The common language of Babel is a more subtle message than the idea of language as we think of it. The mention of the Table of Nations right before the Tower of Babel is a key connection to make. If we want to know why Russia invaded Ukraine, or Caesar crossed the Rubicon, we can step back and ask ourselves, what common language do all nations speak? Or closer to home, what common language do we all as individuals speak?

The common language is not only seen in war, but that is the grossest and most full expression of it. The bombs being lobbed into apartment buildings in Kiev are shouting the language right now.

But really our common language can be heard in the nicest of phrases, and spoken from the kindest of faces. A few good examples of the common language are as follows: Benjamin Franklin, in the 18th century, said, “God helps those who helps themselves.” That is one version of the common language. A more blunt version of the common language is from the 21st century rapper, Fifty Cent, who said, “Get rich or die trying.”

Ben Franklin and Fifty Cent speak the same language. Yes, they both speak English, but more importantly, they speak the original common language, the ancient one, the same as those who were building the Tower of Babel.

Franklin and Fifty are expressing the same idea in different words, separated by a few hundred years. Ben and Fifty are fluent in the the pre-Babel language of “making a name for themselves.” Both orient their lives toward the goal of gaining money and taking power. Gordon Gecko’s famous line spoke the language, fully dropping the facade of Franklin, when he said, “Greed is good.”

Franklin invented a proverb that almost sounds Biblical, but rest assured, it is not. God does not help those that help themselves. He would much rather that they imitate Jesus and give their lives to prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. For all the contributions Franklin made to the founding of America, he did not in any way imitate Jesus. Moral perfection was an interest of Franklin, so long as it was achieved without the Christian God. He tackled the subject in a truly modern way, even using a paper version of a spreadsheet to track his progress, working on one virtue at a time. Father Scupoli was a few hundred years ahead of Franklin, when in 1589 he said, “Virtues are to be required one at a time and by degrees,” except Scupoli’s project included God and required no spreadsheet. In many ways, Franklin’s paper project was attempting exactly the same thing that was happening at the construction site in Babel, just without masonry or mortar.

Let’s talk more about Benjamin Franklin, the gentle old bespectacled grandfatherly figure of American history who graces the front side of every one hundred dollar bill in print. He is a fascinating character who embodies much of the American character and the best intentions of the Enlightenment.

First, Franklin was a Deist, not a Christian. The same goes for George Washington. Franklin was also a practicing Freemason. Even if Washington and Franklin publicly claimed to be Christian, as practicing Freemasons, they likely just found references to God useful for advancing their own public lives among the peasants. This is important to understand, as this is the same root motive that drives an ancient people to build a Ziggurat. The ancient people went to great lengths to justify their power, requiring a lot of stone and labor. Nations needed an awesome structure to control the people, while the Deists of the Enlightenment just declared man and his mind to be the tallest. The modern temple is intellectual, existing in the mind, but still requires assent of the masses. There is just no need to build a tower to reach the sky now, because no lower-case gods need ritual sacrifices or transactions. (We actually do have plenty of rituals and sacrifices still with us, but they are not as obvious now, and I’ll need a whole separate series to discuss that topic.)

Instead of building towers, the Deists kept the upper-case God in our mouths, but tried to move him off-stage, kind of like giving a lifetime achievement award to a good actor that never won an Oscar. Jefferson threw God a medal in the Declaration of Independence and then asked him to kindly step aside and retire.

To this day, a nod toward God goes a long way for politicians, even as they completely ignore him in their policies and personal lives. Of course, everyone is a sinner, so it’s not surprising or even noteworthy that people fall down and appear hypocritical, so I’m not pointing out the failure of politicians to be “good” Christians. What I am suggesting that very few of the Founders were Christian at all, because a practicing Freemason like Franklin or Washington cannot be a Christian any more than a practicing Jew could be a Hindu. They do not go together. Attempting to claim co-existence of Christianity and Freemasonry requires a lot of spinning plates and hula hoops and tambourines and fireworks. Freemasonry is an open rejection of the living God of Israel, and certainly the Trinitarian God of Christianity.

Franklin believed in a Clockmaker God, a being who set the stars in motion and left the lights on before retiring into the beyond. He’s like a gamer who started a video game on auto-mode and went to bed. The Deist idea of God is a Creator that requires no worship and demands nothing. In other words, it’s an absentee father who left long ago and left us free to do whatever we like. The Clockmaker version of God has no relation whatsoever with the living God of Christian faith, because that Bible ends at chapter two of Genesis. Nothing more is needed beyond creation.

Why am I picking on Ben Franklin here? He is the poster child of the common language spoken by the architects of Babel.

Franklin spoke the language of Babel, because the language of Babylon is declaring a deity that either serves us, or doesn’t matter, or both. A Ziggurat is an expensive, fancy way of trying to communicate with and manipulate a god. This required a lot of ritual and song and dance and smoke to sell the idea. But what happens with a Ziggurat is the same thing that happens with Deism. The human, the self, bubbles up as the new deity. Pride rises like hot air and overtakes humility, and the virtues get swapped. Pride rises, humility sinks; it very much matches the behavior of hot and cold air masses. Humility kneels, while pride tries to grasp God.

Franklin did not try to deny that God exists, but rather to deny that God matters. This trick makes for a dead deity instead of a living God still present with us. The Clockmaker God opens the door to this. The result of the long onslaught of Enlightenment thinking is a polite depositing of God in the dustbin of history. If you punch your vote for the Clockmaker God, like Franklin did in his weekly Masonic meetings, then there is little or no difference from denying the existence of God entirely, or making bogus sacrifices in a Ziggurat to justify your power. The false gods of Babel were made in the image and likeness of the ruling class, and the Clockmaker God’s image and likeness doesn’t matter at all because he’s on permanent vacation.

More importantly, the Clockmaker God is not needed to forgive anything, because just like the rulers of Babel, the rules are decided by those in power, or in other words, “those who help themselves.” The pagan god who demanded sacrifice was not alive, but at least the illusion was more lively than that of the Clockmaker God. When the authority of the living Creator God who sustains all things is gone, then there is nothing holding back “those who help themselves.” The proverb of Franklin is essentially a nice way of arguing for will-to-power, as in, win at all costs.

In Franklin’s cosmology, there is no cosmic justice, no everlasting judgment, and the conscience is just a nag that you need to stifle. The cookie jar is just as open and unattended with the Clockmaker God of a deist as it is for the atheist who says there is no God at all.

In fact, the atheist is really the only honest one. This is why I think our age of atheism has a lot of people coming around, the long way, back to belief in the true God, the living Creator God. All of the other trick gods are so obviously false (Zeus) or pointless (deism), that the only God that makes sense, the only one that can even satisfy the intellect and give purpose to our lives, is the transcendent living Creator God. All the other gods don’t matter or are total frauds. In any other cosmos than that of the God of Abraham, we can do whatever we like, and like Franklin, we can help ourselves to whatever we like. A dead or silent God leads directly from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Michel Foucault.

A pagan god can at least command fear, but without that new methods are needed. The thunder god who throws lightning and causes storms only has power through fear. The storm god keeps the lightning nearby to strike if he is disrespected, as he is the one who unleashes havoc on the world. He must be appeased with worship, otherwise he will show us who is boss. The storm god that oddly matches worldly power, in that he is in competition with creation and craves adoration as payment. If he gets what he wants, you will receive a reward. There are many modern Christians who understand God in this way and need to break free from this model, because they are playing the same game of Babel as well.

On the other hand, a Clockmaker God commands nothing. He is the god of indifference. A God that created matter and exited the stage, doesn’t matter at all. It’s like a teacher who leaves the classroom and tells the students to behave. He’s a powerless joke. The hall monitor is gone, so what’s the difference between an absent God that created the universe against a pre-existing universe with no God at all? There is none. The latter is just much easier to live with, except you need something called “the rule of law” to assert control by pretending at objective truth. The funny thing is, however, that the ground for objective truth starts to shake when it’s just a set of rules etched in stone outside a courthouse. Eventually people see through this game as well. What we call “the rule of law” is our new storm god, in the form of courts, police, and in its most full form, SWAT teams and the National Guard. As the masses come around more to match Franklin’s idea of God, or worse, Marx’s idea of God, the jig is up. The pretense of objective truth gets jettisoned for “my truth.”

In either case, there are no rules except what we decide. Ziggurat or no Ziggurat: the god of Babel and the God of Franklin is the one that “helps those who help themselves.” The only thing that comes to matter in this worldview is power. That is the common language of Babel. That is what we want.

However, a living God that knows the number of hairs on your head matters a great deal. That God is the only one that can change our behavior out of love. There is a reason that the God of the Bible has lasted so long. This God satisfies our souls. He fits our lives. He explains everything. He is also the only real one.

The God of Israel, who we have come to understand better in the revelation of the Trinity, is the only one that can make all of our difficulties in life suddenly fall into place, just like he did in creating the universe. Once this concept of God is understood, both suffering and love begin to make sense. The main reason this happens, and keeps happening in every generation, is because, this God is real, and this God is alive.

The language that is being spoke in the Tower of Babel story is not really referring to Sumerian or Akkadian or Greek or Latin. No, it means a worldview that celebrates a culture of competition, power-seeking, comfort-seeking, possession-seeking, and pleasure-seeking. What we really want is God to approve our desires, but our conscience is God’s messenger that lets us know in subtle ways that he will never approve of those things. The worldview or common language is the little voice that tells us otherwise, that suggests that we elevate our pursuits over the glory of God. What we want, instinctually, is salvation independent of God. A Ziggurat is built to pull the gods down, to shape god to match our human pursuits, to justify ourselves. The correct approach to God is to stop trying to manipulate him, because he cannot be manipulated, and rather we need to conform our human pursuits to the will of the one true God.

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In the Tower of Babel story, a common language is being spoken, allowing all people to work together toward this project of pulling God down to earth through this gate to the sky. Let’s talk about that common language, because that too has layers to soak through and scratch off.

Babylon was a world center, a superpower, like New York or Beijing today, or London or Vienna or yesteryear. You can read as such, where perhaps a common language was indeed spoken, a lingua franca, as that has happened repeatedly in history wherever cities and centers of power emerged. The nation in power dictates what language is used, because it’s the language of business and trade. This movement toward one language is not even dictated so much as gravitated toward, because where there is money to be made, people come running. You can watch this happen whenever oil is discovered, or a company is started. Money is honey that draws us like flies.

The most powerful nation tends to steer the world into speaking its language, and right now that language is English because America still, for now, holds the tethers of power. In Rome, Latin was the lingua franca. In Greece, it was Koine Greek. At the time when the story of the Tower of Babel was written, it was likely Akkadian.

But if you want to get to the deeper meaning of this story, you need to think of the “common language” being spoken as not necessarily Sumerian or Akkadian or English or French or Chinese. The common language is about something much deeper. It is a language that explains why every nation, even every family, is in competition, right up to our time, even shedding light on why Russia and Ukraine are in open war this very instant.

How can I explain this?

The common language is a mindset, a way of life. If you read this story at a deeper level, the common language is not Sumerian or Akkadian. It is a worldview.

Just prior to the story of the Tower of Babel is the Great Flood story, and as soon as the flood subsides, we have a world of Noah and his family left as sole survivors. Obviously they spoke the same language or dinner would have been awkward. Now, a literal reading of this may not jive neatly with our modern concept of history and archaeology (although science is now finding that the Flood story actually does merge surprisingly well with ice age data), but that’s not what Genesis is about. As I’ve said before, you don’t go to the Bible to learn about rocks and history, even though there is something to glean there, too. This is a book about the soul, not the cell, nor is it about subjects like geology, anthropology, or philology. It can be useful for those subjects, but it’s not about those topics. This is where the disconnect happens for people as we tend to read it with “Google brain,” like machines, instead of people who consist of both a body and a soul.

Soon after the flood, we learn of Noah falling into sin (getting drunk and naked like a college student) and that’s when the family drama begins, which leads to the splintering of his sons into “the nations.” This idea of “the nations” requires a lengthy digression because of its importance in the understanding the rest of the Bible that follows, which is a thousand pages or so.

The last thing we read about before the Tower of Babel is the “Table of Nations” where all the known people groups of the world are listed. So I lied, there are subjects like geography and history in Genesis, but that is not all there is.

The “Table of Nations” in Genesis 10 is not just a purely mythical and ethnocentric story made up by an early Hebrew tribesman many hundreds of years “after the [alleged] facts.” It exhibits throughout a genuine knowledge of ancient Near East geography and culture. (Patheos)

So who cares about a list of nations that don’t match up with the names we use today?

Well, I do. But so should you. However, without a tour guide on these boring sections and lists in the Bible, my eyes just glaze over. I would have never known that Javan is Greece, or that Mizraim is Egypt, or that Ashkenaz might have been the German people. We need guides here (I recommend Fr. Stephen de Young and Fr. Andrew Damick: Orthodox priests, Bible scholars, and mythology nerds.) You need a guide or it’s too boring and abstract. We use tutors and guides like this for other things, and we should definitely find a guide through the Bible or we will miss why time itself is measured around the birth of Jesus Christ. For instance, if you go to Rome and walk through the Roman Forum, you will just see a bunch of ancient rocks that look mildly interesting and give you a sense of passing time. Without a guide, you will never realize how much history is represented in the weathered stones of say, the Temple of Saturn (which is kind of a Roman version of the Tower of Babel).

All of those boring sections in Genesis actually have more happening than we have time to learn today, which is a shame because it’s so rich in meaning. Our attention spans have shrunk dramatically. Unless you are a Bible nerd, you can’t comb through this stuff without a guide, or multiple guides, and your guides need multiple disciplines of knowledge to even traverse the vast field of information.

One great outcome of our modern academic deep dives into science and history is that we have more light shed on obscure texts. At the same time, however, we are in great danger of missing the purpose of the ancient texts when we reduce it to academic research. Studying myths and religion like academics often shoves God right off the stage. While we look for needles in the haystack, we forget that the purpose of the haystack is to feed a flock. We can easily skip over the spiritual part and just turn it into a never-ending study session. If that happens, then you forget that reading the Bible is an encounter with God. To get anything out of the Bible, you have to remember that point.

The main point that I’m trying to get across with the question of “Why Did Peter Sink?” is that he falls when he takes his eye off Jesus. Peter sinks in the water because he allows his fears and doubts to take over. In other words, he tried to walk on water independently of God, which he cannot do. He loses his peace and control because he tried to take control, allowing his fears to take over, taking back control that must be given up. This is the great paradox of faith. You must give up control to get any kind of control, to have any kind of miracle happen in your life, as Peter illustrates for us.

