Why Did Peter Sink?

What strikes me most about the two commandments of Jesus of Nazareth is two things. First: there are only two, so remembering them is easy. Second, that they have an order, and Jesus even says this clearly, even explicitly.

“Which is the first of all the commandments?”Jesus replied, “The first is this:Hear, O Israel!The Lord our God is Lord alone!You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,with all your soul,with all your mind,and with all your strength.The second is this:You shall love your neighbor as yourself.There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:28-34)

I think most people today agree with the second commandment. We reflexively grant our assent to that idea. This is because that appears to be common sense, and on the surface level, appears to be the easy one, but it’s only easy in the way that we interpret it today. The second command to "love one another" is what the modern world has kept, but we have forgotten about the first commandment to "love God." But these ideas only work if done in the right order. "Love God" has to be primary to make "love one another" work at all. I’ll try to explain what I mean.

There is a chapter in my favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky, called "A Lady of Little Faith." In this chapter is a story of a doctor who says, "...to my amazement, the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love individual people." The doctor adds that he would visualize the great sacrifices he might make for mankind, but in reality he admitted that he couldn't stand to be with anyone for two days without coming to hate the person, "…because he eats too slowly or keeps blowing his nose." This is reminiscent of many Seinfeld episodes, as Jerry is often driven to loathe his girlfriends for minor flaws such as: “She eats her peas one at a time,” or “She’s a low-talker,” or “She has man-hands.”

You can see this happening today, where the online individual "loves" the world. It’s declared widely and openly online. We all claim to love all people, but it's a distant and sanitized "Love one another." It is not the up-close and gritty kind of love for actual humans. It is a clean, separated, pie-in-the-sky kind of love. It is imaginary love.

In the same Dostoyevsky book is a monk named Father Zosima, who gives a response to the doctor's dilemma. The monk implies that to love humanity but hate individual people is a great bait and switch we do to ourselves to feel better. The monk says, "A true act of love, unlike imaginary love, is hard and forbidding. Imaginary love yearns for an immediate, heroic act that is achieved quickly and seen by everyone...as long as the ordeal doesn't last too long."

So what is the answer? What is the difference between the Facebook kind of "love one another" and a real "love one another"? For many people, their heroic act is seen as a vote for the “right” party, or sharing a video, or clicking “like” on certain posts. The monk explains the real difference in the next line.

"A true act of love, on the other hand, requires hard work and patience, and for some, it is a whole way of life." 

And what are the consequences of that kind of love? It is harsh. It drives you into despair. There is not usually a reward. No transaction takes place. People that enter into the true acts of love get mocked, or ostracized, or called extremists. They grow quickly tired or humiliated and want to give up. They are gossiped about. This kind of true act is not typically fun, or brief, or even uplifting. A week of volunteering can cure people of the urge to love individuals, because their volunteer effort may not be recognized, rewarded, or even acknowledged. It takes labor and can usually only be carried out by someone who seems slightly crazy to the rest of the world. Dorothy Day, servant of the poor, warned volunteers: “There are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell, and they are ungrateful.” This is from the same woman who poured her entire existence into helping the poor. She was warning the generic lover of humanity who came to help about the reality of what they would face in individuals, and that the utopia ideas about charity, about loving humanity, could be checked with their coats at the door.

Before I say the next sentence, let me qualify this it by saying that charity done by corporations is a wonderful thing. And now let me just say it: corporate charity that have employees volunteer for a day is an attempt at the grand imaginary act, the “immediate, heroic act that is achieved quickly and seen by everyone,” as the employees get t-shirts printed and take selfies and post on social media, so that all know that they made an effort, and they claim their honor publicly. Every corporate volunteer day I’ve been involved in is more about boosting employee morale and t-shirts than it is about entering into the suffering of individuals. Often the company name is emblazoned in self-congratulations every step of the way. And we all know it’s about the company’s public image and employee morale, not the actual act of charity. Now let me again follow my insult by saying that a great deal of money and time is given by corporations and corporate employees, which is great, but to pretend that the motive is similar to the “love one another” that Jesus speaks of is to be played by sentimental advertising and marketing, which is often internal and aimed directly at employees. Anyone with a discerning eye who has worked inside a large company can feel the blast furnace of internal propaganda regarding the mission, which is always to make the world better by selling whatever it is the company is selling. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps oil companies really do love the environment (as their ads remind us).

The monk adds that true acts of love will never be noticed, never reach the goal, and perhaps never even appear to make progress:

"...at the very moment when you see despairingly that, despite all your efforts, you have not only failed to come closer to your goal, but seem farther from it than ever - at that very moment, you will have achieved your goal and will recognize the miraculous power of our Lord, who has always loved you and has secretly guided you along."

To me, the order of Jesus’ two commandments is of the utmost importance, as I know plenty of atheists that love humanity, but simultaneously hate most individuals that they meet, especially religious people. On the flip side, I know quite a few Christians with the same problem. They love humanity as a whole, and they love individuals - but only those that love them back or agree with their worldview. I fall into this trap often, before and after I was re-converted to faith. And this is the key element of the second commandment of Jesus that goes unnoticed or ignored on purpose.

How easy it is to love a distant blob called humanity or mankind, and likewise how effortless to love someone who is a friend or lover or ally. This is not what Jesus it talking about.

To love someone who is not like you, who hates you, who disagrees with you, and has habits that you don't like, and revolts you politically or morally - this is extremely difficult. That is what Jesus is talking about. He’s not talking about loving your friends who already love you. He’s not talking about loving some distant blob of people. He’s talking about loving those near you, especially those who don’t like you.

When you attempt to love those which you loathe, you will not last long. If you must deal with a person who rubs you wrong for any extended period of time, you cannot maintain any kind of “love” without the love of God shoring up the foundations. Most people will irritate you, given enough time. Our phones and computers now provide the perfect escape for returning to the distant love of humanity, because people drive us insane. For those who enter into the gritty and thankless kind of love, I believe that the only way they can maintain it, is through the first commandment of Jesus, which is to love God. Only God can hold you fast to the idea of forgiveness and giving over of oneself to others. As we know, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and it is only through him that we can reach the kingdom of God. “You must take up your cross daily and follow me.” There is a popular phrase today which hearkens to Stoicism which states, “The only way through is through.” The problem with that is there is nothing to go “through” to reach or arrive at. But Christians know that the only way through…is indeed through, but it through the cross. The cross is where Jesus was crucified before being risen, and so must our own selves die before they can be reborn.

This is where the three rules from Word on Fire work so well in keeping us between the lines.  

* Faith: Christ must be the unwavering center of my life.

* Hope: Remember I am a sinner who needs saving.

* Charity: My life is not about me.

This neatly keeps Jesus' two commandments in the right place - and just as importantly, in the correct order. The order is critical. Love God. Love one another. I think you can "love God" without "loving one another," but I don't believe that you can truly "love one another" in the trenches of real life without loving God first. The second commandment withers and dies rather quickly if the first commandment isn’t watering and shining God’s light upon it. You can try to keep the facade of “love one another” going, but it fades, because God is the only supporting structure that can make sense of the idea. Once God is forgotten it is very easy to justify making life about yourself instead of others. You can pretend to “love mankind,” when you really don’t.

This is the struggle, and it is a struggle to keep these two rules because our instinct fights against it. Without faith, we despair in the trenches and revert back to serving the self. The answer is to fight back. That's the challenge, and following the life of Christ is the weapon. I never understood the idea of "spiritual warfare" but at the bottom, the battle is against turning back to myself, and it will never stop being a battle. To quote Dorothy Day again, she was an updated version of Dostoyevsky’s monk. And she was a real person, not imaginary, and she didn’t make t-shirts about her volunteering or take selfies and post them online. She followed the two commandments, always, and probably not perfectly, but as perfect as anyone possibly can:

“…my own sins that give me such clarity. But I cannot worry much about your sins and miseries when I have so many of my own. … My prayer from day to day is that God will so enlarge my heart that I will see you all, and live with you all, in his love.”

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As easily as I can fall back into old habits, when I’ve quit old habits I can fall into righteousness. Correction: I can fall into a false righteousness. There’s no sugar coating this. Here’s the sequence of events: once I stop going in the wrong direction, I will do the next right action. I get on the beam and walk, steady, as she goes. I’ll ask for forgiveness. While in that state I will understand the need for love of God and others over myself. In tune with a Higher Power while I’m in the recovery zone, I feel the good. Fresh from the rut of doing the wrong thing, I am refreshed, restored, raised up from the gutter.

But then, the danger comes. I will pass over that middle ground of understanding and humility and slide right over into a feeling of pride about my own goodness in this newfound recovery. Pride, in all forms, is the direct opposite of humility. As I’m doing the next right action, I begin to think that I am right, that I am good, better than others. I’ll think that I have knowledge, and that now I am standing on the high ground over the valley of the deadly sins. This can easily beckon me onward to the belief that everyone should act like me. Suddenly, I am the model. Everyone should be standing on the mountain like I am.

This is the great danger of getting “clean.” Funny, we still use the word “clean” as in cleansing, or bathing, when we have won in battle over an addiction or vice. As Jesus pointed out about the Pharisees, they were always washing to be clean on the outside. We are still constantly scrubbing today, trying to be clean. We can get equally lost being clean as we can being dirty. Pride suffocates any sense of mercy or humility.

There is a plateau that exists between the where the Prodigal Son eats with the pigs in his valley of despair and where his upright brother, the Righteous Brother, stands at the peak of presumption. Despair and Presumption: both are wrong. Even the climber high on a mountain can fall into a giant glacial crevice that will swallow him in darkness. You are not safe from falling just because you are higher in the mountain. No, in the rarefied air near the peak there is less oxygen and more cliffs to tumble down.

The parable of the Prodigal Son is not just about the wastrel brother who comes back to God. The popular part of the story is about the drunk, foolish brother. We all love the idiot brother, and we read it sympathizing with him and his father for forgiving him. Why? Because mercy rings out in the story as a right action. We’re sentimental to stories of mercy, rightly so, since we all need mercy. But we kind of hate the older brother, the do-gooder who judges his returned brother and complains to his father that the grand reception of the foolish brother isn’t fair.

But this parable is every bit as much about the older brother, the one who does everything correctly. And I am both of them. I have been both brothers and probably will be both of them again in the future. We are all, I suspect, both of the brothers at different points in our lives. Even today, in small ways, I may be both brothers.

I stray away from faith, away from trust in God, in different ways now than I did as a teenager. When I was in my twenties or thirties, I strayed in different ways than I did as a teenager. In fact, today, I am more likely to stray in the manner of the older brother than I am to stray like the Prodigal Son. The older brother wants some justice against his younger brother. He wants fairness. He’s been holding down the fort, running the estate, keeping the business together all these years. He wants some recognition, and really he wants to feel superior and even get a little revenge. All this time he has been showing up, doing the work, staying on target, never wavering. If his father doesn’t punish the younger brother, but instead celebrates his return, then why hasn’t the father ever celebrated the older brother’s work? He’s been doing the right thing and being responsible for so many years, how can this not be recognized?

He’s right, it’s not fair. Or, according to our instinctual sense of justice, it’s not fair. This happens at work all the time, where someone who doesn’t put in effort receives the same bonus or raise as those who do. Everyone knows this isn’t fair and it often destroys morale. Employees have a very sensitive feel for exactly how little work must be done to achieve the most benefit, and high-flying achievers often quit or complain when someone who doesn’t work gets the same rewards. The interesting thing about the parable is that so many of us dislike the older brother’s reaction, but that is exactly how we tend to react. If anyone gets anything more than us, and especially someone who seems undeserving, outrage is inevitable, anger rises within us. I have seen co-workers outraged at someone for receiving a coffee mug that others did not receive. And the parable is talking about eternal life here, not a porcelain mug that cost two dollars.

The drunken, foolish brother so clearly needs help that the parable often seems only about him. Really, the foolish brother has an easier and more joyous experience in returning to God because he has fallen down on his face and is forced to change. His need for change is obvious. His burden requires that he let go of his ego to return to God, utterly humbled. Humiliated is the right word. After choosing vices and sin instead of good behavior and trust in God, he needs forgiveness and mercy from God. His burden and need to return is easy to understand. But it’s not as easy to understand for someone who has been following all the rules all along. This is the difference between disobedience and pride, where the former shows up in obvious errors made, often externally, while pride robs us of the proper interior state that is needed. This can be seen all the way back to the Old Testament versus the New Testament, where Adam disobeys God in pursuit of worldly pleasures, while Jesus obeys and denies himself any form of pride. The old teaching was to obey, the new teaching is how to fix your heart. The brothers of the parable show us both the exterior and interior problem of all humans, and the fix for both is shown in the life of Christ.

When I screw up, I know that I have to turn back. This is the easy part. Well, this wasn’t easy for a long time, but once I realized the lies that culture sells us, and that turning back to God is the way, the recognition of being on the wrong road happens more often. The trick is to remember to turn back every day, every hour. The saying that “God writes straight with crooked lines” is a common refrain in recovery. Those that overshoot the true path, the right way, can always turn back. So even a truly righteous person, like Peter or Paul or Mary Magdalene, zig zags through life. Only by effort can we return to the path, and only Jesus ever walked on the straight line the entire way. As for us, we are all too ready to justify our gossip or drinking or drug use or swearing or jerking off as normal, acceptable behavior, because we have chosen the modern religion where all things are permitted. Thus we think we we don’t have to deal with it. But for every “whatever” or “meh” we say now while selecting these actions, we will have to deal with the choices made, someday, right after we exhale our final breath, in the long moment known as eternity. If this doesn’t concern you, in the end it will burn you.

The younger brother turned away from God and lived wildly, only to find himself eating with the pigs at their trough. This seems easy to turn away from. But it’s not. Not at first. I’ve spent many chapters or episodes of this journey describing how hard it is to turn back to God once you have gone the other direction. When on the wrong path, stubbornness over bad choices can make it difficult to even admit there is a problem. Once your wrong path is seen as correct, an immense change of heart is needed to turn back again. However, each time you turn back, and try, and ask, and seek, and knock, and cry out for help - it gets easier to do so. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the foolish brother is fully restored, and perhaps, we like to think, he never turns back to his wayward lifestyle. This is a “happily ever after” parable.

