Why Did Peter Sink?

For some reason, turning on the grill is one of the moments when the old desires return. The sun is shining. The smell of propane or charcoal fills the air. The burgers sizzle on the grate. Summer leisure cracks open the door to old habits.

Then there is the hubbub of a brewpub and the smell of microbrews. There is the clink of pint glasses and beer flights passing by on their way to a happy table. The kitchen diffuses the smells of fried food, crispy chicken and cajun fries. Nachos and queso on waiters’ trays pass by as the surrounding laughter and music spills on the table.

Another time and place is the stroll through a parking lot where sports tailgaters hold their pre-game services under canopies and hatchbacks. The beanbags thunk on plywood and frisbees and footballs sail back and forth. Or later, in the grandstand of a stadium, the crowd roars over an interception, or the crack of the bat signals action, and the senses come alive. The smell of the pretzels and hotdogs and popcorn and beer all mingle into a callback, a beckoning for a re-entry into the game.

As simple as a song on the radio, it can come through a melody to remind me of a place, or a glimpse, or a connection. The verses tip me off to a night in a club or bar or house party or basement or couch, where something funny happened or some attraction started. The “good times” of friendly faces come back like apparitions with an invitation to try the habit on once again.

A long day in the hot sun, after working on a project or going for a long run, there is a long thirst that craves a certain kind of satisfaction that ice water and soda cannot quite offer. Physical exhaustion and being sweat-depleted is a fine time to think of cold drinks on a hot night.

Then I feel sad and ask, “Why can’t I drink normally?” Or alternatively, “Why can’t I have just one? Just one to go with this food or mood.” A drink goes well with many things, which is why most people like to have a drink.

Sometimes instead of feeling sad about it, I get mad. I go further, into teetotaler mode, where I feel upset about other people drinking because I can’t do it normally. And from there it devolves into an anger about a culture that pushes and markets drinking so heavily on its citizens. Not just today, but for many thousands of years there has been an idol made out of drinking because people love to drink. Alcohol relaxes us. In moderation it’s wonderful. But there is no such thing for us lucky ones.

When I was eighteen I recall seeing an old picture of Hercules outdrinking Dionysus. Imagine being so strong at holding your liquor that you could outdrink the god of wine. That appealed to me when I was fresh out of high school and quantity meant more than quality.

Not only the Greeks, but even Christian tradition uses wine as central to the sacrament of the Eucharist, and in another example, there is Jesus at the wedding feast at Cana, in his first miracle, creating wine from water to keep the wedding dance going on late into the night. As difficult passages in the Bible go, this is even more confusing for someone who struggles with putting the cork back in the bottle, because if getting drunk is a sin, then why did Jesus seem to encourage it? I’ll come back to that…

The answer to “Why can’t I drink normally?” and “Why can’t I have just one?” is in the historical cycle of madness that drinking created in my own life. For those who have this same problem, it is tempting and easy to fool ourselves to set foot once gain on a slippery slope called control. This is the reason I’m skeptical of any books or drugs that say you can “Control Drinking,” as millions of people who have quit for decades stop playing that losing game of control. I’ve known quite a few people that have gone down that road and slipped. I’ve done it myself. “Surrender to win” is not just a cute saying, it actually works. Even Annie Grace’s book, This Naked Mind, which I really enjoyed, has the subtitle of “Control Alcohol,” but I suspect that is bait to draw in readers, as she more or less says “good luck” to anyone who attempts to control their drinking.

An interesting conversation I’ve had repeatedly with drinkers who have tried to quit is this: they will say, “I quit for a month, just to prove that I could do it, but then I decide to have a beer on a weekend get together, then the next weekend I had a few at a wedding, and then a few weeks later I was kind of back to regular drinking.” I recall saying this exact same thing about drinking (and my nicotine usage as well). I would “quit” to prove that I was not addicted, but the attempt was nebulous and wishy-washy and usually fell off in seriousness rather quickly whenever an event with beer sprung up in front of me and I didn’t want to feel awkward holding a soda or water. But then I would pat myself on the back in congratulations on my quitting and go back to old ways. The funny thing is that this is what addiction is and does: it’s a never ending self-congratulations on just being yourself.

These moments of self-pity struck me in the early days of sobriety when I became more serious about removing it from my life entirely. After the pink cloud of joy over quitting had passed, I faced more difficult weather around the weakness and the rainy season started. That I couldn’t solve the problem on my own I fully accepted, but the excitement over that discovery eroded with the passage of time and days. This self-pity became most obvious on Friday nights when so much of my prior life had revolved around buckets of beer and now I had to fill that time with something else.

Listening to rock or country music certainly doesn’t help, and country music in particular is a full-blown celebration of booze. Sometimes I wonder if Nashville is fully owned and operated by the liquor and beer industry. Nearly every other song on the radio venerates liquor to some degree. The songs that don’t celebrate drinking often relate to family and/or God, which makes the genre a strange combination for me, as liquor played the key role in removing God from my life, and the only thing that allowed God’s return was the removal of liquor from my life. To me, this is the great paradox of country music, but the celebration of drunkenness seems to be winning on the radio.

These triggers I mentioned are different for everybody, but it took me a while to realize the guises they take on and clothing they wear. In short, they are lies that I tell myself.

This dawned on me in an airport after a work conference when I had a rough week, after being around a lot of open bar events. Full staff, premium liquor, glamorous locations, and all free - and my co-workers were lapping it up, as we all love to do when it’s free. But that didn’t bother me, as I’d been around parties and events long enough to know that I could have fun without the buzz. Truly, I’ve realized that I have more fun at events now without it and I can be more honest with people than ever before. And no one cares that I’m not drinking. I think that took about a year to really believe. No one gives a hoot, and they don’t even notice if you have a glass of 7-up instead of a gin and tonic. Even if they do know it’s 7-up, no one cares. Plus, anyone that pressures me about having a drink usually reacts very openly when I tell them I quit. A common response I hear, “I should do that myself,” or “I have a friend that is three years dry,” or “Wow, that’s great!” Rarely do I hear what I once feared, which was: “Oh come on you pansy, let’s do a shot.” When I do hear that, I can now see the battle that person is facing themselves, but I don’t say anything to them. The ones that push it on others may have the same issue that I do. How do I know that? Because I liked to do that when I was drinking.

Being around drinkers stopped bothering me long ago and I find it much more awkward if people don’t drink because I’m around. That’s the strangest feeling, where somehow my demon causes them to tiptoe around. I am fine being around drunk people, to the point that I don’t even care, except I won’t stay out late with them because I have no interest in ever closing down a pub again.

Back to my point about the airport bar: I was sitting by myself after a long week. At tables around me sat men and women in groups, lounging and laughing over drinks. Like many a business traveler, in my past life I enjoyed knocking down a pint or two before boarding a flight because it put me to sleep in the lap of a craft beer. This airport downtime was one of those triggers, like grilling, or attending a sports event, or sitting in a restaurant, or hearing a party song. Sitting in the airport was a strong trigger for drinking. Feeling tired and slightly upset from a difficult week, I wanted to enter into the relaxation and “fun” of the others who were drinking. I was feeling sorry for myself.

But somehow, someway, a light shined on me, showing that my memory about those airport cocktails were lies, fibs that I told myself to justify the flaw that wanted to get out of me. There was an old Twilight Zone episode called “The Howling Man” where the devil was held in an old monastery, contained in a cell that he could clearly escape but for some reason did not. He could only escape if someone invited him out, or let him out, and he would howl until some sympathetic person came along to hear his sob story.

In the episode, a traveler comes along, and disbelieving the monk who has trapped the devil, falls for the devil’s story about the injustices of the monk. Of course the man lets the devil out, because he thinks the devil is not real. This pretty much sums up what I realized in the airport that day. Through great effort I had contained this demon in a cell, and now it was howling to get out, and I was feeling sympathy for this howling call and drawn to listen to its reasons for being released once again. I was ignoring all of the effort and reasons for trapping the devil in the first place.

This is what addiction does. It howls in you. Smokers know this well. I still hear this howling, but not for beer any more, but for food. There is always some kind of howling, but the howling about drinking was the worst kind and now that I have it contained in the cell, I am the only one that can let it out again. This calling, or trigger, or feeling of need is something I finally realized relates precisely to an old term that the Church uses. The word is concupiscence, which is a fun word to say and you just don’t hear it a lot today. But it is exactly what I came to understand in that airport.

…."concupiscence" can refer to any intense form of human desire. Christian theology has given it a particular meaning: the movement of the sensitive appetite contrary to the operation of the human reason. The apostle St. Paul identifies it with the rebellion of the "flesh" against the "spirit." Concupiscence stems from the disobedience of the first sin. It unsettles man's moral faculties and, without being in itself an offense, inclines man to commit sins. (CCC 2515)

This idea of an appetite or desire contrary to my reason became devastatingly apparent, as I knew from past experience where acting on the desire led.

Here’s what I mean by that. When I actually thought about my romanticized ideas about having beers in the airport bar, I remembered those pre-flight beers as some kind of positive action. What I chose to forget was sitting on the plane feeling bloated and dumb for drinking, because it was never just one pint. I remember driving home and being grumpy on arrival because I had come down from the buzz during the flight. I remembered all the times that I just felt tired the next day from the effort my body needed to push out the poison. As I’d been exercising regularly, I knew that that all of those, “I’ll just have one,” moments were always what derailed any fitness or health goals. Inevitably the “I’ll have just one” leads to more, and any one that’s ever gone to a bar with best friends knows that’s how the wildest nights begin. “I’ll have just one” is how the slippery slope starts, because the first step is not very slippery - it seems safe. Like others who try to “prove” they can quit, they end up right back in the same spot, over and over and over again. It is so easy to let out the howling man.

There’s a story about a man named “Jim” who had already messed up his life, repeatedly, and one more foul-up was going to cost him his family…

Yet he got drunk again. we asked him to tell us exactly how it happened. This is his story: “I came to work on Tuesday morning. I remember I felt irritated that I had to be a salesman for a concern I once owned. I had a few words with the brass, but nothing serious. Then I decided to drive to the country and see one of my prospects for a car. On the way I felt hungry so I stopped at a roadside place where they have a bar. I had no intention of drinking. I just thought I would get a sandwich…I had eaten there many times during the months I was sober. I sat down at a table and ordered a sandwich and a glass of milk. Still no thought of drinking. I ordered another sandwich and decided to have another glass of milk.

“Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that if I were to put an ounce of whiskey in my milk it couldn’t hurt me on a full stomach. I ordered a whiskey and poured it into the milk. I vaguely sense I was not being any too smart, but I reassured as I was taking the whiskey on a full stomach. The experiment went so well that I ordered another whiskey and poured it into more milk. That didn’t seem to bother me so I tried another.” (Big Book Chapter 3)

And so Jim lost his family. Jim is one of millions who have done this. This story, and my story, is as ancient as humankind’s discovery of crushing and fermenting grapes. In Moby Dick the blacksmith’s story is like Jim’s story. He has everything, until he chooses to start drinking, and soon he has nothing. And once his life is destroyed he longs for death but not wanting to commit suicide he goes to sea, just like Ishmael, the narrator of the book. Ishmael describes this same spiritual brokenness in the first chapter of the novel, although his doesn’t come from drinking, it comes from a general malaise caused by The Big Empty. I love how Melville describes the entrance of drinking into the blacksmith’s life as a burglar and demon.

[The Blacksmith] had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family's heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shriveled up his home. 

The “bottle conjuror” is kind of a jarring, funny statement, and seems a very dated term. But it’s not inaccurate. You see alcohol repeatedly destroying families, for generations, as it conjures up bad voodoo in so many fathers.

I wonder how many men today have followed this same path chasing a high, whether it’s drinking or drugs or porn or sex. I have taken things as close to the edge of ruin as possible. That’s literally why this podcast/blog exists. Why Did Peter Sink? Because he let the howling man out. Jim let the howling man out. The blacksmith let the howling man out. Why did he do that? Because he took his focus off what was important. He forgot about God.

The variety of addictions makes no difference in this circle of insanity - the pursuit and the outcome is the same. People may not go to an asylum today, but the trail of wreckage this behavior leaves can create a personal asylum to live inside. The howling man is famously cunning and baffling. He calls upon and converts us like the Pied Piper, in an instant. How easily we fall for the lies that we tell ourselves, and act in ways that go directly against our better judgment and reason. I am truly stunned at how easily I can be pulled or pushed to act against my reason. What I’ve come to realize, and with grace I can remember for many years to come, is that the desire and triggers will be back - those desires will never fade completely. They will forever call upon me to let out the howling man. That’s not something that can be solved in our hearts, not alone, and to let the problem begin again, even in the most small way, is once again to let chaos and very real sin back into my life.

I recall someone asking me, “What would be the thing that pulled you back to drinking?” and I immediately thought of going out in a Blaze of Glory, in one rip-roaring wild time. There’s a Tim McGraw and Faith Hill song that appears to have been written by someone with a good grasp on the struggle of addictions and this idea of going out with a bang:

I wanna drink that shot of whiskeyI wanna smoke that cigaretteI wanna smell that sweet addiction on my breath

You know some cowboys like me go out like that

What’s he talking about? He’s romancing his old times as the good times, dressing that pig up, putting lipstick on it, giving it a big kiss, pretending those days were all magical and fun until the mean old world took away his joy. It’s a pity party. I love this song. He’s thinking of the escape and wanting to ride out into the sunset one last time, to disappear from the struggle of this world. And it’s all a lie. He’s invented an ideal escape because he wants to feel young and free, because he’s confused being drunk with being alive, when what it really made him was boring and imprisoned.

Or maybe that’s just what I realized in the airport bar on that winter day.

For myself, I can recall many years ago sitting in Munich at the Hacker-Pschorr brewery, near the grounds of Oktoberfest, and thinking it was like Field of Dreams but for beer. I could picture Ray Liotta saying, “Is this heaven?” and the Kevin Costner would answer, “Nein, this is Bavaria.” Likewise, I recall being at a Swiss Oktoberfest at a small town and looking around at the scene of giant beer steins and waitresses in push-up bras and the brass bands and singing songs and toasting “Prost!”, and I thought to myself: this must be the closest thing to heaven on earth, as everyone was so happy and full of pure joy…and full of so much…well...liters of beer.

Not only that but I will think of music festivals when I was young, where you park the car and immediately you can hear the music and bass from far away. The anticipation of the night could be felt and tasted like the sting of whiskey or gin on my tongue. The sun just starting to sink meant the night’s possibilities were just beginning, and it was time to shutdown the work week in trade for the time to get rowdy and stupid. With a gang of friends of the same mindset, the music and the summer night again felt like some kind of a heaven.

And in both of those “heavens” what I conveniently leave out is the next morning, the day after, the things I said, and worst, things I might not have even remembered. So while, yes, there are good things about those nights, there was much more than just the sunset and the music or the German waitresses. I was just remembering the setting, but had forgotten the plot. There was so much more to the story than a fleeting feeling about my arrival or a moment in time where I felt the joyful spirit, or what the Germans call gemütlichkeit. For others, those things can be enjoyed, year after year, but no longer for me, because I could not quit drinking once I started.

Thus the saying “Do not trust your feelings” stays with me, as my feelings listen to the howling man and want to let him free. There is so much more to life without the howling man, and I can still enjoy a memory of a Munich night or a street festival hoedown. I know that there is no going back to those days, or at least not in the same way. And that is the journey, I suppose, that we all get to walk in this world, to find out what we are built for and what we must avoid. Somewhere a baby is being born right now that will get to walk these same paths that we all do, and he will grow up hearing advice of older, wiser people, and if he’s anything like me he will just ignore that advice and go find out the hard way. William Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” but there is a better path to wisdom than that.

As I mentioned, I would come back to the wedding feast at Cana, the first miracle of Jesus. Dostoyevsky has a chapter on it in The Brothers Karamazov, where a character considering this miracle states, “The first miracle he worked was to bring men happiness…to help men’s gladness.... ‘He who loves men loves their happiness.’” At the request of Mary, Jesus produced more wine, but with people having free will, the guests still needed to make their own decisions on whether to drink to excess. Jesus isn’t there as a life-coach at the wedding that night, but as the world’s greatest guest who just happens to be beginning his ministry. There is much to be interpreted regarding the wedding feast at Cana, more than I can go into here, but for people like me who can’t control their liquor, the fact that free wine is present does not erase the divine gift called free will, nor does it make allowance for discarding the holy virtue called temperance.

