Why Did Peter Sink?

For science-minded people, I think a good way to think of salvation history in the Bible is to consider it in the light of protein folding, where the same protein in “primary structure” is very different than that of “quaternary structure.” The same protein becomes something completely different in each stage, and until the “fullness of time” arrives for the Incarnation through Mary, the protein has not reached its highest state. Until a protein folds into a certain shape, it cannot perform its full function. This is a marvelous thing to study in science, and I have a hard time believing that people don’t recognize the genius of God in this amazingly simple yet incredibly complex topic of protein folding. But then I can look at a blade of grass and see the wonder and awe of God in it, so maybe I’m strange. But it is truly mind-blowing that the same peptide chains can be configured into different shapes that have wildly different purposes and usages. This same unfolding and folding happens in individual lives. If you ever have the joy of watching someone in addiction come to believe and receive new life, this can happen before your eyes instead of over thousands of years.

I realize this is quite a leap from reading the Bible in the light of professional wrestling, but protein folding may help us see that the world of Adam and Cain is different from that of Noah, and that of Abraham, and that of Moses, and that of Jesus. Each covenant is a “fold” toward the “fullness of time” that Jesus speaks of when he arrives.

I once heard a person describe his awakening from addiction this way: throughout his life, he felt as if he was holding a piece of construction paper in front of his face, and was never able to see much. Somewhere on this sheet of construction paper were two eye holes, and now and then, he would shift the paper so that the eye holes lined up with his eyes for a bit. And he could see.

Once he began to pray and work toward a relationship with God, he could see more often, and now he can see because he is in the right position. But really, he says that his sight was positioned for him. Something higher shifted him and the paper to allow the light. This is similar to how this protein folding metaphor works. The same chemical compound is present, but to become useful in a new way, a shift must happen. Although it is the same protein, it is not the same shape after the folding, and can suddenly do new things. It’s the equivalent of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Once we are turned into the right shape we unlock the next phase, or level-up, as gamers would say.

We can see this folding and changing in the sacred texts. If Adam is the primary structure of a protein, Moses seems to be a quaternary structure in this metaphor. He unlocks new meaning in salvation history. Both are men, but they reach new heights as salvation history unfolds. And Jesus is infinitely beyond Moses because it is he, God incarnate, who took on our human shape, but also made the atoms that form all proteins in the first place. He’s the second person of the three-in-one, the Trinity, who holds the gravitational constant in perfect position to allow such miracles of physics to happen repeatedly. Occasionally he even pokes his finger into the laws of nature to, say, walk on water or just walk with us in our trials, and we call these moments miracles.

In God’s plan, somehow the descendants of Cain helped lead to this fourth folding, and now we await the final folding when the marriage of heaven and earth happens. Of course, we don’t understand it fully because we are not God, we are like dogs looking at humans and pondering their behavior, or like me observing the goose on the exit ramp and wondering why there are cars. Goose, dog, me - none are God, but the two animals in that list are living more in alignment with God’s will than I am.

Somehow, someway, cities and weapons and family breakdown is all allowed in God’s plan. Geese getting hit on the exit ramp is part of the plan. Our history from Cain onward of scarring and ripping God’s plentiful earth is part of the plan. The Chosen people, the Israelites attacked and killed the giant clans as part of the plan. Then they themselves were slaughtered by the Assyrians and Babylonians as part of the plan. Caesar killed a few million people in the Gallic wars as part of God’s plan that preceded the fullness of time when Jesus arrived. Since the Resurrection, we’ve had ever larger wars and plagues and famines.

I can’t understand it all without the ideas of free will and redemptive suffering. I wish you luck if you are going to spend a life trying to reconcile suicide, addiction, murder, poverty, starvation, and rampant sexual sin without free will and a living God that allows us to sin out of love but yearns for us to return and repent like Prodigal Sons. It is quite clear that sin is the cause of all suffering. Yet a little voice is calling to us all, if we will pause to listen for it, and only when we do can we “fold” into the next phase, as a more spiritually mature structure, when we allow God to take control, and his will to be done for our lives. It is always the Cains of this world that create a living hell in trying to create heaven through power and increasing technology. It seems obvious at this point that the next serious famine will come when our machines stop working, or electricity fails, or we poison the water. Yet we look back at those who lived sustainably in the “Middle Ages” and “Dark Ages” as ignorant fools, even though they lived in harmony with nature and small communities, like the goose family on the exit ramp (from the prior post). We rush in our cars on massive highways and if we happen to run over the goose, we don’t even stop. As William Blake said in the Proverbs of Hell, “The cut worm forgives the plow,” and also, “The busy bee has no time for sorrow.” These are not compliments, but highways to hell, and we willingly choose those paths. We assume the march of progress will save us but like Lamech and Cain, the wise of this age will be made fools. St. Paul was aware of this, as his own wisdom revealed itself as foolish.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;    the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. (1 Cor 1:18-21)

Cain never folded past his primary structure, but in the Saints, you see the change, the shift, the turning, the folding - from primary to secondary to tertiary to quaternary. This is how and why people change once they fully see Christ as God himself. What seemed wise before becomes foolish once the light of faith alters the meaning of every moment and interaction because the base fear of death is removed completely, and when that happens the kingdom of God is already among us. It’s suddenly visible even amid the suffering.

This protein folding metaphor can work on a social level or personal because it seems that if we are stuck in sin, we have not leveled up from the primary structure. Or, if we have folded into an advanced structure, but then fall back we have gone through some “denaturing” process and need to surrender to God once again to level up. (And of course, in the spiritual life we level up by going down, like Dante going down into hell - by kneeling, we let go and let God fold us into the shape he wants, and prayer is the catalyst.)

As for the mark of Cain, which protects him, it’s disturbing to many that he is not killed. But the death penalty comes about when Noah’s covenant is announced, and again in the Mosaic law. The world is still in primary structure when Cain commits sin and allows it into the world. (Worth noting here is that in the book of Numbers, the Israelite law requires “cities of refuge” for accidental death (manslaughter) and wandering exiles, so God’s law shows mercy to those who haven’t committed murder out of malice.)

But Cain then wanders as an exile, lost, in psychological torture, turned away from God, it seems. Or perhaps he is saved? We cannot know, just as we cannot know who is saved or not, as the particular judgment of any person, besides the canonized saints, is known but to God alone.

So Cain’s descendants accomplish much, and seize power and wealth and pleasure. But there’s a problem with those pursuits. Power lives in perpetual fear of losing power. Wealth lives in perpetual fear of losing wealth. Pleasure lives in…ok you get the point.

We have a role to play in a much larger plan, and to play it properly our highest loyalty must be to Christ, not to a nation, not to a president, and not to an ideology. If you need a key to understanding the Old Testament, it is this: people sin, and things go badly, but it calls them to change, to fold into the next structure that leads them to their ultimate purpose. This is the password to unlocking the mysteries. Everyone sins. Everyone falls. But that is where the “folding” happens to allow us to fit into the puzzle of higher purpose. Abraham sins by taking two wives, and he even gives his wife Sarah to save his skin when he is fearful. He suffers for it. Moses sins, multiple times. He suffers for it. David sins so badly that even small children understand that his move to kill Uriah is an incredibly dirty mafia hit. For goodness sake, Samson…we’ll get to Samson later, in some other series.

When the folding happens to us, where life and experience and time and age re-shape us, we can either become static in an unending prideful pity party…or we can seek faith, hope, and charity. Even a protein like hemoglobin knows that when change happens, it works toward the purpose for which God created it, which is to carry oxygen to our cells. When it is disordered, you have sickle cell anemia and other maladies. And some proteins malfunction, just as some acorns never become oak trees. Such is God’s will. God’s way is beyond our pay grade of knowing, and even what we can know, we cannot fully understand. However, even a protein that malfunctions or an acorn that never germinates still is ready to attempt to live out its purpose. Even if deformed or broken, these “mindless” proteins and seeds know that to carry oxygen or to sprout a sapling is what they must do if the conditions are right. We are no different. Our primary structure is the joining of two cells, and then we fold into a process of mitosis in our mothers’ wombs, then we fold into the light, then we fold into childhood, fold into adolescence, fold into adulthood, parenthood, and old age. From the first cell all the way to the grave, we have the same soul. The protein in its folding does not change but becomes capable in different ways. We are made to be human, with a body and soul, and we are made by God and for God, thus our ultimate purpose is not to make money or win honor, it is to return to eternal life with God, who is the only being that can satisfy our souls. The hunger we have for meaning is the same as our cells for oxygen. Our bellies cry out for food, and we know food exists, so we eat. Our tongue notifies us that water is needed, and water exists. And our heart yearns to have a relationship with God, with a holy family, and it too exists. When all of these other hungers, thirsts, and yearnings have corresponding solutions, so does the greatest desire of all, which is to be loved and to seek supreme happiness, which can be had, in this life and the next.

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Over the centuries an idea keeps popping back up to convince us that Jesus was just like any other teacher, that he was not divine, not supernatural, and that this myth is like any other old myth. It’s just the “dominant narrative,” so we are told, because it served the power structures of the West. But that tale doesn’t tell us much, because if it were only a story, then why didn’t any of the other myths come to “dominate” the landscape? After all, it’s just a story…right?

There was a famous book that killed the faith of many called The Golden Bough, which is a study on ancient religious rituals. C.S. Lewis writes about the impact it had on his dive into atheism in his own re-conversion story called Surprised by Joy.

Lewis’s atheism gained intellectual grounding when, at age 16, he came under the influence of a private tutor, W.T. Kirkpatrick, who was much enamored of a new work by Sir James Frazer called The Golden Bough.

The Golden Bough was the product of Frazer’s monumental survey of all the world religions and mythologies he could lay his hands on. In general, Frazer regarded religion as a human effort to make sense of the frightening and incomprehensible: thunder, pestilence, famine, death, and so on. In particular, Frazer found in human cultures a recurring story of a dying and resurrected god. This god usually was associated with agriculture and fertility—just as in the cycle of nature the plant is broken, the seed enters the ground, and life springs up, so is the god broken, buried, and restored. (From The Spiritual Odyssey of C.S. Lewis)

If there is one takeaway from Frazer’s Golden Bough book on ancient grain gods, it’s that he’s right: all religions are the same. Except for one. Just as C.S. Lewis discovered, there is one single religion that doesn’t fit the mold. Yes, they are all the same, except for the one, because there is only one true God. There are many grains of truth in most religions, but they all have a fatal flaw (or two, or five). Christ is the polar opposite of every other kingly sacrifice or grain sacrifice in human history.

If I may, briefly, take a short aside: The Golden Bough is a book that influenced many flatteners of faith, and it takes the “all religions are the same” approach to history and culture. And it’s very interesting to read. But the centerpiece of James C. Frazer’s myth argument is wrong. He is selling the very same story as the succession myth of Baal or Zeus, where the old god is slain by the new god. But if you attempt to throw Christianity into this melting pot, Jesus just climbs back out of the pot. He’s nothing like the rest of the religions, whether they are from ancient times or from our own modern cults that we pretend are not religious.

In The Golden Bough, there is a myth called “The King of the Grove” (or Rex Nemorensis) which is about a king who must be ever vigilant in fear of losing his power, because he will be killed. Someday, someone will come to the grove and take his power and his life. This should pique your interest, because national politics or office politics is the exact same thing as this ancient king of the grove, without the sword. The ruler of the coffee pot or refrigerator is the same as the ruler of a nation, just on a smaller scale. Winners must maintain a grip on power, or someone else will take it. And of course, no matter how long you hold onto power over the coffee pot or fridge, memento mori - “remember one day you will die” - and a new power will arise. Thus, to protect power beyond your own lifespan, you need more money, land, influence, supporters, cheerleaders, bullets, etc. In other words, you need to take and keep possession, and possession is the meaning of name Cain.

A few decades ago, after watching Apocalypse Now, I spent some days thinking about the myth that the movie is based on, which ties into Frazer’s myth around the king of the grove. The movie plays on this myth, even panning over a stack of books in one scene to shows what Colonel Kurtz has been reading, which contains The Golden Bough.

Now, when a movie shows a book in the background, it is a signal to watchers, with giant red flashing lights, to inform us, “This movie is somehow related to the themes of the book you see that is not so subtly displaying in the background.” There are no accidents in Hollywood. Apocalypse Now was based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, but also on Frazer and the King of the Grove myth.

Ancient kings were also priests, so the words go together in this context, because in the pagan world, religion and power go together. They still do, we just pretend we don’t have religion today. And Jesus came to shatter that illusion. Even the Israelites found out how lust for power plays out when there is an attempt to make it a religion.

The king of the grove holds power only because he has killed the prior king. This took a bit to wrap my head around at first, but here’s the verse from the myth that I sums up the problem of worldly kingship and possession of power:

Those trees in whose dim shadowThe ghastly priest doth reignThe priest who slew the slayer,And shall himself be slain.

Who does this sound like in the Bible? It sounds like Cain, or Lamech. It does not sound like Seth, who invokes the name of God. It does not sound like the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, who bore our infirmities. It does not sound like Jesus, who died on the Cross, conquered death, defeated the devil, and transformed our suffering. The last will be first. Jesus possessed nothing, and gave everything. He is a king unlike any other that has ever been conceived in myth.

Let’s break this apart. The priest-king of the grove who rules, is the murderer of the former king. In taking the grove, he had to kill the former priest-king, and now he is a “ghastly” murderer. And, this current ghastly priest-king will be killed by the next priest-king. In other words, it’s a vicious circle. When I was growing up, the “rat race” referred to people who were racing up the corporate ladder. You can see this same “king of the grove” or “king of the hill” in those pursuing the position of vice president at a company, or control of the local youth baseball board. But really, if you back up enough, this is pro wrestling in a nutshell. But it is also the story of politics, over and over and over, around the world, since Cain and his line to Lamech to Caesar to Trump and Biden.

The King of the Grove is much like King Woods of pro wrestling, and like King Woods, he was the ruler of a pathetic little fiefdom. (Interesting that “Woods” and “Grove” are kind of the same thing. Surely just a lucky coincidence.)

King Woods, the wrestler, did not need to murder to become the championship belt holder in wrestling, so he is less ghastly than the King of the Grove. However, in most wrestling matches there is some kind of cheating, so reaching the top and gaining power almost always requires moral flexibility. This is true in business, where a “being a good businessman” does not necessarily mean he is without mortal sin or good in any other way; it just means he’s good at chasing mammon. In most cases, gaining worldly power requires bending of the rules, or, in other words selling your soul. This is precisely what Jesus meant when he said, “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?” (Mt 16:26)

Why is the King of the Grove “ghastly”? It’s because he has lost his soul in gaining the grove. The base word of ghastly, appropriately, is ghost, and ghost means spirit. The bad spirit has taken over the soul of this murderer who won the grove. Those who seek and wield power in this world paint themselves into a corner. And unless those souls experience the metanoia of turning to Christ, they are lost forever. Metanoia means “beyond the mind” or “change of mind.” To escape the pursuit of power, you have to see the world differently, and to see it differently you have to put on the mind of Christ, as St. Paul says.

Whether your power is in the WWE title belt, the NBA Finals, the United States of America, the TV remote control, or a clump of trees, the game is the same. The king of the grove has killed the prior king, and the king himself will be overthrown, unless he can slay all comers. But truly, even if he keeps his grip on the grove or the title belt, eventually a new king will slay him.

