult choice is to examine and review whether or not to believe in the resurrection.

This dilemma presents a fork in the road on how to live your life, one that must be chosen. This is not like being asked to believe if Athena really sprung from Zeus’s head or to believe in the tree worship of ancient tribes in The Golden Bough, this decision puts the miraculous directly in front of us. And we must choose, as even choosing not to make a choice is itself a choice. Making no choice at all is choosing to deny the miracle. That is the default position, but still it is a choice. I love mythology and trees. Really, who doesn’t? Yes, I love Lord of the Rings and giant oak trees and Ovid’s Metamorphosis and cottonwoods. In fact, I like science too and stand in awe of the everyday miracles of surgery and treatments that save lives. But this dilemma about Jesus and the resurrection cannot be avoided because the reality is that our heart knows there is something more than this world, beyond the confines of science and what is known and knowable, that God is so far beyond our ability and understanding that something supernatural, that is beyond nature, can exist and touch our world. The author of the universe cannot be understood, but you can see the wonder in the world everywhere in art and nature. We are characters in the author’s book who cannot know what is outside of our story here, but we can feel the presence of something higher than just tall tales or the periodic table of elements.

He declared multiple times that he is the way to eternal life. That is a hard pill to swallow for modern rationalists who seek data and a cause for all things. “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live,” and “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” I guess this is why Jesus says we have to enter through the narrow gate, because it is hard to find and perhaps harder to decide to walk through that gate. I think it is mainly hard to squeeze my mind and ego through it.

I’ve gone on in a prior post about how the scenario at the tomb on Easter Sunday sowed doubt in me. The story sounded too fantastic to be true, and lacking answers I let my doubt win rather than pursue the subject, since I didn’t get the impression that asking questions was encouraged. I’ve come to realize that Catholicism can handle any question thrown at it, especially ones surrounding the divinity of Jesus. Today I only wish I had sought a deeper understanding of faith sooner in life. I have come to realize that there is no stone left unturned in the writings of the church and the Catechism, as they have spent 2,000 years turning over stones.

Specifically, for the resurrection, there are many points that tipped the scales from doubt to faith, but not without probably cause and good reason. As Frank Morison noted in his book Who Moved the Stone? about his own conversion to the truth of the resurrection:

I have wrestled with that problem and found it tougher than ever I could have conceived possible. It is easy to say that you will believe nothing that will not fit into the mold of a rationalist conception of the universe. But suppose the facts won't fit into that mold? The utmost that an honest man can do is to undertake to examine the facts patiently and impartially, and to see where they lead him.

The main reasons are below, but each could be a lengthy post of its own.

-The fearful and defeated Apostles turns into fearless and unbreakable believers. No one dies for a lie. Not this way. People may be willing to die for a lie that gives them social standing or power or fame or honor, but the followers of Jesus got none of that. They received the opposite, becoming outcasts and rejects of society.

-If the Romans or people of Jerusalem could have produced the body of Jesus, they would have done so. No one ever did.

-No one disputes that the tomb was empty. This is a massive fact, even for those that accuse the Apostles of stealing the body. Clearly the tomb was empty. This is a problem for the Romans, Jews, and Apostles. Even Mary Magdalene first announces that the body has been taken. Had his body been moved to a different tomb or location, rumor and hearsay in the city would have created cause for a search, and even today pilgrimages to the “correct” tomb in Jerusalem would be occurring. This didn’t happen. The powers at the time try to convince people that the Apostles moved the body, but these men were all cowering in fear, scattered across the city or returned home. Someone in the city of Jerusalem would have known where this second burial location was at, but no one appears to even be searching for a kidnapped body.

-If the Apostles had moved the body or knew of someone moving the body, one of them would have cracked under the numerous beatings and torture and martyrdom that came to them over the next thirty years. They never waver in their story, not once. None of them. Human beings cannot keep a secret, so if they had a secret of such magnitude, it would have come out.

-If it was all made up, the writers of the Gospels and Acts and James would not have mentioned a 7 week gap between the death of Jesus and the beginning of the preaching the Good News. This gap only causes doubt or gives detractors an entry point to suggest that the Apostles spent these 7 weeks crafting a story. This is one of the elements of the timeline that actually creates doubt. If the early believers wanted to sell a contrived fable, they would have claimed their preaching began the moment Jesus had risen. But they don’t write that - they all agree that they were confused and fearful until 7 weeks after the death and Resurrection.

-Once they do begin to tell the story of the Resurrection, after Pentecost, the Apostles manage to win over people in the same city where the trial, death, and burial happened. They convince people who were there in the city when it happened. The Apostles didn’t sneak off elsewhere, far away, and start telling people who might be duped, they stood in the city where it happened, where everyone knew it had happened and had even witnessed Jesus’ ministry. The original band of evangelists were uneducated people with no social standing who suddenly begin to convince people that the Resurrection occurred.

-Over 500 people saw the risen Jesus. It’s not just a handful of people. The “hallucination” theory might work for one or two, but not 11, and certainly not 500.

-Women are recorded as the first witnesses at the tomb and this is important, as culturally they were not even allowed to be witnesses in court. This would not help make the case, so it’s clear that the women were the first to witness, or the Gospel writers would have left it out. They would not have wanted to mention this since it worked against their case, but they did mention it, so why would they make it up?

-Over and over in the Gospels and Acts details are included that allow for doubt, or questions about the miracles. The authors are clearly not crafting a tale because elements of the stories do not make sense unless they were true. If they were trying to build up the apostles, why tell about Peter’s denial of Jesus? Why admit Jesus wanted to escape his fate in the Garden by “passing this cup”? Why have Jesus utter the words, “My God, My God, why you have forsaken me,” on the cross? Why not make the stone at the tomb crumble like magic? Why admit that the Apostles fell asleep in the Garden? Why characterize the Apostles as bumbling rubes so frequently? These books read like no other literature ever written and the writers were not literary types or trained storytellers. These aren’t troubadours, they are fishermen and tax collectors. The reason for all of these curiosities in the Gospels is that the truth needs no rehearsal.

-Crucifixion was a brutal spectacle meant to shame. The fact that the savior of the world would be shamefully executed in this way – no one would make up a story like this. It was demoralizing and devastating to the Apostles, until the Resurrection and Pentecost turned them into lions. To have your savior of the world, your messiah, rushed through an urgent kangaroo court trial and brutally executed with two murderers does not fit with any other story ever told. And no, the myth of Horus is not the same, not even close. Great effort among doubters is made to disable the message, but most amazing is that however many angles the attack takes to steer people away from the Gospels, it never works. The truth of these four books cannot be squashed, despite the Herculean efforts of writers and governments. The story taps into what is written in our hearts and for those who come to believe, the idea that we are both sinners and saved is shocking. That we are corrupt and don’t deserve saving, coupled with Jesus’ coming to serve us and die for us as if we were the heroes of the story, could not be invented by these writers and agreed upon so readily unless they were writing the truth. There is no myth of god of any other religion where the hero dies for the unworthy and then immediately turns around and forgives his killers. If anything, all other myths have the god turn around and wreak vengeance upon his tormentors. For anyone that reads these books without a cynical eye, with a historical context and critical study guides like those of the Navarre Bible or Word on Fire Bible, the reader will begin to feel the power of these words, as there is no myth or history or genre that can compare to this story.

-The Gospels agree that Jesus had said multiple times that he would rise on the third day. This clearly stood out in the Apostles memory as it is recorded in multiple places. This “third day” repetition is hammered into them by Jesus as a reminder.

-The “swoon theory” of Jesus not dying on the cross is beyond ridiculous, as the witnesses of the risen Christ do not see a staggering, bloody, nearly dead man in the Upper Room. They see a fully restored man, but with the wounds to prove it is Him. A “swooned” man who had been tortured and whipped and crucified and lanced wouldn’t be restored in a mere 2 days after the event. He wouldn’t be able to walk or move. Those type of injuries would have had a man on a gurney, not eating fish and walking to Emmaus. Moreover, the “swoon theory” didn’t come about until modern times when some creative academics got together and invented it.

-There is more written about Jesus than any other historical figure of his time. Clearly he existed, and clearly the Romans crucified him. Matt Nelson of Word on Fire recently wrote an article on this.

-Ancient people, I have come to realize, were probably less gullible than people are today (see the internet and Facebook for ample evidence). The idea that the “ancients” were morons is just modern prejudice, also known as chronological snobbery. The idea of someone rising bodily and passing through walls and ascending to heaven would have been every bit as incredulous to an ancient audience as us today with all of our gains in modern science.

-The message could not be stopped. In a short time, this idea spread like wildfire. Starting with Rome and ever since, empires have attempted to stop the message of the Resurrection and failed. There is something greater at work, something beyond this world, something stunning and world-changing. There have been plenty of false messiahs whose messages go nowhere. But this one cannot be stopped, and all of the witnesses agree and will die for it and did die for it.

This quote from Frank Morison sums up the challenge that is put before us:

If the sole evidence for this really extraordinary phenomenon lay in a single passage in the early chapters of Acts it would be possible to regard it as the rather exuberant record of a contemporary historian whose close connection with the movement had biased and colored his views. But this is precisely what no one can claim. There is a far earlier and more authoritative testimony in the letters of Paul, of Peter, and of James the Just, and in the admittedly historic network of Christian churches stretching from Jerusalem through Asia Minor to the catacombs at Rome. Only from an intensely heated center of burning zeal could this vast field of lava have been thrown out from a tiny country like Palestine to the limits of the Roman world…The phenomenon that here confronts us is one of the biggest dislodgments of events in the world's history, and it can be accounted for only by an initial impact of colossal drive and power.

Yet the original material from which we have to derive this dynamic force consists of a habitual doubter like Thomas, a rather weak fisherman like Peter, a gentle dreamer like John, a practical tax gatherer like Matthew, a few seafaring men like Andrew and Nathanael, the inevitable women, and at most two or three others.

I do not want to minimize the character of the historic nucleus from which Christianity sprang, but, seriously, does this rather heterogeneous body of simple folk, reeling under the shock of the Crucifixion, the utter degradation and death of their Leader, look like the driving force we require? Frankly it does not, and the more we think of it disintegrating under the crisis, the less can we imagine it rewelding into that molten focus that achieved those results. Yet the clear evidence of history is that it did. Something came into the lives of these very simple and ordinary people that transformed them…

…The sequence of coincidences is too strong. When we remember the swinging around of the disciples from panic fear to absolute certitude, the singular matter of the seven weeks' gap, the extraordinarily rapid adhesion of converts in Jerusalem, the strange absence of administrative vigor on the part of the authorities, the steady growing of the church, both in authority and power, until the whole situation blew up into the frenzied attempts at suppression under Saul, we realize The Historic Crux of the Problem that we are in the presence of something far more tangible than the psychological repercussion of a fisherman's dream.

If the flip happens in your brain, from disbelief to belief, where resurrection becomes a capitalized “R” - Resurrection - you are in trouble, because there is no turning back. You will be stuck with the result of being happy and having a purpose in your life like you have never experienced before. You will no longer be sinking, you will have a hand reach out for you when you look away and start to fall. The fear of being adrift will disappear when you say, “God, help me,” and Jesus will reach out and grab your hand before it goes under. He will save you first, and then with a gentle rebuke he will say to you, “Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

Notes:

Listen to Trent Horn on comparisons to other myths.

Read Matt Nelson’s article on the existence of Jesus and 4 reasons to believe in the crucifixion.

Book: Who Moved the Stone?

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For some reason, turning on the grill is one of the moments when the old desires return. The sun is shining. The smell of propane or charcoal fills the air. The burgers sizzle on the grate. Summer leisure cracks open the door to old habits.

Then there is the hubbub of a brewpub and the smell of microbrews. There is the clink of pint glasses and beer flights passing by on their way to a happy table. The kitchen diffuses the smells of fried food, crispy chicken and cajun fries. Nachos and queso on waiters’ trays pass by as the surrounding laughter and music spills on the table.

Another time and place is the stroll through a parking lot where sports tailgaters hold their pre-game services under canopies and hatchbacks. The beanbags thunk on plywood and frisbees and footballs sail back and forth. Or later, in the grandstand of a stadium, the crowd roars over an interception, or the crack of the bat signals action, and the senses come alive. The smell of the pretzels and hotdogs and popcorn and beer all mingle into a callback, a beckoning for a re-entry into the game.

As simple as a song on the radio, it can come through a melody to remind me of a place, or a glimpse, or a connection. The verses tip me off to a night in a club or bar or house party or basement or couch, where something funny happened or some attraction started. The “good times” of friendly faces come back like apparitions with an invitation to try the habit on once again.

A long day in the hot sun, after working on a project or going for a long run, there is a long thirst that craves a certain kind of satisfaction that ice water and soda cannot quite offer. Physical exhaustion and being sweat-depleted is a fine time to think of cold drinks on a hot night.

Then I feel sad and ask, “Why can’t I drink normally?” Or alternatively, “Why can’t I have just one? Just one to go with this food or mood.” A drink goes well with many things, which is why most people like to have a drink.

Sometimes instead of feeling sad about it, I get mad. I go further, into teetotaler mode, where I feel upset about other people drinking because I can’t do it normally. And from there it devolves into an anger about a culture that pushes and markets drinking so heavily on its citizens. Not just today, but for many thousands of years there has been an idol made out of drinking because people love to drink. Alcohol relaxes us. In moderation it’s wonderful. But there is no such thing for us lucky ones.

When I was eighteen I recall seeing an old picture of Hercules outdrinking Dionysus. Imagine being so strong at holding your liquor that you could outdrink the god of wine. That appealed to me when I was fresh out of high school and quantity meant more than quality.

Not only the Greeks, but even Christian tradition uses wine as central to the sacrament of the Eucharist, and in another example, there is Jesus at the wedding feast at Cana, in his first miracle, creating wine from water to keep the wedding dance going on late into the night. As difficult passages in the Bible go, this is even more confusing for someone who struggles with putting the cork back in the bottle, because if getting drunk is a sin, then why did Jesus seem to encourage it? I’ll come back to that…

The answer to “Why can’t I drink normally?” and “Why can’t I have just one?” is in the historical cycle of madness that drinking created in my own life. For those who have this same problem, it is tempting and easy to fool ourselves to set foot once gain on a slippery slope called control. This is the reason I’m skeptical of any books or drugs that say you can “Control Drinking,” as millions of people who have quit for decades stop playing that losing game of control. I’ve known quite a few people that have gone down that road and slipped. I’ve done it myself. “Surrender to win” is not just a cute saying, it actually works. Even Annie Grace’s book, This Naked Mind, which I really enjoyed, has the subtitle of “Control Alcohol,” but I suspect that is bait to draw in readers, as she more or less says “good luck” to anyone who attempts to control their drinking.

An interesting conversation I’ve had repeatedly with drinkers who have tried to quit is this: they will say, “I quit for a month, just to prove that I could do it, but then I decide to have a beer on a weekend get together, then the next weekend I had a few at a wedding, and then a few weeks later I was kind of back to regular drinking.” I recall saying this exact same thing about drinking (and my nicotine usage as well). I would “quit” to prove that I was not addicted, but the attempt was nebulous and wishy-washy and usually fell off in seriousness rather quickly whenever an event with beer sprung up in front of me and I didn’t want to feel awkward holding a soda or water. But then I would pat myself on the back in congratulations on my quitting and go back to old ways. The funny thing is that this is what addiction is and does: it’s a never ending self-congratulations on just being yourself.

These moments of self-pity struck me in the early days of sobriety when I became more serious about removing it from my life entirely. After the pink cloud of joy over quitting had passed, I faced more difficult weather around the weakness and the rainy season started. That I couldn’t solve the problem on my own I fully accepted, but the excitement over that discovery eroded with the passage of time and days. This self-pity became most obvious on Friday nights when so much of my prior life had revolved around buckets of beer and now I had to fill that time with something else.

Listening to rock or country music certainly doesn’t help, and country music in particular is a full-blown celebration of booze. Sometimes I wonder if Nashville is fully owned and operated by the liquor and beer industry. Nearly every other song on the radio venerates liquor to some degree. The songs that don’t celebrate drinking often relate to family and/or God, which makes the genre a strange combination for me, as liquor played the key role in removing God from my life, and the only thing that allowed God’s return was the removal of liquor from my life. To me, this is the great paradox of country music, but the celebration of drunkenness seems to be winning on the radio.

These triggers I mentioned are different for everybody, but it took me a while to realize the guises they take on and clothing they wear. In short, they are lies that I tell myself.

This dawned on me in an airport after a work conference when I had a rough week, after being around a lot of open bar events. Full staff, premium liquor, glamorous locations, and all free - and my co-workers were lapping it up, as we all love to do when it’s free. But that didn’t bother me, as I’d been around parties and events long enough to know that I could have fun without the buzz. Truly, I’ve realized that I have more fun at events now without it and I can be more honest with people than ever before. And no one cares that I’m not drinking. I think that took about a year to really believe. No one gives a hoot, and they don’t even notice if you have a glass of 7-up instead of a gin and tonic. Even if they do know it’s 7-up, no one cares. Plus, anyone that pressures me about having a drink usually reacts very openly when I tell them I quit. A common response I hear, “I should do that myself,” or “I have a friend that is three years dry,” or “Wow, that’s great!” Rarely do I hear what I once feared, which was: “Oh come on you pansy, let’s do a shot.” When I do hear that, I can now see the battle that person is facing themselves, but I don’t say anything to them. The ones that push it on others may have the same issue that I do. How do I know that? Because I liked to do that when I was drinking.

Being around drinkers stopped bothering me long ago and I find it much more awkward if people don’t drink because I’m around. That’s the strangest feeling, where somehow my demon causes them to tiptoe around. I am fine being around drunk people, to the point that I don’t even care, except I won’t stay out late with them because I have no interest in ever closing down a pub again.

Back to my point about the airport bar: I was sitting by myself after a long week. At tables around me sat men and women in groups, lounging and laughing over drinks. Like many a business traveler, in my past life I enjoyed knocking down a pint or two before boarding a flight because it put me to sleep in the lap of a craft beer. This airport downtime was one of those triggers, like grilling, or attending a sports event, or sitting in a restaurant, or hearing a party song. Sitting in the airport was a strong trigger for drinking. Feeling tired and slightly upset from a difficult week, I wanted to enter into the relaxation and “fun” of the others who were drinking. I was feeling sorry for myself.

But somehow, someway, a light shined on me, showing that my memory about those airport cocktails were lies, fibs that I told myself to justify the flaw that wanted to get out of me. There was an old Twilight Zone episode called “The Howling Man” where the devil was held in an old monastery, contained in a cell that he could clearly escape but for some reason did not. He could only escape if someone invited him out, or let him out, and he would howl until some sympathetic person came along to hear his sob story.

In the episode, a traveler comes along, and disbelieving the monk who has trapped the devil, falls for the devil’s story about the injustices of the monk. Of course the man lets the devil out, because he thinks the devil is not real. This pretty much sums up what I realized in the airport that day. Through great effort I had contained this demon in a cell, and now it was howling to get out, and I was feeling sympathy for this howling call and drawn to listen to its reasons for being released once again. I was ignoring all of the effort and reasons for trapping the devil in the first place.

This is what addiction does. It howls in you. Smokers know this well. I still hear this howling, but not for beer any more, but for food. There is always some kind of howling, but the howling about drinking was the worst kind and now that I have it contained in the cell, I am the only one that can let it out again. This calling, or trigger, or feeling of need is something I finally realized relates precisely to an old term that the Church uses. The word is concupiscence, which is a fun word to say and you just don’t hear it a lot today. But it is exactly what I came to understand in that airport.

…."concupiscence" can refer to any intense form of human desire. Christian theology has given it a particular meaning: the movement of the sensitive appetite contrary to the operation of the human reason. The apostle St. Paul identifies it with the rebellion of the "flesh" against the "spirit." Concupiscence stems from the disobedience of the first sin. It unsettles man's moral faculties and, without being in itself an offense, inclines man to commit sins. (CCC 2515)

This idea of an appetite or desire contrary to my reason became devastatingly apparent, as I knew from past experience where acting on the desire led.

Here’s what I mean by that. When I actually thought about my romanticized ideas about having beers in the airport bar, I remembered those pre-flight beers as some kind of positive action. What I chose to forget was sitting on the plane feeling bloated and dumb for drinking, because it was never just one pint. I remember driving home and being grumpy on arrival because I had come down from the buzz during the flight. I remembered all the times that I just felt tired the next day from the effort my body needed to push out the poison. As I’d been exercising regularly, I knew that that all of those, “I’ll just have one,” moments were always what derailed any fitness or health goals. Inevitably the “I’ll have just one” leads to more, and any one that’s ever gone to a bar with best friends knows that’s how the wildest nights begin. “I’ll have just one” is how the slippery slope starts, because the first step is not very slippery - it seems safe. Like others who try to “prove” they can quit, they end up right back in the same spot, over and over and over again. It is so easy to let out the howling man.

There’s a story about a man named “Jim” who had already messed up his life, repeatedly, and one more foul-up was going to cost him his family…

Yet he got drunk again. we asked him to tell us exactly how it happened. This is his story: “I came to work on Tuesday morning. I remember I felt irritated that I had to be a salesman for a concern I once owned. I had a few words with the brass, but nothing serious. Then I decided to drive to the country and see one of my prospects for a car. On the way I felt hungry so I stopped at a roadside place where they have a bar. I had no intention of drinking. I just thought I would get a sandwich…I had eaten there many times during the months I was sober. I sat down at a table and ordered a sandwich and a glass of milk. Still no thought of drinking. I ordered another sandwich and decided to have another glass of milk.

“Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that if I were to put an ounce of whiskey in my milk it couldn’t hurt me on a full stomach. I ordered a whiskey and poured it into the milk. I vaguely sense I was not being any too smart, but I reassured as I was taking the whiskey on a full stomach. The experiment went so well that I ordered another whiskey and poured it into more milk. That didn’t seem to bother me so I tried another.” (Big Book Chapter 3)

And so Jim lost his family. Jim is one of millions who have done this. This story, and my story, is as ancient as humankind’s discovery of crushing and fermenting grapes. In Moby Dick the blacksmith’s story is like Jim’s story. He has everything, until he chooses to start drinking, and soon he has nothing. And once his life is destroyed he longs for death but not wanting to commit suicide he goes to sea, just like Ishmael, the narrator of the book. Ishmael describes this same spiritual brokenness in the first chapter of the novel, although his doesn’t come from drinking, it comes from a general malaise caused by The Big Empty. I love how Melville describes the entrance of drinking into the blacksmith’s life as a burglar and demon.

[The Blacksmith] had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family's heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shriveled up his home.

The “bottle conjuror” is kind of a jarring, funny statement, and seems a very dated term. But it’s not inaccurate. You see alcohol repeatedly destroying families, for generations, as it conjures up bad voodoo in so many fathers.

I wonder how many men today have followed this same path chasing a high, whether it’s drinking or drugs or porn or sex. I have taken things as close to the edge of ruin as possible. That’s literally why this podcast/blog exists. Why Did Peter Sink? Because he let the howling man out. Jim let the howling man out. The blacksmith let the howling man out. Why did he do that? Because he took his focus off what was important. He forgot about God.

The variety of addictions makes no difference in this circle of insanity - the pursuit and the outcome is the same. People may not go to an asylum today, but the trail of wreckage this behavior leaves can create a personal asylum to live inside. The howling man is famously cunning and baffling. He calls upon and converts us like the Pied Piper, in an instant. How easily we fall for the lies that we tell ourselves, and act in ways that go directly against our better judgment and reason. I am truly stunned at how easily I can be pulled or pushed to act against my reason. What I’ve come to realize, and with grace I can remember for many years to come, is that the desire and triggers will be back - those desires will never fade completely. They will forever call upon me to let out the howling man. That’s not something that can be solved in our hearts, not alone, and to let the problem begin again, even in the most small way, is once again to let chaos and very real sin back into my life.

I recall someone asking me, “What would be the thing that pulled you back to drinking?” and I immediately thought of going out in a Blaze of Glory, in one rip-roaring wild time. There’s a Tim McGraw and Faith Hill song that appears to have been written by someone with a good grasp on the struggle of addictions and this idea of going out with a bang:

I wanna drink that shot of whiskey
I wanna smoke that cigarette
I wanna smell that sweet addiction on my breath

You know some cowboys like me go out like that

What’s he talking about? He’s romancing his old times as the good times, dressing that pig up, putting lipstick on it, giving it a big kiss, pretending those days were all magical and fun until the mean old world took away his joy. It’s a pity party. I love this song. He’s thinking of the escape and wanting to ride out into the sunset one last time, to disappear from the struggle of this world. And it’s all a lie. He’s invented an ideal escape because he wants to feel young and free, because he’s confused being drunk with being alive, when what it really made him was boring and imprisoned.

Or maybe that’s just what I realized in the airport bar on that winter day.

For myself, I can recall many years ago sitting in Munich at the Hacker-Pschorr brewery, near the grounds of Oktoberfest, and thinking it was like Field of Dreams but for beer. I could picture Ray Liotta saying, “Is this heaven?” and the Kevin Costner would answer, “Nein, this is Bavaria.” Likewise, I recall being at a Swiss Oktoberfest at a small town and looking around at the scene of giant beer steins and waitresses in push-up bras and the brass bands and singing songs and toasting “Prost!”, and I thought to myself: this must be the closest thing to heaven on earth, as everyone was so happy and full of pure joy…and full of so much…well...liters of beer.

Not only that but I will think of music festivals when I was young, where you park the car and immediately you can hear the music and bass from far away. The anticipation of the night could be felt and tasted like the sting of whiskey or gin on my tongue. The sun just starting to sink meant the night’s possibilities were just beginning, and it was time to shutdown the work week in trade for the time to get rowdy and stupid. With a gang of friends of the same mindset, the music and the summer night again felt like some kind of a heaven.

And in both of those “heavens” what I conveniently leave out is the next morning, the day after, the things I said, and worst, things I might not have even remembered. So while, yes, there are good things about those nights, there was much more than just the sunset and the music or the German waitresses. I was just remembering the setting, but had forgotten the plot. There was so much more to the story than a fleeting feeling about my arrival or a moment in time where I felt the joyful spirit, or what the Germans call gemütlichkeit. For others, those things can be enjoyed, year after year, but no longer for me, because I could not quit drinking once I started.

Thus the saying “Do not trust your feelings” stays with me, as my feelings listen to the howling man and want to let him free. There is so much more to life without the howling man, and I can still enjoy a memory of a Munich night or a street festival hoedown. I know that there is no going back to those days, or at least not in the same way. And that is the journey, I suppose, that we all get to walk in this world, to find out what we are built for and what we must avoid. Somewhere a baby is being born right now that will get to walk these same paths that we all do, and he will grow up hearing advice of older, wiser people, and if he’s anything like me he will just ignore that advice and go find out the hard way. William Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” but there is a better path to wisdom than that.

As I mentioned, I would come back to the wedding feast at Cana, the first miracle of Jesus. Dostoyevsky has a chapter on it in The Brothers Karamazov, where a character considering this miracle states, “The first miracle he worked was to bring men happiness…to help men’s gladness.... ‘He who loves men loves their happiness.’” At the request of Mary, Jesus produced more wine, but with people having free will, the guests still needed to make their own decisions on whether to drink to excess. Jesus isn’t there as a life-coach at the wedding that night, but as the world’s greatest guest who just happens to be beginning his ministry. There is much to be interpreted regarding the wedding feast at Cana, more than I can go into here, but for people like me who can’t control their liquor, the fact that free wine is present does not erase the divine gift called free will, nor does it make allowance for discarding the holy virtue called temperance.

The point to take away here is this: if you’re quitting, or trying to quit, but you don’t think you can have fun without beer or liquor in your hand, then you’re not yet in the right headspace to be among the party crowd. Other people do not need to change their ways to accommodate your struggle, because that would make you king and controller of the world, and that’s kind of the whole problem. It definitely helps to have supporters in your corner, but you cannot expect everyone to change for you. Control is the problem.

The desire for control is what you need to let go of to make progress. The miracle is that, at some point, you won’t care if someone drinks right next to you, or pushes it at you, or even dumps it on your head. That is the miracle - you will not care any longer.

However, there is a saying, “If you hang around in a barbershop long enough, you will probably get a haircut.” This sounds old fashioned today, but the meaning for people who try to quit drinking is this: if you spend time in bars while trying to quit, sooner or later you’ll have a drink. If you spend time with all of your old drinking buddies, you will at some point have a drink. So to change your lifestyle, the separation needed requires choices that are hard, and often means losing friendships. In many cases, people even stop listening to their old music because of how close the association is to the desire to fall into the old pattern.

The party crowd will never go away and cold beer on a Friday night will always sound good. The key is to “keep your own side of the street clean” and let others worry about theirs. Someday you will no longer care. You will watch tipsy people slur their speech with amusement and not want to join them, but you must endure some hard days and nights to reach each rung on the ladder. For bonus and motivation, know that you will get to bed much earlier and feel good every single morning. That may be the most unsung wonder of deliverance from a lifestyle of using alcohol. Every morning you wake up like the pre-game cheer from the Dillon Panthers of the TV show Friday Night Lights: “Clean Heart. Clear Mind. Can’t Lose.”

This is a responsibility and burden for us who come to know the problem that dogs us through our days. The Gospel’s presence of buckets of wine doesn’t get us off the hook, not by long shot. Here are some tidbits, food for thought, on why that’s the case from my favorite book, the Catechism:

“The virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco, or medicine. Those incur grave guilt who, by drunkenness or a love of speed, endanger their own and others’ safety on the road, at sea, or in the air.” (CCC 2290)

There is no free pass just because there is a wedding party at Cana. The nod we want to give ourselves will inevitably contradict a path to virtue, and if you already know you can’t control it from a history of excess, then the house will always win in the end. The odds are not in your favor.

“Temperance is the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures ... It ensures the will’s mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable … Temperance is often praised in the Old Testament: ‘Do not follow your base desires, but restrain your appetites.’ In the New Testament it is called ‘moderation’ or ‘sobriety.’ We ought ‘to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world.’ … Human virtues acquired by education, by deliberate acts and by a perseverance ever-renewed in repeated efforts are purified and elevated by divine grace. With God’s help, they forge character and give facility in the practice of the good. The virtuous man is happy to practice them.” (CCC 1809, 1810)

Most men have something calling to them, something that wants to get back into the world, to turn them away from virtue, to allow them to feel defiant instead of obedient. To open that beer, to go to that website, to hit up an old flame, to eat the whole box of cereal in a single sitting…ok, the last one might just be me. As I’ve mentioned before, I have much to learn, miles to go. It’s very easy to write about virtues and difficult to live them out in the real world. But that’s the goal, and as I seem to like goals, I’d rather have a positive public goal than a secret negative goal. Catholic Confession and psychotherapy alike tell us that you must name the thing that ails you to deal with it properly. Naming the problem is one thing. Letting go of control is next, and that is done through a Higher Power, not medication. Removing the cause of my sinking means asking for God’s help, and that is the right step toward daily perseverance, moderation, and steady sobriety.

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Isolating with our devices is the new baseball and apple pie. Whenever I look around, I see someone staring into his or her phone, still as a statue, and I think of the myth of Narcissus and how he stared into the pool at his reflection, and falling in love with what he saw, he lost himself. Then I think to myself, wow, that must be exactly what I look like when I’m staring into my phone. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, chapter 3 there is something strangely relevant for today’s world. Ovid was a Roman poet who lived at the same time of Jesus and during the reign of Caesar Augustus. He recorded many of the Greek and Roman myths, and when I was a attempting to be an author of fiction (which I’ll save for another episode), I read Ovid’s Metamorphosis quite a bit for a couple of reasons: first, they are ancient stories with deep insights, second, I enjoy reading mythology, and third, I could steal plots from these ancient tales and plug in my own characters.

There are only so many plots, and once you exhaust your Netflix, Hulu, Prime, and HBO Plus shows, you will know what I mean by that. There is not an unlimited well of plot lines for writers to draw from. But for my purposes here, I only mean to talk about one of Ovid’s recorded myths, and it’s a pretty well known one, about Narcissus. See if you can spot the similarities between your usage of the smart phone and this silly old myth. Narcissus comes to the side of a pool of water and looks down, very drawn into what he sees there.

…There as he stooped
to quench his thirst another thirst increased.
While he is drinking he beholds himself
reflected in the mirrored pool—and loves;
loves an imagined body which contains
no substance, for he deems the mirrored shade
a thing of life to love. He cannot move,
for so he marvels at himself, and lies
with countenance unchanged, as if indeed
a statue…

All that is lovely in himself he loves,
and in his witless way he wants himself:—
he who approves is equally approved…

The cheat that you are seeking has no place.
Avert your gaze and you will lose your love,
for this that holds your eyes is nothing save
the image of yourself reflected back to you.
It comes and waits with you; it has no life;
it will depart if you will only go.

Good luck finding a more apt description of what the smart phone does to us. The phone is the image of our thoughts reflected back to us, allowing us to love what we are thinking. And we cannot move. We become stone. Like statues, like Narcissus.

Somehow the ancient writers, prophets, and thinkers can reduce our modern “advanced society” to a yawning “been there, done that” kind of mockery. The thoughts and epiphanies in our heads today lack originality if you go back to the classics. What’s clear to me is that the ancients were not simpletons, or fools, or gullible - they were wise from living, and suffering. Storytelling from all cultures has a wisdom that we tend to ignore in our age of instant gratification and tech efficiency.

Even as we unlock more doors to physics and biology, the greatest questions have not changed and will never change. I recently read that scientists have developed a laser to see around corners. Won’t that be nice. Will it make the world a “better place”? No. In fact, many of our “better place” stories about technology end up blowing up in our face, sometimes literally, since military applications are the first takers. A show called Silicon Valley produced a great joke on the software and tech industry’s self-congratulation for fixing the world’s problems. Every app and product claims to be “making the world a better place” but for the most part that is just a marketing ploy and self-delivered backrubs for techies to encourage themselves in their endeavors. There are many things that start out to “make the world a better place” and end up doing the opposite, the two most famous ones that I can thing of being: splitting the atom and a thing called Facebook.

I do not mean to attack science, since I love it. The findings are amazing. I nodded along with these “fixers,” with a faith in scientism, believing that tech and science would undo every knot - if not today, eventually. We, as individuals and collectively, are gazing at ourselves with amazement, marveling, in self-worship of humankind and things of this world, and forgetting about God. I did for many years.

