Why Did Peter Sink?

There’s a saying that, “God has no grandchildren.” A parent’s faith does not necessarily cascade into children. But it certainly helps to see good examples, and the power of the Sacraments do imbue marks of faith in people, marks that remain with them forever. There is no better gift for a person than Baptism, as this gift, even if kept wrapped for many years, never decays or withers. The treasure granted in the moment of Baptism awaits the receiver’s decision to open and accept the gift. It waits for them, untainted, like gold. We may teach our children about Christ, and they may accept the gift, but their children, our grandchildren, will be beyond our reach. If not given the gift, they may have to find faith by the breadcrumbs and signposts on their path in life, picking up the seeds of the word, or even discover a way to God on their own. Somehow, and rather amazingly, even grandchildren who are never taught about the carpenter from Nazareth can find their way to this treasure, even if no one tells them about Baptism or teaches them the faith. Grandchildren of no faith background can find this treasure, because it can be found by anyone. If you walk enough of this earth, traverse enough experience, if you chase wealth or power or pleasure, you will eventually trip over this treasure at least once. Your pride will find the uneven earth to trip upon, one way or another. Whether or not you choose to “buy the field” and be filled with joy, that comes down to the individual, and it is a choice. Our intellect and free will make for wonderful and sometimes awful companions in this journey.

A great mystery is how the Church continues through the ages as the empires rise and fall. Hope fades in earthly superpowers after a hundred years, but the Church stands. It withstands assault. It surges. It falters. It is persecuted. It retreats. It persists. It is restored. Even through all of this scandal, what seems impossible, is possible with God. For those who think we are fools to remain, we can’t explain it very well. But perhaps this will help a bit: we can never quit the Church because we know the words that the childlike Peter admitted to Jesus are true, as I quote like a broken record:

“You have the words of eternal life. To whom else would we turn?”

For those that believe God established his Church “upon this rock,” on Peter, and thus believe in the authority and interpretation of the Church, then there is no choice but to remain, to fight for it, to make it better, and to someday be on your deathbed receiving the last rites, if God wills it. The Sacraments are real, they make the invisible things visible. The Eucharist is the “source and summit” of the Church and partaking in that sacrifice, along with regular Reconciliation, makes Jesus alive. I cannot adopt the “Once saved, always saved,” because I believe that the Sacraments are real. To quote Tim Staples, being “Saved” is ongoing. We should say: “As the Bible says, I am already saved (Rom. 8:24, Eph. 2:5–8), but I’m also being saved (1 Cor. 1:18, 2 Cor. 2:15, Phil. 2:12), and I have the hope that I will be saved (Rom. 5:9–10, 1 Cor. 3:12–15). Like the apostle Paul I am working out my salvation in fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12), with hopeful confidence in the promises of Christ (Rom. 5:2, 2 Tim. 2:11–13).”

If we are just saved by a one time declaration, then the inevitable corruption and sin that follows is a problem. Consider that Judas was chosen, perhaps even saved, before he wasn’t. Consider also, that of the original twelve Christians, eight percent of Christians were Judas. This will always be the case. It’s probably much higher, since these first twelve were chosen people who surely received high-dosage grace. Further, Jesus himself says that few will find the narrow gate but many will find the wide path to destruction. He added the most chilling line of all when he said that all those who call out his name will not be saved, but instead he will tell them, “I never knew you.” It is not enough to declare faith and then not do God’s will. Jesus said that, I didn’t make it up. You must walk with him all the days of your life, to the end, because “by your endurance you will gain your soul.”

This failure of Christians to live up to the high standard set forth by Jesus and the saints has made it remarkably easy for modern people to doubt or laugh at followers of Jesus, because we create scandal quite naturally. The Church is taking a beating by its own failings, but in reality Christians have been hated from the outset, from the first day the word began to spread on Pentecost. Surely if 3,000 people converted that first day Peter preached in Jerusalem, the rest of the world began hating those same 3,000 shortly afterward. The strange thing about Jesus is that he promised his first followers suffering and hatred, as he himself suffered and was hated. The funny thing about that is how many of us hear those words and say, “Great, where do I sign up?”

All religions have their heroes, villains, false prophets, and horrors. Science has its own laundry list of evil experiments done on real people, as you can read up on studies performed that are every bit as awful and disgusting as what St. Bartolome de las Casas was reporting back to Rome about the Spanish explorers. No one would say, “All scientists are evil,” but you will hear, “All priests are evil” or alternatively “Religion poisons everything.” There are different reactions to different religions, and the reaction to Christianity is typically a total and angry rejection. There are a few reasons for this anger, as I see it.

The first reason is because of the lofty goal of holiness in the Church. The Church pronounces its holiness and then falls short, time and again. Expectedly, its opponents have a party over its demise, thinking surely this scandal will be the event that ends the faith of every follower. The old familiar insults are hurled (such as the classic w***e of Babylon, which is really a great name for an insult, even if ridiculous). You see the atheists and everyone else piling on top, rioting in the aftermath of the bad news. Unfortunately, those partying on the potential grave of the Church will be disappointed.

The Church must be held to a nearly unattainable standard, always and forever, because it can never aim lower than the life of Christ and the mysteries of faith without losing everything else. After all, Jesus is the incarnation of God, fully human and fully divine, and he is the founder and his words the foundation and his apostles and bishops the teachers and keepers of the tradition. Yet these members were, from the start, only human. While striving toward his excellence and perfection, they never achieve it, or not for long. As I’ve mentioned before, “perfection kills” but the never-ending work of “progress, not perfection” must be carried forward when we fall, just as Simon the Cyrene carried the cross with Jesus. Even his fully human self needed help once, and miraculously one of us normal humans had a chance to provide it.

Second, this anger goes right back to the old issue of Jesus being divine. Either he was God, as he said he was, or he was a lying lunatic. If you believe that he was God, then you have no alternative but faith, and if you choose lunatic, then the correct response is anger. This is why the response is so vitriolic against Jesus among those who reject the resurrection. When his followers turn out to be weak and fallen, opponents take it out on Christ by proxy of his hypocrite followers, which feels good when your own religion needs to have a winner and a loser.

What people always forget is that the Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum of saints, so they struggle to understand why it is that people return to the Church even after it experiences an embarrassing failure. Those who understand what a hospital is for go there when they need help, as a hospital is to a church, as sickness is to sin. Anyone who expects to only find saints attending Holy Mass will be seeking a Church that doesn’t exist now, has never existed before, and never will exist. They would have better luck finding the saints they expect to find in an art history book, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, or perhaps a graveyard.

Third, Christians are playing a different game altogether than non-Christians, which causes confusion. As humans, we are wired for competition, strife, and victimization, as that is the religion our instinct wants us to have: a fight, a blaming, a competition, an “us vs. them” mentality, and using whatever means available to get an advantage. That is where we naturally tend to go. It’s why Jesus is so radically different than what we expect from a savior. We expect Thor to come down with the hammer, but we get a carpenter with a regular claw hammer. No, we’re like Bonnie Tyler in 1986 singing, “I need a hero,” asking, “Where have all the good men gone? / Where are all the gods? / Where's the street-wise Hercules / To fight the rising odds?”

We need a hero because we want a loser. For those who worship politics or youth or money or power, there is always a winner and loser in those realms. For science, there is a right and a wrong answer. The most radical thing about Jesus is that he shatters the zero-sum game of the winner and the loser. He takes the impact, he is the scapegoat. He is the clear winner of all things, but he loses on purpose. He takes the burden of our incessant blaming and fighting upon himself. The scapegoating ends with him. Correction: it is supposed to end with him. Quite a few of us Christians have missed this message. We killed God on the Cross. Sadly, we would likely do it again today if he returned in the same manner. But he won’t return in the same manner though, as he has assured us with his own words.

His resurrection should have ended the need for a scapegoat. The victory over death by Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection amends our initial fall from grace. We are no longer in the zero-sum game of winners and losers because Jesus took one for the team, the whole team, for all men and women, so that we may be forgiven for what our creaturely instincts guide us toward. This makes it confusing to those outside of Christianity, because it doesn’t fit the normal mode of how we see the world. It’s radically different.

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

For anyone that tuned into the first part thinking this would be about marijuana, I apologize. Part two also uses the title as bait so that I can talk about the near-stoning of the woman by the Pharisees, and also discuss the famous comment of Jesus in the center of that dusty circle. I won’t be sharing any insights about bongs or blunts, or the perils of unwanted stems or sticks, and I won’t be going at all into the pros and cons of spliffs versus fatties, nor will I make any witty rejoinders about schwag or kush or hash. I may talk about eating cereal and sugary snacks, as I often do, but as a fair warning, it will most likely talk about my ongoing battle with the very-American sin of gluttony and unrelated (in my case) to marijauna.

So where was I? Ah, yes, I left off on the uplifting topic of hellfire and brimstone.

As I have mentioned in other posts and episodes, in my slow conversion back toward faith, the hellfire and brimstone speeches never moved me, and even drove me away further. But in reading and re-reading the texts it’s clear that hell is something very real to Jesus and he mentions it often. When you are turned away from God, the idea of hell becomes repulsive for the exact reason that you want to remain turned away, and to face the reality of the word “hell” is scary. Clinging to the modern idea of being “Good without God” means that you must reject the idea of hell, because to consider it as real shatters the worldview. But the cool, non-divine hippy version of Jesus sure talks an awful lot about hell, and readers of the cool hippy version have to consciously skip those hellish parts to keep their non-divine chill dude from throwing people into the unquenchable fire of hell for all eternity. I think some people see Jesus as a first century version of the Dude in The Big Lebowski. Jesus could not be more clear what is at stake, however, and he says the he is the way. He himself. This is a shocking claim. He is the way. The Big Lebowski, the Dude, doesn’t demand much of anything from anyone, aside from his stolen rug to be returned to him. Jesus demands we give everything to him. We must surrender much more than a rug to Jesus, we must surrender our heart, mind, soul, and body to him. He requires our time, talent, and treasure. He asks that we pray constantly. He asks that we graft our branch onto the vine of his life. So Jesus implies that being “Good without God” will get you exactly nothing, as that way of life is basically works without faith. So we have Catholics saying “faith and works” and Protestants saying “faith alone” and non-believers saying “works alone.” Only non-believers hold that faith without works is the way, which Jesus clearly does not support. The both/and of the Catholic Church makes the most sense to me, as Jesus asks for all of us, both our faith and our works, and neither can be faked. We must “believe and be baptized” and also “Do God’s will.” I would say that faith and works go together like peas and carrots, but no one uses that combination any more. So instead I would say that faith and works go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Peas and carrots are not even familiar to most Americans today, so a peanut butter cup of faith and works might make a better example. I think they go well together, kind of like faith and reason, (to quote JP II) where both faith and reason are the wings we need to fly. One quick aside here. Most of my closest friends are Protestants, and we usually don’t go into this division around faith and works. In fact, all the arguments around faith and works tend to put me to sleep, because the Catholics and the non-Catholics I know who love God are usually out there doing charity out of love for God. The people I admire most in both Catholic and Protestant circles are those that never even bring up the argument surrounding faith and works. These people are witnessing their faith in ways that require no argument or apologetics. I’m not even sure it occurs to these silent witnesses that there is an argument, because the people that move me toward more faith are the ones that believe and are baptised are are doing God’s will. I think we can go around in circles on this argument for years while the poor go un-fed and the elderly remain un-attended and the convicts sit un-visited. I’m not belittling that the argument exists and there’s a place for charitable argument around the topic, but it seems that it can become a stumbling block of pride and anger between people who otherwise can say the Apostle’s Creed in its entirety in total agreement. I suppose the main problem with works is when we are doing it solely to get our card punched toward salvation. Eternal life is not like a pizza punch card, where we get a free pizza after we’ve purchased ten, nor is it like Burger King where you can “have it your way.” The turning to God requires sacrifice, but it’s a sacrifice that you will want to do once the invasion of grace storms your life.

Now back to the line that is so rich in meaning:“For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”

That little addendum about measuring adds major spice to the chill flavor of the prior sentence. The recipe goes from being bland Midwestern American fare into a Thai kitchen five alarm fire. A great deal changes when those who have already swallowed “judge not” gets that after-kick of “measure for measure” heat. Suddenly “judge not” does not contain the whole message. We would like it to be a nice, neat, standalone package; a two-word pithy tweet. But with the measurement phrase that follows in Matthew, it’s no longer simple. Not judging was the answer a moment ago, but now Jesus lets us know that we will be judged. All of us. My concern is that the understanding I once held of “judge not” really boiled down to indifference or, again, the philosophy of Poombah or the Big Lewbowski, which is “Who cares? Ha-ku-na Ma-ta-ta!” This is just a variation of the idea that “all things are permitted,” which, in itself is a judgment. If you judge that nothing is wrong, then you have judged that morality is not objective, which is making a judgement. So you have made a judgement and will likely apply that same notion to your own life and actions. Even if we take care not to judge others, we will still be judged, and we will be judged by our actions, which are guided by our free will to judge. That sounds like word salad. To sum up, you will be judged, and even if you don’t think you’re judging others, you are. Poombah has judged, just as Jeffery Lebowski has judged.

If I “judge not” because I believe nothing is wrong, that there is no true right and wrong except what each person decides, then I have made a judgment. Logic, rhetoric, and debate are not in my field of experience. Surely, I’ve committed some fallacy here. Surely this site is littered with fallacies that I’m unaware of. These words of Jesus are nuanced and I’m not quite equipped to describe the depth of these verses, but meaning rises up suggesting that our simplified understanding of “Judge not” is incomplete without considering the whole of what Jesus says, particularly about his first commandment over all to “love God” and secondarily to “love one another.” But first, always, is his urgency for us to love God. There are three parts here that must be taken in and absorbed together.

First, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” meaning that it is not just a set of ethics that bring salvation but he himself. Second, Jesus says “You must love God with all your heart, mind, and soul,” and he says this is the most important rule of all. Lastly, putting a ribbon and bow on his message, he refers to himself as “I AM” four times in John’s Gospel, which is the most clear declaration of saying “I am God” that a first century citizen of Palestine could possibly understand. They knew of Exodus 3:14 where God said to Moses, “I AM.” Then there are the myriad instances of Jesus calling himself “the Lord of the Sabbath” and “Son of Man” and various other nuanced references and especially the interaction with Pilate in Mark where he admits to being the Messiah. He could not be more clear that he is declaring himself to be God than if he ran up and down the temple aisle playing the bongo drums and shouting, “I created the universe, I’m God.” Sometimes I wish he had performed an act like that to make it more clear to us gentiles, but to Jews the words “I AM” and “Son of Man” was effectively that same metaphorical bongo drum.

He clearly states that salvation is through him, that God must be worshiped, and that he is God. These all point to him as God, in the flesh. We think of John the Baptist as slightly “off” by eating grasshoppers and wearing a hair shirt, but he never declared anything even close to this outlandish. Moses didn’t go this far, and he went far. He met God, but never declared himself to be God. Elijah riding off to heaven in a fiery chariot? That’s a wild story, but it doesn’t touch the grandeur of this claim.

There is more to this declaration of Jesus, and this is one of those sentences that cannot easily be put aside, especially if you believe in the incarnation and resurrection and ascension. Heck, even if you can only get your head around one of those mysteries, you can’t set these words aside. Certainly the apostles and writers could never have concocted this story on their own, as they were not equipped. Who would be crazy enough to claim it unless they believed it? Virgil and Homer could not have come up with an epic quite like this. The profoundness of Jesus’ words is like nothing else in literature, which eliminates the notion that he was a lunatic and leaves me always turning back to him being divine. Even a great liar cannot have this kind of wisdom and also perform miracles like multiplying loaves of bread and bring himself back to life and ascend into the heavens. There are plenty of lunatics in the world, but they can’t walk on water. There are plenty of people who have claimed to be God, but they haven’t changed the world. There are plenty of people who have died trying to advance a person’s legacy or cause, but those efforts have not inspired an ever-burning movement that has outlasted every human empire and draws people to give immense amounts of time and money toward belief in the idea.

I think this is what makes it difficult for skeptics, because doubting miracles is something that comes naturally to us, especially today in the age of science. I also think people of the first century were not as gullible as we would like to pretend. However, his words have such depth and punch so hard that we see something extreme and strange happening in Jesus and in the people around him, something different from any other sage like Buddha or Confucious, so strange, in fact, that the miracles require a second look. Even once denied, these stories leave a lingering effect on us, one that causes us to look back over our shoulder now and then at the miracles even as we walk away, as if we need to re-assure ourselves, “Nah, there’s no way he fed the 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish.” “No, of course he didn’t walk on water.” Because if we are wrong and even a single miracle is real, then the weight of these words becomes infinite on our chests.

Some people come to believe via the miracles and others via the teachings. Those gifted with faith can get to the miracles quickly, while those gifted in reason must approach through the teachings and the parables. Still others must come by experience. I think many must come by all three avenues to get up the mountain.

Setting aside this story of the men awaiting to stone the woman (I’ve already parked it for a while here) if we remove the wisdom of his words and also remove his claims to divinity, and are only left with miracles; if he only walked on water, or if he only fed the five thousand, or if he only healed the withered hand, or if he only calmed the storm, or if he only raised Lazarus…what then? What if he only gave us the miracles and no wisdom?

