Why Did Peter Sink?

We all love a showdown scene. We want to see the good guy stare down the bad guy and see who flinches first. In this case, in Jerusalem with Pilate and Jesus, we all know who is who, but what each person represents goes all the way to the top, meaning beyond this world and into the heavens. Jesus facing Pilate is the flesh version of the true God versus Zeus, and we can see the stark difference between these worldviews in this brief interaction. This is like a face-off of the two opposing forces coming to a climax, as Abraham started the path toward this showdown long ago. One of them will be revealed as a fraud. The backstory of this showdown starts way back with Abraham. So we need to backtrack a long ways and talk about him.

The reason Israel is so strange, and so hated, is because they believe that the one true God was never defeated. That is the reason they do not fit in with others. Let me qualify this, however, because the nation of Israel is constantly falling into worship of the many gods. The draw of the world around them is strong, so it’s incorrect to suggest that there was this group of people walking in lock-step, arm-in-arm, from Abraham onward. Within the people of Israel, there was a subset of people that kept the faith. From Abraham to Mary, there always remained some percentage, some handful of devout people, who kept faith in the one God even when the chips were way, way down. Within that special line, even many of them faltered. They strayed, some further than others. This is the true underdog story, because this journey took nearly 2,000 years in order to get to Jesus and it’s full of twists and turns and progress and backtracking.

This leads me up to the idea of a “chosen people,” which always seemed so odd, if not arrogant. To think that God had selected a group of people as “chosen” rankled me because, like everyone outside of a group, it’s irritating to be among the un-chosen. Being un-chosen seems to imply that you are the damned. This upsets people. Being told you are going to burn in hell because of who you are is like hitting someone with a pie in the face. Not a fresh apple pie, but like a fresh cow pie, right in the face.

If you hear a message that makes you feel lesser or damned, anger is the only response. This can be enraging. No one wants to hear about their inability to be saved because of the family he belongs to, or what nation he lives in, or what language he speaks, or what skin color he is, or who he is married to, or that he’s done something in the past that cannot be forgiven. If someone is telling you that they are chosen, but you are not chosen, that puts up a wall. And if you are not chosen, then you are not equal, not worthy, not good enough. Maybe you even feel that you are somehow bad without any possibility of fixing or altering the situation. (This is getting dangerously close to the correct answer of why we need a savior, but for now let’s just stick with the problem of being un-chosen.)

The unchosen feel attacked, and the best way to stop an attack, is to counter-attack. Newton’s third law of motion applies well to the ego in terms of equal and opposite reactions when you start claiming chosen status. So on the outside looking in, the idea of being self-declared as the “chosen people” seems like a move that Jack might make on the island in Lord of the Flies, but you have to look closer.

Our pride rises up against the idea of being left out. Today we might call this FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. Anyone that claims a special status will have outsiders react in several ways: they may want to join them, they many want to reject them, or they may want to destroy them. Everyone feels this sense of rejection in some area, and attempting to make peace in our heart, we must find a group or ideology that includes us. Atheists and non-believers feel rejected because they are told they are not “saved,” which sounds like another way of saying “chosen.” Surely we have all seen believers use this idea of being “saved” like a trophy and it often chases more people away from the tent rather than bringing them in. But Abraham and his people had a reason for being called chosen that is different from what we think of today as “saved.”

Abraham is said to have been called to leave his home by God. He becomes a nomad in old age, leaving his home. Why does he leave? Because he doesn’t fit in. Everyone at the party is drinking from the cup of the moon god and he cannot take a drink without betraying his conviction that there is only one God. There is a parallel here to being called out into the wilderness like other great figures, like Jesus, John the Baptist, Moses, St. Benedict, or St. Anthony of the Desert. Genesis just mentions this casually, but Abraham is called away from the place he lives because his people do not worship the one God. His hometown worships an idol. Due to his belief, he separates and excludes himself from the mainstream. He does this not because he wanted to be left out, not to be alone, not because he wanted to be a nomad, but because the worldview he held required that he evacuate the city or be swallowed up. He has chosen to worship the one God. Because of this, he can’t live among the people. I’ll do my best to explain what I mean by that.

I think the hard question is this: How could any group think they were special? Were they not humans like the rest of us?

The answer of course is: yes, they were just ordinary people. Abraham was an ordinary man who ate and slept and committed sins like any other person. But he made a choice to believe something that no other people believed.

If you believe in the creation and rebellion stories of Genesis, in the one God who defeated all contenders for the title belt, then you must reject the wider world of idols. This is the situation the Old Testament covers in detail.

The reason the wagons are circled in the entire Old Testament is not because the Israelites enjoy or seek conflict. The conflict seeks them. The wagons are circled because they are the only culture hanging on to the idea of a single God. They are the sole believers that the one true God existed before everything else. They alone believe that the first Being was never defeated. Every other people around them has granted assent to the death of the primordial god or gods and now have lesser gods for everything.

Creating a club may cause an angry reaction among those uninvited, but a guaranteed way to animate hatred is to tell someone that their god is fake. Telling your neighbor that their way of life is false makes for fightin’ words. Like Merle Haggard said, “They're walking on the fightin’ side of me.” That is how you get punched in the eye.

But as anyone knows who holds a dear belief or conviction, there is no way to preserve that belief or way of life unless you are willing to proclaim that belief and then live out that way of life. Otherwise you are just a fan or hobbyist. It’s easy to click the Like button and call yourself a believer. It’s much harder to put down the phone and take action. If you declare a belief but don’t take action, then you probably don’t really believe it. You are a tourist or maybe just opinionated. If you truly have a conviction in the belief, then you cannot just “fit in” with everyone else. The only way for the Hebrews to “fit in” with a pagan world was to abandon your belief in the one God, which instantly discredits and devalues the one God. In terms of faith in the one true God, everyone else on planet earth has already done that.

This kind of situation is not foreign to our own experiences. We have all felt peer pressure. Anyone who has been to high school or college parties may have been in this dilemma. Or maybe a boyfriend or girlfriend put you into a dilemma where you had to make a choice that tested your beliefs. For example, no child has ever said that they would someday like to be addicted to drugs. Children know it’s a bad idea. But someday that child will grow up and be in a room at a party where everyone is partaking in something they have sworn to never do, and only then will they find out if what they declared is true or false. The same can be said for drinking, where a child will declare, “I will never get drunk,” but someday at a party there will be a chance to find out if what they declared was true. As the plastic Solo cup is nudged at them, they will be urged to take a drink: “Everyone does it, it’s no big deal.” “Don’t be such a stick in the mud.” “Trust me, you’ll enjoy it. It’s so freeing.” The argument is made to join the ways of the others. The prosecution makes it’s case, through temptation to fit in and have fun, the defense sits at rest with it’s past declaration of belief. In the end, the person will make his decision and either drink or not drink. If the person decides to reject the offer, they choose a harder path, because it often means being alone for the night. By rejecting the offer, he is himself rejected. But that is the price of having convictions. The reject must leave the party, because he doesn’t fit in. He has to find new friends. To fit in can mean giving in and accepting something that you cannot do without betraying your beliefs.

Abraham is where the tide begins to turn back against the grain, against the world. Tupac had a song “Me Against the World.” He should have featured Abraham in the video, but unfortunately these two lived 4,000 years apart. But Abraham really could have said, “It’s just me against the world.” I don’t know that we’ll be talking about Tupac in 4,000 years, but we will likely still be talking about Abraham.

When people wonder why the common denominator in Biblical wars and squabbles seems to be Israel, it’s because of this belief. They do not bend or conform to the gods and the idols around them. The moment that they do, then they have abandoned the one God. Whether its the gods of Sumerian, Egyptian, or Greco-Roman culture, they must reject them all. They don’t give up their belief for anyone or anything, right up until today, whether it’s modern paganism or Christianity or Islam or atheism. This hatred remains today against the Jews and Israel, because they still won’t bend in their faith and conform. There is a same loathing for Christians, for the same reason, as they refuse to “just fit in” with the culture, because the moment you change your beliefs to fit the culture, then you have no beliefs; you are just like everyone else. This is what drives non-believers crazy, because they think: why can’t these people just get with the program? What can’t they just fit into the culture? The answer is very simple: they reject the program because the program rejects the one true God, and that is the one thing that the believers cannot reject. Believers argue it the other way, wondering why the culture, the program, can’t just believe in the one true God. So you see the problem.

There is a bizarre scenario in here that I have to go into briefly. Some Christians hate the Jews and we have ample historical evidence of that. This should baffle anyone with even a modest understanding of salvation history, because without the people of Abraham, the savior would never have arrived. Jesus could not have come from any other group of people, for the exact reason that all other peoples had rejected the idea of one God.

Even within the nation itself, the savior had to come through a very specific line of people because they, for the most part, stuck with faith in the one true God. Through one set of people alone could Jesus have come into the world, as they were “chosen” because they chose God. They kept the faith. This is why Christians who hate Jews make no sense at all, as without the Old Covenant and line from Abraham to David to Jesus, there is no salvation. As Paul says, we would still be in our sins.

I need to stay on track here though, because this is the big moment.

The whole point of the Bible is the story of bringing back worship to the one all-powerful creator God in order to rescue us from the world of the many gods. After the Tower of Babel, the world was pagan and polytheistic. The rest of the Bible is the “return of the king,” the return of the one God. That is the overarching story of the Old and New Testaments. Whenever you go get stuck in a single line of Old Testament violence, recalling this big picture idea is a good idea, because you can easily miss the forest for the trees.

In the Old Testament, starting with Abraham, the one true God is worshiped and defended. In the New Testament, the one true God returns to glory, bringing an end to the world of false gods, all for the sake of rescuing us. This happens through a very specific process of selection, from Abraham all the way to Mary. It’s important to remember how focused and targeted this selection of people really is. The story narrows and narrows toward one woman. Clearly the whole nation of Israel did not gather in Mary’s room during the Annunciation and consent to Gabriel. No, only she said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” She was chosen by God from the chosen people, but this selection, this precision laser-targeting, had to come through the only people on earth who believed in the one God. Could it have happened otherwise? Of course. God can do whatever he wants. But he didn’t. This is one of the mysteries of God’s ways, and while the rational brain wants to rebel at this idea, it is fitting that God chose to rescue us in the way that he did.

Were there other people in the world who believed in the one true God? Possibly, but we don’t know. There are no known groups of one God peoples, so just as Abraham has chosen God, it seems that God really has also chosen Abraham. There is at least one man who worships the one God, as we see in a cameo appearance from Melchizedek, which I’ll talk about later. He just shows up to bless Abraham, but aside from Melchizedek, the world seems completely empty of people that worship one God. There is a sense that “God is Dead” by the time you reach the end of chapter 11 of Genesis. The whole Bible after that chapter is about the restoration of God through this unique line of believers, which is why Abraham is so important to the all three of the major religions of the world today, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

The path to salvation returns via Abraham and his dedication to the one God. For Christians, this beginning by Abraham is fulfilled in Mary, mother of Jesus, mother of God. Jesus of course is literally the God-man, Son of God, Son of Man, the incarnation, fully-human and fully-divine. Jesus is the one true God in human form.

Of course, the irony is that after all the wars, setbacks, journeys in the desert, time in captivity, and staggering hardships, only some of the Jews convert and join the apostles. Many of the chosen people do not choose to believe in Jesus as the Messiah. But in reading the Old Testament, this is hardly anything new or even surprising. The chosen people stray from the one God in nearly every book of the Old Testament. Being a member of the Israelites, or even being of the line of Judah, or David, or even being a cousin of Mary, doesn’t necessarily mean you have chosen to believe in the one true God, and so it also will not mean that everyone will convert to Christianity. Having a social security card doesn’t mean you love America, it just means you are in the tax system. Where you live doesn’t dictate your faith, even though many nations have tried that and still try to force-feed faith today (all countries do this, not just Saudi Arabia, Iran, Cuba, and China. Every nation demands a kind of faith or it could not stand, some just force the narrative harder).

Every Hebrew had free will, just as we have free will today. None of that changed. Peoples of ancient times were not homogenous in their beliefs. They were not one giant blob of uniform ideas, but we tend to think of them like that. The same goes for Romans or pagans. Clearly there were “virtuous pagans,” as Dante calls them in his journey through hell. You can find loads of writing on virtue from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Cicero, Virgil, Plato, Socrates, and many others. So it’s absurd to pretend that all Israelites lay prostrate daily before the one God, while all Romans or Sumerians ate their children like Saturn.

They were just like us, with some being more devout, and others being less devout, and still others not believing at all. For a specific example in our world, you can go from one end of a city and find a strict Catholic church that the Pharisees might even find homey, and then go to the other end and find a church that appears to be unaware of all doctrine. Yet both consider their parish to be fully Catholic, part of the Mother Church. There is gray area between churches, but specific statements of faith are non-negotiable, such as that there is only one God (plus everything else in the Nicene Creed).

What I’m getting at is that faith cannot be forced among the chosen or the un-chosen people, and even among the devout believers there can be significant differences in what “devout” actually means.

To break this out of religious terms, consider the rewards card at your local gas station or grocery store. Having a rewards card doesn’t mean you love the gasoline or groceries from that store. You may get gas and groceries daily from the store, but you have no real loyalty to it. You may only have signed up for the rewards card because of a discount or because it’s close to your house, but whatever the reason you are now a member. The moment a better deal arrives, you may dump that rewards card.

Membership is not a good indicator of belief. It can be a mere matter of convenience, or mutual benefit, or tradition, or dumb-luck. (I will say, however, that I have met some very devout Costco members, making it seem like a religion for some.) Membership does not equate to conviction. Likewise, the chosen people have many members that wander into other religions of the surrounding culture. They may keep their rewards card for when it helps them, but the stories of the Old Testament has many, many instances where Israelites get caught shopping with pagan reward cards at Baal’s Golden Mini-Mart.

St. Paul had rewards cards (membership and citizenship) in both the Jewish and Roman worlds. This helped him to get his trial moved to Rome, but it didn’t spring him from jail. No, the verdict was death for him because he had joined a third club. The new club essentially offered joy in this life and eternal joy in the afterlife. It’s a very different kind of club, one that ultimately got him beheaded. This rewards club can bring a lot of anger upon its members.

Many Jewish people did not join the new faith, since they did not believe that the messiah had come. This has led to so much confusion and anger over the past two millennia, which is uncharitable, to say the least, and led to downright horrific cruelty. Many Christians seem to forget: the story is not over. We are in the messianic age now, the final age. In this age we are to love God, love one another, and do God’s will by keeping his Commandments. We do not know the time when the end will come, and we can ignore the claims of “end-times” authors and apocalyptic highway billboards who proclaim that they have “cracked the code.” All we can do is prepare without knowing, because the day will come when God decides the day has come, not when any person has predicted. This is very plain to see in the Gospel, when it says, “For just as lightning comes from the east and is seen as far as the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be.” (Mt 24:27) In other words, it will happen in an instant, and we will not be able to repent when that day arrives. This is why I feel that the “Doomsday Preppers” may want to stop hoarding canned goods and stockpiling bullets, and instead, they would be more wise to pray and give to the poor (the canned goods, I mean, since no one can get nourishment from bullets).

Each person’s salvation is for that individual to work out with fear and trembling, just as my own is. The saying among addicts is to “Worry about keeping my own side of the street clean.” That is good advice for a store owner and a spiritual person. If I judge anyone, I have immediately lost a sense of humility. Pride is a very difficult animal to cage. So there are two important factors here: first, the story is not over, and second, it’s not for me to hand out judgement as I am sorely in need of mercy. As for the chosen people, it is enough for me to know that the Old Covenant was not revoked by the New Covenant and that God’s will for them will be done, just as it is for the rest of us (CCC 121).

By the time you get through the thousand pages from Genesis to the Gospels, you might think that’s the end. It’s not. We are just in the third act now waiting for the finale, the climax to happen, around which there is much disagreement and speculation. (If interested in more about Israel, the Church, and the end of Act III see this article from Jimmy Akin that dives into it.)

As I mentioned earlier, the heroic tales of ancient Greece read like persuasive arguments for justifying the way of life chosen by the empires of the age. You might say, the stories tell the journey of the people of Zeus, the people who chose Zeus. When you look at the opposing stories in this way, the idea of the chosen people of Israel makes more sense, because the only reason God “chooses” Abraham is because he has “chosen” God. Every city-state around where Abraham lives has chosen some other god.

This is kind of a big deal, because again, it’s the big picture of the entire Bible.

God did not lose any actual power when the nations turned away from him. The story of salvation in the Bible is a big wide turn back to the one true God, to true power and not the power of objects. He was never defeated, but was only defeated in our minds and hearts. The rebellion against God failed in heaven, but we simple humans turned away. Failing to overthrow God, the fallen spirits instead attack his creatures, which is us. These spirits are watching us watch Netflix and sports, as we have once again become distracted from the one God. Now the spirit only has to suggest, “Play next episode?” and we choose to click a button in the affirmative, allowing us to space out and pay homage to the TV god for another hour.

Back to Abraham, Israel, and the gang. All nations and peoples have turned away, except for Israel. And even the chosen people struggle to keep this single truth alive of the one God, the all-powerful God, as they suffer repeated, constant temptation and do battle with the worldly influences around them. Not only do they have to fight this battle spiritually, but they literally fight to the death for this belief, which is why there is so much bloodshed in the Old Testament. People consider the Israelites as the warmongers without considering that they are under constant duress for this polar opposite worldview to every people and nation that surrounds them, and survival in that environment requires battle.

The alternative is surrender. But for them the only surrender that can happen is to the one God, not to other cultures who believe in false gods. The world tried to squash this one, last, final remaining culture that believed in the one God. They refused defeat and went to war and they slaughtered and they were slaughtered because this idea was worth keeping alive.

I think that’s what I failed to understand for a long time, that what the people of Abraham are fighting for is the very existence of the one true God in the hearts and minds of men and women. I so often mention that surrender is the key, but there is surrendering to the way of the world, and there is surrendering to God. The surrender must not be to the world, but to God. The good news for those who love competition (I’m looking directly at Americans) is that when you surrender to God, you stop fighting your fellow men and women, so this may sound like rolling over and giving up, but there is a never ending spiritual combat happening and all hands are needed on deck. And this combat is more intense and powerful than playoff football or the free market or presidential politics.

The whole point of God “choosing” a people to restore faith in him is to point everyone back to the one God. It’s like an English Pointer freezing stiff as a statue and lifting a paw to point to where the hunters needs to go. And we’re all seekers, we’re all hunters for the truth, but we’re easily distracted and confused. We ignore the pointing, thinking we’ll get better directions from our phone or by instinct. That is how the fall happened and how we became “scattered” into many nations. The story of how we came to ignore the one God is fully covered in the falls of mankind that occurs in Genesis, in chapters 1-11, and everything that comes after is the return of God to his rightful place. The dramatic ending comes in the interactions between Caiaphas, Pilate, and Jesus in his trial.

The conspirators take steps to separate themselves from the deed. As for Pilate, he washes his hands with water, literally, in front of the mob and tells the people, “I am innocent of this man’s blood. Look to it yourselves.” But he can’t wash it off. He can’t extract his role in the death of Jesus any more than Caiaphas can, because they are both stuck fighting in the pit. Jesus even tells Pilate that Caiaphas is more guilty, since Caiaphas handed him over, but Pilate’s attempt to wash his hands of the verdict cannot help him. Pilate is still guilty, if only slightly less than Caiaphas who led the campaign to have Jesus killed. The blood on Pilate’s hands sinks in like a tattoo. It’s never coming out.

Choices made long ago set Pilate’s life in motion to lead him to the exact spot where he is presiding over the trial of Jesus. Once you have taken the wrong turn, you often can’t quit the trail. You must go to the end, or so it seems. The woods is thick. To get on a different trail requires going back to the trailhead, and choosing the right path, but for those far along on the wrong trail, starting over seems impossible. The pressures of the life you choose boxes you in. Sometimes there appears to be no way out, but…there is a way.

You must be reborn. You must become like a child again. You must take up your cross. Pilate doesn’t have time for repentance during the trial, because his entire life has painted him into a corner. Caiaphas has no interest in being reborn, whereas you can sense this odd tension in Pilate, kind of like Nicodemus. They both seem to want to ask Jesus for help, but they don’t. They could all be reborn and change their ways, but they won’t. For Pilate, being reborn in the spirit would probably mean he’d be killed by the Romans. To be faithful to the one God requires rejection of the false gods. Pilate, Nicodemus, and Caiaphas all love their own lives too much. They can’t change because they don’t want to. Giving up their path seems too hard, so it’s easier just to keep going. This is exactly how habitual sin works.