I am an internet Luddite. It’s true. I admit it. I see no conflict between science and religion, or science and spirituality, since science is concerned with things of this world and faith is concerned with things beyond this world. But I do see a conflict between big tech and reality. Along with the Narcissus myth that is so obvious in the phone addiction, there is another primeval event that I recall whenever I turn over my phone and see the back.

The irony of the company Apple having a logo of an apple with a bite taken out printed on the back of every phone is too rich and obvious to ignore. While I appreciate the Catechism of the church’s reference to figurative language regarding Genesis 1 and the Fall of Man, I also love the story of how Genesis uses the apple to describe the flaw that is written on our hearts. The Catholic church’s allegorical reading of Genesis is one of the main reasons I am a returned Catholic, as I felt much like St. Augustine when he said: “I was being killed by the Old Testament passages when I took them literally.” (Confessions p109, p414) But when the story for original sin uses an apple as the central temptation of turning the first people away from God and toward worldly pleasures, and the largest corporation in the world, Apple, is turning people away from God and toward worldly pleasures…and the logo is a bitten apple…again you can’t help but nod toward the ancient writers. Apparently, there is something about apples that we really, really like. I think the only name that could have been more perfect for Apple, the company, might have been Golden Calf, but I have a feeling that wouldn’t sell as many phones.

The funny thing to me is that the pre-Christian Greeks had a saying of “Know thyself,” which said that man must be subordinate to the Gods, and Prometheus was punished for getting out of order. The Hebrews first three commandments are about respecting and surrendering to God. The Christian addition was to love God first and then one another. The Islamic profession of faith, first thing, is that there is no God but God. Myths from nearly all cultures have humans in tales that makes them subordinate to God, because mankind is underneath God. The order of things must be God before humans, otherwise bad things will happen. I have a deep feeling that this correct. The ordering set forth by old knowledge was learned by experience.

Today, however, the sprawling message, mainly broadcasting from America, is the opposite focus of the old wisdom. “Know thyself” is now a self-oriented interpretation of life, like the kind Narcissus found. We stare into the phone, at the reflection of our thoughts, looking at a watery, amorphous truth in the mirror, wrapped in a fog of a false “connectedness.” But really we are alone, separated, fooled, like the boy and his reflection, staring at himself in the mirrored shade.

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Avoiding distraction in this century is a battle. This may be the hardest problem of the 21st century. I have been losing that battle. While distractions have always pulled at my thoughts, today there are massive companies like Facebook and Google and Amazon plotting how to better and more completely distract me. The battle for my attention is unfair, as we are outgunned, but life is unfair. I know that prayer is a battle and was never meant to be easy. This is not the easy path. I think that’s the one reason so many people avoid it today.

Today I give a large portion of my time to my device. The companies that benefit from my attention serve their own purposes, not mine, and certainly not God’s. I am being engineered and manipulated to fritter away my time and to doubt my greater purpose. The greatest lie I am told, that we have been told, is that we are connected to others and can be fulfilled by worldly things, while I isolate with my device and orient my heart away from more meaningful things.

The two commandments of the Gospels are very simple. 1.) To love God with all of my heart, mind, and soul, and 2.) To love one another. Do the tech companies appear to be pushing me in that direction? It is said that you cannot serve God and man. Which of these am I serving today?

“He who follows me can never walk in darkness,” our Lord says…if we want to see our way truly, never a trace of blindness left in our hearts, it is his life, his character, we must take for our model. Clearly, then, we must make it our chief business to train our thoughts upon the life of Jesus.

Book 1, paragraph 1 from the Imitation of Christ

I try to heed the words of warning to not walk in darkness, but it’s hard today. To keep my head up, not down, away from the phone is a challenge. When not staring at the phone, then it’s hard to avoid staring at a TV, where I fall for advertising gimmicks and good looking actresses. Sometimes when I see a bunch of moths hovering around a porch light at night on the patio, I think to myself…we are not that different from those little creatures. Show us a light on a phone or TV and we will gather and stare. For example, I love meeting friends for lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings and the whole reason I do is because there are fifty TVs on the walls, all flashing lights. We go from one lighted screen to another, all day long. Even in bathrooms and while pumping gas there are screens that instantly suck us in to watch. We’re worse than moths for clinging to these screens.

Our minds are easily entertained by dancing shadows of light. But the lights from technology are the wrong ones to chase, and my moth brain needs to realize that there is a greater light called the lumen fidei, the light of faith. The light of reason, like the porch lightbulb, pulled me away for many years from the real light. Oddly enough it was experience and reason that brought me back to the true light, the light of faith. I think of how many times I would scroll on my phone or watch an entire season of a Netflix show and feel worse. To empty my mind of distractions and open my heart to God requires more effort than scrolling or chilling on the couch. It requires a daily effort.

Ignoring the latest argument or scandal or meme on the internet means stepping outside of the flow of modern thought. Tomorrow those scandals will be different and they will fade away. Turn off the political propaganda - how can I do this? By getting off the phone. To stop from clicking onto pornography sites, that requires a choice. Millions, maybe billions, of men silently struggle with the lights of porn and they don’t talk about it. To ignore the screens and ads that promise pleasure, material, honor, wealth, and power, a set of tools is needed. Everyone must face this sales pitch that attempts to steal our attention. The answer is to turn the page on escapes and fantasies. First of all, I can start acting like an adult today. How many times have I seen a shirt say, “I can’t adult today.” Not only are we like moths chasing lights, we refuse to grow up because, frankly, many of our lives have been lived in comfort and without challenge to grow up. There is a quote from G.K. Chesterton that fits here. “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

We just want to keep things the same, nice and easy, to be left alone to be with our gossip, scandal, porn, and politics. The only problem with that is then nothing changes in our heart, and surely most people have a nagging idea in the back of their minds, asking them, “Is this really all there is?”

The answer is simple but it’s hard to face the question honestly, especially when you spend adulthood pretending that the question isn’t bothering you. The answer was in the thing I put on a box and kicked to the curb. I never even gave it a chance once I started chasing the lights of this world. And if you’ve read or listened to Why Did Peter Sink? from the beginning, you know the whole story of how hard it was to know where to even start. From the Streetlight God to today, it’s a long and slow path. The difficult thing is that until you set down that bag of bricks that you carry - your politics, your obsession with sex, your want of money, your need for approval - you cannot even get started. I know many people that say they can never consider faith because of some public policy that some group of faithful are championing. And they are right - because they cannot surrender to win, they will always be white-knuckling their hold on that bag of bricks. You may have heard that masturbation causes blindness, but it’s actually our ego that causes blindness. Spiritual blindness is the plague of the 21st century because we’ve been wholly sold on the self. The reason movies like Fight Club did so well with men is because it tapped into the emptiness that is universal among men who have lost faith in God. The moth brain has fallen for the fool’s gold, and Tyler Durden hit the nail on the head with this quote in the movie:

“Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

And the answer to this riddle is so stupidly simple that no one wants to hear it. The reason men are so pissed off if because they have been worshipping things that have replaced that which gives meaning to our lives. And once those things do not produce the expected result, we are angry. And the reason is that they are not God. They are the things of this world. Our hearts are wired for something beyond and are disappointed in anything less.

Sounds easy, and to get started it is easy. It’s hard to maintain but it’s easy to start. Even if you attempt to pray and think you don’t know how, you are already praying by attempting it. The best prayer I know is this one liner:

“God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Say it ten times in earnest and it will be a true prayer for you. Then the distractions will come…don’t worry - the phone won’t forget about you, because you can’t forget about it. Use silent mode or hide the damn thing for a while. The mind provides ample distraction alone, you don’t also need a phone to aid and abet the wandering consciousness. Try not to follow the distraction but stay put in the moment. Here’s one quote from the Catechism for you, as again, it usually makes the point so much better than I can (from the section titled, The Battle of Prayer:)

The habitual difficulty in prayer is distraction…To set about hunting down distractions would be to fall into their trap, when all that is necessary is to turn back to our heart: for a distraction reveals to us what we are attached to, and this humble awareness before the Lord should awaken our preferential love for him and lead us resolutely to offer him our heart to be purified. Therein lies the battle, the choice of which master to serve. (CCC 2725-2745)

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When you first quit drinking you will find it hard to make sense of things. I’m sorry to say, but even after years of sobriety, you may still find it difficult. How easily the order of priority can get mixed up, tossed about and sorted into the wrong slots. Things start to go awry. Or rather, I myself begin to go awry. Life will always go awry, whether I like it or not, but with the right order of things, I can deal better when there is a solid grip at the top to hang onto. Life’s problems become simplified when the order of priorities remains tidy and well-kept. Coupled tightly to that order is one all-important maxim, that helps keep the order in place: That maxim is this: "my life is not about me." For anyone in recovery from any kind of addiction there is a mandate to turn away from yourself and start focusing on others.

There are certain maxims or sayings that I've tucked away to help me in life and this is one of those key phrases. When my life is about me, I tend to isolate. If I'm isolating, then I know I'm going in the wrong direction. For much of my life I pushed all my energy into goals and achievements, which are not bad in themselves. But they were the highest thing, and there's the problem.

I've heard a sermon from Timothy Keller suggest that you need to approach life in "servant mode," as Jesus served us. He didn’t have to…but he did. He could do whatever he wanted…but he didn’t! Servant mode is a two word magical phrase, because when kids or spouse or co-workers ask for something, if you utter in your mind that magic phrase ("servant mode") it’s much easier to respond cheerily - especially when you don't feel like responding cheerily. This works, and of course when I don't do it then I grumble and complain and wish to be left alone. There's that never-ending notion to isolate clawing back to the surface, and I need to kick that crawling beast back into the pit about five times a day.

When I quit drinking, my sponsor said to just say “yes” if someone needs a volunteer. If someone needs help with something, like helping at an event or unclogging a toilet, just do it. These are "service opportunities." Just say yes. When someone I know sees me at a volunteer event, they say, “How did you get roped into this?” I tell people about saying yes to “service opportunities.” They usually laugh, and ask, “How’s that working out for you?”

When I tell them that it’s working out very well, better than I ever expected, they probably think I’ve fell off my bike and hit my head.

Just like "servant mode," this idea of “service opportunity” is another solid two-word reminder of "my life is not about me."

The miracle of Christian faith to me is that it takes away the need for self. The world is obsessed with self and most of us fall into that trap. Watching advertisements during the Olympics this year I noticed that every single ad is selling a vision of self to the viewers/buyers. The hallmarks of “goodness” in modern culture is getting what you want in one of four areas: possessions, pleasure, honor, or power. Those categories can be expanded into subcategories, and those into further subcategories and corners where the varieties of vanity and lust and envy live, but those four major categories sum up the teaching of our modern world, as we have been bashed over the head with ads and messaging since leaving the womb. There is this endless TV and internet testimony about how intrinsically good we are and whatever we want to do is justified, and that we deserve to get everything we want in life…and then, then happiness will settle upon us like a butterfly.

There’s little chance we will see an ad mentioning that we are flawed individuals and that getting what we want is usually the cause of our unhappiness. We want what we don’t need, then when we get our precious want, in a very short time we want something else. Something new, something shinier. Or, the opposite happens: we don’t get what we want, and then we love to play victim and cry the blues instead of moving on. Either way, the self is the master that we serve. We are justified in whatever we want - self-justified.

There's this great surprise answer that Jesus gives to the big questions of life. The saying “my life is not about me” basically liberates anyone who can come to believe it. However, it’s almost impossible to believe that idea of selflessness without getting our approval from somewhere. This approval that we seek, we have to get it from somewhere or we can never feel whole, and it needs to be a sign of approval that exceeds those which can come from a car dealership or house or trophy or diet or online community or drunken orgy.

No one really wants to hear that they are a sinner. It’s a dirty word today, but I suspect it always has been so, because it disrupts our nature. I can’t imagine the wall the Apostles were up against in pagan Rome telling people to repent of their sins. I suspect they asked, “Repent from our what?” The instinct is to want and war and win our way to some version of success. To let go of that way of life, to leave that headspace, well, that is to embrace imperfection. The idea of “you are perfect the way you are” is fine if it helps me accept my flaws, my limits, but not when it is an enabler of my bad choices and elevates me into an object of perfection that needs no reform.

As I say often in these articles: Surrender to win. This is the only kind of surrender that wins this battle and ultimately the war.

I'm flawed, I know it. But I really want forgiveness and approval. This is quite a dilemma. It's a kind of approval that the world can never give. I've searched for it. Aren't I just a sinner, a slow-learning rebel running from God so much of the time? Is there any kind of redemption for me?

And Jesus answers both questions, "Yes."

Then suddenly there is no higher approval needed.

Once you have certainty that the flaws are real but you are still (somehow) saved, that God himself in human form died for your flaws, the need for outside honor diminishes, and can even disappear entirely. I think of the “woman at the well” who is angry but then joyful once she is liberated, internally “cleansed” once she is accepted. Jesus tells her she is saved and she’s over the moon. (The Chosen really nailed this scene and feeling.) This is the oxymoron: I’m not ok…but I’m saved! I know that atheists roll their eyes at that kind of language, of being saved (with an exclamation point!), but there’s no other way to say the truth of what happens on conversion. For those who say, “I’ll try anything once,” try faith. I avoided it for so long because it means admitting surrender of the ego, but that’s what I was really looking for all along.

No accomplishment or possession or knowledge can ever give that peace to you that the woman at the well discovers. No amount of accolades or botox will deliver that prize. What’s funny is that giving up the self is so hard, because even when you do, pride and self will emerge again like bacteria growing from the edges of your soul. Maintaining that peace requires a constant cleansing to keep the bacteria from overtaking the whole soul in a short time. In fact, as so often observed by non-believers, the righteous often have lost their sense of humility. This is what the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector points out.

The praying Pharisee is full of himself for being righteous and therefore has his ego propped up as a mini-god. “How glad am I to be unlike that publican slimeball over there! I keep all the rules.” He’s worshipping himself! The Tax Collector (or publican), knows what a mess his life is, has total humility, and says a more sincere prayer than the holy man. His is the true change of heart and is therefore shown mercy. Clearly the publican’s prayer must be sincere or he is no better off than the self-righteous one. Humility before God cannot be faked. Imagine this same parable today with a Christian and a meth head, or a transgender. Those who ask, seek, and knock to God with humility are never turned away. The Gospels are riddled with examples of this - but it’s important to realize that those on the margins are not invited into Jesus’ saving grace because they are on the margins or social outcasts, they find him through grace and humility and he affirms it. He never says to them, “The Tax Collector received mercy, and then we went back to stiffing clients and committing the same sins.” No, he’s not validating ways of living. Instead he’s showing the way, the path to the light, which is not just through the law and rule but through humility of heart and orientation away from the self.

The whole point of religion is not buildings or politics or morality contests. It’s humility before God. Many Christians know this, but some get on the news when they forget about it and make themselves the center, and the world loves to stone a person virtually today. But the second point of religion, at least the Christian faith, is that no sin cannot be forgiven. Said in a positive way, all sins can be forgiven. The Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum of saints. And that’s what the non-believers don’t understand. They think someone who claims the title Christian must never sin. They love to see them fall. We love to watch the righteous trip and fall on their face in public. Scapegoats are somehow fun for humans to blame for problems (unless you are the scapegoat, like Steve Bartman was in Chicago when he touched the foul ball that Moises Alou was trying to catch). But all Christians fall on their face, all the time, just as non-Christians do. That’s why we have to go back to the hospital all the time.

The self puffs us up with pride. The minute we turn toward our self as king or queen, we begin to puff up. I think my favorite metaphor in the Bible is the “puffing” of bread, as the Jews in the Old Testament have the Feast of Unleavened Bread after Passover. When we are “puffed up” we are full of ourselves. We think we are more important than God. I can almost feel this happen when I start to focus on myself instead of God, when my orientation turns away from trust in God into fear for myself and my desires. Almost as if I’m holding my breath, I feel that rising anxiety in my neck, like a loaf in the oven filling up the pan. When I re-orient back to God, with trust instead of fear, the puff and rising anxiety fades. That is the radical trust I need to remove fear and greed, the two things that I feel most plague of our world today.

So humility is the goal, and it’s much harder than it sounds. I’ve linked to this before, but there are 17 signs that you lack humility from St. Josemaria Escriva. I am failing. The humblebrag is on there. Even in writing this blog I feel there is a horrifying flavor of humblebrag all over it and the only thing that keeps me from deleting every single post is that I’m hoping someone who wants to quit drinking might stumble upon it and find a positive nudge in these words. I would add one more type of humility fail to St. Josemaria Escriva’s list, one that is much shorter and maybe easier to remember. I am the Interrupting Cow. The Interrupting Cow is a knock-knock joke that goes like this:

Me: Knock Knock.

Other person: Who’s there?

Me: Interrupting cow.

Other person: Interrupting Cow wh…?

Me: MOO!

When someone is talking and I am just waiting to talk, or I’m nodding and saying, “Yes, yes,” and I want them to just hurry up and hand over the conch for my turn to blow on it: “Hear ye, I have a personal anecdote that relates to your anecdote but mine is better because it’s about me!” At that point I’m already puffed up and pouring out of the pan.

So it’s one thing to say “my life is not about me” and another thing to take action and succeed in living that maxim. But I do know there are three things, only three, that need to be in a loopback mechanism to pop the puff before my head gets too large.

Three rules to live by (from Word on Fire), plus one extra I added:

Faith: Christ must be the unwavering center of my life.

Hope: Remember I am a sinner who needs saving.

Charity: My life is not about me.

Add these addendums:

See Christ in others instead of their faults.

Stop seeking approval.

Agitated by something? Then the addiction to self is returning. Turn off the computer or phone. Return to step 1.

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As a child, there was a recurring nightmare that would wake me. I could never capture the image or the scene. The closest I could ever come to describing it was pins of light piercing through outer space, or shards of blinding white lightning splitting across an endless night. Along with these pins of light came the sound of drums or barrels, pounding or rolling in a crescendo as the light expanded in the darkness and grew nearer. First there would be one shard of light, but soon other shards would start out of the darkness and split the void, piercing and blinding until there were many shards and they converged and diverged in chaos, illuminating nothing but confusing everything. It reminded me of the void or chaos described in various creation stories of the world, from various cultures.

The nightmare would wake me in a disturbed state. My mind would race to examine what the nightmare meant. I never fully grasped the images, but the dream felt like a painting of anxiety or a depiction of what “racing thoughts” feels like. In fact, I suspect that’s what the nightmare signified or emanated from, not that I am a dream interpreter. This nightmare differed a great deal from those where I was being chased or had fallen off a cliff, because those made sense when I woke. I could gather myself in the safety of knowing that it was only a dream. But these shards of light and pounding drums scared me due to its uncertainty of form and meaning. The best scary movies are the ones where the director and storyline disallow the viewer from seeing or understanding the monster until Act III, or like the movie Bird Box, where the monster is never seen.

Uncertainty is what scares us and makes us act irrationally. For evidence of this outside of a dream, consider the run on toilet paper when the pandora’s box of Covid-19 entered the stage of the world. How odd that millions sought two-ply tissue as a solvent for fear. Fortunately, I had already stocked up on toilet paper, so I had certainty that we could outlast the siege on the tissue paper supply chain, but this phenomenon made for one of the most interesting behavioral things I’ve ever witnessed. I recall other behaviors that baffled me, such as people refusing to make eye contact, even outdoors on public trails where we stood far more than six feet apart. I was reminded of the Ken Follett novel, World Without End, which describes a period of plague in the 1300s. One of the characters advises another not to look at anyone with the plague: “You catch it by looking at sick people.” Behaviors that happened 700 years ago appeared to be happening again. I also re-read the opening of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was written during the plague of the same period, in Florence, Italy, and he describes varied reactions to the fear, which paralleled exactly what was happening in 21st century America. Some Florentines quarantined heavily while others lived as if there were no concern. Some turned to prayer and others to debauchery. The great thing about old literature is how it shows that human nature never changes, even while the technology around us does. We learn things about the world through science, but we’re still the same creatures and deal with uncertainty in polarized ways. We always seem to be re-discovering the truth, or redefining it, because we want to rid ourselves of uncertainty. But that’s not going to happen. Uncertainty is here to stay. This reminds of the quote by astronomer Robert Jastrow:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

That isn’t a quote to mock science, but it speaks to the beyondness that lies past our physical world and universe. I believe that there are things beyond science, that cannot be “found” like atoms and planets can be found. In other words, we cannot get rid of the unknown and uncertainty, not with the hearts and minds that we are born with, not with the world we reside in, and honestly, I don’t think we really want to remove uncertainty. We may think we want to remove uncertainty, but we don’t. Here’s why.

The world would be uninteresting without uncertainty. There would be no fear, but nor would there be surprise. There would be no pain, but there would be no joy or wonder. If the world had certainty in all things, and free will was not a thing, we would not have walk-off home runs or Hail Mary passes to win the game. We would not need to wrap gifts or experience nervousness before going on a first date. If we had 100% certainty on every event surrounding us, we would be machines. Philosophical arguments about determinism vs. free will, or materialism vs. spiritualism, have gone on for centuries, but it’s clear to me that free will is real. I suppose eventually we just choose a worldview that decides for us (there’s a joke in there somewhere). Freedom, believe it or not, is not a one word slogan on a USA t-shirt, it is something much more. This is a better definition: “Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life…The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes.” (CCC 1730-1738)

Now that I’m warmed up, I can get to the point. I seem to need a longer stretch each time before I start to jog, perhaps so I don’t pull a muscle. While uncertainty has an upside and can be fun, there is a flip side of the coin where anxiety, worry, and fear can cripple us. This often happens in the night, in the form of racing thoughts.

What I mean by racing thoughts is the overactivity of the brain that keeps you staring at the ceiling and blocks any cohesion of thought. This often happens before a big event like delivering a work presentation or starting a new job. The night before a test or a game or a marathon often kept me awake, even when I seemingly was not upset or nervous about the day ahead. The brain just turns on, and the switch to turn it off becomes temporarily out of order. Other events like moving to a new house or starting a large project or going on vacation - the details of these plans invade your head and they don’t shake out. In all of these types of activities, racing thoughts can bring stress, but the brain and nerves are chewing on something that could be constructive, or, at the very least won’t kill you. This is the racing thoughts of anticipation and details, and this kind of worry can come fast and hard, but is tolerable mostly because you have some control over the upcoming event. Control is the keyword here, as worry and fear increase in parallel to the grip on your desire for control.

There is a fun kind of fear and worry, like that which comes from horror movies and rollercoasters. The fear of a scary movie excites us just like the intense speed of a rollercoaster drop because it feels like we could die. But we know that we won’t, so it’s a thrill, not actual fear.

Fear without consequence is the fun kind. Horror movies and riding roller coaster takes some courage to do, but the safety net is there. You can pause the movie. On a rollercoaster you have the assurance of engineering and the preview of hundreds of people ahead of you completing the ride in one piece.

Real fear is the one where you have no certainty and no control. It’s the kind in the late night that seeps into your mind hot and clutches your heart with its cold hand. You can’t stop the thoughts as they teem upon you like the zombies in The Walking Dead. And there is no engineer to fix it. The TV and phone can’t drown it out and it’s too late to call a friend without seeming insane, without appearing vulnerable (God forbid). The racing thoughts come hard upon each other like waves in the sea. You can medicate it away, if you’re lucky, for the night with alcohol or drugs or sleeping pills, but they often just make it worse, if not that day, then later on when you need to medicate again, and again, and sooner or later the medication stops working.

This real fear is best met head on in the only way that it can be turned back and that is by prayer, by radical trust in God, because this real fear comes from yourself. Just like the boys in Lord of the Flies, the beast in the woods is out there, but the beast only exists out there because it is actually a projection of themselves. Trust always defeats fear, and fear is born from a focus on the self, for the craving of control and certainty. Trust in something outside the self is the cure. God’s grace confers certainty. Grace and certainty comes to those who trust. I can’t explain why. It just happens. A “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer will help a child, an adult needs something a bit different, but in the end just as simple and sincere. You need to yearn for the trust and the grace will arrive. It must be a surge of the heart, letting go. This is hard to do. For people battling their vices, like those quitting drinking, trusting that you can make it through the night may seem a bridge too far. Or for parents who are up waiting for a teenager to come home, or for someone in mourning the loss of a loved one, letting go of fear may seem a mountain too high. In fact, racing thoughts often happen because of a loss, as I have heard people that are quitting drinking talking about their loss of being “normal” and fitting in with their friends. Saying goodbye to a vice really is like mourning the death of your old self, your old life. I’ve had my share of pity-parties (but they aren’t fun…you get no balloons or cake at these kinds of parties). Usually, I am wanting my will to create action, to make something happen that won’t, or can’t, and that makes free will a burden rather than empowering. The worry and fear can turn to anger, where we want to will away the sense of suffering, by any means, by pills or by miracles, whatever! We’ll take anything to calm the thoughts. We want our freedom, our peace, our way, and dog gone it, we want some sleep. The question underneath it all is just this tiny little problem called suffering and evil. This tiny little problem is only the most difficult philosophical question and biggest blocker to opening any door to religious faith. This is why C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain keeps selling year after year and sticks like glue to the best selling list of books on death and grief. Because why? Why do we have to go through this? Why is there suffering and pain and struggle? (And here is where I’ll sidestep and refer you to read Lewis for that answer, not my writings.)

Somehow the brain can play games like the Geto Boys song “My Mind was Playing Tricks on Me” where the first lines sum up a night of racing thoughts. This song goes to the corners of fear and worry and comes out swinging. (I’ve redacted some of the swear words).

I sit alone in my four-cornered room

Starin' at candles

At night I can't sleep, I toss and turn

...

Four walls just starin' at [me]

Both rap and country music find these edge cases of our lives and conjure an experience in song, from that deep seeking in the soul, and the words have teeth that will bite you if you’re not careful. Later in that same song, a lyric says: “Late at night, something ain’t right.” He’s got the racing thoughts, and can’t fix it.

Rap and country music, whose fans would probably not admit any similarity, touch upon lonely and desperate moments, which is where the best art has always come from, and always will. There is a macho attitude in both genres but on the other side of macho sits loneliness in its various guises. The broken relationship, the aftermath of rejection, the places of unknown outcomes, the hours of weakness and despair, the isolation from bad choices, the agony of loss; these are the places of uncertainty where we can know for certain that there is a God-shaped hole in our hearts. These are also the times when racing thoughts attack a soul.

In those nights of racing thoughts, the replay of thoughts can start in a trickle. The replays then get accompanied by newly invented thoughts, or the spawning and ripening of unrelated thoughts, which then somehow mingle in with the others. All of these swarm into an invasion on the mind, in an onslaught of whispers. Like a primitive CPU, our single-threaded brains cannot flip back and forth fast enough between the context of one thought to the next and it soon becomes deadlocked. A comment from a peer or family member will rewind and start again. You come up with a thousand responses that you wished you had uttered. Or a comment on the internet can send you reeling, knocking you far off the road of tranquility and into a ditch. Concern over a child can drive parents to extreme worry, as kids get left out or insulted or suffer some health issue that the parent cannot take upon themselves. There is money, always money, mostly its absence, never its surplus, that bothers us. Schemes that we have in place, plans, expectations, the fear of failure and the fear of missing out…in a million varieties anxiety can not only invade you, but can conquer you in a matter of minutes.

The answer to anxiety is trust.

To trust, you need to leap and not know where you will land. That is a wild strategy, but it works, especially when other ideas may be leading you away from that choice.

There is a passage in the powerful chapter 6 of John, where Peter shows us what trust really means. This is the only chapter in any Gospel where Jesus loses followers after saying hard things while establishing the holy Eucharist. And after seeing followers leave, Jesus says to Peter, “Do you now also want to leave?” And Peter replies, “Where else would I go?” I hear that response from Peter and it hits me like electricity. It stings me like a current, because it is so true. I recall the first time I read those words and actually understood what he meant, and I had to set the book down because I realized it was true. I couldn’t read any more. Peter’s simple answer summarizes faith. Once you know the answer, there is nowhere else to go. Not only will you not leave, you don’t ever want to leave.

If you’ve tried everything else and you come to know that Jesus is the way, nothing can replace that faith. Peter knows he has found the way, the truth, and the life, even if it’s difficult to understand or unpopular. Having found this answer to life’s riddle he will not abandon it, he will hold fast to it like the parable of the treasure in the field or the merchant and the pearl. He will fail. He does fail. He will fail again. As a human being he must fail, but he will return again and again, as where else would he go? To what? To whom? He knows that the path to truth and peace is only through God.

There is one even better Gospel example of trust. Peter’s saying “To whom else would I go?” is powerful, but another example goes even further. There is Jesus himself in one of his most human moments in the agony in the garden of Gethsemene, on the night of his arrest. He must endure a night of racing thoughts. Even Jesus, who could calm the wind, who could walk on water, must face the terror of uncertainty and death. Temptation and desperation agonizes him, as he knows the Crucifixion awaits. This is Jesus, the Son of God, facing something like what we face, only with more serious and guaranteed consequences, and as always, always, without fail, he shows us how to live. The entirety of the Gospels is Jesus showing us over and over how to live our lives.

In that night dealing with his own fear of things to come, he is praying. He prays to God. Notice in reading the Gospels, whenever Jesus is facing something difficult, he prays. This is Jesus showing us how to live. On the night before he died, he is asking for guidance and putting his total trust in God. To me the question he asks to God and the answer he discerns is the answer to all of life’s nights that are seized by fear. He wants to escape the coming suffering and asks God to stop what is happening. He experiences sorrow and worry and fear. He too, like us, wants to control what is to come and he says these words:

“My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet, not as I will, but as you will.”

That moment makes him so very human as even he doubts, even he has anxiety. He is doing battle with a temptation to escape, to control, to win. But then he prays further and says if this is God’s will then let it be so. He surrenders his will to God’s will. This is the great “thy will - not mine - be done.” That is the answer. It is always the answer. Even Jesus, the incarnate God who bore all our human flaws and fears, turned to God in heaven when he needed help in his night of racing thoughts. He shows us the way. Our nights of terror pale in comparison to the agony in the garden, but we can know the way through the fire because he showed us how.

These nights come for us all and I can squirm and worry and let anxiety wreck me or I can trust and say “Thy will be done, God.” This is yet another “Surrender to Win” moment, and it’s the same question as every time and it’s the title of this website. Why did Peter sink? Because he took his eyes off God. Because he wanted his own will to be asserted, not God’s. Because he turned back to himself instead of keeping his trust steady.

There is a passage from Thomas a Kempis that speaks to this free will problem which drives us all crazy. When we don’t get our way, how easily, how very simply, we get upset and off track. As long as we get our way, we are happy. But when our will is disrupted we instantly flake out:

“But too often some hidden force within, some attraction that meets us from outside, will sweep us off our feet. Plenty of people are influenced in their actions by these undercurrents of self-seeking, without having any idea of it. All seems to go well with them, as long as everything turns out in accordance with their wishes, their plans; but when once their wills are thwarted, they lose their balance and get depressed in no time.” (Imitation of Christ Book 1.14, paragraph 2)

Free will is like a gift and a curse at the same time, and this is one of these interesting contradictions in Christian faith. Yes, I am free to make choices, but no, I don’t get to control anything.

Even if you are an atheist, God is there for you on these nights and you can try it because you have nothing to lose. It’s also free. No downloads or appointments needed. If it doesn’t help, then you can go on being atheist the following morning, and seek out pills and mindfulness and therapy. I’m not making fun of those things, I just wonder why are so many of us stubborn to try prayer in the 21st century. I was like a mule. I wouldn’t dream of trying prayer until I quit drinking, but I was willing to try anti-depressants and relaxation CDs and therapy. It’s almost like in our consumer mindset we want to pay for a product or we don’t think it can be effective. If you try prayer, you don’t even have to tell anyone the next day. It can be your own little secret. I think the stubbornness today is that we don’t want anything budging in our “freedom” because we don’t want to be told “no.” This seems a very American and modern idea, to be the god of our lives and creator of our own worlds. The funny thing is that we are shutting out something that doesn’t actually limit our freedom, it actually expands it.

The grace of Christ is not in the slightest way a rival of our freedom when this freedom accords with the sense of the true and the good that God has put in the human heart. On the contrary, as Christian experience attests especially in prayer, the more docile we are to the promptings of grace, the more we grow in inner freedom and confidence during trials, such as those we face in the pressures and constraints of the outer world. By the working of grace the Holy Spirit educates us in spiritual freedom in order to make us free collaborators in his work in the Church and in the world:

Almighty and merciful God,
in your goodness take away from us all that is harmful,
so that, made ready both in mind and body,
we may freely accomplish your will. (CCC 1742)

In fact, I just took a lot of words to say what Padre Pio said in very few words to everyone who asked him for help. Padre Pio would say to people: “Pray, hope, and don’t worry so much.” That pretty much says it all. It seems so simple when you say it like that. His response was so concise that you can buy a pair of socks with those words. I should take that as a hint to be brief. St. Francis said we should always be brief, since Jesus himself “kept his words short on earth.” I still have much to learn.

So, in summary:

“Pray, hope, and don’t worry so much.”

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I become what I consume. Obviously I’m only referring to the mind, not the physical, for if this were true for the body, I would have turned into a bowl of breakfast cereal by now. But over years of reading and watching movies, with the gift of hindsight, I realize that I do merge with what I read, which isn’t anything new. The old saying rings true: “Where your treasure is, there also your heart will be” - even when the treasure is a destructive one. While throwing around proverbs, I’ll just add another: “Be careful of the company you keep.” I’d apply that same statement the books or movies or media you keep.

Charles Bukowski, the alcoholic poet that I loved to read in my early twenties, is the subject. Yes, Bukowski, the carnal, rejectionist, drunken, insane, brutally honest, self-destructive societal outsider. Who doesn’t love that kind of guy? He’s the guy that follow no rules whatsoever and yet is a virtuoso of victimhood. But then he also wrote from the heart and could spin sentences into gold. He reminds me of the Oscar Wilde quote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Bukowski did look at the stars, but just as often he would lie face down and describe the gutter itself, in great detail.

