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. (CCC 2729)

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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