I don't know if you have seen the quote from C.S. Lewis along the lines of, If you discover you've taken a wrong path and are going the wrong way, it isn't "progress" to keep going along it. It will always feel dreadful, but the only thing to do is go back to the point where it started going wrong and get on the right way.
There is always a struggle to every course correction, and the bigger the change the more momentum you had, the greater the friction there will be to correct it. You have a very large ship; between yourself and your interior difficulties, your family, immediate and extended, your substantial material establishment and your large-ish public reality, I find it inspiring that you've had the courage to pursue this tremendous change. Especially without any real exterior guidance or map. Many have criticized you for your decisions, but I think the thing you rejected was not the truth of Christ, but a false mimic of it. A clever but ultimately harmful knock off. You might be in danger of going the wrong way in this search for the right way now, but the same can be said of all of us.
Greetings Steve - it seems like we may have the same birthday. 54 yesterday. I hope this next year is awesome for you. 47 was the age I was when I got a call out of the blue from a former student that suddenly turned my career in a completely different direction, taking me out of a rut I was getting depressed in. I was saddened to read that you have never felt like you have had a relationship with Jesus or God the loving Father. Pope Benedict said that the evidences for the Church were basically the beauty she has produced and the lives of the Saints. It seems from what you've written from time to time that you've been personally acquainted with a few of those Saints - are you still in touch with any of them? What Twilight Patriot says resonates with me - I always felt the doctrine of eternal damnation was an insult to God.it was one of the things that made me stop calling myself Catholic in 2007. I've reverted since... otherwise I probably would never have heard of you (!)... but I wasn't comfortable until I discovered Hans Urs von Balthazar's 'Dare We Hope'. There is an interpretation of 'extra ecclesia nulla salus' that is not incompatible with a loving God. The actions of Jesus in the Gospels certianly aren't the actions of someone who believes everyone is going to Hell if they don't hear about Him - they are the actions of someone who has all the time in the world. See you in Purgatory!
I sure hope that you find a way to "write a better story" after getting free of the cult and the ruts you used to be in.
I suppose that I can say I have a little in common with your story, in the sense that I grew up in a religion (Mormonism) which I no longer fully believe in. The main difference seems to be that I'm a lot less angry about it - though maybe I just have less reason to be angry, what with starting on the way out at 20 rather than in my 40s, and my career (I'm partway through a physics Ph.D.) not having been at all harmed by this.
At the same time, I am not an atheist (though I'm not, by any stretch, orthodox, I've never seriously considered the possibility that God doesn't exist) nor do I even believe the Mormon church is a force for evil - sure, there are some things they're wrong about but their system of morality is better than that of the surrounding culture, and what trouble it does cause is more of the "ex-Mormon comes to believe the church lied to him and loses the will to believe in God" kind than the "living as a faithful Mormon will sap the joy out of your life" kind.
One of the unique things about Mormonism is that it is a quasi-universalist religion. There was no "massa damnata" for us. People who don't get an adequate chance to become Mormons in their present life will get a chance in the afterlife (that is what "baptism for the dead" is all about). And even people who fail to make it to the highest heaven will usually make it to one of the lower heavens; they won't get to be gods of their own planets, but the place they end up in is still a paradise compared to earthly life. Only a handful of the wickedest people, those who came to know God quite well and then went back on their faith and consciously served Satan (think Judas Iscariot) will end up spending eternity in a place that a typical Catholic or Protestant would think of as "hell."
But there is a flipside to this: it actually says in the Book of Mormon that simply believing in infant damnation is sinful - basically, if you think that God is cruel enough to send people to hell for not following a religion they never heard about, then God will be angered by your belief. So maybe what is going on right now is that God is angry at you for believing in and promoting a cruel and unloving picture of him for so long, and the upshot of it is that you just need to learn to live with a distant God for a while. It might be that because of your having believed, for most of your life, that God was willing to abandon everyone outside of the Catholic Church, God is now abandoning you, at least for a few years, as a sort of karmic payback.
