I was once convinced that there could be no God. Everything, I thought, could be explained through the exercise of the mind. That which escapes explanation at the moment only needs more time, more thought, and more science to be explained. Scientific atheism comforted me.
I started down this pathway of self definition at the age of approximately fifteen, when I needed a way to distinguish myself from those who abused me at school. They believed in God, and they were without merit. They believed in God, and I was growing to hate them. If God was for them, who was against them? Well, that would be me. They seemed to feel justified, and I learned to justify myself. They were dull, and I needed to be sharp. I was converted by the witness of Christians.
I had believed in God, talking with Him every day in conversation, but that relationship was easily severed for the “greater good” of “self preservation” and “self identity”. God became the great tyrant squashing individual wills for the betterment of the establishment. I remember one occasion after confirmation class, during which I had been in the back with my twin brother and another friend discussing skateboards and thrash metal, one of the pastors came up to me and asked me to give him a definition of the Trinity, which is what they had apparently wanted to discuss. I remember turning on the pastor and snottily giving him what must have been a good definition because he acted surprised and then let me go. That gave the ego a boost in the wrong direction, as I felt it swell with self validating pride. I remember saying to myself, “I can answer your questions!” I wanted the real truth, not folklore to make people feel better about dying and which attempted to make sense of senseless tragedies. So by the time I was confirmed into the Lutheran Church, I had no faith. Ironically, I read an essay in front of the congregation entitled, “What my faith means to me.” In my opinion, eternal life was for masochists. In fact, I often felt suicidal, so the dead were in fact quite lucky, if not grateful. People simply needed to grow up I decided. Stuff happens. Life cannot be about dying but living.
“Living” then consists of filling one’s life up with events which bring happiness, ecstasy if we are daring enough, and so I tried to be daring. If death is the worst that can happen, that’s not much of a threat. Death seemed a logical friend. Suicide was a plan I made a couple of times, and a general wish to die was pervasive in my thinking. Death was the ejection seat one could use if the car was obviously beyond control and headed for the cliff anyway. Control and dignity grasped in one final moment, and being an altruist, the world would be better for not having me in it.
Collateral damage is a part of the learning curve. So buck up, or seek the help of a professional, but that’s awfully western so the help of a guru then. If one is smart enough all this dependence upon a “superior” should be avoided. External control is not really the answer anyway, you see. It’s all about knowing oneself, whoever that turns out to be. What can you take? Everything is about feeling. I have been defined by my music, my philosophy, my vegetarianism, my sexuality, my depression, my atheism; all creating a character, who was me, in a story, which was my life. Whether getting evicted from one “punk house” after another with my friends, overdosing intentionally on over the counter medication in order to hallucinate, wondering how we got back home after a night of drinking and/or drugs, serious sickness due to being a well meaning but uninformed vegan, or another relationship dead in a week or a month, three at the most. These are moments when one has to shake the etch-a-sketch a little bit and pick oneself up and start again, smarter. All the while, the problem must not be in the philosophy, which only needs tweaking, but the execution, which only needs tweaking.
Tweaking, scientific, theoretical, a life with no answers, I welcomed this as the answer. Non judgment then becomes the antidote to all wrong judgment. Whatever makes you happy, have the courage to find it. This is such a romantic and attractive idea it has to be correct. The truth is even when one strips away all the Judeo-Christian values one rails against, one still has limitations. I was for the most part a pacifist. I was a vegetarian for instance, not wanting to kill, but this does not hold for all in society. They are obviously wrong, but how can they be? Who am I to judge after all? I had to bravely walk the line between self realized individual and sociopath, treading first with combat boots and finding more refined footwear as time allowed. Oh well, hope for the best in my life and do the best I can. That’s the answer, another non-answer type answer. Good luck, not that I believe in luck.
Humans start looking really stupid, the stupidest animals I used to say. Ecosystems make sense, collective, harmonious, and ecological. Social systems of humans not so: leftists and rightists, men and women, rich and poor, messy and messier. No one really agrees, even those in the same camp. There are just philosophies at odds, all too flawed for serious consideration. I just collected them trying to quilt a greater truth. “Standing on the shoulders of giants” or even pygmies all that is just relative. It seemed college professors wanted to be gods themselves, I distained a full ninety percent of them at least. I consented to no one’s judgment. I was an anarchist! Reading essay after essay about anarcho-syndicalism and writing tons of anarchic prose and poetry.
“Wage slaves indentured to the land by our inability to gain the capital to escape it…” etc. etc.
Marriage, religion, government, and industry were all just institutions which needed to be removed to get to the real truth of human existence. Truth then is buried, only able to be thought about and acted towards, not able to be realized because of the condition of the society around us. A society fed fear and stagnation by said institutions: media, corporations, governments, and, of course, religion; a society for consummate consumption. I used to say, and this was in the early nineties remember, “Chairman Mao and Michael Jordan are similar in that they both want to dress us all in the same clothes, theirs.” Consumerism has the subtlety which communism does not. Forget winning the mind and then the uniform. Win the uniform and then the mind. Get us to love our clothes and our stuff. Attach that stuff to meaningless sound bites, and you’ve done more than any communist has ever done with a sentimentally unsentimental pamphlet. Hegel and Darwin are agreeing on this I am positive.
Is there even such a thing as love? Is love simply biological necessity creating psychological desire in order to create what is necessary to propagate a species or a product? Not so romantic.
If it were simply biological, I have never been immune to those neurotransmitters and hormones. I had never been able to sustain relationships in my life past a few months. The chemical high wears off, as they always do. When they do, quantity is always the first answer, find the never ending high. Isn’t that love after all? What else could happily ever after mean? I put the blame for my disinterest squarely at the feet of the poor individual who no longer held me wrapped in their attention and unceremoniously jettisoned them, thus sending the personality balance tipping ever closer towards sociopath. If the thought often crosses your mind, “Can I do better than the person I’m with right now?” you, as I did, have strong sociopathic tendencies and no one individual will ever be good enough for the prize which is you!
