The Corpse Chapel

What do you do when the thing you once loved most reveals itself to be ugly and cruel, and in so doing, tears a hole right through the center of your existence?

There’s a meme that’s been going around for a while that says, “Men would rather do [insert absurd thing here] than do therapy.”

It’s funny because it’s accurate.

I’ve tried therapy. I haven’t found therapy that works for me yet. My last attempt was supposed to help deal with religious trauma, but the guy I wound up talking to couldn’t help himself - he wanted to argue with me about my conclusions when it comes to faith. I looked him up on LinkedIn, and sure enough, he had a Catholic University in his educational background. I’d found him through BetterHelp, and I was definitely NOT looking for a therapist who shared my former religious beliefs, so it was an unfortunate coincidence. Suffice to say, when I had to stop my sessions for a bit for an unrelated reason, I wasn’t eager to resume them.

I would rather deconstruct my religious experience in public than do therapy, apparently. (At least until I find someone who can actually help.)

So allow me to bleed for a moment, on this fine Saturday morning.

I came across a small kerfuffle online over something Bishop Schneider (whom I used to admire so much) wrote:

My response:

What ensued was a flurry of replies from folks fully invested in the cognitive dissonance and gaslighting Catholics have to specialize in if they’re going to reconcile what the faith actually taught for thousands of years and the God of love they showed up to believe in because they’re decent human beings.

But cognitive dissonance is poison, and I almost overdosed on it. So this stuff makes me livid.

My online buddy, Fr. Joseph Krupp, who has been a better Christian to me through my crisis of faith than almost anyone, DMed me his love and concern, as he sometimes does when I need it most.

And I unloaded the following on him, straight from the gut:

I just sat at my table and cried as I told my wife how fucking angry I am at God, or at least my conception of him. I spent my life digging deeper and deeper into the history and theology of the church to find more authenticity, more reverence, a deeper sense of the sacred…and then I got to tradition, and the liturgies were so powerful, and the sacraments seemed to mean and really attempt to affect what they signified. It was all worded so perfectly. But it’s like exploring a cave and you find this beautiful, ancient chapel underground, and you’re shining your light around in awe and wonder, but then you look past the gold and the mosaics and the treasures and you notice the entire thing is built out of tormented human corpses.

The theology the ancient, authentic church is built on is so vile, so evil, I can never love a god like that. But hating him feels stupid. It’s easier to believe he doesn’t exist than that he is what our ancestors in the faith claimed him to be.

I couldn’t even write this without breaking down again. The thing I loved most and that mattered most to me has turned into the greatest source of betrayal and hurt and ugliness, and it’s like my soul has been torn out.

And when these motherfuckers gaslight me and try to tell me the church didn’t teach this stuff when I prove it chapter and verse again and again and again makes me hate them too, because they lie in order to cope, and they blame it on me and say I’m just making it up. I wish. And when the ghouls show up and say, “Steve’s right, but he’s wrong to reject it, God owes you nothing and you deserve to be damned…”

The whole thing is a horror show. It’s kind of like Islam. The only way to be a good Catholic is to ignore what Catholicism actually believed (and the Church actively tries to whitewash nowadays) and just be nice to people. Just care about and love them.

But I can do that without the corpse chapel, and I don’t know what else to do. I’m too horrified, hurt, and angry to stomach going back inside. But my kids are at a critical age where they need my guidance and example and I can’t give it to them because I’m paralyzed.

So I ask God, “If you’re really there and you really care about me I need you to help me understand the truth, because I’m really starting to hate you if you’re what they say you are,” and he doesn’t answer.

He never answers.

Yeah. Therapy. I know.

A lot of folks have dragged me for leaving Catholicism for the past couple of years. Some think I was a malicious, deceptive “grifter” when I made a living off of sharing the faith. One guy recently accused me of not going to Mass for 20 years! They just make up, and spread it like it’s a fact.

They don’t get it. They don’t even try to get it.

My Catholic faith was everything to me. Consequently, losing it came at a greater cost than anything I’ve ever experienced. There’s been nothing easy about any of this. Some have accused me of doing it for money, but my bank account tells a different story. Amidst waves of overwhelming grief, and despite my epiphany about alignment, I’m still working to reinvent myself at mid-life, with my entire worldview having been shaped by something I’ve come not just to distrust, but in certain aspects, to despise. I feel warped, broken, and left adrift on the ocean without a paddle.

