Why Did Peter Sink?

There is a saying that one man’s hero is another man’s traitor. In the battle of ideas, one man’s apologist is another man’s propagandist. But how can you tell the difference? In the world of ideas, what sounds good on paper may not work in practice. So the right interpretation of the world, both spiritual and physical, matters immensely in the pattern you choose for living, because action reveals the person, and action is often driven by belief. If the wrong ideas and interpretation is adopted, then the wrong compass for finding meaning is selected. Consider how important the compass is. A rocket headed to Mars that is off course even by one degree will miss the target and become space junk. At close range, the mistake of one degree won’t seem to matter, but over a long distance, the error becomes more obvious. So the ideas you subscribe to are important, but even moreso, the hero you choose to follow matters most of all, especially if that hero is one that never misses the mark (because he created the mark and everything else).

For example,The Communist Manifesto sounds like a good idea on paper, but in practice, in the real world, we all witnessed a century of unthinkable slaughter over that little book. The degree of error may have appeared small, but from the revolution in Russia to the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was the undeniable bloodbath. I remember reading that little book in 1996 and thinking that it made a lot of sense. What shocks me about that is that I was reading the book after millions of people, possibly as many as 100 million, had been killed worldwide because of that book. Yet somehow it still sounded good on paper. The body count was still tallying up, but the words on paper made me forget the very bloody history that had occurred partially in my own lifetime. After I shook my brain awake from the spell, I realized that words on paper do not translate to real-world applications. Not all good ideas are good ideas.

The interpretation game can be a dangerous one, especially today, and unless we act as gatekeepers of our thoughts, we allow others to steer us. Clearly, as children we take what our teachers and parents tell us to be a fact, for why on earth would they mislead a child? Today, media has unmatched power in entering our minds and conjuring thoughts, far more than parents or teachers. Unless you grew up in an Amish community, you have been blasted from birth by a continuous firehose from advertising and argument, all the way from Sesame Street to Stranger Things. This is not some conspiracy theory, this is what we are all aware of but accept as part of modern life. There is deliberate implantation of ideas in our brains, and for the most part we seem to enjoy it. We are passive to it, opening up our minds like house showings. Most families have multiple TVs, laptops, smartphones, radios, and home assistants listening and guiding on what to listen to or what to watch next. We certainly go along with it. There is minimal protest. (If you have four hours to kill, watch the old BBC Documentary called The Century of the Self. Be prepared to pause for reflection on how your life has played out, as past choices may appear under a different light.)

A massive flood of inputs is aimed at our minds, making noise and distracting us. This is exactly the goal, because the noise keeps us gyrating and moving and distracted. In silence, the biggest questions roar back to life. When these real questions about meaning and purpose arise, that’s bad for business. For me, the Covid lockdown opened up the silence, so I could hear, finally, those questions in full.

We live by narratives and if we don’t choose the narrative, the noise chooses for us. The interpretations that we assent to often become our real-world practices, and thereby have real-world consequences. But what we accept as our chosen interpretation is not always what is best for our lives. In our worldly minds, we feel wired for competition. Every sporting event and reality show and drama is presented as a contest. We love to take sides. In victory we can gloat, and in loss we can paint ourselves as a victim. Even when things are going well, we like to complain. If anyone doubts this, consider that America in 2023 is the most technologically advanced and wealthy country in human history, yet millions are depressed and worried about the future. To quote Junior Soprano, we are “…like the old woman with a Virginia ham under her arm, crying the blues cuz she has no bread.”

The choice of which worldview to use as a interpretative decoder ring for life is not my main focus here, but I wanted to mention it because our American academic and business leaders have shifted their worldview over the past centuries, moving away from ideas founded on Judeo-Christian thought toward liberalism, socialism, and utilitarianism while keeping the profit motive much intact. This has happened gradually but in recent decades has reached a tipping point where the old ideas of a living God are being sidelined, along with the related ideas of spirits and sins. All are being boxed up for long-term storage. In the coming decades, what this means is that the new radicals will be Christians, so Europe and America will have gone full circle. The pesky Christians will once again be marginalized, at least for a little while.

Moving Christianity out of the public sphere has already led to a very different America. Perhaps being Christian had become too easy, because it was never meant to be. When Jesus talked about the narrow gate, it didn’t sound like he meant taking the exit ramp to hit the McDonald’s Drive-Thru. “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Mt 7:13-14) Then later he deciphers it for us, saying, “I am the gate!” on John’s Gospel and we all know what gate he had to go through for eternal life, which was abject suffering on the Cross.

The term Christian has been too easy to throw around, and too easy to be abused. Wearing a cross is a fashion symbol while the commandments are optional. One of the main reasons I fell away was the hypocrisy that I saw, and the lack of conviction and contrition among believers. The salespeople who were selling this product called Christianity made it appear ridiculous. But over time, thanks be to God, I realized that everything that I thought was Christianity was just Protestantism and liberalism dressed up as “the Way” of Christ.

The coming future will test the mettle of Christians because we will be living in a world similar to the day before Jesus was crucified. Christians will be outcasts and increasingly persecuted. Real persecution will happen again, and not the “persecutions” that we hear about annually like the marginalization of Christ and Christmas. This will be the kind where people lose their job for adhering to the statement of the Nicene Creed and declaring obvious truths, like saying that marriage is between one man and one woman.

What is most interesting is that ideas that came from Christ are being used among all the competing ideologies. Ideas of equal dignity, social justice, charity, serving the poor, and loving one another have been co-opted by humanists, atheists, socialists, and modernists. The only difference is that Christ has been removed from the picture, as if he were just some rich uncle who passed away and left us his best stuff. This leads directly to the second main difference, which is that there is no longer such a thing as sin. There are just oppressed and oppressors. The only sin left is that of the ‘oppressor.’ A trade has been made: Original Sin for Pandora’s Box. With Original Sin, we pin the blame for society’s ills on our own personal built-in flaws; with Pandora’s Box we get to blame someone else.

Not every Christian interpretation of the Bible is a good one. Fundamentalism and Young Earth Creationism may sound good on paper to some people, but anyone with even a mild understanding of science knows intuitively that the idea of a 6,000-year-old planet is flat-out silly. On the flip side, there are those who remove all spirits and miracles from the Bible, like Thomas Jefferson, and end up with nothing but Moral Therapeutic Deism. In both of these cases, too much is amputated, as one cuts out reason and the other cuts out the spirit. Then there is the justice vs. mercy spectrum. Some see God as the angry father who seems over-eager to punish us for every error. Others see a God that just affirms sin, or stranger still, a God that denies sin even exists. Wherever you see a Pride flag outside of a Church, you see a re-enactment of Henry VIII’s re-invention of Christ happening, as sin is being formed to fit the sinner, not the sinner formed to Christ. In either case, these are definitely bad interpretations. There is justice and there is mercy. But there is never only justice or only mercy. There is one way back and that is to repent and believe the Gospel. It is Christ and his Church that must conform to my desires, it is I who must change and conform to Christ and his Church.

As for me, I side with St. Augustine, who said, “Any interpretation of a biblical passage that militates against the love of God and neighbor is necessarily a bad interpretation.” (WOF Bible, 21) Love of God and neighbor is “the ultimate criterion for correct biblical reading.” But then I align with St. Augustine on most things, because he weaves justice and mercy, faith and reason, and in his world faith has a slight edge over reason that makes all the difference. This means that the interpretation of loving someone is where the interpreters have a field day, because most people today see love as simply affirming everyone’s favorite sin. But Jesus never affirms anyone’s sin. That’s because he’s against it. For all those who just see Jesus as a “nice teacher,” he sure talked about hell a lot, and even if he spent time with sinners, I don’t see the sinners continuing to sin. They are converted, because they all repent and believe the Gospel.

But how do we know who to listen to? Who can interpret? Who has the right to do so? How can we trust any interpretation? How can anyone know what is the right interpretation? How can anyone know anything?

This leads right into the rabbit hole of that branch of philosophy known as epistemology, and as far as interpretation goes, and what to believe, you can really get lost, especially in someone else’s thoughts. The reason we end up relying on ourselves and our own experiences as the final authority is because it seems like our head is the only fortress left, the last temple. This is true, but the problem with that is we’ve let too many spies into the fortress, and we’ve invited a circus into that holy place.

The pursuit of truth becomes paralyzing. There are more subjects to study than flavors of ice cream. Philology and archaeology and history and philosophy and psychology, to name just a few. No one can understand all of these subjects, or not deeply, and especially not if you keep a job or have a family. We give up and open the gate.

No wonder people flee from religion. The conflicting messages from the media and the faithful become too much. As for the Bible and Christianity, it’s too hard to understand. Given that I have a day job and commitments, it’s impossible to chase all of these things down. There is too much to sift through. Who can fully understand the Trinity or fathom the Virgin Birth? What about the resurrection of the body? Even among Christians, these mean vastly different things. There are too many arguments and ways of looking at these things.

When every ideology and religion and denomination is trying to pull us in this or that direction, Netflix seems so much easier. Facebook and Hulu don’t push anything on us, right? We just want to make it easy. Disney and the NFL make it easy, and fun, because they just provide entertainment for us. Then we don’t have to think about all of this stuff. It’s easier to just ignore it all. I just want to be entertained and passively watch the screens in front of me. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? Can’t I just let someone else do all the interpreting? They aren’t trying to shape me or change me. Right?

Right?

Wrong.

Unfortunately, no.

While there are many people and organizations who will gladly “volunteer” the right interpretation and the correct narrative of life for you, what is easiest is not best. What is best, what is true, cannot be passively received from a TV or phone. It requires some effort. Anyone who has tried to lose ten pounds or learn a foreign language or master a musical instrument the “easy way” knows that it doesn’t work.

Nearly everyone is willing to sell their worldview to you, if you let them. The best salesperson is the one who sells you something you don’t need, and then you thank her for it. Likewise, the greatest evangelists are those who don’t appear to be evangelizing at all.

The more you sit back and let the images pass before your eyes, the more you are shaped and formed to an interpretation chosen by people who have plans for you, and they are most likely in an office building in New York or Los Angeles, and certainly not anywhere near an upper room in Jerusalem.

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

Bad ideas are like the many-headed hydra. When one head is cut off, two more spring up. Just when Arianism is getting cured, Nestorianism boils over, and when that pimple is taken care of, Monophysitism appears on the body of Christ, and when the ointment for that is applied, a side effect called Monothelitism develops. And even after resolving these things, they come back, but at least the Church has a cure on the shelf for each of these conditions. They come back in odd and interesting ways, and some heresies like Arianism or sola scriptura take many centuries to fade out. Sorry, did I say fade out? They never fully disappear. Arianism was addressed in 325 at the Council of Nicaea, and a modern version of it is visible in humanism. Sola scriptura was addressed in the Council of Trent in the 1500s, yet the circular logic of that idea keeps every dog chasing its tail.

Today, a person could spend every waking minute refuting heresies because it’s all over in the language of believers and non-believers. Arguing over these errors make little impact, since those who openly reject official Church teaching have adopted their own authority, either in scriptural interpretations, or in their own mind. The old errors are so commonly held and pronounced, that I can’t listen to modern music for an hour without recognizing at least one heresy. I think Luke Bryan is the Pelagius of Country Music, but he is just one of many. A good series would be doing a close-reading of errors in Luke Bryan’s greatest hits, because you can find so many heresies passed off as wisdom or truth in his lyrics. It’s not just him, so I don’t mean to single him out. But we live in an age of various common errors, most commonly, Protestantism, Gnosticism and Pelagianism, which are big words, but with basic problems when we examine them as practiced in the real world.

This is why the word “Christian” is so smashed up, misused, and abused that it now looks like the car in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles at the end of the movie. If you think this is false, check out /r/Christianity on reddit.com. It is chaos. That subreddit should be changed to /r/tohu-wa-bohu, which is the Hebrew word for chaos before God created order in the universe.

Pope Pius X famously called modernism “the synthesis of all heresies,” and the Protestants posting on social media does us the favor of proving it beyond the shadow of a doubt. You could play Heresy Bingo and have a winner before finishing the first post’s comment section. Reddit’s generic /r/Christianity feed is like a slop bucket. It’s remarkable to read comments there from self-professed Christians, because few seem aware of the first fifteen centuries after Christ’s death, and it’s not clear they realize that there was a Church operating before the year 2020.

So there are many bizarre versions of Christianity floating around, and I used to think that nothing could outdo the “snakes and orgies” crowd that 60 Minutes did a show on many years ago, but I’ve been proved wrong repeatedly in recent years, as the heresies have erupted in denominations that once seemed to have a reasonable grip on doctrine. But churches like the ELCA and Methodists and even the “cool” Catholic churches have been caught up in the spirit of the times, and thus they will die like dandelions when the autumn of this culture comes, which is always sooner than we think. You cannot get to liturgies featuring drag queens or celebrating the worst sin of Pride without first abandoning Christ and the faith of the apostles. However, the long labor of creating and carrying the church through the gauntlet of time has happened, and for the Church that sticks to those teachings, it will outlast this current chaotic summer, and in the autumn and into winter, the redwood will outlast them all once again and arrive in spring stronger still.

So while this makes a lot of people feel worried and lost, or scared that the Catholic Church will fall into error, it should actually give much hope. Because the only Church that will last is the one which remains in full orthodoxy with Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. The only Church that is interesting or compelling is the one that keeps the Deposit of Faith and rejects all doctrinal errors from 33 A.D. until today, because it is the only Church led by the Holy Spirit.

When the breathless apostles first came to Jesus and reported error being used in Jesus’ name, he said, “It’s ok.” Well, he actually said:

John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward. (Mark 9:38-41)

To break that down a bit, Jesus was telling the apostles that the others may cast out demons in Jesus’ name. That’s wonderful. He didn’t say, “Go out and club them until they stop.” The Church has occasionally errored in that. But Jesus also didn’t say, “Terrific, bring in these outsiders as the new teachers.” They did not become apostles. Jesus didn’t adapt his teaching to the outsiders. The thing about Jesus is that you don’t get to tell him what to do (unless you are Mary), you come to him on his terms and surrender to him. Pride need not apply. Jesus didn’t declare one of these other healers to be “the rock” on which he founded his church. He didn’t make these others the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. He allowed other interpretations, but he didn’t say they were correct. All directions and corrections are provided to the apostles, which is why they were the chosen ones and the leaders.

Even when I was fallen away and considered myself atheist, I knew that if I ever returned it would only be to the Catholic Church (with Greek Orthodoxy as a dark horse in that race), because the only Church that made sense historically, logically, physically, or spiritually was the one that Jesus founded on the rock of Peter, because it was the only one that had fought and outlasted the intellectual, physical, and spiritual march of empires and ideas, and it was clearly different from all other Johnny-come-lately denominations. The non-Catholic denominations may heal people and cast out demons, and that is truly wonderful, but they are wildly prone to poor theology, teaching, and lack the all-important taproot of Tradition to the person of Jesus himself.

The original, the real deal, actually still exists if you look for it. I was quite surprised to find holy people still striving for holiness. It may have been the biggest shock of my life when I returned. The first time I saw a grown man kneel for communion and receive it like his life depended on it, I knew I’d been missing the point. When I started meeting with people that studied and strived for holiness, I realized that the lukewarm representations that I had held as standard was a very low standard indeed.