Then I met Melissa, poor girl. She was sweet and supportive, and we laughed a lot. I was feeling luckier than I had in the past because we were building ties to one another in a short period of time, and time has not been my ally. Inside jokes, deep revealing confidences, and we bought a stuffed monkey which we shared. This sounds stupid, but I expressed a lot of hard to get at emotion through that monkey. When I was mad, I knew the monkey couldn’t be, not at his mommy, and it humanized things in my head. The monkey then was the go between at first, allowing me to gesticulate and sign my feelings of remorse. Monkeys don’t speak and this monkey was no exception. Who would have guessed what brings us back away from the precipice of sociopathology just may be a stuffed monkey. When the first really big fight happened, the make or break fight, and I had to decide for the first time how much this relationship meant to me, I remembered all these connections we had sewn. Before I would have chucked it in, but I realized I couldn’t with her. The scale managed to tip to Melissa.
One of the variables on that scale was faith. She had it, and I had hated it. Relativity it seemed brought us together. She believed in a God whose goodness could look past anything, and I believed she should believe whatever made her happy. We both secretly felt time was on our side. I knew reason had to win the day eventually. Most people just needed to be exposed to the light of real truth and that takes some digging. I had reasoned the nonexistence of God full time since my teens, and she was the nominalest of nominal Catholics. How could the end be in doubt for me? It wasn’t. So one January 1st Melissa said, “I would like to go to church more.” I replied, “Alright.” Melissa got to be a wee bit more religious, and I got to pat myself on the back. Nonjudgmental person of the year, heck maybe ever!
We basically used going to church more as an opportunity to scope out churches we wished to be married in. Melissa’s home parish, St. Thomas More, was way too big for our consideration, so we went hunting for something which better fit our “needs”. When we attended The Holy Ghost Church in downtown Denver
Melissa and I were married there September 24th, 2005 . It’s odd to be married with all the ceremony and beauty of a Catholic wedding and not believe in God. I felt like a sociologist spy.
There are logical questions one may ask at this point. Why would I get married? Why would I get married in the Catholic Church? These are very good questions to contemplate in the rear view mirror, but I hadn’t had the life experiences needed to see what I was actually doing yet. I was, in my mind, accomplishing multiple tasks at once by getting married as an atheist to a Catholic in the Catholic Church. I was satisfying my obligation to family, mine and hers, especially to our parents. I was providing stability for my yet unborn children. They would come to their own conclusions eventually anyway, but in the meantime they would have the cover of normalcy. They would ask questions I could answer sociologically and not the “Why don’t you believe in God?” question.
In my mind and in my private moments I would be fully myself. This, my friend, is a recipe for disaster. Only someone who’s never been married could actually believe that this would work. The arrogance was bound to catch up with me. Arrogance disguised as selflessness and compassion. My wife can’t truly understand me, I thought. I am too far advanced for her silly philosophy, and so I will do her the favor of being discrete.
While on our honeymoon in Paris, which was Melissa’s inspiration for she is well traveled and has exquisite taste in everything but men, we went to the Sacre Coeur. I felt it would be a museum of Catholicism in France. We arrived in the middle of mass. “Wow they still have Mass here?” and there were nuns with lilting voices singing hymns beautifully. We walked around and looked at the amazing artwork. French martyrs in delicate mosaic, and I was truly inspired. I was so moved by the enormous feeling I had in this place. That’s when Melissa and I sat down in one of the pews after mass and I said, “Melissa when we get home I might as well start RCIA classes.”
RCIA, the right of Christian initiation for adults, or confirmation classes for adults was what I promised to Melissa, and I went into RCIA without hesitation. I was the wisenheimer in the class, always ready with a quick comment or joking deference. I wondered aloud if the church had reinvestigated its apparitions and visionaries in the light of modern psychology, maybe all they needed was psychotropic medication, or when a Deacon was explaining the importance of viewing the scriptures alongside the traditions of the Church and I found that a logical equivalent to gun control, in that both the bible and a gun needed regulation due to an inherent potential for deadly misuse. I wasn’t overtly disrespectful in my own estimation, but someone in the class felt I seemed angry when discussing that period at a later time. I imagine I was angry, honestly, having to do this for normalcy in this day and age. Honestly, why still the Catholic Church?
There was volatility going on behind the scenes as well; you see the secrets I was collecting in my closet were exposed. Melissa found my pornography.
Melissa is an understanding and forgiving person who was extremely relative in her thinking at that time. After all she married an atheist, but this was ground from which she would not budge. I knew this fact, that’s why I didn’t try to budge her forcefully during our relationship. I would instead offer her relativist statistics which insisted that after an initial spike in use societies which adopted an anti-censorship stance in relation to pornography actually saw a decrease in consumption over time do to a decrease in interest and sensitivity. Don’t ask me where I got my stats I’m sure I heard it once and that was good enough for me; never mind the fact that my own personal experience had been markedly different than what was supposed by my squirreled away chestnut of unsubstantiated info. The theory may seem like a convoluted way of getting people to stop, but I didn’t want to stop; it offers society the chance of one day being perfect without the pains of not letting anyone have to do anything they don’t want to do. Rome wasn’t built in a day you see. Now it would never be built. She would have nothing to do with this civilized approach to social and personal change. I felt rejected, and at the same time I was obviously in the wrong.
The betrayal Melissa felt was intense and her emotions were right out there. I was impressed by her anger. She was no longer ambiguous in her positions. Her position was to let me know all the ways I was wrong. Her position, as impassioned as it was, made sense to me.
She believed that women were used and manipulated by men for their self gratification; I believed sex was manipulated by both sexes but it didn’t have to be this way if it were embraced. By embraced, I mean I was on the same page as Kinsey and Sanger, early education freeing us from ritualized guilt towards our desires. I was, however, sufficiently convinced that although our views did not agree, Melissa made sense. She was logical, reasonable, and rational, i.e. not crazy. Her passion intrigued me.
I hadn’t seen her with this fire before. She was compelling to watch as well as to listen to. Her body was in tune with her thoughts, and she focused this newly harnessed energy squarely at me.
I was heartbroken having hurt her, but feeling bad is not enough; it won’t change behavior like this. I can remember being exposed to pornography when I was about seven years old, and coupled with masturbation, I had considered it my emotional panacea - combating anxiety, depression, anger, feelings of inadequacy and persecution, rejection and the list could go on. It was my emotional eating; only chocolate cake and pizza can’t be violated. They don’t have a self image. They actually are things to be used. Spot the difference? I couldn’t straight away. It’s something that has to penetrate to your core.