The point to take away here is this: if you’re quitting, or trying to quit, but you don’t think you can have fun without beer or liquor in your hand, then you’re not yet in the right headspace to be among the party crowd. Other people do not need to change their ways to accommodate your struggle, because that would make you king and controller of the world, and that’s kind of the whole problem. It definitely helps to have supporters in your corner, but you cannot expect everyone to change for you. Control is the problem.

The desire for control is what you need to let go of to make progress. The miracle is that, at some point, you won’t care if someone drinks right next to you, or pushes it at you, or even dumps it on your head. That is the miracle - you will not care any longer.

However, there is a saying, “If you hang around in a barbershop long enough, you will probably get a haircut.” This sounds old fashioned today, but the meaning for people who try to quit drinking is this: if you spend time in bars while trying to quit, sooner or later you’ll have a drink. If you spend time with all of your old drinking buddies, you will at some point have a drink. So to change your lifestyle, the separation needed requires choices that are hard, and often means losing friendships. In many cases, people even stop listening to their old music because of how close the association is to the desire to fall into the old pattern.

The party crowd will never go away and cold beer on a Friday night will always sound good. The key is to “keep your own side of the street clean” and let others worry about theirs. Someday you will no longer care. You will watch tipsy people slur their speech with amusement and not want to join them, but you must endure some hard days and nights to reach each rung on the ladder. For bonus and motivation, know that you will get to bed much earlier and feel good every single morning. That may be the most unsung wonder of deliverance from a lifestyle of using alcohol. Every morning you wake up like the pre-game cheer from the Dillon Panthers of the TV show Friday Night Lights: “Clean Heart. Clear Mind. Can’t Lose.”

This is a responsibility and burden for us who come to know the problem that dogs us through our days. The Gospel’s presence of buckets of wine doesn’t get us off the hook, not by long shot. Here are some tidbits, food for thought, on why that’s the case from my favorite book, the Catechism:

“The virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco, or medicine. Those incur grave guilt who, by drunkenness or a love of speed, endanger their own and others’ safety on the road, at sea, or in the air.” (CCC 2290)

There is no free pass just because there is a wedding party at Cana. The nod we want to give ourselves will inevitably contradict a path to virtue, and if you already know you can’t control it from a history of excess, then the house will always win in the end. The odds are not in your favor.

“Temperance is the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures ... It ensures the will’s mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable … Temperance is often praised in the Old Testament: ‘Do not follow your base desires, but restrain your appetites.’ In the New Testament it is called ‘moderation’ or ‘sobriety.’ We ought ‘to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world.’ … Human virtues acquired by education, by deliberate acts and by a perseverance ever-renewed in repeated efforts are purified and elevated by divine grace. With God’s help, they forge character and give facility in the practice of the good. The virtuous man is happy to practice them.” (CCC 1809, 1810)

Most men have something calling to them, something that wants to get back into the world, to turn them away from virtue, to allow them to feel defiant instead of obedient. To open that beer, to go to that website, to hit up an old flame, to eat the whole box of cereal in a single sitting…ok, the last one might just be me. As I’ve mentioned before, I have much to learn, miles to go. It’s very easy to write about virtues and difficult to live them out in the real world. But that’s the goal, and as I seem to like goals, I’d rather have a positive public goal than a secret negative goal. Catholic Confession and psychotherapy alike tell us that you must name the thing that ails you to deal with it properly. Naming the problem is one thing. Letting go of control is next, and that is done through a Higher Power, not medication. Removing the cause of my sinking means asking for God’s help, and that is the right step toward daily perseverance, moderation, and steady sobriety.

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

Isolating with our devices is the new baseball and apple pie. Whenever I look around, I see someone staring into his or her phone, still as a statue, and I think of the myth of Narcissus and how he stared into the pool at his reflection, and falling in love with what he saw, he lost himself. Then I think to myself, wow, that must be exactly what I look like when I’m staring into my phone. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, chapter 3 there is something strangely relevant for today’s world. Ovid was a Roman poet who lived at the same time of Jesus and during the reign of Caesar Augustus. He recorded many of the Greek and Roman myths, and when I was a attempting to be an author of fiction (which I’ll save for another episode), I read Ovid’s Metamorphosis quite a bit for a couple of reasons: first, they are ancient stories with deep insights, second, I enjoy reading mythology, and third, I could steal plots from these ancient tales and plug in my own characters.

There are only so many plots, and once you exhaust your Netflix, Hulu, Prime, and HBO Plus shows, you will know what I mean by that. There is not an unlimited well of plot lines for writers to draw from. But for my purposes here, I only mean to talk about one of Ovid’s recorded myths, and it’s a pretty well known one, about Narcissus. See if you can spot the similarities between your usage of the smart phone and this silly old myth. Narcissus comes to the side of a pool of water and looks down, very drawn into what he sees there.

…There as he stoopedto quench his thirst another thirst increased.While he is drinking he beholds himselfreflected in the mirrored pool—and loves;loves an imagined body which containsno substance, for he deems the mirrored shadea thing of life to love. He cannot move,for so he marvels at himself, and lieswith countenance unchanged, as if indeeda statue…

All that is lovely in himself he loves,and in his witless way he wants himself:—he who approves is equally approved…

The cheat that you are seeking has no place.Avert your gaze and you will lose your love,for this that holds your eyes is nothing savethe image of yourself reflected back to you.It comes and waits with you; it has no life;it will depart if you will only go.

Good luck finding a more apt description of what the smart phone does to us. The phone is the image of our thoughts reflected back to us, allowing us to love what we are thinking. And we cannot move. We become stone. Like statues, like Narcissus.

Somehow the ancient writers, prophets, and thinkers can reduce our modern “advanced society” to a yawning “been there, done that” kind of mockery. The thoughts and epiphanies in our heads today lack originality if you go back to the classics. What’s clear to me is that the ancients were not simpletons, or fools, or gullible - they were wise from living, and suffering. Storytelling from all cultures has a wisdom that we tend to ignore in our age of instant gratification and tech efficiency.

Even as we unlock more doors to physics and biology, the greatest questions have not changed and will never change. I recently read that scientists have developed a laser to see around corners. Won’t that be nice. Will it make the world a “better place”? No. In fact, many of our “better place” stories about technology end up blowing up in our face, sometimes literally, since military applications are the first takers. A show called Silicon Valley produced a great joke on the software and tech industry’s self-congratulation for fixing the world’s problems. Every app and product claims to be “making the world a better place” but for the most part that is just a marketing ploy and self-delivered backrubs for techies to encourage themselves in their endeavors. There are many things that start out to “make the world a better place” and end up doing the opposite, the two most famous ones that I can thing of being: splitting the atom and a thing called Facebook.

I do not mean to attack science, since I love it. The findings are amazing. I nodded along with these “fixers,” with a faith in scientism, believing that tech and science would undo every knot - if not today, eventually. We, as individuals and collectively, are gazing at ourselves with amazement, marveling, in self-worship of humankind and things of this world, and forgetting about God. I did for many years.

I am an internet Luddite. It’s true. I admit it. I see no conflict between science and religion, or science and spirituality, since science is concerned with things of this world and faith is concerned with things beyond this world. But I do see a conflict between big tech and reality. Along with the Narcissus myth that is so obvious in the phone addiction, there is another primeval event that I recall whenever I turn over my phone and see the back.

The irony of the company Apple having a logo of an apple with a bite taken out printed on the back of every phone is too rich and obvious to ignore. While I appreciate the Catechism of the church’s reference to figurative language regarding Genesis 1 and the Fall of Man, I also love the story of how Genesis uses the apple to describe the flaw that is written on our hearts. The Catholic church’s allegorical reading of Genesis is one of the main reasons I am a returned Catholic, as I felt much like St. Augustine when he said: “I was being killed by the Old Testament passages when I took them literally.” (Confessions p109, p414) But when the story for original sin uses an apple as the central temptation of turning the first people away from God and toward worldly pleasures, and the largest corporation in the world, Apple, is turning people away from God and toward worldly pleasures…and the logo is a bitten apple…again you can’t help but nod toward the ancient writers. Apparently, there is something about apples that we really, really like. I think the only name that could have been more perfect for Apple, the company, might have been Golden Calf, but I have a feeling that wouldn’t sell as many phones.

The funny thing to me is that the pre-Christian Greeks had a saying of “Know thyself,” which said that man must be subordinate to the Gods, and Prometheus was punished for getting out of order. The Hebrews first three commandments are about respecting and surrendering to God. The Christian addition was to love God first and then one another. The Islamic profession of faith, first thing, is that there is no God but God. Myths from nearly all cultures have humans in tales that makes them subordinate to God, because mankind is underneath God. The order of things must be God before humans, otherwise bad things will happen. I have a deep feeling that this correct. The ordering set forth by old knowledge was learned by experience.

Today, however, the sprawling message, mainly broadcasting from America, is the opposite focus of the old wisdom. “Know thyself” is now a self-oriented interpretation of life, like the kind Narcissus found. We stare into the phone, at the reflection of our thoughts, looking at a watery, amorphous truth in the mirror, wrapped in a fog of a false “connectedness.” But really we are alone, separated, fooled, like the boy and his reflection, staring at himself in the mirrored shade.

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

Avoiding distraction in this century is a battle. This may be the hardest problem of the 21st century. I have been losing that battle. While distractions have always pulled at my thoughts, today there are massive companies like Facebook and Google and Amazon plotting how to better and more completely distract me. The battle for my attention is unfair, as we are outgunned, but life is unfair. I know that prayer is a battle and was never meant to be easy. This is not the easy path. I think that’s the one reason so many people avoid it today.

Today I give a large portion of my time to my device. The companies that benefit from my attention serve their own purposes, not mine, and certainly not God’s. I am being engineered and manipulated to fritter away my time and to doubt my greater purpose. The greatest lie I am told, that we have been told, is that we are connected to others and can be fulfilled by worldly things, while I isolate with my device and orient my heart away from more meaningful things.

The two commandments of the Gospels are very simple. 1.) To love God with all of my heart, mind, and soul, and 2.) To love one another. Do the tech companies appear to be pushing me in that direction? It is said that you cannot serve God and man. Which of these am I serving today?

“He who follows me can never walk in darkness,” our Lord says…if we want to see our way truly, never a trace of blindness left in our hearts, it is his life, his character, we must take for our model. Clearly, then, we must make it our chief business to train our thoughts upon the life of Jesus.

Book 1, paragraph 1 from the Imitation of Christ

I try to heed the words of warning to not walk in darkness, but it’s hard today. To keep my head up, not down, away from the phone is a challenge. When not staring at the phone, then it’s hard to avoid staring at a TV, where I fall for advertising gimmicks and good looking actresses. Sometimes when I see a bunch of moths hovering around a porch light at night on the patio, I think to myself…we are not that different from those little creatures. Show us a light on a phone or TV and we will gather and stare. For example, I love meeting friends for lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings and the whole reason I do is because there are fifty TVs on the walls, all flashing lights. We go from one lighted screen to another, all day long. Even in bathrooms and while pumping gas there are screens that instantly suck us in to watch. We’re worse than moths for clinging to these screens.

Our minds are easily entertained by dancing shadows of light. But the lights from technology are the wrong ones to chase, and my moth brain needs to realize that there is a greater light called the lumen fidei, the light of faith. The light of reason, like the porch lightbulb, pulled me away for many years from the real light. Oddly enough it was experience and reason that brought me back to the true light, the light of faith. I think of how many times I would scroll on my phone or watch an entire season of a Netflix show and feel worse. To empty my mind of distractions and open my heart to God requires more effort than scrolling or chilling on the couch. It requires a daily effort.

Ignoring the latest argument or scandal or meme on the internet means stepping outside of the flow of modern thought. Tomorrow those scandals will be different and they will fade away. Turn off the political propaganda - how can I do this? By getting off the phone. To stop from clicking onto pornography sites, that requires a choice. Millions, maybe billions, of men silently struggle with the lights of porn and they don’t talk about it. To ignore the screens and ads that promise pleasure, material, honor, wealth, and power, a set of tools is needed. Everyone must face this sales pitch that attempts to steal our attention. The answer is to turn the page on escapes and fantasies. First of all, I can start acting like an adult today. How many times have I seen a shirt say, “I can’t adult today.” Not only are we like moths chasing lights, we refuse to grow up because, frankly, many of our lives have been lived in comfort and without challenge to grow up. There is a quote from G.K. Chesterton that fits here. “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

We just want to keep things the same, nice and easy, to be left alone to be with our gossip, scandal, porn, and politics. The only problem with that is then nothing changes in our heart, and surely most people have a nagging idea in the back of their minds, asking them, “Is this really all there is?”

The answer is simple but it’s hard to face the question honestly, especially when you spend adulthood pretending that the question isn’t bothering you. The answer was in the thing I put on a box and kicked to the curb. I never even gave it a chance once I started chasing the lights of this world. And if you’ve read or listened to Why Did Peter Sink? from the beginning, you know the whole story of how hard it was to know where to even start. From the Streetlight God to today, it’s a long and slow path. The difficult thing is that until you set down that bag of bricks that you carry - your politics, your obsession with sex, your want of money, your need for approval - you cannot even get started. I know many people that say they can never consider faith because of some public policy that some group of faithful are championing. And they are right - because they cannot surrender to win, they will always be white-knuckling their hold on that bag of bricks. You may have heard that masturbation causes blindness, but it’s actually our ego that causes blindness. Spiritual blindness is the plague of the 21st century because we’ve been wholly sold on the self. The reason movies like Fight Club did so well with men is because it tapped into the emptiness that is universal among men who have lost faith in God. The moth brain has fallen for the fool’s gold, and Tyler Durden hit the nail on the head with this quote in the movie:

“Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

And the answer to this riddle is so stupidly simple that no one wants to hear it. The reason men are so pissed off if because they have been worshipping things that have replaced that which gives meaning to our lives. And once those things do not produce the expected result, we are angry. And the reason is that they are not God. They are the things of this world. Our hearts are wired for something beyond and are disappointed in anything less.

Sounds easy, and to get started it is easy. It’s hard to maintain but it’s easy to start. Even if you attempt to pray and think you don’t know how, you are already praying by attempting it. The best prayer I know is this one liner:

“God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Say it ten times in earnest and it will be a true prayer for you. Then the distractions will come…don’t worry - the phone won’t forget about you, because you can’t forget about it. Use silent mode or hide the damn thing for a while. The mind provides ample distraction alone, you don’t also need a phone to aid and abet the wandering consciousness. Try not to follow the distraction but stay put in the moment. Here’s one quote from the Catechism for you, as again, it usually makes the point so much better than I can (from the section titled, The Battle of Prayer:)

The habitual difficulty in prayer is distraction…To set about hunting down distractions would be to fall into their trap, when all that is necessary is to turn back to our heart: for a distraction reveals to us what we are attached to, and this humble awareness before the Lord should awaken our preferential love for him and lead us resolutely to offer him our heart to be purified. Therein lies the battle, the choice of which master to serve. (CCC 2725-2745)

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

When you first quit drinking you will find it hard to make sense of things. I’m sorry to say, but even after years of sobriety, you may still find it difficult. How easily the order of priority can get mixed up, tossed about and sorted into the wrong slots. Things start to go awry. Or rather, I myself begin to go awry. Life will always go awry, whether I like it or not, but with the right order of things, I can deal better when there is a solid grip at the top to hang onto. Life’s problems become simplified when the order of priorities remains tidy and well-kept. Coupled tightly to that order is one all-important maxim, that helps keep the order in place: That maxim is this: "my life is not about me." For anyone in recovery from any kind of addiction there is a mandate to turn away from yourself and start focusing on others.

There are certain maxims or sayings that I've tucked away to help me in life and this is one of those key phrases. When my life is about me, I tend to isolate. If I'm isolating, then I know I'm going in the wrong direction. For much of my life I pushed all my energy into goals and achievements, which are not bad in themselves. But they were the highest thing, and there's the problem. 

I've heard a sermon from Timothy Keller suggest that you need to approach life in "servant mode," as Jesus served us. He didn’t have to…but he did. He could do whatever he wanted…but he didn’t! Servant mode is a two word magical phrase, because when kids or spouse or co-workers ask for something, if you utter in your mind that magic phrase ("servant mode") it’s much easier to respond cheerily - especially when you don't feel like responding cheerily. This works, and of course when I don't do it then I grumble and complain and wish to be left alone. There's that never-ending notion to isolate clawing back to the surface, and I need to kick that crawling beast back into the pit about five times a day.

When I quit drinking, my sponsor said to just say “yes” if someone needs a volunteer. If someone needs help with something, like helping at an event or unclogging a toilet, just do it. These are "service opportunities." Just say yes. When someone I know sees me at a volunteer event, they say, “How did you get roped into this?” I tell people about saying yes to “service opportunities.” They usually laugh, and ask, “How’s that working out for you?”