But I can tell you what the danger is for the Prodigal Son once he has repaired his life and found his way back to God. The danger that awaits him is excess righteousness, like that of his older brother. In the parable, the older brother is coached down by his father from the peak of presumption to join the despairing brother on the plateau of understanding.

The older brother cannot fathom how his father rejoices over the idiot son that squandered his fortune and sullied the family name. The older brother could be from our world today, striving in our merit-based economy and chasing the accolades of the honor culture. He is disgusted by the fool he must call his brother. “Look, all these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders.” But his father explains that the true glory of this world is finding the lost brother. He explains that the older brother does not lose anything by rejoicing in the return of his brother, who is restored to health. And the righteousness melts away from the older brother once he understands. He has been doing the right thing for the wrong reason, and he has to change his heart from righteousness into understanding, returning to loving his brother instead of clinging to his own merit and clutching his pearls of self-worth.

By doing the “next right action,” I can go from being the younger brother to the older brother, and neither is in the right place. Since today we all worship ourselves, the older brother is everywhere. We all think we are right, or righteous, that our opinions and decisions are the correct ones, and we love to stone people online who fall outside of our worldview. Our world has billions of righteous brothers and billions of foolish brothers.

This middle area between the ruts is the right place. That is the place the brothers need to strive toward, to be on the plateau where Jesus taught us to stand. The ruts of pride and disobedience both suck you downward and further away from the light of heaven. The younger brother, once he has found his good sense and received his dad’s love again, he may very easily perch himself upon that same cliff of presumption that the older brother occupied, and he will fall headlong into the ditch of pride. There is much to say about the older brother of this parable, but I will return focus to the problem child, the foolish brother, as at the end of the parable he is now in danger of becoming the older brother.

The trick to fixing yourself without become overly righteous and without dwelling too much on the past takes some practice and if you’re like me you will fail. You’ll fail. Just remember the two quotes: 1.) “Progress, not perfection” and 2.) “Perfection kills.”

Somehow, someway, you must preserve your mistakes and keep them ever ready to hold up in front of your own eyes, like nightcrawlers in a glass jar under your arm. Otherwise you may forget about those mistakes and soon pretend you never held a jar full of nightcrawlers. But at the same time you can’t cry and grovel for forgiveness and wear the jar around your neck like a millstone. If you have sincerely tried to make the change through conversion and penance then you start from there and move forward. You take a picture of that jar of nightcrawlers and keep it in your wallet, or put a poster on your wall. To never forget those mistakes is important, otherwise self-justified righteousness will swallow you just as easily as the urge to do the wrong thing pulled you off course in the first place. Preserve and remember those times.

Yes, I’m referring to those awful nights that will keep you from ever running for public office. Yes, those mistakes should stop you from ever considering the idea of starting a blog or podcast because you are such an extraordinary hypocrite. And yes, you should have those mistakes dangled in front of you now and then by someone that doesn’t like you, because being humbled is the best possible thing that ever happens to you in this world. Embrace the mistake. Don’t deny it. If anything it should keep you humble, because the error of becoming “perfect” means you presume that you have no sins, which is a sin. The sins are well-defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and even if you don’t like what it tells you, it is very logical and consistent. Despair is the sin of thinking that you cannot be forgiven by God, which is what the Prodigal Son does. Presumption is thinking you are already perfect, which is what the older brother does. Both of them are block us from proper humility before God.

Never forget the mistakes, but move on. Move on because you cannot wallow and dwell in that worm dirt forever or you may never grow out of it and you’ll only be compost. The time of supplication and mourning must lead to the next phase of the heart, which is the interior change. By suffering we grow. By challenge we change. Without suffering and challenge we would always be children or adolescents. Without suffering or challenge we would continue on wrong paths until death. Most importantly, without suffering, Jesus would not have conquered sin and death.

He told us quite plainly, as Jesus is so good at doing: “Unless a wheat falls to the earth and dies, it will bear no more wheat. But if it dies…it will bear much more wheat.” Thus it is not some exterior appearance that must change. Penance is a dirty word in our times, but I believe that’s only because we don’t understand it anymore. Here’s a hint about what it means:

Jesus' call to conversion and penance…does not aim first at outward works…but at the conversion of the heart, interior conversion. Without this, such penances remain sterile and false; however, interior conversion urges expression in visible signs, gestures and works of penance.

Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life… (CCC 1430-1431)

When I believe I have made the conversion of the heart, I can easily fool myself. There’s a movie called The Devil’s Advocate with Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves, where Pacino plays the devil and works on the vanity of his target, a lawyer played by Reeves. The devil dangles the bait of glory in front of the lawyer, aiding him to become the best lawyer in New York, helping the lawyer win case after case. Despite defending guilty and repulsive clients, the lawyer revels in the glory, while rejecting the needs of his wife and mother. The devil is eventually rejected by the lawyer, who has a change of heart. The lawyer’s free will wins as he chooses the next right action which separates the devil from him. So the lawyer is freed from the temptation and he appears to move on with this life. A happy ending is in sight. He’s very humbled, and once humbled he becomes quickly satisfied with himself. He’s like me, he dusts off his hands, thinking, “Well, I took care of that problem of evil and found the Lord!” But at the end of the movie, Al Pacino returns in disguise as a newspaper reporter who wants to do a story on the “lawyer with a conscience,” who lost a case for choosing to do the right thing, following morality over glory. And suddenly the devil, once again, has the lawyer chasing a new lure of fame, a different kind of glory, but still the same vice. The devil, Al Pacino, all toothy and smiling, says at the end of the movie, “Vanity: definitely my favorite sin.”

The lesson? When you are led astray, you get yanked off course by one of these vain wishes or addictions, by the desire to do the wrong thing. Worse yet, even when you are pulled back to sanity you can get lured right over to a different desire. Glory, honor, pleasure, wealth, power - there are more disguises over these hooks than you’ll find in a bait shop. In other words, the desire for one thing may seem conquered, but that doesn’t kill off the problem. It returns in a new form, using a new method, in a new manner, unsuspecting but just as cunning. It never stops. This problem isn’t something to beat and put on a shelf like a trophy. No, it returns. Unceasingly, it finds you and you find it. The only way to combat this constant pursuit of you is that you must have the interior conversion. You must receive God to believe and believe to receive God, every single day. There is no day off. You never get to dust off your hands and hang up your hat. There is not an end of the road at a truck stop named “faith” where this problem stops. Interior conversion is an active, living, breathing, idea you must pursue. To believe is a verb. To pray is a verb. Prayers use present tense, not past tense. You don’t need help yesterday, you need it now and tomorrow. Choices you made yesterday have come and gone; your free will has already played that hand. But today and tomorrow have many choices yet to be revealed, traps to watch out for, and sufferings to endure. Some examples of powerful prayers are as follows, all using present or future tense:

Prayer of St. Michael: “St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil…”

Hail Mary: “Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou…”

Prayer to the Holy Spirit: “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in them the fire of your love…”

Prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love.”

Jesus Prayer: “Lord, Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Prayer is to give glory to God and ask for help now, today. We’re not stocking up prayers for next week or when I’m eighty years old. The power of prayer is that is gives strength, direction, and orients us back toward God, which means we receive the gift of humility.

But once I correct myself from errors, and after I find that humility, what can happen is that I shove off the dock of those sins and think I will never see or experience that shore again. I say, “Adieu, Prodigal ways, it’s back to the trough and the pigs with you!”

As that place of sin recedes on the horizon, into days past, I grow smug and quickly righteous, thinking I’ve escaped my weaknesses, only to wake up one morning surprised to find that the problem is back in bed with me. Like Jonah, I can’t outrun myself. How hilarious to find yourself in these ancient Biblical stories. Except it’s not so funny when you first go through it, because you realize that the allegories and characters are more than old writings, they are a fact of your very real life.

“Wherever you go, there you are.” That’s a saying I know well. I travel with myself wherever I go. The dock and shore, the time and the place - those things never held or harbored the problem. Those are just places and things. I have the problem. It’s part of me. The dysfunction travels with me. Things are just things, but I am the carrier of the disease. Watch the news today and you will see the evidence that all men and women carry this problem, not just a few.

This interior conversion then must be renewed constantly, or the proper placement of self starts to wander, or my compass to true north gets skewed by the magnetism that draws me into the wrong thing.

Humility is the right place to be. The elevation of the self is how both brothers in the parable make their error, one by chasing pleasure and the other by assuming honor. The middle, between them, is where they both realize they are not God, that they are both sinners, and that they need and love each other.

There is one other kind of error, not in righteousness, but in challenging God in arrogance. To think that God owes you something, that he is a personal Genie or sugar daddy, is a great mistake. How small we make God out to be in our minds.

Consider Jesus on the cross between the two criminals. The first criminal is not like the older brother in the Prodigal Son. No, he’s in an even worse state of mind. He hasn’t acted righteous, not at all, but he is deriding Jesus and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’

Not only is he mocking Jesus, but he’s expecting some kind of transaction from him. He’s saying, “Well if you’re so great, why don’t you show us.” How many people today are like the first criminal on the cross next to Jesus? This is how a lot of us pray. We give nothing to God because we don’t believe in him, and then say, “Well God hasn’t done anything for me.” He owes you nothing, and if you have rejected God because you didn’t get something, you are the first criminal on the cross. He’s not righteous, he’s not sorry, he’s not humble, but he wants a miracle and worst of all, feels that he deserves one.

Put that against the humility of the second criminal, the good thief, who has committed the same crime as the other criminal but reacts in a completely opposite manner. The first shows arrogance to God, while the second shows humility. And although he is late to the game of conversion, he’s now in the stadium and he’s staying, as Jesus recognizes true faith when he sees it, no matter when it comes in a person. He tells the second criminal, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

The danger of humility is that it can be in the right place, only to switch into righteousness or arrogance in the blink of an eye.

This is where faith, hope, and charity must be prescribed. I’m not a doctor, but a doctor today would offer some cocktail of pills as a cure. There is a better pharmacy, and it’s free, and it’s called a church. Faith and humility go together. In fact, they are inseparable. Likewise, faith and joy go together. These too are inseparable. No, I’m not a doctor but I wish doctors had suggested these three things called faith, hope, and charity to me years ago, as I might have saved two decades of searching. Then again, even if they had suggested it, I doubt I was ready to hear it. I would have demanded the pills anyway, I suspect.

After you screw up, take the next right action, ask for humility, and pray for hope. Pray for the willingness to be willing. If you lack belief, say this awkward sentence: “God I believe, help my unbelief.” That always sounded ridiculous to me, but it works. If you want belief, if you say, “Come Holy Spirit,” it shows up. I’m not selling anything here. I’m not advertising anything that I will make money on. This is all free to anyone. I don’t want your money or praise, I just want you to know that there is hope and if you pray for willingness to be willing, if you try to believe while you are riddled with doubt, something will happen to you. There is so much hope, even when you doubt, but you have to try to receive it.

What is hope? Here’s a definition.

Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit…

The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men's activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity. (CCC 1817-1818)

As St. Paul said, "So faith, hope, charity abide, these three. But the greatest of these is charity." I could have ten episodes on these three virtues and never cover it. Others have written about it much better than I can anyway, such as St. Theresa of Avila’s Interior Castle or St. Francis de Sales Introduction to the Devout Life.

When the next mistake comes around, don’t throw up your hands and stay in the rut. Step out of it. Stay out of the twin ruts of disobedience and pride. Pray for humility, pray for hope to keep your spirits up, and recall that your life is not about you. Remember that one? “My life is not about me.” Make it about something built to last and those somethings are: faith, hope, and charity.

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

As I’ve mentioned in earlier episodes, when you find the drink or drug or vice that suits you, you know it immediately. Even if you didn’t recognize it happening, it happens. For people with addictions, which is pretty much everyone, the substance or experience was pinned on their hearts so long ago that they don’t even know it’s there anymore, nor do they know when it happened. The addiction merges into you, sometimes gradually, but is so ingrained into life that it’s unseen. Like mixing two different paint colors, separating the two is impossible. Well, impossible for us humans anyway. Unless you somehow get jolted awake, no recognition happens, the paint is just mixed into you and you are now both colors of paint.

To illustrate the point, take most men today as an example: they will keep popping beers and opening porn sites and feeding political/personal hatreds, without ever noticing they’ve been overtaken. They will do this while they simultaneously complain about the immorality of everyone else. They are not wrong about the immorality of everyone else, but they don’t recognize the massive plank in their own eye. And I include myself in that entire accusation. I am the foolish brother in the Prodigal Son parable, but I am the other brother as well.

When you find the thing that “does it for you,” you can be conquered quickly. You will embrace it and know that this - yes, this - delivers something that was lacking before, something what you sought, what you had been looking for. You didn’t know you were seeking it, but you found it. Once you found it, now it’s part of you, unless you do battle to remove it.

The most visible examples of this comes with meth or heroin addicts, as you can watch it happen so fast, where the first high elevates the user to such great heights that they are lost in the first experience, after which we get to watch their ungracious collapse, their meteoric crash into the mountain of life. But for most people, for our accepted and private addictions, it happens slowly. The drug or experience hooks you, but you dabble, silently and out of sight. Over time you assemble your cheerleaders to support you, the enablers that must be found to allow continuing on further down the path. Then you keep dabbling at it for the rest of your life, stuck on the problem, but keeping up appearances, thinking that it’s not a problem. The meth or heroin addict reaches the conclusion fast and publicly, like a short violent film, but the rest of us require a full five-act tragedy to play out over 75 years. We make drug users and criminals our cautionary tales, our modern outcasts, as their illustration provides such an obvious error that even a child recognizes the mistaken path. Their suffering gives us a sign of one road to avoid, but there are many well-lighted paths that take more circuitous routes but end up at the same place.

