Homeless With Religion or Without

Not all who wander are lost, but many are.

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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.

My prayers, such as they are, usually go something like this: “Hey God. I don’t know if you’re there, or if you’re listening, or if you want to hear from me at all, but I could sure use your help. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know how to make sense out of any of this. I don’t want to go through life alone, feeling like everything is on me. I’m not enough to bear that burden. But I don’t know how to believe in you, let alone trust you. If you’re there, can you maybe throw me a bone or something? I don’t know what to do.”

These requests seem to fall on deaf ears. I never get anything back. Not even an idea or an inclination, much less a whisper. I don’t understand who I’m talking to, if anyone, nor do I understand why, if he’s listening, he chooses to respond or not to our requests.

I no longer find the Christian story credible, for various reasons, but I am open to being proven wrong. That said, even if I could get past all my doubts and unsee all the contradictions and irrationality in the Christian narrative, what am I to do? Try to force myself to muster up enough attempted belief to live as a cafeteria Catholic? There are things I can no longer accept, which the Church tells me are non-negotiable. And even if I could, where would I go? The toxic swamps of Tradistan? The bougie anthropocentrism of Novusordoland?

I cannot stomach a religion that is so radically, soteriologically exclusive that some of its greatest luminaries taught (without correction) that even unbaptized babies end up in hell. Or in general, one that envisions a heaven with doors barred to the vast majority of souls who ever lived, consigning them to eternal conscious torment even for their ignorance of the truth. The non-doctrinal exclusion from beatific vision known as “limbo” isn’t even a verified belief. Even if it were, it offers no real consolation, if human beings are made for union with God and yet can lose that union through no actual fault of their own.

If universalism isn’t true, what is the point of a story of such a costly redemption? When scoring the battle between God and Satan, should we not be disturbed to realize that according to traditional Christian eschatology, the literal Devil, God’s greatest adversary, has won the most souls by many orders of magnitude? Is this really what we’re meant to believe about a God who is supposed to be pure goodness and love, to say nothing of omnipotent and omniscient? Is it that he is incapable of winning the most souls to his side, or just unwilling? Neither option speaks well of his supposed benevolence.

Culturally, I’m also done being part of a dour, self-loathing ethos, where the faithfuul are constantly belittled and harangued about how sinful they are, even with the tacit admission that this weakness comes as a result of the (unjust) curses of fallen nature and concupiscence. Do we really have a God who cripples our legs and then punishes us when we do not run?

I have no interest in reviving the felt need to succumb to the wild speculation of this or that apparitionist cult in some gnostic attempt at self-consolation. “Things have only gotten so bad because God has some secret plan that will only come to pass if we perform certain rituals and recite the correct prayers on right days for a very specific amount of time.” How many years have we watched people debate about whether Russia was consecrated correctly? How many folks hang the hope of their salvation on the completion of the nine First Fridays? How many wear brown scapulars like magic talismans against damnation, while whispering scary stories about those who lived unrighteously, and were forced through uncanny circumstance to remove theirs, so their life could be claimed without its protection?

I am utterly finished with the cult of masochism and its precept of obligatory belief that we all deserve hell simply for existing as fallen souls. Or that the solution to any and every problem is just more willfully-embraced suffering, as though God is nothing but a cosmic parasite who feeds on human pain.

The trads win on authenticity, liturgy, and theological clarity. But that only inclines me to believe that the authentic vision of the Christian life is so bleak and unforgiving, it conjures up images of Gustave Doré illustrations of the Inferno.

Many exceptions exist on an individual basis, but in the aggregate, trad culture produces some of the most miserable, nasty, vicious (as opposed to virtuous) people I have ever come across. They spit acrimonious invective at their fellows even as they toll their beads. If this is authentic Catholicism, you can keep it. Transcendent liturgies are insufficient compensation for all the backbiting and endless purity spirals.

But neither can I abide the happy-clappy, felt-banners and polyester vestments and good vibes, off-off-off broadway production of Humanism masquerading as Christianity that is the modern Catholic Church. There’s hardly any room at the altar for God, what with all the weirdos traipsing around in order to be “seen.”