When I tell them that it’s working out very well, better than I ever expected, they probably think I’ve fell off my bike and hit my head.

Just like "servant mode," this idea of “service opportunity” is another solid two-word reminder of "my life is not about me."

The miracle of Christian faith to me is that it takes away the need for self. The world is obsessed with self and most of us fall into that trap. Watching advertisements during the Olympics this year I noticed that every single ad is selling a vision of self to the viewers/buyers. The hallmarks of “goodness” in modern culture is getting what you want in one of four areas: possessions, pleasure, honor, or power. Those categories can be expanded into subcategories, and those into further subcategories and corners where the varieties of vanity and lust and envy live, but those four major categories sum up the teaching of our modern world, as we have been bashed over the head with ads and messaging since leaving the womb. There is this endless TV and internet testimony about how intrinsically good we are and whatever we want to do is justified, and that we deserve to get everything we want in life…and then, then happiness will settle upon us like a butterfly.

There’s little chance we will see an ad mentioning that we are flawed individuals and that getting what we want is usually the cause of our unhappiness. We want what we don’t need, then when we get our precious want, in a very short time we want something else. Something new, something shinier. Or, the opposite happens: we don’t get what we want, and then we love to play victim and cry the blues instead of moving on. Either way, the self is the master that we serve. We are justified in whatever we want - self-justified.

There's this great surprise answer that Jesus gives to the big questions of life. The saying “my life is not about me” basically liberates anyone who can come to believe it. However, it’s almost impossible to believe that idea of selflessness without getting our approval from somewhere. This approval that we seek, we have to get it from somewhere or we can never feel whole, and it needs to be a sign of approval that exceeds those which can come from a car dealership or house or trophy or diet or online community or drunken orgy.

No one really wants to hear that they are a sinner. It’s a dirty word today, but I suspect it always has been so, because it disrupts our nature. I can’t imagine the wall the Apostles were up against in pagan Rome telling people to repent of their sins. I suspect they asked, “Repent from our what?” The instinct is to want and war and win our way to some version of success. To let go of that way of life, to leave that headspace, well, that is to embrace imperfection. The idea of “you are perfect the way you are” is fine if it helps me accept my flaws, my limits, but not when it is an enabler of my bad choices and elevates me into an object of perfection that needs no reform.

As I say often in these articles: Surrender to win. This is the only kind of surrender that wins this battle and ultimately the war.

I'm flawed, I know it. But I really want forgiveness and approval. This is quite a dilemma. It's a kind of approval that the world can never give. I've searched for it. Aren't I just a sinner, a slow-learning rebel running from God so much of the time? Is there any kind of redemption for me?

And Jesus answers both questions, "Yes." 

Then suddenly there is no higher approval needed.

Once you have certainty that the flaws are real but you are still (somehow) saved, that God himself in human form died for your flaws, the need for outside honor diminishes, and can even disappear entirely. I think of the “woman at the well” who is angry but then joyful once she is liberated, internally “cleansed” once she is accepted. Jesus tells her she is saved and she’s over the moon. (The Chosen really nailed this scene and feeling.) This is the oxymoron: I’m not ok…but I’m saved! I know that atheists roll their eyes at that kind of language, of being saved (with an exclamation point!), but there’s no other way to say the truth of what happens on conversion. For those who say, “I’ll try anything once,” try faith. I avoided it for so long because it means admitting surrender of the ego, but that’s what I was really looking for all along.

No accomplishment or possession or knowledge can ever give that peace to you that the woman at the well discovers. No amount of accolades or botox will deliver that prize. What’s funny is that giving up the self is so hard, because even when you do, pride and self will emerge again like bacteria growing from the edges of your soul. Maintaining that peace requires a constant cleansing to keep the bacteria from overtaking the whole soul in a short time. In fact, as so often observed by non-believers, the righteous often have lost their sense of humility. This is what the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector points out.

The praying Pharisee is full of himself for being righteous and therefore has his ego propped up as a mini-god. “How glad am I to be unlike that publican slimeball over there! I keep all the rules.” He’s worshipping himself! The Tax Collector (or publican), knows what a mess his life is, has total humility, and says a more sincere prayer than the holy man. His is the true change of heart and is therefore shown mercy. Clearly the publican’s prayer must be sincere or he is no better off than the self-righteous one. Humility before God cannot be faked. Imagine this same parable today with a Christian and a meth head, or a transgender. Those who ask, seek, and knock to God with humility are never turned away. The Gospels are riddled with examples of this - but it’s important to realize that those on the margins are not invited into Jesus’ saving grace because they are on the margins or social outcasts, they find him through grace and humility and he affirms it. He never says to them, “The Tax Collector received mercy, and then we went back to stiffing clients and committing the same sins.” No, he’s not validating ways of living. Instead he’s showing the way, the path to the light, which is not just through the law and rule but through humility of heart and orientation away from the self.

The whole point of religion is not buildings or politics or morality contests. It’s humility before God. Many Christians know this, but some get on the news when they forget about it and make themselves the center, and the world loves to stone a person virtually today. But the second point of religion, at least the Christian faith, is that no sin cannot be forgiven. Said in a positive way, all sins can be forgiven. The Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum of saints. And that’s what the non-believers don’t understand. They think someone who claims the title Christian must never sin. They love to see them fall. We love to watch the righteous trip and fall on their face in public. Scapegoats are somehow fun for humans to blame for problems (unless you are the scapegoat, like Steve Bartman was in Chicago when he touched the foul ball that Moises Alou was trying to catch). But all Christians fall on their face, all the time, just as non-Christians do. That’s why we have to go back to the hospital all the time.

The self puffs us up with pride. The minute we turn toward our self as king or queen, we begin to puff up. I think my favorite metaphor in the Bible is the “puffing” of bread, as the Jews in the Old Testament have the Feast of Unleavened Bread after Passover. When we are “puffed up” we are full of ourselves. We think we are more important than God. I can almost feel this happen when I start to focus on myself instead of God, when my orientation turns away from trust in God into fear for myself and my desires. Almost as if I’m holding my breath, I feel that rising anxiety in my neck, like a loaf in the oven filling up the pan. When I re-orient back to God, with trust instead of fear, the puff and rising anxiety fades. That is the radical trust I need to remove fear and greed, the two things that I feel most plague of our world today.

So humility is the goal, and it’s much harder than it sounds. I’ve linked to this before, but there are 17 signs that you lack humility from St. Josemaria Escriva. I am failing. The humblebrag is on there. Even in writing this blog I feel there is a horrifying flavor of humblebrag all over it and the only thing that keeps me from deleting every single post is that I’m hoping someone who wants to quit drinking might stumble upon it and find a positive nudge in these words. I would add one more type of humility fail to St. Josemaria Escriva’s list, one that is much shorter and maybe easier to remember. I am the Interrupting Cow. The Interrupting Cow is a knock-knock joke that goes like this:

Me: Knock Knock.

Other person: Who’s there?

Me: Interrupting cow.

Other person: Interrupting Cow wh…?

Me: MOO!

When someone is talking and I am just waiting to talk, or I’m nodding and saying, “Yes, yes,” and I want them to just hurry up and hand over the conch for my turn to blow on it: “Hear ye, I have a personal anecdote that relates to your anecdote but mine is better because it’s about me!” At that point I’m already puffed up and pouring out of the pan.

So it’s one thing to say “my life is not about me” and another thing to take action and succeed in living that maxim. But I do know there are three things, only three, that need to be in a loopback mechanism to pop the puff before my head gets too large.

Three rules to live by (from Word on Fire), plus one extra I added:

* 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.

Add these addendums:

See Christ in others instead of their faults.

Stop seeking approval.

Agitated by something? Then the addiction to self is returning. Turn off the computer or phone. Return to step 1.

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 a child, there was a recurring nightmare that would wake me. I could never capture the image or the scene. The closest I could ever come to describing it was pins of light piercing through outer space, or shards of blinding white lightning splitting across an endless night. Along with these pins of light came the sound of drums or barrels, pounding or rolling in a crescendo as the light expanded in the darkness and grew nearer. First there would be one shard of light, but soon other shards would start out of the darkness and split the void, piercing and blinding until there were many shards and they converged and diverged in chaos, illuminating nothing but confusing everything. It reminded me of the void or chaos described in various creation stories of the world, from various cultures.

The nightmare would wake me in a disturbed state. My mind would race to examine what the nightmare meant. I never fully grasped the images, but the dream felt like a painting of anxiety or a depiction of what “racing thoughts” feels like. In fact, I suspect that’s what the nightmare signified or emanated from, not that I am a dream interpreter. This nightmare differed a great deal from those where I was being chased or had fallen off a cliff, because those made sense when I woke. I could gather myself in the safety of knowing that it was only a dream. But these shards of light and pounding drums scared me due to its uncertainty of form and meaning. The best scary movies are the ones where the director and storyline disallow the viewer from seeing or understanding the monster until Act III, or like the movie Bird Box, where the monster is never seen.

Uncertainty is what scares us and makes us act irrationally. For evidence of this outside of a dream, consider the run on toilet paper when the pandora’s box of Covid-19 entered the stage of the world. How odd that millions sought two-ply tissue as a solvent for fear. Fortunately, I had already stocked up on toilet paper, so I had certainty that we could outlast the siege on the tissue paper supply chain, but this phenomenon made for one of the most interesting behavioral things I’ve ever witnessed. I recall other behaviors that baffled me, such as people refusing to make eye contact, even outdoors on public trails where we stood far more than six feet apart. I was reminded of the Ken Follett novel, World Without End, which describes a period of plague in the 1300s. One of the characters advises another not to look at anyone with the plague: “You catch it by looking at sick people.” Behaviors that happened 700 years ago appeared to be happening again. I also re-read the opening of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was written during the plague of the same period, in Florence, Italy, and he describes varied reactions to the fear, which paralleled exactly what was happening in 21st century America. Some Florentines quarantined heavily while others lived as if there were no concern. Some turned to prayer and others to debauchery. The great thing about old literature is how it shows that human nature never changes, even while the technology around us does. We learn things about the world through science, but we’re still the same creatures and deal with uncertainty in polarized ways. We always seem to be re-discovering the truth, or redefining it, because we want to rid ourselves of uncertainty. But that’s not going to happen. Uncertainty is here to stay. This reminds of the quote by astronomer Robert Jastrow:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

That isn’t a quote to mock science, but it speaks to the beyondness that lies past our physical world and universe. I believe that there are things beyond science, that cannot be “found” like atoms and planets can be found. In other words, we cannot get rid of the unknown and uncertainty, not with the hearts and minds that we are born with, not with the world we reside in, and honestly, I don’t think we really want to remove uncertainty. We may think we want to remove uncertainty, but we don’t. Here’s why.

The world would be uninteresting without uncertainty. There would be no fear, but nor would there be surprise. There would be no pain, but there would be no joy or wonder. If the world had certainty in all things, and free will was not a thing, we would not have walk-off home runs or Hail Mary passes to win the game. We would not need to wrap gifts or experience nervousness before going on a first date. If we had 100% certainty on every event surrounding us, we would be machines. Philosophical arguments about determinism vs. free will, or materialism vs. spiritualism, have gone on for centuries, but it’s clear to me that free will is real. I suppose eventually we just choose a worldview that decides for us (there’s a joke in there somewhere). Freedom, believe it or not, is not a one word slogan on a USA t-shirt, it is something much more. This is a better definition: “Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life…The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes.” (CCC 1730-1738)

Now that I’m warmed up, I can get to the point. I seem to need a longer stretch each time before I start to jog, perhaps so I don’t pull a muscle. While uncertainty has an upside and can be fun, there is a flip side of the coin where anxiety, worry, and fear can cripple us. This often happens in the night, in the form of racing thoughts.

What I mean by racing thoughts is the overactivity of the brain that keeps you staring at the ceiling and blocks any cohesion of thought. This often happens before a big event like delivering a work presentation or starting a new job. The night before a test or a game or a marathon often kept me awake, even when I seemingly was not upset or nervous about the day ahead. The brain just turns on, and the switch to turn it off becomes temporarily out of order. Other events like moving to a new house or starting a large project or going on vacation - the details of these plans invade your head and they don’t shake out. In all of these types of activities, racing thoughts can bring stress, but the brain and nerves are chewing on something that could be constructive, or, at the very least won’t kill you. This is the racing thoughts of anticipation and details, and this kind of worry can come fast and hard, but is tolerable mostly because you have some control over the upcoming event. Control is the keyword here, as worry and fear increase in parallel to the grip on your desire for control.

There is a fun kind of fear and worry, like that which comes from horror movies and rollercoasters. The fear of a scary movie excites us just like the intense speed of a rollercoaster drop because it feels like we could die. But we know that we won’t, so it’s a thrill, not actual fear.

Fear without consequence is the fun kind. Horror movies and riding roller coaster takes some courage to do, but the safety net is there. You can pause the movie. On a rollercoaster you have the assurance of engineering and the preview of hundreds of people ahead of you completing the ride in one piece.

Real fear is the one where you have no certainty and no control. It’s the kind in the late night that seeps into your mind hot and clutches your heart with its cold hand. You can’t stop the thoughts as they teem upon you like the zombies in The Walking Dead. And there is no engineer to fix it. The TV and phone can’t drown it out and it’s too late to call a friend without seeming insane, without appearing vulnerable (God forbid). The racing thoughts come hard upon each other like waves in the sea. You can medicate it away, if you’re lucky, for the night with alcohol or drugs or sleeping pills, but they often just make it worse, if not that day, then later on when you need to medicate again, and again, and sooner or later the medication stops working.

This real fear is best met head on in the only way that it can be turned back and that is by prayer, by radical trust in God, because this real fear comes from yourself. Just like the boys in Lord of the Flies, the beast in the woods is out there, but the beast only exists out there because it is actually a projection of themselves. Trust always defeats fear, and fear is born from a focus on the self, for the craving of control and certainty. Trust in something outside the self is the cure. God’s grace confers certainty. Grace and certainty comes to those who trust. I can’t explain why. It just happens. A “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer will help a child, an adult needs something a bit different, but in the end just as simple and sincere. You need to yearn for the trust and the grace will arrive. It must be a surge of the heart, letting go. This is hard to do. For people battling their vices, like those quitting drinking, trusting that you can make it through the night may seem a bridge too far. Or for parents who are up waiting for a teenager to come home, or for someone in mourning the loss of a loved one, letting go of fear may seem a mountain too high. In fact, racing thoughts often happen because of a loss, as I have heard people that are quitting drinking talking about their loss of being “normal” and fitting in with their friends. Saying goodbye to a vice really is like mourning the death of your old self, your old life. I’ve had my share of pity-parties (but they aren’t fun…you get no balloons or cake at these kinds of parties). Usually, I am wanting my will to create action, to make something happen that won’t, or can’t, and that makes free will a burden rather than empowering. The worry and fear can turn to anger, where we want to will away the sense of suffering, by any means, by pills or by miracles, whatever! We’ll take anything to calm the thoughts. We want our freedom, our peace, our way, and dog gone it, we want some sleep. The question underneath it all is just this tiny little problem called suffering and evil. This tiny little problem is only the most difficult philosophical question and biggest blocker to opening any door to religious faith. This is why C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain keeps selling year after year and sticks like glue to the best selling list of books on death and grief. Because why? Why do we have to go through this? Why is there suffering and pain and struggle? (And here is where I’ll sidestep and refer you to read Lewis for that answer, not my writings.)

Somehow the brain can play games like the Geto Boys song “My Mind was Playing Tricks on Me” where the first lines sum up a night of racing thoughts. This song goes to the corners of fear and worry and comes out swinging. (I’ve redacted some of the swear words).

I sit alone in my four-cornered room

Starin' at candles

At night I can't sleep, I toss and turn

...

Four walls just starin' at [me]

Both rap and country music find these edge cases of our lives and conjure an experience in song, from that deep seeking in the soul, and the words have teeth that will bite you if you’re not careful. Later in that same song, a lyric says: “Late at night, something ain’t right.” He’s got the racing thoughts, and can’t fix it.

Rap and country music, whose fans would probably not admit any similarity, touch upon lonely and desperate moments, which is where the best art has always come from, and always will. There is a macho attitude in both genres but on the other side of macho sits loneliness in its various guises. The broken relationship, the aftermath of rejection, the places of unknown outcomes, the hours of weakness and despair, the isolation from bad choices, the agony of loss; these are the places of uncertainty where we can know for certain that there is a God-shaped hole in our hearts. These are also the times when racing thoughts attack a soul.