This is the world of power that strives to reach the top. But getting to the top brings immense fear, unless abandonment to God is made and that power is offered up to the Creator. For the king who says, “Come at me, bro,” he has gained the whole world but lost his soul. The ghastly king can never stop striving. Even moreso, those in power must seek and sniff out enemies constantly rather than wait for them to come, because being king gives an acute sense of smell for anything that threatens the power over the grove. (If you don’t see this in America, then you need to ask yourself why do we have a massive standing army at the ready at all times, if not to maintain worldly power. Our grove is just larger, “from sea to shining sea.” We even have many songs about our grove and rules and movies and titles and flags, and ultimately we have a king, a kind of spirit, which we call a Republic, of which the current president embodies before passing it on to the next King of the Grove.)

Jesus is not this kind of king. He’s the opposite kind of king, because he is the Creator of all things. He warns us, “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” But we don’t listen. We want power over others, over nature, over God, and the addiction to fear grabs us by the chest like a monster.

Jesus is the king who simply allowed the enemies all to come, all at once, to slay him, but much to everyone’s surprise, the slayer did not become king. In fact, the slayers were all defeated. In Apocalypse Now, the dead Colonel Kurtz does not rise after death. He wasn’t a savior. He was just the current King of the Grove, or the King Woods of the WWE.

But Jesus does rise. This makes all the difference. This is the difference between him and all other religions. Yet, wait, there is one more utterly important step in understanding why he is different than all other power plays.

Jesus doesn’t “slay the slayer.”

He forgives the slayer.

He forgives his enemies.

And when the slayer comes again and attempts to kill Jesus, he rises and forgives again. And again. Every generation, the enemy whispers evil into the hearts of men, and they try to slay Jesus, the one true Priest-King, yet he cannot die. The slayers keep coming, but the true God, the living God, is never replaced. There is no succession myth. All of the kings who claim succession, or pretend at it, all of the gods of old, and all of the ideologies of today that claim to have killed god, are false. So yes indeed, all religions are the same, except for one.

They are fooling themselves. Thus, the selling must go on, the crafting of stories must happen, because God is not dead. If you want followers of your power, you need to tell people constantly in overt and subtle ways that God is dead, in ever-new messaging. Because if you stop convincing or coercing people for but a moment, they will instead listen to the law and love in their heart, and they will know that Christ is King and he is risen. Then they will follow Him instead of some Caesar.

Ok - let me leave that aside now. But my point is this: Jesus doesn’t play power games like the King of the Grove myth. He’s the anti-myth because he’s real, he lived, and he is risen.

So for our lives here in this world, where we are given a chance to re-unite with God, where we can purge our sins and pray for illumination with the light of faith, there is a greater concern than politics. There is a greater plan in the works.

So to tie this back to the goose on the side of the highway. What is out of place, and in disharmony, in the world is the difference between the brothers Cain and Seth. Cain strives to shape nature into his image, and Seth lives humbly, invoking the name of the Lord. We live in a world of Cain’s values, not Seth’s. As we have all been pulled into cities, and live in nations with weapons aimed at one another, in constant fear, we are living in a world made by Cain and his progeny. We live in the City of Man, not the City of God, which St. Augustine spent a thousand pages describing.

The difference is striking, as the goose family lives like Adam and Eve did before the Fall. The reason animals are not fallen, even if they are living in what Thomas Hobbes would call a world that is “red in tooth and claw,” the animals fulfill their duties of raising a family and seeking their daily bread (or bug). They do not have an intellect and will that lead to murder over envy and pride, as Cain did. They do not build weapons. They do not build highways and overpasses and retention ponds.

Seth seems to live like the goose. He prays, and presumably, works. Cain shows no sign of kneeling. In fact, when Jesus says “the ruler of this world” is coming, he’s referring to the devil, but he also means the Roman guards who will arrest and kill him. And the Romans, just like Americans today, truly have a lot more in common with Cain than they do with Seth. The leaders and business people and celebrities that we admire have more in common with “the ruler of this world” than with Jesus.

Which brings up perhaps the greatest question in Genesis 4, of why God protected Cain with the “mark” after he had committed murder. But the answer, I believe is simple, and it’s that God still loves Cain because he is worth saving. Cain has also created his own hell in separation from God, because he is a wanderer, an exile, and God’s protection is a penance. Furthermore, to show how God differs from much of our honor/shame ideas of justice, not only does he protect Cain, but he clearly uses him for a greater plan, as cities and technology come from Cain’s family. The punishment of being exiled to wander ruined Cain’s livelihood of farming, making it a lifelong punishment. His punishment is fitting and clearly agonizing to Cain, as he is terrorized by fear and stripped of his occupation. Most importantly, when reading Genesis there is an unfolding of events, an order, and people often look at Christ and say, “Why didn’t God act like Jesus in the Old Testament?” We’ll talk about this folding and unfolding in the next post.

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

Recently, I was driving and took the exit ramp. In the grass on the left was a family of geese, a mother and her baby geese, who apparently had a home in the little retention pond at the center of the concrete jungle. The goose and its babies stood near the road of rushing traffic, and I thought, “Wow, that goose is really out of place standing there.”

Then it struck me that the goose was not out of place. The goose was the only thing in the right place. What was out of place was the massive highway and the car I was in, since the overpass had only existed for about twenty years. Cars alone have only been around for about a century. The goose was right where it was supposed to be, which was near a body of water, with grass around it, so that she could find bugs and weeds to feed to her babies. Everything but the goose was out of place. And to explain why all of the highways and cars and trucks exist is much harder than explaining the goose.

What has been a fascinating exploration for me is to go back and read Genesis regarding the expansion of technology in the world, and from who it comes from. Interestingly, it comes from Cain’s line, and Cain’s name means “possession.” This little story about Cain after the murder of Abel is one of those paragraphs in Genesis that you may feel it’s worth skipping because of the “begat, begat, begat” genealogy, but it so important to slow down or you’ll miss the bus into the next dimension of scripture. Because from Cain’s line comes cities and highways and cars and music and polygamy and swords and bullets. After Cain bashes Abel’s head in, he wanders restlessly in a land called Nod and starts his own family. On the face of it, Cain’s descendants have incredible accomplishments.

Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad; and Irad was the father of Mehujael, and Mehujael the father of Methushael, and Methushael the father of Lamech. Lamech took two wives; the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. Adah bore Jabal; he was the ancestor of those who live in tents and have livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the ancestor of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah bore Tubal-cain, who made all kinds of bronze and iron tools. The sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah. (Genesis 4:17-22)

This little section of Genesis 4 is anything but a yawner, because much else comes from Cain’s line down the road. The boring genealogies that we skip have treasures in them if you follow who begat who in the Bible. Furthermore, the names themselves have great meaning, as they are more than just some username chosen at random. I will consciously avoid diving into Genesis 6 here where the giant clans come from, because that will lead me astray. But let’s just explore Cain’s line a bit.

In terms of what we value today, Cain’s family accomplishments fit exactly what modern parents brag about to one another. From Cain’s line we get the first city, permanent housing (single-family tent homes), and domesticated animals. That alone is amazing. But then we get music, too: the arts come from Cain’s line. And lastly, perhaps most importantly, from Tubal-Cain, we get bronze and iron, which means blacksmithing for building tools and, more ominously, weapons. In other words, Cain’s line is where technology comes from, which most of us worship today. Oh, and we get the first instance of a bad marriage with Lamech, who has two wives. So polygamy enters the Bible initially here, without much fanfare. People often make the mistake in the Old Testament of seeing polygamy and thinking it’s a free pass, that it’s acceptable, and of course it never says that. In fact, it’s always a disaster. Whoever has more than one wife suffers disorder in their house, from Abraham to Jacob to David to Solomon. Never, anywhere, does it suggest that multiple wives leads to anything good. In fact, Isaac has the one model marriage of the patriarchs, and his story is quite happy (aside from the whole trick on Esau by Jacob and Rebekah). But the first polygamist? Lamech? Well, Lamech is a straight-up lunatic sociopath. More on him in a bit. (Note: there is another Lamech in Seth’s line, who we know nothing about. Maybe it was the good version of Lamech.)

Now, you can pass this by and say, “How ridiculous - one family line could not create all of these things.” And in saying so, you will miss the whole point because you’re reading it like a science book instead of a soul book. This is what happens when you don’t stop and think: “What is this book trying to say here?” Because everything in chapter 4 of Genesis has many layers of meaning. In fact, every chapter of Genesis does. (I think what surprises me most today is that the same person who can see four layers of meaning in something like Squid Game cannot see past the surface level literal layer in Genesis. It’s like they can’t apply deep reading if its scripture, but can go full Jacques Derrida on rottentomatoes.com. But I digress.)

Let’s resume.

After Cain and Abel, Adam has another son named Seth, which is the line that leads to Abraham, and eventually Mary and Jesus. After Seth is born, religion becomes a thing. Notice that religion did not come from the line of Cain. This is important.

All we learn about Seth is that after his birth “…people began to invoke the name of the Lord.” (Gen 4:26) How interesting. Like so many things in Genesis a single phrase is freighted with meaning. Recall that all of these stories had to come down in oral tradition, so they couldn’t be as verbose as I am in posts like this that are way too wordy.

So from one branch from Adam we have technology, art, cities, polygamy, murder, and from the other we get…faith. Basically, we get humility before God in the line of Seth. That’s his only “accomplishment,” if we want to call it that.

Worth noting is that farming seems to be assigned to Adam, as he had to get his bread from the sweat of his brow. In the story of Cain and Abel we hear about farming of both animals and plants, because the thing that made Cain angry was Abel’s offering of an animal from his flock, which was chosen over Cain’s fruit “from the ground,” meaning some kind of grain. After Eden, we seem to have an semi-idyllic period of farming. Then comes the murder of Abel, and all hell breaks loose. Like, literally. After the murder comes the march of progress and technology.

You could say that Cain is a real go-getter from the start and there doesn’t seem to be much happening in his family around invoking the name of the Lord. He and his children are busy. They seem to have a lot of goals and they hit their goals. In so many ways, Cain’s family line is a model and ideal of all that modern high achievers seek for their offspring.

If you were talking to a modern Cain, you would likely say, “Cain, you must be proud of your children and grandchildren.” I suspect he would agree. He would be very proud. Don’t we all say that today? “I’m proud of you, son.” We are always talking about our pride over accomplishments. “I’m proud of you for working hard.” “Congratulations on landing on the moon, Neil, the whole nation is proud of you.” Or, “Mr. Oppenheimer, we at the U.S. Army are real proud of all you’ve done in helping us build the first atomic bomb.”

And being “proud” is the problem, because pride really, really likes power. This is one of the words that we mistake as a good thing.

One thing that always gave me a weird spidey-sense in the Gospels is when God says he is “well pleased” over his son, Jesus. At Jesus’ Baptism, God the Father uses this term. Then again at the Transfiguration, God the Father says “well pleased.” He does not say “proud”. Because seriously, the word I expect in this sentence is “proud,” not “well pleased.”

At his Baptism:

And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (Mt 3:16-17)

At the Transfiguration:

While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” (Mt 17:5-7)

Why does God say “well pleased” instead of “proud”? Is this an accident?

It’s obvious that this wording is specifically avoiding the language we would normally use for a child that we are excited about. There is a very careful wording here to avoid using the word proud. We should have a word in English, without the space, “wellpleased”, because then we could tell our children that and avoid the horrors of pride.

I could always feel in these events that there is something different about being well pleased versus being proud. And it seems rather obvious once you realize that the root sin of everything is pride that it is far better to be pleased about a person, than proud about them. The difference of being pleased about your team winning the Super Bowl instead of being proud is that in the first case, you’re content with the beauty of the game, perhaps satisfied with seeing a great game that happened of athletes glorifying God through their physical gifts. In the second case, with pride over winning, you feel superior for your team.

This is subtle but enormous in consequence. Are you wellpleased or proud?

Because pride is what Cain has. He’s dripping wet with pride. When sin was “crouching at his door,” he did not master it by humbling himself, he opened the door and let sin inside. His prideful ego led him to wrath, and wrath, in turn, puts him into a holy terror. Cain also has a terror in him because after the murder of Abel, he feels cursed by God and expects to be murdered himself:

“Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. (Gen 4:14-15)

His terror is softened by God’s mercy. With God’s mark upon him, Cain is protected, but he’s not free of his sin, nor does he seem to be changed. There is no reference to repentance of any kind. Rather than repent and kneel, Cain’s descendants seem to show no humility for this gift of grace. Lamech, his great-great-great grandson, takes this exemption as a a license to kill. Because he brags about killing two men. Without remorse, Lamech says:

I have killed a man for wounding me,    a young man for striking me.If Cain is avenged sevenfold,    truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” (Gen 4:23-24)

Thus you have the full-blown sociopath in Lamech, who feels immune from morality altogether. He’s got multiple murders and multiple wives. Incidentally, this is what I see as the fundamental problem of “Once saved, always saved,” because if you are saved and need no further corrections to your behavior, then you can be Lamech. And by the way, Lamech is a perfect example of a Biblical character showing us exactly how not to act. If we need to have our villain wear a black cowboy hat, Lamech is one of those characters.

Once you go back and read about the Fall in Genesis, and follow the line of Cain, who first sought power by murder due to his wounded pride, a picture of a world full of pride, sin, sex, and violence begin to take shape. His descendants have an increasing urge to control nature via technology and knowledge. There is strong economic drive in the line of Cain to gain wealth and influence. Thus, eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is passed on to us all through some kind of cosmic inheritance, and yet anyone can reject evil. We are fallen yet not ruined. We are damaged but not beyond hope, because we see Seth on the other side of Adam’s line taking a very different approach to life: he is not hammering the world to his will, he is invoking the name of God.

So why does Cain’s line feel so compelled to invent, explore, study, seek, as opposed to say, kneeling to pray? Why do cities and highways and guns come from Cain but not Seth? It’s because of pride and the fear that stems from it. There is fear of the Lord, also known as awe and wonder, and then there is fear of losing what we have “won” here in this life. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom because it will bring you to kneel and pray. Fear of others, fear of losing what you have, is the beginning of a vicious circle, the rat race, and it is the gateway to sin.

Cain has “won” a license to sin, and his family uses this badge of honor to reject God altogether. But then his descendants attempt to “gain the whole world,” which Jesus warns us against, because it’s a trap. Whatever you gain you can then lose to another, and in the process you will lose your soul.

Whoever has much is fearful of losing it, and thus needs more power to push the fear away. Lamech laughs at God, saying that he will be avenged seventy-seven times by God if anyone tries to hurt him. Lamech’s comment is even referred to by Jesus later on in the Gospels. Jesus references this same number. It’s not a coincidence. Because in way, Lamech is right. God will forgive him seventy-seven times. God will forgive us all that many times. That’s exactly what Jesus tells Peter. But the whole point is that it shouldn’t take us seventy-seven times to wise up and stop committing the same sins. Imagine how depressing this must have been for Peter to hear:

 Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” (Mt 18:21-22)

Unlike Lamech, Jesus tells Peter that he must constantly take the lowest seat, the humble place, and forgive. This is difficult to do. Why? Because of pride. Because we want to be Lamech or Tony Soprano, in our own way. We want to win. And you see this play out in the wider world, far beyond the individual.

