Why Did Peter Sink?

The most difficult part of faith to me, is the part where you have to actually have faith. Consider this definition, and think of the implications of it against the backdrop of our world today:

By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. (CCC 143)

Think about what is being requested here. If I completely give my intellect and will to anything, wouldn’t that just make me an automaton or a robot? How gullible do you think I am? You know, blind faith is how cults get started! The definition above always seemed too extreme. I could not subscribe to without a very compelling reason to do so, with ample evidence and reason behind why I would ever submit wholly to anything.

First, to even bring me to the table to consider this deal, the product or service needs to offer an amazing deal, a prize that cannot be gotten anywhere else through any other vendor.

I have already written about the efforts I’ve given toward things of this world, such as alcohol, knowledge, work, and exercise, but in those pursuits I didn’t give complete power over myself. You might say I divided up my intellect and will between a few pursuits at a time, but never fully to any single thing. While drinking I never reached anywhere near the point of alcoholic nihilism like that of Leaving Las Vegas. I certainly never won my age group in any marathons or foot races, proving that I could have trained harder. At work, I may throw myself into tasks but eventually I slack off or burnout. I don’t know that I’ve ever given myself completely to anything.

While I pursued those things, I imagined that I could still be good, or more specifically, virtuous. Obviously I was more virtuous with exercise as my highest priority rather than alcohol, but what I want and desire to be is to be vigilant in staying virtuous. From the self-help books of today, to Stoicism and Epicureanism, to Confucianism, to Buddhism, a code of ethics can be found in a thousand flavors. Each can be applied for living virtuously and righteously, to a high degree of success.

For a time I was enamored with Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. In fact, I still am. He recorded an amazing list of thoughts on living righteously, as he simultaneously tried to halt the rise of a rival Christian ethics that was catching fire among citizens of the empire. Today, a modern Stoic movement’s rise is gathering steam among the secular world, as its core teachings fit into a inward looking self-reliance, meditation, and “mindfulness” (which seems to be the secular term for prayer that we use today). To this day, I refer back to certain passages in my dog-eared copy of Marcus Aurelius’s thoughts. For instance, this passage is powerful to me:

Whatever anyone does or says, I must be a good man. It is as if an emerald, or gold or purple, were always saying: ‘Whatever anyone does or says, I must be an emerald and keep my colour.’ (VII.15)

The book contains an amazing set of ideas for living, many of which you can find strong parallels in the Gospels in the words of Jesus. Verses on forgiveness, kindness, strength, and the fleeting nature of life jump off the page. Marcus Aurelius’s writing contains a remarkable worldview that works well, but, in my opinion, there is one crack in the Stoic concrete that the ice of life wedges apart: the Stoic looks for help from within, while the Christian looks for help outside, from God. The inward vs. outward gaze makes all the difference.

I have already learned the hard way that my willpower alone does not work, or does not work for long whenever I have tried. Willpower and discipline come from the self, but without connecting the mind and body to the external God, we cannot overcome our own built-in flaws. I have character flaws that cannot be unwound from inside because they are written on my bones and brain. The power to overcome these flaws cannot start from within me, because the power doesn’t live in me. The power is outside of me, and I need to let it in to be there. If I don’t let it in, I can’t find it. Once I let the Holy Spirit in, then I can create a “little chapel in the heart” where I can go for strength and trust, to remove anxiety and fear. In addition, the Stoic method works best for the strong, not the weak, ill, or elderly. It approaches life’s problems from a position of strength. Emotionless love and shades of forgiveness exist in Marcus Aurelius, but nothing like the forgiveness that Jesus commands. The best example is when Peter asks Jesus how many times we should forgive someone, and he throws out a number, seven. Is seven times enough?

I can hear the wheels turning in Peter’s head: “Hey, Jesus, about the whole forgiveness thing, what’s the actual maximum before we can hate or discard the person again without feeling bad?” I can almost hear him thinking about someone that he’s irritated with as he’s asking, probably his brother Andrew or one of the other apostles.

Jesus delivers one of his greatest one-liners on forgiveness, shooting down Peter’s question. “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.”* Probably not what Peter was looking for in the answer but the one he needed. Again, I can imagine him nodding and thinking, “Wow, I was almost to seven times forgiving Andrew. I mean, I was thinking that in basketball after seven fouls you get the bonus and free throws, but I’m not even close. He gets to commit seventy more fouls and I have to keep forgiving him.” I don’t think anyone is as relatable as Peter, since his weaknesses and eye for shortcuts do not seem that far off from my own.

If anything makes the Christian message stand out from all others, it’s the approach. Rather than coming from a position of strength, the message of Jesus comes from a position of vulnerability and humbleness. Jesus comes to serve the weak, not the strong. This unexpected twist on power flips the script on all deities. We do not gain God’s favor by our ability, but by our need for God. And God gives the grace if we only ask for it. We used to joke, “What is the best kind of beer?” The answer was “Free beer.” This grace from God is free and it really is much better than free beer, because there is no headache. I just have to ask for help and God fortifies me against anything. I need to be weak, and need help, to be strong. Admitting this is hard, asking for help goes against much of our worldly instincts. This message reverberates through the entire Christian era, even in a recent homily from Pope Francis.

“Be reconciled: the journey is not based on our own strength. No one can be reconciled to God on his or her own…What enables us to return to him is not our own ability or merit, but his offer of grace…The beginning of the return to God is the recognition of our need for him and his mercy, our need for his grace. This is the right path, the path of humility. Do I feel in need, or do I feel self-sufficient?”*

If a code of ethics is all we want or need, then Christianity would never have got off the ground. Even the ancient world had plenty of self-help philosophies. What sets Jesus apart from others is the claim that he is God, but he serves everyone, forgives everyone, and suffers. All of this from a position of weakness rather than strength. This is a wild claim to make and either puts him into one of two categories: he is either telling the truth, or he’s insane. If he is insane, then he’s lying about being the son of God. If he is lying, the resurrection is bogus. If the resurrection does not occur, then all of the New Testament can be thrown out. St. Paul said this very clearly, that all is in vain without the resurrection. Even the ethics and morals are moot because the ancient world already had plenty of moral teachers, ones that were not insane. If virtue is the sole goal, then options already existed.

Thus, it all comes down to the resurrection. All of it: every miracle and parable, every clever comeback and turning of the cheek. If the resurrection does not occur, then the whole New Testament is a tale like any other mythology. As I mentioned earlier, one of the turning points in my loss of faith came from asking questions about the empty tomb and that it seemed easy to remove a body and claim resurrection. Not only that, but the different Gospel accounts of the empty tomb still conjure up those old doubts in me. Were there guards posted at the tomb or not? Who did the women see there? Was it one man, or two men? Or an angel? Exactly how many women came to the tomb and can we get the names please? Was the stone still in place or already rolled back? How heavy was the stone? How were the women going to roll back the stone for anointing if it was sealed? Were they at the wrong tomb? Did Mark add the resurrection paragraph after his first writing, and if so, did he think the empty tomb spoke for itself or did he add it to “fix” his story later on? Where is this tomb?

This can go on and on. It has gone on among scholars, for a long time. I am not going to go any further into my former doubts on the tomb, because I stumbled across a used book in a Goodwill thrift store called Who Moved the Stone? which addresses all of these questions. I’m glad someone else already did the heavy lifting. I just needed to read this short book in a single sitting to soak up the answers I was longing for regarding the tomb.

I’m also not going to go further on the tomb because of one other major reason that I cannot explain away: I cannot fathom the immense drive and spirit of the apostles, who tended to waffle, quibble, and argue. The flaws and frailties of these men make them clearly human, not fiction. And they went from cardboard to steel alloy in conviction, strength, and boldness. Their message never wavered in the aftermath. The only explanation to me is that they did indeed experience and confirm the resurrection of Jesus. All of the apostles were fearful and had fled to hiding places during and after the crucifixion, but then become recklessly fearless and willing to suffer any amount of pain to tell the world what happened.

These first Christians didn’t give their lives for a philosophical system…they died to uphold what they knew because they had seen it with their own eyes. Had it been a lie, then why die for it? … One after another these eyewitnesses gave up their lives defending the truth they had seen: Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead. (The Search, p.119)

Suddenly, somehow, Peter goes from being weak and furtive to a fortress of faith. He is crucified upside down thirty years later, having preached the message his entire life, with no education beyond that of a fisherman. The other apostles fare the same. That is, badly, as they are stoned, burned, stabbed, beaten, boiled, clubbed, and crucified. All the while they are relentless in spreading this message, alone, in different areas of the known world, telling the same story. If they were up to clever tricks about the tomb or Jesus’ body, someone would have cracked and tattled. Moreover, if the authorities, Jewish or Roman, had stolen or hidden the body, they would have just produced it and ended this tall tale.

Something happened, something profound, mysterious, impossible and life-changing for these people. Robert Barron says it best:

“That this dejected band would spontaneously generate the faith that would send them careening around the world with the message of Resurrection strains credulity. What is undeniably clear is that something had happened to Jesus - something so strange that those who witnessed it had no category to describe it.” WOF Bible, p.280).

With daily readings I have come to believe. My faith has come by effort and truly needs continual conversion to stay strong. I did not fall off a horse, like Paul did. The Church talks about continual conversion and the need to restore the belief, and this is true. In coaching there is a saying that you need to refill your “E-tank,” your “Emotional Tank,” from time to time. That is true of coaching, and it’s true of faith. Belief can feel like a gas tank that needs a fill-up, which is why daily prayer is so beneficial to it. Faith is also like fitness, where as soon as you stop exercising the backsliding into sloth and muscle atrophy begins. Whenever we lose focus, we start to slide, and the world has many distractions to pull that focus away. In fact, modern technology is entirely based on pulling our focus away, which is why programmers and marketers have “focus” groups and A-B advertising tests to figure out how to pull your focus away from life so that instead we will focus on their products and services. All of this drains the E-Tank of faith.

As an example of losing that focus, and how quickly and easily it can happen: this morning I had spent time reading and praying and felt ready for the day, both in spirit and body. I got into my car and started driving. At the first stoplight a driver didn’t realize the light had turned green and I almost knee-jerkingly wanted to honk and call the man an idiot. I find this remarkable, as I had just spent time reading about humility, and the lack of it among the Pharisees. “For they preach but they do not practice.”* I’m such a Pharisee. How easy it is to be moral and righteous when alone, and how difficult in real interactions with people. So many of us today, particularly in our cars, leap to anger almost instantly, over minuscule events and perceived insults. I’ll apply that same sentiment to social media, which is the greatest poison to our peace of mind of all modern invention. At least in my car, only I can hear whatever cruel whim flits between my ears. Not so on Facebook and YouTube comments, where we are all free to spew angsty discord to the entire world.

The human heart and mind so quickly drift from intentions and hopes, and so I cannot imagine the remaining eleven apostles, who were ordinary men, sticking to their wits and resolve with such commitment unless they were utterly convinced of the rising of Jesus. This accomplishment was not completed behind closed doors, by reading and writing, but by interaction in the world in the face of monstrous opposition. They did not bring the message by the sword, but rather the sword was put to them. These ordinary people did not flinch or crumble, as if their sign of the cross made their spirit, if not their bodies, impervious to the slings and arrows of this world.

Now, if they had solely come up with a great idea or story that satisfied our hearts, they might have convinced only gullible people to believe. If that were the case, then the powers of the world wouldn’t have worried about them. But the apostles took this idea of the risen Jesus into the heart of the intellectual world of Jerusalem, and shockingly, won the argument. The eleven didn’t flee to the hinterlands to start proclaiming, they returned to the very location of the trial and death of Jesus, where witnesses lived and where the events occurred.