You can’t just easily wash it off. You can’t wish it away. You can’t stop doing it. You can’t quit it. It requires a hard turn against the current, like Abraham did, in order to escape the false gods. Eventually the sin you love the most will paint you into that corner where there is no help, and that is where you will get the chance to make the turn. It’s painful and scary, but so liberating. There is only one person who can extract you from the situation you walked yourself into. All three of these people, Pilate, Nicodemus, and Caiaphas, reject the hand that offers help when they need it most, because their position on a tiny pedestal of power seems like too far to fall for their ego to survive. They don’t realize that it’s exactly the ego that needs to fall and be shattered.

So Pilate’s attempt to “wash his hands” and remove his involvement of overseeing this kangaroo court in Jerusalem fails miserably. To this day, a billion people utter his name every week when they recite the Nicene Creed, right after the Sunday homily. Caiaphas actually got off pretty easy, in that sense, as we don’t recite his name.

Pilate is a representative of a world that has chosen many gods over the one God. It’s probably safe to say that Pilate, at the time of the trial, would have found the idea of one God ridiculous. Every culture in Pilate’s time had bought into the belief that one true God didn’t really exist. But Pilate and Rome is not unique in this sense. What happened to Pilate after the trial is unclear, as he may have been executed, or committed suicide, or may have even converted to be a follower of Jesus. His wife may have converted, and is honored in the Eastern Orthodox church as a saint. As for Pilate, it’s not really clear. But whatever his end, he played the role as the standin for the existing worldview which ruled from the time of the Tower of Babel until the resurrection of Christ. The nations had created and bowed to fictitious gods for a long time, but this interaction with Pilate is where the tide turned against the false gods for good.

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The Gospels writers somehow plumb the depths of meaning with simple phrases and stories, such as Pontius Pilate’s response to Jesus: “What is truth?” These words coming from a Roman governor to the arrested carpenter could not be more loaded with meaning. These are like Easter eggs dropped into the text without any fanfare. They don’t even appear suspicious on first pass. There’s no exposition or discussion. In this case, it’s a simple question, but it speaks volumes. The writer just moves on. It’s like a James Joyce kind of move, except James Joyce did it on purpose, while the Gospel writers don’t seem to craft these intricate, concise jaw-droppers intentionally. The lines are just there. The lines are there because they are writing what happened, as as the saying goes, “The truth needs no rehearsal.” That’s the strange thing about reading these events and teachings and parables, because the words never stop revealing further depth. You skip over these lines and come back ten years later and see something new. You read them the third or fourth time, and your eyes pop out of your head, as a new angle on a phrase appears lit up, under a glow that you somehow never noticed before.

Those three words from Pilate sum up the question that the entire Bible is answering, because Pilate speaks to the truth, whose name is Jesus, and tells him that there is no such thing as truth. The statement reads like a confession, or maybe a statement of faith, as Pilate is looking at the truth and doesn’t recognize it. Pilate does recognize that there is no sin or crime in Jesus, but he’s not interested in justice or mercy, he’s interested in keeping the peace. He’s in the dilemma of a position of power, where doing the right thing must be sacrificed for the proverbial “greater good.” But he is nervous and unsure. The whole situation has both his wife and him rattled. They know something is different about this man, and it seems that the ones in power are slowly becoming aware that the return of the king is near. The Roman foundation of life is for the first time feeling shaky. The false gods are being put on notice.

In his position of power, Pilate stands face to face with Jesus and seems for a brief moment drawn to the truth, before his worldly power yanks him back. Nicodemus, the Pharisee, had a similar interaction, where he was drawn in to the truth, but his status in the community pulled him back in, like Michael Corleone in the Godfather. Neither Pilate nor Nicodemus can reach escape velocity from the orbits their lives have settled into. For Nicodemus the situation is even harder because he wants to believe, but can’t let go of his pride of position and his legalist vision of God. The transactional version of God is a false god just like Zeus, so Pilate and Nicodemus both live under a false god. The one who seems to fully recognize Jesus as the savior is Caiaphas, the high priest, because he knows that Jesus must be killed in order to preserve his worldly power.

Caiaphas tattles on himself, about his worldview, and about his love of power, even more that Pilate does. Pilate is kind of a stooge here, representing the fallen world after the Tower of Babel. He is one of these “scattered” kings, a symbol of the nations who scratch and claw for worldly power. But Caiaphas is meant to be the high priest of the temple in Jerusalem, the leader of those who are set apart for the one God. As the high priest of the Jewish temple, Caiaphas has been appointed to his position of power by Pilate’s predecessor. In other words there is a major problem here.

Do you see the problem? I know this gets weird with the old names, and who is in charge of what, and who or what is a Sadducee or a Pharisee or a Roman, and all of that. But here’s the diamond in the rough. Caiaphas is in bed with Rome.

Just like Solomon, just like Ahab, just like Lot, just like Jeroboam, so is Caiaphas. What has he done? He has rejected the one true God. Of course, he thinks he has not, but he most certainly has, since his job was given to him by the pagan rulers, the Romans. The reason Jesus flips out in the temple and chases out the money lenders and the cattle, is because Caiaphas is a stooge of a stooge. He claims to represent God, the one God, but he’s turned the temple into a Roman beer hall, Texas pit barbecue restaurant, and outlet mall. In other words, he has let the culture in and by doing so rejected the one true God. We all know that Pilate is in bed with false gods; he’s a Roman, so of course he is. But Caiaphas, of all people, cannot be playing around with Uranus! (I’m sorry…I had to go there. I had to. It needed to be said.)

Caiaphas might as well put a statue of Uranus’s grandchild, Zeus, right in the middle of the temple, on a pedestal, because that is what he’s done in spirit. He has allowed the many gods to take over, making the Jews no different from the world. The temple is no longer treated as sacred for the one God. Instead, it’s a place of transactions, just like the any other false slot-machine god of the pagan world. Caiaphas and the high priests have corrupted the temple. Abraham’s steps toward restoring faith in the one god has been steered off course, right into the arms of the many gods. Caiaphas has led the people to stop swimming against the current, and he has turned them around to flow with the mainstream. This ruins the whole project of the chosen people, because the word chosen means choosing the one true God. The moment they stop choosing God, there is no specialness about them. They are just another tribe or nation who prop up objects as gods and project their own desires onto that god.

I hope this makes sense. No one expects Pilate to worship the true God, but Caiaphas is supposed to do just that. The question of “What is truth?” could have come from Caiaphas just as easily as Pilate, because Caiaphas is only after earthly power as well. They are both painted into corners by their lust for power and glory, and neither can get out of it. But Caiaphas recognizes the danger much earlier and takes action to protect his power, to deny the true God, and goes all the way. Once he recognizes Jesus as the messiah, Caiaphas knows that he has to make sure that Jesus is killed.

The Pharisees have a meeting with Caiaphas, who is a Sadducee, and these two groups don’t much care for each other at all. The fact that they meet at all speaks loudly regarding their fear of what Jesus represents. It’s hard to imagine that a wandering carpenter who is healing people could generate such concern, but this is exactly what happens.

In this meeting, the holy men discuss the raising of Lazarus from the dead. For us today, we don’t know what to make of the idea of Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life. It’s a bizarre and almost unbelievable story. This would have been just as unbelievable to Caiaphas and Nicodemus and Pilate and everyone else in those days. Just because they lived in that time doesn’t mean they were stupid, it just means they didn’t have smart phones. If they thought Jesus raising Lazarus was a hoax or a lie, they would not have gathered. If he was just some nutjob wandering about, they would have ignored him. This is always the best way to handle a conspiracy theorist or crazy person: you let them make their own case, because discerning people will eventually see them as nutjobs. No intervention is required by government to convince people that the crazy uncle is crazy. Organizations and powerful people who despise one another don’t convene meetings to discuss how to handle a problem, unless they legitimately see a problem that will threaten their way of life.

The Pharisee and Sadducee meeting in John 11 is like the meetings of the five families in mafia movies, where they gather to set aside differences in order to devise a plan to take out a common enemy that presents an existential threat. Anyone who reads or watches mafia movies knows this is exactly what these meetings are for. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” (Another famous one is “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” which is a line that could almost make Nicodemus suspect in his clandestine meeting with Jesus, but that’s the kind of speculation that I need to leave alone, because I can invent my own conspiracy theory very easily if I go down that rabbit-hole.)

The meeting in John 11 is critical to understand in terms of the scope of the entire Bible, because that is the moment where the decision is made to pursue execution of Jesus. The leader of the meeting is Caiaphas, but they all clearly understand what is happening with Jesus. “If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation.” (Jn 11:45-53)

Do you see what they are trying to protect? They don’t care if Jesus is actually the messiah, the savior. No, they are worried about “our land and our nation.” In other words, they want stuff. They want power. They are operating under the assumption that their role is not serving the one true God, but rather the land and the nation. This shows their cards. They give away their motives.

Why does this matter? It matters because the covenant of Abraham was not only about land and nationhood. If that’s all it was about, then the Bible could have been wrapped up in the book of Joshua. The promised land was to be the sign of the greater promise. The greater promise was to bring a blessing upon “all peoples on earth.” The promise to Abraham about the land and nation has already been completed long before the meeting between Caiaphas and the Pharisees, but they are still clinging to that, instead of the greater promise to bless all people of the planet earth. The land is the sign of the covenant, but not the main payload. It’s only the toy, not the Happy Meal. If the promise was only about land and nationhood, that’s already been done. The book of Joshua even states that the sign of this covenant is complete (Joshua 21:43-45). The cheese stands alone in Joshua. All is well. They have the land, the nation, and it even says, “Not a single word of the blessing that the LORD had promised to the house of Israel failed; it all came true.”

So what’s left? If it all came true in Joshua, what is the rest of the Bible about? Because Joshua is pretty early on, being the 6th book of the Bible. What are the rest of the books about, if the land and nation is the whole point?

To understand what the rest of the Old Testament is about, you have to read the actual terms of the Old Covenant, which Caiaphas and the Pharisees seem to have forgotten about. So it’s worth reading so that we can see there are parts to it, in order. The order matters.

The Lord said to Abram: Go forth from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.

That’s part one. Abraham needs to get out of town. He needs to leave the pagan world of his family and become a nomad. He cannot live among the culture of his hometown where they all cheer for the false moon god on Friday nights. He must set his family apart from the culture of the world. Keep in mind, these lines directly follow the Tower of Babel story, which is the story of how the nations have been scattered and worship false gods. To worship the one God, he must not mingle with cultures who worship false gods.

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

That’s part two. God makes Abraham a great nation which comes to fulfillment in Joshua. Also, Abraham is clearly famous because I’m sitting here thinking of him about 4,000 years after he lived, making him the greatest influencer of all time. TikTok and Instagram fame is pathetic in comparison, no matter how many followers they have. Abraham has literally had billions by now. The checkboxes for part two of the covenant have been checked. This part of the covenant marks the “sign” that God is serious and that he will do all that he says in the third part. This is how covenants seem to work, where there is a sign for us to see and know, and a greater promise, a spiritual promise that transcends our puny desires and goals.

I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. All the families of the earth will find blessing in you.

That’s part three. That’s the big promise. And this promise extends way beyond land and nationhood into the spiritual realm. In fact, God implies that nationhood might not be so important in the end, because he’s talking about “all the families of the earth” finding a common blessing through Abraham. Somehow, someway, there is going to be a unifying blessing through Abraham.

So the blessing is what the prophets are all talking about. This blessing, this mysterious blessing is what everyone is pondering from the book of Judges onward. All the talk of the the messianic figure is about this blessing. The blessing in the last part of the covenant is not about land, or nationhood. This is about something spiritual and higher than the small cookies we want to eat here on earth.

Caiaphas may know all about the prophecies of the coming savior, but he doesn’t care. He knows his power will be lost if Jesus is allowed to live. In his external life he pretends to know and worship the one God, but he is actually in love with his power. He is just like Pilate and will do whatever it takes to keep that power. At the meeting, he admits what he is really after, and that is power for the nation, not the blessing for “all the families of the earth.”

Caiaphas…said to them, “You know nothing, nor do you consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish.” (Jn 11:49-50)

Caiaphas clearly doesn’t think Jesus is crazy. If he did, there would be no motive to want him dead. This is powerful testimony by Caiaphas to show how serious people were taking these miracles and signs that Jesus was performing. If Jesus was an obvious charlatan, they would have left him alone. He would have been like any street-artist in Vegas who wows the tourists. The threat he presents goes way beyond someone who wows people for tips. If he was a political agitator, the words of this meeting would have been different. As it reads, there is zero concern about Jesus rallying an army or seeking glory as a political leader. Someone in the meeting says, “If we leave him alone, all will believe in him…”

This is a huge distinction to be aware of, because this threat is not physical or political. The speaker does not say, “all will take up arms” or, “all will fight for this man.” No, the voice says “all will believe in him.” What the attendees of this meeting are worried about is that Jesus is winning the hearts of people and completely changing their system of belief. And what is it exactly that this shift of belief is about? It’s about him. They will “believe in him.” Every word of this meeting is full of meaning. The people are not converting to some new kind of political ideology or national patriotism, they are converting to believe in him, only him. Why is that a concern? Because Jesus is not them. He is a sole, single person that stands outside of the Roman and Jewish world. What scares them all is that the belief in him means the rejection of the existing power structure, a turning away from that which currently holds sway in the world. And that is, of course, exactly what is happening, because this is the whole point of the story of the Bible, which is to turn people away from the false gods back to the one God.

The attendees of this meeting truly do see what’s happening, and Caiaphas does most certainly. The belief in him will turn the existing world upside down, which to them is right-side up. Pilate thinks the world of many gods is the right-side up. Caiaphas thinks his dabbling with Uranus is right-side up. Nicodemus thinks his legalistic punch-card version of God is right-side up. None of them can see that they live in the upside-down world. They are spiritually blind, like most of us today. They understand the threat, because at this meeting they admit, in fear, that belief in him is what is going to flip the entire world around. The shocking part is that two of these groups, Caiaphas and the Pharisees, think they are the ones that are keeping the flame alive, that they are the watchers who are looking for the one who will bring this blessing to “all the families of the world,” but when that blessing shows up they immediately want it to go away.

The threat comes from what they can see happening, as the converted make no sense. The people who believe in him no longer live like the mainstream. They have a kind of faith and hope in the person of Jesus, that neither the Romans nor the Jews could ever muster by force or through incentives. They can see people changing completely once they believe in Jesus. What is the change? People stop responding to fear and start living for love of Christ. The greatest threat of all here is that this cannot be explained, because Pilate, Caiaphas, and the Pharisees are all accustomed to living in a world that makes sense. They cannot explain it, which scares them, and the reason it scares them is because they haven’t actually thought about the one God in a long time, because no one can explain the one God. That’s how you can tell when someone is full of hot air about knowing God today, because they claim to be on his level. No one can overrule the one God. No one can fully grok the one God. We can sense his presence, through this strange mix of nearness and impossible distance, but we cannot fully know or explain it, because when we contemplate his glory it exceeds our imagination by infinity, yet somehow he reaches us. When you tune in to the one God, you experience a fear and love that result in utter humility before such power. What the powers of the world fear is uncertainty, the unknown, the void, the chaos, the infinite. That is also what we as individuals fear. They want control, total control, and because they see people surrendering their lives to Jesus, they see that control slipping away, that their false gods are powerless, meaningless. The conch shell has the same power as Pilate, which is none. The pig-head on a stick is as weak a god as whatever Caiaphas worships. That is why they know that Jesus must go. Just like Jack on the island in Lord of the Flies, this meeting is just like Jack saying, “I'm warning you. I'm going to get angry. D'you see? You're not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island!”

What Jack, the Romans, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and every other nation and group fail to admit is that they are not having fun. They are all miserable.

They are trapped in a world of sin and see no escape. Seeing no exit, they know they must fight. They must fight because they must save themselves. For those following the mythology, the stories of the gods themselves express the reality of the world where god is an invention. They see only one choice in that definition of the world: fight or die. You band together for safety or you wander alone. The people at this meeting are the ones who have scratched and fought their way to the top of the dunghill.

They have spent a life squabbling for honor, to be mildly comfortable, and any threat to their position in society or the system that they sacrificed for to get that honor and status is terrifying because it exposes them. They have sacrificed so much for the promises of the world. If they are wrong, their entire way of life is a fraud, a waste of time. If the poor, the lepers, the insane, the criminals, and the outcasts are finding joy in their poverty, with no status whatsoever, just by believing in this man named Jesus, then everything that they hold sacred will be proved as powerless as the conch shell that shattered on the rocks. To consider this possibility is too much for them. This mirror is too difficult to peer into because the reflection will betray the truth.

What scares them the most, more than anything else, is witnessing people change and convert to worship a man, one man, named Jesus, and seeing these people suddenly find total joy and meaning. This rocks those in power because for the first time they become aware that their foundation for life is built on sand. They have no idea how it can be possible and don’t want to hear that it is possible. How could happiness possibly come without competition and victory and power and money and pleasure?

They are scared because the poor rejects of society suddenly have more joy and love than they do, and they believe that their choices have been right, that they have followed the rules. Seeing this other way points to the truth that their entire way of life is based on falsehoods, false gods, and identity lies.

This is as transparent today as it was then.

What we sacrifice our time, money, and life for is shown in our actions, not in our words. We act out what we believe will save us. It’s not what we post online or say out loud, it’s what we do. If you doubt this is true, just look at what we sacrifice for. We must punch our tickets with good grades and extracurricular activities, spend thousands of dollars on youth sports, take advanced placement classes, get high test scores, and perform volunteer work quotas in order to get into a good college. We do all these sacrifices so that we can get a good job, so that we can have a comfortable income, and in the job we live in a perpetual state of “what have you done for me lately?” to please a boss or manager, like little Pontius Pilates, who scrapped their way to their positions. To find a suitable mate to match our desired status, we exercise and create clever profiles in search of bedroom experiences. We desire to travel or own things that will fulfill our pursuit of the exotic and the luxurious. We do all of this so that we can eventually raise a family who must also make these same sacrifices, run this same gauntlet, with the idea in mind that someday, if we’re lucky, we can retire and rest. Then in the end, we can tell ourselves, “I did the right things. I followed the rules.” It’s the same problem as Pilate and Caiaphas. We must be our own savior.

The ultimate shock comes when you realize that you don’t have to be your own savior. The reason Jesus must be killed is that he is telling people that they no longer need to be their own savior. He is the savior. He is the one. He is the blessing promised to Abraham. He is the one God. And he is all they have ever wanted or needed and all they need to do is trust in him.

A career oriented person often seems the wise one today, because of his or her car, job, or even their hygiene. But they are so often the lost. They are polished and smooth and say the right words, but there is a gaping hole in their heart.

We think people are crazy who do not take the same path that we are on, because it’s so painful to look down and realize that it is the wrong path. What we sacrifice our time to is the god of our lives. If this seems doubtful to you, consider who you like to mock, to hate. Who is that person or group? That is the language of your own self-salvation. That is the language of the Pharisee praying, “Thank God I am not like that tax collector,” while the outcast tax collector prays, “Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.” If you don’t see this, you aren’t looking very hard, because everyone is guilty of it. Mothers who have many children are mocked by career women, and mothers with many children mock career women. This plays a thousands ways. Blue collar/White collar. Black/White. Asian/European. Rich/Poor. Urban/Suburban. City/Country. Educated/Uneducated. Democrat/Republican. Public school/Private school. Fit/Fat. Christian/Muslim. Believer/Unbeliever. Jew/Gentile. Single/Married. Extrovert/Introvert. Sales/Engineeering. Look close enough and you will find the god you actually worship. The path chosen defines your salvation, your god, as you must justify all that has been sacrificed or chosen. This is the constant hunt for meaning, which morphs in desire and changes its targets but always remains the same in its need to craft a story that explains your choices.

It is not what you say or post or proclaim, it is what you do. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. A cross around your neck can be as meaningless as the conch shell in Ralph’s hands. The cross cannot be just near your heart, the cross must become your heart. It is all about surrender. You can stop trying to save yourself. That’s the story, that’s the message. It’s not “be yourself” or “you deserve to be happy” or “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” The message is: surrender to win.

