People today believe that Christianity is being put back into its cage. That it’s being snuffed out. But what those poor folks don’t realize is how the release of the old pluralistic religions into the world, like that of Rome in the first century, is creating the exact same conditions that allowed Christianity to take hold and win hearts in the first place.

What kind of world do we imagine the apostles woke up in each morning? There wasn’t even a single church for them to go to. They had nothing but the life and words of Jesus, and even that wasn’t written down yet. They didn’t have pamphlets to hand out or crosses to give away. They only had faith that Jesus was God, and with a rudimentary liturgy from the Last Supper, they built the church from that. They lived among the most hostile of worlds to the idea they were selling. It inverted everything that the Romans and Jews and every other culture held as truth. Yet the message of “Surrender your life to the crucified Christ, the humble carpenter, and you will find peace!” took the world by storm. For the apostles, there wasn’t even so much as an Adoration Chapel to find refuge in, unless you count the Upper Room where they huddled in fear until Pentecost.

Those who wish for the death of the Christian faith or the Catholic Church may be in for a rude awakening when the conditions are re-created so that this dynamite can erupt once again. The watered-down, lukewarm, stale versions of Christianity has turned people off, as familiarity breeds contempt. The merger of worldly desires with the goals of Christianity has repulsed people. But the more that we retreat from the ideas that Jesus brought to us, we will begin to realize what we had, and what we lost, and why it won so many hearts and minds in the first place. The Way, as it was originally called, long before it was called Christianity, was a life of total surrender to Christ; to Jesus himself, the risen and glorified God-man. The Way, long before the Mandalorian borrowed that noun, meant abandoning all possessions and goals and desires to be reborn in life through Christ.

As we separate into our homes, hovering over our devices, in isolation, the communities of real people that form around Christ and his Church will once again remind us how his victory was achieved without sending down fire from heaven. That’s the freedom that Christ gives. That’s the relationships that he creates. That’s the whole secret. And that’s the recipe that has been put into storage and is waiting to be re-introduced, and will be in spectacular fashion once the “Big Empty” of this world’s pleasures becomes felt again. As it was in the first century, so shall it be again. I’ve said it more than once on this site but I’ll say it again. We are lost in the morass of modern desires because of a simple fact:We want the wrong things.

In this age of comfort we have the extreme luxury of being able to assume that we are in charge, that we humans don’t need a healer or savior. However, anyone who has gotten drunk a thousand times trying to find heaven can tell you (pick me!) that the next thousand times turns into hell. The same goes for sex or anything else, because the initial high wears off and the addiction takes you by the throat. We may not need a cataclysm to find the need for God, but we will have signs along the way even in days of comfort. One sure fire way to remove all doubt of our need for God is when food prices triple and fuel runs out. Then we may be reminded of what the pre-Christian world was like, and what type of people and powers occupied it. Affluence can provide a mask of control over our affairs, when in reality we are just a few weeks of broken supply-chain away from total desperation. Even without something dramatic we will find the same conclusion. We control nothing in the end.

There are two great tests in life. One is not getting what you want, and the other is getting what you want.

For those of us who have lived in the West our entire lives, we don’t know what it means to live in a fully godless society, but we should remain under no illusion that our chance to learn isn’t nearing. Within the last century, Mexico and Russia have had extermination campaigns to kill off every priest in the land, and both have failed. This has happened before. It has happened in all of Europe during the early centuries of Christianity. It has happened in Japan. Priests are getting killed every week in Nigeria even today. There are thousands of pages of martyr stories from every corner and country in the world. It is happening now in Nicaragua. It will most certainly happen in America at some point. Rest assured, there is a new Miguel Pro right now, already born today in one of the fifty states. There is a St. Lawrence and a St. Joan of Arc, already attending faith formation classes somewhere. They are out there, praying, on their journey toward God.

St. Paul went to Athens, the place of sophisticated non-believers, and stood on the Areopagus long ago, but we are reaching a point where it will happen again, because most people today don’t even know the story of Jesus. We are traveling backward in time. Few kids today could tell you who Moses or David was or why their names are known.

This whole yo-yo effect nearly has a Big Bang feel to it, like how the universe is said to expand and contract. It’s like there is a parallel in human history, as the expansion of sin ran amok from Adam to Noah, then contracted in the Flood. Then sin expanded again, from Babylon through Rome, and then contracted once Christ’s message was rolled into the cosmos from the center-point of the ancient world in Jerusalem. The false religions started backpedaling into hiding. And today, as promised by Jesus, the devil would be let free for awhile and sin would seem to rule. The devil has been released for his time, and clearly the twentieth century was part of his allowance.