Melissa gave me book after book to read decrying pornography, Christian and feminist together, and they really are very different in their take on the subject. The Christian books say this is a sin. Avoiding this sin is going to be difficult but God made you for more, and with God’s help you can do it. The feminist books seem to be written by women for women because they seem to see masculinity and gender roles as the problem. Written by would be women Lenins, so to speak. I recognized the structure of the arguments, and it made me nostalgic for anarchism. They too are digging for a truth covered by the present social morays of ritualized injustice!
RCIA and the pornography fallout were happening at the same time, and I was still an atheist. I felt as though my poor coping skills were maxed out, and my substitute coping mechanism was gone. So I know what you’re thinking, “Here comes the conversion.” It is around the corner but I didn’t run to it. I think all the stories of rock bottom conversions made me leery. I was not going to be that person. I wanted to do it based on merit and reason if it were to happen at all because I wanted to respect myself; although the fact that this was batted about in some loose thoughts means it was none the less on my mind on some level.
Pride and grace wrestling within me is the story of my life, wrestling with God. It’s like Jacob only without the limp inducing bruise and history altering significance.
I hadn’t really thought about the question since I was a teenager, was there a God? How can one even begin to find out? Read the bible? Even if I were to finally understand the seemingly impenetrable words, I would say it is definitely biased. No, it all seems useless without faith. So there I was at the proverbial precipice and there was no way I was going to just jump. Instead I merely shouted over the edge, “God, I have no idea how someone like me would even begin to approach you. So if you are there it’s up to you to show me.” And then I saw God! Actually I didn’t. Nothing seemed to happen. I believe now my heart was changed just a little though. There was a small yearning after that.
The yearning was to let go of all the hurt which defined me. Like an image pressed in sand, I was a negative space. This hurt had a tyrannical hold upon my world view, and every decision I made was processed through this tyrant. It’s like having the polit bureau in your head which produced pictures of Stalin standing next to a shrub that used to be Trotsky. Likewise, Jesus had been replaced in my memory by some sort of topiary, a topiary which became a straw man to beat on. I saw a thread of self deceit beginning as a reaction against a perception. If the initial perception was false, then all that I had done to myself may have been a wee bit excessive. And the beautiful little boy I know I was, with the strong conscience and the desire to befriend everybody, destroyed himself and his conscience for so much less than nothing. The person accusing everyone else of Sophism finds himself to be the worst offender.
This thread I started pulling on started to unravel the sweater of my self-perception which was a pivotal grace in my conversion. It’s the part in the parable when the lost son realized “he longed to eat his fill of the pods on which the swine fed.” (Luke 15:16) Like the lost son, the problem had been perceptions and misperceptions. The truth was I had been sitting in pig slop starving to death. It gave me a lot to think about. I was in one of my favorite thinking spots, the shower, when it occurred to me and I said aloud, “I am like a soul in purgatory wanting to see the face of God and lacking something within, I don’t know what is needed of me. I have so much to lose. 15 years of evolving thought and philosophy all gone.” I sobbed at the thought. Yet even while I was mourning my own passing, something was drawing me on. “Just say yes.” I seemed to feel or hear or sense, God only knows.
After a week of this “purgatory” the pride of “show me” seemed to dissolve into a greater humility, a more worthy posture of receiving rather than taking. It seems so many of our issues with God have to do with entitlement issues. God has told us what is good, but we only wish to make Him an accomplice and errand boy. When He passes on helping us with our self destruction, we pass on Him in favor of our self destruction. “If there is a God, then I must act as though there is.” It didn’t make sense to half heartedly accept the existence of God, and so I started to try.
The first person I told was Melissa. She didn’t think I was very funny, but I managed to persuade her that I was serious about converting. Melissa told me that she had been praying, “My heart be opened to God’s light.” A fact she had never mentioned to me. I had an inner awareness that I owed her silent and fervent prayers for the relative speed of my conversion, yet only through God’s grace of course.
You see my soul was dead. I had killed it with mortal sin; the sin against the Holy Spirit Jesus spoke of. My life was completely and merely material. God waited for the intercessor He knew would come to love me enough to deliver me my first grace. Such is the nature of God’s love as He has no automatons. I could have continued to reject Him for all eternity as I had since the “age of reason”, and He would never have forced me to accept Him. This is Hell: a self chosen destination of total self absorption. Love requires an act of the will in order to be real. The will is a spiritual agent which resides in our souls. Satan, an angel, a spiritual being, used his will to reject God. Love is not simply an emotional state. Emotions are a product of our material bodies. If love were, it would not and could not exist. As Pavlov and Skinner showed, our emotional responses can be conditioned by material stimulants, called antecedents. These antecedents limit our ability to choose freely to the point that behavioral science contends that no choice is actually free, the extreme being addiction. We are actually more robotic in our sins than we are in the Grace and truth of God. So without God there is no soul, no free will, and no love.
Love requires freedom, which God provided for me because love is also self sacrificing. Love also requires relationship, which Melissa and I have, thus the efficacy of intercessory prayer. The nature of love brings us to God in a way in which we are not automated, forced, or unduly coerced. We get to choose God and so choose love too. So we begin to see the importance of love in the body of Christ, His Church. A body whose head is Christ himself, who is Himself inextricably linked by love to the Holy Trinity and the completion of His full nature, the second person of the one triune God.
By God’s grace I began in earnest to join this communion and life became very intense for Melissa and I, who was having a reversion of her own, especially around RCIA classes. I punished my poor class trying to expound on every topic often with, “God told me this last week…” I couldn’t seem to stop myself, I had to share what God was giving me. I dreamt about scripture most nights and would wake pondering them, which was unusual for me as I had never remembered any of my dreams.