Like General Motors, modern Christianity built a lot of models that didn’t last. We had spinoffs of spinoffs so that most of those claiming the label “Christian” today would confuse the heck out of Peter, Paul and the apostles. Dostoyevsky famously wrote in the Grand Inquisitor that if Jesus came back to life, the Catholic Church would kill him again to retain its power. But as the Church lacks the power today that Dostoyevsky imagined, the story has not aged well, despite being a terrific read. It’s more likely that if Jesus returned as Dostoyevsky imagined (which didn’t match anything that Jesus actually said), Jesus would see that most of Christianity outside of the Catholic Church has turned into Imagination Land from Disney’s movie Inside Out, starring Bing Bong, the pink elephant, as the high priest.

Fortunately, the original model is still in storage and is ready to roll. It has some dents in it, for sure, but it runs fine and those scratches can be repaired. The apostolic Church, the body of Christ, that has had plenty of fallen leaders and brokenness over the years, but the heart is alive. The deposit of faith remains, and as long as the head is Christ, it cannot bless sin, because he did not bless sin. He said to “Go and sin no more.” The faithful cannot elevate the self or feelings in replacement of God. The denial of sin is a no-go in the driver’s manual on how to go to heaven.

Embracing orthodox belief is how we answer the question, “What is truth?” It is also how communities and individuals get restored to health. From the Body of Christ, life springs forth, age after age.

We will not find salvation in heresy any more than we will in our youth sports teams or in a Tinder tryst or in an online mob or in our endless entertainment options. Restoration and the path to salvation will come back from where it began, through the Real Presence in the Eucharist, in gatherings of prayer, in speakers witnessing their conversion stories, in Bible studies, in adoration chapels, in Mass, in retreats, in recovery meetings, and anything that forges community away from the false gods propped up by modernism.

To be awakened, we need a massive Ezra moment of deprogramming and teaching, where someone breaks open the scrolls to remind the lost people of a past they know nothing about. In Nehemiah, the people hear the word and understand, and know their sins, and know how they fell into the state of sin, little by little, by departing from orthodoxy.

Ezra opened the scroll so that all the people might see it, for he was standing higher than any of the people. When he opened it, all the people stood. Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people, their hands raised high, answered, “Amen, amen!” Then they knelt down and bowed before the LORD, their faces to the ground. (Neh 8:5-6)

When the people bow their faces to the ground, they have surrendered. But we have not done so yet. We are still in full competition, both with one another, and even more so with God. And this is what every heresy in history does: it competes with God. Most heresies, from Simon Magus to Nestorius to Henry VIII, had a person with a large ego, often a king, who wanted to hammer the Church into his image and likeness, instead of making the Body of Christ in the image and likeness of God.

How are we going to solve this competition problem? How can a culture built on competition, capitalism, winning, and getting whatever we want possibly break that addiction? How can we possibly turn away from serving our desires?

That’s the easy part.

You win that game by not playing. You win in the same way Jesus won it the first time. You win by living in the culture while still being set apart from it. You win by being “called out” of the culture. You go to the desert. You pray, fast, and help the poor, like Jesus. You leave the place of idolatry, like Abraham. You exit the corruption, like St. Anthony to the desert. Like St. Benedict, you reset, apart from the world in the wilderness. Like St. Cyprian, like St. Augustine, like St. Ignatius, like St. Francis, like St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross - you swim against the current, because the current is taking you the wrong way. You reset and then re-enter the fray, washed anew in the blood of Christ.

You win by accepting this sinful world as it is, and while still living in that world, but not being a player in its game. You win by entering into the suffering of others, with love, not affirming their sin, but by witnessing another way. Stop honoring and envying what other people hold as worthwhile. Money, houses, luxuries, sex, entertainment, food, alcohol, cars, boats, drugs, vacations. Stop wanting what the world wants. The entire problem is that you want the wrong things, and this is what leads to every error.

How do you step out of this culture? How do you stop wanting garbage in favor of the Bread of Life? We follow the advice of the Truth himself. Jesus said, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off…And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” (Mk 9:42-47)

The good news for us about this brutal metaphor is that we have something we can rid ourselves of without actual amputation.

What causes our sin in most cases today is what sits between our hands and our eyes. The phone. Our culture is the phone, and envy, lust, pride, sloth, greed, and wrath all reach out to your throat through that device. We can cut off the source of at least half of our most common ways of straying with not a single drop of blood spilled. But few of us will choose this, because hugging our sin is the easier path. Narcissus dies by staring into the mirror, forever, in love with himself.

The easier path is always the one that doesn’t pay off with interest. The easy path is that chosen by Lot, it is the path chosen by those Israelites wanting to return to Egypt in the desert, it is the path chosen by Peter when he denies Jesus, the path chosen by Judas in betraying him, it is the path today of affirming sin rather than fighting it. It is the path chosen by Marcion and Arius and Nestorius and Luther and Calvin and Henry VIII and Joel Osteen. The easier path is always the road to ruin. And who wants to be part of a religion that demands nothing of us, that demands too little, when Jesus has given all to his bride, the Church?

We must surrender to win. You certainly do not win by joining the side that appears to winning, or that you think will win, because even if you win, you are still stuck in the game. In fact, if you win, you may be more stuck in the game than before, like how the proverbial quicksand pulls you deeper the more you struggle. How many aspiring employees who climb to Vice President suddenly find that their wealth and prestige now “require” a bigger house and a finer car and better schools for their kids? How many French and Germans and Russians traded in the humble truths of Jesus Christ for the toxic truths of a political party? How many Democrats and Republicans are doing the same in America right now exactly as they were in Dante’s Florence so many centuries ago, or in Rome during the glory days of Caesar, or in the last days when the collapse of the Bronze Age? All of these past peoples have turned to dust, but the living God remains, and the Holy Spirit carried the Church along in this final Messianic Age.

You do not win by surrendering to the bulldozer of earthly power, on either side. You win by surrendering to the power of Jesus. He is the real ruler over all things. Your way of life will need to change. Your life itself may need to be given up in professing the Truth. But the only way to win at this most important thing is to surrender everything. Ego, pride, self-elevation. Let it go. Otherwise, if your game is here on this earth, whatever you win today, you will need to defend tomorrow, and someday in the future after long years of fighting, you will turn around and see that you have been defending a pile of rubble. When you reach that moment, know that the one Truth is waiting for you to turn your face all the way to look at his sacrifice on the Cross.

Rather than dishearten you, this should ignite you. You have been wanting the wrong things. Desires that you had, items that you wanted to own, experiences that you sought to remember - these were the distractions from the real answer to the one test question. How strange I thought it was for Jesus to say, “Rejoice, for the kingdom is among you.” But it is here. It’s here, but it’s the opposite of the competitive nonsense and little trophies we have been seeking all our lives. This is an incredibly exciting time to be alive, because once again, the world has regressed into the same shape as in the first century, when the apostles lit the fuse for the dynamite of the Gospel. The fuse is once again just waiting to be lit with the fire of the Holy Spirit. The kingdom is here among us, and it is the Catholic Church, with all its flaws. The Church: founded on a rock called Peter, the sinner and the saint, the fallen one transformed into a bold healer. The same answer to “Why did Peter sink?” for an individual is the same answer for the Church founded on the rock called Peter: taking the focus off of Christ and the fullness of him is to sink. To look at him constantly in trust is to experience the unending miracle of walking with God. The kingdom is here, the Church - in the world but not of the world - defending the faith from errors until he comes again.

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

The word “Christianity” may need to go away for a while, like on a desert retreat. It needs to go off to a sweatlodge with St. Anthony of Egypt again so it can figure out what Jesus intended. Few Protestant denominations remain that teach what “Christianity” really entails or demands. The familiarity of it has bred contempt and complacency, which has led to extremely watered-down versions. This is exactly why St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers exited the culture in the third century. Even back then it had been diluted into a cheap BBQ lighter fluid instead of the 100% explosive ethanol it was on Pentecost. Today, it can be restored to be highly flammable once again, but it won’t be done by being “cool” in the culture or by flopping around speaking in tongues or doing fake healings or by affirming sin or denying that the devil exists. It will be restored to it’s original strange potency by the same old proven methods: prayer, fasting, and charity.

But once again, like in the time of the Desert Fathers, the errors that led people away from proper worship and correct doctrine must be re-visited, because they have been allowed back in. All of them. It almost as if a busload of old heresies showed up at the pool, and barged right in without checking their floaties, food, weapons, and drugs at the door. Many of them don’t even bother to wear a swimsuit, as modesty and ideas about sin are old-fashioned. Now the pool is in mayhem. Only a few lifeguards (in red hats) are shouting while others have joined in the orgy. Fortunately, the party is almost over, since it has become a pool no one wants to swim in. The newcomers and families who would like to swim take one look at the chaos and decide to stay home - after all, they can setup their own pool - who needs the community pool? Thus we have many trying to claim the main pool, and millions of little pools where people isolate in their own anti-social backyard. The heresies have stunk up the water to the point that the “Christian” pool is more like a swamp lagoon. Now it will require a lockdown for cleaning. After draining, it needs a full sandblasting before a refill.

The intense, long battle against errors about who Jesus was, what Jesus said, and what he taught, waged over centuries, needs to be waged all over again. Today, it’s not even clear that people understand the word heresy. And to be fair, it is an ugly word. “Heretic” combines two sounds that make Minnesotans like me shiver: “hair” and “tick.” This sounds like a burrowing insect at the base of my hairline. Where I live, ticks raise goosebumps on people more than snakes. Whenever I’ve discovered one engorged on a dog’s belly, or see one climbing my shirt after a walk in the woods, it gives me a case of the heebie-jeebies. But perhaps this strange association is apt. A tick buried in skin kind of fits well with what heresy does. Because a tiny corruption like that caused by a tick lodging in your skin is much like how a heretical idea poisons and corrupts individuals or entire nations. Heresy is not unlike Lyme disease in that it often has a subtle entry point but leads to an insidious devastation of the body as it spreads.

The idea of heresy is something people don’t even like to talk about, but I think it needs to be. I doubt that the average Joe Christian has ever heard of Marcionism, or Pelagianism, or any other heresy, but many certainly speak those heresies openly. Ideas long ago denounced as un-Christian are mentioned as if they were orthodox in casual conversation. But this isn’t surprising, given the past few centuries of rejecting all authority. Almost everyone now is their own Pope, so even if I mentioned the basics of a heresy, my listener would respond, “Who made you the Pope?”

To which I would answer, “Do you see a funny hat on me? Long ago, after a big todo, the Church declared…”

And that’s exactly where the conversation would end, because the appeal to authority beyond the “Self” would outrage the listener.

“The Church has entered the chat.” When that happens, the modern American, Protestant, public school brain exits the chat. It’s over. Authority? Are you claiming authority? Are you kidding me? We have hundreds of years of literature and philosophy and theology crammed between our ears, where the only authority is in national power and the self. America itself is a rejection of old-world “authority.” But this continual march of rejecting authority has put the West in an odd state. Because once the highest authority of God and his Church was thrown out, and the Pope put in his corner in Vatican City, the nations must act as the moral authority. They have been doing this for about three centuries now.

Mentioning the Church’s authority leads to an automatic response. Like a trained bear that can dance, the hearer waltzes off stage on cue. Or, more likely today than ever, this “tamed” bear attacks and mauls the trainer.

What’s most interesting today is that in our rejection of authority, so few today are called to the priesthood, but nearly everyone is called to the pontificate. Worth noting here is that “pontiff” means bridge-builder. But with a billion mini-popes in the world, we end up having a lot of bridges to nowhere, because all of the bridges lead directly back to the self.

This isn’t just an issue among Protestants or agnostics, it’s rampant within the Catholic Church, too. So many people don’t know what the teaching of the Church is that you can hear the echoes of ancient errors every day, even among bishops. Imagine: a bishop that doesn’t understand errors that have existed for thousands of years. You don’t have to imagine it. This is happening all over Europe and the United States. This is the equivalent of an NFL coach not knowing what is a “first down,” or what a “nickel defense” is used for. Could you imagine a coach who worked for thirty years to reach the top, and then have it be revealed that he thought the game was soccer? No. This seems almost impossible, unless somehow you have cronyism or ideology (or both) interfering with the proper promotion of educated and competent bishops.

And this of course is exactly what we have. The creep of heresy gets in like a tic. It’s like Soviet Science or modern American sociology, where ideology has replaced the goal of seeking the Truth, the highest Truth. And it replays over and over in history. It’s Plato versus the Sophists. It’s Athanasius versus Arius. It’s Augustine versus Pelagius. It’s Marx versus Pope Leo XIII. Heresy is ideology that bleeds into faith and skews the right understanding of God, the Trinity, Jesus, the Sacraments, and the whole Church. And it always starts with the rejection of God, in some form, and the elevation of what a person wants. “Blessed are the heretics,” said Stanley Hauerwas. What he meant by this was that without those pushing errors, we wouldn’t see the Truth so clearly. So luckily we have Marcion and Pelagius and Nestorius to illustrate the errors. Their ideas act like bugs on a windshield, where you don’t need to stop until it gets really bad, and then you must pull over at the nearest service station and squeegee like a maniac with elbow grease to get the encrusted scum off. Sin works this way; sin is not a big deal, until it is. Until your sin is going to cause a major accident and maybe even kill you, you don’t take action to fix the disorder.

When you hear a bishop defending an old heresy, often with new words, that was called a heresy long ago, it leads to confusion for the team. Trust in leadership is undermined, especially when the waterboy understands the game better than the coach. You cannot have the offensive coordinator telling the running backs they must run backward from now on. If that ever happened in the NFL, a firing would surely occur. Yet we are not seeing the firings despite wild errors in “coaching” from those in charge in the Church. This is likely because the Church moves slowly, which is good, since they operate like the Ents in Lord of the Rings. Anything worth saying is worth taking a long time to say it. This is one of the great features of the Church so that they don’t jump to conclusions.

There is something called “The Peter Principle,” which has nothing to do with St. Peter or the Church, but simply states that people will be promoted in their career to one level higher than they should be, right to the point where they are incompetent. This doesn’t apply to all bishops, obviously, just a few, but whenever you hear a high-ranking person espouse an idea that was jettisoned as an error many centuries ago, you have to scratch your head and wonder how or why God is working through this.

But rest assured that God is doing just that. Errors about Christianity are ever-present in both the culture and the Church, and I suspect this has been the case since Peter finished his first speech on Pentecost, as surely strange interpretations began immediately. There are many bishops sticking to doctrine and the Truth, with Bishop Barron doing a beautiful job of articulating the faith, following in a long line of great articulators, like Saints Cyril, Maximus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Damascene, Newman, Sheen, and many, many others.

Teaching Wednesday night religion class recently, a kid raised his hand and told me, “My dad says that Jesus is the good God, and the God of the Old Testament was the one that would squash you.”

“Kid,” I said, “Your dad is a heretic.”

Just kidding. I didn’t say that.

“Kid,” I said, “Have you ever heard of Marcion?”

Just kidding. I didn’t say that either.

