Why Did Peter Sink?

There is a reason that the Christian message and the bible have such staying power. There is a reason why the books of Moses are so radical and different from all other texts. There is a reason why the tradition of the people of Abraham is so strange to outsiders, and even angering, and why it makes perfect sense to insiders. Most importantly, there is a reason why everyone cannot stop talking about Jesus.

There is a reason why and it is this: the message of Christianity tips everything we think we know upside down.

But it is actually right-side-up.

The bible is full of inversions that disrupt our assumptions. Rather, it is a series of inversions, one after another. An unfolding of paradoxes and mysteries reveals how and why these inversions matter, including when and where and by whom. Some of the inversions will upset us, while others we may accept without bother. We will have certain inversions that rankle us more than others, and those are the best inversions to meditate upon.

The books of Moses invert the teachings and worldviews of the old Sumerian, Greek, Persian, Hindu, and Roman thinking. The books of the prophets continue the inversions. Christ completes it. But this is not only applicable to the ancient world. It is equally relevant now, or even more so, as a flip to the old ways seems to be happening.

For a long time, we understood the inversions and assumed these ideas were common sense, but as familiarity breeds contempt, we took standing on our feet for granted. But for about five hundred years now, we have been gradually reverting to standing on our heads. To get right-side up again, we only need to consider the inversions again, with fresh eyes. The old language may feel difficult to understand, too time-consuming, too distant in the past; but none of that is really true. If we make even the slightest effort to read the bible, we can see these inversions playing out clearly in our own lives. Further, we can observe these inversions right now in our institutions, assumptions, societies, and families.

The language of the old books may seem difficult, but with a small effort, it can be understood. Many cast out the book without serious review, calling the writings “Bronze Age myths.” The implication here is that those of us who own smartphones are surely more rich in wisdom than the old shepherds of the Middle East. But this is close-minded. The wisdom of the old books goes deep into the heart, and that is a place where we often do not wish to look. Yet if we are open-minded, we will do just that. Modern ideas may have muddied the water, but it can be made clear again with patience, if we simply stop thrashing about and let the words speak.

The reason Jewish, Islamic, or Catholic thought either makes total sense to you or looks completely upside down depends on whether you are standing on your feet or your head. And even if you are standing on your feet, the eyes and ears can still fool you into hearing what you want to hear, and seeing what you want to see. But the real benefit of coming to recognize these inversions is not about being right or wrong, it is about sanity. We speak constantly of mental health. If you live in this world and you sense that there is something “off about it,” then you are likely sensing that something is upside-down. And there is a reason why the message of Christ calls people from every generation - it is because people always sense the upside-down and wish to be right-side-up. In the end, every person chooses whether to stand on their feet or their head. Some come to recognize these inversions and afterward can never again view the world the same. They have a secret that nothing can touch.

No matter your genetics, culture, or experience, you can benefit by pausing to consider the inversions presented by the Jewish and Christian traditions. You have nothing to lose in doing so, and perhaps much to gain.

As for me in writing this, I pray that I lead no one astray, but only present that which can help unfold the wonders of this confusing book and worldview. I am not qualified to write this. I have no abbreviations to add after my name, no prior published works to present, and no status as a great thinker. I’m an IT troubleshooter, a hack writer, and often a maker of poor decisions. I admit these shortcomings to make a point: if I can see these inversions, so can anyone else. From here, I proceed with fear and trembling that I may teach errors, but having been brought back to life, to keep this all to myself seems a bit selfish. I have to share it and I will pray for forgiveness if I mislead anyone. I hope to share these inversions with charity and love for all who read them. Most of all, because I can’t paint or sing all that well, I try to write.

When my kids were young, they would trace their hand and draw a picture to give to me as a gift, and I would cherish it because they made it out of love. So I write this for God. This is my scribbling way of thanking God for helping me find true north again. It’s not Dante or Michelangelo, but since God is a loving father, I offer this to him, along with all of myself - out of obedience, awe, gratitude, and trust - hoping that he might magnet it on his celestial refrigerator for a day or two.

So let us begin. With the many inversions ahead of us, there’s no time to dawdle. And time itself is where we must begin, because that is the initial inversion. This may be the most important inversion of all, but then every inversion is the most important. That is because they all go together. Individually, these inversions may seem odd, but together the inversions reveal a whole. If you come to understand what these inversions mean, there is a solid chance that you will not only be inverted to right-side-up, but you may be healed and made whole as well.

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

If Christianity ever stops being weird, it will no longer change lives.

So let’s get weird.

I knew that the childhood mantra of “Believe in yourself” had failed in the crucible of reality. That turned out to be a bad drug, like the brown acid that the 1960’s burnouts spoke about.

Work and career couldn’t save me. Money couldn’t either. The old trusty sidekick, liquor, was as worthless as ever now. These were all bad drugs. While I had flung beer bottles at religious people for using God as a crutch, I was leaning on various crutches, and when those crutches failed, anti-depressants became the crutch. At this point, I still had no idea that I was soul-sick far more than physically or mentally impaired.

On particularly blue days, or “Black Dog” days as Winston Churchill called them, or the days when the “Noonday Demon” of acedia overtook me, I knew that something was missing. And after a few years working as an engineer, I realized that I needed to talk to a doctor.

And the doctor had the cure. Then I heard the new pitch for the new drug. I needed a supplement to believe in myself. It was medicine, just like insulin. Surely a diabetic would not refuse the medicine that would save his life, so why would someone deficient in a neurotransmitter not trust that pharma solutions could save me?

Here existed a scientific, peer-reviewed solution, and it came in the form of a pill that would simply re-balance the chemistry in my brain. Just eat this little dot once a day and like Dorothy I would be back in humanist Kansas. Never mind that humans had lived for tens of thousands of years without these pills - this was the only solution. The fix was merely a matter of dialing in the numbers, like getting the chemicals correct when balancing a pool PH level. It was easy! There were also techniques, from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and its cousins like RET, and there was pseudo-spiritual self-affirmation options in Buddhist meditation (heavy on the self), and then there was the budding “science” of taking LSD. There was a pill plus technical methodologies to deal. I just needed an action plan for mind and body (no soul needed).

Pills are good

So the days of anti-depressants began. In a pill came the solution, and I convinced myself after a month it “seemed to be working” since I felt “not quite as irritable.” However, today I am certain that if the doctor had given me a magical bag of potato chips in a medical looking package, and had told me to eat one a day, it would have had the same effect. Because I wasn’t feeling any different. The Black Dog days still arrived and struck hard. That was when I was told that the dosage just needed to be increased. More was better…you see…I needed two magical potato chips per day, not one. This is becoming more well known as people are beginning to realize that the modern SSRI pill solution is just another version of snake oil.

What I discovered after about five years is that I could not stop taking these pills, because if I stopped, I became so dizzy that I could hardly stand. Getting off the anti-depressants now felt as hard as quitting tobacco had been.

In the early years of taking anti-depressants, I was still drinking, which in hindsight is insane to me. But after I did quit drinking (a topic I covered at great length in the initial series of this site), I continued with the pills. After a few years of sobriety, I tried to stop taking the pills, and the dizziness gave me such fear that I worried about slipping into some suicidal despair, so I stayed on the pills. This certainly works in favor of the pharmaceutical companies. I continued on the pills, sober, believing that I needed them.

Life without liquor started by asking God for help. Getting back to the basics of belief in God set me free from drinking, to my utter and complete surprise. The only way that I ever got sober was by doing the exact opposite of everything that I had learned in school. “Believe in myself” turned out to be the very thing that was destroying my liver and overall health. How many hundreds of times did I try to will myself to stay sober and it failed? Then suddenly, by simply asking God for strength and direction, I was making it through a day, and another day, then a week, then a month. But then I stopped praying for a long spell, not able to connect the dots.

I stayed sober for a year before falling into the usual trap. “I got this now. I believe in myself.” Yes, that was the road back to ruin. I started with non-alcoholic beer then switched to regular beer and a year or two later I was worse off than before. Then a night in jail and the threat of more rehab got me back to the basics, of the need for God. But this time I knew that I needed God more than he needed me. But I still didn’t need him that much. I had my pills.

The pills carried me through some more years, but I was back in motion. In addition, fitness became an interest and continued until I’d run some eight or ten marathons and did an Ironman. I thought I’d fended off the emptiness forever. But it was after the Ironman in 2019 that it struck back, and harder than ever before. The depression arrived and I knew that I had cured nothing. I could not save myself. I could not manufacture self-esteem. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy was a parlor game. The pills were doing nothing. The fitness had maxed out. I was still on the treadmill of self-esteem. Not even a long period of sobriety was a cure. There had to be something more.

Body and Soul

That is when I understood the soul. For the first time in my life, I realized that we are body and soul. I had inklings about it, in times when I’d felt I’d lost something. In the deadness of my heart, I had always known something was off, ever since middle school.

The comment from Jesus: “Let the dead bury their dead” always shocked me. But I knew what he meant. I knew that he meant the people who never came to know Him. Because until I learned to kneel and pray and ask for God’s forgiveness, I never knew what redemptive suffering meant, and I never knew why he had to go through the cross to be resurrected.

Even this process took time because I was so blind to my spiritual state, that I couldn’t even see my sins and the wreckage of my life that had piled up in the wake of my jetboat named “Believe in yourself”.

The next four years began a long process of spiritual awakening, in a way that I could never have understood or predicted. Even as it happened, I tried to resist it. Sneaking into back rows of churches, I was there for reasons I could hardly fathom. But I knew there was something needed, something desired. A Sunday morning watching Netflix no longer satisfied me. It had never satisfied me, I was just finally becoming aware of it.

I started saying “Yes” to prayer, to fellowship, to volunteering, and to meet people who believed, and I mean really, actually believed in a spiritual life.

The supernatural became revealed again through the witness of others, and I too started to tear down the walls of my materialism and unbelief. The propaganda of the Humanist Manifesto that had been drilled into my head scattered. The false foundations of my public school and media indoctrination started to erode and crumble like sand.

And because the believers were living differently from everyone I had chosen to spend time with since middle school, I had to “come and see” what they were doing. It was so different. Their lives were different. Their thoughts are different. Most of them had less money than me, but they had something that I could never get. They had a sense of rest, of peace. And as I got to know them, I learned something interesting. They all spent time in prayer, every day. None were on anti-depressants. Not one of them “believed in themselves.” No, that was crazy.

No, instead they all believed in God, and the Resurrection of Christ. I knew many other people who seemed to be living without God, but they were taking pills, or smoking weed, or drinking, or chasing a dollar, or obsessing with sex. But here was something different. Here was a free option, called grace. No pills needed.

Then I read G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and the second chapter confirmed what I had known by experience but could never articulate. This is a book about the concept of “Believe in yourself.” The second chapter is called “The Maniac,” and the maniac is the man who “believes in himself.” Chesterton says, “Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief.” I straightened up in my reading chair, as so much of the era from the 1970s to 2020s that I had lived within began to make much more sense. When I was born, the humanists had overrun public schooling in precisely that era (and even ruled the progressive Churches), and the first rule of the humanists, in their manifesto, was that “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.” Thus it was no wonder that my teachers had ruled out God as existing, as a living entity. My few hours a year in faith formation were trampled over and cast out at the first difficult question I raised about God. My understanding of anything about Catholicism or faith was a house of cards. To make matters worse, I had only attended Masses from the post-Vatican II, where it was more guitar and modern “hymns” than reverent prayer and silence. I am not joking when I tell this: the first time I saw a High Latin Mass, I thought I was on another planet. I had no idea what was happening, but I knew that every Mass I had attended as a kid was lacking seriousness. I didn’t even receive Communion that day because I didn’t know what the altar rail was for, or why people were kneeling to receive the Eucharist. Probably best I didn’t, since I still hadn’t understood the need for Confession and being in a state of Grace before receiving the Eucharist yet.

I realized after this process had completed, after I had flushed my anti-depressants, that I had to knock down about ten walls of worldly indoctrination and self-deception that had been erected over thirty years, all the way back to Sesame Street with its early onset self-esteem program of indoctrination…and maybe even Tom and Jerry as I loved watching them beat the hell out of each other and figured that both and Tom and Jerry believed in themselves.

First, I had to accept that God may exist. This meant overcoming the dogmas of academia, that had coached me into the negative position, and until I found Aquinas and Augustine and Pascal and Robert Barron, I had never heard of the compelling arguments for the affirmative. But it wasn’t an argument that made me believe that God may exist - it was the first time I tried prayer and was able to not drink. And this will forever be perhaps the strangest education of my life. For nothing had worked before - no amount of knowledge, no technique, no bargaining, no rewards. Later, I used prayer to discontinue looking at any smut on my computer or phone, and lo and behold, repeatedly kneeling and asking God for help, once again, chased away the demon. This had a profound effect on me, as I realized that prayer did something strange, and it was real.

Then there was politics, which is always the top idol in America. You can’t bring up a news story in most circles without hitting an electric wire related to politics. The issue of abortion or prayer in schools was a trigger for me, as I had been coached well enough in school that liberty and freedom only meant doing whatever one wished. Luckily, over the years I had lived in neighborhoods with people of both parties, so I had close friends of both the left and the right, and I still do, and this is because I have the gift of knowing when to shut the hell up. My 10th-grade biology teacher once paid me a great compliment, telling me that I was a nuisance in class, but I knew when to quit. Now, for some, that may not sound like a compliment, but to me, it meant I had the slightest sense of knowing when to stop acting like an idiot. Perhaps being from Minnesota had something to do with it because we hold back our feelings to avoid offending others - or we did at one time. I think that has passed as greater America has infected the state through social media.

However, when I began to believe in God, I began to set aside certain political issues, such as that unborn babies are “just a clump of cells,” which never made a lot of sense to me anyway. The problem was that if I had a soul, then so did everyone else. If I had a soul, so did my conservative and liberal neighbors - they both did. And if I had a soul, so did babies, and if babies had a soul, so did humans who had not yet popped out of the womb. Plus I had my own children and they were the greatest gift, along with my wife, that I could have ever asked for, and I hadn’t asked for, yet had been given them. And all of these things began to work like a degreasing rust remover on my static and crusty ideas. The bolted-on beliefs from college and my twenties started looking less solid. That wall of politics may have been as thick as the wall of “Does God exist?”

Then there was the approval of the world - a very thick wall - because to believe in God was to reject the secularization thesis that reigned in the last fifty years. Belief in God was a vestige of less sophisticated times. It was like the appendix on the body, or goosebumps - they were leftovers from a more primitive age. Joseph Campbell and many others assured us that Christianity was just like every other religion, every other myth, with just a wrinkle of difference here, a nuance there. I felt like the world was nudging me along, saying, “Nothing to see here, folks: Star Wars is sufficient for your spiritual needs.” Except it wasn’t (and Disney’s takeover of it has certainly proven that out as it degrades with every new release).

