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. 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 solve all earthly suffering. Like the Jews, Yuval expected a political and military messiah. Judas thought Jesus wasn’t enough. 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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