Fear, Faith, and Floundering

I dreamed that I was forced to die, and in a way, that's true.

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On Saturday night, I had a a dream that I had to do something, some kind of ritual ingestion of an unknown drug, that I knew with certainty would bring about my death.

I don’t know what drug it was. I don’t know what the point of the ritual was. It was a dream, and it’s rare that I remember those at all, let alone the fine details.

But in the dream, knowing death was imminent, I became deeply concerned about the fact that I still didn’t have any answers about God. I found myself praying in desperation. I wasn’t ready to go. I didn’t know what my eternal fate, if there even was such a thing, would be, but I didn’t want it to be a horrifying one.

This continued with such intensity that I woke up praying prayers I haven't prayed in a long time.

After I came to my senses, I realized this was not really the manifestation of some latent faith, buried beneath hurt and frustration, so much as it was an upwelling of fear. Fear of death, fear of hell, fear of finding out that despite the fact I can’t know anything for certain about the truth or falsity of any of it, I would still be held accountable for failing to believe.

For me, fear and belief have always been indistinguishable. Faith for me, often as not, manifested as begging God, perpetually, to help me be better, or do better, or save me from whatever I thought might befall me, his wrath being the thing I feared most of all.

I do not relish the idea of a universe without loving God. I do not wish to face the trials and travails of life alone, without a higher power to call on for help. I do not like the idea of nihilism, of a life that is not a part of any overarching plan. I want to say "everything happens for a reason" and actually mean it.

But I like even less the idea of a universe where there is a God who hides while threatening us and making non-negotiable demands.

A God whose wrath is legendary — wrath that only his beloved Mother can just barely restrain by means of her insuperable favor.

A God who is supposedly the paradigmatic embodiment of love, but who is nevertheless content to consign the majority of his "beloved" children to eternal conscious torment, a great many of them through no voluntary fault of their own.

I would rather no God than a God like that.

To live with an abusive father is, in a way, made worse when you are given to believe that in some way he also loves you. A purely cruel father can more easily be hated and abandoned. But a father who loves you —despite his awful rages and abuse — is one to whom you wish to give the benefit of doubt. You hope that the loving part of him will somehow outshine the monstrous part. But the damage it does to you, remaining emotionally vulnerable to a father like that, is long-lasting. It twists you, deforms you, changes you for life.

I remember, as a child, admonishing myself for accepting my father’s apologies, knowing that despite their manifest sincerity, he would do whatever it was again. I would tell myself it was the last time I would forgive, that there were no more chances.

But I wanted to believe him, to love him, and to experience his love, so I always ended up giving in.

When God is spoken about in paternal metaphor, it fits perfectly with my own experiences of fatherhood. The terror of knowing that if he’s there, he will find something you did to be angry about; the feelings of worthlessness that come from never having his approval; the disappointment and abandonment and neglect that come from all your futile attempts to seek his aid, time, or attention; the knowledge that you can never count on him to be there for you when you actually need him.

These are my experiences of both earthly and divine fatherhood, and I hear them echoed when I read the scriptures or the experiences of the saints. I don’t mean the gaslighting scriptures, the ones that tell you that the father will give you anything you ask in Jesus’ name, or that a father will not give a stone when you ask for bread. I think, if we’re being honest, we have all experienced the untruth of those.

We have all asked and not received, or sought bread and been given stones. We simply make excuses to explain these things away.

The truth is, I want there to be a God, but I need him to make some kind of sense. If I am supposed to view him as a father, I want him to be the good dad my own did not know how to be. The one who comforts, protects, and teaches with wisdom, patience, humor, and restraint. I do not want him to be the kind who yells at you for nothing, or unleashes his rage on you for small offenses you don’t even know you committed. I am not interested in a God who berates or beats you for looking at him wrong, then skulks off, back to unreachability, aloof and avoidant when you need something from him.

Absent a God who acts like a father should, a godless universe is preferable.

And yet I still woke up from my dream praying. This is a very deep part of who I am.

I have always known that I would have this struggle. From the moment I left the Church behind, to try to piece together some semblance of irreligious sanity, some hope of actual peace not run straight through with religious anxiety and guilt, I knew that a day would come when I would have a desperately sick loved one, or face some terminal diagnosis of my own, and I would writhe into a corner, nowhere left to go, terrified again, begging, through fear, for God not to hurt me.

