As much as I tried to pretend there wasn’t, there is a God-shaped hole in my heart. There simply is no answer that philosophy or theory or modern science or socialism or witchcraft or astrology or Buddhism or free beer can offer that fills this God-shaped hole in the heart. There is only a person that can fill that hole.

The problem and the solution are both odd.

In the last post, I talked about our need for certainty, and the “secret knowledge” that is often on offer for us. But most “secret knowledge” rejects God and the source of all pain and suffering, which is sin. The “problem of pain” is the all-time number one driver of sending people into the arms of ideologies offering solutions, but they are all fool’s gold. They offer all the answers on paper, but when put into practice, cause far more issues than they solve.

We don’t need to make sense of every last thing once we come to rest in faith. We don’t need every last answer. Continuing to pursue the goals of reason still go on, but we don’t salivate and lust for the answers to come, to fill in the big picture and bring about an earthly utopia, because we already have the answer. Via the Holy Spirit, we already know the ending. We get certainty through God’s will, not our own. The best part of this is that we don’t have to know all the answers any longer, because God knows. What’s odd about this whole “surrender to win” idea is that we get certainty by inheritance from God. While we don’t know God’s will, we know he is good and loving and alive in this world, and that in the end he wins. Even the progressives like to say, “Love wins,” and they are correct, but not in the way they think. Yes, love wins in the end because God is love, and God wins. And when you surrender to God, you win, because he wins. When you surrender, you are suddenly on the winning team and you just follow God’s lead. You no longer feel angry about the rules because you bask in his love. Sure, surrender means imposing limits on the self, but paradoxically this brings ultimate freedom because you no longer have the bondage of self and the onslaught of desires to contend with. You hand over the desires to God, because those thoughts never brought peace, only problems. He takes all the problems away if you ask. When you offer yourself up to him, he blesses you, just as you bless God with your life and actions. When you fight against God, he wins. You might say that when you are disobedient, he kneels you. You cannot fight with God forever. You can certainly wrestle with him, but eventually it becomes exhausting.

There is no idea or argument or award or pleasurable activity in this world that could provide what I was seeking. In the end, no intellectual pursuit came close to a solution, and it wasn’t for lack of effort. The left and right side of politics do absolutely nothing to solve this problem. They just give us all an excuse to kick the can down the road, to avoid the biggest question. Neither side will solve the ultimate problems or bring about any lasting peace. They are mirrors of the same restless mania, trying to win in Washington just as professors and theologians and pundits are trying to win our hearts and minds by reason in universities. The reality of politics can be seen in the online hellscape of continuous wrath. The millions of people squabbling think that rooting for their side gives them a sense of control, while their interior lives and personal relationships are in disarray. This desire for certainty and control is rampant today, particularly because a society of people that have every physical need satisfied now looks to satisfy spiritual needs, but in the wrong places. Partisan politics is an escape from the self for those that cannot surrender to God and find peace. Because we want answers, we try to find it in competition, in politics and in sports. Like drinking and sex, politics and sports provide an escape for those who suspect they are lost but don’t want to admit it.

What I didn’t see coming is that faith exceeds reason. We’ve spent hundreds of years trying to tell ourselves that reason exceeds faith, partially due to the great leaps of science but also because of the failures of those who profess faith to emulate Christ, but I am convinced that we must lead with faith. Yet it’s difficult to tell anyone that today, unless they have made the turn themselves.

All of the other ideas and sciences and ideologies fail simply because they cannot solve that problem. They are the wrong tool, the wrong material, the wrong instructions. What is not “born of the spirit” cannot fix spiritual problems. Ideas may guide us toward behavior and doing good actions in this world, but they cannot bring about the interior conversion of the heart that Jesus can bring. They may highlight our sins, as they should, and guide us toward God, but they cannot sustain us because they purposefully try to pretend God doesn’t exist.