I hate to say it, but then he is even more so God than if we only had his teachings.

If a miracle occurred at all, even once by his hand, this decides the case emphatically and completely, far more than if he was a good teller of tales or claimant to divinity, because we already know that no one can walk on water. But if you take even one miracle, perhaps walking on water, and you pair it with his wisdom and then you add in his claims about his being God, then we have a hat-trick of difficult information to handle.

For anyone that believes Jesus did not say he was God, they must surely exclude statements where he most clearly said exactly that. Consider: "Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.” There is no statement that could possibly affirm more emphatically and finally that Jesus declared, “I’m God.” To Jews who grew up hearing stories of Exodus, God’s answer to Moses about his identity was, “I AM.”

What never ceases to amaze me is that people today, after two millennia of scholarship, on the heels of the thousands upon thousands of deep thinkers who pored over these books, believe they have suddenly unearthed the secret meaning of the Gospel accounts and it somehow matches whatever side-ideology that they happen to be selling, usually some unoriginal heresy that gets warmed up again, kind of like leftovers in a dirty microwave. I’ve heard it said that “the plain things are the main things, and the main things are the plain things.” This is why the Apostles’ Creed is a masterpiece, because it distills the story and purpose to the points that both children and adults, of all education levels, can memorize and understand. There will always be plenty of doubters who come along and announce their discovery of the hidden “truth,” but as the letter of Timothy warned, “…the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”

His miracles, words, and claims overwhelm our puny minds with a question, and force us to consider the supernatural as an answer, even when we don’t want to go there. You can skim the text and pretend it doesn’t matter, but if you read closely and study his life, a higher form comes into focus and presents something strange, appealing, and other-worldly. This problem of his life, logic, and mysteries is that it all makes sense in the totality of the Bible, and I believe the Catechism of the Catholic Church is the handbook for understanding it all. I believe the Sacraments of the church make the invisible things visible to us and put the marks of faith upon us, and that the Holy Mass is Sacred and that the Eucharist truly is the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus, and that through Confession our sins are forgiven as the priest acts in the person of Christ. When the Sacred becomes real, there can be no substitute for Baptism or partaking in the Eucharist at Mass. Somehow it all fits together, and in the strangest way it is the Mysteries that act like the glue to hold faith and reason together. The whole picture is there but we can only see parts of it at a time. It is the totality of scripture and tradition and the very clear presence of the Holy Spirit in this world that make Jesus a magnet that we cannot peel our eyes away from still today. There is nothing quite like these scenes and stories, not to mention the parables, in all of written literature and recorded history.

Ok, finally…back to the circle of stoning: when the woman sat in the middle, Jesus drew his finger in the sand, doodling while the “righteous” men warmed rocks in their hands. Some assume he was writing the men’s sins in the sand, as he already knew their hearts and their errors while they proudly lied and prepared to kill the woman. But it doesn’t say this explicitly in the story, so this is only speculation and Jesus may just literally be keeping his cool, ignoring the tension. In fact, since he shows calmness amid literal storms, that seems most likely - he is simply doodling in the sand, like the shortstop in little league, ignoring the stress and anxiety of the nattering small-souled adults around him. But that doesn’t mean that he is writing off adultery and sin as inconsequential.

We will be judged. He may not be writing our sins in the sand, but he already knows them. That’s guaranteed as nothing can be hidden from God. We will be judged. Just not by each other. I can almost hear him saying, “I’ll take care of the judgment, but thanks for offering to help.”

Strangely enough, anyone that I’ve heard utter the words, “Judge not,” usually goes on to spend the next breaths judging others. That includes Tupac Shakur in his song, Only God Can Judge Me, and come to think of it, Metallica’s song Holier than Thou. “Measure for measure” will we be judged, and the great warning about the unforgivable sin is the one that makes me shudder.

There is a moment where Jesus says, if you do not have the change of heart, you will get to the day of judgment and God will say, “I never knew you.” (Mt 7:21-23) This means you can appear to love God, you can do all the right things, make all the right moves, but God knows what you are really all about. That pizza punch-card will be thrown in the trash. He knows my interior state. I can’t fool him. Without interior change, I’ve made no change, and I can’t fake it. Fooling people is possible. Fooling God? That’s fooling yourself. Superficiality in actions and appearance is much like unrighteous judgment. You cannot fool God, just as those ready to stone the woman could not fool Jesus.

Those men wielding rocks who walked away: I always wonder if they were changed. We don’t know what happens to them afterward. Perhaps some were changed as Jesus spun the accusation back at them. Perhaps knowing the woman is guilty but not condemned struck them as profound on the way home, and they realized forgiveness is possible. Wouldn’t we love to know what happened to those men? It’s like the other nine lepers. Or what happened to the rich young ruler? We have all these cliffhangers where we have to wait for season two, but season two got cancelled due to crucifixion, so we’ll never know. Or someday maybe we will, but not today. Perhaps they seethed with anger and helped put Jesus to the Cross, but later realized their sin and turned, like St. Paul after he was out torturing and killing the first followers. We don’t know. But we don’t need to know, because we are those people. We are the Pharisees and the nine lepers and the rich young ruler. That’s the funny thing I realized when I thought about what happened to those men. I realized that wondering about them is the same as wondering about myself. Those men who came to stone the woman represent all of us, the readers, the people, the fallen souls of this world. How comical then that I read the story of the adulterer and the stoning and I spend so much time reflecting on my judgement of the Pharisees! If it didn’t cause me fear and trembling, I’d be laughing.

Jesus impacts this scene using few words. The woman, the target of the stoning, is not condemned. So we wonder, how can this be if Jesus has come to fulfill the law and the prophets? How can she be guilty, but not condemned? How can we be guilty, but not condemned?

And that question right there is the secret sauce of the Gospel accounts. What is that secret? That all are guilty. We deserve condemnation, but forgiveness is available. Forgiveness is possible. Redemption is possible. All are guilty, but all are not condemned, as redemption can be found in the person of Jesus. Forgiveness comes through the immense sacrifice of Jesus. The fallen (hint: that’s you and me) can still win because by his own choice, God chooses to be sacrificed. He comes down to earth in human form, and stands in the scene at the end, alone with the rock, and no one gets stoned to death in this story. But then at the end of his own human life, he is once again alone, in the center, but this time on the cross. There again, he is alone, abandoned, humiliated, accepting his fate. He is condemned, not us. He is guilty, though without sin. On the cross we see our own sins on full display in the agony of his torture as his life blood drains, his mouth goes dry, his lungs collapse, his muscles and tendons tear, his feet and hands rip against metal as he tries to shift and support his body on the cross. He cannot lean his head back on the wood for the thorns on his head slice him, and he cannot lean his head forward as it shifts his weight ahead and thereby wracks his feet with pain. He cannot press himself upward or his feet will dig further into the nail, and he cannot let himself be lowered or his hands will gape further on their nails. This unbearable pain must be endured for 180 minutes amid the noise of jeering and shaming and hatred and envy and malice and slander. And undeservingly, it is us who are rewarded. For his pain, we receive the gift of knowing our own weaknesses and being offered the chance at life, as he descends and spends the next two days conquering death and hell, until he returns in his infinite risen glory.

So judge not, yes, but remember: you will be judged.

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

Everyone loves the famous line of “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Even better, today people love the line “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” That may be the motto of our era. These are some of the most popular lines from the Gospels and are used as often by non-believers as by believers. These lines can be interpreted to fit into almost any shape you like, and can be raised to affirm any faith or ideology. These lines, when cherry-picked as standalone zingers, behave kind of like what we do with chicken today in the grocery store. We shape these lines to fit our needs and wants. How are these lines like chicken? Well, in the past, we just cooked the whole chicken and broke it apart in the separate parts: chicken legs, wings, breasts, and thighs. Life was simple then. Now we mass produce the chicken and carve it up and pluck out the white meat and blend up the dark meat, and run it through machines and slicers and shapers until it looks nothing like the original chicken. We can shape and press chicken into any bun-fitting shape that we like. There’s chicken patties, chicken strips, chicken nuggets, popcorn chicken, dinosaur shaped chicken, chicken in a can, chicken fries, and chicken burgers. There are even vegan chicken products that have no chicken whatsoever in them, yet are sold under the name of “chicken.” From this poor bird we have created The Island of Dr. Moreau in the frozen food aisle.

We pick out the parts we want and make it fit our own yearnings. We want the bloodless version. If you think of the idea of “the Gospels” and are never disturbed at all, you are missing some major sections. You might be reading the Gospel like you shop the frozen food aisle. In the grocery store, we push our carts and listen to elevator music and pause in the air conditioning, all in complete comfort. We open a glass door and feel a blast of cold air to pick out a bag of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, thinking how cute they are. But that product in the freezer has no resemblance to a chicken. It has sealed us off from all the realities of the life of a chicken. There is no feed, dung, or blood anywhere near our shopping centers. We don’t see anything but the clean, happy ending of the cartoonish dinosaur nugget. There is no evidence of a chicken at all, let alone the sacrifice the chicken made. But the chicken is there, and the sacrifice was most certainly made.

Few people read the words that come before or after the “don’t judge me” parts of the biographies of Jesus. Why is that? Well, for one thing, it disrupts the comfort of feeling safe and nourished. There is no shortage of confusing and disturbing lines that came from the mouth of Jesus. For anyone that accuses believers of cherry-picking lines from the Bible to suit their beliefs, there is an equal amount of cherry-picking done to suit non-beliefs as well. For this latter group, the two lines about judgement are leveraged heavily in the ongoing effort to make Jesus into a non-miraculous, non-divine but cool hippy instead of the incarnation of the creator of the universe who took on our sins for the greatest sacrifice in history.

For the life of me, I will never understand why any non-believer would care for anything said by a non-divine version of Jesus, since then he would be a lunatic and a fraud. Anyone who denies Jesus’ divinity but is still quoting him as a moral teacher should ask themselves: “Why would you care what he said at all, if he’s lying about his primary claim of being the messiah, of being God?”

But let’s continue. Let’s look at these famous lines where Jesus told us not to be ‘judgey’. Let’s go get stoned. Here’s the cast of the scene: Jesus, a bunch of angry Pharisees, and the adulterous woman.

When the Pharisees want to stone the woman who was caught in adultery (Jn 8:1-11), they try to corner Jesus on interpreting the law. They know that he is a follower of the law, that he is a devout Jew. Let me stop right here, since this is probably the main point people miss right out of the gate.

The Holy Family of Mary and Joseph observed Jewish law with devotion. That is, they were devout. So was Jesus. Thus to understand Jesus at all requires understanding that he was very Jewish, and to be a devout Jew means understanding what “the law” means. This also means that to understand Jesus at all means you have to understand the Old Testament, the bloody and gritty parts of the Bible. This is the part of the Bible where the chicken was still on the farm, not in your freezer. The classic mistake people make, from Marcion in the second century to the Third Reich in the 20th century, is thinking that you can understand Jesus without diving into his Jewish heritage. Marcion wanted to get rid of the Old Testament just like many modern people do, and it’s one of the oldest heresies we have to look back on for guidance. People have always tried to throw out the books of Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Why? Because they want to unhitch the train of Christianity from the Jews, but you can’t. Even if Leviticus does sound like your angry old uncle who lacks spiritual bedside manner, you can’t kick him out because he’s part of the family. Without the whole family of books, hardly any of Jesus’ life and teaching makes sense. Without the history that precedes his life and ministry, half of the Gospel of John would not make sense, and most the Gospel of Matthew would confuse the heck out of us. We need the whole, not just parts of it. You know, eventually if you eat enough dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, you start to wonder where the dinosaur came from, and once you start digging into the ingredient list and the supply-chain you will arrive back at the whole food: the chicken. You must have the whole, not just some industrial product in a shiny wrapper.

“The Old Testament is an indispensable part of Sacred Scripture. Its books are divinely inspired and retain a permanent value, for the Old Covenant has never been revoked. Indeed, ‘the Old Testament was deliberately so oriented that it should prepare for and declare in prophecy the coming of Christ, redeemer of all men.’ Christians venerate the Old Testament as true Word of God. The Church has always vigorously opposed the idea of rejecting the Old Testament under the pretext that the New has rendered it void (Marcionism). (CCC 121-123)

So I haven’t gotten very far yet on this story, and no where near the attempted stoning of the woman. But Jesus cannot be understood without the old books, nor can any part of this story. Moreover, this need for the old books doesn’t only apply to Jesus, but how could anyone understand Peter or Paul or John or the various dudes named James without understanding the history of the Chosen people? You have to understand Adam and Abraham and Moses and David and Jeremiah all the way up to the Maccabees and all the rest of the Hebrews in between to get to any sense whatsoever of what is happening in the circle of Pharisees. If you just rush to find the line, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” you have just gone for the dinosaur shaped chicken nugget and pretended that it spontaneously grew in the freezer via the debunked scientific “theory of spontaneous generation.” Nuggets come from somewhere, they don’t just happen.

(Ok, I’m unhitching from the chicken metaphor from here on out, so as not to beat a dead horse. I wanted to say horse-shaped chicken nugget, but I don’t know if it has been invented yet.)

Jesus stated that he came to “fulfill the law and the prophets,” which is a statement forgotten by those who want to carve the hippy version of Jesus away from the Old Testament laws of Moses. So what does “the law” mean? Jesus is talking about the Ten Commandments and the Torah. Now, I don’t want to get into whether he is talking about natural law or specific ceremonial law or cultural law of the Hebrews, because that’s more than I can handle. You need a Trent Horn or Jimmy Akin or Jim Blackburn to break all that down. In his ministry he corrects some of the old law, and does away with some. The good news is this: we know that Jesus perfects the Old Testament law. But while he makes these corrections, he still has immense respect for the old law. He also said, "Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place."

Why did Jesus believe in the old law so much? How could he be so deeply dedicated to the old law? Talk about dramatic, too. He defends the old law so much that he says not only will every letter be fulfilled, but even the smallest part of each letter.

I can think of one reason.

There is one reason in particular, one primary reason that really sticks out to me. And it seems to be very clear, and make perfect sense once you consider it.

It’s because he made the law. He wrote the law. He’s God. So yeah, he’s down with the law. He’s the author. Again, for anyone that forgets that Jesus is claiming to be God while reading the Gospels, these statements will make no sense. The chill teacher version of Jesus would not speak this way of the law, but the divine author of the law, who used human authors to record his will, would speak this way of the law.

He gave the law to his chosen people. If he is God, then he certainly agrees to his own law, because he is the author.

The mistake people make when reading about Hakuna Matata version of Jesus is that they have already rejected him as divine, and therefore nothing he says makes sense, because he is actually speaking as God himself. To read his words as a profound teacher makes little sense when he starts dropping lines like “I saw Satan fall like lightning.” Wait what? If he’s just a dude with peaceful ideas, then he didn’t witness Satan fall from the sky. Surely someone has already tried to fit that into their desire to legalize drugs. “Oh, that must mean that Jesus was on psychedelics.” No, he wasn’t. He was high all right, but that’s because he was the highest being, incarnated into the flesh to walk with us.

Here’s another question: how do you reconcile a purely human Jesus with a line like: “No one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.” How is an entirely human Jesus going to raise anything up? And on what day? If he’s not God and claims this power, then he’s crazy or an arrogant liar. If he is God, then it makes sense but it’s also terrifying. No wonder Jesus gets irritated with the people around him and says, "O faithless and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I endure you?"

Sometimes I wonder if he would say that to me at least once a day. When I imagine Jesus living with me, it’s a good mental exercise, because when I pour an oversized bowl of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran from the MEGA-sized box, and then cut up a banana to throw on top, I just have to wonder - what would Jesus think of such a food spectacle? Worse, what would he say when I ate that bowl, and then poured a second bowl? I suspect he might say, “I never knew you…were such a pig.”

So for everyone today that throws out the Old Testament and Ten Commandments, I wonder if they have not just seized on the most culturally shocking lines of the ancient texts and got stuck there. Some of the old books are difficult to read, without a doubt, and the cultural differences and scientific understanding of the universe creates a gap in understanding, but focusing on those things clouds the religious truth of the texts. To toss them out is to lose the whole backstory of Jesus’ life and his purpose. Jesus does not sound like someone who rejects the past and the law when he says “not one letter of the law will pass away”? Further, he says not even one part of a letter of the law will pass away. Then he later says, “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” meaning we should follow the law of the land where we live, as long as it doesn’t conflict with the law, the real law, the natural law, God’s law, which is the Ten Commandments and those obvious laws which we can know in our conscience.

If you do not read Jesus words as if it were God speaking, then you will get a very odd interpretation of what the Gospels mean. You will have to skip over many parts because they make no sense, and all of the miracles. You will have to throw out all of those completely if Jesus is not divine. If you read his words as the speech of an ordinary man with wisdom, you may just as well go to the airport bookstore and pick up a self-help book full of vanilla maxims on being yourself and pursuing happiness. You can stay in the comfort of ignoring the many times Jesus talks about separating the sheep from the goats, or the wheat from the chaff that will burn for eternity. Because if Jesus is not God but is only claiming to be, then it doesn’t matter and your ego can run buck wild. But if he is God, then the only way to read the Gospels and make sense of them is with the understanding that he is speaking as God himself. It is precisely when you make this turn that you may experience fear of the Lord, which is a good thing because it means you are on the right track.

