Online Dialogues: The Inaccessible Christ, Personal Relationships, And The Suffering Servant's Plea

Only say the word and my soul shall be healed

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Earlier this week, I wrote a piece here about my ongoing difficulties with faith, and the search for a way to lead my family in the midst of my continued journey through the no-man’s-land of unbelief.

As I always do, I shared the post to a bunch of my social media accounts, to encourage people to read and comment.

In the Facebook thread on that post, a discussion ensued. Someone commented, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.”

I don’t know how to explain why this kind of pat response, however well meaning, irks me so. Perhaps it has something to do with that apocryphal axiom from Aquinas:

“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”

The chasm between the believer and unbeliever is incomprehensibly vast. What one takes for granted, the other can scarcely comprehend. This is a truth that cuts both ways.

Irritated, I fired back:

Yes, equally inaccessible, inscrutable, unreachable, and unrelatable.

I cannot fathom how anyone thinks they can have a personal relationship with an aloof, wrathful, silent, intangible god.

“I cannot fathom how anyone thinks they can have a personal relationship with an aloof, wrathful, silent, intangible god.”

To me, this is an obvious problem.

If I can’t see, hear, touch, or perceive someone, how can I really know them personally, let alone love them?

There is a modern phenomenon, in our age of media, called a “parasocial relationship.” It’s that feeling you have when you feel like you know some celebrity or public figure who is not even aware of your existence, because you have seen them speak so often, or read their writing so much, that you feel like you get them. At the end of the day, though, it’s one-sided.

To me, even this is more than I have with God. Or to be more specific, Jesus. I don’t know what his face looks like, what his voice sounds like, how he laughs, his mannerisms, the interesting way he responds to complicated questions, or any of the things that make him who he is.

All I have are some dry texts that convey little about him that feels personal to me at all.

How can anyone claim to know or love a person whom you they never met, never spoken to on the phone, never exchanged correspondence, or had any kind of direct interaction with?

How is it that we convince ourselves such things are possible?

And yet, many believers, when confronted with this question, look at you like you have two heads. It seems that for them, this is a problem that has never even been considered.

To return to my snippy comment about the inaccessible Christ, one of my frequent interlocutors replied, “Yes, cuz the God of the Universe has to meet you on YOUR terms,” followed by an eye-rolling emoji.

I wanted to fire back a caustic reply of my own, but I decided against it.

Instead, I took a deep breath, and re-framed.

This is what I said instead:

I will never understand responses like this. You seem to think of things only in terms of debts and obligations, whereas I’m speaking in terms of intelligibility and sensemaking.

You have blinders on. You have faith, so you can only see what it looks like from the perspective OF faith. My guess would be that you’ve never experienced what it’s like NOT to have faith.

So map it to something else. Say, the Loch Ness Monster. There are a lot of people who really believe Nessie exists. There’s not much in the way of hard evidence, but there’s a little.

What would it take for you to believe that Nessie is real? Would you ask for sufficient proof to overcome your doubt? Would you be perplexed if Nessie believers begrudged you that need for proof, or acted like you’re being some petulant child for not simply being able to force yourself to believe in something you just can’t?

The analogy pales, obviously, in comparison, because God is supposed to be the author of everything, the source of reason and order, and the creator of human reason.

And yet what he presents is not enough to persuade the vast majority of the human race to believe the same things you believe about him - the things you take for granted are true.

Most humans believe in some kind of god, but not the Catholic one, with all his particular demands and all the accreted minutiae that his alleged church says we also have to believe.

And there’s nothing self-evident about any of it. Christ himself said no man can believe if it isn’t given to him from above.

So while I’m open to some kind of divine, creative force in the universe — since no other explanation for all the stuff in the universe really suffices either — I don’t know how to get from there to the very specific attributes and demands of the Catholic God.

And you can roll your eyes until the end of time, but if God himself can’t figure out how to make belief in him acceptable to a skeptical mind like mine — one that has repeatedly asked him to help overcome the lack of belief — then that’s on him, not me.

I can’t make the evidence in front of me appear more credible than it is. And the fact that he hasn’t done so either tells me he’s not particularly concerned with whether people like me get it right.

It’s not me who is making demands of God. It’s people like you who are telling me God is making demands of me, then scoffing when I say I don’t have enough to go on, and if he wants me to believe, I’m going to need more.