Whatever this new Church is, it is not the same religion my great grandparents practiced — if such a man-obsessed thing can be called a religion at all. It is an ersatz Catholicism that has memory-holed its own perennial, often ugly past. But in doing so, it has fallen into unseriousness — an unseriousness that nearly lost me at age 14. If I could see through its frivolity then, as a mere boy, it has no hope of luring me back now, cynical and world-weary as I have become at middle age. It has essentially become a weird immanentist NGO in religious guise; an HOA religion of empty rules and social justice and busybody Susans from the Parish Council. It is a sissified administrative edifice — one that focuses more on diversity and participation and inclusion and busywork than moving its members to contemplation of the divine.

If I believed in a God who wanted me there, I’d be showing up for him, not to hear the bold verbal stylings of Larry the Lector or the not-quite-dulcet tones of Cantor Cathy with her upraised palm and the gently vibrating glad tambourine at her other hip.

If the Hallmark Channel invented a branch of Christianity, it couldn’t be any more cringe.

I cannot find my way back to belief, but even if I could, I would still be homeless.

Homeless with religion or without.

There is no safe port in the ecclesiastical storm.

Some of you have suggested going East, when and if I go anywhere at all. I can only say that Eastern Christianity holds little appeal to me. While I appreciate its emphasis on mysticism and personal spirituality, I am very much a man formed by Western religious thought and ethos. And so, although I spent years treading water in the outskirts of Byzantium before I found the TLM, it was never a good fit. Divine Liturgy was my escape from the happy-clappy, faux-glossolalia-fueled liturgies of my alma mater, but I was always a stranger in a strange land. I’ve visited the Ruthenians, the Ukranians, and the Melkites, but nothing took. My one foray to an Eastern Orthodox liturgy might as well have been a visit to another planet for how alienated I felt. I struggle to imagine myself ever finding a place there that felt like I belonged.

And again, to even explore it again would mean getting over my fundamental doubt about even the thing that Lewis called “Mere Christianity.”

I can’t stop thinking that if “God is in control,” like everyone likes to say, then the responsibility for all this mess is on him. When you’re in charge, the buck stops with you. If he cares, why does he make trying to live the faith hardest for those who want to do it the best they can? Why did he concentrate so much power in the hands of those who are quite literally the worst men in the church? Why, in a world of suffering and temptation, does he allow already-vanquished demons to run amok, to torment and derail those already barely hanging on? Why have generations of Catholics who have been taught that a pope can never steer them wrong in faith or morals been subjected to a pope who does nothing else?

Every way I approach it, I cannot escape the conclusion that the God who inhabits the Catholic edifice, if he is as described, is a monster. He is no better than Odin or Zeus or Mars. He simply has better PR.

If God is real, we must all have gotten him very wrong. We are all, no matter which faith tradition we come from, so morally certain that ours is the correct one, and that anyone who belongs to a different one is pitiable at best, if not damned. Often this belief, ironclad as it tends to be, rests on no greater reason than that those in charge of our particular religion say it’s true.

Source? “Trust me, bro.”

It’s a stunning thing to think that a God who loves us and desires our salvation would let us languish in so much damnable error and confusion, the thousand-plus denominations of Christianity all at war with each other for centuries over what being a Christian even means, to say nothing of the other religions on offer in the world.

A 2,000-year game of telephone, and the original speaker won’t even issue a correction?

None of it adds up. None of it makes sense.

But I concede that the universe is empty without religion. I do not want a life without a God to call upon in times of need, even if my logical brain says I’m being naive.

Is this just a function of the innate human impulse to numinous self-delusion? Or of our limited knowledge? If I do not know what the future holds, does this induce the notion that I may yet hope God will alter it in my favor?

I don’t know. That’s the bottom line with all of it. I don’t know what I don’t know and I can’t know what I can’t know.

The only thing I do know is how discontented I am with all of it.

The search continues, but it’s mostly just fumbling in the dark.