Having tried and sampled these alternative worldviews, particularly the ones without God, I found that the Christian worldview is the only one that makes sense and the only one that works, for the same reasons that Dorothy Day discovered. I went down the other road, only to find Jesus at the end of it. But it’s not only Dorothy Day that found faith in this unexpected way. G.K. Chesterton and St. Augustine are two others who had a gift for articulating this path. They too found what Dorothy Day did. They came to accept one truth that makes all other arguments moot, just as have billions of other people have done.

The problem with Christianity, if you are doing battle with it in your mind and trying to knock it down, is not that it has the best argument. If you come to know Christ, it is the only argument that fills the God-shaped hole in your heart. Nothing else makes sense once Jesus enters your life, because somehow he makes complete and total sense of everything.

This is extremely annoying to people who haven’t experienced it.

Christianity is the best argument of all for living real life, and it is a strange yet beautiful paradox. In order to appreciate the physical realities and emotional struggles of this world that seem to have explanation, you must assent to the spiritual mysteries beyond this universe that cannot be explained. Like any good convert, I now love looking for connections in the Old Testament. I enjoy spiritual reading and - why not - looking for references that lead to the Cross. But that alone is not the cause of belief. It is not the arguments made on paper in the end. I can’t pile up enough evidence and suddenly turn on the light of faith. That’s not how it works.

I believe that Christianity is the best argument, but not because of the Gospels, or the surrounding Old Testament and letters of St. Paul, or the tradition of the church fathers, or the history of the saints. Sure, those provide compelling evidence, but they can also turn people away, depending on how you read them. All of those texts (aside from the Old Testament) did not exist when Jesus was first resurrected. Furthermore, very few people could even read, and if they were lucky they heard someone read from the scrolls from time to time. In my post-conversion life, I am all in on reading the Bible as God’s Word, from cover to cover, but I didn’t arrive at that belief through argument or decision alone. More importantly, none of the first Christians, not a single one, had anything beyond the Old Testament scriptures to base their belief in Christ upon. There was nothing written down in the form of a Gospel for some years. The letters of Paul possibly came first and we can see vibrant communities springing up all over. There were no New Testament scrolls to unravel and read, no cross referenced Bibles, no study guides, no Catechism, no recorded sermons. There was only word of mouth and the power of his name.

The founder of the religion wrote nothing down.

Something lit his followers on fire in a way that cannot be described. I would say that the event cannot be repeated, but that would be false; the same fire springs up daily all over the world. It has never stopped catching fire since that day in the upper room when the apostles were baptized by the tongues of fire some seven weeks after the death of Jesus.

To get to God I arrived by reason and lived experience. But to get to the next level, I arrived by meeting Jesus Christ, the person. The fully human and fully divine person that walked the earth is what somehow reached me. The problem with Christ is that if this person calls you, life is never the same. That is how the argument keeps winning, by changing minds. Life cannot be the same once the fire starts because nothing looks, smells, tastes, or feels like it did before. This is not like stumbling across a good book that brings awareness to some fact of the world, some injustice, some unfairness. This is being jolted to life spiritually and having a new life infused into you. When your soul is brought back to life, it starts drinking from the vine of God, chugging grace like a college student at spring break. Warning: this rebirth can be painful initially, like physical birth. (Pace yourself, don’t drink too fast. Drink one water for every one wine.)

The reality of this power of Jesus, the person, is told by time itself. It cannot be ignored or denied. You may argue about Christians misusing his name, you can argue about the devil quoting scripture for his purposes, and I would agree with you in some of those arguments. But the fact is this: the Christian religion would have died long ago if it were only a good argument. There have been many “good” ideas throughout history, but we don’t build cathedrals for those ideas. We build jaw-dropping churches that produce no economic output whatsoever so that we can worship a man, a poor man, one who died with nothing, naked on a cross!

Putting the idea of “truth” aside for a moment, if an idea or argument doesn’t win hearts and minds, it cannot last. So clearly there is a good argument in Christianity. If it was total nonsense, it could not have lasted. But there is something greater than just the words of an argument. There are many good books and models on how to live life. Marcus Aurelius wrote a great book on how to live life, but there is no one tithing to the Marcus Aurelius society today or handing out pamphlets at the airport about why you should give your life to Marcus Aurelius. Christianity is not just a series of arguments. Jesus is the argument.