I wrote something last week when my flu was at its peak, in a feverish haze that felt almost like drunkenness, that I swore I would not edit. I told myself that I would publish it, no matter how I felt.

But as I gave myself that freedom to let go and just write, what spilled out was not what not what I sat down to say. It became, instead, a story of my own brokenness, and of the experiences that broke me. A demon I apparently needed to exorcize in concrete form. And I knew, at the end, as the narrative fizzled, the beastly things having already been birthed, twisted and deformed, that I could not say these things out loud.

They are not, at least for now, for everyone to hear. Even if some part of me believes that doing so would allow me to take some power back, making my story my own, reclaiming agency over a life sent off course from such an early age.

I am just now finding the courage to confront my demons, just now beginning to attempt to console my “inner child,” a gesture that feels foolish and feminine to my old ways of thinking, but makes so much sense when I look at my own sons, who are as afraid as I am, if not more, because of the anger I accumulated from my own childhood, anger which I took too long to quench.

I learned an exercise recently to help let go CPTSD, and tried it out the other night when I was restless and sick and could not find my way to sleep. Just before bed, I focused on the most painful events from my past I could remember. I thought about certain ugly memories that always bubble to the surface, replaying like old film reels stuck on infinite loops, in the hopes that I could finally learn to let them go.

Some part of me always feels like a fraud for being so affected by these things, even now, so many years later. “Other kids had it worse,” I think. I think it because it’s true. And as I’ve said, there was also love in the mix. There were good times, even if my memories, at least, are mostly of the bad. I’ve written about these, too.

I had a sudden realization, writing my way through all of this, even if most of my thoughts would never be published, that I may have earned a reputation for being a “speak truth to power” guy for trauma-related reasons. Throughout my youth, and into adulthood, I used to have a recurring theme in my dreams. Something or someone would be hunting me, or attacking me, and I would be trying to escape. When it finally came to the moment of confrontation, I would go to defend myself, and some unseen force would restrain my arms, so I could not throw a punch. I have this growing suspicion that every single time I lash out at some authority figure — some priest or bishop or pope or politician — whether they are a deserving target or not, they are ultimately a surrogate for those I was always too afraid to confront.

Placeholders in a proxy war.

The stranger thing are my feelings.

If a situation triggers an emotional flashback or a trauma response, I get very upset, very quickly. The distance from perfectly calm to complete emotional dysregulation is annoyingly short.

But when I purposefully dredged up the old memories, lying in my bed, wondering why these old wounds refuse to heal, I could not, for some reason, feel anything.

Not fear. Not anger. Not resentment.

I was totally numb.

I also have experienced this at times, reading stories about outrageous crimes, the kinds of things where people say, “If this doesn’t piss you off, there’s something wrong with you.” It has always puzzled me why, despite being deeply empathetic, sometimes my nervous system simply does not respond to stimuli that should evoke something, whereas other times I over-react to seemingly insignificant stimuli.

I wonder if it’s related.

Recognizing that in many ways I am still the same frightened little boy I always was, backed into a corner every time life threatens me with some new assault, is galling. I am too damn old to be haunted by these childhood ghosts.

As I look at the smoking wreck of my professional life, I see the other telltale signs.

In both my immediate and extended family, the only clear path to approval and respect was to be as Catholic as possible. So I prioritized this above all else. I became actively involved in my parish as a teen. I would take my lunch break from the hardware store and walk to my parish to eat with the elderly pastor there, falsely stoking his hopes that I would become a priest. I was an altar boy, a lector, and eventually assisted my dad in teaching 6th grade CCD. I began going on retreats with the Legionaries of Christ, then doing apostolate with them, then living in community for my senior year of high school and beyond. I ran their youth groups. I taught in their schools. I first participated in, then directed, their door-to-door missions.

I became obsessed with my perceived mission for the Church. I survived the Legion’s vocational pressure (although that alone took years to escape) and their scandalous fall from grace, and plunged into a theology degree at my very-Catholic college. I wrote my senior thesis about “Media and the New E-vangelization,” then lived those ideas by means of a series of freelance Catholic writing gigs that eventually blossomed into the foundation of OnePeterFive.