The self-help gurus say something different than what our carpenter, who is God, tells us. He’s saying something very different. As God he is showing and telling us in every word and action the exact opposite of the feel-good books on the airport bestseller cart. He does say, “Be yourself.” But he doesn’t say it at all like the books of affirmation at the airport do. He said, “Surrender to me because you are a sinner. Then you can finally be your true self.”

He also says (paraphrasing here into bro-speak): “Only I can save you because I am God. I’m not giving you some self-help tips here for kicks, but for eternal life, so take up your cross daily, crucify your ego, and follow me. Oh, and you will find happiness in me because I am God. But - fair warning - you will get mocked and possibly murdered if you do this thing correctly, and I’m about to show you what that looks like.”

Jesus questioned few of the existing laws of his people, slicing only those ceremonial, cultural laws that strived for outward cleanliness. He only corrected the laws that needed correction, the ones that blocked the interior conversion of the heart, the rules that stifled mercy and humility. (For a great listen on this story, check out Tim Keller’s podcast on “The Humility of Jesus.”)

According to the law, adultery was illegal and stoning was the punishment. So the situation was this: the Pharisees have a woman in the middle of the circle. With rocks in hand, they put the question to Jesus on what should be done to her as a violator of the law of Moses. However, before he answers with his famous line, Jesus squats down and draws in the dirt with his finger. No one knows what he was drawing in the sand or dirt, or why he does it, although there is plenty of speculation. Perhaps he was doing something profound in the sand, or perhaps he was just bored with their games and like a nine-year-old shortstop drawing in the dirt during a boring baseball game he found something more interesting in shaping the sand. Regardless of what he drew in the sand, Jesus stands up and delivers the ultimate one-liner, the greatest microphone-drop in the history of life and literature, saying the famous line, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Then he bends down once again and draws in the dirt, again doodling like the detached young shortstop or writer of something profound and creative. Whatever the case, it causes the Pharisees’ pride to crumble.

Stunned, the men with rocks fall silent. They slowly fade away, leaving one by one. Hungry for blood and justice, they suddenly lose interest as the one-liner from Jesus seems to annihilate their motivation to kill the woman. Their goal of trapping Jesus in a legal argument snapped upon themselves. The comment seems to turn the mirror onto the men, showing them their own sin, and they drift away leaving the woman and Jesus in the center of the disappearing circle.

This is often how God works in my own life, where something will happen that bothers me, gets me all wound up, and slowly, gradually, I come to realize that my perception of the problem is not exactly right and that I’m probably more prideful and lacking humility than the person I’m upset with. This whole “drawing his finger in the sand” is like a metaphor for God taking his time to correct us, stirring up our consciences, awakening us to our own flaws and failures. What a shame that I am so talented at seeing others’ failures first before my own, as this talent does me little favor. Perhaps I should have pursued being a judge on American Idol or at the county fair or bodybuilding competitions, because I’m so keen on finding the flaw in others instead of myself. Perhaps I missed a career opportunity. Seeing my own flaws is a brutal process of introspection, and God does seem to walk me to that place. He lets me burn off the passions before showing me my own faults.

Everyone takes this quote from Jesus and runs with it. This one gets mixed right in with his other comment about non-judgement. “Don’t judge me,” we say. Or maybe, “Only God can judge me.” But I would argue that those who say those words don’t understand what Jesus is saying. He’s not saying we won’t be judged. He’s saying, if you have no sin, you can judge. But who has no sin? Only one person can say that, and it’s Jesus. It’s God. He is the one that can judge. In this case, he can judge the woman, but he’s not judging her. Not yet, but he will.

In these cases, he’s always indicating that the judgement is not happening right now…but it will happen. Judgement is coming, but there is time yet. These lines are about mercy on living persons, but the final justice is 100% guaranteed for every person upon their last breath. His mercy does not affirm violations of the law, but rather corrects behavior and offers a second chance.

That’s why the last verse of this story is the most important of all. He tells her to “Go and sin no more.” The implication is that she did sin, but she has another chance. She’s forgiven. This is the most important line in the story and has parallels to the story where Jesus heals the paralyzed man. In that story, Jesus considers what is more amazing: that he can make a paralyzed man pick up his mat and walk, or that he can forgive the sins of the same man. Obviously the medical miracle is amazing, but the claim that he can forgive sins jumps infinitely ahead in terms of wonder. The people who witness the event are more amazed at the medical healing, but truly the forgiveness of sins is far more profound and meaningful, which is what he’s trying to convey to the people.

This forgiveness brings up two questions. Who can forgive sins? Well, obviously only God can do that. A cool hippy cannot forgive your sins, and I know a few cool, aging hippies who still believe in peace, love, and dope but they cannot forgive sins. A drug user on psychedelics cannot forgive my sins. If one of these types told me that he forgave me for all the evil things I’ve done, I would buy them another beer (or whatever their drug of choice) because I would consider them already intoxicated.

So why do non-believers and deniers of Jesus’ divinity read these lines and consider that an ordinary man has any power to forgive sin? I think it’s more likely that this forgiveness question is ignored, or glossed over, or not looked at very closely. Actually, I think many people do feel like Jesus is divine, but they don’t want to think about it too closely, because once you really dive into the Gospels, or stare at the crucifix for a long time, you start to see your own sins and feel the need to change. In fact, this is why I feel that crucifixes should have the spent body of Jesus hanging in defeat, so that when you look upon it - and really look at it - you see your flaws in the wounds of Christ. A bare and clean cross doesn’t deliver the message like a cross with the mangled body of Jesus fully exposed does, with his bloodied head, punctured hands and feet, the many cuts and bruises from the scourging, the scuffed joints from falling three times on the road to Calvary, and the gaping hole in his side by a spear that rammed into his heart. On that cross, the cross with the body, you can imagine how the sinless man squirmed and hung and suffocated under his own weight, while being jeered at and mocked for all his goodness, while he thirsted under the heat of the sun, for three hours, dehydrating and struggling to breathe. He had no sleep the night before and had been beaten and ripped apart with Roman whips. That is the cross I need to see, not the empty cross with no nails and no body. I do not want to see the “before” cross, I want to see the “after.” I don’t want to see the cleaned up Disney version of the cross. The ugly cross is where the life of Christ makes sense and the mystery of his sacrifice can just begin to make sense to me. Then I can begin, just barely, to see how my own sins and fallen nature put him there in that horrible place, and somehow, strangely, how that awful sight shows the greatest act of humility and love the world has ever seen and becomes the ultimate example of how to live, and the ultimate symbol of hope for our souls.

The second question is: how can he forgive her sins, or anyone else’s sins? How can that be? What is happening? How can there be no consequences for breaking laws, when he says no part of the law, not one letter, nor a part of a single letter, will pass away?

That’s the question the Pharisees want answered, and in a clever way Jesus does answer it. He answers it by showing the men that judgment is not taking place that day, not by them. There is so much more to this story.

For starters, did the woman commit adultery alone? No. That’s not possible. So where is the man and why isn’t he also in the center of the circle? Surely he too committed adultery. Shouldn’t he also be stoned? Where is the man that committed the act with this woman? Why is she the only one being accused and tried for adultery? This is one of those moments where you can see Jesus treating the dignity of all people equally, woman or man. He cuts through the double-standard. He subverts the culture. Wait…is he…wait…what? Is he smashing the patriarchy? He is establishing some kind of equality in eternal judgement here, as Paul realized a few years later: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” So there is that. But if you believe Jesus is God and he is speaking as God, and he speaks highly of the first and most famous patriarch, Abraham, and does the same about many of the others like Moses and Elijah and Jacob and Isaac, then he doesn’t seem real keen on “smashing” them, since after all, he chose them.

Next, who are the men that want to stone her? Jesus implies something incredible here: the men that want to stone her are adulterers themselves. At the very least they are guaranteed to be sinners of some kind, breakers of the law, and likely worthy of stoning as the fullness of the law prescribes. Should they be stoned themselves for the same crime, or for a different crime? I would bet they are guilty of it, just as most men today are guilty of it, nearly all of them as they pore over the porn in their phone and degrade the women in the images and then clear their browser history and then pretend they haven’t committed adultery. I have been as guilty as any in that regard, as the websites beckon us, tempt us men, into easy-access lust and defile our marriages and relationships while we project our sin onto those performing the act on the screen, instead of looking at our own behavior. How many millions of men have partaken in looking at porn, only to go online afterward and lament the fallen morals of our society? The Pharisees are still encircling the woman today, as we sinners act as spotless as a lamb. We do this while the Lamb of God squirms in agony on the cross for our fallen hearts, to forgive us, to give us a second, third, seventh, and seventy-seventh chance.

And what happens to the woman then? She is not condemned. But saying “Go and sin no more” implies that she was guilty of the accused act. I feel it’s safe to assume the woman is forever changed after this moment, like so many others that Jesus comes into contact with, as he fundamentally re-plants them in rich soil. He rips out the roots of old ways out. But that redemption, that re-planting, comes with a huge caveat, one that I feel most people miss when they throw around the “Judge not, lest ye be judged” one-liner as if it were a shield.

This redemption that Jesus preaches only happens in the Gospel stories to those that have the correct humility before God. He cures people who have faith. In some cases, he cures people but not all of them change their ways, such as the ten lepers that he cures and only one comes back to thank him. (A Samaritan, of all people!) The one leper comes back to him, and Jesus tell him:

“Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine? Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?” Then he said to him, “Stand up and go; your faith has saved you.”

Faith has saved this one leper. What’s the implication? His sins are forgiven. This implies the other nine may be healed from leprosy, but they are not changed. They have not changed. The other nine are back in the arcade of life, living without their physical malady, but afflicted with the spiritual malady, and not giving any thanks and honor to God. This is what happens when you make God a transactional being for redemption only when you think you need a lift. You cry out for help when you need it, but turn away as soon as you have what you want. That is where the judgment will come down, and this cleansing of the ten lepers states it pretty plainly, in my opinion.

The change is what must happen. Without the change, the condemnation will come. Forgiveness entails expected duties that follow, otherwise there is a lack of understanding about what the forgiveness meant. Fortunately, we get repeat attempts here. God is well aware of our weaknesses, and I believe he wants us to know and embrace our own. If you don’t know your weaknesses, how can you be prepared to fight off the temptations that will cause you to fall? Knowing my weaknesses becomes a great gift. Gifts and crosses come to us all, and sometimes the cross is the gift that awakens my faith.

If we receive forgiveness, it must really be received, and not as a “Get out of jail free card.” The one unforgivable sin the Jesus alludes to is the rejection of the Holy Spirit, which is the rejection of God. So anyone that rejects God, inside their hearts, will not receive forgiveness. That sends a chill to me, as I often wonder about that. Obviously, nothing can be hidden from God, as we are an open book to God, and how easily our petty pride can rise up and knock us off course, tipping us right back to a subtle rejection of Jesus, making him into a personal redemption center where we go when we need to exchange our token prayers for forgiveness.

Those who receive the Holy Spirit see their whole life change. Those that understand, change their ways out of joy. Those that do not understand, do not change. The “Judge not lest ye be judged” line is shortened by most people, to the detriment of the concept, as there is a key line that follows it elsewhere when he mentions the idea of “judge not.” In this story of the stoning, Jesus says nothing of judgment, as she appears to have a clean slate. “Go and sin no more.” Like the lepers, she is starting fresh, but as we saw in the ten lepers, only one is actually saved. Curing or forgiving should arouse faith in the healed or forgiven, but this doesn’t always happen. But elsewhere Jesus does say “Stop judging, that you may not be judged.” (Mt 7:1-2) Everyone loves that line. But the very next line in Matthew after that is this: “For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”

I’ve never heard anyone add this part when quoting this line: “measure for measure will you be judged.” We just say the first part because it makes a good comeback, and then allows us to agree to disagree, or more likely just permits us to make up whatever rules we like. “Judge not” alone allows our own pride and disobedience to continue un-chastised and unchanged, but it doesn’t account for the next words that Jesus says, because a judgement is coming, in full measure, and that includes our choices that we make. So even if you, or a co-worker, a friend, a schoolmate, or a relative doesn’t get to have the final word on judgement in this world, someone or something does in the next.

So who is doing that judging? Is it the cool hippy Jesus? No. This is the fiery Jesus, speaking as God. We forget about this Jesus, who killed the fig tree for not producing fruit. We forget about this God-man who said, “The son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.” (Mt 13:40-42)

In fact, if you don’t believe in God, nor believe in Jesus as God, but you read the line “so will you be judged,” who exactly do you think Jesus is talking about as doing the measuring? For those that do not believe, but who quote these lines, how can this idea of cosmic judgement still mean anything? Yet these lines resonate, because even when reminded of the measure for measure, non-believers nod. Even while claiming atheism and disbelief in heaven or hell, people still want some kind of ultimate payback or justice. An infiltration of “karma” seems to have wafted into the room, but it doesn’t fit into Christianity. Judgement is to karma as an apple is to an orange. Jesus shares no concept of karma. He’s talking about a final judgement, and he will direct you to heaven or hell. He mentioned hell many times. He mentions it all over the place, and souls are going there. Does that sound like the cool hippy allowing us to do whatever you want? Does anyone remember a verse that says: “That’s cool; get drunk, trash the place, lie, cheat, steal, be prideful, commit adultery, have random hookups. Do whatever you want, it’s all good, I’ll just save you at the end.” No, there’s nothing like that. Maybe that will turn up in the next version of the Dead Sea Scrolls that is found in a cave in Qumran, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

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When things are going well, we consider ourselves in charge. But the minute things go sideways in our relationships and expectations, we transplant the blame owed to people onto anger at someone else, and that someone is often God. If I am mad for something that I was not given, or about some thing that was “taken,” or at someone who did something to me, or at someone who did not do something to me, then perhaps my concept of God is too small. In fact, that concept of God is so small that it makes the creator into a creature of the creation (and that only happened once, a few thousand years ago). God does not make deals and does not bargain with us. In fact, that’s exactly the devil’s occupation. If God is the creator and the mover of all things, the devil is the dealmaker who tempts us and accuses and divides and sows doubt. This is what the classic play Faust and the country music song The Devil went Down to Georgia both point out. The devil is “willing to make a deal” and he dangles a million varieties of the “golden fiddle” in front of each one of us. God does not deal in transactions. He has no need of us. It’s us who need him. His moves are beyond our understanding, yet we must make choices in this world to do his will the best that we can. On the flip side, the devil needs us, so he offers bargains, persuading us to trade our souls for golden fiddles or honor and prestige. We gladly barter temporary shiny poisons of this world over eternal life of our souls and think we came out on top of the bargain.

Human flaws are a common blocker among many of the fallen away. For me it was a huge blocker. For Catholics, the sex abuse scandal made it very difficult to justify continuing on with the faith. But God did not commit those acts, people did. Right now, today, there are adults committing those same horrors - literally, right now, these things are happening. I suspect in twenty years, tales from the pandemic will begin to seep out of locked-down households. Where secrets live, sins hide. There is no question that these sins revolt us, every one of us, but God did not commit these sins. People did these things. People do awful things when no one is watching. It is not the first time and won’t be the last time. No matter what religion brings in the faithful, or political party takes power, no matter what ideology wins the culture, these same sins will continue. These things flourish under secrecy and isolation. For humans, there is no other way. As a child will steal a cookie when a parent walks away, adults who have full reason can conjure far worse actions than pilfering food - but the root cause remains the same as the child. When no one is watching, the self and ego take over. When authority disappears, the apple re-appears. The genius of the story of the Garden of Eden is that you can witness it every single day happening like clockwork as the human heart, wired for God, is so easily short-circuited by temptation and evil. This is not the sole problem of just one culture or skin color or religion or political party or nation or family or age group or parenting style or diet or climate. The same flaw exists in every person who has lived, is living now, or will live in the future. And likewise, regardless of time, place, or physical attributes, there is but one cure for it and that is turning back to God. To do so can be humiliating, but it fixes the short-circuit and restores the heart.