To be Catholic, or really any non-”progressive” Christian, was to be a modern freak. It was not approved of by the educated and cool people. I liked reading Reddit, which was like the atheist training ground of the internet. On Reddit people could be anonymous and bash the church openly, and all of the veiled arguments against Christianity in the media and college were unleashed in their full anger online. Oh, and Islam was the true religion of peace - all of Christian history was to blame for every injustice in the modern world. No, I believed that. In hindsight, it’s amazing how far your false teaching can take you, and it’s no wonder to me now that the books of the Church Fathers are swept under a rug. To read Augustine’s Confessions, or Origen’s First Principles, or the story of the martyrs of Lyon, or hear about the Battle of Tours and the Battle of Lepanto, or read of the martyrs like St. Lawrence and St. Agnes, or to see the early church in the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch - all of this is more thrilling than any roller coaster at Six Flags.

As I started to read the Gospels and read the writings of the Church Fathers and listen to Bishop Barron, as well as the Lord of Spirits podcast, Tim Keller, Father Mike Schmitz, and more - I knew that I had not been told anything about the history of Christianity.

The education system, from kindergarten to college, had hidden a trove of books from us. Purposefully it had steered me away from millennia of wisdom. All spiritual things were kept away, all of the things that held Christendom together. Even the dichotomies were false ones: I had only ever heard of nature vs. nurture, as if all problems were merely questions of genetics or environment. As if only those two things could be the cause of human sin. They walled off “The Fall” as a non-possibility, and in walling it off proved in the 20th century experiments of communism, fascism, and liberalism that nature vs. nurture did not account for all problems. The longer you look into the abyss, the more you know The Fall happened. But the education system blamed other things. Never was it the world, the flesh, and the devil that prompted us to sin. Never was it the idea of concupiscence, a word that I didn’t learn until my late thirties.

Worse, there was a false war over faith vs. reason, and until digging deeply I learned that not only was this an invention of the Enlightenment, but the people beating the drum of that war were standing on the shoulders of the giants of faith who used their reason to discover the wonders of the natural world while still having full faith in God. There was no conflict between faith and reason. The fundamentalists and atheists may have had some odd war over those two things, but Catholics did not.

The wisdom of the Saints was kept like dry goods in storage. But the great thing about it is that just when all the bad movies and boring bestsellers had lost their flair, I stumbled onto St. Augustine, St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. John Damascene and realized that there is absolute dynamite in the word of God and the history of the church. I remember reading The Imitation of Christ on an airplane and thinking, “I should hide the cover or these people will think I’m a crazy Christian.” That was an odd thought. In fact, I now know who put that thought in my head. I had never once thought that I should “hide the cover” when I was reading Ovid or Virgil on a plane. I never thought that when reading Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

And so it occurred to me that the real rebel today is the one who reads The Imitation of Christ. The only books I was embarrassed to be seen with were the ones that felt like they inverted the whole world that I had come to accept. And the fact that invasive thoughts were suggesting that I stop reading it or hide it hinted to me that the nature of thoughts may not be purely material things. After all, thoughts are only in the intellect, and angels are pure intellect - as are demons.

Oddly enough, this open reading of books written by early Christians felt like an act of revolt against the world. As a child of the 1980s and 1990s, I tend to like a revolt now and then, but this was the first revolt against the world instead of God. Now I was repenting, turning back. I think when we 90s kids were drinking like fish and head-banging, we were only doing so because we had never seen beauty or truth, never heard it, never understood it, never encountered it. We were raised with ugly buildings, ugly art, and ugly ideology. Given the choice today between listening to Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” or “Jesu, Salvator Mundi” from the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles - ten out of ten times, I choose the nuns. (Sorry, Hetfield, you’ve been replaced. Those women need no distortion pedal or even guitars to outdo you. Thanks for all the metal, but I’m all good now.)

Punk is done, rock is dulled: beauty, truth, and goodness is new again. Why? Because God makes all things new. Many of us who grew up in the late 20th century and early 21st century have never seen or heard such things. Irreverent Masses and the pop music hymns are all we were shown. We are so accustomed to ugliness that we don’t even know it until we start digging in the past to see what “The Enlightenment” tried to bury. There is much more out there than the material world. There is new life in Christ. Life is not just biological or psychological, it is spiritual, it is Sacramental.

“Something shook out of me”

After I started seeking God, which came in incremental steps, there were two days when the world of ghosts and spirits became real to me in ways that I cannot account for.

The first was an out-of-body experience I had in a doctor’s office, when I was being told something and could no longer hear the doctor. For a brief period, I felt as if floating in the room, or absent from my body. This may have lasted only ten seconds, but in those ten seconds, I caught a glimpse of a reality outside of the body. Nothing dramatic happened, I just felt a separation from my body and recognized that the soul can live outside of the flesh. This made apparent the need for change, for the animating, the soul, seemed to be separating for the sole purpose of telling me, “Here I am. This is the self you thought was you. This is your soul, and your body is down there. You need to acknowledge me.”

This startling experience rocked various assumptions I had about the material world. Already I had known that through prayer, somehow, someway, I could resist temptations like alcohol that otherwise drove me to madness, that I could never stop on my own.

But the second experience showed me that the concept of possession is real. Again, I am at a loss for an explanation for this, but the day this happened is the day that I began to read the Bible and see it completely differently.

I was at home. Because I had been learning about God and catching up on reading the books I had never been exposed to, I took a moment to watch a show about Catholicism, called Symbolon. Now, Edward Sri is not a speaker or teacher that I am drawn to, but it is he who changed my life by merely speaking words - not even to me, but in a recording - and what he said caused something to leave my body.

Again, this is too strange for words, and whatever I make of it here, will fail to tell the ghostly nature of what occurred. I’ve written about this before but didn’t mention the “shaking out” that happened with it. Something left my body, or my soul, or both.

It was a word that changed me. Some say that books don’t change people; paragraphs do. But for me, it was a single word that opened up the scripture. The word “literarily.” Edward Sri said there is a difference between reading the Bible “literally” and “literarily.” The literal was important, but the spiritual reading I had been ignoring. Reading the Word of God was more than a literal or literary exercise, but somehow the word literary awakened me to understanding that there was a literal and a spiritual way to read. Better still, within the spiritual sense were the moral, allegorical, and the Big Picture (of how it related to Jesus) senses.

This was a moment of St. Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding,” as the literal and spiritual senses of scripture suddenly flowered. I realized reading the Bible was not an academic exercise, it was a living encounter with the Word of God.

It made all the difference in the world to me. When I heard that, something made my ears perk up. Edward Sri had only said this:

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)

This marked the death of fundamentalism, from both sides. The pure materialist science perspective was gone. Any creeping “faith alone” or fundamentalist Protestant reading was gone, too.

The four senses of scripture roared from the book. I guess it like how LSD users describe their imaginary worlds coming to life when the hallucinations begin. But I wasn’t using LSD. This was a stone sober revelation. This was an encounter. This was the Holy Spirit. I had rejected it for so long, the unforgivable sin, and somehow I now let it in. Or rather, I didn’t do anything - God did something.

How do I know that this moment in time changed something in me? Because I felt it. And because I’ve seen it happen to others.

In AA meetings you will often hear someone say, “I felt something lifted off of me.” Whenever I hear this, I know that God is working miracles in this world just as he was when Jesus walked the earth, or when Moses heard God thunder on the mountain, or when a dazed Abraham made his covenant with God. There is another saying in AA, and it is, “Don’t stop coming until the miracle happens.” Newbies don’t know what that means and often find it confusing, if not irritating. But something happens and it cannot be explained in purely rational terms.

Something happened.

Something strange. Something wonderful.

Years ago, when I knew the time to drink was nearing, I always felt a tingle in my forearms. It was like a creepy, crawly feeling - like a temptation or urge or compulsion. There was a sense of a force approaching that could not be satisfied. On that day when something happened, I had been sober for four years at this point, so the writhing feeling rarely ever happened. I was past that. But I was still white-knuckling life on many days. Some days I still live that way.

But when I heard the words about how to read the Bible, my hands shook. It was not like an excess caffeine shake, nor was it like a nervous shaking, nor was it like a hunger shake, nor was it like the natural tremor that I have in my hands. Something shook out of my hands, something invisible.

This was a violent shake. The shaking lasted perhaps one second. But when it happened, I said, “Yes, that’s it.” And I knew. I knew then and there that the reason I had been unable to read the Bible was because I had blinders on from Protestant fundamentalists and atheist scientists who had presented a false dichotomy. There was no war between faith and reason. There was another invisible realm beyond nature vs. nurture. There was a way to read Genesis that made sense. There was a way to know Christ as the eternally begotten Son of God, fully human and fully divine. The world and scripture opened up, spiritual and physical.

When it shook out of me I knew what the demoniacs had felt in the Gospels, what Mary Magdalene had felt. Further, I knew what Jesus meant when he said that we must ask, seek, and knock and God will answer, because even though I didn’t know what was drawing me, I was no longer seeking myself, I was seeking God.

This was a casting out. The shaking that occurred that day altered the course of my life. Many little walls had to come down before that, but that day did something that no book or life experience could ever do. Were it not for the shaking out of something from my forearms and hands, no senses would have caught the departure of this presence that had been over me. Suddenly I could say, “Something was lifted off of me,” but for me it was, “Something shook out of me.”

And it was that day that I knew: I no longer needed anti-depressants. I needed prayer, fellowship, scripture, and the Sacraments. I needed God, in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I still needed “me” because I knew that I was made for God, and my heart had been restless until it rested in Him. But I also knew that I needed Reconciliation and the Eucharist far more than Lexapro or Wellbutrin. I knew that every misguided search and difficulty had been leading me to that moment. And after that, the moments kept coming where I saw more clearly, such as when I first attended a High Mass in Latin, where I saw how powerful liturgy could be, or when I continued to meet people of faith, or when I kneeled to pray, or read spiritual books, or volunteered for things that I didn’t necessarily like to do.

A few weeks after that day when “something shook out of me,” I dumped the last of the pills down the toilet. Whatever had shaken out of me seemed to stir the Holy Spirit in me. I felt as if the Baptismal and Confirmation graces were set free. Whatever had been “over me” had departed, and I knew it. And I knew how to keep it that way, through the name of Christ, through prayer and obedience, submission to God. Not through effort, but by surrender. The old “surrender to win” attitude worked. The cure had been to unlearn all that I had ever learned, because once I stopped believing in myself, I believed in God. I knew that the devil was real, and he certainly believed in himself. I knew that sin was real and it was some relative wishy-washy opinion.

No longer was I on top. I was in the lowest place, because I knew that spiritually I had long been a sitting duck when I thought I knew more that spirits of pure intellect. No longer did my ideas come first, but I submitted to the teachings of the Church. These rules were not for oppressing but for freedom, the right kind of freedom. Most of all, I knew Who was greater than both the devil and myself. In a great mystery, our trials and tribulations are permitted, because they allow growth to happen. But there is no growth without struggle, and action and humility must be settled into a union. Scripture is alive. God is alive. He is risen. These are all mysteries to embrace. “Surrender to win” must be the way, as the Lord showed us. In the strangest story of all, God became man, was crucified, died, and rose again. At long last, I am alive and no longer looking for the answer in myself, because I no longer believe in myself. I believe in God.

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

There is more backstory to tell before I get to the day that I flushed my anti-depressants.

I had never hear of Father Garrigou-Lagrange and the idea of a “predominant fault,” also called a root sin, until a few years ago. Everyone has a predominant fault, and it is one of three things: pride, vanity, or sensuality. Sensuality seems to be my taproot, because in pleasure I find the sensual escape from all struggle. A slice of pumpkin pie is not unlike a shot of whiskey for me. But pride and vanity are ever ready to take the lead as well as my predominant fault. The more I reflected on it, I came to see that I have all three of these faults. And the more I reflected on everyone else I know, I came to realize that every human being suffers from all three of these in different ways.

Pride is unavoidable. I came to reject authority, since that is the American way, and pride is the fault in every case. The problem is that we lionize pride today. Individual pride, national pride, school pride, family pride, town pride, gay pride - it’s everywhere. We have all forgotten that pride is what caused the Fall because we dropped humility long ago. Vanity too is praised. Looking fit, being cool, seeking approval, receiving honors, gaining esteem - all of these are valued today. And as for the old morality around sensuality, around sex and food, gluttony and lust? The old “prudish” ways didn’t seem to have any answers either. Pride, vanity, and sensuality were littered all over in the lyrics and scripts of American culture. After all, celebrities and singers believe in themselves, and usually in interviews when asked to give advice to aspiring fans, they say, “Never give up. Always believe in yourself.”

The messages about marriage and sex and morality in general were unanimous on the radio and TV: humans could only flourish if they were free to sleep with random partners at will, unrestrained from the old Church rules. Also, getting high was good. Also, sex was meaningless and masturbation was self-care. Also, honoring your parents was for suckers. Also, the pursuit of wealth was not a trap, but the good life. Also, Sundays were not for worshipping Jesus, honoring Mary, and communing with the Saints, they were for sleeping off a hangover, drinking Bloody Marys, and watching the New Orleans Saints play football. And as for God? Get serious - that was just an adult Santa story.

Rage Against the Machine summed up the 1990s best with their lyrics: “F*** you, I won’t do what you tell me,” screamed at high decibels. Like in the old Maxell cassette ad, this song screamed what we felt inside. It’s comical to listen to Rage Against the Machine songs now, but it’s solid evidence of what a screwed up era it was, particularly when we were living an age of wealth and privilege. Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg took care of glorifying violence, meaningless sex, and open disrespect of women. The culmination of it all came with Limp Bizkit screaming, “Give me something to break” in stadiums full of wrecked people smashing into each other like the harpies in hell. We were like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, where all the cosmetic gauges and lights in the control room looked great as the reactor core, the heart, was in the throes of violent meltdown.

The good thing was, all of this could fit in just fine with the “Believe in yourself” mantra. The important thing was that you kept up the facade of self-esteem. The first principle of “believe in yourself” is that perception is reality: Whatever I think is right, is right because…I believe in myself. I am the authority. The Sophists that Socrates argued against have been let out of their cage all over again.

Having grown up around a fair amount of lukewarm Christians of all stripes, it seemed that the call to chastity and claim to holiness was a wink. Some were living their lives as if Christ had risen from the grave, but not many. Following suit, I loosely clung to the Church for a badge of identity for a while, until the school system fully applied the wedge between belief in Self versus belief in God. I was mostly eager to let it happen. After all, most TV shows mocked the Church in one way or another. I’d seen George Carlin’s HBO-special tirades against faith that made atheism seem cool. Most of all, teachers and college professors seemed to be on a subtle crusade against all things supernatural. Here is one example (of many possible examples) of the programming I received:

In my junior year of high school, in chemistry class, the teacher showed us a video that explained what really happened at the Wedding Feast at Cana. We were told by the Bible and at Church that Jesus had miraculously turned water into wine. This was a mystery to be pondered and wondered about in awe. But my teacher shared a hypothesis that it could have been accomplished by a chemistry trick. Jesus was most likely a magician, or a scientist (Occam’s Razor, right?) - and therefore he was a charlatan. The laws of physics could never be broken, you see, because we lived in a purely material universe. The teacher showed us a video and was very pleased with it. (This really did happen in class, and there really is a video about this, although I cannot find it now.)