But I will not live a lie for one more day, even if it made all the pain and hardship of leaving go away. I won’t come back for comfort or for fear. The only thing that would ever bring me back would be a firm conviction that it was right and true after all.

Which is why I’m incredibly frustrated when it comes to dealing with many believers. The best people I know are believers. Many of the people I love most in this world have been devoutly religious.

But many of the worst people I’ve encountered are, too.

And you simply can't have a truly honest conversation about your objections to fundamental aspects of the faith with people who have a deep-rooted incentive to never come around to your way of thinking. If they concede any of your points, the integrity of their own faith is called into question, and then the world around them begins to collapse, just as it did for me. Thinking objectively, without unflinching preference for doctrine or dogma, is incredibly dangerous to the integrity of the Christian framework. The best you can hope for with folks afraid of losing their own faith in the face of objections they can’t overcome is a sort of quasi-open-mindedness that always seems to stop short of anything like real willingness to entertain contrary ideas.

I don't mean to imply there aren't people honest enough to attempt this, but they have to be willing to risk loss of faith if they become persuaded of conclusions that are incongruous with their beliefs. For most believers, that's just unthinkable. It’s dangerous. And the advice they get from the Church is to never entertain such temptations.

So for me, it really is like waking up in the Matrix. Good luck getting people to agree with you that we’ve all been part of an elaborate deception. Existential angst remains the deep, lifeless desert I must traverse, very nearly alone. The answers I seek are not within reach. Only God could provide them, if he’s there at all. He never does, so why should I believe?

The “silence, apostate!” crowd have malice toward me, but deep down, it’s fear. Fear that this could happen to them. They need to believe I sinned my way out of the Church because then, as long as they keep their noses clean, they’re probably safe. It’s so much easier for them to malign me for being a vicious deceiver than to actually look at the soul-rending heartbreak that undergirds my unsolicited metanoia.

I think about going back sometimes. I miss things about it. There is a wholesomeness in Christianity, at least in the people and their authentic devotion and desire to become virtuous and do good. There’s something about quiet prayer in an empty chapel, “alone with The Alone.” But I cannot escape the image of the corpse church. I can’t unsee what I now see. To embrace the good is to accept the bad.

If God exists, and he is love, he cannot be the kind of God who is willing to damn the majority of mankind, or cast countless infants into hell for the simple crime of an inherited sin. As David Bentley Hart observes:

What then, we might well ask, does this make of the story of salvation—of its cost? What would any damned soul be, after all, as enfolded within the eternal will of God, other than a price settled upon by God with his own power, an oblation willingly exchanged for a finite benefit—the lamb slain from the foundation of the world? And is hell not then the innermost secret of heaven, its sacrificial heart? And what then is God’s moral nature, inasmuch as the moral character of any intended final cause must include within its calculus what one is willing to sacrifice to achieve that end; and, if the “acceptable” price is the eternal torment of a rational nature, what room remains for any moral analogy comprehensible within finite terms? After all, the economics of the exchange is as monstrous as it is exact.

If God is love, how can we explain the problem of Divine Hiddenness and nonresistant nonbelief? If he is not love, then what is he? Pure creative force? Were we never meant to exist in relationship to him? Is he indifferent to the fact of our existence?

We cannot truly know. I struggle deeply with the realization that I will never know for certain until it’s too late for it to matter — at least, eschatologically speaking. I hate the quite possibly non-existent God for the relentless, cruel mind games he plays on an inferior caste of beings against whom he has well and firmly stacked the supernatural deck. I hate the very idea of a God who would do the things that were done to Job just to prove that Job is more loyal to God than he is wise or self-respecting.

If you were hoping I would conclude with some salient point that ties things all together, I am sorry to disappoint you. Welcome to my world, where answers are impossible to find and challenges are in infinite supply.

I’m not depressed anymore. I’m doing too much work to improve my health (down almost 40lbs this year!) and mental strength. But I am sometimes overwhelmed with the sadness and hurt of betrayal and loss.

I can only say that I will never give up fighting, never stop seeking truth. It’s just that coming to terms with the idea that the truth I seek will likely never be in reach — and certainly not now, when I feel I need it most — is really hard to bear.