Fear is why the wealthy nations must keep their foot on the head of weaker nations and peoples. Really, this explains any sin, from racism to theft to adultery to sodomy to murder. All sin is a lack of trust in God. All sin is a rejection of God for the pride of the self and fear of not getting what we think we want. But Christ is the king who trusts, rather than fears. So for everyone in the last century who wanted to flatten Christianity into “just another religion”, like Joseph Campbell or James C. Frazer or the New Atheists, they are missing the whole point.

This is why Jesus is different. This is why Christianity is different from every other religion. This is why God does not act like a professional wrestler or politician.

To say that all ancient religions are all just a replay of the myth of “the hero with a thousand faces,” or that ancient agricultural sacrifice was the same thing as Christ on the cross, is to miss the whole purpose. They cannot see yet because they haven’t asked Christ to rub the healing mud into their eyes so that they see what and who he really is.

Christ rules in love, not in fear. If you are being told that you must believe or else you’ll go to hell, you are hearing the completely wrong motive to believe. Because fear is not the reason to believe, it’s the thing that gets conquered when you come to believe. Fear of the Lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom, but love of God leads to eternal life, and that joyful life can begin today. And this doesn’t make sense until you have the experience of blind Bartimaeus, who only knows one thing, and one thing only, and that is that Jesus healed his sight and his soul. “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” (Jn 9:13-25)

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Do you know what I really like about the Old Testament? It’s what a lot of people hate about it. But I think most people hate it because they don’t read it with the four senses of scripture. Instead, they pluck out one-line and hold it up like a dead rat, and say, “Look what I found! Look at how awful this book is! Can you see this thing?” I liked doing this, too, when I was dead, before the change happened.

But readers do this plucking of the rat without understanding the larger structure, because rats exist even in the most beautiful buildings. The Chrysler building surely has some rats in it, but we don’t go to New York to see the rodents.

What I like about the Old Testament is that the characters are not portrayed as perfect. They all sin. Every one of them. In fact, they are portrayed as human, very human. This is why I think so many people stumble while reading the Old Testament. They are expecting spotless heroes, just like we expect in our politicians now. In the growing honor/shame culture of America, we forgot how to read. We forgot nuance. We are like children who need one cowboy in a white hat and one in a black hat so we know who is good and bad in the Bible. But the Bible is more like Shakespeare than your average network TV drama. Grey’s Anatomy and Chicago Fire have the depth of a baby pool, but the Bible goes down into the Mariana Trench in our souls.

This is why I see professional wrestling everywhere today. Every news organization has its saints and villains, just as the WWE does with its characters, such as the clean-cut John Cena versus the greasy Undertaker. This is also why I think of pro wrestling as a more serious endeavor than modern news and politics. Because wrestling doesn’t pretend to be what it’s not. It doesn’t pretend at any other motive than entertainment, and is a satire on our own prideful lust for power. Thus, it is pure. It’s pure in its absurdity. It’s ridiculous. I don’t watch it regularly, but I find it more authentic than what our media and politicians are pretending at. Pro wrestling is the Days of Our Lives soap opera for boys, and some men. Like me.

Maybe there is the fifth sense of reading scripture, in that you must read in terms of power. More specifically, you have to read it under the light of living in fear vs. living in trust. I’ll use pro-wrestling here to describe what I mean, but you could use whatever sport you like. Use Battlebots or professional pickleball instead, if that’s your thing.

But when your last day arrives, there is as much at stake in the outcome of presidential politics as there was when the wrestler King Woods (my personal favorite) lost his crown to the evil Roman Reigns.

I know this sounds extreme, but hear me out.

Modern geopolitics is every bit as much smoke and mirrors as Monday Night Raw or Friday Night Smackdown. No. Correction: geopolitics must use far more smoke and mirrors, since wrestling’s kingdom is in a patchwork of rented arenas around the country, and the TV broadcast uses very focused camera shots on small crowds assembled tightly so that it appears to be large. The illusion of importance is key.

This is a modern sacrilege to say, because I don’t venerate politicians. To say that politics is not that important will trigger people, because it is perhaps the most worshipped idol of the 21st century. But let me be the first in line to disrespect modernity’s sacred cows. If there is a list to be on for sedition against the current ideologies, I’d like to have a row in that database. I don’t worship politicians, celebrities, or movements that reject right worship and non-heretical faith in Christ. I may be many things, and have committed many sins, but I don’t intend to take my last breath as an apostate to the one true King.

When America goes the way of Sumeria and Rome and the Mayans and Imperial Spain, nothing will change in terms of who is the real power over us all, for there is only one. If the fifty states are balkanized and dis-united into fifty nations, the same King will remain. Division is ugly, but it will happen at some point, because we’ve already allowed the accuser and deceiver into our nations, cities, houses, and hearts.

The spirit of a nation can obey God or reject God. Nations choose their course just like individual people choose their actions. Free-will is the gift God grants for us to choose our own ending. In either case, for a person or a nation, the choice to turn to God must be made, and of course it all starts on the personal level. The more citizens who turn away from God, the more a nation will turn away. Thus, whether it is President Biden or President Trump (or whoever), they will have my respect as the manager of America, because I learned long ago to give respect to rank rather than the person wearing the rank. But no president is the ultimate authority. I can render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but I don’t care who Caesar is if he rejects God. If he or she leads us into temptation and delivers us unto evil, there we must part. A Caesar who thinks power is God or denies the existence of a living God cannot be followed when it comes to decision time, because the ultimate decision that we must make is not about this life, but eternal life.

If our social managers turn away from God, then believers cannot play the game of “follow the leader” any longer, for there is only one leader of all earthly leaders, and that is God. Jesus said, “Follow me.” This implies a choice, not a forced march. This has been established as the way, as Jesus said we must follow him, and not earthly power. The Bible is full of examples on how to do this as well when the times comes. From the three stubborn boys that Nebuchadnezzar threw in the furnace, to the Maccabee brothers, to every Apostle and martyr in Church history. We have many examples to review and emulate in the martyrology of the Church. Most obviously, Jesus himself showed the way. Peter, too, even spells it out in Acts 5 when they were arrested for violating the speech codes and thoughtcrime of first century Jerusalem. You should immediately see parallels of this today, as we are once again instructed not to “teach in this name” of Jesus, as it is said to be a micro-aggression or colonialist or offensive. Peter says, “Sorry, not sorry. We have a higher authority than human resources or the online mob.”

And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest questioned them, saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.” (Acts 5:27-32)

Understanding where the real power lies is critical. It is not in pro wrestling. It is not in presidents. It’s not even in the nation with the most naval destroyers and nuclear warheads. This is where a disconnect happens for people, in misunderstanding how to read the Bible.

There is a disconnect between those who worship the government and those who worship God. How you rank power structures changes everything in how you view the world, and for everyone who preaches on “power differentials” today, they almost always have their ranking out of order, because God is never mentioned in their ranking, the absence of which makes their entire preaching moot and empty of meaning. This is why every ideology fails in the end when it tries to assume authority and dictate its version of morality: it has no authority, nothing solid as a foundation. Oddly, we cannot know God fully or comprehend the idea of God, and we can’t fully know his ways, yet God still gives bedrock to our lives here in the material world. This is because we can know that he is infinitely greater than us and all his creation, yet we also know that he is wired right into our bodies and minds and souls. What the idea of God does for us is stop the nightmare of “infinite regress” where we keep asking, “What came before the earth? What came before the universe? What came before God?” It stops at God, the Creator. Interestingly, the band AC/DC had a pair of songs that I think illustrate this point. “Highway to Hell” and “Who Made Who?” are related, because as soon as you start to question the Creator of all things and who made you, then you will be on the highway to hell, which is just separation from God.

I truly cannot stress enough how important the concept of God being the first thing is for your mental health. God created the world “out of nothing” (ex nihilo). If you’ve heard the saying, “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” it’s essential to know that fear in this context really refers to “wonder and awe,” which is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. If you lose that wonder and come to believe that chaos was first, then fear sets in, and everything else that comes along with it, like depression and lust and greed, well, you know - all the rest of the deadly sins.

But most importantly for this series, is the need for power. In our world, we think of power as rank in society.

You cannot make it through basic training in the military without coming to know what “respecting the rank” means. “Render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar,” as Jesus said. This sums up the idea well. We have a duty to obey the law. Paying taxes is right and just, so long as the nation is right and just. For a nation to be worthy of obedience, however, this duty only applies if the nation doesn’t violate the real law, the Commandments, or ask us to reject Jesus’ command to “Follow me.” You can even distill this down to natural law if you’re not inclined to religion, and plenty of atheists believe in natural law because it can be arrived at by reason. Natural laws should be the basis for national laws. But if national laws demand abandonment of natural law, which comes from God, the first thing, then we have an uncrossable chasm. At that point our loyalty must be unequivocally pointing toward God and not a President or any founding document, no matter how yellowed and venerable it looks. Within any nation, there is a battle going on, just as there is within every heart.

And this war is a spiritual one.

As for the concerns of the day (from the Covid tales about a bat, to “Who blew up the Nordstream pipeline?”, to how we should react to the Russia-Ukraine war) these are all secondary concerns to the kingdom of God. This sounds insensitive, but it’s actually the most sensitive thing you can do. Because all of the news of the day is not seeking the City of God, it’s seeking the City of Man.

The kingdom of God is among us, we are told. But are we looking for it? Are we living in it? The kingdom of God is here, but not yet. That’s a hard concept to grasp (maybe harder than ex nihilo). The kingdom will come, yet it’s here. What?

Clearly the worldly things impact bodies and souls, but still Christ says the kingdom is among us. That’s because HE is the kingdom, the way, the path, the gate, living water, the bread, the priest, the prophet, the king.

One of the strangest things is to realize that the promised Messiah would bring a kingdom to earth, here among us, and for those who look around and say, “He must not have been the Messiah? Where is this Kingdom?” But the kingdom is here. It is the Church. The Body of Christ exists. The Church is in all nations, as promised, and as promised, the violent and fearful try to topple it. In every generation, the Church is attacked, but it rebounds, retreats, reforms, repeats. Christ said the kingdom is under attack. From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force. (Mt 11:12) The presidents and prime ministers and Caesars and educators can all take a number. Get in line.

This is the kingdom of the counter-culture, of Christ, because his kingdom is built on a different foundation from that of all other kings and clubs and governments. This is the kingdom where trust is greater than fear, because at the root of all power politics is fear. At the root all all pride is fear. The idea of fig leaves should ring a bell here.

This is the way that Jesus intends for us to see the world, in trust rather than fear, and any worldly king that doesn’t recognize the real king and source of earthly power must reject God in favor of his power, which requires fear to maintain. And who should our trust be in? Not in worldly power. Not in promises from people or serpents. Ultimate trust must be in one thing, and one thing only, and that the creator who made us for him and to be loved by him. When we understand that we are created, then we know that our needs will be met by God if we trust in him. This is why Jesus needs so little. He says, “Consider the lilies of the field” who are adorned greater than King Solomon (or King Woods). The beauty of creation far exceeds our human fashion and pomp and circumstance.

He reminds us that we only need to request “our daily bread,” which is Christ himself, the Bread of Life. Furthermore, he says, “foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Yet does Jesus sound concerned about his lack of money or shelter? No. This is radical. It’s extreme. And he’s right.

It’s stunning for us to hear such a thing, especially for those of us who grew up in a time of plenty, and learned about Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of self-actualization, or Tony Robbins’ will-to-power, or Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy’s argument that we can shape the universe into our own image and likeness.

Jesus says, “No” to all of them.

Jesus says, “Stop trying to create the world and trust in God who already created it.” But it’s worth noting that the fox still has to dig out its den, and a bird must create its nest. Abandonment to Divine Providence does not mean that you need not do anything. It doesn’t mean you can lay around all day so that you can be spiritual all the time. Rather, it means fulfilling the duties to your station in life and letting all other worries be offered up to God. It means living for God, like a fox or a bird glorifies creation by doing what is proper for them. A fox or bird has total trust in the Creator, yet these animals must still perform their work. A nest doesn’t build itself. A den won’t dig itself. Thus, work is good, as are the created things themselves, so long as they are used rightly. We are no different. This is at the heart of the teaching of the Church, based on what Jesus said to his followers. Bodies are not bad. Work is not bad. We are fallen and compromised, but can be redeemed, and all of us, every human being, has sufficient grace on offer - an open-ended gift - that can be the ladder we use to climb to heaven.

Fear is not what foxes and birds rely on, they live freely, like children, and trust in their Creator. Only humans fear and prepare to fight in a zero-sum game, because of the Fall. We can prove our fears by simply turning on the news, and see the fingerprints of Original Sin everywhere. Fear is why we build highways and bombs and smart phones, because we don’t think God will provide for us. If we cling to our lives instead of God, then we begin to be fearful, and that is when power becomes the game, and it is a game of total obsession once it begins.

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

I think the day the canary died in the coal mine was in 1994 when Dr. Jocelyn Elders announced to the world that masturbation was a medical good, even necessary, telling one of the greatest lies in history. Every man in the listening world was nodding along, because if science said the old morality was dead, men were more than ready to agree. I was probably eating a Little Debbie Nutty Buddy when I heard it, or drinking a 32-ounce Big Buddy from the local mini-mart.

Now, Dr. Elders lost her job for that after a big kerfuffle, but the word was out: chastity was a sin, not a virtue. The last, old fuddy-duddy rule that Christianity had lifted up regarding lust was being pulled down and paved into a parking lot. This commandment came from the tower of Washington D.C., from the anointed Surgeon General, who knocked down one of the last fences of morality. What Woodstock had not already opened the gate to, we had finally taken down the last blocker. (For anyone familiar with Chesterton’s fence, you can see that this relates directly. And if you are familiar with Chesterton’s fence and how we foolishly have removed all the fences because of our assumption of knowledge, then you may also see how the story of Chesterton’s wall relates as well.)

The fatal flaw of science when it turns into a source of spiritual direction is the same flaw with every other ideology: it doesn’t believe in God. I mean, of course it cannot, because pure science is a study of the natural world. Science is beautiful and good at finding the truth when it sticks to experimentation and data. But once the crossover is made into morality, it becomes dangerous, because to misunderstand that souls exist means missing half the person. The ideology of “scientism” happens whenever you hear morality lessons starting with the words “Studies show...” The devil attacks the body, and places thoughts in our heads, because that’s all that he can affect. Without our defenses of prayer and fasting, we are sitting ducks. Science doesn’t believe in God, and therefore doesn’t understand the devil. But the devil understands science just like he can quote scripture. We all know the devil can quote scripture, so it follows that he can twist organic chemistry and molecular biology as well to his purposes.

What we all forget is this: the devil is smarter than us. All of us.

Angels and demons are pure intellect, and for us to think we “know better” is exactly what he wants. (Watch the movie Nefarious for an accurate portrayal of demonology.) He plants thoughts in our heads in order to deceive, distract, divide, and drive us to despair. And the best thought he can plant in our heads is that he does not exist, and neither does God, and neither does your eternal soul. This is like the reverse of the parable of the mustard seed. Instead of a seed being planted and growing into a great shrub that houses many birds, the devil just brings us the bird droppings. There is no growth, just death.