Jesus had just used an acid-to-base additive to cause the color of the water to change. The people in Cana were so drunk that they couldn’t tell. (Of course, this disregards the line that this was the “best wine” of all from the actual Wedding Feast at Cana story - and it is the sober host that tastes it and announces the quality of the wine - but I digress.)

To me, this event marks the logical conclusion of the long watering-down of Biblical scholarship. The wine at Cana was now just colored water. This fit well with the modern scholarly view that when Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes that the people just shared what they had been hiding. All the miracles were being explained away in purely rational, natural, material methods.

The message was clear: science was the only way of knowing; no such thing as miracles existed. A university New Testament class took it even further with mentioning a funny “swoon theory” to explain away the Resurrection. Comparative literature professors turned the Bible into the equivalent of Greek myth.

The 19th century Germans had dissected the Bible, the 20th century atheist academics then had the body drawn and quartered, and now it was scientists themselves doing the autopsy. That my public school teacher (who was really just echoing the very old Ebionite heresy) was now evangelizing kids into the “cool teacher/magician” version of Jesus illustrated how far the Word of God had fallen in Christendom.

This anti-religious intrusion into science class surprised me, although I don’t know why it did. God-talk had long been forbidden at school. Religious mockery, however, was not prohibited, even by teachers, and this was specifically true for Christianity, while Islam and Jewish talk had a hall pass. This speech code had been established in fifth and sixth grade already. God-talk had been banished from music and language arts. But now I had an authority from the science department pitching the idea that the Biblical miracles were a magic act, a facade, a sham. This was going above and beyond the typical curriculum of “believe in yourself” to openly plant doubts about the idea of a Creator, the Incarnation, miracles, and faith in general.

Besides my one hour of Mass a week as a child, with its three readings and a seven-minute Homily, I had no spiritual direction. School and TV sitcoms were the closest thing to spiritual direction. Teachers and TV dads gave the life talks.

The idea that the public school is “non-religious” has become less and less tenable, because the consistent messaging from age six onward was a dead match for the beliefs of religious humanism. And of course, there was always the obsession with shape-shifting Liberty, as liberalism has its goddess on an island off of New York City. But what the goddess of liberty means can be whatever you like, since individualism goes really well with “believe in yourself.” Unfortunately, all of this takes a very long time for a kid to figure out, and that is the point; most will never figure it out.

As for me, I was a house of cards, with no real strength in my belief. No foundation, no understanding.

Had life events not guided me to another path, I would never have uprooted what had been planted in the soil tended by my public school gardeners. Now when I think of the teachers I had, they were so clearly humanist in their approach. For three years in particular, the humanist message was like an air-horn in the classroom. I don’t think it was anything evil. These teachers had just bought a bad batch, thinking they were planting oak trees but it was just thorns and thistles. They acted as the apostles of John Dewey, not Jesus Christ.

I suppose they even thought it was working. Having been around enough sales people, a pitch becomes contagious when it appears to be working. As long as people are buying, they will use the pitch. This also happens with fishermen, where if one guy catches a big fish, everyone cuts their bait and starts using the same bait that the lucky guy was using. We just can’t help ourselves but get on the bandwagon.

But as soon as the product proves a failure and the pitch can no longer sell product, they drop it like garbage and chase the new thing. Fishermen do the same.

That is what has happened now, as the humanism of the 20th century has proven to be a failure, and new shiny pitches were taken up for testing. These too will fail within a generation. The problem is that these ideas are all coming from “The Enlightenment,” which was never the candle in the dark it claimed to be. If there was any light, it was from a dumpster fire of half-truths. It ignored the soul and God, the key things needed for sanity and mental health.

My teachers of the humanist dogma were doing what they thought was best for kids because the cult of self-esteem had been sold to them first. When you buy a bad product, it’s hard to admit. It’s embarrassing. It was like the many monorails that were sold to cities across America, or like Olympic villages with their unused, mossed-over bobsled tracks. The problem is that much time is required to pay the piper for leading people into error, and it takes generations to correct.

This is why the modern dogma of “Believe in yourself” is so lame. We are just so small in the grand scheme of all that God has created in time and space, and when we elevate our importance to the highest place of belief, it’s absurd. It’s boring. We’re so limited, but God can do anything. To quote Pink Floyd, I’d rather have a walk-on part in the war, than a lead role in a cage. (And we are living in a spiritual war.)

Thus it becomes a manner of assenting to a set of foundational ideas and the proof is in how you live. Because it’s one thing to say “I believe in one God” and then live for the sacred Self. And now I know, this is why I needed to ask my doctor about Lexapro. This division within from childhood had cleaved me apart, leaving me as only a body. Because I could say the Creed at Church but not believe it, and I certainly wasn’t living it. Around age eighteen, I started only mouthing certain lines of the Nicene Creed, if I happened to attend Mass. But in reality, I was just finally in such a state of mortal sin that I could no longer even fake the words. And this is how the devil gets you.

What must never be forgotten is that angels are pure intellect, and the devil is a fallen angel. Hence, if we assume our intelligence is high, the angels shake their virtual heads and the devils rub their virtual hands.

While I was mouthing the words of the Creed but living a humanist or agnostic life, the devil’s work was already done. Voltaire, the writer who made a living attacking the Catholic Church so long ago, once advised a person who wanted to leave the Church on how he could stop believing that the Eucharist was the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus. Voltaire told him to continue committing sins and receiving the Eucharist until it blunted his faith so badly that the Eucharist became just a wafer, just a piece of bread. As it turns out, Voltaire understood spiritual warfare extremely well, because he articulated exactly what has happened to millions of “faithful” Catholics. This is exactly how faith dies, because saying the Creed and receiving the Eucharist does nothing without Confession and conversion of the heart and kneeling and asking God for help. Once disobedience in living for God has taken root, the outward actions of faith become false. The entire idea of “believe in yourself” casts God out immediately, but of course, when we turn from God we only cast ourselves out.

Either a Creator made the world, or it has always existed. This was the presented options from Church and from public school. Today, for me, it takes far less faith to believe that time and space came from a Creator God who made it “out of nothing” than for time and space to have been created by…nothing. How much faith you need to believe that the universe is “self-existing”?! Far more than I can muster. But the public schooling and media propped up this absurdity for a long time simply by repeating this first principle of humanism in subtle and sundry ways.

Is it any wonder people today are scattered and confused? If you have two opposed worldviews battling and rattling around in your head for power and control, chaos and disorder are the result. How could it not be? If I told you that up is down one minute, and down is up the next, it would be confusing. As Jesus said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Humanism, it turns out, is a crusade against standard Christian ideas like God, sin, the Fall, the need for redemption, eternal life, and so on. The summary statement of the humanist manifesto says something very old, in a kind of triumphant reiteration of the sophist Protagoras who said, “Man is the measure of all things” but with more words. The humanists even sum up their own manifesto with a flourish arguing that the fruit from the tree of Knowledge tastes better than that from the tree of Life:

Though we consider the religious forms and ideas of our fathers no longer adequate, the quest for the good life is still the central task for mankind. Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement. He must set intelligence and will to the task.

Ah, the good life! Sounds good. And yes, “he alone” will bring the dream, the utopia! God need not apply. But really, all of this could be summed up more concisely, had they just said what my second-grade teacher had said, which was: “Believe in yourself.”

This is what the architects of the public school system believed. Is it any wonder then that I became a humanist, when I had to sit in rooms for forty hours a week through the late 1980s and entire 1990s and early 2000s and listen to humanist sermons from humanist teachers?

When you are feeling strong…and when it comes to an end

While I was spinning in motion, on fast-forward all through the public school years, I could keep up the energy to believe in myself, so long as I achieved, believed, and had plenty of strength.

This was a period of strength and motion, such that I could keep the illusion alive that I could will my destiny. I could have a good-looking girlfriend, win the game, ease the pain with a gallon of beer, work like a dog, get the grades, and fudge my way through life with a smile while my flaws were excused. Because one thing was clear: outside of the Church, the idea of sin only existed in getting caught. If all the right things were done, self-actualization would come.

This is a lie.

In Leo Tolstoy’s short story, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” the dying man has lived a successful life. He’s done all the right things. He’s punched his ticket at every proper stop on the secular journey of life. But in his last days, nearing the edge, he peers into the nothingness. Looking back on his life of “right” choices that made him a respected person with a good career, he wonders about the point of his life and career. The gaping mouth of the Big Empty is looking at Ivan when he muses:

"Then what does it mean? Why? It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!

"Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done," it suddenly occurred to him. "But how could that be, when I did everything properly?" he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.

Oh, it’s unfair, cries Ivan! Like a Pharisee, he had done all the external actions needed to be whole, to be self-actualized, and to be at peace. Yet he is not at peace in his heart - he is at terror. Why?

Because he didn’t choose the right things. He chose the wrong things. Career and success are good things, but they are lesser things. Ivan Ilyich is at a loss because he chose the things that the culture valued, not what his heart and God value. A life of fear chases things, and I know it well. But Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

When I was living like Ivan Ilyich, as all body, achievement, and reputation, I had no concern for the soul or God. Then the illusion of strength and accomplishment painted me into a corner. Ivan’s second chance comes in the weeks of his death, when he is weak.

I was feeling strong, most of the time, and in those days I could indeed “Believe in myself.” But when the down periods came and the tank was empty, the great sadness came with it. A lesson in life was being taught that, when I am feeling strong, I have grand ideas about life, justice, and mercy. But when I am weak, those feelings change. Weakness is never far away either, as a simple cold or flu can collapse the whole facade. Any crack in the armor can cause the rust to begin, and we become brittle. Aging is a great teacher, as Ivan Ilyich learned.

On some of the darkest days, even after winning a game, or getting a grade, or getting a raise at work, I could not hold back the swell of emotion that made me think of ending my life. This glorious, gifted, unique, special, life - where I “believed in myself” and “followed my heart” and “was perfect just the way I was” - I could not explain why I was so lost. On those days I thought of veering into a semi-truck. And even if a girlfriend or my mom asked me, “What’s wrong?” I had no words. None whatsoever. There was nothing that I could tell them, because I myself had no idea what was wrong. For someone to have everything, and yet be utterly empty, made no sense to me. This is why for a long time I assumed I needed anti-depression medication. I needed a button to push, a technique, a material solution. I didn’t understand that the entire problem was spiritual.

When the booze stopped working, the pills took main stage. And when the pills stopped working, I knew that I’d been trying to turn on a light using the wrong switch. The pyramid of self-actualization was not wired to anything but myself, and I had lost the ability to believe in myself any longer.

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

As long as I kept moving and doing and performing, it seemed that these “Black Dog” days of depression could be kept at bay. To be busy became a virtue, rather than a vice. For about thirty years I believed sloth was just lying around and didn’t understand that the other half of sloth is the constant busybody who cannot stop working. Thus it seems that sloth is more of a national pastime than baseball. Funny that I had never been told the word, “acedia,” also known as the Noonday Devil, in any of my schooling.

The old American ethic of hard work starts early and sets deep in the bones. Oddly enough, we call this the “Protestant work ethic,” which is ironic because Protestants reject “faith and works” in favor of “faith alone.” But they certainly understand work, or like so many of us, we speak about our hard work to express our virtue. I like to do that and then spend far too much time surfing the internet or reading books. This obsession with busy efficiency even filters into leisure time, where so often a vacation or weekend is jam-packed with busy events, to the point that after the leisure time, I need leisure time to recover from the leisure time. But of course, there is no time for that - it’s back to work.

As long as I never sat still for too long, and always had something to do, I would never have to look into the Big Empty. Everyone seemed to have this same malady of filling the time with must-haves which were nice-to-haves or not-really-needed-at-all. Through some good fortune, I had the opportunity to spend weekends as a child on farms, where the flow of life centered around the animals and the crops, and the mania of the suburbs didn’t infect me there. I also had the good fortune of a grandmother who would chase us away from the television and disallow it except for a short hour at night, so that we had to find outside, pastoral activities, like climbing apple trees, or chopping thistles around fences, or marveling at giant garden spiders with their webs in the tall grass, or catching elusive butterflies, or helping with a new calf, or playing with cats (or finding a dead one occasionally).

There was no rush to get somewhere or be anywhere because the dairy cows owned the clock. 

I was in that world for many years of my early life, and seemed to have forgotten it entirely once sports and school was lifted up as the way.

Because when the world came calling, I left that behind. The culture insisted, and I believed it, that the ways of the country swain were plain and dull. Music and movies went out of their way to persuade that the hicks were all ignorant. Hillbillys, hayseeds, and yokels were portrayed as white, male, abusive, ignorant, alcoholic, and oppressive, but from my own experience I knew better (or I should have). I remember the first time I heard someone actually use the term “flyover states” in derision on a business flight and how I laughed but secretly winced, knowing the goodness of the people in those lands that appear so empty from a tin can 30,000 feet up in the air.

The farm was gone from my life, and many of the actual farms themselves just disappeared. Like so many other little farms in the name of progress and solvency, nearly every one I had worked on had been sold to a larger concern. This land crash was the source of many songs and things like Farm AID in the 1980s.

All of the conventional wisdom steered me away from the simple farm life anyway. “There is no future in farming.” “There is no money in it.” “There is so much more to experience in the city, in traveling, in retiring on a beach somewhere.” The reduction of farm populations has been happening for centuries, I just happened to be in the last gasps. Agriculture had long been going the way of Walmart like every other industry, where brutal efficiency and economies of scale became the only way to remain a going concern.

Thus, the path forward was through schooling, sports, and especially STEM. Mostly, the way to rest was to be busy, not sitting in rocking chairs in the yard watching the sun go down. Plucking potato bugs out of mom’s or grandma’s giant garden, or bottle-feeding those hungry calves; no, these tasks were now best done by pesticides and (increasingly) immigrant workers. That way of life was coming to an end, visibly, as the roads I knew where many little farms had been in operation, dwindled to a few, and the few that were left no longer gave names to cows. Those cows with personal names like Pearl and Loretta now had serial numbers in a database.

My point from that long story is this: I’ve never felt more whole than when working on a farm, in the slow days, where time rolled with the lives of animals, crops, families, and the ever-present community that found a centerpoint under a Church steeple. Never once in that world did I hear anyone say the mantra, “Believe in yourself.”

Now: before I go on, let me put a damper on this rose-colored glass view of the “country life.” I’m aware of the oozing, reductive nostalgia. Ample struggles occur in the rural life. The people are sinners in many ways, like anywhere else. But clearly I’m not alone in lamenting our collective departure from the agrarian life and nature. The Romantics made a genre of it as a backlash against industrialization, against the mechanized worldview, and the rural life is now fully mechanized. Looking back to days in the country is a literary staple. Virgil was doing the same before Christ in his idyllic Georgics. In the Nativity story it is the shepherds, the lowly country people, most disposed to receive the good news. They were not making a name for themselves, they were living quietly like the lambs that they tended.