For me, the abuse scandal of the Church shoved me away from God more than I already was, as I had focused on the people who had committed the acts. I did not think of the billion people worldwide that did good things with their faith, who found meaning, who did great works of charity, and who loved God first and foremost. I saw the trees amid the forest, the sick and twisted trees, as representative of the whole. I felt that all the trees should be torn down if such a forest allowed such horrors to grow. But then I realized that thousands of school teachers a year are accused or convicted of the same crimes as those disturbed clergy members, yet I never called for the end to all public schooling. Families all over the world commit abusive acts against one another, but I never sought the destruction of the family. I had reserved my worst anger against those who failed at holiness, and I tried to corral God into the same pen as those men who failed, the people. The abuse scandal of the Church horrifies and sickens me to the core, as the Church holds a higher standard, as it must, as it is meant to do, which makes the abuse of trust that much worse. If a claim to holiness is made, then departures from that claim are magnified. To think of the Cardinal McCarrick story or the 300 Pennsylvania priests’ abuse brings forth a rage in me. Ugly realities should and must be held up for all to see, to ridicule the hypocrisy, as the awful reality of child abuse will forever be one of the primary reasons for lost faith in a creator or loving God. The hypocrisy of false holiness is the greatest scandal of all! It’s a scandal to be a holy fool and scare people away from God with manic literalism, but far worse is to be a holy pretender who is rotten at the core. You know who else hated hypocrisy? Jesus Christ, that’s who. And as far as children goes, he said this:

“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of things that cause sin! Such things must come, but woe to the one through whom they come!” (Mt 18:6-7)

Pain and suffering will remain with us, for reasons unknown, but the Church is God’s light on earth. Thus the horror of the abuse scandal damages the victims plus millions more, to the point that the faithful should be and must be the most outraged. We should be the most angry, both clergy and laity. The worst part of it is that the small percentage of predators in the Church through the era of abuse have sullied and destroyed the work of the many good and uplifting priests and bishops and deacons and believers. Priests that I have known and interacted with, who create joy and guide people, suffer from the choices of criminal colleagues. Clearly a culture that allowed it to happen must be gutted and ripped out, while remembering that God did not do this, nor did the Sacraments, nor did celibacy. It was a subset of corrupted human beings who shrugged off authority for ego and pleasure. While the disgusting wound keeps healing and re-opening, it is the work of those who believe to eradicate the problem, from stem to stern, so that the trust of the faithful, and especially of children, can never be used against them again. As of now, steps are being taken, too late for those victims, but the addition of zero tolerance policies, training for all volunteers, Safe Environment training, background checks, Codes of Conduct - all of this and more will be needed, forever going forward. For a good read beyond my rant, read Bishop Barron’s A Letter to a Suffering Church. Prepare to be sad and disturbed. But there is hope. There is always hope.

Until I finally set aside my own anger about other people's sins, perceived or imagined, correctly or not, I could not let myself be open. I had somehow forgotten: we don't pray to people. We pray to God. And I think of the moment when people left Jesus after they were disturbed about his teaching, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” This revolted some disciples and they left him, and Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” And Simon Peter says the words that those of us who believe still know to this day: “To whom shall we go?” We know he is the way, the truth, and the life. Peter says the words we all feel: “You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” And so we must remain and carry on and restore the Church, since we believe it is his Holy Church passed on through Peter and the apostles. That is a short yet complete summary of why we’ll stay, and run into the burning building to save it instead of fleeing the flames. The root cause of this failure is not God, and never was God. Nor was it Jesus or the Holy Spirit. It was human beings, flawed and fallen, but allowed to sin and abuse trust. So the fix must be made not with the Trinity, but with humans, as it was in the Garden, as it was at the Crucifixion, as it is today, as it will be again tomorrow, as it ever shall be until the Second Coming, on the day we cannot know that will arrive like a lightning flash across the sky.

That was the problem for me. I conflated humans with God. As a child, we are not taught to pray to a person. No, we are taught to pray to God. So now it makes no sense that I doubted God when it was always a person or my expectations that let me down. What a revelation to learn that people will always let you down if you put your entire faith in them. There is a saying among recovering addicts: An expectation is a planned resentment. I find that to be a fact repeatedly as I gain hindsight on past decades and phases. If a person or persons drove me away from God, then what in the heck was I expecting of them to begin with? I can tell you, I was not even considering God during my drift away from faith. I was focused on people, places, experiences, and expecting the impossible from flawed creatures, resenting the world when people did not act a certain way.

If people are not the thing keeping you from faith, here’s another common possible fence that’s keeping you out: you are too busy. Career or school or raising a family may be exhausting you. I took this route. (I took various wrong routes.) The weekend became something for social gatherings and parties, but never, never for God. I felt too weary to consider Church because the world of the weekday siphoned the energy from me. The weekend became about relaxing and mingling and recovering for the week. Then the weekend was never about God, not even for one hour. For one hour I couldn't rouse myself from the couch. How many us married couples have elevated our children above our marriages and even over God? How many youth sports tournament and leagues and practices have overtaken Sunday mornings? Then there is just the lazy pajama morning. How many Netflix and video game marathons have swallowed the hours of Sunday? The amusing distractions of sports and media carry us smiling toward our own spiritual deaths.

There was time, but never enough, so I thought. But it wouldn’t have mattered if had unlimited time, because I claimed that I was too tired and too indifferent. For one hour a week, out of the 168 hours in a seven day week, I could give neither the time nor the energy to offer up a single prayer of thanks. World weary, with a heavy heart, I slumped in the couch to restore myself. Like the apostles in the garden who could not stay awake with Jesus for one hour as he approached his torture on the cross, I could not give one hour. I could not move from the comfort of the couch. But I made sure I spent multiple hours watching sports, or going to the gym, or the brewpub, or shopping, or engaging in pleasure - but I could not give that one hour, or even a single minute.

I fell asleep instead of giving that one hour to God, which is where the heart wanted to go all along. I stifled it and told it to be quiet. “I'm too busy for that, I need to watch this three hour football game. I need to stare at this phone to finish reading this editorial.” The hard truth was that the screens were draining me, never restoring me. Even writing requires a screen, so here I sit a hypocrite, as usual. I imagine that what I’m doing on the computer or phone is important, but it’s just being busy. Reading news or information seems important, but it’s not. "Learning something” is wonderful, but it can feed the ego more than the soul, depending on what you are learning. If I’m learning about a new programming language or how to build a birdhouse, then there is benefit, but if I’m reading about the latest news story, then it does nothing but agitate me, and we can all name people whose news obsession has infected and overtaken their actual lives. This gossip and garbage information empties me out of the all vestiges of grace, and kills off any sense of sanctity that I might have carried with me into the virtual realm. Holy, sacred, sanctity, hallowed - those words meant nothing to me, until the turn back to trust in a Higher Power happened. Those holy things and ideas were words to be mocked and reviled because they blocked progress, knowledge, and efficiency in getting things done.

Yesterday I heard someone say that art class in elementary school is a waste of time because it would never “get kids anywhere in life.” But where are these kids going? Where is a child going that art, religion, music, or literature classes won’t get them? I think it will get them exactly where they need to go. For a time, I was in agreement with that sentiment. Too busy for foolish things. Too busy for unproductive pursuits. What happens then is that the busy schedule becomes progress itself, until after performing that act for several years you discover that foolish things and unproductive pursuits are often the very spice of life if those things even touch an edge of art, music, religion, and literature. Business and industry replace the sacred. Sitting still becomes the enemy. Being busy pretends at being “good” behavior: working, taxiing children to activities, exercising, politicking, watching the latest TV show - that was a list of what seemed “useful.” This pursuit of all these things made for a constant chase of knowledge at a thin, surface level.

Like the narrator of The Great Gatsby, I aimed at becoming “that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’” This goal of being versed in all subjects or having knowledge in all areas is a fantasy. Consider how people sit around fires with friends today compared to before the invasion of the smart phone. Conversations dug up questions that had no answer in the present company, and when the answer was unknown, we made up stories and jokes about the possible answer amid the firelight. Today, the moment a question is introduced, hands reach for phones to pull back the answer, the “truth.” All of the imagination and joking is killed off instantly, as the spark upon such kindling for conversation has water drown it immediately. There is so much less wonder, imagination, and conversation because Google exists, although software companies spend much in advertising to assure us the opposite. The fireside story or tale has become someone who loves their phone reading a Wikipedia article to those seated at the fire, and the dead imaginations nod and say, “TIL: Today I learned.”

But as for me, the pursuit of knowledge was a thinly veiled pursuit of approval and acceptance and self-justification. I can hardly see it as any different from the constant cleansing of the Pharisees, or like modern Muslims who wash many times a day for prayer. This “cleansing” is also done to our modern obsessions, those things we want so badly, that knowledge or sex or money or power. What we want is love and respect, to be seen, to be relevant, and desperate for the approval we will try to “wash” ourselves constantly. Then there is the possible horror that I’m still pursuing approval, among readers, in writing a blog and recording a podcast. The horror here is that I’ve learned nothing, and this very writing that you are reading is only the latest pursuit of approval. Yet I feel I have to share the story, as the experience of surfacing from a drowning state into drying out compels me to write now. The change from pessimism to optimism happened. Slowly at first, then seemingly overnight. There were markers along the way of how I lost my trust in God, and markers where I took turns to come back. The last turn I took led to radical trust, and now nothing is the same.

The change struck me so hard that the “fix” made total sense. That I could suddenly stop seeking approval in all of the old places jarred my entire sense of universe, earth, self, soul, meaning, and purpose. Realizing that putting my trust in that old “sky-fairy” was the key to the door that opened to peace shocked me so much that this sentence proclaims it here and now. The abandonment of any need for pharmaceuticals confirmed to me that the God-shaped hole in our hearts is a real thing. And so I am almost grateful, in a way, for the culture today that silenced and hid God away from me, lured me away from this secret, discouraged talk about the subject, encouraged me to look for answers elsewhere in work and physical ability and alcohol, coaxed me explore all the avenues of self worth, only to make me so fully aware in the end that the one glaring omission of meaning sat sidelined through it all. Sitting on end of the bench of my roster of meaningful pursuits sat Jesus of Nazareth, the last player to enter the game. The humble one, ignored, avoided, mocked, sat patiently while all the other flashy players (who talked a big game) limped back from the field of life. I finally turned to that one remaining person, and said, “Ok, Jesus. Let’s try this. I’ve tried everything else.” Only to find, of course, that the last player is the the greatest of all time, and now he is the only one needed. All along, he was the only player, coach, owner, and fan that I ever needed, and the joy of gaining this valuable knowledge would seem a shame not to share.

For anyone else that might be thrashing about in those same waters and not sure where the life buoy is located, I feel that I should share it, as it took me so long to reach for the hand that was waiting to be grasped the whole time.

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Many people today say they are unaffiliated, or don’t have a religion. They are against organized religion, and distrust historic institutions or hierarchies, so they feel that they have no religion. But everyone has a religion. There may not be weekly meetings that are attended at traditional brick and mortar churches or mosques or synagogues or ashrams or hermitages or monasteries, but there are worship services that outperform traditional liturgies and there are pilgrimages that would rival the Canterbury Tales. People will drive across the country to see Mickey Mouse, or wait outside bookstores for the next Harry Potter book. They will meet up for costume and role playing parties where the fantasy is accepted as reality. They will sleep outside on concrete to get the next iPhone. They will fly ten thousand miles to hear the keynote speech from the Apple CEO. The sports pilgrimages that men make to football stadiums is spoken of with hallowed tones, as if to stand where Joe Montana or Joe Namath or Joe Theisman once threw a hail mary pass is a more highly regarded holy ground than where Gabriel said the actual words “Hail Mary, full of grace” to the Blessed Virgin Mary herself.

As a non-believer, when I reviewed my worldview, I realized I’d found a similar replacement for what I’d had before in traditional religion, with curious parallels. A trick of the mind happens when we abandon our idea of religion. When we declare that we have “no religion,” we have already replaced our concept of religion with something different, but the parts are all there.

To sum up the modern view that I held - my worldview that I felt had removed all religion - it went something like this:

The universe was formed from a massive explosion of pre-existing matter, and gradually over time we evolved from single-celled organisms into fully sentient beings, assembled from far flung star parts and activated by solar power. Whether any pre-existing power or intelligence existed is unknown and unimportant. The creator acted as a clockmaker or artist, and he crafted 100 types of atoms and various physical laws to govern the universe, finely tuning key variables like gravity to keep the dance of atoms and chemistry valid throughout the ages. The laws governing the behavior of matter and energy cannot be broken; the creator cannot or chooses not to poke his finger into the game to disrupt nature and produce miracles. We inhabit a speck on a speck, known as the planet earth, which may be one of many habitable planets in the universe. Pursuit of knowledge and progress is the way, as knowledge is leading us toward a promised land of equality and plenty for all. Against the forces of superstition and ignorance, progress moved forward. From the first living organism, our earliest ancestor, until today, the accretion of knowledge is leading to higher life forms. This progress creates stepping stones of knowledge toward when we will be fulfilled in our understanding by advances in science, engineering, and technology. The rapid leap forward we are experiencing today should have, could have, and would have happened much sooner, but free thought was kept imprisoned by religious institutions until the age of the Enlightenment dawned on the dark ages. Embattled by its enemies, science has finally been unshackled to reveal the truth of the universe. We were only kept from this future by the backwardness of traditional culture, childish superstition, patriarchy, powerful institutions, and primitive tribal structures. In the near future, planetary death will occur through climate change unless we repent of our wasteful ways and adopt a purely rational, scientific view. Through green energy we will be saved. The day is near when we will be able to transfer our conscious mind into a digital immortality. One day we will escape death, shake off our bodies, and have limitless knowledge and pure freedom. Finally, in the distant future, the solar system will collapse, the sun will swallow the earth, and the universe will consume itself into a singular dense spot of matter, and explode once again to restart the cycle.

This modern view has it all. By “all” I mean this worldview contains everything that constitutes a religion. I was taking part in a modern religion that has all the trappings of any religion that has ever existed. This modern religion also has its own vocabulary and language and revelations and sacrifices. The priests of this religion even have uniforms or vestments called lab coats and, in the software world, hooded sweatshirts. There are monks and priests in today’s secular religion as much as there ever were in Islam, Buddhism, or Christianity. Not only that, but this “Scientism” has the key elements that form a creed: a beginning, an ending, a progression, a hero, a villain, and an apocalypse. I realize the word Scientism sounds strange, but what else could it be called? The only thing missing from it is God. But then it is we ourselves that take his place, so it certainly does have a god, but it’s just an evolved ape who wears clothing and stares at screens all day.

This realization was an unexpected discovery to me, but so obvious once examined and dissected. We cannot live without some kind of religion. Everyone walking this earth has a religion, whether he or she knows it or not. Consider how people will wait outside for three days for a Harry Potter or Star Wars movie, or will camp out all night on Black Friday for a sale. Consider just how devout members of the Democratic or Republican parties can be, how they will spend hours a day trumpeting the good of their own party while calling out the evil of the opposition. Monks could hardly show such dedication in a cloistered desert hermitage. Fashion and musicians and car companies and cosmetics and guns and pornography have their constant followers, ever faithful in defense. The willingness to defend these modern things makes traditional religious defenders and apologists appear to lack zeal in comparison.

While I pretended not to have a faith, I most certainly did have a religion. We are wired for it, and if it's not Christianity or Islam or Buddhism, a religion will surface in something else, like money or health or technology or Harry Potter or socialism. Science, Post-Modernism, and Socialism are religions in disguise. The body itself can become a kind of religion. Literally, millions of devout gym members are attending their worship services on treadmills and leg press machines right now. Everyone is living according to some kind of ultimate faith, whether they admit it or not.

As someone who once found that science and religion could not co-exist, I now reject that division. In fact, I find it to be the opposite, as faith and reason are both needed if wisdom is to be found. I’ve mentioned this several times, but faith and reason are the two wings that make us fly. A bird with one wing cannot leave the ground. To find meaning and purpose in this life we need both reason and faith. The imaginary battle of faith vs. science that has been heated and hammered into a modern worldview is pure invention, but children are being steered to believe that invention. Those driving us in this direction have a clear agenda, and they don’t know it, but it’s an agenda that will backfire. This way forward will backfire, because a worldview that lacks an ultimate meaning results in a lifetime of trying to fit square pegs into the God-shaped hole in the heart. There is another blowback that is coming, but this one is for those who guide children away from God, as words directly from Jesus stated plainly: “Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the person through whom they occur. It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.” Note: this blowback is coming for those with and without faith.

The first commandment of Jesus was to love God, thus the very first sin, the worst sin, is to reject God. American culture has fully adopted rejection of God, and I fell for this bait, hook, line, and sinker, for about fifteen years. Unfortunately, there is a blaring warning about this for our souls from Jesus, as teaching children to reject God or causing them to lose faith is called out specifically as a guaranteed path to hell. Turning away from God violates the first rule - not just the Old Testament rules - but of the two commandments of Jesus. The first sin in Genesis was a rejection of God, hence the name original sin. Funny how things all tie together in this strange book. This theme of “turning away” and “turning back” is a story arc, a loop, a core truth, a central point of it all. And of course, the point of the entire body of scripture and church and worship and faith is to remember to have humility before God.

I don’t think I know a single person who doesn’t believe that “humility before God” sounds like a bad idea, and that includes atheists and scientists and rednecks and hippies. Most of the atheists I know say they don’t believe in God, but scratching the surface a bit you come to realize that they mostly hate arrogance in religious people and, therefore, they hate God, as if God were some sidekick of a certain person, or group of people. This is an example of throwing out the baby Jesus with the bathwater. It can be a newsflash to some people that Jesus himself also hated religious hypocrites, which may shock people because they realize that they are not that far from God after all.