One of the most vivid dreams which comes to mind involved the revelation as Moses as a type of Christ. Imperfect as Moses was, he was a sign. He himself being drawn out of the waters of the Nile, then bringing his people through the waters of the Red Sea, and leading them from their slavery in Egypt. These historical moments were juxtaposed for me aside moments when Jesus provided us the sacramental waters of our baptism - beginning with His own baptism in the Jordan via John the Baptist, freeing us from our slavery to original sin. Then how God provided manna for the people in the desert as sustenance during their trials and purifications, and how Jesus is the bread of life sent from heaven for us during our trials and purifications in our quest for Him who is our Promised Land, our Jerusalem, our Kingdom, and our home. I dreamt all of this and more until I came to the transfiguration of Jesus. Jesus stood with Elijah and Moses. It dawned on me that Moses like Elijah had a human body. He had also been assumed into heaven. This was a Jewish tradition and not scriptural, but there he was not a spirit but a spirit with a body. Moses standing beside Jesus and Elijah revealed something hidden to me about the scriptures; they can’t reveal everything without tradition. It was like scriptural code pointing away from Sola Scriptura from before the New Testament’s very inception.
Reading the bible in the context of sacred tradition makes sense because it demands obedience. Our attitude towards Christ starts to resemble John the Baptist as he says, “I must decrease so He might increase.” After he had heard the voice of God the Father confirmed his realization of Jesus as Messiah as he baptized Him, “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.” We also heard the words of God the Father during the aforementioned transfiguration, “This is my beloved son, with whom I am pleased; listen to Him.” There is a thread between John’s attitude and the expounding of the Father upon His initial statement at Jesus’ baptism. Expounding upon the initial statement did not initiate a change in status of the Son of God. But it revealed John’s disposition was already correct, which was humility toward God. He recognized Jesus as the Lamb of God who was promised to Abraham (Genesis 22: 8). Jesus is the fulfillment and the model. John the Baptist’s attitude must be ours; his heart was already ready for Jesus, his attitude was already correct. He received this grace while he was in the womb of his mother, Elizabeth. The same grace we receive at our baptism, and the grace that is waiting for us in our conversions, the conversion which must be a death to self, the “self” we become attached to is dying anyway honestly. John was disposed figuratively to death to self as I have shown above, but he received something greater than this also. He died a prototypical death to that of Jesus Himself, for when John asked Jesus from his confinement, “Are you the one who is to come or shall we look for another?” Jesus replied, “Go tell John what you hear and what you see: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them. And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.”(Matthew 11: 2-6) These fulfill the prophesies of the prophet Isaiah all but one seemingly, “To proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners,” (Isaiah 61: 1) Ouch, that would be the big one for me if I were John the Baptist sitting in prison. I envision John having a Psalm 22 moment, “My God, my God why have you abandoned me?” Like Jesus on the cross. Psalm 22 may begin as a lament but it ends in praise for the deliverance our Lord has brought. The deliverance John foresaw and preached. He called Jesus “the Lamb of God” which is the title which most succinctly reveals Jesus as the embodiment of this deliverance. He baptized and Jesus would sacramentalize baptism; John died a martyr and Jesus died for the expiation of the sins of the whole of mankind. We do not have control of our lives, and only God knows what is best for us. We may want to cling to this life, but our main objective is not in this life but the next. That objective is God. Those who wish to cling to this life will be disappointed because everybody dies, but if we aspire to live with God today and in eternity we have no fear of our inevitable end. Our Psalm 22 moment will happen, and it will reveal our faith. John was faithful, and I know he died at peace. John is the last of the foreshadowing types of Christ, and he got it right in so many ways that we can follow his example and still follow that of Christ. This is our charge too, to become an example of Christ as an outward expression of our faith in our God and in His Gospel. Through revelations such as these, the bible went from being dense and impenetrable to coherent and comprehensive.
The bible is the inspired word of God and Jesus is the word made flesh but He is not the word made flesh made word again. The tabernacle does not hold the Torah as it does in the Synagogue; it holds the Eucharist. Jesus has instructed us both after the multiplication of loaves (John 6) and at the last supper that the Eucharist is how He continues to be with us. The Eucharist became the center of my prayer life.
I could not yet receive the Eucharist at mass, but I started going to be with Jesus in the adoration chapel, where the Eucharist is exposed for veneration. The first time I went to adoration I was pretty intimidated and the chapel was full of worshippers, but there was one kneeler open just before the monstrance which held Our Lord. I genuflected, knelt, and looked up at Jesus with some anticipation and trepidation.
I closed my eyes, and I was back in my Junior High gym locker room. Having just taken a shower, I was naked and holding on to the training table which stood by the door to the gymnasium. I held on with all my strength as my classmates tried to pull me off of it. Their plan was to throw me naked into the gym where the girls were waiting to be dismissed. After what seemed like a long time they gave up. I had tried to suppress this memory and had been mostly successful, except when I wanted to look back with scorn. This time the memory was accompanied by something else, Jesus. I saw Him there with me naked, scourged, and crowned with thorns. He had been with me sharing my torments. I made Him an accomplice and turned on Him. He wanted to show me what to do with all the pain and rejection, and I answered by paining and rejecting Him. I felt sorrow welling up from deep within that had needed to be dealt with for some fifteen years. I kept telling Jesus I was sorry and sorry I blamed Him. I felt the lost opportunity of all those years of separation, but I felt as though Jesus was comforting me.
A small booklet caught my eye as I left the adoration chapel. I walked over to the bookrack were I read “Divine Mercy” printed across the top of the booklet. I sat down and began to browse through it when Lisa, one of my RCIA teachers, came into the entryway also. “Hello.” I said and she responded in a very plain unexcited tone, “Aaron, I have something I need to tell you. While you were praying, I saw Jesus cradling your head against His Sacred Heart. He was comforting you.” I said thank you, but chose not to break open my heart again for her to tell her she was right. She wasn’t asking for confirmation anyway.
This may be a good time to explain that in the Catholic Church one finds every charism one finds in the broader Christian world, all of which were actually born in the Catholic Church as it was the only church. There is everything from the very analytical to the very charismatic and more often a very healthy blend of these two seemingly divergent extremes. Lisa, with direction, had nurtured her charismatic gifts.
Taken on its own her vision would have been easily dismissed as a nice bit of encouragement from a well meaning friend. But in the context of my own revelation, and the booklet I was holding in my hand, the whole experience built in resonance in my heart and mind. I asked her if she thought it would be alright if I took the Divine Mercy booklet. She looked at it smiled and told me yes it was definitely for me.