One last unnecessary metaphor: if we become purely academic in our reading, we will consume scripture like a stale Little Debbie snack instead of savoring it like the rich french silk pie that it is. The same goes for the Eucharist. If you don’t believe that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ under the appearance of bread, then it is just a flavorless wafer. It’s just a symbol, and then what’s the point? Why bother? It has to be more than a symbol, just as the word of God has to be the actual Word of God. So please, ask for faith, and keep asking. Keep walking toward Jesus. As we go, Keep your eye on the Savior, not the Baal (Ball. Get it? Stupid joke. Fine, I’ll stop.).

Noah’s family spoke the same language. The nations all came from his sons according to the story. In other words, Noah’s family history is way, way back in time. Instantly, our Google brain would like to say, “No, the first homo-sapiens were from the African savannah and they spread out over thousands of years, etc, and the nations formed from tribes and people groups, etc.” To which I would reply: is the narrative of science, at its core, all that different than the story of Adam and Eve in a garden (savannah?) as the first two human parents? And as we have much evidence of ancient flooding from ice ages, is it not reasonable that civilizations were wiped out from rising seas and rivers? Sometimes I think we are talking about the same things when we argue about science and religion, it’s just that the sacred writer of Genesis didn’t have terabyte storage to give all the details, so the writer crammed all of pre-history into eleven short chapters. Of course we have more data today. Yet somehow archaeology keeps affirming things in Genesis as we go, just as science keeps affirming the Big Bang theory, which came from a priest, of all people, and fits insanely well with Genesis.

If you are following the 30,000 year timetable of when modern people emerged across the world, then this story of Noah must be considered deep in history. My money is on 10,000 B.C. since that was the last big flood of the ice ages. Clearly “the nations” took time to develop. The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 indicates that long before the Tower of Babel was built, the worship of One God, the true God, was established, because Noah had been chosen by God to build the ark.

If Noah and his family were the only people, and Noah worshipped the Creator God of Genesis, then something dramatic begins to happen after the dispersal of Noah’s sons into the world, as in, the worship of other gods. This is where the famous succession myth begins, where a god like Zeus or Baal overthrew the ancient god, the first god. In other words, along with “the nations” come the idea of local gods, because if you break off from the original, you have to create a founding myth and a god that supports the myth. In other words, the schism that forms “the nations” also is the impetus that forms the gods. In the same way, companies are formed, such as how two fired executives of Handy Dan went on to found The Home Depot. You might even say that the stone that was rejected from Handy Dan became the cornerstone of Home Depot. (I’ve gone into this succession myth stuff a lot in a previous series called About Uranus so I won’t belabor it here.)

There is a time gap in between Noah’s drunk night and the Tower of Babel. A lot happens in one chapter. It’s not clear how much time. Perhaps one hundred years, perhaps 15,000. When construction finally began on the Tower of Babel, the nations exist, but everyone is speaking the same language. Clearly, an academic or scientist will have trouble computing this: how could languages not have developed if the nations already had? That doesn’t make sense. Put a pin in that idea, because there seem to be two types of “language” being referred to here.

This is where the Tower of Babel story gets interesting. Here is where you can take the simple path of understanding it as a fable, a tale of how languages and nations came from. Or, you can read the “common language” in a different way that opens the door to far more understanding of the Bible as a whole, and why Jesus came to the earth at all.

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 Tower of Babel story is a strange one. It’s strange enough that I’m going to spend a lot of time on it, to the point that you will surely switch over to YouTube in about ten minutes. My hope is that this blog/podcast does not drive you back into the arms of the politics, porn, and video games, so I’ll do my best to keep it moving. I may have already lost most of you just at the mention of those candies.

On the surface level, the Tower of Babel reads like a tale of where languages came from, in the same spirit of fables, such as, “How the Tiger Got its Stripes.” You may pass over the text and think, “Isn’t that cute. A story of where the many human languages came from.” Like the Garden of Eden story you can read this one literally, yawn, close the book, then return to your sportsball and Door Dash. And doing so you will miss the entire point of the story of the Tower of Babel.

There is another layer, much deeper than the literal, and you can scratch the surface using your fingernail and realize that there are multiple layers of paint. This is why it is a timeless story. First, understanding that “Babel” means “Gate to God” or “Gateway to God” should tell you there is more happening than a simple tower construction project. You could even call it a “Stairway to Heaven” but I am not here to talk about Led Zeppelin. Still, that song title is a phrase that is relevant, or even possibly a reference to the Tower of Babel. If you ask five people the meaning of the lyrics, you will get five answers (my money is on the Lord of the Rings interpretation being closest to the mark, since Led Zeppelin band members were Tolkien nerds). However, even if “Stairway to Heaven” is about Arwen and Aragorn, the Lord of the Rings is the most Catholic novel ever written, so in a wide circling way, from classic rock back to Genesis all the way to the rock of the Church, we have to drive by the Tower of Babel story anyway.

The same variety of interpretations that happen with “Stairway to Heaven” can come from readers of the Tower of Babel story, and I think if we called it the “Gate to God” story we would probably be at a better starting point.

The Gate being built is a Ziggurat, which is a pagan temple. The location may have been Eridu, in modern day Iraq. Or it may have been elsewhere. It’s not particularly important where it was built, because lots of these Ziggurats existed in ancient times, and they are remarkably similar in shape and purpose, even across cultures that had no contact.

Now, if you have the idea of some giant tower that touches the sky, you need to first stop and understand that ancient people were not stupid. They knew that a tower could not be built to the sky, probably better than we do, since they didn’t have steel and even one hundred feet in height would have been an engineering marvel.

So if you want to get anything out of the story, you have to put aside your presentism and unconscious bias. Presentism is the modern bias and assumption that people that didn’t have smart phones were only slightly higher than baboons in terms of mental and intellectual acumen.

What is a Ziggurat? It is a temple built as a home base for rituals and sacrifices to gods of the lower-case mythological variety. Archaeologists have found these structures with staircases to a central altar, where worship and sacrifice was made to gods. The most famous god of the ancient world was the storm god, or sky god, like Baal, or Marduk, or Zeus, or Jupiter (who are actually all the same god just shifted from one culture to another and that, too, is important to keep in mind as we go along.)

At the core of the story is God observing the construction of this Gate to God, and the people in charge are intending to build it “to reach the sky.” Why the sky? Because that’s where the sky god lives. Sometimes he lives in a mountain, but the sky god throws the lightning bolts.

Along with the sky god, there is a whole list of other gods, like the moon god, the sun god, etc. There is even “Father Sky,” who was a more primordial god in these same cultures, but this elder god was knocked out by the storm god in a battle on the spiritual realm. This too is important to keep in mind, as the tale of Zeus defeating his father Uranus plays into the story of the Tower of Babel very much.

The interesting thing about mythology is how celestial objects, like the moon, and natural phenomena, like storms, get translated into spirits. This is mythology in a nutshell, and we assume the ancient people were just trying their best to explain away what could not be explained by science, since there was no such thing as science. There were no telescopes, so in our Present Bias we look at these tales as explanations in a pre-scientific age. These are cute tales from primitive people, who, if they were around today, we would pat on the head and send away with a dum-dum sucker.

What nonbelievers use today as a shield against all things supernatural is a saying known as the “God of the gaps.” The idea is that we only assume God exists for things that we cannot explain yet. This is full-blown presentism.

For example, the reason the Irish no longer believe that fairies bring illness is because we know what germs are. We can see germs under microscopes. Until we knew about germs, we blamed fairies. In other words, since we couldn’t explain illness, we pawned it off on fairies and God. However, right now, in 2022, science is still claiming to look for a mythical “bat of the gaps” in the Covid story, while we all know that there was no bat, but there most certainly was a very large virology lab. The great irony is that a bat that doesn’t exist has been invented and mythologized now by the very same people who mock any idea of fairies or spirits. We could get lost here in talking about scapegoating and human nature, but let’s stay on track.

The “God of the gaps” idea is a modern argument to reduce all religion to superstitious nonsense. It’s an idea that modern writers like Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins have campaigned hard to sell. There’s just one problem with both the fairy stories and Carl Sagan.

Neither of them match the concept of the God of Christianity.

A quote from Carl Sagan illustrates the problem perfectly, and he was very close to understanding the God of Christianity, but he was bothered by fairy believers who kept moving God into the gaps. This illustrates the problem with how bad conceptions of what the Christian God is brings so much confusion:

“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed’? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’“

In other words, Carl had clearly never read the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Carl is actually very close to understanding the awe of God in the way that Catholics understand God. Whoever he is talking about in that quote has no understanding of God as he is understood in the Catholic Church.

The God of Israel, is unique, in both conception and power, as Yahweh does not live in the universe like the pagan gods. The God of Christianity, the Trinity, is complete, a whole, that encompasses both the universe and our hearts.

God is far simpler to understand than Zeus, in that he is One God, existing forever, outside of space and time. At the same time, he is infinitely more complex in that we can never understand him at all. We can understand God, and we can never understand him.

There is another jarring quote where Carl Sagan showed that he was talking about believers that did not understand the Christian God. He said, “Your God is too small for my universe.”

To which anyone who spends time in the Catechism can tell you, “No kidding, Carl.” That’s been a known fact for 4,000 years. Cave people knew that, and they didn’t have telescopes.

What amazes me most today is how science assumes that all religious people are merely superstitious buffoons, but when they begin to talk about God, they are describing a pagan concept of lower-case gods, not the understanding of the God of Israel and certainly not the Trinity. This is where bad instruction of the faithful leads to a mess, and as far as bad training and catechesis goes, Catholics have a lot of explaining to do. We have dropped the ball horribly for about three generations now in teaching something as basic as, “How can we speak about God?”

God is bigger than Carl’s universe. The universe alone can't explain Carl Sagan. As Peter Lawler said, “Physics can’t explain the physicist…Physics, by itself, simply explains away the physicist—and much else.”

Far bigger than our conception or intellect can handle, God transcends our minds. He is not in the gaps, he created all the gaps, and no matter how many gaps we figure out, there will be more gaps. Like Sagan, who seemed to think that we have overtaken God in terms of knowledge about the universe, the brightest minds of the middle ages thought God kept the planets afloat with crystals. Sagan and company are no different than the confused thinkers of the “Dark Ages” who thought they had figured everything out.

But here’s something important to realize: the incorrect concepts of the universe was never doctrine. The idea that the earth was at the center of the universe was never part of Christianity. That’s only what the intellectuals of the middle ages believed. This is why the Church moves and decides slowly, like the Ents, the trees in Lord of the Rings, who take a long time to decide anything. This is also why the Church doesn’t leap in when economic and tech fads offer utopia. The wisdom of the Church plays out in a couple of ways, one in its patience, and second by recognizing heresies and bad ideas long before they are proven to be bad ideas, such as the theories of Marx or calling out Transhumanism (before it gets started).

The truth comes out over time, and science is a small part of revealing God’s world to us. It’s one kind of knowledge, but it’s not wisdom. It’s worth noting that in a hundred years we may realize that much of modern science is wrong. This happens repeatedly in our history. What is a solid “known” today could be laughable later. Phrenology had its day as a serious science, when people interpreted bumps on our heads. Now it is a joke. (Sociologists beware!)

But God does not change, nor does the proper concept of God. To assume otherwise is to be exactly like the intellectuals of the middle ages, who were surely certain of their errant ideas. To assume all is known today is the classic mistake of the falls in Genesis, too.

What often seems to be the case is that non-believers have a bad concept of God, stemming from various causes. I think the main problem is that they just don’t understand the Trinitarian God properly. I certainly didn’t. The reason we don’t is because the loudest voices proclaiming God today confuse the right meaning of the word. In fact, I don’t think most Christians know the meaning of the word God, because he just seems to be a vending machine to so many. (Here is where I resist ranting about the message preached in the “Prosperity Gospel”. )

If you think Zeus and the God of Israel are the same thing, you cannot read the Tower of Babel story. Don’t do it. Don’t even try. Why waste your time? You cannot understand it if you don’t even understand what the writer was talking about. If you don’t have the proper idea of God in place, you will fail before you start. It’s like beginning a calculus problem when you only made it through Algebra II. It’s like interpreting a modern biology book using the theory of the four bodily humors from Galen, the ancient Greek physician. It doesn’t work. You will be lost on reading the first sentence.

To understand the God of Israel, you have to backtrack and realize a few things. First, you have to rip out your modern assumptions and biases and reset, because all of the noise around God in our media has created a windstorm in your head. Everyone is trying to put their spin on what God is, and until you find the right language, the crazy interpretations will continue to spin. In my own surfacing into the light, I slowly realized that I had cut myself off with a little of help from my friends and much help from the media around me, not to mention a giant pool of Captain Morgan. I had sliced myself off, walled myself in, because of various reasons. In trying to “find myself,” I got lost, and the reasons I lost God was because of exactly the list of reasons listed in the intro of the Catechism. I had forgotten the right concept of God, overlooked what I knew was true, and rejected the entire idea of God.

…this "intimate and vital bond of man to God" can be forgotten, overlooked, or even explicitly rejected by man. Such attitudes can have different causes: revolt against evil in the world; religious ignorance or indifference; the cares and riches of this world; the scandal of bad example on the part of believers; currents of thought hostile to religion; finally, that attitude of sinful man which makes him hide from God out of fear and flee his call. (CCC 27-30)

Yes, all of those things. The pain and suffering of this world confused me, I was ignorant of what the word God really meant in the Bible, I was drawn to pleasures like drinking, I saw many bad examples of believers that made me question faith entirely, and my education, along with movies and books I read, was purposefully leading me by the nose to a path of belittling and laughing at those with faith.

I remember trying to read Genesis and thinking, “This is ridiculous,” and only fifteen years later did I realize that my understanding of God was all wrong. I had to reset completely. Life has a funny way of beating you into a state of reasonableness so that you can try again.

To reset, I started with this:

God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God--"the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable"--with our human representations.16 Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God.

Admittedly, in speaking about God like this, our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity. Likewise, we must recall that "between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude"; and that "concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him." (CCC 39-43)

He transcends all creatures, including myths like Zeus.

He created everything, including our ability to invent myths like Zeus.

We are continually learning more about creation. We are not done learning or discovering wonders here, because we are not God. This should be a cause for awe - Carl Sagan is correct. If he met people who understood God in this sense, instead of reducing all Christians to knuckle-dragging fundamentalists, he could have had terrific conversations about that very fact.

God is nothing like the pathetic Zeus. He’s way beyond us, transcending our world, while at the same time reaching down to us and saying “Boo!” from time to time. He alerts us that he’s present.

Most importantly, we cannot control God. This is critical to reading the Tower of Babel story. The pagan gods are far more mundane and limited than the God of the Trinity. The pagan gods live in mountains or in the forest. They are the moon. They are the stars. They are within the universe.