That's the joke on us moderns who mock traditional religion and “organized” religion: we think we've shrugged off religion, like it was a dirty shirt, because we are now too smart, too busy, and too enlightened. But turns out that we had another shirt on underneath, with the same brand name, titled: religion. We run from one religion right into the arms of another religion. Why? Because we have no choice. We must. Our hearts require it. We cannot help it or hide from it. If we get rid of our Rosary we’ll go find crystals and horoscopes. If we discard daily reading the Gospels, we’ll do daily readings on politics or sports or technology. We want meaning. We need reasons for belief, and we need a sense of right and wrong, and like it or not, the built-in urge for religion surfaces in every person in all ages. This feature of human experience cannot be stifled, or not for long, and even when stifled it’s still peeking out though we may be unaware.

“God and country” provided the old banners that gave people meaning, and all of history has shown how those can be abused and twisted into cruel and unusual manifestations of evil. God, country, and even family are being replaced with a variety of distractions today, but this will not last long. A time of plenty and peace leads to diversion and distraction. The period of relative peace held now will fade, and along with it, so will these new religions. The new religions revolve around the individual. The old standards, with all their flaws, provided a sense of purpose and meaning in people’s lives. The book of Genesis did not take shape by accident. It is the result of thousands upon thousands of generations of understanding how human life and society stay together. The story begins with God, then leads to a family, and finally that family forms a nation. Literalists miss this because they are not looking for it. This order matters, because as soon as we attempt to ignore God, we begin to destroy the family, and as the family goes, so goes any nation.

The 20th century smashed the notion of national pride as always being a good thing, as disorder and death can drape itself under a flag. The nations of Germany, China, and the Soviet Union all tossed out God as the first casualty and followed that attempted murder with millions of actual murders of human beings. Today it’s less fashionable to have national pride, but if you doubt that national pride still exists, you don’t need to look for a redneck with a jacked up pickup on the gravel roads of America. Watch the opening of any World Cup soccer game, when the national anthem rings out for each team. Look at the faces of the players, eyes wet with tears, their cheeks and foreheads steeled like flint for the coming match, their arms linked in solidarity with teammates and somehow even the crowd. The bond of nationhood cements the people through the playing of the song. The crowd sings at the top of their lungs to give strength to the men on the pitch, like soldiers set to fight a 90 minute war by sport, as proxies for the hordes of citizens at home; to win glory for the symbol of their common flag; to bring honor to that shared patch of dirt that the nation calls its home, where all its dreams and feats and failures and hopes and history, good or bad, has tied them together. That nationalism and tribalism is very much still there, just as our sense of religion may appear hidden but is ever-present.

National pride must be checked by the higher power of the divine, but whenever the policy of “God first” slips, nationalism becomes a brutal god, and so now we are rightfully wary of leaders who promise the moon and stars. Even family pride must be checked by the divine, or the same problem arises. Further yet, even when “God first” is replaced with “religion first” then the religion itself becomes a God, and God gets shoved to the side. This can happen with Catholics or Muslims or Jews. Anything replacing God marks the end of truth and results in guaranteed chaos, because there is no ultimate truth or justice. Nationalism is good, in the right dosage. Individualism is good, when kept beneath the Creator. Religion is good, when humility before God remains the focus. In other words, all of these things are good, when ordered correctly and not in themselves the ultimate goal. Religion is best when it does not wield state power, but rather acts as the moral compass of state power. This is why the arguments for religious freedom, from Tertullian and Justin Martyr to Thomas Jefferson and Dignitatus Humanae, remain critical for future generations, perhaps even more today than when those writers first shared their ideas. Any attempts at coercion of faith upon people will fail miserably, and cannot avoid devolving into a horrifying totalitarianism. This applies to nationalism, individualism, or religion. If this sounds like exaggeration, you need look back no further than 100 years at the many dictatorships and attempts to crush all forms of dissent. And again coercion has re-appeared, with its current manifestation in America taking up the banner of individualism as the ultimate good. The saying, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it,” is not true. We will repeat history whether we know history or not.

Today, politics and career often take a front seat over God, family, and flag, as we attempt to provide meaning through votes and jobs, and at our peril ignore the crusty old dangerous ways of nationalism and organized religion. The idea today is that we must smash the old. “Smash the patriarchy” is as meaningless a phrase as “Support the troops” or “Defund the police” but all of these work as slogans because of their vague intention and unfocused aim. All three of these slogans pretend to preach virtue, but only make the speaker feel superior for selecting a side. What we have today is a situation of personal feeling as truth, which means that we clamor for a stamp of approval for whatever is we want to do, and in doing so we deem our desires themselves to be good and just. Why? Because we want them. Whatever we want is right. At the end of the book of Judges, the final line matches our times today: “In those days there was no king; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

That is where we sit today, and history will play out what the old civilizations and peoples found out the hard way, from thousands of years of mistaken pathways through war and peace and seasons of change. In the book of Wisdom chapter two might have been written today, in our age of rising atheism and indifference, as the sacred writer uses the voice of the culture of the self to describe its beliefs. There is nothing new under the sun. The author of Wisdom states plainly what those without faith in God seek: to craft a world to satisfy delights and to never stop partaking of those delights, right up to the last day, since if there is no afterlife, judgement, or resurrection, then what else is there but food, drink, entertainment, and “fun”? Virtue is for suckers.

For by mere chance were we born, and hereafter we shall be as though we had not been; Because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason a spark from the beating of our hearts, And when this is quenched, our body will be ashes and our spirit will be poured abroad like empty air….Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that are here, and make use of creation with youthful zest. Let us have our fill of costly wine and perfumes, and let no springtime blossom pass us by…But let our strength be our norm of righteousness; for weakness proves itself useless. (Wisdom 2)

This is summing up the “will to power” three thousand years before any German tackled it. All of this chapter of Wisdom sounds familiar today. We have middle-aged men gulping testosterone pills and protein shakes, worshipping the god of youth, with the enemy being old age. Marriages are sacrificed for pornography every day, as the sacred desires of our fickle minds must be satisfied. Technology is a god that promises to solve all of our problems, even though it actually created the problems that it now needs to solve (see: Climate Change, the threat of Nuclear War, Cyber attack, mega-earthquake from fracking, Coronavirus). Consumerism presses forward with the latest fads, gadgets, vehicles, and fashions to occupy our wants and desires. Rampant self-indulgence runs riot as “to each his own” plays out in real time before our eyes. Sin is seen as only that which could harm another, which is the masterstroke of our egos to allow us to keep us clinging to the seven deadlies because they only harm ourselves, and even self-harm is denied, as the addictions cut so deep that even senior men cannot give up habits that should have died as they passed adolescence into adulthood.

At least the Greeks gave names to the gods. We pretend there is no god while we live out full lives worshipping them. Hephaestus, Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Eros. I challenge you to watch TV ads and see if you can tell exactly which god is calling for worship in each commercial. There may be a good opportunity for a board game or Bingo cards for finding which Greek god is being dialed in each advertisement.

This religion of “science” is not the only modern replacement for religion around, it’s just one of the better and most complete candidates because it has a full cosmology. By definition it cannot extend into matters of faith and morality, but for many followers it does. The role of science is to observe and explain the natural world, but when it extends past that it becomes philosophy and often bleeds into religion.

Our modern cosmology and understanding of the universe looks back on that of the book of Genesis with a sneer, but a thousand years from now it’s just as likely that our understanding will look equally silly. Our concepts of black holes and quantum physics and string theory could sound as ludicrous as the “firmament” that held the waters above and below the earth. It’s even possible that the firmament theory of Genesis will seem more wise, should the next round of cosmological definition be something completely strange to us moderns. But in either case, the structure of the universe that we “know” at different points in history tells us nothing about faith or morals, and advances in telescopes and computing cannot mine truth any better than the old thinkers and storytellers. Plato and Paul and Confucius and Buddha and Shakespeare and Dante have deeper insights into truth than all the scientists in history, even if they had never heard of calculus or chemistry.

Science makes for a good religion because it can explain so many things, make sense of our world, and provide an answer for all questions. Ever since Voltaire’s lifelong relentless attack on religion made headway, legions of science apologists stand at the ready to take up arms in defense of Nature to act as a check against the slightest whiff of religious fanaticism. It has become every bit as religious as religion, as can be seen in the long crusade of ink and letters from Voltaire to Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud to John Dewey.

The claim is that we are creatures caught up in a cosmic accident, where knowledge can only be ascertained by the scientific method. Only what is observable, repeatable, and testable is real. Consciousness is merely a result of evolution. Our morality and stories are but guardians and guides for our own self-preservation, learned through a cruel history of pain and suffering. Art, literature, and religion are side-effects of overactive imaginations of weak and primitive tribes that invented magic, superstition, God, gods, and goddesses for psychological and sociological survival.

This modern god of science has a scapegoat for blame, for redemption, for justification, just like the old religions. A religion must have an enemy, as all gods promise approval, cheerleading, and ultimately righteousness, which means someone else must lose. Christianity has the devil, The Fall, and Original Sin. There has to be a loser, an opponent; you cannot be a freedom fighter today without an oppressor. You cannot be freed without overcoming a master. For the modern gods, the enemy is still there if you look for it. The other political party must be wrong. The ravages of age and deterioration is to blame. Diet, sugar, fat, and high-fructose corn syrup are to blame. The anti-intellectuals are to blame. The hillbillies are to blame. The immigrants are to blame. The rich are to blame. Those on welfare are to blame. The capitalists are guilty, squeezing blood from the workers. No, the flip-side, the communists are causing the problem by killing all motivation. There is a hero and a villain.

My favorite quote about the grand left-right argument of economics is from John Kenneth Galbraith who said, “In capitalism, man oppresses man. In communism, it’s just the opposite.” While that is funny, it’s also a true statement. But it’s also worth noting that one of those ideologies has proven repeatedly to embrace wholesale slaughter of humans much more readily than the other, and I don’t even have to mention which one for you to know the answer, and it is the same one that inherently denies God as one of its core tenets.

And then there’s the most popular villain of all: the Christians. Science fundamentalists tend to take aim most pointedly at Christians, and often Muslims, too, but in this cultural moment it is the Christians. Never mind that fact that modern science would not exist without Christianity, or that most of the great breakthroughs were made by God-fearing people. Let’s set aside those minor names, like Mendel, Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Mendel, Pasteur, Kelvin, and Einstein. Ignore those thinkers for a moment.

Because there is some truth to the accusation of blame, of course, as many readily point at the Spanish Inquisition and behavior of “Christian” explorers in the New World that followed on Columbus’ heels. Yes, Europe has horrific segments of history, as religions can be abused and twisted. For instance, read the letters of St. Bartolome de las Casas to hear about what Spanish wealth-seekers were doing to natives in the Caribbean, some under the banner of their supposed faith. It is revolting. Were it not for de las Casas writing in the 1520s to alert about the horrors of the Spanish running amok in the New World, the Church would not have written Sublimus Deus in 1537 condemning all enslavement and re-asserting the fact that natives are created in the image and likeness of God. And even then, could a letter from the Pope suddenly halt the evil of men running wild who want nothing more than gold, violence, and sex? No. But it does make me wonder how much longer and how much worse this state of butchery would have continued if no one like Bartolome de las Casas had been present to witness and report on the evils, because he was one of the few voices crying out from the literal wilderness of the New World.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated event in human history restricted to Europeans, as you can read stories of the gulags in Russia or the lengthy list of massacres in China or find numerous accounts of similar gruesome events coming from the Ottomans or Romans or Zulus or Mayans or Incas or Hawaiians or First Nations or literally any culture that ever existed, try as we might today to gloss over the shared flaw in our hearts, which has always been with humans wherever we have lived. Thanks to the 20th century, when nationalism and socialism reigned, Europeans lead in all body count statistical categories for brutality and inhumanity, but to assume that only one continent of people is capable of atrocity is to ignore reality and all of history. We want to plug our ears and close our eyes, but to pretend that one group of people has this flaw while other human groups do not carry this same disease is to bury our heads in the sands of a version of history that would be more aptly called fantasy.

One undeniable fact is that as we gain knowledge and mastery over science and technology, we become increasingly deadly, as each invention increases the death toll, from the longbow, to the broadsword, to the stirrup for riding horses, to the musket, to the cannon, to mustard gas, to the atom bomb, to the inter-contintental-ballistic-missile, to biological weaponry, to whatever unexpected coming attack will slay our modern energy grids and supply chains and water supplies. The reason why is that with each advance, the greed of opportunity is seized by people. The question is always, “How can we make money or benefit from this new knowledge,” and rarely “Should we be doing this at all?” I have seen this firsthand in product meetings where the ability to do something is adopted, such as spy on shoppers, or install keystroke logging software, and the uneasy question usually arises about ethics from mousy engineers, but is quickly knocked down by an executive or manager who wants a good fiscal quarter. To observe this human tendency to exploit others does not require a war to observe. We are all seeking to find an advantage using whatever tool is available, just as a younger sister learns to cry tearfully to thwart a bullying older brother, because she learns it can summon a father or mother to arrest the bully. If the younger sister had a taser that proved more effective, they would just use that.

Christians never needed any extra assistance from its own followers to earn the hatred of its enemies. No, they are hated even when they are preaching the Good News with humble hearts and mercy in mind. But rest assured, any atrocity or horror committed under the banner of professed Christians never came from Jesus Christ, the founder of the faith. Anyone who says it does, doesn’t understand Jesus, and needs to start again on Matthew 1, verse 1 and proceed to John 21, verse 25.

The evils people do in Jesus’ name have never come from Jesus. This is something quickly forgotten. Whether or not those who acted in God’s name as a wolf in sheep’s clothing were true believers does not even matter, because the bloodstain remains. The wound of scandal brought by someone professing faith remains for a long time. The lion is supposed to lay down with the lamb, not eat it, no matter how delicious the lamb. The believer is supposed to give unto Caesar, not become Caesar. Christians in error have become the example held up in pop culture. Many TV shows today have the villain as a Christian. It’s easy to see who the villain of American society is by watching movies or reading books from a specific year, as once the Soviets held all the roles of villains, then it was middle-eastern Muslims, and today it’s almost entirely Christians.

Yet Jesus still remains risen up, glorified, and no matter what evil men carry out, he himself can never be sullied. This is why Christianity can be stood up time after time, after every apparent deathblow. It rises again with Jesus himself. Because of the high standard set by Jesus, we can never live up to it, not fully, and often not even minimally. For this reason the sex abuse of children by Catholic clergy hurts all the worse, because Jesus’ Church on earth is meant to be the keeper of the light of faith, and “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” yet for all the truth, beauty and goodness that the faithful see in our Church, in its essence and meaning, its buildings, its art, its Catechism, in the history, the mysteries of the Holy Mass, in the Sacraments, in the Rosary, in the Real Presence of the Eucharist, it hurts terribly when the attack comes from the Church itself, when trust has been eroded from the inside. Still the beauty of all those parts can never be destroyed or diminished, no matter how far fallen followers have gone in the ruination of their own souls.

Betrayed trust among non-Christians brings bruises, but among the faithful, from inside, the betrayal gives a nearly fatal wound. The saying, “There is no honor among thieves” is meant to be intended for non-Christians, which is why the sex abuse scandal provides endless firepower for powerful guns aimed at the Catholic Church. For the billion people who have known and trusted good priests, this was especially painful, sometimes too hard for words, to the point that excuses were made, and sometimes even excuses for the excuses for the behavior, when there is no excuse that can be allowed. The pain of the victims supersedes all guilt and shame. But it was not God that committed the crimes, nor the Church, but corrupt men who abused their power and violated every precept of the faith and caused immeasurable scandal.

For the many that would like to see the Church wither and die, thinking that this event will surely be the final death of Christianity, they will be sorely disappointed. Scandal has rocked the Church for 2,000 years and each of those looked like the last punch, but the Church will never die because it cannot die. I’m not claiming this to be arrogant. I’m not writing this to be rude. I’m saying it because it is a fact. In every age, Jesus somehow gathers a people to his Church.

Every generation of humans rediscovers the power of the same man from Nazareth, over and over, again and again, because nothing comes close to its power, nothing touches the completeness of the life of Jesus, and nothing overcomes the resurrection once you come to believe it. Clearly, I have no right to speak for anything regarding the Church. I have no status. I’m not even a very good Catholic. I should probably just shut up and not share my opinion on these topics. But I know what I’ve found, and it’s something quite different and far more meaningful and powerful than what my old religion of science could offer.

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Coercion and fear repel more people than it brings in. Societies that attempt this eventually collapse under the weight of constant coercion and fear. The Church failed to produce believers when some of its members used force or fear to gather followers. Short term successes gained by fear result in long term losses. Consider people you know who may have attempted to bully others into belief. How did that work out? Not well, I suspect. This is why someone like St. Francis is still loved today while the Grand Inquisitor of Spanish imperial power is reviled.

The underlying reason someone has faith makes all the difference. Forcing people into faith is like forcing a dog to read. It cannot happen. Even if the dog attentively stares at the page, he is likely only doing so in lieu of a treat for making the effort. If the dog will be beaten for not trying to read, then he is only doing it for self-preservation. If he is only staring at the page for a treat, then the brief sensual pleasure is the motivation making it worth the wait. What I’m getting at is that if faith is solely attempted for the treat of heaven or the fear of hell, then it is not really freely chosen. This is called out very clearly in the Catechism of the Church.