[There is]…the indisputable fact that Christianity was gaining adherents at a prodigious pace. The movement was spreading beyond all reasonable expectation...The terrific persecution of Saul, involving an inquisition to places as far distant as Damascus, shows that four years later it had grown to really alarming proportions.*

Put this fact together with who first witnessed and started to tell of the risen Jesus. The women at the tomb were first, and Mary Magdalene explicitly is mentioned. The very first voice that recognizes and announces the missing body and resurrection is a woman who had “seven devils” driven out of her and was a “sinful” woman. If spinning a yarn, the Gospel writers would have posted someone of political or worldly significance. Perhaps someone like Caiaphas, the high priest, might have come to the tomb and said, “I was wrong. I can’t believe it, but it’s true,” and thrown himself into prayer. But no, the witness to the most important event in history is a “fallen” woman, who would not have clout, nor even enfranchisement among women. Yet she is the chosen witness, fitting with the “last will be first” of Jesus’ teachings. The empty tomb, as seen by the women, is undisputed. There seems to be no one arguing that the body is gone and the burial clothes were left behind. The only argument seems to be about what happened to the body, but not about the empty state of the tomb and the women being the first to discover it.

The second voice is Peter’s, the fisherman, and his first proclamation starts with something funny, assuring that he and his cohort are not drunk. “These people are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.”* That he needed to say this suggests that he knew this message sounded radical and insane. Without any education or platform to deliver knowledge, he begins by telling people, “Really, people, I’m not on drugs.” But the message is not aimed at simpletons, rather he delivers it to “devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem.”* This implies both uneducated people and intellectuals. If this were all a charade and tale, the leader would need to be someone steeped in rhetoric and debate, to handle the rebuttals and logical criticisms that surely came immediately. But it’s a man who catches fish for a living, who somehow convinces thousands upon thousands that what he has seen is true, in the city where the event occurred. Peter is not a genius or shrewd salesman, but after Jesus’ death his character is altered dramatically. I often think of the saying, “The truth requires no rehearsal.” This is why salespeople and lawyers need to rehearse arguments, demonstrations, and pitches: because there is a roundabout angle to getting to the “truth.” Peter is able to speak plainly, from the heart, and people believe him, unrehearsed, because he’s telling the truth and wouldn’t be able to convince anyone if he were telling a contrived fiction. He doesn’t have the training and toolkit to do that. His transformation is unexplainable without the Holy Spirit filling him with grace. The same can be said for the others who became warriors of faith after having so recently been trembling and afraid at the crucifixion, hiding out, even returning to their old jobs after being devastated at the death of Jesus, thinking that he had not “redeemed Israel” after all.

“It took an objective encounter with the risen Jesus to crystallize the disciples' faith in Him and cause them to proclaim His resurrection. Visions and subjective experiences would not have done it. Something had been seen. Something real.”*

“Gethsemane's cowards became Pentecost's heroes. This is inexplicable without the Resurrection. Had prestige, wealth, and increased social status accrued to new believers when they professed Christ and His resurrection, their profession would be logically understandable. In fact, however, their "rewards" were of a different type, eventually involving lions, crucifixion, and every other conceivable method of stopping them from talking.”*

I spent many years refuting and mocking the idea of the resurrection of Jesus. I have made many rude thoughts about it, siding with the doubters and logicians, writing off miracles as artifacts of an age where the world was haunted by demons. In reality, I guess my abandonment of Christianity was one response, because if you do not accept the resurrection, then the only answer is total abandonment of the faith. St. Paul has said the same, as have many others. Without the resurrection, what’s the point of it all?

I cannot explain how resurrection can occur, nor do I need to, because I believe now that events can happen beyond our comprehension, that science does not and will never explain everything. Even if life is discovered on other planets, or our physicists take us to the depths of the quantum world, and biology cures the last disease, and psychologists can explain away and prescribe solutions for all mental ailments, nothing can replace the need for God in my heart, as I have followed it all the way down to the end of the line, and I know that the answer to all questions is through faith, by surrendering my will and intellect to belief in the resurrection of Jesus. The flaw of humanity is real, and I find nothing more convincing than the resurrection of Jesus as the cure, for the forgiveness of me and my enemies, as the only way to live in the world and hold on to one another for the promise of the next. There is only one path to removing hate, and that is forgiveness and love, and that is why the power of the Christian message never dies. Right now the world may be called “post-Christian” but it’s not, as nothing the secular world can offer will ultimately replace the message of love and forgiveness through God. The United States and Chinese empires of today will fall away like every other empire before it, like the USSR, the Third Reich, the Austro-Hungarians, the Ottomans, the Hapsburgs, the Holy Roman empire, the Romans, the Greeks, and a thousand other willed sand castles of mankind, yet the truth of faith will endure. People have in the past and will again in the future use, abuse, and twist the faith to make it a tool of worldly power, but the center will hold because love and forgiveness shine through any lies in the end. Straying from that cannot go forever because the believers are like yo-yos, who must come back to the starting point. Nothing could shake the power of the message that empowered the very first believers of Jesus, and time and again those who hold steadfast to the Golden Rule correct the errant ways of a drifting faith. To this day the power of the Word remains fully charged, and this is because of the resurrection. From a position of weakness, forgiveness, and love, we are saved from death, and the faith will carry that forward and never end. While we quibble over traffic, split our families over politics, moralize over sexuality and death, obsess with celebrities and materialism, entertain ourselves with movies and music, and distract ourselves with phones and computers, the righteousness of Jesus’ message and resurrection remains unbothered. Even if Christians go back into hiding for a thousand years, and the followers are once again hunted down, as they are today in parts of the world, the faith will never die - because there is nothing better on offer, nothing like resurrection and the forgiveness of sins, nothing above it, nothing with more truth, and nothing more satisfying to the heart. We are the inheritors of the greatest mystery of all time. We are the same as those originals, lost and found, over and over again. We may start out like Saul, but end up like Paul, unable to explain how or why it happened, just as we can’t fully explain the resurrection. Once you choose to believe it, you don’t have to explain it. I just know that it is real and that I have changed.

“The phenomenon that here confronts us is one of the biggest dislodgements of events in the world's history, and it can be accounted for only by an initial impact of colossal drive and power…a habitual doubter like Thomas, a rather weak fisherman like Peter, a gentle dreamer like John, a practical tax gatherer like Matthew, a few seafaring men like Andrew and Nathanael, the inevitable women, and at most two or three others…seriously, does this rather heterogeneous body of simple folk, reeling under the shock of the Crucifixion, the utter degradation and death of their Leader, look like the driving force we require? Frankly it does not…Something came into the lives of these very simple and ordinary people that transformed them.”*

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I can only imagine that a true scholar would be rolling their eyes at much of this, given my amateur and immature understanding of theology, philosophy and the history of the Catholic Church. Likewise, I don’t expect that I’ve stumbled onto anything new and that this may read as a typical recovery story. It’s unlikely that someone will say, “Stop the presses: Here’s a leftover that found God after trying everything else. Wow, and an ex-drinker too?!” How unoriginal, I know.

Still, I’ll continue in case one person out in the ether finds any of this pertinent to their own life situation. The major events that drove me to this spot in life where I’m writing this at all are as follows: the faith of my childhood, the discovery of drinking, the pursuit of knowledge, my varied and failed attempts to quit drinking, the arrest for drunk driving, my subsequent search for meaning, and the eventual return to faith.

Which takes me to my next stumbling block, “The Fall of Man” and original sin. These loaded terms were always a sticky point, and I would guess might be for other religious “nones.” I thought this took a negative view of humanity, and that we actually had more goodness inside than evil. Back in college I felt this smacked of an “opiate of the masses” argument. Then I spent 20 years trying to behave myself and failed miserably.

The tree of knowledge of good and evil, when taken literally, does seem a bit simplistic, but when taken literarily becomes genius. As I mentioned in one of my prior takes on drinking, the apple on the tree of knowledge could have been a bottle of Jack Daniels, or Coors Light, or a fancy cocktail. As Jim Gaffigan said, “An apple? Have you ever been tempted by an apple? I would have been like ‘put some caramel on it and come back to me.’”

Strange, but it seems familiar to me, this path of innocence, temptation, knowledge, suffering, separation from God, focusing on self, and wandering in search of meaning…and…wait a minute. I have heard this before. It’s the summarized version of my entire life!

Obviously the author of Genesis didn’t need as many words as I do to make a point. Using only a tree, serpent, and apple, the whole tale of “What’s wrong with me?” was told in a few pages. Yet I need many thousands of words and asides to get to the same point. Apparently I write much like I swim, zig-zagging instead of aiming directly for the buoy.

The apple is not an apple. The apple is the source of temptation and the vices we cannot give up. The apple is drink, drugs, porn, news, possessions, fame, fortune, jealousy, hate. It’s one or more of these, or additional items not included on that list, but in summary it’s something other than God.

G.K. Chesterton said “…the only dogma for which we have empirical evidence is the dogma of original sin.” Watch the 11 o’clock news at night, or even better, watch what’s going on inside of you. You’ll see the evidence…of original sin there. This deep level dysfunction that we can’t solve on our own. And that is an enormously important door into Christianity. (WOF Episode 270 at 11 minutes in)

St. Augustine famously said, “Lord let me be pure - but not yet!” There is a yearning for goodness, somewhere, inside everyone, but we want to cling to our will and vice because it’s fun or we believe that these sideshows represents freedom. I didn’t want to let go of drinking even though I knew that drinking continually disabled me from living the life I wanted to live. With alcohol in my life, I could never live up to the morals that I pretended to hold. I could not stick to an exercise program, could not be honest with people. Every regret in my life came from a night of drinking. Without exception, every hurt I caused in this world could be drawn directly back to drinking. Removing my “freedom” to drink gave me all of the good things that I wanted and I became more free precisely because of self-denial.

Unfortunately, vices and sin can be like a game of whack-a-mole, where you knock one vice down and another pops up. Pride, vanity, lust, anger, the urge to dominate others - knock any of these down and they will re-emerge in another form, shape shifting, always looking for cracks to crawl back into. Like a house, the slightest of gaps in windows or doors allows the outside air to seep inside and you never notice the draft, until suddenly you are shivering on a bitterly cold night. Only then you will notice the source of the problem, but it’s been there the whole time, even during the days of fair weather.

There is much chatter in the past two decades about being “Good without God.” Sure you can be good without God, but the hollowness of that state crumbles under duress. I recall the time I saw Richard Dawkins speak at a bookstore. At the time I thought he was cool. I liked how he was undermining the faithful Pharisees of the modern age and sowing discord among the Christian hypocrites.

But in watching and listening to Dawkins it dawned on me after only about ten minutes how miserable he seemed, even in his arguments. The smugness filled the room. In contrast I thought of my grandmother with her rosary and the never-ending joy in her that she brought to her family. I thought of the billions of people who found hope in faith. His uninspiring message made me leave that talk feeling empty, the opposite of how I felt around my grandmother and other Christians. I entered as a Dawkins fan, only to leave repulsed by his message. This put me in a no-man’s land because I couldn’t accept God, nor could I reject God. If the “selfish gene” was the driver of all motivation, then we are selfish, and therefore sinners anyway. Worse, without redemption we are hopelessly evil. If there is only the rule of law to constrain our actions, put on your seatbelts, things will continue to get bumpy. Some people may be good without God, but not for long, and not when times get hard. Yes, plenty of people pretend to be Good with God, too, and I know some atheists and agnostics that have a stronger moral compass than some Christians I know. But without God, in the end, it’s every man for himself.