Now, the devil is going to devil, since that’s his job. God allows this, to give us temptations and trials, to make us choose. People don’t like this idea, because why would a good God allow this? The only problem with a purely material world is that you have no explanation for evil, and so we pretend that wealth and education and sexual freedom will solve the problem, but as I’ve just gone on at length here about, the abundance of food and sex do not solve the problem of sin at all. And eventually, no matter how much you eat, whether it’s sugar or protein, and no matter how much sex you have, the Big Empty God-shaped hole in your heart still needs filling.

Free-will is the manner in which we choose grace or sin, and when you have a Surgeon General come out like Moses’ on Capitol Hill to announce that sexual sin no longer exists, the people get the keg, the condoms, the Hustler mag, and the Golden Calf out of storage immediately. Once the gate is removed, the sheep wander, and wander we have. Jonah’s jaunt to Nineveh could be done to any average midwestern American town at this point, but unlike the king of Nineveh, no one would respond by wearing sackcloth and sitting in ashes.

So food can’t save us, and nor can sex. But like food, sex can be used for good purposes or bad ones, and the modern idea of sex as freedom has destroyed millions of marriages and families.

Ask anyone who has had many partners if its true that sex has brought fulfillment. Has lots of sex brought them peace? The answer is no. We all know these people. They are everywhere. The constant pursuit of the next partner makes for a life of lying and surface relationships. Sex by itself is basically as deep and meaningful as what the paint shaker at Home Depot experiences in its gyrations. I don’t know many people that would watch a video of the paint shaker at Home Depot, but that is essentially what pornography is. The same goes for one night stands and quickies with strangers. In other words, sex is removed from its actual purpose of making children. It’s really wild that this declaration, so obvious, is wrongthink today, but the purpose of sex is obviously reproduction, and it is pleasurable in order that we reproduce.

Try as you might to explain it away, the purpose of sex is reproduction. Pleasure is not the primary purpose. This is hard to accept today, but realize that you would not ever be reading this if pleasure was the only purpose. Immense amounts of money go toward papering over this fact, but every day, babies are born, popping out and wailing to prove the purpose of the act. “It’s me,” they cry. “I’m the reason you’re horny. Surprise!” The intention is to unite a husband and a wife, and to make babies. It’s funny that penguins understand this but people with smart phones do not.

In fact, anyone who continues this charade of trying to trade sex for meaning like it was a stock market finds themselves more lost than drug addicts in the end. The wreckages that follows a life of random sex is as bad as that of alcohol, and so often they go together. Surely we all know porn addicts and incurable strip joint patrons. Watching their efforts to find another partner is like Dexter, the serial killer, searching for his next victim. But the constant pursuit of sex makes for a pathetic chase scene, not that different from scenes in The Walking Dead where zombies pursue Michonne or Maggie. It’s just all so shallow that watching it makes you sad. It makes you sad for the both the pursued and the the pursuer when you know that the lies used in the wooing will all fall flat in the end.

How many country songs cover this state? Loneliness, it’s really something. There’s such different kinds of sadness. I mean, Old Yeller is sad, but not nearly as sad as loneliness that leads to sin. Requiem for a Dream is a drug movie that follows this arc of desperation for euphoria, but unlike Old Yeller, where you are sad about the wholesome doggy whose goodness felt nearly transcendent, you feel shattered and destroyed in the sadness of a life drugs and sex that walk the characters into a living hell, and ends with Jennifer Connelly reduced to a stage dog dancing for more drugs.

Sex becomes a closet pursuit for the addicted, really, worse than many drugs. It may excite the flesh for a bit, but sooner or later, like any fix, you need more, and the more you need, the more vicious the cycle gets, until it becomes a circular hell (which I’m certain is why Dante made the rings of hell circles, because we all choose the vicious circle that we occupy). After a while, the pursuit gets weird and strange as what formerly satisfied no longer delivers the punch that the lust requires to get off again. This obsession is the secret addiction of millions of American men, who should all proceed en masse to join an Exodus 90 group or a Strive 21 program to break these poisonous soul ties. Oh, and start saying Deliverance Prayers (for yourself and your immediate family - just don’t start dabbling in delivering others…bad idea).

Oh, you say you don’t believe in the devil? That is all childish nonsense. Well, that’s because he’s already got you. If you don’t believe in the devil, he’s already bought your soul. His first tactic, number one, is to convince you that he doesn’t exist. And while you do his bidding, he won’t bother you. It’s only once you start to fight it that you will begin to know that he is real, and so is God.

This idea of freedom by way of sex is the shiny apple we’re told to eat, with the promise that it will give us knowledge, make us like God. The reality is that we all find out that what we lost can never be restored, and sex is like a new car on the dealership lot, shined up and waxed. (It’s interesting how shiny things always seem to fit so well with sin.) Within weeks, a new car is covered in salt and dirt from the highways. Before long it’s like every other car on the street and we’re still the same body and soul riding around in it, often eating fast food while we listen to songs about sex.

So many are desperate to prove that sex can fulfill them, but like a man who buys a new pickup to turn heads, in a few years he will become disillusioned with that machine and need a newer, younger truck. Or if he can’t afford the newer vehicle, he’ll start adding aftermarket bolt-ons until it starts looking cartoonish. Or worse: from the start, the new car was a lemon, and it was never what he thought it would be, but now the debt is hanging around for years.

This is why virginity in the ancient world was highly prized. They knew what we have forgotten. Sex sells, yes, but it’s way oversold. There is more to life, and just as Plato and Socrates and Confucius and Marcus Aurelius and Jesus all told us, the higher pursuit of virtue far exceeds the desires of the flesh. Even the Epicureans taught that much.

The shiny apple is always an illusion. Good things come from self-denial more often than they do from indulgence. But because of media and a bad notion of freedom, chastity has been given a bad name. What may shock you is to learn that people pursuing chastity have greater friendships than people who see themselves as raging balls of desire in constant need of sex. Virtuous friendship, in fact, requires it. Once lust is removed entirely, virtuous friendship can soar. But how can you remove lust?

Let’s go to the replay. In Genesis, once Joseph goes to Egypt, and after he gets out of prison for his sweet dream interpretation, he has a job. But the boss’s wife wants him. In a predicament, she advances on him, and what does he do to thwart the advances of his boss’s wife?

He flees.

Now for most sin, you pray and fight, as the Spiritual Combat demands us to do. But for lust? No, you flee. You turn away.

Joseph illustrates the successful method of handling lust. In the Navarre Catholic Study Bible, there is a great comment about this story, from St. Caesarius of Arles, that is applicable today:

"Joseph flees in order to escape...Learn, therefore, to flee if you want to win out against the attack made by lust. Do not be ashamed to flee if you want to attain chastity....Among all the fights a Christian has to engage in, the most difficult are those of chastity; here the struggle is a daily one, and victory is difficult. In this a Christian cannot but have daily acts of martyrdom." (Sermones 41, 1-3)

Also, a note is shared on this same story from St. Josemaria Escriva, who is very much to the point: "Don't show the cowardice of being 'brave'; take to your heels!" (The Way, p. 132)

Joseph didn't have a smart phone or a laptop, but the same tactic can apply and work for lust today. Turn off the device. Block the site or the person. Flee from it.

Do you want to know a secret? People in monogamous relationships and single people practicing chastity have a secret. It’s really simple. No, it’s not that they are not tempted. Surely, they are tempted as much as anyone, or used to be. But the big secret is that they avert their eyes when lust arises, and this becomes a daily practice until it’s not even a challenge. Hit your knees and pray. When temptation comes, pray. Always. It’s the same for quitting drinking. Prayer works. Along with that, you can use St. Ignatius’ 14 Rules of Discernment. They are the Swiss Army knife of learning and putting this spiritual fight into practice.

When chastity is pursued, you stop sizing up everyone for sex. “Oh, look at her,” becomes, “Look to Christ.” Seriously, observe your horny friends. Do a little people watching. They are not at peace. The fruit of chastity appears un-shiny to the untrained eye. But once you put down the hash pipe of modern culture, with its sex obsession, and see people as made in the image and likeness of God, who deserve love and respect, the world looks different. Chastity, that old-fashioned idea, will free you in ways you never knew, because what you think you need is only something you want. The Buddhists understand what Lainey Wilson was saying in her country song, "Things a Man Oughta Know”:

“If I can’t have it, I can go without.”

Exactly, Lainey. That’s something George Costanza oughta know, and me as well. That is a thing we all oughta know.

Learning to live this way in all things is true freedom, because you leave your personal Egypt, no longer a slave to the passions. If you can sit in a room and not “want” something you are beginning to understand what the pursuit of holiness is all about. The substitutes we use in place of God are never what we really want. They can be good things, but not if they are the highest thing, the highest desire for our life.

The only thing you need is God. This is how you surrender to win. Sex? If it happens, great. If not, great. Job knows how this works:The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away: Bless the name of the Lord. As some recovering alcoholics like to say, “It’ll work out or…it’ll work out.”

In other words, you’ll be fine either way. Recall Job as often as possible, as he summed up the proper humble mindset of a believer in the living God.

Obviously, most of us learn this after eating the fruit. Much later, after eating from the tree of knowledge, we say, “Oh, I get it now. Yes, I should have listened to my mother or father or that old person who told me this earlier when I just wanted to ignore them.”

The problem today is that the elders have gone off the rails. Most of the Baby Boomer and the following generations grew up in a time of unparalleled affluence, which is like the express line to hell. Money and comfort lead to these ideas. If you are seeking religious truth from the Bible, follow the money. Follow the power. Follow the comfort. The Israelites get rusty real fast as soon as they are exposed to these oxygen rich environments of wealth, power, and comfort.

The indoctrination from schools and media assure us, even compel us, to believe that sex is the key to happiness, so that we act like the Bergens in the movie Trolls, who must eat a troll to be happy. The whole movie is about the Bergen prince unlearning the cultural lies he’s been indoctrinated into.

This is why we are at the point where the next St. Agnes will rock the world, because once teenage girls realize that the culture is lying, watch out. One Agnes can turn into a billion real fast.

This, I believe, is God’s plan with social media, because the mimetic desire of human instinct kicks in fast. Once kids realize that sex and identity politics is an empty cup, and after they spend another decade observing the results of their parents’ moral failures in pursuing their false “freedom,” the pursuit of holiness will become radically appealing.

But here’s the thing that the Catholic Church teaches that no one wants to admit: the Church teaches that sex is good. In fact, it teaches that all of creation is good, but that we misuse it. The world, and matter, is not evil. Not at all. One of the most mangled ideas of ex-Catholics is this equation that sex = bad. That has never been the position of the Church. Ever. What an eye-opener it would be if men and women would turn off YouTube and Hulu for a moment to read Theology of the Body, but I won’t hold my breath. It’s far easier to believe that the Catholic church hates women and sex. But if you want to understand the Church’s actual sexual teaching, and stop taking in the lies that people speak about the Church, it requires actual reading the sources rather than just assuming the lies. If I want to learn about a product, the last thing I would do is take the word of the competitor’s salesman, but that is exactly what we choose to do. FUD is a an acronym for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, and it is a tactic of sales to grease the customer with these three things in order to squeeze a purchase order out of them. Nowhere is FUD used more than in portrayals of Church teaching on marriage, sex, and the body. I would challenge anyone to give an honest reading of Theology of the Body and then say (without lying) that the Church hates sex or is anti-sex. The Church opposes sin. It does not oppose sex.

When we use our bodies in right relation to God, we find the good and the beautiful. This core concept of Christianity has been discarded in favor of our desire for the apple, a sugary snack that satisfies the body but not the soul. We’ve traded short-term arousal for drinking from the vine that gives life. The best advice I received was not to trust my emotions, but to follow the movements of my heart. The shelf-life of an emotion is brief, often just a few days. The movements of my heart, however, take me either away from or toward God, and that is where the discernment must happen. The longest trip we ever take is from our head to our heart, which seems to me another way of understanding that we must move away from the tree of knowledge and toward the tree of life.

Luckily, we get another chance. Jesus doesn’t shoot the wounded; no, he heals them, restores them, resuscitates them.

We can eat from the tree of life if we unlock that door and let Jesus in, as he is the Bread of Life and the bringer of the Living Water. That’s the buffet you want. Forget the Vegas spread. Throw out your beer bong. You really want to binge and chug? Jesus is the never-ending spring break in Cancun you always wanted, but without the hangover and the regret and the awkward walk home.

In the end of the episode of Seinfeld, George gets greedy, and he says, “I flew too close to the sun on the wings of pastrami,” comparing himself to Icarus in the myth. What did he do that caused his pleasure wings to melt? He tried to add a third love into his sex life. Food and sex just wasn’t quite enough anymore, so he brought a portable television under the sheets to have with his sandwich and girlfriend. He added technology and entertainment. In 1997, the internet was hardly used by most Americans, but we were well on our way to flying too close to the sun, with food, sex, and even though we had technology already, we were just getting our feet wet. We were on the verge of bringing the screen into every aspect of our lives, into every waking (and even sleeping) moment. George Costanza, it turns out, was a prophet of the 21st century. As anyone knows who has looked for happiness in those things, the reason George could never be happy was because he was treating people like things and things like people. His character is seeking joy, hope, and rest, but he’s looking in all the wrong places.

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I always wondered why monks put fasting so high on the list of things to do, and St. Benedict, who saved civilization from returning to complete debauchery, had specific rules for his monastery about food. It was known that the monk who could not be disciplined on food would fall to pieces on virtue.

I can confirm this.

Having grown up on Kool-Aid and Little Debbie (and loving every Nutty Buddy minute of it), the era of cheap food has created a constant feast. The elderly people who grew up in the Depression understood food far better than their baby boomer children and grandchildren. They certainly understood it better than those of us who, in our post-Kool-Aid college era, could pound cheap cases of Natty Light beer and wash it down with a Nacho Bell Grande at 4 AM. (Lest anyone feel I lean too far right, let me remind you I live caught somewhere between hippy and redneck, and the hippies and tree-huggers were right about fast food and fertilizer. But, they missed the second part. While pointing a finger at food and greed, they accepted sin and the overall moral decay as “progressive.”)

Here’s my theory on Genesis as a mirror of the Green Revolution and the Sexual Revolution:

No-fault divorce was caused by refrigeration. Nitrogen fertilizer led to mass-scale abortion. The combine harvester led to the current transgender fad. In short: just as food led to The Fall in the Garden, so did the food security of the last seventy years lead to the rejection of God all over again.

In Iowa, a man named Norman Borlaug is praised for feeding a billion people with his scientific agricultural management principles, but in producing massive yields and cheap food, we ate from the tree of knowledge once again and made the same mistake. There is a reason that The Fall starts with food. Taking food for granted leads to sin, lots of it. Food and sex are intertwined. Notice, please, if you will, that the story in Genesis 3 of eating is followed by an obvious sexual fall where they know their nakedness.