A quote in Acts of the Apostles from a rabbi named Gamaliel is telling, because this Jewish leader tells his fellows to let the Christian fad play out. Why? Because he’s wise. He knows that a cause will die out on its own if it’s not from God. Gamaliel refers to some long-forgotten movement started by a guy named Theudas, but this Theudas “…was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing.” He urges his peers to let this Christian novelty just play out, like how rolling your jeans or wearing Zubaz pants and Hypercolor shirts bloomed and faded in the 1990s. Zubaz pants and Hypercolor shirts were not from God, and so they both died out. Both were hideous actually. For something more recent, consider fidget spinners or Crocs or Heely shoes. Gamaliel said of these wacky Apostles of Jesus, “…if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.” (Acts 5:34-39)

That is why it never dies. Because it’s more than an argument. It’s more than a feeling. It’s more than a fad. It’s not from this world. The Holy Spirit is not of human origin. The truth that Christ represents cannot be rebutted or refuted. Once the spirit turns a non-believer into a believer, there is no turning back on the second conversion, or the re-birth spoken of by Jesus to Nicodemus in John 3. This is why the apostle Peter states the famous line, saying what everyone knows who has come to put their entire life and trust in Jesus. Jesus asks if Peter and the apostles will leave him, and Peter replies, matter of factly: “To whom else would we go?”

To whom else would I go? That is the billion dollar question. Peter is basically saying, “I’ve found what fits into this giant, gaping God-shaped hole in my heart, so I’m done looking.” Sometimes I wonder why I took so long to get to where Peter is. It’s like I was wandering around the beauty of Creation and pouring liquor in my mouth, saying, “I wonder what could possibly fit this enormous void in my life?” How strange it all is in hindsight. When I’m hungry I eat food; when I’m thirsty, I drink water; but when I was yearning for God, I looked everywhere else. I tried it all. All of it.

For the converted, the same answer applies. Once you land on the truth of Jesus, you realize that you are done searching. There is rest. There is peace. There is love. There is certainty.

That is the answer to why faith overrides reason for believers. That is also the reason the religion does not die. Because those who believe know that there is nowhere else to go. Unfortunately, the actions of many believers can drive others away, but don’t let it. Yes, there are crazy Christians, but there are crazy people in all walks of life and political parties and ideologies. Don’t lock yourself out of trying just because your uncle or co-worker is a hypocrite. (Always recall that Jesus hated hypocrites worse than prostitutes and tax collectors!)

This stubbornness of believers does produce a maddening state for those on the other side of the fence. Non-believers come with their wares, offering pleasure in this life, a life free from the guilt of sin. But whatever they are selling is second-best. It’s day-old bread. Jesus is the bread of life, the fresh bread. There is no person or idea or argument that can replace him.

The most difficult thing is making sense of this to other people who think you have lost your marbles, but they will never understand it unless they are turned by the spirit. The gift does not come to everyone.

Peter knows that no other person or ideology can fill the void in him, so his answer speaks the full truth. He has already looked elsewhere. He may not know exactly how Jesus is God, but he knows that Jesus is God and that’s all that matters. That alone is the entire argument. No powerpoint presentation needed, no notes, no talking points, no objection handling. The Apostles’ Creed sums up the entirety of the Bible, the tradition, the beliefs, and the reasons why. Those words can’t bring the spirit, but it’s the best summary of what people believe.

The followers of Nietzsche or Karl Marx or Michel Foucault or Richard Dawkins are the modern version of the followers of Theudas. In another hundred years there will be new names, new ideologies, new quirks, new fads, and who will be argued about alongside those new names? It will be the same name: Jesus. He will still be known by all. He will still baffle thinkers and anger intellectuals and bring joy to billions of simpletons like me.

Everything else is a replay. We’ve seen these shows before. The new academic arguments are not new. The latest theories and ways of looking at the world have been tried already. Found wanting, they were discarded. But we will try them again, and again. We insist on it, because we must attempt to define our universe and destiny. Every generation yearns to be free of God, and every generation fails.