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It’s time we talked about Uranus. It’s not easy to bring up Uranus, but Uranus is an important topic, more than you realize. No, no, not the planet. I mean Uranus. I’m referring to the god of Greek mythology, also known as Father Sky, born out of Chaos by Gaia, Mother Earth. He’s one of the top gods of the lower-case ”g” variety.

The greatest coincidence in word history for any eight year old boy is the collision of modern English with the name of this Greek god, Uranus. By sheer passage of time and happenstance of language, a child can mock and blaspheme a word that the ancient Greeks thought held power. Uranus wasn’t always a funny word. There was a time when the word was spoken with seriousness, as Uranus and his offspring provided meaning in the ancient world. That’s where we’re going in this multi-part episode.

I’m not sure how many people know the story of Uranus. He is also called Ouranos, which is not nearly as funny, but I’m going to switch to using that version now, so I can shove off from the dock of toilet humor before this turns into Captain Underpants fan fiction.

An interesting thing about mythological systems is the order of how creation happened, or what came first. In Greek mythology, as written by Hesiod, the order of creation goes like this: Chaos was the first thing to exist. Followed by Earth (Gaia), then Tartarus (Underworld/Hell), then Love (Eros), and only after all that do we get to Heaven with Father Sky (Ouranos).

So the God of heaven, Ouranos, is the fifth thing to come into existence. Notice that this mythology does not have a pre-existing God. Ouranos is fifth so he didn’t even medal in this contest, or get to stand on the podium. Chaos and the Earth were first and they somehow begat the Heavens. This order of “begetting” is important.

I know what you’re thinking. This probably seems rather unimportant. It certainly did to me. After all there are many world mythology systems. Osiris in Egypt arrives in a similar path. Often the primordial first gods of other mythological systems arrive in a similar pattern.

When I read this years ago, I marveled mostly at how similar concepts seemed to crossover with the creation story of Genesis. In particular, the idea of chaos stood out. As I read more myths, the origin stories use of this idea “chaos” continued to appear and it fascinated me, but led me down a classic path of doubt where I began to see all religions as being the same thing with different names, different recipes of formless chaos mixed with different characters. There is always a flood story, too, in many cultures’ mythology. So like many people exploring our past and origin stories, I came to believe that various cultures arrived at a similar, solid story that satisfied our searching hearts and minds. This pulled me toward classrooms instead of churches, as the project became comparing religions, looking for parallels to explain away the truth claims, rather than looking closely at what the truth claims are saying.

After enough nights of looking up at the stars and wondering, I imagined the ancient peoples found their way to an origin story that helped them sleep at night. I recall doing this myself, leaning on the hood of a car and smoking cigarettes with friends, staring into the Milky Way on humid summer nights. Between drags, we would ponder the depths of the sky, just like any ancient person might. Underneath the billions of distant fiery stars, the cherry red end of the Marlboro would burn brighter than them all, and sooner or later someone would bring up the fact that staring into space makes us seem small, or better yet, “You ever wonder what’s out there?” or worse, “You ever wonder what the purpose of all this is?” That to me seems like the perfect leading question into the beginning of myth. Rather than dig too deep though, we’d move on to talk about something else, usually girls we liked, which was at least a topic closer to earth.

Once I started reading the old stories, perhaps made up by ancient smokers laying on the hood of their chariots, I started to see a remarkable similarity in the stories around the world. So I thought it was all quite simple. We just needed a story to make sense of the unknown.

But as I returned later in life to those stories, some things began to stand out that seemed insignificant as a teenager. Having decided that the stories were nothing more than entertaining fairy tales from ignorant bushwhacking cavemen, I ignored the fact that these stories were told over and over again for thousands of years and these stories did not provide mere entertainment, but actually formed the rock of meaning in their lives. These stories attempted to give people something to stand on and make sense of their thoughts when they peered out onto the vast ocean, or looked into a gaping night sky, or survived a howling storm, or mourned the death of a child.

These stories had more depth and meaning to them than we tend to understand, because we consider our ancestors to be simpletons, at least until the Enlightenment. Many of us, including me, think that our current generation is the only one that is finally onto the truth. We still have origin stories, like the Big Bang Theory, which seems to be the most solid model that science has found. Science is always trying to chase down new origin stories, like the multiverse, or the idea that we live in a computer simulation like The Matrix. In essence, we are still staring into the sky and wondering the same questions, making us not all that different than the ancient storytellers.

The story of Ouranos being born out of Chaos, however, stopped me in my tracks one day, because I realized how different Hesiod’s Greek creation story actually is from the book of Genesis.

As usual, I’m late to the game. I don’t think I’ve kicked over any new rocks and found treasure but this struck me as significant. The key difference between the Greek story of creation and the Genesis story of creation is what came first. In the Greek story, it’s Chaos. In Genesis, it’s God.

I passed over this various times without thinking it mattered, but it does, because the root of the origin that the universe grows out of results in a different path. The order matters a great deal. If God was made, there is always the question of something before God. If God was first and made everything, including the chaos, then God is the final stop for all questions of existence, meaning, understanding, and purpose in this world. If God is first, then he is the answer to all questions. The buck stops with God, so to speak.

The order of which came first is critical, but so is the life of Ouranos.

Ouranos did not have omnipotent power. Nor did Gaia. Nor did Chaos, or Eros, or Tartarus. None of these gods were omnipotent. Ouranos is treated as the top dog, but he suffers defeat by his own children. He could not withstand a rebellion and is toppled by sub-gods. Ouranos is sat on the bench. A new god, in this case his son Cronus (or Saturn), takes over. The idea of an infallible, omnipotent god fades, because if Father Sky can be beaten, then so can the new god.

Again, you may just hear these stories and think this is minor, that it’s not a big deal, that it has no impact on our lives today, and you will move on. You may think these are just stories like “How the Tiger Got Its Stripes” but they are not. These are much bigger stories because they are foundational for the meaning of life. How the tiger got its stripes doesn’t affect how you feel when you lay back and look at the stars. But if you live in a world where chaos spawned the gods, instead of an omnipotent God creating order out of chaos, the foundation you build your life upon will lead to different patterns of living.

I think we naturally want to respond to these ancient myths like silly fables, like those of Rudyard Kipling or the Brothers Grimm. These old stories seem so distant from us, and even childish, but I think we are fooled about our level of sophistication by our indoor plumbing and iPhones. We are not unlike the ancient storytellers nearly as much as we think, and even the simple fables by Kipling and Grimm and Aesop have far more depth than we’d like to think.

The story of the Bible is different from that of mythology, and it’s also unlike any fable. Why? Because of the origin story. God exists first, and nothing defeats God. It’s actually quite boring in terms of drama, which is why studying mythology is fun. There are more characters, more variety, there’s love, there’s violence, treachery…it’s like the Sopranos or Game of Thrones.

Since the one God of the Bible never suffers defeat, there is never a power struggle at the top. There is a rebellion, but it is squashed and we hear about it only briefly. The books of Ezekial and Isaiah and Revelation discuss this rebellion a bit, but God is never defeated, and seems to never have been in any real danger of defeat. Why? Because he is the omnipotent creator God who created everything out of nothing. He brought all order to the chaos, doing so by his voice alone, and of course if he wanted to he could speak and destroy as well. God created the earth and everything else, and this is unlike the Sumerian, Greek, or Egyptian myths. The famous opening line of the Bible says it best:

“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth — and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters...” (Gen 1)

God is first, not created from something prior to him. God creates the heavens and earth out of nothing (also called ex nihilo, to sound fancy). The Greeks have it the opposite way. So do the Egyptians and Babylonians, as the gods are born out of chaos. The God of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity is not born. He just is. He is existence itself. This is why when Moses asks for God’s name, the answer is, “I AM.” There is no name, because he is being itself.

The funny thing about this is that I felt drawn into the Greek and Egyptian and Norse mythologies because of the characters and the conflicts. For a long time I thought the book of Genesis was boring because it lacked an exciting storyline like other mythological hierarchies, but there is a reason the book of Genesis doesn’t read like the Game of Thrones mythologies of the Greeks. The reason is that the rebellion is smashed. In the Bible, there’s no underdog upset. You might say that Cronus doesn’t win. Why? Well, the sub-gods don’t win, because they were never born. They don’t exist. Whatever rebellion happened, it’s over. God has no problem defeating it. We move on as if God had swatted a mosquito. The rebellion seems more like a nuisance event among God’s created beings, the angels, than something he is ever concerned about.

The great image of this is that God is like an artist, and the characters in the painting or book may attack one another, but they cannot attack the creator, because the creator is not in the painting or book. He’s outside of it, he’s bigger than the work of art. The example I’ve heard told is that you don’t see Shakespeare show up in one of his plays. Macbeth can’t kill Shakespeare, because Macbeth is a creation, not the creator. Macbeth cannot even fathom Shakespeare, let alone attack him. That’s like us with the one God. Fortunately, we are more than words on paper, so we can see hints and breadcrumbs that God has laid down for us, which is more than Macbeth could ever do. We also get to make choices, and Macbeth is stuck.

Rather than disturb God, the angels squash the rebellion. They remove the disgruntled leader, the shiny one, along with his other rebellious snaky friends. The rebels are heaved off the deck of heaven while God relaxes on the patio with some iced tea.

And this, finally, is what I want to discuss in this episode.

Cultures all have a creation story, and ancient mythologies also have a rebellion story among the gods. However, the order of creation is not the same, nor is the result of the rebellion, and these two things make a difference in how you see and interact with the world and other people. These foundational things can change how you find meaning in the world and how you explain events that happen in the world.

There is line from Jesus that is jarring in Luke 12, because only an actual divine being could even say these words: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” So there is a rebellion, but it’s over.

Nothing happened to God when the rebellion occurred. He is still the Most High God, the only God with any power. Now consider what happens to Ouranos in Greek mythology:

Uranus (Ouranos) was Father Sky, the Ancient Greek personification of the heavens and, for a while, the ruler of the known universe. Fatherless, he was conceived by Gaea alone, with whom he formed the primordial couple, thus becoming an ancestor of almost all Greek gods. However, he was a cruel husband, and he didn’t allow any of his children to leave the womb of their mother, which eventually led to a rebellion and his demise at the hands of his son, Cronus.

What is interesting is that Ouranos is mentioned as the ruler of the universe, before we was replaced by sub-deities. His own children replace him. This is common plot in myths. In most mythologies, an initial god, seemingly all-powerful, has his throne usurped by a more youthful and virile god, proving that he never was all-powerful. This is exactly what does not happen in the Old Testament.

Let’s just walk this path quick so we can jump ahead to Zeus and the time of Caesar, when Jesus walked the earth.

The pagan stories of a higher god being replaced by the other gods is a common one. Ouranos is overthrown by Cronus (a.k.a Saturn). In turn, Cronus is eventually overtaken by one of his sons, Zeus. We all know Zeus as the god who threw lightning bolts and acted like the Harvey Weinstein of Mount Olympus. When the Greek epics are written in the heroic age, Zeus is the ruler, and his children rule the cities of mankind (Apollo, Artemis, Hephaestus, Athena, etc). In other words, full-blast polytheism is in place, and the old primordial gods are all on the bench. Ouranos is dead or impotent or just missing in action. A similar story happens in the Sumerian stories with Anu and in the Egyptian stories with Osiris. They get toppled in a coup.

Why am I telling you this? Why on earth do I spend any time thinking of this?

In the story of Greek mythology, the portrayal of the overthrow of the elder gods by Zeus reads as a kind of progress. Zeus’s victory reads like a good thing. The successful rebellion of Zeus reads like a freedom-fighter story, like a Braveheart of the heavens, where William Wallace overthrows the the evil Edward the Longshanks. There’s a sense of propaganda in the stories, and obviously you can argue that for the Bible as well, as it’s advocating for the one God, and we’ll go into this shortly.

The gods of myth are seen as heroic. Some, like Hercules, are even called heroes, so of course the rebellion that brought the heroes must have been a righteous act. Heroes are to be worshiped because they are righteous.

But there is a story in here about the gods and heroes that is easily missed amid the victory champagne and backslapping hoopla. The ancient people, somewhere along the way, seem to have changed from worshiping one God to worshiping many gods. This is the opposite of the story of Abraham and his descendants, because they are going from many gods back to the one God.

This results in a major issue and fundamental discrepancy between cultures. To this day it impacts individual and national interactions. The difference is staring us in the face through the stories of the cultures themselves. The defeat of the rebellion makes the original God all-powerful for Jews and Christians. Conversely, the success of the rebellion in other mythologies makes the original God or gods weak.

In the case of Jews and Christians, this belief in one undefeated true God results in a different morality and expectations for life and the afterlife than that of the defeatable Ouranos.

Once I realized this, much of the Christian story started to fall into place and make sense, even the difficult parts.

The rebellion of the gods is actually a rebellion of the people, because the moment the people kill off the creator God in their stories, then you have a vacuum of meaning that must be filled with a sub-story. The lower gods are inventions, stories to explain away the uncertainties and unknowns of life. The reason we shrug off myth today is because its so apparent that these gods are invented. A child who laughs at the word “Uranus” doesn’t concern us, because we know that the myth was just a powerless invention of the past, like Zeus or any other deity. Uranus is a joke today, just like Zeus, because they never had any power to begin with.

When we kill the idea of “one God,” humans get creative. We pull the idea of god close to us, just like the people were attempting to do in the Tower of Babel. They wanted to reach god, but what they really wanted, the real goal, was to become gods. They wanted to make the one true God serve man, and if that was not possible, then they would make new gods. And that is what happened. It’s what happens today, in more subtle ways, less obvious ways.

When those building the Tower of Babel could not bring the Most High God down to the people, God “scattered” the people. Another way of saying this is that when they failed to control the one God, they withdrew from God and invented their own gods.

The reason why the Tower of Babel failed is not because of engineering limitations. The whole “tower” idea of a metaphor, but the meaning of the story is an explanation of how humans rejected the idea of a single God to rule them all.

The problem for people was that God doesn’t bow to human will. He carries out his will. Being human, that’s not a satisfactory answer to us. Thus, learning that we could not become God or make him do our will, we created new gods, ones that serve us. These gods don’t care what is in our heart. No, these gods only want sacrifice and we want control.

The problem with one God, with only one, is that not everyone can get what they want. If the one God made everyone happy, he would be a constant contradiction. Consider it this way: if two children are arguing over the same cookie, only one can eat it. Both cannot eat the cookie. They could split the cookie, but let’s just say it’s a small cookie, or if you want, change it to a paper dollar bill, which is something that cannot be split apart.

One will leave happy and the other will leave pouting. To take this into religious terms, one will win and presume God loves him. The other will lose and assume that God loathes him or has cursed him. One will feel righteous. One will feel victimized and abandoned. And both are wrong.

The history of the Yankees and Red Sox franchises illustrate this, as Boston fans assumed for 86 years that the team was under the “curse of the Bambino,” as it was believed that the baseball gods had smiled on New York and abandoned Boston after the trade of Babe Ruth in 1920. The Yankees received the cookie; Boston received a “curse.” While this was mostly considered a joke, people believed it and even asked modern witches to reverse the curse, and I would guess millions of prayers went up to God from Boston in those years. If any franchise appears to have been chosen, it is the New York Yankees, which is why many fans across America loathe the Yankees, because the Yankees have won the cookie (known as the World Series) twenty-seven times, with the next closest team, the St. Louis Cardinals, being at a mere eleven cookies.

We spend a great deal of time praying for sports teams to win, not unlike the ancient prayers and sacrifices in cities where they worshiped gods and goddesses. Interestingly enough, the ancient gods often had a mascot or animal representation like our sports teams do. Since sports is a way of life in America, when my team wins, I feel satisfied, as if the world is somehow right and just, as if God had directed things correctly. But that is not how I am supposed to understand the world if I believe in one God. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. This is how pagan gods worked, where they received prayers and answered them.

God’s will is not like this. His will is done regardless of which team wins, and it has nothing to do with my feelings on the matter. Whether I get the cookie or someone else gets the cookie, God’s will is done. That’s the way to understand the world and universe that has only one God. The correct response is to give thanks whether you receive the cookie or not, which can be difficult to do but is critical in understanding how the one God differs from the many gods.

To praise God for getting what I want is to slip into a worship of the slot-machine God, which is as false as Zeus. On the other hand, if I blame God for not getting what I want, then I’ve moved into rejection mode. I can slip into a passive-aggressive mode in order to fix or justify hurt feelings. When I perceive suffering, or perceive abandonment of God, I might reject God, wanting to hurt him by turning away from him, but it only ends in self-harm to me. Or I may go in search of a new or a different god that will support my desires. One way or another, I want satisfaction, which is not the same as praying for the one true God’s will to be done.

This split happens in Lord of the Flies, as the boy Ralph keeps order on the island initially with the symbol of the shell, the conch, holding it up as a representation of authority. The conch, beautiful in itself, represents the old world that the boys came from before their plane crashed on the island. This old world seems to be a kind of heaven in their minds, where adult authority held a stabilizing, centralized force in their lives. They have this past civilized world represented in the conch. The conch is like a sacred object, but it is only an object. Yet it seems to have power as when it’s produced, order is brought to the meetings. However, as soon as division begins, Jack and his pack of choir-boy hunters decide that they want to live by a different set of rules. They want new rules, but really, they just want to rule, to win, to be in charge. They don’t want Ralph and his appeal to an empty authority that no longer exists or has any teeth. The weakness of Ralph is exposed, as his authority has no actual power to discipline or enforce rules. In other words, the conch is exposed as a mere symbol, or idol, with no real power, and soon it’s tossed onto rocks where it shatters into pieces.

Jack and his hunters move away to the other side of the island and create a new god, a god that encourages competition and hunting, mainly because Jack likes hunting. Whatever Jack likes becomes what the god likes. He has created a new god out of thin air, without having so much as a online bachelor’s degree in theology. By the mere speech of Jack, the power of Ralph’s side of the island is declared dead. If Jack cannot break the rules, then he will make the rules. His power is ensured by making sacrifices to the new god. Of course, Jack’s god also has no power, because as soon as someone else wants to break the rules, they can go and create their own god. This is how gods come to be. They are power moves. They take power by force. What Jack offers the young boys is safety and strength, through the willingness to commit violence to retain power. This calms the fears. His idol is a dead pig’s head placed on a stick that has been “sharpened at both ends” which is emblematic of what Jack will do to anyone that crosses him.

This is how gods of myth come into existence. This is also how organized crime comes into existence. Weakness and fear and rejection of existing authority leads to an overthrow. The old authority must be replaced, so human or divine gods are invented, conjured naturally by our desires and fears, in order to explain the universe and the world we live in. Most of all, we want something to restore a sense of order to calm our nerves about the unknown. This is why chaos is at the beginning of all creation stories. Chaos scares the hell out of us.

These gods have no power, except in our minds, because they only exist in our minds, with perhaps an object that we venerate as the embodiment or personification of the idea, like a golden calf or bull that we read about in the Bible. But like the golden calf or bull, the conch shell and the pig’s head are objects that have no actual power. They work for a while, until the next disgruntled group or tribe or nation takes over by force. The void cannot be stared into for long without a guardrail, or you will fall into the chaos and die. We need a story, a reason, a meaning, a vision, a protector. You can choose the one God, or you can choose invented gods. People will choose that which serves their desires and assuages their fears.

These guardrails, these minor gods, are still with us today, perhaps even more so than they were in ancient times. We just don’t use golden statues or bloody sacrifices. (Well, we do actually, but that’s for another day).

In the end of the book, Ralph is the only boy who has not converted to the new idol on Jack’s side of the island. Ralph is the only believer in the old system who is willing to stand up for the world symbolized by the conch, the rightly ordered world, as he sees it. He ends up being hated and hunted because he will not join Jack’s side. Most interesting in the end is that he is saved by a Navy ship, an officer, and while this seems to vindicate his appeal to the authority of the old world, the author makes this closing scene a masterful conclusion, because the larger world is in a nuclear war, a world war. The same battle that is happening in microcosm on the island is playing out in the larger world. The conclusion shows us that the island is no different from the adult world, because the Navy ship is on its way to destroy other people, other nations, when it stops to save the boys on the island. The naval officer seems to bring back civilization, but in reality he is doing exactly what Jack was doing to Ralph, which is hunting other men, just in a more polished and “civilized” way. Power justifies itself through whatever means necessary.

Of course, everyone who ever read this book in middle school or high school is told that the weak boy, Simon, is the Christ character, and before Simon is killed, Jack tells him, “You’re not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island.”