In my own days of drinking, I knew there was a problem around control, a dysfunction that I couldn’t manage. I knew it from the very first time the buzz spun me around, that this was my drug, what I had been looking for. But I also knew there was something not right about this affinity but I didn’t want to face the problem. However, when I stumbled onto Charles Bukowski, I found a kindred spirit where I didn’t have to care about the problem. I just let the problem be. I could let it exist. I just wanted to allow myself to not feel lost and empty, which meant letting the desire live unfettered. Not wanting to deal with the problem, I found Bukowski giving me a fist bump and saying, “Just go with it. Embrace it.” One quote that sticks in my mind was this one:

“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

There is no question that Bukowski was a deep addict that could speak profoundly, often striking deep at the paradoxes written in our souls. Honesty and raw pessimism makes his writing hit readers hard. His gutter-style of writing, from the dark places, made him famous. He compared himself to a Roman writer named Catullus, another poet of the alleyways who lived on the hidden streets of society. The humor in Bukowski’s stories made me laugh out loud, as he crossed every line and broke every taboo. This appealed to me because, like a court jester, he stood outside of society and mocked all of our facades. The masks that we wear and our modern rituals meant nothing to him. Throughout history, outsiders like the comedian and the bum on the street both hold special privilege to mock us “normies,” and Bukowski played both bum and comedian. He didn’t fit the mold of expected society, so he flung himself far from it and laughed at the absurdity, like a failing student slinging mud from the back row of class. Or he at least appeared to be unbothered by his flaws.

But then he would write something that let his own mask slip from his persona, like a poem called “Bluebird” that, when I first read it, struck me like a shovel to my forehead. A flicker of light remained within him. He knew something deep about his spirit, admitting that he recognized something like hope within.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the ws and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

That poems sits in great contrast to his more common themes of nihilism, insanity, and pessimism, which fired on all cylinders through most of his writing. He touches on something very far down, very deep, in his spirit, and his Bluebird is like the last refuge of his hope, and it reminds me of a teaching of the Catechism that states the same thing, but without the references to whiskey and smoke:

In the depths of his conscience…always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience when necessary speaks to his heart: do this, shun that. (GS 16 & CCC 1776)

Bukowski, even in full rejection mode, taps into the center of something that cannot be drowned with booze or smoked out.

What fascinated me in his writing is that he avoids all political correctness, which was already a thing in his era, and goes straight to the bottom, to the blind alleys, and just says the things that few would say or write. He was a prophet of the “Big Empty” where nothing matters, and where nothing is important. In his world, everything is a waste of time. I recall reading this quote and nodding along, as so many mornings you would wonder why the day needed to happen:

“I don’t know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what?”

Or darker still, Bukowski could enter a contest against Sylvia Plath for the saddest sentence ever written. There was always a yearning for suicide in the writing of both of their works. Here was a writer that could articulate depression. An example from Bukowksi:

“If I hadn’t been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.”

Similar to Hemingway’s quote, “Drinking is a way of ending the day,” Bukowski had a devastating idea about drinking as a way of killing hisself each day:

I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.

When I was reading Bukowski, the sentiments confirmed ideas that I held. The rejection of society and self I felt, even while I was going through the motions of proper society externally. The mask I wore in society, Bukowski just discarded it. He had no need of approval, or so he said - which is funny, because he actually did need approval. He wrote for approval and constantly sent out his art for publication. But like the person today who posts on Facebook, “I don’t care what anyone thinks about me, I am who I am,” it’s the same plea for approval. Declaring that you don’t care about approval is always a cry for support from others to approve of you. I know quite a few people who need to be seen in a big pickup and drinking beer and talking sports who say, “I don’t care what people think of me.” It always make me laugh, as this is like a very lite beer version of Bukowski, who took that sentiment and no parachute and jumped all the way to the bottom of that lie.

The sadness that could be discerned in his writing so often bordered on thoughts of suicide, which is unavoidably where this way of life leads. My own feelings were bolstered by Bukowski’s announcements about the cruel “truth” of the world. My suspicions were that the Big Empty was it, that life had no meaning, and here was the first author I found that wasn’t afraid to declare it without a bunch of “isms” like subjectivism or positivism or communism or existentialism or deconstructionism or just plain old atheism. Bukowski didn’t write happy endings or pretend the world was good. He saw the world as a mess and so he pushed the eject button.

After reading many of his poems, however, his notions of being at odds with everything start to seem self-congratulatory. Today, what I see so many years later in his quotes is an addict in full bloom, with no remorse or intention to change. The same celebration of alcohol and recognition of emptiness can be felt in the books of Hemingway and Fitzgerald as well, but they have more refined plots and complex characters. Bukowski’s dissatisfaction finds an outlet to pleasure through drinking, as the state of drunkenness removes what ails his heart, and so that becomes the center of his life. (This is not surprising to anyone that enjoys drinking or drugging, but differs none for those chasing other addictions like porn, gambling, cheating, food, work, shopping, plastic surgery, fitness, or internet and video games.) His rough youth and escapades are illustrated in his books via his alter ego Henry Chinaski. The path of his addiction is so well recorded that his life reads like a manual: this substance that gives pleasure initially becomes less satisfactory, but then you can’t stop doing it because you’re looking to get the high back again. Always repeating the same loop of events, he drinks to escape life. Then the isolation and self-pity infiltrates his life and everything else becomes pointless, stupid, a waste of time, and no one understands him. The reason he claims to love isolation so much is because of the grip alcohol had on him, not because he actually enjoyed isolation. The spiral of depression takes a person to a lonely place, and while the user feels like the vice lifts him up, it’s a trick of the mind, and it only took me about 20 years to realize that this is literally what the word “hell” means. Bukowski celebrates this error because his addiction wants him to stay there and be lonely with it. A false worldview has trapped him, so he claims to love his self-absorption and self-pity. For all the humor and deep thoughts in his writing, that’s what it is. He’s in a hell that he’s chosen and is too stubborn and addicted to ever leave.

As the saying goes, the devil won’t bother you while you are already doing what he wants; he only bothers you when you try to stop. If you don’t believe me, stop doing the thing that troubles you the most and report back in one year about how it went for you.

Repeatedly in his stories you can hear this bottoming out, this hopelessness, as he just wants to be left alone with writing and liquor because there no one can hurt him. No one but himself.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.

This is actually why I like Bukowski still today. He’s just so honest about the problem. I read it very differently now though having called closing time on my own pity party. As I was adrift in adulthood, despite having a good job and wanting for nothing, this gnawing sense of meaninglessness led me to seek and explore the emptiness, since if nothing was all there was, why not make the most of it? There are billions of people in this state today. I can sense it in conversations and see it in their faces. I have felt what Bukowski describes and if you attend recovery meetings, you will hear this sentiment over and over and over again. One thing that has always amazed me at recovery meetings is that people will admit things very much like Bukowski. They will utter these damaged and lonely ideas to strangers because they felt no one would understand, and then, to their surprise, everyone understands. If it were not so sad it would be comical, that we all carry this burden, asking ourselves, “What is the meaning of life?” but feeling inadequate to articulate the feeling, we just say “Screw it,” and dive back into our problem because we think others would find our ideas crazy. As I’ve said before, at recovery meetings, no one is going to be surprised at your darkest thoughts or what you have done in the past because you lack the uniqueness you imagine. Yes, it hurts to hear it. Bukowski was unique in his writing, but he was not unique in his drinking or his addiction. In fact, he would have still been a great writer without the booze.

As I’ve mentioned, I was a big fan of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Bradley Nowell of Sublime. Both died in their twenties. Both had drug and alcohol problems. I once referred to Kurt Cobain as my “hero” years before I had discovered Charles Bukowski. When someone pointed out that “hero” might not be the right label for a lead singer who was a drug addict that killed himself, I ignored them, believing that the rock star life of full-speed-unto-death was a more honest life than most (insert laugh-track here). So I was already primed for Bukowski and my discovery of his writing was far from accidental. In fact, I sought such corroboration of my worldview, just as we all do.

What drove me to anger in those years were Christians, who represented everything opposite of Charles Bukowski, who was so “free”. The Christians appeared fake and gullible and obnoxious, as they embodied a quote by Bukowski: “Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”

But those boring damned people were not damned, because while Bukowski was “free” to do whatever he wanted, he was miserable. His identity came from his writing, but he worshipped his image as a rebel. He loved his fame once he got a taste of it. In fact, he needed all those boring people to loathe, but he also needed them as readers, so that he could justify himself. What was valuable to him? He claimed it was nothing, but it was three things: writing, drinking, and insulting everything that wasn’t his own writing or drinking.

I suppose I should cut to the chase. In those Bukowski-admiring years, I had come to have faith in atheism, believing that nothing mattered. I say “faith” because to believe in nothing is as much a leap as believing in God. This conversion had taken place over years, but once I was finished with college and making my way in the world, living alone, I found no purpose whatsoever to anything. There was making money and moving up the ladder at work, but even then I knew something major was missing from those pursuits.

That march toward nihilism had begun in college. No, even before that, when I first started to lose faith as a teenager over questions around the Resurrection of Jesus and I couldn’t get any satisfactory answers. I was grasping at God in those years, trying to find God and getting hung up on literal readings from fundamentalists, which I could not accept. But once I hit these Bukowski years, I was now straight-up fleeing God. I wasn’t grasping at all, I was running.

What I did not understand is that while sprinting away from God, I was going to run in a full circle once I realized, years later, there is nothing in that void, that is has nothing to offer, and that a worldview aimed at the void is simply wrong. If I had been educated in the faith, so many questions would have been answered, but it seems that the idea of blind faith and not asking questions bumped me sideways to the point where I had to go searching for different answers. In observing bad behavior in Christians, I lumped them all together as one blob of humanity and ignored learning any actual doctrine.

What’s funny to me now is that the Church was well-aware of my entire experience long before I stumbled onto it, and as I mention often, it hurts to find out how unoriginal I am. In 1965, the Catholic Church published this:

For, taken as a whole, atheism is not a spontaneous development but stems from a variety of causes, including a critical reaction against religious beliefs, and in some places against the Christian religion in particular. Hence believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion. GS 19

I could tick all of those boxes, and tick them off about many Christians that I knew. Neglect of training or education? Check. Erroneous doctrine? Check. Deficiencies in moral and social life? Without a doubt.

Furthermore, in their explanations of modern atheism, the following description also stuck to me like flypaper:

For while God is expressly denied by some, others believe that man can assert absolutely nothing about Him. Still others use such a method to scrutinize the question of God as to make it seem devoid of meaning. Many…contend that everything can be explained by this kind of scientific reasoning alone…Moreover, atheism results not rarely from a violent protest against the evil in this world, or from the absolute character with which certain human values are unduly invested, and which thereby already accords them the stature of God. Modern civilization itself often complicates the approach to God not for any essential reason but because it is so heavily engrossed in earthly affairs. (GS 19)

Now when I consider that statement against a Bukowski quote about being his own god, he is like a case study of a lost sheep. Bukowski realizes that without God, he is a god, and with that arrangement, nothing has any meaning but that which he declares meaningful.

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god…”

In other words, there is no truth for Bukowski, and ultimately no meaning. He is “pliable” and “adjustable” which boils down to a pretty weak lower-case god.

The great realization that I had was two-fold: there is a God, but more importantly I am not God. That short sentence - I am not God - changes every single thing I see in the world. This is like standing in a room full of mirrors and then suddenly stepping outside, where before all I could see was myself and my expressions, my feelings, and suddenly I saw everyone else. The way of seeing the world radically differs between a believer and a non-believer, and it changes even further for Christians. When your life is no longer about you, nothing looks the same.

Bukowski even knew there was something good in the world, and in him. He actually reveals why he hides his beloved Bluebird in the second verse of his poem. Why does he keep this beautiful Bluebird hidden in his heart? Because he likes his rebellion. His status as a rebel feeds his ego. If he shows his Bluebird, he has to give up his outsider status, which helps him sell books.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

The appeal of Bukowski to those adrift is his stubbornness to never let his light shine, even when he knows the little light is in there, deep in his heart. There’s even a parable about hiding a light under a bushel basket. As an artist, Bukowski was actually grasping at something higher, but he could not admit it to the world.

For those that do come to faith, the former life of standing in the room of mirrors comes to be seen as a false life, a different life - almost a life that didn’t exist because of the focus on the self. When Jesus cures the blind man and the blind man says, “All I know is I was blind, and now I see,” his life is changed in the literal sense of vision but also of his outlook on the world and his soul. The lives of many saints are remarkable in similarity when this change occurs, like Ignatius, Augustine, Paul, Dorothy Day, Elizabeth Anne Seton.

If you are a doubter, just consider the annoying people who are always talking about Jesus and seem to have a wellspring of happiness. Aren’t they annoying? Aren’t they boring?

But the sense of joy is honest in them. It’s real. The turning toward God changes people in ways that cannot be understood unless you experience it. This blindness-into-sight is what happens to people who experience conversion. Once it occurs, you realize that it’s not boring. Life is not boring. Faith makes every day worth living, so that you don’t wake up and put on your shoes, and like Bukowski say, “Oh, now what?” This way of seeing makes you wake up filled with hope instead of despair. You know the world has flaws, and so do you, but still there is hope.

This way of seeing flips everything on its head, just as you see with Matthew or those who “come to Jesus.” Nothing is the same for them ever again. They would not even recognize their former lives and would never want to go back to old ways. Like me and so many others, unfortunately, you almost have to arrive at this destination the hard way - by following things to their end, to realize that you were looking in the wrong place.

Now I think back to the influence of writers like Bukowski had on me, and how I allowed myself to celebrate my errors and flaws. That wasn’t a mistake so much as a guidepost along my way. We are raised today to believe that fulfilling our wants and desires is path to happiness, but the only times I’ve grew spiritually is when I don’t get what I want, when I deny myself. The many freedoms we have today to satisfy the self is actually what chains us to a life of misery. The self always wants more, whether it’s food or sex or comfort or honor or pleasure or wealth. Bukowski did what he wanted all the time and it’s pretty obvious he was miserable.

If anything I’m grateful for the entertainment of Bukowski’s books as it hustled me along to the end of the path, where I could realize that it is not better to rule in hell than serve in heaven. Turns out that serving myself creates a kind of living hell. Separating myself from belief in a loving God makes this life into a place of endless wants and desires. Elevating myself into a god - it’s just too much work! It’s too empty if I am the only decider of right and wrong, the lonely chooser of what is meaningful and meaningless.

I wouldn’t advise anyone to read Bukowski, not because I think he’s a bad writer. I think he’s amazing, and I still laugh just thinking of some of this quotes. Rather, I wouldn’t recommend him because the influence of reading can be strong on a mind and persuasive in tugging one toward blind alleys. If you are seeking that kind of writing, you will find it anyway. If you are already one of the “boring” people that Bukowski hated, who has faith and hope, I would strongly recommend remaining boring and full of hope.

I could give a drunkalogue on adventures undertaken under the influence of alcohol which might lead you to believe that pursuit of selfish pleasures is anything but boring, but I can assure you, if you go to any recovery meeting, you can watch people roll their eyes or fall asleep when a newcomer tries to wow ex-drinkers with his or her tales of debauchery. No one cares. Everyone has heard it. Moreover, no one wants to hear it, whether in a recovery meeting or regular life. Drunk stories only entertain the teller. All “wild” stories of intoxication are a dime a dozen. The aftermath of “wild” stories may be the only interesting part, since the epilogue is not about the teller, but about the people the story impacted and quite often hurt.

Once again, as the saying goes, “Where your treasure is, there also your heart will be.” If your treasure is nothing, your heart will find those who celebrate it, such as Bukowski or Camus or Marx or Dawkins or Foucault, or so many others who preach faith in nothing. They may not all be labelled as nihilists, but at the bottom, of you follow it to the end, that’s what the underlying doctrine really is.

A better recommendation would be to find a better treasure. For anyone looking for a reading recommendation, I would start with the Word on Fire Bible, and read all the side commentaries. Don’t just read the Gospels, read the explanations of why the parables and encounters of Jesus are so profound. Don’t just pick up any Bible, read a study Bible and start with the Gospels, since that is where the real treasure is. That was the book I needed. Had I read the Gospels with this kind of understanding instead of following Bukowski’s adventures, I may have never gone down those aimless paths. At the very least, I likely would not have got stinking drunk and bought a one-way ticket to…oh never mind. That alone would have been worth giving the Gospels a solid try.

Lastly, idolizing drunk writers and artists allows justification of bad behavior. When I fancied myself a writer, I fell for the cult of drinking in which Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald are lionized for their maladies. Creativity, as the hypothesis goes, is linked to drinking. But as anyone who is not a creative genius knows, there is a fine line between skills being sharpened by a buzz and falling off a cliff after drunkenness. For anyone that has been drinking while playing card games or pool or darts, or even backyard beanbag toss, or anything involving the brain - yes, the drink loosens you up and there’s a moment of genius and skill…right before it takes you downward into the abyss of stupidity and acting like an ass. If our heroes happened to write something great, and perhaps they got loosened up with a few drinks, that’s one thing. But to celebrate heroic drinking is a fool’s errand. And yes, I’m calling myself a fool for falling for this idea. I fell for it because I wanted to allow my flaws to flourish, rather than deny them and face my problems.

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There was a third reason that lurked in my mind as to why I wanted to do the Exodus 90 challenge, as I discussed in my last post. As I’ve written at length about in other posts, I was a slow convert to belief in God. But I knew that my faith was not yet rooted deep. Events in my life, plus the addition of the pandemic, made me realize how fragile this world really is. Society is a tenuous thing, held together with duct tape and bubble gum, as are corporations, and even families. Like the stock market, the social contract we live under could tumble at any time. Marriages and families crumble every day as husbands and wives capitulate to their wants and desires. Companies that are making money have high spirits, but as soon as a bad quarter comes along the lukewarm employees begin to flee like rats on a sinking ship.

The wheel of fortune would spin eventually, likely soon, and I felt that I lacked the fortitude that would be needed in the inevitable chaos. The unpredictable changes of life and society could bring any outcome, as we are all pawns in an infinite game of three-dimensional chess. Having read enough dystopian novels and history books, I realize that hard times will come, that this American moment of excess and plenty is temporary. Moreover, it was obvious to me that throughout history the one thing that prevailed and still prevails is faith and the Church. Despite a thousand attacks against Christianity, from government attempts to destroy it, or the constant hatred from all sides (including from itself), still it stands. Some how, some way, faith and the Church remains, and never dies. And of course now it’s easy to understand why it never dies. As long as there are people in this universe, and the story of Jesus is alive in even one person, it will return in full, always and forever.

It does not take a prophet to predict the fall of nations, as the empires of this world wax and wane every hundred years, and the prophets of old could feel a nation’s decline without reading The Fate of Empires or measuring economic statistics. On the one hundred year anniversary of World War I, we can marvel at the change in worldly power in a single century, as the Austro-Hungarians must have wondered what hit them. Likewise, I recall walking through the ruins of the Roman Forum, being in awe of the decay around me, where such great names like Cicero and Caesar had walked and where major events once occurred. All the while I could not help but compare it to the mall in Washington D.C., since it is a modern Forum. What will a thousand years of time and weather would do to the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument? The famous poem Ozymandius comes to mind.

Am I ready for the change when it comes? For a time when a nation splinters and fractures into civil war? Was I even ready to handle losing my job? Or my health? What about my life?

Was I prepared to deal with the loss of loved ones? Could I be the rock that others would need in that time, or would I crumble like sand? Would I stand there with nothing to offer, as I used to when I was an atheist, and say, “Let me know if I can help in any way,” offering only empty platitudes to the sorrowful? (As if mowing their lawn or running errands would help heal their heart, when they are aching for a spiritual solace.)

Would I avoid talk of God or salvation because I didn’t want to look like a Jesus freak? Or would I have courage, and be willing to pray with people and offer them the hope and love of Jesus who died for our sins? The way of seeing the world between the non-believer and believer is stark when the real things in life, the things that really matter, come to the fore.

I do know who was able to withstand all of these changes, and stare death in the face and go to it without fear. It’s painfully obvious who that person is. He was able to not only live without sin, but face the greatest sins and insults of this world, and still go to his death with hope and love. The opposite of fear is faith, and radical trust in God.

The saints did their best to imitate Christ, except they were all sinners. The key thing about the saints is that they knew they were sinners, but still they had faith. The world could take everything from them, beat them, suppress them, hate them, jail them, kill them - and still, there they were, still standing with faith, hope, and charity when they drew their final breath in our world.

Even today, Christians are loathed and hated and still being persecuted actively, and still the light of faith continues to pass to the next candle, and the next, and the next. You can see it every Sunday at Mass. Even as the different types of Christian faiths bicker, the light shines in all of them: Lutheran, Evangelical, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic - the light does not go out, and the reason why is because it is impossible to extinguish. The world has tried everything, literally every possible way to bury this belief, and the flame remains today and still spreads, even flourishing against the fire extinguisher known as the internet, where hordes mock and deride religious people every day.

By 2050, Christianity is predicted to be the largest religion, yet we are told by the media and academics that this religion called Christianity is dying. What they don’t realize is that, even if this faith in Jesus is snuffed out in one corner, the fire magically re-ignites itself in a new place, somewhere else, and there is no question that a revival will come again to the places where it is fading today. No video game or drug or car or house or surgery or accomplishment or website will ever cure the needs of the heart, as much as we pretend otherwise. I could only distract myself for so long, and as St. Augustine said, “Our hearts our restless until it rests in God.”

The light needed to become stronger in me. I was like a wooden match barely burning. And there was one thing, especially, that I needed to shine the light upon. Most importantly: was I strong enough and committed enough in my marriage to handle the storms? Could that light remain flickering in the darkest of nights?

It took me quite a few years to realize how sacred marriage is, or to even realize that it really is sacred. Unsurprising to anyone who has the order of priority in life sorted out, this realization about marriage came to me once I had finally set God on top of my list of concerns. When you don’t believe, those with faith will annoy you with tips like, “Put God first and everything else will fall into place.” That is so irritating. When you are not ordered first to faith, that sentence is like nails on a chalkboard. But then I learned to hear properly. The sentence sounds just fine once you are have priorities in the the right order.

“Unless you believe, you will not understand,” or said another way, “Unless your faith is firm, you will not be firm.” Oddly enough, I ain’t even mad now about my being out of tune for so long. I just wished I’d sooner listened to the music.

An awareness of this gap in my faith probably aided me just enough to say yes to join the Exodus 90 group. I have found that saying “Yes” to new things, with a positive goal, is the way to strengthening my belief. However, that must come with a definitive “No” to the self, which is always vying to be the center of attention. I want to make myself first, the chosen one of my life. But for any lasting happiness, the self must be at a minimum of third. Faith must forever be first, followed by family, with marriage being at the peak of the family, even over the members known as husband and wife. As I have come to remember it, the order of things that works the best is the five F’s: Faith, Family, Friends, Fitness, Finances.

This must be an ongoing project, really a constant one. To grow toward faith requires care and feeding, and some days are much better than others at efforting toward that goal. Anyone who is married knows the struggles and resentments can outweigh the joys if you let it happen. The little foibles of each person become enraging annoyances if we let them, while we ignore our own foibles that enrage and annoy others.

A truly great marriage requires submission of both people toward this mystical union known as “marriage”. For many years, for so many years, I failed to understand what marriage actually is, and I don’t think I truly understood the word marriage until I listened to Timothy Keller’s series on the topic (links below). The irony is that while being married and seemingly functional in that state, I was walking blind and oblivious to the entire purpose.

If you are married and struggling, or considering marriage, or even in a relationship, or thinking of getting into a relationship, or thinking of getting a pet, or even alive and drawing oxygen - then I would encourage you to skip your next Netflix series and give these podcasts at the end of this article a listen. I came across this series and realized that having a terrific marriage does not require fasting for 40 days in the desert. It’s actually much simpler than that. This too is a kind of Why Did Peter Sink? story: when you lose focus on the purpose of marriage, you start to sink.

Having a great marriage requires recognizing it as something sacred and giving all to that union. As a non-believer, the idea of the sacred was a joke to me, and that was exactly why I had no anchors in life. A good marriage requires knowing and committing to the unassailable idea that “the essence of marriage is a promise.” The cause of every problem of every marriage is self-centeredness. The modern idea that the other person needs to make you happy is a recipe for failure, as we see every day in our culture. The reality is that each person must submit to the other and to the marriage, completely and wholly. The way to success is the exact opposite of what modern society teaches us about relationships. Consider the saying that is so common now: “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.” That is probably the worst advice and most openly selfish relationship quote imaginable, but is now being passed about as sage wisdom.

Ok, there is much more than I can re-iterate here. Listen to the series. There are just a few prerequisites: turn off any distractions, set aside your cynicism, and stop clutching your grudges about your wife or girlfriend. The only thing you have to lose is your ego.

Marriage as Ministry Power

Marriage as Commitment

Marriage as Commitment and Priority

Marriage as Priority and Friendship

Marriage as Friendship

Marriage as Completion: One Flesh

Marriage as Completion: Gender Roles part 1

Marriage as Completion: Gender Roles part 2

Marriage Supper of the Lamb

Marriage as Ministry Power

Marriage as Commitment

Marriage as Commitment and Priority

Marriage as Priority and Friendship

Marriage as Friendship

Marriage as Completion: One Flesh

Marriage as Completion: Gender Roles part 1

Marriage as Completion: Gender Roles part 2

Marriage Supper of the Lamb

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.whydidpetersink.com

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Over the past few years I’ve attempted two very different challenges. One is the Ironman triathlon which I’ve already written about. The physical test of the Ironman race itself is punishing, but the commitment to training before the event makes the triathlon an immersive, life changing event. Most days of training require an hour or two of exercise to get the legs and lungs prepared for long distance swimming, biking, and running. As an amateur (and I’m very much that) my commitment to racing is minimal compared to serious athletes, yet finding time to pursue an hour or two of exercise requires that fitness be elevated to a high priority in the day. With a full time job and family, time is precious, so I’m sometimes lucky to have an hour to sneak away for exercise.

Even with the clock looming over every choice, I enjoy charging out the door to run, or driving to the pool to get a half hour swim completed. A sense of accomplishment comes with ticking off blocks of exercise. Plus there is the kicker of feeding my vanity, as fitness feels good. Even when doing long bike rides or runs, the physically exhausted aftermath also feels “good” as it acts like a purge or cleansing. Exhaustion allows my love of food to come out of hiding, too. Burning tons of calories justifies (in my rationalizing mind) overeating and shoveling food at my face: eggs, toast, watermelon, Cinnamon Toast Crunch - these are a few of my favorite things.

The bait of the Ironman race was the challenge that it presented, and having watched videos in the 1980s where athletes were nearly dying to cross the finish line made it enticing. Strange, isn’t it, that suffering is attractive? For a good laugh, watch this Clif bar ad about what it’s like at the start of a triathlon, when everyone is thrashing about in the water. Those images of extreme exhaustion appealed to me, just like military ads from the Navy and Marine Corps appealed to me as a teenager, as the hook for both the Ironman and the Marine Corps is the challenge and the honor that comes with the association of the name and logo. So it was this badge of honor that I was really after in pursuing the Ironman, though it took me some time to realize it.

At the beginning of this year, a different type of challenge came to my attention through a friend. He didn’t recruit me or try to lure me since he wasn’t going to do the challenge, he only mentioned Exodus 90 as a point of interest, where a group of men commit to a spiritual exercise of self-denial. No TV, no social media, no video games, no porn (including no masturbation), no snacks, no alcohol, no unnecessary phone usage, and no unnecessary purchases.

The self-denial part was intense by itself, especially for a food monster like me. But there was a few other key facets of this program that made it quite different from other diet and detox programs.

Daily hour of prayer

Fasting on Wednesday and Fridays

Exercise on at least three days a week

Weekly meetings with the group

And cold showers.

All of that for 90 days.

That’s a lot of self-denial and discipline, but these fasting elements weren’t the real “hook” of this challenge for me. The hook, I thought at the time, was the mandatory cold showers. Having listened to the book What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength by Scott Carney made this whole idea intriguing. Aside from having an insanely long title, the book’s ideas around cold therapy seemed a hot topic among modern seekers. This kind of self-inflicted discomfort was right up my alley! As the world tries to remove all discomfort, there seem to be quite a few of us hunting for it. Endurance tests of exercise and discipline always sound fun. Or so I thought.

From quitting drinking I had already learned that the self-denial of “freedoms” is actually the most freeing thing I ever did. The funny thing about our world today is that everything is permitted and we are free to do whatever we like, but in turn we actually link our bodies, spirits, and minds to these freedoms, and end up getting stuck. And I’m not just talking about drinking. Just watch people with their phones for the most obvious example of modern addiction. Our addiction to pleasure is really an addiction to “self”, which I am terribly guilty of much of the time.

Like everyone, I get lost in my phone too, and coming off a poisonous 2020 election year on social media, I was happy to set aside all memes and polarizing articles for a 90 day break. I had quit social media before the election season, and yet it still infected my ears and eyes. A technology detox was a second reason I thought Exodus 90 would do me some good.

I remember taking a cold shower on the first day, when the outside temperature was -10 degrees Fahrenheit. As you might imagine, that first shower was not enjoyable. Not at all. But as soon as I was done, I was awakened and fully alive. Grimacing in cold water for a minute invigorated me. In fact, a bit of advice here for anyone: if you are having a bad day, or you don’t like your current mood, there are two things that can instantly change your state of mind. 1.) Take an ice cold shower, or 2.) Do burpees to exhaustion. Neither of those two things can be done without your mood changing, and both take 2 minutes or less.

The ice cold shower requires an act of will to step into the water. Someone told me to say before stepping in: “Remember, Jesus died for my sins.” This actually works pretty well, since I considered hanging on a cross and being mocked my everyone to be far worse than enduring a minute or two of cold. Disclaimer: I did a Navy shower, where you get into the cold water and get nice and wet, then turn off the water. Then you soap for about 30 seconds, then turn on the water and rinse off. I was assured that this was an acceptable “cold shower” method, although I’m not sure on whose authority the worthiness of a cold shower can be verified.

What I didn’t think would be terribly difficult turned out to be the hardest part. By far, the daily hour of prayer proved almost impossible for me. The three parts of Exodus 90 are “prayer, asceticism, and fraternity.” When joining the program, I was focused on the ascetic practices and hoping to meet some new friends. The daily holy hour did not seem like that big of a deal. I figured I could knock that out each morning easily and not really think about it, like going for a run.

But the daily “holy hour” was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. Truly, it was more difficult than learning to swim. I could not pray for a half hour. I could not sit still and pray whether I was kneeling or standing or laying down. I finally understood Pascal’s saying, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I thought of those moments in the Garden when Jesus scolded the apostles for not being able to stay awake for one hour. I suppose that made me feel a bit better, since they were all saints and even they failed.

I could not focus or clear my mind to pray, or not for long without feeling my phone beckoning me or a book or some distraction calling out to me from the corner of my mind. The daily minimum was 20 minutes and the Exodus 90 book said that the time should be in contemplative prayer, a term that I had to look up since I didn’t even know what contemplative really meant. Oh, I could read for hours, but to sit in a chair and pray for 20 minutes felt like eons of time.

After a week of trying and failing at the daily holy hour, I just spent the time reading the Gospels and considered that to be “holy,” but a group member reminded me that I was not exactly following the guidance of the program, since contemplative does not mean reading.

And I knew I was cheating at it because I could not do meditative prayer. This reminded me of a time when I had a relaxation CD in my car, many years before, and I was always irritated by the slowness of the narrator, since I wanted to just hurry up and relax already. I shouted at the speaker one day, “Can you just hurry up and relax?!” Obviously, I didn’t understand that the verb “relax” required no action, no hurrying.

This struggle continued. I would do some daily readings and then try to pray in silence, and I had a few days where I was able to maintain silence for a while, but then distractions would flit into my thoughts and I would try to ignore them, only to chase them in the end. I spent time reading the Catechism, as the Exodus 90 program helped guide me to relevant paragraphs, suspiciously aware of the problem I was experiencing:

The habitual difficulty in prayer is distraction. It can affect words and their meaning in vocal prayer; it can concern, more profoundly, him to whom we are praying, in vocal prayer (liturgical or personal), meditation, and contemplative prayer. To set about hunting down distractions would be to fall into their trap, when all that is necessary is to turn back to our heart: for a distraction reveals to us what we are attached to, and this humble awareness before the Lord should awaken our preferential love for him and lead us resolutely to offer him our heart to be purified. Therein lies the battle, the choice of which master to serve. (CCC2729)

That was it, as if plucked from my brain into that book. I would make excuses for why I couldn’t concentrate, blaming the light from outside, or the dog needing to go for a walk, or that I couldn’t get comfortable. My mind would drift off even if all was well, and I would take a sour grapes approach, thinking that perhaps silent prayer wasn’t really necessary anyway. Again the Catechism nailed down my excuses showing that I was lacking originality, as usual. (aside: The idea of my uniqueness that I was sold as a child, has turned out to be disappointingly and utterly false.)

We must also face the fact that certain attitudes deriving from the mentality of "this present world" can penetrate our lives if we are not vigilant….Christian prayer is neither an escape from reality nor a divorce from life. (CCC 2727)

I was still clinging on to some doubt about the need for prayer. I was doing this Exodus 90 to strengthen my faith, yet in reading the daily Exodus verses I was having a hard time with some of the stories. In the weekly meeting with my fraternity, I would feel like an outsider because certain political feelings were being made known that bothered me. Some of them seemed like Facebook in the flesh, with their opinions on their shirtsleeves, but fortunately the group leader reiterated the point that this program was not about politics or memes or any of that garbage and toxic waste. I was letting politics bother me rather than focus on the principles. I thought of quitting the group, just as I had done with AA. But I stuck to it. Each Monday, I tried to re-double my effort at prayer, and began to have small segments of time where I had glimmers or hope, where peace and nearness to God enveloped me.

I wasn’t there yet, but I was getting closer. I was still light years away, but at least a few rays of light struck me. An understanding hit me, as I realized that I could be easily swayed yet, as distractions still stole my attention, and once again the Catechism book pointed to me why this was happening:

The most common yet most hidden temptation is our lack of faith. It expresses itself less by declared incredulity than by our actual preferences. When we begin to pray, a thousand labors or cares thought to be urgent vie for priority; once again, it is the moment of truth for the heart: what is its real love? (CCC 2732)

As the saying goes, “For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” What was my treasure then? Was it the group of men? Was it the words I was reading? Was it my home? My family? My self? My stomach?

All of those are the wrong treasure.

The treasure must be God, and nothing above it. This is literally the problem of the question put forth in these writings: “Why Did Peter Sink?” He sinks because of lack of faith. When Peter looks away from Jesus, he sinks because he fears losing his life, his self. In essence, Peter becomes the treasure, not God. Fear is the result of looking away from God. When God remains the treasure, you cannot feel fear or greed or lust. When you have a radical trust in God, you have succeeded. The moment you forget that trust, you are adrift again.