The classic blunder of so many non-believers is that they assume God is an object in the universe, like how we think of Zeus. Whenever you hear, “All gods are the same,” you know immediately the speaker does not understand the Christian concept of God. Sagan’s “small God” comment and Bertrand Russell’s famous “teapot god” betray their fundamental misunderstanding of what the word God means to Catholics. The architect of the universe is not standing in the solar system like a tour guide; he transcends all creation. He transcends all things, but is still a living God that can reach us on a very personal level.

So when you read the Tower of Babel story, the important things to keep in mind are:

* The Tower is a Ziggurat built to “reach the sky.” Babel means “Gate to God.” The ancient cultures believed that these pyramid temples made a connecting point between heaven and earth. They often have a stairway to an altar on the top. These exist across the world, even in Aztec and Mayan cultures that never had any apparent contact with Mesopotamian cultures. (This should start raising hairs on your neck but resist the urge to blame aliens here.)

* Ziggurats were built to worship gods of mythology, most commonly the “sky god,” a.k.a. storm god, a.k.a. thunder god, a.k.a. fertility god, a.k.a. the rainmaker. This god goes by various names in history: Baal, Marduk, Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, and more (Perkūnas, Perun, Indra, Dyaus, and Zojz). This god was usually depicted with bull horns and/or holding lightning bolts. In mythology, the sky god “defeated” the primordial god (or gods). This tale is called the succession myth and it gets repeated in Babylon, Greece, Rome, and many other places. This god is a shape-shifting rapist who can appear as a bull, a serpent, a swan, an eagle, or even a shepherd. As Éomer says in The Two Towers, “The white wizard is cunning,” so is the fertility god.

* Satan is the storm god. Yes, the “S” word. This came as a shock, since I enjoy reading Greek and Roman mythology. But really, how did I miss it for so long? The horns often depicted on Satan are exactly like the bull horns of Baal. And Baal = Marduk = Zeus = Jupiter = Thor = Satan. Baal is Zeus. Baal is also Satan. They are all the same character. Jesus even calls Satan ‘Beelzebul,’ which is a version of Baal-Zebub, the Philistine deity of Baal/Zeus equivalent. Better yet, Beelzebul is actually a mocking name that riffs on Beelzebub. “Prince Baal” or “Lord Baal” is modified by Jesus to mock “Baal of flies” or “Lord of dung.” This mockery also took me aback, because if Jesus mocks the sky gods, it proves that God does indeed have a sense of humor. There is word play going on. Jesus again mocks the sky god a second time when he gives the nickname “Sons of Thunder” to James and John (Mk 3:17), which means sons of the sky god, a.k.a. Zeus. Like most nicknames, it is not a compliment. When they call for revenge on those who oppose Jesus, James and John are acting like Baal or Zeus or Satan. James and John ask, “Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?” Jesus turned and rebuked them. (Lk 9:51-54) Jesus is the polar opposite of the cruel and vengeful sky god. In other words, Jesus is God, and God is love. This is the opposite of the fallen angel named Satan, who shape-shifts and goes by many other names. (Yet for some reason God allows Satan to divide, distract, and deceive us in this world, which is the great head-scratcher for us all and takes a lifetime to understand.)

* Keep in mind that all myths are victory tales and founding narratives. They are written and told to justify for the current state of affairs in the world. When you read any myth, you have to read it from the perspective of the myth-makers. Babel is part of Israel’s story, but if the other side told the story of Babel, it would be a very different tale, where the temple at Babel would be seen like St. Peter in Rome or Notre Dame in Paris, or the Empire State building and Statue of Liberty in New York.

* The intention and goal of building the Tower of Babel versus the intention building St. Peter or Notre Dame is starkly different. The “Gate to God” is being built up to “the sky.” The Tower is meant to bring god down to earth (just like in Ghostbusters - more on that later) and make a name for the people. St. Peter and Notre Dame are built to give glory to God, not to people. This fundamental misunderstanding of God makes all the difference, both in our individual lives and in the pursuits of nations.

* The God of Israel cannot be controlled. He does not need us. We need him.

If you read the Tower of Babel at only the surface level, at the “How the Tiger got its stripes” level, where it’s only about how the various languages came to be, you will get something out of it. That is a valid, literal reading, but you will miss the greater significance of the story.

Know before you start: God doesn’t make transactions with his creatures. Praying for what you want can work out in strange ways, but it always works out in how God wills it. He gets the last laugh, you might say. Even the great destroyers of faith, Marx, Voltaire, Hume, Russell, Dawkins, et al. are part of God’s plan somehow. He allows doubt and struggle for reasons we cannot understand, but like Joseph in Egypt, when we realized that all his struggles had a purpose: “Even though you meant harm to me, God meant it for good.” (Gen 50:20)

Without this understanding of God, we are trying to manipulate him and make him dance. But he is the one who makes us dance, and it’s much easier to dance with him than to try to lead. He is Tolkien and we are Frodo. We are his characters. We cannot reach up and grab the author, and that is exactly what the builders at Babel are trying to do. This is a really, really bad idea for us to try, both then and now.

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

Each individual faces a trial, and the trial consists of one question. We face this trial today and every day of our life.

At some point, we all get to play the part of Pontius Pilate when he is forced to face Jesus. In the trial of Jesus, it is not actually Jesus who is on trial, but the world, and Pilate is the stand-in for every one of us.

Now, most of us know there is corruption in the world. We’ve heard all the stories of the wealthy getting away with murder (sometimes literally) and corruption within both political parties. We know of suffering and pain that doesn’t make sense. We observe many religious Pharisees acting like hypocrites and we see wealthy American Herodians being morally corrupt in every way. America, like Pontius Pilate, for all its claims to virtue, real and imagined, must confront Jesus someday and will have to decide on how to answer the test. We all get to stand like Pilate, not giving the trial, but in the chair of the defendant.

When Jesus said, “Lead us not to the test” in the Lord’s prayer, he didn’t mention that the test is only one question, and it only has one answer.

“Do not bring us to the time of trial,” is another translation. “Lead us not into temptation,” is the most common one we hear in English. Trial, test, temptation - in all cases, we ask God to help us steer clear of it. And what is this test?

We are there. We are taking the test, every day. But we only come to understand the test when we come to forks in the road, decision points in our lives. In good times and in bad times, the trial comes out to meet you. We ask God to lead us not to this test, but because of our desires we like to go looking for it, and we all find the test eventually.

How we answer this test question says everything about us. How we answer it guides our day, our choices, our feelings, our reactions, our heart, our family, our career, our evenings, our mornings, our meals. Judgment day will be so easy for God to carry out, because we answer this test every day. The test question is the one that Pilate asked to Jesus, which is ironic, because Pilate is the one actually on trial. This is the only question on the test:

“What is truth?”

That’s the whole test.

It requires a response. Not just verbally or mentally, but in our actions. It’s both an oral and a practical exam.

In our age, that single question draws many responses. “What is truth?” brings long responses, based on logic, and even illogic, with sweeping topics of historical analysis, tales of heroes and villains and victims, windy arguments, appeals to emotion, appeals to reason.

But God can stop all test-takers after the very first word out of their mouths, because the only answer he is looking for is Jesus.

You can tell how fragmented a person is, how compromised, how scattered, how lost, by how that one question is answered. If you ask someone, “What is truth?” and they start rambling, they are the lost. Pray for them, and pray for yourself, and pray for us all, because even if we think we are not lost, that we are found, even if we answer correctly, we very likely fail the practical part of the exam, which is our lives. This is important to recognize. Even if you answered with the name of Jesus, it is your actions in life that answer for you.

By the time you arrive at judgment, God already knows your answer. You gave it already. And anyone who claims or claimed verbally that Jesus was the truth, but rejected him in spirit, and did not actually follow him along the way, will be exposed. We are more than our mind. We are God’s instruments, with a mind, yes, but also with arms and legs. Did we just assert belief in our mind or do something about it? Did that belief animate our body or just sit boxed up in our head? There is no weaselly appeal to be made to a higher court. The Creator God is the final stop.

Like the rich man in hell who begged for Abraham to go back and tell his brothers to repent, the request will not be honored. We have had our chance. We already have been told, warned, and we choose to ignore the Creator. Even if we acknowledged that he exists, we probably only acknowledge it like we acknowledge everything else. We grant God the same significance of other facts like existence of gravity. Gravity exists. So what? Admitting God exists is just like admitting any other fact that you might accept. Seasons change. Cats are funny. We can declare that God exists and even say that Jesus is the truth, and then we can proceed to give it the same level of respect that we give to any other fact. God exists. Water exists. Now back to cat videos. Agreement to the notion of a Creator is not the question. This is a pass/fail test, and “God exists” is an automatic fail if that’s all you got.

If you feel unsure about “What is truth?” then you are adrift. You are either in the camp of the whitewashed tombs trying to save yourself with some long-winded answer, or you are in denial, thinking that some of your sins are acceptable. If you are unsure whether you are a sinner or not, you are waffling on the fence, and that fence is electric - at some point the power is going to get turned on and you will feel it.

You cannot answer “Jesus” to the test question if you do not come to know your sins and that you are a sinner. That means all of your sins, including the ones you’d like to keep and defend as honorable.

This is the slippery slope of how dishonoring God moves into the mainstream of your life. Straddling half-measures and partial surrender is how the bad patterns spread its feelers through your own life and through an entire nation. This is how the values of Mardi Gras move into Lent. This is how the sandbox database becomes the production database. Chaos is near when the sacred cannot be separated from the rest of the world. When the playground of the red-light district becomes an acceptable way of life, then prepare for impact. America has even gone so far as to give a place of honor to behaviors that only belong in the red-light district. Put your head between your knees, and…no…don’t kiss your ass goodbye; put your head between your knees and pray.

The conscience is silenced by celebrating your desires, and the conscience is the little voice of God, the great gift of the good guardian angel.

You may have answered this question correctly long ago, but have slipped.

This is how habitual sin works.

The pioneer stage of turning away from God is that first sip of beer, the first toke on a joint, the first kiss, the first bribe that you get away with. Taboo is removed and a further step is taken. Retreat and advance, and once you start to enjoy the sin, the conquest begins. Then you get into regular commerce with the sin, transacting your moods on it, trading your body and soul for it.

After that the slide quickens. The drink or the touch or the bribe becomes an expected luxury, a common occurrence, even an expectation.

Once it starts to bear itself out as a problem, you intellectualize it, rationalize it, justify it, saying some version of “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Science, especially genetics, makes a good brush to paint it as a virtue to be embraced, using deft strokes of psychology, sociology, and nature and nurture arguments. When asked, “Is doing X a sin?” you have a paint palette at the ready, just like you do when faced with the ultimate test: “What is truth?”

In the last phase, you settle into the sin, like Gollum with his Ring, the precious, like a ghoul who cannot see himself moving into decline and collapse. This whole cycle happens to individuals and to groups of people and to nations. If no chainsaw miraculously cuts you free from these growing vines, then the decline and collapse process will keep covering you until it becomes a grave.

You need to break free. But you can’t without help. If lucky, a forest fire will burn the brambles away. Often the only way out of habitual sin that has taken root in your body and soul is to be burned free. Like a prescribed burn is done to refresh a prairie with fire, to remove the weeds and the invasive species, we must feel the fire of the spirit to re-awaken our hearts to be generated anew. To return to the faith of a child, to start again, to be reborn - we must become awake to the fact that the things that we thought we wanted were all wrong. Otherwise habitual sin will remain just that: a habit.

American culture has ceased approving of the prescribed burns that renew people. We’ve silenced the voices that speak the truth. We’ve done a wondrous job intellectualizing most of our sins.

We are no longer afraid of God, because we think he’s not real. Unsurprisingly, we no longer worry about sin, because we think it too, is not real. These things go together. The reason the Hebrews said, “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” is because you won’t understand God until you know how pathetically weak you are. Living in a bubble of affluence, we misunderstand how weak we are. But we will learn. We all get to learn this. Affluence is an illusion that turns you away from God and the truth because you assume that the comfort and strength you feel is all under your control somehow. This is the same reason that strong young men are cocky while hunched over old men are humble. He is fooled by muscles as his undeniable strength. But the decades roll along and atrophy instructs with reality.

Only when the plane is about to crash can some of us awaken. That is when poor choices of who we chose to follow in life get outed as frauds. Those who follow Jesus do not have this problem even when the plane crashes into the mountain. This is because they know the answer to the test question, and if they really know that answer, then they have imitated the man, as best as they could.

Whatever rock you hit, whatever end you arrive at, there is no need to worry if you know that Jesus is the truth. Fear of the Lord will get you started on the path to the truth, and Jesus will remove that fear. First you have to know your weakness in order to understand what is really meant by God, because once you see the dragon, you will know the need for God. Fear of the dragon will lead you to God, who is far, far more powerful that any earthly or even spiritual dragon. But the dragon is real and the dragon will kill you. Then you surrender, and Jesus will slay the dragon for you. He will lay it down like a kitten. But you can’t tame the dragon alone, and Jesus won’t do it with you until you recognize and accept your weakness and sinfulness. Surrender is the only way to enlist the army of angels and saints.

We are in the climate of the last days of Babel where the clouds are darkening. The Tower seems nearly complete once again, as there seems to be nothing we can’t do as humans, and our lives bear out our own paper-thin “truth.” We deny ourselves nothing. We are told that we can do anything, we can be anything, and we proclaim this loudly…and that is exactly how every fall of man in the book of Genesis happens.

Everything is permitted when truth no longer exists except in the mind. Everything is upside-down and inside-out and the only real truth that comes out of it in the end is the same pre-Jesus bulldozer of “Might Makes Right.” You hear this message today of “taking the power,” and while some lament the old power fading, of European “whiteness” as the old ruler, you now hear of the ascendant “wokeness” replacing it. What neither side of this volleyball game realizes is that whichever side in this struggle wins, it’s the same outcome.

The underlying rejection of God will result in one side on top and the other complaining. We will again be living in a world of “rules for thee, but not for me,” just like the Epsteins and Trumps and Clintons and Bezos and Gates families do today. Do not let power fool you. Those who think that their oppressor has been “Christianity” have no clue about Jesus, the living God. Evil done under the guise of Christianity is the same as evil done under any other ideology.

Don’t let anyone distract you from the test. Because it’s rather easy, when you stop and think about it. You already know the answer.

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

Public service announcement: While the world may seem to be falling around you, all is well.

There is understanding among citizens of what is happening. The center is slipping. A poet need not articulate the state of America. We do not need a literature class, or William Butler Yeats to explain it. Anyone living today can grasp what the poet was trying to say in “The Second Coming,” even if he did misread the tea leaves on the end times.