My childhood dreams of becoming a novelist and getting into filmmaking (and other kinds of art) were shoved aside. Everything, always, was about the Church and her mission. I prioritized these things above my family, my dreams, whatever job I had at any given time, and basically everything else.

And when my entire house of cards came tumbling down, when the fear of God that was no doubt fueled by the fear from my father and the guilt and shame from my mother could no longer hold back my torrent of doubt and anger and regret, I found myself adrift, the best years of my life not just behind me, but wasted in pursuit of the mission of an institution that was only too happy to discard me and slam the door behind my back.

So here I am, at mid-life, washed ashore upon the wreckage of a life lived according to the expectations and beliefs I inherited from others before I was old enough to properly think them through, having given everything I have ever had to a mission I can no longer carry out.

My only remaining gift is the writing that was shaped into my instrument of spreading zeal. Ironically, that ability has thus far proven nearly useless in my nascent post-Christian life. Writers, it turns out, rarely make a living, unless they are writing about religion — the one topic where the audience has been conditioned to open their wallets for the cause.

I don’t get any do-overs. No take-backs. I do not have time for drastic course corrections. I can only go forward, into the dark, stumbling and lost, trying to plot a new course.

I'm 46, with 7 dependent children, trying to make ends meet at a time when the cost of living is higher than it's ever been, and I have no fallback career. To do something new would mean to begin again from the bottom up, but I need to be paid like a man of my age and work experience, not like a teenager just starting out. And as much as delivering food has been an unexpected balm to body and mind, the ratio of pay to expenses makes it unworkable beyond the short-term. The miles are adding up fast on a vehicle I cannot afford to have break down, and nearly half of what I make goes back to fuel.

I am still determined to start finishing novels, but the gut-punch reality is that the financial prospects of this endeavor are not good:

[T]he economics of publishing are a lot like venture capital investment: most books, the overwhelming majority, don’t sell. Companies make many mini-bets. Very occasionally, a bet in their portfolios goes absolutely wild and they finally make a profit entirely on the success of just a handful, or at most a couple dozen, books a year, despite officially publishing hundreds or even thousands. To publish a book (which is hard enough as it is, and requires a good deal of luck) is merely to enter this further grand lottery.

To truly understand the bleak reality requires a comparison. The analogy I think best is that the few who can make a living solely by writing books are cultural billionaires. And I think it’s arguable that becoming a cultural billionaire is just as rare as becoming an actual billionaire (under an admittedly broad calculation of equivalency).

I keep trying to dig deep and find some optimism, but I feel as though I missed my chance to build a life outside of Catholic media. I did not chart a career path in my 20s, building towards some grand exit at the top of my career. I caromed between disparate jobs, trying to land in some goldilocks zone where I could be the writer I always wanted to be.

And I suppose, to my credit, I accomplished that. For a little while, at least.

But now, for whatever reason, it isn’t working for me anymore. Something I am doing is wrong.

Maybe everything is.

Or maybe, unbeknownst to me, I am on the precipice of figuring it out. Maybe after mining all this time, one last stroke of the pickaxe will reveal my niche, uncovering the hidden diamonds at long last.

I only know that I am running out of time.

I don’t know why any of you have chosen to stay on this weird journey with me, but I appreciate you being here — especially those of you who have paid to support my work.

I will continue writing here, but this shift toward telling stories in a narrative non-fiction style is likely to be my only mode. It is a kind of craftwork; a skill-building exercise. I am training my mind to look for detail and texture again, to layer text with subtlety and heft.

That part, at least, feels good.

On the other hand, I don’t have entire days any more to do the kind of media analysis that went into Friday Roundups. There is simply too much to do, and every activity must be weighed and monetized. It’s a mercenary business, not ideal for art, but as the metastasizing cost of everything ravages the finances of people across the world, the necessity becomes obvious.

I find myself thinking that “money is the only god.” This is a cynical thought, not an idolatrous one. The majority of our lives are spent in its pursuit, just so we can survive. What time is there for leisure, or culture, or art, when the bills keep coming due?

All I know is that my dream seems apropos; whatever this phase of life is that I am going through, it feels very much like a forced death.

Will there be a rebirth? It’s too early to be sure.

I can’t see the way out from here, but I retain some hope that this is a story with a happier ending than the current chapter of its second act implies.