That is the miracle, I realized, somewhere along the way. When I quit drinking, some old person with 30 years of sobriety said to me, “Don’t quit until the miracle happens,” where in this case “quit” meant to go back to drinking. I recall thinking, “What miracle?” Well, the miracle is that at some point you no longer want to drink. You are just happy without it, and you have a Higher Power that gives more than drinking ever could. The miracle is, once you have trust in God, you don’t want your vice.

With faith in Jesus, the miracle goes further, however, way beyond drinking or sex or whatever your cross to bear in this world is. The miracle is that you stop struggling and forget about yourself. You no longer even want to sin. You are content to be content because you have all faith in Jesus, and all you want to do is give thanks to the incarnate God for showing the way.

It always comes down to the self. For me, maybe for everyone. One way or another, the self wants to be the treasure. The instant that the self exceeds God, Peter sinks. This is unavoidable. This is predictable. It happens every time.

Around the third week of Exodus 90 I started reading the Word on Fire Bible and St. Augustine’s Confessions. That is when I really I started to make some headway, as those two books, plus prayer, began to jackhammer at my doubt and elevate my faith. The commentaries in the WOF Bible opened door after door to understanding the Gospels. How little I understood in the Gospels. Second, the experience of Augustine was so eerily similar that I could not fathom he was writing almost 1,600 years ago. Then someone said I should read The Imitation of Christ and I realized that I’d found the handbook to the spiritual life.

I didn’t master contemplative, silent prayer, not by a long shot. But I began to have days where I could maintain 20 minutes, or have a fairly legitimate holy hour without thinking about Cinnamon Toast Crunch. When I struggled to concentrate I would pray the Rosary, which takes about 20 minutes and use a website called the Rosary Center to reflect on a scene from Jesus’ life for each Hail Mary. This proved a valuable tool, as I could do each prayer and picture the image of something for each bead. This method changed the meaning of the Rosary from rote recitation to something dynamic. I would enter into the world of Jesus and experience these moments. As a kid, my impression of the Rosary was of a bunch of droning gray-hairs in the pews on Sunday before mass. Now I was finally understanding why it was seen as a transcendent experience by those with faith. Then I read the Rosary book from Word on Fire and found this even more expansive on why so many people around the world pray with these beads every day.

To get an idea of what I mean, rather than just doing 10 Hail Mary’s for each decade of the rosary, I would read a verse before saying the Hail Mary for that particular bead. Then the combination of the prayer plus the image becomes powerful, and slows down, and has meaning. I was no longer rattling through the beads like a machine. Each bead then has a story, and something to contemplate.

“The First Sorrowful Mystery – The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane”. For each bead, contemplate the following:

Jesus and His Apostles go to Gethsemane to pray. Mt. 26:36

With Peter, James and John, He enters the olive grove. Mt. 26:37

“My soul is sorrowful unto death.” Mt. 26:38

“Father, if it be Thy will, let this cup pass from Me.” Mt. 26:39

“Yet, not My will, but Thine be done.” Mt. 26:39

“Could you not watch one hour with Me?” Mt. 26:40

“Watch and pray that you enter not into temptation.” Mt. 26:41

Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss. Mt. 26:48

“Having seized Jesus, they led Him away to the high priest’s house.” Lk. 22:54

His disciples abandon Him. Mt. 26:56

I’ve heard that men don’t do the Rosary as much as women. Once I slogged through some education on it, and took my time, I understood why it is so popular. And it is so old-school, so retro, that it can’t help but be cool again. There is nothing so counter-cultural as the Rosary in 2021. It is now the equivalent of the Sex Pistols in 1977 or Dr. Dre’s Chronic album in 1992. Holiness and faith is reviled by a majority of society today, so this is clearly the time that Christian faith will be coming back into style, or very soon. In reality, faith is maybe the only thing that never actually comes into style or goes out of style, which is why it will never die, too.

While I was making progress in prayer, I was still struggling with it. Don’t let me fool you, I still find it very difficult on many days. Many days I hardly lift a finger in prayer. I’d make a terrible Pharisee because I fall into distraction and sin so easily. But I think there’s a lesson there itself, as the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector says something important about being “good” and thinking I’m owed something by God for my good behavior, as if my perceived approval of my actions and self-denial make me better than others. The danger in being righteous in religion is the exact same trap of self-worship that the non-religious fall into. In fact, that is what drives more people away from church and faith than anything else. The Pharisee’s righteousness is so obviously a kind of self-approval and self-worship. Jesus says the genuine prayer of a prostitute or tax collection is more justified than the “good” person, so long as the prayer is humble and true. Bishop Barron points out about this parable that “the entire point of religion is to make us humble before God and to open us to the path of love. Everything else is more or less a footnote. Liturgy, prayer, the precepts of the Church, the Commandments, sacraments…all of it is finally meant to conform us to the way of love…When they have instead turned us away from that path, they have been undermined.” (Word On Fire Bible, p 409 commentary on Luke 18:9-14)

I also found that the ascetic practices of Exodus 90 became increasingly difficult to maintain, as the flesh didn’t enjoy being subdued for so long, as 90 days is a long time! Fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays proved more difficult than anticipated, and I would crash the next day and overeat. Having no snacks or coffee throughout the day caused an inner tantrum inside me, as the food monster wanted his daily excess of sugar. Some of the ascetic practices were easy, as I had already cut out drinking and TV, and porn never seized me like it did other people I know. Seems everyone has a vice that works for them, really does the trick. Some self-denial is easy, and some is torture, depending on your hunger.

For me is was the food. The food! That was the hard part. I could not purge snacking from my life. I needed someone standing by to slap the snacks out of my hand, since auto-pilot will take me straight to the pantry if I’m bored or stressed for any reason.

I found the Exodus readings hard to enjoy and wondered how many ways a tabernacle could be described, and how long such details could go on. As Easter neared I began to fall off the wagon, failing at various practices, finding 90 days starting to to feel more like a full year. I felt like a fraud as I checked in every day with my accountability partner, but then he struggled too.

I made it to the end, relieved to be taking warm showers again. Oddly, the cold showers were the easy part.

In a way, I failed miserably at Exodus 90. But then, as I progressed through this program I realized that this was more challenging than training for the Ironman. The difficulty of Exodus is higher than going for daily runs, swims, and bike rides. I enjoy running, swimming, and biking. I don’t enjoy denying myself things that I enjoy, which is kind of the whole point. Curiously, I learned more about myself in Exodus 90 than the Ironman, as it highlighted where I was weak both in body and spirit. The Ironman training is about willing the self to do, to achieve. Even though I am a mediocre triathlete, I received the same “Finisher” shirt as everyone else for the Ironman. There is not a finish line in faith and prayer. Exodus 90 is about removing the self from all things, while Ironman is about elevating the self. Removing the self, or denying wants and desires, tested me more than anything I’ve ever done, more than the Ironman. In fact, it was so difficult, that I am not sure I want to attempt another “90 day spiritual exercise” because it was the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted. But it was also perhaps the most rewarding thing. After all, my light did grow brighter in those 90 days and I gained understanding of where I am lacking, or rather where I still need to let go of my addiction to self.

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The one thing that strikes me each morning is that how quickly my moods can change and that I shouldn’t trust my feelings. I’m not sure where I read it, but someone mentioned that hunger is like a toddler, always needing something. I seem to have a house full toddlers. I want coffee, I want quiet, I want food, I want media. I want. Therein lies the problem. I want. Even if you kick your worst habit, new desires still find their way into your head. The Buddhists almost have my problem nailed down, since the cause of all suffering does seem to stem from desire. However, there is one thing lacking in the Buddhist answer to the problem of suffering, and that is what the divine person of Jesus presents as a better answer.

The problem is this: if Jesus is who he said he is, then we would be insane not to follow him. If he’s not who he said he was, then he was insane and deserves not a second look. Tim Keller mentioned this in a podcast and reminded me of this dilemma. And I need to be reminded over and over, because this is at the center of why I was a religious “None” for so long. This either/or scenario that Jesus presents is hard to handle. One way or another we have to make a choice, that either Jesus told the truth or he didn’t. The default choice is doubt and indifference, that he is not the son of God and the Resurrection did not happen. This is the The Matrix red pill/blue pill scenario, but this is a more important decision than what the modern conspiracy theorists are using this metaphor to sell. Decide that it is a lie, and you wake up each day and ignore the story. He either rose from the dead, or he didn’t, right? This is the question that must be answered by everyone, like it or not. If we do nothing, the default position of doubt is then our selected choice. With this decision, he is lying and it’s all a hoax.

Well, I spent two decades believing that he was lying. That didn’t work out very well for me as I chased so many dead ends. In terms of worldly goals, it worked out fine, great actually, but my soul remained empty through those years. I was spiritually dead. I imagined that I was alive and righteous and “connected” on the internet, but my heart was flatlined. So then I had to slink back and reconsider which pill to take once again. Taking the other pill is much better. Truth be told, I was able to stop taking other kinds of pills (see: Citalopram) once I decided that he was not lying. That alone to me was stunning, absolutely stunning, and I wonder how many others’ mental health would improve if they just gave it a shot. The main difference is that one pill removes meaning from life, and the other pill grants meaning to life.

I know that exercise boosts my mood and fixes me for a bit, but after pursuing various goals of fitness, I know that fitness alone is primarily for my ego, like any other pursuit of pleasure, not for deep fulfillment. I do find the discipline of exercise far better than old habits, like drinking or watching TV or scrolling on websites. Yeah, those really don’t help much of anything in terms of the heart. How many times have I sat on the couch late at night after watching some TV series or movie only to go to bed feeling like I just wasted the evening? Entertainment is like Cinnamon Toast Crunch; so good to consume, but ultimately leaves me empty. Both are best enjoyed in moderation and kept below the more important “Five F’s” that I will explain in a minute.

The year of the pandemic allowed me ample time to consider what is important, and I am grateful for the space that opened up to find my way back to faith. I see triathlons and marathons as a good goal, but now with my ordering of life changed, fitness no longer takes precedence. Before the pandemic, I saw fitness as this high moral good, a righteousness in itself. I felt like it washed me clean somehow, that through my registration I had purchased a modern indulgence for my soul. But now I see that fitness must fall lower, as follows, in my Five F’s:

Faith

Family

Friends/Fellowship/Fraternity

Fitness

Finances

Any deviation from that order means I am out of order, like a vending machine that doesn’t vend. Thus the trick is remembering this order, especially when I want to go on a two hour bike ride or 10 mile run, or when I want to binge a TV show on Netflix.

What I want is often wrong. Learning this is easiest by getting your butt kicked around in life. If my faith or my dedication to family fades, or if I neglect friendships, then this will mean I have elevated fitness over those higher F’s. I have done that a lot in my life and I can see the wake of wreckage it leaves. If my marriage comes after anything like drinking or swimming or coaching, then I’m off track. What’s clear to me is that this ordering of F’s is right. I want to get out for a run today, a brief one, because faith, family, and friends have commitments already. Running is an action done for myself and my ego, but it does help boost the other F’s. This is the tightrope to walk, where choices I make tell me where the priorities sit. Fitness helps improve those Faith and Family parts of life, so there is no reason to pretend that all acts done for the ego is somehow bad. I am not a desert monk. No, I’m not nearly as cool as St. Anthony of Egypt. The key of the order is to remember that items lower in the list are not by themselves inherently bad. They are good. But they must never bubble up to the top and become the highest good, the summum bonum, of my life. That is when the title of this blog comes into play: Why Did Peter Sink? Because he was out of order on the Five F’s. But simpler still, the Faith “F” fell out of first place.

There is a way to help keep this order in place, too. There’s a three step recipe described by Word on Fire that seems to help me screw this order to the wall, and it even acts as a good standalone prayer.

Finding the Center - Christ must be at the center of my life.

Knowing I am A Sinner - There is a dysfunction that I cannot fix by myself.

Realizing My Life is Not About Me - Charity and volunteering is the way, and whenever I am thinking of myself, there’s a pretty good chance I’m looking away from God.

I would add a fourth to that and say: 4. Stop looking for approval from anyone but Jesus. Am I feeling agitated by something in this world? If so, my addiction to self is returning. Turn off the computer or phone and return to step 1.

Every run, swim, or bike ride that I do alone can become a time of reflection and even prayer. That I know, as I often go to that “chapel in the heart” anyway while running or biking. I don’t know who to thank for this idea, (maybe Ephraim of Syria, I don’t recall) but I go there quite often when the world is swirling around me.

I can’t tell you how many times I have gone to that chapel while coaching, when the chaos starts to swirl. If you want to see a depiction of hell’s Furies in modern times, attend a youth sports tournament championship game that has gone into overtime. There you will witness a complete disorder of priorities. I’m not talking about the the children, I’m talking about the adults.

The projection of desire by parents onto kids is something that I could elaborate on, oh I would guess, for a few weeks. The reason people are so into children’s sports is because they lack something. They need approval, they want love, but they desire above all honor. None of us are about to be called up to war where we can take up our shield, for God and country, like in The Battle of Maldon, where the Anglo-Saxons got rocked by the Vikings but went down in a blaze of glory. But we are still yearning for that experience and youth sports is the proxy experience. I can watch the change on a parent’s face as bloodless victory nears. I feel like if I threw a T-Bone steak toward their folding chair they would ravage it like a starving wolf in the corner of the gym. For glory and honor, for the victory of our ego over some random parents from another suburb. Following through with The Battle of Maldon, if I replace Æthelgar and Godric in the verse below with people I know it would work today as well as a millenium ago:

So Æthelgar’s son emboldened them all,
Godric to the fight. Often he let go of his spear,
the slaughtering spear flying into the Vikings,
so he went forth, first in that crowd,
hewing and maiming, until he perished in the battle.

Godric fought and died for England and became a legend. Little Johnny fights under the mantle of the local gas station or realty office. That ribbon or medal may be cheap in terms of money, but in today’s world is sought like the Ring of Power, as we seek validation in that idol, until the next tournament, next week, on a Sunday usually, where the whetting of the appetites for honor starts all over again.

I’ve watched parents explode in rage, not always at the opposing team, or the referee, but often at their own child. That’s when you can see the truth spill out on how sports actually affects their lives. It’s embarrassing and everyone looks away. Funny how we never approach and ask someone, “What is the order of priority in your life? Is youth sports the highest good, above your family or faith?” That would irritate a lot of people, but might be beneficial in the long run for challenging their notions.

But in that moment when others are losing it, that’s when the chapel within is ready, like a 24-hour neon sign in a bar flashing the words: “Happy Hour”. I can go there and watch the madness happening around me and I ask myself, “Why Did Peter Sink?”

Literally, I do this. If I can extract myself from getting caught up in the moment, I definitely do this. I have several seasons of using this tactic now in the dugout and on the basketball bench. There’s no soundtrack of Ave Maria playing, no cinematic experience, no bathos like the Hallmark Channel movies, there is only a single question to ask myself, to re-center on what is most important so that I avoid going adrift and sinking, to put fear aside and find that radical trust in faith again.

Lest you think I feel sports are bad, I do not. The benefits of sports outweigh the negative, as the kids make friends, they exercise, they understand what teamwork means, they work toward a goal, and they celebrate the ups and downs of wins and losses. Overall, the kids learn many of life’s lessons through sports. It’s just the adults that are insane, and I’m as guilty as anyone of elevating it to an excessive height in the priority of things. I still recall the devastation I felt in the first seasons when a last second shot crushed our hoop dreams. This was actually one of those moments of realizing the disorder of my life, when a group of kids making a basket could cause my sense of the world to crumble. As a Minnesota Vikings and Golden Gophers fan, I should never have fallen into this trap. I should have known well in advance that hanging my ultimate hopes and mood on a sporting event would leave me cold and in the fetal position, yet I still let youth sports feed my ego vicariously to the point where it gave me a false sense of value.

The same goes for fitness. Getting in shape so easily converts from making a self-improvement into a self-love, and then quickly slides over into lust or pride, and I’m sorry to say, a kind of self-worship. Need evidence? Have you heard of Instagram? You know what I’m talking about. It all started with simple gym selfies. Now the clothes appear to be painted into every crack and crevice of the human body, leaving so little to the imagination that Jane Austen’s Victorian readers heads would have have exploded upon eye contact. The pursuit of happiness through fitness or sports or knowledge or drinking - it’s all the same. All of it. It may make you happy for an hour or two, maybe a week, maybe even a year or five years. But eventually it will fail, and then you will wonder why. I certainly scratched my head and wondered why this thing or that thing didn’t satisfy, and usually, before long, rather than examine why, I would move on to another thing and expect the permanent solution to happiness to be there. I wondered why.

And now I can tell you why. It’s not because any of those things are specifically bad in themselves. It is because all of those things were not God. What happens is that there’s a thing I wanted, and if I got it, I was soon disappointed, and if I didn’t get it, I was soon disappointed. And then I was angry or upset or depressed.

Why?

Because it wasn’t God.

Thomas Merton said, “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

Anything that you put highest in your life that is not God has a shelf life of supermarket milk; it’s good for a while then turns rotten. If you want to get off that treadmill of the pursuit of happiness, if you want a way to be happy not for a week or month or year, then give faith a try - a real try. Do it for a year. For all the quack diets and depression pills and exercise equipment we buy, what would hold you back from trying something that is free?

Exercise in general, without question, is good. It’s very good. The mental assist that physical exercise gives me helps with the second and third F’s, Family and Friends. I believe there is a way to weave this all together, but the danger here is that the self, not the Higher Power, is driving the decision. Pride (A.K.A. honor) is a many-headed hydra that comes back to me in a thousand forms. Cut one head off, and two grow in its place. If I aim to build habits around a Christ-centered life, such that I can deal with whatever challenges lie ahead, I can remain disciplined in faith and not fooled by the shadow-puppets of this world that beckon us toward the four Big Empties: pleasure, honor, wealth, and power.

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In my tunnel vision of life, for some strange reason, I choose to learn by my own mistakes. Rather than learn from what others have taught and told to me, I prefer to get tossed around and beaten up before coming to see the light. But in that path I have much company, as today there is the idea of finding your own “truth,” which is kind of funny, as if there are seven or eight billion versions of truth in the world. In essence, finding your own truth implies that there is no truth, and what that really means is that there is no God, there is no First Cause of the universe, and that we are just unhappy results of chemistry and physics. I do not accept that since at the bottom of that is nihilism and meaninglessness. I do, however, think it is extremely important to let people find that out, as I needed to do. Despite ample opportunity to follow the path back to the heart, I became stuck and lost in so many oxygen-starved capillaries of the world.

As for getting lost in the worldly things, I should be grateful for it, to be honest. My life suffered no major hardships to correct me back to awareness of my powerlessness. I was under the impression that I had control, which allowed me to pursue paths of learning and ideas that elevated the self. I know others who came to faith much earlier, some who came to see after a tragic event. Others apparently just have the gift to believe and stick to it from a young age, which is the key, as Jesus says “…unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” What’s funny is that people that take the long route (like me) end up coming back like a child, or more aptly…a prodigal.

Of course, as a returned prodigal, that means I have committed many, many sins for which I need forgiveness. In my two decade absence from church, I made a laundry list of mortal sins - or grave matters. I needed absolution of those to get myself righted, and fully oriented toward God. To me, my weaknesses and frailties of the past give me insight into the Golden Rule, the most important commandment. Because of my flaws, I understand others’ flaws. But it depends on the flaw. You see, I seem to have accepted my flaws as valid, while judging certain other flaws as greater or worse. Yes, I have a snobbery about specific flaws, it seems, which Jesus didn’t mention anything about. So as to that Golden Rule, the greatest commandment, I like to imagine that I’m capable of living true to it, but I’m not. This one paragraph rules over the rest of the Bible:

“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

That last sentence puts a bow on the Bible. It’s like a gift card with a tagline message. “Dear reader, in case you don’t have time or energy to read a few thousand pages of ancient texts, here’s a quick summary for you: Love God. Love and forgive others. Your life is not about you.”

It seems so simple. How easy it really seems to love everyone. If I direct my positive thoughts, my heart, and my soul toward God, I will see the good in all and love everyone I encounter today and every day. I think, yes, I am capable of that love toward all. I can be like that weird guy at the retreat who plays spiritual rock music and raises his hands, eyes closed, and calls for witnesses. But I can do it my way, through caring and understanding and respect. I could love them like a normal person might love others without a creepy weirdness!

Sure, yeah. I can. I surely could. Then I step outside of the house and the world attacks and I attack it back. Heck, even inside the house I have attitude some mornings.

Why is it so hard? I do know that when I stay focused on God, when I spend time in the morning with the New Testament or with Christian texts, I am more oriented toward this notion of “love thy neighbor” than if I get out of bed and charge out the door. Without question, this focus helps me to love others more effectively. But I lose focus, like Peter on the water, and slip - only it takes me a while to call out “Lord, save me!” since I like to sneer and judge for a spell before I recover. Why did Peter sink? Oh right, he forgets about God.

To love one another sounds so easy, but in reality is perhaps the hardest task assigned to a Christian particularly because of this: it is actually easy to love someone when it is reciprocated, such as in a family, or in a Church full of like minded people (although there can be plenty of discord in those places too). What makes the Golden Rule really difficult is when the love is not returned, not reciprocated, but instead you are either hated or you have to shove aside your own feelings of dislike, disdain, or hate to remain humble. In fact, today in what is called the “post-Christian” era, it’s less likely that others will hate you for being Christian so much as they will just roll their eyes at you - because they have all heard plenty about Christianity. Rather than being persecuted, Christians seem the persecutor due to having such an incredible run of winning for two millennia. So what does this mean?

I believe that Christians, American in particular, are feeling a backlash for being too aligned with worldly power. The “love” that Christians have been pushing since faith made its unholy merger with politics around 1980 has effectively flattened and removed the effervescent bubbles from the message. Love thy neighbor became love thy Christian neighbor, and to hell with the rest. Besides, everyone loves an underdog and for some time Christians were not the underdog that they are supposed to be.

Without question the media and politicians have painted this picture, and have done so successfully, making Christians the enemy as of late. As the religious are removed from the public square and an atheist society takes shape, what comes afterward will be ugly. Those opposed to faith will focus on sins that the faithful have committed and ignore the massive amounts of charity and community work that followers of Jesus do in this world. This is not to say the abuses are excused. No way. There are horrific offenses that deserve full attention and justice. But there is far more good done in this world by those with faith in God than by the few faithful who have eroded trust in religion. Having worked at homeless shelters in two states, I can tell you that 99% of groups that volunteer are religious groups. Everyone ranting online from their computers about saving the poor - you don’t see them show up in person. They care enough to tweet, but not enough to enter the fray to mop the floor and do the dishes.

Most Christians that I know are like me: human. (Some are very strange and I’m not yet sure about their origins, but most appear to be human.) But the reality is that Christians suffer the same problems with loving others as non-Christians, but the point of the whole doggone faith is to try to do better. The reason people go to church, is to return to the right path. When non-believers point out that people going to church have a lot of flaws, I have to laugh because that is the purpose. “Those religious people are awful.” No kidding? That’s literally why they are praying and asking for forgiveness. They are a bunch of sinners, the only difference is that those going inside are admitting their limits and faults. There’s a response from G.K. Chesterton about why did he become a Catholic, at which we said, “To get rid of my sins.” Those flinging and slinging mud at people of faith for having stains on their life are so close, so infinitely close to understanding the “why” but sadly missing the point. They point out that Christians are not perfect, they are sinners. To which every Christian who knows about original sin just nods in agreement and goes to church.

Since I am not Jesus, that is why I have to try, try harder, and try again. Knowing that I will fail still means I need to make an effort, every single day, to love my neighbor. And that love needs to have no conditions attached to it. No strings attached. No waiting for reciprocity or validation - I have to love without being loved back. I must forgive all affronts and insults and perceived flaws, because I commit errors and sins when I lose vigilance. The minute I forget about God and stop praying constantly, I am pulled back into the morass of human nature. I am owed nothing, I owe all to God. I start to sink. I start to drown.

When I think of the modern Church with the struggles of keeping the faithful, where people are leaving due to modern Siren songs, and chasing shiny things on the internet, like New Age religions and alternate lifestyles, the Church must remember the greatest of all commandments which the whole depends on. Love your neighbor. This is the focus. Never can the eye be taken off the ball of the greatest commandments, or the game is over. And the order matters. First: Love God. Second: Love your neighbor. Without the first, the second one doesn’t stand a chance.

Want to know a recipe for disaster? First, take a fundamentalist version of Christianity and stir it real thick with politics, and let those folks be the primary voice of Christianity for several decades. Constantly preach anti-intellectualism in a rapidly changing culture where knowledge is expanding at an exponential rate. Fold in a distrust of science, making it an enemy of religion rather than a complementary pursuit of truth. Seize on a single grave sin, abortion, as the only focus of morality, ignoring the enormous list of unrelated mortal sins that mankind can commit. Divide the family by letting fathers off the hook, forcing no one into the discomfort of responsibility. Tenderize excessive drinking and drug use until fully meshed into daily life. Glaze the eyes of men and boys with endless pornography from an early age. Let marriage cool until the sanctity gels and turns into the equivalent of a high school relationship. Finally, for the topping, drape over a sex abuse scandal, sprinkled over a century, so abhorrent, so far beyond the pale that it makes Jerry Sandusky’s escapades at Penn State look like a parking violation. For a finishing touch, quibble over liturgical format while the building burns around you.

Is it any wonder the Church says people are leaving vs. joining at a rate of 6 to 1?

For myself to return, it took a series of events to even want to listen or learn from a Church that had seemed conjoined to politics. The abuse scandal shattered trust in the priesthood, which is a shame since so many millions get spiritual direction from them.

The sense of “us vs. them” was apparent to me as a child, as Catholics were obviously mocked in films and society, and I could see how the faithful circled the wagons in America, going into defensive mode against the secular world. All the while, flaws were festering on the inside just as much as outside. And do you know what? Aside from Jesus, the flaws were on the inside and the outside long ago in the same way. Way back in 30 A.D. the Church was as full of flawed people as it is now. We can read about what a bunch of knuckleheads the apostles were before the resurrection awakened them and the Holy Spirit invigorated and steeled them. You can read St. Augustine and see how flawed he was on practically every page of his Confessions. It is actually the flaws that make us real. You can’t hide from them. They are not going away and never will. It’s not “us vs. them” it’s “us vs. us” because we are them! And them need help as much as us.

Grammar is not my strong suit.

In the first century, to go against the grain and preach “love thy neighbor” would get you crucified or boiled or clubbed. Nowadays it just earns the rolling of eyes and a yawn, because the focus on the greatest commandment became something of a joke. The problem is not that anyone disagrees with “Love thy neighbor.” No, the problem is that everyone agrees with that. But everyone has forgotten the first commandment of Jesus, which is to “Love God.” Today’s Catholic and Protestant only has to suffer ennui and disdain instead of a beating, mostly because of our own faults at forgetting to remind the world what the first commandment is. Loving neighbor cannot be done without love of God. I need a daily reset, getting back to the root solution to realize that: “I am not a smart man, but I know what love is.” Again, I must come back to God like a child, or in this bad joke of an example, like Forrest Gump to Jenny.

As I digress away from the subject of this article, which is about the test of loving thy neighbor, I must write a bit more on the causes of why the Christian message, which at first spread like wildfire and took hold of the world for so long, has “petered” out in recent decades. We all know the story of Jesus and the resurrection. Everyone does. Everyone on earth has heard it in some form, but many give it about the same level of credence that they give to the Marvel cinematic universe. In fact, some people are more excited about the Marvel comics because it’s not brought to them via annoying religious proselytizing.

Many years ago, I recall sitting on a beach on spring break when someone came and asked me if I’d chosen Jesus as my personal savior. I said, “No,” and asked them to move on. Now, at this point in my life I was agnostic so this experience annoyed me and I simply wanted these people to leave me alone. I always felt anger at them and thought of the Grateful Dead lyric in the song “Truckin’” where Jerry Garcia sings: “They just can’t let you be.” I had spent many years turning away Mormons and family members and quite literally anyone who was selling religion or telling me about God.

Why?

Why did anyone coming at me in the usual format of “Jesus as personal savior” repel me so much?

Because I didn’t want to be sold.

In America, everyone is selling, all the time, to the point that you know even the doctor is selling you in the clinic. The saying, “If you go to see a surgeon, he will recommend surgery” is true. There is nowhere you can go in this country without being pitched. I would watch televangelists and my stomach would turn at the spectacle of salesmanship occurring which was clearly in the name of money and fame rather than God. The beach, TV, and door-to-door evangelists with their pamphlets had nothing new to share, and I wondered how their pitch worked on anyone. The questions I had were not in need of a true or false answer, but the pitchmen were trying to close the deal as if I were buying a car: “So do you want this baby in red or blue?”

This sales style of evangelization reminded me of salespeople at work, some who would throw their mothers into traffic if it meant hitting their quota. Salespeople in the software world must tailor their message to whatever product or feature produced the biggest bonus or commission. In corporate America, there is so much smoke and mirrors that it’s difficult not to see snake oil in all products on the market eventually, and unfortunately it was most apparent in the religious proselytizing. The trick to all sales is to appear like you are not selling something, but that you have something the buyer wants and needs. Funny that what the beach and TV evangelists were selling was in fact what I wanted and needed, but their pitch was not working.

So for saving my soul, this elevator-pitch approach actually confirmed my suspicions of that old Marxist “opiate of the masses” idea, as if believing in religion meant being a simpleton and sucker who only believed because heaven sounded like a better option than hell.

Who can argue with that? Heaven does sound better than hell. But I was lost on four things that the beach and TV evangelists were skipping over. I didn’t figure out what this approach was missing until I listened to Bishop Robert Barron, who spelled it out in a podcast. I couldn’t articulate the problem, but he could. These four points were the problem of why I couldn’t get on board with the simple pitch:

Existence of God: Do I even believe in God? This is the first block and if you can’t get past this one then you’ll never get to the Cross. But I would never have got past this block without falling on my face and having to find the Street Light God. (Thank God for that Street Light God.) I realized in the end that finding the existence of God is not really an intellectual exercise, but an act of faith. And once you believe, only then do you understand. I do believe in God, because of the First Cause and Contingency arguments. Basically, something cannot come from nothing. I’ve moved on past this, but this is where most atheists and agnostics get stuck, and rightly so. Good luck with the Resurrection if you don’t believe in God! But if intellectual arguments are needed, then I choose to take up sides with Thomas Aquinas in his 5 Ways.

The Bible: Fundamentalism and literalism had blocked me from considering it as anything but myth. I truly didn’t understand how Catholics read it until recently. I had to start over with a non-fundamentalist reading to even get started. Until I understood how to read the Bible properly as a Catholic, the wall was impassable. How Catholics read the Bible has made all the difference in the world to me.

Anti-intellectualism: Catholicism appeared to be against deep thinking, against reason. But this is the picture painted by those who dislike the Church, that want us to believe that Catholicism is merely an act of ancient ritual and superstition. I was like Han Solo, doubting “hokey religion” as “simple tricks and nonsense.” In reality, the Church has a deep, intellectual history, but this had been somehow hidden from me and needed to be “re-discovered” by me. Starting with Augustine, I began to see how unexposed I was to the tradition of intellectual ideas. From those early church writings, through Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics, all the way to Popes Benedict and Bishop Barron, I began to realize the vastness of Catholic thought and teaching. All of the deep questions of philosophy, art, and literature have been considered and argued over the last two thousand years by people wiser than me. I had shut myself out of two millennia of wisdom and thought because of the prior two problems regarding God and the Bible. Reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Word on Fire Bible blew my socks off as I found my assumptions to be wrong time and again. Plus, there is no shortage of intellectuals among the Dominicans, Jesuits, and Franciscans. The nerds at Catholic Answers seem to be able to take on all comers on any topic, be it chemistry, physics, history, or theology. This is what shocked me: there is no stone unturned in the cosmology of the Church, and no question too hard for it to answer. I may not like all the answers, but there is an answer. When I think of a question, when I’m feeling clever and believe I’ve found a plot hole, I quickly learn that my question has already been mulled over long ago and answered in excruciating detail.

Science: Finally, religion and science are not enemies but different avenues to truth. Catholicism is surprisingly pro-science, far more than I suspected. The perception of a conflict between science and religion is invented, again by those who dislike religion. The idea that the Church is anti-science is not only wrong, but the complete opposite. The Catechism states that science glorifies God in helping us understand his creation. The Church’s only ask is that science should be done for good rather than evil. So figuring out atomic bombs and tweaking viruses for biological warfare are obviously bad, while curing disease and understanding the universe is good. In other words, the Church requests that science avoid advancing the opportunity for sin in the world. Not exactly controversial. Science reveals the world, but science cannot destroy or outshine God. The Catechism is quite clear on this in Faith and science: "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are."

As far as bringing myself back to the faith, I can say that Bishop Barron made more sense to me than a thousand other voices and I am grateful for his podcast and books, as that was the entry point that I needed to come back to the Church. Quitting drinking brought me to God, and Word on Fire brought me back to the Church.

Alongside Robert Barron, there is another man, Timothy Keller, a Presbyterian, who made equally significant points to me about why that beach evangelism failed to work. He said, paraphrasing from a podcast, that there’s a gulf of difference between “religious proselytizing” and “gracious good newsing.” Jesus calls us to do gracious good newsing. No one wants the other form. Want to evangelize people? Then do the good newsing. Humility and grace will win converts, because knowing and showing that you are a sinner and not better than anyone else will catch a lot more fish. Oh, and treat everyone the same. Keller says your soul craves something, and Jesus gives it the living water that it needs.

That’s the stuff - the simple stuff, without any lights or music or hand waving or virtual retreats. No psychedelics or TED talks needed. Gracious good newsing. Show me by example. I can believe that, and, heck, I can do that, because I am finally past those 4 bullet points above, which were the hurdles I couldn’t leap over for most of my adult life.

Once past those blocks, I could worship God and pray to God. And then I could work toward loving others and expect nothing in return because Jesus has already died for my sins, and my salvation is through him. Because I am full of sin and mistakes, I need to love others. That is my duty as a Christian for what Jesus has done for us. In fact, if I cannot love someone, if I am struggling, I try to think of why. To love thy neighbor is not easy, and that’s why we have to double our efforts when we struggle to do so. The moment we forget the greatest commandment, we have lost the purpose, and we will keep losing because disdain or hate has stolen our gaze. God is love, and each person is a child of God, a person that deserves Christian love. Not lukewarm Christian love, but real love, just as Jesus gathered the tax collectors and lepers and all manner of sinners to him. This doesn’t mean all sins should be allowed and celebrated, because that is literally what the modern world thinks we need. We need to love the drunkard, not the fact that he’s drunk and wants to be drunk. Somehow people managed to love me through my drinking years, but it was clear that my priorities were out of order. The modern Pharisees are the ones who get lost in the dogma and lose the love. To me, Catholic teachings have the comprehensive cosmology that works and makes sense, both intellectually and spiritually.