…"man's response to God by faith must be free, and. . . therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act." "God calls men to serve him in spirit and in truth. Consequently they are bound to him in conscience, but not coerced. . . This fact received its fullest manifestation in Christ Jesus." Indeed, Christ invited people to faith and conversion, but never coerced them. "For he bore witness to the truth but refused to use force to impose it on those who spoke against it. His kingdom. . . grows by the love with which Christ, lifted up on the cross, draws men to himself." (CCC 160)

So that is the difficult part for non-believers, to find reasons for faith without fear or force or trick or treat as the driving factor.

Love must be the magnet. A magnet is a perfect metaphor for the experience of those who despise religion, as fear or force is often what repelled them in the first place. Most often it was not God that repelled them but a personal interaction. Someone or something attempted to force the wrong end of the magnet at them. This never works, or not for long, since it takes much effort to hold two opposite poles of a magnet together and they separate as soon as that force is released.

Religious invitations can act exactly like holding a magnet to metal with the wrong poles facing one another. Fear and force repels. But if you turn the magnet around, so that the right magnetic field is displayed, the attraction is immediate. It just feels right. There is no fighting or struggling because the attraction is natural and fitting.

The exterior paint job known as “Good without God” means nothing by itself, and however you try to twist Jesus’ words, the Gospels cannot be interpreted as supporting this idea. I believe this is the biggest hurdle for modern people, as the new commandment of “love thy self” must be conquered and knocked-out to make spiritual progress. I think this is why my favorite self-help book, The Imitation of Christ, doesn’t show up on bestseller lists, since the message of humility and total detachment from material goods is not what retailers and marketers want us to be considering in a consumer society.

The parables that stick to me and re-surface daily in my mind are the one liners, The Treasure in the Field and The Pearl of Great Value. Perhaps I’ve stumbled over the treasure. Maybe I have by some lucky circumstance obtained the Pearl of Great Value. I believe I have, and I hope and pray that this lucky stumble happened by grace.

I marvel at the longevity of this story of Jesus. The same Pearl and treasure that is found by every generation, by people who are born-again, by those who turn back to God. For most of my adult life the term “born again” raised the hair on my neck, as something to dislike and be irritated by. Seeing “Promise Keepers” raising their hands and closing their eyes made me feel awkward, because I felt they were hypocrites and actors. Now I could be standing among them. At the time, I felt that these Christians were the very Pharisees that Jesus had come to depose. Oddly enough, when the “turn” happened for me, I was not even thinking about the phrase “born again” but that is an accurate description of what happened, since there is really no other way to describe the change. The verse of Amazing Grace never made much sense either, until it did: “I once was blind, but now I see.” Suddenly, I was the hackneyed, rehashed, repurposed convert that I formerly loathed. It’s almost comical in its predictability, I suppose, and yet I’m happy that it happened to me, and I wouldn’t have believed it ever could have happened. Except that it did.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a hypocrite. A huge one. You should really find other blogs and podcasts to listen to, from more convincing, holy, and saintly types. Listen to Trent Horn and Father Josh and Father Mike. Read material from Thomas Merton and St. Augustine and Scott Hahn, not my words. Go away, go to them. All of my ideas have been said better, by wiser and more devout people.

One concern I have is that I have turned back but not had a true interior change. While I can see things that have changed, my pride and fear still run rampant. Vices of the flesh may go away, but the underlying flaws of the Fall remain, and just as St. Thomas Aquinas said, I’ve come to know that the first and worst sin of pride leads to all the others. Again, if the Garden of Eden is littered with “metaphorical truth” on how to live, both the literal and metaphorical reading lead to the same conclusion, which is to love God and obey him out of loving duty. This propensity toward pride will remain in me regardless, in all of us, always, but to despair is the wrong answer. It’s this pessimism that killed my faith the first time, and if allowed it will kill it again. Thus to preserve faith, the quelling of pride and kneeling into humility must be a daily effort.

The scandal of hypocrisy among Christians can cause others to loathe people of faith. When those who lack faith see sinners who are trying to be saints, they roll their eyes and find it ludicrous, particularly when the sinner’s past is an open closet of public skeletons. As a result, those who find faith and then pray in public (say through a blog or podcast exactly like this one…ahem) can cause those fallen away to stay away, and worse yet, cause people to leave their faith rather than come toward it. The concept of “scandal” in the Catechism of the Catholic Church is defined as not only those falls from grace that Christians often have, like when a Protestant preacher gets caught cheating on his wife or, worse yet, the sex-abuse scandal of the Church. These public failures or scandals can make Christianity look like a sham. This is the type of scandal we are familiar with. But there is another kind of “scandal” that can be committed, one that is equally revolting to non-Christians. This is the one that turns people off today even more than the fall from grace. This type of scandal comes in several forms: being righteous without humility, acting like a religious nutcase, obsessively discerning demons where rational explanation will do nicely, speaking in tongues for attention, or in general fanaticism that forgets the point of religion. The point of religion, of all the buildings and Sacraments and liturgy and prayer is this: humility before God. The point is to love God, to let his will be done, to be humble, to follow his rules, and to love others. Scandal is not just some religious person getting caught up in debauchery, it is anything that can wedge someone’s chance for faith away from God.

Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense. (CCC 2284)

There are those people who are “Good without God” that are still better citizens and more altruistic than I am. Don’t misinterpret or confuse my ability to jot down words or read from a script with holiness. As Shakespeare said, “The devil can quote scripture for his own purposes.” So even while I feel changed, most of my life is still the same, where I go to work and overeat Frosted Mini Wheats and carry out much of the same activities as I did before. I commit plenty of sins of the heart and I’m nowhere near where I could, should, or would like to be. Pride runs amok. For anyone who would tell you that the change happens, and you never feel blue or downcast again - that person is lying. The difference is that you have a transcendent hope that lifts you up, and that is the one thing the doubter lacks who is good without God. They can prop up work or political views or money or relationships or bedroom conquests or accomplishments or family as a replacement lower-case-G god for a while, but none of these can go the distance because they are the fleeting things of this world.

But the change does happen to people, and the change is real, and the change is undeniable. Many things become easier once the change happens, as there is strength and direction to be drawn constantly whenever I turn back to God for help. God is the continual and endless vine of life that provides, and I realize that I only felt dead inside when I had voluntarily separated myself from that vine. This doesn’t mean there is euphoria, or that enough prayer will make me rich and healthy and grant all my wishes. No, that’s the con game that the Prosperity Gospel plays. Instead, there is a sense of possibility and endurance, best summed up in a John Henry Newman quote: “Ten thousand difficulties make not one doubt.”

As I’ve mentioned before, the day my sleepy faith was wakened, I was suddenly re-connected to the vine of life and jolted into respiration. A fallen branch laying in the grass was somehow taken back up to the tree and revived. I would like to say that I willed this to happen, but I only willed myself to ask, seek, and knock on God’s door in prayer. I know that others had prayed for me, like St. Monica did for her son Augustine. God had been nudging me all along with situations and guidance, and certain people in my path illustrated such faith and goodness that I had to take notice, and still…still somehow I managed to congratulate myself, as if it was me that made all the difference. I could have broke my arm slapping my own back in self-praise.

I had forgotten that I had help. In fact, I recently recalled how when I was fallen away from faith, I used to jokingly say to myself, “Jesus, help me,” and I would sometimes even mockingly say the lyrics of a Carrie Underwood country song and say out loud when struggling, “Jesus, take the wheel.” I found the song’s sentimental chords and verses to be a bit ridiculous. Yet now I can’t help but wonder if whenever I uttered those words, they were like little prayers, and the receiver of those words was taking them quite seriously the whole time, and responding slowly, revealing the path back to faith in my life, and helping me when I most needed it. Somehow, even when I did not believe, I still knew there was power in his name.

(For two good reads on the idea of religious freedom, read The Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatus Humanae), a fascinating document. Spice is up with a reading of On the Development of Peoples (Populorum Progressio) while you’re at it.)

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

I recently heard about an atheist who prays to Jesus because “there is power in his name.”

Can you imagine anything more strange than that statement? A person that denies all things divine or supernatural, prays to a 1st century construction worker because of a mysterious “power in his name.” This makes no sense. Logically, it is indefensible. If one believes there is no God, there can be no “power in his name.”

Except he is right. There is something about Jesus. There is something about him. There is something about his name. We cannot stop looking at his life and talking about his words and thinking about his otherworldly-ness. Strangely, this is especially true for many who have turned away. They feel compelled to look again over their shoulder while walking away. They have to check now and then to make sure he’s not who he said he was. Reading atheist message boards, there is much discussion of Jesus in a constant effort to explain away his divinity. Why is that?

Because there is power in his name.

An atheist can stumble onto religious truth without even trying, as Jesus himself said, “All things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.” (Let’s pause here for a quick aside, so I don’t sound like I’m on the Prosperity Gospel bandwagon. This doesn’t mean you will receive money or power, it means you will receive spiritual gifts. Recall Jesus praying and fasting in the desert, rejecting the three great temptations: 1. material comfort, 2. fame and honor, and 3. power.)

A non-believer can still feel the urge to ask for God’s help. The notion to pray is the part of religion that we can’t shake even after we turn away. For modern people living in comfort, the idea to pray only arrives in desperate times, in a transactional model, where we want to put in a coin into God to get a drink when we’re thirsty, only to toss God away like an empty can once satisfied. Many of us today who live in a normal house with modern appliances live in greater comfort than any king or queen throughout our entire human history, but we don’t consider that when we watch Netflix and eat ice cream from the freezer while sitting in front of the gas fireplace on a winter night. We are more likely to unearth this desire to pray when comfort is taken away. A time of uncertainty is where many discover the need for God, but like the parable says, the seeds of faith can be sown on a barren path, or on rocky ground, or in seemingly good soil that is riddled with thorns and thistles. Our prayer may start and end with a crisis, or it may continue through suffering but later wither and die under a new kind of stress. The urge may carry us a long time, through much growth, but then amid success, weeds can spring up and choke us before we bear any fruit.

Both suffering and success are equal tests, and depending on how they are received, each can either heighten or reduce our relationship with God. Hitting bottom can provide a spark for the light of faith, and can be a great blessing in hindsight. As many reverted atheists and addicts come to learn, there is power in Jesus’ name when you have no where left to turn. Success on the other hand can make you forget to give thanks, as a sense of self-sufficiency can shove aside any idea of grace or blessing. Wealth and honor are the weeds that convince us we did it all ourselves, or that we pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps, and just as suffering and struggle can cause us to ask, “Where was God?” so too can prosperity.

In suffering, we blame God. In success, we ignore God. We have even tried to kill God, only to find out he rises again. We can blame him, but we cannot ignore or kill him. And that is why the strange notion to pray comes back to the non-believer, because his heart is wired for it, try as he might to rid himself of the one thing that will satisfy.

When Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” even a great doubter can sense that something is different about Jesus than anyone else who ever lived. Great ascetics, seekers, teachers, and storytellers have lived in various eras, but we don’t pray to those people. We don’t pray to those persons, but maybe we adopt their ideas or methods of living. We don’t pray to Buddha or Confucius or Socrates or Isaiah or Moses as being infused with the divine, but we see them as souls who could reach out to the divine, or the divine reached out to them, or both. They sensed the Higher Power, they communicated with something beyond the world, and they articulated something that we can all feel. But we don’t consider them to be supernatural beings themselves.

Take John the Baptist, for instance, who fasted and prayed and preached repentance. He was a great ascetic and inspiring spiritual leader. But no one gets fired up and angry and denies the existence of John the Baptist. Families don’t split over him. No one’s life changes radically once they read about John the Baptist, except in the light of Christ. Believers and non-believers alike do not feel even a fraction of the push or pull toward the name John the Baptist as they do to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. We do not cry out to John the Baptist, or for that matter any other human being, like Albert Einstein, or Martin Luther King, or the President, or any other earthly name. There is only one name in which we believe God took human form and walked with us here on earth.

So yes, there is power in Jesus’ name. It is undeniable. He said he would bring a sword that divides us, and sure enough we see this every day. Families and countries are divided over who Jesus was, because if his words are true, then the world changes radically. Concern about John the Baptist and his beheading is not a daily conversation across the world. The death of Socrates does not stir us to hold ritual celebrations worldwide. There is only one person that causes such devotion and change, and it is because he said, “I am the way.” He did not say, “Here’s the list of things you need to do to live a good life.” He showed us how to live, yes, but that is secondary to the belief in him as the son of God, which he repeatedly stated as the prerequisite. “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”

When I think of these moments where doubters discover the notion to look toward Jesus (and especially for one who take the next step to pray to him), the thought that comes to me is the quotation that unnerves me the most, even as a believer. An atheist who prays to Jesus would surely enjoy reading the line: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”

For non-believers, that line sounds pretty positive at first, as it calls out religious hypocrites as not being saved. The second phrase, on the other hand, should concern us all. Only the ones who carry out the will of God will be saved. In light of Jesus two commandments to “Love God” and “Love one another,” this means we have a two-part task. That line gives me a shudder, even as a revert, particularly when I go on to Jesus’ followup line: “Then I will declare to them solemnly, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you evildoers.’”

For the modern people that enjoy the idea of the “chill” Jesus, this is one of those difficult passages where he plainly suggests that hell is a real thing, and some of us are going there. Who am I kidding, he actually suggests that many of us are going there. But as we cherry pick the hippy-Jesus lines that suit our culture of Hakuna Matata, we forget about this declaration and the other ten places in the Gospel where Jesus talks about dividing the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, and assorted other obvious metaphors regarding souls being judged and sent into heaven or hell. When we do not live in line with the Gospel, with faith, while doing God’s will, it seems we may hear that line on the last day, “Depart from me, you evildoer.”

I will admit: I know various atheists who live virtuous lives, more so than some professed Christians. The idea of being “Good without God” is true, it can be done and is done all the time. The problem is that if you read the accounts of Jesus’ life, the one thing he criticizes repeatedly is the outward appearance of “goodness” when the interior state is godless. The “good without God” mantra of today is attractive because what it really translates to is “all things are permitted.” It aligns perfectly with the idea of “if I’m not hurting anyone but myself, it’s ok.” This belief is held by millions, and I’m not talking solely about drug addicts on the fringe of our society, but men who condemn others’ sin while they browse porn daily instead of investing in their marriages. In fact, the state of the world today is edging toward a place where all is permitted but nothing is forgiven. Looking good, acting righteous, saying the right things, paying taxes, volunteering, doing charity work: not one of these “Good without God” ways of life satisfy the commandment of Jesus, explicitly stated, the very first commandment, to “love God.” This first commandment is a non-negotiable, and there is no kingdom of heaven for those that disregard it, whether you are “good” or not. This is a difficult concept of faith, but the critical step. And for many to “love God” seems a bridge too far, so they fall back to the fortifications of self. If I had a nickel for every time I walked that route…I’d have a lot of nickels.

This is a hard pill to swallow for those who cannot cross the river of disbelief. This is the port to faith that first must be reached, or you can never find the narrow gate that Jesus speaks about. Heck, I’m still groping around for the narrow gate. But one thing is very clear to me: people cannot be coerced to faith. This is not possible. I don’t think that human beings can even be scared into faith, which is why the hellfire and brimstone only can get a heart so far. I do believe, now after turning back, that the saying “fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom,” but without question that fear of God must be rooted in love of God. Consider children who are constantly shouted at and always face stiff consequences for all bad behavior. They do not learn love, they learn how to lie, and act virtuous solely to avoid punishment. However, when meted out properly and well, a loving parent’s discipline instills a different kind of fear, which might more properly be thought of as duty. A loving God inspires a sense of duty, and a joy in fulfilling those requirements. As I’ve mentioned before, I once thought the devil and hell were not real, until I found that I could not escape my flaws and walked like Dante all the way down into a hell. And it was there and then that I discovered, to my utter astonishment, that prayer could solve my most difficult challenges. I was stunned. Having tried everything else, it was this simple and free act of taking action as if I had faith that granted the gift of faith itself. What a surprise to discover that this is one of those “learn by doing” things, not that different from thinking about playing piano versus actually playing the piano, or like imagining yourself doing woodworking instead of getting some lumber and a saw. Of course, I only took those actions because it was a last resort, but when people say that “faith is a gift,” I formerly rolled my eyes, and now I nod in agreement. Oddly enough, that devil and hell that I did not believe, I now believe in, and the fear of hell never pulled me toward God until I was fully immersed in the pit and snares of this same devil. Catching a glimpse of another way, I could see the escape. Now, let me pause: for non-believers, you may call this cosmology and belief as being merely a “metaphorical truth,” that the devil or hell are metaphors that provide simple-minded folks like myself images on how to behave. The scientist may consider these metaphors as a kind of behavioral therapy. Call it what you like; as for me, I am sticking with the Trinitarian God as the solution to battling demons, avoiding despair, and falling into the fire.