That’s exactly what rejection of God sounds like, from the Garden of Eden to the death of Christ in the Gospels. Adam and Eve reject God because it’s more fun to eat the fruit. The Pharisees and the Romans reject God because it’s more fun to be in power than to surrender. The cold reality is that to have “fun” and to eat all the fruit, the one true God must be rejected or killed off, even though in reality God can never be killed off. God doesn’t go away or diminish because we pretend he’s not there.

To believe in the one true God leads to a different set of rules, ones that are not as fun, which is exactly why it irritates us so much. It chafes us to know that there is only one answer, one truth, because then we can’t always get what we want.

The rules of the one God disallow the “fun” things, calling them “sins,” but the rules are all there for good reason and not arbitrarily. This is the root difference between worshiping one God versus many. The one God has specific rules, while the invented gods can have whatever rules the inventors choose, and even then the rules are malleable.

The invented gods can spin off into many new versions, like spinoffs that get worse and worse. We have all seen how spinoffs devolve into madness. Anyone that watches TV knows this. Think of the shows that flung out like radioactive isotopes from Law and Order and All in the Family and Happy Days. They become progressively worse, further from the inspired original, with only a profit motive as the muse for the writers. This is what it feels like when you read some of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Don’t get me wrong, I love the stories, but you can’t take it seriously as coming from the heavens. By the time you get to Arachne, the spider, goddess of weaving and sewing, you have then entered into the same realm as Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill or Goldilocks or Little Red Riding Hood. I’m not making fun of the story of Arachne, I’m just saying that the mythology is so obviously invented that the whole tree is poisoned if you are trying to sell it as divinely inspired. This is what makes the Gospels so different, because there is no sense of fairy tale or fable about it. The Gospels are not written like tales, they do not read like fables, and in the overarching story of the whole Bible, the more you read it, the more strange and more connected it becomes.

This has an enormous impact on how you interpret what is truth. The response from Pontius Pilate to Jesus is the great example of this difference in cultures and worldviews. After Jesus states that he has come to testify the truth, Pilate’s response is the perfect summary of someone living under the pantheon of Rome. Pilate says to Jesus, “What is truth?” (Jn 18:29-38)

This line could be the thesis statement of a culture that worships many gods. A better line could not more fully describe the Roman worldview of Pilate’s era. Really, most Americans today might give the same response. Pilate speaks “his truth” in that the truth is kind of gray, kind of movable, kind of like a Protean and shape-shifting god of ancient mythology. For Pilate, there is no truth but what power declares it to be. Truth is the first casualty as soon as we rule against the one God in favor of many gods. There is no truth except what we decide, and who decides? He who holds power. But, for those that believe, there is truth. There is one undeniable truth. And Pilate is looking at that truth when he tosses off this line. It’s so rich in meaning. Pilate is staring at the truth. He’s telling the truth that truth doesn’t exist. There is a sense of comedy and tragedy all at once here. Pilate is lost, but he’s so close to the answer. For Christians who believe in the one true God, Jesus is the truth. He is the way, the truth, and the life. He is the complete and total truth. But Pilate cannot see it, because he is spiritually blind. He is blind not only because he dwells in the indoctrination of a Roman world with many gods, but more likely because he is blinded by his own ambition and earthly power.

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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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

The desire to look and feel young goes back a long way, as in all the way to the beginning. Death is our primary fear that drives so much other behavior, we will do anything to stave it off. Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, said, “…what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” This attitude might have made Socrates a good match for my fictional woman with the cursed bananas, although he was not recorded as being attractive at all. She may have swiped left and passed on him.

If you doubt that we are chasing youth, just read or watch advertisements. Yesterday I was on the treadmill, chasing my own fountain of youth, and I could see a TV in the distance.

It showed a series of advertisements and infomercials: An infomercial with the late Larry King showed the incredible life-saving benefits of “Prostagenix,” a prostate supplement. Like any good snake-oil, having the letter X in the name goes a long way, as many supplements go this route, especially those marketed to men who are either obsessed with strength or desperately trying to hang on to the glory days of youth. Here’s a sampling of ‘X’ named companies and products that might give me eternal youth: Nugenix, Bodydynamix, NO XPLODE, Nitraflex, Oxide Booster, Vapor X5, XTEND, Shotgun 5X. All of these ‘X’ names sound technical and give me the impression of deep science revelations that could very well conquer death. Cellucor C4 is literally named to sound like an explosive made by a biomedical lab. Then there are things like Total War and Bucked Up, which sound like supplements that the Greek gods Ares and Priapus would take, except the Olympian gods don’t need to supplement anything because they are myths that don’t age. They are not real. The myths of ancient Greece are not even written like the Gospels where clearly Jesus and the Apostles lived in a specific time and place. The Greek gods were obvious stories meant to match specific phases of life, and seasons of the year, and human experiences. But as men, we would really like to be pinned to certain gods as if it were a permanent buddy-system, so we can stay in our twenties and thirties. The problem is, one day you must switch from taking pre-workout biotech chemistry elixirs to “please just keep me alive” prostate health supplements. Talk about humbling, but it comes for us all sooner or later.

The next infomercial was an ad for a battery-powered device that sprays tanning dust onto skin, and apparently this is targeted to women. The “Breeze” device ad showed middle-aged to elderly women being transformed into young flowers of the field by an application of orange dust. The ad itself was so airy and bright that I had thought perhaps this infomercial had been recorded in the same room that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about in the The Great Gatsby, when Nick the narrator first goes to East Egg and realizes how the rich, young, beautiful people live:

The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. (from The Great Gatsby - Chapter 1)

That was the look and feel of the infomercial setting. However, the spraying of this paint on faces seemed very unnatural amid the hyper-natural, if not heavenly, atmosphere of the white-clad studio. As the women sprayed the dust onto their faces I eventually thought of the phrase, “From dust you came and to dust you shall return,” but I never considered the dust would be orange.

Finally, someone turned the TV to ESPN, the channel that dedicates all of its time to celebrating youth and glory. The first advertisement that I saw was about low testosterone, with two aging legendary sports figures pitching the sale. In their obvious post-retirement leisure time, having achieved much success and notoriety through physical prowess but clearly not enough money to avoid getting lured into endorsements, the athletes casually stroked golf balls down the driving range, looking confident and strong. Their faces were slightly weathered from the march of time and, of course, their gritty play on the baseball and football fields. *wink* One of the greatest baseball sluggers of my lifetime, Frank Thomas, discussed the need for testosterone supplements with Doug Flutie, the plucky underdog quarterback who threw arguably the greatest Hail Mary touchdown pass in history. Their nonchalance and openness about aging signaled that it was no big deal to admit their bodies were changing. Sagging energy and muscles - that was normal! Floundering virility in the bedroom did not get mentioned openly but between the lines the word “flaccid” seemed to hide. The closed-captioning read like a parent talking to an adolescent about puberty. Paraphrasing the message, I read this: “Hey bud, it’s ok that you can’t hit home runs and drink hard and have sex all day any more. Neither could we. That is, we couldn’t until we started taking these pills and powders. You can do it, too, friend, with this product.”

In the 1990s, the snake oil and cure-all elixirs were not so dressed up and well-marketed. In fact, I think the 19th century hawkers of cure-alls, like those portrayed in the Little House on the Prairie had a better story for selling than what I recall in the 1990s. The horny goat weed and aphrodisiacs, not to mention “energy boosting” ephedrin, not only sounded like snake-oil but even looked like it. You could buy things at the gas station, either in the bathroom vending machine, or discreetly at the register. There was the courtesy at the checkout line where the cashier would kindly not make eye contact as the customer said, “Just the soda and candy bar,” as he furtively snatched a packet of horny goat weed and added it to the pile. But today, the sale of Dr. Porkenheimer’s Boner Juice is wrapped in very attractive marketing, with legendary, fatherly ex-athletes doing the shilling. Going back to that difficult reference to “boiling goats” from an earlier episode - isn’t it fascinating that the book of Exodus prohibits Canaanite fertility rituals that also involved goats, which we consider to sound archaic? Yet in our sophisticated, enlightened time, many people still take something called “horny goat weed” to preserve youth and virility, and it can be found in various supplements under more gentle names today. Now we have official pharmaceuticals from major corporations stamping approvals on snake oil to increase virility. Pfizer has replaced the ritual of the boiling of the baby goat with lab work, and again, if Exodus were written today, the warnings about joining the surrounding culture would be different.

I think we all owe an apology to used-car salesmen, because everyone knows that the used car salesman is trying to make a dollar and will try to squeeze blood from a turnip, or more appropriately, a contract out of a lemon. But the real snake-oil salesmen today are very polished, very smooth, with terrific stories and targeting and know exactly which insecurities we need to feed. How do they know? Because our private thoughts have been purchased from our phone data. In fact, I think that used car sales is now one of the few honest trades left amid the whitewashed tombs known as corporations, where externally virtue is portrayed through marketing, while the real business operation ruthlessly seeks wealth and consolidation of power. The polish and shine of Google and Amazon advertising is like putting a silk hat on Jabba the Hut.

Let’s get back on track.

What’s interesting, once again, is that the Garden of Eden story can be seen in advertising. Did you know - the word “serpent” could alternatively be translated as “the shiny one”? The shiny one is slippery and deceptive. I think this would help people get over the stumbling block of the “talking snake” problem, because when we are talking about something difficult like temptation and sin, we don’t necessarily think of a serpent, but everyone knows deceptive, slippery people, and that is what the enemy really is. The snake works great for children and people who have returned to faith, because the understanding of the serpent as a slippery, deceptive being makes sense. But for the fallen away, the idea of a talking animal makes them raise their eyebrows in doubt.

Marketing departments know exactly which wound to poke for each of us, and we all have one or more. We have been carrying along lies our entire lives: that we are unattractive or stupid, or we have fears of powerlessness or shame or rejection. What we want is to feel loved and respected, healthy and safe. Thus, the best way to sell something is to remind us that we are none of those good things, that our wound is still a major problem, and that we could get over that wound if we just bought or ingested a product. This is exactly why you don’t get Superbowl ads simply showing Jesus hanging on the Cross for thirty seconds - it’s just terrible for sales, even though he is the only thing that actually can heal every single one of those insecurities and wounds.

But let’s go back to Socrates for a moment, as he is perhaps one of the most admirable people to ever walk the earth. By his own words, he felt that celebrating health and physical accomplishment while pursuing wisdom made for the most worthwhile pursuits. That seems difficult to disagree with for a modern person today. Diet, health, and exercise - these are the obsessions of so many now, along with knowledge. So for a moment, I just want to compare Jesus and Socrates, as both of these men changed the world, but in quite different ways.

The fact that Socrates was recorded as being unattractive is interesting. Someone felt the need to write down that he was a “squat, unattractive, barefoot man… with bulging eyes, large lips, and a pot belly.” We never hear anything about Jesus, as to whether he was handsome or what his eyes looked like. Every portrayal of him shows the effects of poverty and fasting, and rather than physical attributes, the one thing we know for sure is that he is universally depicted as having humility. The reason I bring up Socrates here at the end of this series is because there are similar parallels in the lives of him and Jesus, but Socrates saw bodily health and wisdom as the heights of human pursuit, whereas Jesus advocated for humility and prayer, with the body only needing its “daily bread.”

Most interesting of course, is that both of these men became martyrs, but Jesus’ choice to accept death was very different from Socrates. On the night before he died, Jesus talked about drinking from “the cup” that symbolized his suffering. This is a curious word choice, as 400 years earlier, Socrates chose to die by drinking from a literal cup of tea containing deadly hemlock. Jesus talked about drinking from the cup, but his cup, his trial and death, was far more brutal and awful. Socrates’ death came like a deep sleep, while Jesus’ execution came in wave after wave of pain and abandonment. At seventy years old, the death of Socrates happened like a sophisticated modern euthanasia, where he was chilling with friends and giving a fine speech. Jesus accepted a much different cup, not with one poison in it, but with every possible poison in it. The cup Jesus consumed contained all the ugliness of human sin. These cups could not be more different, despite both cups leading to the same ending of death by execution. Socrates gives a hopeful speech in the end, with honest words about his uncertainty about an afterlife: “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.” Then he drinks the poison tea. He goes into death almost fearlessly, it seems, and those around him are struggling more than Socrates.

Jesus on the other hand is abandoned and in a suffocating agony for hours. He doesn’t have a speech, but instead has the “last seven words” from the cross, which includes his prayers for his tormentors (“Forgive them, for they know not what they do”) and he gives total certainty about the afterlife to the the good thief next to him. He tells the thief, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

These two endings are only the same in the martyrdom, but not at all in the details or message or expectations.

So how did Socrates feel about the self, the body, and growing old? His own words (or the words of his student, Xenophon, who wrote the words) tell us that Socrates may not have fully bought into the “grain of wheat” parable. The Greek was a caretaker of his body, and a lover of exterior beauty. Socrates was a man who spent the day at the gym and arguing about wisdom. Frankly, it sounds like a great life. Lifting, praying, and intellectual pursuits? Sign me up.

Years ago, the realization dawned on me that Jesus never attended a gym. There is not one parable about lifting rocks on leg day or running a 10K, and he never advises anyone about a low-carb diet. In fact, he’s always talking about carbs, not protein. Bread. In particular, he says he is the “bread of life” when he introduces the institution of the Eucharist. But Socrates is known to have spent much of his time at a gym. I’m just guessing here, but Socrates was likely jacked if he spent all his time at the gym. Perhaps he had sweet traps and triceps, like the people you can observe at every gym in America who carry around gallons of water and grunt while bench pressing six plates. Jesus is often portrayed as a thin, nearly sickly looking man, and the idea of him even entering a gym to exercise is laughable. There is just no way Jesus would be a gym member.

So I laughed. And then the sense of humor wore off. I stopped laughing because I realized I’d stumbled across a major problem.

I realized that every time I go to the gym, I am not dying to self. No, not at all. At the gym, I am watering and fertilizing my wheat plant, as if I were going to live forever. I’m supposed to be letting the seed die and fall to the ground, but I’m spending lots of time on a dryland version of the Fountain of Youth. Every moment spent at the gym is not living in line with the Gospel. The gym is all about me, and truly most of us attending the gym have vanity and lust scribbled all over their bodies. For goodness sakes, the walls are covered in mirrors! Then I realized: I am just like the woman with the cursed bananas! (Bet you wonder how this all tied together, right? So did I.)

I enjoy the gym. I like going to the gym. But as I imagine I’m aiming to live a Christian life, I’m fooling myself. The trick I always forget is that just when I think I’ve escaped the devil, that is, the “slippery one,” that’s when he’s probably steering me exactly where he wants me to go. Best to assume that he is somehow tempting me, and pray for God’s mercy, and since I always need help, it never hurts to ask for the angels and saints to join me, or to ask for Mary to intercede and crush his nasty head with her heel. The spiritual combat we all have to face has far better moves and more skill than both professional wrestling and Ultimate Fighting Championship combined, so it is wise to call in the whole crew, even if only a false alarm in the end. Perhaps it’s only a cat stuck in a tree, but I call the fire department, ambulance, and police. To ask for God’s will to be done often requires it, especially when my own will wants attention.

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So how exactly do you return to the faith of a child?

How can you get over these textual difficulties? How do you even make sense of your “rebellion” against your childhood faith, when it may not seem like a rebellion at all, but rather an awakening to truth?

Asking questions can be the very thing that drives you away from faith, as reason alone seems to call for finding truth elsewhere. You have been lied to, and now the time has come to correct it. The authority over you has been revealed to be a fraud, just to keep you in your place.

Do you know what this is? Do you recognize where you have heard this before?

This is the temptation and the fall of man. The serpent tells Eve this exact message, persuading her that God is hiding the truth in order to keep humans lower and lesser. The snake says, “God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil.” (Gn 3:4-5)

I’ve said this many times, but if you had told me back in college that in my forties I would be quoting Genesis and telling others about how the serpent talking to Eve makes total sense, I probably would have jumped off a bridge. I’m not even exaggerating. Ok, maybe a little. But I was in full-blown Thomas Paine mode, and teetering on Richard Dawkins’ atheism. Any book I picked up regarding Genesis would have been to argue against it or mock it as fairy tales, because I was completely convinced that evil portrayed as a talking snake was only a scare tactic for those in authority wanting to keep control over people.

But then life happened. In those days of life, I came to realize that there are falls that we must pass through. Every person who has ever lived must pass through the fall, or falls. If you don’t think you’ve encountered the fall, you either haven’t reached it, or you may need to hike longer yet. The third option is that you have had the gift of faith, like a child, from the beginning and never lost it. Those are the most fortunate people, but the rest of us must reach the fall.

The fall is the oldest trick in the book, the oldest temptation, which is exactly why it’s in the beginning, right after the creation stories. Adam and Eve are you and me. They are these naive childlike humans who reach the age of reason and start to ask questions about the world. The experience of Eve describes my own thoughts and feelings once I reached middle-school age. No longer content with the answers I was given, I started wondering about the narrative and rules that had been handed to me, and once I started down that path, the fall happened. I didn’t eat a literal fruit, but asking questions and getting unsatisfactory answers I veered into doubt, thinking much like Thomas the Apostle and Thomas Paine the revolutionary. The lack of logical explanations increased my doubt, shaking the foundation, and coupling that doubt with the weight of hypocritical adult behavior that I could observe, the rock teetered toward tumbling down the hill. The last nudge came simply from my own desire to push the rock over the edge.

The flow of the fall goes like this:

There is something I want. I know I shouldn’t do it, as I’ve been told not to or advised not to. The idea occurs to me that the rules don’t apply, that I see others breaking the rule, and that the rules are really only for “bad” people. If I really want to do it, I’ll find someone to do it with me, or research for some book that tells me it’s ok to do. But really, if I see others doing it and not being struck by lightning then it must be fine; others have already jumped the fence and the bull has not gored them to death. Then the temptation comes more alive. Why am I prohibited from this thing? What’s the big secret? I am coaxed into moving the desire outside of my head and into action. With nervousness, the threshold is crossed. The fall is complete. Now I have knowledge. The knowledge of those who were already doing it suddenly belongs to me.

The musical Into the Woods has a song by Little Red Riding Hood called “I Know Things Now” that dives right into this fall. The lyrics contain all the good stuff from Eden. She rejects motherly advice as she falls for the wolf’s seductive invitation. After being swallowed by the wolf she realizes that mother was right, and then needs someone to save her from the darkness.

Mother said, "Straight ahead," Not to delay or be misled. I should have heeded Her advice... But he seemed so nice!

He seemed so nice! The wolf and serpent in the Garden of Eden seem to have something in common. Almost like these are parallel tales instructing us with an allegory here. Little Red Riding Hood and Eve could probably go to coffee together and hash this out for several hours. “Wait,” says Eve, “did you say a talking wolf? That’s so weird! I ran into a talking snake.” Little Red Riding Hood replies, “In the woods?” Eve says, “No, a garden.” Anyone overhearing the conversation would assume they are baked or tripping, as the two of them would be in total unison once they got into the details.

Back to the song from the musical, Little Red Riding Hood continues:

I really got scared, well - excited and scared - but he drew me close and he swallowed me down, down a dark slimy path, where lie secrets that I never want to know, and when everything familiar seemed to disappear forever.

Oh, Little Red, I don’t think the sacred writer of Genesis could have said it better. Paradise lost, innocence swallowed up. She took the plunge and the fun wore off. In the fairy tale, her mother tells her to run nice and straight to grandmother’s but the wolf distracts her, and uses the same tricks that the serpent in the garden uses, and those are the four D’s: Deceit, diversion, division, and lastly despair. The wolf distracts her, showing her all the lovely flowers of the woods, and Little Red thinks that perhaps granny would like a bouquet. The wolf suggests that she pick some flowers in order to deceive her about his real aim, which is to eat her. So Little Red is diverted from her path and suddenly divided from her mother’s instructions, she is acting against the one that loves her, thinking the kindly wolf means well. A few hours later she is betrayed, swallowed up, and in a dark and hopeless place - despair. (The musical Into the Woods has a lot of searching for fulfillment, as characters fall into despair over their unfulfilled desires…I could talk about it all day because fairy tales and fables tell us more about ourselves than we would ever suspect, just like the book of Genesis).

Little Red Riding Hood finally comes to knowledge, and not just the knowledge of the fall, but knowledge of the solution. She knows that someone must set her free. In this case it’s the huntsman, who slices open the wolf and sets the girl and grandmother both free.

So we wait in the dark until someone sets us free, and we're brought into the light, and we're back at the start.