In those nights of racing thoughts, the replay of thoughts can start in a trickle. The replays then get accompanied by newly invented thoughts, or the spawning and ripening of unrelated thoughts, which then somehow mingle in with the others. All of these swarm into an invasion on the mind, in an onslaught of whispers. Like a primitive CPU, our single-threaded brains cannot flip back and forth fast enough between the context of one thought to the next and it soon becomes deadlocked. A comment from a peer or family member will rewind and start again. You come up with a thousand responses that you wished you had uttered. Or a comment on the internet can send you reeling, knocking you far off the road of tranquility and into a ditch. Concern over a child can drive parents to extreme worry, as kids get left out or insulted or suffer some health issue that the parent cannot take upon themselves. There is money, always money, mostly its absence, never its surplus, that bothers us. Schemes that we have in place, plans, expectations, the fear of failure and the fear of missing out…in a million varieties anxiety can not only invade you, but can conquer you in a matter of minutes.

The answer to anxiety is trust.

To trust, you need to leap and not know where you will land. That is a wild strategy, but it works, especially when other ideas may be leading you away from that choice.

There is a passage in the powerful chapter 6 of John, where Peter shows us what trust really means. This is the only chapter in any Gospel where Jesus loses followers after saying hard things while establishing the holy Eucharist. And after seeing followers leave, Jesus says to Peter, “Do you now also want to leave?” And Peter replies, “Where else would I go?” I hear that response from Peter and it hits me like electricity. It stings me like a current, because it is so true. I recall the first time I read those words and actually understood what he meant, and I had to set the book down because I realized it was true. I couldn’t read any more. Peter’s simple answer summarizes faith. Once you know the answer, there is nowhere else to go. Not only will you not leave, you don’t ever want to leave.

If you’ve tried everything else and you come to know that Jesus is the way, nothing can replace that faith. Peter knows he has found the way, the truth, and the life, even if it’s difficult to understand or unpopular. Having found this answer to life’s riddle he will not abandon it, he will hold fast to it like the parable of the treasure in the field or the merchant and the pearl. He will fail. He does fail. He will fail again. As a human being he must fail, but he will return again and again, as where else would he go? To what? To whom? He knows that the path to truth and peace is only through God.

There is one even better Gospel example of trust. Peter’s saying “To whom else would I go?” is powerful, but another example goes even further. There is Jesus himself in one of his most human moments in the agony in the garden of Gethsemene, on the night of his arrest. He must endure a night of racing thoughts. Even Jesus, who could calm the wind, who could walk on water, must face the terror of uncertainty and death. Temptation and desperation agonizes him, as he knows the Crucifixion awaits. This is Jesus, the Son of God, facing something like what we face, only with more serious and guaranteed consequences, and as always, always, without fail, he shows us how to live. The entirety of the Gospels is Jesus showing us over and over how to live our lives.

In that night dealing with his own fear of things to come, he is praying. He prays to God. Notice in reading the Gospels, whenever Jesus is facing something difficult, he prays. This is Jesus showing us how to live. On the night before he died, he is asking for guidance and putting his total trust in God. To me the question he asks to God and the answer he discerns is the answer to all of life’s nights that are seized by fear. He wants to escape the coming suffering and asks God to stop what is happening. He experiences sorrow and worry and fear. He too, like us, wants to control what is to come and he says these words:

“My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet, not as I will, but as you will.”

That moment makes him so very human as even he doubts, even he has anxiety. He is doing battle with a temptation to escape, to control, to win. But then he prays further and says if this is God’s will then let it be so. He surrenders his will to God’s will. This is the great “thy will - not mine - be done.” That is the answer. It is always the answer. Even Jesus, the incarnate God who bore all our human flaws and fears, turned to God in heaven when he needed help in his night of racing thoughts. He shows us the way. Our nights of terror pale in comparison to the agony in the garden, but we can know the way through the fire because he showed us how. 

These nights come for us all and I can squirm and worry and let anxiety wreck me or I can trust and say “Thy will be done, God.” This is yet another “Surrender to Win” moment, and it’s the same question as every time and it’s the title of this website. Why did Peter sink? Because he took his eyes off God. Because he wanted his own will to be asserted, not God’s. Because he turned back to himself instead of keeping his trust steady.

There is a passage from Thomas a Kempis that speaks to this free will problem which drives us all crazy. When we don’t get our way, how easily, how very simply, we get upset and off track. As long as we get our way, we are happy. But when our will is disrupted we instantly flake out:

“But too often some hidden force within, some attraction that meets us from outside, will sweep us off our feet. Plenty of people are influenced in their actions by these undercurrents of self-seeking, without having any idea of it. All seems to go well with them, as long as everything turns out in accordance with their wishes, their plans; but when once their wills are thwarted, they lose their balance and get depressed in no time.” (Imitation of Christ Book 1.14, paragraph 2)

Free will is like a gift and a curse at the same time, and this is one of these interesting contradictions in Christian faith. Yes, I am free to make choices, but no, I don’t get to control anything.

Even if you are an atheist, God is there for you on these nights and you can try it because you have nothing to lose. It’s also free. No downloads or appointments needed. If it doesn’t help, then you can go on being atheist the following morning, and seek out pills and mindfulness and therapy. I’m not making fun of those things, I just wonder why are so many of us stubborn to try prayer in the 21st century. I was like a mule. I wouldn’t dream of trying prayer until I quit drinking, but I was willing to try anti-depressants and relaxation CDs and therapy. It’s almost like in our consumer mindset we want to pay for a product or we don’t think it can be effective. If you try prayer, you don’t even have to tell anyone the next day. It can be your own little secret. I think the stubbornness today is that we don’t want anything budging in our “freedom” because we don’t want to be told “no.” This seems a very American and modern idea, to be the god of our lives and creator of our own worlds. The funny thing is that we are shutting out something that doesn’t actually limit our freedom, it actually expands it.

The grace of Christ is not in the slightest way a rival of our freedom when this freedom accords with the sense of the true and the good that God has put in the human heart. On the contrary, as Christian experience attests especially in prayer, the more docile we are to the promptings of grace, the more we grow in inner freedom and confidence during trials, such as those we face in the pressures and constraints of the outer world. By the working of grace the Holy Spirit educates us in spiritual freedom in order to make us free collaborators in his work in the Church and in the world:

Almighty and merciful God,in your goodness take away from us all that is harmful,so that, made ready both in mind and body,we may freely accomplish your will. (CCC 1742)

In fact, I just took a lot of words to say what Padre Pio said in very few words to everyone who asked him for help. Padre Pio would say to people: “Pray, hope, and don’t worry so much.” That pretty much says it all. It seems so simple when you say it like that. His response was so concise that you can buy a pair of socks with those words. I should take that as a hint to be brief. St. Francis said we should always be brief, since Jesus himself “kept his words short on earth.” I still have much to learn.

So, in summary:

“Pray, hope, and don’t worry so much.”

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I become what I consume. Obviously I’m only referring to the mind, not the physical, for if this were true for the body, I would have turned into a bowl of breakfast cereal by now. But over years of reading and watching movies, with the gift of hindsight, I realize that I do merge with what I read, which isn’t anything new. The old saying rings true: “Where your treasure is, there also your heart will be” - even when the treasure is a destructive one. While throwing around proverbs, I’ll just add another: “Be careful of the company you keep.” I’d apply that same statement to the books or movies or media you keep.

Charles Bukowski, the alcoholic poet that I loved to read in my early twenties, is the subject. Yes, Bukowski, the carnal, rejectionist, drunken, insane, brutally honest, self-destructive societal outsider. Who doesn’t love that kind of guy? He’s the guy that follow no rules whatsoever and yet is a virtuoso of victimhood. But then he also wrote from the heart and could spin sentences into gold. He reminds me of the Oscar Wilde quote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Bukowski did look at the stars, but just as often he would lie face down and describe the gutter itself, in great detail.

In my own days of drinking, I knew there was a problem around control, a dysfunction that I couldn’t manage. I knew it from the very first time the buzz spun me around, that this was my drug, what I had been looking for. But I also knew there was something not right about this affinity but I didn’t want to face the problem. However, when I stumbled onto Charles Bukowski, I found a kindred spirit where I didn’t have to care about the problem. I just let the problem be. I could let it exist. I just wanted to allow myself to not feel lost and empty, which meant letting the desire live unfettered. Not wanting to deal with the problem, I found Bukowski giving me a fist bump and saying, “Just go with it. Embrace it.” One quote that sticks in my mind was this one:

“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

There is no question that Bukowski was a deep addict that could speak profoundly, often striking deep at the paradoxes written in our souls. Honesty and raw pessimism makes his writing hit readers hard. His gutter-style of writing, from the dark places, made him famous. He compared himself to a Roman writer named Catullus, another poet of the alleyways who lived on the hidden streets of society. The humor in Bukowski’s stories made me laugh out loud, as he crossed every line and broke every taboo. This appealed to me because, like a court jester, he stood outside of society and mocked all of our facades. The masks that we wear and our modern rituals meant nothing to him. Throughout history, outsiders like the comedian and the bum on the street both hold special privilege to mock us “normies,” and Bukowski played both bum and comedian. He didn’t fit the mold of expected society, so he flung himself far from it and laughed at the absurdity, like a failing student slinging mud from the back row of class. Or he at least appeared to be unbothered by his flaws.

But then he would write something that let his own mask slip from his persona, like a poem called “Bluebird” that, when I first read it, struck me like a shovel to my forehead. A flicker of light remained within him. He knew something deep about his spirit, admitting that he recognized something like hope within.

there's a bluebird in my heart thatwants to get outbut I'm too tough for him,I say, stay in there, I'm not goingto let anybody seeyou.there's a bluebird in my heart thatwants to get outbut I pour whiskey on him and inhalecigarette smokeand the w****s and the bartendersand the grocery clerksnever know thathe'sin there.

That poems sits in great contrast to his more common themes of nihilism, insanity, and pessimism, which fired on all cylinders through most of his writing. He touches on something very far down, very deep, in his spirit, and his Bluebird is like the last refuge of his hope, and it reminds me of a teaching of the Catechism that states the same thing, but without the references to whiskey and smoke:

In the depths of his conscience…always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience when necessary speaks to his heart: do this, shun that. (GS 16 & CCC 1776)

Bukowski, even in full rejection mode, taps into the center of something that cannot be drowned with booze or smoked out.

What fascinated me in his writing is that he avoids all political correctness, which was already a thing in his era, and goes straight to the bottom, to the blind alleys, and just says the things that few would say or write. He was a prophet of the “Big Empty” where nothing matters, and where nothing is important. In his world, everything is a waste of time. I recall reading this quote and nodding along, as so many mornings you would wonder why the day needed to happen:

“I don’t know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what?”

Or darker still, Bukowski could enter a contest against Sylvia Plath for the saddest sentence ever written. There was always a yearning for suicide in the writing of both of their works. Here was a writer that could articulate depression. An example from Bukowksi:

“If I hadn’t been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.”

Similar to Hemingway’s quote, “Drinking is a way of ending the day,” Bukowski had a devastating idea about drinking as a way of killing hisself each day:

I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.

When I was reading Bukowski, the sentiments confirmed ideas that I held. The rejection of society and self I felt, even while I was going through the motions of proper society externally. The mask I wore in society, Bukowski just discarded it. He had no need of approval, or so he said - which is funny, because he actually did need approval. He wrote for approval and constantly sent out his art for publication. But like the person today who posts on Facebook, “I don’t care what anyone thinks about me, I am who I am,” it’s the same plea for approval. Declaring that you don’t care about approval is always a cry for support from others to approve of you. I know quite a few people who need to be seen in a big pickup and drinking beer and talking sports who say, “I don’t care what people think of me.” It always make me laugh, as this is like a very lite beer version of Bukowski, who took that sentiment and no parachute and jumped all the way to the bottom of that lie.

The sadness that could be discerned in his writing so often bordered on thoughts of suicide, which is unavoidably where this way of life leads. My own feelings were bolstered by Bukowski’s announcements about the cruel “truth” of the world. My suspicions were that the Big Empty was it, that life had no meaning, and here was the first author I found that wasn’t afraid to declare it without a bunch of “isms” like subjectivism or positivism or communism or existentialism or deconstructionism or just plain old atheism. Bukowski didn’t write happy endings or pretend the world was good. He saw the world as a mess and so he pushed the eject button.

After reading many of his poems, however, his notions of being at odds with everything start to seem self-congratulatory. Today, what I see so many years later in his quotes is an addict in full bloom, with no remorse or intention to change. The same celebration of alcohol and recognition of emptiness can be felt in the books of Hemingway and Fitzgerald as well, but they have more refined plots and complex characters. Bukowski’s dissatisfaction finds an outlet to pleasure through drinking, as the state of drunkenness removes what ails his heart, and so that becomes the center of his life. (This is not surprising to anyone that enjoys drinking or drugging, but differs none for those chasing other addictions like porn, gambling, cheating, food, work, shopping, plastic surgery, fitness, or internet and video games.) His rough youth and escapades are illustrated in his books via his alter ego Henry Chinaski. The path of his addiction is so well recorded that his life reads like a manual: this substance that gives pleasure initially becomes less satisfactory, but then you can’t stop doing it because you’re looking to get the high back again. Always repeating the same loop of events, he drinks to escape life. Then the isolation and self-pity infiltrates his life and everything else becomes pointless, stupid, a waste of time, and no one understands him. The reason he claims to love isolation so much is because of the grip alcohol had on him, not because he actually enjoyed isolation. The spiral of depression takes a person to a lonely place, and while the user feels like the vice lifts him up, it’s a trick of the mind, and it only took me about 20 years to realize that this is literally what the word “hell” means. Bukowski celebrates this error because his addiction wants him to stay there and be lonely with it. A false worldview has trapped him, so he claims to love his self-absorption and self-pity. For all the humor and deep thoughts in his writing, that’s what it is. He’s in a hell that he’s chosen and is too stubborn and addicted to ever leave.

As the saying goes, the devil won’t bother you while you are already doing what he wants; he only bothers you when you try to stop. If you don’t believe me, stop doing the thing that troubles you the most and report back in one year about how it went for you.

Repeatedly in his stories you can hear this bottoming out, this hopelessness, as he just wants to be left alone with writing and liquor because there no one can hurt him. No one but himself.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. 

This is actually why I like Bukowski still today. He’s just so honest about the problem. I read it very differently now though having called closing time on my own pity party. As I was adrift in adulthood, despite having a good job and wanting for nothing, this gnawing sense of meaninglessness led me to seek and explore the emptiness, since if nothing was all there was, why not make the most of it? There are billions of people in this state today. I can sense it in conversations and see it in their faces. I have felt what Bukowski describes and if you attend recovery meetings, you will hear this sentiment over and over and over again. One thing that has always amazed me at recovery meetings is that people will admit things very much like Bukowski. They will utter these damaged and lonely ideas to strangers because they felt no one would understand, and then, to their surprise, everyone understands. If it were not so sad it would be comical, that we all carry this burden, asking ourselves, “What is the meaning of life?” but feeling inadequate to articulate the feeling, we just say “Screw it,” and dive back into our problem because we think others would find our ideas crazy. As I’ve said before, at recovery meetings, no one is going to be surprised at your darkest thoughts or what you have done in the past because you lack the uniqueness you imagine. Yes, it hurts to hear it. Bukowski was unique in his writing, but he was not unique in his drinking or his addiction. In fact, he would have still been a great writer without the booze.

As I’ve mentioned, I was a big fan of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Bradley Nowell of Sublime. Both died in their twenties. Both had drug and alcohol problems. I once referred to Kurt Cobain as my “hero” years before I had discovered Charles Bukowski. When someone pointed out that “hero” might not be the right label for a lead singer who was a drug addict that killed himself, I ignored them, believing that the rock star life of full-speed-unto-death was a more honest life than most (insert laugh-track here). So I was already primed for Bukowski and my discovery of his writing was far from accidental. In fact, I sought such corroboration of my worldview, just as we all do.

What drove me to anger in those years were Christians, who represented everything opposite of Charles Bukowski, who was so “free”. The Christians appeared fake and gullible and obnoxious, as they embodied a quote by Bukowski: “Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”

But those boring damned people were not damned, because while Bukowski was “free” to do whatever he wanted, he was miserable. His identity came from his writing, but he worshipped his image as a rebel. He loved his fame once he got a taste of it. In fact, he needed all those boring people to loathe, but he also needed them as readers, so that he could justify himself. What was valuable to him? He claimed it was nothing, but it was three things: writing, drinking, and insulting everything that wasn’t his own writing or drinking.