What Revelation makes known to us is confirmed by our own experience. For when man looks into his own heart he finds that he is drawn towards what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from his good creator. (CCC 401)

By my own experience, I am cognizant of this problem. If and when I remove my focus from God, I will soon start to scowl and stew, and distrust people and hate them for their foibles. When I keep prayer and hope alive, when I turn toward God, I can love my neighbor and expect nothing in return. My story is like that of Peter being invited out of the boat to walk on the water. “Courageous in the boat, but timid on the waters*” I too will sink when faced with fear and uncertainty if I lose focus. I take my eyes off of Jesus and fall, letting doubt discourage me, and I will quickly turn my back on the one place from which I can draw strength. The dysfunction takes over, the creature within rises, and I look for my apples, the ones I like to eat when I think God is not there. My favorite apple is knowledge. It’s like a HoneyCrisp apple to me. And I can only think of the Screwtape Letters, # 1, as the method of distraction to pull me away from what is good, back toward sin. To wind me up with doubt, I only need to apply racing thoughts:

Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about. *

I already know that I will lose focus and return to negative thinking and trip myself up over political, theological, or personal diversions. It’s inevitable. Other Christians will likely be the ones that push me away, but instead of letting that happen I need to hold the focus. Because after spending two decades searching for God, it would be a shame to do it all over again, when I already know the answer. Maybe Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings said it best, summing up the condition: “the hearts of men are easily corrupted.” The Catholic Church and Pat Benatar agree: Love is a battlefield.

Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield, man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God's grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity. (CCC 409)

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 problem with the Bible is in the beginning. Genesis: that masterful piece of writing, that somehow causes so much confusion. Throughout college and young adulthood, my interactions with Christians that read the Bible literally caused me to turn away. Typically the extreme views of the inerrant word bothered me, and here I’m referring to ostrich-head-in-the-sand type of claims like that of the Universe being only 6,000 years old or people co-existing with dinosaurs. Unfortunately, at that time I deemed those extreme views as default positions of religion, as I spun further away from any and all religion.

I felt exactly like St. Augustine, who said some 1600 years ago: “I was being killed by the Old Testament passages when I took them literally.” (Confessions p109, p414) This ability of ancient writers, from Augustine to St. Paul to Homer, to nail the exact feeling I have often surprises me, although it shouldn’t. There is a massive trove of wisdom from our ancestors, from all cultures.

In college I had taken New Testament and Old Testament classes, thumbing over much of the Bible. What I found enjoyable as a child were the stories, such as the Creation, the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, the fascinating stories of the lineage of Jacob and Joseph. But in college I began to read closer and find the discrepancies with modernity, such as the rainbow being a sign of a covenant with Noah as opposed to refracted light exposing the spectrum to our eyes. Another example that had me laughing was the reference to mathematical Pi in First Kings. This error of Pi = 3 instead of Pi = 3.14… blew my mind, as the infallible book had mistaken one of the most common facts that every school child knows.

Then he made the molten sea; it was made with a circular rim, and measured ten cubits across, five in height, and thirty in circumference. (1 Kings 7:23)

Pi equals 3? No, no, stop right there: Rainbows and Pi had known answers, they were not signs and approximations. The teacher explained away the difference, the glaring error, but I could see the wizard behind the curtain now, nobody was fooling me any longer! About the same time the movement surrounding the “Historical Jesus” became known to me and I fortified my doubt with books and materials from the “Jesus Seminar” effort, which I now find to be aptly described as"Hot-Tub Religion" -- a Christanity with all of the pleasures and none of the pains -- the theological equivalent of Diet Coke.

Thus, in college and for years afterward, I read the Bible literally and drained it of magic and miracle, much like Thomas Jefferson did with his Bible using a razor to carve out all miracles.

The funny thing was that I had become the literalist. Fundamentalists and atheists read the Bible literally in every book. As time has passed and I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed that extremists, religious or non-religious, from the political left or the political right - these people are almost identical mirrors of each other.

Well, my teacher attempted to explain the problem of Biblical literalism to me, but I had no interest in listening by that time. Both professors that I had on religious topics, I rejected, despite their knowledge far exceeding my own on the subject. On my term papers, the teacher would mark up my smart-ass comments and suggest that the rainbow could be a symbol, or that Pi need not be precise to the decimal in order to get the basic shape of a circle.

Sometimes you have to read a book three times to get the point. Actually, reading a book at different phases of the journey can provide new takeaways, as I know this from reading and re-reading Moby Dick and 1984 and The Brothers Karamazov and other masterpieces as I cruise through the five acts of my own life’s play. The problem with reading the Bible literally as a fundamentalist does is that it becomes robotic and feels spoon-fed. The problem with reading the Bible literally from the modern scientific view, as if the books were peer-reviewed academic papers, is that the context of the culture and the genre becomes lost in minor details that miss the entire purpose.

The change and awareness about literalism happened for me through a video, not a book. A short moment of teaching, of hearing something that I had heard many years before, shattered my cynicism in a moment.

I caught a video series called “Symbolon” that spelled out the difference between “literally” and “literarily.” One syllable. A few letters. It makes all the difference in the world to me.

The Catholic approach to Scripture is different from the fundamentalist view, which reads Scripture in a literalistic way. To discern the truth God put in Scripture, we must interpret the Bible literarily, remembering that God speaks to us in a human way, through the human writers of Scripture. That means that we examine the context and intent of the author for any given passage.

-From Symbolon (session 3)

The power of one syllable is stunning. Literally vs literarily makes a world of difference, and was a huge stepping stone to faith. In fact, as far as the power of one syllable goes, consider this: superlative and superlaxative are also only one syllable of difference, but what a difference in meaning.

I guess the problem was always this: I felt gullible and stupid swallowing the “literal” pill. Honestly, I think that was always the problem, from when an adult first told me to “Just believe and not ask questions,” that response knocked me back so far that I couldn’t get over it.

Alongside that, I failed to remember and realize that the people from two thousand and three thousand years ago also were not stupid. They survived and withstood hardships that my generation could not fathom. Their grasp of knowledge had a depth far beyond our own in seeing the world without the knowledge that has been revealed through science over the past two hundred years. I suspect if you threw the people from today back into the era of Moses, we would have gladly remained in Egypt unless he would have promised Netflix and porn on the other side of the Red Sea. Furthermore, the average person today, who so cleverly knows how to use appliances and technology, would be utterly useless in the ancient times and have no clue how to teach and apply any modern knowledge to their world, since we are all specialized and sharpened to very specific tasks today.

The difference between literally and literarily is but a single syllable, but the alteration in understanding leaps forward. I feel that this point of Catholic teaching has been buried for a long time and should be trumpeted from the Pope himself. Of course, it has been, I just wasn’t listening. If I could be so turned off by the literal readers turning the Bible into a square peg for a round hole, surely many others also felt that way. I think that’s why books like Moby Dick became so fascinating to me, because those were meant to be read for the deeper meaning, not the superficial “whiteness of the whale” that Ahab was so angry about. Reading Moby Dick literally would ruin the story. The book would be complete garbage if read literally instead of literarily.

I love books and literature, and I do believe that the many years of literal, fundamentalist voices claiming Biblical authority led to the demise of many individual faiths like mine. I could be wrong, and I often am, but I don’t think I’m alone.

I mentioned Bishop Barron earlier, because he is articulating the thoughts that I failed to muster. Seeds of ideas about faith that I had, he has brought to full bloom. In the Word on Fire Bible, an introduction discusses how to approach to the Bible. I used to laugh about this question, as I recall a college professor talking about “How should we approach William Blake?” As I can’t resist crudeness, I always thought this sounded like we might be going to kidnap him. I guess we should approach William Blake from behind, at night, with a dark van.

Sorry, another digression. Brevity is the soul of wit, and vigorous writing is concise. I’ll try to remember that.

Barron discusses in “How to approach the Bible” the solution to my inability to appreciate the book with five strategies. In my post-college years I did pick up the Bible once and decide that I would just read the whole thing again, as a piece of literature rather than revelation, as I had wanted it to be literature, but felt that dogma disallowed that type of reading. Well, reading Genesis is fun, and Exodus, but once I reached the laws of Leviticus I stopped. I couldn’t do it. I moved on to some science fiction and stayed there for a few years.

My approach to the Bible as a single book does not work. The idea that the Bible should be taken literally is a pointless question, because every book is a different genre. The Bible is not one book, but many books, and you have to read each book wearing the proper hat. Is it poetry or history? Is it a prophet speaking or a third-person narrator? When Genesis is read literarily, it truly is a magnificent piece of literature and speaks with great meaning, the deepest thoughts, and answers the questions of the hungry heart.

Too bad I didn’t know this long ago, but the Catechism spells it out pretty plainly, that Catholics do not read the Bible literally.

The account of the fall in Genesis uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents. (CCC 390)

In addition to that, the Catechism points this out rather bluntly, I just never bothered to read it.

In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words. In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking, and narrating then current. (CCC 109-110)

So that’s kind of embarrassing, for me anyway, when I think of my past editorials at parties and comments to tear down religion. I knew everything, but somehow didn’t know this. Weird. I wonder what else I didn’t know.

That distinction of how to read the Bible really was the largest block on my ability to proceed. If I could understand the “First Cause” and know that God had to exist, and allow myself an honest and intellectual look at the Bible versus a rote-learning pill-swallowing reading, this could be the start of something great.

The other four point of approaches to the Bible from Barron also knocked over some problematic things for me. Here’s the whole list of five things that demolished a wall between me and faith:

* Be attentive to the genre of each book. For example, Psalms is not a history book, so don’t read it like one.

* The Bible is a one book but it is a library, and it tells one story, the unfolding of a great drama.

* “Any interpretation of a biblical passage that militates against the love of God and neighbor is necessarily a bad interpretation.” St. Augustine said that love of God and neighbor is “the ultimate criterion for correct biblical reading.”

* Distinguish between what “is in the Bible and what the Bible teaches” for there is an “awful lot of cultural baggage from the ancient world.” Look for the overarching themes and meaning as a whole.

* The ultimate purpose of all books is the dying and rising of Jesus Christ and to “draw all people into communion” with Him.

The third item struck home because so often the “love” appears lost in modern arguments, especially in the online world of vitriolic commentary between those with and without faith, and even between those with different flavors of faith. In many cases the faithful seem to struggle with that point as badly or even worse than those who doubt. Once again, I wonder how many people have fallen away from faith because of bad interpretations? If you read the Bible literally instead of literarily you can get off-track and forget to take the love potion. The fact that anyone could reference the Bible for pro-slavery arguments sums up the problem of “literal” readings, because there is much talk of slavery in the Bible from the culture and setting - but the entire purpose of the overarching story is to love God and your neighbor.

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I did not become a believer overnight. However, I began to ask, seek, and knock on the door, and found that if I kept doing those three things I gained understanding in the areas where I had struggled. Following the “What do I have to lose?” argument, I started to discard pieces of my doubt and chose to believe. I would avoid nit-picking and scoffing at every bit of the Old Testament that didn’t make perfect sense in the 21st century, and instead look for an overarching meaning, with a greater focus on the New Testament. This intention of mine lacked originality, as I recalled Chapter 4 of the AA Big Book describing my exact condition:

We used to amuse ourselves by cynically dissecting spiritual beliefs and practices when we might have observed that many spiritually-minded persons of all races, colors, and creeds were demonstrating a degree of stability, happiness and usefulness which we should have sought ourselves.

Instead, we looked at the human defects of these people, and sometimes used their shortcomings as a basis of wholesale condemnation. We talked of intolerance, while we were intolerant ourselves. We missed the reality and the beauty of the forest because we were diverted by the ugliness of some its trees. We never gave the spiritual side of life a fair hearing.

All true. In the margins of my confirmation Bible from high school, I had scribbled in cynical comments alongside Genesis verses, as I had read the book literally to point out the contradictions. From the start I had issues, from the first pages, since not one but two creation stories occurred. In college I had read Native American creation stories, Hawaiian myths, Greek and other stories, and so I had tossed in the Hebrew book of Genesis with the lot, discounting it as nothing more than another myth. Rather, I considered it the dominant myth of creation, but no more correct than stories of Greek Zeus or Hawaiian Pele.

However, whenever I read any of those creation stories I marveled at how over space and time, separated groups of humans came up with similar ideas about the beginning, as if there were an intrinsic knowledge or capability of understanding the world we lived in. Primitive or not, we all have stories to explain the world around us. What struck me is that all of these peoples found an origin story, because they needed the spiritual presence in their life to explain why there is something rather than nothing. Why does anything exist?