What a great line, and the writer of it is not a Christian. This is where these “seeds of the word” are all over the culture, even in the most secular places like Disney films. What is happening in this fairy tale? She falls, she despairs, she is saved by someone who undoes the mistake. He slays the wolf, and from her darkness she is “reborn” into the light of the world. I mean, she is literally reborn, cut from the wolf by C-section, and then she is “back at the start.” What is the start? She is once again a child. She has returned to childhood. Does any of this sound familiar? She has fallen and is reborn into the light, saved by a savior, and once again a child. In fairy tales, we are close to touching scripture stories and don’t even know it, but this is why fairy tales and fables never die.

Little Red goes through the fall and restoration rather quickly, while we may linger long in the belly of the wolf. This is because once the falling sequence begins, it becomes comfortable, the action can quicken, because the authority, now exposed as a fraud, holds no sway. If we believe our mistaken path is good, we will follow it for a long time. Unfortunately, the act that you believed would “open your eyes” to knowledge and make you into a god, can never deliver because it was based on a lie to begin with. But we will tell ourselves there is always a next action, a further step, something a bit more extreme or different, that may be the key to seeing the fullness of life, where we will unlock the god level.

The quote of Thomas Paine saying, “My own mind is my own church,” is simply his self-deception carried to its logical conclusion. He has elevated his own thoughts, temptations, and desires to be sacred and godlike. To call your head a church is to proclaim yourself a god. There’s no other way to interpret that statement. Even though I always mention how shocking Jesus’ declaration of his divinity is, that calling himself God is incredible, in reality billions of us do this daily, just in our own minds. Thomas Paine is a terrific author to read because he celebrates his fall so openly that it’s like a dissection of doubt, splayed out for us to review. I like writers who do this, because they show what the mind is like without the gift of faith. Never forget, that faith is a gift, one that is given to us, but we must ask for it, and Thomas Paine lacked the gift and I suspect he didn’t ask for it, because he thought it was for suckers and fools, just as I did before I came up against difficulties that could not be overcome without help outside of myself. Maybe he never felt boxed in, trapped, or in the darkness like Little Red Riding Hood, Eve, and me. Whatever the case, for someone like Paine, or other writers who clung to an open rebellion against God, such as Charles Bukowski or Christopher Hitchens or Karl Marx, I suspect that power, fame, and recognition had something to do with it, and the root of all that is pride.

The secret that you learn once you turn is this: the thing that took you into the darkness, is how you will be purified. I’d really like to claim that idea as my own, but St. Bernard (not the dog) said it, and if you go to recovery meetings this is only a revelation to newcomers, as those who have passed through the bottom come to realize that without their vice they would never have reached bottom and been reborn to become free of the vice.

The great contradiction for us follows the path that Dante took in the Inferno, in arguably the greatest writing of all time, where midway through his life’s journey he found himself lost in the dark, and the only way to get to heaven was to pass through hell, and of course once he gets to the bottom of hell, seeing all the vices and sins human beings can commit, he emerges onto the mountain of Purgatory. Yes, he has to go down in order to go up. The trick of the serpent and wolf is that their false promises lead you to believe that sin will make you level-up to be like god, but sin actually takes you down, in a spiral, that slowly circles around. You can get stuck in that spiral for a long time thinking that the rock or crack you cling to is where you want to end up. Some stay there forever. But life has a way of pushing you down that spiral once you begin circling the drain, and ultimately you need to let go and pass through the drain, through the darkness, or you can never get back to the light.

This temptation in the garden that Eve faces is the moment before we depart from our childhood faith. Modern literary people would call this a “coming of age” story or “loss of innocence.” The moment in the Gospel of Luke where twelve year old Jesus is in the temple ‘asking questions’ seems included for a specific purpose. There are no other childhood stories of his life. So while I laser in on the fact that Jesus was “asking questions” in the temple as a signal of his coming of age, of the moment where many of us would take the first fall, the rest of the chapter in Luke tells us something important, as Jesus doesn’t take the fall (as I did).

When his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.” And he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart. And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man. (Lk 2:48-52)

The worried mother, Mary, reminds Jesus of the parental authority over him. In the response there is a whiff of rebellion in pre-teen Jesus. He instructs his mother about his purpose, about who he is, about who his real father is, but the critical turn back to obedience is made before he overrides his parents’ authority. The temptation of a normal person to rebel is strong; imagine being God, with infinite power, and having to obey a human. However, having already selected Mary to be the mother of God, he relents and obeys, and doing so, Jesus shows us how to avoid the pitfall of the fall of man. He keeps his childlike faith intact by listening and asking questions. When his mother gives him instruction, he obeys. He shows us how to live. There’s so much more to go into here, but let’s stick to the fall, that root sin of pride and the rejection of authority.

As for us regular humans, we want to disobey, so we do. We toss out authority and faith, sometimes at the same time, or sometimes gradually. Even if we don’t fully throw out faith, we only keep it nearby for when a lifebuoy is needed, because to live with the open faith of a child in a teen or adult world would make us seem like a freak. Consider how a high school senior would be received if he came to school excited about Santa Claus. He’d be treated like a moron, like Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin in the The Idiot. When I first rejected God, I had this notion of God as a myth like Santa Claus or Zeus. The problem here is that this is an immature understanding of what Jews and Christians mean by “God.” If my concept of God was so small that I could compare the creator of the universe to a man that brings gifts and lives in the world that he created, then I had no concept or understanding of the God that is being itself. The reason God says his name is “I AM” in Exodus is because there is no name for him, he is beyond our labels, but we need a word so we say God.

To protect ourselves, even if we still believe, we have to keep it hidden. After everyone else has stopped believing, we would hate to seem like a gullible fool, so we dust the small concept of God under a rug, thinking it will go away. One of the most surefire nudges toward the death of faith is when one of your closest friends, someone you trust, or an older person you admire either expresses their own doubts or makes fun of your gullibility.

I can think of several people that pointed out how gullible I was, not about faith, but about other ideas or notions. Once you have the wound of feeling like a gullible fool, you need to find a fig leaf to cover that. Cynicism is a giant fig leaf that can cover entire bodies - it’s like a frond more than a leaf. More people hide behind cynicism today than just about anything else because the cynic doesn’t trust and doesn’t hope. Wonder and enchantment have left the building. The cynic sees the conspiracy and ulterior motive in everything, because once bitten they are twice shy. The idealist who is exposed as gullible or foolish can retreat rapidly into cynicism as a defense move. The cynic appears bold but the fool who admits his faith and takes on insults for trusting in God has far more courage. Why? Because he is exposed. Openness to God means exposure and vulnerability, while cynicism is easy and effortless. The difference between the two can be seen in any classroom in America, where the student that raises his hand to ask a question is exposed and vulnerable to the back row cynics who mock the question and he who asked. But the cynic is the one riddled with fear, which is why the fig leaf is needed.

The cynic is a visitor who will enter your life on a “speak and destroy” mission, like a heat seeking missile, pretty much like a serpent in the garden or wolf in granny’s bed. The person may not intend to be the catalyst for your fall, but they will provoke you toward the rejection of authority, God, and all things sacred. The abandonment of the childlike faith is nearly unavoidable, but this fall can be the greatest blessing of your life if you do eventually return, if you get up again. Rising from this fall may take five years, twenty years, or you may be on your death bed before you can overcome it, like the good thief on the cross next to Jesus, or the many people who call for Last Rites after having fallen away from their faith.

Overcoming the fall takes time. We don’t go through this fall like Eve or Little Red Riding Hood in just a few pages. But once you fall, you may have to fall all the way down.

Jesus tells the Parable of the Two Sons, which I think applies to the return to faith. A dad has two sons. Dad tells the first one, “Get to work,” and the first son replies, “Up yours, Dad!” and doesn’t move, but then later he feels bad about it and goes out to the field to do the work. (In case you didn’t notice, I’m paraphrasing the dialogue here.) Dad then approaches the second son and says, “Get to work.” The second son says, “Yes, sir, right away, Dad, you betcha, I was just about to go do just that,” and then he doesn’t move at all and sits on his butt and doesn’t feel bad about lying to his father. What’s the message? The first son will be chosen. The second one is just trying to look good, just saying the right words, and talk is cheap. To Jesus, talk is always cheap because he knows your heart. Jesus actually tells the Apostles and Pharisees that the prostitutes and tax collectors will find heaven before those who say all the right things in the temple.

Wait. What?

The reason why the worst sinners find their way to Jesus is because their fall is so far and they hit the ground so hard. Wham! Drunks and addicts know this. They come to realize that they have rejected God because they feel his absence. God doesn’t provide the safety net, he lets them hit in order to jolt them back to life. The people who go wild in their fall, their coming of age, who throw out God completely during their age of reason, who choose their pride of life over God, these are the ones that become brutally aware of what has been lost. How do I know this? Because I lived it. As I said, the sin you like the most, will start the fire that purifies you. By falling I became aware, and addicts worldwide tell this tale. Addiction is a way to fall, and recovery is the rebirth, the return. Many are the ways to the path of addiction: drugs, alcohol, sex, success (or vicarious success through your children), gambling, lying, co-dependence, stealing, setting fires, inhalants, nicotine, gaming, shopping, cutting yourself, gaming, pornography, tanning, coffee, work, fitness, social media. Any addiction can get you there. You can fall to the bottom and hit the ground hard through any of these channels.

If you have an experience that mirrors the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the story of returning to home is powerful. For those who think of Santa Claus as the same as God, I have never met anyone who hits bottom and wakes up to realize that it all started when they rejected the jolly old elf. No, the comparison of Santa to God is for immature atheists, not for serious doubters. The awakening begins when you are cut out of the belly of the wolf by a creator and savior called God, big ’G’, not by a fat mythological character. But in order to be set free, you must give up, surrender, to give back authority to the loving embrace of God. And many people refuse to do that, claiming that they cannot, or are not ready.

My point in all of this is that in order to return to the faith of a child, you have to have abandoned the childlike faith in the first place, otherwise you would never have left that state. The faith of a child is what you see when the child sings and doesn’t care who is listening, or dances in springtime puddles. It’s having loud conversation in quiet waiting rooms, or running around outside naked without awareness that it’s illegal. The faith of a child means to be exposed and vulnerable and free, and to believe that Goldilocks really did eat the bears’ porridge. To return, you must be open. You must not care about your exposure and vulnerability, and trust that God’s will is being done regardless of what mockery comes your way.

Also, you can only return to something that you left behind.

I so often look at the Gospels and think of Jesus’ own life as the model for living, the perfect example of how we should live. What I’ve often wondered about is the eighteen year gap between twelve-year old Jesus being “found in the temple” and his baptism by John, which marks the beginning of his ministry.

Could it be, perhaps, that Jesus gives us the example in his own life, staking off a period of time when we venture out, when we mature. Aren’t these middle years precisely when the wheat plant is growing but not yet ripe? The grain of a wheat plant doesn’t exist until it is mature, therefore a grain of wheat cannot yet die. To mature and produce grain, a plant must go from childhood to adolescence and finally adulthood, and only then can grain fall to the ground.

To me this eighteen year gap in Jesus’ life story is speaking something to us. We know that Jesus did not sin in his initial temptation to rebel. He obeys his mother and keeps his faith. Of course he does; he’s God. But that temple story shows us how we were supposed to live to avoid the fall. Then the story goes dark for almost two decades, where we can assume he is working construction jobs with his earthly father, Joseph. Somewhere in there, Joseph dies and we know little else except for that around the age of thirty, Jesus emerges, and begins to speak and heal.

The baptism of Jesus is the first metaphor for us to observe in the grain of wheat parable, as baptism is being “reborn” in the water and spirit. As I mentioned before, the “unless a grain of wheat dies” message has two metaphors that can apply, if not more. The first is to be reborn, and the act of baptism fits like a puzzle piece.

The second metaphor is the literal death of the body and resurrection. The first death and rebirth is something we can carry out now. Only Jesus can lay down his life and take it up again. But baptism is the action we can perform here and now. In fact, we can be reborn every day. In fact, the purpose of the Sign of the Cross is to renew our baptismal vows every day. It’s not just a cool hand motion we Catholics do for kicks or to get attention. This is one of those things, so ancient in the Church, that we don’t even remember what it’s for, so we need to remind ourselves now and then. Check out the free e-book from Word on Fire on the Sign of the Cross for some illuminating insights.

Dare I venture into further interpretation? (I wish someone wiser than myself was here right now, like Trent Horn or Father Mitch Pacwa or Saint Pope John Paul II, to guide me back from the precipice of bad interpretation.)

Jesus knows that we are going to fall and turn away. He practically implies that you are lying if you can’t admit that you have turned away. Jesus, who knows our hearts, fires shots at the Pharisees for false representation. The accusation he makes at the Pharisees centers around them being clean on the outside but filthy on the inside. Nicodemus becomes confused with Jesus during their conversation about “rebirth,” unsure of the meaning. It’s so easy to bash on the Pharisees as Jesus points out their error, since they are so legalistic in following rules that they think that is all that matters, that no change of heart is needed.

The Pharisees are the protectors of the culture, so their behavior is following God’s will of the Old Testament. The Jewish people are always being hemmed in by other cultures, from the time of Canaan boiling their goats right up to the infiltration of Rome. The Pharisees are doing their best to keep the covenant, to save the traditional culture, to keep the Jewish people “set apart” from the pagan, polytheistic world that surrounds them. What great lengths Nicodemus and company go to in their defense of that culture. Then suddenly John the Baptist shows up and says everyone must repent and be baptized, and then Jesus shows up and takes it even further saying a full rebirth is required. None of this makes sense right away to Nicodemus or his colleagues because they feel that they are righteous, that they have never rejected God. Jesus comes to tell them, “Oh yes, you have.” The fact that Nicodemus doesn’t know he’s taken the fall means he is still spiritually blind. Why? Because he is so bloated with pride, whereas the prostitutes and tax collectors and Prodigal Sons of the world are all too aware of their own fallen nature so that they understand what Jesus is saying long before the educated and wealthy classes begin to understand.

What I’m trying to say is this:

How can you return to something unless you have gone astray in the first place? Jesus knows we will go astray. He knows that we already have gone astray, and that we’ll not just do it once, but repeatedly. It’s not just a middle-schooler or drunk college student problem. The problem is shared by all, in all ages and all phases of life. Again, if you believe that Jesus is God, then you must read everything he says as coming from God, and God knows everything written in Genesis because he himself beamed it down somehow to the sacred writer. He knows about the Fall in the Garden, he knows about our rebellion, and he’s all too aware of our attempts to hide from him.

So if Jesus, who was sinless, gets baptized at thirty years old, despite not needing to be baptized but to show us how to live and be re-born, might we not suspect that he is deliberately telling us (and here by us I mean myself): “Yes, I know you spent many years rejecting me. I know you turned away from me, and I saw you closing down all those bars and acting the fool. At least Little Red Riding Hood was only picking flowers for grandmother, but you were totally out of control. I also know how you mocked me, and said I was just an imaginary being like Santa Claus, just invented to control people. Oh yeah, I saw all of that, and more, especially the things that only you know about. But as you know now, I’m real. I’m here. I came for you as one of my lost sheep. I waved many signs in front of you that you chose to ignore. But I’m glad you are listening now, and that you can see me again. So follow me. From now on, I will lead you. Be baptized and believe.”

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Perhaps you’ve noticed, in his earthly life, Jesus did not live to be one hundred years old. He didn’t even live to be fifty years old. He lived to the age of thirty-three, or thereabouts. Thirty-three is a nice, medium, mature age, and he chose to die. At the age of thirty, be began this journey toward the cross. Now, I am about to go off the orthodox trail here, but I feel like there is a signal to us, a message calling from the silence of his years between being found in the temple at age twelve and his public baptism around the age of thirty. The fact that Jesus began his ministry at thirty is curious, because he talks often about spiritual rebirth. He talks about returning to the faith of a child. After the infancy narratives of Jesus are completed, the only glimpse we see of Jesus is when he is in the temple in Jerusalem among the elders. This is one of my favorite parts of all the Gospels:

“After three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions, and all who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers.” (Luke 2:46)

Jesus was twelve years old at the time, so to read this in 21st century American terms, he would have been a middle-schooler. As many parents know, and many of us may remember, middle school is roughly when the “age of reason” begins, not to mention puberty. A litany of questions and doubts enters the mind of a middle-schooler. Around age twelve, the tooth fairy and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are all deceased. The myths begin to be seen as scandalous lies used as a carrot-on-a-stick to lure kids into good behavior. And do you know what else can easily become a suspected fraud when a child attends the funeral of Peter Cottontail? Yes, the answer is God.

The “age of reason” is when we enter into a greater understanding of the world around us and begin to grow toward adulthood, which means that is when we start ‘asking questions.’ For the Church, the age of reason is when we are said to be morally responsible for our actions, since we can no longer play the ignorance card regarding knowing what is right and wrong. Interestingly, the Age of Reason is also the name of a book attacking Christian doctrine and the idea of miracles, written by one of America’s founding fathers, Thomas Paine, who argued for Deism, not atheism. What Thomas Paine questioned in his book is many of the same topics any middle-schooler with a curious mind will come across, as the mind, body, and soul go searching together for meaning in this world. Paine didn’t come up with anything new, he just articulated the doubts about miracles and his discomfort with difficult sayings in the Bible, and he wrote the book in his fifties, meaning he could organize his doubts much better than a twelve year old. Paine spent a life of rebellion, gaining fame in America for his pamphlets titled “Common Sense” which called for revolution, and then he went revolution shopping in France and thought it might be nice if they, too, overthrew the government and all Church involvement in society. From his own words, he said that churches and religions “…appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

Furthermore, he hated the Bible, calling it demonic: “Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.”

This is a perfect definition of the two-fold set of doubts that those coming into the age of reason and adulthood will be tempted by and want to investigate. First, the imposition of authority irritates, especially when the rules seem arbitrary. As teenagers grow and learn, they see adults that do not live up to the rules set forth, as hypocrites abound in all spheres, whether in work, church, or family life. The idea that authority is invented solely for purposes of control becomes an easy leap to make. If the models for authority are bad, or you have been repeatedly told are bad, then the association of authority as an evil oppressor can be enticing because it turns the doubter into a victim and a freedom fighter. In the years of doubt and questioning, the urge rises in all of us a stepson feels to scream at his stepfather, “You’re not my dad!” when it comes to any institution or any person that holds authority over us that constrains our behavior and thought.

The second onslaught of doubt comes from, yes, that same Old Testament that Marcion and millions of others throughout history have disliked. Every child reads the happy stories of the Old Testament. Children’s Bibles go from creation (wow!), to Adam and Eve and the cute serpent (they’re naked, lol!), to Noah’s saving ark (happy animals!) to David killing Goliath (the underdog wins!). And that’s about it. That’s the summary of the forty-six books of the Old Testament. I think both parents and children are ready to move right on over to the New Testament, to the non-judgemental, loving God, manifested in the person of Jesus.

The child has faith in these primary stories about Adam and Noah and David. Children believe them. This is the “faith of a child” that Jesus talks about returning to, where there is wonder and willingness to believe. Parents and children can have amazing discussions and talk through life lessons solely from these top-ten greatest hits, through these highlights of the Old Testament. Kids learn these stories because they aren’t yet ready to tackle confusing lines like, “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” (Ex 23:19) A child that hears a line like this may have some concern about what is for dinner, but will not likely care or even pretend to understand, even if you explained it. That this line has more to do with protecting Israelite identity so that they avoid becoming like neighboring tribes, in this particular case the Canaanites, who boiled a goat in its mother’s milk as part of a magic fertility rite, would not even enter their developing brains. Actually, it’s not that the child will be unable to understand it. No, the problem is that we adults don’t understand it. We can’t make sense of it ourselves, so we dumb it down and shove it to the back of the bookshelf.

Few adults can interpret or explain the backstory of the goat. It raises questions. Let me just consider a few of those questions that I can think of off the top of my head.

Why would anyone boil a goat in the first place? Who boils a goat at all? This is America. Beef won long ago, we don’t eat goat, so let’s go back further: why a goat? And who boils meat? I mean, boiling hot dogs and bratwurst makes sense, but no one would boil a steak unless they were mentally ill, and they certainly wouldn’t admit it. Have they considered a grill or a smoker? The taste would be much better. Where is this strange culinary event taking place? Is this in France? Why would you boil milk? What’s with the goat being “young”? Seems kind of cruel. I could see PETA being all over this. Was the goat alive before it was thrown into the pot? Is the goat boiled with hair? Are the hooves still on, or do those get lopped off? If so, what happens to the hooves? If it’s alive, does the goat bleat while boiling? I imagine it would make a really sad sound. At least you can’t hear a lobster bleat as it dies in boiling water.