I have heard this notion of “instant addiction” from users of opioids, marijuana, meth, sex, gambling, and porn. I’ve actually observed it happen in a gambler once, as he acquired the “taste” for the win. The pleasure of winning a bet spread across his face like The Grinch as he hatched his evil scheme to steal Christmas. When the right wrong touches you, even if you aren’t looking for it, you will know. At that moment, this wrong will then gather its belongings and take up residence inside your head permanently, like a bad tenant that you cannot evict. Just ask anyone who got addicted to oxycodone or other narcotics by accident after receiving pills for pain from a doctor. They didn’t know they were looking for that thrill, but they found it by pure accident. For most people the pills won’t cause a problem, but for others their entire life self-destructs into a pursuit for more prescriptions. To those observing other people with theses vices, especially with vices we do not share, this behavior is bizarre. Yet for most people there is a something like an opioid that draws us in like bugs to a trap, and we just can’t help but taste that sweetness. I recall a night out long ago when I was at a bar with two others. One was a man obsessed with sex. The second was terribly overweight and still obsessed with food. Then there was myself, who just wanted to drink to drunkenness. And as I looked around our table in that bar, I thought to myself, “Aren’t we quite the trio.”

As for me, drinking beer took a bit of getting accustomed to, but as a teenager I had acquired “the taste” and never again lost it. But I wasn’t really after the taste. None of us are after the taste, not really. We want the effect. I’ll take the result, not the taste, thank you very much. The idea that we love the taste is a cool trick. We dress up beer and liquor in a thousand flavors. Ethanol tastes terrible, so it has to be disguised for us to ingest it. We want the buzz. This is the little secret of wine “aficionados” and “craft” beer drinkers and whiskey “connoisseurs,” but they will defend to the death that they love the taste, and surely they do believe it, once alcohol has merged into their life and taken up residence. But without the buzz there is no reason for acquiring a taste. 

I am not trying to say that drinking is bad. This is not a teetotaler tirade. I needed to remove the tap from my own life, but I don’t ever pretend that drinking is bad for all people. Drinking provides much joy for people. We are all just wired for different problems, and mine happens to be alcohol, which is why I babble on about it here, but I feel that one addictive experience can help understand other addictive experiences. Most people can handle a few drinks, although there are many who think they can, but really can’t. What I aiming at is this: people lie about why they drink, because no one does it for the taste. This is how we justify our sins, with simple and sometimes elaborate lies. For the record, drinking is not a sin, but drinking to drunkenness is a sin most definitely. I didn’t make that up, but I think it’s fairly obvious that a large portion of the awful things that happen in our lives and in many families can be traced directly back to drunkenness. Generations of families are ruined by drunkenness, sometimes stemming from a single night that a father or mother was drunk, which begins a domino effect. A good rule is the G.K. Chesterton line, “We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.”

But for those of us that do drink too much of them:

An impulse to do the wrong thing can conquer me. Even knowing something is wrong doesn’t provide enough reason to not to take the wrong action. Reason need not apply. Like the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey, the high is wanted again and again and the mind never tires of it because it appears to put anxiety, suffering, and mental pain to rest.

Except it doesn’t. The Lotus flower doesn’t fix anything, not at all, but the sailors want to believe it has solved their problem. They forget other things, like where they were going, their home, their families, replacing goals or hobbies with the substance and experience that they now treasure. Odysseus’ men gladly forget all things important to them:

“…those who ate of this honeyed plant, the Lotos,

never cared to report, nor to return:

they longed to stay on forever, browsing on

that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland. (from the Robert Fitzgerald translation)

The Lotus replaces the men’s motivation and direction. There is also the loss of innocence, which is part of everyone’s journey, and this personal pathway is different for all but there are similarities between those who find the Lotus in achievement or status or gambling or drinking or sex, or some combined cocktail of those things. The sense of right and wrong is still present after the first few times, but begins to diminish the more the wrong thing is chosen. Soon the wrong way becomes increasingly normal and eventually becomes a permanent fixture that you don’t want to have judged or reviewed. Then you will not care one bit that some guy named Isaiah ever said, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” because you will want to be with your precious. Remember, Gollum started out as Smeagol. He was a cute and happy little hobbit before the ring transformed him into a ghoulish murderer.

The echoes of this desire to do the wrong thing is sometimes subtle and you may or may not notice when it happens, but you can hear it plain as day in songs, like One Republic’s Counting Stars. The lyrics cannot be heard but as a yearning to do what his conscience tells him is wrong. This guy gets it.

I feel something so right by doing the wrong thingAnd I feel something so wrong by doing the right thing…Everything that kills me makes me feel alive

The strange twist on those lyrics is not just his desire to do the wrong thing, but his repulsion at doing the right thing. His is an advanced case of lost innocence, but common, as once the decision is made to “call evil good and good evil” then wrong behavior becomes the standard, not the exception. There is even a death wish in these lyrics of wanting to be on the edge of life and death merely to feel alive. You can see this path of destruction in a one-liner from the Parable of the Prodigal Son: “…the younger son collected all his belongings and set off to a distant country where he squandered his inheritance on a life of dissipation.” Surely he knew it was wrong, but he chose that path anyway. He wanted to live wildly and riotously. That was his drug.

There is excitement in doing the wrong thing. Fun and pleasure can come from good things, but the devil plays on the other side of that fence in the activities that we know are wrong. We think, or want to believe, that’s where the fun is at. For me, coloring outside the lines appeared to free the soul from the tethers of morality and furthermore seduced me with the promise of creativity, which I saw in others who had traveled the road of excess. For reference: see every dead rock star. Janis Joplin to Jim Morrison to Bradley Nowell to Amy Winehouse to Scott Weiland to Chris Cornell. Flawed people, but creative souls who achieved a kind of greatness in music, as a side hobby all had major drug or alcohol problems. The result is that we mashup creativity and freedom into one bowl, thinking they go together. This opens the gate to choosing actions that our conscience tells us not to do, like a nerdy hall monitor. When the conscience tells us to “No running, go back and walk,” we decide we are tired of listening to this fuddyduddy, that running in the hall is more fun, so we beat up the hall monitor and take his lunch.

This same “freedom” I saw in writers that I admired. They all seemed to disregard common rules only to make their own and become more creative because of it. Many of these favorite writers also ended up losing their marbles and soon after their life by their own hand, like Ernest Hemingway and Jack London and Hunter Thompson and Sylvia Plath.

Extracting myself from this rut going in the wrong direction, required extra help. Far more motivation and direction was needed to get out of this rut than I needed to get into it. Anyone who has found themselves in a literal rut, whether by plowing a field, driving a car on a gullied out dirt road, or even while using the tow-rope at a ski resort, you can find your way into the rut much easier than you can pull out of the rut. In fact, when watching the tow rope ferry skiers up a hill at a ski resort, I have watched kids fall down in order to get out of the rut, and that matches my own experience. Falling down is sometimes the only way to get out of the rut, otherwise you just end up following the rut to its end. Wiser folks than myself just avoid putting their skis into the rut, or having dropped into the rut, carefully step back out of it. I applaud them on their good sense.

When I was, at long last, able to step out of the rut, I reached a point where I assumed that the problem was solved. “That was easy,” I thought, shaking the snow off my hands, “Problem solved. I’ll never do that again.”

But as I’ve mentioned in earlier episodes, my first attempts to stop drinking failed after a month, or after six months, or even after a year. I had to try and try again. And it’s not impossible, not by a long shot, that even after five years of sobriety I won’t fall headlong right back into the rut again. It happens all the time to people. The rut is always there, if we only choose to put our ski back into it.

Switching metaphors here, let’s move from skiing to dragons. The dragon doesn’t go away. There is a decent chance I will revert back to the same mistakes of the past. But beyond that, even if I may have penned the dragon of drinking, there are plenty of other dragons to face in the world and nearly every day these cause struggle and trouble for me, or rather I allow struggle and trouble into my life. Some days are better than others. Some days I feel that there is nothing that can derail me from doing the right thing. On other days I struggle from the moment I awake in the morning. Those are the days when I forget about God. Why Did Peter Sink? Yes, again, the same answer. He took his eyes off God.

Without a doubt, as creatures we will never be perfect. It’s impossible. The lizard brain is strong, but we can strive away from its wiles that seduce us. Rather than go toward it, we try to resist it. But there are times that we fail. Two sayings I like about perfection are as follows:

* Progress, not perfection.

* Perfection kills.

I can’t claim either of those quotes, but I will steal them for my purposes. Now, these quotes could be interpreted as license to do whatever you want and then seek forgiveness afterward, making them half-hearted enablers of the vices. After all, you could distill “Perfection kills” to mean “I’ll never be perfect, so why try at all?” But that is reducing it to an all-or-nothing scenario where our efforts toward the good are nullified. Even though we will fail, we must strive toward goodness. When we fall it is by choice. Adults are just like any child who wants a cookie, who knows that it’s often easier to get forgiveness for eating the cookie than it is to get permission. So we often perform the act and then the supplication is made later.

This is what often bothers people about Christian forgiveness, as it can come late in a person’s life. However, if there is one thing Jesus makes clear, repeatedly, it’s that God doesn’t care if the change of heart comes late in life, he only cares that it happens. There is the parable of the laborers, where those laborers who worked only an hour in the field received the same pay as those that worked all day. “It’s not fair,” they complain. But nothing is lost for those who worked all day. The eternal reward is the same and just as great. There is no keeping score on who turns back to God, or when they turn back to God. Those already turned should have joy now, and when others turn they should share in their joy. The expectation of getting more than others is one of our human flaws that must be shed if we are ever to understand the idea of salvation. The death row confession and plea for forgiveness angers people. Yet that forgiveness is precisely what the penitent thief on the cross next to Jesus receives in his final hour. An overarching theme across all the Gospels is “the first will be last and the last will be first.” As a reader, I almost feel beaten over the head by that concept, which is good, because that’s the only way I remember anything. The idea goes against our instincts, especially in our merit-based society.

So what happens when you do screw up and revert back to old ways? First of all, there was a saying in AA meetings: “We don’t shoot our wounded,” which always seemed like the right answer for those who struggle but keep trying, who need a hand. For anyone who started drinking again, but returned to the meetings, an acceptance was there but no one was offering a sappy “poor me” attitude. There was acknowledgment from the group but not praise.

Obviously, the goal should be to avoid the error at all times. Obviously. But who among us can say they don’t make mistakes? Wait, I forgot: we have Facebook and everyone’s life on there is perfect. But just for an instant, imagine a world where people didn’t pretend to be perfect, like say, well, in the real world, the non-digital world, on a planet called earth. Imagine our actual world where people are flawed and screw up all the time and say they will do one thing but do another.

We mess up. That is what we do. We think that we won’t mess up, but then we do. So let’s say you start eating the Lotus flowers and then by some miracle you stop eating them. Then after a while, you may forget why you stopped eating the Lotus flowers because life was easier with them. Life was more enjoyable while you were escaping to eat the flowers. Then what do you do? Wouldn’t it be easier to just go back to old habits?

I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve had some good advice given to me.

The first thing to do is this: take the next right action. That is all you can do for starters. Stamp it on your forehead. “Next right action.” And after that action, you can take the next right action. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I can’t fix much, but I can fix one thing. One thing at a time, one day at a time. The “next right action” idea must be volleying around in my head just like “surrender to win” and “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner” and “Why did Peter sink?” These phrases are the way back. One step at a time, one cheesy little quote at a time.

There is a second danger I need to share, and this is just as dangerous as the wayward ways of the Prodigal son, the foolish brother. You get into the first rut through disobedience to what your conscience knows is right behavior. But there is a second rut that can be fallen into, on the other side of the screw-up, after you’ve corrected the first error. This other rut is carved by righteousness, and in that rut lies the other sin, the oldest and greatest sin of all: pride.

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

What’s wrong with cute little manger scenes? Nothing. Nothing at all. They are terrific…if you’re under 10 years old, and perfect if you have already returned “like a child” and believe. They encapsulate the major events of the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus for those two groups of people.

However, for those who are doubting, for those who have never believed in the first place, and for those who have already turned away, the cute little manger scene can appear as childish nonsense. Worse, the cute little manger scene doesn’t tell the story that is in the actual texts. Even the Charlie Brown version takes out all the pain, terror, suffering, and glory of what happened in these events.

The cartoon version has its place and purpose for telling the overall story of the infancy narratives, but for people today who have never read the books, or don’t want to read Matthew and Luke, these simplified images gloss lazily over the real struggle, challenge, and fear that cries out subtly but constantly from the understated biographies of the infant who came to be known as Jesus of Nazareth.

Welcome to the airing of grievances. After complaining for a while, then I’ll tell you why I love cute little manger scenes.

screenshot from dreamstime.com

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How many times and in how many ways does Jesus say, "What difference does it make if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?" How many ways does he say, “the last will be first”? He just can't say it enough. It’s everywhere in the parables and the miracles. Lazarus, the woman at the well, the Gerasene demoniac, the blind, the deaf, the withered hand, the tax collector, the many lepers, the widow, the wedding guests, the salt of the earth. And he never, never says you just have to turn back for a little while, he says, "By your endurance you will gain your soul." He means endurance in faith, in fidelity to God. A permanent turn is needed. Daily orientation is the ask. But believe it or not, it becomes less difficult the more you play the game of interior conversion. The magic happens one day, when you no longer want to turn away. You want to remain turned, and you completely forget about the old ways.

This is not like endurance in a marathon, or perseverance at work, or dedication toward achievements, or leadership in family life. This is endurance in turning toward God all the days, right up to the last day, to the end of your life, to the final hour. Knowledge, money, and self-mastery do not give you any endurance for this task. They usually turn you the wrong way. 