How many adults today have heard of Marcion? Who has ever heard of Marcion, or Menander, or the Cathars? Few today have heard of these old names except for geeky Catholics who know about the ecumenical councils where the early Church had to settle these disputes. These old heresies argued for exactly what this kid’s dad was teaching. This idea springs up repeatedly, and if we haven’t heard of Marcion, we’ve certainly heard of Nazi Germany, which was rife with Marcionism as an offshoot of its hatred and ethnic cleansing of the Jews. (Tip: Marcionism always goes hand in hand with anti-Old Testament thinking and makes a beeline toward anti-Jewish thoughts and behavior.) Any time that Catholicism lacks respect for the Jews, it is in error, and this is why the document known as Nostra Aetate was sorely needed, as a reminder that the Church “recalls that the Apostles, the Church's main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ's Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people.” I also must add here, that if Jesus is God, and you believe that as I do, then he inspired the entire Old Testament, including the parts that are confusing, and Jesus was a devout Jew, as were Mary and Joseph. So for any Catholic to misunderstand the intensely deep meaning of the Jewish roots of Christianity is to be like the sower’s seed on the rocky path. If Jesus is God, and if Scripture is inspired by God, and all of the prophecies of the Messiah were foretold by God, and the story of the chosen people is God winning back the world, then throwing out the Old Testament seems a bad idea.

The kid’s father who taught Marcionism was doing the same thing that a writer like Dan Brown does in his novels (as wildly inaccurate in history and logic as they are). He finds an old heresy and dusts it off as something fresh and new. Then it’s presented as a fact, as a new “orthodoxy” and then believers have to spend lots of time re-arguing what has already been argued and ruled upon. But this is one of the strengths of the Church, actually, in that it has a structure that can do this. We can all see the Protestants lack this authority to rule, which leads to heresy proliferating like a cytokine storm. Truly, if there is one weakness in the Eastern Orthodox churches, it’s that they cannot resolve disputes like the Catholic Church can, because the Bishop of Rome can speak from the Chair of Peter, as Christ gave Peter the keys, which is to say, the authority.

What’s old is new, but none of the heresies are actually new. You can go read St. Irenaeus who wrote Against Heresies in the second century, and most heresies today were already in play. Over time, new errors have come about, and over the centuries others have written books to define these errors, and why they are errors, like St. Alphonsus Liguori with the History of Heresies. There are many. St. Hippolytus of Rome. Denzinger. Belloc. Fortunately, we don’t have to go read all of these, we can just read the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It’s the Reader’s Digest condensed version of about a million pages and scrolls from Adam to Pope Francis.

There’s a reason these ideas come back to life, and it’s because we default toward doubt, not faith. And faith is a gift. With the eyes of faith, the heresies are clear, as the scales fall away from our vision once we see Christ for who he really is, and that is God. Once you can see Jesus and hear the word of God, then it’s clear why none of the heresies work in practice. This is why they don’t stick. They come and go like an Old Navy shirt - sure, it feels good for a bit, but you can tell how cheap it is, and you’ll throw it out after a few years.

The heresies sound good when you first discover them. They seem to make sense. This is why it took me a while to figure out that everything that Dan Brown writes is actually a spoof comedy, not a drama. Because his send-ups of heresy as truth and adventures in bad history lessons made me re-arrange my video shelf so that The Da Vinci Code sits right next to Dumb and Dumber. When I need a light-hearted night to let loose, I can choose either movie.

The reason heresy is declared and marked as incorrect is not about power and control. It’s about what heresies do, and what they don’t do. It’s about how they misunderstand Jesus and salvation history. It’s about a false way to know God. The reason heresies are declared is simple: they do not work. They do not work logically or spiritually. They do not work in the mind, in the soul, or in the body.

This is the thing I’ve been saying in this entire series in talking about sales and practical application. There are many shiny things that seem real, but like advertising for bad products, those things wind up being a mirage in the desert. What works is not just that which sells. Consumers and voters may select bad choices. Mistakes play out over time, long after the sale was made. What becomes heresy is not based on popular opinion, but based on what happens when an error is chosen. There is perhaps nothing more vindicating in the Church’s slowness than in its rejection of birth control and abortion, as both of these “cure-all” remedies of the techno-utopian evangelists have blown up spectacularly. What was supposed to solve divorce, unhappiness, and family issues has exploded in divorce, unhappiness, and family issues.

What works is that which lasts and endures through the ages. What works isn’t always what seems easy, but what works satisfies the intellect, the will, the body, and the soul. Virtue works. Chastity works. Humility works. Faith works. Hooking up with random sex partners and pretending it doesn’t matter? That doesn’t work. Shouting your abortion? That doesn’t work. Believe in yourself instead of something higher? That doesn’t work. Perception is reality? That doesn’t work. All of these ideas run into the rock of life, the true test, where bad ideas run aground.

But we forget this every generation, and we re-learn it in every generation. We forget the Truth because we want to be new and clever, but the bad ideas are always old and warmed-up leftovers. This is why someone like Jean-Paul Sartre can be celebrated for a hundred years for saying, “God is dead,” when he’s just saying the same thing every middle-schooler has said since the beginning of time. But when you do so with a Ph.D. it seems to have weight, despite the long-winded argument being the result of never growing past high school rebellion. What happens then is that everyone else also stuck in that ninth-grade rejection of authority, claps their hands and says, “Brilliant!” because it satisfies their egos and excuses their sin.

This is why the same heresies pop up and die over and over again because heresies are exactly like dandelions. Orthodoxy, however, is like a redwood tree. Hardwoods grow slowly, apparently weak as saplings, while the wild and fast-growing grasses spring up quickly. But what is apparently hale and hearty in spring dies in the autumn. The hardwoods always win in the end, because they are built to last through the seasons of life, and that includes the winter of suffering.

To go back to the sports metaphor, Catholicism is a fourth-quarter faith. It’s not for the first drive down the field, or for the halftime show. It’s built for the last drive that wins the game. It’s for the long haul, made to last, not for showing off and fading away.

So, to bring this back to heresy and Marcion: you have to read about Marcion to understand why his idea of “the Old Testament God is not the same as the New Testament” is an error all by itself, and a very dangerous one at that because it twists scripture into a wildly different shape. In the early church, Tertullian and others took up the battle and won the argument, closing the door on Marcionism forever as an error in what the Church founded by Jesus believes. And it’s not a “because I said so” argument and defense, it is well-reasoned and logical, and worth exploring. Many of the “Jesus as the dude” arguments are a form of Marcionism, just as much as anti-Semitism has a taproot in Marcionism. But if I don’t stop here, this post will turn into a lengthy discussion on this particular heresy, so let’s move forward. More to come in part 2. Perhaps a whole series on heresies is needed, but that may require a more focused mind than my own, like those who have already written books on it.

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The wool has been pulled over our eyes for about seventy years now (or maybe 500 years), where we think that we have liberated women, but really we have walked into a trap. I’m not talking about women’s sports or women having careers traditionally held by men here, I’m talking about the real things that separate men from women.

Men have walked into the trap as well. We’ve all walked into the trap, each into our own separate trap, claiming freedom while the snare tightens around us in our solitary “liberty” cages. Yes, there is a well-known trap, called the “Two Income Trap,” but there is a worse trap, called the gaping maw of the underworld (better known as hell). The trap is that we think we can hammer morality into any shape we like, but we can’t. The trap is that we think motherhood and fatherhood are not particularly important, and that men can be women and women can be men, but they can’t.

Some things are not changeable. When balancing a wheel, the more we try to hammer a wheel into the shape we’d like, the more unbalanced the wheel becomes. The more you hammer, the worse it gets and whole wheel eventually throws the bearing and destroys the machine.

We’ve seen this movie before and Catholics are always the “jerks” that stand athwart certain truth claims made by voices in the culture. But Catholics are only jerks in this case because they must teach what was handed down. It’s either abandon the faith and bow to the Golden Statue, or set your face like flint against the world, the flesh, and the devil and continue to preach what Christ and the Apostles taught.

What is a sin has been defined since before Jesus taught the Apostles, and then Jesus clarified and refined it. It cannot be changed. When people get angry at the Church, it is solely because the Church repeats what Jesus said and the Apostles taught. This is why the church that Christ founded is the one with authority, which really makes people bristle. But the fact is this: morality cannot be legislated, it cannot be papered over, it cannot be coerced, and it cannot be softened to fit the mood of middle-schoolers, no matter what kind of emotional hostages they try to take.

What is sin and what is not sin, is not up for debate. There are Cardinals in the Catholic Church today who do not understand this, and they certainly do not understand Matthew 5:17-19. But the teaching of the Apostles is as timeless as God in heaven. Our own consciences can inform us that the natural law is right if we could only sit in a room quietly and listen to that small voice without reaching and scrolling on the phone. Our smartphones today make us less wise than ancient people, who were more likely to understood their need for a savior far better than we can, because they understood suffering, and they knew what Jesus’ redemption meant for their bodies and souls.

Americans today don’t like this idea of rules set in stone, such as Commandments, which is why we continually try to interpret the Bible on a personal basis, which twists all into destruction. Personal interpretation of the Bible is precisely how the devil re-crafts the bad sale from the beginning of human history to infect the Messianic Age that we are living in now. The devil has lost the war, but he can win some battles along the way and take souls, and he does this by twisting morality and re-naming sins as holy things.

Throughout American history, from supporting slavery to selling consumerism to pushing the various evils of the Sexual Revolution, sola scriptura has been used to give sin a divine mandate, and thereby entrench it ever more securely in the culture. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, provides a solid foundation for doctrine and morality and has stood strong in the face of each attack. (from Don Johnson at Catholic Answers. For insight into our current fiasco of Biblical interpretation, read Don’s book: Twisted into Destruction.)

Without a doubt, men failed women before seventy years ago, but because of that failure that started in the 1960s with the lies of the sexual revolution, men have failed women even worse by allowing the current mania to thrash about so wildly. I realize that sin has been around since the Fall in the Garden, but the sixties gave it a boost, like a five-hour energy drink that lasted nearly a century.

What’s funny is that having received this unbridled, bursting sense of liberty, depression has hit an all-time high. But how can that be? I say it’s funny, but it’s not. It’s sad, because we are sad. We are reliving these Garden stories, over and over. When Eve took the fruit, men followed, and both ended up sad as they were cast out of the garden, keeping God’s image but losing his likeness. (For a good read on the fallout from the sexual revolution, read Adam and Eve After the Pill.)

The initial lie from the devil led to a bad relationship. And the lie started with a false sense of food security, leading to curiosity for knowledge, working against trust in the Creator, all of which preceded the sexual fall and made the people believe that they no longer needed God, or each other (much more on this in an upcoming series on food and sex).

Since the Fall, we just can’t learn. Men refuse to love women properly, and the mess begins all over. The enmity between man and woman repeats, and it only is combatted by humility and submission of husband and wife to each other. The backlash against toxic masculinity is appropriate, because the cartoonish ignorant version of manliness that marketing departments preached to men was an absurdity, and it was the least Biblical idea in history. Trucks, sports, money, and sex do not make a man “manly.” A man driving a truck in a lift-kit doesn’t look manly, he is just wearing a giant fig leaf. And a man who kowtows and removes himself from all responsibility to defer to women is pathetic. Healthy masculinity buys a truck if he needs to haul stuff around. Healthy masculinity doesn’t buy extra horsepower just to bark his tires at a stoplight, he buys extra horsepower because his job is pulling heavy things.

Material things, when presented as necessities to manliness, make him into a buffoon. Do you know what actually makes a man “manly”? This will come as a shock, because it’s the same thing that can make a woman “womanly”.

Acting like Jesus makes a man. Imitating Christ is how you become a father, a son, a brother, a nephew, a cousin, or a friend. Likewise, imitating Christ is how you become a better mother, a daughter, a sister, a niece, a cousin, or a friend. Dying to self makes a man manly. Dying to self makes a woman womanly.

There is right masculinity, and Jesus exemplified it. He lives it. He did not take a wife, but he shows us how to live whether we are single or married, man or woman, rich or poor, Jew or non-Jew. And although he did not marry, he made it utterly plain that having a wife, one wife, through all the hard times, makes a man masculine. Gathering notches on your truckbed can only make a man into a fool and an enemy of God.

But the backlash against the absurd form of macho manliness has swung the pendulum into what girls today are told is liberation, where they are essentially being taught to act like men and want the things that men want. I have not seen any ads teaching girls to desire a family and loving husband, but I have seen many holding up sports glory, money, and sex as the highest goods. The funny thing is that many boys are now realizing that sports glory and money will not bring happiness, and are pulling away from those pursuits. The false idols are showing their sandy bottoms. They are washing away and will continue to erode over the next generation.

However, in telling girls they can be men, we declare they have been empowered, but have they? Mocking motherhood and marriage has not been empowering, and since women cannot actually be men, but can imitate them, they have shunned their nature for man’s nature. And once again, due to this disorder, God will allow us to be taught by disorder, by our own choice. When the formless void that God created and filled is not filled in the way he designed, disorder erupts.

But we have done more than mock motherhood and the family unit. We have spent the past forty years mocking fatherhood, with sitcoms fathers, particularly Homer Simpson, leading the charge. Now the latest fad is to replace fatherhood with the government, the State, and we’ll learn that social workers make for an even worse husband than Homer Simpson in the long run. The Soviet Union discovered this and the fallout from that was worse than ten Chernobyl incidents. At least radiation poisoning only affects the body, not both the body and the soul. The United States has a long stretch of disunity ahead, and we have chosen it.

C.S. Lewis once said that hell is always locked from the inside, and people who choose to live in hell, in sin, merely refuse to turn the lock, because they think sin will make them happy. This is especially true in a marriage that is viewed as a temporary contract rather than covenantal joining of two people into one flesh. If marriage is not a fully binding and joining of the flesh, then why bother? This is the same argument that we have for the Eucharist. If it’s just a symbol and not the Body and Blood of Christ, then who cares? If marriage is just a symbol of the State, of a legal contract, then who wants it? We want the sacred, and that’s what Sacraments are, and sacraments are the path to God, to uniting our will and lives and marriages to God. In marriage, a man submits to his wife and his wife submits to him. This is the least anti-woman idea in human history.

If the Woman at the Well doesn’t tell the story of an awakening by turning away from sexual sin, then I don’t know what does. New life comes when the Woman at the Well rejects her personal sin and understands God’s forgiveness. She realizes that men have used her as an object, and perhaps she has used men in the same way. Leaving the well, drunk on the living water, she knows that sex is a bad substitute for God in the temple of her heart. She is suddenly unshackled from her own past and the identity lies she has been led to believe. She is healed after meeting God. Coming to know God’s will for her, her brokenness is suddenly made sense of. All is clear. She was blind but now can see. The vice that she pursued, her weakness, is the very thing that purifies her in the end into holiness. We are a world of individuals, sad and depressed like the Woman at the Well just gasping for thirst, to taste this living water and return to a life of virtue.