The reality is this: these ideas have been dug out of the freezer and thawed out, then re-packaged ideas with new branding, kind of like what happened with consumer applesauce over the past twenty years. Applesauce manufacturers swapped out clumsy jars for single-serving squeeze packs. Consumer sales skyrocketed because the squeeze packs were fun for kids and perfect for school lunchboxes. But regardless of the delivery, when applesauce reaches your mouth, it’s still just applesauce. Yes, the container has a Disney character or a QR code (with a chance to win!), but it’s still only applesauce inside. The container doesn’t change the substance. The payload is apple slurry-goo, the same as it was in the old jar. The same happens with the many repackaged rebellions against God. We can call it paganism or atheism or positivism or Epicureanism or Stoicism or Jainism or humanism or wokeism, but it’s all the same applesauce in the end, because these ideas all reject the idea of one true God, a most high God, and that is why all of these things eventually grow tasteless. Worse, unlike applesauce, these rebellions contain nothing nourishing for the body or the soul.

Each generation tries to convince itself that this time the idea is something different. The ancient people already saw all of the things we are seeing today, they just didn’t have a TV or phone to watch it on. In our desperate efforts to be powerful or cool, we all become weak and lame. I learned the hard way that the boring way of life is not the pursuit of faith and holiness. The ultimately boring way of life is this constant searching for something, this constant rebellion against God. Life in Jesus just looks boring but it is the one source of true, authentic joy. He remains through all of these generations like a rock, a solid foundation of unending hope. He is unchanged and unphased, while the self-exalting educated classes of each generation lives and dies over and over again, falling over themselves, jockeying for position, like toddlers in an unsupervised daycare center.

There is a different type of knowledge in Jesus that exceeds all of the learning of the great philosophers and political thinkers and military leaders and scientists of human history. Despite numerous attempts to crush the faith, it returns. This is not disputable. Faith in Jesus may die in one place, but it grows elsewhere, like magic, almost as if there were some kind of holy spirit bringing it to people around the world.

Like dandelions in American yards, homeowners try in vain to kill this unwanted weed, but it cannot be killed, for even if you kill the local dandelions, or a million dandelions, the seeds have already spread far and wide, and the minute you stop killing the plants, within a year or two the dandelions will have returned in full.

The idea cannot be killed. It can be stifled and those who have the idea can be murdered or silenced, but the idea of Jesus is something that cannot be contained or stopped. Communism and fascism killed over 100 million people in the 20th century. Many of those killed were Christians. Yet the life of Christ still inspires people and draws them back. Like St. Thérèse of Lisieux said to Jesus, quoting Song of Songs: “Draw me and we will run.” This rebirth in faith comes from something beyond our understanding. It brings a complete and sincere adherence to Christ out of joy, not by argument or coercion. God only needs to call his followers and they come. How? I don’t know.

But now I don’t need to know every detail. The mysteries I place in God’s hand. The Divine Mercy image has the quote, “Jesus, I trust in you.” That’s the cure. I am more interested in the idea of “religious truth,” since that is what the Bible speaks most to me, and it’s easy to forget that if I forget to trust in God. I’m more interested in the mystery of interior conversion, because that is the part of Christianity I missed when learning about faith. Based on how many people in recovery meetings for addiction talk about how they formerly understood God, a lot of people missed the whole idea of “interior conversion.”

God doesn’t need to make lengthy arguments or offer worldly incentives. Even those who don’t believe can just utter the words, “Draw me, we will run,” or say, “Come Holy Spirit,” and the movement toward faith can begin. It’s so simple that it seems absurd to those who don’t believe. The seed of faith is planted where it is wanted and requested, and often it is planted where it is unwanted and unrequested. For some of us, we seem to have no choice in the matter (as was the case for myself). Other man-made ideas like feudalism or positivism or communism or humanism must be propped up with tremendous effort, but as soon as the driving force falters, the energy fades and the movement dies. But with Jesus, the energy continues, always sustained, because it does not come from man. The energy comes from God. He is the vine, the living water, the Bread of Life, the way, the truth, and the life.

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