Then there’s the context of where this line appears in the book of Exodus. The chapter is talking about harvest parties and bringing in “first fruits” from the fields and pastures to honor God, so that’s all fine and dandy. Makes sense: bring in offering to honor God, got it. But then it jumps right into a line about boiling goats! This line feels like some addendum or amendment to address a one-time event, like a version of the curse of the goat on the Chicago Cubs, where a man showed up with a pet goat showed up and said, “Them Cubs, they ain't gonna win no more,” which caused them to suck for decades, but in this case the man showed up, boiled a goat, and said, “That Israel, they ain’t gonna be Chosen no more.”

How would the average parent talk about this boiling goat verse with a child? Parents just want children to go to bed, not partake in Biblical interpretation by nightlight. The load of laundry, the permission slip for the school field trip, the dental bill, the property tax, the summer vacation plan, tomorrow’s meetings, the need for personal hygiene - all of these questions and issues outrank the problem that a boiled goat represented to the Israelites and the sacred writer of Exodus. We just can’t go into the details, so we stick to the easy things, the big things. There is a reason why the “main” stories are simple ones and it has to do with the same reason that fairy tales and fables are short and sweet with lots of imagery. It’s so we can remember them, while the details and the layers of these stories go far deeper, into places that a parent and child cannot easily venture into, but over the course of a lifetime, we encounter versions of these stories and takes in our very real world and experiences. But I’ll get to that later, because first we have to deal with the boiling of this baby goat.

These confusing lines are actually important, however, because every line has a purpose in the Bible. So for the record, now that I’ve expanded on this long enough that the goat could have finished boiling, what is the purpose of this line about boiling goats? The reason Israel does not boil goats in it’s mothers milk is actually quite simple. The fertility rite of the Canaanites goes against their worship of the one God. So this line, bizarre as it is, directly supports the Ten Commandments that Moses received just a few chapters earlier in the text. This interjection about the goat is about the first commandment: you shall have no gods before me. This prohibition of boiling is literally called out because these are the types of rules that keep God’s chosen people set apart from the pagans. Israel worships the one God, not the Canaanite or Egyptian or Persian gods. So not only do they outlaw boiling goats, but this line can be read as outlawing any pagan ritual or magic or sorcery.

But no child or middle-schooler will likely dig into the underlying meaning of strange verses like this. Most adults will never even consider looking (unless they enjoy it like I do), because it takes too long, the information is hard to find, and there is a game on TV or fingernails to polish. There’s not enough time! Isn’t there a fountain of youth we could drink from?

We lack the time and energy, so we abandon the strangeness of this cultural quirkiness. After all the goat was boiled some three to five thousand years ago, if not long before that. We feel that this goat has no relevance to us today. The Children’s Bibles present a kind of God that Disney could have come up with. In fact, the cartoon Bibles of today are likely the result of desperate Christians attempting to hold back the flood of Disney’s secular religion, as it aggressively evangelizes the world and steamrolls actual cultures and traditions, much like the Roman empire and Spanish conquistadores did, but without the sword. In fact, were Exodus being written now, I suspect it would have lines like, “Don’t worship your smartphone” or “Discard all Disney movies,” because the point is not about the specific ritual with the goat, it’s about any ritual (magic or otherwise) that tears apart the fabric of the Israelite community. Anything that diverts focus from the one true God is prohibited, therefore using magic to try to conjure up fertility is not allowed.

So that’s the first set of questions the budding doubter has to deal with, but the main hangup about the Old Testament is the violence, and by hangup I mean, we just disconnect the call. Click. Bye!

After we have passed through the dumbed-down gauntlet of tickly feathers in our modern Children’s Bible, we are in for a shock if we go searching in the actual Bible. If we ever go to the actual text (and most of us won’t, especially Catholics) we’ll find the snake in the garden of Eden, but he won’t be cute. The animal rescue story of Noah’s no-kill shelter ark becomes something much darker. And the peaceful and loving Jesus who passes from this world to the next requires massive pain and suffering to fulfill the new covenant.

The reaction for the light reader is to retreat or ignore the Old Testament because of the bloodshed and violence. This might be a wise move to preserve your faith, because many non-believers dive into the horrors and read deeply, only to determine that they cannot resolve a loving God with violence and suffering. The top objection to God is the existence of suffering in this world, since this seems converse to any argument against a loving God. Not diving into the pit and studying the Old Testament is sometimes a shield for people who put their complete trust in God. They know the truth, they have fully turned to God, and nothing you can say or tell or show them will disrupt that trust in God. This may seem like an ostrich, with its head-in-the-sand, but there is a reason for people who have been reborn to do this.

Why would someone appear to choose ignorance? Because they have received the gift of faith and will automatically tune out any reading of the Bible that does not enrich that faith. They will reject any reading that does not celebrate the “encounter with God” that the word represents to them. Many atheists have more Biblical knowledge than believers because they dig in and look closely, they have more education, and they are truth seekers. Truth seekers read deeply and believe that the only way to read is objectively.

Formerly, in my days of disbelief, I was fully on the side of calling out these ostriches. How could anyone not inspect the Bible and see the problems within it? Even when I wanted to give a reading the benefit of the doubt, it was felt too glaringly ignorant and foolish to believe, and after a few of those experiences I stopped reading the actual book at all and looked for authors like Thomas Paine, or writings from the Jesus Seminar, or John Dominic Crossan - authors who would confirm my suspicions. I recently spoke with someone whose faith was waning, and he told me he wanted to go find books that would cut through the apologetics and defenses. He wanted to find historical analysis and books that delved into the likelihood of the Gospel realities. He wanted a kind of “Bible as literature” approach and scientific approach to the Bible. I told him that his faith will go into hibernation or die if that’s the approach he takes, because he’s already decided. What he wanted was total confirmation for his faith, like Thomas the Apostle, and the entire prospect of having and keeping faith rests on the idea that you will never have that certainty. This is the great contradiction of faith and what makes people so crazy. Once you accept and adopt the mysteries of faith, or the grace of God gives you the gift of faith, then the leap is taken and people will defend and guard that faith with their lives, literally.

This is why the faithful seem so dense and dumb to non-believers.

Now, having come back, I completely understand why the ostriches act obtuse in defense of their faith. Not everyone has time or ability to do deep readings, but they know the faith is real, that the book is the truth, and even if they can’t understand everything they have total trust and will not allow anyone, especially someone that aims to destroy their faith, to even allow the words of doubt to enter their ears. Most of the re-born believers have already been down the road of doubt, so they know where it ends, and no argument or persuasion will trick them into falling again. Yes, they will fall into sin again, but they will not doubt God again.

This seemed crazy to me. I never understood it, until after I returned to believing and started reading a book that I could feel undermining my belief. I stopped reading that book, immediately, only finishing it later once I felt able to return. I actually recall feeling something urging me to stop reading the book. Then I knew I had crossed the leap into land of the ostriches. Since that experience, I recognize when the need to stop or to pray is near, when it must be done. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this one of the signals that the saints refer to when they talk about Spiritual Combat. Yes, it sounds crazy, but perhaps you know about this combat already, as you may have tried to quit doing something that you would like to remove from your life, only to find that you cannot, so you justify it as a cost of life, that every one must have a vice or two. After all, no one is perfect, right?

The truth is that the devil never bothers you while you are carrying out his will, but he will aggravate you terribly once you attempt to stop. For me, this has a real life illustration in tobacco usage and addiction, as I could not stop with my own willpower. In fact, tobacco was way ahead on inventing the self-driving car than Tesla or General Motors. What do I mean by that? Well, whenever I had decided to quit using tobacco, I would have built-up my resolve to quit and would even be telling myself in the car that I would not drive to a gas station to buy any tobacco. But to my utter surprise, soon I would be standing in line paying for tobacco products of one form or another. My car seemed to drive itself to the store. These almost felt like out-of-body experiences except I was clearly turning the wheel and signaling to turn into the gas station or grocery store. No matter how firmly I resolved to quit, I could not. No matter how fully dedicated to stopping this practice I proclaimed myself to be, the addiction took over. In the end, the only way I managed to stop using tobacco was the same method I learned and applied to stop drinking, which was prayer. Asking daily for strength and direction from a Higher Power is how it started, and it works, and still works. My car no longer drives itself. This power to change through prayer made no sense. Nothing made sense, after all of the extended efforts and books and nicotine gum and pills and therapies - none of that worked. The one thing I never thought would work not only worked for one type of vice, but works for all types of vice. If this experience happens and you begin to believe in that Higher Power as having real, inexplicable power, you may make the leap from generic Higher Power to believing in God and soon the entire Apostles’ Creed. And then you’re in trouble. You know you can never go back, nor do you want to go back, nor will anything, come hell or high water, separate you again from the loving God who came looking for you, reached out, and scooped you up.

This is why believers may not read as deeply as educated doubters. They never want to lose the gift of faith again. No Old Testament story can dissuade them. Take Samson, the maniac from the book of Judges. Even if Samson slaughtered 1,000 Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone and acted like a total jerk before and afterward - even that will not deter the faithful, because they may not know exactly why it’s important, but they know that story is important.

Once you start asking for the Holy Spirit to help you read the book, and you read the book seeking faith, thinking “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.” I have to repeat this often, but faith is a gift. Those that don’t have faith literally cannot read it as an “encounter with God.” This is not to irritate or mock either side of this question, it’s just a fact that the gift of faith changes your entire approach to how you read the word of God. If you are coming in to find doubt, you will find more reasons to doubt. If you are reading to boost faith, you will boost your faith. It’s like the saying, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”

Various anti-Christian websites have done the work of extracting the most cruel scenes of the Old Testament so that we don’t have to do any scrounging around. These lists are posted online for even the most casual doubter, from middle-schooler to full-blown Thomas Paine, so that he or she can confirm their suspicions, that yes - the Old Testament violence is in there. If you are looking for the angry God who tortured Job, or the Judges who slayed the enemies of Israel, it’s all there, and if you want to decide that God was an invention propped up to keep us in line, then you can pat yourself on the back for locating the cherries you want to pick to support that theory. This is the lazy person’s kind of Biblical reading.

What we fail to realize is that the stories may tell of a violent event to make a point. I often think that is the whole point of many of them. They show us the errors of humanity, within and without the circle of the Chosen people. St. Augustine, who seemed to have been sent from the future to help us all learn to read, said, “Narrata, non laudata.” This means, “It is narrated, not praised.” An account of an event in the Bible is not automatically a celebration of the event. This is a key point that the armchair doubter misses completely.

The presence of a story does not make it good or holy solely by its membership in the pages of the Bible. God’s judgement is not always explicitly stated, so we must read for the religious truth of the book, the scene, or the sentence. This is difficult, but worth the effort for those that take the time, if you can find time. The book of Judges is so littered with violence and morally confusing events that any reader who was looking for direct practical life guidance would probably end up in jail. Many of the characters, such as Samson in Judges, is not so much a model to imitate as a way of life to be avoided. When Samson uses a donkey’s jawbone to slaughter the Philistines and then brags about it, he goes even further and demands that God give him a drink. That is not advice on how to behave. Samson’s gift of strength, however, does become his curse. There is religious truth hiding amid the jawbone story if you read the rest of the story of Samson, because he is purified by his vice. His strength becomes his weakness, and this is exactly how sin works. But the average reader isn’t going to find that if the only part of the story plucked out is the slaughter and war. Samson dies due to his violence and arrogance. Reading with the eyes of faith and knowledge of what sin does to a human being will tease out the religious truth. Moreover, a Christian reader should always be looking for how everything relates to the coming redemption of Jesus.

The account of Samson in no way suggests his behavior is admirable. In fact, when we read the Bible in the light of Christ, we can see that all of this jawbone slinging behavior of Samson is exactly the opposite of how Jesus lives his life. So the message is practically a flashing red light telling us, “Don’t be like Samson! He’s a violent, arrogant brute who lacks humility.” St. Augustine has also said that any reading of the Bible that pushes us away from faith, hope, and charity is almost certainly incorrect, since that is what Christ came to tell us while he simultaneously came to fulfill the prophecies and uphold the law of the Old Testament.

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Before the the final test, a good question to ask yourself is this: “If I get everything I want in this life, but I lose my soul in the process, what good is getting what I wanted?”

Maybe we need to backup even further and ask the more fundamental question. “Do I believe I have a soul?” I mean, I really had to stop and ask myself that question a few times in my life. If you do believe in a soul, then the question of “What do I want?” needs to be studied, because the final test is all questions about that topic.

If there is no soul, then of course you don’t need to study. What else is there but this life? You can pay lip service about ultimate meaning but if death is final then there is no final test and no need to study at all. Hakuna Matata. Carpe Diem. Try everything. You define your destiny. Perception is reality. After all, it’s just like Pontius Pilate said, summing up the modern worldview: “What is truth?” So good luck to you! I suspect you’ve stopped reading about now, so thank you for listening.

If an adult lives only for himself, but never commits to anything beyond his own goals or dreams he will wind up being like a firework instead of the wheat plant we were discussing in part two. A firework amazes us, briefly. Well, it amazes us if its not a dud. Katy Perry assures us that we are all fireworks, but anyone who has lit July 4 mortars knows that not all fireworks pass by the quality assurance team before being boxed up and sent out the door. But even for the well-packaged and manufactured fireworks, even the best one will produce but a brief wonder that quickly fades and disappears into a smokeless void in the dark. That’s it. It’s over.

In comparison, the wheat plant story seems like a dud compared to that of the firework, with its blaze of glory through the night. Dylan Thomas said it best in his famous poem, which sounds a lot like a firework.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

He went out like a firework, too, with a life of heavy drinking that likely killed him at age 39. Great writer, heavy drinker. Bad relationships, miserable most of the time. But he got what he wanted! He amazed us and burnt out like a firework, like Neil Young’s line, “Better to burn out than to fade away.” Better to burn out early like Natalie Portman in Black Swan than later like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.

The wheat plant is not like a firework. The advice for living from Jesus points to a polar opposite life, even though Jesus died at 33. The blaze of glory of a rock star like Dylan Thomas is a kind of self-sacrifice but for glory, fame, and recognition. The kind of life and death Jesus refers to repeatedly leads to a humble or even hated, loathed, mocked, and tortured death, but one that ultimately leads to salvation.

A mature plant creates seed, and each seed will fall and create more life. There’s a double-metaphor here, one for your life and death, and one for your life and spiritual re-birth while you are still alive.

By dying to itself, by not trying to preserve its present mature state, by not trying to live forever or gain notoriety above all other wheat plants, the proper life of a wheat plant lives through the death of its self. This metaphor can have a third meaning about having a family, but the heart of this wheat tale isn’t about having children or a family. Jesus did not have children and he is the ultimate grain of wheat.

The parable is about returning to the spirit of childhood and having a childlike faith. It’s about spiritual re-birth. It’s another way of saying, “Be baptized and believe!” It’s about forgetting the self and living for others. This “dying” applies to married or celibate or barren people, with or without children, young or old, black or white, man or woman. It’s for everyone.

The death of self is about living a life of faith, hope, and charity. Life is not lost, but rather is restored to health by returning to a childlike faith. We gain nothing by living forever in adulthood. Have you seen any vampire movies where the vampire is happy? No, of course not. The vampire has found the fountain of youth and is perfectly miserable. Do you know why? Because without time or age or bodily breakdown to worry about, a vampire can do whatever it desires.

If I were a soulless vampire who lived forever, do you know what I would do? First, I would rob a bank so I had plenty of cash for tuition. Then I would enroll in a university and take physics, biology, chemistry, and math courses until they ran out of offerings. Simultaneously, since I would have unlimited time as a vampire, I would take language courses in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and ideally I’d spend a decade learning Eastern and Western philosophy. Then I would cap it off by applying to a ultra-nerdy Dominican school of theology. With all of that knowledge, I would feel like I had a start on what I’d like to soak up. Unfortunately, even after all that, I’d still have the rest of eternity to figure out what to do here on earth, other than find my daily rodent for sustenance. I guess I could do the weekly New York Times crossword, because I’ve never been able to finish one. I’m glad I’m not a vampire, however, because I don’t want to live forever. I don’t even like the taste of blood when my nose bleeds for no reason in the Minnesota winter, where skin becomes like the surface of Mars. So based on the diet alone, Bella can have Edward. No thank you, I’ll pass on that lifestyle.

Without limits, life becomes meaningless for the same reason that waking up to Christmas morning every day would become pointless to children. This leads right up to the same problem for adults who believe they want no constraints, and then living in that boundless world finds that the limits have a purpose.

But back to the idea of living forever: like the mythical vampire, we think we want to live forever, but eternal life on earth would become a living hell. To wish for endless life here on earth is like hoping to win the lottery. We think all problems disappear with enough time and money, but we forget our fundamental flaw. The yearning for both of these is a kind of escapism, and what we really want is heaven, and heaven is to rest and stop searching. My imagined scenario of “what would I do as a vampire” betrays my treasure and where my heart is at. Notice that what I considered worth doing with unlimited time (and stolen money) was to pursue endless education.

Notice that I did not wish for faith, hope, and charity? My “lottery” fantasy, my goal if I became limitless, was not to love God and love others. It was to love myself and increase my knowledge - literally to become more like God in the way that the devil promised Eve with his lies. The fountain of youth and lottery fantasy will tattle on where your treasure it at. Few people would say, “If I could live forever and had unlimited money, I would give glory to God, pray for salvation, and give all my time to widows and orphans.” I didn’t say that. My mind does not gravitate toward others when asked, “What would you do if you had unlimited resources?” My desires were all for the self. My treasure is not youthful skin, mine is actually worse. The first thing that sprung into my mind was to elevate my knowledge, like the first sin to eat from the tree of knowledge, and just like Eve I was tempted for more knowledge with the idea that I might be more like a god. No snake was present in my house when this happened.

So my first instinct was to eat from the tree of knowledge. The point here is that pride, even if hidden away, waits to emerge whenever opportunity appears. It’s always waiting. As soon as the door opens, as soon as constraints are removed, we slip into patterns that the ancient stories of Genesis warn us about.

To give oneself away instead of elevate oneself is best shown through the life of Christ, because he chose death. He chose faith, hope, and charity, despite the fact that he could have shown us his limitlessness whenever he wanted. God could have chose to be incarnated with the intention of instructing us on sustainable energy or better farming techniques or the ultimate skin care routine. He could have held seminars about microbiology and germs and surgery and neurology to help us leap forward in medicine. He could have delivered a model of the solar system and walked us through the geological strata of the earth to help us make sense of our world. He could have come however he wanted and lived forever and produced a world of plenty where no one lacked any food or shelter. He could have sent us robots to serve our every need. He could have infused us with complete knowledge so that we could converse with him on the patio in any language, whether it be Arabic, English, Japanese, or even the Gleep-Glorp language from the planet Zoltan. Heck, he could have just decided to smite us all in a rain of fire and terror just for kicks. But he didn’t. No, this time, for this first visit to us, he showed us how to live. He showed us how to live with humility by example. Rather than kicking down doors and dropping bombs, he comes in the most unexpected manner, which is why it’s so confusing.

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The pursuit of happiness plays out in strange ways, and the vice or obsession that seems like the answer leads to bad patterns of living. As readers and watchers we hate didactic stories that feel like moral preaching, but a tale well-told can sneak lessons in like a subtle spice in a dish, where we know we liked the meal but can’t explain why. We can usually sniff out a morality play from a mile away, so we look for the next show to watch or book to read. Aesop’s Fables are so obviously trying to tell us something moral that we tire of them quickly, but we’ll fawn over Moby Dick or Hamlet or Finnegan’s Wake for generations because we can’t easily discern what the heck is going on. We love the hunt. We could find all that we need in Aesop but it’s too simple; the lessons are too obvious and characters too one-dimensional. So here’s a couple of movies that I like where this hunt for meaning and purpose and happiness play out somewhat like the woman with the cursed bananas, as the main characters follow their vice or obsession right to the bitter end.