Yeats wrote the poem in 1918, after World War I, during a pandemic known as the Spanish Flu, in the twilight of the British empire. Sound familiar? The power structure was fading into decadence right along with the British rejection of God, just as it always does. When people lost their way, God retreats and the center falls apart. Three hundred years of lusting for power and wealth surfaced into the lust for pleasure and corruption. The “stable” world of London, built by wealth won through violence, was falling into the chaos to which all empires succumb, as America is now. The evil done to “gain the world” led to a collapse of belief and with it went morality. Gaining the world, as always, means losing your soul. When the mask of a godless social order slips away, people scramble for safety like insects exposed under a lifted rock. Here’s how Yeats saw it happening:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Weeks could be spent on these lines. But do we need to spend time on it? We do not. We can just go on social media and see the best people lack conviction, while the worst people hurl invectives and spew anonymous hate in comment boxes. We don’t need Yeats, not when we are living in the time when this is happening before our eyes.

We can feel the center slipping and await the “blood-dimmed tide.” A small match will set this dried tinderbox ablaze. We don’t need Yeats to explain the poem now because he was a product of the same era that we have lived in for fifty years, where a people who rejected God fell into the spell of habitual sin, and then wondered what happened. Yeats soaked in the same tub that we are in. He lived a life of late-stage empire just as we have, trying to make a name for himself.

As Democrats and Republicans blame one another, and Right-wingers and Leftists hurl stock insults back and forth, and fascists and communists label each other with only a vague understanding of the actual meaning of the words, what is happening is the scramble for cover. Preparations are being made for the coming war as God retreats from the land, just as he did for the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Israelites, the Romans, the Germans, and the Soviets. The “passionate intensity” that we see online is just individuals placing their bets, finding their foxholes to hide in, with the hopes that the chips fall their way, that they have chosen the winning side. Fig leaves are being tried on and fit for size, in hopes that it marks them as an accepted teammate on the victorious side. With luck, their name won’t make the roster of the new enemies of the state.

What is happening is that people are trying to get out of the way of the swinging axe when it comes for blood, and it will swing. They think getting out of the way of the axe is by moving further from the center. A fragile state is felt. The pendulum appears most dangerous in the middle, and perhaps it won’t slice those who move off to one of the corners, away from the center. Moving far left or far right seems to be the only escape. So one side will cling to a version of “tradition,” claiming they want law and order (but with certain cheats allowed) and the other side wants to smash tradition and allow all things, where the only “sin” is whatever the old authority wanted. In either case, both sides are riddled with the same problem of pride and competition driving their choices, and by choosing a side they harbor anger and resentment toward the other. The zero sum game board is set and the only thing holding back the reign of terror is that that the grocery stores are still full of food today. The first rush to hoard during the Covid pandemic was for toilet paper. The second rush will be for guns and grain, and unfortunately, those who have the most guns can always just go ahead and take the grain.

Why am I mentioning all of this? Is this some sort of prophecy of pandemics, war, riots, and lies? No. Yes.

God knows all this is happening. He is allowing it to happen.

Is this God’s will?

Of course it is. It’s his world. It’s his universe. Christians are not called to solve all problems. They are called very explicitly to believe and be baptized and keep God’s commandments. Then, after that, to preach the most important news: that there is a savior who can transform our suffering. Jesus did not come to be Caesar or President, but to feed the poor and save souls. He did not come to save the rich and powerful, he came to save the poor and lost.

It’s important on election day to recall the lessons on why Jesus died. He came to take away the sins of the world. He did not come to end suffering. No, suffering is still here. We still have to deal with that. Even atheists have to deal with that problem. Jesus came to forgive our sins, but it wasn’t to remove all suffering. He didn’t come to make life easy, to put our feet up and order take-out. It was so we could understand suffering, and transform our suffering into something greater. He came to take away our sins and defeat death. He showed us how to live.

Most importantly, he came to defeat the devil. This is probably the least talked about reason that he came, which is odd, because this message is strewn all about the Gospels, from the temptations in the desert to the casting out of demons to his descending into hell. We do not get to eternal life without this victory over evil. Taking away our sins is great. Transforming our suffering - even better. But defeating death and evil - that is why he is the savior.

We still have to live out our lives here in the meantime, and with Jesus by our side, we can have total gratitude for every injury and insult that comes our way. That is the power of the Gospel. He was crucified so that we might live. The kingdom of God is among us. Be a joyful believer and pray for his grace, with the faith of a child.

Resist the urge to lay blame. The sinners are here, and you and I are among them. We are them. We’ve taken the same bites of fruit as Adam and Eve. The loss of innocence at an individual level plays out similarly to that of a whole nation. The world is always going to have suffering until God says otherwise, and there will always be dabblers and fools and seekers and lost souls. Just pray for them and give thanks that you might be found again every day. If our nation tries to crown itself as King and Creator, it will fall. There is only one truth, and that is the life of Christ, the lessons of the Cross, and the glory of the Resurrection.

If others assume their invincibility, their divinity, that there is no Higher Power or eternal justice between them and God, then there is no longer a distinction between heaven and hell. Let them have their beliefs, but never abandon yours. All that glitters is not gold.

When the constraints are all gone, when the police and planners can can no longer hold back the riot, know that God’s will is playing out. Money and power can play games with perception for a while, but the truth will always come out in the end. As Jesus warned us, the yeast of the the Pharisees is hypocrisy and the leaven seeps into the whole of the bread. Once everyone catches on to what the top people in society are doing to win, then the middle class follows suit. That is where the personal resistance must happen. Do not follow. Do not pursue. Stay with the Gospel and reject all polished apples presented to you.

When right and wrong becomes blurred, what will you do? What happens when the drag queen becomes the preacher? (I’m not making this up, this has already happened. In that case, you find a new church.) When sin is brought to the center, what happens to the center? What happens when the strip joint is elevated over holy places? What happens when our leaders don’t believe in sin? What happens when they no longer believe in God? What happens when marriage is no longer about a sacrament, a man and a woman becoming one flesh, but just a contract? What happens when we just rename things?

Fortunately for us, we don’t have to ask these questions, we will just get to observe it in action, in living history. For those who believe, that is where the test will be. The test will be how you reacted when the world fell down around you. When the chaos comes, like the Great Flood, will you be in the ark, or will you be squabbling for the last high spot on a teetering sandcastle amid the rushing waters?

Will you rush to take up the sword? Will your main concern be winning a war? Will it be power you are ultimately after, or humility before the Lord? Because on that day neither Democrats nor Republicans will be there to save you. More than likely they will be there to kill you, and like St. Paul, St. Timothy, St. Lawrence, you can meet them with joy.

You will know if you followed Him on the last day, right after the last exhale of breath from your lungs. Because it’s not what you win here, but whether you endured in the faith to the end. The toys you have here, the boats and the cars and the conquests and the political victories, will be as useful as the toys you gathered in your crib as a baby. Jesus asked us to take up our cross and follow him, not gather up comforts and settle. You will know your faith meant something, not if you win, not by the number of men you outlasted; you will meet Jesus if you do what he asked: if you prayed, believed, fasted, gave to the poor, and carried the message forward. If you healed the sick and kept his commandments. He did ask you to worry about who is governor, or state representative, or senator. He explicitly said that he did not care about Caesar or Pilate, as their power here was only given to them from above. So it is with any election outcome here today.

The Great Commission was not given to the apostles to gain earthly power. It was done to heal the sick, to bring the message of salvation. Those who need Him know Him. He calls them to him. Rest assured tonight that the winner of the election will not offer salvation. The winner today will offer some cheap trinket instead of the Pearl of Great Value that Jesus offers. In fact, if you follow Him correctly, the earthly powers will come to hate you and mock you, not love you. We can see it happening now. And for Christians who are wringing their hands right now about the comfort of a Christian society slipping, they have confused their comfort and wealth with Jesus Christ himself.

Be reminded - the God who came to live among us was without a place to lay his head. He served the poor and found the lost. He died on a Cross, hanging in public for three hours naked, suffocating with nails driven through his hands and feet. We are Sadducees and Pharisees, not Christians. We seem to have forgotten that to be Christian should not be cool, and a cross is not a fashion symbol but an instrument of execution. A church that follows this culture to fit in with the times will be orphaned in a short while. The churches that change their doctrine to fit the moment are just another fidget spinner or social media app. They come and go. They are as far from Christ as were Herod, Caiaphas, and Pilate. To buy into the zeitgeist is to forget the lessons learned from two millennia of being vilified and attacked from all sides. Whenever we mumble our way through the Nicene Creed we forget the blood and tears that forged those words, starting with St. Stephen all the way to the martyrs in Nigeria this week.

To fall into the trap of politics is to forget the entire purpose of God’s incarnation as a fully human and fully divine person named Jesus. Those who claim to be powerful here, whether it’s the Democrats or the Republicans, whether it’s Trump or Biden, or whatever name comes next in the list of presidents, they are not ruling. They have their scraps here, but no real power. Jesus ascended into heaven and he rules from there. Never forget that God is ruling this world and whatever temporary suffering we have here is prelude to the great joy that awaits us.

After all, what’s the worst they can do? Take away your social media? You should be so lucky. What’s worse than that? Take away your money. Yes, and set you free.

The worst they can do is kill you. And then the joke is on them.

The person who loves Christ and belongs to Christ, the worst they can do to you is kill you, and when that happens you go to rule and reign with Him... That’s the promise that we have in this vision.

So if we really understand what the Ascension is about, this should give us a lot more confidence in the way that we live our life. This is where St. Paul got his confidence, despite the shipwrecks and the beatings and the persecution and the hatred and the mocking he took. He knew that for him to live was Christ and to die was gain, and so he didn’t have to be afraid of anything or anyone. Anything anyone did to him would ultimately work for his benefit, for his blessings and his glory, and blessings and glory that are eternal, over against sufferings that are temporary, even if they go on for our whole lives here on this earth.

If we really have this vision before us, then all of a sudden we don’t have to worry about who’s president. We don’t have to worry about whether certain bills pass Congress. We don’t really have to worry about anything any more, because we serve and more importantly are loved by the God who rules over all of it. (Fr. Stephen de Young)

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Let’s check out a famous City of Man. Let’s go to Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is the most famous red-light district in the world in the Netherlands, where people can tour and observe prostitutes showing their wares in single stall bedrooms. I’ve been there. It’s very odd, as you have naive tourists walking around as if we were wandering at Costco in the meat section, except in Amsterdam you can make eye contact with the meat while it’s still alive. Or perhaps more similar, it’s like the cattle judging at the county fair, where the judge pokes at the young heifer and says, "Well, this rump is marbling nicely - this one may get a Reserve Champion ribbon," or "I bet she’ll draw a good bid at the auction."

The experiment that the Netherlands has done is to permit everything with the underlying goal being that it would reduce crime and drug use overall. This is meant to be merciful, as heroin addicts and sex addicts just need a little outlet, and if allowed they could be productive members of the city and not harm others. Mercy is the goal, and the flip side of mercy is justice. Surely allowing people to let their wild side out for a run around the yard is more merciful than locking up every casual drug user and dirty john. The same merciful motive created wet houses for hopeless alcoholics, or free apartments for chronic homeless. This is intended to be the flip approach to the “War on Drugs” approach, the heavy hammer, which imprisoned a lot of people but may not have actually quelled drug use. However, wide open policies haven’t seemed to work either, as the famous Platzspitz experiment in Zurich played out in a very public way.

The TV show The Wire has great episodes about this, where a place called "Hamsterdam" is allowed to exist in Baltimore, in an attempt to fix a city overridden by crime and drugs. The show portrays the experiment as a success, but politics in the city disband Hamsterdam because it makes them look like they are promoting the destruction of the city rather than being merciful. Oddly enough, the roping off of an area does allow the majority to live outside of the influence of the chaos of drugs and red-light vice, and done with the understanding that suppressing all vice will lead to an explosion, allows the edge of society to live in sin while families and careerists can pursue their own dreams. In the TV show, a man named Bunny Colvin wants to save Baltimore by creating a vice district:

Colvin wondered if there was a way for drugs to be made safe for low level users to take them without facing punishment; comparing the city's drug problems to the illegal public consumption of alcohol, which was circumvented when people began keeping their beer in a paper bag. After the attempted murder of Officer Dozerman, Colvin finally decided that he would independently set up three "free zones" in his district where addicts and dealers were allowed to conduct their business under supervision but without interference. This would move the drug trade into a controlled, uninhabited area to protect the rest of his district.

What happens in end is that the vice district is removed and the crime and drugs moves back into the neighborhoods where parents, children, and elderly live. To quote the band, the Offspring, "You gotta keep 'em separated." Mixing the innocent with the fallen must be done with caution. Any caring parent raising a child will try to steer his or her children toward good choices, just as any bird does not build a nest where predators can climb. Taken to a wider level, a city or nation that embraces the disorder of the Prodigal Son and places it at the center will suffer. Las Vegas, and increasingly Nashville, act as the main outlets for American party, like a neverending Saturnalia or Fat Tuesday. Vegas even advertises this in its moniker of Sin City and the motto, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." The message is: come here to sin and get wild. This is the outlet for the Groundhog Day kind of life that people feel, where you get up and go to work and raise kids and do laundry and do it all over again the next morning.

The idea of "setting apart" a time or place for letting loose and celebrating pleasure has been with humans for a long time, but the overall governing idea on how a city or group should be formed has been battled about just as long. Plato’s Republic is around 2,400 years old, but the Code of Hammurabi is close to 4,000 years old. The Laws of Israel in the first five books of the Bible was written about 3,000 years ago. But that doesn’t mean these discussions and ideas were not taking place long before they made it to paper.

We are lucky to have the preservation of these arguments, because for some 20,000 to 30,000 years people have been discussing and observing how we should organize our world. Along with those descriptions of law and governing philosophies, we have ample evidence of festival and party weekends that acted as part of the fabric of a culture. Before Mardi Gras and Oktoberfest there was Saturnalia, Kronia, Purim, Chinese New Year, the Festival of Drunkenness (in Egypt), and a thousand other small festivals around harvest and marriages and victory. We still have these today, and even dedicated places where people can go to have their own festival whenever they choose.

Las Vegas is a place set apart for rejection and rebellion from the typical rules of society, and most certainly against the idea of a watchful God. If anything, Vegas is modern shrine to the Greek or Roman god of wine, Dionysus (or Bacchus for the Romans). Vegas also worships the gods and goddesses of sex, Eros and Aphrodite (a.k.a. Cupid and Venus), since people go there specifically for nude shows and strippers and red-light action. Much like an altar, the stage at a strip joint presents a ritual gathering place where men offer money, eat, and drink in front of it. Even the dance that strippers do acts like a ritual, since they all do the same things in luring dollars out of pockets. The same can be said for the Sports Book areas where people gather in the dark, around TV screens, and make offerings of money, sacrifices, in the hopes of the sports gods granting a wish. Again, food and drink is present, and the ritual of watching and praying to the screens happens at every table.