…the serpent said to the woman, “…when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked…” (Gen 3:4-7)

Stop. Do you hear how the food was eaten in this secure food paradise? It was eaten without God. Adam and Eve rejected God. Neither of them paused to say “Grace” before eating the fig (or the apple, if you prefer). No, they ate just like we do today, like we do at Culver’s or Applebee’s, we just dive right in because the food is taken for granted. Occasionally you see some weird family praying in public, but it’s rare. And right after Adam and Eve pig out on the fruit, they are naked, porning up the whole world. They are George Costanza.

How we think about food matters immensely in the moral life, and it’s no wonder that the mass rejection of God parallels the obvious fact that few people pause to say a prayer before eating today. As I fell away, I fell into free beer and fast food and the Age of Costanza swallowed me like the sea beast did Jonah, except I was in the belly for far more than three days. I was barfed out about fifteen years later.

Notice, if you would, that the Lord’s Prayer hinges in the center on the phrase: “Give us this day our daily bread,” signaling that food is important. In fact, food is so important in centering our lives around God, that the whole Lord’s Prayer links this line about food between the beginning heavenly things to the latter earthly things. Food is a gift from God and we should be acknowledging that simple fact as a blessing. But we think the food came from our own ingenuity and cleverness.

We assume that the Chipotle and the mutant-sized fruits at Costco all came from us, forgetting that the soil and water itself came from God. This is like someone entering a beautiful home, hanging their own 3x5 picture on a wall, and declaring, “I built this house.” The fact that we have mucked with some genes, figured out refrigeration, and spread NPK fertilizer around the earth in no way diminishes the reality that this created world is the foundation, the gift from God, from which every calorie we eat springs forth. In other words, we are foodless without God. The Great Hunger in 1800s Ireland was not that long ago, and for goodness sakes, Band-Aid and “We are the World” was a mere forty years ago when Ethiopia suffered from famine. The illusion of food security is strong because anyone alive in America today who remembers the Great Depression is now very likely in a nursing home, and those people tend to say a prayer before they eat.

A culture flush with food and wealth quickly falls into sin. I don’t know how, but the short and seemingly simple book of Genesis always has another layer to it. But then so does Exodus. In the prelude to the Golden Calf, what happens? A giant Texas barbecue, that’s what.

“…the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.” (Ex 32:6)

Food and booze are followed shortly thereafter by the most famous orgy in history, the scandal known as the Golden Calf incident. It makes Watergate or the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal look like a game of Go Fish. Furthermore, in Exodus, whenever the Israelites start complaining, they want to return to the “fleshpots” of Egypt where they were slaves, but you can see how strong food is, such that it goes hand in hand with the rejection of God. What they pine for is when they were slaves and “sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full.” Surely there were some hieroglyphic nudes involved as well, the ancient Egyptian version of Playboy or Penthouse. We’ve all seen the art - they had their porn on stone and papyrus instead of screens.

The more I read the Bible, the more I see how much food and sex come up, and why the seemingly odd acts of sacrifice in the Pentateuch make increasing sense, because it was aligning the people’s food toward God, and this is exactly what the Eucharist does in our lives at the Catholic Holy Mass. (Once again, two excellent books to help understand sacrifice and food in the Bible are Welcoming Gifts: Sacrifice in the Bible and Christian Life and Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist.)

Somehow, a kind of knowledge lies within our food, and it goes specifically with taking food for granted. There is something about being full, and having plenty of food, that leads to pride and the rejection of God. I think this is why Jesus says that it will be harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven. Why? Because the rich man has plenty of food. He feels fully secure and therefore thinks he can live without God. He assumes he has no weakness because his belly is full and he cannot imagine missing a meal because his bank account is also full.

All of this illuminates to me why so many of the saints fasted, and why the beatitudes elevate the poor, and why Jesus calls so many of his sheep from places where food security is unlike the American buffet. Those who appreciate food tend to appreciate God, because they know that God is the giver of food. “Give us this day our daily bread” is not a demand; it’s a supplication to God and a request made with gratitude.

Even today, wealth means food security, but we have so much food that even those in poverty are overweight, and statistics bear this out. Thus we have reached an odd point, where poverty does not mean hunger in many places. That’s great that we have food, except when it leads to the rejection of God.

So knowledge of good and evil, and the idea that we can be like God, comes after food abundance. It should come as no surprise that the modern “all-you-can-eat-buffet” started in Vegas in the 1940s in order to keep gamblers at the tables, as food and vice were married in true Vegas style.

When we feel full, we assume a strength and power that we don’t truly possess, and when feeling strong, our pride blooms. When pride blooms, humility is trampled. Fertilizer brought the modern fruit in the garden but the fruit was Fast Food and cheap food, and we have eaten, and eaten, and eaten, like the Hungry Little Caterpillar. The only problem is, we’re not caterpillars, so we don’t turn into butterflies, we just become full and look for other things to do, like sinning. Sex is the most obvious one. Without food abundance, there would have been no Woodstock, because there would not have been a large population of idle college students of prime working age who could while away their youthful years on drugs and alcohol. Without food abundance and a sense of security in wealth, the Prodigal Son never leaves home and squanders his money on vice. I speak from experience, despite coming of age long after Woodstock, and millennia after the Prodigal Son.

Once we are full, knowledge is the great, tantalizing dessert that we desire, always calling to us. It is like the pie in the old diners that sat in the revolving glass case, spinning around, on display like some kind of jewelry near the cash register. The pie sat behind glass like forbidden fruit, and we only order after being already full. But the appetite continues, wanting the pie.

I remember looking at the pie and cake in those well-lit spinning cases and wondering, “What might the pie taste like? Will it fulfill me and finish off my meal? What if I could just have a bite?” I don’t recall a serpent being there at all, but if serpent actually means “Shiny one” as I have read, then I know what the sacred writer of Genesis was referring to.

St. Benedict knew something important. He knew that we cannot reach the wisdom through the mouth and stomach. The kind of knowledge that will satisfy our souls does not come through food, which is why Jesus tells the devil, “Man cannot live by bread alone.” It’s not through pie or Kool-Aid or the constipation that accompanies 200 grams of protein a day that we will find the peace and rest we seek..

In a bizarre twist, we must pursue a different kind of knowing, sometimes called the Cloud of Unknowing, and it comes not through food, but through self-denial and prayer.

The cloud of ecstasy, we’re told by the culture today, must come by a different kind of relationship, usually sexual or experiential, and we completely forget about food. If we haven’t fallen for the marketing of the sugar mafia, particularly Coca Cola, then we may fall for the fitness syndicate’s promises. If we are not overeating, we then go to the other side of food insanity, where we must know the caloric content and nutrients of every morsel that passes over our teeth. But in both cases, gross abundance of food is present. The foodies and the gluttons have one thing in common: a food obsession coupled with the abandonment of God.

Hence, our current world of sexual immorality is a symptom of a prior fall, just as we really don’t see the sexual fall in Genesis until chapter 6, with the infamous Nephilim, which come after the eating in the Garden.

But one thing is certain. Wealth and abundance lead to the other sins of the body, the “warm sins” as they are sometimes called. And in my own lifetime, you could watch and observe this mood change about what is and what is not a sin, which almost coincided with the increased portions of food. The organic phenomenon is trying to correct the problem seeing food as the God, when food is in fact the gift from God, and so every crossfit and intermittent faster who is not measuring out their food-prep with God at the forefront has missed the point. Both the obese and the buff miss the purpose. It’s no wonder we don’t understand Leviticus, because it’s almost entirely about food and getting into the right relationship to God via food.

But we have moved on, thinking that the food abundance will last forever, and thus we’ve moved on to ever greater sins, knocking down walls and fences of morality and calling them old-fashioned. Why? Because we think this Garden was of our doing, and not God’s.

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

In an episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza tries to figure out a way where he can eat his favorite sandwich while he has sex. So he puts a “pastrami on rye with mustard” sandwich in the nightstand drawer, so that midway in the act with his girlfriend he can sneak a bite and thus enjoy his two favorite things simultaneously.

The last seventy years of American history could be dubbed the Age of Costanza, because the sitcom character articulates the twin falls of our food abundance that led to the euphemism that we call today the “sexual revolution,” a term we use to describe our era of broken homes, drug abuse, sex toys, birth control, permanent adolescence, and endless soul searching. Really, what is the show Seinfeld about if not living a life of permanent adolescence? Jerry’s apartment is stocked with children’s cereal, they never cook anything, they eat at the diner, and the four main characters are childless, aging New Yorkers where lust and entertainment consume their lives. It’s like a neverending sophomore year of high school. Jerry and the other three are all grains of wheat that never die, but let’s set that parable aside for now.

Here’s what’s interesting. George Costanza put food and sex together. Long ago, St. Benedict recognized the connection between food and sex as well, except St. Benedict realized that overstuffed bellies forget God and proceed directly to sin. His motto of Ora et labora (Pray and work) set the basic rule for life in the monastery, and when I read this a few years ago, something stood out to me because I had lived life in the Age of Costanza, in the age of “all-you-can-eat” buffets and ubiquitous porn. St. Benedict wrote:

Above all things, however, over-indulgence must be avoided and a monk must never be overtaken by indigestion; for there is nothing so opposed to the Christian character as over-indulgence, according to Our Lord’s words, “See to it that your hearts be not burdened with over-indulgence. (The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 39)

As I’ve gone on at length in prior series about the decline and fall of how we read and understand the Bible, we have had a parallel decline in how we see and understand our food, of which I will go on at length about now. But I’m not going all Michael Pollan. I’m not going to ramble on about organic farming or paleo diets or whole foods or macros. I’m going to talk about food and sex as part of a spiritual reality.

George Costanza was so far gone that he doubled-down, thinking that more would be better and lift his spirits, but it’s a spiral to the bottom. His character was so blind, that while eating he also wanted sexual pleasure, and while making a great joke of his character’s entire selfish lifestyle, he sums up the entire post-World War II era of massive food production and sex as a “pleasure alone” obsession.

But St. Benedict figured out the problem. He put things together in the correct order. Food and sex go together, sort of like many of us 1990s bar patrons considered “beer and cigarettes” as a form of dark-side “bread and butter.” Recognizing this connection between the belly and lust, St. Benedict linked fasting in the Church to something higher than attaining six-pack abs. The modern saying of, “Abs are made in the kitchen” has the opposite purpose of the clean eating that happens in a monastery. A fasting monk very likely has six-pack abs, but no one will ever witness them, nor is is that the intention of the fast. For the monk with low body fat and sweet muscle definition, the goal is not vanity, or pride, or sensuality - it is humility. A monk that is successful in this would not even be aware that such a six-pack has been obtained, and would care even less if informed of such a useless, fleeting possession in this space-time called creation.

Most intermittent fasters today seek six-pack abs to have more sex, or be desired for sex, so like George Costanza, they are controlling their food, and really obsessing over food, in order to have more sex, or to be more desirable for sex. In other words, adultery of all varieties is the goal. I have never heard anyone proclaim, “I’m working on getting six-pack abs for God.” But a monk is doing exactly that without even knowing it. Removing the variable of sex from all equations allows for virtuous motives to flourish.

Here’s the dirty little secret about the obesity epidemic and the fitness-craze in America: they are the same thing. They are the same problem. They are both a kind of gluttony. Fitness goals dabble in lust and vanity and pride, whereas the simple overeater is just sitting in the hot-tub of sloth. Both of these problems can only occur in a time of excess food, where the overeater fails to stop eating, and the fitness crazed person has so much food that they can pick and choose to only eat what fits their “macros.”

Recently at the gym, I heard a man say, “I have a hard time eating 200 grams of protein a day.” I wanted to tell him: “That’s because no one in history has ever needed that much protein a day.” Ok, maybe Andre the Giant. But rather than start an awkward discussion, instead I just pondered my own motive for attending the gym, and wondered: was I truly there to preserve and sustain my body, or if I want to look good for other people, that I might be admired? Because even if sex isn’t the aim of exercise, to be desirable can be just as lusty, and Jesus was quite clear about how easy adultery is to commit. “But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Mt 5:28) This phrase I keep on echo in my head, because how many men today understand that adultery, a mortal sin, is always just a thought away. This is exactly where the spiritual combat must be fought, and fought, and it is a worthy fight to take up because once you can turn your eyes away from lust, real freedom begins, not to mention truly virtuous friendships.

The fitness dilemma, I won’t go too deep into it here, since I covered it in an earlier series. But I will leave it by echoing St. Augustine, who I feel suggested the best reason for exercise, which is to reasonably care for the body, for what God created is good, with the full awareness that we not only a body. As a member of the laptop class, in a sedentary age, we in the privileged information technology world are increasingly separated from manual labor: Thus heeding St. Augustine, I need to “care for the body as though I was going to live forever, and care for my soul as if I were going to die tomorrow.” Love God, love others, then love the self. JOY is spelled: Jesus, Others, You.

Back to the monks: a fasting monk aims toward chastity without a second thought of six-pack abdominal muscles. The fasting weightlifter aims toward adulation and maybe sex fantasies, or at the least, being desirable. No gym selfie has ever been posted on social media without the motive of getting laid or being coveted somewhere behind it. The monk aims toward God, and the other toward the self, or more particularly, the ego. The monk aims to tame the passions, while the other wants to inflame them by lighting a match and throwing gas on the tinder (and often using an app called Tinder). Much of the marketing will tell you that exercise is about body and mind, but will never mention the soul, making it yet another situation where we live out of wholeness, spiritually out of sync, in the amputated state of a body peeled apart from its soul.

We tend to admire the fit, just as we do the wealthy. But we look at thin, poor monks with a side-eye. Perhaps today we’d call those chasing virtue “try-hards” rather than “Jesus freaks.” But how you treat your food is really, really indicative of how you live your entire life. I say this as a sugar monster with the full realization that much of this post is about my own history of dating Sara Lee, Betty Crocker, and dear old Aunt Jemima (may she rest in peace). I really need to get started renouncing soul ties to these high-fructose ladies.

As a food monster, this has been one of the more eye-opening discoveries of my adult life. All of that Kool-Aid, it couldn’t have helped. When I think of the Kool-Aid man now, I can’t help but think of Bluto from Animal House, because like Bluto, Kool-Aid man barges into rooms and crashes through walls, overstuffed and ready to party. I was probably drinking Kool-Aid and watching Animal House at one point. I think I first saw the movie around age ten, which is one of the hundreds of movies that encouraged us all to drink the cultural Kool-Aid, and as I chugged sugar, Bluto chugged Jack Daniels and it was certainly cool. We all drank the Kool-Aid one way or another, since every 80’s and 90’s movie preached the Gospel of the self.

The Mountain Dew, the Lucky Charms, my beloved Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Jimmy John’s, and so much Taco Smell…is it any wonder that the era of “party ‘til you puke” was followed by the era of Spanx and Tinder and Drag Queen Story Hour? It is a literal echo of the Garden of Eden story, where immorality follows a bounty of food availability. The book of Proverbs specifically calls out the excess consumption of sugar as a danger!