The Apostles had a group of women in the center of Church formation. Mary, the Mother of God, and Mary Magdalene could not have more important roles in the founding of Christendom, and they still hold those roles. Martha, Joanna, Photini…there are hundreds upon hundreds of women saints that are venerated, with buildings and churches and feast days named after them. There is no Church without women, because without Mary, the Mother of God, we have no incarnation, and without Mary Magdalene and the other women, no one is at the tomb on Easter morning when they first discover that Jesus is risen. To this day, it is more likely women that hear the voice of the living God. They are the ones that often lead men to this glorious mystery. Go to any parish and take a look around. Who is leading the Rosary before Mass? Who is managing the office and records? Who is organizing faith formation? Who is prepping the altar for Mass? Who is leading the choir? Women are everywhere in the Church. They are valued far beyond what the secular world tells you, because the secular powers doesn’t want you to know this, and they certainly do not want you setting foot inside a Parish, lest you might become a Catholic. That is why the drumbeat of oppression and “Dark Ages” talk never ceases. There is an old saying among lawyers: “If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the law is on your side, pound the law. If neither is on your side, pound the table.” That is the game being played whenever you hear that the “Church hates women.” It is neither a fact nor a doctrine. It is a fabrication.

Here’s an excerpt from an article called “Does the Catholic Church Really Hate Women?”

Apparently the justice of Christian morality offered a refreshing perspective to women in the ancient world accustomed to husbands who cheated and left at will. The number of women who converted to Christianity in the early centuries after Christ indicates that women were attracted to this new way of life. Indeed, they were among the most zealous converts and defenders of the faith:

Christianity seems to have been especially successful among women. It was often through the wives that it penetrated the upper classes of society in the first instance. Christians believed in the equality of men and women before God and found in the New Testament commands that husbands should treat their wives with such consideration and love as Christ manifested for his Church. Christian teaching about the sanctity of marriage offered a powerful safeguard to married women (Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, Penguin, 58–59).

In light of this history, does anyone seriously believe that the Assyrian or Greek or Roman or Mesoamerican world respected women more than followers of Christ did? Can people argue that position with a straight face? Does anyone really think that the long era before Christ, and further back, before Abraham, was a “better” time for women? Aside from Christianity, did any other religion take over the world in this way, where women and marriage sounded the battle cry into the culture? The answer is a simple but loud, “No.”

This is exactly why marriage is the hill to die on for Catholics, and I’m referring to Sacramental marriage, not courthouse contractual marriage, as deemed to be marriage by the U.S. Government. Government marriage is as meaningful as an Apple end user license agreement. It does nothing spiritual, it’s only legal. Unjust laws do not change God.

And frankly, why would anyone care what a government thinks of marriage? Every government in history falls into the abyss of after a few hundred years. Is that really the arbiter of truth? Jeffersonian Democracy will not outlast God, so whatever is decreed from Congress is utterly useless for eternal life, which is what the concerns of the body and soul need to be aimed toward. What is the point of religion? It’s eternal life. It’s rebirth here and being raised to heaven hereafter. It’s not getting a legal document. It’s not winning power from a Supreme Court that will be a rusted out ruin, a weathered artifact, or a tourist stop in a hundred or a thousand years.

The only marriage that matters is that which is eternal in the eyes of God, in which two people become one flesh. All others are just certificates of participation and “pieces of paper,” as modern people like to call it. Marriage defined by government is meaningless, because government is not God. Men today will say, “Why do I need a piece of paper to prove my love?” The answer is: “You don’t.” The piece of paper isn’t a Sacrament. The Sacrament is the Sacrament. For this reason, whenever someone says, “I don’t need a piece of paper to prove I love you,” they are right, because a government piece of paper not only proves nothing, it does nothing. It should be called Garriage, for “Government marriage.” Or Narriage, for “Not Marriage.”

Sacramental Marriage changes two people into one. Two bodies become one, and two souls are bonded, which are only parted at death, as Jesus said there is no marriage in heaven. “When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” (Mark 12:25).

You can hold this belief that the Church hates women only if you choose to completely ignore the actual facts of pre-Christian society and the incredible spread and long-lasting nature of Christ’s message and his Church. Christian marriage has outlasted empires, fads, intellectual movements, cosmic models of the universe, and it will outlast all versions of “government marriage” we currently pretend are real. After all of the current fads of open marriage and same sex marriage and polygamy fail, as they always have failed, the value of Sacramental Marriage will still be with us. It is not by accident that the Commandments are what they are. They were not invented at all, they were arrived at. They were not set forth to control people, they are what sets you free.

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Something that gets buried today is how the pagan or secular world treated people, and it’s buried for a reason. We like to pretend the “Dark Ages” were full of witch-burning psycho priests but that pre-Christian societies were joy-filled lands where all joined hands and sang songs like the Whos in Dr. Seuss’s Whoville. But nothing could be further from the truth. A good read on how much people have forgotten our Christian roots is a book by Tom Holland, titled: Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. We have forgotten how much Christianity has improved the lives of everyone in comparison to the “good old days” of paganism. We are so accustomed to hospitals, universities, libraries, and non-profit charities that we forgot where they all came from. They didn’t come from Caesar or anyone in his time. People like to think there was some utopia before the “evils” of Christianity stamped out the fun. We will get to find this out soon, however, since we are lurching backward toward that “fun.”

We forget things easily, not just over long expanses of time, but in single generations. The book of Judges illustrates this well, where each fall into sin has a savior, but within forty years, the people resume their errors and forget why they needed order. Our era is similar to that which preceded World War I when nations celebrated the beginning of the war, holding parades, cheering, wishing the boys well in their lovely uniforms and flags, only to find out a few years later that the war was a meat grinder of unprecedented levels, thanks to progress in technology and science.

As we whisk God out of the public arena and out of our personal lives, we forget what the world was like before Jesus walked this earth, died on a cross, and rose from the dead to take away our sins, transform our suffering, and defeat the devil.

One of the primary lies told today about the pre-Christian world is that women’s lives were better without the Church imposing restrictions on them. But this is not true. It has never been true. It never will be true, no matter how many professors and bloggers keep writing about it.

Disrespect of women was not a Christian doctrine or idea, but it was indeed a core doctrine of the secular powers of Rome, actually quite similar to the lyrics of Snoop Dogg. You could sum up the treatment of women by the wealthy of the ancient world in Snoop’s hit song, “It ain’t no fun, if the homies can’t have none.” Women were objects, pure and simple. The interesting thing about reading the Old Testament treatment of women is that today we think it sounds barbaric, when in reality it was the most progressive treatment of women in the ancient world. We read with Western eyes, blinded by time, through which we are blocked from understanding, nuance, and history. With the Church, women achieved a radical leap forward, one that the pagan world mocked for centuries. Many of the women who fought against the old ways were martyred for it. Strange that they would be willing to die for such “oppression.” We are taught and bonked over the head repeatedly with this “Dark Age” myth in every university course. By design, we are not taught the reasons why Christian life appealed to so many women, because it undermines the sand foundation of modern life, which will ultimately undermine itself because it is spiritually dead.

Here is a summary from Mike Aquilina of how women were treated before God revealed himself to us through Jesus. I should note that none of this was covered in my university history classes, nor was it ever mentioned in the Women’s Studies class I had to take:

Pagan and Christian sources agree that the Church grew at an astonishing rate in the first three centuries of its existence. The modern sociologist Rodney Stark estimates a steady growth rate of forty percent per decade during centuries of intermittently intense persecution when the practice of the Faith was a capital crime. Pagan and Christian sources agree that women made up the majority of converts.

The most effective opponent of Christianity from this period, the Greek philosopher Celsus, mocked the Church for this. Around A.D. 178, he accused Christians of not daring to evangelize women when their sensible husbands and fathers were present but rather getting hold of them privately and filling their heads with “wonderful statements, telling them to pay no attention to their father and to their teachers.”

What kind of statements were those? They no doubt involved the principle of equality of the sexes before God. “There is neither Jew nor Greek,” said St. Paul, “there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

The apostle wasn’t denying sexual differences, nor was he claiming there should be no difference in the roles that men and women played. Rather, he was claiming for women—and slaves and foreigners—a dignity that no one in his world, not even a philosopher as brilliant as Celsus, could recognize.

A woman in that world was seen as having little intrinsic value. She derived her identity from the males in her life—first her father, and then her husband, and then her sons. The law recognized little for her in the way of natural rights or protections. Women were not permitted to testify in a court of law because their testimony was considered unreliable. The law treated them like children.

The value of their sex was nowhere more evident than on the day of their birth. Infanticide was common in the Greco-Roman world. It was practiced mostly for economic reasons, to limit family size and to maximize the future return on the father’s investment in childrearing.

Thus, children who were “defective” in any way—i.e., disabled—were usually drowned in a bucket of water at birth or left exposed at the town garbage dump. There they might be claimed as carrion by vultures and dogs or taken up by pimps to be raised as prostitutes. All the documentary and archaeological evidence indicates that the most common “defect” for which children were abandoned was femaleness.

Nowhere is the matter expressed more shockingly than in a “love letter” found in the excavations at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. The husband, Hilarion, closes his missive to his wife, Alis, by saying: “If you happen to be pregnant again, if it is a boy, leave it; if it is a girl, throw it out.”

In the economy of antiquity, a girl was an expense, an economic liability in ways that a boy was not. A boy would one day be an earner. A boy might provide for his parents in their old age. He might even improve their status by his accomplishments.

A girl, on the other hand, would need to be fed and clothed for more than a decade before she was married off—and upon marriage her father would have to pay a sizable dowry. For these reasons the Roman playwrights referred to girls and young women as “odious daughters.” It’s likely that the dialogue in their works is an accurate reflection of common turns of phrase.

The ideal daughter, for pagan Romans, was physically beautiful, for the beautiful would be married off the soonest. The typical age for her arranged marriage was twelve, theoretically at puberty, but many girls were given in marriage at eleven to a man much older. And the marriage, it seems, was consummated whether the girl was physically ready or not.

It appears there was little expectation of a loving relationship. Adultery was common, as was divorce. Abortion was common, as was infanticide. Marriage was a transaction established for the continuation of the customs of family and society for another generation.

A woman’s role was to produce a son to be heir. If she suffered the misfortune of widowhood before bearing a son, she might live the rest of her life in poverty.

The laws and traditions of the Greco-Roman world had been refined over centuries to communicate the value that society placed on women. It was very low.

If not held back by faith and morals set on the rock of objective truth, people will treat women like objects and objects like women. (This is sin in a nutshell, by the way: choosing the wrong goods.) And there is no one more in danger of being treated like an object than the crown of creation, who is called woman. If you were rich and powerful in pre-Christian times, you could have as many objects called women as you could afford or capture, including the wives of those less powerful than yourself (see: every King that ever had a harem. Also see: David and Bathsheba, as well as Solomon’s sex life with hundreds of wives. These are two Biblical falls from grace for this behavior, where sin is being narrated and not praised…notice that wherever there is polygamy, you have a mess, and that includes Abraham and Jacob. At least Isaac kept it together with Rebecca, and they are the true model of marriage in the Old Testament).

We are moving back to that era now, as calls for the bad idea of polygamy have resurfaced. Utah is no longer the only place we associate with this term. This is just one form of sin that is being presented as a good today, as slippery salespeople twist truth into the shape of bad ideas that women finally escaped through faith in Christ and living the Christian life with Christian men. The arguments today are no different from the Romans and Greeks. Is your baby possible defective or just bad timing? Kill it. Abort. Marriage has a minor difficulty? Divorce. Want immediate pleasure instead of commitment, responsibility, and love that requires work and action? Porn. Got a mother-in-law you don’t want to deal with? Park her in a home.

The reality is that the only reason we have nice things at all is because of Christianity. And that is the spiritual struggle that we are in, where advertisers and intellectuals preach from the screens, telling us that progress means going backward to pre-Christian insanity, which always ends in “might makes right.” If you are not pursuing objective truth as your ultimate goal, as the end of all things, then the desire for power is the substitute. I don’t care how you try to sugar coat it; when God is no longer the foundation of truth, you end up with “my truth” and that devolves into groups dictating “truth” by coercion, eventually at gunpoint. Whenever the church has gone astray, they fall into this same trap, of power politics mixing with the faith. The eye can never stray from Christ, who is the truth and foundation of all things. Nor can his words be twisted, as he says of the Commandments they are not malleable to fit the decade we live in:

Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Mt 5:17-20)

To understand the difference between the pre-Christian era and the “Dark Ages” of Christianity, let’s compare two buildings, arguably the two greatest buildings in the world, which happen to be in the same city, just a few miles apart.

When people travel to Rome, they mainly visit two places. One is the Colosseum, where hordes of bloodthirsty fans got drunk, gambled, and watched men fight one another to the death. The other is St. Peter’s Basilica, a Church, where a fisherman was crucified for telling people about a carpenter who was God incarnate. It’s stunningly beautiful, but the real purpose is that St. Peter’s is a place where the Sacraments take place: Baptism, Confession, Holy Matrimony, and the Eucharist. Holy Mass happens hourly, even while the tourists mill about. The purpose of St. Peter’s, and any other church, is humility and surrender of your life to God.

Do you see the difference?

Both are architectural marvels, visually stunning, spectacles to the senses, but their purpose is in direct opposition to each other. Notice that America no longer builds beautiful churches. This should tell you something, as we build billion dollar stadiums for gladiator games. St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City was built in 1858 and dedicated in 1910. The rise of the modern stadium started in the early 1900s, and exploded after World War II. We are moving away from St. Peter’s and back to the Colosseum, and so are our human relations.

What I am getting at is: without humility before God, we see competition and strife as the great entertainment, the great game. Suffering is something to avoid and shun at all costs. Winning is all that matters, because winning removes suffering. We completely lose the point of redemptive suffering. This is because most of us don’t really believe in the afterlife or eternal life any longer. We have no meaning in our lives, so we look for it in athletics, sex, money, and power. Our simple functions as fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters no longer excite us because we have traded eternal life for the plastic trophies of this world. One thing that always amazes me is that within three months after the Super Bowl or NCAA Tournament, I can’t even remember who won, because it really doesn’t matter. But I never forget Christmas or Easter or Pentecost or the Ascension days, because those matter immensely.

Nothing angers unbelievers so much as the idea that you were made for a higher purpose, made by a living God who resides outside of time and space but speaks to us here. The purpose is to serve him and serve others, and the primary way we do that, if not married to Christ or his Church, is marriage between one man and one woman. Having a marriage and family is the great purpose of our earthly lives.

Why is that message so bothersome? Because it doesn’t allow us to follow our base instincts, which is to pleasure ourselves constantly. It requires abandonment to a higher power and a higher purpose, neither of which is the self. Sometimes we confuse this, thinking that our “sacrifice” for work or school is the offering we make to God. But those things are ultimately for the self, not God. Offerings to God expect nothing in return, because there is no transaction to be made when dealing with God, and if your offering is contingent on receiving something from God, you are actually talking to the devil.

Yes, some people are not fertile, some will live a single life, some will adopt, some will never have children. Abandonment of the self means conforming your life to God’s will, not despairing over what struggles he has given us, because we are all given struggles in order to draw us closer to him. Until you realize this, suffering will seem arbitrary and unfair.

As for sex, the great call to chastity is pursuing a life of virtue whether you are married or single. They are both chastity, just different types. How can anyone understand the parable of the grain of wheat without looking at the formless void of creation and seeing that in order to fill it, it must be done in the right way, which is to fill this void in the form with families? God didn’t say, “Subdue the earth and form a government, and have the government raise the children.” No, that’s what Karl Marx said, and all of his flunkies that followed him, who now occupy your employer’s human resources department and local school board.