If you don’t believe the message of Christ is divinely inspired, then you have to at least consider the fact that the story of Christ is far more compelling to people than that of Zeus or Wicca or the other stories of supernatural explanations. The fact is that Christianity has a far better story, even if you don’t believe in supernatural things. We have just stopped telling the story because many of the tellers can’t separate themselves from the Word of God. The reason the message is diluted is because you have everyone claiming the message and welding their favorite sin onto the message, whether it be love of money or sexual sin. We are lacking heroes and authentic lives. We don’t yet have our St. Benedict or St. Sixtus or St. Anthony of Egypt. But that person will arrive. The false prophets are loud, but they will fade away. And even if they continue to make noise and draw followers, the way of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving is already known to those who seek to follow Him.

People have forgotten that demons exist. Now we are emboldened by a false sense of security, as the chaos of the world seems gone. We can walk into dark basements and tell ourselves that no monsters exist. Feeling so bold, we have even started seeking out those demons once again. But we are only bold because we know the light switch is near. The comfort of technology and electricity acts as a security blanket. After all, monsters aren’t real, or so we tell ourselves. So there’s nothing to be afraid of. Right? And yet people still go out into the countryside, or woods, or a basement when the bulb is out, and they start to wonder…what if they are real? The boldness shrinks when the lights go out, or the engine fails, or the boat starts to take on water. People who are glued to screens do not understand what prior generations did. As soon as the chaos peeks its head out from the darkness, we’re not so sure that those monsters are gone.

This is the result of people trying to live on reason alone. Stuffing our sense of the supernatural into a box doesn’t make it disappear. The ghosts and demons come out of hiding once God is forgotten or ignored. Since the demons cannot destroy God, the next best thing is to destroy his beloved creation, and that means you and me.

The best way to destroy a person is to tell them there is no God. It’s also the easiest. We are wired for God, but we are wired for desire and rebellion as well. The wiring for God urges us, via our consciences, to seek God, as doing the wrong thing leaves us empty. No one wakes up from a one-night stand and feels fulfilled. No one wakes up after a food or drinking binge and feels it was a good decision. If they do, they are already long down the path of denying that sin exists. Habitual sin acts like blinders on a horse, keeping the soul going in the direction where the devil wants to take you. The good that we are after is not the stuff or substance that we want. It’s something far better, but we have to give up our self to obtain what is truly good.

As soon as there is no God, then we can not only do whatever we like, but then we must solve all of our problems by ourselves and using things in this world. Or, if we can’t solve them, we at least must shove our problems out of the way. This can be seen in basic data points, like how non-religious doctors are much more likely to hasten and accelerate death of terminally ill patients. The reality of the denial of God and rejection of the idea of sin rises up like swamp gas.

Once the flip of the switch is made where God is not something to be taken seriously, then something must take its place because we still need salvation, a healer. If you don’t think you do, examine where all of your free time is spent and you will find your surrogate savior. For many, it’s sports. For others, it’s politics. For the more obvious sinners, it’s drugs, alcohol, and sex. In all cases, the person of Jesus takes a backseat, or is kicked out the car altogether.

For those who remain on a strict diet of Enlightenment thinking, they have tapped technology to play the savior. They have turned to science, because rejecting spirits and God leaves no where else to turn. At least the seekers who summon spirits are trying, unboxing that supernatural feeling. Reason alone leaves you as half a human. The body and the soul must be put back together, as is done to Peter in John, Chapter 6. When all other options have failed, when flat reason and unbelief leaves you flat, and the false religions are outed as nonsense, you will have nowhere else to turn. Consider this exchange between Peter and Jesus, but replace the word “Jesus” with “Science” or “Technology” or “Wicca” or “Astrology”.

Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” (Jn 6:67-69)

Now the modern version:

Science then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” Simon Peter answered him, “Science, to whom shall we go? You have the words of material life. We have come to believe and are convinced that there is no God.” (Jn 6:67-69)

Technology is the modern master, but it’s an odd one because it’s an amorphous blob of knowledge, not wisdom, that is so specialized that we just grunt and accept it as the one true god, like cave men who “knew” that the sun god or big oak tree held all the secrets of the universe. For 99% of us, if tomorrow we were told that electrons were found to be very tiny acorns, we would take it on faith as a fact, because in no way or scenario could most people ever test or prove otherwise. Now, we have to take it on faith that physicists and chemists would not lie to us like that. Yet often they do. Science takes bad paths that require a long time to undo, plus a massive waste of time and energy as good money follows bad science. (If you don’t believe me, see the 2006 Alzheimer’s research, or dry labbing, or the history of phrenology, or cold fusion in a coffee cup, or Piltdown man in Sussex, or many, many other cases).

