Before getting too far in this post, I want to start out with an admission. I am under no presumption of my salvation. I do not subscribe to the “Once saved, always saved” life insurance plan. To me, that is like saying, “I’m a marathon runner,” because I ran one two years ago. But I probably couldn’t even finish one today. There is work that must accompany the claim of being a marathon runner if I intend to use that label in the present tense. God may be outside of space and time, but I’m certainly not. Thus the assurance of salvation that Protestants cling to is not for me, because it doesn’t fit in with real life. It’s like saying, “I’m asleep” when I’m awake, or “I’m eating” when I’m just chewing gum. The proclamation doesn’t match the reality, especially if I’m living a life of sin and not efforting toward holiness. Wait - am I saying that works are required for salvation?

Yes. Because that’s what Jesus said. It’s even what Paul said, and it’s what the Apostles said, and it’s what the Church said for 1500 years, going through centuries of martyrdoms and suffering and arguing and hammering out doctrine before the idea sprung out of Mr. Luther.

That is the issue, of course, or one of them. How are we saved? How can we know? That’s really what drove Luther to protest. It wasn’t church corruption, because that has always existed. The idea that corruption was the cause is a myth, because corruption in the Church has been around since Judas. So please put the “paying to get to heaven” financial corruption on a shelf. Disgusting behavior by some priests was not the main cause of the protest. Not even close.

He wanted to know he was saved, so that he could live his life in peace. He was obsessed with sin and grace, with salvation. He wanted assurance. But he fell into the trap called scrupulosity. This is a problem can lead to despair, so he tried to pole vault to salvation, and solve the problem. But he ended up on the other side of despair, which is called presumption.

I get it. The moral life is hard. It’s a difficult thing to deal with sin. But working toward holiness means not obsessing over sin but picking up the Cross every day and carrying it. The thing is, we’re not complete with this life until the last breath, and along the way, we have to avoid presumption and despair, the twin pillars of error, represented perfectly in the two brothers in the story of the Prodigal Son.

With faith, hope, and charity, I aim to work toward being in a state of grace, as best as I can, through the Sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist. This working toward grace becomes the great “undo button,” the “un-trade,” where I sent Herschel Walker back to the Dallas Cowboys, in a sense. The good news is that with daily conversion, I can undo that trade every morning, every moment. Rather than be a cause for despair, it’s a pattern for living that works. Faith and works, body and soul. They go together like peas and carrots.

I returned to God and found a manner to live that removed the fear of death, making it not a cause for worry but a future occasion that brings hope. So much of our underlying fears are of death. The fear of hell is real, since Jesus spoke of it about thirteen times. But death and the void affects us all in different ways. This is why we wear fig leaves.

We wear fig leaves of wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Why are we wearing them in the first place? Because we fear death and the unknown. Happy Christians seem so odd, or even irritating, because death is no longer fearful to them. They don’t make sense because they have indeed pole-vaulted the main problem of life. You sometimes have to wonder, “Do they want to die?” Well…in a way, yes, they do, because it means going home. But the gift of this life, even with its struggles and pain, is the way of the Cross, and you cannot get to heaven unless you go through the Cross. This life is our second chance after the fall in the Garden to choose the tree of life. I often wonder why video game fanatics are not on-fire Christians, because figuring out the game of life comes through Jesus. He has the codes and weapons that we need in the spiritual life. Forget Fortnite or Call of Duty, this life, both materially and spiritually, has enough slings and arrows to dodge and fight against. Having Jesus alongside to slay all dragons makes everything suddenly exciting.

I recently met someone who was living at a homeless shelter, who has terminal cancer. She lives in pain, in a terrible situation, who has battled addiction her whole life. No one would envy her situation. But she told me how good that God had been to her. She was overjoyed that she might get her own apartment for this year, with her own bathroom. When you meet people with true faith like her, and then you go interact with someone who has a beautiful house and family but is miserable and faithless, you know which person has been given the real gift. It’s not money. It’s not stuff. It’s not status. None of that matters if you have faith, which is why Jesus said that the prostitutes and tax collectors will recognize the kingdom of heaven before the wealthy and the Pharisees. The “winners” of this world are the ones that lose in the end. And that it by choice. Free will is granted to us for this very reason. What we trade, what we put in our hearts where faith should be, are all the crappy Herschel Walker trades of this world.

The Church and its teachings provides the greatest framework for living that I have found after searching through worldviews and trying them on like I was thumbing through racks of clothing at Macy’s or a Goodwill store. Nothing comes close. The pattern of life provided in the Church makes sense, but only if you live it. Striving for holiness may seem foolish, but only if you never try it - and I mean really try it, not just mail in a half-effort.

The word “orthodox” scares people because it sounds radical, but it means “right path.” These “oppressive rules” are not intended to make you suffer. They are to help you walk toward God, to move away from sin, and toward grace.

Now, I have much to say about the other worldviews that I tried on. Stoicism seemed a close second to Christianity, but without Jesus becomes a joyless, miserable facade to pretend to uphold for long. Epicureanism had the same problem, except flipped with a plastic-smile artificial joy with no duty or responsibility. Atheism? The longer I lived, the more I realized that it takes far more faith to stick with that than with the Resurrection of Christ. What’s most interesting to me now is how I got off the orthodox trail in the first place.