Seven hundred years ago, in Book 1 of the Imitation of Christ, the author says something that our modern ears don't want to hear, since we hold knowledge so dearly today: 

“As for knowledge, it comes natural to all of us to want it; but what can knowledge do for us, without the fear of God? Give me a plain, unpretentious farm-hand, content to serve God; there is more to be made of him than of some conceited University professor who forgets that he has a soul to save, because he is so busy watching the stars. To know yourself—that means feeling your own worthlessness, losing all taste for human praise. If my knowledge embraced the whole of creation, what good would it do me in God’s sight?” (Book 1, “Imitation of Christ.”)

Seven hundred years later that same conclusion can be found. What good is all this knowledge if I can't answer the bigger questions about life itself? What good is Google if there is only how and no why? If I know everything about the world, what good is that knowledge to me if I am without meaning? What good is money if I can only buy more stuff? In other words, what good does it do me to gain the whole world if I lose my soul in the process?

There is no way to turn back while our eyes are glued to phone and computer and TV screens and our ears only hear voices from the current culture of disbelief. If you are hung up on politics or gossip, you will remain turned away, indifferent, starving for meaning while your bite closes down again and again on only air. How difficult it was for me to break away from the trance of modern distraction and vice. I think of the movie The Matrix, where the computer cursor types out to Neo, “The Matrix has you.” It has us all. We believe we have the control, the power, that we are the rulemakers of our own lives. But that’s the trick. We are the controlled, the ruled, the servants of a sad and depressed culture, stroking our ego with beer and porn and memes and videos, pretending we’re not desperate for something more. As the old saying from Charles Baudelaire goes, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” The only way to break free is to shatter the illusion that you have control, and that will free your head to turn. The only way to freedom is through obedience to God, and the only way to the kingdom of heaven is through the Cross.

If you are angry at Christians, as I once was, about a rule that they follow, you might want to ask them, why aren’t they angry about the rules. How can religious people be so happy with so many rules? You can be assured that every Christian has vices, that there are rules that he wants to break. Without any mental strain at all, I can think of five rules right now that I like to break. There are temptations enough to satisfy even the most devout person. But instead of being angry about temptations and the rules, the convert does battle against them, knowing that the model that Christ provided is the way, the truth, and the life.

This acceptance of the rules is similar to why basketball players and fans are happy with the game of basketball when it’s played correctly, within the framework that it is intended to be played. Without rules, a basketball court would be chaos. It is exactly the rules that allow something beautiful to occur. Would you rather watch a badly refereed basketball brawl or a well-officiated basketball game? The latter of course, and you'll enjoy the game more because you aren't thinking about the rules. No, you are enjoying the game because there is agreement on the rules. Where no rules exist, you have lawlessness, you have chaos, and you have a mess. Where there are rules, you still get arguments, but you also get harmony. Without rules, you don’t even get to have a game. How baffling to think that rules bring happiness. Why? Forgiveness, hence, joy. With that joy, the rules are fine because those rules outlaw things that we humans have already tried, experiences that have already failed to fill our cup of life. Like St. Therese said, the rules are small inconveniences once you are drinking from the vine of Christian life.

It's not cool to be obedient, not in America. But now I don't really care what will make me cool for 40 or 80 years on earth, I want to know what God finds worthy for eternity, and the answer is in the four Gospel accounts of Jesus' life, the letters of Paul, and the lives of the saints. I don't care if a neighbor or a friend laughs at my faith. I don't care what arguments science or philosophy uses in attempts to tear down the Bible or the faith. I am the Merchant in the parable who has found the Pearl of great value. I am the one who finds the treasure in the field, who in his joy sells all to get the field. There is nothing that can disprove that Jesus is what he said he was. He literally is the way, the truth, and the life. I have to laugh when my former problems with literalism were resolved to the point that there are miraculous events in the Bible that I now receive…literally. And one of those literalisms that I believe is that "No one comes to the Father except through me." There is no study or syllogism or theory or axiom that can separate me from this Pearl.

Here’s what we don’t want to hear. The self must die to reach the goal. This is what keeps us from turning back to God. For our whole life we are told to promote ourselves, to work on our selves, to believe in ourselves. And then Jesus decides to tell us that the self must die. If you find the Pearl, you are strangely willing to let the self decrease and, ideally, disappear. “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." Once you find the Pearl, the rest of the rules make perfect sense. That is why Paul can say without batting an eye, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ that lives in me." His old self is dead and gone. Saul is no more. Paul is reborn, like a child. He has turned back to God and found new life. Nothing is the same.

To cling to the self is the road to serfdom. To return like a child to faith is the road to freedom. To honor God above the self is the key to breaking out of your prison cell, and the key is already in your hand. To say yes to God, like Mary's consent to Gabriel - her great fiat of "Let it be done to me"; to let God's will take precedence over your own - "Thy will - not mine - be done" - as Jesus said in the garden the night before he died on the cross; to be selfless and honest in prayer like St. Therese in her "Little Way"; and most of all to be like a child saying his or her nightly prayer, or looking upon a manger scene at Christmas, or gazing at the crucifix at the wounds in Jesus’ hands, feet, and side; and finally to know, without a doubt, that God joined us here on earth as a helpless baby, weak, vulnerable, suffering like us, that he entered our world, came into this world with us to share our pain in order to take it away...this is how you find your way back to belief and find the innocence that you lost. 

You will never find it in a book of facts. Your job will never give it to you. Your partner or spouse won’t deliver the fullness that you seek. Knowledge and status and politics will never come close to where you want to be. But as long as those things consume your thoughts and your time, they will distract you and keep you from ever receiving belief, from experiencing the change. You will sit far away from the joy that your heart desires, bristling at God, in denial, secretly afraid that those parables and miracles might be true, clutching this world's pleasures close to you as if they have any value, and calling those who pray to the heavens fools. 

All of this keeps you away, because you don't like certain rules. Because you can’t let go. Because surrendering feels weak when it is the only act that truly requires strength. And in the end, you won’t experience the joy because you were too afraid to be open, too angry about the rules, and at last alone because you never even attempted to play. 

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 solution is so simple and yet it seems like a mountain that cannot be crossed. The solution is so basic that it almost seems absurd. And yet it is the solution, the only answer, and it's what St. Therese knew so well, as did St. Matthew: 

"Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." 

To turn.

“Unless you turn,” it reads. The word turn shattered my assumptions. I often would see a crazy Christian on the street corner yelling, "Repent!" and thought “What a nutcase.” The word “repent” has so many strange connotations for me of people who seemed a.) to be insane, and b.) to mismatch the message of Jesus as I understood it. But to turn - this sounded different. To turn my life, to turn my mind, to turn: wait…what does that mean? To turn means to re-orient the direction I was facing. That made more sense. Repent sounded like fear-based correction. "Repent and avoid the fires of hell!" In “Repent for the end is near!” I can hear that old-time Jonathan Edwards in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God delivering hellfire and brimstone to a country church in the year 1741. You have to love a good Calvinist sermon for the fire it can light under people. But that never motivated me. You’d think it would. Fire hurts. The pain of burns is worse than anything I’ve experienced. But that message wasn’t really Good News to me. That sermon could never cause me to turn. I could not even hear that message. In fact, it drove me away, and so it was the opposite of persuasive, it was repulsive. Hellfire sermons are powerful to some people, but that’s not the honey that draws this fly into the Church door. No, that message was vinegar. Good behavior driven solely by fear seemed an absurd path to salvation, and once again, seems to make us more like dogs than humans with intellect and free will.

Comedians like George Carlin and the New Atheist writers latch onto that notion of "You will burn in hell for all eternity and your flesh will boil and melt and you will scream forever, but…remember, dear child, that God loves you." Modernity mocks this idea, and just as God has been reduced to an optional Santa Claus, the devil has been reduced to a Halloween costume or horned clown with a pitchfork, to the detriment of millions of people’s faiths.

By luck, I am just dumb enough to have hit bottom without having the terror of a fiery hell. By luck, I found hell. And only then did I return to the Gospels, but this time with proper guidance and a study Bible. Then I found something deeper than that old fear-based motivation of avoiding hell. To become fully awake, I was struck on the head repeatedly, as I had been dense to the meaning of "repent" for most of my life. It means to turn back to God. To turn away from sin. How does someone turn back to God? You just do. You turn your thoughts, your heart, and your mind.

It’s difficult to explain. You can’t turn until you are ready. You can try anytime you like. The old saying of “You can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink” works well here. You cannot turn until you are ready and listening. Turning does not work until your mind becomes open. Turning sounds so easy from people that have turned already, but for those not ready they will feel like their spine and neck are fused together. Ideally we could all just have Jesus stick his fingers in our ears and say “Be opened,” like he did to to the deaf mute dude in Decapolis. Barring that miracle, we can try to “Be open” by effort, by asking God for willingness to be willing. I have come to believe that this “openness” is the single and only question on the entrance exam to getting accepted into Christianity 101 and starting on the journey of faith.

There’s the Gospel story about the prostitute who is washing Jesus’ feet while he was at a dinner party with the Pharisees. This surely created a scene by her behavior and her very presence in the room. I suspect prostitutes and Pharisees didn’t ordinarily hang out, at least not publicly, if you know what I’m saying. The picture of this dinner party where a prostitute is on the floor washing one of the guests feet is, quite honestly, bizarre.

A word in this story jarred me, as so often one single word in the Gospel stories can do to people. Someone told me that once that “Books don’t change people, paragraphs do.” In this story, a single word changed me.

After Jesus briefly discusses the woman with his host, a Pharisee, Jesus goes on to tell the parable of “The Two Debtors.” One debtor owes 500 days of wages and one debtor owes 50 days of wages. The creditor, seeing that neither debtor can pay it back, forgives their debt. Jesus says, “Which of the debtors will love him more?” The host of the dinner, a Pharisee, says in reply, “The one, I suppose, whose larger debt was forgiven.” Jesus replies to him, “You have judged rightly.” (Luke 7:36-50)

Then a powerful word suddenly occurs in the next sentence, a life changing word.

“So I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven; hence, she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.”

In this sentence the behavior of the woman is explained. There is a keyword in the middle of the sentence: hence. This is the turning point, the swivel on which the change is made. The turn happens on that hence.

She loves Jesus because she has been forgiven. She does not love him in order to obtain forgiveness. She is forgiven first. She realizes this forgiveness. Then she loves him. Forgiveness comes first, then the love. In fact, I’m not sure how it can be any other way.

The power of these little realizations repeatedly unlock the doors and windows to refresh my belief. I go from holding my breath to taking a deep inhalation of amazement. As usual, Bishop Robert Barron illuminates these things better to me:

It is most important to note that Jesus does not, strictly speaking, forgive her sins; rather, he notices that she has been forgiven. And the evidence for it is her self-forgetting love. She loves so passionately and so courageously…precisely because she has been so graciously and abundantly forgiven.It is decidedly not the case, Jesus implies, that love precedes divine forgiveness as a sort of prerequisite; on the contrary, forgiveness precedes love as the condition for its possibility. It is not the case that one’s moral life must be upright in order to win divine favor; rather, the sheer gift of God’s favor tends to produce an upright moral life, a life of love.

(For more on this dinner party see pages 347-349 in the WOF Bible, the best $30 I have ever spent.)

Realizing that forgiveness is real and present for us, for all of us, results in the un-fusing of the neck and spine which allows us to turn, which then, afterward, results in the joy. With this combination, we can then annoy the world by running around telling everyone about the Good News of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and the forgiveness of sins.

That “hence” is the Good News. You are flawed yet forgiven, hence, happiness. Simple words.

Forgiveness, hence, joy.

That is sum of it all right there in three words. Notice the sentence is not “Fear, hence, joy.” No, it must be “Forgiveness, hence, joy.” This turning, however, does not happen without the right order of events. Maybe the sinful woman and I are just the fortunate ones, as we owed 500 days of wages that we could never pay back and somehow stumbling along in the dark, we suddenly understood that forgiveness is possible, hence, great love was found.

This is the same as the parable the man who finds the treasure in the field and sells all he owns to buy the field.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. (Mt 13:44-46)

The treasure in the field is forgiveness. Then “out of joy” he sells all that he has. Notice the placement of that qualifying phrase “out of joy.” The treasure is forgiveness, hence, in his joy he sells everything for it. He trips over this treasure called forgiveness, and only then is he joyful. He’s not joyful and then trips over the treasure of forgiveness.

The woman washing Jesus’ feet at the Pharisee’s dinner party has that joy. Why does she have it? She has found the treasure. What is the treasure? Forgiveness. She knows forgiveness is possible, hence…hence…hence, she is joyful. Forgiveness, hence the turn. Forgiveness, hence, joy.

Why didn't anyone tell me about this? How did I miss this?

To turn means to have an interior conversion, to be open. To turn does not mean throwing myself on the ground in fear. Love is a far stronger pull than fear. Observe a child that gets screamed at for doing anything incorrectly, versus a child that is taught and coached to do things correctly. Which approach do you think a child will respond to better in the long run? Screaming and fear, or teaching and love?

Just as a better understanding on how I should be reading the Bible awakened me, so did this idea of turning back to God. Suddenly the lunatic shouting on the street corner made sense, but I wanted to go and correct his sign. I want to stop my car, get out, and ask him, "Hey buddy, can I change the wording on your cardboard sign? I just need to change repent to be turn." 

Repent means to turn. But what motivation is there to turn? Oh right, forgiveness. Yes, forgiveness, the treasure, the pearl, the whole reason for the Incarnated God of Christianity in the person of Jesus. Redemption, wow, what a concept. Oh right, that small detail of dying for our sins, of taking our sins upon himself, of entering into our suffering and not flinching so that he could defeat death and thereby set us free. Right, just that part, that minor detail.