I suspect that any person who enters a church on any Sunday has about the same amount of sins on their conscience as any other person. Many of us have private sins that perhaps we only expose in silence or confession, or we fail to see altogether. Every soul in attendance at any given mass carries his or her own millstone into the pew. Everyone has a cross to bear, everyone has a vice, a tendency that weighs them down. Accepting sinners is part of the gig, especially when their flaws are not like our own flaws. This goes back to my flawed thoughts about flaws: my flaws are fine, but yours…are not ok. That doesn’t work. Now, clearly not every sin is as bad as murder, but there is a long list of grave matters that the Church defines and I wish you luck discerning God’s intention on which one is worse than the others. Last I checked they were all “grave” matters and each of us need to be constantly reconfigured and oriented toward Jesus. In reality, all of us sinners have at least one major issue to tackle and resolve through penance and faith in Jesus Christ.

“…penance…must take into account the penitent's personal situation and must seek his spiritual good. It must correspond as far as possible with the gravity and nature of the sins committed. It can consist of prayer, an offering, works of mercy, service of neighbor, voluntary self-denial, sacrifices, and above all the patient acceptance of the cross we must bear. Such penances help configure us to Christ, who alone expiated our sins once for all.”

This doesn’t mean sins of the modern age should just be glossed over and we pass laws enshrining and celebrating sin. There exists a Natural Law. Going out and getting drunk on purpose is against the rules. Looking at smut online is against the rules. Sex and booze both pave the road to nowhere. Drinking to drunkenness, in my experience, is the gateway to many other sins. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the multitude of social and family ills that beer and liquor unleash. Drug use and drunkenness open a floodgate to the whole garden of earthly delights. I believe that drinking gets too much of a pass in some Catholic circles. This concerns me quite a bit, as there is nearly a celebration of a drinking culture in the Church that many Protestant circles reject, and I think drinking is the plank in the eye of Catholics while they admonish others for their sins. I suspect much of the sin in the sex abuse scandal was due to drunkenness.

St. Paul kind of sums up the modern world in one sentence of what we should not be doing.

…let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. (Rom 13.13)

Drinking, drugs, and pointless sex are a no-go, according to St. Paul. And the “rivalry and jealousy” phrase reeks of social media.

What gets thrown into the same pot by Paul? Sex and booze. Both are journeys away from God, both are false idols of this world. Both of these pursuits are searches into empty alleyways, which look like a carnival from the outside but turn into prisons. The key to “love” is not abandoning anyone who goes down those alleys to check out the carnival, but rather to wait for them to wake up and walk out, free from the bondage. Oh, and the other key is to not follow them down the alleyway and join in on the carnival of orgies and drunkenness.

Take a look at the list on this page of mortal sins and contact me if you are free from all of them, since you might just be the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and I think I’d like to meet you. As for me, I can tell you that on any Sunday, I have, or have in the past, had one or more of these mortal sins marking me for need of forgiveness and penitential acts. I can see plenty that I know I’ve committed and on some occasions definitely should not have joined the Communion line.

In fact, I just realized that gluttony happened to me this morning, when after breakfast I sort of had a second breakfast. Thus I’ve already befouled my day with a mortal sin, during Lent no less, yet no one will shame me for my error because I downed that extra Pop Tart in private.

I am not the model of piety, and I know quite a few believers who are also like me. They are all like me, with human frailties and problems. In reality, even those who have remained faithful throughout the struggles of the Church commit sins every week, every day. I know that modern Christians like to draw the battle line in the sand between moral relativism and moral absolutism, where we hunker down behind a redoubt, bricked in by the absolute truths of Natural Law. But I will say the test for Christians is the same as it ever was: if I cannot love my neighbor, all of them, then I better check myself and try again, because the Golden Rule is kind of important. I mean, it’s just that little detail that Jesus said “the whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

I fail, and that’s the whole point of why I need to keep going back to Mass and asking for forgiveness during the Confiteor. If I fail to love someone that is different from me, or I spurn them because they don’t like me, then I didn’t really love them in the first place and I am at fault. First, I need to keep my own side of the street clean before I worry about someone else’s side of the street.

I believe the true question for love is not a question at all, but a statement of fact from 1 John 2:9. This is the whole test, right here:

Whoever says he is in the light, yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is nothing in him to cause a fall.

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The most difficult part of faith to me, is the part where you have to actually have faith. Consider this definition, and think of the implications of it against the backdrop of our world today:

By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. (CCC 143)

Think about what is being requested here. If I completely give my intellect and will to anything, wouldn’t that just make me an automaton or a robot? How gullible do you think I am? You know, blind faith is how cults get started! The definition above always seemed too extreme. I could not subscribe to without a very compelling reason to do so, with ample evidence and reason behind why I would ever submit wholly to anything.

First, to even bring me to the table to consider this deal, the product or service needs to offer an amazing deal, a prize that cannot be gotten anywhere else through any other vendor.

I have already written about the efforts I’ve given toward things of this world, such as alcohol, knowledge, work, and exercise, but in those pursuits I didn’t give complete power over myself. You might say I divided up my intellect and will between a few pursuits at a time, but never fully to any single thing. While drinking I never reached anywhere near the point of alcoholic nihilism like that of Leaving Las Vegas. I certainly never won my age group in any marathons or foot races, proving that I could have trained harder. At work, I may throw myself into tasks but eventually I slack off or burnout. I don’t know that I’ve ever given myself completely to anything.

While I pursued those things, I imagined that I could still be good, or more specifically, virtuous. Obviously I was more virtuous with exercise as my highest priority rather than alcohol, but what I want and desire to be is to be vigilant in staying virtuous. From the self-help books of today, to Stoicism and Epicureanism, to Confucianism, to Buddhism, a code of ethics can be found in a thousand flavors. Each can be applied for living virtuously and righteously, to a high degree of success.

For a time I was enamored with Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. In fact, I still am. He recorded an amazing list of thoughts on living righteously, as he simultaneously tried to halt the rise of a rival Christian ethics that was catching fire among citizens of the empire. Today, a modern Stoic movement’s rise is gathering steam among the secular world, as its core teachings fit into a inward looking self-reliance, meditation, and “mindfulness” (which seems to be the secular term for prayer that we use today). To this day, I refer back to certain passages in my dog-eared copy of Marcus Aurelius’s thoughts. For instance, this passage is powerful to me:

Whatever anyone does or says, I must be a good man. It is as if an emerald, or gold or purple, were always saying: ‘Whatever anyone does or says, I must be an emerald and keep my colour.’ (VII.15)

The book contains an amazing set of ideas for living, many of which you can find strong parallels in the Gospels in the words of Jesus. Verses on forgiveness, kindness, strength, and the fleeting nature of life jump off the page. Marcus Aurelius’s writing contains a remarkable worldview that works well, but, in my opinion, there is one crack in the Stoic concrete that the ice of life wedges apart: the Stoic looks for help from within, while the Christian looks for help outside, from God. The inward vs. outward gaze makes all the difference.

I have already learned the hard way that my willpower alone does not work, or does not work for long whenever I have tried. Willpower and discipline come from the self, but without connecting the mind and body to the external God, we cannot overcome our own built-in flaws. I have character flaws that cannot be unwound from inside because they are written on my bones and brain. The power to overcome these flaws cannot start from within me, because the power doesn’t live in me. The power is outside of me, and I need to let it in to be there. If I don’t let it in, I can’t find it. Once I let the Holy Spirit in, then I can create a “little chapel in the heart” where I can go for strength and trust, to remove anxiety and fear. In addition, the Stoic method works best for the strong, not the weak, ill, or elderly. It approaches life’s problems from a position of strength. Emotionless love and shades of forgiveness exist in Marcus Aurelius, but nothing like the forgiveness that Jesus commands. The best example is when Peter asks Jesus how many times we should forgive someone, and he throws out a number, seven. Is seven times enough?

I can hear the wheels turning in Peter’s head: “Hey, Jesus, about the whole forgiveness thing, what’s the actual maximum before we can hate or discard the person again without feeling bad?” I can almost hear him thinking about someone that he’s irritated with as he’s asking, probably his brother Andrew or one of the other apostles.

Jesus delivers one of his greatest one-liners on forgiveness, shooting down Peter’s question. “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.”* Probably not what Peter was looking for in the answer but the one he needed. Again, I can imagine him nodding and thinking, “Wow, I was almost to seven times forgiving Andrew. I mean, I was thinking that in basketball after seven fouls you get the bonus and free throws, but I’m not even close. He gets to commit seventy more fouls and I have to keep forgiving him.” I don’t think anyone is as relatable as Peter, since his weaknesses and eye for shortcuts do not seem that far off from my own.

If anything makes the Christian message stand out from all others, it’s the approach. Rather than coming from a position of strength, the message of Jesus comes from a position of vulnerability and humbleness. Jesus comes to serve the weak, not the strong. This unexpected twist on power flips the script on all deities. We do not gain God’s favor by our ability, but by our need for God. And God gives the grace if we only ask for it. We used to joke, “What is the best kind of beer?” The answer was “Free beer.” This grace from God is free and it really is much better than free beer, because there is no headache. I just have to ask for help and God fortifies me against anything. I need to be weak, and need help, to be strong. Admitting this is hard, asking for help goes against much of our worldly instincts. This message reverberates through the entire Christian era, even in a recent homily from Pope Francis.

“Be reconciled: the journey is not based on our own strength. No one can be reconciled to God on his or her own…What enables us to return to him is not our own ability or merit, but his offer of grace…The beginning of the return to God is the recognition of our need for him and his mercy, our need for his grace. This is the right path, the path of humility. Do I feel in need, or do I feel self-sufficient?”*

If a code of ethics is all we want or need, then Christianity would never have got off the ground. Even the ancient world had plenty of self-help philosophies. What sets Jesus apart from others is the claim that he is God, but he serves everyone, forgives everyone, and suffers. All of this from a position of weakness rather than strength. This is a wild claim to make and either puts him into one of two categories: he is either telling the truth, or he’s insane. If he is insane, then he’s lying about being the son of God. If he is lying, the resurrection is bogus. If the resurrection does not occur, then all of the New Testament can be thrown out. St. Paul said this very clearly, that all is in vain without the resurrection. Even the ethics and morals are moot because the ancient world already had plenty of moral teachers, ones that were not insane. If virtue is the sole goal, then options already existed.

Thus, it all comes down to the resurrection. All of it: every miracle and parable, every clever comeback and turning of the cheek. If the resurrection does not occur, then the whole New Testament is a tale like any other mythology. As I mentioned earlier, one of the turning points in my loss of faith came from asking questions about the empty tomb and that it seemed easy to remove a body and claim resurrection. Not only that, but the different Gospel accounts of the empty tomb still conjure up those old doubts in me. Were there guards posted at the tomb or not? Who did the women see there? Was it one man, or two men? Or an angel? Exactly how many women came to the tomb and can we get the names please? Was the stone still in place or already rolled back? How heavy was the stone? How were the women going to roll back the stone for anointing if it was sealed? Were they at the wrong tomb? Did Mark add the resurrection paragraph after his first writing, and if so, did he think the empty tomb spoke for itself or did he add it to “fix” his story later on? Where is this tomb?

This can go on and on. It has gone on among scholars, for a long time. I am not going to go any further into my former doubts on the tomb, because I stumbled across a used book in a Goodwill thrift store called Who Moved the Stone? which addresses all of these questions. I’m glad someone else already did the heavy lifting. I just needed to read this short book in a single sitting to soak up the answers I was longing for regarding the tomb.

I’m also not going to go further on the tomb because of one other major reason that I cannot explain away: I cannot fathom the immense drive and spirit of the apostles, who tended to waffle, quibble, and argue. The flaws and frailties of these men make them clearly human, not fiction. And they went from cardboard to steel alloy in conviction, strength, and boldness. Their message never wavered in the aftermath. The only explanation to me is that they did indeed experience and confirm the resurrection of Jesus. All of the apostles were fearful and had fled to hiding places during and after the crucifixion, but then become recklessly fearless and willing to suffer any amount of pain to tell the world what happened.

These first Christians didn’t give their lives for a philosophical system…they died to uphold what they knew because they had seen it with their own eyes. Had it been a lie, then why die for it? … One after another these eyewitnesses gave up their lives defending the truth they had seen: Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead. (The Search, p.119)

Suddenly, somehow, Peter goes from being weak and furtive to a fortress of faith. He is crucified upside down thirty years later, having preached the message his entire life, with no education beyond that of a fisherman. The other apostles fare the same. That is, badly, as they are stoned, burned, stabbed, beaten, boiled, clubbed, and crucified. All the while they are relentless in spreading this message, alone, in different areas of the known world, telling the same story. If they were up to clever tricks about the tomb or Jesus’ body, someone would have cracked and tattled. Moreover, if the authorities, Jewish or Roman, had stolen or hidden the body, they would have just produced it and ended this tall tale.

Something happened, something profound, mysterious, impossible and life-changing for these people. Robert Barron says it best:

“That this dejected band would spontaneously generate the faith that would send them careening around the world with the message of Resurrection strains credulity. What is undeniably clear is that something had happened to Jesus - something so strange that those who witnessed it had no category to describe it.” WOF Bible, p.280).

With daily readings I have come to believe. My faith has come by effort and truly needs continual conversion to stay strong. I did not fall off a horse, like Paul did. The Church talks about continual conversion and the need to restore the belief, and this is true. In coaching there is a saying that you need to refill your “E-tank,” your “Emotional Tank,” from time to time. That is true of coaching, and it’s true of faith. Belief can feel like a gas tank that needs a fill-up, which is why daily prayer is so beneficial to it. Faith is also like fitness, where as soon as you stop exercising the backsliding into sloth and muscle atrophy begins. Whenever we lose focus, we start to slide, and the world has many distractions to pull that focus away. In fact, modern technology is entirely based on pulling our focus away, which is why programmers and marketers have “focus” groups and A-B advertising tests to figure out how to pull your focus away from life so that instead we will focus on their products and services. All of this drains the E-Tank of faith.

As an example of losing that focus, and how quickly and easily it can happen: this morning I had spent time reading and praying and felt ready for the day, both in spirit and body. I got into my car and started driving. At the first stoplight a driver didn’t realize the light had turned green and I almost knee-jerkingly wanted to honk and call the man an idiot. I find this remarkable, as I had just spent time reading about humility, and the lack of it among the Pharisees. “For they preach but they do not practice.”* I’m such a Pharisee. How easy it is to be moral and righteous when alone, and how difficult in real interactions with people. So many of us today, particularly in our cars, leap to anger almost instantly, over minuscule events and perceived insults. I’ll apply that same sentiment to social media, which is the greatest poison to our peace of mind of all modern invention. At least in my car, only I can hear whatever cruel whim flits between my ears. Not so on Facebook and YouTube comments, where we are all free to spew angsty discord to the entire world.

The human heart and mind so quickly drift from intentions and hopes, and so I cannot imagine the remaining eleven apostles, who were ordinary men, sticking to their wits and resolve with such commitment unless they were utterly convinced of the rising of Jesus. This accomplishment was not completed behind closed doors, by reading and writing, but by interaction in the world in the face of monstrous opposition. They did not bring the message by the sword, but rather the sword was put to them. These ordinary people did not flinch or crumble, as if their sign of the cross made their spirit, if not their bodies, impervious to the slings and arrows of this world.

Now, if they had solely come up with a great idea or story that satisfied our hearts, they might have convinced only gullible people to believe. If that were the case, then the powers of the world wouldn’t have worried about them. But the apostles took this idea of the risen Jesus into the heart of the intellectual world of Jerusalem, and shockingly, won the argument. The eleven didn’t flee to the hinterlands to start proclaiming, they returned to the very location of the trial and death of Jesus, where witnesses lived and where the events occurred.

[There is]…the indisputable fact that Christianity was gaining adherents at a prodigious pace. The movement was spreading beyond all reasonable expectation...The terrific persecution of Saul, involving an inquisition to places as far distant as Damascus, shows that four years later it had grown to really alarming proportions.*

Put this fact together with who first witnessed and started to tell of the risen Jesus. The women at the tomb were first, and Mary Magdalene explicitly is mentioned. The very first voice that recognizes and announces the missing body and resurrection is a woman who had “seven devils” driven out of her and was a “sinful” woman. If spinning a yarn, the Gospel writers would have posted someone of political or worldly significance. Perhaps someone like Caiaphas, the high priest, might have come to the tomb and said, “I was wrong. I can’t believe it, but it’s true,” and thrown himself into prayer. But no, the witness to the most important event in history is a “fallen” woman, who would not have clout, nor even enfranchisement among women. Yet she is the chosen witness, fitting with the “last will be first” of Jesus’ teachings. The empty tomb, as seen by the women, is undisputed. There seems to be no one arguing that the body is gone and the burial clothes were left behind. The only argument seems to be about what happened to the body, but not about the empty state of the tomb and the women being the first to discover it.

The second voice is Peter’s, the fisherman, and his first proclamation starts with something funny, assuring that he and his cohort are not drunk. “These people are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.” That he needed to say this suggests that he knew this message sounded radical and insane. Without any education or platform to deliver knowledge, he begins by telling people, “Really, people, I’m not on drugs.” But the message is not aimed at simpletons, rather he delivers it to “devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem.” This implies both uneducated people and intellectuals. If this were all a charade and tale, the leader would need to be someone steeped in rhetoric and debate, to handle the rebuttals and logical criticisms that surely came immediately. But it’s a man who catches fish for a living, who somehow convinces thousands upon thousands that what he has seen is true, in the city where the event occurred. Peter is not a genius or shrewd salesman, but after Jesus’ death his character is altered dramatically. I often think of the saying, “The truth requires no rehearsal.” This is why salespeople and lawyers need to rehearse arguments, demonstrations, and pitches: because there is a roundabout angle to getting to the “truth.” Peter is able to speak plainly, from the heart, and people believe him, unrehearsed, because he’s telling the truth and wouldn’t be able to convince anyone if he were telling a contrived fiction. He doesn’t have the training and toolkit to do that. His transformation is unexplainable without the Holy Spirit filling him with grace. The same can be said for the others who became warriors of faith after having so recently been trembling and afraid at the crucifixion, hiding out, even returning to their old jobs after being devastated at the death of Jesus, thinking that he had not “redeemed Israel” after all.

“It took an objective encounter with the risen Jesus to crystallize the disciples' faith in Him and cause them to proclaim His resurrection. Visions and subjective experiences would not have done it. Something had been seen. Something real.”*

“Gethsemane's cowards became Pentecost's heroes. This is inexplicable without the Resurrection. Had prestige, wealth, and increased social status accrued to new believers when they professed Christ and His resurrection, their profession would be logically understandable. In fact, however, their "rewards" were of a different type, eventually involving lions, crucifixion, and every other conceivable method of stopping them from talking.”*

I spent many years refuting and mocking the idea of the resurrection of Jesus. I have made many rude thoughts about it, siding with the doubters and logicians, writing off miracles as artifacts of an age where the world was haunted by demons. In reality, I guess my abandonment of Christianity was one response, because if you do not accept the resurrection, then the only answer is total abandonment of the faith. St. Paul has said the same, as have many others. Without the resurrection, what’s the point of it all?

I cannot explain how resurrection can occur, nor do I need to, because I believe now that events can happen beyond our comprehension, that science does not and will never explain everything. Even if life is discovered on other planets, or our physicists take us to the depths of the quantum world, and biology cures the last disease, and psychologists can explain away and prescribe solutions for all mental ailments, nothing can replace the need for God in my heart, as I have followed it all the way down to the end of the line, and I know that the answer to all questions is through faith, by surrendering my will and intellect to belief in the resurrection of Jesus. The flaw of humanity is real, and I find nothing more convincing than the resurrection of Jesus as the cure, for the forgiveness of me and my enemies, as the only way to live in the world and hold on to one another for the promise of the next. There is only one path to removing hate, and that is forgiveness and love, and that is why the power of the Christian message never dies. Right now the world may be called “post-Christian” but it’s not, as nothing the secular world can offer will ultimately replace the message of love and forgiveness through God. The United States and Chinese empires of today will fall away like every other empire before it, like the USSR, the Third Reich, the Austro-Hungarians, the Ottomans, the Hapsburgs, the Holy Roman empire, the Romans, the Greeks, and a thousand other willed sand castles of mankind, yet the truth of faith will endure. People have in the past and will again in the future use, abuse, and twist the faith to make it a tool of worldly power, but the center will hold because love and forgiveness shine through any lies in the end. Straying from that cannot go forever because the believers are like yo-yos, who must come back to the starting point. Nothing could shake the power of the message that empowered the very first believers of Jesus, and time and again those who hold steadfast to the Golden Rule correct the errant ways of a drifting faith. To this day the power of the Word remains fully charged, and this is because of the resurrection. From a position of weakness, forgiveness, and love, we are saved from death, and the faith will carry that forward and never end. While we quibble over traffic, split our families over politics, moralize over sexuality and death, obsess with celebrities and materialism, entertain ourselves with movies and music, and distract ourselves with phones and computers, the righteousness of Jesus’ message and resurrection remains unbothered. Even if Christians go back into hiding for a thousand years, and the followers are once again hunted down, as they are today in parts of the world, the faith will never die - because there is nothing better on offer, nothing like resurrection and the forgiveness of sins, nothing above it, nothing with more truth, and nothing more satisfying to the heart. We are the inheritors of the greatest mystery of all time. We are the same as those originals, lost and found, over and over again. We may start out like Saul, but end up like Paul, unable to explain how or why it happened, just as we can’t fully explain the resurrection. Once you choose to believe it, you don’t have to explain it. I just know that it is real and that I have changed.

“The phenomenon that here confronts us is one of the biggest dislodgements of events in the world's history, and it can be accounted for only by an initial impact of colossal drive and power…a habitual doubter like Thomas, a rather weak fisherman like Peter, a gentle dreamer like John, a practical tax gatherer like Matthew, a few seafaring men like Andrew and Nathanael, the inevitable women, and at most two or three others…seriously, does this rather heterogeneous body of simple folk, reeling under the shock of the Crucifixion, the utter degradation and death of their Leader, look like the driving force we require? Frankly it does not…Something came into the lives of these very simple and ordinary people that transformed them.”*

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I can only imagine that a true scholar would be rolling their eyes at much of this, given my amateur and immature understanding of theology, philosophy and the history of the Catholic Church. Likewise, I don’t expect that I’ve stumbled onto anything new and that this may read as a typical recovery story. It’s unlikely that someone will say, “Stop the presses: Here’s a leftover that found God after trying everything else. Wow, and an ex-drinker too?!” How unoriginal, I know.

Still, I’ll continue in case one person out in the ether finds any of this pertinent to their own life situation. The major events that drove me to this spot in life where I’m writing this at all are as follows: the faith of my childhood, the discovery of drinking, the pursuit of knowledge, my varied and failed attempts to quit drinking, the arrest for drunk driving, my subsequent search for meaning, and the eventual return to faith.

Which takes me to my next stumbling block, “The Fall of Man” and original sin. These loaded terms were always a sticky point, and I would guess might be for other religious “nones.” I thought this took a negative view of humanity, and that we actually had more goodness inside than evil. Back in college I felt this smacked of an “opiate of the masses” argument. Then I spent 20 years trying to behave myself and failed miserably.

The tree of knowledge of good and evil, when taken literally, does seem a bit simplistic, but when taken literarily becomes genius. As I mentioned in one of my prior takes on drinking, the apple on the tree of knowledge could have been a bottle of Jack Daniels, or Coors Light, or a fancy cocktail. As Jim Gaffigan said, “An apple? Have you ever been tempted by an apple? I would have been like ‘put some caramel on it and come back to me.’”

Strange, but it seems familiar to me, this path of innocence, temptation, knowledge, suffering, separation from God, focusing on self, and wandering in search of meaning…and…wait a minute. I have heard this before. It’s the summarized version of my entire life!

Obviously the author of Genesis didn’t need as many words as I do to make a point. Using only a tree, serpent, and apple, the whole tale of “What’s wrong with me?” was told in a few pages. Yet I need many thousands of words and asides to get to the same point. Apparently I write much like I swim, zig-zagging instead of aiming directly for the buoy.

The apple is not an apple. The apple is the source of temptation and the vices we cannot give up. The apple is drink, drugs, porn, news, possessions, fame, fortune, jealousy, hate. It’s one or more of these, or additional items not included on that list, but in summary it’s something other than God.

G.K. Chesterton said “…the only dogma for which we have empirical evidence is the dogma of original sin.” Watch the 11 o’clock news at night, or even better, watch what’s going on inside of you. You’ll see the evidence…of original sin there. This deep level dysfunction that we can’t solve on our own. And that is an enormously important door into Christianity. (WOF Episode 270 at 11 minutes in)

St. Augustine famously said, “Lord let me be pure - but not yet!” There is a yearning for goodness, somewhere, inside everyone, but we want to cling to our will and vice because it’s fun or we believe that these sideshows represents freedom. I didn’t want to let go of drinking even though I knew that drinking continually disabled me from living the life I wanted to live. With alcohol in my life, I could never live up to the morals that I pretended to hold. I could not stick to an exercise program, could not be honest with people. Every regret in my life came from a night of drinking. Without exception, every hurt I caused in this world could be drawn directly back to drinking. Removing my “freedom” to drink gave me all of the good things that I wanted and I became more free precisely because of self-denial.

Unfortunately, vices and sin can be like a game of whack-a-mole, where you knock one vice down and another pops up. Pride, vanity, lust, anger, the urge to dominate others - knock any of these down and they will re-emerge in another form, shape shifting, always looking for cracks to crawl back into. Like a house, the slightest of gaps in windows or doors allows the outside air to seep inside and you never notice the draft, until suddenly you are shivering on a bitterly cold night. Only then you will notice the source of the problem, but it’s been there the whole time, even during the days of fair weather.

There is much chatter in the past two decades about being “Good without God.” Sure you can be good without God, but the hollowness of that state crumbles under duress. I recall the time I saw Richard Dawkins speak at a bookstore. At the time I thought he was cool. I liked how he was undermining the faithful Pharisees of the modern age and sowing discord among the Christian hypocrites.

But in watching and listening to Dawkins it dawned on me after only about ten minutes how miserable he seemed, even in his arguments. The smugness filled the room. In contrast I thought of my grandmother with her rosary and the never-ending joy in her that she brought to her family. I thought of the billions of people who found hope in faith. His uninspiring message made me leave that talk feeling empty, the opposite of how I felt around my grandmother and other Christians. I entered as a Dawkins fan, only to leave repulsed by his message. This put me in a no-man’s land because I couldn’t accept God, nor could I reject God. If the “selfish gene” was the driver of all motivation, then we are selfish, and therefore sinners anyway. Worse, without redemption we are hopelessly evil. If there is only the rule of law to constrain our actions, put on your seatbelts, things will continue to get bumpy. Some people may be good without God, but not for long, and not when times get hard. Yes, plenty of people pretend to be Good with God, too, and I know some atheists and agnostics that have a stronger moral compass than some Christians I know. But without God, in the end, it’s every man for himself.

What Revelation makes known to us is confirmed by our own experience. For when man looks into his own heart he finds that he is drawn towards what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from his good creator. (CCC 401)

By my own experience, I am cognizant of this problem. If and when I remove my focus from God, I will soon start to scowl and stew, and distrust people and hate them for their foibles. When I keep prayer and hope alive, when I turn toward God, I can love my neighbor and expect nothing in return. My story is like that of Peter being invited out of the boat to walk on the water. “Courageous in the boat, but timid on the waters*” I too will sink when faced with fear and uncertainty if I lose focus. I take my eyes off of Jesus and fall, letting doubt discourage me, and I will quickly turn my back on the one place from which I can draw strength. The dysfunction takes over, the creature within rises, and I look for my apples, the ones I like to eat when I think God is not there. My favorite apple is knowledge. It’s like a HoneyCrisp apple to me. And I can only think of the Screwtape Letters, # 1, as the method of distraction to pull me away from what is good, back toward sin. To wind me up with doubt, I only need to apply racing thoughts:

Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about. *

I already know that I will lose focus and return to negative thinking and trip myself up over political, theological, or personal diversions. It’s inevitable. Other Christians will likely be the ones that push me away, but instead of letting that happen I need to hold the focus. Because after spending two decades searching for God, it would be a shame to do it all over again, when I already know the answer. Maybe Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings said it best, summing up the condition: “the hearts of men are easily corrupted.” The Catholic Church and Pat Benatar agree: Love is a battlefield.

Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield, man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God's grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity. (CCC 409)

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The problem with the Bible is in the beginning. Genesis: that masterful piece of writing, that somehow causes so much confusion. Throughout college and young adulthood, my interactions with Christians that read the Bible literally caused me to turn away. Typically the extreme views of the inerrant word bothered me, and here I’m referring to ostrich-head-in-the-sand type of claims like that of the Universe being only 6,000 years old or people co-existing with dinosaurs. Unfortunately, at that time I deemed those extreme views as default positions of religion, as I spun further away from any and all religion.

I felt exactly like St. Augustine, who said some 1600 years ago: “I was being killed by the Old Testament passages when I took them literally.” (Confessions p109, p414) This ability of ancient writers, from Augustine to St. Paul to Homer, to nail the exact feeling I have often surprises me, although it shouldn’t. There is a massive trove of wisdom from our ancestors, from all cultures.

In college I had taken New Testament and Old Testament classes, thumbing over much of the Bible. What I found enjoyable as a child were the stories, such as the Creation, the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, the fascinating stories of the lineage of Jacob and Joseph. But in college I began to read closer and find the discrepancies with modernity, such as the rainbow being a sign of a covenant with Noah as opposed to refracted light exposing the spectrum to our eyes. Another example that had me laughing was the reference to mathematical Pi in First Kings. This error of Pi = 3 instead of Pi = 3.14… blew my mind, as the infallible book had mistaken one of the most common facts that every school child knows.

Then he made the molten sea; it was made with a circular rim, and measured ten cubits across, five in height, and thirty in circumference. (1 Kings 7:23)

Pi equals 3? No, no, stop right there: Rainbows and Pi had known answers, they were not signs and approximations. The teacher explained away the difference, the glaring error, but I could see the wizard behind the curtain now, nobody was fooling me any longer! About the same time the movement surrounding the “Historical Jesus” became known to me and I fortified my doubt with books and materials from the “Jesus Seminar” effort, which I now find to be aptly described as"Hot-Tub Religion" -- a Christanity with all of the pleasures and none of the pains -- the theological equivalent of Diet Coke.

Thus, in college and for years afterward, I read the Bible literally and drained it of magic and miracle, much like Thomas Jefferson did with his Bible using a razor to carve out all miracles.

The funny thing was that I had become the literalist. Fundamentalists and atheists read the Bible literally in every book. As time has passed and I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed that extremists, religious or non-religious, from the political left or the political right - these people are almost identical mirrors of each other.

Well, my teacher attempted to explain the problem of Biblical literalism to me, but I had no interest in listening by that time. Both professors that I had on religious topics, I rejected, despite their knowledge far exceeding my own on the subject. On my term papers, the teacher would mark up my smart-ass comments and suggest that the rainbow could be a symbol, or that Pi need not be precise to the decimal in order to get the basic shape of a circle.

Sometimes you have to read a book three times to get the point. Actually, reading a book at different phases of the journey can provide new takeaways, as I know this from reading and re-reading Moby Dick and 1984 and The Brothers Karamazov and other masterpieces as I cruise through the five acts of my own life’s play. The problem with reading the Bible literally as a fundamentalist does is that it becomes robotic and feels spoon-fed. The problem with reading the Bible literally from the modern scientific view, as if the books were peer-reviewed academic papers, is that the context of the culture and the genre becomes lost in minor details that miss the entire purpose.

The change and awareness about literalism happened for me through a video, not a book. A short moment of teaching, of hearing something that I had heard many years before, shattered my cynicism in a moment.

I caught a video series called “Symbolon” that spelled out the difference between “literally” and “literarily.” One syllable. A few letters. It makes all the difference in the world to me.

The Catholic approach to Scripture is different from the fundamentalist view, which reads Scripture in a literalistic way. To discern the truth God put in Scripture, we must interpret the Bible literarily, remembering that God speaks to us in a human way, through the human writers of Scripture. That means that we examine the context and intent of the author for any given passage.

-From Symbolon (session 3)

The power of one syllable is stunning. Literally vs literarily makes a world of difference, and was a huge stepping stone to faith. In fact, as far as the power of one syllable goes, consider this: superlative and superlaxative are also only one syllable of difference, but what a difference in meaning.

I guess the problem was always this: I felt gullible and stupid swallowing the “literal” pill. Honestly, I think that was always the problem, from when an adult first told me to “Just believe and not ask questions,” that response knocked me back so far that I couldn’t get over it.

Alongside that, I failed to remember and realize that the people from two thousand and three thousand years ago also were not stupid. They survived and withstood hardships that my generation could not fathom. Their grasp of knowledge had a depth far beyond our own in seeing the world without the knowledge that has been revealed through science over the past two hundred years. I suspect if you threw the people from today back into the era of Moses, we would have gladly remained in Egypt unless he would have promised Netflix and porn on the other side of the Red Sea. Furthermore, the average person today, who so cleverly knows how to use appliances and technology, would be utterly useless in the ancient times and have no clue how to teach and apply any modern knowledge to their world, since we are all specialized and sharpened to very specific tasks today.

The difference between literally and literarily is but a single syllable, but the alteration in understanding leaps forward. I feel that this point of Catholic teaching has been buried for a long time and should be trumpeted from the Pope himself. Of course, it has been, I just wasn’t listening. If I could be so turned off by the literal readers turning the Bible into a square peg for a round hole, surely many others also felt that way. I think that’s why books like Moby Dick became so fascinating to me, because those were meant to be read for the deeper meaning, not the superficial “whiteness of the whale” that Ahab was so angry about. Reading Moby Dick literally would ruin the story. The book would be complete garbage if read literally instead of literarily.

I love books and literature, and I do believe that the many years of literal, fundamentalist voices claiming Biblical authority led to the demise of many individual faiths like mine. I could be wrong, and I often am, but I don’t think I’m alone.