This is a theme even in the Old Testament. When Lot and Abraham go separate ways, Lot chooses to go to the city. Lot chose poorly because he strays from God. Abraham stays in the land with the flocks and remains faithful to God. David begins as a shepherd, innocent and naive, and only falls into sin once his name becomes great. The lesson of living the simple life is not in literature by mistake, it is from actual life experiences. Whether from Genesis, Luke, Virgil, or John Keats, this loss of innocence after leaving the farm is a common theme. In my own experience, those nearest to nature or farming, who are not just weekend suburban tourists punching their nature tickets, who live quietly outside of cities and society, seem to commune with the divine more readily. They certainly seem more prone to prayer. They give glory to the highest good, God, not the precious Self. And the cult of self-esteem had no time for that kind of cow-eyed view of life. Kneeling and silence and simplicity were never a part of my life in school or sports or career pursuits - and so as I was indoctrinated, such “useless” things came to seem like a waste of time.

Sport and School

To be playing a sport, or studying, or watching a sitcom, or eating or drinking was to be happy.

No, that’s not it. No, to be doing those things was to be busy.

And to be busy was to be useful. Even watching TV had a cultural currency of being able to speak the lingo of the week. To have watched the latest Seinfeld or Sopranos episode became applicable knowledge at the water cooler and at happy hour.

From the age of twelve onward, I was always busy with something, and if not busy, I was taking in multiple streams of noise, doing homework during American Top 40 or carving out time for appointment TV, like Saturday Night Live or The Simpsons. TV filled the gaps between homework and sports until I finally learned to enjoy reading. The goals of life were fairly straightforward: what was valued was youth, strength, knowledge, career, fun, and victory. Especially victory. In sports, the lesson was rivalry and competition. The self-esteem train continued through it all. The aim of life was to make a name for oneself, just like the builders at Babel intended. Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song should have been the school fight song. Victory, youth, vigor, success, wealth, fun, and who can forget sex? Valhalla, I am coming.

Arriving at the “age of reason” means the end of childhood. When it arrives, the seeds planted by those guiding the child begin to sprout. As to when I reached the age of reason, it’s hard to say. But when it did, what grew from the seeds of esteem did not flower as my teachers imagined.

Of course, the answer to all modern existential problems was to stay busy, to assuage the horror of looking into the void. To accomplish this we kept every hour of every day booked with running hither and thither, because experiences meant fulfillment. Fun meant life. Accomplishment brought esteem.

A student-athlete’s life is a constant blitz of must-do lists. I think that student-athletes understand the pressures of a quarterly sales world long before they should. The market’s “tyranny of the quarter” probably came to be from Anglo-Saxon student-athletes (scribe-knights?) who couldn’t kick the addiction. While salespeople live by “the number,” that monetary target they must hit, student-athletes go from one pressure situation to the next, and it’s never about what they accomplished the week before. It’s more like Glengarry Glen Ross. The question of coaches and adults is unspoken, but it is the same as a sales manager: “What have you done for me lately?” Oh, you won last night? There’s another game tomorrow. Your body is sore? Suck it up. You have a math test? You’ll have time on the bus. Do you even care? A season ends and the next begins. Are you even trying? I believe this is why Army basic training felt disappointing to me. I was expecting more of a challenge. After years of the student-athlete grind, the co-ed Army training didn’t really pack the punch I expected.

Somewhere around 10th or 11th grade the crackup started. I made it through several of these and I suppose each one makes you stronger, for a while. When the crack up starts, the load becomes visibly heavy. The solution of being busy stops working, and people notice. Then someone would play the good cop, and march out the old mantras: “You’re doing great. You’re very capable. You just need to believe in yourself.” This was like a kind of repetitive prayer for the self, but without any actual healing.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right, I should have practiced more.” “Yes, I should have studied more.” “I’m such an idiot - I just need to believe in myself.”

Even Sundays were not for sitting. The day of rest was eroding rapidly into a day for shopping and sports. I remember when people would not work, when stores were closed, when farmers would not even plow a field on Sunday. It was not long ago that the Third Commandment was taken seriously (which gives me hope that one day it will be again).

The years of middle school and high school rushed by - an absolute blur. School and sports provided the meaning of life, with a mystical career ahead. Without ever having read Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning I understood the basics of his logotherapy, which was that I needed a purpose, a goal, something to shoot for. Like many student-athletes it became a kind of religion. I think it’s fair to call it an idol. More accurately, we had a whole set of idols, like the Greeks had for gods of different domains of life.

In those early years when the mania of sports and school took over, I was certain that I would never use drugs or alcohol. That would be insane. How could I consider such a thing? How could I jeopardize sports glory for the pride of the town, the team, and my personal status? Even in eighth grade, I wondered why or how anyone would risk their athletic eligibility by drinking on the weekend. What kind of lunatic would do that? To Valhalla, through sports! Sports provided the most transcendent activity available, I thought, so how could anyone trade the beauty and goodness of dropping a three-pointer, or hitting a running back so hard that a snot bubble emerged from his nose? Did those teen drinkers not understand that they exchanged honor and glory for something as smelly and nasty as beer?

That was before I ever felt a buzz.

I realized that the transcendence of a buzz exceeded the glory of hard hits on the field or the sound of a swishing net. In that moment of the first buzz, I learned that the concept of self-belief was malleable to whatever I wanted it to be, because I was sole decision maker over what was good, true, and beautiful. Sports was out; the buzz was in.

Without a doubt, I began to lose the nerve in competition once alcohol blunted the edge. Where there had been a yearning to take the last shot, I now wanted to drink a shot. I no longer wanted the pressure. I wanted out. I wanted to move on, to post-high school, to escape - anywhere - to the military, or an adventure, or a trade. Race car drivers can “lose the edge” and be forced to retire, and I know exactly what that means, despite never having driven a race car. Once the inner burning fire of “rage to master” a sport is dwindled to a pilot light, the desire can only be faked.

What was good, true, and beautiful suddenly came in a can or a bottle, because that was instant escape. When the first shots of sloe gin had tucked me into an envelope of drunkenness, I felt more alive than in anything else before it. No, not alive - I felt dead to all concerns. I was removed from all other goals. The pressure of math and sports and needing approval suddenly and totally vanished, at least until morning. The warmth and tingle of the liquor took away all expectations, all resentments.

However, a warning sign appeared the very first night, as I punted a football at my friend’s house and broke a window. But that didn’t register as a signal from above to reconsider my choice, because I believed in myself. The broken window happened by chance. That was just bad luck, you see, not a lesson in free will.

In the first years of drinking, while sports and school still weighed heavily, days of utter despair would come and I had no answers why. There was no answer to, “What’s wrong?” Something was deeply wrong but I had nothing to blame but myself. Life and meaning were based on the self. So when the hours yawned, when I wasn’t busy, the edge of the Big Empty showed up. To escape its gaze was to jump into it. I could avoid it by achieving, or just fall into the Empty. Depending on the day or the hour, I would either believe in myself or be trying to destroy myself. Sports had become a burden and I wanted out by my senior year. I’d had enough of the screaming coaches and insanity. I wanted oblivion and escape. I wanted to be in the Big Empty. I’d had a decent share of minor sports glory and was ready to move on - it wasn’t the high I was looking for, because it wasn’t high enough. I wanted to play basketball just for fun, but that was impossible. In the machine of year-round high school sports, it’s a job. It’s far more like a job, but you don’t learn anything new and there is no life application for knowing how to beat a zone press. Win or lose, you get screamed at. Then in the huddle someone yells, “C’mon guys, we gotta believe in ourselves!”

Yeah, that’s what we needed. More self.

Years later, after a few ACL tears and knee surgeries in college, my physical strength had waned and sports departed from my life. Drinking and reading surged ahead, as I would work, drink, read, and repeat.

But after graduating from college and having no purpose other than to get a job and make money, the void began to stare back at me. No, it came looking for me, and drinking to avoid the void no longer worked. A repeating pattern like the movie Groundhog day is fun, but before long becomes a living hell. Signs appeared. I ignored them. Literally, like when I put my face through a windshield, having rammed my Jeep into a tree. Or when I missed work, or when I soured relationships speaking in slurred cursive. The isolation started. Those things were unfortunate, but really, I rationalized, they could have happened to anyone, I thought…or well, anyone that chose to drink to oblivion. The world was wrong, all wrong. I was right.

By age nineteen, I had already known the falsity of the joy of alcohol, and had tried quitting many times, even taking a whole summer off, and what a glorious summer it was, working on a farm. Yes, once again, after a year of internship in a cube in front of a laptop, I had one last hurrah working on a farm. Once again, I felt whole. But by autumn the liquor and college bars resumed.

In a few short years of drinking, I already could see the problem but could see no way out of it because to be rowdy and reckless felt like life. Life in the suburbs lay ahead and thought I did not want to go there, I was drawn toward it like a lodestone rock. It repulsed me, yet I was going to be there someday, and I wondered how could I possibly become one of those yuppies who pet their grass and check their 401k statements.

How strange it seems now, that the joy I once had from sports and school was gone, and I pretended that I was getting my meaning from drinking. Work was just something to be done between wild weekends. Honor and glory seemed less interesting than self-destruction. But then this was the 1990s, when bands like Nirvana and films like Fight Club drew so many young men. If you didn’t believe in anything, you could choose self-improvement or self-destruction. Like many others I knew, I tried to have both. And like every drinker who cannot quit, forgiveness of the self was granted weekly - because I needed to drink again for that brief escape.

The cult of self-esteem still had me, and what it led to was a cycle of self-salvation and self-hatred. I came to a bitter understanding of what St. Paul meant when we said in Romans, “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” And I knew that I wanted to quit, so badly sometimes, and I would swear it off, only to fail shortly thereafter. But truly I did not want to be healed, and here I came to understand St. Augustine’s struggle with sex addiction when he said, “Lord let me be chaste - but not yet.”

It makes me shudder to think of it now because I missed so many signs and chose so poorly in those years. They are terrific reminders for me, like the four stupid tattoos on my arm; these are forever reminders of the lost years, because they have no meaning, other than to do something to stay busy. I would love to stop here and tell you that alcohol was the whole problem. But when I quit drinking a decade ago, I found that I still “needed” anti-depressants. Alcohol was not the problem at all, it was only a mask, a symptom. Four years into that sobriety, I completed an Ironman triathlon and had achieved what I thought would cure me of all maladies, only to find that I was quite possibly as blue and lost when I was sober and accomplished as I had ever been drunk and insane. I was chasing banners, flags, mascots - I was an escapist - like the mobs of people in Dante’s outermost circle of hell. I was stuck in the modern infinite loop of acedia.

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For about fifteen years, I took anti-depressants. Three years ago, I flushed them down the toilet. It was the same day that I stopped believing in myself.

I haven’t looked back.

For much of my adult life, I assumed that a diagnosis of “Major Depression” would plague me forever, because it was simply a case of biochemistry that wasn’t working properly. It was a mechanistic problem, like a bent axle that needed to be bent back into shape (constantly), or like a lawn that needed continuous watering to remain green and lush. It was a disease, you see - not my fault. And it wasn’t bad, but it needed modern treatment, like diabetes. Also, it needed techniques to manage it, an exercise of a sort, that required appointments with professionals. Without pills, data, techniques, and plenty of money, there was just no cure. Depression was a biological and psychological problem, requiring manipulation of receptors and a program of self-talk.

Some backstory is needed here, and since I can get lost in long asides in my storytelling, I will try to do my best to stay on track. Oh, who am I kidding, let’s go get lost.

The problem of other minds and the cult of self-esteem

I have come to know that deprogramming from the cult of self-esteem is a long journey. Long ago, in a childhood far, far away, I pondered whether the world was some kind of Truman Show. I recall hiding under a bed at a sleepover, wondering why the world seemed to be a grand conspiracy against me. Were they all actors? Were they even real? This notion came to me way before the movie The Truman Show or The Matrix existed, and I’ve come to learn that the idea of solipsism is about as original as the wheel or marriage in human history. The great thing about being a reader is that you always come to discover that every “original” idea that comes to mind proves to be quite unoriginal and has been discussed and beaten to death already by thinkers above my pay grade. What’s strange to me is that the idea of the Truman Show doesn’t occur to little children, who understand reality, but mostly this “fake world” problem only occurs to emo teenagers, narcissists, and doctors of philosophy. I seem to fit that crowd all too well, if unevenly.

This Truman Show idea happened in the same period when the public school I attended drummed to the heavy beat of uniqueness and self-esteem. Elementary students became the test tube for a variety of academic ideas from Abraham Maslow, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, John Dewey, and a laundry list of other modern tinkerers. Of course, our parents were clueless about this in rural and small-town America, which made it the perfect proving ground for new ideas. The most fascinating thing about growing up in the 1980s and 1990s is that in looking back, we were treated like lab rats in massive experimentations of humanism and liberalism and a few other “isms” favored in the scholarly world.

Much like today, the mind-body problem was being attacked from all sides. The problem of pain has long been the enemy of the Enlightenment and the idea of modern progress. Death is the abomination that must be ignored, re-evaluated, and eventually conquered. This blitz from the sciences on solving human suffering has been sending academic linebackers at the elusive quarterback called “consciousness” for several centuries.

By dumb luck, I just happened to be born in the generation where the culmination of the academic experts had “the solution,” and they were granted the authority to carry out those experiments by the US Government and the State of Minnesota. Had I been born in Caesar’s time, I would have simply learned the family trade, since I was not born in the Patrician class. The plebes learned to work and to praise the gods. The American plebes born before the 1960s followed a similar path, but somewhere after education became an activist’s laboratory, the plebes became interesting to the experimenters, and the public school turned into a place of strange evangelization. Far more dogmas came to me in class than in Church.

And what was the program being sold? Really, at the bottom, it was the same cure as the Church promised to fix. It was healing. We all want to be healed. But the solution for healing is wildly different depending on the foundational things that a worldview is built upon.

A great healing was coming for the kids, and for the grown-ups, and it was a psycho, social, and somatic cure. The mind could be soothed with happy thoughts, the body tamed with exercise. The shackles of tradition needed to be tossed off, like ropes from a ship at dock, so that the mind and body could sail away into peaceful-yet-fun waters. Fun - that was the cure. Smile!

Now that I think of it all, the world’s guidance reminds me of a water ride at an amusement park, where artificial rocks and walls are built and a rugged-looking raft floats “dangerously” through a false “wildness” built for our entertainment. Yes, the world portrayed by the Church was one where the devil prowls about looking for the ruin of souls. The world portrayed by the Church was like the movie The River Wild, where massive rapids or thieves could and would kill you. The world portrayed at public school was more like your standard “river rapids ride” at Six Flags where nothing could hurt you - where you just needed to loosen up, laugh, and throw up your hands in the air in praise of fun. Death was to be avoided, and not even talked about.

We were sold a story: most of all, what we lacked was self-esteem. If there is one word that dominated my early years it has to be self-esteem, with unique and special taking the silver and bronze medals. Self-esteem is defined as “a confidence and satisfaction in oneself.” Confidence has root words of “with faith” con - fide, or “faith in oneself.”