I began praying the chaplet of Divine Mercy often and reflecting on the mercy of God. Christ who was free from sin has the ability to judge others without hypocrisy. Jesus Christ is perfect justice. He is also perfect love, which is the nature of the Trinity. It is mercy which transforms justice into love.
So I who have no claim to judgment without hypocrisy can only in justice be merciful. Mercy transforms even the misperception of justice, which is mine, into love.
I thought about those hurts I had been so in bondage to throughout my life. I began to pray to forgive those who I felt had done me injustice. I also began to pray for those who I had injured. It was painful to come to terms with the license I’d taken with other people’s lives. The truth of the synergy which Jesus prayed to His Father, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.” emerges. I brought a lot of souls with me as I descended into my atheistic hell, and I continue to pray for the virtue to lift up the souls I encounter; to be a vessel of God’s grace to others. This is not a goal, but a life’s journey. I’ve found that if I’m not progressing on the journey, I’m regressing. There is no treading water. The spiritual journey is one up an inclined plane.
The bitterness, fear, and resentment I had been expressing in my life moved me away from a close relationship of trust with God. Our ability to fully receive forgiveness from God becomes a matter of our disposition to receive it. Bitterness and trust are at odds. If I could not trust God enough to let go of my bitterness, how could I trust Him enough to totally forgive my sins? It’s by our Faith we are healed after all. My projected bitterness undermines the effect of the forgiveness God has perfectly given. God will not withhold the grace we require, but we must learn the disposition required to receive it more fully. We must trust that God is God, and we are not. We trust ourselves to His justice and dispose ourselves to His mercy.
But how far could I trust the Church? I was having a hard time coming to terms with the Church’s teachings on abortion and homosexuality. To the world at large the Church is misogynistic and bigoted. I didn’t know how I could defend the Church in that world.
It just so happened that exactly at this time there were two issues on the ballot concerning traditional marriage and the assertion of homosexual civil liberties. One of these issues defined marriages in Colorado as being exclusively between a man and a woman; the other would create civil unions for gay couples. How should I vote? I’d been waiting for a chance to vote as a “progressive” on these issues for my whole adult life. Now my young faith and the Archbishop said I must vote the other way. What to do, what to do?
As I entered the ballot booth, I wasn’t yet one-hundred percent certain, but I remembered my first promise was to try to do what God wanted. God exists or He doesn’t. If He does, I must act as though He does. I voted for traditional marriage and against civil unions for homosexuals.
This exercise in obedience unleashed torrents of grace which allowed me to discern the issues which concerned my conscience. Jesus told His apostles that when the Holy Spirit came He would say nothing which Jesus had not told Him to say. Jesus had also insisted that He Himself had taught nothing of His own, but only what God the Father had told Him. The teachings God the Father gave Jesus included remarkably that the greatest is the servant of the least, the servant of all, which shows explicitly the nature of God the Father’s relationship to the other persons of the Trinity, which they in turn reciprocate perfectly. It also shows God’s relationship with His creation. God, who created everything from nothing, must hold His creation together through His active will because without it we return to our natural state, which is nothingness. I have blasphemed and railed against God. I would have been justly dealt with if God let me slip into my natural state, but for the nature of God’s love. I began to see the degree of self sacrifice I have and still require of God in His love. My small attempts at loving obedience are nothing in comparison to what God has done for me even in my disobedience.
There was still a fear that I would be seen as a bigot, especially by my friends and family. Bigotry is not about strongly disagreeing; it is about that disagreement causing hatred. I have not an ounce of hatred for homosexuals. Do I want something better for them? Yes, I do, but it is no different to me than wanting something better for myself than my own propensity for sexual sin. We all are called to carry our crosses and we must. Sexual sin is really similar to other sins and the first sin for that matter. We believe that God, or at least His Church, is holding out on us.
Who could better understand the needs of a man better than a man, or those of a woman better than a woman? Men tend to believe that what men need is license. We can’t help it, we are visual creatures, boys will be boys, etc. Women tend to believe that what women need is perfect unconditional empathetic support. Both of these desires are seemingly at opposite ends of an emotional spectrum, but both share a quality with the other. That quality is an inability to judge moral acceptability. An inability to make moral judgments makes it impossible to sacrifice oneself enough to truly love. One is dominant and one is submissive in the relationship. To be willfully in love requires us to deny ourselves what inevitably will destroy trust, faith, and ultimately love.
This destruction is what I had caused in my own marriage by failing to sacrifice my desires for pornography. There will always be a line to cross no matter how permissive our partners seem. This is simply the nature of the human heart. No human individual can give another total license or total unconditional empathy, for they cannot remove themselves, their feelings, and their own personal desires totally from the equation. The personal justification with which the offending partner retorts inevitably bears witness to the degree they are actually unwilling to be in love with anyone save themselves, I too was no exception.
I have used the self righteous barb, “You just don’t understand me, and you are just being judgmental.” The deeper reality was I didn’t understand myself. I didn’t understand how I had made my hurt and fear into a tendency to retreat into a personal delusion where I had imaginary acceptance. I retreated from the chance of being hurt by others into a relationship with myself, which naturally sacrifices real relationships. This is the nature of barrenness, not willing to even risk self sacrifice. So if a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, that woman believes she needs barrenness.
Barrenness is always won at the hands of relationship, our true nature. Barrenness is often won at the expense of actual individuals lives. These individuals are our own sons and daughters living in a woman’s womb. Our individual hurts and longings for acceptance, or whatever one may wish to obtain or balm in the act of having sex may seem to become personified. That is only an emotional reality. The actual person resulting from that union is an actual physical reality and deserves to be treated individually from the emotional state which motivated the child’s conception. This may be a call to actually shore up those issues for the sake of the child. Through caring for that child and through the Grace of God, we may be healed ourselves rather than just disposing of the child and the blessings which would come through the personal growth inherent in accepting the blessing of a child. God allowed that child to be conceived and wants him or her to exist.