I mentioned Bishop Barron earlier, because he is articulating the thoughts that I failed to muster. Seeds of ideas about faith that I had, he has brought to full bloom. In the Word on Fire Bible, an introduction discusses how to approach to the Bible. I used to laugh about this question, as I recall a college professor talking about “How should we approach William Blake?” As I can’t resist crudeness, I always thought this sounded like we might be going to kidnap him. I guess we should approach William Blake from behind, at night, with a dark van.

Sorry, another digression. Brevity is the soul of wit, and vigorous writing is concise. I’ll try to remember that.

Barron discusses in “How to approach the Bible” the solution to my inability to appreciate the book with five strategies. In my post-college years I did pick up the Bible once and decide that I would just read the whole thing again, as a piece of literature rather than revelation, as I had wanted it to be literature, but felt that dogma disallowed that type of reading. Well, reading Genesis is fun, and Exodus, but once I reached the laws of Leviticus I stopped. I couldn’t do it. I moved on to some science fiction and stayed there for a few years.

My approach to the Bible as a single book does not work. The idea that the Bible should be taken literally is a pointless question, because every book is a different genre. The Bible is not one book, but many books, and you have to read each book wearing the proper hat. Is it poetry or history? Is it a prophet speaking or a third-person narrator? When Genesis is read literarily, it truly is a magnificent piece of literature and speaks with great meaning, the deepest thoughts, and answers the questions of the hungry heart.

Too bad I didn’t know this long ago, but the Catechism spells it out pretty plainly, that Catholics do not read the Bible literally.

The account of the fall in Genesis uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents. (CCC 390)

In addition to that, the Catechism points this out rather bluntly, I just never bothered to read it.

In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words. In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking, and narrating then current. (CCC 109-110)

So that’s kind of embarrassing, for me anyway, when I think of my past editorials at parties and comments to tear down religion. I knew everything, but somehow didn’t know this. Weird. I wonder what else I didn’t know.

That distinction of how to read the Bible really was the largest block on my ability to proceed. If I could understand the “First Cause” and know that God had to exist, and allow myself an honest and intellectual look at the Bible versus a rote-learning pill-swallowing reading, this could be the start of something great.

The other four point of approaches to the Bible from Barron also knocked over some problematic things for me. Here’s the whole list of five things that demolished a wall between me and faith:

Be attentive to the genre of each book. For example, Psalms is not a history book, so don’t read it like one.

The Bible is a one book but it is a library, and it tells one story, the unfolding of a great drama.

“Any interpretation of a biblical passage that militates against the love of God and neighbor is necessarily a bad interpretation.” St. Augustine said that love of God and neighbor is “the ultimate criterion for correct biblical reading.”

Distinguish between what “is in the Bible and what the Bible teaches” for there is an “awful lot of cultural baggage from the ancient world.” Look for the overarching themes and meaning as a whole.

The ultimate purpose of all books is the dying and rising of Jesus Christ and to “draw all people into communion” with Him.

The third item struck home because so often the “love” appears lost in modern arguments, especially in the online world of vitriolic commentary between those with and without faith, and even between those with different flavors of faith. In many cases the faithful seem to struggle with that point as badly or even worse than those who doubt. Once again, I wonder how many people have fallen away from faith because of bad interpretations? If you read the Bible literally instead of literarily you can get off-track and forget to take the love potion. The fact that anyone could reference the Bible for pro-slavery arguments sums up the problem of “literal” readings, because there is much talk of slavery in the Bible from the culture and setting - but the entire purpose of the overarching story is to love God and your neighbor.

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I did not become a believer overnight. However, I began to ask, seek, and knock on the door, and found that if I kept doing those three things I gained understanding in the areas where I had struggled. Following the “What do I have to lose?” argument, I started to discard pieces of my doubt and chose to believe. I would avoid nit-picking and scoffing at every bit of the Old Testament that didn’t make perfect sense in the 21st century, and instead look for an overarching meaning, with a greater focus on the New Testament. This intention of mine lacked originality, as I recalled Chapter 4 of the AA Big Book describing my exact condition:

We used to amuse ourselves by cynically dissecting spiritual beliefs and practices when we might have observed that many spiritually-minded persons of all races, colors, and creeds were demonstrating a degree of stability, happiness and usefulness which we should have sought ourselves.

Instead, we looked at the human defects of these people, and sometimes used their shortcomings as a basis of wholesale condemnation. We talked of intolerance, while we were intolerant ourselves. We missed the reality and the beauty of the forest because we were diverted by the ugliness of some its trees. We never gave the spiritual side of life a fair hearing.

All true. In the margins of my confirmation Bible from high school, I had scribbled in cynical comments alongside Genesis verses, as I had read the book literally to point out the contradictions. From the start I had issues, from the first pages, since not one but two creation stories occurred. In college I had read Native American creation stories, Hawaiian myths, Greek and other stories, and so I had tossed in the Hebrew book of Genesis with the lot, discounting it as nothing more than another myth. Rather, I considered it the dominant myth of creation, but no more correct than stories of Greek Zeus or Hawaiian Pele.

However, whenever I read any of those creation stories I marveled at how over space and time, separated groups of humans came up with similar ideas about the beginning, as if there were an intrinsic knowledge or capability of understanding the world we lived in. Primitive or not, we all have stories to explain the world around us. What struck me is that all of these peoples found an origin story, because they needed the spiritual presence in their life to explain why there is something rather than nothing. Why does anything exist?

Just as all kids do, I remember thinking of the universe and how it could not go on forever, that a meteor could not continue on to infinity, because I could not fathom infinity. Somewhere there must be a place where it ends, like where the vacuum of empty space just turns into a fuzzy TV screen. I often thought of a “backstop,” as on a baseball field, where if the ball gets past the catcher, it doesn’t roll forever. There’s a backstop to halt the ball. The universe had to have a backstop or fence, or some kind of ending and beginning. Furthermore, something had to be first, as something could not come from nothing.

The one thing that kept me from ever truly abandoning Catholicism, even as an atheist or agnostic, was the pursuit of science among its clergy. The Church has a lot of nerds in it who ponder these questions. As science had become my new religion, I considered the Big Bang the answer to the origin of the universe. When I first learned that it was a Christian scientist that came up with the theory, I felt a bit shocked, maybe even upset, because here religion somehow mingled with science without either being cheapened.

Evolution, of course, was the other elephant in the room, and most of the time I heard about Christians trying to remove it from the schoolbooks. From the Scopes trial to Intelligent Design to the latest Texas textbook controversies, there seemed to be a continuous goal to sweep the idea of evolution under a rug. Because of stories in the media over the last 25 years focusing on this fundamentalist view, I had forgotten that Catholics do not object to the idea of evolution. They teach evolution in Catholic schools and hold that evolution doesn’t conflict with Church teachings, because it doesn’t conflict with God as the “First Cause” of the universe, nor does it discount the spiritual soul, the ghost in the machine that transcends the atoms that form the body. The soul is touched by the sublime. This same idea can be found in all creation stories across the world, that deep in our hearts and minds we know that something cannot come from nothing and that the soul goes beyond the material world. Far from being anti-science, the Catholic Church seemed to be one of the few pro-science religions and this didn’t get any attention in the press. From the Church’s rulebook itself, the Catechism states it quite clearly:

The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers. (CCC 283)

Creation and evolution do not sit in permanent opposition to one another as both sides of the fundamentalist secular and religious folks would have us believe. Science and faith are not in a battle to the death. One thing that has amazed me is the number of practicing Christian and Jewish scientists in the world. I formerly considered these people to be mad, since holding both scientism and religious dogma could not be done simultaneously, or so I thought. These people had volumes more knowledge than myself on science, yet somehow they maintained their faith. How? Did they fail to take notes in college? Were they dense?

I think that I was a bit dense, and I realized that science has as many radical fundamentalists as any religion. While I strived to deny God, I could never remove the notion of the “First Cause.” Accepting this idea alone, rather than fighting it, reminds me a bit of the Ironman endurance race where I was trying to defeat the water rather than relaxing and letting it lift me up. Fortunately there is ample readings from the Church to discuss all of these things in detail, and far from running away from science, the Church’s embrace of knowledge means that truth can be sought in both lab coats and vestments.

Then there is art. Yes, art, the un-scientific pursuer of truth that spills forth from emotion and feeling, edging upon the spiritual realm beyond ours by its very attempt. We praise science for its march of progress, while art stands the test of time regardless of our knowledge of biology and chemistry and physics. Dante and Shakespeare do not diminish as we learn more about the world. The great epics and fables from all corners of the world are no less today than they were on first utterance. They were deep in meaning before technology allowed them to be presented on paper or phones, and their depth exceeds the tangible things of this world. If I think of a song that animates my heart, oldies like the heavenly praise of Ave Maria, or rage music like Smells like Teen Spirit, or tear jerkers such as Sunday Morning Coming Down by Johnny Cash and Fade into You by Mazzy Star - there is a paralyzing miracle to music that we all fall in love with, all of which brings us to a transcendent escape whether we want to admit it or not. For an atheist this is just brain chemistry and psychology at play, just as our soul is just atoms and electricity flitting about, bonding and breaking, bonding and breaking, until we fall into nothingness.

Perhaps it’s just a turning of the mind toward the divine that makes all the difference, just allowing it be possible. Admitting that maybe there is more than just science made all the difference for me in appreciating nature and art. When God is real, and faith is pursued rather than eschewed, everything changes. Having walled myself off from God, I had actually walled myself in, to an isolation, and total loss of wonder. This is why people who have “found” faith are so annoying to those without it - because it changes everything, such that their former life seems like wasted time spent by a stubborn fool who refused to turn around and give belief a chance.

This is why born-again people irritate us so much: they are happy. I used to say, “They are just using God as a crutch,” and now I think, “Wow, this is such a terrific crutch, I should have been using this crutch all along instead of those others ones.” Much better than the crutches of TV, beer, sex, celebrities, and constant seeking of approval of others. I mean, you could say that anything is a crutch. Someone on reddit once mentioned how desperate and lost I must have been to need Jesus to save me, and I thought, “That is so true.” It was meant as an insult, but I realized that he was like an Irish Setter pointing at the truth. The atheist made a great insight about me. I was desperate and lost. I’m so glad I found faith. Because in the end it’s not the person of faith who is crazy or boring or adrift, it’s actually the person without faith who doesn’t realize their own desperation and loss. If I consider the boredom and restlessness I had as an agnostic or atheist, and the joy I see at Sunday mass on people’s faces, there is no comparison. Laying on the couch watching Netflix empties me, while receiving Communion at church with the other faithful invigorates me and re-charges my life. This reminds me of Ignatius of Loyola, when after being wounded by the cannonball he laid in his hospital bed reading adventure stories about knights, and the excitement faded into disappointment after he finished those books. Then he read the lives of the saints and felt joyful, motivated, and full of life. Tales of knights or superheroes are like candy. Stories of faith are like rocket fuel for life.

Acceptance of God’s existence may have been the biggest stumbling block for me. Years ago I had “allowed” the idea of God but didn’t fully inspect the idea until I started actively asking, seeking, and knocking. Saying yes to the existence of God allowed me to punch a hole in the wall I had built around myself. I thought I had built the wall for protection from the religious nuts of the world, but by hiding from them, I had walled myself into darkness. And for once I thought: they can’t all be nuts. Through that hole I could see a little light on the other side. And it was about time for some demolition of that wall.

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Having made the grade on my test of physical endurance, I felt compelled to focus more on my work, since the nine months of training did stretch my dedication to the corporation that employs and pays me. I have long enjoyed the products and culture of the company, often being a cheerleader and one who “drinks the kool-aid” to be a good soldier of the rank and file. The willingness to put in long hours or do extra on the weekend came naturally since the game of global competition ensured that there are the quick and the dead when it comes to the modern market, especially in the technology arena.

Now, with that declaration of my work-ethic, I also enjoy slacking off at work and I burnout frequently. But I like to speak of my undying work ethic to feel like a good American, since we tend to equate work with a person’s value. My own father imbued a strong sense of work for work’s sake in his children, as did his father before him. Work defined a person’s character and worth. A lazy person was “a worthless thing.” Money was fine, but to be known as a hard worker garnered more respect and honor. You’ll notice that I sometimes desire honor over other worldly things, and that is my vanity. However, I’ve noticed that change over the past thirty years in American culture. Money has come to be viewed a measurement of a person’s goodness more so than the work he or she does. This placement of money over character has surely been around forever, but I have observed a change in opinion surrounding these desires just among the people in my circle of life.

Surely by now a clear psychological profile could be pulled from these writings and I’m aware that various notions of my goal-seeking and work-aggrandizing ways may be damaged to various degrees. I know some strange notions of morality hover over me and I have confusion in my own thoughts and words. However, in a place of hard winters and farm life, I believe this culture against sloth took form out of necessity, since lack of preparation and unwillingness to complete tasks could result in disaster. A work-oriented lifestyle made sense until the hard winter problem was solved with forced air furnaces, gas fireplaces, and whole-house humidifiers. The chores of farm life no longer apply to most people because there are few farms left today. Larger factory farms is all that is left, which employ low-paid immigrant labor, and large farm families no longer make sense given the costs of raising children. Those of us that left these millions of defunct small farms found work in cities, as we have since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Part of the restlessness of myself seems to be an American problem at large, since when I lived in Europe the locals complained that we Americans “did not know how to have lunch.” True enough. Even today, I often eat lunch at my desk, not wanting to waste time on a meal. The sense of business and needing to do something all the time emanated from old values toward work, but modern technology seems to have increased our fear of missing out. In fact, farm people did stop for lunch and took afternoon breaks, and in the evening found time to be still.

Time is money, and we want not only to be successful in money but also experience everything. Most interesting is that in our drive for efficiency in everything, we forget how to relax, to the point that the work itself becomes a hamster wheel that we actually want to spin upon. I have often confused sitting at a computer with being the equivalent of being productive, when most of the time I could shut the laptop and get the same amount of “work” done. Even when not working we rush about “experiencing” everything that we can squeeze into the hours, to feed our senses of touching, tasting, seeing, hearing, and doing. Leisure becomes like work when chasing experiences.

The intangible work that I do with software causes an internal struggle in me since I have nothing to show for my many years of work. Being someone who apparently needs feedback and approval, a sense of honor, this ethereal production of code never felt meaningful. I was urged into the technical fields in order to “make money” so that I could live a “good life.” That pairing of money and goodness did not match the teachings of my youth, particularly in the Church, but the message of what mattered in this worldly life became clear, as perhaps it did to many in the 1980s when greed accelerated as an American virtue. Simultaneously we were taught the fear of retiring poor, as we had to “pack our own parachute” lest we strike the ground at retirement at the terminal velocity for poverty. Greed and fear are twins that grow together.

With the sedentary nature of my work, I missed the physical labor and bloodflow of life. I spent so many years turning to drinking instead of exercise to get my mood lift for the day, which of course is a false lift, since drinking takes you up a ladder to nowhere with the buzz, and at night during sleep you slide down a bit further to a lower point on the ladder for the next day. There had been efforts toward exercise, but nothing sustained until I finally quit drinking and then, as I’ve covered in too much detail, the obsession to exercise replaced drinking. Exercise did give me a proper lift of spirits, however, and allowed me to look past the empty feeling that software and IT work deliver. For a case study on how the IT world feels to me, see the movie Office Space.

Over the years of work I’ve had periods of dedication and burnout, like a cycle of its own. The weekly sprints and quarterly releases of software tend toward frantic states of activity and then in between there are many break-fix troubleshooting days that can extend late into the evenings. Solving little problems keeps work interesting, and in another path of life I might have been an appliance repairman or mechanic and enjoyed that. Much of my work has been in troubleshooting and I’ve developed a knack for finding the source of problems and making corrections. I realize that all work becomes monotonous and can feel soul-crushing if a person allows it to. I had allowed my own soul-crush to happen. Really, I chose that option.

In an earlier post I mentioned that career lived at the bottom of my list of priorities, but at times it hovered near or at the top. Like so many others today, I found my meaning in my work, even my identity, and I reveled in my commitment. Like my one night in jail, I felt superior to my co-workers. Why? Because I was a producer, not a feeder. In fact, I could have been Shylock from The Merchant of Venice as I spoke about co-workers in the same manner:

…a huge feeder,

Snail-slow in profit, and he sleeps by day

More than the wildcat. Drones hive not with me,

Therefore I part with him…

So much for being a team player. I disdained the “worthless” but still enjoyed their praise when I completed a task or showed the way. Interestingly, I enjoyed working with first or second generation immigrants to America most of all because I found them usually hungry to make their mark, which meant working hard, working extra, and going to great lengths to complete their tasks. I judged my fellow extended-stay Americans as less valuable since they often checked out at 5 o’clock and worked a mere 40 hour week. Given this observation, I understood why IT jobs were fleeing to offshore hubs.

Truth be told, I had periods of time where I did little, often after I built up a lot of reputation capital for some fix or solution that earned me a lot of back slaps and attention. In reality, I played the “feeder” when I could because I wanted to pursue my own side projects and goals, including running, biking, and swimming. During my training, I would sneak away from work and cancel dubious meetings in order to exercise.

Upon completion of the Ironman, I threw myself into work again as I could finally back off from training. The product, the glorious product, needed to be better and I would be its champion. As for why it needed to be better, I didn’t care so much about market share or money, I just didn’t like the overall quality and every bug I filed or fixed caused an embolism in my head. When I focused on the product, I became agitated. In fact, the product often irritated me, just like co-workers often irritated me.

In fact, my phone irritated me, the news on the phone irritated me, Facebook irritated me, YouTube comments irritated me, anything Twitter related really irritated me, and even LinkedIn had a similar effect of…irritation.

I was always irritated about something in the online domain. Unless I was exercising or hanging out with my family, I was probably irritated. I felt bothered and bitter much of the time, and it tied directly back to the wonders of software and the internet. Oh, on the exterior I held it together and showed the happy face, the peaceful and calm dude, at your command, delivering that white-glove service.

I realized that I hadn’t been to any AA meetings for quite some time and according to AA, that meant I had been “white knuckling” my sobriety, a term I disliked since I felt that they used it to impress people back into AA. But this term fit my state, I had been gripping things too hard like exercise and goals as my guide for life. Even if I did pray for help, strength, and direction, I usually did so semi-seriously as my limited faith had already slipped. I was still at the point of acceptance of a Higher Power, much further along than the Street Light God, but still occasionally blocked. The great scissors of the Serenity Prayer, for cutting through life’s irritations, I had forgotten.

The restless spirit lived on and the hungry heart gnawed at me.

Approaching and passing four years of sobriety, I knew that I could never go back to drinking because I’d wasted too many years in that morass already. One day I checked on my savings and 401K and realized how much I had saved. My retirement nest egg was incubating nicely.

I realized I had everything. Everything this world has to offer, I had experienced or obtained it, and still the restlessness and wandering mind scanned for something more or new or different. There was literally nothing more in the world that I wanted than what I already had. I had a family, a high-paying job, healthy children, a fine house, two reliable cars, respect from my peers, friends and neighbors that I enjoyed, an excess of energy from exercise, and I had my own health. I lived near my parents and extended family and was able to see them often, to be there in the capacity of a son, nephew, cousin, grandchild whenever needed. Even the volunteer coaching I kinda, sorta enjoyed. Still, I felt unhappy much of the time.

I realized that the my worldview of goal-oriented meritocracy didn’t work in the long run. I had scribbled down a quote from an author named Chris Stefanick since it related to me.

“Life is more than comfort. Life is more than a list of accomplishments and activities. While such a list might help you fill out a college or a job application, it does not fill up your heart.”

The obvious truth became apparent, that I could not find fulfillment in materialism or mindfulness or knowledge or even charity work and volunteering. The journey was leading me to one place, and that was back to where I started, to God. The funny part is that this was my hidden fear, that with all my swagger and anti-God talk for years, that instead of everyone else looking like hypocrites, I was the hypocrite. I had become the cliche, leaning back into faith after trying everything else in life. If only there were a word for that, like a parable or something, for a prodigal that strays and goes wild for years only to return home to his father in supplication and in need of forgiveness.

Around this time I felt the urge to return to church, and I tried a different Evangelical church, but again it just wasn’t right, just as AA was not quite right for me. Then one of my children asked to be baptized Catholic, because we had not baptized them, having been “nones” for their entire lives. We said yes. And it was then that I started to rediscover and realize just how little I actually knew about the Church, despite my many years of growing up in the faith.

I started listening to and reading books from Word on Fire, after a tip from a friend. There was a voice in Bishop Barron that I had never heard nor expected to come from a priest, as I had written off the Church some time ago. But he cut through the AM radio noise and YouTube sowers of discord and the crazy attention seekers to get to the heart of the Christian message, which was the message of “love one another” and the deep underlying intellectual tradition that the foundation of the Catechism had been built upon. I had missed the whole point, or rather, never really took the time to see the point while I was chasing down every goal and “freedom” that I could find.

I immediately quit Facebook to remove that poison from my life. I realized that I had nothing to lose in returning to the faith like a child. And I had nothing to fear, just as Bishop Barron asked in a commentary: “What are you afraid of? What do you have to lose? Does it terrify you to think that you might lose your wealth? Your social status? The affection of others? Your health? Your power or influence? Your reputation and good name? Your life?”

If you’ve read all the prior writings here, you’ll know the answer to all of these at some point or another was “Yes.”

In all my pursuit of knowledge, I had overlooked so many books. In the airport, on a work trip, I picked up a book by Timothy Keller called The Reason for God. When I bought it I looked over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching me, feeling like I had betrayed the “nones.” The young cashier looked at me with disdain and I saw my younger self in his expression. Apparently, I had waited so long to buy a book about God that it had become a counter-cultural punk rock kind of thing to do.

Not long after that I picked up a Catechism of the Catholic Church book from a Barnes and Noble. At that point I realized, I didn’t know jack squat about Catholicism.

So I had a lot of work to do to catch up.

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Before dawn, I stood at the starting line of the swim, among a horde of people in black wetsuits. A mist of the morning shrouded the water. I could see the slight chop on the surface, as the wind pressed on the dark lake.

I hardly slept an hour the night before the Ironman, not due to nerves, but because my old college roommate, who offered to stay with me at the hotel for moral support, had snored the entire night. Fatigue already had a hold of me and I hadn’t yet started the race that would take the entire day.

The size of the crowd of triathletes surprised me, as there were so many people willing to partake in the same challenge. The swimmers lined up by ability, so I move to the back of the pack, knowing that I would not impede those who actually knew how to swim. The line crept forward as the race started. To reach the water it took nearly forty minutes as only a few people entered every few seconds, staggering the swimmers to minimize the inevitable collisions that happen in the water. The sun peeked over the horizon.

Suddenly I was in the water and stroking at the water with my head down, breathing from side to side every three strokes as I had practiced. The lack of sleep I could feel in my arms and legs, the muscles and tendons felt acidic and brittle. But that was a secondary concern as the waves exceeded my ability. The chop in the water slapped at my face whenever I turned into a wave and I began swallowing water and sputtering, gagging and nearly choking several times. My training had been done in placid pools and lakes, not ocean-like conditions. Only once or twice on a vacation had I swam in the surf and I lasted only a short time where the waves were breaking. Other swimmers ran into me and I ran into them and control of the day quickly slipped away from me.

I panicked. Within two minutes I felt spent. Earlier that year I recalled reading about several drownings at races. I wanted to get out of the water as fear of drowning reached up from the bottom of the lake like seaweed on my feet. But I could not tuck tail and run now, not after all the training, not after telling people about my goal. The reason why those people had drowned flashed through my mind as I thought about my intention to continue. Had they experienced a moment where they should have stopped, where their instinct had warned them?

I bobbed in the waves for a bit and then swam forward. Again the waves struck my open mouth when I turned for air and I swallowed a mouthful, again gagging and nearly vomiting. From the pool I had learned how to take a mouthful and keep going, since that is part of swimming (and the joke is to think of it as hydration). Getting water in the belly wouldn’t kill me. But getting water in my lungs would kill me and the amount I seemed to be taking in worried me. A frantic desperation came over me as I thrashed against the water, kicking and pulling, kicking and pulling, fighting the entire lake, like Achilles fighting the river God, Scamandros, in the Iliad. “And in his confusion a dangerous wave rose up and beat against his shield.” Except Achilles survived that fight with the help of Athena, who was definitely not coming to my aid in this wine-dark lake. The fatigue and fear struck me hard and I swam over to a kayak that floated near the swim course.

The man in the kayak, my version of Athena, was a mortal spotter for swimmers in need of help. I asked him if I could put my hand on his kayak for a moment to gather myself, and he nodded and said, “Just don’t pull too hard or we’ll both be in trouble.”

For thirty seconds I gently held onto this little life raft, collecting myself and watching the chaos around me. From there I could see swimmers running into one another. Swimmers turned up like a pod of belugas catching mouthfuls of air. The colorful swim caps dipped under and re-appeared. The sound of continual splashing and thrashing filled the air along with the slap of the waves against the bodies. I told myself to relax, remembering that water cannot be controlled or defeated. To let myself float and flow with the water would spare my strength and allow me to rudder myself toward the first buoy. Watching the swimmers and the directions of the waves I suddenly realized why I was drinking so much water. The slap of the waves came from the left, therefore I needed to breath on the right.

Upon resuming I stopped kicking and dragged my legs behind me, letting them float like logs. The water lifted and dropped me on the waves. No longer fighting it, I pulled myself through the water and breathed every fourth stroke, on the correct side, where no waves could surprise my face. In true amateur form I swam way off course several times, being way off track and not aligned with the buoy. The rookies like me formed an enormous gaggle in the water, spread wide in all directions, clueless to direction. But I didn’t let it discourage me and I swam back to the thrashing flock to get in line, only to get off course again minutes later.

At least once a minute I ran into another person, or someone ran into me. Typically we would both stop and say “Sorry,” and then continue on. I suspect among the elite swimmers there is a less forgiving spirit, but in the back of the pack most people seemed to understand that mistakes happened…a lot.

When I passed the first buoy I felt like my body had called up some reserve energy forces, most likely summoned by the adrenaline and fear felt in the first few minutes. I had done 2.4 miles in the pool a few times so I knew I could slog this out, and “Just keep swimming” like Dori, the fish in Finding Nemo. An old shoulder injury tended to come back when I swam and I felt the joint crunching with each stroke, but I kept throwing out that arm, over the top, over the top, until I came to the next inflatable buoy, which I ran into with my head. I laughed at my navigational skills and continued onward, zig-zagging through the lake.

Turning at the last buoy a sense of elation came over me. Exhaustion neared in my arms from pulling and pushing. But with merely a third of a mile to go I knew that this milestone in endurance would be met and passed. The shore neared, slowly, as I kept peeking up every few strokes. Some kayakers and paddle boarders shouted encouragement. When I reached the shore I lifted myself out of the water and a sense of joy struck me. The “peelers” told me to lay down and they stripped off the wetsuit, and I ran, nearly naked, through a gauntlet of people to the transition area, smiling the entire way, ready to get on the bike and continue on.

After the swim, the bike ride seemed almost peaceful as much of the ride was a cruise through country roads. I had upgraded my Wal-Mart bike to something better, though still going cheap compared to many of my fellow riders. The 112 mile bike ride is the fun part because of the scenery and speed. The only worrisome part of the ride is descents of steep hills, where I watched my speedometer hit 45 miles per hour. On skinny road bike tires, one slip or over-correction in steering can lead to an ambulance ride. With cycling, I tend to find that another mile can always be “gutted” out, or achieved by grit alone.

The marathon at the end marks the beginning of the pain. As I mentioned that in a normal marathon, the race starts at mile 20. In a full Ironman, this is still true, but the pain arrives around mile 13. Or sooner. The first half of the marathon felt like a joyful hurt as I exceeded my target pace, only to find that my steps began to feel like hurdles in the second half. A kind person tipped me off before the race to find the chicken broth in the late hours for a restoration of the body. He said, “The chicken broth has pulled many triathletes back from dark places where they wanted to quit.”

To my amazement, people lined much of the race, yelling encouragement, drinking and partying while we passed by, giving us a laugh or a reason to smile. The event is inspiring to others and I realized that selfishness in the pursuit does have something to do with it, but at the same time these events, while useless, can inspire and bring joy to this world.

Rain started to fall in the last hour of my race and my shoes squirted water out the sides with each step. Several times I had to walk to allow the pain to settle out of the muscles and to let a cramp fade away, but I resumed as soon as possible. My wife appeared on the side of the road, supporting me, giving me hope. My best friend in the whole world, always, through the years, through my drinking, my arrest, my recovery, my moodiness, and my searching. And I am embarrassed to know that I have forgotten from time to time to put our marriage into its proper placement in the order of priority.

As I came toward the finish line and crossed under the large digital timer, onto the red carpet, I heard the iconic saying, “You are an Ironman” coming from the announcer, Mike Reilly. The mission was complete. I now had over three years of sobriety under my belt, a multitude of marathons for proof of change, and now the label of Ironman to boot. I had proven I could change my life. Real change, not just temporary modifications. The emotions came up again, not as strongly as the first marathon that I completed, but the fleeting contentment of accomplishment landed on me for a while. Another goal crossed off the list of things to do, with adversity faced and overcame, where I might have tapped out in the lake earlier in the day I continued, to the end, into the rainy night. I had everything in life and now proof that I could set and accomplish just about any goal. I fell asleep that night wearing my “Finisher” t-shirt and woke up feeling semi-normal, not nearly as sore as I expected. A new day in the post-race glow began and I posted this victory over self to Facebook, and I felt the power of the Likes gathering in me, as my friends and acquaintances online commented and validated my pursuit as worthy.

For a few days I basked in that glory of achievement. Who am I kidding, I still think of that day as a highlight because the experience was unique and powerful to me. But within a week I started inspecting my bike and shopping for new shoes. I started looking up race schedules, to find the next challenge. After a week, the euphoria faded and flat-lined, and once again I was wondering:

Now what?

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Within days, I signed up for another marathon and started a cycle of planning events, with each marathon being about four to six months apart. This schedule allowed me to always have a target on the calendar that I would be preparing for, to remain in shape, to be ready mentally and physical for races, and most importantly, to remain sober. This also allowed me to tell people about my plans at the gym and bask in my pride of accomplishment. I was eager to let people know that I had quit drinking and found this “new” untapped motivation and ability.

This need for attention and pride didn’t seem negative to me, because I felt like I could impact people positively through stories of effort instead of stories of partying or cynical humor. I didn’t share much on Facebook but I was pleased when someone shared something about me, or perhaps snapped a picture of me after a race. The number of Likes on one of those posts did boost my mood, or alternatively flattened my mood based on the lack of Likes. I wanted approval, just as I always had, ever since childhood. From my friends, from my parents, from my peers - I wanted to know that I was good and sought validation.

By the time I had done three more marathons, I began to notice a pattern of anticipation leading up to the event and then afterward a kind of bottoming-out. The race prep held excitement and wonder, and the race itself felt like a purging of pent up time and energy. But then the day after a race, perhaps partially from soreness or from the depletion of nutrients, an ennui toward life took hold. A dysphoria swung back after the euphoria of the race and I finally realized that this low feeling prompted me to start searching for the next race to run so that I could get back to where I wanted to be. In essence, the races were like being drunk. The highs and the lows still followed my life like a vice whether I was in shape or fat, sober or drunk. The restlessness and anxiety could re-enter the stage at any time and the worst days, those “black dog days” of dysfunction and hopelessness, could arrive without so much as a stubbed toe to blame. I considered how I had started taking medications like Lexapro and Wellbutrin, so long ago, going to the doctor to get something to address my malady and yet the symptoms still returned. Tweaking dosages could help, but then I had been taking those pills for years. Depression is a disease, I was assured. Depression happens due to an imbalance of chemistry in the brain…but wait! Haven’t we heard this before in the form of the bodily humors? Maybe Lexapro helped to reduce my black bile and make me more sanguine. The old was new again and the new was old. Perhaps the Stoics were correct after all and time is a flat circle. I started to doubt the efficacy of pharmaceuticals for this infinite loop of highs and lows. There was something else at work.

Those difficult days of moodiness I dealt with in one of two ways. One way was acceptance and realizing that life imposed hard days for no reason, and that I should stop whining and deal with it like a grownup. The other way involved acting more like a baby. In the latter experience, little things set me off, not with anger toward others, but negatively toward myself, and no amount of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or positive self-talk could re-orient my mind on those days. I wanted to complain and find fault. In fact, the easiest way for me to tell that I was in a bad state would be to monitor my thoughts about my wife, my neighbors, immigrants, racial issues, politics, and various religions and world views. When I was in a foul mood, some scapegoat outside of my tribe of one person would receive my ire, for no reason other than I was upset with myself in some way.

Rather than take this ride to the bottom again, I signed up for more races. A marathon no longer thrilled me so I bumped up to a 50K race. That was enough to put the carrot out further on the stick. A book by ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes had a great quote that led me to believe I needed to go farther, that I wasn’t yet in the zone of knowledge in regard to body pain and mental commitment.

If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon. If you want to talk to God, run an ultra.

The first two I had already confirmed. Running a marathon had changed my life. So naturally I wanted to the know the third part and talk to God. This was reminiscent of my younger self wanting to experience love, poverty, and war because that’s what O. Henry said a person needed to experience a full life. I wanted experiences. I had lived in Europe, worked on farms, been in the Army, worked at a homeless shelter, skydived, tried drugs, pursued sex, experienced the highs and lows of sports, fallen in love, had my heart broke, tried exotic foods, gone camping, canoeing, fishing, hunting - but I hadn’t done an ultramarathon or triathlon yet. The fat and happy life had not provided any deep insight to me, even as I settled into my comfortable bed and read books at night. I still needed to find a struggle, one of my own choosing. The comfort of modernity was driving me to seek hardships like an ultramarathon because my membership in the privileged class had satisfied all wants and desires.

So I signed up for the 50K and ran it. It wasn’t enough mileage.

So I signed up for a 50 mile race and a full Ironman for the coming summer.

I started trained all winter in the snow, like in Rocky IV but without the abs of a ‘roided up Stallone. I began swimming at the lap pool, having no idea how to swim a proper freestyle stroke. I received the kindest insult from a veteran swimmer who, before giving me some critical tips, said, “You look like a person who came to the sport of swimming late in life.” He was right. Forcing myself to learn swimming came with that click of a mouse button, when I signed up for the Ironman without really having any hope of completing a 2.4 mile swim. Paying the fee for a race somehow has the power to steel my determination. Though I came to swimming late in life, I was still hell-bent on developing enough stamina to finish the race.

Surely the Ironman would cure me. This was the thing.