This was the theme of elementary school. Self-esteem, I was promised, brought healing. If I had to invert one Biblical phrase to show the difference between what Jesus said and what my grade school, high school, college instructors, and even my employer’s human resources said, it would be the antithesis of Matthew 11:28-30. Jesus said to come to him. The education system said, “Come to me,” meaning myself. Here’s the anti-Matthew:

“Come to me, me that is weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and me will give me rest. Take me yoke upon me, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and me will find rest for me soul. For me yoke is easy, and me burden is light.”

I just had to believe in myself. To hear it often too - you are unique - you are special. You are gifted (which always made it odd for kids that didn’t get that label, since it seemed to indicate that they were “not-gifted”?…but that’s another topic).

These ideas of uniqueness and specialness are indeed true for all people, but without something more, these words are terrible burdens and lead to strange endings, because they put a rubber stamp on our choices as endorsed, no matter how bad. Whatever hobby, addiction, idea, or obsession I had was just a confirmation of my unique and special self. The lesson was basic, teaching me that I didn’t need some made-up deity to help me pull through this thing called life. No, I could do it all alone, so long as I relied ever more on myself. And whatever I decided was true, was right. Sounds great, but this false power is more of a curse and is visible in millions of people’s lives now.

In school and on TV, in sports, it seemed that so many people had the solution of self-actualization and self-esteem that they were tripping over each other to tell it and sell it. In elementary school, it was a technique. In college, I learned the “Hierarchy of Needs” from Abraham Maslow taught in three different classes - psychology, marketing, and political science. It was like a humanist parade where Maslow candy was being tossed out everywhere, and looking back I could see the same parade from second grade onward (and probably earlier if I could remember). Maslow was like a Moses of the second half of the 20th century, who came down from the mountain with his pyramid etched on a tablet.

In the years when the onslaught of uniqueness and self-esteem was happening, I recall being pulled out of class for “gifted” meetings. I’m surprised we didn’t all end up with identical tattoos that said “UNIQUE” with a serial number after it.

And now I’ve gone too far. I apologize. Let’s continue.

But my point is that my Truman Show problem (otherwise known as “the problem of other minds” or solipsism) fed right into the uniqueness and self-esteem worldview that was quite literally being rammed down my throat, or rather, hung around my neck. Let’s talk about the great IALAC sign experiment that millions of American children had to partake in.

The IALAC Sign Incident

This incident, in particular, has never left my mind, and that was the second-grade project that was given to our entire class, known as the “IALAC Sign” experiment, an idea invented by the humanist Sidney Simon.

The IALAC sign was a piece of paper that we wore around our necks with the letters I.A.L.A.C. which stood for, “I am lovable and capable.” We also did “Me-Me” time during this year of class, which was all about, “Me!” But the IALAC experiment was a self-esteem-building exercise intended to teach children the all-important humanist mantra: “Believe in yourself!” And so I did. I did enjoy causing trouble, but I always knew to follow orders when the time came to be serious. I knew when to quit, and how to follow orders. So I did what was asked. I believed in myself.

With the IALAC sign, I recall gathering in the gym, sitting on the floor, and listening to the speaker and one particularly enthusiastic teacher, who I came to realize long after the fact was a hard-core humanist. The speech about the signs we wore around our necks went like this: “Every day you get a new IALAC sign. When someone insults you, a piece of your sign gets torn off. When someone compliments you, a piece can be restored.” So we practiced saying put-downs and compliments, as part of the exercise, and we would tear off parts of the paper. This was great fun because my friends and I would feign devastation and tear off a large piece. “You smell.” “You suck.” So we’d laugh and rip off a piece of the sign. We’d even tear it in half so that it dangled in pieces, then go get some tape and “heal” the IALAC signs with compliments.

Then the speaker became serious. He informed us of something ominous. “When you turn eighteen, you no longer get a fresh sign each morning. You get one sign for the rest of your life, and when it gets torn, your sign can keep getting smaller. And for some people, it disappears entirely. So you need to build your self-esteem.” This seemed the secular equivalent of what Jesus said about being “…thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Mt 8:12) If that last IALAC sign is insulted down to nothing, it seemed we could be in a kind of living hell. But the speaker assured us, so long as we “believed in ourselves,” that could never happen.

I have many more anecdotes about the “believe in yourself” mantra, from teachers to coaches to TV shows to music, but I feel that anyone living today understands this already. The people alive today in the general culture have heard little else than “follow your heart” and “be yourself” and “let you be you” and even “God loves you just the way you are” since we left the womb.

One shining light: The “Great Books” program

There was one shining light in elementary school that I recall where we weren’t preached at with the ethos of humanism, and it was a Junior Great Books program that I got pulled into somehow. This was something very, very different from all of the other lessons in class. A few kids got to attend. We would read good stories like “The Ugly Duckling” and examine them, doing close readings, and the moderator of that little program didn’t preach the “Be yourself” message. I really can’t thank that fellow enough for running that program, because it was the only element of my public schooling that seemed to have any depth to it. The evangelization of uniqueness felt like a firehose to the face for years, and the Junior Great Books hour was like drinking from a cool fountain.

“Then they came for the humanists…”

Now, in recent years it’s becoming en vogue to raise the alarm about the “cult of self-esteem,” which is refreshing because it’s so overdue. The media and education system sold and force-fed a dogma to several generations of people. The well-meaning humanists like Maslow, Sidney Simon, and Carl Sagan are no longer cool, they are old, or even deceased, and thus the target of modern healers. Psychiatry can finally get some perspective on itself, too, since it’s about as old as cinema, and the newcomers can bash the experts of yesterday. But since these experts of past days were neither people of the book, nor people of tradition, but rather “people of science,” their experiments should be reviewed. The results should be examined. The old experts did this to their ancestors, and now it shall be done to them. And while they threw out religion and all things spiritual, which they deemed to be a failure and relics of a long, silly era of human history, the corpse of the twentieth century should be laid out on a table for examination. Since the 19th and 20th century experts felt that religion caused so many problems, it’s only fair to look at how well human happiness and satisfaction fared when it was tossed out. We now have a solid century of data for the experts to review from the purely secular era of governments, schools, and media that blocked all spiritual things from children and adults.

So how did it work out?

Today one out of three people in America admits being depressed. Before this grand experiment, people reported more satisfaction with life, and since the self-esteem evangelization began, the number of depressed has leaped higher.

The experiment performed on children of the second half of the twentieth century is just now being exposed, scrutinized, and put under the magnifying glass. Because of what happened when the lesson of self-esteem played out, the receivers of this obsession with “the self” discovered by experience that confidence in oneself is incredibly reductionist and provides no meaning for living. The self gets lonely. The self cannot provide meaning. It needs something outside of the self. The self is an island. The self cannot save itself. When you hear it said out loud, the whole idea sounds like a dog chasing its tail.

What came with the message of “love thyself” was a cocktail of lukewarm American civil religion, from the old Protestant work ethic, where presidents tip their hat to God and wink. Add to that the old Anglo-Saxon values of kicking ass and taking names, and we get the “work hard, play hard” attitude. Mix that with “You are perfect just the way you are” and you have a dangerous self-righteousness and a gaping hole where the soul once sat.

The only solution was to keep smiling and rushing around like chickens with our spiritual heads cut off.

And that is what was missing from all of the educational, academic, and government attempts to make us whole. The soul. It is the soul. I promise, you will never hear the word “soul” mentioned by these modern troubleshooters. Psychiatry cast out the soul long ago, starting with Freud. They may refer to a mood, or a vibe, or a feeling, but the soul is not any of those things. The soul is the immortal part of our existence that animates our body, a rational soul that requires no matter whatsoever, as it is immaterial, and lives past our final breath, because it is not dependent on a set of lungs and a pumping heart and a brain. Our soul is what awaits the resurrection of the body. The soul is…

The spiritual principle of human beings. The soul is the subject of human consciousness and freedom; soul and body together form one unique human nature. Each human soul is individual and immortal, immediately created by God. The soul does not die with the body, from which it is separated by death, and with which it will be reunited in the final resurrection…In Sacred Scripture the term “soul” often refers to human life or the entire human person. But “soul” also refers to the innermost.aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God’s image: “Soul” signifies the spiritual principle in man. (What exactly is a soul?)

Soul is life. It is the human person. So imagine what happens when we slice that away?

These modern attempts to heal, from the IALAC sign, to ABC’s TGIF sitcoms like Full House, to Sesame Street, to “free health care,” to DEI, to pills, to whatever we got coming in the pipeline…are all bound to fail because they ignore the most important thing of all: the soul.

We live in a worldview that sees the body as a material thing that must be saved at all costs. The mind too is material. This flattened view of the mind has bumped the soul from all public discussion, because, well, science has all the answers. But it can never have the full answer because it doesn’t account for the whole person. Health of the body and mind is seen as a principal goal, but the health of the soul is set off in the land of fairy tales, not to be spoken of in the public square. Therein lies the problem.

The key problem is this: we see the body as the principal thing, but it is the soul. Don’t worry - I am not going light/dark Gnostic here. The body is good, but we think of the body as having a soul. But if you shift your thinking, you may change your whole worldview: the soul has a body.

This shift from saying, “My body has a soul” to “My soul has a body” could rattle your world, so be careful: say it slowly. Most likely this idea has probably never been mentioned in your earshot.

When you were created, matter from your mother and father joined and your soul was created. Your soul then gained a body, as cell division began, and the same soul has had your body from the time you looked like a seahorse in the womb to today.

What do you see in the mirror? Your soul has that body. And the body is good because God made it just for you. Bodies are not perfect, but the soul is immortal, and God loves your soul and your body and will re-unite them in a risen and glorified way that exceeds understanding on the last day. Just as no one could describe exactly what or how Jesus existed in the Resurrection, so shall we be. It is the soul that will be with God first, and when the body joins it in heaven, the joy of being with him will overflow to the body in a reunion.

Filling the Big Empty

For many years I was in this state of isolation, where the body and mind drift alone in time and space, and I gave not one thought to the idea of a soul. Armed with the sword of self-esteem and shield of physical strength, plus a basic aptitude for schoolwork, I did not need the soul.

Except for whenever I came to the gaping maw of the cliff, on the edge of the abyss of emptiness I felt inside. Yes, then there was a real problem. The Big Empty - it was like a sensory deprivation tank that only offered madness, isolation, and the circular hell of racing thoughts.

Once the problem of sadness bordering on madness started hitting hard, the need to firefight the problem became paramount. But no matter what I threw into the cavern of the Big Empty, it could not be filled. Booze, food, movies, accomplishments, sex, adventures, travel, competition, entertainment - it was always yawning and I could not look into the gaping void for long without trying something else, lest I might just jump into the pit. And belief in myself could not con my way out of it. The word confidence means “with faith” and what was odd was that the faith was to be placed in me, but myself was the problem, so when I refer to circular hell, this is the crux of the issue. Self-esteem requires trust in the self, but it is the self that cannot cure the self. This is how circular arguments blow up just like machines that spin out of control.

Thus, getting good grades or winning in sports became the obvious outlet for many years. It was an outlet. Hitting the free throw at the end of a game was an elevator for self-esteem. But missing it, on the other hand, resulted in a different ending. Self-esteem didn’t always put the ball in the net.

You might say I reached “peak esteem” around 1989, right around the fall of the Berlin Wall and the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan, and like the Soviet Union it began to collapse after that. Unsurprisingly, the top-down lies of the Soviets began to be exposed around that time in full display, and so did my elementary school infusion of confidence. I still recall the day. I got off the bus on a dusty afternoon in May, and I grabbed the newspaper. The cover of the local newspaper showed a Soviet tank retreating from Afghanistan, the great graveyard of empires. For some reason that image impacts me to this day because something started to change around that time, unrelated to the unraveling of the Soviet Union. The “coming of age” was coming in a negative way.

And I wasn’t the only one noticing a problem. “For whatever reason,” said Dr. Jean Twenge, “…if you look at what was going on back then, the early 1990s were not a good time, particularly for young people.”

No it was not. Maybe we needed the IALAC signs drug out again to hang around our necks, like paper millstones. Maybe we needed another trophy. Maybe we needed more one-on-one time. Maybe we needed to be more free to express ourselves and be more creative. Maybe we needed more reassurance and less discipline. Maybe we needed more field trips. Why weren’t we happy? We had constant and endless fun! So much fun - always happy things, happy faces, smiles, positive vibes, feel-good shows, amusement parks, upbeat music.

So why did the whole generation rush to the booze, weed, gangsta rap, and the grunge scene where self-destruction was the message? Could it be that getting wasted and wrecking “the precious” uniqueness became the only escape from the cult of self-esteem? I don’t know. But that’s what I did. Snoop Dogg, Nirvana, a liter of Jack, and a pack of Marlboros were the yang to the yin of self-esteem.

I think what happened is a law of spiritual physics was broken. We were pumped so full of worldly self-esteem that we popped.

On certain days, I recall my mom being able to read my face and know something was deeply wrong, despite my best efforts to hide it. And it was in that same year, 1989, that I started to doubt God and wonder how I could ever believe in the miracles that I had accepted just a few years before. And it was in that same year that I stopped looking for answers in heaven and focused more on science. And it was in that same year that I stopped saying my prayers at bedtime.

There seemed only two ways out of the cult of self-esteem, and one way was to believe in myself to the end, to the extreme, and the other was to destroy myself so that I didn’t have to think about it any longer. This is the danger of the fundamentalism of “believe in yourself.”

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When I was fallen away, I thought Richard Dawkins was interesting. I recall the time I saw Dawkins speak at a bookstore (Powell’s in Portland, long ago). At the time I thought he was cool. I liked how he was undermining the new “Pharisees” of the modern age and sowing discord among the “Christian hypocrites” as I had yet to realize that we’re all sinners. 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 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.

Now, with that said I am somewhat grateful for Dawkins because without pure materialists like him, I may never have come back to the faith. It was like a prescribed burn in a field clearing the weeds so that the new life could spring forth. I do believe that is what’s happening today in the wider world.

Dawkins is the only one who really puts all his chips in the middle and lays his cards on the table. Atheists don’t buy the bluff that much of postmodernism is selling. He would reject transgenderism and Baal the storm god in the same breath — as would Catholics. Dawkins even knows that deists are just hedging their bets on a bad hand. The only card player left for atheists to play against is those who believe in the one God, the God Most High. The interesting thing about atheists is that they are closer to coming back to belief in the one God than they ever realize, or would ever care to admit, because they’ve seen through all the smoke and mirrors of the meaningless and dead gods. They actually are closer to understanding the God who sits outside of time and space — who created time and space — than they realize because they reject all of the nonsense and cling ultimately to mathematics.

However, I see this as a long process of preparing the seedbed for faith. Because I don’t think many modern atheists have read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or a study Bible like that of Ignatius Press or Word on Fire. Few people have read St. Augustine’s Confessions or the Imitation of Christ outside of Catholic circles. And they certainly have not read Veritatis Splendor or Fides et Ratio or Dignitatus Humanae. But if they ever did, they would find that the God we believe in in the Catholic faith is logical, beautiful, and bigger than anything we can ever imagine in creation. But of course, that revelation of a living God comes only by cooperation with God’s grace, which is always ready and waiting on a no-interest loan for those who simply ask, seek, and knock. The beauty of the Church is that you get to keep your reason, all of it, and faith makes it soar higher.