If you have found honey, eat only enough for you,    lest you be sated with it and vomit it. (Proverbs 29:16)

Oh, we have found honey. We have found sugar. A book called Sweetness and Power covers the history of how Europeans took sugar by the sword, turning a luxury into a staple, and how it radically changed culture, diet, and even work. In other words, the Garden of Eden story, so concise in its telling in Genesis, has played out over the past 500 years in America since the fruit of the sugar-cane became an obsession. Somehow moving to “a land flowing with milk and honey” causes a falling away from God, in every case. The Biblical stories tell this repeatedly, as food abundance in Egypt leads to slavery, and food abundance in Canaan leads to worshipping other Gods. Without even knowing much about the Bible, we can see that Jesus was a thin man, who denied himself luxurious food, who didn’t workout for muscle mass, and didn’t desire sex, and didn’t sin. As always, he shows us how to live. Even when he feeds the masses bread, he doesn’t continue to do it daily, because he came to bring the living water and Bread of Life, which is the true food and drink that we seek.

St. Benedict knew this “sweetness and power” problem long before Columbus sailed. He has some outstanding insight about how the monks who could not maintain a fast were like fodder for the devil.

And oh, it hurts to read that because I know it to be true. It all makes sense. Peeling the onion of sin from a life results in many “Ah-ha!” moments, where we see through a glass darkly and then suddenly we see Jesus face to face and understand how and why the errors were made, but more importantly, how to remedy them through his healing atonement. Reading the early Church Fathers is always eye-opening, because we think of them as hicks and backwards, and then they prove in their wisdom that they knew the human heart better than billions of us do today.

So is it any wonder that the Fall in Genesis centers around food followed by sex? The fruit of the tree attracts, the rejection of God happens and the loss of innocence results. Taking the easy food, from the forbidden tree, leads to sin. When I think of the Green Revolution from the 1940s onward, which flooded cheap food to the wealthy West, and the undeniable moral decay of America that has followed, it’s difficult not to see the connection. In fact, of all the things that brought the West to a place of debauchery, I would not say it is the birth-control pill or no-fault divorce. No, I would say it is the combine harvester and nitrogen fertilizer.

Hear me out. I realize you’ve stopped reading after that last sentence, but hold on a moment.

The immense amount of cheap food that American ingenuity and efficiency has produced, and the sexual depravity that followed, does it not seem to follow, that this was the same course of tale told in the Garden of Eden? An abundance of food led to the elevation of our pride, bringing about the rejection of God, and soon after, the detonation of sin erupted like a bomb in our world? You don’t get to the sexual fall without going through a story of cheap, easy, and accessible food.

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There’s a movie called The Mission from 1986 with Robert De Niro, where two different approaches are taken to meet the natives and bring the message of Christ.

In the first attempt, a priest played by De Niro tries the sales approach and in his heavy handed messaging, he irritates the people, gets tied to a cross, thrown into a river, and sent over a waterfall.

Then the second man, Jeremy Irons, comes and plays his oboe. That’s all he does. A beautiful song, simple in its melody, softly plays in the jungle - a song never heard by the people before. The music intrigues the people, and even though they smash his oboe, they don’t smash his face. They take him into their village. The beauty of the song breaks down a wall. And suddenly there is an inroad to friendship, and more importantly, into the life of Christ, because it was beauty, not a sales pitch, that led to interest, and ultimately, a relationship. And beauty is how you bring the message of Jesus Christ to people. It is the beauty of the story, of the person and living God that he is, of who he is, what he is - that’s what needs to be shared, and it can’t be shared in a sales pitch.

The feeling that a sales approach gives is this: “Oh, so I am just a project to you? A notch in your belt? A credit for your way to heaven?”

It’s the same feeling of the Verizon salesman pushing unwanted products when you just want your phone fixed. Evangelism that feels like a one-night stand only lasts as long as a one-nighter. There’s no beauty, and there’s no relationship. It’s just a temporary feel-good, like eating pixie stix.

This is what hurts more than saves: “Did you really just pretend to be friendly just to make me convert?”

It feels dirty. It makes me want to run. Conversion can’t be treated like the old Highlander TV show, where Duncan McLeod slays his enemy and then he takes on their power. There is no sales commission or power gained if you convert someone to understand that Jesus is God. We are to preach the Gospel and “heal the sick,” and much of healing comes from befriending people - as in real befriending.

Becoming friends means having no ulterior motives, no commission, no bonus. Becoming friends does not mean hoping they will be baptized and then you move on. This has the relationship depth of a star football player at a college frat party ranging over the drunk and willing freshmen. Virtuous and real friendship requires the gift of self with no motives of a kickback. (Not coincidentally, this is exactly how we should approach God and the Mass.)

An ulterior motive gets outed quickly if you are only becoming friends with the hopes of converting a person, and then it feels like one party got duped into that one-nighter. Flattery and a few free drinks might get someone laid, but it doesn’t get them love. There’s no substance to it. There’s nothing underneath it.

Conversion by trickery or strategy of any kind is not what God asks us to do. Did Jesus do any of that? I read the Gospel often and I don’t see him tricking anyone. I see relationships forming and lasting, or if not lasting, an authentic experience happens where sin is outed and transformation begins. In fact, I always see that Jesus is non-competitive, non-gimmicky, but he challenges them at the same time - and that authentic challenge what attracts people to him. He’s not acting like a salesman, asking about someone’s mother just to establish rapport. Nor is he playing the game of the Romans, who go out and conquer people by the sword and then spin propaganda, crafting a message about how they brought “peace” to all that they threatened.

Jesus doesn’t play the stupid games that we do.

He isn’t a salesman. He’s not a bully or a genie either. He’s authentic. And that is what we are absolutely dying to find. Something real. Something beautiful that is just offered for his own sake. Something and someone who isn’t selling is what we want. And we want more than just something free, like free beer, we want beauty that touches our soul. In America, our idols known of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” pretend to give us this, but in this pursuit, we turn everything being into a sale, from sports to healthcare to news. Even religion becomes a sale with the prosperity Gospel and therapeutic Deism.

Loving Jesus doesn’t need to be cool. It’s not supposed to be, until you suddenly understand who he is. Then he’s way cooler than anything you’ve ever known or seen. Which is why he is cool. He’s cool because he’s not trying to be cool, he just is a living witness of how beautiful life can be, even when sin makes it ugly.

This is why the Woman at the Well story, and Peter’s “drop the nets” moment, and saint stories like those of St. Augustine and St. Teresa of Avila (and all the rest) make us step back and look at our own lives. We wonder what happened when those people met Jesus as the living God. And until it happens to you, it will seem fishy, suspicious, and too good to be true, because we are accustomed to being sold and told lies.

This is why attempts to make Christianity cool come off so badly to me. Most Christian music and evangelization feels forced. It’s the Robert De Niro kind of forced-feeding versus Jeremy Irons playing the oboe. Recall that people didn’t want to kill Jesus for being cool. No, he rejected all that the world considered cool. The world’s fads of money and power bored Jesus. It was for this very fact that they hated him. He didn’t want what everyone else thought gave their lives meaning. The real threat of Jesus to the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Romans was not that he was becoming popular. It’s that he inverted their whole world and made a mockery of their earthly wants and desires. Power, money, pleasure - he needed none of it.

While everyone is trying so hard to be cool, Jesus is just praying and being friends with people. No concert needed, no TED style talks, no cultural hooks like hot-monogamy, no parades, nothing but being himself. Being a follower of Jesus is not meant to be cool. It’s meant to make you conform your life to Christ, know you are a sinner, take up your cross, and very likely be reviled by the culture, and after all that still be joyful enough to give away money to the church and the poor.

See, it doesn’t make sense, does it?

But it does make sense.

Once you turn into the light, you can see all of it. The world is suddenly illuminated.

It’s not supposed to be cool. It’s supposed to be beautiful.

You want to follow him, because Truth is beautiful, and then you don’t really care about how it looks to the world. However, the wrong kind of friendship, the salesperson kind, is not going to bring the sheep back to the fold. It’s the same result as chasing sheep with a fiery torch. Hellfire scare tactics don’t work, and nor do sugary friendships, nor does flirty bait-dating. People are dying to find something authentic. And here’s the kicker: once they find Jesus to be authentic and follow him, they can no longer die.

A religion that enters into competition has to sell itself to win, and the moment that begins, it’s a product and no longer a way of life. The moment that selling begins, it is no longer Christianity. Evangelization is not about selling. It’s about complete transformation. If selling is required, then it needs a story, and how tempting it can be to craft a story around a product, just a wee bit here and there, and then pretend that the product matches a story instead of the product matching reality. The extreme push of corporations to sell mindfulness products today has the same rank odor on it that the door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses and beach evangelizers at spring break always had.

I have walked into many customer-facing situations where the story told by the salesperson did not match the reality of what the product could do. When reality can’t live up to a sales and marketing story, the jig is up. These are what you call “difficult conversations” where you have to explain, as nicely as possible, that the salesperson was lying, or at least committing certain sins of omission by not volunteering accurate information. However, a sales story that matches reality can be seen in the proof of the product. It can be seen in the continued used of the product. It can be heard in testimonies of those using the product. It can be seen in things built using the product. Proof of use and effectiveness can be seen and heard across the world for something that really works. Like for example, the Old and New Cathedrals of Salamanca, Notre Dame, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Peter square, St. Paul’s cathedral, and a million small churches. Like works of art and literature and songs and stories of saints. These are beautiful things, created in homage to a savior that heals. When I hear “Gentle Woman” and “Ave Maria” and “Immaculate Mary” every year in December on the holy day of Immaculate Conception, I have to sit in the back row because it brings tears to my eyes. It’s just so beautiful. I can hardly take it. I recall this happening with other songs, where the beauty penetrates so deeply that I can hardly stand it, as if my heart could be broken and healed in three minutes. It has happened to me with “No Woman, No Cry” from Bob Marley and the Wailers. The same with Andrea Bocelli’s “Con te Partiro.” Surely we all have songs that can cut us deeply and bring tears of sadness or joy. To hear the songs in Church, however, about Mary and Jesus, is still different because the Mother of God and God Incarnate are the ultimate healers. Every December, or whenever the Marian songs are sung, I can know the beauty and goodness of the Blessed Virgin Mary through song, through the glorious gift of music that God gave to some people. We all have gifts, but musicians have one of the most beautiful ones and they can share it with us to lift us up, just like the birds of the morning who call to one another from the trees, as if God is saying to the world through these amazing creatures, “Good morning.”

Birds aren’t selling their song. They are offering it up. They are giving their song to the world. They are using the gift that God gave them to reveal the beauty of all creation.

In other words, Creation is a product I can believe in, because I can see it, and it’s beautiful. An account manager with steady customers who believe in a product are a far more steady stream of income than customers that were tricked into purchase orders and contracts by a charismatic salesman. God isn’t a salesman. The tricks we play on people aren’t needed with real beauty. The cute smile, the witty rejoinder, the steak dinner, the sleek demo, the free stuff - shirts and pens and mouse pads and all the other crap salespeople unload on customers as if they were kids at parade - none of that sustains trust if the underlying product doesn’t work or isn’t authentic. A huge backlash is happening right now in the post-Vatican II liturgy that tried to “modernize” the Catholic Mass to keep up with the trendy ways of the world. This was a mistake that may slowly be corrected. It’s become increasingly clear to all that the irreverent productions were attempts by Catholics to compete with Protestant services. But once your faith tries to be cool, it’s dying. Who would want it, when it’s entertainment, because like every show or product that needs a lot of marketing to keep it going, it’s not really needed. Beauty doesn’t need to compete. Faith cannot win in the space of entertainment, because it’s more than entertainment. Because it is not made for that space. That space is the complete opposite of what faith and the Mass is about.

We have football stadiums and rock shows and music festivals and strip joints and TED Talks and drive-in movie theaters. All of those are more “fun” than Catholic Mass, but they are all selling something completely different. And none of those things last, as sports leagues come and go, bands break up, music festivals peter out, strip joints get condemned, and TED Talks is on its last days. Drive in movie theaters are barely hanging on. There are a thousand and one options for entertainment which all come and go over the decades. Even Elvis, the King, and the Beatles, will be but a blip in a history book soon. They are completely in the rear-view mirror already.

Given our short attention span that moves on from one form of entertainment to another, this makes the fact that a Church could be the dominant and lasting centerpiece of life for 2,000 years rather mind-blowing. True, there wasn’t the option of NFL football games and music festivals and Burning Man. But those things that draw millions of worshippers today will be long gone before the Church is gone. Why? How did it hang on for so long? It’s not like the Catholic Church was the only religion in existence. Why didn’t one of the other “religions” of the ages before Christianity rise up to replace it? After all, if it was so obviously a bunch of false superstitions of fearful farmers, then why couldn’t something other than Christianity have swept it away?

This is a question that doesn’t get asked out loud.

The answer is they haven’t replaced Christ because…they are not beautiful. Christ’s music makes life sing. He is the way, the healer, the maker of all music, the one who makes the invisible be visible. The reason we love art and music and stories is the same reason we love Jesus, and the reason is because we see the beauty of all creation in him:

Jesus said to Thomas, "I am the way and the truth and the life.No one comes to the Father except through me.If you know me, then you will also know my Father.From now on you do know him and have seen him." (Jn 14:6-14)

Once you hear the music of the original reasons to believe, it begins to make sense. All of the clanging gongs and noise are trying to convert you by beating you over the head, and many Catholics have tried the approach of Robert De Niro in The Mission. For those approaches that used guilt and ugliness, the Church was thrown in the river and sent downstream. And now is the time where we can hear the oboe finally, now that we’ve heard enough of the noise, so that we can be curious enough to take a second look.

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 much as I tried to pretend there wasn’t, there is a God-shaped hole in my heart. There simply is no answer that philosophy or theory or modern science or socialism or witchcraft or astrology or Buddhism or free beer can offer that fills this God-shaped hole in the heart. There is only a person that can fill that hole.

The problem and the solution are both odd.

In the last post, I talked about our need for certainty, and the “secret knowledge” that is often on offer for us. But most “secret knowledge” rejects God and the source of all pain and suffering, which is sin. The “problem of pain” is the all-time number one driver of sending people into the arms of ideologies offering solutions, but they are all fool’s gold. They offer all the answers on paper, but when put into practice, cause far more issues than they solve.

We don’t need to make sense of every last thing once we come to rest in faith. We don’t need every last answer. Continuing to pursue the goals of reason still go on, but we don’t salivate and lust for the answers to come, to fill in the big picture and bring about an earthly utopia, because we already have the answer. Via the Holy Spirit, we already know the ending. We get certainty through God’s will, not our own. The best part of this is that we don’t have to know all the answers any longer, because God knows. What’s odd about this whole “surrender to win” idea is that we get certainty by inheritance from God. While we don’t know God’s will, we know he is good and loving and alive in this world, and that in the end he wins. Even the progressives like to say, “Love wins,” and they are correct, but not in the way they think. Yes, love wins in the end because God is love, and God wins. And when you surrender to God, you win, because he wins. When you surrender, you are suddenly on the winning team and you just follow God’s lead. You no longer feel angry about the rules because you bask in his love. Sure, surrender means imposing limits on the self, but paradoxically this brings ultimate freedom because you no longer have the bondage of self and the onslaught of desires to contend with. You hand over the desires to God, because those thoughts never brought peace, only problems. He takes all the problems away if you ask. When you offer yourself up to him, he blesses you, just as you bless God with your life and actions. When you fight against God, he wins. You might say that when you are disobedient, he kneels you. You cannot fight with God forever. You can certainly wrestle with him, but eventually it becomes exhausting.