And if it did not cure me, there were 100 mile races out there waiting in the hinterlands of Death Valley and Leadville, Colorado. Training in snow still seems somewhat mad to me, since I recall hobbling along snowmobile trails and waving at the riders. Surely they thought I was insane. But I was sober and still pouring my heart into family, coaching, training, and my job. Perhaps it was insane but it was working. Except for one thing:

I had found a new path to isolation. Again, like every hobby before, the fitness craze aligned perfectly to a solitary person like me. Yes, I could have joined running groups or Crossfit organizations, but I liked the quiet and the silence of the long runs. Even at the gym, I wore headphones. Everyone at the gym seemed to be working out together, but alone. Only if we saw a familiar face would we pause the music for a minute and chat before returning to isolation in the earbuds.

I always had myself to talk to. Learning to swim and training for endurance offered plenty to ponder. Someone asked me what I thought about while running for hours, and I said, “The same things I think about in bed at night staring at the ceiling.” Exercise didn’t remove the brooding mind from me. No I carried my brain with me, but as the body exhausted itself the mind became less prone to brooding. In fact, after several hours of running I found doing even basic math problems in my head difficult, because I had a hard time calculating my pace and mileage despite it being simple math. Running seemed to pull the blood out of the brain and into the legs, which can be nice for someone with a tendency toward rumination.

My workout schedule of preparing for the Ironman started nine months in advance. Most days required two workouts, yet I always wanted to pound miles. To pound miles - I wanted to run myself to exhaustion or wreck myself on the bike so that when I arrived home I collapsed into the arms of a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Being wasted from exhaustion on a bike or on a run made me feel more alive. I recall a hot day when I set out for a 20 mile run and I brought only a liter of water. The heat exceeded my expectations and after three hours of running I was not yet close to home. The last four miles felt like a desert and I suffered greatly for my lack of foresight on water. Normally I was careful about water, recalling military obsessions about carrying enough water. The hour it took me to walk to the house seemed like a day. Now I was never in any real danger, as I wasn’t verging on death, but this was an experience that I learned a lesson from and took a strange enjoyment from due to the test of my body. This wasn’t like Jesus in the desert for 40 days, it was just me in the sun without water for a few hours. Yet the devil could have bartered my soul for a cup of ice water that day. (I just hope the devil doesn’t know about my love of breakfast cereal, too.)

Here’s the odd thing that I started to notice. Suffering by useless tasks like marathons does test a body and mind, but the real tests in life are those things that are not glamorous or prideful, like doing the laundry and dishes. Cleaning the bathroom floors, toilets, and mirrors for forty years and raising children and dealing with people - that is the real test of endurance. Yet I don’t feel the need to write about the last time I cleaned the bathroom, unless I were to tell you about the clog of hair in the shower drain that looked like a dead squirrel when yanked out. The actual test of endurance is in the small daily things and the ups and downs of family and community life.

Endurance sports appear as virtuous through the persistence and training that are required to finish them, but if looked at closer they could be seen as personal pursuits performed in isolation for recognition from others. I don’t want to discount all goals, but the the wetsuits, bikes and running shoes all adorn the athlete with a shine to make the pursuit appear glamorous and worthy of respect. In the end, the accomplishment is itself a purchased product. These achievements allowed me to wear a persona of success, not very different from purchasing a luxury car, and basically to brag about my ability. The marketing won me over. I had paid quite a bit for those marathon t-shirts and medals.

I realize that I could inspect every single action I take to find similar motives, and pick apart everything I do until there is nothing left but the dry bones of criticism. But as I spent the summer taking long solo bike rides, rushing to the pool for laps, and running out the door for 10K training runs I had to consider my rationale for this goal. Because at some point, the need to test my physical endurance had started to unhitch from inspirational and slid toward selfishness. Luckily my family gave encouragement, but if they had objected to the amount of time I spent alone in this pursuit, I’m certain that I wouldn’t have stopped training because I wanted to be known as someone who had completed the Ironman, because then I would be special. Or something like that.

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By elevating fitness to one of my highest priorities, I assured a daily dose of endorphins to my brain. As long as I remained healthy and avoided injury, this appeared a viable path to permanent sobriety. No matter what my work schedule looked like, I carved out time for exercise and would leap out the door to get to the gym. Soon I realized that the gym had some similarities to a civic organization because the same members showed up day after day. After seeing the same people for a few months, the interactions of sharing weights and spotting one another led to acquaintance and eventually casual friendships. This was a thin connection, since only the pursuit of our own self image bound us together, but there was the common interest. When someone asked me what I was working on today, with the expected answer being “legs” or “back” I would joke, “Mostly my insecurities.”

More truth than a joke, the pursuit of fitness did have elements of vanity laced within it, such as desiring to feel good and be attractive increased confidence in my personal life. The personal progress of fitness asserts a notion of accomplishment and a strange kind of righteousness. One good habit leads to another, and soon I was snacking on celery and reading motivational books. Interestingly, being in shape alone holds no moral value, but somehow the positivity that I felt seemed to make me believe I was increasing in morality. However, I found more vanity seeping into my appearance, such as selecting tighter t-shirts to wear. Once again feeling the same yearn that drives all social media: “Look at me! Notice me!” Fitness easily slips toward lust and envy if any allowance is made for those feelings, since the gym is akin to an emporium for showing off. But I know that my reasons for fitness remained solid, since quitting drinking remained paramount and I was literally replacing the urge to drink with the urge to work out.

Within a short time, I could not go a single day without exercise just as I had so often required a beer at the end of a workday before my commitment to sobriety. A flip had occurred in my brain regarding how and when I received my happy chemicals. The boost from alcohol came with a follow-up nadir of depression, whereas the runner’s high only came with fatigue and a solid night of sleep. If anything, the only negative side-effect of running was an increase in appetite.

I mentioned that snacking on celery became a regular thing, but so did unexpected food binges as my body sought to maintain a certain caloric intake, and going from no exercise to regular exercise proved difficult for me in balancing my diet. If I succeeded for two days with a good diet, I crashed on the third and engorged myself on carbs to an embarrassing degree. This pattern continues to this day where I can eat well for a while and then the day of reckoning comes when sugar and starch becomes under attack in my kitchen.

When I realized I could run 13 miles, the next goal became the full marathon and I signed up and began to train. Once I committed to the plan and started logging more miles, I became more hungry and it seemed that every time I did a run and hour or two, the remainder of the time I spent thinking about Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. As the miles used up the glucose and sugar in my body, my mind turned to food and specifically the most sugary cereals I could find. At some point I had to stop buying it because if I had Cinnamon Toast Crunch in the house, a shameless devouring would ensue until the box was gone. Once again, the tendency toward excess ruled me. Even with the fitness and running, I pursued it excessively, just as I had drank alcohol. And apparently I had this same vice breaking out into the world of breakfast cereals as well. I was a carb monster.

✓

The effect of all the exercise did improve my family and marriage relationships as I had a purpose and they saw this change happening. Without question, replacing alcohol with exercise created a rising tide in the house that lifted all boats. Like other people at the gym, I concurred that getting my daily exercise meant sanity could win the day, and I was a better citizen of the world with exercise than without it. Over the last thirty years, the “good” of exercise seems to have become a platitude among many Americans, as if there really is something inherently correct in the habit or act of body movement. But I suspect this is a Western or American idea mostly, since we love to celebrate goals and the will to succeed. I recall my grandmother asking me why I was running and exercising so much and it dawned on me that no one of the old farming generations would have bothered to run or lift anything, because their entire lives were a struggle of lifting and moving from sunrise to sunset. I recall her weeding a massive garden every day, carrying pails to feed animals, picking and peeling apples, canning, jarring, cleaning, feeding. My job in a software company required almost no movement, no effort other than thinking. Then I realized that the only people I interacted with at the gym were those with sedentary jobs, who lacked movement. Carpenters or construction workers did not need to burn some extra calories after a day of labor. The gym then almost seemed a kind of privileged place just like in ancient Greece, where the rich and aristocratic could wile away the day.

As I approached my first marathon, I injured my calf, pulling my soleus muscle, bad enough that I had to rest for a few weeks. Likewise, I began to feel stronger with weights and heaved my shoulder into an injury by grabbing larger weights than necessary. When these downtimes occurred, I realized that in replacing alcohol with exercise, if my body failed due to injury, I would be once again back to square one and searching for a hobby or purpose to fill the void. Rather than dwell on that awful idea, of emptiness underneath the muscle, I planned to be more careful in my exercise and not let my aging body suffer the vanity of my mind. I would stifle the urge to run too fast or lift too much weight, since that could destroy my ability to exercise and steal my joy away.

I ran through snow, sun, and rain. I didn’t miss days, avoided excuses, and pushed onward. The book Born to Run had a large impact on me as I realized that endurance sports held a spiritual secret that I wanted to unlock. This quote struck me as profound and it powered me through some long runs on the trail.

“We've got a motto here-you're tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.”

This kept me believing that my old knees could carry be through that first marathon. When the day arrived, I had done a 20 mile test run in preparation and had cramped terribly through the last two miles. The day of the race started with perfect weather. My soleus muscle appeared healed. I was ready.

In the third mile of that race I pulled my soleus muscle again and I started limping and walking, but the pain was tolerable and I had already decided that I would finish that race even if I destroyed my body in the process. This marathon marked a rite of passage from drunken slob to tempered strength. This was a victory of the will and I pushed past the pain for the rest of the morning.

Someone said that a marathon starts at mile 20 and I discovered the reason. In the last six miles, the muscles start to misfire. I could see my calves vibrating, bubbling like the blood was boiling inside, or aliens were about to emerge from my skin. Every step becomes painful as the shortage of salt and water punishes the nerves and muscle fibers. I found a fellow suffering runner to cajole along with me who could barely move his thighs while I bemoaned by calves and hamstrings. Eventually he told me to go ahead without him as he needed to walk, so I departed from him and continued. My family popped out at various points and cheered, making me grateful to the point of watery eyes, as I didn’t deserve their love for simply running a race that I needed to prove to myself was possible. My kids carried signs with funny sayings and banged the cowbells.

In the last few miles the crowd thinned and I was alone for a stretch where I could review my year. The date of the race was one year after my arrest. I had remained sober for a year and changed my body and mind. The suffering of the last miles in the first marathon was a graduation from the past year, from a past life, as if I had turned the page on the chapter of life known as young adulthood, or the drinking years.

As I saw the finish line and heard the music, I began to get emotional in realizing what this meant to me and I thanked God for that policeman who pulled me over and arrested me. This was the journey of life and hope and faith. I was nowhere near the end of the journey but this marked a milestone, just as running across the Golden Gate bridge had struck me as a priceless moment. There was something to endurance. To keep going, always, always keep going - this would carry me through the marathon and my marriage. I could endure. With God’s help, who was always with me, for that strength and direction that I needed and could never muster by myself. My kids ran with me to the finish line. While I was not perfect, I was improving. I finished the race in just under four hours.

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Amidst this swelling of excitement and pride surrounding fitness, I experienced a setback, as the system of law and order pumped the brakes on my accelerating plans. The clear path to victory over my flaws, of drinking and sloth, could be obtained through the Church of Iron: free weights, squat racks, and my trusty old aluminum bike. I felt empowered, emboldened to tackle my problems and defeat them. I had the illusion of control.

However, the court proceeding directed me to alcohol counseling and probation, which did not concern me at first. I needed to make an appointment with a substance abuse counselor and get things sorted out. Clearly, I could show the drug and alcohol counselor my progress, and sell them on my new zest for life, then be on my way.

I contacted someone that I knew from my initial recovery who had righted herself and become a drug and alcohol counselor, and I thought surely she could rubber stamp my progress chart so that I could send a report to the state for verification and maybe a back rub. Instead, she made an appointment for me with another counselor, probably realizing that I wanted an immediate approval to continue on my own path of recovery and self-discovery.

In my meeting with the counselor, I answered all questions honestly, giving scores between 1 and 5 for how I was feeling, including honesty about my bouts of depression. The interview seemed to go well, with much banter and chatter, and were I applying for a job it seemed I would have received an offer. To my surprise, the next day I received an order to do a 28 day inpatient program. My heart sunk, thinking this would derail my coaching, fitness, work, and family life that was just beginning to mend. The first stitches of repair would be ripped apart again. With small children, I believed that I could not leave for a month to dry out because that would be out of the household, and I had already been dry for a month while waiting for instructions from the government.

I sought a second opinion, from a more formal organization, this time from an esteemed medical center, not a strip-mall rehab clinic. The motivations of the rehab center, I surmised, was to get clients in the door to make money. AA meetings only took donations, and didn’t send invoices like 28 day inpatient and outpatient programs. As the saying goes in AA, “Some of us are sicker than others” and I was less sick. My resolve to quit raged within and I wanted to get back on the bike. During this time my attendance at AA meetings surged because I needed to show the world that I meant what I said, even though no one was watching or listening but me and my immediate family.

On several occasions I joined the AA group at the detox center. To get there I needed to hitch a ride with another AA member. Each time my “taxi” arrived I spoke with the person in recovery and realized how lucky I was. My family remained intact, while theirs were separated. My house payments were on time while they struggled to make rent. My job paid well, and they bounced between multiple jobs trying to make ends meet. Returning to the detox center felt strange after waking up stupefied in there a short while ago. I still saw the Coors Light billboard out the window and had to laugh at its ironic placement.

By then I had a sponsor who I didn’t particularly like. The dogma of AA lived loudly in him. He knew the Big Book verbatim and had an absolutist approach, with five years of sobriety under his belt. He wielded those five years like military rank over my month of sobriety, which irritated me, particularly because he was younger than I was, as well as unmarried and without children. I found it difficult to relate to him beyond the desire to stop drinking, which is of course the entire point of AA. I tried to recall the saying: “Principles over personalities,” which meant to ignore our differences and focus on the common intention to be sober and thereby virtuous. He too had issues with religion but could allow for God’s existence, so long as it wasn’t the Christian kind. That we shared, but his anti-Christian stance exceeded mine. Simultaneously, I was trying to allow a bit more of the Triune God back into my life, for a little while anyway.

That was the period when I attempted to find a home in an Evangelical church, accepting the invitation of some willing neighbors who wanted to save my soul. Their good intentions brought me into their fold but as soon as the people started raising their hands and closing their eyes, I felt a disturbance in the force. Then after a few weeks, the pastor’s sola fide and sola scriptura sermons seemed odd to me, and the concert style of service turned me away. I attended a Celebrate Recovery meeting, which was a Christian AA group, but felt it was a more emotional copycat of what AA was already doing, just with an Evangelical angle.

Why would that bother me? Why would I care? Because I didn’t like the idea of Christians taking and making everything into their own image. The 12 steps of AA had been moved into the Church and the word Jesus was added to the steps, along with obligatory Bible study. This seemed to me the way that the whole Christian religion had spread from the start, by taking other things, like pagan holidays and rituals, and experimenting until they found the malleable way to hammer them into Gospel-fitting shapes. I felt like Lieutenant Dan on Forrest Gump, railing against the constancy of “Jesus this and Jesus that, have I found Jesus yet?”

Hence my attempt at finding God through the Evangelical path did not last long, since my high sensitivity to so many things averted my attention. I had all these hangups about Christianity that reared up almost as soon as I entered an Evangelical church. These same concerns and misgivings, these doubts and disdain, came up whenever I entered a Catholic church, too. I could start the day with a clear mind and heart oriented toward belief and within thirty minutes of Mass all of the old reasons I had stopped believing were back in full force. Even by tuning the radio dial and accidentally landing on a Catholic radio station I would roll my eyes since the unspoken motto seemed to be All abortion, all the time. The only issue that seemed important to Catholics and Evangelicals was abortion, with a side dish of gay marriage to gnaw on.

The noise of the world continued and since I could find no message of love in the Christians, and the love seemed hermetically sealed inside the Church walls to a homogeneous set of believers. Love your neighbor meant love your Christian neighbor and forget the rest. The pursuit of money and power among the faithful appeared as egregious as among the faithless, with new vehicles and pools and hot tubs and RVs and ATVs frequenting nearly every driveway and backyard. The Prosperity Gospel made a mockery of it all, and the ascendance of Donald Trump as Christian, as savior, of defender of the working man, made it all plainly absurd. I quickly abandoned my attempt to be re-born a Christian.

I gravitated back toward progressive politics and typically landed somewhere in the middle, since I found both extremes of the right and left to be indefensible. The battle cry of moral relativism from the faithful rang out against the leftists for allowing all manner of sin to be validated, with an abstraction of Aristotle vs. Rousseau occurring in a daily title fight for the winning worldview on the internet.

Whenever I entered the real world armed with ideas and opinions, usually from a book I’ve read, the world quickly disarmed me with its mayhem. I would abandon my soft convictions and retreat to a “live and let live” mentality because that was a safe space, to use the modern term for cowardice. If I could avoid offending anyone, I could then be left alone to find my own truth.

This is what I pursued in getting a second opinion on the state of my alcohol abuse. In my next visit, I decided to not answer any of the questions factually and instead paint the rosiest picture of my life imaginable. I was on two anti-depression medications and exercising seven days a week. I was attending AA meetings and not just sitting there, but speaking and contributing. I made all of this known in the meeting with the two counselors. These claims were not lies, but I exaggerated the joy I was feeling so they would not recommend a 28 day inpatient program again.

At one point in the interview, I said, “I spoke with a friend last week who was hungover from a weekend of partying, and I told him that I was feeling great. I wish I’d made this change long ago.”

My salesmanship failed because at the end both counselors left the room and came back recommending a 28 day inpatient program. As soon as those words left the senior counselor’s lips, I felt shock. The words struck me so hard that I felt dizzy and thought I might fall out of my chair. I could hardly hear anything that followed and it seemed that perhaps this was some kind of panic attack, which I had never experienced. Stranger still, I felt outside of my own body for a moment, like I was somehow in the air around myself but not with myself. This floating experience felt drug-induced, but I was sober. Again I felt the presence of a soul or essence departing me and returning. I suspect my face must have dropped like a stone, because once I collected my spirit and body together again the bearded professorial counselor said, “I gather you are not pleased to hear the recommendation.”

I was not pleased. And I told him so, saying that I was making the change and working hard toward something solid and positive. My children and wife needed to see this in action, hear the mea culpas, and witness the work-in-progress. I could not leave for a month to explore my addiction which I had already accepted.

The counselor recounted my anecdote about the conversation with my friend, who had been hungover from partying. To my surprise, the counselor implied that I was missing the nightlife and my old habits. I could not believe my ears, as in my attempt to convey how I did not miss drinking, he construed the message to mean that I wanted to be drinking. At that point I realized what being inside “the system” meant, grokking it entirely, as if Franz Kafka was sitting in the room and nodding, saying, “Now do you get it? See what I meant in all those stories?”

Again, I immediately assumed that this was about money rather than helping people. The counselor needed to collect bodies in seats for his programs and I was fresh meat delivered by the state unto him. And if he recommended inpatient rehab, I would have to partake and pay for inpatient rehab. Long ago, from a surgeon, I had heard the phrase, “When you go see a surgeon, you will be recommended surgery.” That held true for surgeons and just about every profession I’d ever encountered, from car dealers to lawn care to Pampered Chef agents to New Age religions to organized religion. This premise certainly held true with my own company’s salespeople who would go to great lengths to tailor any message that could complete a sale. What you need, is what they are selling. When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or at least that was my position, when in reality the protocols in both of my assessments likely recommended rehab for someone who had driven drunk while twice over the allowed blood-alcohol content and had a history of excessive drinking. I mean, there was my own behavior to inspect as well, but my will and ego wanted to drive this bus myself.

My reaction to the recommendation may not have been fair to the counselor, but I argued them down to an outpatient program before they signed off on the report, which would go to my probation officer. And I never did join an outpatient program, having dragged my feet for two years on it, claiming AA as my program, and eventually even dropping out of that in order to focus on my family, my coaching, and all manner of intense exercise that I felt purged the toxins and animus from my body, in a kind of self-flagellating way. The miles lengthened and goals ossified into must-have experiences on my calendar. This focus on exercise replaced books, travel, woodworking, writing, reading, as the centerpiece of my life. The hierarchy of my life was sobriety by whatever means followed by fitness, family, marriage, and career. This seemed the right ordering at the time.

I did find one book to fly solo with during that time, which was Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind. That little book contains great arguments against drinking in a modern way that is totally non-religious in nature. She has made a little gift to the world in this book to shatter the illusions about why we drink, such as to have a better social or sex life and how for the most part, drinking does more to tear down your life than to improve it in any way. Without a doubt, drinking has destroyed more families and careers than anything else in my social circles. Nothing even comes close. As Homer Simpson once said, “Drinking is the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.” Except in reality, the solution part is just escapism, and burying one’s head in the sand.

The hardest part about quitting drinking in our society is the ubiquity of the message to drink. If you have never tried to stop, I would dare you to try it for 3 months and see how much you notice the billboards, ads, and commercials that steer you toward it. Then there is events that are fully geared toward drinking - sports, concerts, backyard barbecues, dinners, tours, neighborhood fires, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, going away parties - nearly all social gatherings have an element at play. And the funny thing is, if you’ve been playing along in that world for a while, you are brainwashed into thinking that refusing a drink will be rude, or look awkward. Once you start saying “No” you will soon realize that no one cares, and if anyone does care that you aren’t drinking then they are likely a problem boozer who hasn’t realized it yet. Furthermore, you suddenly meet the many people who don’t drink at all and find a new kind of bond over abstinence. It’s amazing how people open up if you say, “No thanks, I quit drinking. It wasn’t doing me any good, so I had to make a choice to cut it out.” Rather than it throwing a wet blanket on people and parties, in my experience people open up and share stories of their own struggle or a family member that has also quit.

In five years of non-drinking, the most pathetic ad I’ve seen from the beer industry to promote drinking as a way of life was from Michelob Ultra, where a robot is exercising like mad among normal people. The robot is freakish to the normies, as its muscular metal body outperforms them all, but the obvious point is that the robot has no personality. Then at the end of the commercial, the robot is jogging past a pub where everyone is laughing and enjoying life while having tall glasses of Michelob Ultra (which is comical in itself, as the beer is 99.9% water and has no flavor). A caption appears on the pub window saying, “It’s only worth it, if you can enjoy it.” This is a very subtle and cruel insult at people who are trying to quit drinking or have taken up exercise to help them stop drinking. I was a bit shocked as it even struck me as, “Wow, I’m just a robot, exercising all the time now instead of drinking with friends.”

When you are in sales, the goal is to sell. I’ve known that from the working environments I’ve been in and around. But the lengths that the beer and liquor industry goes to in order to make alcohol “cool” is unparalleled. This Michelob Ultra ad is just another derivative of the great South Park commercial that mocked the beer industry’s constant push to marry fun with drinking. The South Park ad shows image after image of sex, cars, women, fun, vodka, expensive things, bikinis, posh hotels, money, tuxedos, threesomes, Vegas, more sex, and then at the end comes the platitude of “Please Drink Responsibly,” which is in direct contradiction to everything that was in the ad. I even think back to the indoctrination of beer ads in the 1980s where the humor in the commercials made us kids talk about the ads at school, with Joe Piscopo, Spuds Mackenzie, Bud Bowl, Bob Uecker, John Madden, and Old Milwaukee’s Swedish Bikini team. That was all long before “The Most Interesting Man in the World” came along showing how you could only be interesting with alcohol.

The deck is stacked heavily against those who want to stop. In fact, I recall the backlash against the Joe Camel ads and people saying it was government overreach to stop that campaign for cigarette companies targeting kids. But I can tell you this: in 4th grade, my friends and I at school liked to cut out and tape up pictures of Joe Camel in our lockers at school, because we thought he was cool. We didn’t admire the Marlboro Man for his ruggedness, we admired Joe Camel for his cars and ladies and overall playboy lifestyle, and I’m not even sure we knew why at that age. Whatever it was, the marketing worked and by age sixteen we were all smoking Camel Lights.

I’ve heard the argument that “you can just ignore the ads.” If you are a drinker, I dare you to stop for 3 months and let me know how ignoring the ads went for you. Good luck on that.

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Riding a bike with plastic bags full of groceries dangling from each handlebar can be dangerous, since turning and stopping can sway the balance of the bike. A wipeout at an intersection is surely hilarious to people in their cars, and I have provided that laugh a few times.

In America, cars equal freedom. For the first time I had lost the privilege to drive. This proved a humbling experience having to ride my bike to the grocery store, to recovery meetings, and to appointments. I needed to arrange rides to events and ask for help more often than I liked. On work trips, I had to explain away why I didn’t have a rental car. By pedal I propelled my way around the city, using the bike lanes and trails. Having witnessed many cyclists ignore the rules of the road, I tried my best to obey proper traffic behavior, but I will admit running a few stop signs when no cars are around. Stopping and starting a bike again by pedaling takes a lot more energy than pressing a foot on a car’s brake pedal. Now I know why bicyclists don’t stop unless they must.

Initially I found commuting by bike to be an embarrassment, as my neighbors all knew what had happened. But within a few weeks I discovered that I could bike fifteen miles a day and not feel sore afterward. This startled me since I had generally avoided riding a bike since childhood. My old Wal-Mart bike needed a tune-up, but for a few months I squeaked along, not really understanding what a quality bike felt like, but then I didn’t much care as the enjoyment increased, all thanks to this loss of my freedom to drive.

To get to AA meetings, I needed to ride about seven miles each way and in the summer heat I would show up dripping with perspiration. The fatigue and sweat reduced my ability to pay attention in the meetings, but my goal (another goal) was to attend 90 meetings in 90 days, a staple prescription for those starting or resuming AA, since regular attendance forms a solid habit and forces a person to get to know people in the program. With family and work obligations, I biked frantically to and from the meetings, determined to commit to the change and strike drinking from my life completely, once and for all.

Occasionally I frequented an evening meeting, meaning I had to cycle back at dusk. As summer days shortened, I found myself on a paved trail in the dark as the chill of night settled into the trees around me. These night rides became exciting as I hoped no sticks or surprises lay on the trail waiting to flip my bike over. On several nights, thousands of fireflies lit up the trail with natural fireworks that I never knew existed in the city. It was glorious.

I began to enjoy the bike rides more than the meetings and started to yearn for longer rides. Suddenly I could understand why cyclists, in their strange spandex attire, became committed to their hobby. Getting out of a car and onto a bike actually allowed you to be in the world. A car wrapped me like an envelope and I experienced very little. Traveling by bike through the city made me much happier than driving, likely because of the exercise but I also suspect because of the lack of media. No radio, no phones, no touchscreen: just the open air and whatever the weather brought that day.

As my legs began to get in shape, I wondered about distances and my ability to ride nonstop for thirty miles, and soon forty miles. Likewise, I started to run, realizing that my body felt better than ever, like it once did in high school before I started drinking. In my late thirties, I realized that I had wasted twenty years thinking that my knees were shot due to surgeries, when in reality I had let them rot and get weak by lack of usage. Instead of coddling them, I improved them by applying pressure to the joints and bones via exercise. I started to do squats with weight.

The truth became readily apparent that alcohol had not only been a crutch for me but had also been the thing that had crippled me from the start. In reviewing my history, most of what I had held as important faded once drinking became a part of my life and my sense of depression started then as well, around the age of sixteen. My sense of right and wrong dwindled into a vague sense of truth over the drinking years because my vice required a loose allowance toward mistakes. I could forgive others for their mistakes somewhat easily because I needed to allow my own errors to happen and be excused. This morass of circular logic permitted anything and celebrated my errors, making me the decider of all that was good or bad in the world. The main rule I adhered to could be summed up as a philosophy of “Leave me alone, I have my own rules.”

Of course, the rules could change whenever I wanted them to be different. That was how I liked it. Being powerless bothered me most of all. To be told what to do disturbed me, and even enraged me. Yet I had just experienced a loss of power where I began to appreciate biking more by having lost the right to drive. At the time I didn’t recognize this as significant. Instead I seized upon the point that I was able to exercise more and my will and ego enjoyed that a great deal. No longer did I cry the blues about my bad knees, but rather I heard the call of endurance sports calling. Fitness became a moral good by itself and I began signing up for longer distance races.

I recall the day when I realized that I no longer had to stop on the bike. Energy surged in me, as it was almost a spiritual experience, when I knew that I could bike for hours and hours now and my legs felt like pistons. On another occasion I decided to go for an eleven mile run across the Golden Gate bridge while in San Francisco on a work trip. The weather was foggy and misty that day. The red towers peeked out of the fog as I ran beneath them and the runner’s high struck me so profoundly that tears came to my eyes and again I felt as if I never needed to stop running.

The notion arrived of running a half-marathon came to me, and three months after my arrest I had completed a half-marathon. This seemed an impossibility for over twenty years and by simply removing alcohol and my driver’s license from my life, I discovered something amazing about myself. I would say that the scales fell from my eyes, but I had more than one set of scales to go through. As I embraced fitness, I began to back away from AA once again. Like the first time, I reached the 9th step of recovery, then retreated again and said goodbye to my sponsor. My new sponsor was my bike, my gym, and my running shoes. I kept a small space for a Higher Power, for God in my mind and heart, but the goal had shifted toward feats of fitness, and once again, goals willed to fruition.

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Upon release from jail, after posting a hefty bail, I had a frantic sense of urgency to tie up loose ends. The timing of this event seems nearly providential in hindsight, as I had just volunteered to coach my first youth sports team, and the first practice was that same night. I had not eagerly signed up for this coaching job, but as I waited in jail the importance of this position swelled into a symbol of my responsibility and thus the need to fix my behavior. The vanity of my reputation needed a fresh coat of paint and here was an opportunity. Suddenly, I wanted to be there for my kids, more than anything, and my grumbling about volunteering turned into a must-have, because I wanted to save face and give the appearance of a good father. Aside from my drinking I did give all to my children, but now the shine was off the penny. Redemption was my real motive, not goodwill. For my children had never seen me stumble so publicly and spectacularly. Knowing that my image had fallen dramatically stabbed me, as I thought of the children’s disappointment and confusion. I felt as if I had taken a pin to a beloved balloon and popped it right in front of them. Actually, the metaphor of me as a balloon full of air sounds about right.

With only a few days left with a valid driver’s license, I scrambled about the city taking care of errands, one of which included purchasing gear for the team I was to coach. Preparing for coaching became a focus, because it was something positive amid the guilt of returning home, where I had to face the music of my best friend, my wife, who I knew I had failed.

I had entered into marriage half-heartedly and because of that, I never elevated marriage to be the centerpiece of life, where it belongs. We had not married in a church and the idea of sacredness around marriage did not even occur to me. Yet she always remained my best friend and even in times of strife we overcame our differences to come back together. We could not live apart, without each other, because we share a real love that has foundation in our roots of friendship. How she ever put up with my nonsense will be the great mystery of my life.

But irresponsible drinking and the predictable unpredictability of the bad nights loomed over the marriage. This arrest and jailing was a breaking point. Even without an ultimatum from her, I had already declared a do-or-die demand against myself to stop drinking once and for all. My shame cut deep and I resolved to change. This turning point in my life and our lives together put pressure on the marriage, for which I am forever guilty of and sorry for.

Five years later, I am beyond grateful for these events. Without this arrest and turning point, no progress would ever have been made. The experience of “hitting bottom,” which I thought had happened many times before, finally and truly slammed into me. In prior fiascos, I must have only scraped the bottom because somehow I always forgave myself and returned to old behaviors. I typically scoffed at the cliche stories of people who quit drinking, considering them hypocrites, especially those who became moralizing holy rollers and “Bible Beaters.” Wouldn’t I be like any other hypocrite after spending twenty years partying only to become a teetotaler? So I was careful to quiet my resolve to quit drinking without becoming a denier of others, always thinking of this Kahlil Gibran line in The Prophet regarding hypocrites:

…who comes early to the wedding-feast, and when over-fed and tired goes his way saying that all feasts are violation and all feasters law-breakers?

I needed to clean up my side of street and let others worry about themselves. So I started coaching with fervor and attending AA meetings once again. I attended an Evangelical church several times only to find the hand-raising and concert-style service too foreign to my senses. I couldn’t embrace the Evangelical way even though I appreciated the people. I sought books on Eastern philosophy, but AA became the refuge for a time again. Through AA, once again, I had allowed God to exist, but without belief in miracles. That was a bridge too far. But in accepting God I at least had a handlebar for life, something to hold onto in this struggle of re-learning how to live. That’s truly what it is. For anyone who is replacing the substance or being at the center of their life, an entire re-training must be undertaken in learning how to live. While this process took place, doubt was never far off, often creeping in, challenging every step toward change.

I remember one of the first times that prayer proved to me that it worked. Yes, I said prayer - that action that elderly people partake in, and sometimes those crazy young adults that you try to avoid. Yes, actual prayer, as in folded hands and looking up to the heavens and feeling a surge of the heart - that kind of thing.

A friend asked me to go see a movie, Transformers 2, and since I had enjoyed the toy as a kid, I agreed, thinking that a night out would be fun. But the Transformers movie proved so horrible, and so unnecessarily long, that I felt like would writhe out of my skin. The non-drinking and stress of trying to keep my depression under control came to a climax in the movie theater, spurred on by the absurdity of the movie. So bad was the movie that I said the Our Father about ten times to outlast the cinematic torture and to avoid insulting my friend, who loved the movie.

I realize this is a ridiculous anecdote about the power of prayer. Watching a movie is not any kind of hardship, but in the moments when we discover things about ourselves, it’s not always poetic.

And in all seriousness, all Transformers movies should be destroyed.

By then I had learned to pray a simple way, and I use it to this day. When struggling, I was taught to ask God for strength and direction. Besides rote memorized prayer, I didn’t know how to pray, and maybe I still don’t, but I do know how to ask for strength and direction. This always helps, and I can repeat it over and over if needed. Along with that I can ask God what is the “next right action” and direct my energy toward that, whatever it may be. The third thing that I learned to try and try again was to pray for the “willingness to be willing” to believe. I’m sure these sound silly, as they definitely did to me at first.

Then there is the quote that changed many things for me: “Surrender to win.”

“Surrender to Win” is more powerful than I ever imagined and despite the words sounding like giving up, the reality is that you rarely ever need to win. Most arguments and wants have a pointless foundation. Look at social media or comments sections on websites: do you see anyone winning there? What a mess of egos gone wild. But this saying goes way beyond helping extricate oneself from internet conversations. This touches real life, which is where the surrender to win mantra performs a strange magic that softens, heals, and can even build a fortress of strength.

Once I could see that I personally did not need to win all the time, I started to win in a different way. Surrendering removes desire for the need to be right. Surrendering lessens my ego’s need to be special. The things worth surrendering for are as follows: to allow my belief in God, to elevate my marriage above myself, and to worry less about my wants.