Just as all kids do, I remember thinking of the universe and how it could not go on forever, that a meteor could not continue on to infinity, because I could not fathom infinity. Somewhere there must be a place where it ends, like where the vacuum of empty space just turns into a fuzzy TV screen. I often thought of a “backstop,” as on a baseball field, where if the ball gets past the catcher, it doesn’t roll forever. There’s a backstop to halt the ball. The universe had to have a backstop or fence, or some kind of ending and beginning. Furthermore, something had to be first, as something could not come from nothing.

The one thing that kept me from ever truly abandoning Catholicism, even as an atheist or agnostic, was the pursuit of science among its clergy. The Church has a lot of nerds in it who ponder these questions. As science had become my new religion, I considered the Big Bang the answer to the origin of the universe. When I first learned that it was a Christian scientist that came up with the theory, I felt a bit shocked, maybe even upset, because here religion somehow mingled with science without either being cheapened.

Evolution, of course, was the other elephant in the room, and most of the time I heard about Christians trying to remove it from the schoolbooks. From the Scopes trial to Intelligent Design to the latest Texas textbook controversies, there seemed to be a continuous goal to sweep the idea of evolution under a rug. Because of stories in the media over the last 25 years focusing on this fundamentalist view, I had forgotten that Catholics do not object to the idea of evolution. They teach evolution in Catholic schools and hold that evolution doesn’t conflict with Church teachings, because it doesn’t conflict with God as the “First Cause” of the universe, nor does it discount the spiritual soul, the ghost in the machine that transcends the atoms that form the body. The soul is touched by the sublime. This same idea can be found in all creation stories across the world, that deep in our hearts and minds we know that something cannot come from nothing and that the soul goes beyond the material world. Far from being anti-science, the Catholic Church seemed to be one of the few pro-science religions and this didn’t get any attention in the press. From the Church’s rulebook itself, the Catechism states it quite clearly:

The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers. (CCC 283)

Creation and evolution do not sit in permanent opposition to one another as both sides of the fundamentalist secular and religious folks would have us believe. Science and faith are not in a battle to the death. One thing that has amazed me is the number of practicing Christian and Jewish scientists in the world. I formerly considered these people to be mad, since holding both scientism and religious dogma could not be done simultaneously, or so I thought. These people had volumes more knowledge than myself on science, yet somehow they maintained their faith. How? Did they fail to take notes in college? Were they dense?

I think that I was a bit dense, and I realized that science has as many radical fundamentalists as any religion. While I strived to deny God, I could never remove the notion of the “First Cause.” Accepting this idea alone, rather than fighting it, reminds me a bit of the Ironman endurance race where I was trying to defeat the water rather than relaxing and letting it lift me up. Fortunately there is ample readings from the Church to discuss all of these things in detail, and far from running away from science, the Church’s embrace of knowledge means that truth can be sought in both lab coats and vestments.

Then there is art. Yes, art, the un-scientific pursuer of truth that spills forth from emotion and feeling, edging upon the spiritual realm beyond ours by its very attempt. We praise science for its march of progress, while art stands the test of time regardless of our knowledge of biology and chemistry and physics. Dante and Shakespeare do not diminish as we learn more about the world. The great epics and fables from all corners of the world are no less today than they were on first utterance. They were deep in meaning before technology allowed them to be presented on paper or phones, and their depth exceeds the tangible things of this world. If I think of a song that animates my heart, oldies like the heavenly praise of Ave Maria, or rage music like Smells like Teen Spirit, or tear jerkers such as Sunday Morning Coming Down by Johnny Cash and Fade into You by Mazzy Star - there is a paralyzing miracle to music that we all fall in love with, all of which brings us to a transcendent escape whether we want to admit it or not. For an atheist this is just brain chemistry and psychology at play, just as our soul is just atoms and electricity flitting about, bonding and breaking, bonding and breaking, until we fall into nothingness.

Perhaps it’s just a turning of the mind toward the divine that makes all the difference, just allowing it be possible. Admitting that maybe there is more than just science made all the difference for me in appreciating nature and art. When God is real, and faith is pursued rather than eschewed, everything changes. Having walled myself off from God, I had actually walled myself in, to an isolation, and total loss of wonder. This is why people who have “found” faith are so annoying to those without it - because it changes everything, such that their former life seems like wasted time spent by a stubborn fool who refused to turn around and give belief a chance.

This is why born-again people irritate us so much: they are happy. I used to say, “They are just using God as a crutch,” and now I think, “Wow, this is such a terrific crutch, I should have been using this crutch all along instead of those others ones.” Much better than the crutches of TV, beer, sex, celebrities, and constant seeking of approval of others. I mean, you could say that anything is a crutch. Someone on reddit once mentioned how desperate and lost I must have been to need Jesus to save me, and I thought, “That is so true.” It was meant as an insult, but I realized that he was like an Irish Setter pointing at the truth. The atheist made a great insight about me. I was desperate and lost. I’m so glad I found faith. Because in the end it’s not the person of faith who is crazy or boring or adrift, it’s actually the person without faith who doesn’t realize their own desperation and loss. If I consider the boredom and restlessness I had as an agnostic or atheist, and the joy I see at Sunday mass on people’s faces, there is no comparison. Laying on the couch watching Netflix empties me, while receiving Communion at church with the other faithful invigorates me and re-charges my life. This reminds me of Ignatius of Loyola, when after being wounded by the cannonball he laid in his hospital bed reading adventure stories about knights, and the excitement faded into disappointment after he finished those books. Then he read the lives of the saints and felt joyful, motivated, and full of life. Tales of knights or superheroes are like candy. Stories of faith are like rocket fuel for life.

Acceptance of God’s existence may have been the biggest stumbling block for me. Years ago I had “allowed” the idea of God but didn’t fully inspect the idea until I started actively asking, seeking, and knocking. Saying yes to the existence of God allowed me to punch a hole in the wall I had built around myself. I thought I had built the wall for protection from the religious nuts of the world, but by hiding from them, I had walled myself into darkness. And for once I thought: they can’t all be nuts. Through that hole I could see a little light on the other side. And it was about time for some demolition of that wall.

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

Having made the grade on my test of physical endurance, I felt compelled to focus more on my work, since the nine months of training did stretch my dedication to the corporation that employs and pays me. I have long enjoyed the products and culture of the company, often being a cheerleader and one who “drinks the kool-aid” to be a good soldier of the rank and file. The willingness to put in long hours or do extra on the weekend came naturally since the game of global competition ensured that there are the quick and the dead when it comes to the modern market, especially in the technology arena.

Now, with that declaration of my work-ethic, I also enjoy slacking off at work and I burnout frequently. But I like to speak of my undying work ethic to feel like a good American, since we tend to equate work with a person’s value. My own father imbued a strong sense of work for work’s sake in his children, as did his father before him. Work defined a person’s character and worth. A lazy person was “a worthless thing.” Money was fine, but to be known as a hard worker garnered more respect and honor. You’ll notice that I sometimes desire honor over other worldly things, and that is my vanity. However, I’ve noticed that change over the past thirty years in American culture. Money has come to be viewed a measurement of a person’s goodness more so than the work he or she does. This placement of money over character has surely been around forever, but I have observed a change in opinion surrounding these desires just among the people in my circle of life.

Surely by now a clear psychological profile could be pulled from these writings and I’m aware that various notions of my goal-seeking and work-aggrandizing ways may be damaged to various degrees. I know some strange notions of morality hover over me and I have confusion in my own thoughts and words. However, in a place of hard winters and farm life, I believe this culture against sloth took form out of necessity, since lack of preparation and unwillingness to complete tasks could result in disaster. A work-oriented lifestyle made sense until the hard winter problem was solved with forced air furnaces, gas fireplaces, and whole-house humidifiers. The chores of farm life no longer apply to most people because there are few farms left today. Larger factory farms is all that is left, which employ low-paid immigrant labor, and large farm families no longer make sense given the costs of raising children. Those of us that left these millions of defunct small farms found work in cities, as we have since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Part of the restlessness of myself seems to be an American problem at large, since when I lived in Europe the locals complained that we Americans “did not know how to have lunch.” True enough. Even today, I often eat lunch at my desk, not wanting to waste time on a meal. The sense of business and needing to do something all the time emanated from old values toward work, but modern technology seems to have increased our fear of missing out. In fact, farm people did stop for lunch and took afternoon breaks, and in the evening found time to be still.

Time is money, and we want not only to be successful in money but also experience everything. Most interesting is that in our drive for efficiency in everything, we forget how to relax, to the point that the work itself becomes a hamster wheel that we actually want to spin upon. I have often confused sitting at a computer with being the equivalent of being productive, when most of the time I could shut the laptop and get the same amount of “work” done. Even when not working we rush about “experiencing” everything that we can squeeze into the hours, to feed our senses of touching, tasting, seeing, hearing, and doing. Leisure becomes like work when chasing experiences.

The intangible work that I do with software causes an internal struggle in me since I have nothing to show for my many years of work. Being someone who apparently needs feedback and approval, a sense of honor, this ethereal production of code never felt meaningful. I was urged into the technical fields in order to “make money” so that I could live a “good life.” That pairing of money and goodness did not match the teachings of my youth, particularly in the Church, but the message of what mattered in this worldly life became clear, as perhaps it did to many in the 1980s when greed accelerated as an American virtue. Simultaneously we were taught the fear of retiring poor, as we had to “pack our own parachute” lest we strike the ground at retirement at the terminal velocity for poverty. Greed and fear are twins that grow together.

With the sedentary nature of my work, I missed the physical labor and bloodflow of life. I spent so many years turning to drinking instead of exercise to get my mood lift for the day, which of course is a false lift, since drinking takes you up a ladder to nowhere with the buzz, and at night during sleep you slide down a bit further to a lower point on the ladder for the next day. There had been efforts toward exercise, but nothing sustained until I finally quit drinking and then, as I’ve covered in too much detail, the obsession to exercise replaced drinking. Exercise did give me a proper lift of spirits, however, and allowed me to look past the empty feeling that software and IT work deliver. For a case study on how the IT world feels to me, see the movie Office Space.

Over the years of work I’ve had periods of dedication and burnout, like a cycle of its own. The weekly sprints and quarterly releases of software tend toward frantic states of activity and then in between there are many break-fix troubleshooting days that can extend late into the evenings. Solving little problems keeps work interesting, and in another path of life I might have been an appliance repairman or mechanic and enjoyed that. Much of my work has been in troubleshooting and I’ve developed a knack for finding the source of problems and making corrections. I realize that all work becomes monotonous and can feel soul-crushing if a person allows it to. I had allowed my own soul-crush to happen. Really, I chose that option.

In an earlier post I mentioned that career lived at the bottom of my list of priorities, but at times it hovered near or at the top. Like so many others today, I found my meaning in my work, even my identity, and I reveled in my commitment. Like my one night in jail, I felt superior to my co-workers. Why? Because I was a producer, not a feeder. In fact, I could have been Shylock from The Merchant of Venice as I spoke about co-workers in the same manner:

…a huge feeder,

Snail-slow in profit, and he sleeps by day

More than the wildcat. Drones hive not with me,

Therefore I part with him…

So much for being a team player. I disdained the “worthless” but still enjoyed their praise when I completed a task or showed the way. Interestingly, I enjoyed working with first or second generation immigrants to America most of all because I found them usually hungry to make their mark, which meant working hard, working extra, and going to great lengths to complete their tasks. I judged my fellow extended-stay Americans as less valuable since they often checked out at 5 o’clock and worked a mere 40 hour week. Given this observation, I understood why IT jobs were fleeing to offshore hubs.