Unsurprisingly, scientists are as susceptible to the deadly sins like anyone else, much of which is prompted by the shiny tempting apple that promises to get their paper published and make them a science god. You can see that Genesis 3:1 verse playing out in those stories just like any other story. Can’t you just see how the wheels turn in a brain to lie, to fudge the truth, in order to get a paper published? When the serpent says to Eve, “Did God really say you can’t eat from the tree?” This is how that question plays out:

“Did God really say…I can’t alter this image to match my experiment results?”

After all, we only sin because we perceive a good thing and want it, and decide that skirting the next right action will be acceptable, as the perceived good thing we want won’t hurt anyone if we just cheat a bit to get it. We want status and recognition, that is the perceived good thing. In order to get it, how easy it is to be convinced that our ideas and interpretation of the data is correct, and that we just need to fit things into our mind’s image of the world, instead of resting our in God’s world.

Faith is submitting our intellect and will to God, which means that unbelief is the opposite: it is submitting our will and intellect to our selves.

So science has its own falls and corruption. It advances and retreats and advances again. Science can do so much, but only so much. The limitation to science is the fact that it can’t get outside the universe, nor can it tell us why a sunset is beautiful, or why Shakespeare’s stories are timeless, or why seeing a baby born can change a person’s conception of everything in creation. In fact, this is exactly why so many people like to quote Hamlet when he says to Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” There is more to this world than science and technology. In fact, the dullest things in this world is the way we treat nature like it was a cadaver to be dissected.

Consider Horatio to be like a Mark Zuckerberg, or any agnostic or atheist. Hamlet and Horatio have just seen and spoke with the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Horatio is the archetype of the Reformation/Enlightenment world-changer, disenchanted from the angels, saints, sacraments, and souls.

Horatio, a model of rationality, is still having a hard time swallowing the whole business. Ghosts are not the sort of beings his "philosophy" easily takes into account. We know that Horatio is, like Hamlet, a student at the University of Wittenberg, a notable outpost of Protestant humanism. The philosophy he studies there is probably classical—a compound of ethics, logic, and natural science. The emphasis on everyday phenomena pretty much excludes speculation about talking ghosts. (From enotes.)

So Horatio is just like a modern person, like me not that long ago, who must rely solely on reason and rationality. He is one of those poor folks sliced in half, by their own volition: all body, no soul. Because like our alternate version of Peter, anonymous internet user, where else can Horatio go? Peter can say to Jesus, the living son of God, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

The purely rational person cannot ask for any spiritual explanation, ever! Because even cracking the door to the reality of souls and spirits leads to a flood of what-ifs. To someone trying to live in a world of pure reason, the only thing holding back the chaos monster is science and technology. The odd thing about this position is that while you lampoon the religious as superstitious fools who puts his fingers in his ears and makes noise to drown out the reality of the material world, on the flip side, the rationalist must put his fingers in his ears and make noise to drown out the possibility of ghosts and spirits. Anything beyond the material world must be stuffed in a box, because if even a single ghost story is true, if a single prophecy of the future was proven legit, or if any being’s soul is real, or any miracle has ever happened - even a single miracle - then the closed door of reason is suddenly flung wide open.

Thus the savior of technology must be clung to, because to what else can the non-believing materialist turn? All spiritual things must be deduced to a chemistry problem. Many people can claim to make their decisions based purely on reason, but like many a Christian who claims to be in a state of grace while receiving the Eucharist, there is a lot of not-so-devout rationalists. But they believe that when push comes to shove, they will side with science, just as even the most lukewarm Christian will declare that their alliance falls on the side of faith. But these types of declarations are for grouping and identifying oneself, where the science-fan does not wish to align with the ignorant believers and the half-hearted Christian will side with believers to avoid being called a heathen. Marketing departments make healthy profits relying much on our instinctual reaction to divide ourselves among declarations. Selling cars and nail polish is not terribly different from selling a worldview, but the worldview you adopt has a far greater impact on your life and death than the color of your fingernails on the steering wheel.

The promise of freedom through a gadget or technology leads to a kind of reliance, and ultimately a kind of slavery. But this servitude cannot easily be seen except by some unfortunate prophetic Cassandra who know of problems to come, yet can do nothing to halt its progress. Also, it should be noted that once Prometheus had stole fire from the gods, no one ever suggested that he put it back, even if it turned out the we weren’t even ready to handle fire properly. The entrepreneurial maxim that “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door” holds true whenever we discover something new and shiny. But these are all distractions from the truth. And all of those shiny things will leave you empty, all of those experiences will end and require another chase down the next rabbit-hole. There is always something to keep looking for, until you trip over the treasure in the field, and find Jesus, the crucified carpenter, and discover that it was him you were looking for all along. Then like St. Augustine you can say, “My heart was restless until it rested in Thee.”

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