I know the answer to some of life’s great questions, the hardest questions. When I look at the story of Peter walking on water, I can see it all there.Why Did Peter Sink? Because he took his eyes off God. What does Peter do? He cries out to Jesus for help. Why did Peter fail? Because he’s a flawed human being. Why does Peter cry out? Because he has faith. Why does Jesus save him? Because Peter is forgiven. Hence, Peter is back in the boat, with the treasure of all treasures, the forgiveness of Jesus. Once forgiven, hence, Peter is later witnessing to all, sampling Psalms like a rap artist, preaching “you will fill me with joy in your presence.” (Acts 2:28)

We can only enter this game of belief and faith if we turn back to God like children. Sometimes it takes a near drowning to make that turn, to cry out, to reach for the hand of God. Fairly often people just trip over the treasure, like the man in the parable, walking in the field. Surely it can happen by effort, but more often we seem to find it by accident or by bad choices. Faith certainly does not come by knowledge. It certainly does not come to he or she who has the most money. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet will get nothing for their knowledge and wealth, not an ounce of faith comes from those things. The poor have more potential than wealthy people. Likewise, doctors and professors get no more ability to communicate and pray to God than someone in prison, or someone in poverty, or someone with no education. The rich and educated may even receive less ability for faith, often because their own success, deserved or not, make them blind and deaf instead of open.

Rather, it’s the person that comes back like a child, that turns back, who will find the hints about the next world. He who orients himself toward God can regain the innocence that was lost. Turning back like a child creates understanding, and no, it will not restore all that was lost, and you won't be suddenly given all you pray for, but you are given more than that. Jesus never said suffering will go away. God is not a winning lottery ticket. We were given Jesus and his example. He did not watch our suffering from afar, but entered into the suffering with us. His mother suffered, his apostles suffered. They suffered more than us, and yet they had joy. That's the gift. That’s what we are supposed to imitate. Consider how crazy this line from Acts of the Apostles sounds. Paul is in prison, in chains, with his fellow believers, after being beaten and bound hand and foot. And what is Paul and his pal doing? Here’s what they are doing: "About midnight...Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God as the prisoners listened." (Acts 16:25) They are singing songs like they were at a nightclub. This is the baffling joy that drives non-Christians crazy.

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It's funny that so many people say they'll try anything. "I'll try anything once." They will eat any food, try crossfit, try hot yoga, pilates, therapy, support groups, meditation, fad diets, essential oils, herbal medicine, surgery, intermittent fasting, drugs, mountain climbing, buying boats and cars and RVs and motorcycles, second houses, threesomes, foursomes, every kind of strange sex imaginable, tattoos, piercings, mutilation, more horsepower, more acres, a thousand bottles of wine and whiskey, younger women, older men, hunting exotic animals, deep sea fishing, gossiping, inhalants, designer drugs, cliff-jumping, extreme sports. We will try anything. Anything at all. But we will not try one thing. Many of us will do anything, except for one thing. There is one thing we will not try. We will refuse to try turning to God. We will not try prayer. No way. Not a chance will we try that one thing.

Why?

Because it’s different from all of those other activities. The reason we won’t try it is because of the word control. Because it means letting go of something else. What is that thing we can’t let go of? It’s called the self. Because letting go means we are no longer in charge, no longer in control. We've been told we create the way ahead, we create our own reality. Me. You. I.

I get to be the one who decides how my life plays out. I get to pick all the things. I am in charge.

I used to say: "I'll try anything once." But not prayer or faith, or an honest reading of the Gospels using a study Bible. That I would never try. I would try anything except peering into my own heart and possibly facing the fact that maybe, just maybe, I was wired for God. Hell no, I won't go there. Not there. Anywhere but there. Like Sam-I-Am in Green Eggs and Ham, I will do anything, but not that one thing. No, never. No way to that one thing that could actually help. Absolutely not.

I was too afraid to ask for help, to need God, to want God in my life because it meant that I might be wrong about my wager that God was not real.  

Here’s another saying: "If it doesn't kill you it will make you stronger." We are fooled by our own "strength." We think strength is what we need, when what we need is to admit our weakness in order to be free, in order to be strong. Our human strength quickly fades. Only an illness or an accident, which is one day coming for every one of us, on a day that we do not know, either of these is all it takes to sap our glorious strength. Anyone who exercises regularly and then misses a week of that exercise know how fast muscles atrophy and weaken. Anyone who feels strong today can surely remember the last bout of the flu they fought off where it made them a puddle of weakness.

My social media feed teems with wonderful stories of people overcoming obstacles, striving to be better, hurdling disabilities, and doing amazing things - These are inspiring and courageous stories. I love to read them. Getting a degree, running a marathon, hitting a sales goal, climbing the ladder. Outstanding. There are so many terrific stories of people’s lives. But never, not once, do I see anyone mention God or a blessing or a grace that helped the person achieve that of which they boast. I was the same in my pursuits of writing or triathlons or accolades at work. Always we hear about the power of the person, the drive of the achiever. We are instructed that only the achievers’ grit and skill earned the prize, and maybe some extra motivation or anger came from someone who told the winner they couldn’t do it, so they climbed that mountain to prove those naysayers wrongs. Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time, in his Hall of Fame induction speech mentioned the names of those who had snubbed him or denied him along the way. Even in his success, Jordan was holding onto that list of names, using it as motivation to anger him, to drive him, to strive, to win, to achieve. And wow did he ever achieve. In this world, he has achieved a greatness and fame that few in history could match. We admire his tenacity and talent and merit, and for it he has glory attached to his name. But then you have to wonder why he wanted to prove them wrong so desperately, and it’s clear that he wanted those people to approve of him. Having not received the approval he sought, he showed them what “His Air-ness” could accomplish without them.

Today, God is considered absent from so many lives. Someone once said (I’ve heard it attributed to both Thomas Merton and Joseph Campbell):

“People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

My accomplishments are pitiful compared to these people on LinkedIn or to Michael Jordan, but that quote is a bullseye for the misdirection I discovered in climbing toward my own goals.

Long ago in his book Confessions, St. Augustine realized his ladder was on the wrong wall. Striving, winning, doing, achieving, pushing the limit, obtaining all that this world has to offer - that's what Augustine was doing. He began to see that those actions were the wrong verbs. Slowly he realized that his ladder was up against the wrong wall. Even after he knew that the goal was incorrect, he struggled to admit it. For years he battled what his heart already was telling him. The tug kept pulling at him until he had to answer.

What we seem to be telling ourselves today is “I'll be happy when...” That's the mindgame that keeps us in our slumber. I'll be happy when I retire. I'll be happy when I graduate. I’ll be happy when I get that next degree. I'll be happy when my kids graduate. I'll be happy when this school year is done. I'll be happy when I get a newer car. I'll be happy when my team wins the SuperBowl. I'll be happy when I get a raise. I’ll be happy when I get laid. And the joke around all of this sleepwalking is that we won't be happy when any of those things happen. We’ll just be done with those things, and we’ll look busy and feel important in the process, but still asleep regarding the bigger question.

When you get the thing you're after you'll have contentment for a while, maybe a month. If you’re lucky, a year. Three things can happen then. The first outcome is this: you get what you want and find out it didn’t fix anything, so you need another something, the next experience, the new thing. Second outcome: you get what you wanted, but you'll be anxious and worried that something will take it away from you. Or the third outcome, you'll lose the desired thing and then be miserable because you had it once; you were happy once but the world stole your happiness away. Then you be the person who says “I was happy when…” Most likely, if you still believe things and experiences will fulfill you, the process will start again. Because it must start again, as that is the flaw in our hearts. "I'll be happy when..." We cling and clutch to "I'll be happy when...dot dot dot."  

I tried that. For about 20 years. Because I had already turned away from faith over religious rules that I did not like. Well, that and scientific facts that I knew but Isaiah and Daniel and Jeremiah did not know them.

What bothered me was the Bible, like the covenant of Noah and the rainbow, or Adam being 930 years old when he died. A literal interpretation turned me away entirely, so that I couldn't even read the book. Thousands of years of wisdom, and I discarded it because the book said Adam was 930 years old when he died, when I should have read that to mean, "Adam was very old when he died." I was looking for a book of scientific fact, and that is not what the Bible is, that is not what books of the Bible are. On my bookshelf I have a title named The Big Blue Book of Bicycle Repair. When I need to fix my bike, that is the book I open. Another book title on the shelf is Molecular Biology of the Cell. If I want to understand the inner workings of mitochondria or DNA, I can read that text book. I cannot look in the Bible for information on bikes or biology, just as I can’t look in a book about bikes or a book about cells for answers about the soul. If I read scripture like a rule book or a repair manual or a science book, I will never find what is actually inside it. It will never work. The cell does not explain the soul as much as the soul does not explain the cell. To make it even more interesting, each book in the Bible is a different kind of book so I have to know what I’m looking at before I know what I’m looking for.

To take a different example, Moby Dick is written somewhat like the Bible. The different chapters are written in wildly different styles, so that the novel almost seems like a collection of separate books, but with an overarching story. Melville seems to be playing at this and even confessed to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne that he had written a “wicked book,” a comment that I’ve not yet fully come to grasp, but I have my suspicions why he may have said that.

However, in this novel he wrote chapters in a variety of genres: a sermon, a hymn, a scientific treatise, and a Shakespearian drama. There are opening sections of the book called “Etymology” and “Extracts,” which are definitions and quotes about whales. There are parables and prophecies and mysterious allusions throughout which give literary critics eons of material to fuss over. But here is the funny thing: the chapter called “Cetology,” which is the study of whales, gives a factual, scientific account of whales. This Cetology chapter reads like a dull encyclopedia entry and I can hardly get through these pages. In fact, I have only read it once. I have skipped over it in subsequent readings of the book. A whale biologist of the 21st century would shred this chapter due to its scientific inaccuracies. The 19th century understanding of whales pales in comparison to what marine biologists know today. So if we try to read Moby Dick like many read the Bible, we would throw out the masterpiece because of the errors regarding the science of whales. If Melville’s book is a novel about whaling, but gets so much wrong about whales, then how can we trust anything about whales in this book?

But here’s the important part: no one ever reads Moby Dick for the chapter called “Cetology.” Herman Melville wasn’t writing a book to expound on facts about whales, despite the book being so much about whales and whale hunting. We read this novel because it speaks toward the deepest truths of the human heart, much of which we can’t even put our finger on, hence the literary critics and scholars submit an unending stream of papers and dissertations on this novel. Moby Dick is like the play Hamlet, where the argument over whether Hamlet was insane or only pretending to be insane has produced endless discussion and always will. The question of “Was Hamlet mad or just pretending?” is a battle taken up by each passing generation. In fact, there is so much discussion and writing around the potential insanity of Hamlet, that Oscar Wilde asked a different question: “Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad, or only pretending to be?” Of course, parallels to this arguing can be drawn to the same question of whether Jesus was either insane or who he said he was. “Lord, liar, or lunatic” goes the argument, and the answer we choose for that question has far greater consequences for our lives than whatever we may decide about poor Hamlet’s mental state.

The same happens with Moby Dick, where people scour and search for the meaning, oddly enough, just like Ahab in his search for the white whale. The irony is wonderful. Ahab hunts for ultimate meaning in the whale, while we search for ultimate meaning in Ahab’s hunt. This is why summaries of books about the themes or characters don’t come close to touching the actual experience of slowly reading these works of art. It is the totality of Moby Dick that pulls readers in, decade after decade. Readers attempt to grasp what this book is actually about. The novel is almost impossible to reduce into a tagline or list of bullet points, which is why literary types will likely remain interested in it for centuries to come. In fact, this is one of those books that I read every ten years or so and find that it is a completely different experience each time I come back to it, as the words have not changed, but I have changed. What I think is true has changed, so the book reads differently. This same perspective finally dawned on me about Scripture. Reading it as a child I revered and read the stories in awe, but then I dropped the sacred and it became lower-case scripture, and then later it became mere literature like Moby Dick, and then lastly into a dull history and bad science book. Only when I returned to it once again like a child did I see the profoundness of it and thereby regained reverence for it.

The Bible is a library of 73 different books, of different genres, but all with deep religious and human truth captured like lightning in a bottle. Like Moby Dick, there are wildly different genres and themes and characters. The flaws of humanity are exposed in great detail, so if you want to find ugly things, you can find them in there. In fact, I think the ugly parts are in there because they are supposed to be there. The Old Testament makes Game of Thrones look childish. Bloodshed and sex and the seven deadlies are on full display. Amid those Old Testament books are rules, laws, teachings, tales, and yes, many scientific inaccuracies. But if we only see the rules and facts then we may as well be a dog trying to read a book, because a dog can understand "No" and can be obedient without the added burden of learning to read. Likewise, if we are only looking for rules, then we might as well be a robot reading the book, as a decision tree can be followed by a robot via conditional programming. A robot could also discern whether scientific principles of the modern age are met as well, which we know that they are not. But fortunately, we are neither dogs nor robots. We are complicated human beings. Even if we evolved from other species, we know in our heart and mind and soul that there is something more going on, and that’s why Moby Dick and Hamlet and the Bible capture our attention. We are not just apes wearing clothing. We're not just slightly higher in intelligence and cognition than other animals and plants. We have intellect far beyond the rest of our fellow creatures, so far beyond that we determined how to control or capture every species of plant and animal in this world long ago. Our dominion over this planet is painfully clear, and we have been bad stewards, which actually violates one of our first appointed duties according to the Book of Genesis, but that is a topic for another day.

More importantly, no other animal creates music and art or studies philosophy and math. And no other being builds nuclear weapons or skyscrapers or hospitals. And no other species betrays and fights and envies and kills and shames with such cruelty. And no other species strives and accomplishes and helps and supports and teaches and loves like we do either. 

There is something deeper in our hearts and minds happening than in the other living residents of this planet (sorry, pet lovers). Even if science, for all of its awesome findings, discovers life elsewhere, that will not change what we know in our hearts, that there is something beyond this universe, beyond the entire universe. When we reduce the idea of God to be a “Flying Spaghetti Monster” or Bertrand Russell’s teapot or my own “Street Light God” what happens is that we make a gross reduction of God into something knowable and therefore not-God. The fact that ancient Hebrew cosmology held that there was a dome or firmament over us instead of a galaxy, and pillars holding up the earth instead of gravity, does not reduce God any more than our limited understanding of the universe does today. Knowing the shape of this world and universe does not get to the bottom of the greatest questions. Moreover, any attempt to reduce God into being a teapot or plate of pasta or a street light, or any thing of this world, only buries the great questions once again in a childish mockery.