All the mechanisms of motherhood engage immediately as the little life signals chemically to his/ her mother that they exist and the mother’s womb readies for that reality. Her body seeks to protect that baby without the conscious consent of her mind. The body is so logical without our knowing for it does what is natural after the inevitable happens, as if the act of procreation itself was consent. In the vast majority of cases, 99 percent, this should be the point of free choice. Society at large deems it alright to be cruel to people who are overweight and obese. They chose what they put in their mouth say those sad and poor judges. The activity I am referring to should be a lot harder to partake in than snacking, and yet sex outside its intent is seen as a basic human right.
“My body my choice,” could not be a more ironic catch phrase. It’s spoken by women who are attempting to disregard and invalidate their choice. The choice which has created another body entirely that is only half her DNA.
It’s easy for a man to say right? I am the father of two beautiful boys and one beautiful daughter, and I parent them. All men, if they are men, should be open to this expression of reality. If they are not, why are they suitable partners? It’s easy to try to punt; it’s not easy to deal with the reality of having punted. What are the individuals who have made this murderous decision going to do to balm the hurt? Repeat the flawed logic and attempted validation in sex. We can always dig holes deeper.
Juxtaposed for the libertine is the perceived freedom of personal imprisonment created by self preserving and risk free disconnection from relationship versus the true freedom which comes from the deep and personal connections won from a willingness to sacrifice oneself.
Who knows better than a man what a man needs? God. What if what a man needs is a woman? This would be the one truth a man could not discover through his own identity. The only place to find the key which opens the door inside you, the only door one really longs to walk through, is not within oneself but within one’s spouse. When we walk through this door we are able to realize that the world we thought was so full and rich was simply the porch, and the door we wished to walk through was to our own home, the home of our true self identity.
God reveals His nature as Trinity by drawing us out of ourselves in service to our spouse and so reveals to us our own intended nature. Didn’t Jesus say this is why we leave our fathers and mothers and cleave to our spouse, becoming one flesh? Two becoming one could make a third could they not? The nature of God is shared with us through this sacramental bond, a sign on the road to our total fulfillment in Him.
Marriage is a cathedral, sex is the mass, and children image Our Lord in the Eucharist. Jesus conceals His power. Perception tells us He is helpless in the form of bread, totally at our disposal. His imperceptible power is a gift. It calls us to engage our wills to respond in love and thus draws us into communion with the Trinity.
Babies require so much of us, yet something is drawn out of us as we make our efforts fraught with inevitable frustrations and trials to care for this totally dependent little person. That something is we in the state of true love. What else can bring us to serenity as gazing upon a child, especially as they sleep in serenity after an hour of frustrating attempts at soothing them?
I believe anyone who has had a child wonders at some point how anybody has more than one. The trials faced initially seem untenable and one comes to believe that they would die of exhaustion and frustration before the infant becomes one month old. This, however, proves not to be the case. Somehow we soldier through, becoming endowed by our trials with a greater capacity for these trials and those to come.
This has also been my experience as a Christian. Our trials may change, but trials are ever present. The trials I faced initially seemed to almost consume me. I have gained much by the effort it has taken to overcome them; a process which is ongoing, a process which continually reveals not my own strength but that of God. For as children we believe we are doing things completely under our own power, but as we mature we see, and become, the hands of our parents working to keep the bike upright. Likewise in our spiritual journeys we believe in our youth we are under our own power, but grace reveals itself as we accept it. We become more aware of the fact that we are frail to a fault, and Jesus has always shouldered the weight of the cross He has called us to carry.
I have tried to continually return to God in the sacraments in my trials, especially confession and the mass. The grace I have received in these sacraments is changing me. They provide me with reassurance of my own state in the body of Christ. In confession I hear the words, “I forgive you.” I am only human and so continually pick myself apart until I hear those words. Once I am assured I am in the state of grace, I have something to protect and so I engage my human nature in an appropriate way. This is also a time of revelation, renewal, and change.
My first confession was with Father Mel, and I was scared. I went as soon as I found out all that was required was baptism and I was baptized, thanks Mom and Dad. The worst part of that confession, and I believe most confessions, is standing in line. Waiting, ruminating, rehearsing, debating one’s intent, should I or shouldn’t I, do I have to? Yes confess it all. God already knows, and you just convicted yourself of its importance anyway. Let it all go. It being my first time, I had all of these scenarios and more running through my head. I set myself up for even greater stress because the rest of the class wouldn’t go for months yet, and we hadn’t talked about the specifics in RCIA class yet. Melissa went too for the first time in roughly ten years. What a trooper. She was even more frightened than I was.
The sheet provided to guide the penitent through their confession was bringing up terrible memories from which I wanted to be free but was not fully convinced I ever could be and definitely did not wish to say out loud. I entered the confessional, was obviously going to genuflect, and Father Mel told me not to. Great start. “Forgive me Father for I have sinned, this is my first confession.”
The confession went briskly as I confessed everything as it came into my mind. The flow stopped eventually. I apologized for not being more specific and not doing a better job. Father Mel reassured me that I had done a good job and as long as I wasn’t intentionally withholding anything all my sins would be forgiven. Then he raised his hands over me and allowed Jesus to use his person and his priesthood to speak the words which absolved me of all my sins.
You see everything in the confessional hinges upon the Holy Spirit. The penitent relies upon the Holy Spirit to confess what must be confessed, and the priest allows the Holy Spirit to bring Jesus Christ literally into the confessional. The sacramental life of the Church does not depend upon the strength of the believer’s faith but has been instituted to strengthen the believer’s faith. We are like the father of the possessed boy in scripture saying, “I believe, but help my unbelief.”
Jesus is present in the sacraments of the Catholic Church regardless of our weak ability to perceive Him. We nurture our relationship with Christ. It is a real relationship with an actual person. Our relationship takes effort, and effort is rewarded.
Sola Fide, faith alone, denies our need to exert effort. The Sacraments provide our weak faith with sustenance and support and a real connection to a real God. Without this connection to the true presence of Christ fully within the sacraments, Sola Fide is turned on its head. If a practitioner insists, “It is by my faith that I am justified.” The emphasis, in our human nature, becomes increasingly focused on the word “my”. One’s attention becomes self centered on an abstract idea of one’s faith, rather than God, leading to insecurity and self doubt instead of deeper faith which undercuts the very idea of Sola Fide. Alternately it often causes a false and prideful confidence which belittles God, making him a buddy and our equal. God is God, and we are not. Christians filled with the confidence of Sole Fide were the Christian witnesses which helped make me an atheist.