Truth be told, I had periods of time where I did little, often after I built up a lot of reputation capital for some fix or solution that earned me a lot of back slaps and attention. In reality, I played the “feeder” when I could because I wanted to pursue my own side projects and goals, including running, biking, and swimming. During my training, I would sneak away from work and cancel dubious meetings in order to exercise.

Upon completion of the Ironman, I threw myself into work again as I could finally back off from training. The product, the glorious product, needed to be better and I would be its champion. As for why it needed to be better, I didn’t care so much about market share or money, I just didn’t like the overall quality and every bug I filed or fixed caused an embolism in my head. When I focused on the product, I became agitated. In fact, the product often irritated me, just like co-workers often irritated me.

In fact, my phone irritated me, the news on the phone irritated me, Facebook irritated me, YouTube comments irritated me, anything Twitter related really irritated me, and even LinkedIn had a similar effect of…irritation.

I was always irritated about something in the online domain. Unless I was exercising or hanging out with my family, I was probably irritated. I felt bothered and bitter much of the time, and it tied directly back to the wonders of software and the internet. Oh, on the exterior I held it together and showed the happy face, the peaceful and calm dude, at your command, delivering that white-glove service.

I realized that I hadn’t been to any AA meetings for quite some time and according to AA, that meant I had been “white knuckling” my sobriety, a term I disliked since I felt that they used it to impress people back into AA. But this term fit my state, I had been gripping things too hard like exercise and goals as my guide for life. Even if I did pray for help, strength, and direction, I usually did so semi-seriously as my limited faith had already slipped. I was still at the point of acceptance of a Higher Power, much further along than the Street Light God, but still occasionally blocked. The great scissors of the Serenity Prayer, for cutting through life’s irritations, I had forgotten.

The restless spirit lived on and the hungry heart gnawed at me.

Approaching and passing four years of sobriety, I knew that I could never go back to drinking because I’d wasted too many years in that morass already. One day I checked on my savings and 401K and realized how much I had saved. My retirement nest egg was incubating nicely.

I realized I had everything. Everything this world has to offer, I had experienced or obtained it, and still the restlessness and wandering mind scanned for something more or new or different. There was literally nothing more in the world that I wanted than what I already had. I had a family, a high-paying job, healthy children, a fine house, two reliable cars, respect from my peers, friends and neighbors that I enjoyed, an excess of energy from exercise, and I had my own health. I lived near my parents and extended family and was able to see them often, to be there in the capacity of a son, nephew, cousin, grandchild whenever needed. Even the volunteer coaching I kinda, sorta enjoyed. Still, I felt unhappy much of the time.

I realized that the my worldview of goal-oriented meritocracy didn’t work in the long run. I had scribbled down a quote from an author named Chris Stefanick since it related to me.

“Life is more than comfort. Life is more than a list of accomplishments and activities. While such a list might help you fill out a college or a job application, it does not fill up your heart.”

The obvious truth became apparent, that I could not find fulfillment in materialism or mindfulness or knowledge or even charity work and volunteering. The journey was leading me to one place, and that was back to where I started, to God. The funny part is that this was my hidden fear, that with all my swagger and anti-God talk for years, that instead of everyone else looking like hypocrites, I was the hypocrite. I had become the cliche, leaning back into faith after trying everything else in life. If only there were a word for that, like a parable or something, for a prodigal that strays and goes wild for years only to return home to his father in supplication and in need of forgiveness.

Around this time I felt the urge to return to church, and I tried a different Evangelical church, but again it just wasn’t right, just as AA was not quite right for me. Then one of my children asked to be baptized Catholic, because we had not baptized them, having been “nones” for their entire lives. We said yes. And it was then that I started to rediscover and realize just how little I actually knew about the Church, despite my many years of growing up in the faith.

I started listening to and reading books from Word on Fire, after a tip from a friend. There was a voice in Bishop Barron that I had never heard nor expected to come from a priest, as I had written off the Church some time ago. But he cut through the AM radio noise and YouTube sowers of discord and the crazy attention seekers to get to the heart of the Christian message, which was the message of “love one another” and the deep underlying intellectual tradition that the foundation of the Catechism had been built upon. I had missed the whole point, or rather, never really took the time to see the point while I was chasing down every goal and “freedom” that I could find.

I immediately quit Facebook to remove that poison from my life. I realized that I had nothing to lose in returning to the faith like a child. And I had nothing to fear, just as Bishop Barron asked in a commentary: “What are you afraid of? What do you have to lose? Does it terrify you to think that you might lose your wealth? Your social status? The affection of others? Your health? Your power or influence? Your reputation and good name? Your life?”

If you’ve read all the prior writings here, you’ll know the answer to all of these at some point or another was “Yes.”

In all my pursuit of knowledge, I had overlooked so many books. In the airport, on a work trip, I picked up a book by Timothy Keller called The Reason for God. When I bought it I looked over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching me, feeling like I had betrayed the “nones.” The young cashier looked at me with disdain and I saw my younger self in his expression. Apparently, I had waited so long to buy a book about God that it had become a counter-cultural punk rock kind of thing to do.

Not long after that I picked up a Catechism of the Catholic Church book from a Barnes and Noble. At that point I realized, I didn’t know jack squat about Catholicism.

So I had a lot of work to do to catch up.

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

Before dawn, I stood at the starting line of the swim, among a horde of people in black wetsuits. A mist of the morning shrouded the water. I could see the slight chop on the surface, as the wind pressed on the dark lake.

I hardly slept an hour the night before the Ironman, not due to nerves, but because my old college roommate, who offered to stay with me at the hotel for moral support, had snored the entire night. Fatigue already had a hold of me and I hadn’t yet started the race that would take the entire day.

The size of the crowd of triathletes surprised me, as there were so many people willing to partake in the same challenge. The swimmers lined up by ability, so I move to the back of the pack, knowing that I would not impede those who actually knew how to swim. The line crept forward as the race started. To reach the water it took nearly forty minutes as only a few people entered every few seconds, staggering the swimmers to minimize the inevitable collisions that happen in the water. The sun peeked over the horizon.

Suddenly I was in the water and stroking at the water with my head down, breathing from side to side every three strokes as I had practiced. The lack of sleep I could feel in my arms and legs, the muscles and tendons felt acidic and brittle. But that was a secondary concern as the waves exceeded my ability. The chop in the water slapped at my face whenever I turned into a wave and I began swallowing water and sputtering, gagging and nearly choking several times. My training had been done in placid pools and lakes, not ocean-like conditions. Only once or twice on a vacation had I swam in the surf and I lasted only a short time where the waves were breaking. Other swimmers ran into me and I ran into them and control of the day quickly slipped away from me.

I panicked. Within two minutes I felt spent. Earlier that year I recalled reading about several drownings at races. I wanted to get out of the water as fear of drowning reached up from the bottom of the lake like seaweed on my feet. But I could not tuck tail and run now, not after all the training, not after telling people about my goal. The reason why those people had drowned flashed through my mind as I thought about my intention to continue. Had they experienced a moment where they should have stopped, where their instinct had warned them?

I bobbed in the waves for a bit and then swam forward. Again the waves struck my open mouth when I turned for air and I swallowed a mouthful, again gagging and nearly vomiting. From the pool I had learned how to take a mouthful and keep going, since that is part of swimming (and the joke is to think of it as hydration). Getting water in the belly wouldn’t kill me. But getting water in my lungs would kill me and the amount I seemed to be taking in worried me. A frantic desperation came over me as I thrashed against the water, kicking and pulling, kicking and pulling, fighting the entire lake, like Achilles fighting the river God, Scamandros, in the Iliad. “And in his confusion a dangerous wave rose up and beat against his shield.” Except Achilles survived that fight with the help of Athena, who was definitely not coming to my aid in this wine-dark lake. The fatigue and fear struck me hard and I swam over to a kayak that floated near the swim course.

The man in the kayak, my version of Athena, was a mortal spotter for swimmers in need of help. I asked him if I could put my hand on his kayak for a moment to gather myself, and he nodded and said, “Just don’t pull too hard or we’ll both be in trouble.”

For thirty seconds I gently held onto this little life raft, collecting myself and watching the chaos around me. From there I could see swimmers running into one another. Swimmers turned up like a pod of belugas catching mouthfuls of air. The colorful swim caps dipped under and re-appeared. The sound of continual splashing and thrashing filled the air along with the slap of the waves against the bodies. I told myself to relax, remembering that water cannot be controlled or defeated. To let myself float and flow with the water would spare my strength and allow me to rudder myself toward the first buoy. Watching the swimmers and the directions of the waves I suddenly realized why I was drinking so much water. The slap of the waves came from the left, therefore I needed to breath on the right.

Upon resuming I stopped kicking and dragged my legs behind me, letting them float like logs. The water lifted and dropped me on the waves. No longer fighting it, I pulled myself through the water and breathed every fourth stroke, on the correct side, where no waves could surprise my face. In true amateur form I swam way off course several times, being way off track and not aligned with the buoy. The rookies like me formed an enormous gaggle in the water, spread wide in all directions, clueless to direction. But I didn’t let it discourage me and I swam back to the thrashing flock to get in line, only to get off course again minutes later.

At least once a minute I ran into another person, or someone ran into me. Typically we would both stop and say “Sorry,” and then continue on. I suspect among the elite swimmers there is a less forgiving spirit, but in the back of the pack most people seemed to understand that mistakes happened…a lot.

When I passed the first buoy I felt like my body had called up some reserve energy forces, most likely summoned by the adrenaline and fear felt in the first few minutes. I had done 2.4 miles in the pool a few times so I knew I could slog this out, and “Just keep swimming” like Dori, the fish in Finding Nemo. An old shoulder injury tended to come back when I swam and I felt the joint crunching with each stroke, but I kept throwing out that arm, over the top, over the top, until I came to the next inflatable buoy, which I ran into with my head. I laughed at my navigational skills and continued onward, zig-zagging through the lake.

Turning at the last buoy a sense of elation came over me. Exhaustion neared in my arms from pulling and pushing. But with merely a third of a mile to go I knew that this milestone in endurance would be met and passed. The shore neared, slowly, as I kept peeking up every few strokes. Some kayakers and paddle boarders shouted encouragement. When I reached the shore I lifted myself out of the water and a sense of joy struck me. The “peelers” told me to lay down and they stripped off the wetsuit, and I ran, nearly naked, through a gauntlet of people to the transition area, smiling the entire way, ready to get on the bike and continue on.

After the swim, the bike ride seemed almost peaceful as much of the ride was a cruise through country roads. I had upgraded my Wal-Mart bike to something better, though still going cheap compared to many of my fellow riders. The 112 mile bike ride is the fun part because of the scenery and speed. The only worrisome part of the ride is descents of steep hills, where I watched my speedometer hit 45 miles per hour. On skinny road bike tires, one slip or over-correction in steering can lead to an ambulance ride. With cycling, I tend to find that another mile can always be “gutted” out, or achieved by grit alone.

The marathon at the end marks the beginning of the pain. As I mentioned that in a normal marathon, the race starts at mile 20. In a full Ironman, this is still true, but the pain arrives around mile 13. Or sooner. The first half of the marathon felt like a joyful hurt as I exceeded my target pace, only to find that my steps began to feel like hurdles in the second half. A kind person tipped me off before the race to find the chicken broth in the late hours for a restoration of the body. He said, “The chicken broth has pulled many triathletes back from dark places where they wanted to quit.”

To my amazement, people lined much of the race, yelling encouragement, drinking and partying while we passed by, giving us a laugh or a reason to smile. The event is inspiring to others and I realized that selfishness in the pursuit does have something to do with it, but at the same time these events, while useless, can inspire and bring joy to this world.

Rain started to fall in the last hour of my race and my shoes squirted water out the sides with each step. Several times I had to walk to allow the pain to settle out of the muscles and to let a cramp fade away, but I resumed as soon as possible. My wife appeared on the side of the road, supporting me, giving me hope. My best friend in the whole world, always, through the years, through my drinking, my arrest, my recovery, my moodiness, and my searching. And I am embarrassed to know that I have forgotten from time to time to put our marriage into its proper placement in the order of priority.