I suppose I should cut to the chase. In those Bukowski-admiring years, I had come to have faith in atheism, believing that nothing mattered. I say “faith” because to believe in nothing is as much a leap as believing in God. This conversion had taken place over years, but once I was finished with college and making my way in the world, living alone, I found no purpose whatsoever to anything. There was making money and moving up the ladder at work, but even then I knew something major was missing from those pursuits.

That march toward nihilism had begun in college. No, even before that, when I first started to lose faith as a teenager over questions around the Resurrection of Jesus and I couldn’t get any satisfactory answers. I was grasping at God in those years, trying to find God and getting hung up on literal readings from fundamentalists, which I could not accept. But once I hit these Bukowski years, I was now straight-up fleeing God. I wasn’t grasping at all, I was running.

What I did not understand is that while sprinting away from God, I was going to run in a full circle once I realized, years later, there is nothing in that void, that is has nothing to offer, and that a worldview aimed at the void is simply wrong. If I had been educated in the faith, so many questions would have been answered, but it seems that the idea of blind faith and not asking questions bumped me sideways to the point where I had to go searching for different answers. In observing bad behavior in Christians, I lumped them all together as one blob of humanity and ignored learning any actual doctrine.

What’s funny to me now is that the Church was well-aware of my entire experience long before I stumbled onto it, and as I mention often, it hurts to find out how unoriginal I am. In 1965, the Catholic Church published this:

For, taken as a whole, atheism is not a spontaneous development but stems from a variety of causes, including a critical reaction against religious beliefs, and in some places against the Christian religion in particular. Hence believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion. GS 19

I could tick all of those boxes, and tick them off about many Christians that I knew. Neglect of training or education? Check. Erroneous doctrine? Check. Deficiencies in moral and social life? Without a doubt.

Furthermore, in their explanations of modern atheism, the following description also stuck to me like flypaper:

For while God is expressly denied by some, others believe that man can assert absolutely nothing about Him. Still others use such a method to scrutinize the question of God as to make it seem devoid of meaning. Many…contend that everything can be explained by this kind of scientific reasoning alone…Moreover, atheism results not rarely from a violent protest against the evil in this world, or from the absolute character with which certain human values are unduly invested, and which thereby already accords them the stature of God. Modern civilization itself often complicates the approach to God not for any essential reason but because it is so heavily engrossed in earthly affairs. (GS 19)

Now when I consider that statement against a Bukowski quote about being his own god, he is like a case study of a lost sheep. Bukowski realizes that without God, he is a god, and with that arrangement, nothing has any meaning but that which he declares meaningful.

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god…”

In other words, there is no truth for Bukowski, and ultimately no meaning. He is “pliable” and “adjustable” which boils down to a pretty weak lower-case god.

The great realization that I had was two-fold: there is a God, but more importantly I am not God. That short sentence - I am not God - changes every single thing I see in the world. This is like standing in a room full of mirrors and then suddenly stepping outside, where before all I could see was myself and my expressions, my feelings, and suddenly I saw everyone else. The way of seeing the world radically differs between a believer and a non-believer, and it changes even further for Christians. When your life is no longer about you, nothing looks the same.

Bukowski even knew there was something good in the world, and in him. He actually reveals why he hides his beloved Bluebird in the second verse of his poem. Why does he keep this beautiful Bluebird hidden in his heart? Because he likes his rebellion. His status as a rebel feeds his ego. If he shows his Bluebird, he has to give up his outsider status, which helps him sell books.

there's a bluebird in my heart thatwants to get outbut I'm too tough for him,I say,stay down, do you want to messme up?you want to screw up theworks?you want to blow my book sales inEurope?

The appeal of Bukowski to those adrift is his stubbornness to never let his light shine, even when he knows the little light is in there, deep in his heart. There’s even a parable about hiding a light under a bushel basket. As an artist, Bukowski was actually grasping at something higher, but he could not admit it to the world.

For those that do come to faith, the former life of standing in the room of mirrors comes to be seen as a false life, a different life - almost a life that didn’t exist because of the focus on the self. When Jesus cures the blind man and the blind man says, “All I know is I was blind, and now I see,” his life is changed in the literal sense of vision but also of his outlook on the world and his soul. The lives of many saints are remarkable in similarity when this change occurs, like Ignatius, Augustine, Paul, Dorothy Day, Elizabeth Anne Seton.

If you are a doubter, just consider the annoying people who are always talking about Jesus and seem to have a wellspring of happiness. Aren’t they annoying? Aren’t they boring?

But the sense of joy is honest in them. It’s real. The turning toward God changes people in ways that cannot be understood unless you experience it. This blindness-into-sight is what happens to people who experience conversion. Once it occurs, you realize that it’s not boring. Life is not boring. Faith makes every day worth living, so that you don’t wake up and put on your shoes, and like Bukowski say, “Oh, now what?” This way of seeing makes you wake up filled with hope instead of despair. You know the world has flaws, and so do you, but still there is hope.

This way of seeing flips everything on its head, just as you see with Matthew or those who “come to Jesus.” Nothing is the same for them ever again. They would not even recognize their former lives and would never want to go back to old ways. Like me and so many others, unfortunately, you almost have to arrive at this destination the hard way - by following things to their end, to realize that you were looking in the wrong place.

Now I think back to the influence of writers like Bukowski had on me, and how I allowed myself to celebrate my errors and flaws. That wasn’t a mistake so much as a guidepost along my way. We are raised today to believe that fulfilling our wants and desires is path to happiness, but the only times I’ve grew spiritually is when I don’t get what I want, when I deny myself. The many freedoms we have today to satisfy the self is actually what chains us to a life of misery. The self always wants more, whether it’s food or sex or comfort or honor or pleasure or wealth. Bukowski did what he wanted all the time and it’s pretty obvious he was miserable.

If anything I’m grateful for the entertainment of Bukowski’s books as it hustled me along to the end of the path, where I could realize that it is not better to rule in hell than serve in heaven. Turns out that serving myself creates a kind of living hell. Separating myself from belief in a loving God makes this life into a place of endless wants and desires. Elevating myself into a god - it’s just too much work! It’s too empty if I am the only decider of right and wrong, the lonely chooser of what is meaningful and meaningless.

I wouldn’t advise anyone to read Bukowski, not because I think he’s a bad writer. I think he’s amazing, and I still laugh just thinking of some of this quotes. Rather, I wouldn’t recommend him because the influence of reading can be strong on a mind and persuasive in tugging one toward blind alleys. If you are seeking that kind of writing, you will find it anyway. If you are already one of the “boring” people that Bukowski hated, who has faith and hope, I would strongly recommend remaining boring and full of hope.

I could give a drunkalogue on adventures undertaken under the influence of alcohol which might lead you to believe that pursuit of selfish pleasures is anything but boring, but I can assure you, if you go to any recovery meeting, you can watch people roll their eyes or fall asleep when a newcomer tries to wow ex-drinkers with his or her tales of debauchery. No one cares. Everyone has heard it. Moreover, no one wants to hear it, whether in a recovery meeting or regular life. Drunk stories only entertain the teller. All “wild” stories of intoxication are a dime a dozen. The aftermath of “wild” stories may be the only interesting part, since the epilogue is not about the teller, but about the people the story impacted and quite often hurt.

Once again, as the saying goes, “Where your treasure is, there also your heart will be.” If your treasure is nothing, your heart will find those who celebrate it, such as Bukowski or Camus or Marx or Dawkins or Foucault, or so many others who preach faith in nothing. They may not all be labelled as nihilists, but at the bottom, of you follow it to the end, that’s what the underlying doctrine really is.

A better recommendation would be to find a better treasure. For anyone looking for a reading recommendation, I would start with the Word on Fire Bible, and read all the side commentaries. Don’t just read the Gospels, read the explanations of why the parables and encounters of Jesus are so profound. Don’t just pick up any Bible, read a study Bible and start with the Gospels, since that is where the real treasure is. That was the book I needed. Had I read the Gospels with this kind of understanding instead of following Bukowski’s adventures, I may have never gone down those aimless paths. At the very least, I likely would not have got stinking drunk and bought a one-way ticket to…oh never mind. That alone would have been worth giving the Gospels a solid try.

Lastly, idolizing drunk writers and artists allows justification of bad behavior. When I fancied myself a writer, I fell for the cult of drinking in which Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald are lionized for their maladies. Creativity, as the hypothesis goes, is linked to drinking. But as anyone who is not a creative genius knows, there is a fine line between skills being sharpened by a buzz and falling off a cliff after drunkenness. For anyone that has been drinking while playing card games or pool or darts, or even backyard beanbag toss, or anything involving the brain - yes, the drink loosens you up and there’s a moment of genius and skill…right before it takes you downward into the abyss of stupidity and acting like an ass. If our heroes happened to write something great, and perhaps they got loosened up with a few drinks, that’s one thing. But to celebrate heroic drinking is a fool’s errand. And yes, I’m calling myself a fool for falling for this idea. I fell for it because I wanted to allow my flaws to flourish, rather than deny them and face my problems.

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

There was a third reason that lurked in my mind as to why I wanted to do the Exodus 90 challenge, as I discussed in my last post. As I’ve written at length about in other posts, I was a slow convert to belief in God. But I knew that my faith was not yet rooted deep. Events in my life, plus the addition of the pandemic, made me realize how fragile this world really is. Society is a tenuous thing, held together with duct tape and bubble gum, as are corporations, and even families. Like the stock market, the social contract we live under could tumble at any time. Marriages and families crumble every day as husbands and wives capitulate to their wants and desires. Companies that are making money have high spirits, but as soon as a bad quarter comes along the lukewarm employees begin to flee like rats on a sinking ship.

The wheel of fortune would spin eventually, likely soon, and I felt that I lacked the fortitude that would be needed in the inevitable chaos. The unpredictable changes of life and society could bring any outcome, as we are all pawns in an infinite game of three-dimensional chess. Having read enough dystopian novels and history books, I realize that hard times will come, that this American moment of excess and plenty is temporary. Moreover, it was obvious to me that throughout history the one thing that prevailed and still prevails is faith and the Church. Despite a thousand attacks against Christianity, from government attempts to destroy it, or the constant hatred from all sides (including from itself), still it stands. Some how, some way, faith and the Church remains, and never dies. And of course now it’s easy to understand why it never dies. As long as there are people in this universe, and the story of Jesus is alive in even one person, it will return in full, always and forever.

It does not take a prophet to predict the fall of nations, as the empires of this world wax and wane every hundred years, and the prophets of old could feel a nation’s decline without reading The Fate of Empires or measuring economic statistics. On the one hundred year anniversary of World War I, we can marvel at the change in worldly power in a single century, as the Austro-Hungarians must have wondered what hit them. Likewise, I recall walking through the ruins of the Roman Forum, being in awe of the decay around me, where such great names like Cicero and Caesar had walked and where major events once occurred. All the while I could not help but compare it to the mall in Washington D.C., since it is a modern Forum. What will a thousand years of time and weather would do to the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument? The famous poem Ozymandius comes to mind.

Am I ready for the change when it comes? For a time when a nation splinters and fractures into civil war? Was I even ready to handle losing my job? Or my health? What about my life?

Was I prepared to deal with the loss of loved ones? Could I be the rock that others would need in that time, or would I crumble like sand? Would I stand there with nothing to offer, as I used to when I was an atheist, and say, “Let me know if I can help in any way,” offering only empty platitudes to the sorrowful? (As if mowing their lawn or running errands would help heal their heart, when they are aching for a spiritual solace.)

Would I avoid talk of God or salvation because I didn’t want to look like a Jesus freak? Or would I have courage, and be willing to pray with people and offer them the hope and love of Jesus who died for our sins? The way of seeing the world between the non-believer and believer is stark when the real things in life, the things that really matter, come to the fore.

I do know who was able to withstand all of these changes, and stare death in the face and go to it without fear. It’s painfully obvious who that person is. He was able to not only live without sin, but face the greatest sins and insults of this world, and still go to his death with hope and love. The opposite of fear is faith, and radical trust in God.

The saints did their best to imitate Christ, except they were all sinners. The key thing about the saints is that they knew they were sinners, but still they had faith. The world could take everything from them, beat them, suppress them, hate them, jail them, kill them - and still, there they were, still standing with faith, hope, and charity when they drew their final breath in our world.

Even today, Christians are loathed and hated and still being persecuted actively, and still the light of faith continues to pass to the next candle, and the next, and the next. You can see it every Sunday at Mass. Even as the different types of Christian faiths bicker, the light shines in all of them: Lutheran, Evangelical, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic - the light does not go out, and the reason why is because it is impossible to extinguish. The world has tried everything, literally every possible way to bury this belief, and the flame remains today and still spreads, even flourishing against the fire extinguisher known as the internet, where hordes mock and deride religious people every day.

By 2050, Christianity is predicted to be the largest religion, yet we are told by the media and academics that this religion called Christianity is dying. What they don’t realize is that, even if this faith in Jesus is snuffed out in one corner, the fire magically re-ignites itself in a new place, somewhere else, and there is no question that a revival will come again to the places where it is fading today. No video game or drug or car or house or surgery or accomplishment or website will ever cure the needs of the heart, as much as we pretend otherwise. I could only distract myself for so long, and as St. Augustine said, “Our hearts our restless until it rests in God.”

The light needed to become stronger in me. I was like a wooden match barely burning. And there was one thing, especially, that I needed to shine the light upon. Most importantly: was I strong enough and committed enough in my marriage to handle the storms? Could that light remain flickering in the darkest of nights?

It took me quite a few years to realize how sacred marriage is, or to even realize that it really is sacred. Unsurprising to anyone who has the order of priority in life sorted out, this realization about marriage came to me once I had finally set God on top of my list of concerns. When you don’t believe, those with faith will annoy you with tips like, “Put God first and everything else will fall into place.” That is so irritating. When you are not ordered first to faith, that sentence is like nails on a chalkboard. But then I learned to hear properly. The sentence sounds just fine once you are have priorities in the the right order.

“Unless you believe, you will not understand,” or said another way, “Unless your faith is firm, you will not be firm.” Oddly enough, I ain’t even mad now about my being out of tune for so long. I just wished I’d sooner listened to the music.

An awareness of this gap in my faith probably aided me just enough to say yes to join the Exodus 90 group. I have found that saying “Yes” to new things, with a positive goal, is the way to strengthening my belief. However, that must come with a definitive “No” to the self, which is always vying to be the center of attention. I want to make myself first, the chosen one of my life. But for any lasting happiness, the self must be at a minimum of third. Faith must forever be first, followed by family, with marriage being at the peak of the family, even over the members known as husband and wife. As I have come to remember it, the order of things that works the best is the five F’s: Faith, Family, Friends, Fitness, Finances.

This must be an ongoing project, really a constant one. To grow toward faith requires care and feeding, and some days are much better than others at efforting toward that goal. Anyone who is married knows the struggles and resentments can outweigh the joys if you let it happen. The little foibles of each person become enraging annoyances if we let them, while we ignore our own foibles that enrage and annoy others.

A truly great marriage requires submission of both people toward this mystical union known as “marriage”. For many years, for so many years, I failed to understand what marriage actually is, and I don’t think I truly understood the word marriage until I listened to Timothy Keller’s series on the topic (links below). The irony is that while being married and seemingly functional in that state, I was walking blind and oblivious to the entire purpose.

If you are married and struggling, or considering marriage, or even in a relationship, or thinking of getting into a relationship, or thinking of getting a pet, or even alive and drawing oxygen - then I would encourage you to skip your next Netflix series and give these podcasts at the end of this article a listen. I came across this series and realized that having a terrific marriage does not require fasting for 40 days in the desert. It’s actually much simpler than that. This too is a kind of Why Did Peter Sink? story: when you lose focus on the purpose of marriage, you start to sink.

Having a great marriage requires recognizing it as something sacred and giving all to that union. As a non-believer, the idea of the sacred was a joke to me, and that was exactly why I had no anchors in life. A good marriage requires knowing and committing to the unassailable idea that “the essence of marriage is a promise.” The cause of every problem of every marriage is self-centeredness. The modern idea that the other person needs to make you happy is a recipe for failure, as we see every day in our culture. The reality is that each person must submit to the other and to the marriage, completely and wholly. The way to success is the exact opposite of what modern society teaches us about relationships. Consider the saying that is so common now: “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.” That is probably the worst advice and most openly selfish relationship quote imaginable, but is now being passed about as sage wisdom.

Ok, there is much more than I can re-iterate here. Listen to the series. There are just a few prerequisites: turn off any distractions, set aside your cynicism, and stop clutching your grudges about your wife or girlfriend. The only thing you have to lose is your ego.