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 pandemic opened a gap in time. Like a two year layover, the plane was grounded so that we could hop off, sit quietly in the concourse, read the map, and adjust our itineraries. For some, the opening of this gap in time caused the vacuum to fill with old habits, often bad habits. For others, a re-prioritization of life occurred, but the order of those priorities varied dramatically between people. Politics, technology, porn, drinking, and material possessions seemed to take the top place for many. Liquor store shopping sprees and shiny things captured much of our time, talent, and treasure. Having deleted all social media accounts for much of the pandemic, I missed the online drama, but now having been drawn back to social media for community and school event information, I see now that I didn’t miss much.

This time has caused a great deal of sorrow for many from the virus. But far more have felt a mental sickness from the isolation. We are told that the world is changing, but it is the same world that it was before. Human nature did not change. A trend toward disorder and chaos is clearly happening, but this is not a new thing or even original, as there is nothing new under the sun. This has happened many times before. We are living in a time best described in the book of Wisdom, chapter 2. These seemingly novel ideas pumped by the media are as old as time. The narrative around a post-Christian, post-American, post-9/11, post-colonial, post-2008, post-capitalist, post-Cold War, post-modern, post-truth, post-Covid, post-everything world are as credible as the sugary calories I get from my favorite Post cereal (which is no longer Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but Honey Bunches of Oats (with Almonds)). Today, I find that the back of a cereal box has more reading depth than any of the the major news outlets. At this point, I grant professional wrestling a higher level of seriousness than The New York Times, CNN, or Fox News, because at least pro wrestlers have the courtesy to wink and admit they are pretending. The falseness of pro wrestling is obvious, and therefore far more honest, which today gives these steroid and drug-fueled wrestlers a higher integrity than the smoke and mirrors surrounding the veiled ideologies disguised as news from our media companies. To see this madness in action, just login to Facebook or Twitter and scroll through your friends’ postings. The vociferous progressive and angry conservative will sway like a reed to whatever is popular today. Remember Kony 2012? Remember Cecil the Lion? Remember the wet market? Remember flattening the curve? Remember that insulting tweet? Remember the thousand other daily crises between then and now? Look at today’s headlines and you will see today’s Cecil the Lion. Everything is a crisis. And here’s the thing I’ve learned: when everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis.

To illustrate what I mean by that, here’s a real world tale of what happens when “everything is a crisis.” A software company had a model of measuring the severity of customer problems, which went from 1 to 7, with severity 1 being the highest, or worst. A severity 1 meant that the system was down and the customer was losing money. For a long time, this model worked, until a series of especially vocal customers began to realize that if they lobbied to get every support issue elevated to level 1, they received instant and premium support. The most talented troubleshooters would come running to their aid, since the skilled employees were always in demand for difficult issues. Thus, the customers began ranting and raving about every case until they received the recognition and label of severity 1 on all tickets. These customers saw this as a good thing.

What happened in reality is that more customers began to realize how to game the severity model, and soon many issues were in the high-priority, house-is-on-fire queue. So while customers imagined this was a good thing, the support staff that I was part of burned out and realized that if every incoming case was high priority, then all tickets were actual normal priority, regardless of the assigned severity. The skilled engineers began working longer hours and grew frustrated. If every ticket requires all hands on deck, then eventually you run out of hands. It’s like when a freshman keeps pulling the fire alarm in a college dormitory over and over, night after night; eventually people stop getting out of bed to go outside, and discover they would rather die in the fire than waste their time freezing outside at 3 AM for no good reason.

In the end, the support issue severity system became so meaningless that a higher level of zero was added. Yes, for real. A new status was invented quietly to address the problem. Within a year the skilled employees started to depart the company looking for greener pastures where they were not running from one meaningless task to the next. Customers eventually realized that “severity 0” was the secret internal status that they now needed, and believe it or not, the company had to add a negative status, “severity -1”, to hide yet another level for actual crisis tickets. As time went on, the product support grew lazy and cynical and tickets lingered without anyone really caring, while customers continued to scream on the phone about their “severity 1” or “severity 0” ticket that wasn’t getting addressed. Everyone suffered, until the whole severity system had to be re-ordered when a new boss came in and shook up the whole severity triage. It was kind of like Simba returning and replacing Scar in the pride. The new boss, Simba, fought for the engineers and we battled to reset the severity of tickets to their proper places. But the sad ending here is that this boss eventually left, because in cleaning up he stepped on a few toes of the hyenas (a.k.a. cynical engineers) who enjoyed the status quo. Why would anyone prefer a bad system to a disciplined and logical system? Because when everything was a crisis, no one had to do any work. It was a state of gridlock where engineers could complain about the state, but then just go home at five o’clock. The result of “everything is a crisis” is a kind of despair or paralysis, which can even become comfortable in its dysfunction for those riding the current. In chasing every problem, no problem is addressed. In sounding the alarm, we become living examples of the boy who cried wolf. I suspect the wolf is near, if not already here, but we stopped expecting him to ever appear.

This watering down of what the word “crisis” means will eventually make a real crisis strike us like lightning. I suspect it is only a high level of material comfort and extended time of peace and prosperity that could allow us all to have so much time and energy to spend online seeking a daily problem to get excited about. We are somewhere in the seven stages of empire, as after the fourth stage of affluence comes the age of intellect, followed by decadence, and soon afterward, decline and collapse.

The pandemic held this state of constant crisis in front of our eyes, since we were all shut indoors and kept separate. Early on I realized that I could react in one of two ways to the noise. I could embrace the cage match of fixing the world’s problems by thumbing responses on my phone. (I was slow to realize in the early days of social media that clicking a “like” button will not bring about a utopia.) Or…I could turn the phone off and change myself. At least, I could try - not sure I can really change, but an effort can be made. This goes back to my use of the Serenity Prayer. This little prayer is the great knife that cuts through issues and helps discern which road to take. And as far as that utopia goes, I look forward to the incredible time ahead that the partisans are promising, but in the meantime, while I continue to witness the result and reality of Original Sin in every human being including myself, I will try to live for today with hope for the future. I’ll try not to think about actual crises that could happen, such as the launch of the ten thousand nuclear warheads aimed at every major city across the world, or the possibility of a giant solar flare frying every electronic circuit on earth, or the dollar being dumped as the world’s reserve currency creating exponential inflation, or drought and famine across world agriculture, or biological warfare that would make Covid look like a sniffle.

In this two year pandemic, if you haven’t made a change yet but have considered making one, or want to make a change, this opening in time might have been the greatest opportunity of your lifetime. The question to ask yourself is this: did you waste this time? Did you let it slip by? Did you freak out over every 24-hour news cycle? Or did you turn off the TV? Did you put your phone down or cling to it every waking minute?

I hope you didn’t waste it, or that you don’t waste what is left of it. There will never be a perfect time, but if you did squander this time, these many months when the world slowed down, then the perfect time to change is now. The old Chinese proverb holds true: the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago; the second best time is today. This isn’t some new age idea. It is ancient and cross-cultural. But it comes with one warning: when you “seize the day” make sure you what you are seizing is something worth reaching for.

When I think of the lost years of my life, I think of hiking experiences where I’ve stopped to look at trees growing in strange places.

Warning: I’m switching metaphors now.

On cliffs and rocky paths, tree roots cling to impossibly small cracks, nooks, and crannies. The tree itself twists and bends, growing sideways or curling toward a sunny spot. How these trees survive bewilders me. They seem to have nothing to hold onto, yet they live and grow. Some even appear to thrive, but the weight of the tree growing sideways will eventually fall due to its own weight fighting against gravity. They struggle, yet live full lives. With their improper footings and nutrients they become stunted as the roots grope along cliff and rock edges in a desperate search for water and minerals. The will to live, to survive, shows itself in the exposed roots. You can see this intense yearning to live in plants and animals everywhere you look in nature. This is never a question in nature. The will to survive and reproduce are the two driving forces for all living things, unquestioned among all species from largest to smallest.

With people, I often can’t tell who is like the thriving tree on the craggy precipice, who is out of place, who is out of sorts, or who is growing sideways but seemingly fine. They may appear to be thriving, but have no footing, and rather than a physical search for sustenance they engage in an unseen mental and spiritual search, only to have their roots grasp at rocks and sand that give no nutrition. They slowly starve trying to draw life-water from a swamp of politics, sports, porn, liquor, or possessions. Others seem to have access to an untapped source that defies reason. An unseen wellspring feeds the taproot. These strange trees are often the ones that make the woods and the cliffs beautiful.

If every tree was in solid soil and growing straight and true, I’m not sure a mountain hike would be as interesting. What’s strange is you often see a tree that appears to be on solid footing, on good soil, but is actually sick, while the strange tree on the cliff protrudes sideways from the rock, yet appears to be healthier than the tree in rich soil. There are healthy looking trees that are hollow inside due to beetles or disease and you don’t know it until the day a strong wind snaps the trunk in half or uproots the rotten base.

The difference between trees and people is that we can change our footings. We can move, whereas a tree cannot. We can ask ourselves questions and react. We can change. Here’s a list of questions for asking yourself:

How did you spend the first year of the pandemic? What were you doing for the last 22 months? Did you grow or did you shrink? Did you get older or were you reborn? Did you scroll on your phone constantly? Did you discover the power of silence? Did you look inside and ask the real questions that you want to ask? Did you live online? Did you comment online? Did you stew about politics? Did you rage quietly or publicly about how the virus was being handled? Did you swipe left or right all day? Did you stare at your favorite porn each day? Did you get drunk often and lol about it?

You may have wasted the greatest opportunity of your lifetime, and that might have been the best chance to change your footing.  

When is a good time to find true meaning? Now is a pretty good time. The present seems like a good opportunity. Yesterday was better, but today is a good choice. You can try to get back to where you once had meaning, or if no such place exists, to find that place. If no place can be easily found, ask, seek, and knock. Pound on the doors of new places. Search for the right path and place to plant yourself. I would suggest you stop shopping at Amazon and start shopping where people meet in flesh and bone and talk about real things. You will not find it at the bar or liquor store. You will not find it at the mall or on an app. Millions have looked in those places, and millions have never found it there. You will not find it in yourself, either, despite the convincing claims of New Age religion and modernism. The “self” is exactly the stumbling block that needs to be looked away from to experience a true change.

There is something in you that aches to be aroused, and believe it or not, it’s not sexual. There is an assumed obsession around that subject today, where happiness is thought by many to only come through something to do with titillation and body parts. This is probably the greatest distraction of the current age, maybe only matched by the desire for possessions and shiny things. But there is something deeper in the center of you that wants and demands something greater to believe in.

I think an honest question to ask oneself who has become a cynic or doubter is this: why did you stop believing? What is the real reason? What crushed you? What stole it away? What political position made you stop believing? What intellectual argument? What hypocrite turned your stomach? What jerk or cruel act twisted the good into something bent and broken? Why did you abandon belief? Was it something you did to someone else? Because there is a reason it happened, or multiple reasons. Something made you doubt and maybe even stop believing.

Or perhaps is it just indifference. You stopped caring. Someone talked you out of it. We can very easily be talked out of belief by clever argument if we’re not careful, and there are many arguments that try to convert you away from your true belief. One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that anyone who insists that you not talk about your religion to others, is preaching their religion to you in that very ask. What they are saying is actually this: “My belief is that you shouldn’t speak about your belief.” In other words, they are converting you to adopt their non-belief and indifference toward faith. Then out of concern for niceness and offending the other person (who, by the way, may have just effectively silenced you or even caused you to abandon your convictions) you grow quiet as if your principles were mere suggestions for living instead of the bedrock of meaning in your life. The religion of the self is the de facto religion of this age, but this is an unsatisfying way to live. An age of doubt is here, temporarily. If you don’t realize this fact, you have already been converted, or are being converted to it, or have allowed it to silence you. Many people are having their faith euthanized right now, slowly going to sleep in our culture that acts like carbon monoxide on our spiritual life.

Every day that you actively doubt is a day that you aid and abet your own de-conversion and willfully turn away from God. The great trick of this era is that government and corporations and schools and media companies pretend to act for our benefit instead of their own. We are instructed by all of these institutions that it is somehow intolerant or bigoted to proclaim the life, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus in public. The irony is that all of these institutions will pass away before long, from the U.S. Senate to Amazon.com to the Teacher’s Union to the Washington Post. These are all temporary things trying to silence something that can never be silenced, no matter how much noise is made, or how much smothering of people’s faith is attempted. In reality, there is nothing intolerant about having convictions and principles to live by, and at least in America this right to hold religious belief is protected. Nor is there anything bigoted about being open about your faith, as anyone who reads the four biographies of Jesus can discover rather easily, if he or she decides to crack the cover of the book and stop accepting what the culture is preaching. The culture of the self is very hard to turn away from. It’s everywhere. A society that pushes a religion of no-religion doesn’t like to hear anything about parables or miracles, and therefore today we are being told that the God of love is suddenly a God of hate. This is not a failure to transmit on God’s part, this is a failure to receive on our part. We only want a God that affirms what we desire, and that remains the case unless you experience the invasion of grace.

In the idleness of the past years, in the pandemic, some larger questions of life must have jarred you from time to time. If these questions haven't sprung up, then you will just continue on the road of indifference that ends in the land of Blah. I don’t want to be in that gray place. That road requires no action and no vigor and offers no real satisfaction, unless the next TV show or case of beer or oversized meal or one-night hookup can somehow fulfill the deepest concern inside you.

Call me a skeptic.

Many of us walked away from God for a reason, somewhere along the way. There are many possible reasons. If the problem is intellectual, that God cannot be real, then there is reading and listening, as you have probably spent much more time reading and listening to reasons not to believe and have never given the spiritual way a fighting chance. I have gone over my own struggle in detail in earlier chapters of this journey. Ideas and reason blocked me, as I wanted to learn everything, to know, to appear smart, wise, and most of all, consider myself above superstition and myth.

But ideas are just one cause of spiritual blindness. Often a human drives us away. Someone brashly shoved religion on you, and failed to deliver the message. A confluence of things drove me away. If it wasn’t only ideas about God, then what other cause pushed you away?

Perhaps it was one of these things:

Someone hurt your feelings. Something crushed you. Something distracted you. Someone annoyed you. Someone did something to someone that you loved.

What do all of these have in common?

All of these are reasons that have a person or a group of people at the root. Notice that the problem in any one of those reasons was not God. The reason is always something else.

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

For many years, I thought it seemed boring to have faith. There didn’t seem much shine to it, unless you watch some of the more charismatic preachers who go to great lengths to make it appear like a performance art, but then it becomes ridiculous. I thought the struggle of life was the fun, only to find out that everyone clawing their way up the hill is silently miserable. Miley Cyrus’s song “It’s the Climb” makes me shudder as she instructs people to believe that the clawing and scratching on the slippery teflon hill is the way. No, Miley, I’m sorry: “It’s the Slide.”

"Faith will tell me Christ is present when my human senses fail." That’s a statement I believe, but the senses do have their moments. Three things tell me God is present. Silence can suggest to me that God is present. Words can make me believe. In both of these, hearing is the sense that can make me believe in the invisible. Silence is often the best way to hear. When there is no silence, I can go to silence in the “chapel of the heart.” When I’m in the world, among all its noises, I can often hear God’s love in a voice, a song, a sermon, or even reading text. I can hear. Hearing is the only sense that can really prove God’s presence to me, with seeing being a fine complementary sense, as the “argument from beauty” may not prove God’s existence, but it sure does when you are watching a sunrise or hearing a baby laugh or beholding a giant oak tree or seeing a deer or fox in the wild. But hearing can touch reason and faith all at the same time, through prose or verse, from sermon or song, and even spoken words. I can “hear” by reading, too. When you hear the words that move you, they cut you to the quick. The truth shuts out all of the nonsense, if only for a moment, and the yearning and struggle suddenly makes sense.

In any given day I can flip the triangle over the wrong way. When I remember to turn it back into a bowl, then I can slide down into the center again, if only for a bit, to the place where I can turn toward God. All of the busy noise disappears for a bit. The things that cause hurt or anxiety, perceived or real, no longer matter when you are in the center. The word of God strikes at the center of you and resonates. The notion that faith is boring becomes preposterous. Life without faith becomes a far more boring existence. The empty life is that of constant struggle. The life without meaning is the one that climbs without ever resting. That life without faith is the one that must “do something” and never stops to pray. When you hear the right words, and you turn to God, there is nothing so exciting in your entire life because you have the cheat code to understanding while retaining the mystery itself. You can revel in the mystery, as suddenly the center is not so far away. But you can only reach that center and stay there if you let go of yourself.  

A few years ago, I discovered some hard questions that needed to be asked. The death of ego is a difficult thing, and I’ll probably never keep it down for more than an hour at a time. Some of those questions were as follows:

How much silence did I have, or could I have had if I had turned off the phone in my pocket? Did any of the time I spent in the past year bring the world’s troubles to an end? Does anything that I do today give me control over problems that are already unleashed across the world? Does anyone seriously think we will eradicate all that we dislike? How much time spent worrying have I wasted? How many nights sitting up with anxiety have I spent over this past year? Did I spend the day angry and frustrated or did I let go of control and offer it up to God?