The form we are given by God is called marriage, between a man and a woman, and the void is filled with new life, called children. That sentence there is enough to get me fired, but the truth must be spoken and the truth will remain whether I say it or not. Because not only does marriage and family fulfill the physical form of this world, but it fulfills the heart. Dying to self means maturing into a greater purpose to serve God and others. Only then can we be spiritually reborn here. Then in physical death, if we choose God’s will and not our own, we will we be brought back to union with God in eternal life. That’s what we want, both here and hereafter. We don’t want what HBO is telling us to want. We don’t really want what Apple is selling. It’s not just sex that we want. Not just career. Not a threesome. Not four wives. Not soullessness. We want God, as it is in heaven and on earth. Psalm 128 is the model for fulfillment.

Your wife will be like a fruitful vine

within your house;

your children will be like olive shoots

around your table.

Thus shall the man be blessed

who fears the Lord.

FYI: “Fear” of the Lord means wonder and awe, a healthy fear, not the kind of fear where you simply pay your taxes to avoid jail. This is a kind of fear that grows out of love, wonder, awe, reverence, and it all starts with knowing that you are a sinner in need of forgiveness, in need of a savior. Recognizing your status as a sinner will free you, because it sheds all the fig leaves we wear. Then once we have bore our souls before God, and become honest, open, and willing, then we can return to the faith of a child and let the ego wither away as it must. Recall that Jesus died naked on the cross. All was stripped away, and his death showed us the result of our sins, for what we did to Jesus we do to one another every day.

This doesn’t mean it’s easy, but if you fear the Lord and are grateful for your daily bread and want nothing beyond the grace of God, only then will the blessings of a wife and children satisfy you, because you will share all of it with the Creator. And if some tragedy occurs, like in the book of Job, and all is taken away, even then you will still have the grace of God, as that is the rock of your life that can be clung to when everything else fades away. When your life becomes an offering to God, and God’s endless offering of creation is accepted by you, then what more could you possibly want? Conforming your will to God’s is how you level-up in this world, and you do this by praying.

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 sales, when you have to sell a lemon, and you know it’s a lemon, and the buyer knows it’s a lemon, then as a salesperson you must re-craft the story for the second sale. Bad products require a good story, and one that gets told and re-told often. How else could Coca-Cola make an entire nation obese and continue to sell the same product without relentless marketing? How else could Bud Light sell a watered-down tasteless slop without funny ads that convince children it’s cool? With a good story, and one that is constantly updated, no one has to feel like a fool for buying it the first time, or the thousandth time. The trick is keeping up the smoke and mirrors so that the buyers feel “in da club.” People don’t want to admit, undo, or take action against prior bad decisions, so a fresh, shiny story helps re-affirm a poor choice. An ever-changing, shape-shifting narrative is essential to this strategy. Rather than feel stupid and admit something is a bad product and bad choices were made, we just modify the story. Surely, the crafted story will insist, something just wasn’t quite right the first time around. This time it will be better. This time, the bugs are fixed. Version 2.0 is improved. The installation was done incorrectly. The product wasn’t tuned properly. This time, the springs won’t break and the bottom won’t rust out.

The first time a terrible idea was bought happened in the Garden of Eden. Eating the fruit, it was said, would make the people like gods, but it didn’t. So this was a bad sale. It was a faulty product. It was a bad sale, based on a lie, for a product that couldn’t deliver what was promised. The fruit only led to sin. If the devil had been a vendor on Amazon, Eve would have written a one-star review.

But the devil is a relentless salesman, with an apparent quota and target number, so he comes back with new pitches for the same old awful product. Since we are humans, and curious, and because we hate to admit that we are suckers, we give him another chance. In re-crafting the story, he returns with something of interest, something different than a fruit, to sell us the same rotten garbage.

In modern times, a reverse Garden of Eden happened, where for men, women became the fruit. Consuming her would make men like gods. The same Fall happened all over again, because when you eat from the tree of knowledge instead of the tree of life, you get sick. Instead of loving, respecting, and supporting women, through sickness and death, for richer or poorer, until death do us part, men opted for quickies and no responsibility. But we did not become like gods. We became estranged from them because we forgot that they are the crown of creation, the finishing touch on this world. We became islands instead of joined together with them. And because of this choice, many men became divorcees, isolated in apartments, separated from our wives and children in broken homes, lost because we or our parents bought the lie that monogamy and chastity could not make us happy, when it is only virtues like these that can ever make us happy, because they bring us closer to God.

When men stopped believing that they are joined in the flesh with their wives in marriage, they stopped leaving their families and cleaving to their wives. I don’t think most men today have even heard of the “leave and cleave” idea. I certainly hadn’t. No one ever gave me a “leave and cleave” sit-down chat, because most people had forgotten it, or never heard of it. The TV certainly was not teaching it. If anything, the TV was shouting for divorce and birth control. There are so many stories of men coming drunk to their weddings in the 1970s that it is no wonder the state we are in, since treating the Sacrament like a bachelor party invalidates the ceremony.

This is why American culture is dying. But this is not a bad thing in its current form. You can tell which way a nation is heading by whether it leads its citizens toward God or away from him. If cultural practices and laws attempt to block or silence God, then God will indeed withdraw from the nation. God’s grace is available, but when media and politicians actively put up smokescreens, God will allow it. He’ll just pop up later once the chaos ensues and say, “Here I am.” The only thing a culture can do to God is attempt to hide him, but his Presence punches through regardless to those who he calls. And as for our faltering society, which is bent on self-worship: it’s not much of a culture to speak of anyway when the American centerpieces are money and power (which we mis-label “liberty”). The pitch, demonstration, and sale of Americanism has played itself out. The shiny product of Jeffersonian Democracy turned out to be a lemon, just like the fruit in the Garden, and the only thing propping it up for the past 250 years has been Christendom. The last days of America will be chaotic, because that’s the exact result of life without God.

The funny thing about this attempt to normalize and celebrate immorality is that it just brings us back to an old familiar place. The next generations will come to know the same conditions that made the world ripe for Jesus and the Apostles to change the world, and perhaps the most radical thing of all that was preached was chastity.

Chastity is not a flaw in Christianity. It is one of the main reasons why early Christianity took off. It is self-denial, not self-affirmation, that frees us from slavery.

In the birth of Christianity, women led much of the charge. Starting with Mary Magdalene at the tomb, women are first to find the risen Jesus, before the stubborn and fearful men do. Like Mary Magdalene, they lead men to faith, or like Eve, they can easily lead men away. Why? Because we want women and follow them. Women tend to find the meaning of Jesus before men, and this is how millions of men end up in churches to this day. Rest assured that many men are in the “sexist” church on Sunday under orders from their wife. They are rousted from bed to get dressed for getting to church, because women often understand Jesus and need for a savior more readily than men.

The sanctity of marriage was real among practicing Christians in the first centuries, and still is. In the Roman world, marriage was a joke, as it is in secular America now. No-fault divorce is one of most anti-Christian developments in the Western world, but it is nothing new. Jesus admonished his own people in his own time for disrespecting marriage. Whenever I hear that “Christianity doesn’t respect women,” this is a statement that is a naked rejection of facts from history and the story of the gospel. My own college history textbook stated that Islam treated women with more respect. The main thing I learned in college was “Christianity Bad,” especially for women. But reading the history of the Church, that doesn’t fit at all.

I mean, the thing is, you actually have to read. You cannot just ingest a video from a YouTube influencer who hates the church because his uncle was mean, or nod at a modern academic’s portrayal because he had to pick a thesis on Marxist theory that would get accepted by the humanities journals.

The Church was led by the Apostles, but it was filled by women. It’s worth noting that the creation story follows a pattern, where the “formless void” from the very first sentence of the Bible has a three day period of making a form, of construction and architecture, and the second three day period fills that “house” with beings. The Church was a formless void, which needed structure first, and then it had to be filled with people. Pentecost is the “let there be light” moment, and the structure of the Church is then formed in the shape of the Apostles, who appointed bishops and ordained priests. But a church of merely bishops and priests would be a empty and lonely place, just as the creation of galaxies and stars and planets would be boring without something living in the void. A beautiful church has an architecture and form, but without people inside singing and worshipping, what’s the point? For the same reason, outer space is boring because there is nothing in it. Only the stars make it interesting. The same goes for planets, where a rock spinning in space without life is nowhere we want to visit. Empty churches are great for contemplation of God’s greatness, but solitude is not the primary purpose of any Church.

Now this is important: notice that once God completes the first three days of architecting things, and after filling the earth with plants and animals, he creates man. In the first chapter of Genesis, he creates man and woman at the same time, but in chapter two, there is a critical thing to notice about how he completes and caps this great project of creation. The last thing created is woman, like the finishing touch on a great work of art. In other words, all of the architecture of the first three days, and all of the creatures and things in the second three days, including the man, Adam, are incomplete without the glorious master stroke of God in creating the woman. This is important to understand, because if Jews and Christians hated women so much, then why is the crown of all creation Eve, a woman? The problem we have is that we don’t venerate woman nearly as much as we should, and anyone that misunderstands the veneration of Mary in the Church is missing this point, that womanhood and the gift of motherhood and marriage are utterly sacred parts of humanity, the likes of which we cease to exist without.

You have to ask yourself a few things.

If the Church hates women so much, then why was the early Church inundated with women converts?

If the Church hates women so much, why did so many women in the early Church want to have a Christian husband?

If the Church hates women so much, then why was marriage to one woman for life so important to men of the Church?

If the Church hates women so much, then why did women get to participate in Christian worship, from the beginning, when they didn’t get to in any other religion?

If the Church hates women so much, then why are they involved with so many parts of administration and education at churches?

If the Church hates women so much, then why are so much of the liturgical calendar days every year dedicated to women saints and martyrs?

If the Church hates women so much, then why do we have so many saints that are women?

An answer to all of the above questions is simple. The answer is that the Church does not hate women.

The idea of complementarity is anything but hateful. It’s reality and it respects women far more than second and third wave feminism ever did. First wave feminism was just the secular re-assertion of what the Church had already been teaching, but obviously men had failed women terribly in practicing it. What the Church teaches and what people actually do in life rarely match up. That is the case today, too. The later stages or “waves” of feminism were all about abortion and divorce, at which point the Church must part ways, since the goals from the 1960s onward did not deal with human dignity, but rather centered on the blessing of murder and adultery. Jesus was against those things, and it wasn’t popular to say so when he was alive, nor is it today, yet it must be said. The modern stage of feminism, like stage four cancer, is pure delusion. The great irony today is that men wearing women’s clothing have moved in and hijacked the ship of feminism because the ship shifted from Platonic, Aristotelian, and Christian ideals over to Sophist, Enlightenment, and Marxist ideas. This is how all good things fall apart. In case you wonder when and where the shift happened, it’s easy to spot. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a Christian, schooled in a seminary, steeped in classical philosophy and she had a healthy fear of God. Betty Friedan was schooled as a Marxist and God was nowhere in sight.

This is the most modern story you can tell, because this is the story of America as it sheds God’s graces and runs with Lady Liberty’s hair flowing in the breeze as she rushes into the arms idolatry of the Self and the State.

The difference between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Betty Friedan is that the former was arguing for “The Truth” and the latter was arguing for that slippery and shape-shifting serpent known as “My Truth.” It’s literally Socrates against the Sophists all over again.

What Betty Friedan really meant to say was this: “Men failed women.” And she was 100% correct. Betty Friedan was correct about come things, and wrong about everything else. Personally, I crush on Dorothy Day. Because Betty saw birth control and smashing men as the cure for society, as the panacea for the yearning of the bored mother and wife. Yet now women have all the opportunities of men and the yearning continues, but is worsened into a gnawing because of the degraded state of motherhood and marriage. Dorothy Day saw the errors of Marx and came to believe in the beauty of motherhood and marriage. Betty saw childless careerism as the solution because she was an unhappy Marxist (and I’ve yet to meet or read of a joyful one).

Truly, it’s ironic how these two women passed like ships going in different directions. Dorothy Day started with an abortion and had two marriages, only to find Jesus and the Church. She then proceeded to feed a million homeless people and restore thousands of families to health. In contrast, Betty Friedan had one husband and one family, but her ideas advocated for divorce and abortion and led to more broken homes than the family tree of Genghis Khan.

The thing about “The Truth” as opposed to “My Truth” is this: Imagine a man standing in a pool that is just deeper then he is tall. He has two beachballs, one large and one small. “My Truth” is what you see him holding above the water, but underwater he is desperately trying to keep the other ball, the giant inflated beachball, between his knees, so that it doesn’t pop up and reveal “The Truth.” It is an awkward state to be in, because it takes so much work and struggle to pretend that “My Truth” is “The Truth.” This is why people who see Christ for who he is are so relieved. Augustine saying, “My heart was restless until is rested in Thee” is the admission of the man in the pool who has stopped trying to keep the giant beachball submerged and pinned between his knees. It’s a relief. For goodness sakes, even finding Socrates is a start if you can’t find Jesus yet. Read Plato, today if you can, and then the Gospels, if you can’t quite stomach the miracles.

Men stopped treating marriage as a covenant, and Christianity became a joke. But this all goes back to sin being blessed and allowed in the culture. The heresies that deviate from Catholic teaching is the root cause, and men were hearing the shape-shifting voice of “My Truth” long before Betty Friedan ever started arguing in favor of abortion and pornography. I could drop a long list of male names who heeded the devil’s voice before her, starting around the year 1500, but I’ll resist the urge.

The other reason why men treat women poorly has a simple answer. It’s actually the same answer. That answer is this: sin is real. And so is the devil.

Fallen men find bad patterns of living, and one of those patterns is the overly macho persona that spawned Burt Reynolds in the 1980s, as he marked the pinnacle of the Playboy era. Today, at the end of macho men, we are naturally rebounding into an excess of macho women.

If you’ve ever balanced tires or watch a mechanic do so, you can see how this happens. If I’ve used this metaphor before, I apologize. When an unbalanced tire spins on the balancing machine, they get violent, and as we all know from Newton, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. To resolve the unbalanced tire, you stop the machine, reset, hammer the weights onto the rim, and restart it. You don’t just speed up the machine and hope it balances itself. It takes work to fix the unbalanced wheel, not just faith. It requires evaluation and action. The mechanic may even hit his thumb with the hammer, causing a little pain when stopping to fix things. But you have to stop the machine or it will throw out the bearing.

We’re nearing that point where the whole machine breaks down because we’re spinning violently and blaming each other when the problem is the lack of balance in our relationships.

If you understand the concept of the Fall of Man, you will understand why we have sin and suffering. If you think that the Church invented sin, or that sin isn’t our fault and came from Pandora’s Box, or that people are all good with no flaws, then you cannot understand Christ. But if you understand the Fall and come to know our own weakness and poverty comes by choice and by our putting evil thoughts into action, you will humbly understand that there is sin. There are two types of sin as well, ones that offend God like lust and greed, and there is also physical sin that causes suffering and pain. We tend to only focus on the physical and mental suffering, while we completely ignore the massive tumor of spiritual sin that weighs us down.

Whenever women are disrespected, as in our modern culture today, we have forgotten that every human is made in the image and likeness of God, the imago Dei, and more specifically, we have taken our eyes off of Christ. We’ve started to sink in the water, just as Peter did. The great question of “Why Did Peter Sink?” that this entire blog is centered around applies to this.