There is no idea or argument or award or pleasurable activity in this world that could provide what I was seeking. In the end, no intellectual pursuit came close to a solution, and it wasn’t for lack of effort. The left and right side of politics do absolutely nothing to solve this problem. They just give us all an excuse to kick the can down the road, to avoid the biggest question. Neither side will solve the ultimate problems or bring about any lasting peace. They are mirrors of the same restless mania, trying to win in Washington just as professors and theologians and pundits are trying to win our hearts and minds by reason in universities. The reality of politics can be seen in the online hellscape of continuous wrath. The millions of people squabbling think that rooting for their side gives them a sense of control, while their interior lives and personal relationships are in disarray. This desire for certainty and control is rampant today, particularly because a society of people that have every physical need satisfied now looks to satisfy spiritual needs, but in the wrong places. Partisan politics is an escape from the self for those that cannot surrender to God and find peace. Because we want answers, we try to find it in competition, in politics and in sports. Like drinking and sex, politics and sports provide an escape for those who suspect they are lost but don’t want to admit it.

What I didn’t see coming is that faith exceeds reason. We’ve spent hundreds of years trying to tell ourselves that reason exceeds faith, partially due to the great leaps of science but also because of the failures of those who profess faith to emulate Christ, but I am convinced that we must lead with faith. Yet it’s difficult to tell anyone that today, unless they have made the turn themselves.

All of the other ideas and sciences and ideologies fail simply because they cannot solve that problem. They are the wrong tool, the wrong material, the wrong instructions. What is not “born of the spirit” cannot fix spiritual problems. Ideas may guide us toward behavior and doing good actions in this world, but they cannot bring about the interior conversion of the heart that Jesus can bring. They may highlight our sins, as they should, and guide us toward God, but they cannot sustain us because they purposefully try to pretend God doesn’t exist.

Having tried and sampled these alternative worldviews, particularly the ones without God, I found that the Christian worldview is the only one that makes sense and the only one that works, for the same reasons that Dorothy Day discovered. I went down the other road, only to find Jesus at the end of it. But it’s not only Dorothy Day that found faith in this unexpected way. G.K. Chesterton and St. Augustine are two others who had a gift for articulating this path. They too found what Dorothy Day did. They came to accept one truth that makes all other arguments moot, just as have billions of other people have done.

The problem with Christianity, if you are doing battle with it in your mind and trying to knock it down, is not that it has the best argument. If you come to know Christ, it is the only argument that fills the God-shaped hole in your heart. Nothing else makes sense once Jesus enters your life, because somehow he makes complete and total sense of everything.

This is extremely annoying to people who haven’t experienced it.

Christianity is the best argument of all for living real life, and it is a strange yet beautiful paradox. In order to appreciate the physical realities and emotional struggles of this world that seem to have explanation, you must assent to the spiritual mysteries beyond this universe that cannot be explained. Like any good convert, I now love looking for connections in the Old Testament. I enjoy spiritual reading and - why not - looking for references that lead to the Cross. But that alone is not the cause of belief. It is not the arguments made on paper in the end. I can’t pile up enough evidence and suddenly turn on the light of faith. That’s not how it works.

I believe that Christianity is the best argument, but not because of the Gospels, or the surrounding Old Testament and letters of St. Paul, or the tradition of the church fathers, or the history of the saints. Sure, those provide compelling evidence, but they can also turn people away, depending on how you read them. All of those texts (aside from the Old Testament) did not exist when Jesus was first resurrected. Furthermore, very few people could even read, and if they were lucky they heard someone read from the scrolls from time to time. In my post-conversion life, I am all in on reading the Bible as God’s Word, from cover to cover, but I didn’t arrive at that belief through argument or decision alone. More importantly, none of the first Christians, not a single one, had anything beyond the Old Testament scriptures to base their belief in Christ upon. There was nothing written down in the form of a Gospel for some years. The letters of Paul possibly came first and we can see vibrant communities springing up all over. There were no New Testament scrolls to unravel and read, no cross referenced Bibles, no study guides, no Catechism, no recorded sermons. There was only word of mouth and the power of his name.

The founder of the religion wrote nothing down.

Something lit his followers on fire in a way that cannot be described. I would say that the event cannot be repeated, but that would be false; the same fire springs up daily all over the world. It has never stopped catching fire since that day in the upper room when the apostles were baptized by the tongues of fire some seven weeks after the death of Jesus.

To get to God I arrived by reason and lived experience. But to get to the next level, I arrived by meeting Jesus Christ, the person. The fully human and fully divine person that walked the earth is what somehow reached me. The problem with Christ is that if this person calls you, life is never the same. That is how the argument keeps winning, by changing minds. Life cannot be the same once the fire starts because nothing looks, smells, tastes, or feels like it did before. This is not like stumbling across a good book that brings awareness to some fact of the world, some injustice, some unfairness. This is being jolted to life spiritually and having a new life infused into you. When your soul is brought back to life, it starts drinking from the vine of God, chugging grace like a college student at spring break. Warning: this rebirth can be painful initially, like physical birth. (Pace yourself, don’t drink too fast. Drink one water for every one wine.)

The reality of this power of Jesus, the person, is told by time itself. It cannot be ignored or denied. You may argue about Christians misusing his name, you can argue about the devil quoting scripture for his purposes, and I would agree with you in some of those arguments. But the fact is this: the Christian religion would have died long ago if it were only a good argument. There have been many “good” ideas throughout history, but we don’t build cathedrals for those ideas. We build jaw-dropping churches that produce no economic output whatsoever so that we can worship a man, a poor man, one who died with nothing, naked on a cross!

Putting the idea of “truth” aside for a moment, if an idea or argument doesn’t win hearts and minds, it cannot last. So clearly there is a good argument in Christianity. If it was total nonsense, it could not have lasted. But there is something greater than just the words of an argument. There are many good books and models on how to live life. Marcus Aurelius wrote a great book on how to live life, but there is no one tithing to the Marcus Aurelius society today or handing out pamphlets at the airport about why you should give your life to Marcus Aurelius. Christianity is not just a series of arguments. Jesus is the argument.

A quote in Acts of the Apostles from a rabbi named Gamaliel is telling, because this Jewish leader tells his fellows to let the Christian fad play out. Why? Because he’s wise. He knows that a cause will die out on its own if it’s not from God. Gamaliel refers to some long-forgotten movement started by a guy named Theudas, but this Theudas “…was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing.” He urges his peers to let this Christian novelty just play out, like how rolling your jeans or wearing Zubaz pants and Hypercolor shirts bloomed and faded in the 1990s. Zubaz pants and Hypercolor shirts were not from God, and so they both died out. Both were hideous actually. For something more recent, consider fidget spinners or Crocs or Heely shoes. Gamaliel said of these wacky Apostles of Jesus, “…if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.” (Acts 5:34-39)

That is why it never dies. Because it’s more than an argument. It’s more than a feeling. It’s more than a fad. It’s not from this world. The Holy Spirit is not of human origin. The truth that Christ represents cannot be rebutted or refuted. Once the spirit turns a non-believer into a believer, there is no turning back on the second conversion, or the re-birth spoken of by Jesus to Nicodemus in John 3. This is why the apostle Peter states the famous line, saying what everyone knows who has come to put their entire life and trust in Jesus. Jesus asks if Peter and the apostles will leave him, and Peter replies, matter of factly: “To whom else would we go?”

To whom else would I go? That is the billion dollar question. Peter is basically saying, “I’ve found what fits into this giant, gaping God-shaped hole in my heart, so I’m done looking.” Sometimes I wonder why I took so long to get to where Peter is. It’s like I was wandering around the beauty of Creation and pouring liquor in my mouth, saying, “I wonder what could possibly fit this enormous void in my life?” How strange it all is in hindsight. When I’m hungry I eat food; when I’m thirsty, I drink water; but when I was yearning for God, I looked everywhere else. I tried it all. All of it.

For the converted, the same answer applies. Once you land on the truth of Jesus, you realize that you are done searching. There is rest. There is peace. There is love. There is certainty.

That is the answer to why faith overrides reason for believers. That is also the reason the religion does not die. Because those who believe know that there is nowhere else to go. Unfortunately, the actions of many believers can drive others away, but don’t let it. Yes, there are crazy Christians, but there are crazy people in all walks of life and political parties and ideologies. Don’t lock yourself out of trying just because your uncle or co-worker is a hypocrite. (Always recall that Jesus hated hypocrites worse than prostitutes and tax collectors!)

This stubbornness of believers does produce a maddening state for those on the other side of the fence. Non-believers come with their wares, offering pleasure in this life, a life free from the guilt of sin. But whatever they are selling is second-best. It’s day-old bread. Jesus is the bread of life, the fresh bread. There is no person or idea or argument that can replace him.

The most difficult thing is making sense of this to other people who think you have lost your marbles, but they will never understand it unless they are turned by the spirit. The gift does not come to everyone.

Peter knows that no other person or ideology can fill the void in him, so his answer speaks the full truth. He has already looked elsewhere. He may not know exactly how Jesus is God, but he knows that Jesus is God and that’s all that matters. That alone is the entire argument. No powerpoint presentation needed, no notes, no talking points, no objection handling. The Apostles’ Creed sums up the entirety of the Bible, the tradition, the beliefs, and the reasons why. Those words can’t bring the spirit, but it’s the best summary of what people believe.

The followers of Nietzsche or Karl Marx or Michel Foucault or Richard Dawkins are the modern version of the followers of Theudas. In another hundred years there will be new names, new ideologies, new quirks, new fads, and who will be argued about alongside those new names? It will be the same name: Jesus. He will still be known by all. He will still baffle thinkers and anger intellectuals and bring joy to billions of simpletons like me.

Everything else is a replay. We’ve seen these shows before. The new academic arguments are not new. The latest theories and ways of looking at the world have been tried already. Found wanting, they were discarded. But we will try them again, and again. We insist on it, because we must attempt to define our universe and destiny. Every generation yearns to be free of God, and every generation fails.

The reality is this: these ideas have been dug out of the freezer and thawed out, then re-packaged ideas with new branding, kind of like what happened with consumer applesauce over the past twenty years. Applesauce manufacturers swapped out clumsy jars for single-serving squeeze packs. Consumer sales skyrocketed because the squeeze packs were fun for kids and perfect for school lunchboxes. But regardless of the delivery, when applesauce reaches your mouth, it’s still just applesauce. Yes, the container has a Disney character or a QR code (with a chance to win!), but it’s still only applesauce inside. The container doesn’t change the substance. The payload is apple slurry-goo, the same as it was in the old jar. The same happens with the many repackaged rebellions against God. We can call it paganism or atheism or positivism or Epicureanism or Stoicism or Jainism or humanism or wokeism, but it’s all the same applesauce in the end, because these ideas all reject the idea of one true God, a most high God, and that is why all of these things eventually grow tasteless. Worse, unlike applesauce, these rebellions contain nothing nourishing for the body or the soul.

Each generation tries to convince itself that this time the idea is something different. The ancient people already saw all of the things we are seeing today, they just didn’t have a TV or phone to watch it on. In our desperate efforts to be powerful or cool, we all become weak and lame. I learned the hard way that the boring way of life is not the pursuit of faith and holiness. The ultimately boring way of life is this constant searching for something, this constant rebellion against God. Life in Jesus just looks boring but it is the one source of true, authentic joy. He remains through all of these generations like a rock, a solid foundation of unending hope. He is unchanged and unphased, while the self-exalting educated classes of each generation lives and dies over and over again, falling over themselves, jockeying for position, like toddlers in an unsupervised daycare center.

There is a different type of knowledge in Jesus that exceeds all of the learning of the great philosophers and political thinkers and military leaders and scientists of human history. Despite numerous attempts to crush the faith, it returns. This is not disputable. Faith in Jesus may die in one place, but it grows elsewhere, like magic, almost as if there were some kind of holy spirit bringing it to people around the world.

Like dandelions in American yards, homeowners try in vain to kill this unwanted weed, but it cannot be killed, for even if you kill the local dandelions, or a million dandelions, the seeds have already spread far and wide, and the minute you stop killing the plants, within a year or two the dandelions will have returned in full.

The idea cannot be killed. It can be stifled and those who have the idea can be murdered or silenced, but the idea of Jesus is something that cannot be contained or stopped. Communism and fascism killed over 100 million people in the 20th century. Many of those killed were Christians. Yet the life of Christ still inspires people and draws them back. Like St. Thérèse of Lisieux said to Jesus, quoting Song of Songs: “Draw me and we will run.” This rebirth in faith comes from something beyond our understanding. It brings a complete and sincere adherence to Christ out of joy, not by argument or coercion. God only needs to call his followers and they come. How? I don’t know.

But now I don’t need to know every detail. The mysteries I place in God’s hand. The Divine Mercy image has the quote, “Jesus, I trust in you.” That’s the cure. I am more interested in the idea of “religious truth,” since that is what the Bible speaks most to me, and it’s easy to forget that if I forget to trust in God. I’m more interested in the mystery of interior conversion, because that is the part of Christianity I missed when learning about faith. Based on how many people in recovery meetings for addiction talk about how they formerly understood God, a lot of people missed the whole idea of “interior conversion.”

God doesn’t need to make lengthy arguments or offer worldly incentives. Even those who don’t believe can just utter the words, “Draw me, we will run,” or say, “Come Holy Spirit,” and the movement toward faith can begin. It’s so simple that it seems absurd to those who don’t believe. The seed of faith is planted where it is wanted and requested, and often it is planted where it is unwanted and unrequested. For some of us, we seem to have no choice in the matter (as was the case for myself). Other man-made ideas like feudalism or positivism or communism or humanism must be propped up with tremendous effort, but as soon as the driving force falters, the energy fades and the movement dies. But with Jesus, the energy continues, always sustained, because it does not come from man. The energy comes from God. He is the vine, the living water, the Bread of Life, the way, the truth, and the life.

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In college, I wasn’t aware for some time that various dogmas of the academic world were steering me. Wanting mostly to party and pass classes, I was easily walked into the secular dogma, to the point that I was converted to the progressive worldview. I recall English and History classes being full of new interpretations that turned nearly every literary or historical person into either an oppressed or oppressor class, (or queer/not queer). Groupings of people were very, very important, which flew in the face of my childhood clubbing of the idea that stereotyping by group was evil. Now it was good to group people.

Of course, these were the correct interpretations, at long last! One professor insisted that Abraham Lincoln, King David, Jesus, Billy Budd, and Queequeg the harpooner were all gay. We spent considerable time on that topic, despite it having little or nothing to do with the class I thought I had signed up for. How did we know their sexual preference? Well, the evidence was right there in the text: these folks all had close friendships with other men, therefore, gay. Friendship between men, I learned, always implies sodomy is happening. This was the secret knowledge, the Gnostic gospel, of a professor. We just weren’t mining what was being told between the lines, but with her magic reading goggles, we would be set free from the shackles of the Western Canon and sexual oppression. This professor, and other professors, gently nudged me toward ideas that undermined the worldview I thought I held. Critical Theory and Queer Theory were the latest things, so those worldviews were being evangelized to us students with nearly the same vigor as St. Paul telling about Christ in Ephesus.

As a paying student, I provided a captive audience to the message.