Dawkins just says what many have been thinking all along, which is this: God doesn’t matter. Thomas Jefferson went halfway, but Dawkins just comes out as openly apostate. He is saying that the Emperor has no clothes. He is also like the Emperor Napoleon, when an officer suggested that “God willing” they would take Brussels in the morning. Napoleon allegedly said, “God? God has nothing to do with it.” That’s the same answer Dawkins gives. To Dawkins, there is no God, or gods, living or otherwise, outside of our brains. Hence, he’s razed the weeds and prepped the soil for coming back to what Abraham and the Apostles and St. Agnes meant by “God.”

Of course, Dawkins’ grand bet on the selfish gene goes too far. He’s all in with all the answers, but he left out of the equation an important variable. He fails to solve for Y, as in “Y are we here?” That is the problem with this worldview, because in a world without meaning, you have to live in that world. So does everyone else, and everyone else is not necessarily an educated PhD who can spend a lifetime inspecting in all corners of science and history. Everyone else lacks the funds and leisure time to find meaning. Everyone else, for the most part, in the end, has to rely on what someone says is true. I take it on faith that germs cause disease and not fairies, even though I have never actually saw either of them infect a person. Dawkins and company can win arguments about how the world works, but what they cannot win an argument about is why a sunset is beautiful. When there is no satisfactory ultimate why, people spend a lifetime searching for that variable. In the end, what the world without a living God results in is someone else taking control by force and dictating that the value of Y must be what they say it is, simply because they said so.

So even though I’m not a Dawkins fan, at least he isn’t hedging his bets. He’s all in, and I actually think deniers like him are closer to finding God than the builders of Babel or the deists like Ben Franklin ever were. Having the door half-open to God is like letting the heat out of the house in winter. At some point, you have to make up your mind to go outside or stay inside. This makes me realize, truly, that we should pray for Richard Dawkins. He may end up bringing more people back to faith in God than we could have ever realized. He is almost at the top of the circle, since when we run away from God, we often find ourselves running right into the arms of God.

Today, we are witnessing the outcome of what happens when the ideas of Dawkins are taken to its logical end. The reason Dawkins is wrong is that he doesn’t understand what the builders at Babel and the deists like Ben Franklin understood well. The ancient emperors from history and American Founders knew that people needed religion, and to pull that rug out from society would cause the city itself to collapse. Now we are seeing funny religions pop up, because we pretend we don’t need one.

The root problem for Dawkins is that he has a middle-school concept of God that he never outgrew. He’s also operating as an autonomous speaker of “his truth” without a plan or concept of how to organize a world. He doesn’t have employees or mouths to feed or an economy to plan. In the walled-in academic world where the idea of “no souls” exists, Dawkins fails to realize something rather large. His theory of the “Selfish Gene” starts from the bottom, instead of the top, and therefore he cannot describe the whole. His answer of “Because of genes!” is too simple. A toe does not describe the wholeness of a person any more than a gene does, and genes cannot explain the totality of human nature. Dawkins is so smart, but he can’t understand what simple farmers and mothers and the poor with no education understand perfectly well. You would think an evolutionary biologist would be very equipped to understand the parable of the grain of wheat, but somehow he misses it completely. I find this to be marvelous irony.

We need religion. People need religion. Or they will find one. And it won’t be what you expect. In the clean, childless world of our universities, ideas sound good that lack depth. Dawkins’ answer is from the atomic layer, and he emerges from a quiet library to tell us that we are nothing but atoms. Meanwhile the bustle of the street doesn’t hear a word he’s said, because life is happening far beyond the atomic layer. When Dawkins’ burst forth from his library, he was telling a very different message from what the apostles told when they emerged from the Upper Room at Pentecost, after having received the breath of life, touched by tongues of fire. No, when Dawkins and his disciples emerged in their lab coats to tell us the good news, their message was that respiration is a selfish act to propagate our genes and that there is no meaning to any of it. The apostles had a message of eternal life, while Dawkins made us ponder suicide.

So while I commend Dawkins for his honesty, he is actually more foolish than the leaders of Babel or Jefferson. At least the leaders at Babel and Jefferson were offering something to believe in: “Look, here’s a tower. It’s a Gate to God. See?” And Jefferson and Franklin offer something, too: “Look, here’s a sacred document, a Constitution, where we make a nod to God — and also — over there — see the Statue of Liberty?”

Dawkins only offers the abyss. And our brains revolt at the idea. We all know the Big Empty is there, but we don’t really want to stand on the edge and look into it. We can’t. Not for long. The temptation to believe that Dawkins is right draws us all, as doubt is more natural to us than faith. So even if we dabble in disbelief, most move away from the edge in search of a Higher Power of some kind. The search for God, when thwarted or stifled or silenced, erupts like boils, in strange places and in uncomfortable ways. We are already seeing strange religions being born in America now, almost more strange than that of the pagan gods of Babel or America’s traditional worship of the rule of law, wealth, and the slippery thing called “Liberty.”The Tower of Babel or the Constitution may be an elaborate way to justify power, but it is a better attempt at meaning than what Dawkins offers the masses. But again, Dawkins is the only honest one, which is also why his idea is the most dangerous. He’s the anti-Jesus (I don’t want to call him the anti-Christ, because he lacks the charisma needed for that). Dawkins tells us that we are purely material beings without souls. He goes all the way.

Most people hold back and speak the old common language that dances around this fact, finding idols and obsessions to occupy or fence off the Big Empty. Dawkins has spent his life shouting this message and now we are seeing what fruit it bears, where we are in fact atomized, solitary beings (kind of like his selfish gene!). When we are just chemical machines, we do indeed act like the “selfish gene” writ large. Again, not only is this message the polar opposite of Christ, but it’s brings the polar opposite result. Where people know Christ, they form communities, families, and fellowship. There is warmth amid the struggle. It’s not perfect. But when suffering comes, there is a prayer, and a church, and a people, and the Body of Christ. Dawkins inability to get past a small understanding of God leaves him on the playground all alone. 

As we watch millions of community organizations and church groups fading away in America, we are clearly becoming more atomized, as people sit at home watching TV alone instead of joining the Lions’ Club or a bowling team. What is worrisome about this is that Hannah Arendt, who dissected the rise of 1930’s totalitarianism, said that loneliness, a.k.a atomization, is a first step toward totalitarianism, because isolated people without purpose or faith are attracted to a powerful ideology that delivers some kind of meaning. Hence, the transgender craze we are seeing is not surprising at all. Those people are seeking God, but it’s a long way home. I sympathize because I did the same thing, but with liquor. That’s also a long way home.

To me, in the end, Dawkins’ worldview makes Kurt Cobain or Morrissey seem light-hearted.

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I was in a state known as “fallen away” for about 15 years, because I had never experienced what is known as interior conversion. I was going through the motions and so the purpose of religion and church felt like fishing with no hook and no bait. I wasn’t catching anything, and wasn’t learning how or why, and I didn’t know how it was supposed to work. So I stopped fishing and moved on, which I’ve come to realize was the best and worst thing that ever happened to me.

I fell away for similar reasons to most people. I felt it was a lot of rules, and I saw bad representatives around me with a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude. With that, it became easier to deny the idea of sin, which is precisely how I came to reject God. This is where I stayed for a long time, because once you turn away it takes a “compelling event” to be re-awakened to turn back. And from my experience, you cannot get to the resurrection unless you get to belief in God first. That has to be restored before you start asking for God’s help. To me the proofs for God must be shown or come to a person that has turned away before you can dive into the mysteries like the incarnation, resurrection, and ascension. Fortunately, an addiction provided the “compelling event” for me where I wake up in jail and did rehab and turned back to God. But not everyone is as lucky as me.

The gaze of our culture is toward earth, not heaven. There is an ambivalence and uncertainty about whether we have souls at all. We are conditioned that way now. A lack of depth in religious education and exposure for young people, at least where I grew up, didn’t help. Public school seemed to make an effort to steer around any idea of a spiritual life. I recall campaigns in school to build up our dignity and self-worth, but it was all body and mind, but certainly not soul-oriented. My idea around the soul was dead on arrival in high-school, indoctrinated to the public school’s dance around the spiritual. All things were taught as materialism.

Worse, I felt that I couldn’t ask questions about faith as a child, whereas in school I was encouraged to dig into every topic. Religious teachers from middle-school through college, take note: students want depth, not coloring books. They want a challenge, not busy work. It took me a very long time to realize the intellectual depth of Christianity. I had never come across or been introduced to St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas. Reading Augustine’s Confessions blasted at my assumptions, as did Word on Fire materials, from the podcast to the books. The wall of earthbound explanations became like Plato’s cave, where I was only seeing shadows on the wall while the real story, or the other half of the story, was in the spiritual life. But someone who is turned away from God has that wall up and they will not be receiving messages that are transmitted to them, because they have scrambler for anything that hints at God. That is why you have to get to reasons to believe in God first.

Misunderstanding how to read the Bible is an enormous blocker, and I don’t think the “Catholic” way to read the Bible is that well known. “How to Read the Bible” from the WOF Bible was eye-opening, as I’d lumped Catholics with Fundamentalist readings, which ruined how I understood it. I hated reading Genesis when I was in the scientism and literalism mindset. I could only read it like Carl Sagan on one hand, or like Ken Ham on the other hand. You can’t read Scripture like a science book, because it’s not a science book. It’s about the soul, not cells. Moreover, you can’t go deep in science classes and then come back and try to read it like a fundamentalist. That doesn’t work for people who take advanced science classes. You can’t tell someone who took literature classes that there is no figurative elements, because we know how to read. This isn’t elementary school where you could convince a child that Aesop’s fable of the “Ant and the Grasshopper” is just about insect life. We know there is allegory, we know there is interpretation. So we can’t read it literally or scientifically, but we need to use our whole mind to read it. Any one-dimensional reading of the Bible will fail, but you can read it in each dimension and then see how they relate. It’s not like other books. Most interesting to me now, is that I’ve realized that you can go very deep on science and read the Bible like Catholics do. You can learn about evolution and still find that Genesis makes complete sense. In fact, I think the deeper you go on science, the more that Genesis and the Gospels make sense, but I’m biased the other way now.

Once you start looking for the historical, allegorical, moral, and religious truth of what the Bible teaches, that is a game changer. But again you have to want to believe in God first. If you approach the Bible as fiction from the start, you will read it as fiction. If you start with doubt, you will be scoffing by the third day of creation and wonder how God said, “Let there be light” before he created the sun. I know because I scoffed. I didn’t understand that the “light” was faith, or the idea to create, or the power of God to make something out of nothing. Once you allow that light in, however, you can read the Bible and not get stalled on difficult passages. The catechism teaches that Genesis uses figurative language in places, and I came to realize that how Catholics read the Bible is deep, not shallow. Eventually you get to the point that you can read Genesis literally, figuratively, allegorically, morally, and how it relates to Jesus and the end of time. Even historically. Heck, even scientifically and it still works. I’m not kidding. If you think it’s just some old myth, you aren’t reading it deep enough.

One thing that helped me return is the example of faithful Christians I know – Catholic, Protestant – I saw their lives, lived in devotion and that probably did more for me than anything. It made me want to have what they have, because when you turn away you live in a restlessness. Experience is a pre-requisite for some of us to realize that “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” You may not know you are restless until one night you become fully aware of how lost you became in all that searching in wrong places. But when we are looking earthward instead of the heavens, we think the world has the answers instead of God who created the world. Somehow the flip has to happen, to turn your head upward. Refusing to pray or ask for help is rejection of God. But like the Bible says, we are stiff-necked, which I learned was an idiom about oxen that would not turn when poked by the farmer. The thing is we have to want to turn in the end, we have to want to receive God’s grace. Desiring God is where the flip happens but like St. Paul and St. Augustine, it’s often not a voluntary thing, it’s a gift. For Paul it happened all at once. For Augustine it was a slow-burning eight season HBO adult series. Either way, the result was the same because they ended up on fire for God. They were never the same again.

What you can do for someone who has fallen away? You can call. Send a text. Be a friend. Listen. But have faith and keep building yours up. I think those actions alone can be the compelling event, because seeing someone pass through life with faith is a powerful argument even without words. Praying a 54 day Rosary novena won’t hurt either. I’m not even kidding, since both of you will benefit. You have to love them and just pray for God’s will and recall that we need God, he doesn’t need us. He loves us and wants us to return, but only we are harmed in turning away. Prayer is powerful, more than I ever realized.

For me it took arguments for God, experience, the silent witness of others, and my own foolishness to want to know God. I suspect a few people were praying for me. In the end, you have to realize that you can’t save yourself. When you feel strong, there’s no need for a savior. Realizing how weak and helpless I was gave me the nudge I needed, and a life of worshipping the self and the world is depressing. Wealth, pleasure, honor, and power become boring. My generation grew up dreaming about rocking out with Snoop Dogg and the Victoria’s Secret angels on our own private yachts after winning the Superbowl. We wanted all the world had to offer, all these fruits and experiences that seemed to be liberating, but they ended up bringing spiritual death. None of that brings true happiness. Spiritual things come back to life once you become willing to ask for help. While science may have some cures, it doesn’t have THE cure. Pills and therapy can go part of the way, but not all the way, because the last part of the journey doesn’t come from a pharmacy or from a technique. The last leap has to come by faith.

People who turn away from God (which is everyone, unless you are Jesus, who is God, and if you are him, please contact me I’d like to meet for coffee ASAP)…let’s start this sentence over. People who turn away from God imagine they have found freedom because they only see the rules of religion as oppressive, but that’s because they don’t understand the interior conversion of the heart is what transforms. That’s the whole point of cathedrals and hymnals and candles and long Saturday night Easter Vigil Mass and stations of the cross and ashes on our foreheads and all the kneeling and standing. To give glory to God, once turned, makes total sense, because that’s all we can do to even try to give thanks for what God has done for us. Seeking humility before God means offering up our prayers, our money, our songs, our hearts - all of those things. If you haven’t turned back, it won’t make sense because it cannot make sense. You’ll see religion as a modern kind of Pharisee, all justice and no mercy and full of hypocrisy. You’ll see the sinners fall and point out that we are hypocrites, which is true. But we are trying. That’s the goal, to love God, to love others, and to keep his commandments. To do God’s will and give him glory is the game. What you have to show someone who is turned away is that the “rules” are not the endgame. The interior conversion is why everyone who comes to drink from this vine never leaves the party. If it were only about rules, Napoleon or Julius Caesar or Genghis Kahn would be the object of our worship, because they were very good about enforcing the law. Love of God goes way, way beyond the rules, but because of that love, the rules must be followed. People who turn away do not like those rules, because they think what the rules outlaw are what is enjoyable. Unfortunately, it will never make sense to them when you try to explain that getting drunk and having sex is not what they really want. That message is scrambled because they can’t get first to God, and second to the interior conversion. There is a joy that the fallen away are oblivious to. They have no idea it exists and think those who claim it’s true are liars. They think it’s boring and enslaving but it’s the ultimate liberation. And if you like excitement, if you like a good fight, spiritual combat is a sport that never stops.

