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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