Oddly enough, I was steered away from faith at a Catholic college, almost like I had paid for it to happen. But interestingly, in my falling away from Catholicism, Protestantism didn’t attract me. Not at all, as the “faith alone” felt too easy and “scripture alone” (or “sola scriptura”) was too corruptible so that I knew immediately that I could make Jesus whoever I wanted him to be. After all, I was the authority. John Calvin ran into that problem almost instantly and sort of made himself a new Pope. You can even see how Luther’s denomination have splintered in so many ways because if you don’t like the current interpretation, you can just as easily make up a new one, just like Luther and Calvin did. (Here I should refer readers to my series About Uranus which covers how gods and religions come to be, and why Abraham is so important.)

So, seeing other worldviews as unsatisfactory, I went straight for the answer of mighty Science, just like many young people are doing today. Unfortunately, I didn’t even get a funeral for my spiritual death, although I did pass out quite a few times from alcohol use and may have missed it. Those blackouts always concerned me, for what I might have missed, or lost, only to learn much later that I had lost something, at least temporarily, and it was my soul. But turning back to God made me realize that the devil must give it back when you want to stop sinning. The devil is like both a coat-check service and bartender who holds onto your soul and pours drinks until you are ready to leave the party of sin. But he can’t lock you in forever. He must let you leave, even though you have to fight him to get out the door. Hotel California is only a song, not a real place, but the devil would very much like you to believe you can never leave him. (That is, once again, the sin of despair).

I have not come to bash Martin Luther, because he was right about some things, like corruption in the Church, and wrong about other things, like “faith alone” and “scripture alone.” Those two ideas are awful, no doubt, and I have much to say about it, but his initial motives were right. He despised corruption in the Church, but there has always been corruption. The Reformation was not about corruption. That’s a myth. Corruption was part of it, but corruption has always been part of the Church, just as it is in any human organization or family. But in starting the Reformation, he released far more corruption of doctrine. Luther was a very smart man, but you can see how it all unravelled and grew beyond it’s original scope, especially since he was a true defender of the Eucharist. Calvin was brilliant as well. However, there are many smart people in every age, but that doesn’t make them correct on everything. St. Augustine was wiser than Luther or Calvin, and he stuck to the Apostolic teachings. He recognized the need for the authority of interpretation, because obviously if we all become our own Pope, then Jesus just becomes a sidekick rather than our master.

Because of Luther’s great step into the world of sola fide, and worse, sola scriptura, and even more so from John Calvin, today in America the word Christianity means whatever you want it to mean. If you want to handle snakes and have orgies and call it Christian, who is anyone to judge? Sola fide! Sola scriptura! The arguments of slavery came from the anti-Catholic, heavily Protestant world of early America. How? Because you can read the Bible however you like with sola scriptura. Plus, you’re saved no matter what. If you were saved in 1982 and have been looking at porn and not observing the Lord’s day ever since, you’re fine! That’s why today we have the sexual unravelling, which will be seen in the future as a travesty of moral failure, just as we see 19th century slavery and social darwinism and 20th century war horrors today.

This explosion of resurrected heresies has happened because of the Reformation. For Luther’s initial intentions, I truly sympathize. But the fruit of the protest that exploded is ashes. A thousand denominations has helped spread the Gospel of Christ, which is great, but with awful doctrine it has flattened the message of Jesus into the Big Lebowski. The Reformation spread the word of God not like light but like butter, smearing it on people instead of illuminating the world for all to see. We are all our own authority now. Everyone is a little pope. Even unbelievers with their doctrine of “reason alone” could not have pulled this off, and they all have their own idea of who Christ was. Now the doctrines of the Apostles gets conflated and mashed up with every fundamentalist and Jehovah’s Witness and Prosperity Gospel interpretation of the Bible.

I try to make sure to use the word Catholic so that people know what I mean, since the word “Christianity” has been smashed into the atomic level, such that every Christian is his own authority now, and most don’t understand the long road of heresies that needed to be checked and corrected. What’s strange about this is that the two thousand years of trying to understand the life of Christ is cast out, in exchange for our own interpretation, as if Peter, Paul, John, Jude, James, Augustine, Polycarp, Ignatius of Antioch, Ignatius of Loyola, John Damascene, Irenaeus, Aquinas, Catherine, Therese, Teresa, John Paul II, and the thousand other saints had nothing insightful to say about it. Every age has had brilliant people, but brilliance alone is not a reason to follow someone to false teaching. The Sophists were brilliant, like Luther and Calvin, and they were wrong. Using the word Catholic ensures that most people I meet probably recoil with horror immediately. It’s like a modern leprosy to those basking in the light of modern media, but given that Jesus assured us that his followers would be hated, it pretty much confirms that I’m on the right track.

But there’s a funny thing about that, too. People don’t really hate the Church. They think they do. But they hate the cartoon version of the Church that they have in their mind, which looks like a construction paper, glue, and crayon creation from kindergarten class.

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