If we find another creature outside of our planet, that doesn’t remove our own question about the union of our body and soul. The suspicion about a sense of divinity touching our souls will not suddenly recede. We will still have the same questions and yearnings whether or not alien life exists. There is clearly something beyond the trifles we chase here on earth, as most of us can smell, touch, taste, see, or hear that calling. Something will also lie beyond what any other creature on another planet might be chasing, because they too live in the same universe that we do. I’ve heard this idea is only a “God of the gaps” theory, where people of faith just keep finding a place for God to hide even as science knocks down walls where God was hiding before. The cosmology of the Hebrew firmament was replaced by Ptolemy, Ptolemy by Copernicus, Copernicus by Newton, Newton by Einstein, and so on. Yet none of these illuminations about the universe resolves anything about the great “whys” of our presence. If anything they should make us more humble before God, more in need of mercy, since we are so small and vulnerable.

For those who feel the tug, or have awareness of a soul, we want to be joined to something higher, beyond nature, beyond cells and atoms or stars and black holes, something that we can't ever touch but constantly yearn to reach. To be indifferent about that yearning is one thing, but to consciously deny the yearning is to say quietly, “I don’t believe” and then the replacement must become "I'll be happy when...," or "I'll try anything once," or "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Those are all ways to ward off the calling in our soul toward a Higher Power. 

That is why this idea of "love one another" and “love thy enemy” cannot stand alone without God. There is a reason that Jesus gave two commandments, and the second one, not the first one, was to "love one another." The first commandment from Jesus was to love God. First rule: love God. And the order of these two commandments matters immensely, as the second rule is useless without the first rule. Wealth, honor, power, and pleasure are fine things, if, and only if, they come after the two commandments given to us by Jesus. Everything rests on the keeping the the two commandments of Christ, and these two rules must be followed in order to work.

If you say you'll try anything once, what could possibly stop you from trying prayer when the tug comes? The only thing stopping me was myself. Once I amputated the enormous cyst, the chip on my shoulder, I could at least bow my head. What I thought made me special was what made me plain. When I kneeled to pray, my life began to change.

There is nothing so liberating as admitting weakness and recognizing how finite I am, and to say that "I am not God." To know that I don't have to create the truth, or solve the riddle, or define the meaning of life is like setting down a giant sack of bricks. To say, "Help me, God, I am lost and I don't know why." To say, "I can't fix this myself, I need you, God." It's a hard word to even say today: God. We've attempted to reduce him to a "sky fairy" or "flying spaghetti monster" or "Santa Claus,” all because we wanted to make him small like ourselves, or smaller, or even into a cartoon. And the funny thing is that in trying to make God small, we've made ourselves small. God is so much more than us, so much more than this universe that we can't even fathom it, but the tug in our hearts lets us know that God is there. We make up silly names for him because we can't explain it away, and mocking God is how we shield ourselves from what our hearts already know. So instead of listening, we live in a state of spiritual death, fighting over the rulebook instead of playing the game; picking apart facts and words rather than experiencing what faith can do. We want noise instead of the power of the wordless silence where we can reach for God and he reaches for us. St. Thérèse of Lisieux said:

“For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”

People love and respect St. Therese of Lisieux, the "Little Flower," who died in France at age 24. Why? Because she got it. She knew both the question and the answer. She understood the tug better than anyone. In her book, The Story of a Soul, she wrote: 

“All the great truths of religion, the mysteries of eternity, plunged my soul into a state of joy not of this earth. I experienced already what God reserved for those who love him (not with the eyes, but with the heart); and seeing the eternal rewards had no proportion to life’s small sacrifices..."

She had a simple, joyful, deep faith that wasn't quibbling over a passage or rule that she didn't like. She learned by playing the game. She was living her faith and getting more contentment than anything this world could ever give, even calling those dreaded rules of prohibition "life’s small sacrifices." It was St. Therese's famous "Little Way" that amazed people, where "she obediently and graciously served others no matter where she was or what she was doing." This surge of heart toward God, this pure act toward faith, this constant receiving of grace, and this selflessness granted her freedom to be fulfilled beyond anything that we strive for in this world. She was the servant of God and others, just as Jesus commanded us to be. She embodied those two commandments in her entire life, in every action. The modern rock stars who died in their twenties will fade to anonymity long before St. Therese of Lisieux is last spoken of, because she tapped into the fullness of life through humility and it came pouring out of her into this world.

Only two commandments were given, and for many of us we can't even lower ourselves to speak the word "God." We can't even attempt the first commandment because we can't let go of our own pitiful power. Meanwhile, we can see someone like St. Therese who did not start with the rules, but started playing the game, and ended up a starter on varsity, All-American, Olympian, and All Around Champion Gold Medalist. She was and still is the ultimate rock star.

The problem and the solution is simple. The problem is caused by replacing God with ourselves, because we think we know better. Somewhere along the way, after we lost our innocence - maybe in our teens, maybe as a child, maybe as an adult - we decided God was not real. The pain and suffering we've experienced could not possibly be allowed in a just universe, so we killed God off in our mind. But he never left our hearts. We can never shake that presence, that nagging feeling that God might still be there. So we keep looking elsewhere while he stands right behind us, waiting to be recognized again. He's just waiting for us to acknowledge him.

God doesn't need us. He's not the lost one. We are. We are the ones that need God, not the other way around. But we have decided we can't see him while we search everywhere else for a replacement, and these sideshows are pathetic surrogates in the end for what we are really seeking. 

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Two things that scare us are corpses and ghosts. Peter Kreeft wrote about this, noting that these scare us because they are separated things that belong together. When apart, dead bodies revolt our senses and spirits terrorize our minds. Horror movie plots depend upon our disturbance at this separation of body and soul, or if not total separation, then the disordering or the dismemberment of bodies and souls. Without the soul the body is not animated, and without the body the soul is as invisible as a passing breeze.

Now, I am not a trained philosopher, but it seems fairly straight forward that if God doesn’t exist, then our soul fades away with him, and along with those things, so goes our free will. Worse still, in a godless universe where we are happenstances of chemistry, the “do unto others” notion begins to unglue. Things we hold in our minds fall apart quickly once the soul is denied. The soul is like a binding agent, like an egg in a recipe, that keeps the flour of matter held together. Remove either part of the recipe and the whole cookie crumbles.

This presented a real problem for me, as the idea of the Golden Rule clung to me even after falling away from faith. The concept of “do unto others” is found in various religions and cultures throughout history. However, the further step of “love your enemy” is unique to only a few. Jesus was quoting the Old Testament in his two commandments to “love God” and “do unto others.” He did not invent it himself, he was quoting Moses and Proverbs, but taking it even further into forgiveness. To make the point stick, he claimed to be God, the actual one and only God, the living God, and then he lived out this practice of loving his enemies, all the way to his final breath on the Cross.

This is the trouble with Jesus.

He raised the bet so high that even if other books of wisdom say, “love your enemy,” none of them declare that the speaker or author of the phrase was God himself. This claim that he makes cannot be understated. He says he is God in the flesh. Imagine hearing someone say that to you. What is most unbelievable to me is that I believe him when he says it.

More strange still is the fact that even non-believers quote and paraphrase Jesus, when they should be rejecting him entirely as a liar. Many atheists are obsessed with Jesus, but only to disprove him or mock him. Yet they can’t look away. They can’t stop talking about Jesus. The trouble here is that what he says is insane to us, but then he doesn’t act insane. Instead everything he says and does becomes convincing that he is not lying, which is why we cannot stop reading and arguing about him, and naturally, those who deny him wind up hating his followers. Oddly enough, Jesus predicted all of this, telling his followers that they would be hated. Wow, was he right about that.

If Jesus is not God, then what else would Jesus be but an arrogant and insane person? That’s why the response from deniers comes like a hammer. If you don’t see the God in Jesus, then the response could only be anger. Really, who could possibly be taken serious saying, “I forgive your sins,” unless the person saying it was God? Who could possibly have the nerve to speak it, and expect to be believed, save God himself?

The Thomas Jefferson Bible is an attempt to circumvent this problem of Jesus’ divinity, but Jefferson missed the point from the start. Jesus is not only instructing us about God. He is very clearly telling us that he is God. Jefferson cut out all miracles and supernatural events of his Bible, keeping just the teachings of Jesus. As a Deist, Jefferson believed in God, but not in the divinity of Jesus. But why would anyone, let alone the wise Jefferson, keep the teachings of an ordinary flesh-and-bone person that claimed to be God but was lying about it? If Jesus is not God, why would anyone care what he said about anything, on any topic?

When I was a non-believer, I thought Thomas Jefferson was onto something, but at some point in my struggle with faith in the Resurrection I realized that if the miracles are not true, then Jesus is not God, and that would make the teachings a complete waste of time. Buddhism has great teachings, so you can get that there. Stoicism has all the morals and self-denial you’ll ever need, and a ton of great sayings to use in place of prayer. Greek mythology has more characters and better drama. We don’t need or want an “ethical teacher” who says he is God, unless he actually is God. If he is truly the incarnate God, then yes, we want that. We want that very much. More than anything in the world. There are plenty of people in history who have believed they are God. But we don’t believe any of those people. We only believe this one carpenter who made the claim.

If the miracles and Resurrection did not happen, then Jesus is a fraud. But if the miracles are true, then the teachings matter. No, it’s more than that. Then everything he ever said or did matters immensely. Quite honestly I would rather Jefferson had carved a version of the Gospels that kept the miracles instead of the teachings, because while the teachings are wonderful, the Resurrection is why a billion people occupy pews every week. They do not get dressed up for church on Sunday morning because he told the parable of the talents or upbraided some Pharisees about the meaning of the law. The Resurrection is everything. The teachings interpret the rules we are the live by, but they do not provide the reason for belief. The reason for belief is the miracle, not the parables. I don’t like rules. But I love the miracle. Thus, I love the parables, too. If the Resurrection didn’t happen, then those rules don’t matter. But the more I read the Gospels the more I realize that I can not help but see that Jesus is God. There is just no other way around it. I cannot read it any other way.

So as a result, if you see that Jesus is the incarnate God, his “do unto others” and “pray for your enemies” become real commands. You don’t have martyrs of other faiths praying for their enemies while being tortured and killed, as Jesus did when he cried out, “Forgive them for they know not what they do." Then you have the many saints doing the same thing, like St. Stephen or St. Maria Goretti or Good King Wenceslaus. For a believer the right answer to every situation is to imitate Jesus, but this proves very difficult. This is like reading fan fiction, where the imitator never lives up to the original writer.

Sure, praying for your enemies sounds good on paper, but that idea is not natural to us. Love my enemy sounds reasonable when I am comfortable and full and warm. Most of us live in greater comfort than any king who existed before the inventions of refrigeration or indoor plumbing. In a stable society, with well-fed people, in warm houses, and plenty of jobs, then, yes, “love your enemy” seems entirely possible. But many people today can feel how tenuous and fragile this order of our modern society actually is and no prophet is needed to announce that we are likely occupying a temporary state in human history.

This problem of being only a creature, only chemistry, is troubling, or should be troubling to us all. If we have intellect but no real free will, with no goal save that of our next meal or personal achievement, hope and charity sink like stones. If we lack souls, then we are solely creatures, and creatures forget “do unto others” when resources grow scarce. When it comes time to eat, a wolf does not think of the good of the pack until its own belly is full, nor does a blade of grass consider its neighbor when searching for water in a drought. Plants and animals do not divest of their resources or pray for their enemies, they merely strive for self-preservation and reproduction. 

These ideas would sometimes corner me when the “noonday demon” of depression would arrive unannounced, at any hour, not only noon. Then, as a creature, I had few places to turn, but none of those places could really help.

Yes, there are pills and therapy, but I could not cry out, "Help me, science!" to answer the deepest longing of my heart, which was never fully satisfied with what this finite world can offer. I could read about Cognitive Behavioral therapy, but that was an arrow still aimed at the self. Mindfulness was another self-buttressing solution, and was a bit warmer to the problem but still faced earthward. Then there was talking to someone, but the talk would give guidance toward lifestyle changes, yoga, hobbies, and offer pamphlets and especially pills. Psychiatry since the time of Sigmund Freud has loathed faith so a nudge never came from there. After making all the lifestyle changes and trying all the suggestions, it always seemed that pills was the actual answer.

Doctor: Any tobacco or alcohol or drug use?

Me: None.

Doctor: So you have a healthy diet and exercise regularly?

Me: Yes. Except for daily breakfast cereal with 9 grams of added sugar per serving.

Doctor: What about yoga?

Me: Yes. I’ve done that.

Doctor: How is your job and family relationships?

Me: All very stable.

Doctor: And you have hobbies and friends.

Me: Yes.

Doctor: What about financial difficulties?

Me: I have a good job.

Doctor: Are you overstressed?

Me: Only when I drink too much coffee.

Doctor: And you’ve read those pamphlets I gave you?

Me: Yes, and many other books.

Doctor: (pensive, coming to the end of his WebMD list of suggestions) Have you tried prayer?

I’m kidding. Of course the last comment didn’t happen. No, here is what the last comment was:

Doctor: (pensive, coming to the end of his WebMD list of suggestions) Well, I guess we can increase your dosage. How many milligrams are you taking? I’ll write a new prescription for you.

Always pills. Always pills. Hooray for pills! I felt like the scene in the movie Dumb and Dumber where Jim Carrey is stuffing rat poison pills into a man’s mouth and telling him, “Pills are good. Pills are good.”

Science, that trusty tool to fix all the things, could offer facts and instruct me about neurotransmitters and receptors and synaptic clefts. Better yet, science could do some magic with those pills that seemed to provide a solution. But in the end I realized that pills did not resolve the problem any more than getting high or drunk ever solved a problem. Taking pills to address spiritual problems is like taking Advil to heal a compound bone fracture. It’s the wrong treatment.

So science wasn’t the solution.