To accuse the Church as being anti-woman is to ignore history as well as Christ’s life itself. Yes, many men in history have disrespected women, but “disrespecting women” is no more of a Church doctrine than geocentrism ever was. Just as Copernicus and Galileo didn’t disprove the faith and morals of the Church, neither has your angry uncle’s treatment of his wife. Disrespecting women is not a position of the Church. It never has been. The fact that the Apostles were men is not disrespecting women, it’s just that Jesus formed his church this way. If he had selected twelve women as his Apostles, then the Church would be structured that way. If you go back to the “formless void” of creation, which is a critical two-word term in the Bible, note again that in creating, God first makes structure and then populates and fills it with living things. In the first chapter of the Bible, we see the mode of creation that God uses, which is to architect and build the house, and then he fills the house with plants, animals, and people. Whether you believe in 6-day Creation, theistic evolution, or even atheistic evolution, we all know that the world was created before living things filled it. Whether you believe that the first bacteria came from an asteroid or from the finger of God, there is no denying that the structure in which bacteria could live had to exist prior to bacteria performing it’s first act of mitosis and splitting into two bacteriae.

The formation of the Church happens like this as well. Jesus creates his Church by choosing Apostles, and suddenly there is a structure - a form. But with a mere twelve people, this form has no living things in it. Bishops and Priests alone do not make up the Church. It doesn’t even seem a stretch to me to see Pentecost, the day that the tongues of fire touched the Apostles and Mary, as the moment of “Let there be light” in the universe. I’ve often felt that the “light” made much sense in the idea of the Big Bang, in the concept of fire, while simultaneously meaning “light” as in the act of creation itself. Pentecost was the Big Bang of the Christian story, as it exploded from Jerusalem, as critical mass was reached in prayer in the upper room when the tongues of fire touched the Apostles.

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

If you don’t believe in heaven, then you have to try to find it here on earth.

And you won’t. But you will spend a lifetime looking for it.

You may think you found it for a minute, but it’s fleeting. There is no metaphor used more often as an illustration of heaven than sex, and there is no more apt metaphor for the illusion of an earthly heaven as well, because no matter how much sex you have, you still have most of the day where you are not doing it. After the ecstasy, the march of hours awaits. You might even say this is the difference between Pop music and the Blues, where Pop suggests that good feelings set you free, and the Blues (and Country) confirm the aftermath. Belinda Carlisle sings “You make heaven a place on earth” and Bill Withers reports from Act II of life, after you’ve made a lover your idol and she fails to live up to it, “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.”

What we substitute for God is the definition of an idol, and sex is the #1 greatest hit substitution of all time. It’s not the only thing. There are others: there is the next big thing, the exotic, the new, the sensory high, the perfect partner, the perfect society, the flawless family, a career, a new spouse, a life where we are never offended or hurt, or sports teams, or cars and boats. But all of these substitutes prove to be empty trophies in the long run. Why? Because they are substitutes, like Splenda or Equal instead of real cane sugar. They taste similar but they are artificial replacements that lack nourishment.

All of our substitutes for God are attempts to arrange the world in a way that we want it, in a struggle with how God set this world up for us to live in. Like it or not, we are here, and even the mystics and mindful have to come back to earth to eat and go to the bathroom. There is no substitute for the needs of both the body and the soul. This is why our relationship to God must be personal for the good of the soul, and our relationship to food, drink, sex, and all of creation must be personal for the good of the body.

You will never arrive at heaven here in this world. Good feelings do not equal heaven. I don’t care how hot she is; I don’t care how delicious the cake is; I don’t care how high the drug takes you: you will never find peace in any of those things. Billions have tried it. And billions have come down that mountain empty-handed. The illusions fade. The high wears off. Youth, beauty, power, and wealth fades. In the 21st century, nowhere is this illusion more obvious than in these areas: sports, careers, relationships, and entertainment. Everyone is squabbling over these scraps as if they bring eternal life.

So no, you will never arrive at heaven here in this world. But you can get a peek of it. It’s just not via the ways that the world promises, and the media today, most of all, from Disney to Victoria’s Secret to OnlyFans, pretends that sex is the key to unlocking heaven here on earth, but it’s a mirage in the desert that offers no living water to those who pursue it.

You need something more substantial, steady, rock-solid, and unchanging to provide the food for your life, your hope, and your peace. That food is from the Bread of Life, both divine and human. That peace comes through a relationship in prayer, in humility before God. Any other angle or technique and it’s not going to happen. As long as you try to be the potter instead of being the pot, as long as you try to shape everything into the shape you want instead of conforming your will to God’s, you will be searching for something that did not exist in the beginning, is not now, and never will be. There is only one that was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever.

I know many, many people, including myself, that have tried to find it the quick and easy way, and didn’t get what they wanted. Worse, many have got what they wanted and found that it wasn’t really what they were looking for. It’s interesting to watch people get what they want and then start chasing the next thing. I did this, repeatedly, for many years, until I finally landed on the one thing that fulfills all desire.

What’s interesting is that sex became a centerpiece of what we think of as “fulfillment” and chastity has become the dirty word. That which dare not speak its name is not not adultery or homosexuality or pornography. No.

It’s chastity.

Is anyone surprised by this? I can recall watching a thousand TV shows, from Doogie Howser to Desperate Housewives to Game of Thrones, and hearing a thousand songs, from Led Zeppelin to Snoop Dogg to Rihanna, that suggested that virginity and chastity were not something to celebrate but something to be mocked. Virginity was to be removed, as quickly as possible, like a malignant tumor.

That is the environment and message that anyone growing up with a TV in the last fifty years had to experience. Most men have a story of the first Playboy centerfold they witnessed, or other magazine, that opened the door to artificial concepts of women and sex. Upon sight, those images were embossed into the memory, seared like a steak on a blazing hot grill. You cannot unsee pornography. Millions of men are stuck in that rut forever after, because women have become objects of pleasure and nothing more. Today, thanks to science and technology, billions of children who are raised on iPhones have this capability to discover what cannot be unseen, and they can see it whenever they wish.

Here is my thesis on all of this.

Men have failed women.

More precisely, men have failed to grow up and take responsibility. We tend to think of education and career as signs of maturity, but these are false signals. A career is not “growing up.” Nice possessions do not indicate maturity. A mortgage does not make a man. A laundry list of experiences do not lead to wisdom. All of these things have been promoted as giving purpose to life, and none of them do that. These are all selfish things, which are not bad by themselves, but when placed as the highest thing lead to the abandonment and rejection of women, who become just another object to obtain, use, and discard.

If you read the history of the sexual revolution, it was not driven by women. This is probably the greatest myth of our era, more damaging than the UFO mythology, and less fun as well. The sexual revolution was driven by men, by so many Peter Pans who weren’t stuck in innocent childhood but were stuck in perpetual adultolescence, playing adult while acting like college sophomores forever after.

Here’s something you need to consider and examine very seriously to understand and de-program yourself from what you’ve been sold:

The birth control movement was not about women.

The abortion movement was not about women.

Neither of those movements was for the benefit of women.

It was always about men.

It was about men getting away with treating women like objects, like single-use throwaway humans, and taking no responsibility for the sex that they wanted to have without acting as fathers and husbands. That’s the dirty secret of the whole sexual revolution. It wasn’t about freedom for women. It was about freedom for men.

The fact that everyone bought into it doesn’t justify it any more than slavery was justified by bad-faith interpreters. No, the argument of “Fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong” doesn’t hold up, especially when it comes to issues of faith and morals. The fact that Americans and Europeans buy the modern identity lies just illustrates how well the sales pitch and demonstration was, but we are now all witness to the real world application and the disaster it has brought over the past fifty or seventy years. As I’ve mentioned in this series, there are three parts to a sale: the pitch, the demonstration, and the real world application. The pitch and demo looked good, but now we see the fruit of buying a bad product. And this should be where the second sale fails. It should fail, because the product and idea that was sold didn’t work.

When the first sale had a good pitch and initial demonstration, but the product is a flop in the real world, the second sale should never happen unless the buyer is a sucker. We will find out in the Generation after Z if the suckers are really suckers, or if the world turns back to the truth. One thing is certain, written about from Plato’s Republic to the Book of Judges to The Fall of Ancient Rome to 20th Century Nationalism: calamity must come from a bad idea that has taken hold of a people before they are awakened to repentance. There is spiritual combat on a personal level and a group level, and of course the only way to win on both levels is to fight the spiritual warfare starting with oneself.

Now, a good salesperson can ram that second sale through. They often do. I’ve watched them do it to customers who should absolutely ditch a software product. But eventually, with a bad product, the employees, buyers, and users revolt. No, let me rephrase that. They don’t so much revolt as simply withdraw support. Employees leave the company, buyers write bad reviews, and users find a new method of doing their work. In other words, in seeking the good, people go elsewhere when bad ideas are selected and insisted upon. You can see this today in public schools and police forces, where bad ideas have been selected by the governors and administrators. It is rare to talk to a teacher or police officer who is not praying for the day they reach twenty years of service so that they can lock in their pension, and then quit, or find a new way to increase their years in government service. They are withdrawing. As we are made in the image and likeness of God, we act in ways that mimic God without even knowing it - in some things. In choosing sin, we do not act like God, but in pursuing the good, true, and beautiful, we do act like God, and why is this? Because what we are really pursuing is God himself. Heaven. To be with God - that’s the whole point of all of our actions, we just don’t usually realize it.

For those who think God “causes” bad things to happen, he does not. He acts just like employees, buyers, and users of a bad product. He simply withdraws and allows the chaos to re-enter. Recall how the Bible opens, where God stretches his hand out over the “watery chaos.” We are never that far from chaos, and all that keeps us from it is God’s hand. The universe could be snapped out of existence now if God merely tweaked the gravitational constant by a hundredth. Many do not understand what the Great Flood story is about, because we don’t teach it properly to children, so we just think it’s some folklore about animals and a localized flood in the middle east. But it’s not about that, not at the deeper level.

God does not send the flood, he simply withdraws his protection over sinful people, because they have adopted a substitute for God, and since they refuse to turn back to him, he simply stops holding the chaos back. The deluge happens on its own as he no longer graces creation with order. He allows the full disorder to occur again - the watery chaos. I didn’t understand what “watery chaos” meant until my near-drowning in the Ironman race, but once I was floating in a stormy lake, the penny dropped on the meaning. This withdrawing of God also happens at the Tower of Babel story, where God withdraws from sinful people and scatters them. He doesn’t send us sin, we create it, and then he lets it play out, like the loving father in the Prodigal Son. God says, “Yes, I’ve given you free-will, so if you want to drink and w***e around, you can, but you can’t do it with my blessing, so you’re on your own.” Notice that the father in the Prodigal Son gives the wild child his money and the child leaves - he doesn’t bring the prostitutes into his father’s house. God remains perfect, and we go chasing foolish substitutes. So you could say that either we withdraw from God, or he withdraws from us, but either way, he is good and loving and the choice of rejection via substitution is always, always one that we make.

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So we are back at the start. Or we are back at a kind of start. Like Abraham. Like Agnes. We are back to the place where Abraham was called out of Ur of the Chaldees. We are back to the day that Moses was called out of Egypt. We are back to the Annunciation where Mary said Yes to Gabriel. We are back to Christ going into the wilderness to defeat the devil. And we are back to Agnes rejecting her culture and choosing a life of chastity and marriage to Christ over the chaos and immoral culture surrounding her. We are back to the place where the calling comes to say “No” to the culture and “Yes” to God.

We are back to where professing Christ’s Crucifixion and membership in the Catholic Church that Jesus founded is the ultimate counter-cultural act. We are back to the time when obedience to God and his Church are the best way to lose friends and alienate people. And thank God for that!

The time of Agnes has, once again, arrived. It seems clear to me that Agnes and Abraham would have much to speak about if they ever ran into each other at a waiting room. But it might be a short conversation.

Agnes: “So, Abraham, I hear you had to leave your family and your city and your entire way of life?”

Abraham: “Yes, the culture…I just had to leave it.”

Agnes: “Oh, I completely understand,” (Her phone starts buzzing, and she picks it up) “Sorry, Abe, someone is calling.”

Abraham: “I know who it is.”

Agnes: Hello? God? Yes, it’s me, Agnes!”

Fist bump.

The struggle today is to come up for air, because the culture has a pole that tries to keep us shoved underwater, gasping for air. But truth always rises. So no matter how much dancing and singing we can see underwater, we are meant to breathe easy. We eventually come up for air and have to fight off the pole, by necessity. Hardship, suffering, or a death in the family will make us sick and tired of all the gasping. What we really want, most of all, is to rest in the truth, and his name is Jesus.

As they say in recovery circles, we become “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Enough nonsense, give me something real. Enough TV, enough books, enough beer, enough video, enough news. At some point you just want to stop pretending that what is not important is important. I want to rest in something more. Let me be free to love God and follow him and not care who laughs. Let me be open to the Holy Spirit and let it transform how I see everything. For many years, the saying of Jesus, “Let the dead bury their dead” confused the heck out of me, but once you experience the conversion of this earthly life, “the dead” makes incredible sense. This life is not all there is. There is so much more that we cannot see but can somehow know, because God is impossibly far but infinitely close to us. Who can possibly explain it? Not me. But I can tell you that once it happens, you will know what St. Paul meant when he spoke of seeing dimly through the glass, because the reflection of the self will be gone and the world, both physical and spiritual, will be seen:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13:11-13)

What amazes me the most is that some saints come to know that as teenagers. Others have to wait, and some have to wait until the moment of death, like St. Dismas, the Good Thief, who is crucified with Jesus and finds him in the final hour.

When you see someone come up for the air, and they completely change their life, you will witness a miracle. They are no longer dead in their sins. When we do come up for air, we get an opportunity to see that the underwater world we thought was real was only an aquarium. The plants are fake, the rocks are artificial, even the scuba man at the bottom is plastic. Reality must be faced, and powerlessness against time and space is a fact that we are all dealt at some point. At these moments of inflection in our lives, God is speaking to us, and we get to choose: will we play against him, or with him? But we all have to learn this our own way, on God’s time. Nothing can be coerced.

Wealthy men, academics, and for-profit media has preached and prayed for us to submit to the false gods, the sex god, the money god, the self god, the sports god, telling us that the only way to fulfillment was through our achievements, affiliations, and our reproductive parts (which we try not to ever use for the actual purpose of reproduction now). Bank accounts and awards and entertainment try to console us in our pursuit of false happiness. Pills and plastic devices have been engineered to un-engineer the nature of our organs. We are told that the design of our bodies is not for unity and procreation with the obvious complementarity of man and woman, but instead only for our temporary pleasure, not much different from a bowl of delicious Cinnamon Toast Crunch (which I no longer keep in the house).

What’s most strange is that in our separation of body from soul, the most scientifically minded fellows, who harp on the need for objective reality and truth, willingly abandon that noble goal of objective reality like a Soviet scientist in order to be fashionable for the cultural zeitgeist. Fads that lack basis in objective reality silence otherwise serious people. Even what is known through the naked eye somehow befuddles modern scientists, as the idea of womanhood has proven too hard a nut to crack for academic cowardice and timidity. For 30,000 years of evolution, this required no diploma to articulate. For most of us who can see the naked emperor, we just say it out loud, but many academics, even those trained in the hard sciences, insist that the Emperor’s clothes are glorious.