As I came toward the finish line and crossed under the large digital timer, onto the red carpet, I heard the iconic saying, “You are an Ironman” coming from the announcer, Mike Reilly. The mission was complete. I now had over three years of sobriety under my belt, a multitude of marathons for proof of change, and now the label of Ironman to boot. I had proven I could change my life. Real change, not just temporary modifications. The emotions came up again, not as strongly as the first marathon that I completed, but the fleeting contentment of accomplishment landed on me for a while. Another goal crossed off the list of things to do, with adversity faced and overcame, where I might have tapped out in the lake earlier in the day I continued, to the end, into the rainy night. I had everything in life and now proof that I could set and accomplish just about any goal. I fell asleep that night wearing my “Finisher” t-shirt and woke up feeling semi-normal, not nearly as sore as I expected. A new day in the post-race glow began and I posted this victory over self to Facebook, and I felt the power of the Likes gathering in me, as my friends and acquaintances online commented and validated my pursuit as worthy.

For a few days I basked in that glory of achievement. Who am I kidding, I still think of that day as a highlight because the experience was unique and powerful to me. But within a week I started inspecting my bike and shopping for new shoes. I started looking up race schedules, to find the next challenge. After a week, the euphoria faded and flat-lined, and once again I was wondering:

Now what?

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Within days, I signed up for another marathon and started a cycle of planning events, with each marathon being about four to six months apart. This schedule allowed me to always have a target on the calendar that I would be preparing for, to remain in shape, to be ready mentally and physical for races, and most importantly, to remain sober. This also allowed me to tell people about my plans at the gym and bask in my pride of accomplishment. I was eager to let people know that I had quit drinking and found this “new” untapped motivation and ability.

This need for attention and pride didn’t seem negative to me, because I felt like I could impact people positively through stories of effort instead of stories of partying or cynical humor. I didn’t share much on Facebook but I was pleased when someone shared something about me, or perhaps snapped a picture of me after a race. The number of Likes on one of those posts did boost my mood, or alternatively flattened my mood based on the lack of Likes. I wanted approval, just as I always had, ever since childhood. From my friends, from my parents, from my peers - I wanted to know that I was good and sought validation.

By the time I had done three more marathons, I began to notice a pattern of anticipation leading up to the event and then afterward a kind of bottoming-out. The race prep held excitement and wonder, and the race itself felt like a purging of pent up time and energy. But then the day after a race, perhaps partially from soreness or from the depletion of nutrients, an ennui toward life took hold. A dysphoria swung back after the euphoria of the race and I finally realized that this low feeling prompted me to start searching for the next race to run so that I could get back to where I wanted to be. In essence, the races were like being drunk. The highs and the lows still followed my life like a vice whether I was in shape or fat, sober or drunk. The restlessness and anxiety could re-enter the stage at any time and the worst days, those “black dog days” of dysfunction and hopelessness, could arrive without so much as a stubbed toe to blame. I considered how I had started taking medications like Lexapro and Wellbutrin, so long ago, going to the doctor to get something to address my malady and yet the symptoms still returned. Tweaking dosages could help, but then I had been taking those pills for years. Depression is a disease, I was assured. Depression happens due to an imbalance of chemistry in the brain…but wait! Haven’t we heard this before in the form of the bodily humors? Maybe Lexapro helped to reduce my black bile and make me more sanguine. The old was new again and the new was old. Perhaps the Stoics were correct after all and time is a flat circle. I started to doubt the efficacy of pharmaceuticals for this infinite loop of highs and lows. There was something else at work.

Those difficult days of moodiness I dealt with in one of two ways. One way was acceptance and realizing that life imposed hard days for no reason, and that I should stop whining and deal with it like a grownup. The other way involved acting more like a baby. In the latter experience, little things set me off, not with anger toward others, but negatively toward myself, and no amount of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or positive self-talk could re-orient my mind on those days. I wanted to complain and find fault. In fact, the easiest way for me to tell that I was in a bad state would be to monitor my thoughts about my wife, my neighbors, immigrants, racial issues, politics, and various religions and world views. When I was in a foul mood, some scapegoat outside of my tribe of one person would receive my ire, for no reason other than I was upset with myself in some way.

Rather than take this ride to the bottom again, I signed up for more races. A marathon no longer thrilled me so I bumped up to a 50K race. That was enough to put the carrot out further on the stick. A book by ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes had a great quote that led me to believe I needed to go farther, that I wasn’t yet in the zone of knowledge in regard to body pain and mental commitment.

If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon. If you want to talk to God, run an ultra. 

The first two I had already confirmed. Running a marathon had changed my life. So naturally I wanted to the know the third part and talk to God. This was reminiscent of my younger self wanting to experience love, poverty, and war because that’s what O. Henry said a person needed to experience a full life. I wanted experiences. I had lived in Europe, worked on farms, been in the Army, worked at a homeless shelter, skydived, tried drugs, pursued sex, experienced the highs and lows of sports, fallen in love, had my heart broke, tried exotic foods, gone camping, canoeing, fishing, hunting - but I hadn’t done an ultramarathon or triathlon yet. The fat and happy life had not provided any deep insight to me, even as I settled into my comfortable bed and read books at night. I still needed to find a struggle, one of my own choosing. The comfort of modernity was driving me to seek hardships like an ultramarathon because my membership in the privileged class had satisfied all wants and desires.

So I signed up for the 50K and ran it. It wasn’t enough mileage.

So I signed up for a 50 mile race and a full Ironman for the coming summer.

I started trained all winter in the snow, like in Rocky IV but without the abs of a ‘roided up Stallone. I began swimming at the lap pool, having no idea how to swim a proper freestyle stroke. I received the kindest insult from a veteran swimmer who, before giving me some critical tips, said, “You look like a person who came to the sport of swimming late in life.” He was right. Forcing myself to learn swimming came with that click of a mouse button, when I signed up for the Ironman without really having any hope of completing a 2.4 mile swim. Paying the fee for a race somehow has the power to steel my determination. Though I came to swimming late in life, I was still hell-bent on developing enough stamina to finish the race.

Surely the Ironman would cure me. This was the thing.

And if it did not cure me, there were 100 mile races out there waiting in the hinterlands of Death Valley and Leadville, Colorado. Training in snow still seems somewhat mad to me, since I recall hobbling along snowmobile trails and waving at the riders. Surely they thought I was insane. But I was sober and still pouring my heart into family, coaching, training, and my job. Perhaps it was insane but it was working. Except for one thing:

I had found a new path to isolation. Again, like every hobby before, the fitness craze aligned perfectly to a solitary person like me. Yes, I could have joined running groups or Crossfit organizations, but I liked the quiet and the silence of the long runs. Even at the gym, I wore headphones. Everyone at the gym seemed to be working out together, but alone. Only if we saw a familiar face would we pause the music for a minute and chat before returning to isolation in the earbuds.

I always had myself to talk to. Learning to swim and training for endurance offered plenty to ponder. Someone asked me what I thought about while running for hours, and I said, “The same things I think about in bed at night staring at the ceiling.” Exercise didn’t remove the brooding mind from me. No I carried my brain with me, but as the body exhausted itself the mind became less prone to brooding. In fact, after several hours of running I found doing even basic math problems in my head difficult, because I had a hard time calculating my pace and mileage despite it being simple math. Running seemed to pull the blood out of the brain and into the legs, which can be nice for someone with a tendency toward rumination.

My workout schedule of preparing for the Ironman started nine months in advance. Most days required two workouts, yet I always wanted to pound miles. To pound miles - I wanted to run myself to exhaustion or wreck myself on the bike so that when I arrived home I collapsed into the arms of a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Being wasted from exhaustion on a bike or on a run made me feel more alive. I recall a hot day when I set out for a 20 mile run and I brought only a liter of water. The heat exceeded my expectations and after three hours of running I was not yet close to home. The last four miles felt like a desert and I suffered greatly for my lack of foresight on water. Normally I was careful about water, recalling military obsessions about carrying enough water. The hour it took me to walk to the house seemed like a day. Now I was never in any real danger, as I wasn’t verging on death, but this was an experience that I learned a lesson from and took a strange enjoyment from due to the test of my body. This wasn’t like Jesus in the desert for 40 days, it was just me in the sun without water for a few hours. Yet the devil could have bartered my soul for a cup of ice water that day. (I just hope the devil doesn’t know about my love of breakfast cereal, too.)

Here’s the odd thing that I started to notice. Suffering by useless tasks like marathons does test a body and mind, but the real tests in life are those things that are not glamorous or prideful, like doing the laundry and dishes. Cleaning the bathroom floors, toilets, and mirrors for forty years and raising children and dealing with people - that is the real test of endurance. Yet I don’t feel the need to write about the last time I cleaned the bathroom, unless I were to tell you about the clog of hair in the shower drain that looked like a dead squirrel when yanked out. The actual test of endurance is in the small daily things and the ups and downs of family and community life.

Endurance sports appear as virtuous through the persistence and training that are required to finish them, but if looked at closer they could be seen as personal pursuits performed in isolation for recognition from others. I don’t want to discount all goals, but the the wetsuits, bikes and running shoes all adorn the athlete with a shine to make the pursuit appear glamorous and worthy of respect. In the end, the accomplishment is itself a purchased product. These achievements allowed me to wear a persona of success, not very different from purchasing a luxury car, and basically to brag about my ability. The marketing won me over. I had paid quite a bit for those marathon t-shirts and medals.

I realize that I could inspect every single action I take to find similar motives, and pick apart everything I do until there is nothing left but the dry bones of criticism. But as I spent the summer taking long solo bike rides, rushing to the pool for laps, and running out the door for 10K training runs I had to consider my rationale for this goal. Because at some point, the need to test my physical endurance had started to unhitch from inspirational and slid toward selfishness. Luckily my family gave encouragement, but if they had objected to the amount of time I spent alone in this pursuit, I’m certain that I wouldn’t have stopped training because I wanted to be known as someone who had completed the Ironman, because then I would be special. Or something like that.

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By elevating fitness to one of my highest priorities, I assured a daily dose of endorphins to my brain. As long as I remained healthy and avoided injury, this appeared a viable path to permanent sobriety. No matter what my work schedule looked like, I carved out time for exercise and would leap out the door to get to the gym. Soon I realized that the gym had some similarities to a civic organization because the same members showed up day after day. After seeing the same people for a few months, the interactions of sharing weights and spotting one another led to acquaintance and eventually casual friendships. This was a thin connection, since only the pursuit of our own self image bound us together, but there was the common interest. When someone asked me what I was working on today, with the expected answer being “legs” or “back” I would joke, “Mostly my insecurities.”

More truth than a joke, the pursuit of fitness did have elements of vanity laced within it, such as desiring to feel good and be attractive increased confidence in my personal life. The personal progress of fitness asserts a notion of accomplishment and a strange kind of righteousness. One good habit leads to another, and soon I was snacking on celery and reading motivational books. Interestingly, being in shape alone holds no moral value, but somehow the positivity that I felt seemed to make me believe I was increasing in morality. However, I found more vanity seeping into my appearance, such as selecting tighter t-shirts to wear. Once again feeling the same yearn that drives all social media: “Look at me! Notice me!” Fitness easily slips toward lust and envy if any allowance is made for those feelings, since the gym is akin to an emporium for showing off. But I know that my reasons for fitness remained solid, since quitting drinking remained paramount and I was literally replacing the urge to drink with the urge to work out.

Within a short time, I could not go a single day without exercise just as I had so often required a beer at the end of a workday before my commitment to sobriety. A flip had occurred in my brain regarding how and when I received my happy chemicals. The boost from alcohol came with a follow-up nadir of depression, whereas the runner’s high only came with fatigue and a solid night of sleep. If anything, the only negative side-effect of running was an increase in appetite.

