Homeless With Religion or Without

Not all who wander are lost, but many are.

The following is a paid subscribers-only post with free preview. If you’d like access to all subscribers-only features and posts, you can sign up for just $5/month or $50 per year, right here:

Subscribed

Writing is how I make my living, so if you like what you see here, please support my work by subscribing!

If you’ve already subscribed but would like to buy me a coffee to help keep me fueled up for writing, you can do that at the button below:

Or alternatively, if you’d like you can drop a tip in my PayPal. Thanks for your support!

---

I implore your forgiveness in advance for a messy, meandering, soul-searching post. I’m taking a break from political-posting to take a crack at something I’ve been thinking about.

Let me start at the beginning.

A friend wrote me the other day, unexpectedly divulging some of their own struggles with the Catholic faith. Someone who is educated, devout, and conversant in the teachings of the Catholic faith.

Papal supremacy, they said, even just garden-variety papalism, is the hardest pill to swallow.

Back when this person was considering converting to Catholicism, many years ago, one of their concerns was how Catholics knew a bad man couldn’t become pope and use all the power concentrated in that office to start tearing everything apart.

The response was, “That’s impossible. Can’t happen.”

But then it did.

This friend also conceded that while they have seen the transformative power of contemplative prayer on the individual, they see intercessory prayer may as roughly the same thing as superstition: “Might as well set a chicken on fire,” they said. God clearly does not intervene the way most people like to think he does. Too many worthy prayers go unanswered. And it doesn’t even make sense that he would violate the free will of the people we pray for, in the hopes they’ll change, or treat us differently, or take better care of themselves, and so on.

I want to believe that asking God for stuff works. Wouldn’t that be incredible? “Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you.” How many times have I asked the Father something in Jesus’ name, only for absolutely nothing to come of it? How many times have you done the exact same? The evidence to back this biblical claim is simply not consistent or reliable.

Even in those areas where I have asked, and something I wanted did happen, I can easily identify prosaic explanations that would also make sense of events. How much do we simply project our interior desires for efficacious prayers upon the results of our own effort, or even mere happenstance?

This specific issue — the obvious inefficacy of at least most intercessory prayer — was one of things that broke down my stalwart Catholic bastions. Every day, seeing people claim God interceded in menial aspects of their lives, but knowing that this was simultaneously happening for countless others who were even more in need, ate at me. I’m glad you think God got you that better job, but what about the parent desperately beseeching heaven not to lose their dying child? What about the sex-trafficked child pleading that God would protect them from the horrors to which they are subjected daily, never to find relief? How about the family caught in a natural disaster like Hurricane Helene, begging God for rescue before watching their loved ones drown as the flood waters overtook them?

I can’t accept the idea of a God who is willing to help me find my car keys or pass a test at school, but who doesn’t help the miner trapped in a cave-in get out to see his family again.

If he intervenes in the affairs of men at all, then the times he doesn’t raise serious questions.

And if he doesn’t intervene, then what are we to believe about him? How are we supposed to trust or love him? Or believe that he is good?

I am not content with nihilism, or materialism, or even theistically-open agnosticism. These are not workable long-term states of being. But neither can I simply will myself back to a place where I can honestly profess a creed. I will not lie about something so important simply because….I believe it’s so important.

These days, I often find myself trying to talk to this God I am not sure exists. I do this almost every day. Times are hard. Things aren’t working out. We are struggling here in my house, and we don’t know how to dig out. I’ve lost a lot already, and can’t stand the idea of losing more.

So I fall back on old habits, and I try to pray.