As I was receiving this instruction and the evidence was presented for these interpretations, I recalled that quote from Nietzsche, where he mocked Christian apologists and theologians for using the approach of “when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” He mocked Christians who found any stick of wood or twig in the Old Testament as a reference to the Cross. I know what Nietzsche meant, as the typology of linking Old Testament to New Testament does sometimes feel like a reach. But Christians are not alone in doing this. My professor obsessed with sexual preference was doing the same thing. From Sigmund Freud onwards, an obsession of finding sexual references in every possible shape, led to our modern priesthood of professors to seeing everything like a ten year old boy who had just discovered a Playboy magazine. Then there was Nietzsche himself, constantly finding his own thought as evidence for his own genius (his last published book was titled, Why I am So Wise).

While I was taking these classes and receiving the transmissions of modern secular dogma, I began to realize that the close readings of texts were as strange and stretched as anything a Christian interpreter ever came up with. Actually, they are more than stretched, they are now completely broken.

If Christians were finding the Cross in every stick of wood of the Old Testament, then the modern theorists were doing the same for sex and oppression. The problem is that there definitely are signals and references that exist regarding the Cross, but taken to the extreme they fall into a level of absurdity. But for my instructor that was looking for disordered sex in literature, any friendship, any handshake, any nod, squeeze of the hand, or look, or glance, any wink became undeniable evidence of a character’s sexual intentions.

The idea of friendship disappeared.

There was only one type of love and that was the kind where people must sleep with one another. There was not a separation of types of love, which anyone in the real world understands. There is physical love (eros). There is friendship (philos). And there is the highest kind of love, which is sacrificial, unconditional love (agape). But in modern lit crit circles, there appears to be only the erotic. These interpretations are a one-trick pony and after a while, the trick gets to be routine and dull. A never-ending obsession with sex as our identity becomes as pathetic as the pursuit of crystal meth, because it’s just one small part of life. In fact, the way we understand sex as an identity makes our bodies and lives so cheap, that it reminds me of the great quote from C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory.

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Mud pies in the alley are fun as a child. But they lose their appeal, when the totality of life is so wonderful and awe-inspiring that to focus on one small aspect of existence is to miss the forest for a tree.

The obsession with sex and oppression came off like a brain fever for two of my professors, because they could not speak for long without beginning to sound just like the overreaching Christian who grasped to link any wood object in the Old Testament to the Cross. The further the obsession became clear, the more thin the argument became. The linkages began to look like a crazy person’s conspiracy wall, where every bit of art, literature, and history was connected by red yarn, to prove that Western Civilization was just a grand scheme to oppress and to stop people from the false heaven of “sexual freedom”.

Instead, what I became convinced of is that the modern dogma is all one huge, ongoing protest to deny that sexual sin exists at all. The professors were doing exactly what every individual or group has done who doesn’t like the existing rules against sin; they break the rule and form a new group that allows and argues for the sin. People really, really think they hate the Catholic church because it consistently sticks to a well-defined list of sins, and doesn’t budge. But that is it’s job, to preach and defend the faith and morals set forth by Christ, and carried forward by the Apostles, and by the Bishops ever after. Thus, they see the church as just a set of rules that is hateful. But the church doesn’t hate anyone - they just won’t affirm your sins. If you see the Church as a list of rules, you don’t understand your sin. If you don’t know your sin, you are still in darkness, because you don’t know why you need a savior. And if you don’t know your weakness and need for a savior, you will never know Christ. Period. When Jesus asks the apostles after washing their feet, “Do you understand what I have done for you?”, he is talking to you and I. To each of us, God asks, “Do you understand what I have done for you?” If you do, then you’re life will radically change. Until you understand what the Creator has done for you, by coming here incarnate as a man - to forgive our sins, to transform our suffering, to defeat the devil, to regenerate our lives in water and spirit, and to raise us to eternal life - you won’t understand who he is or what he has done for you.

The main job of the Catholic Church is actually pretty simple: to speak truth, and speaking truth in love means saying no to sin. But even more so, it’s job is to ask you, “Do you understand what Jesus has done for you?” And if you understand what he has done, your sin and need for a savior will be blindingly clear.

Remember, Jesus wasn’t killed for affirming the sins of others, he was killed for calling out their sins. Anyone who considers their sin to be a virtue, is on the wrong side of history, because God is outside of time and space - all of this time that we live in has happened for God. It’s all done already. Thus, rejecting God and denying sin are the same thing. History is already done for God, and we have this glorious opportunity to cooperate or reject his grace right now. Accepting his grace doesn’t just mean you go straight to euphoria, if means you recognize what he has done for you, and then you begin to see your flaws. You must go through the purgative way before you get to the illuminative and unitive way. Today, people want to jump straight to the unitive, but there is no pill or magic spell or transporter to skip the journey, as Dante showed us so well in the Divine Comedy.

Five hundred years ago, protests against the rules formed new denominations, where our brothers in faith splintered into many groups that tweaked the rules to fit their desires for control and to allow some sins to be vindicated. But today, academics go to great lengths to go deeper to find that sin itself does not exist, that what we call sin is actually a feature of our DNA. Today, we don’t go by “faith alone” but much of our non-spiritual direction uses “reason alone,” and reason alone in the wrong hands is a slippery as faith alone.

A tendency toward alcoholism and same-sex attraction or gambling addiction are seen as genetic outcomes. But even if that’s true (and it’s very likely not true) the choice to drink to drunkenness or to have sex outside of marriage or gamble away the mortgage is still a choice. These are still actions beyond the temptation. “Lead us not into temptation,” is a prayer to ask for help in battling our concupiscence, also known as our urges to choose poorly. We all have our cross to bear. What we are tempted by does not require follow through in performance.

We really want to deny something is a sin because we like the sin, and we go to great lengths to find cheerleaders that will confirm our desire. Interestingly, the sins that we want to deny, those related to alcohol or sex, we can pin to DNA, but no one does this for racism, which is also a sin. There is a sense that we can deny sin that “doesn’t harm anyone but myself” but that’s the problem. Sin always harms other people, even if the action happens alone or with another consenting person. There is no other result of sin but harm to oneself and to others, which is why Jesus and all of sacred scripture prohibits these actions. For fans of the show Breaking Bad, Walter White lives by “reason alone” and he always has reasons that make perfect sense to him and he portrays his actions externally as “doing it for the family,” while he destroys lives around him like a human volcano throwing lava everywhere.

Chapter 7 of Mark shows a nice, short list that will save a lot of time, since people like to argue over what Jesus accepted and what he prohibited. He lists 13 things. It’s not like he hid this list. It’s right there.

“From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.” (Mk 7:18-23)

Drunkenness (licentiousness and folly), sex outside marriage between a man and a woman (adultery and unchastity), and racism (evil thoughts and malice and deceit and arrogance) are all covered here. It’s all very simple really. Jesus says, “Here’s the list: don’t do these.”

In fact, evil thoughts and unchastity are the very first two things he mentions, which apply directly to racism and sex outside of a valid marriage between a man and a woman. So cheer up, there’s a little something in Mark 7 for both of our American political parties and foes to soak up. Every human being is guilty of one or more of these thirteen things. The only person who is not guilty is Jesus. The greatest sin of all is to forget this. As always, pride is the gateway to sin, since it infects the heart, and the heart is where all the rest of these thirteen things take root.

But I have not come this far to merely complain about professors or excessive allegory in Christian thought. I get what is happening today. We don’t want to admit our sin any more than Adam or Cain wanted to. We want to divert the blame.

We are all arguing for our favored worldview and trying to recruit others to our side. We want to win. We want to feel righteous. No one wants to be wrong. This is all expected. This is what we like to do. This is not new.

My point is not to mock German philosophers or Critical theorists or Christian interpreters. The whole game of the tree of knowledge is “reason alone.” It is to argue your case against the will of God.

Sports team plan strategy and tactics to win games. So do intellectuals with arguments. This is also why so much ink is spilled in making the case for each side. We require reason to make arguments, and ideally the argument aligns with our experience and feelings, but this doesn’t always happen. This is why people switch sides as the phases of life unfold. Given enough time and grace, the rebellious teenager becomes a gentle grandparent. Even in our own lives, the lion lays down with the lamb, but it may take about eighty years to find a comfortable place to settle. Life experience and age carry great weight in determining what we believe is true, and in each phase of life we consider our experience to be the right one, the truth, the accurate assessment. Based on our experiences, we can use reason to determine what is true and good.

But there is a problem in relying solely on pure reason. The problem is that pure reason ignores that a spiritual side exists at all. As soon as we do this, we can reason sin right out of the picture, as if it was White-Out. But just like using White-Out, it doesn’t remove the ink or pencil mark beneath it, it’s only covered up. It’s still there. We know it’s still there, and the paper is sullied beyond repair, unless some supernatural favor can clean it up. Reason can argue and twist anything into what we want it to be. For Luther, he recognized that sin was still there, and like the White-Out metaphor, he said that Jesus’ redemption made us like a “dung hill covered in snow.” So he reasoned that we were still a piece of crap, but had some White-Out on us. He also pretty much tossed out free-will, and whatever he didn’t toss out, Calvin heaved out the window shortly thereafter. Both of these men were trained as lawyers and you can see how their “faith alone” argument stemmed very much from an underlying line of reasoning that laid the pavement for the truck of unbelief and bad interpretations of scripture to ram its way through Christendom for the past 500 years. Today, we have everyone arguing for “reason alone,” but this devolves quickly into a pursuit of power, because unless you are using reason like Socrates, subjective bias creeps in quickly. Thus, in my university classes, the “reasoned arguments” of my Critical Theory evangelist professor was unmoored from objectivity entirely so that every character with a friend in every book could be sniffed out and spoken of solely in terms of sexual identity. With reason alone, or faith alone, when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is the problem with ideology, and Catholicism is the antidote and counter-culture that cures this hammer/nail problem. Reason alone assumes certainty can be had in everything, while living with “faith and reason” allows for the mystery and nuance, which is exactly what makes life with this body and soul interesting.

If we only use argument to test our world, we cannot have a full game of life, because there is more to our body and soul than reason alone. There is a spiritual life. It’s like playing tennis against a wall instead of against a real person. Eventually it becomes boring, because there are no surprises. The ball volleys back at the exact angle you expect. It’s a game of Pong…forever. There is no spirit or life in the game. Also, you can never beat the wall, because it cannot fail to return the ball. You can never finish and shake hands with your opponent. When the spirit enters your life, then you can play a full game. Like Jacob: you can wrestle with God, but you can’t wrestle with him unless you first admit he’s there. Wrestling with yourself is even worse than playing tennis against a wall.

In the end, to my surprise, the root problem that I was trying to solve wasn’t an intellectual problem at all. There was a larger problem to solve. The problem I was trying to solve was spiritual, not material. It was not a mind problem, it was a soul problem.

The soul surpasses the mind. For non-believers, soul and mind may seem like the same thing, but the soul transcends the mind. Collapsing the mind and soul into one thing kills the spiritual life. If you think of mind and soul as one and the same, then you have walled body away from soul. You have placed the mind solely on the body, in the material world. But the mind doesn’t belong only with the body, nor does the soul disappear just because you built a wall. Souls can pass through walls.

If you must wall off the concept of mind, better to place it with the soul rather than the body, since the mind is where prayer happens. If the mind can only serve the body, then your thoughts can never leave the ground, and you will be stuck with the pursuits that end in the Big Empty - wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. If there is only Mother Earth, then nature with all it’s beauty is also the same nature that is red in tooth and claw. There is only competition.

Better yet, tear down the wall, admit the soul, and embrace the mind as the intermediary. The mind and heart link body into soul. The denial of an immortal soul puts a limit on life, and a soulless mind makes the body a robot. The connection to God is in the soul. A mind that doubts the soul must invent meaning. Then come the strange gods, because they must. The gaping hole where the soul sits invites the odd gods to move in and take up space. They makes themselves at home and eventually will evict you if you don’t evict them first.

We can pretend the soul isn’t in the room, but the elephant is still there. No matter how many blankets or tarps we use in trying to cover the elephant, it remains. Also, the elephant is too large to remove from the room, so it’s there to stay. You may evict the unwanted housemates, but not the soul.

The mind requires arguments as food for thought, but argument does not give life. Argument brings strife, not peace. To have peace, the mind needs certainty. To have life, the mind needs joy. This certainty and joy must come through the spirit, not from argument. The spirit is what animates and gives our body life.

We think we need all the answers, but accepting that there is mystery beyond our knowledge can settle the unsettled mind. In the end, it wasn’t an argument that won me over, just like it wasn’t an argument that convinced the illiterate masses of people who followed Jesus before the Gospels were even written. Yes, the story of Jesus provides an argument, but it is more than merely an argument. As any doubting middle-school child knows, there are flaws in the argument. The resurrection stories alone sow doubt with the inconsistencies and contradictions, so clearly the argument of Jesus’ story alone is not the only force in play.

Something beyond argument changed the early Christians. Something beyond explanation changes people today. There was no book or argument that clinched the deal for the converted. There were no books at all to begin with. There was the story that people heard, of the victory of Jesus over death, but even that alone was not enough. We know that the story alone is not enough, because scholars who study for a lifetime struggle to reconcile the story of Jesus with the evidence. Doubt over the resurrection and his life in general makes writers and preachers talk about Jesus as much now as they did in the first century.

Yet a person who cannot read at all can completely understand. People make radical life changes, as they are impacted so profoundly that it was clearly more than an argument that reached them. A poor person or a rich person can be equally affected. People from different nations and backgrounds can kneel beside one another as brothers and sisters, in complete unity on the basic facts laid out in the Apostles’ Creed. The contradictions in the resurrection stories do not bother them one bit, to the great irritation of unbelievers. How is this possible?

A touch of the spirit goes beyond reason. Something reaches down and turns the heart, sets it on fire. This cannot be explained except by the supernatural. I realize this sounds like UFO conspiracy theorists who seem to say, “When in doubt, it must be aliens.” This is bigger than aliens. The truth is that aliens would also be creatures of this universe, meaning they were created. This is bigger than any created creature and more strange as well.

The difference between unbelievers and believers is where reason is placed in the order of things. For many people today, reason exceeds faith. If reason is the highest good, the world of spirits dies. Reason alone cannot tolerate mysteries.

But for those who place faith higher than reason, there are mysteries and they are glorious mysteries. The odd thing about placing faith higher than reason is this: when we live purely in reason, we want certainty and no hocus pocus. But when we live in faith, we get certainty but can also keep reason. The Christian biologist can believe in the certainty of the resurrection while exploring the depths of the physical world. The Christian astronomer can believe in an immortal soul while studying the pillars of creation in the night sky. The atheist biologist or astronomer must find all the answers in the cells, atoms, and universe. For the believer, reason is still maintained, but it submits to faith.

Something strange happened when I came to understand this hierarchy. I realized that there are different types of “knowing.” Those who have little worldly wisdom or factual knowledge can hear the name Jesus Christ and come to understand that he is God, while the wisest and wealthiest people cannot understand. Where the light of Christ shines, the problem is solved. This awakening changes lives, to the point that all prior experience becomes illuminated in a new way. All the problems are solved through the mystery of the Cross and the Resurrection. This world of chaos and order, of suffering, of pain, of joy, of peace, all suddenly make sense. The puzzle is solved.

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