I mentioned that snacking on celery became a regular thing, but so did unexpected food binges as my body sought to maintain a certain caloric intake, and going from no exercise to regular exercise proved difficult for me in balancing my diet. If I succeeded for two days with a good diet, I crashed on the third and engorged myself on carbs to an embarrassing degree. This pattern continues to this day where I can eat well for a while and then the day of reckoning comes when sugar and starch becomes under attack in my kitchen.

When I realized I could run 13 miles, the next goal became the full marathon and I signed up and began to train. Once I committed to the plan and started logging more miles, I became more hungry and it seemed that every time I did a run and hour or two, the remainder of the time I spent thinking about Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. As the miles used up the glucose and sugar in my body, my mind turned to food and specifically the most sugary cereals I could find. At some point I had to stop buying it because if I had Cinnamon Toast Crunch in the house, a shameless devouring would ensue until the box was gone. Once again, the tendency toward excess ruled me. Even with the fitness and running, I pursued it excessively, just as I had drank alcohol. And apparently I had this same vice breaking out into the world of breakfast cereals as well. I was a carb monster.

The effect of all the exercise did improve my family and marriage relationships as I had a purpose and they saw this change happening. Without question, replacing alcohol with exercise created a rising tide in the house that lifted all boats. Like other people at the gym, I concurred that getting my daily exercise meant sanity could win the day, and I was a better citizen of the world with exercise than without it. Over the last thirty years, the “good” of exercise seems to have become a platitude among many Americans, as if there really is something inherently correct in the habit or act of body movement. But I suspect this is a Western or American idea mostly, since we love to celebrate goals and the will to succeed. I recall my grandmother asking me why I was running and exercising so much and it dawned on me that no one of the old farming generations would have bothered to run or lift anything, because their entire lives were a struggle of lifting and moving from sunrise to sunset. I recall her weeding a massive garden every day, carrying pails to feed animals, picking and peeling apples, canning, jarring, cleaning, feeding. My job in a software company required almost no movement, no effort other than thinking. Then I realized that the only people I interacted with at the gym were those with sedentary jobs, who lacked movement. Carpenters or construction workers did not need to burn some extra calories after a day of labor. The gym then almost seemed a kind of privileged place just like in ancient Greece, where the rich and aristocratic could wile away the day.

As I approached my first marathon, I injured my calf, pulling my soleus muscle, bad enough that I had to rest for a few weeks. Likewise, I began to feel stronger with weights and heaved my shoulder into an injury by grabbing larger weights than necessary. When these downtimes occurred, I realized that in replacing alcohol with exercise, if my body failed due to injury, I would be once again back to square one and searching for a hobby or purpose to fill the void. Rather than dwell on that awful idea, of emptiness underneath the muscle, I planned to be more careful in my exercise and not let my aging body suffer the vanity of my mind. I would stifle the urge to run too fast or lift too much weight, since that could destroy my ability to exercise and steal my joy away.

I ran through snow, sun, and rain. I didn’t miss days, avoided excuses, and pushed onward. The book Born to Run had a large impact on me as I realized that endurance sports held a spiritual secret that I wanted to unlock. This quote struck me as profound and it powered me through some long runs on the trail.

“We've got a motto here-you're tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.”

This kept me believing that my old knees could carry be through that first marathon. When the day arrived, I had done a 20 mile test run in preparation and had cramped terribly through the last two miles. The day of the race started with perfect weather. My soleus muscle appeared healed. I was ready.

In the third mile of that race I pulled my soleus muscle again and I started limping and walking, but the pain was tolerable and I had already decided that I would finish that race even if I destroyed my body in the process. This marathon marked a rite of passage from drunken slob to tempered strength. This was a victory of the will and I pushed past the pain for the rest of the morning.

Someone said that a marathon starts at mile 20 and I discovered the reason. In the last six miles, the muscles start to misfire. I could see my calves vibrating, bubbling like the blood was boiling inside, or aliens were about to emerge from my skin. Every step becomes painful as the shortage of salt and water punishes the nerves and muscle fibers. I found a fellow suffering runner to cajole along with me who could barely move his thighs while I bemoaned by calves and hamstrings. Eventually he told me to go ahead without him as he needed to walk, so I departed from him and continued. My family popped out at various points and cheered, making me grateful to the point of watery eyes, as I didn’t deserve their love for simply running a race that I needed to prove to myself was possible. My kids carried signs with funny sayings and banged the cowbells.

In the last few miles the crowd thinned and I was alone for a stretch where I could review my year. The date of the race was one year after my arrest. I had remained sober for a year and changed my body and mind. The suffering of the last miles in the first marathon was a graduation from the past year, from a past life, as if I had turned the page on the chapter of life known as young adulthood, or the drinking years.

As I saw the finish line and heard the music, I began to get emotional in realizing what this meant to me and I thanked God for that policeman who pulled me over and arrested me. This was the journey of life and hope and faith. I was nowhere near the end of the journey but this marked a milestone, just as running across the Golden Gate bridge had struck me as a priceless moment. There was something to endurance. To keep going, always, always keep going - this would carry me through the marathon and my marriage. I could endure. With God’s help, who was always with me, for that strength and direction that I needed and could never muster by myself. My kids ran with me to the finish line. While I was not perfect, I was improving. I finished the race in just under four hours.

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Amidst this swelling of excitement and pride surrounding fitness, I experienced a setback, as the system of law and order pumped the brakes on my accelerating plans. The clear path to victory over my flaws, of drinking and sloth, could be obtained through the Church of Iron: free weights, squat racks, and my trusty old aluminum bike. I felt empowered, emboldened to tackle my problems and defeat them. I had the illusion of control.

However, the court proceeding directed me to alcohol counseling and probation, which did not concern me at first. I needed to make an appointment with a substance abuse counselor and get things sorted out. Clearly, I could show the drug and alcohol counselor my progress, and sell them on my new zest for life, then be on my way.

I contacted someone that I knew from my initial recovery who had righted herself and become a drug and alcohol counselor, and I thought surely she could rubber stamp my progress chart so that I could send a report to the state for verification and maybe a back rub. Instead, she made an appointment for me with another counselor, probably realizing that I wanted an immediate approval to continue on my own path of recovery and self-discovery.

In my meeting with the counselor, I answered all questions honestly, giving scores between 1 and 5 for how I was feeling, including honesty about my bouts of depression. The interview seemed to go well, with much banter and chatter, and were I applying for a job it seemed I would have received an offer. To my surprise, the next day I received an order to do a 28 day inpatient program. My heart sunk, thinking this would derail my coaching, fitness, work, and family life that was just beginning to mend. The first stitches of repair would be ripped apart again. With small children, I believed that I could not leave for a month to dry out because that would be out of the household, and I had already been dry for a month while waiting for instructions from the government.

I sought a second opinion, from a more formal organization, this time from an esteemed medical center, not a strip-mall rehab clinic. The motivations of the rehab center, I surmised, was to get clients in the door to make money. AA meetings only took donations, and didn’t send invoices like 28 day inpatient and outpatient programs. As the saying goes in AA, “Some of us are sicker than others” and I was less sick. My resolve to quit raged within and I wanted to get back on the bike. During this time my attendance at AA meetings surged because I needed to show the world that I meant what I said, even though no one was watching or listening but me and my immediate family.

On several occasions I joined the AA group at the detox center. To get there I needed to hitch a ride with another AA member. Each time my “taxi” arrived I spoke with the person in recovery and realized how lucky I was. My family remained intact, while theirs were separated. My house payments were on time while they struggled to make rent. My job paid well, and they bounced between multiple jobs trying to make ends meet. Returning to the detox center felt strange after waking up stupefied in there a short while ago. I still saw the Coors Light billboard out the window and had to laugh at its ironic placement.

By then I had a sponsor who I didn’t particularly like. The dogma of AA lived loudly in him. He knew the Big Book verbatim and had an absolutist approach, with five years of sobriety under his belt. He wielded those five years like military rank over my month of sobriety, which irritated me, particularly because he was younger than I was, as well as unmarried and without children. I found it difficult to relate to him beyond the desire to stop drinking, which is of course the entire point of AA. I tried to recall the saying: “Principles over personalities,” which meant to ignore our differences and focus on the common intention to be sober and thereby virtuous. He too had issues with religion but could allow for God’s existence, so long as it wasn’t the Christian kind. That we shared, but his anti-Christian stance exceeded mine. Simultaneously, I was trying to allow a bit more of the Triune God back into my life, for a little while anyway.

That was the period when I attempted to find a home in an Evangelical church, accepting the invitation of some willing neighbors who wanted to save my soul. Their good intentions brought me into their fold but as soon as the people started raising their hands and closing their eyes, I felt a disturbance in the force. Then after a few weeks, the pastor’s sola fide and sola scriptura sermons seemed odd to me, and the concert style of service turned me away. I attended a Celebrate Recovery meeting, which was a Christian AA group, but felt it was a more emotional copycat of what AA was already doing, just with an Evangelical angle.

Why would that bother me? Why would I care? Because I didn’t like the idea of Christians taking and making everything into their own image. The 12 steps of AA had been moved into the Church and the word Jesus was added to the steps, along with obligatory Bible study. This seemed to me the way that the whole Christian religion had spread from the start, by taking other things, like pagan holidays and rituals, and experimenting until they found the malleable way to hammer them into Gospel-fitting shapes. I felt like Lieutenant Dan on Forrest Gump, railing against the constancy of “Jesus this and Jesus that, have I found Jesus yet?”

Hence my attempt at finding God through the Evangelical path did not last long, since my high sensitivity to so many things averted my attention. I had all these hangups about Christianity that reared up almost as soon as I entered an Evangelical church. These same concerns and misgivings, these doubts and disdain, came up whenever I entered a Catholic church, too. I could start the day with a clear mind and heart oriented toward belief and within thirty minutes of Mass all of the old reasons I had stopped believing were back in full force. Even by tuning the radio dial and accidentally landing on a Catholic radio station I would roll my eyes since the unspoken motto seemed to be All abortion, all the time. The only issue that seemed important to Catholics and Evangelicals was abortion, with a side dish of gay marriage to gnaw on.

The noise of the world continued and since I could find no message of love in the Christians, and the love seemed hermetically sealed inside the Church walls to a homogeneous set of believers. Love your neighbor meant love your Christian neighbor and forget the rest. The pursuit of money and power among the faithful appeared as egregious as among the faithless, with new vehicles and pools and hot tubs and RVs and ATVs frequenting nearly every driveway and backyard. The Prosperity Gospel made a mockery of it all. I abandoned my attempt to be re-born a Christian.

I gravitated back toward progressive politics and typically landed somewhere in the middle, since I found both extremes of the right and left to be indefensible. The battle cry of moral relativism from the faithful rang out against the leftists for allowing all manner of sin to be validated, with an abstraction of Aristotle vs. Rousseau occurring in a daily title fight for the winning worldview on the internet.

Whenever I entered the real world armed with ideas and opinions, usually from a book I’ve read, the world quickly disarmed me with its mayhem. I would abandon my soft convictions and retreat to a “live and let live” mentality because that was a safe space, to use the modern term for cowardice. If I could avoid offending anyone, I could then be left alone to find my own truth.

This is what I pursued in getting a second opinion on the state of my alcohol abuse. In my next visit, I decided to not answer any of the questions factually and instead paint the rosiest picture of my life imaginable. I was on two anti-depression medications and exercising seven days a week. I was attending AA meetings and not just sitting there, but speaking and contributing. I made all of this known in the meeting with the two counselors. These claims were not lies, but I exaggerated the joy I was feeling so they would not recommend a 28 day inpatient program again.

At one point in the interview, I said, “I spoke with a friend last week who was hungover from a weekend of partying, and I told him that I was feeling great. I wish I’d made this change long ago.”