“The truth is that Jesus begins by making His followers suffer,” the writer J.K. Huysmans wrote, “and explains himself afterwards.”
btw, I was 47 when I walked away from LifeSite and moved to Norcia and started finding a new way in life.
I don't know if you have seen the quote from C.S. Lewis along the lines of, If you discover you've taken a wrong path and are going the wrong way, it isn't "progress" to keep going along it. It will always feel dreadful, but the only thing to do is go back to the point where it started going wrong and get on the right way.
There is always a struggle to every course correction, and the bigger the change the more momentum you had, the greater the friction there will be to correct it. You have a very large ship; between yourself and your interior difficulties, your family, immediate and extended, your substantial material establishment and your large-ish public reality, I find it inspiring that you've had the courage to pursue this tremendous change. Especially without any real exterior guidance or map. Many have criticized you for your decisions, but I think the thing you rejected was not the truth of Christ, but a false mimic of it. A clever but ultimately harmful knock off. You might be in danger of going the wrong way in this search for the right way now, but the same can be said of all of us.
Greetings Steve - it seems like we may have the same birthday. 54 yesterday. I hope this next year is awesome for you. 47 was the age I was when I got a call out of the blue from a former student that suddenly turned my career in a completely different direction, taking me out of a rut I was getting depressed in. I was saddened to read that you have never felt like you have had a relationship with Jesus or God the loving Father. Pope Benedict said that the evidences for the Church were basically the beauty she has produced and the lives of the Saints. It seems from what you've written from time to time that you've been personally acquainted with a few of those Saints - are you still in touch with any of them? What Twilight Patriot says resonates with me - I always felt the doctrine of eternal damnation was an insult to God.it was one of the things that made me stop calling myself Catholic in 2007. I've reverted since... otherwise I probably would never have heard of you (!)... but I wasn't comfortable until I discovered Hans Urs von Balthazar's 'Dare We Hope'. There is an interpretation of 'extra ecclesia nulla salus' that is not incompatible with a loving God. The actions of Jesus in the Gospels certianly aren't the actions of someone who believes everyone is going to Hell if they don't hear about Him - they are the actions of someone who has all the time in the world. See you in Purgatory!
I sure hope that you find a way to "write a better story" after getting free of the cult and the ruts you used to be in.
I suppose that I can say I have a little in common with your story, in the sense that I grew up in a religion (Mormonism) which I no longer fully believe in. The main difference seems to be that I'm a lot less angry about it - though maybe I just have less reason to be angry, what with starting on the way out at 20 rather than in my 40s, and my career (I'm partway through a physics Ph.D.) not having been at all harmed by this.
At the same time, I am not an atheist (though I'm not, by any stretch, orthodox, I've never seriously considered the possibility that God doesn't exist) nor do I even believe the Mormon church is a force for evil - sure, there are some things they're wrong about but their system of morality is better than that of the surrounding culture, and what trouble it does cause is more of the "ex-Mormon comes to believe the church lied to him and loses the will to believe in God" kind than the "living as a faithful Mormon will sap the joy out of your life" kind.
One of the unique things about Mormonism is that it is a quasi-universalist religion. There was no "massa damnata" for us. People who don't get an adequate chance to become Mormons in their present life will get a chance in the afterlife (that is what "baptism for the dead" is all about). And even people who fail to make it to the highest heaven will usually make it to one of the lower heavens; they won't get to be gods of their own planets, but the place they end up in is still a paradise compared to earthly life. Only a handful of the wickedest people, those who came to know God quite well and then went back on their faith and consciously served Satan (think Judas Iscariot) will end up spending eternity in a place that a typical Catholic or Protestant would think of as "hell."
But there is a flipside to this: it actually says in the Book of Mormon that simply believing in infant damnation is sinful - basically, if you think that God is cruel enough to send people to hell for not following a religion they never heard about, then God will be angered by your belief. So maybe what is going on right now is that God is angry at you for believing in and promoting a cruel and unloving picture of him for so long, and the upshot of it is that you just need to learn to live with a distant God for a while. It might be that because of your having believed, for most of your life, that God was willing to abandon everyone outside of the Catholic Church, God is now abandoning you, at least for a few years, as a sort of karmic payback.