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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