There is nothing rational in your response. And I can’t tell you how much reactions like yours make me want to flip two birds at the whole thing and just stop even looking at Catholicism as a possibly correct answer to the problem of divine hiddenness.

A friend and former colleague showed up in the thread. He commented:

That is also not how I have experienced God. I have perceived his nearness and care since I was a child, and I think (as figures like Jordan Peterson are discovering) it is the embodiment of the Logos in Christ which brings an even more tangible closeness to our spiritual experience. I see nothing in emerging paradigms in physics or anything else of the sort which either supersedes or invalidates the Incarnation. In fact, I think these emerging areas all ultimately point in the same direction: The Logos.

To which I replied:

And yet for some reason, some of us, no matter how long we pursue some comforting, familiar sense of God, never find it.

It could be us, I suppose, our unique personalities, or quirks, or even traumas, but, "Sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea," right?

I find myself thinking about this a lot.

If God is there, and he hears me asking him to help me find my way out of the darkness of my insufficient understanding and broken faith and to lead me into the light of truth, why will he not, like the Roman Legionary’s sick servant, just say the world and heal me?

Is it really so presumptuous to ask?

As is usually the case, my discussion spilled over to other platforms, like X. I got an interesting comment from Brendan Ross:

Under the modern Catholic approach, the more you know/investigate, the worse you are. If you choose to be an ignorant person when it comes to faith and morals, it becomes impossible to commit a mortal sin.

I replied:

I just keep thinking about going to confession in my last few years as a Catholic, talking about struggling with my faith, and being told repeatedly the remedy was to stop looking at what the Church was doing and stop giving any thought to my doubts.

Ignorance is not virtue.

Then, Fr. Joseph Krupp kindly chimed in:

It’s funny to say, but I wish I would’ve got you in the box with me. To Wrestle with faith is a divine thing. Heck, the name Israel means “wrestles with God.”

More than most people I know you are obsessed with finding out what’s true and that’s why I’m confident brother. I believe you’ll get there. I pray that doesn’t sound overly self-assured or arrogant or any such thing. I just know on some level what it’s like to cast aside the cloak of surety in a thing and place it on a person. I believe every step you’re taking to get wherever this goes will draw you closer to Him.

I’ll end with my reply to him, which I think sums up my feeling, in general, about where I am in this strange, off-road detour I’ve been on. Perhaps some of you will identify with this:

I'm confident, for reasons I can't explain, that this weird path I'm on is one I had to go on.

I am not confident for the reasons that you are, though I have to leave the door open to that.

But I had to strip away all the crap that had twisted me in the wrong direction and factory reset my epistemology problem. Had to.

It's funny, but there's this lady on here who is autistic and she tells me (vis a vis the Telepathy Tapes) that she can read things about people. She watched some videos of me from years ago, and then now, and she keeps telling me how much "lighter" I am.

She explained further:

"I think part of it is that you've stopped lying to yourself about anything. You're being truthful to yourself and you've stopped disowning parts of yourself for the sake of others. You're reintegrating and becoming whole. The things that tethered your spirit before that were truly dangerous you've cut the lines.

Yes, you're going through a lot of horrible, stressful stuff. I totally get that ... But I think doing so with a tethered spirit is like swimming in concrete, and now you're not. It's like your spirit is a joyful little child again, exploring, finding cool rocks to look at, puddles to splash in, and being true and free. It doesn't negate the weight of the world's stressors...but it's experienced from a different place when you're free."

And I can't deny that this feels true.

“It's like your spirit is a joyful little child again, exploring, finding cool rocks to look at, puddles to splash in, and being true and free. It doesn't negate the weight of the world's stressors...but it's experienced from a different place when you're free.”

I cannot tell you how dead-on she is. I am going through so much right now: re-invention, severe financial difficulties, profound relationship challenges, and a struggle, at an age where I thought I should have at least had some things figured out, to figure out who the hell I really am, and what I really believe.

But I also do feel like a little boy, picking up sparkly rocks, chasing turtles in the pond, lying on the grass looking up at the stars.

The world is full of wonders, and I may not know my place in all of it, or how to relate with whoever its author may be, but my greatest lament is that I only have a few decades left, at best, to squeeze every moment of delightful discovery from the adventure.