Marriage as Ministry Power

Marriage as Commitment

Marriage as Commitment and Priority

Marriage as Priority and Friendship

Marriage as Friendship

Marriage as Completion: One Flesh

Marriage as Completion: Gender Roles part 1

Marriage as Completion: Gender Roles part 2

Marriage Supper of the Lamb

Marriage as Ministry Power

Marriage as Commitment

Marriage as Commitment and Priority

Marriage as Priority and Friendship

Marriage as Friendship

Marriage as Completion: One Flesh

Marriage as Completion: Gender Roles part 1

Marriage as Completion: Gender Roles part 2

Marriage Supper of the Lamb

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

Over the past few years I’ve attempted two very different challenges. One is the Ironman triathlon which I’ve already written about. The physical test of the Ironman race itself is punishing, but the commitment to training before the event makes the triathlon an immersive, life changing event. Most days of training require an hour or two of exercise to get the legs and lungs prepared for long distance swimming, biking, and running. As an amateur (and I’m very much that) my commitment to racing is minimal compared to serious athletes, yet finding time to pursue an hour or two of exercise requires that fitness be elevated to a high priority in the day. With a full time job and family, time is precious, so I’m sometimes lucky to have an hour to sneak away for exercise.

Even with the clock looming over every choice, I enjoy charging out the door to run, or driving to the pool to get a half hour swim completed. A sense of accomplishment comes with ticking off blocks of exercise. Plus there is the kicker of feeding my vanity, as fitness feels good. Even when doing long bike rides or runs, the physically exhausted aftermath also feels “good” as it acts like a purge or cleansing. Exhaustion allows my love of food to come out of hiding, too. Burning tons of calories justifies (in my rationalizing mind) overeating and shoveling food at my face: eggs, toast, watermelon, Cinnamon Toast Crunch - these are a few of my favorite things.

The bait of the Ironman race was the challenge that it presented, and having watched videos in the 1980s where athletes were nearly dying to cross the finish line made it enticing. Strange, isn’t it, that suffering is attractive? For a good laugh, watch this Clif bar ad about what it’s like at the start of a triathlon, when everyone is thrashing about in the water. Those images of extreme exhaustion appealed to me, just like military ads from the Navy and Marine Corps appealed to me as a teenager, as the hook for both the Ironman and the Marine Corps is the challenge and the honor that comes with the association of the name and logo. So it was this badge of honor that I was really after in pursuing the Ironman, though it took me some time to realize it.

At the beginning of this year, a different type of challenge came to my attention through a friend. He didn’t recruit me or try to lure me since he wasn’t going to do the challenge, he only mentioned Exodus 90 as a point of interest, where a group of men commit to a spiritual exercise of self-denial. No TV, no social media, no video games, no porn (including no masturbation), no snacks, no alcohol, no unnecessary phone usage, and no unnecessary purchases.

The self-denial part was intense by itself, especially for a food monster like me. But there was a few other key facets of this program that made it quite different from other diet and detox programs.

* Daily hour of prayer

* Fasting on Wednesday and Fridays

* Exercise on at least three days a week

* Weekly meetings with the group

* And cold showers.

All of that for 90 days.

That’s a lot of self-denial and discipline, but these fasting elements weren’t the real “hook” of this challenge for me. The hook, I thought at the time, was the mandatory cold showers. Having listened to the book What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength by Scott Carney made this whole idea intriguing. Aside from having an insanely long title, the book’s ideas around cold therapy seemed a hot topic among modern seekers. This kind of self-inflicted discomfort was right up my alley! As the world tries to remove all discomfort, there seem to be quite a few of us hunting for it. Endurance tests of exercise and discipline always sound fun. Or so I thought.

From quitting drinking I had already learned that the self-denial of “freedoms” is actually the most freeing thing I ever did. The funny thing about our world today is that everything is permitted and we are free to do whatever we like, but in turn we actually link our bodies, spirits, and minds to these freedoms, and end up getting stuck. And I’m not just talking about drinking. Just watch people with their phones for the most obvious example of modern addiction. Our addiction to pleasure is really an addiction to “self”, which I am terribly guilty of much of the time.

Like everyone, I get lost in my phone too, and coming off a poisonous 2020 election year on social media, I was happy to set aside all memes and polarizing articles for a 90 day break. I had quit social media before the election season, and yet it still infected my ears and eyes. A technology detox was a second reason I thought Exodus 90 would do me some good.

I remember taking a cold shower on the first day, when the outside temperature was -10 degrees Fahrenheit. As you might imagine, that first shower was not enjoyable. Not at all. But as soon as I was done, I was awakened and fully alive. Grimacing in cold water for a minute invigorated me. In fact, a bit of advice here for anyone: if you are having a bad day, or you don’t like your current mood, there are two things that can instantly change your state of mind. 1.) Take an ice cold shower, or 2.) Do burpees to exhaustion. Neither of those two things can be done without your mood changing, and both take 2 minutes or less.

The ice cold shower requires an act of will to step into the water. Someone told me to say before stepping in: “Remember, Jesus died for my sins.” This actually works pretty well, since I considered hanging on a cross and being mocked my everyone to be far worse than enduring a minute or two of cold. Disclaimer: I did a Navy shower, where you get into the cold water and get nice and wet, then turn off the water. Then you soap for about 30 seconds, then turn on the water and rinse off. I was assured that this was an acceptable “cold shower” method, although I’m not sure on whose authority the worthiness of a cold shower can be verified.

What I didn’t think would be terribly difficult turned out to be the hardest part. By far, the daily hour of prayer proved almost impossible for me. The three parts of Exodus 90 are “prayer, asceticism, and fraternity.” When joining the program, I was focused on the ascetic practices and hoping to meet some new friends. The daily holy hour did not seem like that big of a deal. I figured I could knock that out each morning easily and not really think about it, like going for a run.

But the daily “holy hour” was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. Truly, it was more difficult than learning to swim. I could not pray for a half hour. I could not sit still and pray whether I was kneeling or standing or laying down. I finally understood Pascal’s saying, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I thought of those moments in the Garden when Jesus scolded the apostles for not being able to stay awake for one hour. I suppose that made me feel a bit better, since they were all saints and even they failed.

I could not focus or clear my mind to pray, or not for long without feeling my phone beckoning me or a book or some distraction calling out to me from the corner of my mind. The daily minimum was 20 minutes and the Exodus 90 book said that the time should be in contemplative prayer, a term that I had to look up since I didn’t even know what contemplative really meant. Oh, I could read for hours, but to sit in a chair and pray for 20 minutes felt like eons of time.

After a week of trying and failing at the daily holy hour, I just spent the time reading the Gospels and considered that to be “holy,” but a group member reminded me that I was not exactly following the guidance of the program, since contemplative does not mean reading.

And I knew I was cheating at it because I could not do meditative prayer. This reminded me of a time when I had a relaxation CD in my car, many years before, and I was always irritated by the slowness of the narrator, since I wanted to just hurry up and relax already. I shouted at the speaker one day, “Can you just hurry up and relax?!” Obviously, I didn’t understand that the verb “relax” required no action, no hurrying.

This struggle continued. I would do some daily readings and then try to pray in silence, and I had a few days where I was able to maintain silence for a while, but then distractions would flit into my thoughts and I would try to ignore them, only to chase them in the end. I spent time reading the Catechism, as the Exodus 90 program helped guide me to relevant paragraphs, suspiciously aware of the problem I was experiencing:

The habitual difficulty in prayer is distraction. It can affect words and their meaning in vocal prayer; it can concern, more profoundly, him to whom we are praying, in vocal prayer (liturgical or personal), meditation, and contemplative prayer. To set about hunting down distractions would be to fall into their trap, when all that is necessary is to turn back to our heart: for a distraction reveals to us what we are attached to, and this humble awareness before the Lord should awaken our preferential love for him and lead us resolutely to offer him our heart to be purified. Therein lies the battle, the choice of which master to serve. (CCC 2729)

That was it, as if plucked from my brain into that book. I would make excuses for why I couldn’t concentrate, blaming the light from outside, or the dog needing to go for a walk, or that I couldn’t get comfortable. My mind would drift off even if all was well, and I would take a sour grapes approach, thinking that perhaps silent prayer wasn’t really necessary anyway. Again the Catechism nailed down my excuses showing that I was lacking originality, as usual. (aside: The idea of my uniqueness that I was sold as a child, has turned out to be disappointingly and utterly false.)

We must also face the fact that certain attitudes deriving from the mentality of "this present world" can penetrate our lives if we are not vigilant….Christian prayer is neither an escape from reality nor a divorce from life. (CCC 2727)

I was still clinging on to some doubt about the need for prayer. I was doing this Exodus 90 to strengthen my faith, yet in reading the daily Exodus verses I was having a hard time with some of the stories. In the weekly meeting with my fraternity, I would feel like an outsider because certain political feelings were being made known that bothered me. Some of them seemed like Facebook in the flesh, with their opinions on their shirtsleeves, but fortunately the group leader reiterated the point that this program was not about politics or memes or any of that garbage and toxic waste. I was letting politics bother me rather than focus on the principles. I thought of quitting the group, just as I had done with AA. But I stuck to it. Each Monday, I tried to re-double my effort at prayer, and began to have small segments of time where I had glimmers or hope, where peace and nearness to God enveloped me.

I wasn’t there yet, but I was getting closer. I was still light years away, but at least a few rays of light struck me. An understanding hit me, as I realized that I could be easily swayed yet, as distractions still stole my attention, and once again the Catechism book pointed to me why this was happening:

The most common yet most hidden temptation is our lack of faith. It expresses itself less by declared incredulity than by our actual preferences. When we begin to pray, a thousand labors or cares thought to be urgent vie for priority; once again, it is the moment of truth for the heart: what is its real love? (CCC 2732)

As the saying goes, “For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” What was my treasure then? Was it the group of men? Was it the words I was reading? Was it my home? My family? My self? My stomach?

All of those are the wrong treasure.

The treasure must be God, and nothing above it. This is literally the problem of the question put forth in these writings: “Why Did Peter Sink?” He sinks because of lack of faith. When Peter looks away from Jesus, he sinks because he fears losing his life, his self. In essence, Peter becomes the treasure, not God. Fear is the result of looking away from God. When God remains the treasure, you cannot feel fear or greed or lust. When you have a radical trust in God, you have succeeded. The moment you forget that trust, you are adrift again.

That is the miracle, I realized, somewhere along the way. When I quit drinking, some old person with 30 years of sobriety said to me, “Don’t quit until the miracle happens,” where in this case “quit” meant to go back to drinking. I recall thinking, “What miracle?” Well, the miracle is that at some point you no longer want to drink. You are just happy without it, and you have a Higher Power that gives more than drinking ever could. The miracle is, once you have trust in God, you don’t want your vice.

With faith in Jesus, the miracle goes further, however, way beyond drinking or sex or whatever your cross to bear in this world is. The miracle is that you stop struggling and forget about yourself. You no longer even want to sin. You are content to be content because you have all faith in Jesus, and all you want to do is give thanks to the incarnate God for showing the way.

It always comes down to the self. For me, maybe for everyone. One way or another, the self wants to be the treasure. The instant that the self exceeds God, Peter sinks. This is unavoidable. This is predictable. It happens every time.

Around the third week of Exodus 90 I started reading the Word on Fire Bible and St. Augustine’s Confessions. That is when I really I started to make some headway, as those two books, plus prayer, began to jackhammer at my doubt and elevate my faith. The commentaries in the WOF Bible opened door after door to understanding the Gospels. How little I understood in the Gospels. Second, the experience of Augustine was so eerily similar that I could not fathom he was writing almost 1,600 years ago. Then someone said I should read The Imitation of Christ and I realized that I’d found the handbook to the spiritual life.

I didn’t master contemplative, silent prayer, not by a long shot. But I began to have days where I could maintain 20 minutes, or have a fairly legitimate holy hour without thinking about Cinnamon Toast Crunch. When I struggled to concentrate I would pray the Rosary, which takes about 20 minutes and use a website called the Rosary Center to reflect on a scene from Jesus’ life for each Hail Mary. This proved a valuable tool, as I could do each prayer and picture the image of something for each bead. This method changed the meaning of the Rosary from rote recitation to something dynamic. I would enter into the world of Jesus and experience these moments. As a kid, my impression of the Rosary was of a bunch of droning gray-hairs in the pews on Sunday before mass. Now I was finally understanding why it was seen as a transcendent experience by those with faith. Then I read the Rosary book from Word on Fire and found this even more expansive on why so many people around the world pray with these beads every day.

To get an idea of what I mean, rather than just doing 10 Hail Mary’s for each decade of the rosary, I would read a verse before saying the Hail Mary for that particular bead. Then the combination of the prayer plus the image becomes powerful, and slows down, and has meaning. I was no longer rattling through the beads like a machine. Each bead then has a story, and something to contemplate.

“The First Sorrowful Mystery – The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane”. For each bead, contemplate the following:

* Jesus and His Apostles go to Gethsemane to pray. Mt. 26:36

* With Peter, James and John, He enters the olive grove. Mt. 26:37

* “My soul is sorrowful unto death.” Mt. 26:38

* “Father, if it be Thy will, let this cup pass from Me.” Mt. 26:39

* “Yet, not My will, but Thine be done.” Mt. 26:39

* “Could you not watch one hour with Me?” Mt. 26:40

* “Watch and pray that you enter not into temptation.” Mt. 26:41

* Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss. Mt. 26:48

* “Having seized Jesus, they led Him away to the high priest’s house.” Lk. 22:54

* His disciples abandon Him. Mt. 26:56

I’ve heard that men don’t do the Rosary as much as women. Once I slogged through some education on it, and took my time, I understood why it is so popular. And it is so old-school, so retro, that it can’t help but be cool again. There is nothing so counter-cultural as the Rosary in 2021. It is now the equivalent of the Sex Pistols in 1977 or Dr. Dre’s Chronic album in 1992. Holiness and faith is reviled by a majority of society today, so this is clearly the time that Christian faith will be coming back into style, or very soon. In reality, faith is maybe the only thing that never actually comes into style or goes out of style, which is why it will never die, too.

While I was making progress in prayer, I was still struggling with it. Don’t let me fool you, I still find it very difficult on many days. Many days I hardly lift a finger in prayer. I’d make a terrible Pharisee because I fall into distraction and sin so easily. But I think there’s a lesson there itself, as the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector says something important about being “good” and thinking I’m owed something by God for my good behavior, as if my perceived approval of my actions and self-denial make me better than others. The danger in being righteous in religion is the exact same trap of self-worship that the non-religious fall into. In fact, that is what drives more people away from church and faith than anything else. The Pharisee’s righteousness is so obviously a kind of self-approval and self-worship. Jesus says the genuine prayer of a prostitute or tax collection is more justified than the “good” person, so long as the prayer is humble and true. Bishop Barron points out about this parable that “the entire point of religion is to make us humble before God and to open us to the path of love. Everything else is more or less a footnote. Liturgy, prayer, the precepts of the Church, the Commandments, sacraments…all of it is finally meant to conform us to the way of love…When they have instead turned us away from that path, they have been undermined.” (Word On Fire Bible, p 409 commentary on Luke 18:9-14)

I also found that the ascetic practices of Exodus 90 became increasingly difficult to maintain, as the flesh didn’t enjoy being subdued for so long, as 90 days is a long time! Fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays proved more difficult than anticipated, and I would crash the next day and overeat. Having no snacks or coffee throughout the day caused an inner tantrum inside me, as the food monster wanted his daily excess of sugar. Some of the ascetic practices were easy, as I had already cut out drinking and TV, and porn never seized me like it did other people I know. Seems everyone has a vice that works for them, really does the trick. Some self-denial is easy, and some is torture, depending on your hunger.

For me is was the food. The food! That was the hard part. I could not purge snacking from my life. I needed someone standing by to slap the snacks out of my hand, since auto-pilot will take me straight to the pantry if I’m bored or stressed for any reason.

I found the Exodus readings hard to enjoy and wondered how many ways a tabernacle could be described, and how long such details could go on. As Easter neared I began to fall off the wagon, failing at various practices, finding 90 days starting to to feel more like a full year. I felt like a fraud as I checked in every day with my accountability partner, but then he struggled too.

I made it to the end, relieved to be taking warm showers again. Oddly, the cold showers were the easy part.