Something is amiss. “Follow the science” has become as amorphous as “Support the troops” or “The future is female.” What we now call “the science” is a moving target, because real scientists, actual biologists, refuse to tell us what a woman is, for fear of reprisal.

This is why another Agnes is coming.

I am fairly certain that babies know what a woman is better than professors today, because they know their food comes from a woman, a mother, not some man dressed up as a woman or mutilated to play the part. Putting away childish things means living in your body, which is a gift from God, for the purpose for which you are. Anything else is fantasy, as much as wishing to be born in another place and time, or taller, or better looking. When I saw dimly through the glass I only saw a reflection, but when God calls you no longer see the reflection of yourself but the Imago Dei, the image and likeness of God, in yours and every other face, and then you can go forth, reborn, without the self.

What’s sad is seeing so many adults willingly donning the shock-collar of fear. Afraid not to look “progressive” enough, we turn into clams. Growing up in America, I heard the propaganda that only in the Soviet Union would adults have to conform their data to the party line. Surely such a thing could never happen here! Yet here it is. A kind of quietism is happening as universities today, but unlike mystic meditation where you seek God, the great thinkers are afraid to step anywhere or make a peep for fear of stepping on the devil’s toes. Of course, this fear has a lot to do with the loss of employment and missing mortgage payments, because job loss is the cudgel the party-line uses instead of Siberian prison camps.

That’s why Agnes will triumph again. Teenage girls have neither the baggage of adults nor the filter. When the next Agnes discovers who and what she is, she will reject the culture and the culture will attack her because the culture cannot look upon its sins honestly.

Most wonderful is the irony. Catholics are mocked for faith in the Eucharist as the Body and Blood of Jesus, but modern people have more faith in things that cannot happen or do not exist at all. Many highly educated people believe in magical transformations of boys turning into girls by putting on a skirt, or in the mysterious bat in China that caused Covid (an animal that will never, ever be found because it came from a science lab). For this reason, the truth claims of our culture need to be examined and re-examined because many of the claims require as much faith, if not more, than believing in the 37 miracles performed by Christ.

Frankly, believing in Jesus walking on water is far easier for me to believe than that teenagers can transform into a cat, simply by the act of posting on social media and declaring a feline transformation.

The pitch for this sale is weak. The story is so bad. What stuns me, especially after my own falling away and returning, is the staying power of the Gospel story. Why is that? Because it is a better story. It’s the greatest story ever told, and I’ve read a lot of stories.

The awful story that comes from the modern universities, the media, and influencers, and the dull hook of it all is that through some sexual act we will reach the mountain of knowing. Through some pile of money, we’ll be happy. Through some act of the self-will, we will “manifest” or self-actualize.

But we won’t.

Let’s use a quote from Fight Club to round this out.

“We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

But there’s no need to be angry. Once the post-adolescent teenage angst wears off, the solution is waiting. This is the Good News: there is a solution. There is an answer. No, it’s a not a Fight Club, or a bank account full of money, or an orgy, or a pill. No, it’s far stranger than that. The answer is a person. He’s a person and you can know him, but you have to talk to him. You don’t need to be angry, or join a Fight Club. But you do have to do one thing. All you have to do is give up everything you thought you knew. And very soon will come another Saint Agnes, who will show us exactly how to do that. In the verse below, substitute “teenage girl” for “man”, and female pronouns for male pronouns, and you will hear once again the ancient message of St. Agnes that cries out to our world today.

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life? (Mt 16:24-27)

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I recently had the misfortune to witness a middle-schooler, in public, playing a game on a VR headset, punching at the air and talking about all the blood coming out of the imaginary character he was fighting, and then he started making sexual motions with whatever was left of the imaginary bloody character. This spectacle went on for too long. It dawned on me that we don’t even have to pretend there are invisible demons any longer, people are openly engaging with them. Honestly, watching this kid on the VR headset made me want to call for the nearest exorcist and psychiatrist, although I would guess only the former could truly help.

The world is starving for authenticity. Everything we see on a screen is paper thin. Everything we see in virtual reality is vaporware. A maddening search is happening today for authenticity and the witness of the next Agnes is coming who will jolt many from their slumber and others will attack the authenticity. Those who God calls, hear his voice, and he does indeed call his sheep in mysterious ways.

Already in schools we hear from kids coming home that are being bullied for not being open enough to sex, or ideas about sex. Chastity, and the goal of chastity, is the sin of our age. The occurrences and teachings happening at American schools everywhere would make the Romans at an orgy do a double-take.

While this may seem a tragedy, this may actually be a good sign. It may actually be part of the great comedy, because, as you know, comedy ends in a marriage, and only tragedy ends in death. The marriage of heaven and earth is guaranteed to follow a trial before the passing of this world happens, and all is God’s will. The victory is already won.

(Quick reminder: God is outside of time and space. Only we are within it. Our job is to cooperate with God’s grace that is freely offered. We can reject it, too. The Catechism of the Catholic Church covers all of this. It is truly essential reading, so much that if I am ever exiled to a desert island, I will take three books with me. The Bible, The Catechism, and The Imitation of Christ. If I get a fourth book, Moby Dick, since it is inscrutable and I’d be in a sea setting.)

We are guaranteed a wild fourth quarter before the final buzzer sounds. Whatever you do, do not follow the crowd. The wisdom of the crowd is a myth. Sure, it’s a good title for a book, but Jesus said the opposite when he said that wide is the road that leads to destruction, and the gate is narrow that leads to eternal life. Agnes found the narrow gate.

So whatever is in store for the years ahead, be like Agnes. Be like Mary. Don’t fall for the coming AI bot or VR headset. The great religious deception will claim billons, but, spoiler, God wins in the end. As always, in the end, God gets the victory and the glory. Like all romantic comedies, this all ends in a wedding, because he loves us.

Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

…

The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world. (CCC 675-677)

Cosmic upheaval? Brace yourself. Find a rock to hold onto.

This world is passing, but before it does we will see more saints like Agnes.

We have reached the final end of this era, where unless you are fully committed to unchastity, you are evil. The inversion is made but like a buoy, the right-side-up will bob back into view once we stop trying to drown that which forever floats and can never be sunk.

We’ve gone all the way down now, which means the only way left is to go up, just as Dante shows us so well in the Divine Comedy. From John Wycliffe to Machiavelli to Rene Descartes to Thomas Hobbes to Karl Marx to Michel Foucault to Richard Dawkins to Steve Jobs to the currently trendy Yuval Harari: with all these intellectuals shoving God off-stage, we have reached full selfie-mode and the final stage of “my truth,” which is the descendent of the twin killers of faith called sola scriptura and pure reason.

Getting rid of God did not produce the glorious society, it did not free us from sin, and it did not disprove any Catholic teaching. The Pollyanna ideas of Steven Pinker and Yuval Harari will be as historically comical as the certainty of Hegel’s, Marx’s, and Fukuyama’s claims about “The end of history.”

Rest assured, in case anyone wonders: history as we know it, in time and space on this planet, will be over when Jesus returns. Not before. Not after. For those with concerns about being “on the right side of history,” the right side is that of Agnes and Mary, and Philomena, and Perpetua and Felicity, and all of the other teenage girls who changed the world in the name of Jesus Christ, son of the living God.

After all of the attacks and misinformation and corruption and abuse, the truth of Christ still stands, and will forever stand. And so does the Church. It stands on the triple foundation of Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the Magisterium’s authority. We were taught that all the wars of the past were over religion, but then the twentieth century happened with religion nowhere in sight, which gives us great opportunity to review what we were taught about things like the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War as well. What we learn if we look back, and look hard, is that these were wars of nationalism, of kings and mercenaries, not unlike the World Wars, which were over resources and power. All wars are unlike Christ, but we tell ourselves fibs to blame religion, when it is always powerful and prideful leaders, who may or may not use people’s faith as a tool, to wage wars. The reality is this: religion in Europe and America has been placed under the state for a long time. Even Luther and Calvin traded their budding churches for state protection, and both found early on that to protect their ideas, the sword was needed in carrying forward their interpretations. Once they and so many others took up their personal vocation to be Popes, they then found that putting the toothpaste back in the tube could not be done when the peasant revolts started, because the peasants realized that they also had a vocation and calling to be a Pope. Everyone became a Pope.

Everyone became the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, thus it was no longer sacred. The claim of “My truth” today is how we all crown ourselves Pope. We all want to be King and Pope, and in rejecting the Pope, the Reformation crowned Kings, who hired biased interpreters to argue and sew their desires onto the word of God.

Eventually we all became kings of our own flat, secular lives. “Whose realm, their religion" is a phrase that came out of the 1500s when kings were hammering scripture to fit their needs, and it wasn’t just Henry VIII, it was every realm that realized they could act like Jack in Lord of the Flies and invent their own religion. I have written about this ad nauseam in two long series, one about Abraham and Uranus and one about the Tower of Babel. None of this rejection of God is new.

What is always new is Agnes. The rejection of the rejection of God always stuns us, because we forget that we can say “Yes” to God.

Rejection is the oldest cliche in history. It’s boring. Sin makes you stupid. It always needs a new name. We just pretend every generation that it’s new, but it’s trite and lame. Thinkers like Descartes (or Dawkins, or Harari, et al), they are not doing anything particularly deep, even though we pretend they are. They are just bad ideas with modern jargon that resurrect the moon god religions of old. They expand and expound the moon god with more words, a thousand fold more, all to reduce the authority of God. All they want, really, is to take up the mantle of God, but they can’t. (Sorry creatures: you are created. I know it hurts to hear it.)

So rebellion seems original but it’s like watching re-runs. It’s boring. Every power grab in history is the same, as it is universally a rejection of God and neighbor. When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” he declared “thinking” to be the first principle, which is precisely the fall in the Garden of Eden as the devil places a thought into Eve’s head that she will be like God, and then Adam follows along (and then blames her). The reason Mary’s Fiat, her “Yes” to God is such a big deal, is because it reverse Eve’s “No”. This is why we call Mary the “Undoer of Knots”.

No, Mr. Descartes: thinking is not the first principal of all things. Being itself, a.k.a. God Most High, is the creator. Descartes’ great mistake was to assume that thoughts come from us and are not put there, and he managed to strip away everything but his mind, and in excessive thinking, he became a mouthpiece of the one (hint: it’s the devil) who forever tries to tell us that the soul does not matter, or…or at the very most, if the soul exists at all, is disconnected from the body.

Descartes was an amputee, too. I can relate. Through a long series of academic arguments, I amputated my soul using the methods of Descartes, and so have many others today. But it bears repeating: the good news is that the soul didn’t go anywhere. It’s still linked with the body. In fact, it’s inseparable in the long run. We just “think” it’s been amputated, just as we “think” the devil doesn’t exist, and “think” that God doesn’t exist, or “think” that God isn’t a living God who knows the number of hairs on our heads.

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They say America is a great melting pot, but on a local level it’s Walmart. There is no place where every walk of life, every occupation, every ideology or religion, every fashion choice, every body type or disability, can be seen and shared, at least on the surface level. But what is more amazing is this: all of these people, mingling and bumping carts into one another, shop in relative peace. (Ok, so occasionally there’s a police car outside, but I’ve seen it at Target or Costco, too…just not as often.) Perhaps this general peacefulness is because everyone in the store is focused on getting what they want and then planning on promptly leaving. As long as no one pokes a thorn in the side of our consumerism, apparently we really can get along.

For as long as I can remember, Walmart has been slammed as the angel of small-business death. Walmart holds a unique place of anger in many hearts on both the right and left sides of American politics. I’ve even heard one hyperbolic person say they would rather walk over hot coals than enter a Walmart store.

We really enjoy arguing, especially about politics, economics, and religion, but even things like retail stores. There was an old saying “Arguing with an engineer is a lot like wrestling in the mud with a pig. After a few hours, you realize the pig likes it.” To that point, about ten years ago, I sat in a meeting room for an entire week of product design listening, and occasionally contributing, to a battle between front-end web engineers over which javascript library we should select for use in our product. Yes, an entire week of arguing about a part of a product that customers would neither see nor care about.

But no matter whether you love it, hate it, or just secretly go to Walmart on vacation when you need something and think you won’t be seen, Walmart is the only place on earth where you can get a fishing pole, frozen fish, a fish piñata, and a pet fish, all while getting the brakes fixed on your fishing boat.

From my years of listening to disdain for Walmart, the problem for many consumers is not the global supply chain or the treatment of workers or the environmental impact. The real issue shoppers have with Walmart is that they don’t want to mingle with “the people” who shop there. There is a subtle implication toward something awful when a voice laments, “I had to go to Walmart,” as if they just used a port-a-potty on the third day of a rock music festival.

The phrase, “people of Walmart,” is a modern wink between folks that hints at the dregs of society, bordering on a modern version of Biblical uncleanliness. The “people of Walmart” in modern America is analogous to the “lepers of Molokai” in 19th century Hawaii. This superiority complex happens not only among my more educated and wealthy friends, it is also expressed among my blue collar friends. I’ve heard the sentiment from various ethnicities and races. There doesn’t seem to be a single “group” of people that have this condescending feeling about Walmart. I cannot discern who will hold the sentiment. The disgust for Walmart transcends our usual tribes, so I can never tell who will start to show symptoms of illness when the word Walmart comes up in conversation.

In any case, I come neither to bury Walmart nor to praise it, but mostly stand in observation of it as the modern marketplace, like the agora of classic Athens but with light-speed logistics, rock bottom prices, and no coupons needed.

Aside from the military, a hospital emergency room, and maybe a waterpark on a hot summer day, there is no place of greater diversity slammed together and in constant interaction than at your average Walmart. College campuses and corporate America are the two least diverse environments in America that I have been a part of, despite their constant trumpeting to claim that prize. In my university and corporate travels over the past 25 years, I have yet to see a hillbilly wielding a dry-erase marker in front of a whiteboard or a man with gold teeth refining his powerpoint presentation. However, I have seen both of these people at Walmart. Real diversity is where you have every class, every race, every religion, every level of education, every disability, every propensity, and every shape of human being imaginable pressed into one place.

Walmart teases out our prejudices. I would go into Walmart and see someone and shake my head. I would comment: “Look at that guy…what a mess. What an absolute mess.” Perhaps you know what I’m referring to. I suspect you do. There are websites dedicated to the people that I’m referring to, like www.peopleofwalmart.com, which I’m not even going to hyperlink because while the site is funny, it’s mainly for sophomores in high school, especially the daily “Feature Creature.”

I realize that comedy can be mean, as there are various ways to get a laugh, such as thwarting expectations, shocking the sensibilities, or good old fashioned body humor that we humans have perfected over thousands of years. And I’m not going to pretend I don’t laugh at those things. As I’ve said before, don’t let this blog/podcast fool you - I am flawed in more ways than one. Yes, I laugh at body humor. For instance, have you seen the trilogy of movies known as Shrek, Shrek 2, and Shrek the Third? I enjoyed those movies. But those movies do not exist without body humor. Here’s a quick summary…Shrek: he’s ugly and overweight. Prince Farquaad: he’s short and dandyish. Prince Charming: He’s a good looking rich prick. The end. Roll credits. That’s the movie. And the movie is hilarious.