My salesmanship failed because at the end both counselors left the room and came back recommending a 28 day inpatient program. As soon as those words left the senior counselor’s lips, I felt shock. The words struck me so hard that I felt dizzy and thought I might fall out of my chair. I could hardly hear anything that followed and it seemed that perhaps this was some kind of panic attack, which I had never experienced. Stranger still, I felt outside of my own body for a moment, like I was somehow in the air around myself but not with myself. This floating experience felt drug-induced, but I was sober. Again I felt the presence of a soul or essence departing me and returning. I suspect my face must have dropped like a stone, because once I collected my spirit and body together again the bearded professorial counselor said, “I gather you are not pleased to hear the recommendation.”

I was not pleased. And I told him so, saying that I was making the change and working hard toward something solid and positive. My children and wife needed to see this in action, hear the mea culpas, and witness the work-in-progress. I could not leave for a month to explore my addiction which I had already accepted.

The counselor recounted my anecdote about the conversation with my friend, who had been hungover from partying. To my surprise, the counselor implied that I was missing the nightlife and my old habits. I could not believe my ears, as in my attempt to convey how I did not miss drinking, he construed the message to mean that I wanted to be drinking. At that point I realized what being inside “the system” meant, grokking it entirely, as if Franz Kafka was sitting in the room and nodding, saying, “Now do you get it? See what I meant in all those stories?”

Again, I immediately assumed that this was about money rather than helping people. The counselor needed to collect bodies in seats for his programs and I was fresh meat delivered by the state unto him. And if he recommended inpatient rehab, I would have to partake and pay for inpatient rehab. Long ago, from a surgeon, I had heard the phrase, “When you go see a surgeon, you will be recommended surgery.” That held true for surgeons and just about every profession I’d ever encountered, from car dealers to lawn care to Pampered Chef agents to New Age religions to organized religion. This premise certainly held true with my own company’s salespeople who would go to great lengths to tailor any message that could complete a sale. What you need, is what they are selling. When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or at least that was my position, when in reality the protocols in both of my assessments likely recommended rehab for someone who had driven drunk while twice over the allowed blood-alcohol content and had a history of excessive drinking. I mean, there was my own behavior to inspect as well, but my will and ego wanted to drive this bus myself.

My reaction to the recommendation may not have been fair to the counselor, but I argued them down to an outpatient program before they signed off on the report, which would go to my probation officer. And I never did join an outpatient program, having dragged my feet for two years on it, claiming AA as my program, and eventually even dropping out of that in order to focus on my family, my coaching, and all manner of intense exercise that I felt purged the toxins and animus from my body, in a kind of self-flagellating way. The miles lengthened and goals ossified into must-have experiences on my calendar. This focus on exercise replaced books, travel, woodworking, writing, reading, as the centerpiece of my life. The hierarchy of my life was sobriety by whatever means followed by fitness, family, marriage, and career. This seemed the right ordering at the time.

I did find one book to fly solo with during that time, which was Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind. That little book contains great arguments against drinking in a modern way that is totally non-religious in nature. She has made a little gift to the world in this book to shatter the illusions about why we drink, such as to have a better social or sex life and how for the most part, drinking does more to tear down your life than to improve it in any way. Without a doubt, drinking has destroyed more families and careers than anything else in my social circles. Nothing even comes close. As Homer Simpson once said, “Drinking is the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.” Except in reality, the solution part is just escapism, and burying one’s head in the sand.

The hardest part about quitting drinking in our society is the ubiquity of the message to drink. If you have never tried to stop, I would dare you to try it for 3 months and see how much you notice the billboards, ads, and commercials that steer you toward it. Then there is events that are fully geared toward drinking - sports, concerts, backyard barbecues, dinners, tours, neighborhood fires, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, going away parties - nearly all social gatherings have an element at play. And the funny thing is, if you’ve been playing along in that world for a while, you are brainwashed into thinking that refusing a drink will be rude, or look awkward. Once you start saying “No” you will soon realize that no one cares, and if anyone does care that you aren’t drinking then they are likely a problem boozer who hasn’t realized it yet. Furthermore, you suddenly meet the many people who don’t drink at all and find a new kind of bond over abstinence. It’s amazing how people open up if you say, “No thanks, I quit drinking. It wasn’t doing me any good, so I had to make a choice to cut it out.” Rather than it throwing a wet blanket on people and parties, in my experience people open up and share stories of their own struggle or a family member that has also quit.

In five years of non-drinking, the most pathetic ad I’ve seen from the beer industry to promote drinking as a way of life was from Michelob Ultra, where a robot is exercising like mad among normal people. The robot is freakish to the normies, as its muscular metal body outperforms them all, but the obvious point is that the robot has no personality. Then at the end of the commercial, the robot is jogging past a pub where everyone is laughing and enjoying life while having tall glasses of Michelob Ultra (which is comical in itself, as the beer is 99.9% water and has no flavor). A caption appears on the pub window saying, “It’s only worth it, if you can enjoy it.” This is a very subtle and cruel insult at people who are trying to quit drinking or have taken up exercise to help them stop drinking. I was a bit shocked as it even struck me as, “Wow, I’m just a robot, exercising all the time now instead of drinking with friends.”

When you are in sales, the goal is to sell. I’ve known that from the working environments I’ve been in and around. But the lengths that the beer and liquor industry goes to in order to make alcohol “cool” is unparalleled. This Michelob Ultra ad is just another derivative of the great South Park commercial that mocked the beer industry’s constant push to marry fun with drinking. The South Park ad shows image after image of sex, cars, women, fun, vodka, expensive things, bikinis, posh hotels, money, tuxedos, threesomes, Vegas, more sex, and then at the end comes the platitude of “Please Drink Responsibly,” which is in direct contradiction to everything that was in the ad. I even think back to the indoctrination of beer ads in the 1980s where the humor in the commercials made us kids talk about the ads at school, with Joe Piscopo, Spuds Mackenzie, Bud Bowl, Bob Uecker, John Madden, and Old Milwaukee’s Swedish Bikini team. That was all long before “The Most Interesting Man in the World” came along showing how you could only be interesting with alcohol.

The deck is stacked heavily against those who want to stop. In fact, I recall the backlash against the Joe Camel ads and people saying it was government overreach to stop that campaign for cigarette companies targeting kids. But I can tell you this: in 4th grade, my friends and I at school liked to cut out and tape up pictures of Joe Camel in our lockers at school, because we thought he was cool. We didn’t admire the Marlboro Man for his ruggedness, we admired Joe Camel for his cars and ladies and overall playboy lifestyle, and I’m not even sure we knew why at that age. Whatever it was, the marketing worked and by age sixteen we were all smoking Camel Lights.

I’ve heard the argument that “you can just ignore the ads.” If you are a drinker, I dare you to stop for 3 months and let me know how ignoring the ads went for you. Good luck on that.

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

Riding a bike with plastic bags full of groceries dangling from each handlebar can be dangerous, since turning and stopping can sway the balance of the bike. A wipeout at an intersection is surely hilarious to people in their cars, and I have provided that laugh a few times.

In America, cars equal freedom. For the first time I had lost the privilege to drive. This proved a humbling experience having to ride my bike to the grocery store, to recovery meetings, and to appointments. I needed to arrange rides to events and ask for help more often than I liked. On work trips, I had to explain away why I didn’t have a rental car. By pedal I propelled my way around the city, using the bike lanes and trails. Having witnessed many cyclists ignore the rules of the road, I tried my best to obey proper traffic behavior, but I will admit running a few stop signs when no cars are around. Stopping and starting a bike again by pedaling takes a lot more energy than pressing a foot on a car’s brake pedal. Now I know why bicyclists don’t stop unless they must.

Initially I found commuting by bike to be an embarrassment, as my neighbors all knew what had happened. But within a few weeks I discovered that I could bike fifteen miles a day and not feel sore afterward. This startled me since I had generally avoided riding a bike since childhood. My old Wal-Mart bike needed a tune-up, but for a few months I squeaked along, not really understanding what a quality bike felt like, but then I didn’t much care as the enjoyment increased, all thanks to this loss of my freedom to drive.

To get to AA meetings, I needed to ride about seven miles each way and in the summer heat I would show up dripping with perspiration. The fatigue and sweat reduced my ability to pay attention in the meetings, but my goal (another goal) was to attend 90 meetings in 90 days, a staple prescription for those starting or resuming AA, since regular attendance forms a solid habit and forces a person to get to know people in the program. With family and work obligations, I biked frantically to and from the meetings, determined to commit to the change and strike drinking from my life completely, once and for all.

Occasionally I frequented an evening meeting, meaning I had to cycle back at dusk. As summer days shortened, I found myself on a paved trail in the dark as the chill of night settled into the trees around me. These night rides became exciting as I hoped no sticks or surprises lay on the trail waiting to flip my bike over. On several nights, thousands of fireflies lit up the trail with natural fireworks that I never knew existed in the city. It was glorious.

I began to enjoy the bike rides more than the meetings and started to yearn for longer rides. Suddenly I could understand why cyclists, in their strange spandex attire, became committed to their hobby. Getting out of a car and onto a bike actually allowed you to be in the world. A car wrapped me like an envelope and I experienced very little. Traveling by bike through the city made me much happier than driving, likely because of the exercise but I also suspect because of the lack of media. No radio, no phones, no touchscreen: just the open air and whatever the weather brought that day.

As my legs began to get in shape, I wondered about distances and my ability to ride nonstop for thirty miles, and soon forty miles. Likewise, I started to run, realizing that my body felt better than ever, like it once did in high school before I started drinking. In my late thirties, I realized that I had wasted twenty years thinking that my knees were shot due to surgeries, when in reality I had let them rot and get weak by lack of usage. Instead of coddling them, I improved them by applying pressure to the joints and bones via exercise. I started to do squats with weight.

The truth became readily apparent that alcohol had not only been a crutch for me but had also been the thing that had crippled me from the start. In reviewing my history, most of what I had held as important faded once drinking became a part of my life and my sense of depression started then as well, around the age of sixteen. My sense of right and wrong dwindled into a vague sense of truth over the drinking years because my vice required a loose allowance toward mistakes. I could forgive others for their mistakes somewhat easily because I needed to allow my own errors to happen and be excused. This morass of circular logic permitted anything and celebrated my errors, making me the decider of all that was good or bad in the world. The main rule I adhered to could be summed up as a philosophy of “Leave me alone, I have my own rules.”

Of course, the rules could change whenever I wanted them to be different. That was how I liked it. Being powerless bothered me most of all. To be told what to do disturbed me, and even enraged me. Yet I had just experienced a loss of power where I began to appreciate biking more by having lost the right to drive. At the time I didn’t recognize this as significant. Instead I seized upon the point that I was able to exercise more and my will and ego enjoyed that a great deal. No longer did I cry the blues about my bad knees, but rather I heard the call of endurance sports. Fitness became a moral good by itself and I began signing up for longer distance races.

I recall the day when I realized that I no longer had to stop on the bike. Energy surged in me, as it was almost a spiritual experience, when I knew that I could bike for hours and hours now and my legs felt like pistons. On another occasion I decided to go for an eleven mile run across the Golden Gate bridge while in San Francisco on a work trip. The weather was foggy and misty that day. The red towers peeked out of the fog as I ran beneath them and the runner’s high struck me so profoundly that tears came to my eyes and again I felt as if I never needed to stop running.

The notion arrived of running a half-marathon. Three months after my arrest I completed that half-marathon. This seemed an impossibility for over twenty years and by simply removing alcohol and my driver’s license from my life, I discovered something amazing about myself. I would say that the scales fell from my eyes, but I had more than one set of scales to go through. As I embraced fitness, I began to back away from AA once again. Like the first time, I reached the 9th step of recovery, then retreated again and said goodbye to my sponsor. My new sponsor was my bike, my gym, and my running shoes. I kept a small space for a Higher Power, for God in my mind and heart, but the goal had shifted toward feats of fitness, and once again, goals willed to fruition.

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