There’s a dark crime thriller movie called U-Turn starring Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez, where a cocky hotshot that is addicted to pills becomes stranded in a desert town in Arizona when his car, a convertible, breaks down. The movie did not do well and critics didn’t love it, but the main character’s self obsession and his undying conviction that “he is lucky” make his fall through the acts disturbingly comical. In the end, after being involved in two murders, after being thrown from a cliff, after breaking his leg, after being beaten, and when he is nearly dying of thirst, he claws his way back to his car, in the middle of nowhere under the dead heat of a midday Arizona sun. He is an utter mess and barely alive, but he looks in the rear view mirror and says to himself, “You’re still lucky!” right before he turns the key and a hose bursts in the radiator, rendering his car useless. His luck has finally run out. He will die in the desert, as the scavenger birds gather around his convertible. I have to admit, I laughed out loud, even as this movie careened from comedy into tragedy in that moment, because I think the director, Oliver Stone, meant for it to be funny. And for some reason I connected this darkly humorous scene to St. Paul when he was locked in the prison with his traveling companion, Silas. The two of them had been dragged and beaten with rods in Phillippi, and after all that the two of them were “praying and singing” until midnight. Paul is like the devout version of Sean Penn, saying to himself, “I’m still lucky!” but Paul is talking about being lucky in Christ, lucky to have Christ, whereas Sean Penn is still talking about his luck in his disordered pursuit of money and drugs and sex.

The greatest moment of this movie, is that after the glaringly obvious error of his ways, and his continuous pursuit of drugs, women, and money that has led him into this mutilated mess, he still clings to his fool’s gold, his oak tree, his false idol. He clutches his sins like pearls right to the end only to have it all blow up in his face just like the rubber hose on his radiator. The movie didn’t win any awards. It wasn’t received all that well, but it stuck with me because it illustrates the saying of “where your treasure lies, there will your heart also be.” In the beginning, Sean Penn is driving a slightly beat up convertible car with the top down, which is like a symbol for how he lives his life: loosely in the breeze. He’s just having fun, he’s got neither conviction nor compunction, he’s just letting the wind blow him wherever it takes him. And in the end, this top-down way of living is exactly how he is exposed to the desert birds and vultures that will eat him in that same convertible, as if he’s been put into a desert oven and served open-faced to the brutal reality of nature, red in tooth and claw (and beak). 

Other movies and stories follow this path as well, with two of my favorites being The Wrestler and Black Swan. I feel like these two movies tell a similar story but from very different worlds. Pro wrestling and ballet are rarely compared or even spoken of in the same breath. However, Natalie Portman in Black Swan is obsessed with a rage to master ballet, to be the best, to succeed at all costs. And she does. She becomes perfect, and in doing so dies in the final act having reached her goal, but it cost her everything. She sacrifices her future, the possibility of family and love and friendship, even her innocence. Everything is put at the foot of the altar of her burning passion for mastery of ballet. In The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke has outlasted his glory days but floats about in a wake of disastrous relationships and drug abuse, unable to adjust to regular life. His need for fame and glory in the ring is never put to bed, so unlike the Black Swan, he does not die in his glory, he has to live beyond his moment of greatness. The Black Swan character dies at the height of her success. She has performed the perfect dance and died for it, but her tragedy is sacrificing all for a dance that perhaps only she appreciates (this reminds me of The Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, but I’m already spreading out this comparison too far, so maybe in another post). In The Wrestler, there are two tragedies. First, he outlives his success. He has been to the top and held the title belt. He’s basked in adoration of fans and taken the trophy home. But now, that’s all over, and he must live as an ordinary man, as he takes a job at a deli in the grocery store and must serve every regular joe who wants a pound of sliced ham. The earthly glory has been tasted and cannot be removed from his mouth. The need to return to that state of honor lingers, it follows and haunts him daily. In the last scene, the wrestler has joined a local semi-pro wrestling troupe that performs in local gyms. He wants to ride out into the sunset one last time. Unlike his glory days, he is a cartoonish figure of both body and soul, with his muscles pumped full of steroids and supplements, and a face tattling on years of drug and alcohol abuse. The fans cheer and jeer him, recalling his better days but not respecting him any longer as his hour has passed. In one last jump from the top ropes, the wrestler leaps for glory, to hear the cheer one last time, to be noticed and seen and loved. He dies of a heart attack in the air. There is a sense that he is at peace, as he has once again received the glory, he has been the flying acrobat, the show, the centerpiece, the entertainer. He is loved, sort of, by the crowd. But the crowd doesn’t really care about him. It’s not a real love. Those that he should have loved, his daughter and former wives and girlfriends, are all gone from his life. Repeatedly, he has chosen glory and drugs and sex over those closest to him. He has failed to love them, trading real love for the false love of the crowd. Thus the sense of peace in his death is not so much of achievement, but rather a putting to sleep the neverending dream that could not die, the need for the approval and cheer of strangers that never came close to real love at all. The ballerina’s death comes in her prime, and the wrestler’s death in his twilight, but they both suffer the same illusion.

So how does that relate to cursed bananas or dreams of writing fame?

One of the reasons I don’t write fiction any longer is because I gave up the “dream” and realized that fame or glory would never have satisfied any more than getting drunk did. Perhaps there’s an element of sour grapes, too, since I chose not to pursue it fully, and I didn’t get glory, so I put on the fig leaf of “I didn’t want to be a success anyway because it would make me shallow.” That notion I’ve dug into a bit, but in one of those life moments like what I had in the office cubical, I had another one when I read a poem by John Keats. In a little library at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, while all the other combat medics in training were engaged in less nerdy things, I spent my free hour or two reading. After dismissal, I would rush off to the library and pull a book from the shelf of the classical literature section. One day I read his poem called “On Fame.” I remember it feeling like I was reading instructions from an experienced artist to forget about fame, to give it up. The poem reads:

Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy

To those who woo her with too slavish knees,

But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,

And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;

She is a Gipsey,--will not speak to those

Who have not learnt to be content without her;

Keats, who gained fame in his short life, was saying that to pursue fame almost guarantees that the pursuer won’t get it. He’s talking about motives and desires. If the desire is for fame, then the pursuit is all wrong. So I knew when I read these lines, that if I did not write for the love of writing, then it was like a business pursuit or cheap trick for the love of strangers. I knew I loved literature and writing, but there was never enough. I always wanted more books and more time to write. I was chasing a goal, like the characters in Black Swan and The Wrestler. The “rage to master” something comes to most of us in some form, where we want to be great at science, or programming, or gaming, or a sport, or cooking. But the motive underneath that rage must be examined, because the root of the rage may not be joy but a kind of anger or even hate. Keats tells us to kiss fame goodbye before you even start, because if you don’t, that butterfly will never land on you. He compares fame to a goddess that chooses some “thoughtless boy” who has a heart at ease. So say goodbye, and if she likes you, she will follow you.

Ye Artists lovelorn! madmen that ye are!

Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,

Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

Whatever our “treasure” is we must be able to live without it. We also must make sure that it’s not the main treasure, otherwise we may learn the hard way that the treasure is actually a mirage. Is the desire to publish a novel or succeed in business or get 10,000 followers or win the state title actually driven by joy and passion? Or…is it one of the seven deadlies causing all the trouble underneath? It comes down to the question: are you worshipping an oak tree, or God? Are you panning for fool’s gold, or seeking eternal life? Is your daily ritual and life being sacrificed for fame, glory, wealth and honor, or do you offer all of those up in exchange for humility like Christ did on the cross? This is not an easy topic to dig into, and there are layers to unearth.

I believe that God’s will may be made revealed slowly to us. He knows the ending, but we don’t. There are crossroads in this life where free will makes it difficult, and choosing which direction to take is difficult. Eventually, we must make decisions, as sometimes I want God to shine a light on the path forward, and there are times it almost seems like he has done that. But to expect to hear God’s voice for decisions is not how it works, and we must choose a way. I think I made many of the “wrong” choices, because I knew when things were wrong. My conscience ate at me when I chose those errant paths. Jesus says to enter by the narrow gate. He didn’t say it’s located in the alley behind the bar. Wide is the path that leads to destruction, he says, but to follow him we must take up our cross daily. But that sounds hard, doesn’t it? Isn’t that hard? You would think so. But it’s not once you begin. Recall the simple phrase: Surrender to win. The gentle mastery of Christ in life is what Keats was talking about, and it’s what the young woman with the bananas needed. It’s what Sean Penn needed in U-Turn (maybe in real life as well). This is what ballerina needed and what the wrestler needed in those films. It’s what the hunter is hunting for and the seeker is seeking after. What are they all trying to find?

They are seeking something that is good, true, and beautiful. The best stories are of restless souls seeking redemption through strange sacrifices and pursuits. This is a story as old as time, literally, as what else is happening in the Garden of Eden? It is the story of lost innocence and the subsequent pursuit of what the belly and mind want. The “journey” we talk about today, the journey that we are all on: that journey is the root idea of the Fall in the Garden, where people journey away from God, rejecting his rules, in pursuit of knowledge and finding that sin leads to death. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of someone who was once innocent getting lost and trying to find their way back to God. It’s so simple it’s absurd. What drives me nuts about Genesis is that taken literally it’s every bit as good as allegorically. Honestly, one of the reasons I don’t write stories any longer happened when I realized that the greatest stories had already been written, and everything else was a re-hashing. As the saying goes, “All philosophy is footnotes to Plato.” I would echo that and say that all literature is footnotes to the Bible, and I would add the Greeks in there too. All modern stories are retelling of old stories, and the idea that the ancients were ignorant betrays our own arrogance. What we reveal in discounting old stories is the revelation of our own biases and worldviews. My bananas story is like the Garden of Eden story, and also the same story of Narcissus. Trapped by passion for his youth, Narcissus stares into the water until he dies, still gazing at his reflection in the river Styx as he makes that boat ride into the underworld. Both of these stories say much more than my Bananas, or U-Turn, or The Wrestler, or The Black Swan, and in far fewer words, with much greater meaning and application to my daily life.

But the happy ending for all of these seekers is simple. The rest 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. The restlessness has a solution. It’s available. It’s free. It’s here now. It can be delivered today, to anywhere. 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)

What Jesus is trying to tell us is that the fountain of youth is available, but it’s through him. The pool is open. I think the old language of the “the kingdom of God is within you” can be confusing, for a few reasons, one being that the word kingdom is dated to a different time than ours of American democracy. The word itself - “kingdom” - feels strange. A better translation is probably “the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” Jesus is always talking about water, and the Fountain of Youth is a magical water that restores, like the waters of Bethesda where the crippled and lepers attempted to receive miraculous healing. But it’s simpler than that. Einstein and other scientists have expressed a kind of surprise at how the simple formulas can describe the cosmos, and yet allude to greater complexity than we can fathom. When Jesus is talking about himself being the “living water” he is literally telling us that he is the fountain of youth, that he is the place of renewal. When he says, “I am the vine and you are the branches,” he is saying we must drink from his living water, from his life. The water is always a metaphor for belief in him. We baptize one another in water to help us get the point, that the living water is Jesus. We put holy water on our heads and fingertips to remind us that God is the way to health and renewal. He turns water into wine. He walks on water. He calms the water. He saved the sinking Peter from the water. There’s just so much going on with water that you have to realize that these similes and metaphors are alternative ways for Jesus to say, “To be saved, you must be baptized and believe.” What’s interesting here is that he says it flat out with no metaphor. But it’s like that’s not enough. We’re too picky to just hear the words: “Be baptized and believe” and take it at face value. But if we don’t like that one, he says the same thing to Nicodemus: “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” For some reason, we need more. The literal version fails, so we need a metaphor, a story. Then we get the metaphor and the story and we start checking for malleability so we can shape it into what we want to hear.

Must we choose to be beaten over the head? How many stories, Biblical or otherwise, tell this same tale? We want something deeper, because we must keep eating from the tree of knowledge. The fruit of that tree never fills our bellies, or not for long. We are intellectual gluttons, such that if the simple answer is given, we reject it for it’s simplicity because we are not yet like God, just as the snake promised Eve. The reason it is called the tree of knowledge is because we hunger and thirst for knowledge far more than we hunger and thirst for the righteousness that Jesus’ mentions in the beatitudes. Google has accelerated this gluttony for knowledge into the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet at an all-inclusive resort in Cancun with an all-night open bar.

I share the same malady as The Hungry Little Caterpillar, which is gluttony, for both food and knowledge. The caterpillar’s gluttonous consumption transforms him into a beautiful butterfly, as that is how his life is intended to unfold, but my hunger for knowledge leads to intellectual gluttony and spiritual diabetes. The caterpillar eats everything until it’s stomach hurts, but this gluttony is toward the right goal of becoming a butterfly. My gluttony for knowledge leads to isolation behind a stack of books, to the point that I start to study the Bible instead of just read the Bible. I heard a comment somewhere that made the point: “Many of us would rather attend a seminar about heaven than actually go to heaven.” This is true because like the fountain of youth, the pursuit of knowledge is unending and can never be complete. To gain all knowledge is to become like God, which is precisely the problem just like wanting to remain young forever.

Knowing that many of hunger for knowledge, Jesus throws us a lifeline, offering us both the straight-shooting literal version of his message and a bonus metaphorical version. He does this multiple times, in multiple ways, and still…somehow…still we struggle to receive the transmission. How can it be so hard? Is this why he calls us a “stiff-necked people”? What a great insult. I had a stiff neck from a pinched nerve recently and had to turn my whole body to look at people, which made me think of this idiom, which I learned came from oxen that refused to turn when lashed or poked by the farmer.

Yes, we are stubborn. No argument there. A second line that I always smile at when reading the Gospel is when Jesus says, “Let the person who has ears listen!” I’m sorry, but there’s an element of humor to it because I think of a public school teacher who is trying day after day to deliver lessons, but has twenty out of thirty kids screwing around and ignoring him. When the test day comes, the kids who weren’t listening complain, “But you never went over this stuff! We’ve never heard of this material! It’s not fair.”

Apparently we have stiff necks and no ears. Why are we diagnosed as stiff-necked and earless by Jesus? It means we are prideful, rebellious, and stubborn. We’re jumping around in the back of the classroom ignoring the teacher and expecting the test to be open book, or that if we fail we get a second or third chance to re-take the test. While the teacher instructs, we’re having spit-wad wars and showing off. We’re passing notes and checking our phones. In short, we want a different kind of wisdom than what he offers because we want to make a name for ourselves, to be seen, to win, to be approved. The snake suggested this idea in the garden to Adam and Eve so that we cannot hear the truth, so that we cannot be simple and exposed, we cannot be naked before God. The simple answer doesn’t satisfy us, because the suggestion that we can “be like God” still lingers in our ears that listen to what they want to hear. We choose not to believe that what is ultimately good, true, and beautiful could be so simple, because the enticement of something secret and deliciously complex seems more exciting and inviting.

Even as Jesus tells us that the children understand “the kingdom” better than adults can, we scheme and plan our way to outdo each other. Paul states it quite plainly: “Has not God made the wisdom of the world foolish?” Indeed he has, and that lesson is hard to learn, as it seems the best students learn this lesson early and the rest of us take the wide path to destruction, and many of us never learn at all. Unless you return like a child to faith, you can never have it, and for those of us that cannot bear something literal, here’s the related metaphor that Jesus offers: “unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”

A grain of wheat doesn’t form until the plant reaches maturity. It is “wheatless” until adulthood. So the grain of wheat, in its youth, grows, but the intended purpose of the plant is to grow and make more wheat. The point of the plant isn’t to just live forever, or outlast the plants around it, or use up as many resources as it can to be the largest wheat plant. The point of the plant is to reach maturity, and then return to the earth - to give itself back, to produce more wheat. In other words, to become like a child again. The wheat plant started from a seed of wheat. It must return to become a seed of wheat, like a child. The adult must become like a child again to be complete. The child must grow, mature, but must become like a child once again. It’s so simple but so complex, like Einstein’s formulas.

“Whoever loves his life will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.” So do you want the fountain of youth, or eternal life? (Trick question: the fountain of youth is available, if you stop looking in the wrong places, and stop thinking it’s all about you.)

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When I was in my twenties, I wanted to be a fiction author. The germ for a story idea would jump into my head, through some observation, and then would multiply and merge with other broodings and books I’d been reading. Hopefully, you are trying to go to sleep right now, as perhaps this episode will take you there, as it’s going to be a long one. I’m going to summarize a story idea that I never wrote. The germ of this story popped into my head at the grocery store when I observed an elderly woman and a young businesswoman approach a fully stocked banana stand at the same time. That was it. Here’s the short version of a story called The Fountain of Youth.

A young businesswoman is rushing about to collect the items on her grocery list, while at the same time, in the same store, a thin, old woman, hunched over and unattractive, rides in a mobile cart. They both shop the produce aisle, and the elderly woman is slowly driving her cart toward a table that holds the bananas. Only a single bunch of green bananas remains. The young woman is swinging her basket, grabbing peppers and lettuce, while chatting on her phone. Before the old woman reaches the table, the young woman swoops over to the banana table and grabs the last bunch of bananas, unaware that the old woman is reaching for it.

The old woman says, “Excuse me, but could I have a few of those bananas?” The young woman at first ignores her due to her phone conversation, but the old woman keeps talking. Annoyed, the young woman pauses her phone call to interact with the old woman, and upon hearing her request for the bananas, the young woman considers her strict diet of smoothies, her intermittent fasting plan, and her rigid exercise schedule and says, “No, I’m sorry.”

The old woman pleads, “I can only get a ride to the store twice a week and I’m out of bananas, and my doctor recommends them for my heart health.” Then she coughs and wipes her mouth with a flannel shirt sleeve, which causes the young woman to recoil.

The young woman cannot find the charity to give the old woman any of the green bananas and tells her, “Sorry, I got here first. Better luck next time.” She puts the phone back to her ear and attempts to resume the conversation with her friend, but she hears a response from the old woman. The young woman puts the phone down again. She can sense the old woman has said something rude. She asks, “I’m sorry, but what did you say? I didn’t hear you.”

The old woman says, “I said, may you age with those bananas.” The young woman is stunned at first, but then laughs out loud, and with condescension says to the poor woman, “You are adorable. Pathetic, but adorable.” And with that the two women part ways.

The young woman drives home in her BMW 3-Series and doesn’t think about the comment any further. She hits the gym, engages in some hot sex with her manscaped boyfriend who lives with her, and ends the day watching a TV show while perfecting her presentation for work. Over the next few days, she eats a few of the bananas, which have now turned golden yellow. Everything in her life is perfect.

But five days after the interaction at the grocery store, she is in the bathroom and notices a spot on her hand that she has never seen before, a small brown spot, slightly irregular in shape, and she makes a mental note of it but rushes off to work. The following day she goes for a run in the hot sun with her hairless boyfriend, and they talk about family and kids briefly but veer off into social issues and political problems that face the future of the world. When she arrives home, her boyfriend says to her, “Wow, look at those freckles! It’s like they just appeared on your nose and cheeks.” She has never had freckles, and doesn’t believe him until she goes to shower and looks in the mirror. Her face now has freckles. Very normal freckles, but unexpected freckles that were unplanned and unwanted.

Then she suddenly remembers the little spot on her hand, and notices that it has grown ever so slightly. In a scoff, she remembers the bananas. She remembers the comment from the old woman, but laughs nervously, and while showering she walks out of the bathroom dripping in her towel to inspect the bananas on the counter. One of the bananas has begun to show spots.

The next day the spot on her hand has grown splotchy, and she is no longer laughing but considering the possibility that the old woman has somehow cursed her. She begins to find ways to preserve the bananas, first trying to keep them at an exact temperature, but eventually finding so many spots forming that she has to freeze them, and her skin becomes more blotted. She attempts to find the old woman at the grocery store, returning at the same time each day but never meets her. A doctor’s visit diagnoses her with “Bronzing,” and she begins seeing a dermatologist and two separate skin specialists.

Her obsession with preserving her youth becomes maniacal, as she feels her destiny is now somehow linked to the bananas. After a year, a succession of maddening events causes her to unravel. Her boyfriend’s mother asks innocently about potential grandchildren. Feeling badgered, the young woman admits she does not want children due to the effect on a woman’s body and alludes to a “miscarriage” in her past that creates a rift with her boyfriend. He breaks up with her, and soon her friends drift away into family life.

She has a horrible scare when her mother housesits for her while she is away on a business trip. From the airplane, after landing, she calls her mother and amid the obnoxious sounds of screaming infant on the plane, her mother tells her that she is “making banana bread with two of the frozen bananas,” leading to a frantic freakout on the airplane that nearly gets her arrested. She drives home in a panic, unloading her anger and long held resentments against her mother, while fanning the banana bread and wrapping it in plastic. A falling out between mother and daughter happens that is never again healed.