In a way, I failed miserably at Exodus 90. But then, as I progressed through this program I realized that this was more challenging than training for the Ironman. The difficulty of Exodus is higher than going for daily runs, swims, and bike rides. I enjoy running, swimming, and biking. I don’t enjoy denying myself things that I enjoy, which is kind of the whole point. Curiously, I learned more about myself in Exodus 90 than the Ironman, as it highlighted where I was weak both in body and spirit. The Ironman training is about willing the self to do, to achieve. Even though I am a mediocre triathlete, I received the same “Finisher” shirt as everyone else for the Ironman. There is not a finish line in faith and prayer. Exodus 90 is about removing the self from all things, while Ironman is about elevating the self. Removing the self, or denying wants and desires, tested me more than anything I’ve ever done, more than the Ironman. In fact, it was so difficult, that I am not sure I want to attempt another “90 day spiritual exercise” because it was the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted. But it was also perhaps the most rewarding thing. After all, my light did grow brighter in those 90 days and I gained understanding of where I am lacking, or rather where I still need to let go of my addiction to self.

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 one thing that strikes me each morning is that how quickly my moods can change and that I shouldn’t trust my feelings. I’m not sure where I read it, but someone mentioned that hunger is like a toddler, always needing something. I seem to have a house full toddlers. I want coffee, I want quiet, I want food, I want media. I want. Therein lies the problem. I want. Even if you kick your worst habit, new desires still find their way into your head. The Buddhists almost have my problem nailed down, since the cause of all suffering does seem to stem from desire. However, there is one thing lacking in the Buddhist answer to the problem of suffering, and that is what the divine person of Jesus presents as a better answer.

The problem is this: if Jesus is who he said he is, then we would be insane not to follow him. If he’s not who he said he was, then he was insane and deserves not a second look. Tim Keller mentioned this in a podcast and reminded me of this dilemma. And I need to be reminded over and over, because this is at the center of why I was a religious “None” for so long. This either/or scenario that Jesus presents is hard to handle. One way or another we have to make a choice, that either Jesus told the truth or he didn’t. The default choice is doubt and indifference, that he is not the son of God and the Resurrection did not happen. This is the The Matrix red pill/blue pill scenario, but this is a more important decision than what the modern conspiracy theorists are using this metaphor to sell. Decide that it is a lie, and you wake up each day and ignore the story. He either rose from the dead, or he didn’t, right? This is the question that must be answered by everyone, like it or not. If we do nothing, the default position of doubt is then our selected choice. With this decision, he is lying and it’s all a hoax.

Well, I spent two decades believing that he was lying. That didn’t work out very well for me as I chased so many dead ends. In terms of worldly goals, it worked out fine, great actually, but my soul remained empty through those years. I was spiritually dead. I imagined that I was alive and righteous and “connected” on the internet, but my heart was flatlined. So then I had to slink back and reconsider which pill to take once again. Taking the other pill is much better. Truth be told, I was able to stop taking other kinds of pills (see: Citalopram) once I decided that he was not lying. That alone to me was stunning, absolutely stunning, and I wonder how many others’ mental health would improve if they just gave it a shot. The main difference is that one pill removes meaning from life, and the other pill grants meaning to life.

I know that exercise boosts my mood and fixes me for a bit, but after pursuing various goals of fitness, I know that fitness alone is primarily for my ego, like any other pursuit of pleasure, not for deep fulfillment. I do find the discipline of exercise far better than old habits, like drinking or watching TV or scrolling on websites. Yeah, those really don’t help much of anything in terms of the heart. How many times have I sat on the couch late at night after watching some TV series or movie only to go to bed feeling like I just wasted the evening? Entertainment is like Cinnamon Toast Crunch; so good to consume, but ultimately leaves me empty. Both are best enjoyed in moderation and kept below the more important “Five F’s” that I will explain in a minute.

The year of the pandemic allowed me ample time to consider what is important, and I am grateful for the space that opened up to find my way back to faith. I see triathlons and marathons as a good goal, but now with my ordering of life changed, fitness no longer takes precedence. Before the pandemic, I saw fitness as this high moral good, a righteousness in itself. I felt like it washed me clean somehow, that through my registration I had purchased a modern indulgence for my soul. But now I see that fitness must fall lower, as follows, in my Five F’s:

* Faith

* Family

* Friends/Fellowship/Fraternity

* Fitness

* Finances

Any deviation from that order means I am out of order, like a vending machine that doesn’t vend. Thus the trick is remembering this order, especially when I want to go on a two hour bike ride or 10 mile run, or when I want to binge a TV show on Netflix.

What I want is often wrong. Learning this is easiest by getting your butt kicked around in life. If my faith or my dedication to family fades, or if I neglect friendships, then this will mean I have elevated fitness over those higher F’s. I have done that a lot in my life and I can see the wake of wreckage it leaves. If my marriage comes after anything like drinking or swimming or coaching, then I’m off track. What’s clear to me is that this ordering of F’s is right. I want to get out for a run today, a brief one, because faith, family, and friends have commitments already. Running is an action done for myself and my ego, but it does help boost the other F’s. This is the tightrope to walk, where choices I make tell me where the priorities sit. Fitness helps improve those Faith and Family parts of life, so there is no reason to pretend that all acts done for the ego is somehow bad. I am not a desert monk. No, I’m not nearly as cool as St. Anthony of Egypt. The key of the order is to remember that items lower in the list are not by themselves inherently bad. They are good. But they must never bubble up to the top and become the highest good, the summum bonum, of my life. That is when the title of this blog comes into play: Why Did Peter Sink? Because he was out of order on the Five F’s. But simpler still, the Faith “F” fell out of first place.

There is a way to help keep this order in place, too. There’s a three step recipe described by Word on Fire that seems to help me screw this order to the wall, and it even acts as a good standalone prayer.

* Finding the Center - Christ must be at the center of my life.

* Knowing I am A Sinner - There is a dysfunction that I cannot fix by myself.

* Realizing My Life is Not About Me - Charity and volunteering is the way, and whenever I am thinking of myself, there’s a pretty good chance I’m looking away from God.

I would add a fourth to that and say: 4. Stop looking for approval from anyone but Jesus. Am I feeling agitated by something in this world? If so, my addiction to self is returning. Turn off the computer or phone and return to step 1.

Every run, swim, or bike ride that I do alone can become a time of reflection and even prayer. That I know, as I often go to that “chapel in the heart” anyway while running or biking. I don’t know who to thank for this idea, (maybe Ephraim of Syria, I don’t recall) but I go there quite often when the world is swirling around me.

I can’t tell you how many times I have gone to that chapel while coaching, when the chaos starts to swirl. If you want to see a depiction of hell’s Furies in modern times, attend a youth sports tournament championship game that has gone into overtime. There you will witness a complete disorder of priorities. I’m not talking about the the children, I’m talking about the adults.

The projection of desire by parents onto kids is something that I could elaborate on, oh I would guess, for a few weeks. The reason people are so into children’s sports is because they lack something. They need approval, they want love, but they desire above all honor. None of us are about to be called up to war where we can take up our shield, for God and country, like in The Battle of Maldon, where the Anglo-Saxons got rocked by the Vikings but went down in a blaze of glory. But we are still yearning for that experience and youth sports is the proxy experience. I can watch the change on a parent’s face as bloodless victory nears. I feel like if I threw a T-Bone steak toward their folding chair they would ravage it like a starving wolf in the corner of the gym. For glory and honor, for the victory of our ego over some random parents from another suburb. Following through with The Battle of Maldon, if I replace Æthelgar and Godric in the verse below with people I know it would work today as well as a millenium ago:

So Æthelgar’s son emboldened them all,Godric to the fight. Often he let go of his spear,the slaughtering spear flying into the Vikings,so he went forth, first in that crowd,hewing and maiming, until he perished in the battle.

Godric fought and died for England and became a legend. Little Johnny fights under the mantle of the local gas station or realty office. That ribbon or medal may be cheap in terms of money, but in today’s world is sought like the Ring of Power, as we seek validation in that idol, until the next tournament, next week, on a Sunday usually, where the whetting of the appetites for honor starts all over again.

I’ve watched parents explode in rage, not always at the opposing team, or the referee, but often at their own child. That’s when you can see the truth spill out on how sports actually affects their lives. It’s embarrassing and everyone looks away. Funny how we never approach and ask someone, “What is the order of priority in your life? Is youth sports the highest good, above your family or faith?” That would irritate a lot of people, but might be beneficial in the long run for challenging their notions.

But in that moment when others are losing it, that’s when the chapel within is ready, like a 24-hour neon sign in a bar flashing the words: “Happy Hour”. I can go there and watch the madness happening around me and I ask myself, “Why Did Peter Sink?”

Literally, I do this. If I can extract myself from getting caught up in the moment, I definitely do this. I have several seasons of using this tactic now in the dugout and on the basketball bench. There’s no soundtrack of Ave Maria playing, no cinematic experience, no bathos like the Hallmark Channel movies, there is only a single question to ask myself, to re-center on what is most important so that I avoid going adrift and sinking, to put fear aside and find that radical trust in faith again.

Lest you think I feel sports are bad, I do not. The benefits of sports outweigh the negative, as the kids make friends, they exercise, they understand what teamwork means, they work toward a goal, and they celebrate the ups and downs of wins and losses. Overall, the kids learn many of life’s lessons through sports. It’s just the adults that are insane, and I’m as guilty as anyone of elevating it to an excessive height in the priority of things. I still recall the devastation I felt in the first seasons when a last second shot crushed our hoop dreams. This was actually one of those moments of realizing the disorder of my life, when a group of kids making a basket could cause my sense of the world to crumble. As a Minnesota Vikings and Golden Gophers fan, I should never have fallen into this trap. I should have known well in advance that hanging my ultimate hopes and mood on a sporting event would leave me cold and in the fetal position, yet I still let youth sports feed my ego vicariously to the point where it gave me a false sense of value.

The same goes for fitness. Getting in shape so easily converts from making a self-improvement into a self-love, and then quickly slides over into lust or pride, and I’m sorry to say, a kind of self-worship. Need evidence? Have you heard of Instagram? You know what I’m talking about. It all started with simple gym selfies. Now the clothes appear to be painted into every crack and crevice of the human body, leaving so little to the imagination that Jane Austen’s Victorian readers heads would have have exploded upon eye contact. The pursuit of happiness through fitness or sports or knowledge or drinking - it’s all the same. All of it. It may make you happy for an hour or two, maybe a week, maybe even a year or five years. But eventually it will fail, and then you will wonder why. I certainly scratched my head and wondered why this thing or that thing didn’t satisfy, and usually, before long, rather than examine why, I would move on to another thing and expect the permanent solution to happiness to be there. I wondered why.

And now I can tell you why. It’s not because any of those things are specifically bad in themselves. It is because all of those things were not God. What happens is that there’s a thing I wanted, and if I got it, I was soon disappointed, and if I didn’t get it, I was soon disappointed. And then I was angry or upset or depressed.

Why?

Because it wasn’t God.

Thomas Merton said, “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.”

Anything that you put highest in your life that is not God has a shelf life of supermarket milk; it’s good for a while then turns rotten. If you want to get off that treadmill of the pursuit of happiness, if you want a way to be happy not for a week or month or year, then give faith a try - a real try. Do it for a year. For all the quack diets and depression pills and exercise equipment we buy, what would hold you back from trying something that is free?

Exercise in general, without question, is good. It’s very good. The mental assist that physical exercise gives me helps with the second and third F’s, Family and Friends. I believe there is a way to weave this all together, but the danger here is that the self, not the Higher Power, is driving the decision. Pride (A.K.A. honor) is a many-headed hydra that comes back to me in a thousand forms. Cut one head off, and two grow in its place. If I aim to build habits around a Christ-centered life, such that I can deal with whatever challenges lie ahead, I can remain disciplined in faith and not fooled by the shadow-puppets of this world that beckon us toward the four Big Empties: pleasure, honor, wealth, and power.

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In my tunnel vision of life, for some strange reason, I choose to learn by my own mistakes. Rather than learn from what others have taught and told to me, I prefer to get tossed around and beaten up before coming to see the light. But in that path I have much company, as today there is the idea of finding your own “truth,” which is kind of funny, as if there are seven or eight billion versions of truth in the world. In essence, finding your own truth implies that there is no truth, and what that really means is that there is no God, there is no First Cause of the universe, and that we are just unhappy results of chemistry and physics. I do not accept that since at the bottom of that is nihilism and meaninglessness. I do, however, think it is extremely important to let people find that out, as I needed to do. Despite ample opportunity to follow the path back to the heart, I became stuck and lost in so many oxygen-starved capillaries of the world.

As for getting lost in the worldly things, I should be grateful for it, to be honest. My life suffered no major hardships to correct me back to awareness of my powerlessness. I was under the impression that I had control, which allowed me to pursue paths of learning and ideas that elevated the self. I know others who came to faith much earlier, some who came to see after a tragic event. Others apparently just have the gift to believe and stick to it from a young age, which is the key, as Jesus says “…unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” What’s funny is that people that take the long route (like me) end up coming back like a child, or more aptly…a prodigal.

Of course, as a returned prodigal, that means I have committed many, many sins for which I need forgiveness. In my two decade absence from church, I made a laundry list of mortal sins - or grave matters. I needed absolution of those to get myself righted, and fully oriented toward God. To me, my weaknesses and frailties of the past give me insight into the Golden Rule, the most important commandment. Because of my flaws, I understand others’ flaws. But it depends on the flaw. You see, I seem to have accepted my flaws as valid, while judging certain other flaws as greater or worse. Yes, I have a snobbery about specific flaws, it seems, which Jesus didn’t mention anything about. So as to that Golden Rule, the greatest commandment, I like to imagine that I’m capable of living true to it, but I’m not. This one paragraph rules over the rest of the Bible:

“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

That last sentence puts a bow on the Bible. It’s like a gift card with a tagline message. “Dear reader, in case you don’t have time or energy to read a few thousand pages of ancient texts, here’s a quick summary for you: Love God. Love and forgive others. Your life is not about you.”

It seems so simple. How easy it really seems to love everyone. If I direct my positive thoughts, my heart, and my soul toward God, I will see the good in all and love everyone I encounter today and every day. I think, yes, I am capable of that love toward all. I can be like that weird guy at the retreat who plays spiritual rock music and raises his hands, eyes closed, and calls for witnesses. But I can do it my way, through caring and understanding and respect. I could love them like a normal person might love others without a creepy weirdness!

Sure, yeah. I can. I surely could. Then I step outside of the house and the world attacks and I attack it back. Heck, even inside the house I have attitude some mornings.

Why is it so hard? I do know that when I stay focused on God, when I spend time in the morning with the New Testament or with Christian texts, I am more oriented toward this notion of “love thy neighbor” than if I get out of bed and charge out the door. Without question, this focus helps me to love others more effectively. But I lose focus, like Peter on the water, and slip - only it takes me a while to call out “Lord, save me!” since I like to sneer and judge for a spell before I recover. Why did Peter sink? Oh right, he forgets about God.

To love one another sounds so easy, but in reality is perhaps the hardest task assigned to a Christian particularly because of this: it is actually easy to love someone when it is reciprocated, such as in a family, or in a Church full of like minded people (although there can be plenty of discord in those places too). What makes the Golden Rule really difficult is when the love is not returned, not reciprocated, but instead you are either hated or you have to shove aside your own feelings of dislike, disdain, or hate to remain humble. In fact, today in what is called the “post-Christian” era, it’s less likely that others will hate you for being Christian so much as they will just roll their eyes at you - because they have all heard plenty about Christianity. Rather than being persecuted, Christians seem the persecutor due to having such an incredible run of winning for two millennia. So what does this mean?

I believe that Christians, American in particular, are feeling a backlash for being too aligned with worldly power. The “love” that Christians have been pushing since faith made its unholy merger with politics around 1980 has effectively flattened and removed the effervescent bubbles from the message. Love thy neighbor became love thy Christian neighbor, and to hell with the rest. Besides, everyone loves an underdog and for some time Christians were not the underdog that they are supposed to be.

Without question the media and politicians have painted this picture, and have done so successfully, making Christians the enemy as of late. As the religious are removed from the public square and an atheist society takes shape, what comes afterward will be ugly. Those opposed to faith will focus on sins that the faithful have committed and ignore the massive amounts of charity and community work that followers of Jesus do in this world. This is not to say the abuses are excused. No way. There are horrific offenses that deserve full attention and justice. But there is far more good done in this world by those with faith in God than by the few faithful who have eroded trust in religion. Having worked at homeless shelters in two states, I can tell you that 99% of groups that volunteer are religious groups. Everyone ranting online from their computers about saving the poor - you don’t see them show up in person. They care enough to tweet, but not enough to enter the fray to mop the floor and do the dishes.