How to read the Bible: https://www.wordonfire.org/videos/bishop-barrons-commentaries/how-to-read-the-bible/

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In some of the shortest parables, Jesus delivers the deepest of messages regarding faith and meaning to believers and seekers. Take for instance the parable of the Merchant and the Pearl, where in two sentences Jesus explains the priceless reward we receive through him. The Merchant, having found this one Pearl, sells all that he owns to have it because nothing else, nothing in this world, even comes close to the value of it.

The Pearl is like what many of the Saints find when they realize the reward and consolation that Jesus grants us through his death and resurrection. Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” Thomas Aquinas said, “God alone satisfies.” Teresa of Avila said, “God alone is enough.” Repeatedly, we see this peace settle onto those with faith. They undergo drastic change by their belief in God. This is not the superficial change that comes from other pursuits, like money or vanity. This is true change.

With faith comes a gift of joy, but the world wants to suppress it and smother it. If faith isn’t giving me joy, then I’m not understanding it correctly. Those that profess their peace in Christ will have their joy tested daily, because just as his life and teachings threatened the Roman order, so does it threaten the modern empire of the Self. Those who worship the self find Christian faith childish and openly laugh at it. I certainly did. I mocked the faithful while I was fallen away from belief. But Christians can celebrate being mocked. It is perfectly fine to be laughed at, and almost an achievement in itself. Jesus prepared me for these moments:

“You will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who perseveres to the end will be saved.” Mk 13:13

I should not be deterred by this, for I do not need others approval; the only approval I should consider is God’s. So I must return daily to my faith, like a child. If I recall how I lost my faith in the first place, it was because I grew cynical in adolescence and early adulthood. I thought there were no more mysteries in life, and no God except the Watchmaker kind. But having regained my faith, I don’t want to lose it again. What I realize now is that my faith as a child made more logical sense than my doubt in adulthood.

“Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Mt 18-19

Thus when people smirk at these words, or openly jeer belief, this is actually a time to be glad. That alone is a clear indication that I am oriented in the right direction, toward God. To endure whatever comes, be it mockery, condescension, indifference, opposition, or even violence - can I remain humble and peaceful? Keeping the faith, like a child, is the correct path. The reward of eternal life through Jesus’ death and resurrection cancels any earthly insult. Nothing else on offer in this world can fulfill my heart and soul in the same manner.

I have already tried all of the other options. They all disappoint in the end. They come up short. Why?

Because they are not God, which is what I was really hungering for.

I don’t put myself into the Gospel scenes enough. I need to feel the emotion of Christ in the words. I don’t put myself into the scene of his Passion, but I need to start doing it more. How would I act in those trials and struggles? Would I fold up like a chair and crumble? Can I hear the people around me? Do I sense the tension, struggle, and pain in the words and actions? Would I even be among the crowd around Jesus, or shaking my head at them? I bet I would be, because the Romans and Jews and people of all nations who gathered to crucify him were the same as us today, they just happened to live before us.

I often find confusion in the readings. I used to give up and assume it was primitive fairy tales, but now I know I must speak to wiser believers about it, or read the writings of the early Church. Every rebuttal and question that I can think of has already been asked, pondered, argued, even fought over. Ask, seek, knock: if I shutter my mind when I come up against something difficult, then I have despaired and turned away. When I’m confused, this is precisely the time to discuss the words with other members of the faith. Find real people to talk to about it, and avoid online comment pits of conversation on social media. There is little or nothing to learn on social media. I must speak with people of faith, as “iron sharpens iron.” Far wiser people than I have gone over these words and remained solid in their belief.

Jesus and his teachings are what my soul wants. I am the Merchant and Jesus is the Pearl. If I return to my treasure daily, as the Saints did, and read deeply, and yearn for the spirit of Christ, he will guide my day, and ultimately my life.

“God alone satisfies.” CCC 1718-1722

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Doing a root cause analysis of all rejection of God reveals the same underlying bug. The fatal flaw of every Goliath, no matter how large, is the same. It is pride. And the fig leaf of pride is covering up an inner fear. But for those who abandon all comfort to God, fear withers because there is more than just this life. The truth is the living God, maker of all things visible and invisible.

There is a lesson here, however, about fear, for which David and Goliath can provide the example. This lesson is as timeless as it is obvious, for David was instructed to be silent by his brothers, by his fellow countrymen, who were all trembling in fear of this large bully that seemed undefeatable. But David refused to be silenced.

He knew what was true, what was good, and he would not be quieted by muscle, shouting, or argument, because that is what the human heart must do when the Truth is being stifled. This is when the humble and simple turn bold just by standing up for what is beautiful and offering up all their worldly reputations, possessions, and lives for the glory of God.

“For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?”

A thorough understanding of that verse must be made in order to set your face like flint against what is popular and powerful. Because when faced with death or the loss of a job, some men and women will understand that those things mean nothing, zero, compared to the Truth, and they will willingly stand, even if they are the last, single, solitary voice on earth, to declare the Truth and go out naked and alone to fight the giant with nothing more than the Truth at their side. I would like to believe I could do that, but my fear is that I will be like Peter who was bold in the boat but timid on the water and started to sink as soon as the wind came up. Why did Peter sink? Because of fear. Because he didn’t trust in God like David did.

Keep in mind that Goliath came to the camp every day for forty days, challenging the whole army, and no soldier would stand, until the youthful David said, “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?”

Did you catch that? Not the insult about the circumcision, but the last part: the living God. He is alive. He was alive then, he is alive now. And David knew that he could be trusted, because he is the Creator, the Maker, the Artist, the Author. He is Being Itself.

And his brothers tried to silence him, because they were afraid of Goliath, afraid of fighting for the Truth. His brothers said:

“Why have you come down? And with whom have you left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know your presumption, and the evil of your heart; for you have come down to see the battle.” And David said, “What have I done now? Was it not but a word?” And he turned away from him toward another, and spoke in the same way; and the people answered him again as before.

David was not content to hear their defeatism, so he went straight to the leadership and asked them, and there too he was shut down and told not to speak.

When the words which David spoke were heard, they repeated them before Saul; and he sent for him. And David said to Saul, “Let no man’s heart fail because of him; your servant will go and fight with this Philistine.” And Saul said to David, “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are but a youth, and he has been a man of war from his youth.”

So he was told “No” once again, and what was his weapon? It was not yet the slingshot, but his voice, his words, for he knew what he was, what he was capable of, and most of all he knew what it meant to fully trust and abandon himself to God.

But David said to Saul, “Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and smote him and delivered it out of his mouth; and if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him and killed him. Your servant has killed both lions and bears; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, seeing he has defied the armies of the living God.” And David said, “The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.”

By speaking, by asking, seeking, knocking; by speaking, he was given the right to go fight, and it’s obvious that if he needed to ask again, or a hundred more times, he would have kept thrashing about the camp until someone listened to him and was awakened to the fight. But he would go it alone.

And Saul said to David, “Go, and the Lord be with you!”  

So because they were thinking like men and not like God, they dressed up the boy in a man’s armor, too heavy to move around in, so that he would be “safe,” and in that safety David knew he would lose the fight. He needed to be naked and fearless in front of God in order to defeat Goliath.

Then Saul clothed David with his armor; he put a helmet of bronze on his head, and clothed him with a coat of mail. And David girded his sword over his armor, and he tried in vain to go, for he was not used to them.

Then David said to Saul, “I cannot go with these; for I am not used to them.” And David put them off. Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in his shepherd’s bag or wallet; his sling was in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine.

With basic tools, unexpected trust, and wild abandon in his faith, he went forth, to be mocked and derided, surely even by his own army.

And the Philistine came on and drew near to David, with his shield-bearer in front of him. And when the Philistine looked, and saw David, he disdained him; for he was but a youth, ruddy and comely in appearance. And the Philistine said to David, “Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?” And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. The Philistine said to David, “Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and to the beasts of the field.”

David did not need more. He did not need armor, nor sword, nor clothing, nor shield. He had all of these things on his side, as he invoked God, just as St. George before he slayed the dragon, just as Jesus rebuked Satan in the desert. You cannot go to war with evil alone, and you cannot go to war half-hearted. This battle is in the realm of spiritual combat. The battle for Truth, the one Truth, is always spiritual.

Then David said to the Philistine, “You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down, and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s and he will give you into our hand.”

The battle is the Lord’s. It is always so.

When the Philistine arose and came and drew near to meet David, David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet the Philistine. And David put his hand in his bag and took out a stone, and slung it, and struck the Philistine on his forehead; the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell on his face to the ground.

So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and struck the Philistine, and killed him; there was no sword in the hand of David. Then David ran and stood over the Philistine, and took his sword and drew it out of its sheath, and killed him, and cut off his head with it. When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled. And the men of Israel and Judah rose with a shout and pursued the Philistines as far as Gath… (1 Samuel 17)

Faith and works. Body and soul. Ask, seek, knock. If you must speak out, do it with charity. Remember that you are fighting with something beyond the humans who appear to be the enemy. They are not the enemy, they are just behind enemy lines. This is a spiritual war. For this a sword is not needed but rather faith, hope, and charity. By your endurance you will gain your soul.

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We’ve all been raised on heroes and politicians and athletes that feign perfection. But in the Old Testament, the characters are all flawed. They are also all limited, because they are human, not divine. Some do awful things. In fact, they are just like real people. Thus, we all have our limitations, in that the specs of our design cannot exceed various parameters. We may feel ten feet tall but no one has ever been near that height. We may feel bulletproof but every king who has ever lived has passed away into death. This is going to take me a while to get to it, but we are like NASCAR, in that we have predictable speeds and power. We all seek power, but because of our limited dimensions and parameters, dictators and bullies end up like stock cars passing by, with the same engines and spoilers, but with different decals on the exterior to pretend they are unique. Each car is different, while each is the same. This is a both/and scenario. You can see this positively or negatively, but the end goal of each makes all the difference. What are you racing toward? That is the only question that matters in the end. If it’s not toward the highest good, then even if you finish in first place, you lose.

The Bible also shows our limitations as a group, such as the scapegoating mechanism and tribalism. Biblical characters would be cancelled today in our unforgiving modern era (depending on what party they belonged to). We live in a similar time of scapegoating as the Israelites did. This is because the law of Moses actually understood the problem with scapegoats and had a day of Atonement for sin management. You could call this an SMS - a Sin Management System, to use modern IT language. But today…we just have sin. We don’t manage it, because we don’t believe in it. We sweep it under the rug and pretend it isn’t there. Sin is old-fashioned, so we think. To follow the stock car analogy, this is like ignoring wires showing on tires, where a blowout is imminent.

But to use a different metaphor for a moment: sin is best likened to a disease like cancer, where our past unconfessed sins remain with us and grow to enormous proportions. When we read a medical article about someone who had a fifty pound tumor, we all say, “How could someone not know they had a fifty pound tumor?” The articles usually have a picture of the person with the glaringly obvious medical problem. It’s baffling to us how someone would not realize something was awry.

But most of us walk around carrying fifty pound spiritual tumors, from sins never repented. The sins from one-night stands, burned bridges, anger, hatred, and self-loathing all continue to grow on our souls, and will continue to do so, until the disease is loosed in confession. If only we could see each other’s souls. Interestingly, others usually can see our sins better than ourselves, as it’s so easy to know why someone else is spiritually ill, but we cannot see our own spiritual tumors. And so much of our sin is about power, or gaining an edge over someone, or protecting our little grove that we consider the self to be the king of. We all have a grove, even if it’s only our social media profile, where we feel like the king. But we’re not the king. I’m not the king, and realizing that is the greatest relief I’ve ever had. Knowing I’m a sinner allows me to stop pretending, stop fighting, stop squabbling over the scraps. There is a king, and it’s not me, and surrendering to the loving, living God is like having the massive tumor cut away, and all that ugly growth from many years of power-seeking behavior can be put aside.

This is why I like the Old Testament. We can see the diseased state of sinful lives. It’s so obvious. The supernatural reading of the Old Testament changes everything. (Michael Heiser, who recently passed away, has a documentary for helping you get started in this. Unless you believe in God, and the devil, you will read the Bible like a 21st century American and miss the whole point.)

Whenever someone points out the shortcomings of the Old Testament patriarchs or prophets, I want to remind them that, yes, exactly, you are catching on: sin is narrated in the Old Testament for a reason, and that reason is that these people were not the incarnation of God, like Jesus was, but were struggling in the world to work toward his grace, but failing and often choosing sin.

The Old Testament, unlike other mythology systems, shows the ugly side of humanity, and if you disagree, go read about Samson again in Judges and see if you still think he was a model for living. If you think of Samson as a saint, please stop and re-read his story. St. Augustine famously said, “It is narrated, not praised,” to help us understand a guy like Samson. But rest assured, Samson is in there for a reason. In fact, the Good Thief who repents on the Cross next to Jesus in his last minute is in there for a reason, a very good reason. His name is St. Dismas, and wouldn’t we all be so lucky to turn and see Christ in our last hour, in our last breath? (St. Dismas, pray for us.)

There is much to learn from the story of Samson, it’s just not that he was a good guy who could do whatever he wanted because God said so. If you read the Bible in that way, such that anyone under the banner of the Chosen people is flawless, then you have spiritually drawn the Monopoly card that reads: “Return to Go, do not collect $200.” You need to start again. If you read about Samson and say, “Well, clearly he was predestined and chosen, so he could do whatever he want.” Just stop. Think about what you are saying. Does it make any sense at all? Samson was supposed to be a monk consecrated to God (a Nazirite) who doesn’t sleep around, drink, touch dead things, or cut his hair. And what is his story? It’s doing all of those things, and even when he destroys the Philistines, he’s not doing it for the glory of God, he literally asks for strength to get revenge. If anything, Samson proves the old adage of “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” and the reason the story of Samson is important is because we see the strangeness of history, of sin, of leaders, of salvation history. When you go to read the Old Testament with “Chosen People” blinders on, you miss the richness of the narrative. As I said, the “white hat/black hat” Cowboy story that Americans want to find - it ain’t in the Old Testament.

But perhaps Samson did repent in his last hour. Perhaps God used him in ways radically beyond our finite minds. God takes care of the particular judgement for each person, not us. Sacred scripture illustrates lives and the arc of salvation history, and we are like ants catching a glimpse of something so far beyond our understanding, like a rocket, or a surgery, that we must stand in awe of creation and continue on in our faith and work without full knowledge. And that is the mystery of faith - though we can never know all things, we can know some things, and catch glimpses of God’s glory and learn the repeated lessons of redemptive suffering, with the Crucifix showing us over and over, that there is no way to heaven but through the Cross. And even Samson can show us that story.

Trent Horn wrote, “The Bible is not a sterile collection of perfect people who always follow God’s will. It is instead a drama about how God redeemed imperfect people and used them, in spite of their flaws, to accomplish his sovereign and holy will for mankind.”