Vegas is set aside for a kind of ritual pilgrimage for those in rebellion. The idea of drinking, gambling, and partaking of bodily pleasures makes Vegas clearly a place where Holy and Sacred things are not welcome, or not the traditional Holy and Sacred things. There are substitutions which take their place. The reality is that while in Vegas, the holy and sacred things are sports, sex, food, and drink. Once you see the ritual and sacrificial aspects of what happens in Vegas, you see a religion in process. It’s difficult to see it as anything but a pilgrimage. When you hear someone say, “I go to Vegas every year,” they have identified their offering of sacrifice (money, brain cells, liver tissue), their veneration of the warm sins (of gluttony, lust, and greed), their place of pilgrimage (Luxor, Excalibur, Treasure Island), their liturgy ritual (repentance by hangover, spa rebirth, poolside libations, slot machine offertory, nude dancing adoration, and communion by all-you-can-eat-buffet with chocolate fountain chaser). It’s all there, it just not called “religion” and no overt human sacrifice is raised up to unmask what it really is (except Nevada actually is one of the leading states for human sacrifice to Moloch per capita).

There are places set apart for where the party never ends, like Las Vegas or Key West or Bourbon Street. Then there are established weekends for celebration in every town and city, known as festivals and block parties. Both of these set-aside places and events allow people to feast, to let loose, and to reset their moral compass. The letting down of morality for a day or weekend is intended to allow recalibration and grounding of the party-goers greater purpose. By letting the masses off the leash, they get to run wild for a bit before returning to productive and ordered living. The festival weekend mimics the fall and the redemption, which is why it makes sense for every culture and city and town to hold these events. An allowance for rebellion is made, even in the most strict cultures in order for people to see why the norm of order is so valuable. If the celebration doesn’t center on alcohol, then it’s a feast of some kind. A touch of gluttony is added to the calendars in the form of feast days in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions.

One of the greatest paintings of this block party rowdiness was from Pieter Breugel the Elder, known as The Peasant Dance, and while the fashion of the peasants may differ greatly from today’s attire, the characters and actions within the painting can be witnessed wherever heavy-duty drinking takes place. Unrestrained dancing and haggard drunken faces own the foreground. There is a couple in the background sneaking into a barn for solitude and a presumable tryst. There are tankards of liquor everywhere. Lust, gluttony, and wrath are present, just like any nightclub today. The unrefined people of the peasant world engage in everything that happens annually today at Coachella among our elite, privileged, and “refined.”

Most interesting in the painting are two subtle elements that are shoved aside in favor of the tavern. On the right-hand side of the painting is a blurry picture of the Virgin Mary, tacked on a crooked tree. She is fully ignored by the peasants. In the background, at the center of the painting, is the church, the centerpiece of the town, ignored for the day. The celebration is thought to be the feast of St. George. This feast day is like other days surrounding holy days in our time, like Fat Tuesday as a feast before the Lenten season of fasting, or Halloween before All Saints’ Day. There is a season for fasting and for feasting. The Peasant Dance shows a lack of morality, yes, but it also shows the allowance of a sanctioned escape from the ordinary churn of days where the townspeople, whose rituals of work and worship, are dispensed for a time.

The idea of having a Liturgical calendar is designed with this in mind, because if all days were fasting, then fasting would lose its meaning as an offering and be mere drudgery. Worse, if all days were feasts, then civilization would collapse. The calendar of the Church did not balance feasts and fasts by accident or dumb luck. It is designed to move with the seasons of life. This reminds me of an old Huey, Dewey, and Louie Christmas special, called “Stuck on Christmas” where the duckling boys think it would be great to have Christmas every day. Getting their wish, they soon discover that after about five days of feasting and toys, they are miserable. Christmas and endless feasting grows into a burden, just like any addiction.

The error happens when this feasting is made the center of life. This goes to the core issue of our mental illness outbreak today. The fact that every day can be a feast now is why so many addictions seize lives. Pair this with declining belief in the one true God, and you have a problem that science cannot solve alone. Because there is no longer a concept of “sacred” time and space, all days are flattened into Groundhog Day. The idea of sacred places and things and days is no longer recognized in culture, which leads to a kind of malaise in all the days. We can overeat and get drunk and find a sex partner any day we like. Or we can do some New Age prayer routine, but only in a yoga studio or our living room, because we have no sacred place to go to. After all, “Everything is sacred,” which of course means that nothing is sacred.

For replacements, things like Super Bowl Sunday and Fourth of July Parties have overtaken the prominent places of Easter Sunday and All Saints' Day. I think this over often, as it’s clear that most Christians put far more preparation into Super Bowl Sunday than Easter. That alone tells you how secularism and the new pagan “holy days” has come to dominate America. There should be a widespread outcry among Catholics to boycott Super Bowl Sunday, because it is literally the new “holy day” where we not only gather in a ritual, but also eat in front of the liturgy presented by the TV. There is so much pagan cult ritual in Super Bowl Sunday, it’s hard for me to fathom that it has slipped past every self-proclaimed Christian as “just a social gathering.” Super Bowl Sunday is one of the only set-apart days that Americans share, and it is anything but holy or sacred. If you watched Jennifer Lopez’s halftime show in 2020, you will know that you were watching something demonic or perhaps the greatest satirical wake-up call of all time to every Christian in America. In the show, she did an imitation of the three crosses at Calvary using stripper poles, where she was lifted up on a center pole and appeared crucified in the center. What other word could be used for this than demonic, as the entire imagery was the inversion and mockery of Jesus Christ? If you believe that Jesus is God, then what do you make of this image, which took a lot of planning and practice to perfect for a live show? There are no accidents in Hollywood.

Few Americans even batted an eye, but I knew then that something was rotten in America.

Sometimes an image or a moment jars you awake. You suddenly realize that the nation you thought were living in, is not at all what you imagined. It’s like when you get sucked into admiration for a group or company, only to find out after joining that the exterior is just a cheap veneer and the inside is completely rotten. Or when you meet a celebrity and find out he’s all too human. America today is like a jack-o-lantern after Halloween, still smiling but rotting and caving inside. When J-Lo was lifted up like Christ, I knew that a threshold had been crossed long ago, but I was only seeing it then.

We would all be wise to back away from sports, entertainment, and wealth worship in general, but I have a feeling we won’t, since those are the values of the elite. Now that we know how much cheating takes place in professional sports with rampant steroid use and sign stealing and deflating footballs, we know that professional wrestling is every bit as honorable. We know know that the media companies are hell-bent on mocking all things Christian. As far back as 2005, NBC’s Committed did a full episode mocking the Eucharist, where in the end, the consecrated host is flushed down the toilet.

Wealth and winning and comfort are what we worship, so we have just gone ahead and merged stripper poles and soft porn into our halftime shows. Why not? Let’s just stop pretending we aren’t living in a Roman orgy. I’d personally like to thank J-Lo for lifting herself up to be the new Christ, because I’d like to think that she was doing it in satire, using stinging ridicule and wit, and subtly yelling at us all to turn off the TV and get right with God. That’s the best charitable answer I can give, because if it was anything other than that, we need to pray for Jennifer, who once assured us in “Jenny from the Block,” while she was nearly nude in the video, that she, “Put God first and can't forget to stay real.” J-Lo is a very common specimen of modern Christianity however, which is a quick nod to God while you ignore every single thing He ever said.

The crucifixion of Jesus was mimicked using imagery from a strip joint, with an extremely wealthy woman being lifted up, alive and well, claiming the image of Christ on the cross. Moreover, notice that everyone is falling at her feet in worship below her. Yet, this passed by the viewers and we all went back to eating wings and talking football and gossip and getting drunk. Sinead O’Connor’s act of tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II brought an outrage, but this was more subtle dig at all things Christian, and there was hardly a bark because everyone who sets aside time for the Super Bowl is, let me say it here first, a modern pagan. There is no other explanation for it, and J-Lo just helped point it out. A good conspiracy could be made that J-Lo was actually calling us to be awakened to our faith, because she was pointing out how far we have fallen. Somehow I doubt it, but if she is ever reborn in the faith, this image will require some explanation.

The problem with our new holy days is that there is nothing sacred about football, and Super Bowl Sunday has all the hallmarks of a Roman feast day for Dionysus or Zeus.

What happens when the belief in the transcendent Most High God fades is not just that we don’t feel guilty, it’s that nothing is elevated into sacredness. We remain on the flat earth, never reaching up to God. Rather than being lifted up into sacredness, the reverse happens, and everything falls into the profane, the ordinary.

What this leads to is a search for the sacred, because if it’s not built into the calendar, into the week, into blessed objects, then the heart must go to seek it. With no restrictions or guidance, the search can go on at any time, any where, and thus what is best reserved for special days of feasting becomes a daily “Stuck on Christmas” that depresses the hell out of people. This falling and rising action of our life stories is built into the Liturgical calendar, and it’s even built into the seasons of the plants and animals around us. Fasting, feasting, and ordinary time; suffering, thriving, and holding steady - these are the ups and downs and in-betweens that make a life whole.

When the Prodigal Son's errant lifestyle becomes the norm instead of the exception, there is a problem. Escape from real life is not meant to be permanent. Anyone who reads the parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11-32) knows that his choices are poor and the story resonates with people exactly because we can understand the character arc. The prodigal wild son begins the story whole, but in living in escapism, his version of Christmas every day turns to misery. He falls, and now he’s stuck. He threw away the sacred for the profane. Then he is brought to his senses and restored. He surrenders to his Father, and his Father rushes out to greet him with love. The end. Roll credits.

Notice that the fall in Act II did not become the final act for the Prodigal Son. Act II is not the happy ending, nor even a place anyone wants to stay. The point of the fall is to stand up again, just as Dante must go all the way down through the bottom of hell to emerge on the mountain of Purgatory, just as any addict must hit a bottom, soft or hard, in order to rise up, and in case you can't see where I'm going, it's why Jesus must go to the cross to be killed in order to be raised and resurrected.

This story of falling and rising is not just for us humans. God himself goes through this, which is what makes the story of Jesus so compelling and strange.

But why? I mean, isn't that always the question? Why would God have to come to us in order to die and be raised again? I didn’t understand this for a long time. It’s still difficult sometimes, and I know why cynics make fun of it, but I think it because it’s not easy to understand. Of course, it’s much easier to belittle the story with a meme like this one. I once thought this was clever.

Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree. Makes perfect sense.

There’s so many things in this that are misunderstood, but it is effective at destroying people’s faith, especially if the person has spent no time trying to learn the faith and spends no time in prayer. I mean, for goodness sakes, zombies eat people, people do not eat zombies. If this insult can’t even get the basics of zombiedom right, it’s pretty sad. And for the record: Catholics do not symbolically eat his flesh. We actually eat Jesus. And his glorified and risen body exists in the Real Presence of the Eucharist, under the appearance of bread. Yes, his body, blood, soul, and divinity is in the Eucharist. So please, fix up your insults before posting them. At least get the mystery correct. The Eucharist is everything and I feel sad for you if you don’t understand what the word theosis means.

Destroying faith is easy. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Most of us had little or no education on faith or religion, or if we did have some, it was sketchy and full of holes. If anything, it was some mashed potatoes of Catholicism, 50 shades of Protestantism, and a glued-and-taped-together Hollywood portrayal of Christians-gone-bad. I was so under-catechized that I couldn’t have defended my faith against a light breeze. And that’s exactly why my faith blew away like a leaf in the first rustle of wind at an outdoor keg party.

When you practice something you don’t understand, it’s just like doing busy work for no reason. I recall in the Army when a drill sergeant would make soldiers move a pile of rocks from one location to another, for no reason other than to keep us busy and to assert his power. Similarly, I recall doing hundreds and thousands of quadratic equation problems in math that I didn’t care about or understand. This is exactly what practicing a religion without understanding it feels like. Doing the Rosary without understanding why is much like moving a pile of rocks from point A to point B and back again, or like doing easy quadratic equations repeatedly. It is pointless. Without knowing how or why it’s done, you cannot grasp its purpose, usage, and application to your life. A kid who was told to read a book in Arabic when he can barely speak English would get about as much out doing the Rosary if he has no understanding of prayer and meditation.

On the other side, there is understanding without practicing, which is like telling everyone you are in shape and ready for a marathon, and knowing all the details of stretching and training, but when race-day arrives, your gut is hanging over your shorts. You have zero stamina and lung-strength for the race. To understand Christianity, you can’t have rules and no understanding, nor can you have understanding with no rules. You must practice the faith to be fit for it, and you must learn the faith to make sense of it.

Without faith, prayer, and understanding, of course it seems like nonsense. Without the interior change, it means nothing. And without the rules, it changes nothing. This is the body and soul needing both parts of faith and reason. This is where the leap of faith joins the mouth with the action of the hands. It’s not just about rules, and it’s not about living without rules. The whole thing is about humility before the one God, and when the change of heart happens, you don’t care about the rules or the vices, because everything begins to fall into place and make sense.

Even after the change, you still have battles with vice and wrongdoing, but you are eager to remove them from your life. Strict legalism and unbridled lawlessness no longer make sense, because neither can satisfy you. They can actually unite into a single thing called love, and that is the love of God first and foremost. But you have to understand forgiveness first, to know that you are loved, and to understand it, you have to kneel and say it out loud. You have to practice it to keep it, and to practice it, you have to be forever open to it. The change starts with a choice of “being willing to be willing,” to take that first step of asking the Holy Spirit to come and fill your heart with a flicker of light. Without opening up to that, you cannot expect the change to happen. Say yes to being open, and you never know where it will lead.

The sandbox and the red-light districts allows you to grow and get lost. What you thought you wanted turned out to be vapid and empty promises, like a cheap knockoff of the real thing. When you stop chasing the cheap things, the base things, you’ll know that you were crawling on your belly. But there is a way to think of this that can help make sense of time lost in the alleys. The caterpillar inches furiously on the ground, seeking forage and shelter, seeking something that it cannot possibly realize. And then one day, when it’s ready, it begins to transform, and after so much crawling and struggling, it undergoes a radical, difficult transformation, one that must be painful, but that suffering is transforming the caterpillar into a butterfly. And when the cocoon splits open, the new life begins, and what was once a caterpillar chasing things on the ground, is now a miraculous and beautiful being that flies.

All of those desires that occupied so much of your time, all the days of being lost, are the formation of your story guided by God, the growing of your soul toward meeting Jesus, and if you let the suffering transform you, you will never be inching on the ground again, you will be aloft with Him.