Most Christians that I know are like me: human. (Some are very strange and I’m not yet sure about their origins, but most appear to be human.) But the reality is that Christians suffer the same problems with loving others as non-Christians, but the point of the whole doggone faith is to try to do better. The reason people go to church, is to return to the right path. When non-believers point out that people going to church have a lot of flaws, I have to laugh because that is the purpose. “Those religious people are awful.” No kidding? That’s literally why they are praying and asking for forgiveness. They are a bunch of sinners, the only difference is that those going inside are admitting their limits and faults. There’s a response from G.K. Chesterton about why did he become a Catholic, at which we said, “To get rid of my sins.” Those flinging and slinging mud at people of faith for having stains on their life are so close, so infinitely close to understanding the “why” but sadly missing the point. They point out that Christians are not perfect, they are sinners. To which every Christian who knows about original sin just nods in agreement and goes to church.

Since I am not Jesus, that is why I have to try, try harder, and try again. Knowing that I will fail still means I need to make an effort, every single day, to love my neighbor. And that love needs to have no conditions attached to it. No strings attached. No waiting for reciprocity or validation - I have to love without being loved back. I must forgive all affronts and insults and perceived flaws, because I commit errors and sins when I lose vigilance. The minute I forget about God and stop praying constantly, I am pulled back into the morass of human nature. I am owed nothing, I owe all to God. I start to sink. I start to drown.

When I think of the modern Church with the struggles of keeping the faithful, where people are leaving due to modern Siren songs, and chasing shiny things on the internet, like New Age religions and alternate lifestyles, the Church must remember the greatest of all commandments which the whole depends on. Love your neighbor. This is the focus. Never can the eye be taken off the ball of the greatest commandments, or the game is over. And the order matters. First: Love God. Second: Love your neighbor. Without the first, the second one doesn’t stand a chance.

Want to know a recipe for disaster? First, take a fundamentalist version of Christianity and stir it real thick with politics, and let those folks be the primary voice of Christianity for several decades. Constantly preach anti-intellectualism in a rapidly changing culture where knowledge is expanding at an exponential rate. Fold in a distrust of science, making it an enemy of religion rather than a complementary pursuit of truth. Seize on a single grave sin, abortion, as the only focus of morality, ignoring the enormous list of unrelated mortal sins that mankind can commit. Divide the family by letting fathers off the hook, forcing no one into the discomfort of responsibility. Tenderize excessive drinking and drug use until fully meshed into daily life. Glaze the eyes of men and boys with endless pornography from an early age. Let marriage cool until the sanctity gels and turns into the equivalent of a high school relationship. Finally, for the topping, drape over a sex abuse scandal, sprinkled over a century, so abhorrent, so far beyond the pale that it makes Jerry Sandusky’s escapades at Penn State look like a parking violation. For a finishing touch, quibble over liturgical format while the building burns around you.

Is it any wonder the Church says people are leaving vs. joining at a rate of 6 to 1?

For myself to return, it took a series of events to even want to listen or learn from a Church that had seemed conjoined to politics. The abuse scandal shattered trust in the priesthood, which is a shame since so many millions get spiritual direction from them.

The sense of “us vs. them” was apparent to me as a child, as Catholics were obviously mocked in films and society, and I could see how the faithful circled the wagons in America, going into defensive mode against the secular world. All the while, flaws were festering on the inside just as much as outside. And do you know what? Aside from Jesus, the flaws were on the inside and the outside long ago in the same way. Way back in 30 A.D. the Church was as full of flawed people as it is now. We can read about what a bunch of knuckleheads the apostles were before the resurrection awakened them and the Holy Spirit invigorated and steeled them. You can read St. Augustine and see how flawed he was on practically every page of his Confessions. It is actually the flaws that make us real. You can’t hide from them. They are not going away and never will. It’s not “us vs. them” it’s “us vs. us” because we are them! And them need help as much as us.

Grammar is not my strong suit.

In the first century, to go against the grain and preach “love thy neighbor” would get you crucified or boiled or clubbed. Nowadays it just earns the rolling of eyes and a yawn, because the focus on the greatest commandment became something of a joke. The problem is not that anyone disagrees with “Love thy neighbor.” No, the problem is that everyone agrees with that. But everyone has forgotten the first commandment of Jesus, which is to “Love God.” Today’s Catholic and Protestant only has to suffer ennui and disdain instead of a beating, mostly because of our own faults at forgetting to remind the world what the first commandment is. Loving neighbor cannot be done without love of God. I need a daily reset, getting back to the root solution to realize that: “I am not a smart man, but I know what love is.” Again, I must come back to God like a child, or in this bad joke of an example, like Forrest Gump to Jenny.

As I digress away from the subject of this article, which is about the test of loving thy neighbor, I must write a bit more on the causes of why the Christian message, which at first spread like wildfire and took hold of the world for so long, has “petered” out in recent decades. We all know the story of Jesus and the resurrection. Everyone does. Everyone on earth has heard it in some form, but many give it about the same level of credence that they give to the Marvel cinematic universe. In fact, some people are more excited about the Marvel comics because it’s not brought to them via annoying religious proselytizing.

Many years ago, I recall sitting on a beach on spring break when someone came and asked me if I’d chosen Jesus as my personal savior. I said, “No,” and asked them to move on. Now, at this point in my life I was agnostic so this experience annoyed me and I simply wanted these people to leave me alone. I always felt anger at them and thought of the Grateful Dead lyric in the song “Truckin’” where Jerry Garcia sings: “They just can’t let you be.” I had spent many years turning away Mormons and family members and quite literally anyone who was selling religion or telling me about God.

Why?

Why did anyone coming at me in the usual format of “Jesus as personal savior” repel me so much?

Because I didn’t want to be sold.

In America, everyone is selling, all the time, to the point that you know even the doctor is selling you in the clinic. The saying, “If you go to see a surgeon, he will recommend surgery” is true. There is nowhere you can go in this country without being pitched. I would watch televangelists and my stomach would turn at the spectacle of salesmanship occurring which was clearly in the name of money and fame rather than God. The beach, TV, and door-to-door evangelists with their pamphlets had nothing new to share, and I wondered how their pitch worked on anyone. The questions I had were not in need of a true or false answer, but the pitchmen were trying to close the deal as if I were buying a car: “So do you want this baby in red or blue?”

This sales style of evangelization reminded me of salespeople at work, some who would throw their mothers into traffic if it meant hitting their quota. Salespeople in the software world must tailor their message to whatever product or feature produced the biggest bonus or commission. In corporate America, there is so much smoke and mirrors that it’s difficult not to see snake oil in all products on the market eventually, and unfortunately it was most apparent in the religious proselytizing. The trick to all sales is to appear like you are not selling something, but that you have something the buyer wants and needs. Funny that what the beach and TV evangelists were selling was in fact what I wanted and needed, but their pitch was not working.

So for saving my soul, this elevator-pitch approach actually confirmed my suspicions of that old Marxist “opiate of the masses” idea, as if believing in religion meant being a simpleton and sucker who only believed because heaven sounded like a better option than hell.

Who can argue with that? Heaven does sound better than hell. But I was lost on four things that the beach and TV evangelists were skipping over. I didn’t figure out what this approach was missing until I listened to Bishop Robert Barron, who spelled it out in a podcast. I couldn’t articulate the problem, but he could. These four points were the problem of why I couldn’t get on board with the simple pitch:

* Existence of God: Do I even believe in God? This is the first block and if you can’t get past this one then you’ll never get to the Cross. But I would never have got past this block without falling on my face and having to find the Street Light God. (Thank God for that Street Light God.) I realized in the end that finding the existence of God is not really an intellectual exercise, but an act of faith. And once you believe, only then do you understand. I do believe in God, because of the First Cause and Contingency arguments. Basically, something cannot come from nothing. I’ve moved on past this, but this is where most atheists and agnostics get stuck, and rightly so. Good luck with the Resurrection if you don’t believe in God! But if intellectual arguments are needed, then I choose to take up sides with Thomas Aquinas in his 5 Ways.

* The Bible: Fundamentalism and literalism had blocked me from considering it as anything but myth. I truly didn’t understand how Catholics read it until recently. I had to start over with a non-fundamentalist reading to even get started. Until I understood how to read the Bible properly as a Catholic, the wall was impassable. How Catholics read the Bible has made all the difference in the world to me.

* Anti-intellectualism: Catholicism appeared to be against deep thinking, against reason. But this is the picture painted by those who dislike the Church, that want us to believe that Catholicism is merely an act of ancient ritual and superstition. I was like Han Solo, doubting “hokey religion” as “simple tricks and nonsense.” In reality, the Church has a deep, intellectual history, but this had been somehow hidden from me and needed to be “re-discovered” by me. Starting with Augustine, I began to see how unexposed I was to the tradition of intellectual ideas. From those early church writings, through Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics, all the way to Popes Benedict and Bishop Barron, I began to realize the vastness of Catholic thought and teaching. All of the deep questions of philosophy, art, and literature have been considered and argued over the last two thousand years by people wiser than me. I had shut myself out of two millennia of wisdom and thought because of the prior two problems regarding God and the Bible. Reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Word on Fire Bible blew my socks off as I found my assumptions to be wrong time and again. Plus, there is no shortage of intellectuals among the Dominicans, Jesuits, and Franciscans. The nerds at Catholic Answers seem to be able to take on all comers on any topic, be it chemistry, physics, history, or theology. This is what shocked me: there is no stone unturned in the cosmology of the Church, and no question too hard for it to answer. I may not like all the answers, but there is an answer. When I think of a question, when I’m feeling clever and believe I’ve found a plot hole, I quickly learn that my question has already been mulled over long ago and answered in excruciating detail.

* Science: Finally, religion and science are not enemies but different avenues to truth. Catholicism is surprisingly pro-science, far more than I suspected. The perception of a conflict between science and religion is invented, again by those who dislike religion. The idea that the Church is anti-science is not only wrong, but the complete opposite. The Catechism states that science glorifies God in helping us understand his creation. The Church’s only ask is that science should be done for good rather than evil. So figuring out atomic bombs and tweaking viruses for biological warfare are obviously bad, while curing disease and understanding the universe is good. In other words, the Church requests that science avoid advancing the opportunity for sin in the world. Not exactly controversial. Science reveals the world, but science cannot destroy or outshine God. The Catechism is quite clear on this in Faith and science: "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are."

As far as bringing myself back to the faith, I can say that Bishop Barron made more sense to me than a thousand other voices and I am grateful for his podcast and books, as that was the entry point that I needed to come back to the Church. Quitting drinking brought me to God, and Word on Fire brought me back to the Church.

Alongside Robert Barron, there is another man, Timothy Keller, a Presbyterian, who made equally significant points to me about why that beach evangelism failed to work. He said, paraphrasing from a podcast, that there’s a gulf of difference between “religious proselytizing” and “gracious good newsing.” Jesus calls us to do gracious good newsing. No one wants the other form. Want to evangelize people? Then do the good newsing. Humility and grace will win converts, because knowing and showing that you are a sinner and not better than anyone else will catch a lot more fish. Oh, and treat everyone the same. Keller says your soul craves something, and Jesus gives it the living water that it needs.

That’s the stuff - the simple stuff, without any lights or music or hand waving or virtual retreats. No psychedelics or TED talks needed. Gracious good newsing. Show me by example. I can believe that, and, heck, I can do that, because I am finally past those 4 bullet points above, which were the hurdles I couldn’t leap over for most of my adult life.

Once past those blocks, I could worship God and pray to God. And then I could work toward loving others and expect nothing in return because Jesus has already died for my sins, and my salvation is through him. Because I am full of sin and mistakes, I need to love others. That is my duty as a Christian for what Jesus has done for us. In fact, if I cannot love someone, if I am struggling, I try to think of why. To love thy neighbor is not easy, and that’s why we have to double our efforts when we struggle to do so. The moment we forget the greatest commandment, we have lost the purpose, and we will keep losing because disdain or hate has stolen our gaze. God is love, and each person is a child of God, a person that deserves Christian love. Not lukewarm Christian love, but real love, just as Jesus gathered the tax collectors and lepers and all manner of sinners to him. This doesn’t mean all sins should be allowed and celebrated, because that is literally what the modern world thinks we need. We need to love the drunkard, not the fact that he’s drunk and wants to be drunk. Somehow people managed to love me through my drinking years, but it was clear that my priorities were out of order. The modern Pharisees are the ones who get lost in the dogma and lose the love. To me, Catholic teachings have the comprehensive cosmology that works and makes sense, both intellectually and spiritually.

I suspect that any person who enters a church on any Sunday has about the same amount of sins on their conscience as any other person. Many of us have private sins that perhaps we only expose in silence or confession, or we fail to see altogether. Every soul in attendance at any given mass carries his or her own millstone into the pew. Everyone has a cross to bear, everyone has a vice, a tendency that weighs them down. Accepting sinners is part of the gig, especially when their flaws are not like our own flaws. This goes back to my flawed thoughts about flaws: my flaws are fine, but yours…are not ok. That doesn’t work. Now, clearly not every sin is as bad as murder, but there is a long list of grave matters that the Church defines and I wish you luck discerning God’s intention on which one is worse than the others. Last I checked they were all “grave” matters and each of us need to be constantly reconfigured and oriented toward Jesus. In reality, all of us sinners have at least one major issue to tackle and resolve through penance and faith in Jesus Christ.

“…penance…must take into account the penitent's personal situation and must seek his spiritual good. It must correspond as far as possible with the gravity and nature of the sins committed. It can consist of prayer, an offering, works of mercy, service of neighbor, voluntary self-denial, sacrifices, and above all the patient acceptance of the cross we must bear. Such penances help configure us to Christ, who alone expiated our sins once for all.”

This doesn’t mean sins of the modern age should just be glossed over and we pass laws enshrining and celebrating sin. There exists a Natural Law. Going out and getting drunk on purpose is against the rules. Looking at smut online is against the rules. Sex and booze both pave the road to nowhere. Drinking to drunkenness, in my experience, is the gateway to many other sins. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the multitude of social and family ills that beer and liquor unleash. Drug use and drunkenness open a floodgate to the whole garden of earthly delights. I believe that drinking gets too much of a pass in some Catholic circles. This concerns me quite a bit, as there is nearly a celebration of a drinking culture in the Church that many Protestant circles reject, and I think drinking is the plank in the eye of Catholics while they admonish others for their sins. I suspect much of the sin in the sex abuse scandal was due to drunkenness.

St. Paul kind of sums up the modern world in one sentence of what we should not be doing.

…let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. (Rom 13.13)

Drinking, drugs, and pointless sex are a no-go, according to St. Paul. And the “rivalry and jealousy” phrase reeks of social media.

What gets thrown into the same pot by Paul? Sex and booze. Both are journeys away from God, both are false idols of this world. Both of these pursuits are searches into empty alleyways, which look like a carnival from the outside but turn into prisons. The key to “love” is not abandoning anyone who goes down those alleys to check out the carnival, but rather to wait for them to wake up and walk out, free from the bondage. Oh, and the other key is to not follow them down the alleyway and join in on the carnival of orgies and drunkenness.

Take a look at the list on this page of mortal sins and contact me if you are free from all of them, since you might just be the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and I think I’d like to meet you. As for me, I can tell you that on any Sunday, I have, or have in the past, had one or more of these mortal sins marking me for need of forgiveness and penitential acts. I can see plenty that I know I’ve committed and on some occasions definitely should not have joined the Communion line.

In fact, I just realized that gluttony happened to me this morning, when after breakfast I sort of had a second breakfast. Thus I’ve already befouled my day with a mortal sin, during Lent no less, yet no one will shame me for my error because I downed that extra Pop Tart in private.

I am not the model of piety, and I know quite a few believers who are also like me. They are all like me, with human frailties and problems. In reality, even those who have remained faithful throughout the struggles of the Church commit sins every week, every day. I know that modern Christians like to draw the battle line in the sand between moral relativism and moral absolutism, where we hunker down behind a redoubt, bricked in by the absolute truths of Natural Law. But I will say the test for Christians is the same as it ever was: if I cannot love my neighbor, all of them, then I better check myself and try again, because the Golden Rule is kind of important. I mean, it’s just that little detail that Jesus said “the whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

I fail, and that’s the whole point of why I need to keep going back to Mass and asking for forgiveness during the Confiteor. If I fail to love someone that is different from me, or I spurn them because they don’t like me, then I didn’t really love them in the first place and I am at fault. First, I need to keep my own side of the street clean before I worry about someone else’s side of the street.

I believe the true question for love is not a question at all, but a statement of fact from 1 John 2:9. This is the whole test, right here:

Whoever says he is in the light, yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is nothing in him to cause a fall.

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