As a Lutheran, I never felt forgiveness after we spoke the penitence rite. I was distracted and confused because I knew the pastor was about to preach on some aspect of how our faith alone ensured our salvation. Why did we profess our sins and our faith? Why not just our faith? Why didn’t our profession of faith irradiate our sinful nature? Was God all powerful or not? If we were going to heaven based upon our faith, and we professed that faith here and now, what changed? Why didn’t it change now when our Christian witness mattered to others? If all these people were going to heaven just as they are, then heaven must be really awful. Death without Heaven seemed the true liberation, to be finally rid of all these “good Christians”.
Leaving the confessional I knew I was forgiven, a perception that went beyond feeling. It is the intangible reality of sacramental grace. The physicality of the process helps too. Hearing the words, “your sins are forgiven,” really fills a human need, which makes sense because Jesus is not only fully divine but also fully human. He made Thomas feel His wounded hands and wounded side because He knew Thomas. He was more than generous with Him. He was merciful. This mercy is extended to the physicality of the Church’s sacramental life.
I went to this sacrament weekly at first because it was the only one I had access to. I just wanted to be close to Jesus. I wanted to hear His voice. We still go every couple weeks just because we need it, and we love each other. Melissa and I experience a change in our relationship after confession, a renewal. It’s almost like cheating at the game of life! Sacraments work together.
Easter was drawing nearer and with it the sacraments of confirmation and first Eucharist. First though there was Lent.
I wanted my first Lent to be real! I heard that in ancient times the promise of covenant was called sevening oneself. I did seven things for my first Lent. I gave up TV, the computer, coffee, idle chatter, and fasted while I added reading the bible and reading a passage from any other religious book, in short I wanted to be a monk. Even the over exuberance of young faith cannot do all of this well, but I did do my best, and I think God got quite a lot of amusement out of me at this time. That’s why I won’t recommend this practice to anyone and won’t do it again. It is like my one year old trying to keep up with my three year old. I’m really impressed with how far his trying to overcompensate for lack of size and experience with speed, brute force and reckless abandon gets him even though sometimes he ends up crying uncontrollably after ending up a pile on the ground. I think that only in my toddler faith could God find my extreme pride and total lack of appreciation for my spiritual size amusing, but my heart was in the right place. I wanted God more than anything, that initial promise still fresh in my head, “There is either a God or there isn’t and if there is I must act as though there is.” The truth is our relationship with God is not going to be a sprint no matter how badly we want Him. Our heads would explode, and we would be totally intolerable to be around with such suddenness. We don’t have to appear to be schizophrenic to the world around us to have a meaningful conversion. Imagine instead a long walk in the countryside just Jesus and you allowing Him time to stop and expound on ideas while taking in all the geographic points of interest.
The emphasis in the gospel is not so much on what we do but what we intend. The Pharisees developed a code of conduct to try to keep them away from even the blush of sin. Jesus called them on the stiffness and heartlessness of the application of their code as they tried to call out His disciples for picking heads of grain to eat as they walked on the Sabbath and again as they ate with unwashed hands. Jesus said it’s not what we put into our mouths which make us unclean but what comes out of our hearts. They lost the intent of their rule and pursued the action without love in their hearts. The opposite came instead. Their rule hardened their hearts causing them not to approach people in love and thus bring about a people intent on worshiping God. Rather their rubric caused them to reproach people and incline them further away from God than when they started. The Pharisees did this for the sake of their own perceived piety. Jesus illuminated this fact when he said the Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath.
Faith without works is actually dead though because our works become an exterior sign of our interior reality, the love in our hearts. Just as Jesus said it’s what comes out of our hearts which makes us unclean; it’s also what comes out of our hearts which make us like Him. Sin does actually separate us from God, and it exposes the darkness still within us. Our actions bring into light what we need to work on in the interior of our hearts. Satan has no choice but to show us what is wrong with us in the hope that we still love it more than God, but if we respond in prayer and use the sacraments, God can heal those hurts. Most healing takes time, work, and understanding; we must have these as we learn alternate behaviors which exemplify virtue rather than sin. Even if God heals us instantaneously, we must learn to deal with the world in a virtuous way or God’s gift of healing is imperiled. We have to acknowledge our sin and be willing to surrender our sin and ourselves to God. Jesus did say be perfect as My Father is perfect; this requires love not calculation. Perfection is total abandonment to God’s love, again self denial, but so God can show us our true selves. Our true selves walking back into the garden letting go of the original sin, to want to be our own gods. Paul said Jesus was perfected at the point of dying on the cross, though he had acted as a slave to God’s will perfectly to that point, he was a free agent until the last. He chose the Father’s will and thus, “was like us in all things except sin.”
Works are not simply just working. I offer this example; I work on a geriatric psych unit on which a woman was admitted for taking a lot of pills in an attempt to take her own life. In her perception she had lost the ability to do work for her family and felt worthless to the point of suicide. I tried to impress on her the fact that the love she has for her family is the most important work she can do. Her suicidal attempt itself shows how her work was not about love but about herself.
In my ten plus years of working with the mentally ill, I have found something out. Mental illness turns our attention upon ourselves. The depressed person, I have firsthand knowledge of this one, believes nobody loves them and they maybe unlovable. The schizophrenic believes everyone is after them and actually every event which is happening is about them. These are just a couple of examples of how the damaged brain thinks about itself almost exclusively much to the detriment of that individual.
We are all so enamored with the idea of feeling self fulfillment. When we don’t feel ourselves being fulfilled we stop looking at the truth of how important we are to those we love. A person can only gain so much in the best of circumstances by deep personal introspection. We are a part of the body of Christ and only so much can be learned about the body through microbiology. A cell which grows exponentially and individually is called cancer. Our psychology and our spirituality are springs of the same truth. As we reach out of ourselves we find meaning for our psychological health and we find God in person through our service. We find we are sharing in His life.