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The red-light district in a city is meant to be an outlet for the restless to blow off steam, for lawlessness to play out, within acceptable limits. The unwritten rule is this: if you want to be risky and maybe destroy yourself, just go do it over here in this corner. It’s a silent agreement. Town festivals are just small versions of Fat Tuesdays for the locals. A culture or society needs a Purim or Fat Tuesday or Carnivale or a parade or a keg party or Prom to let it all hang out for a bit, because it keeps people sane.

However, the allowance of the rowdy night or weekend only makes sense if a return to normalcy and rules happens after it’s over. Notice that Halloween is followed by All Saints Day. Fat Tuesday is followed by Ash Wednesday. Lent, a period of fasting and prayer, is followed by the feast of Easter. What's interesting in the Christian liturgical calendar is that these outlets are built into the year, every year, because there is an awareness of this “need” to sin, to burn off the slag, as if perhaps we have actually learned something over time. Maybe from the thirty thousand years of human history we have learned something. Maybe wandering the African savannah to the caves of France to crossing the Bering Strait and living in the empires of Sumeria and Mesopotamia and China and Egypt and Greece and Rome taught us some things. Maybe the smart people passing down oral tales figured a few things out and warned us in stories about why full lockdown and full license are both not great ideas. Perhaps, maybe, just maybe, there is some wisdom passed down to us through these silly myths and oral stories that came from these toothless flyover illiterate goat herders from ancient times that we sophisticated internet and smart phone users might benefit from if we can take a break from our Netflix and porn.

One of these stories is the play, The Bacchae, by the Greek playwright, Euripides. This tells the story of Pentheus, a man who tries to defeat the god of wine and partying, Dionysus. To make a long play short, Pentheus gets ripped to pieces by the Maenads, the wild women, because he tries to peek and disrupt their annual ritual celebration where they let it all hang loose. The whole point of this play is what I’m talking about in this post.

The Bacchae depicts a struggle to the death between the twin forces of control (restraint) and freedom (release), and permits Dionysus to provide an answer to this question. The god's implicit message is that not only is there space within society for the irrational, but that such a space must be allowed for that society to exist and thrive. By denying or opposing the irrational, as Pentheus did, the person who opposes it, or the society that denies it, will be torn apart. (taken from Sparknotes)

So you see, database design and Greek tragedy can be discussed together.

While this play may seem to go into some strange notions, the point is clear, and the United States congress should have read this play before passing the Prohibition of Alcohol amendment, as that marriage of law and excess order gave birth to a Mount Saint Helens eruption named Al Capone and organized crime.

In more recent history, we were able to observe the lockdowns for Covid where the state put very strict rules on people, but left liquor stores open as “essential” business, which seemed to be the one element of minor rebellion allowed. IN response, people took to drinking during the lockdown as a coping strategy. However, staring into screens and drinking did not help very much, because soon many of the cities in the United States were in flames and rioting went on for month after month. The lockdown led to the upside-down. On the one hand we had complete control, while in other areas there was total lawlessness. And this happened with both the left and the right, so it’s not like just one “side” went crazy in the state of legalism.

The decision to leave liquor stores open is one thing. But then another decision came. Churches were closed, but strip joints were granted the status of being “essential businesses.” This, to me, is the summary statement of the Covid era in America, because it highlighted how upside-down our leadership and culture has become. Or rather, it simply revealed a reality that was already in existence, but just hadn’t been made fully known, at least to me.

The upside-down world had finally shown its true face. Was it God’s will to have liquor stores and strip joints and abortion clinics be open and celebrated while churches were closed? Apparently so. And most likely it was done so that we could observe the madness that ensued and then choose how we want to live our lives. The nation had long held the word God on its lips, but never had it been so clear that it has long been only lip-service.

If there is one common thread in the stories of the Bible, it is that turning away from the living God leads to disorder. No sooner did churches get shuttered in California than massive riots erupted. Correlation is not causation, but what strange luck for the devil for those two things to happen in succession. A moment in 2020 struck me when suddenly I understood why Abraham was called out of Haran. He had to leave the culture behind.

For three months straight, cities across America belched smoke into the sky, night and day. I saw places that I formerly frequented in Portland, Oregon being burned to the ground. Then we saw the capitol building invaded by a hoard. It was difficult not to see the events that played out as Biblical, because the pattern matched eerily well to those old Bronze Age myths from those smelly, backward goat-herders. The dilemma of the ancient people was suddenly shoved near to each of us. The illusion of the nation that we had been living in disappeared. It was like a glossy polish of a tabletop hiding a rotten and termite-eaten wood structure.

Like makeup removed from a hideous face, we saw the what America really had become. The empire was finally, fully unveiled. And as an empire can only come by elevating human desires to be higher than humility before God, like all empires, the pursuit of power and wealth and pleasure and honor eventually drives itself off a cliff. Empire is an attempt at self-salvation. Empire is the direct ambition of pride. But in the end, like a cell that refuses to live and die in its seasons, empire is a massive, unspoken suicide pact made among millions of people. Empire is the story of a cancer cell writ large. In making itself the most important thing, above God, an empire ends up killing the nation. A wise nation has its seasons and abides with fear of God. An empire ignores the seasons and thinks it will never die.

As soon as a nation or a people justifies its decisions by the wrong kind of “freedom,” the unravelling begins. There is “freedom of indifference” and “freedom for excellence.” This is extremely simple and ties into everything else I repeat here. We can choose the fruit on the forbidden tree or we can choose to obey God. That’s the dilemma: which type of freedom do you choose? Choosing the former, the wrong kind of freedom, precedes disorder, chaos, and eventually war, which America is hurtling toward. Order spins into disorder quickly when the wrong definition of “freedom” takes hold of a people.

You can witness this on both sides of American politics. The pendulum swings, but unlike a clock pendulum, it swings with a knife, an axe, slicing into that which occupies the middle. To avoid the knife, sides must be chosen. As the pendulum is lowered, the knife gets closer, and the sides must flee further apart. After all, the one thing we know we want is self-preservation, not death. To avoid being cut down, we huddle on the left or the right to hide. Political parties are modern fig leaves, and as Adam said to God, “I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid,” that is what we are saying when we rush into the mob of our chosen political party. We hid behind the elephant or the donkey, using those affiliations to protect our nakedness, but neither of those will save you or anyone else in the end.

The Greeks had Alexander, Persia had Cyrus, Rome had Caesar, Germany had Hitler: all of these model the same problem that is told about Babylon and Egypt in the Bible. These are the stories of empire and power. We tend to idealize the ancient emperors but see the most recent ones as monstrous. We speak of Caesar with strange admiration and despise Hitler, even though these two were doing the same thing, warring and enslaving and killing people in pursuit of power. Rest assured: the conquerors are all monstrous. These famous names are the “strongmen” of history, but they are all symptoms of an underlying disease. They only come to power because of mass fears among the people, growing out of eras like we have in America today. Hyper-polarization, distrust of authority, scapegoating, economic problems, failed attempts to overthrow the government, lies being spread, pandemics, propaganda, inflation. The canary in the coal mine for nearing the “strongman” phase of a nation is easy to spot: it is the collapse of sexual morality. America has been inching in this direction for sixty years and the snowball is now tumbling downhill.

No sociologist, historian, or political scientist need explain it, as people feel the fragmentation happening today. The lust for national power brought a lust for everything. The desire for money and power created dirty deeds and deals, compromised morality. Secret wars brought affluence, and affluence brings entitlement. The bad example in our national leaders of how power and wealth was gained leads directly to the desires of individuals that need no more justification than “I want it” and “don’t tell me what to do.” Here’s the thing: if the winners cheated to get their spot on the podium, so shall we all. If the winners cheated, so can we. And we see it everywhere. We see it in business: Enron, Wells Fargo, Theranos. We see it in sports: Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones and Barry Bonds. We see it in the wealthy: Epstein, the Panama Papers, Trump, Gates. We see it in the church: McCarrick, the 300 Pennsylvania priests, the Jay Report.

None of the models and heroes follow the rules. So we begin to ask ourselves the fatal question: “Why should I?”

And that is exactly the question that must be resisted. “If they can do it, why can’t I?” That is the temptation in the Garden. That is the voice that you must reject. In the Spiritual Combat, you must distrust that voice, and put all of your confidence into God alone, praying for Jesus to give you strength and direction, and the breath of life, the Holy Spirit, to guide you away from the easier path. Be Abraham, not Lot. Be Peter, not Judas. Aim to be a saint. The bad examples of this world should not open doors for you, but rather represent police-tape of where you do not cross, as the only cross to be concerned with is the one which Jesus will help you bear and carry.

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 fringe can always be found. Just pop into your corner bar or nightclub, it will be there tonight. Likewise, In our own individual lives, we have an exploratory fringe phase, or phases, plural. Or maybe you lucked out and went straight from middle school into grandmotherly virtue. But I didn’t. And if you doubt that we need to explore, and the corner bar or nightclub doesn’t prove it to you, just stroll through a humanities building at any university and witness future moms and dads who are actively calling for revolution. These same world-changers, in less than a decade, will be climbing corporate ladders, carting kids around, and defending and protecting the very institutions they want to see collapse. They may even be worshipping in a church and witnessing to you. (Like…ahem…hypocrites like me.)

The “age of reason” or “loss of innocence” demands exploration, for if we don’t at least taste the fruit of the forbidden tree, then the desire to gorge will likely emerge twisted and deformed later on in life. I cannot help but see this in the Garden of Eden story and in Jesus’ own repeated reference to being “reborn” and returning to the faith of a child. Maturing in plants and animals requires massive change and emergence, and for us it requires asking questions and facing the great questions of life, as in: “Why am I here, where am I going, where did I come from, what is real, what is true, what is good?” Then once you get through that post-adolescent idealistic period and wake up a parent, you know why you are here. Parents confuse childless adults in this, and the childless adult can never fully understand what it means until they themselves have a child. It is a bridge too far to cross.

The great questions in life are answered by doing what you are supposed to do. It’s really simple in the end and Jesus said things that were so obvious that it seems bizarre that God himself had to come here and tell us. The secret is this: to grow, to marry, to have a family, and to return to our Creator. In the beginning, our body reaches while our soul is quiet. In the end, our body quiets while our soul reaches. The little clones of yourself called children provide the answer in the middle. Staring up at you with big eyes, they need you to provide dinner. While you cook you might grumble, but that is the meaning of life. There is a very simple saying from Jesus that captures it:

“If a grain of wheat dies, it bears much fruit.”

The wheat must die to fulfill its purpose, which is what? Obviously a wheat plant is not intended to live forever, or there will be no more wheat. If a wheat plant remained locked in adolescence, no wheat seeds would form on top. That’s called a dud. Now there are very different causes of failure to bloom in plants, some of which are not the plants fault but have more to do with environment, soil, timing. Those plants suffer the same burden as people who cannot reproduce, and for people this is an awful realization. However, today we have many healthy plants who choose not to flower, who refuse to bloom by choice. This is a very different kind of problem than those who cannot bloom because of a physical or environmental reason. Those who want to have children but cannot must bear a kind of suffering that the perpetual adolescent-by-choice cannot understand.

The purpose of a wheat plant is to give up itself in order to make wheat. That is the answer. That is the secret of life. It’s not what Faith Hill tells us in the country song, “The Secret of Life,” a song that has always eluded me to having a single insight into any secret. The secret of life is not Monday Night Football and a good cup of coffee. The secret is living to maturity and then dying to self. The secret of life is giving yourself away in the end for your spouse, family, country but ultimately for God. The secret of life is becoming what you are made for, and finding your vocation, whether it be married or consecrated single or priest. Not all acorns become an oak tree, but that is the intended aim. As for Monday Night Football, that hasn’t even been around for fifty years. However, for 30,000 years humans have survived and replicated without football. Even the idea of a “good cup of coffee” is only about 500 years old, so there is no case to be made that the secret of life has anything to do with Starbucks or Folgers. The secret of life is to become what you are, not what you imagine. Today we have acorns that declare themselves as lemon trees. Contentment comes with realizing the purpose of life, and even if all people do not have children or get married, they can fulfill God’s will in many other ways.

Our lives have the exact same purpose as that of animals and plants and even skin cells, in that we are to grow, survive, reproduce, and die. Hard to hear? Yes. How can death be something to celebrate? Because we forget this rudimentary fact. Jesus had to remind us of something so basic that the simplicity of his profound message is incredible all by itself! The reason that pride is the root sin of all disorder is because it drives us away from our telos, our purpose, so that we think our life is about our moment in the sun and not our children and living through the seasons of life. The reason the shiny one convinced Eve to eat the apple was by telling her that we would become like God in a snap. That’s the whole story of sin. When we desire what is not ours, what is not our purpose, we get out of season. We become a cancer cell, which is a little structure that rejects that there is a season for all things. We actually can become more like God, but there is no shortcut. It requires patience and suffering, since that is the model that Jesus demonstrates for us.

"There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens. A time to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to reap." (Ecc 3:1-2)

Forgetting the last part, the dying to self, the reaping, is arguably missing the most important part, otherwise you just remain a self-absorbed overgrown child. And in terms of biology, a cell that doesn’t die when it should becomes a cancer cell. Cancer is the refusal to complete the cycle of life. Perhaps instead of telling someone to “act your age,” we should advise them not to be a cancer cell.

A cancer cell happens by missing the signals that should guide its tiny life. By missing prompts, by receiving incorrect signals, by evading messaging, and by “sticking” to a phase that it should move on from, a cell becomes cancerous. Like plants, this can happen due to environment and nutrient issues, but the story is the same. You can blow up this metaphor into the life of a person that refuses to grow up or gets stuck in a rut or is forever seeking or thinks he will live forever. A “normal” cell knows that “unless a grain of wheat die, it cannot bear much fruit,” but a cancer cell declares, “I am the fruit!” And by losing its telos, its purpose, in the body, the cancer cell proceeds to kill the body.

This is what sin does. Cancer is disorder. And sin is our spiritual cancer, founded on our pride, telling us that we are the fruit, we are the good thing, we are the god who should live forever. Pride is always what causes us to miss the signal, to evade the message, to get stuck in a phase, and to think that the ego is what life is all about.

The simple "falls" of Genesis, that seem so childish, so mythical, are apparent in our own lives and our own neighborhoods if we take a minute to observe. The more we try to pretend the “fall” doesn't exist or, conversely, the more we affirm ourselves as being beautiful in every single way, the worse it gets.