Nor could I say, “Help me, self!” when the well inside was already dry. The cistern was cracked, my tank was empty, so I could not draw up the strength needed to restore myself, as my self lacked the necessary mortar to seal the drain. In fact, my self was the problem, so I only could pretend for a while to “suck it up” or “man up.” As an employee of large corporations, I was very good at keeping up the adage “Fake it until you make it,” as that is the lifeblood of office culture. But faking takes a toll. At some point, unless you are especially gifted with the twin pillars of pride and vanity, faking it becomes hard to maintain. Along with drinking issues, this is another stop in life where I discovered the flaw in willpower, as the self has its limits. Both science and willpower eventually run into finite walls. What a surprise then when I discovered that the Holy Spirit not only seals the cistern, but it fills it too, and as a bonus it can pass through those finite walls.

No knowledge or possessions or status or science or self-assurance could help me with the underlying questions. “If you’re felling depressed,” I was told, “it’s because there is a chemical imbalance in your brain that requires medication.” Whenever I heard this I could not help but think of Brave New World and the drug called soma, where the characters would take this wonder drug to bury any uncomfortable feelings or questions about their life and the universe. The narrator even says “…that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.” In fact, various lines from the book says it all. Soma had “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”

What I heard from my fellow atheist friends and my doctor was what Huxley’s sex-obsessed character Lenina says in the book when Bernard is feeling blue:

“…why you don't take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You'd forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you'd be jolly. So jolly.”

So I did. Or I tried to be jolly. I pretended for periods of time to have conquered the problem, but it never truly disappeared. I tried to answer the yearning, to fill the void with sand, to pulverize it, to medicate it, to cure it with therapy, to use mindfulness, and to ignore it through chasing goals. But science and my personal autonomy proved inadequate in fastening any kind of lasting meaning to existence. Science did not satisfy the heart, nor did my own attempts at sculpting truth suffice.

Science feeds our need for certainty, for actual answers, and science is excellent for finding truth in certain spaces. I should qualify that; the hard sciences are reliable at finding truth through measurement and experiment. There are various other “sciences” that do not share the same rigor as chemistry and biology and physics, but even these three fields are beginning to have bleed-through from non-scientific political and social ideologies. Yet, even solid science cannot get us all the way to the goal, to the full “why.” The “whys” I am speaking of are all simple sentences: the why of existence, of being, of knowledge, of gravity, of time, of beginnings, of endings, of justice, of truth, of goodness, of beauty, of righteousness, of suffering, of forgiveness, of redemption.

The real questions were these subtle “whys.” Like shadows behind a wall, the shapes were papered over, kept in hiding by small talk and distractions. We could all see the shapes but we avoided talking about them. Instead we talked about these things: “Have you seen the ?” “Did you watch the game yesterday?” “Can you believe what President said?” “Have you seen the new ?”

Those were not the questions I cared about. The main question underneath, that I was seeking, is encapsulated in this quote:

"Man will always yearn to know, at least in an obscure way, what is the meaning of his life, of his activity, of his death." (Gaudium et Spes, 41)

I would go to great lengths to find answers to these questions via ideology in a book or through the lens of my self and my experience. But sooner or later, a little tug would come back to me. As it always does, I’d feel the tug, like the nibble of a fish biting a hook.

This electric feeling of “the tug” was like that which comes through a fishing pole, when the tug of something on the hook alerts the mind, while simultaneously quickening the heart. Anyone who has gone fishing and had the luck of getting a nibble, or better yet, catching a fish, knows this feeling. The tug of the fish brings full awareness. You become awake to what is happening in the water, where you cannot see, but you know full well something is there because you can feel it. We only have our senses to know anything, but this kind of tug that I’m talking about goes past our usual senses into something deeper, to a sense in the heart that cannot be quantified, captured, or tested like other things.

Old ideas would come into motion. Something would hint to me that there is more than just work and paying bills or having sex or drinking beer. But I would shut those thoughts down because I did not want to open those archives. I was worried that what I had denied might be true. That was the real fear. I believed that I had control and that God was not real. But then on occasion the tug became a strike, a direct bite. A fight. Suddenly then I’d be wrestling with the question: what if it is true? What if I am not the creator of my destiny? What if there is something more to life? 

For anyone who knows what I’m talking about - this feeling of a tug - if you doubt or deny God, you will probably ignore that tug, like I did, and continue onward. No shortage of TV series and movies and hilarious cat videos await, so you can carry on for years with staring into screens. But sooner or later in life you may not want to ignore it. You may not be able to ignore it forever as some event will force the issue. The beauty of free will is the choices we get to make. The path we are being guided to walk is to ignore the tug. That’s what we are being told by every part of society: TikTok advertisement: “You are the good thing.” Christina Aguilera: “You’re beautiful, in every single way.” L’Oréal Paris: “Because you’re worth it.” Nike: “Just do it.” Harley Davidson: “American by birth. Rebel by choice.” Reebok: “Cheat on your girlfriend, not your workout.”

I guess the slogan, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner,” will just never do well in sales. Memento Mori sounds better as a slogan, but the translation, “Remember one day you will die,” also probably won’t sell widgets. “Take up your cross and follow me” will probably not be a Bud Light Super Bowl ad any time soon. Well, I guess these slogans aren’t for the short term. In the long run, however, as in eternity, these slogans work wonders.

How funny it is to me that I refused to take orders from anyone, but all the while I was being told, guided, instructed what to do by advertisers and businesses and governments and influential people. As the doctor guided me toward pharmaceuticals, the political parties and ad agencies and sports leagues and social media were going to great lengths to keep me distracted from addressing the tug, from calling on the aching question that was raising its hand. While the world was selling me on freedom and autonomy, they were telling me what to do every step of the way. They were telling me, “Don’t be a fool. Don’t look into it. Whatever you do, do not ask the hard questions.”

But the tug was summoning me to something bigger, to this much greater question, far bigger than what Apple product to buy or Netflix show to watch. And I didn’t want anything like God to be true. I did not want it to be valid. Because then someday I would have to revisit those rules, those old bronze age edicts that I felt so unfair, so out of touch with our modern world, and that bothered my sense of freedom because they said “No” to my behavior. I didn’t want to be challenged.

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A few years ago, during a basketball game that I was watching, a player leaped forward for a loose ball and landed on his knees. He gathered the ball and while doing so he slid across the floor, as he wore kneepads which allowed him to coast along the hardwood for a yard or so. With only a two point lead in the game, this “slide” caused an eruption of fans yelling “Traveling! He traveled!” The referee ignored them and the game continued.

When a timeout was called, the coach approached the referee and, as I was in earshot, I overheard the argument about whether or not the slide constituted a traveling violation. The referee argued for the slide’s innocence and the coach raged about the ruling. So when I went home that night, I had to look up the rule.

From the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) rulebook I found a full page on the violation of “Traveling.” I read it looking for this “slide” scenario to see if the coach or the referee was correct. In rule 25.2.2, I found the answer:

25.2.2 A player falling, lying or sitting on the floor: It is legal when a player falls and slides on the floor while holding the ball or, while lying or sitting on the floor, gains control of the ball. It is a violation if the player then rolls or attempts to stand up while holding the ball.

The referee was correct. A player can slide with the ball, provided he or she doesn’t roll or standup during the slide. The momentum of the slide does not constitute a step. While holding a basketball, you could slide from one end of the gym to the other and not be called for traveling. A slide only becomes a traveling violation if the player in mid-slide or post-slide tries to take a step or roll over.

That was the first time I had ever cracked open a book of basketball rules despite having enjoyed years of playing this sport as a kid. The fact that I had never, not once, referred to a basketball rule in an official document struck me as interesting, because I felt that I knew a solid amount of detail about the game, but never once had I studied the rules. The idea of reading the rules never occurred to me, but playing for hours in driveways and open gyms drew me in like a moth to flame.

Playing or watching the game of basketball, or baseball or football, interested me naturally, and made me grow to love the sport. I could talk endlessly about the sport. Reading the rulebook, however, does not interest me. Aside from referees and coaches, there are probably few people that do read the rulebook.

When kids learn to play a sport, you don't give them the rulebook. No, they first start playing the game and learn the rules as they go, and soon find that the rules are there for good reasons. Take kickball, for instance, where nearly any kid can play and while having fun, learns the rules. By playing kickball, a kid learns most of the rules of baseball and softball, too, since kickball is largely the same game. But no one stops a kickball game to describe how a force-out works by pulling out and referencing the rules of USA Baseball.

In other words, I became interested in a sport by playing the game. The love of a sport grows by practicing the sport. It is the same with faith. Here you may roll your eyes and many will stop reading, as I’ve made the comparison that will drive most readers or listeners right to the “unsubscribe” button.

But consider this. No one gets to faith by reading Leviticus. Likewise, no one reads the Ten Commandments and throws up their hands in prayer. Instead, they throw their hands up in prayer first, and later, perhaps much later, become interested in the Ten Commandments.  

This I did not understand. I was hung up on faith and religion due to rules or positions around policies like abortion or immigration or taxes or the welfare state - pick a card, any card. I had opinions and comments for anything and everything, like we all do. But just as I didn't get any closer to faith in my failed attempts to "read the Bible" because I didn’t like certain phrasings and rules, neither did I get closer to faith by reading the daily news, which in large part is always about our modern laws and societal rules. 

I believed I could never be a Christian due to Catholic and Evangelical ideas around laws. And I was right. I could not be one. I would never be a Christian because I didn't even understand what it meant to be a Christian. I wasn't practicing. I wasn't playing the game. No, I was scouring the rulebook for things I didn't like. Doing so, I banned myself from the stadium, and so I couldn't play or even be a spectator. I was like a baseball fan who didn’t like the designated hitter rule, so I quit watching the game forever.  This reminds me of a quote by the biologist Herbert Spencer:

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

Through my contempt, I was barred from the information and truly stuck in everlasting ignorance. I only saw a stack of rules, and from my angle it blocked any view of the bigger picture.

The faith of Christianity disallows many activities and choices that we desire, like watching porn and getting drunk and having meaningless hookup sex and hoarding money, so yes, there are rules. People really don't like that Christians fence these activities out via their rules. I hated rules as much as the next guy because I loathed having any rules lorded over me. I wanted to be my own boss. 

Thus, an impassable mountain sat between me and faith. It is impossible to have faith in the state I occupied because contempt prohibits any attempt. But the rules of the Christian faith were not the problem. I thought the rules were the problem, but that was not the problem. No, it was my yearning to be self-sufficient in all things that blocked a much deeper yearning. I did not want to give up an inch of ground, territory that I imagined I had fought for and won by rejecting the traditions and stories of older generations. Here I was, the modern hero, uprooting the tales of what I considered to be a 2000 year hoax that had somehow duped eighty generations of men and women. Me against the world. If someone had told me, "Freedom comes from obedience, not rebellion," I would have raged at them and spat, "Don't tell me what to do!" That was my motto. 

As long as the goal of my life was centered on drinking or money or sex or work, then of course I didn't want any rules. How could I? In private, I wanted to do whatever felt good. In public, I wanted to do whatever made me appear cool to my peers. More importantly, I didn't want to be challenged by anything, ever. Especially, I didn't want to be challenged by rules passed down from ancient, superstitious goat herders who didn't even know that the earth went around the sun. What possible value could I get from bronze age wanderers that had never heard of natural selection or calculus or atomic weight or absolute zero? 

That is how the shield formed around me. I bristled at laws that appeared to go against the mantra of "love one another," while crowning myself with the knowledge gained by human ingenuity (not my ingenuity, mind you, but others), I felt that progress through scientific revelation, not religion, would rectify the problems of the past and usher in the glorious future. 

There was one devastating problem with these positions. This future utopia through science and economics required me to have a massive amount of faith in humans as a group. In fact, I think it requires more faith to believe in humans than it does to believe in God. After all, we have immense evidence of what humans do to one other, from all ages. Even this week, horrors permeate the news, even while we are right now at the greatest heights of technological prowess and scientific progress.

So this drive for progress that seemed like the answer to fix ourselves and our world, has not done it. Conversely, for all its wonders, progress has simultaneously led to many unanticipated problems. "Every kind of progress is a two-edge sword." This can be observed repeatedly in history, where science or invention introduces or discovers something about the world we live in, and that knowledge can be used for good or evil, usually both. You don’t get fireworks without someone in China first playing around with mixtures of sulfur and saltpeter, but the fun of that first sparkler was quickly recognized as gunpowder for weapons. In the same way, you don’t get to billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide spewing in the atmosphere without hundreds of small accretions of knowledge, take for example Alessandro Volta’s toy pistol that fired a cork when hydrogen touched an electric spark. There is always this give and take with the word “progress", but today the pull of it draws us further away from meaningful questions and has us instead cleave to facts and facts alone, with the idea of God being sidelined ever more each year. This makes the The Big Empty inside us yawn even more and reveal its bottomless chasm.

Faith in science and faith in atheistic ideologies means having faith in humans over God, but here is the devastating problem with that brand of faith: to love one another goes directly against our instincts and those ideologies, without God, cannot claim any kind of foundation for morality. No matter how much knowledge we have, at our core we are flawed with jealousy and hate and lust and greed. This idea about loving one another didn't come from post-Enlightenment thinker like Immanuel Kant or Karl Marx or Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs, it came from Jesus, a carpenter from the first century. This is the underlying problem of everyone who is claiming “love” for their cause. Even atheists like to talk about Jesus and his message of “love one another.” Every group wants a piece of that second commandment. But all of these “loves” quickly contradict each other and we’re left in a pickle. The public campaign of secular and religious groups relentlessly bangs the drum that “love is on our side.” But the secular side only wants the second of Jesus’ two commandments. They reject his first commandment completely. Definitely, we all want the second one, but absolutely not the first one. They want Jesus on their side even while they deny God.

This might be the most fascinating thing of all to me about Jesus.