There is a fourth idea that I picked up regarding my struggle with belief in a Higher Power, and that was to start small in terms of a deity. I still remember after attending a meeting, standing outside of a Greek church, a man told me to make the street light my Higher Power.

“For now, just give thanks to that Street Light for everything in your life.”

“Seems a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

“Ask the Street Light for help every day when you get on your knees. Right now, that Street Light is greater than you are. That’s your Higher Power.”

“Uh, ok.”

Stupid as that sounds, this was a place to start, and I am quite certain there is no organized religion in the world that would suggest this, but I know from myself and various other doubters that choosing something simple works, like a stapler or a plant or lawnmower - or a street light.

If you play this game and allow some object to be your Higher Power, and really pray toward it for strength and direction, that street light will amaze. Comical and ridiculous? Absolutely. But so are human beings and sometimes laughing helps kickstart ideas and change. I recall praying, “Street Light, please help me today. Help me to not drink and to be nice to people and not be the ass that I usually am. Keep me from acting like a moron. Help to be a better father and husband and son and co-worker instead of my typical narcissistic self. And maybe I can try to swear less, too. Thank you, Street Light. Amen.”

If it sounds like I’m making light of establishing a Higher Power or finding God, I am not. Not all people can easily return to believing in God once they have fallen away or become agnostic or atheist. As I lost my faith during my teenage years, I lost the ability to believe or even find a reason to pray. Devoted religious people seem to be unwavering in their faith to the point that they cannot even fathom how someone has doubt. Therefore, those people always seemed unapproachable to the unfaithful like me. If anything I felt this gulf between believers and non-believers pushed doubters away rather than invited us to try, because to have doubt felt like a weakness or a character flaw. Those with faith don’t seem to struggle, or at least don’t give the impression that they struggle, although I know now that’s not the case. Everyone struggles. Faith is usually portrayed as something you either have or you do not. I suspect doubt finds harbor in every mind and heart, even among regular church-goers. This explains why the Street Light faith worked for me - it allowed for the possibility of faith.

What I see happening with addicts and alcoholics is that the best path back to faith is through this wide gate at first, not the narrow gate. The Street Light God works because it doesn’t make one go from preschool to graduate school in a single leap. The idea that someone who has completely rejected God or Christianity could jump back in immediately to religion, to “change and become like children” is not likely or even reasonable to expect. There is an education and processing that needs to happen, and the main reason this education and process needs to take place is because many of these people, like me, never learned why we were really going to church in the first place.

Sure, we learned why on the surface: to save our souls, to be forgiven our sins, and bring us to everlasting life. Ok, great. Now what does that all mean? I had no idea.

But surely I cannot be alone in the experience that growing up, I learned all the things to say at the right time in church, but beyond the procedural there was a lack of knowing why all the hubbub, vestments, and stained glass. I spent years attending Wednesday night religion classes, never missed a Sunday, and was an altar boy for six years. I even read my Children’s Bible with fascination, and felt that being Catholic was a real part of my identity.

I just didn’t know why.

While I saw the inside of a church often, I was simultaneously learning a great deal of science and math as the years progressed. Moreover, the teaching of “questioning everything” became a prominent point in education. To search and explore questions about the natural world was a moral good. Science was slowly undermining my faith, not by its own fault, because science is a search for truth, just like faith and philosophy but in a different domain. The problem was this: while I was learning to excel at school and question everything, the Mass and Church was a static part of my life that did not seem to accept questioning.

A major fork in life happened when I asked an adult about the stone being rolled back at Jesus’s tomb. Surely, if someone rolled the rock in front of the tomb to close it, then a person or persons also could have rolled the rock away from the tomb. Even if the tomb was sealed, metal tools could have unsealed it just as easily. And the answer I heard back from a respected elder person was: “Don’t ask questions, just believe it.”

This comment caused an earthquake in me because as science seemed to question and correct itself, religion appeared to not want any arguments. Science, even in its wild tangents throughout history, did seem to right the ship, given enough time, if the findings changed. The response of “Don’t ask questions” shook me because prior to that day I had been coming to faith like a child, because I was a child. In school, having been in “gifted” programs (still not sure how I was selected into these programs) we read books critically. The same notions of reading seemed applicable to the weekly readings at church, but being rebuffed I started to doubt and even secretly laugh at some of the stories. Along with the rock at the tomb, I found many other questions, and if they could not be discussed or took a long time for myself to explore, I didn’t have interest enough for the pursuit. I was of a generation that got a “lite” version of understanding faith, hence the major drift of unaffiliated people today. With a lack of deep understanding, other things took the place of religion. Sports more than anything became a kind of replacement religion. School and parties filled the other spaces. When I began to observe political Christians behaving badly, I conflated them all into one homogenous group of hypocrites.

Obviously, I should have found a second opinion for my questions about the rock at the tomb. All of my doubting would have found the right answers if I had met the right mentor. But in a small town there isn’t a surplus of intellectuals running around quoting Augustine and Aquinas, ready to respond with the words needed to address such things. If Karol Wojtyla or Joseph Ratzinger could have been cloned in the 1980s and 1990s and sent to each parish worldwide, I have no doubt myself and millions of other kids would have remained within the faith. To be fair, the person who told me not to ask questions wasn’t equipped to answer my questions and I should have asked others, but the river of culture carried me away.

Life became exceedingly busy in the teen years, with sports and homework and jobs and friends and girlfriends and trying to secure beer for the weekend. Church faded into a Sunday event before NFL football. Wednesday night religion class became less relevant as I was so often tired from sports practice and slogging through math problems that I was checked out in religion class, just there to punch my ticket by memorizing Hail, Holy Queen or some other prayer. A sense of the meritocracy in the world started to become clear to me. It was no longer “by the sweat of your face you will get your bread” it was rather “by the firing of your neurons you will get a job.”

A second major event occurred that altered my thoughts on what it meant to be Catholic. Sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s, each week after church there would be “Bush for President” flyers on our car’s windshield after church. The pro-Life movement took off and without anyone telling me or saying so, it became clear that to be Catholic meant to be Republican. Yet in a farming community, the political choice and leanings of the early 80s trended toward the Democrats. In any case, my point here is not either political party being right or wrong. My point here is that the Church appeared to have aligned with one party, and I became confused as to the purpose of religion if elections were now invading the space carved out for God. In fact, I could not tell if the Church was part of the Republican party or if the Republican party had joined the Church. Conversations around politics became awkward, as clearly the people had split somewhere down the middle, since America was pretty much 50/50 on the two-party system then just as it is today. Even then I saw no way that either party fulfilled what I thought the Catholic faith was all about, and today I know that neither party fulfills Catholic Social Teaching, as each side has different takes that do not exactly fit. Actually, I don’t see how either party can work for any Christian. I guess you just pick the one that seems the lesser of two evils for how you see the world.

These windshield flyers changed the way I saw Church. Such lowly, earthly things as elections seemed irrelevant to the Mass, but now various people in the local parish were stirring up the flock. I knew people that did a lot of charity work but they were not pro-Life. I knew pro-Life people that volunteered and prayed often, and lived holy lives. The divisions made no sense to me, since I knew that not a soul inside that Church on any given Sunday was without sin. Yet some people who seemed to be good, certainly holier than me, were dropping out of the pews. I didn’t realize it at the time but these events began to shape later thoughts on how I viewed the Church, especially once the abuse scandals started seeping out.

In hindsight I can review my history and see my own psychological quirks and problems, but I can also see the starting blocks where the rise of the “nones” or New Atheists began running. By the time I graduated high school, faith became a minor aspect of my life, unless you count my faith in Dionysus, the God of liquor and partying. Still, a flicker of belief remained and I wasn’t ready to let faith go yet, even though in the post-Confirmation years I just thought of myself as Catholic, despite living zero of the values. Prudence flew out the window. Temperance? No, are you kidding me? Faith, Hope, and Charity? I would have thought you were referring to exotic dancers’ names.

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To my surprise, while being assigned a cell, the jailer made me watch a video on how to deal with sexual assault during my stay. This hotel was definitely a one-star rating. I asked the jailer if rape was an actual possibility on my first stay and she laughed and said, “Not likely.” Not exactly reassuring.

When I entered my cell, I met my roommate, a man with a face full of tattoos. He moved aside and let me pass, then stayed near the doorway so he could watch the TV in the distance through the sliver of a window on the door. I settled in with my bundle of items, a towel, some soap, my spork for meals, and an ample sense of displacement. I recognized immediately that my feeling as a first timer in jail differed greatly from my roommate who was doing 90 days for repeat drug and other convictions. Clearly to him, the cell and surroundings had a normalcy that I did not yet share, and with luck I wouldn’t have to learn. I settled on the top bunk (on another plastic coated mattress) without even unfolding my blanket and I stared at the ceiling.

In my pursuits and hobbies, I often sought isolation and privacy so that I could think and not be bothered, always choosing hobbies and activities solitary in nature, such as reading, drinking, woodworking, writing. Even with people present, drinking seemed more of a solitary pursuit since myself and my fellow drinkers were after the escape more than camaraderie, or perhaps through camaraderie we sought the desired escape. Now I had full isolation.

Mission accomplished?

What bothered me most was the tarnish of the crime against my otherwise good reputation, dubious as it was. My fake humility could really only be described as damaged vanity. Through years of misbehavior while drinking I had otherwise behaved and kept up appearances. I believed I was a good person, sometimes, while also hating myself. A kind of motto that I told myself was: “Self-hatred is my greatest motivator.” The meaning intended by this awful idea was that I was a capable person who could will or force tasks to completion, primarily because I believed I was not deserving of anything. Nothing in this world was owed to me, and I was no different from an ant on the sidewalk that gets his work done without expecting a reward. At the same time, I could be a real diva if anyone disrupted my personal time or bothered my sensibilities. And I wanted the attention and praise of others, kind of like can be seen in every post on social media where the implicit cry from the poster is, “Look at me! Notice me! Please, validate my existence! I want approval because I’m craving to be loved!”

I’m not sure how these notions came to be in my mind, but now I know that it was flawed, and for some time I blamed a Catholic upbringing for sourcing this lament. I knew this wasn’t entirely fair because I had spent ten years listening daily to albums like Nirvana’s Nevermind and Sublime’s 40oz. to Freedom, and assorted 90s rejectionist music. As a case in point, the song “Breed” by Nirvana, which I still love to this day, starts out with these lyrics:

“I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, Care if it’s old. I don’t mind, I don’t mind, I don’t mind, I don’t mind, Mind, don’t have a mind.”

Likewise, to reference Sublime (a band I also still love), I think of the accumulated impact of listening to “What Happened?” some ten thousand times and how this band might have altered my worldview:

“Threw a bottle at the bouncer
Didn't think that he was cool
Pissed in someone's drink
And threw a bike into a pool”

I would add some of my favorite Ice Cube and Tupac lyrics as well but surely the idea is established. Partying recklessly is what I’m hinting at here.

More likely than my church-going youth causing my self-destructive tendencies, rather, I suspect that it kept me from going full anarchist and torching the streets. The rage of youth burned fierce and I wanted to rebel. Self-destruction was so metal, so gritty and real. In reality, it was just like riding on a rollercoaster where you want the thrill of near-death adventures while buckled in with a seatbelt and shoulder harness. Rock and Rap music just presented the rebellion I was after. They were my cheerleaders.

But the fire of youth can be difficult to manage and outlets will be found, on purpose or by accident. I believe that avoiding feelings, not talking about feelings, allowed internal brooding to swell into self-loathing and self-destructive behaviors. All of that touchy-feely stuff was not part of my life. Rather, I deemed it a ridiculous outgrowth of modernity, a kind of New Age, California-way that deserved no review. Today I know better: talking is good…and California is still, well, California.

I held too many contradictions in my mind. On the one hand, modernity had the answers, on the other hand I felt its efficiencies were wearing away meaningful work. It certainly hollowed out the farms and factory jobs in my corner of the world as consolidations and outsourcing crushed the local economy. I ended up becoming a software engineer but I could never truly love my line of work since I saw blue-collar and agricultural work as more real and the people in those vocations far more interesting. The software and IT business world of sterile screens never did excite me. There exists a kind of affluent boredom in the modern office that lacks heart, because the occupations themselves only require our head.

In those college and early adulthood days, I pretty much sought moral anarchy. Yet I also wanted order and rules, with a yearning to do the right thing. On one hand I wanted education and on the other I thought ignorance was bliss. Basically, let me try to be honest, since that’s the point of writing this: I just wanted it my way depending on how I felt at the time. I felt that truth was malleable to my current state. My worldview morphed constantly and made no sense to me, and eventually I threw up my hands and found drinking and disdain to be a good corner to hide in while I progressed through time on this planet. I had all the answers, but no conviction. I could not articulate anything and therefore thrashed about like Ahab, wanting the answer to surface next to me so I could name it, kill it, and mount it on the wall.

This drifting way of life, eventually, brought me to my weekend in jail, for which I am now most grateful.

When I woke up in jail, I was flushed out of my cell to breakfast, I realized how much like a fish tank the common area was, where people watch the new person, where furtive eyes peek constantly. Sitting at a table by myself I suddenly had three men join me and start asking questions about why I was there, how long I was staying, and finally, to the point, if they could have any of my food, my leftover soap, and any extra phone card minutes when I departed the jail. Remaining quiet for the most part, I observed the comfort with which the regulars roamed the jail versus the corners where others sat quietly.

As I was being brought before the judge, they strung five of us together in conjoined handcuffs and led us to a holding cell. In the cell we conversed and I learned that two of those with me were booked on heroin charges, and to my surprise, they were discussing how to get one of their mothers to post bail in order to be released…so that they could go buy more heroin right away and get high again. The poor woman, I thought. Addiction this strong seemed impossible to overcome, yet I heard them scheming a plan that would likely financially obliterate this mother. Another man had a drunk driving charge, too, but he had been driving with a child in his car. He looked wounded and I could see his pain because he had a face bearing misfortune. He just looked unlucky, and I began to realize how lucky and fortunate I had been, always, always, in my trip through this world. But one thing seemed certain - none of them in there but me seemed to be thriving in life, at least not in what our culture deems as success. I didn’t get the impression that they had grown up in houses that took pride in good grades and ate home cooked meals every night.

Honestly, I thought of them mostly as knuckleheads and wanted to get away from them. I did not love them as neighbors or equals. The experience reminded me of days spent in a military barracks, where many of the same character types seemed present. Imagining that jail to be an Army barracks did not seem much of a stretch. After all, we all wore the same uniforms. I felt I was made of better stuff than most of them, that I was morally better in some way. Yet alongside this notion, I also saw myself as this lowly blight on society. Again my thoughts made no sense in their contradictions. Was I good or bad? My measurement of worth came only by achievements rather than something intrinsic. The “work hard, play hard” principal: I imagined achievements like money and honor was the purpose, with pleasure and escape as the reward. The movement toward a goal was righteous, and missing the mark was bad. And clearly these people in jail, I thought, had failed in life, worse than I had.

My notions of altruism and equality, I realized, were shadows and projections from my reading and my books. My empathy and caring was best kept fresh in isolation, not in interacting with actual people with real flaws. For if I really believed in people and saw the good, I would have applied it here in jail, but I only saw the shortcomings and wanted to flee from these ne’er-do-wells, even though I simultaneously considered myself one of these screw-ups, but to a lesser degree. Somehow I flip-flopped between seeing myself as a good person and a degenerate, as if I had all three of Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov brothers, Dmitri and Alyosha and Ivan, all rolled into me. I was a good intellectual degenerate jerk. A drunken idiot atheist with a heart of gold.

In a way, I was right. From that list of attributes, I carried some with me daily, and set others down, and picked up different ones to play with. In talking with the other jailbirds, they too played with these toys of personality and behavior in making their way each day. In fact, I could see that their flaws and mine mirrored one another, depending on the hour. Yet I still thought I was not like them. All of them. My aim exceeded theirs, my thoughts went deeper, my personhood was somehow imbued with specialness. My life meant more and they were fools.

Yet I was in the same place as all of them.

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I awoke facing the wall. My mouth like cotton, I sensed something amiss and an old familiar feeling. When you wake up from a wild night where memories are sparse, or non-existent, a moment of panic can grip you due to the uncertainty of place and time. The drab detox dorm room had two beds in it, with waterproof mattresses. I rolled over to sunlight blasting through a window and the first thing I saw outside was a Coors Light billboard near a highway. The irony was striking. I had been drinking that watered-down slop the day before, along with whatever else I could funnel into my face.

An old familiar panic gripped my forearms and shoulders, and stirred in my gut. I had noticed this many years before, even during my first mornings after drinking. If humans had souls, or a root essence, I thought, you could experience it via its absence in shaky morning-afters when the five senses lay crippled by the hangover. As the saying goes, “Faith will tell me God is present when my human senses fail.” Except it was kind of opposite of that, because with my failed human senses, I felt the horrific emptiness because I had wholly rejected faith.

The notion filled me with dread that some part was missing, or had departed, or was still downtown at the bar, and I needed that essence to return to me. I needed that part to put the rest of the senses and self together again. Whenever I had awoke in a house full of responsible people, my typical response to this lost feeling was to show artificial health and vigor, to get up and appear normal and recovered, despite wanting to sleep, or disappear, or die. I’ve noticed the same in others, often at business conferences, when a drinker clearly had a rough night or did something foolish, but they rise and pretend that all is well. The lengths a hungover person goes to in pretending stuns me, from my own experiences and from watching others.

To my horror, a clock on the wall showed 4 o’clock…in the afternoon. Having slept all day and not yet called home, this clock signified my betrayal of my wife and children. The mistake I had made this time could not be ignored or charmed over. This error in judgment and prudence leapt past the usual cause of grievances in our household. Worst of all I had been drunk driving while I had a responsibility for my children and should have woke up at home, not in detox. I knew immediately that this would be a scar upon all of my relationships. All of them. Everyone important in my life suffered because of my choice the night before.

Over the coming hours I cycled through the process of denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Then came the shame and the guilt. I had learned about the difference between shame and guilt in a prior attempt to stop drinking. Guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done, whereas shame is feeling bad about who you are and that you don’t deserve love. Since I like to hold pity parties for myself, I tended to choose a la carte from both of those classifications.

Several years before the arrest, I had tried earnestly, voluntarily, to quit drinking, doing a 28-day outpatient program, to fix myself and address the question of “What is wrong with me?” The propensity to drink and make a mess of life ate at me enough that I had decided to get help. In this circle of misfits, I nearly walked out on the first day when I read the 12 steps on the wall. The second step required capitulation to a “…Power greater than myself.” That verbiage really, really bothered me.

But I stayed. I stayed in that program and did the 28 days, learning a great deal about addiction and how my “lizard brain” works. Indeed, I still know to this day that it is my lizard brain that wants Cinnamon Toast Crunch at 3 AM.

At the urging of counselors, I attended AA meetings, and even tried to believe in a Higher Power. At the time I was atheist or agnostic, depending on the hour, and I leaned left politically, mostly only to lean away from the religious right. My position was not for specific issue, but merely against all things religious, which I felt poisoned the world. At that point in my life I subscribed to the sermons of Hitchens and Dawkins. The deconstruction of my belief in the Christian faith is a long story. More on that later.

Of the many, many things I learned in that 28-day recovery group was that rich or poor, left or right, educated or uneducated - alcohol and drugs do not discriminate. These substances will overpower the strongest will and beguile the most cunning mind. They will feed a person’s vanity and shape an ego into whatever form desired. They will lift you up or bring you down, whichever you want or think you prefer. For me, drinking was the “tree of knowledge.” I suppose that makes Captain Morgan the serpent. Replace the symbolism in Genesis with whatever your vice and I suspect that the same story can be told. Whatever entices and mesmerizes and steals goodness away from you, and replaces love in your heart with negativity is probably your own apple on the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Unfortunately for me, even if I avoid one tree, sometimes I find a second tree, or a third.

Detox is a primarily a waiting area, where you dry out until you can be taken to jail. Hence, each drunkard is allotted ample time to think and commiserate with others in the same state of limbo. What frustrated me most was that a month before the arrest I thought I had made the life changes I needed. I had quit tobacco and started exercising, and I was learning to drink socially, controllably. For a month I had done well.

So what happened?

The same thing that always happened.

In hindsight, the spur to action a month earlier had been from drinking too much on a work trip and regretting the outcome. Thus, like every cycle before this cataclysm, I trod the same path: drinking lightly for a time, then back to drinking heavily, onto regret and shame, followed by abstaining and declaring a life change, and lastly looping back to the beginning.

The same cycle repeated for twenty years.

A drinker will always forgive himself in order to drink again. The only difference this time was legal consequences, which apparently is what it took (after all, the system is called the “Department of Corrections”). I needed a correction. Until the arrest I wasn’t unscrambling the obvious message to wake up.

An AA group visited to the detox facility to hold a meeting. I joined their meeting, almost eager to share that I needed to join AA and get on track, as the disturbance in my family and home life was quaking in me.

I had tried AA before, for a while. But rather than 12-stepping I did 9 steps and then dumped my sponsor. He had urged me to unhitch from the past and latch onto AA, full-time, but the group felt cultish and separated from the world that I had to live in. Too much God, I thought. I wanted something more scientific, like SMART Recovery or psychological explanations or pharmaceutical solutions. I had read the Big Book and other AA materials and found them fascinating at first, but it didn’t stick. Reading and re-reading the Big Book struck me as pseudo-scriptural and the writing didn’t feel profound enough to merit such continual attention. The chapter titled “We Agnostics” made me realize what an unoriginal thinker I was, as I was like the chapter’s archetype: “…so touchy that even a casual reference to spiritual things made us bristle with antagonism.”

It always stings when I find out how predictable and regular I am.

My tendencies, I felt, did not need the full treatment of AA, as “some of us are sicker than others.” Truly, some people have a much worse struggle with alcohol than I did, and I listened in pity to those people. Surely those people needed the whole program. But I had issues with parts of the Big Book and felt that AA took an anti-intellectual turn in saying that problem drinkers tend to “…read wordy books and indulge in windy arguments, thinking this universe needs no God to explain it.” To me those were fightin’ words, since books and knowledge sustained me. I saw science and progress as the ultimate good, and spiritualism and religion as backward-facing fanaticism and wizardry.

In my half-hearted AA attempt, I reached the “Pink Cloud” stage where everything was wonderful, where quitting drinking was easy, and life was grand. Call it my Pollyanna phase. Then, as the AA members and alcohol counselors warned me, the Pink Cloud passed me by and regular cold fronts came around with blustering sleet and negative windchill. I lasted about a year sober, got my one-year chip as evidence, but never fully bought into the program. I said the prayers and joined hands and even (kinda, sorta) liked saying the Our Father with the others. I almost always left an AA meeting feeling lifted up (although my sponsor warned me that feeling good wasn’t the point of meetings, but it was a nice side effect).

I can only praise AA, despite not attending any more. So many people slam it for not being the answer, that there is “too much God” in it. But it gave me a toolkit for dealing with life that was far better than the portrayal of AA in TV and movies. TV’s portrayal of the organization is absurd and disconnected from reality. The numerous proverbs I learned in those rooms still help me in the grind of days. At a meeting, people drop these one-liners into conversation that seem backwards at first, but then become profound upon inspection. I would marvel at the phrases after hearing them the first time. Sometimes they don’t make sense until a day or week later. “Surrender to win.” “Wear the world like a loose shirt.” “Don’t trust your feelings.” “There’s nothing so bad happening in your life that a drink can’t make worse.” “Principles over personalities.” “One day at a time.” “Progress, not perfection.” “Don’t quit before the miracle happens.” “Do the next right action.” “Thy will, not mine, be done.” “Perfection kills.” “An expectation is a planned resentment.”

Hundreds of these sayings exist and I mutter them still today, and probably always will. I could write much about each of those sayings and how each has helped me interpret my predicaments. They also summon a memory of a person or a face from a meeting. But above and beyond all of those sayings, in usefulness and practical application to life, is the one prayer that is said at every meeting. The Serenity Prayer. Yes, the corny Serenity Prayer.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Trite or not…this sentence acted as a gateway for me to even consider, to even deign or lower my high and mighty self, to accept that there might be a Higher Power or God over me. It also taught me that whenever I use the words “trite” or “corny” or “cliche” in a sentence, I expose my cynicism toward anything wholesome or time-tested. Those words are like my tell in a poker game. I liked to apply those labels to anything old-fashioned or traditional. Those trite and cliche things were tired and expired, and I was so modern and smart. It’s funny now, with hindsight, my way of life was what had become tired and expired, and certainly cliche.

In the beginning, I would not say the first word - “God” - because I wanted to secularize the prayer, and I felt that the prayer still worked without the first word. However, without the first word, the rest still implies that you are speaking to some Higher Power, some “thing” that can grant the serenity. Otherwise, to what are you asking for Serenity if not the spirit of the universe, or Gaia, or Zeus, or…God?

So much of life can be cut to the chase with this little prayer, yet it is so simple. The Serenity Prayer in its plainness is like a razor that can cut through hard problems like butter. If I were to successfully apply the principles of that prayer alone to my daily decisions, with no other rules or aphorisms or moral guidance, I could quickly separate the meaningful from the useless. You take the problem, thought, or decision and ask yourself: “Can I change this?” If not, then you drop the subject because it’s beyond your power. If you can change it, then you decide if you are willing to take up the challenge to change it, and if you are willing, you do the work. If you are not willing, then you don’t, and again you drop it. Surely the wisdom part is the tricky thing, especially for someone who is all too human, like myself. The prayer provides a little Venn diagram for your problems, where you can place life’s issues into one of two circles: Accept or Change. Wisdom is knowing into which circle to push each problem.

By the time I had attended the AA meeting in detox, I had met many of the other people in residence with me, and found jailhouse lawyer types, hard alcoholics in denial, and drug addicts who had somehow even found a way to get drugs into detox, which baffled me. Like a field trip, detox feels like a tour, or a museum of people that are captured from their natural habitat and paused for a time of reflection.

After 36 hours of sobering up, after some tears and anxiety, the arresting police officer returned and picked me up for my next stop, the county jail. Cuffed again and back in the police car, I discussed what would happen next with the police officer, who told me I was one of his favorite arrests due to the interesting conversations that we had during booking, none of which I remembered, other than a snapshot or two captured in my mind during the blackout.

An awareness of my powerlessness had set in through the hours of detox, and the handcuffs were the physical reminder of my lack of control while I rode in the car. No choices could be made. No media, no snacks, no smart phone. Possibly, for the first time, I understood what freedom actually meant, since in taking these things away, I only then realized what unbridled freedom my entire life had been as an American in the late 20th century and early 21st century. I had been born in the most “free” time in history, with the least personal struggles - no war, no disease, no death - and yet I had invented my own struggles and even felt depressed most of the time. In fact, I had even been taking depression medication for years, all during the easiest and least challenging period in history. I kept thinking about the AA saying that drinkers suffer from a “spiritual malady” and suffer from their own will. This sense of powerlessness did a ride-along as the police car entered the county jail intake door.

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Midway through my life’s journey, I saw the lights of a police car in my rearview mirror. In a blackout, only snapshots come back to you, providing subtle hints of a night gone sideways. Usually these memories are of the worst scenes of the night. Once the mind has already checked out, certain still-shot images still register in the wetware.

I managed to get to the side of the road and go through a proper arrest. I recall refusing the sobriety test not because I wanted to contest the policeman’s assessment in court, but because I could barely stand up. I had been driving 35 miles-per-hour on a 65 mile-per-hour highway, at 4 AM, with no shirt and no shoes.

The mistake of that day had been made many hours prior to the sirens, when someone offered me a shot of liquor. I stayed strong and said no. Actually, I only said no once, then I gladly took the shot, and then another, and another. I liked claiming that “If I just stick to beer” nothing could go wrong. Light beer keeps the madness away, I believed, since you can’t drink it fast enough to get really stupid. This is not actually true, but it lengthens the process of getting wasted. That I even needed to consider this possibility speaks for itself. This propensity I considered a normal feature of people, fortifying my bias with a remembered passage from the novel Winesburg, Ohio about the men from the country coming to town for a rowdy night:

Under the influence of drink the naturally strong lusts of their natures, kept suppressed by the heroic labor of breaking up new ground, were released. A kind of crude and animal-like poetic fervor took possession of them. On the road home they stood up on the wagon seats and shouted at the stars. Sometimes they fought long and bitterly and at other times they broke forth into songs.

To drink was to relax and let loose, and let go of the frustrations and struggles of the day or week. I suspect that is true for many people. But there’s a problem in this notion for some of us that like to shout at the stars.

There is a saying among AA meetings: “One is too many, and twenty is not enough.” I had known for a long time, since the first time I ever drank alcohol, that I was prone to excess. Not only prone, but I yearned to overdo it. In high school and college the slogan was: “A day is not wasted if I am.” Escapism was a way of life. I found others with the same reason for existence, as we like to do for our vices. We all need our cheerleaders for enablement, whether it’s online or in person. We found camaraderie in drinking hard and finding oblivion. Together but apart in our stupors, we were modern Lotus-eaters.

Thus the way of life I subscribed to in high school and college became a continuation into adulthood, even into parenthood, and though I could keep the worst of nights to a minimum, sooner or later, the urge to go off the deep end with drinking returned, just as it always had for all the drunks through the ages. The illusion of control plays the repeatable trick upon those of us who like to escape. In so many ways the drug finds a path into our nervous system so that it can again reign over us.

I recall making the officer laugh while sitting a bright office while he booked me. Even then, under arrest, I had the need to please people, or try to charm as best I could, to avoid confrontation and evade difficult conversations. As a middle sibling I seemed to have found the way to walk the line. And how to lie, too. Lying allowed me to isolate and avoid people, life, and the small burdens of my easy life. I didn’t much care to be yelled at or made to feel dumb. Those two insecurities, well, I’ll come back to those, plus a few others.

The drunk driving charge would have taken me to jail immediately, but being so stinking drunk, I was dropped at an overnight detox center first. The night was a blur and I neglected to use my phone call to contact my wife for fear of waking her, only to leave her searching frantically for me the next day. There is much more to that part of this irresponsible story that I could go into, but suffice it to say that a general mode of selfishness ruled me.

My arrest was past due. Drunken driving charges should have been pinned on me years before, but somehow I had slipped through the net. Buzzed driving on the weekend was normal, and more than a few times in college I woke up without knowing how I had got home, until I looked outside to see my car. So the day of being arrested loomed over me for two decades, and finally, like many of my friends who were arrested before me, it was my turn. We had a sense of humor about getting in trouble. Screwing up gave us a story, as if we were still rebelling against a teacher from middle school. We shared a fake apathy as a core value, even while we worked hard to further our professional lives. The reality is that my life lacked any difficulty. I didn’t grown up wealthy, but I was from the 80s and 90s and I had faced no real hardships. I wanted to get wasted, just like the metal and rap and country music glorified. To smoke and drink at every opportunity, to blackout, to wake up in strange places - that’s what I enjoyed, or not so much enjoyed, as sought for escape. There was something to the Chuck Klosterman “killing ourselves to live” mentality with Nirvana’s nihilism, Snoop Dogg’s love of weed and disrespect of women, and outlaw country music’s unapologetic glorification of drunkenness. Add to that Fight Club and Rage Against the Machine and Smashing Pumpkins - the 90s really hated authority of all kinds.

Of course it was cool, because the music and idols broke all the rules. Same as every generation, we scoffed at the proper society our parents tried to emulate, or at least pretend toward. Add in the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the internet to this mix, and a vacuum had been flipped on in that “end of history” period. The good people, the adults of the community that cared, they could not contend with the surrounding influences of the world. That battle was lost instantly when the internet made every possible idea, good or bad, suddenly available to all. Before I had ever heard of a religious “none,” I had arrived to that desolate place through culture, aided by the internet, and accelerated by my discovery and love of alcohol. Alongside drinking, I added a second drug of books. Knowledge was the additive, and together I learned that booze and books can act like mortar and bricks to build a powerful wall to hide inside.

I was rather obsessed with reading everything I could get my hands on for about fifteen years, and as any seeker knows, one book leads to another, and the more you learn, the more you become convinced that you know almost nothing at all. This is nothing that I discovered myself, as Socrates said, “I know that I know nothing,” and Protagoras’ Paradox added “the more you learn, the less you know,” both of which today have been appropriated into the fancier sounding Dunning-Kruger Effect. Truly the more I read the more unstable my convictions became, but I had to read, and read more, trying to make up for lost time as a drifting youth and cram in as much knowledge as possible to find the truth, the elusive truth. But the depths and nuances of knowledge slip away like eels as you can read one argument today and the counterpoint tomorrow, only to feel yesterday’s seemingly solid worldview vanish from beneath you like sand under your feet on the beach when the wave retreats. The tales of my Bible could no longer keep up with science, literature, and technology, as I was awash in many subjects and following ideas wherever they might lead me.

But there was too much information. Just too much to take in. So I would drink from the books and then drink from the bottle, and just as soon as I thought I knew everything, another subject could be found to upend the prior subject. Through it all I held a sense of righteousness and morality, thinking that I was right all the time (and surely, I felt that most people were more ignorant than my well-read self. This pursuit of knowledge was one of my chief insecurities). I drank, yes, but it was because I didn’t need the crutch of religion, of faith in the sky-fairy. That nonsense was an empty cup, and my cup was full. Actually, I often had a cup in each hand.

With science as a sword and the history of religious violence as my shield, I scoffed at faith as the appendix of history, a vestige of ancient society concocted by fearful goat herders. I had bet the house against Pascal’s wager, that indeed it was better to rule in hell than serve in heaven if that’s what it took to declare reason as the preferred path, as the road less travelled. With my cosmology of materialism hammered down, come what may, I was a good person with some flaws, who just needed to take an occasional break from drinking to get back under control. Everyone has their vice, right? In fact, isn’t it always those who pretend to have no vices where the sickness is worst, where the most heinous acts tend to flourish? My vice, often a public drunken one, allowed an open door to the skeletons in my closet. The only difference between me and a priest or rabbi or a guru was that I knew how to have fun.

And it was fun.

Until it wasn’t.

Because the motivation for all of the reading and the drinking wasn’t knowledge and escape. The urge came from the void, the pit of emptiness, which I thought could be filled with words and buried with a buzz. I came to call this gnawing feeling as the “Big Empty,” after a song title by Stone Temple Pilots.

When I was arrested, the snapshot of that dazzling blue light splash in the rearview mirror is almost a work of art in my mind, since that image marks my arrest and about-face from that void.

It was the best day of my life.

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