I hate to say this, but the Prodigal Son actually needs a place to go get drunk and try to hookup. So does the Woman at the Well. Here’s the thing: if we never get lost, we’ll never be found. How can we be found if we never get lost? In the end, both of these people, the Prodigal and the Woman at the Well, are cured by their excess. But they can't be healed until they either outlive or fully explore their empty desires. Unfortunately this can cause big waves for others in the wake of their self-exploration. The illusions offered by pleasure, honor, wealth, and power seduce them, but by consuming that spiritual junkfood they come to realize the emptiness more completely and understand fully why a savior is needed. Those who go astray may be the first ones found. Those who never leave, who never stray, may never realize that they are lost. But we all get lost. It’s a guarantee. No matter how safe you think you are, you will get lost somewhere along your path through time and space. And you can lose sight of God in a locked one-room apartment just as easily as you can hitchhiking like a highway drifter.

Yes, the Prodigals could pray it away, but they don’t. They won’t. Because it doesn’t work like that. Commanding faith in others is exactly how Communist governments work. In other words, it doesn’t work. It sounds good, but it’s impossible for someone to believe unless God draws them. For whatever reason, God gives us trials, allows us free will, and lets each of us walk a path that leads to him. Then when he’s ready, the shepherd comes to find us. Some seed of rebellion and exploration is planted in our minds by a spirit, compelling us to explore, and then later God starts giving signs to us as he exorcises the demon and proves us in the trial. He “burns away the dross” so that we can be pure silver through these trials. Many are guided down the wrong path, by friends or relatives or bad circumstances, but some of us go searching for casino and bar without any nudge. As for those who steer us into bad patterns, this is where Jesus warns those who mislead the “little ones.” I always wonder when I hear this: is Jesus talking about other people, or the demons that suggest bad ideas to those people?

As far as learning to pray, how many are even taught today? So few have any exposure to it, and the closest thing to prayer being mass marketed now is yoga class, which teaches self-worship. The Prodigals can’t get to prayer because they don’t know the way. And for many who are lost in the search, even if they did know how, they won’t until they are ready. As St. Augustine said, “Lord, let me be chaste, but not yet.”

We have many books and media marketing in place convincing us all that happiness must come through a product or experience that will fulfill the self. Our desires, we are told, is who we are. This is the worst advice imaginable. Sure, another trophy will do it, another notch on the bedpost, another million dollars in the bank, another drink, another toke. How can we take any of this seriously? Of course more of the same will not satisfy. It’s more…of the same.

The cruel trick or glorious revelation, depending on your point of view, happens to the Prodigal Son and the Woman at the Well. When they get what they want, they learn in the end that what they wanted...wasn't what they wanted at all. What they wanted was love, and the drinking and the sex failed to give it. You can see this happen the same way in people who buy a new boat or house. The experience or the possession fail to deliver. A 350 horsepower boat is not as fast or powerful as a twin-engine 400 horsepower boat. But neither boat will fill the hole that the boat is trying to fill.

Both the Prodigal Son and the “Woman at the Well” end their stories in a “drop the nets” moment like Peter and Andrew. When they catch all the fish that they thought they wanted, they suddenly realize it was not about the fish. And they drop the nets and the fish like a bad habit. They leave everything to follow Jesus. Because He is what they were looking for. Finding him, they were done looking. Forever. They could suddenly rest and stop searching. They wanted something greater than their desires, more than things or experiences of this world could ever provide, and they found it in a fully-human and fully-divine person named Jesus. Who would have thought - they found it in a construction worker. Perhaps we should all think of that as we drive by these invisible men in hard hats and dirty clothes who stand on scaffolding and roofs and trusses in our cities and towns.

Rebellion plays out. But it always leads to the same end where the vapid false freedom of “doing whatever I want” proves empty and meaningless. Given that this exploration will happen, whether we like the idea or not, there is reason to allow an outlet for people to go and explore this rebellion, because all must explore, and some are going to do it much more than others. Law and order is required to keep it within reason. One thing proven over and over is that the more you clamp down on this balloon of rebellion, the stranger the manifestation of rebellion that squirts out. There is no reason to encourage rebellion, but there is also no denying it will happen. Bad desires are like infections that must be treated early, ideally by talking rather than doing. Many are guided and pointed down a wrong path and may not have known of other choices. Some will have a good guide and be pointed in the right direction, and even many of these will not heed sound advice because the call of the Fall is so strong.

You can’t keep Rapunzel hidden in the tower in the woods forever. The argument against censorship of children preaches this, and like most fairy tales, it rings true to some extent. However, there is a reverse story happening today where the Prince takes Rapunzel out of the tower too soon, when she’s about five, and drops her off at Hastings Avenue in Vancouver, B.C. at midnight. The argument against censorship has created our current state of the world, where ideas arrive in children’s brains via the wild west of smart phones long before those brains are ready for it, and now it has been blessed by policymakers in the public schools. This, too, is very Biblical. We have seen this before. Whenever I hear someone toss out the Bible as bronze-age nonsense or goat-herder tales of yore, I am instantly assured they have not properly understood it, and they are likely reading Genesis, Exodus, Judges, etc as science books or history books rather than as a tour through the heart of every human who ever lived.

Giving dangerous things to humans before they are prepared is one of the primary ideas in the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve are told that they can skip all the steps of growing to be like God. No, they are promised a shortcut. And who doesn’t want that? That is our nature. When faced with preparing a proper dinner or microwaving a frozen pizza, I have often chose the latter. I want what is easy, and available…like right now. This is what the fruit represents to Adam and Eve. This is the first example of our modern obsession for instant gratification.

They can leap ahead in time by eating the fruit, without any need for maturity at all. This is the same defense people are offering today for psychedelic drugs as the way to transcendence. The drug is promised as the superhighway to God, but like every shortcut it comes with unintended consequences. The superhighway does not provide the same journey, as you only see the billboards and gas stations, whereas the slow path through the woods gives intangible rewards like grace and wisdom. The difference between reaching for transcendence through, say, magic mushrooms versus doing the Rosary is that in the first one you are the subject and in the second one, you fade away completely in favor of God and the Blessed Mother.

The serpent offers them the fruit as knowledge of good and evil so that they may be like God. But what happens surprises them. They do not become like God. They become fallen. They would have been better off locked in Rapunzel’s tower for a longer period, as they were not ready for the devil’s tempting. Their bootstrapping has led to them being strung out, just like every drug does, and they are now in a bad state, kicked out of the garden for disobedience, and ultimately for their own good as they cannot be in the place of holiness, as the Garden of Eden translates to “where God is.” Thus, they have to suffer because they cannot handle living “where God is” just yet. They need time to grow.

We have the two extremes of total censorship versus total exposure. As usual, a balance is somewhere in the middle, because total lockdown of Rapunzel leads to a wild child who can tell lies really, really well, and total exposure puts her at risk of growing up way too fast for her brain chemistry to catch up. In either case, the fall happens. Every person “falls.” But you may be able to soften the landing.

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

For database administrators, the term “constraints” comes up often. It refers to rules placed on what types of data can be stored in the database, and where it can be stored. Relational databases are containers that organize information into tables, columns, and rows, like a spreadsheet but more powerful, with linkages and relations between the tables. This logical organization of data led to billions in profits over the past fifty years. I spent a decade working for Oracle, one of the database heavyweight contenders, so I had a good amount of exposure to products built on both good and bad database design.

Having worked on products that used minimal constraints in database design, I learned the hard way that front-line support teams must do daily trench battles against customer issues that could have been avoided by proper design. A lack of proper “constraints” on the database, or having no limits or rules, leads to a mess, a bunch of noise, that eventually turns into a jumbled heap of garbage data. The saying, “Crap in, crap out,” is used to describe this scenario. If anything can be put into the database, a problem lurks. When you go to use that data to extract reports, you can be fairly certain the data will be badly formatted and unfit for consumption.

Unexpected errors spring up due to the disordered mess that has been allowed into the data tables. The result is spending a lot of time in dangerous database surgery, crafting INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements to repair the mess, and mistakes can kill a business application. Fortunately, working with software does not involve actual living things, so if you kill a database or application, people don’t die. Unless of course that database or application is supporting medical procedures or critical inventory systems. Then it is very possible that the death of the database can lead to pain elsewhere.

You can see where this is going.

There is an obvious parallel to database management and our lives, both individually and socially. Database design is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.

Ordering chaos is what most of human life is about, and because so much of our lives is about ordering chaos, it is exactly why the opening in the book of Genesis is about bringing order to chaos. This point should not be missed if you ever open your Bible to page 1 and read the first paragraph.

This may seem a stretch, but the urge to create a spreadsheet, which is to bring order to chaos, has a parallel to the greatest mystery of why our universe and world exist at all. The act of “creating” is to take material and thoughts and try to give them a shape that makes sense. A painter at an easel with a blank canvas is much like the spreadsheet creator, or woodworker, or musician, or even someone trying to organize a closet-gone-wild. They start with resources in a disordered state and an idea in their mind. In creation they merge the physical with the spiritual, just as we are body and soul.

The act of creation starts with an action, an idea, and organization, and that is why the saying, “Let there be light” does not refer to the sun. Whenever someone gets hung up on the sun being created on the fourth day instead of the first, I feel that this act of creation is misunderstood, as the “light” is the action of merging of physical and the spiritual, body and soul. “Light” is the first step toward ordering the chaos.

There’s a saying in the software world that “every product started out as a spreadsheet.” A spreadsheet is often started by someone in the office to try and make sense of what is happening in the business, or with customers, or even with something as simple as coffee machine duties. There’s usually someone who is bothered by the disorder just enough to take action. The same sense of chaos that leads someone to file for running for city council is the same notion that drives an office worker to open a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets and start naming columns and entering data in rows. When the artist first touches her brush to the canvas, or when the spreadsheet creator clicks the File → New option on the menu of a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, an act of creation is underway. All of our acts of creation are contingent on God’s creation, as without gravity and matter, our spreadsheet would not be needed.

We want order, because chaos becomes unbearable, and you can do three things to deal with chaos: you can fight the chaos, you can flee the chaos, or you can live in the chaos. If you choose to live in it, you may handle it in a few ways, some of which will lead you to peace or others that make you insane.

The saying, “There’s a spreadsheet for that” long precedes the saying “There’s an app for that.” Once various entrepreneurs realized the data they were tracking had relevance to a wider audience, the spreadsheet turned into a database and then eventually a user interface is added, and suddenly you need salespeople to go forth and tell the world. In this way, a product is born. The idea is conceived in the inventor’s mind and willed into existence by tools and skills. There is a “let there be light” moment followed by taking action and creating.

A single spreadsheet managed by one person is not a workable solution for large problems. Once the spreadsheet creator leaves the simple shire of the spreadsheet, he or she faces numerous questions around access rights and restrictions. Updates can cause chaos without proper locks, requirements, and referential integrity. In database design these are known as constraints, which are like the castle walls controlling what data comes into the database, or like laws regarding what types of data are allowed to live in this little kingdom of data. People have become billionaires in finding ways to represent data effectively, as without organization, data is a pile of chaff that cannot even be burned for heat. Data is utterly useless without organization.

Too few constraints or too many constraints both create problems. If I get started on database talk, this could be a long episode, so I’ll keep this part short. I’ve spent a career poking around in databases and log files looking at error codes and messages. Not a very glamorous life, and I have often joked about being in “log file hell,” when a customer dumps 2 gigabytes of log output into my lap for troubleshooting. This blog/podcast could easily change from the topic of falling, recovery, and reverted faith into one about troubleshooting databases and software error codes. Why Did Peter Sink? would be about error stacks, bug fixing, and system stabilization. The interesting thing, however, is even if the topic changed from restored faith to database troubleshooting, the main message would still be around order, disorder, and re-ordering, which is what the book of Genesis and the Gospels are really all about.

To deny this yearning for order results in collapse rather quickly, because if there is no desire for order, or no faith in the system, data systems can turn sour as quickly as milk. There is a kind of faith needed in a product for it to last. The data must provide a sense of order, and meaning to the users. Otherwise someone or something will replace the system or employees will just leave, if they have any means whatsoever to do so. There is faith required even in the purely material world of software and data, because in the end the users are human. But faith in a product to assist keeping order at a job or corporation is different from the kind of faith needed to order your life.

Staring into chaos can be done for a long time, when times are good. Non-believers and pure materialists have obviously always been part of society, and surely they rolled their eyes at the religious nuts back in Jesus’ time as much as they do today, but they are typically the fringe of society, not the center that holds all things together. The rules and need for order get sidelined when affluence and plenty seem to have solved all problems. You’ll see this in business when times are good, where there is largesse and generosity, which leads to abuses and corruption. Then the recession hits and the disorder and lack of discipline is called out. Layoffs happen. Hiring is frozen. People suddenly have to justify their purpose. The comfort of good fiscal quarters leads to corruption and laziness, and when the belt gets tightened, the fringes get squeezed first. But the fringe doesn’t go away. It just goes into hiding for a bit. The heart always wants to explore the fringes.

Wise societies allow for this searching, leaving small openings in life open to the wanderers. Even strict nations have dedicated days for wandering and loosening the rules, because holidays like Halloween and Mardi Gras and Carnival and Purim offer release valves for rebellion and rowdiness. These festivals came out of the need to allow some pressure out of the balloon. Mount Saint Helens blew its top off because there was no escape for the pressure. Hawaiian volcanoes have lava dribble nicely out the top because the pressure is not bound up as tightly. This is the tightrope that cities have to walk. How much disorder should we allow? Towns and villages have annual festivals for drinking and staying up late, because it grants a hall pass for the standard of work and faith in something greater. This is to avoid the Mount Saint Helens type of explosion.

Cities have streets or districts where vice is allowed, or at least ignored. Driving or walking on these streets can make for jaw-dropping tourism for the uninitiated. I recall driving down Hastings Avenue in Vancouver, B.C., in broad daylight, where someone was using a toilet that was just sitting on the street (no plumbing). Prostitutes in ripped fishnet stockings were seeking clients. Various lost souls smoked crack openly. Every boarded up doorway housed a body or two, apparently sleeping.

It seems that all cities have this street: Prospect in Kansas City, Langstrasse in Zurich, or Hastings in Vancouver, etc. Every city has a neighborhood like this, just like every small town has a bar or house where the fringe can gather. People drive down these streets for a kind of Poverty Tour (a.k.a. Poverty Porn) of how the other half lives. These places make for a kind of living cautionary tale, like that which parents can use to cudgel children away from drugs and other bad patterns. “Do you see what happens, kid, when you do drugs?”

Small towns make for interesting interactions because a full variety of vices, worldviews, and systems of belief are shoved close to one another and must interact, whereas in larger cities you can live in one area without ever touching or interacting with those different from you. In a small town, you do not have that option of isolation. The town drunk and the mayor may be in the same diner or grocery store or church. But what I’m driving at is a city or a country thing, nor a race or class or national thing. It's a human thing.

