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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