Most of us wasted this year's opportunity. For most of us told to stay home during the pandemic, who were not in health care jobs, that time was a gift squandered. To hear, to listen, and understand what was missing in our lives. Most of us just continued more of the same things we did before the pandemic, that is, “doing something,” without realizing that the great gap in time offered us a chance for reflection and change. Most of us heard nothing in the silence because we sought out the noise of the busy world of social media, especially in America, as political turmoil and elections drowned out a glorious silence. Alongside that, excessive buying and selling of hot tubs and cars and houses and appliances consumed us. These consumer things, these material things, they consume us, our time, our value, our worth. As the saying goes, the things you own end up owning you. Then there was the drinking and eating to excess, or conversely the furious diet and exercise in response to previous overindulgences. This yo-yo of thinness and obesity happens to so many of us that we might just consider walking on a treadmill while we simultaneously shovel Oreo cookies and ice cream into our faces. We may have changed our pursuits and wants in the pandemic, but many of us traded one unfulfilling desire for another. The best things in life are free. There are very few things that are free, but they are there: prayer is one of those things. Will it change the world? Maybe not. But will it change you? Without a doubt.  

I will say the pandemic opened up a listening post for me, like I was given a chance to climb to a cliff overlooking a valley that contained the world. And I could look down and see the world, and when I shouted down into the abyss I would only hear the echo of myself, nonsense, nothing, just my own voice coming back to me in a weaker form. My voice, thrown down into the valley of the world, could do nothing but either be drowned out or be bounced around the rocky walls before returning to me as a pathetic powerless echo. Or, instead, on that cliff I could turn my head upward, I could look upward, toward heaven and without opening my mouth, in silence, there I could hear everything. Suddenly, everything, as if I had found the Aleph from Jorge Luis Borges short story, where he saw infinity from standing in a certain spot in the cellar of an old house that was about to be demolished. He wrote something that sounds nearly Biblical: “I shut my eyes - I opened them. Then I saw the Aleph…”

“On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished.”

Borges and William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman and Dostoyevsky were all writers that seemed to have found that spot where they could see much of the world all at once, and then even past the world (although Whitman could only see himself, which explains much in our present age of disbelief in God in favor of ourselves). These writers could articulate the world in ways that most people can understand but not put into words. But where the writer is looking makes a big difference. Whitman took us in the wrong direction, looking in the mirror for his meaning and muse, instead of looking to heaven. Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, was able to see the worldly and otherworldly perspectives.

But this gift isn’t only available to writers or artists. In fact, the more education you receive, the less you may be able to see beyond this world. Artists may be special in their ability to articulate this infinite place, but everyone can go there. A painter or writer is not needed to experience the same thing, as no artist can capture what each person can feel and know in their own experience of reason and faith. The great philosophers often become famous for recording ideas that have bounced around in most people’s heads at one time or another, and their fame is for spelling out the idea in official jargon. Everyone has the gift, and philosophers and artists can only attempt to reproduce it, and they never do it justice in their drawing or writing. The most un-artistic person in history has access to God, because they can come to rest in the nest of the presence of the Trinity.

“God’s kingdom lies within you…You must turn to him, the Lord, with all your heart, and leave this wretched world behind you, if your soul is to find rest.…you must make room, deep in your heart…it is for the inward eye, all the splendour and beauty of him; deep in your heart is where he likes to be. Where he finds a man whose thoughts go deep, he is a frequent visitor…if you really direct your gaze inwards, and rid yourself of uncontrolled affections, then you can turn to God at will, lifted out of yourself by an impulse of the spirit, and rest in him contentedly.” (Book II, The Imitation of Christ)

This is available to every person, and knowledge or skill has nothing to do with finding this place.

The Sign of the Cross represents this perfectly, as God is above, in heaven, Jesus came here, to earth, and the Holy Spirit enters and fills your heart. In fact, the Sign of the Cross by itself can be an amazing prayer, said slowly, as you contemplate God above, using your intellect and will, your reason and faith, and then to your heart, to the son, to Jesus, who shows us how to live, you can imagine him sitting next to you or in front of you as you pray and know that he came to earth as one of us and knew every suffering plight and struggle that we do, and lastly, moving across your chest, you can request the Holy Spirit to come and be with you, as Jesus promised, that he would not leave us orphaned, that we would have the Advocate, the presence of God, the third person of the Trinity, here with us always. All of that from the Sign of the Cross, that short sacramental that we rush through so we can start another prayer. Slow down - that motion is a prayer all by itself, and maybe one of the best.

The great questions have an answer when you turn away from the world. The world doesn't have the answers. Once I realized that silence and listening was a possibility, I realized that I could find the quiet whether I was alone or in a crowd. The silence is always available, even when standing among a hundred other souls. When you turn away from the world toward God, what is happening around you no longer matters.

I was facing the wrong direction. For most of my life, I was facing the world, facing the crowd, seeing the action and the excitement as attractive, when it was more like a pit of entrapment. Only in listening did I come to hear the Word, and understand what “The Word” actually meant. Three ways of listening helped me. 1.) Through silence and listening to God, 2.) through spending time with faithful Christians who live their faith, and 3.) by reading, by contemplating, and by being moved and challenged by the four Gospel accounts.

In seeking, I came to accept the mysteries and see their power. There was meaning in there that I had glossed and skipped right over, of a depth far beyond any pagan myth or scientific fact. Then in the Sacraments of the Church I saw the invisible become visible. Sacredness became real again. To me that was a miracle all by itself. You won’t understand what I mean unless you have lost all sense of what is sacred or never believed it in the first place, and then suddenly the Sacred shows up as real you cannot be the same person.

There was the end of competition, too. There was Jesus. In the center of all this was Jesus, waiting for me to wake up and notice him, to recognize his sacrifice and his risen glory. I’m reminded of James Joyce’s description of the artist, “…the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Jesus is seated - he is sitting - next to God. He is there, always. He has already done the work, taking on the sins of the world, and has been tortured and killed for us. Yet most of us aren't even bothering to look up to him because we are so fixated on our own pride and schemes in life. Jesus is resting, not jumping around, not yearning for your favorite football team on Sunday, not willing you to choose the right diet. He is seated, next to the living God, hearing our prayers, until he comes again. Perhaps he is paring his fingernails, as Joyce guessed, although that seems a bit too specific an action, but I understand what he means. God is love, and he is at peace.

Unless I can get to the middle of the triangle between the points of self-hatred, self-righteousness, and indifference, I can’t see the light of faith. If I flip my perspective, make the turn, repent, then I may get to that center. But I often easily drift past the place or turn back to myself completely and suddenly begin struggling once again. Sometimes I cannot hold my position for long, but knowing that center is there, where the turn can be made, means I have to strive not for the world, but to turn away from the world.

Like Peter and James and John in the garden, I could not stay awake for one hour with Jesus. For two decades, I could not stay awake for one hour. I could not hear either. I was deaf. I could not understand what his incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension meant until one day, suddenly I could. The dominoes fell one by one, with finality, as I listened and learned from the Gospels all over again the life of Jesus, along with powerful words from ancient writers like St. Augustine and modern speakers like Robert Barron and Mike Schmitz and Fulton Sheen and Scott Hahn and Tim Keller. The more I ask, the more I seek, and the more I knock, the more the door opens. “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” I find this to be true. I can flip the world over, and easily, gently, roll back into the center.

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

We must have a winner and loser. We want it. You can’t have the biggest boat without someone having a smaller boat. You can’t have the most knowledge without someone else having less knowledge. You don’t win a poker game without the other hands at the table folding. Your country can’t win the World Cup without the other 31 countries going home defeated.

What a shock it can be then to find out that there is a way to live where keeping score doesn’t matter. The game is over. Your money, health, possessions, experience, and knowledge are useless and meaningless to your salvation. You don’t win or lose. Someone has already won by taking the onslaught of all of the world’s problems and competition upon himself for us.

When I turned away from belief, I needed a winner and a loser. Only by turning back could I see what exactly it was that I had turned away from. In many cases, I never really examined God in the first place, because it appeared boring. This problem of boredom was one of the worst blockers to my turning back. An extreme dumbing down of instruction caused this, as I failed to understand why religion has lasted. The misunderstanding of the big picture and the details left me with a caricature, a grotesque version of religion as painted by a secular media and entertainment industry that so clearly loathes religion and religious people.

But I can’t blame cultural steering nearly as much as I can blame myself, because lacking all conviction I let the wind move me, the mood of the hour, and failed to grasp the need for both reason and faith, thinking one had all the answers and the other was nothing more than a complex child’s fantasy. As the saying goes, reason and faith are the two wings that help you to fly, and I attempted to fly with a single wing, and crashed into the mountain, struggling to maintain direction, exhausted from so much one-sided flapping.

I realized that there were three planes or points that my life careened between when I used only one of those wings. These 3 points made a triangle and each day my location on that triangle moved, and the walls were formed by connections between one of these three states:

1.) self-hatred

2.) self-righteousness

3.) indifference

These three blockers form walls, making a triangular pyramid. Like a video game character, I was stuck on this pyramid and the object of the game was to find equilibrium in the center, at the top. But that was the problem: I could never get to the center. I could only pass over the apex now and then, and then slide down one of the three sides again. I thought this triangle was a flat two-dimensional shape where I could just plant myself wherever I liked, but with enough experience I came to realize this triangle had a shape to it, a peak. The center was elevated.

I think of this triangle or pyramid as a curved surface. The game, I thought, was to get to dead center, to balance in that place where I didn’t despise myself, didn’t worship myself, and wasn’t indifferent about life. This is difficult because the triangle exterior is made of teflon, so that getting to the top and balancing in the middle, could never last for long, as I would roll down to one of the sides again. Gravity pulled me downward to the edges.

To remain in the middle, I had to be perfect, or to have the perfect circumstances to generate enough energy to get there. But being imperfect, I could never get there, or if I did, never stay there for more than an instant. I strived to get to the top of this warped shape, but the gravity of my instincts pulled me back down the incline.

When I reached the peak, that centered state, when my aim was occasionally on target, I was able to feel a brief sense of peace. But I couldn’t stay there. So I wanted to get it back again. Once you know there is a center, and that the center offers goodness and beauty and truth, the urge to return to that place becomes the goal. The only problem is the means you use to get there once, often stop working on subsequent attempts. The peace in that center is what I wanted, so I would attempt to take steps that had worked before, only to find out that the action plan didn’t work the second time around. But stubbornly, I would keep trying that worn out method, the recipe that worked once but never again. Those methods I’m talking about are a variety of avenues to the same conclusions: drinking, endurance sports, woodworking, studying, writing, and career accolades. All of these things are good in themselves, but cannot keep and hold the peace since they are finite actions and goals attempting to replace and fill an infinite desire.

People are always trying to find the center of this warped triangle, and they use various kinds of fuel to get there. This is why drugs and violence and sex ad gossip and fitness seem like the way to get to the center, because those activities they make us feel alive, and these things summon energy in us, so that we can create enough force to can roll ourselves uphill on the side of this pyramid, and maybe temporarily reach and roll over the glorious peak. When feeling high, or when doing something new for the first time, you pass over this mountaintop. There is a sense of transcendence, for a moment, for a minute, for an hour. After you slide away, you know the peak is still there, so close to you, but so far away again. The nearness of it summons you to seek, yet the place can never be held when attempting to climb the pyramid in this way.

Getting to the top, the center, appears to be the goal of the game of life. We strive and try to self-actualize in the middle of this curved shape. I can see people I know struggling to get to this center, scrambling and grasping and charging up that slippery hill. Millions of people today are playing this game, clawing and scrapping toward it, somewhere between despair, superiority, and indifference, and there are millions who have settled into the edges, stuck on the walls, who have stopped trying to climb, miserably accepting a default state of self-love, self-hatred, or most commonly now, indifference. Many have just stopped trying.

But there is a cheat code to this game.

You can turn this pyramid over.

We are foolishly climbing on the outside, when we can be reclining on the inside.

When you see the world differently, this hill-climbing goes away. Instead of a hill in the middle, this triangle shape becomes a bowl. When it is no longer a hill, it becomes a nest. The center is no longer a place you struggle toward, but a place of rest you gladly occupy, through no merit or effort. I realized, slowly, that I’d been looking at the wrong side of this shape all along.

The turn toward God is the cheat code. It flips this triangle over. The difficulty of navigating this curved triangle changes when you change your perspective. The Stoic idea of “the obstacle is the way” no longer makes sense, because you come to realize that there is no obstacle. Now it becomes easy to get to the center. You no longer fight gravity, you come to rest in gravity and you only oscillate from the center when the world shakes you up, and then you get jostled about, but with surrender you easily slide back into the center, restfully. You give control over to God and put your trust, a radical trust, in his guidance and direction, and the struggle ends because you no longer need anything else.

The world tells you that you need to climb the hill, that getting to the top is where you need to be. When you are trying to get to the top, trying to get to the center the hard way, you can experience that fleeting joy only briefly as you miss the mark and roll away. You know the center, the sweet spot is there, but you can’t reach it, or if you do reach it, you cannot stay there. You know there is a euphoric state in the middle of this triangle but the effort required to get there exhausts you and is unsustainable for a lifetime, which is why those of the worldly view end up settling into the edges, standing about like wallflowers, until they realize, if they are lucky, that they have been looking at the world the wrong way, and after trying everything else arrive at the secret code that turns the world upside down.

In my younger days, days of high energy, I would roll from the wall of indifference toward the wall of sin without remorse, and on that day’s journey I could pass near the center. Charging uphill took immense energy. For me, I would confuse the experienced high of the center with the power of myself to willfully create peace and contentment. Note: you cannot truly “will” peace into existence, into your heart. You cannot will it but you can pray for it. And then, with continued effort, peace happens. Contentment happens. Neither of those two things can be willed or forced or created. Peace and contentment require rest and letting go, not doing or acting.

I recently saw a bumper sticker that said, “There is no God, so stop praying and DO SOMETHING.” A better example of the problem could not be crafted. This sticker summed up the main problem of living, but not at all in the way that the owner of the car imagined. The entire problem is this idea to “DO SOMETHING” instead of surrendering. I could not have articulated my former problems better than that bumper sticker’s imperative, because that encapsulated my worldview. In a godless world, we must act, we must do, we must run around experiencing everything. An imagined utopia with no problems at all awaits just around the corner, if only we would “do something.” The distracted and agitated state means we cannot sit still. However, in that same godless world, once you run around long enough “doing something” to better yourself and justify your life you realize that it doesn’t matter what you do, so you might as well eat, drink, and be merry, and after you “do something” long enough, you realize that pleasure also isn’t the way to live, as all pleasures become dull once enjoyed too many times, and eventually the conscience comes calling, as the still small voice in your head knows that something is lacking. When you run out of energy “doing something” you fall to the wall of indifference, out of energy, cynical and pessimistic. In a godless world, where nothing matters but what we imagine, the wall of indifference or the wall of despair is the final resting place. The problem of a world without God, once you’ve convinced yourself that we are but a speck on a speck in the universe, that we are so small that we do not matter, and that there is no purpose to life, the problem is this: now you have to live in that universe.

That universe of meaninglessness is the one where you absolutely must “DO SOMETHING” to keep from going insane. Drinking certainly fooled me with the sensation that it could transcend the problem, but this problem cannot be escaped so easily. I would start from indifference and disappointment, become intoxicated, and careen past a brief state of temporary tipsy joy, until I fell back down between the walls of self-righteousness and self-hatred. In my peripheral vision, as I pinballed between the triangle of sin and self-righteousness and indifference, I knew there was something better, something more, an elusive state of peace and joy. There was something in that middle, in the center, so I wanted to get back to it. But I could never stay there with this approach, because the physics was all wrong.

But when you flip the triangle over and change it from a hill into a valley, from an uphill to a downhill, you need very little effort to get back to the place of joy. Humility lets you roll right down into the center, to the nest, where you are no longer restless and striving, you are no longer tired and angry. As St. Augustine said, “My heart is restless until it rests in Thee.” He knew that he had found the bowl, the cup, the nest, the place of rest. Once he flipped this triangle over, he passed through the plane to the other side, then suddenly he no longer needed to struggle to get to the center.

In fact, one of St. Augustine’s great realizations was when he saw a drunkard on the street who seemed happy. The drunk appeared to be at rest in his excess, and Augustine actually envied the drunk. In all his success, Augustine was miserable, while the drunk seemed content. But Augustine forgot to realize that the drunkard would wake up the next day and be miserable, back in one of those corners of indifference or self-hatred. Augustine was bouncing back and forth between the corners or self-righteousness and self-hatred, until he flipped the triangle over and came to rest in the center for good, once and for all.

Finally, there is one more level to this change of worldview. This triangle shape is like an escape room. Once you flip the triangle over, once you see the triangle differently, and once you come to rest in the bottom, in that center you can experience a lasting peace. But there is one more hidden treasure to this shape.

Once you are stable and steady, once you bask in the comfort of not struggling. You can turn and can see further because it’s not just a 2-dimensional curved surface after all. Along this curved triangle, there is a spot that reveals a z-scale, a third dimension. This is the spot that the millions are looking for and don’t know it. This is where Jesus left his guidepost, a sign for us. He points us to where the wholeness of God is, to where he is seated next to God. This turn is difficult to see, but we can sense this dimension. He called it the “narrow gate”. “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many.”

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