Even atheists and Marxists somehow want to claim Jesus for their argument. They want Jesus in their corner, but only if he’s got nothing supernatural or transcendent about him. What they don’t seem to realize is that if Jesus is not supernatural, then he’s a liar and a lunatic, which I talked about in my own struggle to come to faith in the Resurrection (known as the Trilemma from C.S. Lewis: Jesus is Lord, lunatic, or liar - and you must pick one).

But there is this magnetism to Jesus, even among those who say they reject God. This is utterly confusing to me. Even those who despise the idea of God will still quote the words of Jesus. Even the atheists say, “But Jesus loved everyone. He loved the murderers and the prostitutes. He wouldn’t judge. Judge not lest yet be judged.” Everyone, believer and non-believer, wants Jesus on their side. I wonder why that is. Why is he so powerful of an idea to us? Why can’t we stop talking about Jesus? What is going on? Somehow, someway, despite every effort of this world to stifle and crush the fire of faith in this carpenter, it fails every time, in every generation. There is a story of Napoleon telling a Cardinal Consalvi that his armies would destroy the church, to which the Cardinal replied: “If in 1,800 years we clergy have failed to destroy the Church, do you really think that you'll be able to do it?” While amusing, it is indeed a fact, one that we are living through once again today. Why is it that nothing can destroy faith in this man, or in his Church? With all these hated rules and prohibitions, where generation after generation fights against it, why does Christianity remain standing?

I have some ideas about that.

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

In my slow conversion, the deadbolt that barred me from faith was always true belief in the resurrection, since the entirety of Christianity depends on it, as St. Paul himself wrote. Without it, the whole story falls apart, and none of the other miracles matter. The resurrection of a sinless human opens the door to the forgiveness of sins and new life for us all. If there is no resurrection, then Jesus is simply an insane charlatan that deserves no respect or worship. This situation of the resurrection puts everyone into a decision point about whether to believe or not, and this is exactly why Christianity is so challenging. The leap of faith all comes down to the resurrection.

To me the proper response if you do not believe in the resurrection is rejection of all of the Christian faith. Literally, none of it is worth the paper it is written on if he is lying, even the teachings and parables, because to claim divinity without it being true really would be a mental disorder. There is no other response but rejection if the resurrection did not happen, as the teachings of Jesus become moot if the miracle is false. There are lots of teachers in history we can use that didn’t claim something so outlandish. Especially today with all the meditation and self-help books, we can find maxims and aphorisms to live by that do not require belief in miracles.

On the other hand, if the resurrection happened, then you have no choice but to fully embrace Jesus as the savior. This is why belief is hard, because if the resurrection is true, everything is true. All of it, and yes, that includes the hard parts. The resurrection truly is an either/or selection that we have to make, and if the default is choosing doubt and ignoring the claim, the much more difficult choice is to examine and review whether or not to believe in the resurrection.

This dilemma presents a fork in the road on how to live your life, one that must be chosen. This is not like being asked to believe if Athena really sprung from Zeus’s head or to believe in the tree worship of ancient tribes in The Golden Bough, this decision puts the miraculous directly in front of us. And we must choose, as even choosing not to make a choice is itself a choice. Making no choice at all is choosing to deny the miracle. That is the default position, but still it is a choice. I love mythology and trees. Really, who doesn’t? Yes, I love Lord of the Rings and giant oak trees and Ovid’s Metamorphosis and cottonwoods. In fact, I like science too and stand in awe of the everyday miracles of surgery and treatments that save lives. But this dilemma about Jesus and the resurrection cannot be avoided because the reality is that our heart knows there is something more than this world, beyond the confines of science and what is known and knowable, that God is so far beyond our ability and understanding that something supernatural, that is beyond nature, can exist and touch our world. The author of the universe cannot be understood, but you can see the wonder in the world everywhere in art and nature. We are characters in the author’s book who cannot know what is outside of our story here, but we can feel the presence of something higher than just tall tales or the periodic table of elements.

He declared multiple times that he is the way to eternal life. That is a hard pill to swallow for modern rationalists who seek data and a cause for all things. “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live,” and “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” I guess this is why Jesus says we have to enter through the narrow gate, because it is hard to find and perhaps harder to decide to walk through that gate. I think it is mainly hard to squeeze my mind and ego through it.

I’ve gone on in a prior post about how the scenario at the tomb on Easter Sunday sowed doubt in me. The story sounded too fantastic to be true, and lacking answers I let my doubt win rather than pursue the subject, since I didn’t get the impression that asking questions was encouraged. I’ve come to realize that Catholicism can handle any question thrown at it, especially ones surrounding the divinity of Jesus. Today I only wish I had sought a deeper understanding of faith sooner in life. I have come to realize that there is no stone left unturned in the writings of the church and the Catechism, as they have spent 2,000 years turning over stones.

Specifically, for the resurrection, there are many points that tipped the scales from doubt to faith, but not without probably cause and good reason. As Frank Morison noted in his book Who Moved the Stone? about his own conversion to the truth of the resurrection:

I have wrestled with that problem and found it tougher than ever I could have conceived possible. It is easy to say that you will believe nothing that will not fit into the mold of a rationalist conception of the universe. But suppose the facts won't fit into that mold? The utmost that an honest man can do is to undertake to examine the facts patiently and impartially, and to see where they lead him.

The main reasons are below, but each could be a lengthy post of its own.

-The fearful and defeated Apostles turns into fearless and unbreakable believers. No one dies for a lie. Not this way. People may be willing to die for a lie that gives them social standing or power or fame or honor, but the followers of Jesus got none of that. They received the opposite, becoming outcasts and rejects of society.

-If the Romans or people of Jerusalem could have produced the body of Jesus, they would have done so. No one ever did.

-No one disputes that the tomb was empty. This is a massive fact, even for those that accuse the Apostles of stealing the body. Clearly the tomb was empty. This is a problem for the Romans, Jews, and Apostles. Even Mary Magdalene first announces that the body has been taken. Had his body been moved to a different tomb or location, rumor and hearsay in the city would have created cause for a search, and even today pilgrimages to the “correct” tomb in Jerusalem would be occurring. This didn’t happen. The powers at the time try to convince people that the Apostles moved the body, but these men were all cowering in fear, scattered across the city or returned home. Someone in the city of Jerusalem would have known where this second burial location was at, but no one appears to even be searching for a kidnapped body.

-If the Apostles had moved the body or knew of someone moving the body, one of them would have cracked under the numerous beatings and torture and martyrdom that came to them over the next thirty years. They never waver in their story, not once. None of them. Human beings cannot keep a secret, so if they had a secret of such magnitude, it would have come out.

-If it was all made up, the writers of the Gospels and Acts and James would not have mentioned a 7 week gap between the death of Jesus and the beginning of the preaching the Good News. This gap only causes doubt or gives detractors an entry point to suggest that the Apostles spent these 7 weeks crafting a story. This is one of the elements of the timeline that actually creates doubt. If the early believers wanted to sell a contrived fable, they would have claimed their preaching began the moment Jesus had risen. But they don’t write that - they all agree that they were confused and fearful until 7 weeks after the death and Resurrection.

-Once they do begin to tell the story of the Resurrection, after Pentecost, the Apostles manage to win over people in the same city where the trial, death, and burial happened. They convince people who were there in the city when it happened. The Apostles didn’t sneak off elsewhere, far away, and start telling people who might be duped, they stood in the city where it happened, where everyone knew it had happened and had even witnessed Jesus’ ministry. The original band of evangelists were uneducated people with no social standing who suddenly begin to convince people that the Resurrection occurred.

-Over 500 people saw the risen Jesus. It’s not just a handful of people. The “hallucination” theory might work for one or two, but not 11, and certainly not 500.

-Women are recorded as the first witnesses at the tomb and this is important, as culturally they were not even allowed to be witnesses in court. This would not help make the case, so it’s clear that the women were the first to witness, or the Gospel writers would have left it out. They would not have wanted to mention this since it worked against their case, but they did mention it, so why would they make it up?

-Over and over in the Gospels and Acts details are included that allow for doubt, or questions about the miracles. The authors are clearly not crafting a tale because elements of the stories do not make sense unless they were true. If they were trying to build up the apostles, why tell about Peter’s denial of Jesus? Why admit Jesus wanted to escape his fate in the Garden by “passing this cup”? Why have Jesus utter the words, “My God, My God, why you have forsaken me,” on the cross? Why not make the stone at the tomb crumble like magic? Why admit that the Apostles fell asleep in the Garden? Why characterize the Apostles as bumbling rubes so frequently? These books read like no other literature ever written and the writers were not literary types or trained storytellers. These aren’t troubadours, they are fishermen and tax collectors. The reason for all of these curiosities in the Gospels is that the truth needs no rehearsal.

-Crucifixion was a brutal spectacle meant to shame. The fact that the savior of the world would be shamefully executed in this way – no one would make up a story like this. It was demoralizing and devastating to the Apostles, until the Resurrection and Pentecost turned them into lions. To have your savior of the world, your messiah, rushed through an urgent kangaroo court trial and brutally executed with two murderers does not fit with any other story ever told. And no, the myth of Horus is not the same, not even close. Great effort among doubters is made to disable the message, but most amazing is that however many angles the attack takes to steer people away from the Gospels, it never works. The truth of these four books cannot be squashed, despite the Herculean efforts of writers and governments. The story taps into what is written in our hearts and for those who come to believe, the idea that we are both sinners and saved is shocking. That we are corrupt and don’t deserve saving, coupled with Jesus’ coming to serve us and die for us as if we were the heroes of the story, could not be invented by these writers and agreed upon so readily unless they were writing the truth. There is no myth of god of any other religion where the hero dies for the unworthy and then immediately turns around and forgives his killers. If anything, all other myths have the god turn around and wreak vengeance upon his tormentors. For anyone that reads these books without a cynical eye, with a historical context and critical study guides like those of the Navarre Bible or Word on Fire Bible, the reader will begin to feel the power of these words, as there is no myth or history or genre that can compare to this story.

-The Gospels agree that Jesus had said multiple times that he would rise on the third day. This clearly stood out in the Apostles memory as it is recorded in multiple places. This “third day” repetition is hammered into them by Jesus as a reminder.

-The “swoon theory” of Jesus not dying on the cross is beyond ridiculous, as the witnesses of the risen Christ do not see a staggering, bloody, nearly dead man in the Upper Room. They see a fully restored man, but with the wounds to prove it is Him. A “swooned” man who had been tortured and whipped and crucified and lanced wouldn’t be restored in a mere 2 days after the event. He wouldn’t be able to walk or move. Those type of injuries would have had a man on a gurney, not eating fish and walking to Emmaus. Moreover, the “swoon theory” didn’t come about until modern times when some creative academics got together and invented it.

-There is more written about Jesus than any other historical figure of his time. Clearly he existed, and clearly the Romans crucified him. Matt Nelson of Word on Fire recently wrote an article on this. 

-Ancient people, I have come to realize, were probably less gullible than people are today (see the internet and Facebook for ample evidence). The idea that the “ancients” were morons is just modern prejudice, also known as chronological snobbery. The idea of someone rising bodily and passing through walls and ascending to heaven would have been every bit as incredulous to an ancient audience as us today with all of our gains in modern science.

-The message could not be stopped. In a short time, this idea spread like wildfire. Starting with Rome and ever since, empires have attempted to stop the message of the Resurrection and failed. There is something greater at work, something beyond this world, something stunning and world-changing. There have been plenty of false messiahs whose messages go nowhere. But this one cannot be stopped, and all of the witnesses agree and will die for it and did die for it.

This quote from Frank Morison sums up the challenge that is put before us:

If the sole evidence for this really extraordinary phenomenon lay in a single passage in the early chapters of Acts it would be possible to regard it as the rather exuberant record of a contemporary historian whose close connection with the movement had biased and colored his views. But this is precisely what no one can claim. There is a far earlier and more authoritative testimony in the letters of Paul, of Peter, and of James the Just, and in the admittedly historic network of Christian churches stretching from Jerusalem through Asia Minor to the catacombs at Rome. Only from an intensely heated center of burning zeal could this vast field of lava have been thrown out from a tiny country like Palestine to the limits of the Roman world…The phenomenon that here confronts us is one of the biggest dislodgments of events in the world's history, and it can be accounted for only by an initial impact of colossal drive and power.

Yet the original material from which we have to derive this dynamic force consists of a habitual doubter like Thomas, a rather weak fisherman like Peter, a gentle dreamer like John, a practical tax gatherer like Matthew, a few seafaring men like Andrew and Nathanael, the inevitable women, and at most two or three others.

I do not want to minimize the character of the historic nucleus from which Christianity sprang, but, seriously, does this rather heterogeneous body of simple folk, reeling under the shock of the Crucifixion, the utter degradation and death of their Leader, look like the driving force we require? Frankly it does not, and the more we think of it disintegrating under the crisis, the less can we imagine it rewelding into that molten focus that achieved those results. Yet the clear evidence of history is that it did. Something came into the lives of these very simple and ordinary people that transformed them…

…The sequence of coincidences is too strong. When we remember the swinging around of the disciples from panic fear to absolute certitude, the singular matter of the seven weeks' gap, the extraordinarily rapid adhesion of converts in Jerusalem, the strange absence of administrative vigor on the part of the authorities, the steady growing of the church, both in authority and power, until the whole situation blew up into the frenzied attempts at suppression under Saul, we realize The Historic Crux of the Problem that we are in the presence of something far more tangible than the psychological repercussion of a fisherman's dream.

If the flip happens in your brain, from disbelief to belief, where resurrection becomes a capitalized “R” - Resurrection - you are in trouble, because there is no turning back. You will be stuck with the result of being happy and having a purpose in your life like you have never experienced before. You will no longer be sinking, you will have a hand reach out for you when you look away and start to fall. The fear of being adrift will disappear when you say, “God, help me,” and Jesus will reach out and grab your hand before it goes under. He will save you first, and then with a gentle rebuke he will say to you, “Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

Notes:

Listen to Trent Horn on comparisons to other myths.

Read Matt Nelson’s article on the existence of Jesus and 4 reasons to believe in the crucifixion.

Book: Who Moved the Stone?

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