The "fringe" element in small towns and cities are granted an outlet to avoid an eruption, as complete suppression results in a blast. This is same reason that sandboxes are placed outside for children rather than in the kitchen. Individuals and societies allow exploration to play out, because it’s going to play out whether you allow it or not. Even the most repressed societies have rebellion in secret underworlds. But this is not due to the repression or the rules, as some would have us believe. This exploration and rebellion happens. Why? Because we are fallen creatures.

We need a sandbox to play in, a development area, a place to thrash about. Just as cities cordon off a street for this exploration, database administrators create non-production environments, sometimes called “sandboxes” where any wild-child programmer can go play, break things, try on data, running through rows and flipping tables. The key thing for keeping organization is that you do not experiment with what you already know works and is running the business. You allow the skunk-works stuff over in the fringe, the development database, but never, ever in the database which puts dollars on the balance sheet.

This may seem a geeky metaphor to compare to cities with their red-light districts, or to our lives with their periods of rebellion, but it is hardly different. Cities allow the inevitable rowdiness, within reason, and database designers provide a romper room, and if the city or the database admin had their way, they would prefer to have as little of this disorder as possible. Yet it’s allowed, because to completely stifle all experimentation and rebellion leads to the spread of mayhem to the entire city. In businesses, the rebel programmer forces will just start their own shadow IT. Users and party-seekers stop asking for permission altogether.

God allows us some rope, to wander and explore, otherwise we may never learn what the rules are for in the first place. The forgiveness of sins is not a get out of jail free card so much as it’s an understanding and loving Father who knows of our need to seek out the dragon. God is not the rigid Pharisee, who is like a city administrator that cracks down on every last jaywalker in the street, or the database administrator that allows no access and no data for anyone and kills all creativity. He is the loving Father that prefers we stayed but knows we’ll stray, and when we return from our dragon-quest beaten and broken, he will not even say, “I told you so.” That is the Father of the New Covenant. The words of Jesus speak of this type of Father, and this is Our Father, meaning yours and mine and everyone else’s.

For some reason unknown to us, God allows sin. This is the perhaps the most confusing thing of all about the Creator. This drives many away from belief because we know sin is the cause of suffering, so how can it be allowed? Yet we can see the same pattern in our world happening all the time, which seems to confirm that we are indeed made in the image and likeness of God. When we try to bring order, we also allow the fringe, and just as the city allows a small red light district in order to preserve a wider peace and order. The IT department grants a corner for chaos so that the business can operate and maybe benefit from creative ideas that come out of the fringe.

In all cases, good things can come out of the allowance for rebellion. The rebirth of a city, a business, or a person can happen out of this model. Beautiful things can come from those drifters and dreamers, as long as they don’t get stuck there forever in despair. The key is to grow, to learn, to come back, and with God, the key is always to surrender, and rather than defeat the dragon, you accept self-defeat, you accept the mystery, and God defeats the dragon for you.

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Ideas that looks good on paper often don’t work as expected. Compare a football play drawn in a playbook to what actually happens on the field. These two things rarely, if ever, match perfectly. This problem is the cause of many gray hairs among coaches as their plans fold like a house of cards when put into action in the real world. We live in a time where many ideas look good on paper, or more specifically, on screens, and our mind is easily convinced, that things we’ve tried and have not worked out well, will work if we just try it one more time.

“This time it will be different.”

For example, we know that heavy drinking is a bad idea, but perhaps we’ll try it this weekend. Or, we know that dating multiple partners results is gunpowder and kerosene that results in relationship explosions, but what if, just maybe, everyone who ever lived through a tumultuous love triangle is wrong? Or on a wider scale, we have all observed socialism’s train-wrecks that invariably result in brutal dictatorships, but let’s give it another whirl (this time with feeling)! We get fooled by the fruit on the tree without remembering what happened after the first bite.

We need a plan, a starting point, a model to follow, and everyone is selling a playbook. Many of these plans have been proven to be bad ideas, even in our own experience. Yet we keep trying them, even after we know the likely outcome. In our lives, we know the patterns that fail, but like the stubborn coach we can’t accept that the X’s and O’s in our mind are bad ideas even after repeated attempts that prove it. We’re still convinced our rag-arm quarterback can complete that bootleg rollout cross-body pass despite the last five attempts when it resulted in a pick-six touchdown for the defense. The coach who says, “Let’s run it again,” will be searching for new employment soon.

We privately know that the best model is the one used and put into practice by sober, boring coaches, not wild rebels, but it’s hard to admit. There is a reason that Nick Saban draws the best players to Alabama year after year. He’s sober, he’s boring, and doesn’t run dumb plays. In his sober, boring way, he wins a lot. It works. It has always worked, since the beginning of time. Adam and Eve didn’t like being bored, and that’s where things went south really fast.

Even while we are out testing theories and researching ways of living, we can see that the boring people keep the wheels on the bus. We even rely on it. No child who is out playing wants to come in for dinner if mom or dad is a hot mess that serves a cold meal but forces the family to call it delicious. No, we want a balanced, tasty meal, served hot and on time, by a largely boring cook who follows the recipe, and executes the recipe well. Or, for another example, my accountant may be an alcoholic, but I don’t want him drunk while he’s doing my taxes. I would prefer that he is sober and boring and careful.

In the IT world, compare the sober, boring, careful database administrator who says “no” to everything versus the fresh-out-of-college wired programmer who wants to rip out the old, stodgy system with the latest fad tech pulled down from GitHub. Or, consider a business manager who patiently reviews expense reports versus the lavishly-spending salesperson who is wooing a whale of a client. These roles are all important players on the roster of a business, but the reality is this: someone has to be the jerk, or the business will fold. Someone has to tell the creative person to reign it in, or there will be no business. You need the creative people and the boring gatekeepers. If everyone is nice all the time, and no one ever says, “No,” then the production systems will collapse into disorder and the expense reports will swell until bribery and embezzlement become side-channels of compensation. The moment the lock is removed from the safe, someone will start calling it “petty cash.”

The lawmakers of revolutionary America knew this, and for their various faults, they knew that allowances were needed for those wild-eyed rebels to explore the edges of the frontier, while also realizing that tripwires needed to restrain the majority so that no more Salem witch burnings might ignite. Oddly enough, we’re nearly back to witch hunting, but the witches being cancelled are the Christians. (This may sound shocking but Christians being burned makes a lot more sense. Christians are supposed to be converting witches to the faith through the joyful witness of their lives, and not burning anyone.)

The founders also knew that the morality of the Christian tradition was the bedrock that a stable country could be built upon, even if they were only Deists themselves and Christians-in-name-only. They knew that humans needed some rope, some allowance for both creative and destructive rebellion, but not too much rope. They knew that when the fringe becomes the center, the center becomes the fringe, and that arrangement does not work. I’ve used the sandbox and kitchen metaphor before. When a child’s sandbox is brought into the kitchen, dinner is never the same. Sand gets into the food, hands get burned, the floor gets filthy, and the cat may use it as a litter-box. This is not sustainable. The place for “fun” is not in the operations center of the house.

The dabblers having fun in the sandbox - the tourists, the experience-seekers, the addicts - are trying on ways of life. They are trying to run plays from a playbook that is full of bad ideas. But even if told, they will run those same plays. To err is human. We know people will go there, and if you take away the playbook or the field they practice on, they will find a new place to play and invent new plays. Explorers explore. We want to taste and try things on, and we’re steered to drinking, sex, and the pursuit of money daily by the images set before our eyes. We are tempted to seek, and told that our desires are our identity. The manufacturing of seekers (consumers) is the primary goal of advertising and Hollywood writers. “Try everything” by Shakira is suggesting kids really try everything, from skydiving to fantasy football to sodomy to Fentanyl. Go for it! You are only the sum of your desires! That is how you will find rest, or so we are told. Next time you hear Shakira’s song, substitute the word Fentanyl for Everything.

There is an alternate option here, offered by Jesus, which we tend to consider last, where he says, “Come, follow me, and I will give you rest.” What’s interesting is that Jesus not only “looks good on paper” like a shiny product or football play in X’s and O’s, but he can execute the play and give a proper meaning and shape to your life, while he also gives you rest. He also has many friends for you to meet, both here and hereafter. The only problem is that Jesus gives it for free, so marketing and Hollywood are not needed. Shakira would have been wise to add a third verse to “Try Everything” that provided the proper ending to what she’s suggesting.

I tried it all, God, why am I still so lost? 

Now my fears are here, and there’s nowhere to turn. 

I tried it all, to fill this hole inside,

Help: Draw me, Lord, and we will run.

Country music, and some rap music, is better about tying up the loose ends of story songs. Pop music tends to pretend that there is no Act III to their stories, but there is always at least three acts in every story, otherwise it’s not much of a story.

In producing a nation of consumers, also known as seekers, we have hit peak depression because people bought the tale that a life that resembles a hedonistic rave will be fun forever. This is why you see people bouncing like pinballs from one wellness idea to the next, one diet to the next, one “way of life” to the next. You see it in Christians who bounce from one church to the next because the Pastor isn’t “feeding them.” (Again, if you are going to Mass to get something instead of to give, and that is to give glory to God, you don’t understand why St. Peter or Notre Dame or any other church was built in the first place.) If you are expecting to be fed and be constantly entertained, you will always be in the pinball machine, bouncing around, never at rest.

What we really want is meaning, purpose, and community, all of which are given, all at once, when faith in Christ settles into your bones and into your soul. Then you will find rest. When you follow him, the person of Jesus, the construction worker who is God, you will get what you really wanted, especially when you realize that you wanted all the wrong things. Bonus: you get community and people who will open up and talk about real things. These people tend to talk about more than how many reps they did today or how many grams of protein meets their macro requirements.

Entertainment and consumption are the great distractions today. These are patterns that need to be shattered, and Jesus will do all that for you - for free - you just have to ask him, and keep asking. These habits are hard to break, but they are the shackles you put on every day by choice.

Seekers get to learn the hard way because the school of life and hard knocks is brutally honest. There comes a day when the Netflix binge no longer brings joy but crushing sadness. That’s the finger of God pressing on you while you lay on the couch.

Fortunate souls learn by watching others’ bad behavior. Take for example: Those who grew up with parents who, following Shakira’s advice “Try everything,” often conclude that trying everything leads to a thousand sessions of therapy. This is why both AA and Al-Anon exist. The first is for those who “Try everything” and keep burning their hand on the hot stove. The second is for those who had to figure out how to live with those who “Try everything” and keep burning their hand on the hot stove.

If you never leave the land of play, you get stuck there. The longer you play in the sandbox, the more the voice of the conscience becomes muffled. The sandbox plays by different rules, often no rules, which is exactly why the sandbox is out in the yard and not in the kitchen. The education of a child in the sandbox teaches valuable lessons that may not be taught while helping prepare dinner in the kitchen. In places without established order, you learn to fight or flee. You learn to lead, follow, or get out of the way. You learn your strengths and weaknesses.

However, you can’t live your while life in the sandbox, because imaginary games and child’s play are not intended to become permanent ways of life. Eventually, if you are sixty years old and still playing in the sandbox, it becomes pathetic to see a grown man or woman still making mudpies and calling it cake. Other adults no longer think it’s cute or funny. If you’ve ever seen a sixty year old man in a college bar checking out the sophomores, you know exactly what I’m talking about. A sore thumb sticks out because it’s not healthy. A fish out of water is out of place. The presence of an old person in a young person’s environment draws eyes because it doesn’t make sense and we know it by instinct. There is a popular lie going around claiming that, “Age is just a state of mind,” which is exactly what the middle-age creep in the nightclub is claiming while he sucks on the straw of his rail drink. Age is an immutable fact of time and space, while mind is malleable to a mood or desire or how much sleep you had the night before.

Once, while training for a half-marathon, I convinced myself that running a pace of seven minute miles was a “just a state of mind.” When the race began, I kept telling myself, “It’s just a state of mind, pace is just a state of mind.” Then I learned in the race, around the fifth mile, that I was a liar, and I crashed. I gasped, “Nope, it’s biology. Pace is related to biology.” My mile pace might be somewhat related to what my mind had decided, as I could motivate myself with encouragement, but my VO2 Max was where the rubber met the road.

As we’ve become more accustomed to virtual lives through screens and interfaces, we put far more credence in our imagined states than reality can support. I had trained hard for the race, thinking that what I decided in my head could be realized, but physiology had a different fact, presenting reality abruptly to my mind, compliments of my lungs and legs.

This is the same thing that happens in pursuit of bad ideas tended to in your mind, usually extending from some sickly tentacle from a seed of advertising that fertilized your desire for money, power, escape, or sex. We can not live as just a soul, nor just a mind, nor just a body, because none of these make up the whole of our self. We are watering and feeding whatever our is planted in our mind, what we are told to like, and we are surprised when the fruit is rotten at reaping. The reason for the rottenness is that we have elevated the mind over the body and soul, which are who we actually are. Our desires are not who we are. That is the great lie. We must seek to be whole, body and soul, with mind as the point of connection. When we focus too much on “mindfulness” we can easily forget that we have a body and a soul, and that is who we really are, made in the image and likeness of God.

As I’ve mentioned before (quoting Peter Kreeft), the reason that horror movies focus on either ghosts or corpses is because in the first, the soul lacks a body, and in the second, the body lacks a soul. These terrify us because body and soul go together. Mind is where we connect body and soul, and staring in a phone we end up a zombie, neither body nor soul. The reason zombies need to have their brain destroyed to die is because they are staring into their inner phones, drooling over their desire, and neither body nor soul. They are just rotting bodies without a soul, lumbering toward their insatiable desire. Can anyone deny that someone staring into their phone looks like a a zombie?

With luck or divine intervention, an awakening occurs, or a savior arrives. Rescue operations need to be present at all times to accept those with casualties returning from the sandbox, but some will reject any hand offered, and some never reach for the hand. Until someone is ready to quit the sandbox, they do not understand the need for rescue.

Getting lost in the imagination is the cause of our mental illness pandemic in the age of screens. When we separate our body from our mind, we are no longer whole. The great irony is that the solution being presented is “more mind”: more apps, zoom meetings, more interactions with technology.

Whenever we look at the screen, we sever our mind from our body and soul and enter into a false reality. This happens with any gadget interaction, including virtual reality, which is where we are now headed, compliments of our tech overlords. The isolation of the mind happens whether you are scrolling websites or on a zoom with real people. The mind engages with the screen and the screen reflects the self. The person on the other end of the screen could just as well be a robot or software application. But what looks good on paper, or screen, doesn’t often play out well. Unless you follow the patterns of tried-and-tested usage, practice in time and space, with body and soul, you are winging it by following only words and feelings. The testing grounds for ideas is in the world, on the court, on the field, not what the X’s and O’s show on the screen. Any gray-haired coach can tell you that.

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