The years begin to pass by and she maintains a youthful look, managing the skin condition with great care and vigilance. She spends large amounts of her earnings on skin-care and aging products. As she enters her fifties, she is still spending most of her time with twenty to thirty year olds.

Her career soars and by the age of fifty-five she moves into the role of Vice President of People Operations.

Fast forward: she is sitting alone in a one bedroom apartment at age seventy-five, her lips and face full of botox, with bottles of prescriptions and hormones spread out on a coffee table. She is mutilated by plastic surgeries, wearing excess makeup, and living on shakes, powders, and supplements. Childless and friendless, with few family connections remaining, in her living room chair she scrolls on her phone, researching therapeutic cloning techniques. She sets down her phone and gets out of the chair, to sit on the floor to do her daily meditation and mindful breathing. In the silence, an electric hum from the corner of the room permeates the air, but somehow this sound comforts her. The soft buzzing comes from a special freezer, with a backup battery. In the corner of the room is a mini-freezer that holds the last remaining moldy and cursed banana, frozen and sealed in extreme cold. She smiles in her meditation, proud that she has proved the old woman wrong, and has preserved her youth.

The end.

I never wrote the full story. I thought about the story for days until I could see the story unfold to where it wanted to take me, or where I wanted to take it. Sometimes I’m not sure how the flow happens.

This is the strange thing that happens once you start writing. If the urge to “be a writer” bites you, then you will start writing stories and you will spend a lot of time thinking about stories you want to write. The urge came to me in 1999 when I started typing out poems and short stories. I remember reading books and feeling disappointed in the plot or characters and decided that perhaps I could write better than those authors. In 2000, I went for a run one day and decided halfway through that I needed to return home to my house and begin writing, and I ran home with urgency and did just that. Thus began an obsession around writing. Then I began to realize that writing stories is more difficult than I thought, but the urge to produce and create consumed my days and nights. This continued for about fifteen years.

Thinking of stories is one thing. Writing them in a compelling way is far more difficult. The idea for a story is the simple part, because many people have ideas for stories and novels floating around in their heads. Consider how many people have great business ideas or inventions in their mind, but cannot or have not put them into physical form. With stories, it’s the same. To flesh out and write the story is difficult because it moves from being a dream into a grueling task, like when you go from thinking about getting in shape to actually joining a gym or counting calories. It’s much easier to imagine a result than to work for it, because the work is neither glamorous nor easy.

A significant amount of time is needed to write the actual stories. Writing requires dedication and resolve, but when I was writing and doing the work, I felt compelled to get the story out, to the point that I needed to get it out of my brain and onto paper or computer screen. This same notion began anew once I found the urge to do marathons and triathlons. I needed to get out and run or bike. The need felt unstoppable because of the desire for the goal of completing the upcoming race to the best of my ability. Both writing and racing brought about this mania.

The story just had to be written, making it almost like a lust, or a sickness. This baby had to be born. Creative desires can be like any other addiction. Watch what happens to someone who is clearly addicted to their phone if he or she cannot find it. The phone-addict will begin to get antsy and squirm, and start looking, searching, until they get irritated and cannot live in their skin until the phone is found. Or think of a regular marijauna user or daily drinker you know who is “not addicted” but turns into a completely different person if their drug is taken away. They assure you that they can quit any time that they want to, but for some reason never do, because they actually cannot. The sickness demands the underlying need to be fulfilled.

While nowhere as dramatic, this urge to write and “get the story out of my head” reminded me of a story about Caravaggio, the great Italian painter, while he was working on the Raising of Lazarus. Whether or not true, the tale reports that Caravaggio had a dead body exhumed for the painting, and told two of his models to hold the dead body so he could paint it. When they objected, he pulled out his knife and told them to stand still or he would make them just like the corpse they were holding. Clearly, this level of obsession shows that he had to get this painting out of his system, since he was willing to kill (and dig up bodies) in order to get the picture out of his head and onto the canvas.

What’s interesting is the urge to write can become an addiction, but as a creative pursuit never seemed like a problem. Oddly enough, when I talked to hunters, they would describe a similar “sickness” - a need to get into the woods, to be in nature in pursuit of a deer or a turkey or other small game. This description was strangely like the need to write or drink or smoke. There’s a common thread in all of them. Initially, in those conversations I could not relate to hunters at all, but when I considered my own need to find a silent library to flesh out story ideas or to immerse myself in reading, I think my need for that refuge was not different from a fisherman seeking a quiet trout stream or a hunter hiking into a valley floor. Although hunting is shunned by much of modern society, the hunter feels and connects to something deep and visceral in our nature. The hunter is seeking what the artist or drunkard is seeking. What are we all after?

We are searching for paradise. We are seeking something that is good, true, and beautiful, but with different ideas about what that means and how to obtain it. Everyone is after those things, but some are unaware of why and if the “sickness” is not driven by the right motives, the pursuit becomes ugly. Some hunters are just out for blood. Some artists just want fame. Drunks (that are not like ordinary, calm drinkers) are seeking a direct escape to heaven, without the work of creating or capturing. Drunks and drug users want to take the elevator, not the stairs.

At the root of our pursuits is the desire to reach something higher, because those three nouns - the good, the true, and the beautiful - are the only things that will ultimately satisfy us. But in our pursuit of these three things we can easily mashup temptations, distractions, and pride with that purity. The real reason hunters are hunting at all is to find meaning in their life, to experience fellowship with other men, to get approval from a group, to connect to their ancient instincts, and to stand in awe of nature and creation. I am not a hunter, but what I see in hunting is a kind of sacrifice and thanksgiving. While writing a story is creative, and hunting is for killing, there are curious parallels to the passion guiding both pursuits. To some degree, the published book is not unlike the trophy deer. In the end the book sits on the shelf, and the stuffed animal is displayed on the wall. The same happens with diplomas and exotic photos from vacations or medals from military service or even private memories of sexual conquests. We are chasing a desire that is difficult to describe, but we want to display it and let it be seen, to make a name for ourselves, to feel worthy, to amass a list of accolades that will in the end be mere phrases in our obituary as the world continues to turn without us. (I have to resist the urge to dive into the Tower of Babel story, but it’s so relevant to this.)

The banana story is about clinging to something, to a dream or idea, to a concept or want, and expecting that dream or fantasy to bring fulfillment. For the woman in the story, it’s youth. For me, it was writing and being considered smart or creative. This idea of sacrificing your time, money, and energy to save your most beloved thing, is not a new story. I recall choosing to give up friendships and social gatherings in order to read or write, believing that the creation I was working on would bring fulfillment. I felt that for anyone to succeed or reach a goal that everything must be sacrificed. Marriage, children, socializing, weekends, nights, television, dining out, running errands, folding laundry - those things were for others, for those without a “noble” pursuit that I had. Full of myself, I was like Leona Helmsley when she said that “Only the little people pay taxes.” My inflated self wanted to believe in my invented mission. When pride of self takes over the mind, everyone else and everything else become “little” compared to the dream.

Whenever it felt like the goal of writing the great novel was getting further away I would isolate with books or a laptop. “Wherever your treasure lies there will your heart be.” Thus I was willing to forego friendship and fellowship to be alone with the imaginary treasure. Unfortunately, it took years to realize that the treasure was actually just a warning light.

The young woman in the story clinging to her youth is just a metaphor for my own obsession from age twenty to thirty to be “a writer.” What I didn’t know is that crossroads would find me at three places in my life: marriage, children, and addiction. The avoidance to commitment to anything beyond my goals had to be shattered. But it didn’t happen all at once. I still clung to the dream and goal of writing even after marriage and kids, which means my treasure was still in the wrong place. I was keeping things together, but when you have one foot in the fantasy world, the commitment to real relationships cracks. I could publicly declare myself as committed, but privately hedge my bets. But thankfully there was a day I recall sitting in a cubicle and realizing my future, where I could have a wife and family and dog, or I could remain alone and possibly get a book or two published. This realization changed my life, and I don’t know how else to describe it except that there was a kind of guidance happening on that day, as I recall the cubical and the lighting and the place of business where it happened. Whether it was a guardian angel or good orderly direction or just plain sense clocking in for duty, I am grateful for that startling jolt, because it meant the first step away from my “self.”

The goal of a quiet house with two or three books on a shelf suddenly seemed selfish and even foolish. At the same time I relished the idea of being like one of those lonely scholars or curmudgeonly writers who pursue their craft with such a rage to master it that they let their obsession rule their days. I worried that time would pass and that the creative years were short. I knew that the high energy of my early twenties would fade, as I saw my co-workers in their forties and fifties who had dreams of pontoons, cabins, and retirement. The evidence of creative atrophy was all around me in programmers whose white-hot urge to invent had burned down to the wick. Discussions of 401K and TV shows replaced the intensity of youth. I was judging them all, yes, but I was most often judging them for what aging and family life had seemed to strain out of them. They seemed like decaf coffee beans, washed out, with very few milligrams of caffeine left in them (which explains why so many of us drink so much coffee as we get older). I felt that two years in my twenties had to be worth twenty years of the old, tired, expired later years.

What I failed to see is that my reckless living in my twenties was less fulfilling than what these middle-aged mothers and fathers felt about their own lives. They had raised families and done the long work of putting food on the table and doing late-night math homework and attending numerous music or sports activities and essentially giving up their goals to bring another to successful adulthood in the world. These fuddyduddies, who I thought had done so little, had done more than my imagined solitary writer would ever accomplish.

That was the temptation that I yearned after: youth and fame. This was stoked by reading biographies of writers, which I treated like hagiographies. But the writers I admired were not like the saints, not at all. A misguided admiration of Hemingway and London and Fitzgerald only helped me justify alcohol abuse as if it were a virtue, and made it a sacrificial offering to creativity. If I was destroying myself, it was for the creative act. If madness was the price for creative grace, I was willing to sign my life for that loan. In fact, I sought out writers that were known drunkards, thinking that those authors had more depth, when in reality many of them wrote completely forgettable books. This is the temptation I accepted, as drinking and writing seemed like fitting accomplices. The urge to create is the germ, but piggybacking very closely on that positive goal is the fungus of desire for fame and approval. Sometimes I wonder what comes first - the desire to create, or the desire to be noticed, like a chicken-and-egg scenario. I think the “desire to be noticed” came first, because the desire to be noticed is really a desire to be loved. Thus in some cases the desire to create is a fig leaf we wear to mask the desire for love. We want to be noticed, because we think it will make us loved and respected.

So what I really wanted was a stamp of approval for my behavior, but way underneath that was a desire for appreciation, stacked under layers of other manure and dirt. The manifestation of the need for love became visible in the pursuit of writing, but the inability to stop drinking once I started was the cry for help from underneath the pile of garbage. I wasn’t interested in tattoos or piercings or coloring my hair or weird sex. We have different cries for help, and mine was just drinking. I convinced myself that heavy drinking was a righteous burden of all writers.

See the trick? Did you catch it? A swap happened.

The need for approval and love gets transplanted with some strange idea like this. I felt that drinking hard was the cross that writers must bear, and even something to be proud of. Perhaps this desire to drink guided me toward writing in the first place so that I could justify drinking, since writers and artists get a free pass for their madness. Writers who were not alcoholics, I felt, lacked the “gift.” Oddly enough, drinking is a cross to bear, not a gift, but when dealt with it ends up becoming a gift. What shocked me in the end is that these crosses can become a gift. This is why so many recovering addicts and alcoholics introduce themselves at recovery meetings saying, “I’m Jane, a grateful addict,” or “I’m Joe, a grateful alcoholic.” They realized when they turned back to God that the cross they took up was the greatest gift they ever received because it is the exact thing that forced them to change.

How upside down we are once we re-name the vice as a virtue. This can be observed in our world all the time. We “flip the script,” to quote the TV show Cobra Kai, and make our fig leaf the identity of our life. I don’t want to dive into the character of Hawk from Cobra Kai, but his “flipping the script” is his journey into his vice, which kills his virtue, until he returns to his true self and flips things back to right-side-up. The very thing that we are using to cover our nakedness, our fear, our feeling of inadequacy is what we need to remove in order to be healed. The wound hides beneath the vice and until it is exposed, there can be no healing. How can a physician heal something that cannot be seen? Cue up the Jesus words! (you knew it was coming):

The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? He heard this and said, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” (Mt 9:11-12)

The whole solution is right in those two verses. We want to turn our “sacrifice” into a virtue. Jesus says, “No, I don’t want sacrifices, especially not bad sacrifices. No, I want your whole life. Now show me the wound!” He’s practically shouting it like Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire. “Show me the wound, Jerry!” These verses from Matthew make Jesus the undefeated and defending champion of both religion and psychiatry for two thousand years. I remember taking a class called “The Psychology of Adjustment” in college and not once did that textbook mention faith as a possible solution to problems “adjusting” to change. What a shame, since it could have been a short class. I can see the need to avoid mentioning this, since it might put a large amount of psychology majors out of work, which is already an issue for a field that provides most of our nation’s baristas. Jesus is a bigger threat to the therapy industry than self-driving trucks is to the logistics industry. Who needs truckers if can trucks drive themselves? Who needs expensive therapy when you can read Matthew and talk about it with others for free?

Yes, I’m simplifying and generalizing to make an editorial. I also empathize with psychology majors as I pursued computer science and English majors, and only one of those fields is sought after for employment. But it cannot be denied that faith has been shoved into a corner by medicine, by our schools, by government, and most of all by our media, yet the open secret is that faith can be, without a doubt, a proper and effective cure for many mental issues. The head-scratchers in the media wonder why suicide rates have increased and depression is at an all-time high, while church attendance and affiliation plummet. The cry goes out daily to do more for mental health, while we ostracize people of faith like lepers to the fringe of society.

The gift of faith heals, but it is exactly that: it is a gift. This odd thing called faith can be more effective than a lifetime of depression pills or affirming therapy, and it costs nothing. But, it’s not so simple. It cannot be prescribed or ingested or bought or sold. There is no insurance needed for it. Unfortunately, people can walk the corridors of modern pharma and therapy for years and not once hear that there is another way, but honestly even if they are told, they may not “hear” it because the time has not arrived for the hearer’s ears to be open yet. The timing varies for each person. So I understand why it’s not talked about, but it’s a shame because many people would benefit. Therapy is a modern version of “faith-healing,” but the faith must be in the techniques and drugs, not in God. The faith must be in the science and the credentials on the wall. The efficacy of the therapy is measured and studied to find improvements. All of this is great. But there’s something fundamentally missing from this equation. Science was never intended to replace faith or morality, because those are not parts of the observable and testable universe. You can see the sacred being replaced with science, but it’s not the right tool. The trend today is moving toward a merger of science and morality, which will ruin science. Just like religion merging with state power ruins religion, the same will happen to science. For those not paying attention, the Soviet Union and China have already done this experiment and it doesn’t end well. Papers and research must conform to party doctrine, making it a leap of faith, not a study of nature. Worse, if you put morality and faith into the halls of state power, brace yourself for bad weather.

We’re all talking about mental health today, constantly, as if mental problems just started happening in recent history. The only cure offered comes in the form of pharmaceuticals and paid therapy. The healings that Jesus does in the Gospels are mostly related to mental health. Yes, there are the skin healings of the many lepers and the withered hand and the woman who bled for many years and re-attaching the Roman’s ear (ok, so there are a lot of physical healings), but the majority of his healings are the same soul-wracking mental problems that we have today. When it says he “healed many people that day,” those are just the ordinary everyday miracles that he did, while the bigger miracles get a full telling, like raising Lazarus from the dead or restoring the paralyzed man’s legs or healing blindness. These ordinary “healings” don’t only happen in the pages of the Gospels. You can witness them happening today in recovery meetings, for all kinds of mental health issues, and these are attributed to a Higher Power, to God. This isn’t like the TV evangelist pulling some audience plant on-stage so that he can heal a man so that you wire him a check. This is happening in back-rooms of office buildings and churches and government centers, where no one is watching, where the smell of burnt coffee acts as the incense, and the liturgy consists of the Serenity Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer with real, open honesty in between.

This can be witnessed right now in a meeting in your own town. The wildest thing about the healings that Jesus performs is that I have seen these very things occur in people, in real-time, in the 21st century. Even for myself, for all the times I tried to quit drinking, through willpower or using science or techniques, none of those things worked. Nothing changed until I asked for God’s help and started to pray. Full stop.

Other people I have known, they have seemed so far gone that there was no hope for restoration, much like the Gospel stories of the Gerasene demoniac or the boy with an unclean spirit. Yet they get clear and clean, and a year passes and they are still clean. Then another year, and another, and they are bright-eyed and flourishing. There are Mary Magdalenes among us. There are former demoniacs walking around in our midst. These souls are everywhere, rubbing shoulders with you, interacting with you, but you don’t see them because they are healed and restored.

As I’ve said before, I discarded pills when I turned back to God and I am extremely doubtful that I ever needed them in the first place. Had I followed the steps prescribed by the physician in Matthew 9:11-12 and from the doctor named Luke, I might have learned this sooner. People that don’t believe in miracles scoff at tales of healing unless a double-blind study was used, and peer-reviewed papers support the evidence. But you can meet people who have restored their mind, body, and soul through friendship with Jesus. As for the re-attachment of the Roman’s ear, I understand the difficulty for some to believe in stories like that, but given the incredible real-life healings I have seen, I’m willing to say, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” Nothing is impossible for God, and if Jesus could multiply bread and fish, I doubt that surgery presented much of a challenge for him.

So in living in my world of the flipped script, I felt that alcohol made for authenticity. “In wine, there is truth”; In vino, veritas. Truth had to be conjured, raised up from within by being uninhibited, so that I could speak like a jester before a king. Liquor was the secret potion to unlock the hidden “truth” within. The wild and awful alcoholic lives of the writers I admired seemed to be the required gate fee for entry into greatness, as the wise fools, I thought, were the ones that must hold up the mirror to society. Oh, the lies we can tell ourselves. This is not the sound of one hand clapping, this is the sound of one hand slapping its own face.

In reality most of the writers I admired lived terrible lives. They burned bridges constantly. They had multiple marriages that fell apart in dramatic fashion. They ended their lives in suicide or slow death by addiction. But they reached their goal. Yes, they got what they wanted. They had their treasure, a skinny volume or two on their bookshelf with their name printed on the spine. Did that make them happy in the end? Did it fulfill them? I doubt it made any of them happy or content. It probably fed their pride, making the dragon even bigger.

This is why my woman and her cursed bananas had to be a caricature in the end. I thought a woman character would work best for the story because I could juxtapose her youth, beauty, and vigor against a twisted gargoylish solitude in the final scene. I wanted to display the inside, unseen, gnarled experience of misguided pursuit on her character. A male character would have required a different path, but I could have done the same story with a male bodybuilder or womanizer who has his trophies gathering dust on a shelf, and the notches in his headboard being reminders of many broken relationships. In the closing scene, he could have been a freakish, wrinkled body sitting hulking and damaged in a recliner, and for added effect I would have him spray tanning his orange arms while he sipped from a cocktail of branch chain amino acids and collagen peptides. 

Anyone who has felt a sense of transcendence, or the temporary “greatness” we all get to feel on occasion, yearns to recreate the moment. If you can’t experience it again, then you may feel like a “one hit wonder” or “a flash in the pan” or “a fluke” or “an intellectual lightweight” or whatever else the outer doubters and inner critic can hurl at you. Ex-athletes have a rough adjustment to the world because they peak so young. Likewise, an inventor whose idea catches on must try to invent again to catch lightning in a bottle a second time. An artist who catches the eye of a patron must continue producing desirable work. These blessings of success can become a curse, unless you surrender the ego. As life teaches us all, the two great tests we will face are success and failure, and success is sometimes the more difficult test.

To give up a dream may seem like defeat. But to surrender, which took years and stages to happen for me, led me to the greatest elevation I could have hoped for or ever imagined. Every phase where I had to make a choice to chop away at the false god of writing and imagined glory led to the ultimate death of that idol. It’s like St. Boniface cutting down the oak tree that the pagans worshiped. If you can chop down a god, then that’s a false god. I always thought it was incredibly rude of Boniface to cut the tree down, but in reality, what was he doing? He showed them the absurdity of a tree as a god. He exposed the false treasure. To have a false treasure revealed as fool’s gold is the greatest gift to give someone, even if it initially enrages them. People only get mad at the death of false gods because they are still in denial about its value. If a man is never told or shown that what he worships is phony, he will find out in the worst way of all when he tries to cash it in at the end. Like Narcissus, he will keep gazing into that illusion right until his death. 

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