And thank God for that, because a story of perfect robots is not a human story, and is not interesting unless you are under ten years old. The Great Story of Israel has much more going on than Wyatt Earp’s showdown. There is indeed a good guy and a bad guy, with God reclaiming the world from the fallen angels, but that is what we forget while we zero in on the individual character or verse. Not only are there fallen angels, there are fallen people, but here’s the point: those people are redeemable. Arguably, even the Pharaoh of Exodus is redeemable. Thus, when people get fired up over the violence in Joshua, or 2 Peter calling Lot “righteous” after he offers up his daughters for rape, they are reading it in a way that we don’t read or watch anything else. Why are we so dense at reading the Old Testament when we can follow intricate narratives in a ten-season TV shows that shows the depth and nuance of individual characters in a slow-burning plot? Why do we choose to read it like children?

It’s simple. Most of us haven’t really read it. If we have, we have not since we were children, so we got the white hat/black hat version of it, which is fine…until you are no longer a child. We haven’t even had a tour of the adult version, which is a much more serious and dark version. The flood story alone goes from being a happy pack of animals on a ship to an utterly terrifying world-ending mayhem.

Another possibility is that we received a dumbed-down fundamentalist reading of it, which is great for becoming familiar, but not for depth and nuance. And when I say fundamentalist, I mean both the Fundamentalists and the New Atheists, because both read the Bible in a way that gets little or nothing out of it. I can’t stress this enough: reading the Bible using the four senses of scripture is how it opens up into a four-dimensional trip. So many people charge in and say, “I’m going to read the Bible in a year” and they get to Leviticus or Numbers and stop because it’s boring and appears to be unrelated to the modern world, when in reality, all of it is central to the experience we are living in right now. If you are going to read the Bible in a year, follow the Bible in a Year tour guide, Father Mike Schmitz, and it will go far, far better than doing it on your own.

But the main reason why adults read the Bible like cowboy stories is this:

We read the Old Testament like ten year old pro-wrestling fans because we don’t understand that we are living in a spiritual war. In our modern assumptions about the world, we forget that ghosts are real. We use the word soul but laugh at the idea of ghosts. But the word is the same. We just have a cartoon version of “ghost” now due to TV shows like Scooby-Doo and Caspar, but we still know that we have souls in the quiet places of our hearts and minds.

Our adult, data-driven minds forget that there is more types of knowledge than what can be graphed or measured. We don’t accept that there is more than just matter, but also spirit. Admitting that angels and demons are real does not often come from college educated lips. Why? Because we think we know better. Frankly, we don’t read the Bible believing that God is real. Thus, we don’t understand the overarching story that leads to Christ’s defeat of the devil, and thereby miss the entire point of the entire library known as the Bible.

If you don’t believe in the devil, then you probably don’t believe in God. If you don’t believe in God, you probably don’t believe in souls. If you don’t believe in souls, you don’t believe that you could spend eternity in either heaven or hell. But you can. And you will.

This is the root problem for many of our social and mental maladies as well. We have numbed the part of our brain that allows for belief in the supernatural. We have flattened God into “all religions are the same” when they are anything but the same.

This is why whenever I read about an academic paper that suggests “all prehistoric peoples were egalitarian” I know immediately that I am reading modern propaganda, because not only do we not know that, but the authors of such things also have an agenda and bias, usually one that matches either liberalism, utilitarianism, postmodernism, post-colonialism, or (most often) socialism and communism. In short, an anti-Christian bias.

And if you don’t think that is true, enroll in a modern University and test this hypothesis. Attend any class in the departments of anthropology, history, English, or really any of the humanities, and listen for commentary on organized religion or belief in the supernatural. Anything that poses as science denies the supernatural, as it should. But, many things that pose as science are not actually science. There is an ideology creeping in everywhere, and the goal of any ideology is power. Universities have a spiritual nature, too, but the spirit is not from God. And in denying God, they fear language that speaks of God. A bias against Christianity is dogma today in nearly every school, public or private. The only lens you as a student can choose is the tinted goggles of modern scholarship. The creeds of modernism demand a denial of the supernatural, which is odd, because in the end, the supernatural will deny the modern man and woman who doesn’t cooperate with the free offer of grace.

If a history professor in his hiring interview suggested that Israel was a chosen people by God selected to bring about the Savior of souls, it’s difficult to imagine a callback happening for a second interview. That alone would be immediate cause for moving on to the next candidate to find someone who assented to the belief that all cultures were equally un-chosen. In higher education, the era of Christendom is treated like a child, one that never matured, but now we know better. It almost seems like the academic world has tried to put Catholicism into a group home for the elderly, so that it could be ignored. But the primary reason it’s not talked about is not that Catholicism isn’t true, it’s that Catholicism is a constant thorn in the side of the polite power grab, and power requires its enemies to be silent.

The creed of today is more aligned with the religion of humanism or socialism than Catholicism, but it is every bit as religious in nature. Because of this, universities have become a self-congratulating, backslapping loops of nonbelievers, where the jockeys in the horse race for tenure require adhering to specific speech codes, and shutting out all comers. We are in the Grove. The nonbelievers have a standing army, and whoever comes to slay the slayer will be the next priest-king. But the thing about power is that it’s all the same. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

It’s like NASCAR (back to the main metaphor). Every power seeker is ultimately the same. It is only the king who is the Suffering Servant that is different. Every single other power-seeker preaches the opposite of the Beatitudes. Like race cars, ideology that seeks power is trying to win a race. What is the race for power? It’s the idea that there is a solution to all the world’s ills through a set of ideas, rather than through God.

In NASCAR, cars must be built a certain way. Mechanics and engineers can only massage and tweak the strict engine and chassis requirements so much before the speed tops out, as by physics there is a limit to what can be done. There’s a blocker on what can be done with these cars. It’s the same with ideology, because like stock cars, ideas cannot exceed their worldly dimensions. Materialism, in all its forms, can only use the things of this world. Thus liberalism, capitalism, socialism, scientism, techno-utopia, postmodernism, utilitarianism, and the rest all have “the solution” to win the race, to stave off pain, to bring worldly victory, to bring heaven to earth. But if there is one thing Jesus showed us is that suffering is part of our lives here. Even he who cured diseases and cast out illnesses still had to suffer, and suffer greatly because of sin in the world. The cause of all suffering is personal sin, not external enemies, and until everyone realizes that we will indeed have oppression and suffering. The remedy is to follow both Commandments, to love God first, and then to love others as Jesus loved us. This is the lesson: that we must first seek the kingdom of God, and accept what suffering may come. When God is ready he will bring heaven to earth, and not before.

The stock cars of auto racing are like the stock beliefs of ideology that block the supernatural from our lives. I do believe that there is half of us that love God (or think we do) and another half that loves others (or pretend we do), and both are firing on only three cylinders instead of all six. You must put God’s love and love of others together to exceed the restrictions of this world’s physics, and yet - and yet, like NASCAR, there are still rules to follow while doing it, called the Commandments, and the way to do so is spelled out in detail in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

But our modern gods of culture is limited by the constraints of unbelief. Unbelief in corporations, academia, and the media means we must assent to belief that we are alone, that God is not alive. So obviously, our efforts try to solve all suffering with ideas, and to break the physical and spiritual laws using ideology, which always ends up breaking all rules because it turns into a religion.

This is why we can all laugh (and cry) at the line: “In capitalism, man oppresses man. In communism, it’s just the opposite.” Power that defers to no Higher Power cannot accomplish what it sets out to do, which is to create heaven on earth. All of the kings of this world are the same people. What Democrats and Republicans in America often do not understand is that they are the same people, just as the Nazis and Communists were. It’s like any NASCAR feud. Take the skirmishes between Chase Elliott and Kevin Harvick at Bristol, for instance. Two drivers nearly duked it out over a race, while the crowd cheered it on. What are the drivers after? The Cup. The championship. The power. What does the mob want? They want whichever car they cheer for to get power, so by proxy they can feel powerful. That’s what fandom is, just like world politics. We only wave flags because we want our side to win, because our side, we believe, has the ideology that deserves to win. But whoever wins the power only matters in how they wield the power and to whom they give glory toward.

To follow this through a bit more: both drivers are pretty much interchangeable, just like the cars they drive. They have both been blessed to be in racing families and God-given talent and surely a convenient sets of fortunate happenings to get them into the elite and small field of NASCAR racing. They have, in a sense, hit the lottery of gifts in terms of auto racing. Now, if Kevin Harvick’s soul was swapped into Chase Elliott and vice versa, it’s likely the drama would be the same, because they would still be driven to win the Cup. But it would also make a good Freaky Friday style of movie, as after the swap, Kevin Harvick would realize that Chase Elliott and his mechanics are probably decent guys in the same pursuit of the Cup. Perhaps he might return to his own body full of love for his enemy and a new appreciation of the sport of racing. Better yet, a terrific ending would be when both resume racing for the greater glory of God, like the dude in Chariots of Fire, who ran for love of the game, not the trophy, as his angry opponent did).

The reason Jesus is so interesting to every generation is because he’s obviously different from every other power seeker in human history. Why is he so different? Because he’s not seeking power. He already has it. All of it. And so he’s giving it all away, all the time, and serving us all, who really don’t deserve it. He’s like the lowest guy in the Pit Crew who hands the lead mechanic the wrench and gets yelled at for doing it too slow, and then doesn’t object or complain despite being the inventor of the automobile and greatest mechanic in the universe, the Creator of all things.

Thus, reading the Bible in the light of power is illuminating, because we are living in a time where the West, that has been under the power of classical liberalism and humanism, is turning toward atheism and strange brands of Gnosticism, and quite literally every heresy since the Resurrection. For those who win power on earth, they will have their prize. They will gain the “Commanding Heights” of economies and governments - for awhile. Then when we tire of that driver, another stock car will come along, with a new ideology and flag, and will replace it. And whoever wins the Cup, inherits the fear of losing it. The shame and honor culture is ballooning now, and will continue to do so, and when power is lost, or perceived to be threatened, the scapegoats will be trotted out, as usual.

Power games are so predictable that it looks no different than the Daytona 500, except the Daytona 500 brings more joy to people, because the winner of a car race doesn’t promise heaven. As soon as the winners in society get what they want, and believe they have saved the world (if only everyone would fall into line with their plan), they begin to oppress the world in a new way. Some winners are better than others, and those are the ones that - at least nominally, like Thomas Jefferson - tip the hat to God for what they have been given here on earth. But the tip-o-the-hat to God can be used as a smokescreen for blatant power grabs, too. All ideas and movements that promise to bring heaven on earth are false. Because only God will do that, and he will do that in the last day, when Jesus returns. (Also, pro-tip: the “Rapture” as you may understand it was invented some 1800 years after Jesus. As I advise friends out of love, stop reading fiction by Dan Brown, and do the same for Tim LaHaye.)

When the Bible is read as it is not intended to be read, it becomes a dead letter. When it is read through the lens of NASCAR, you can easily see what the Assyrians, Babylonians, Herodians, and even what the Israelites are doing. But the lesson is this: no power is given here on earth except what has come from God above. This is what Jesus tells Pontius Pilate, who thinks his hard work and pluck has made him governor of Judea. This is incorrect, according to Jesus. This also explains the violence in the Old Testament, and how a tiny army could overrun Canaan, or how Abraham with three hundred men could overrun the Five Kings who capture Lot. Just as the nation of Israel gets its power from God, it is also taken away by God, through other people. Other nations appear to “take” the power, but God’s plan is somehow always working within this world, especially when we cannot understand it. In many ways, we are like a dog staring at a stock car race, having no idea why cars are going in a circle.

All power here in this world is given by God, and we should serve in humble gratitude if it comes to us, as we have free-will to reject or cooperate with God’s grace. He gives us all sufficient grace to use our intellect and will to realize that we need a savior, and no one in the end can say, “I didn’t have enough evidence to believe,” as Bertrand Russell famously imagined he would tell God after he died. Any political power or NASCAR champion must understand: the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. And the answer in both cases, winning or losing, is to become humble before God and to keep his Commandments. When Israel conquers Canaan, people fail to understand that God is granting power to Israel, and when the nation later sins terribly, and repeatedly, God takes away what was given.

This is not Prosperity Gospel interpretation, this is Humility Gospel. In the book of Job, after he loses his family and wealth, his buddies say, “Perhaps you just weren’t holy enough, and that’s why all this suffering has come your way.” That’s the Prosperity Gospel in one line. “You just weren’t holy enough to be rich.” To which I would say: who is more holy than Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate? And what happened to him? He suffered.

Even if you serve God, you may suffer in this life, and still the answer, as Jesus showed us, is to pray and bless the name of the LORD. Even in his agony, Jesus cried out to God, quoting the 22nd Psalm, which many people are confused about. I was confused. “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’” As a child I thought, “How could Jesus seem to think God left him if he is God?” The problem was that I had no idea that he was quoting the first line of a Psalm, which is a beautiful prayer for times of suffering. He was praying from the Cross, and even in his final words, he offered his spirit to God, and when he appears most defeated, most powerless, he is about to show what real power is on the third day when the women come to the empty tomb. Jesus doesn’t need power over the Romans, because he has power over what the Romans fear most, which is death.

Seriously, I urge you: get a good study Bible and read using the four senses of scripture. If we only read it as “Bible as Literature” or as breadcrumbs for cultural or archaeological or historical events (and we now define “history” much different than the sacred authors did), then it’s no wonder that confusion around the truth is making such a comeback. At least the fantasy of Norse gods addresses a need for the supernatural in people. People need religion, one that transcends this world. And if they don’t follow a religion, they will find one or invent one, and what it leads to is ideology, and always in the end, the will to power.

This is exactly what Jesus came to destroy. Because that kind of “power based” thinking is from the accuser, the divider, the father of lies. If we see the world as a power struggle, then we cannot yet say, “I was blind, but now I see.” The Christian way of seeing the world is not the same as Nietzsche or Marx or or Hitler or Stalin or Foucault or Kendi. You must put on the mind of Christ to step out of the circular “head that eats the tail” model of the world.

If you forget this, and think power is the narrow gate to heaven, you won’t see the big picture. You will forget that God exists. To forget this is folly. To forget God is the same as rejecting God. Because you will lose the context, and perhaps much else. If you are looking for single verses to mock, you may become more focused on the body than the soul, and though the body is important, it is not the only thing to be concerned with. When you lose awe, wonder, and reverence for the real power that created all things, you may forget the most important thing, which is the Creator. The danger then is to think that this world and your body is all that there is. Once that happens, you will be distracted, which is what the devil prefers. Jesus gave us clear instructions. He said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” If you think Jesus was just some nice guy, some dude who came to permit everything, you might want to re-read the Gospels carefully. We are not meant to be the king or the judge, we are asked to follow, in servant mode, as Jesus did. He is the one who can give us the rest and peace that we are really looking for, rather than the false power we imagine will bring us happiness. Don’t waste your life chasing the little kingdoms and title belts of this world, unless you are doing it for the greater glory of God, and even then, should you somehow be granted power, of any kind, remember gratitude to the real power. Because it didn’t come from you.

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