People never tire of height and weight and fart jokes because - and this is modern blasphemy to say today - our bodies are funny. There’s just no way around the fact that human bodies make us laugh, and we all know they make us laugh, but some of us today are getting very good at the art of taking offense. But surely even those folks have to stifle a laugh when they see America’s Funniest Videos classic clips of “man getting kicked in the crotch.” To deny that bodies are funny is to deny one of the better parts of our nature, but we are denying it and as a result comedians are declining to book shows at corporations and college campuses, which are, as I’ve mentioned already, the least diverse places in America, as much as they try to tell us otherwise. Consider classic books that use body humor, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; it’s the skinny guy and fat guy buddy adventure story. Or A Confederacy of Dunces’ main character, Ignatius Reilly, who is a stream of endless body humor. Or the movie The Princess Bride - it would not even be a movie worth watching without the six fingered man, Andre “the Giant,” the albino hunchback torturer, the old hag with warts, and the many speech impediments the characters have, in particular the priest who mixes up the letters “W” and “R” and “L”.

Unlike books and movies and Shrek, Walmart is of the flesh and brings out the type of superficial judgment that I also like to pretend I don’t make. Why does this happen at Walmart? Because in that store lives the full array of rednecks, hippies, preppies, snobs, slobs, spinsters, bachelors, gangsters, w*****s, studs, duds, broods, dudes, litters, critters, fops, goths, sloths, freaks, geeks, and even some that give me the creeps.

Luckily, I fit right in with many of these groups. I feel right at home. These are my people.

Back in college I read about a morality test, in a marketing class of all places, coined the “TV Test.” The TV Test goes like this: when engaging in an act of questionable ethics, if your actions were being broadcast to the world, like the movie The Truman Show, you should ask yourself this question: would you still perform the act if the world was bearing witness?

This was a fine test for me to consider in 1997, as at that point I didn’t have time for God, but any religious person knows that this test should be called “The God Test,” which requires no studio or camera, since we are always under the oversight of God. The TV Test is a secular test of morality. If you wouldn’t cheat on your partner while being watched on TV, you probably should just skip hitting on the waitress. If you wouldn’t stuff twenty dollars bills in your pocket while running a cash register and being observed on TV, it’s a good idea to put the money into the drawer. Stealing, cheating, getting drunk, lying, acting rude, watching porn - the TV Test is indeed a good test to reveal unchangeable moral rules. (For the record, shopping at Walmart is an act I would do while being filmed on TV, so that’s how I know it’s not really a wrong action, although I would be embarrassed to be seen buying so many sugary snacks.)

The TV Test works well for determining right and wrong. Take these two actions: smoking cigarettes vs. watching pornography. I would be willing to be seen smoking on television. I would not feel my conscience eating at me. On the other hand, watching porn is something I would definitely NOT want to be seen doing. So it’s easy for me to tell which one if these acts is immoral. One is bad for my health, but the other is bad for my soul. But oddly, many people see smoking as a modern sin while watching porn is no longer considered to be wrong at all. Eating sugar for many is a modern sin, but I would eat a whole bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats on NBC’s Today show and not feel ashamed. I wouldn’t be proud of it, but I would not feel my conscience telling me that eating the added grams of sugar is morally wrong. Clearly, if you don’t want to be seen doing something in public, you can be certain that it’s not right. The internet age has attempted to flip various acts from vice into virtue, but the “small voice” within whispers the real answer to us.

The TV Test has its merits, but there’s one problem, a rather large problem. This kind of test relies on external feelings of how you would act if being observed. This goes directly to our need for approval and our sense of honor and shame. What this test lacks is internal motive. The TV Test is all about what others think about you, not what you think about yourself or how you see the world.

(Oh God, not again, here we go…on to the religious stuff...)

Yes, that’s exactly where I’m going.

The problem of the “TV Test” is the underlying motive. Let’s take the example of the temptation to eat grapes in the produce aisle. Doing the right thing is a wonderful thing in itself, since if you know someone is watching, you probably won’t snatch grapes in the store as you slip through the cool and concealing fog of the produce misters. But that decision to do the right thing and not eat the grapes is a change in behavior that comes from fear of being caught, from someone holding up your immoral act and showing it to the world. In other words, it comes from coercion of outside forces. And make no mistake: Walmart and Target will prosecute, as many errant teens have discovered the rule of law in this way. No one wants to be outed in the local police blotter as a grapelifter. But don’t we all want to eat some grapes at the grocery store? But we don’t eat the grapes if there is fear of getting our hand slapped. (Note: Just stay with me here for a minute on the grape metaphor as a surrogate for all temptation. Replace “grapes” with whatever vice you have such as “do drugs” or “steal” or “cheat” or “get drunk” or “gossip” or “have orgies” or “watch porn all day” or “reject your family” or “hate your mother in law” or “flirt with your ex on Snapchat”…you get the point.)

True change in behavior does not come from fear, it comes from inner change, and trust is another word for faith. This comes from a change in the heart. In other words, doing the right thing can be done by a robot that is programmed to act on certain conditions. This is what totalitarian societies strive for by attempting to convert people into robots based on fear: If this, do that. If not this, then proceed to jail. If still not obedient, flog twenty times, then loop back into society. If still low morale, send to re-education camp. Finally, on error, terminate the defective bot.

We program machines to “do the right thing.” But we are not machines. (Well, I take that back. As a former atheist, I did believe that we were just machines, or merely large organisms of randomly selected chemistry lurching about the earth. I’ve since abandoned that.) For those who still gaze with wonder at the universe and accept mysteries beyond nature, even if only from watching Lord of the Rings or believing in the Lucky Charms leprechaun, there is something special about the ghost and the machine.

To not eat the grapes is righteous, truly, as everyone in their heart knows that stealing grapes is wrong. No matter how plump and tender they look, stealing grapes is wrong. Really, the more plump and tender the grocery store grapes appear, the more you need to resist the urge, as the temptation is greater. No one would ever argue against stealing being wrong unless they have completely lost their mind, or they are perhaps starving. The TV Test teases this out. If stealing was ok, we would just do it and not care. But we do care. So external pressure to follow certain rules works for many things, but this is the robotic kind of decision. This is doing right by external pressure to avoid consequences.

However, there’s a second and very different kind of reason to do the right thing that comes from an internal change. This kind of change does not come from external pressure. In fact, it’s not coerced at all, in any way. It is chosen. Yes, you can be “good without God” but there is still something missing, and true change comes from the one thing that fits the God shaped hole in the Big Empty of our heart. (Oh, here it comes…faith stuff…oh, God, please spare my non-religious readers, help them bear this next part as I start to pontificate on the internal change of heart, the metanoia.)

It comes from faith. And it comes from grace.

As usual, I find something in the Catechism that shows me that 2,000 years of thinking about faith has produced some excellent distillations of the problems we humans face.

To be human, man's response to God by faith must be free, and. . . therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act. God calls men to serve him in spirit and in truth. Consequently they are bound to him in conscience, but not coerced. . . Indeed, Christ invited people to faith and conversion, but never coerced them. For he bore witness to the truth but refused to use force to impose it on those who spoke against it. His kingdom. . . grows by the love with which Christ, lifted up on the cross, draws men to himself." (CCC 160)

Forget about the “TV Test.” I have a new test called the “Walmart Test” and you can do this test even without being a Christian, but it’s much easier if you are one. Upon entering the mart, or even before you enter - you can start this test while you are in the parking lot - pin this single idea on your brain’s bulletin board: that every person you see is a child of God, that every person there is important, and that you can see Christ in each person’s face.

There’s a saying I’ve stolen from a guy who signs his emails with “See Christ in others, be Christ for others.” Somehow it’s always those short proverbial sayings that stick the best in my brain and make the most sense. They cut to the chase. This may be because I’m in my forties now, so phrases of eight words or less are necessary.

This includes seeing Christ in the person that would win “most likely to become Hitler” in your mind’s yearbook of societal characters. You probably already know who I’m talking about. You know who it is. How do I know? Because everyone has a scapegoat, an archetypal villain that we brook own own ego against, to affirm to ourselves, “I’m good, that person is bad.” If any behavior smacks of evidence for original sin, it’s that humans seem wired to seek something or someone to hate. We want approval, we want love, and we’re capable of much love, but we also gravitate toward hate all too readily. We need that opposing force to support our own yearning for righteousness and self-love.

Honestly, don’t we seek out anger? Last night I sat down in my chair, quite content for a moment, and then a minute later, I looked at my phone and saw an article, and I clicked on it and then became instantly agitated. And I realized afterward, did I not perform that act myself? Did I not just become angry by own volition? And for what reason other than I was feeling content and happy! I sought out something to irritate me and disrupt the peace.

We seek agitation, and the phone giveth. Oh, it giveth. Why do we want to dislike something? Despite all the love memes we post on Facebook, there is the equal and opposite force pulling us the other direction. One of the most fascinating phenomenons to watch on Facebook is to have a friend that posts a picture of his or her family followed an hour later by a vitriolic partisan article about a lightning rod political topic. Love - hate - love - hate. It’s like they are saying, “Here’s something I love” and later “Here’s something I hate.” The happy and loving posts almost seem to act as counterbalance to claim their image back from the stronger yearning to communicate how angry they are. I hide these people’s feeds because I can’t handle the constant love/hate, not because I don’t like those people, but because I have to deal with my own tendency toward love and hate along with theirs. One at a time people, get in line. I’ve got my own flaws to fight before I can handle yours. This is where the internet’s poison gets nasty for society, because instead of just dealing with our own extremes we get to observe and react to everyone else’s internal monologue too, and frankly, I am not equipped for flaws beyond my own massive problems and insecurities.

This shame/honor culture and love/hate firehose of opinions lives rent-free in our heads, and in many of us has taken up permanent residency with the fusion of social media into our lives. Even before social media, comments to articles on web pages were rife with this extremism toward honor and shame. This is exactly why I don’t have comments enabled on Why Did Peter Sink? Have you ever, in your online life, read the comments of an article or a social media post on social media and felt better? Have you ever moved on from typing and commenting with a good feeling? I have not. Typing online is a good place to use the “TV Test.” Would I type this comment if the world were watching me? Anonymity is a seductive thing online, since it allows our cruelty to go unchecked.

So back to the “Walmart Test.” This test must be done with all shoppers, but especially against those who personify your most vilified group. So whether that person you would like to wish away is a Republican or Democrat, fat or thin, black or white, immigrant or citizen, gay or straight, on welfare or paying cash - you need to do this test on that person. You need to see the dignity of every person.

This is the imago Dei test. Every human being is made in the image and likeness of God, with a soul granted at the beginning of their life. “The notion of the imago Dei is also that which gives each and every human being an equal share of human dignity. And this is the game changer. Catholic Social Doctrine is based principally upon this notion.”

If you do this correctly, going to Walmart may become the greatest experience of your life. You may find yourself spinning around in the pet food section, proclaiming loudly, like John Dryden after reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “Here is God’s Plenty!” This may even be euphoric for you when you look at that Trump supporter or drug user or person on food stamps or that woman with five children or that rich snob and say to them in your head, “This is a child of God. Someone loves this person. This person is valuable and meaningful. Jesus died for that person’s sins just as Jesus died for mine. I am no better than that person. I see Christ in that person’s face and they are a miracle.”

But…whatever you do, don’t hug them. Say hello, or maybe pierce their bubble to start a conversation. Just don’t hug them. That’s how the police car can suddenly appear in front of Walmart.

I say this without being silly or trying to provoke anyone. You must do The Walmart Test stone-sober, not high or drunk, because it’s very easy to feel the whole “I love you, man” mood when you are intoxicated. That’s not really “Seeing Christ in Others,” that’s a false elevation, a vacuous happiness. Drug users often have this “I love you, man” attitude, but that’s not a valid test, because they have already escaped the world in the high of the drug. I remember a person from college that would get stoned and go to the local zoo to look at animals for some kind of zen. That is not what I’m talking about. This is a sober test. A test of internal change, not external change, not to be created by coercion or chemicals. This is a test about choosing to orient your life toward Christ and to see him everywhere.

True change is internal. It requires a turning toward God.

This is the part that I never understood about Christianity for the first thirty-some years of my life. I saw it as mostly rules, as buildings and rituals, as a path to righteousness through actions. That’s not what it’s about at the root. All of those things like rituals and buildings help us stay on track to the true destination. But it’s not only about the laws and the rules. That’s not the main purpose. The primary purpose is to change how you see. The purpose is to make change from the heart which changes your entire vision of the world. For those that think Jesus was a great moral teacher, that’s a key part but not the whole. It’s about sin, forgiveness and acceptance, and number one above all: about seeing the world as Christ saw the world. It’s about entering into the suffering with others, not against them.

Christianity is, above all, a way of seeing. Everything else in Christian life flows from and circles around the transformation of vision. Christians see differently, and that is why their prayer, their worship, their action, their whole way of being in the world have a distinctive accent and flavor. (Centered, p 37)

How else could the martyrs be burned to death while still praying for the one who lit the match? That sounds like drug-induced behavior. For someone about to be killed and still see Christ in the face of the killer, this is such a radical idea that goes against all instinct. Drugs like liquor and politics could never give that much of the “I love you, man” feeling.

What happens is that the faithful sometimes forget to see Christ in others. There are millions of Christians who do see this way, they just don’t make the news. We only hear about the ones who lose the vision and need to get back to the hospital for sinners. When that happens, when someone falls, the media pounces. Non-Christians rejoice when the righteous fall. They see the Pharisee in those Christians that judge others while self-justifying their own behavior with the presumption of salvation. The meek inherit the earth, not the proud, right? But while the media dances on a fallen figure’s grave, what they forget is that in being humbled, the fallen figure usually realizes the mistake and comes to a stronger and more appropriate faith through humility. Having faith is not supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be hard.

The second part of my stolen saying is to “Be Christ for Others.” This means letting go of the zero-sum game, of needing something for every action you take. You have to let go of the self and the never-ending "wanting” of more. Hasn’t that exhausted you? More money, more recognition, more likes, more house, more car, more sex, more drama. It becomes so repetitive always wanting the next thing, the new shiny toy, the next experience, that it’s like a hamster on a wheel running for no reason.

This letting go means you go into servant mode and wind up receiving more than if you had gotten what you wanted.

Someday I dream I will walk into Walmart and see two people, perhaps a Republican and a Democrat, gripping each others ears with both hands and saying simultaneously, “How did I not see this before?!”

I won’t hold my breath.

The Walmart Test is where you can choose to mock those you feel superior toward, you can choose to disdain your perceived enemies, you can mock them with body humor…or…or…you can choose to see Christ in each person’s face. This is not meant to be easy. It never was meant to be easy. As a Christian you are not even meant to be loved. Jesus even warned us that we will be hated for his sake. If someone hates you, take heart, because you’ve found the perfect subject for your Walmart Test. Can you love the person you hate the most? Better test: can you love the person that hates you the most? Can you pray for your enemy? I bet you can.

“[God] will have us learn to bear the burden of one another’s faults. Nobody is faultless; each has his own burden to bear, without the strength or the wit to carry it by himself; and we have got to support one another, console, help, correct, advise one another, each in his turn.

Meanwhile, there is no better test of a man’s quality than when he cannot have things his own way. The occasions of sin do not overpower us, they only prove our worth.” (from The Imitation of Christ. p 47)

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