The last week of Lent Melissa took me to a Franciscan retreat house. Francis it seems had chosen me to be under his patronage. He was on the short list with St. Augustine, St. John of the Cross, and St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a.k.a Edith Stein. He seemed to bombard me with stories of his life I related to, and I fell in deep brotherly love with Francis of Assisi. So Melissa, the thoughtful and amazing person she is, booked us a few days at a Franciscan retreat house. We used this week to grow even closer together spiritually. We went to daily mass and ate breakfast with the sisters, we prayed the Stations of the Cross, we walked around the grounds just talking about our adventures in God thus far, and just enjoyed each other’s company. We were the only people in the retreat house, so it was quiet and peaceful. When I reflect on the week, I think of Melissa and me eating the little microwavable dishes we brought with us and just how relaxed we were in the company of the other, and God; beautiful, simple, and often silent moments.
Holy week was coming to a crescendo with the Easter tridium. We returned eager for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. I was aching to “abide” with Jesus in the Eucharist. So Holy Thursday was almost too much to take reliving the last supper in that special way; special because though we relive the last supper at every mass, this is when Jesus instituted it as a sacrament and so it is the focus and center of the mass. It is a teachable moment as they say, when the Mass explains itself to all who will listen, like watching a movie with the director’s commentary on. The anticipation of coming into full communion with the Church Jesus himself gave us, through the means he himself gave us, was too much, well almost too much. It was a very emotional time. It’s like being a parent at a particularly proud moment and realizing that the moment goes so much beyond what I could ever take credit for. In other words, it was very humbling in the best way possible.
Aching for Jesus turned quickly to mourning for Jesus as Good Friday dawned. I had been praying the Stations of the Cross during Lent before Melissa and I prayed them as the center of our retreat, so the events of the Passion were as visceral as I could make them in my head through God’s grace during Good Friday.
Sin is so terrible that this is what it cost. Jesus, God Himself, came to show the true nature of man, the nature of man as if the fall had never happened. Adam should have rather died than let his wife and himself succumb to the promises of death. We can only die in a life without God, and we separate ourselves in an effort not to be under God’s will but have our own. Our wills are not sufficient to survive and our insistence on self reliance can only end in death; for we are not our own Gods. We are made of the dust of the Earth. I again remember, as Paul did, Jesus was made a slave to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Jesus was a man and as Jesus said to countless others that His faith saved Him. It had to. He was not different from those he ministered too. “He was like us in everything but sin.” He was without sin because of His perfect faith, His perfect obedience, and thus His perfect action. Could Jesus have had perfect faith without perfect action in accord to that faith? That seems such a silly question, but it is at the heart of many people’s faith, again my objection to Sola Fide! If Jesus said, “Take the narrow road.” And, “Not everyone who cries Lord, Lord will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but only those who followed the commandments of God.” Where is the gap in reason? If Jesus said take the narrow road, then He Himself walked a tightrope. Just as God told Paul, “My Grace is sufficient,” but we must try! No one can steer a ship that is not moving; that’s the nature of that ship in this world. Jesus shows us our nature in this word as the perfect template. If we follow the example of the template, we can see that we can only stray so far from that template before we are making something else entirely.
Jesus is the I Am. Easter was ever in His heart as a human being. Because He was a human being, He acted in time. Because He acted in time, He had a future and required faith in the truth of Easter in His heart.
Judas can be illustrated as a counter to Jesus. In the Acts of the Apostles it is explained that Judas was an Apostle, and he chose to separate himself from God. Though no one can be canonized to hell, his actions seem to show a tragic desire to go his own way into Gahanna via an acute psychological condition which caused him tragically to take his own life. He was replaced in his office as apostle one for one by a successor as is still done to this day.
He obviously had a position to lose, for when he lost it he was replaced, and he lost it according to his own will. We must not follow his example and fall into sin which separates us from life; but follow the example of Our Lord who had to choose, as we all do, not to be separated from His Father and life, even though He too died bodily. Our lives are tied to Good Friday as we live them, but our faith must be that Easter, and the resurrection is inevitable through that cross.
On Holy Thursday, Jesus present in the form of Eucharist is processed out of the sanctuary and housed in a tabernacle set up in another part of the church. There is no mass on Good Friday, there is instead: the liturgy of the word, in which the Passion according to John is read, the veneration of the cross, and communion. This procession afforded me an opportunity to witness Jesus’ presence perceptually. If a person closes their eyes, they can feel an individual pass by at close range even though they had not been touched. This is the perception I felt as Jesus left the church. The church felt void of His life force or something. I dare you to try it. Sit in your church or a church when they are still and quiet, and then sit in a Catholic Church. Repeat as necessary until you too are Catholic.
After Jesus left, the church felt like the church I grew up in, or the chapel I pray at in the hospital, or what the second temple must have felt like without the arc of the covenant in the holiest of holies, or the Hindu temple, or Muslim temple I had visited. There is the ambiance of a place set aside to worship God, but it lacks God’s physical presence. Jesus said, “This is my body.” And then, “This is my blood.” He was not just waxing poetic. He had lost many disciples over this teaching the previous year in John 6 and He just kept insisting it was so. It is so.
Easter vigil was the occasion upon which I was confirmed into the Catholic Church and received my first Holy Communion. It took my breath away and my class knew something significant had happened to me because I was actually speechless, which is a miracle I am sure you too can appreciate now.
In John 17:20-21, Jesus prays, “I pray not only for these, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe you sent me.” As an atheist this was one of the major arguments against Christianity, “There is no one Church, there is no one truth, there is no one God. There is only discord and dissent among Christians. Even if I, an atheist, wanted to discuss God with someone whom shall I ask? They all aren’t right, I know that much.” So Jesus is right as always, and we are once again called to take part in the love and union of the Trinity.
“We partake of the one bread and one cup so that we may become one in Christ. That we may bear fruit, rejoicing that He has redeemed the world.” This is a prayer I pray with the patients I bring the Eucharist to at Swedish Hospital and it is one of its realities. Jesus binds us together if we allow Him. If we are not bound together in Him, we have rejected Him and the world suffers for not knowing Jesus. The Church has been in existence for more than 2000 years. Be wary of flashy new ideas, and if you find any here please forgive me, for I am still a young convert and prone to pride. Pride is the greatest danger to humanity.
Please pray for me.
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