It’s funny. I don’t know if you remember but I kept telling you about a letter I was writing you. It started a couple of years ago and I would noodle away at it sometimes. In the end I deleted it because the man I was writing to didn’t exist anymore.
I’m really proud of you brother. I really am. I hope you don’t read that as insensitivity to your pain, not at all. It’s more a recognition of the beauty that’s going to come to full bloom in you in a short amount of time.
As always, I hold you and your family in my heart and prayers.
One of the reasons I eagerly dive into every new post here is that you *don't* act like you've got it all figured out. You're humble, honest, and unafraid to ask questions you don't know the answers to. I can only speak for myself, but I'm all in on riding shotgun for whatever parts of this journey you care to share with us. It's practically an adventure story—and who doesn't love one of those?
As for your novel, please share the prologue with us! Religion meets UFOs? Sign me up.
You don’t need to apologize to anyone for writing about yourself. We are all selves and your discussion of your thoughts and experiences is interesting and valuable to all of us.
I think as Catholics, when we begin to share our inner, personal struggles, we’re often bludgeoned with “die to yourself” and “offer it up” and other forms of self-negation. Thinking about yourself and your own thoughts is not selfish or corrupt, it’s quite normal and basically how anyone processes anything!
Catholicism encourages people to essentially disown themselves, in my experience. They demand this self-betrayal as though you can indefinitely deny and shut down your true feelings and authentic thoughts in favor of how you’re told you must feel and think, on pain of sin. We often end up with broken, fractured, false selves because of this.
No one has all the answers, and frankly, it’s far more interesting to ask meaningful questions in a good faith pursuit of truth.
"Catholicism encourages people to essentially disown themselves, in my experience. They demand this self-betrayal as though you can indefinitely deny and shut down your true feelings and authentic thoughts in favor of how you’re told you must feel and think, on pain of sin. We often end up with broken, fractured, false selves because of this."
I know this is a part of my neuroticism. My constant negative self-talk. It's amazingly hard to escape this mentality, or at least, the guilt that goes with it if you don't beat yourself up enough.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by Steve Skojec
Have no fear in continuing to do what you've been doing with the substack. You represent more people than you perhaps realize: thoughtful, intelligent and morally sensitive believers/former believers who wrestle with these questions. Your thinking certainly resonates with me, and it would appear with a multitude of others.
Hart is brilliant. I've been reading the same book off and on as well as lots of Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Syria, Macarius and Dionysus the Areopagite. You might want to give the site "Ecclectic Orthodoxy" a try. Lots of good smart people (including Hart) write for it and address many of the issues that concern you.
A friend of mine who is a priest of the Eastern Church said to me once "You Latins want to understand everything and often imagine that you do. It's an exercise in futility. It doesn't work that way. You have to come to a place of contentment with not knowing or understanding." Or as Baronnes Kathryn Doherty, a Greek Catholic and the founders of Madonna House once said "Western Christian, fold the wings of your intellect and bring your mind down into your heart. That's where you'll meet God."
Perhaps Father Thomas Hopko of happy memory was correct when he stated "Western man has been traumatized by his image of God. This is the main reason he has lost faith."
I have seen zig zaging UAPs twice in my life and their images left in my memory can't be erased. Whatever or whoever they are, their resemblance to the fairies, djinn, sylphs, elementals and gods of old is hard to ignore. It would seem that "they" have been here for a very long time. Many Christians dismiss all these phenomena as demonic, but I wonder whether that's too easy. No less a light than St. Anthony of Egypt encountered a centaur and a satyr. The latter told him that he and his kind were neither demons nor men and asked for his intercession.
Not to blow sunshine at your ego but I have no doubt you could write a brilliant book dealing with these themes. You will definitely want to read the work of Dr. Jacque Valle and John Keel.
I had a weird experience with a Hart acolyte on the internet about a year ago.
OK, so I'm not sold in the idea of Universalism. I am sold on the idea of an immense mercy, which considers all kinds of extenuating circumstances and conditions. I can also imagine a human perversity that rejects such mercy for various reasons. I therefore find myself just a shade less optimistic than Bp. Robert Barron. I don't think I need Universalism to function happily.
So, just to try to work Hart out in my head, I engaged with an online debate with a Hart follower. I did it with the academic idea "Let's see if there is a weakness here, somewhere". Well guess what? The Hart follower not only thought I was wrong to even ask the question, but only a creature of Hell could do so! Yes, you read that correctly: this Hart follower told me - when I added up his disparate posts - that the need to ensure no one was in hell required that I be consigned to it!
Once again we see, here, the utter mystery of this subject, and how we will always tie ourselves in knots unless we keep our faith as simple as possible.
Steve, I thought of you several times while reading a little book I picked up recently.
The book is 'Courage to Pray'. Seeing the cover in a used book store, it leapt out to me, because as a thoroughly secular person for about 80 percent of my life, I mightily struggle with prayer. I'm reading through it very slowly, but here's what I've got so far.
1. "In the Book of Revelation there is a marvelous passage where John says that those who go into the Kingdom are given a white stone with a name written on it which only they and God know. This name is not the label we are given and called by in this world. Our true name, our eternal name exactly fits us, our whole being...it defines and expresses us perfectly." In short, there is a true version of us.
2. This is the only version of us that can offer sincere prayer, the only version of us that can have relationship, and the only version of us that has ultimate existence, but the difficulty is we don't know ourselves perfectly or even--to the extent that we do--we don't manifest what we know of ourselves perfectly.
3. As a result, we typically come to God in prayer as effigy. We offer God what we think He wants, the particular straw man of ourselves which we bring to church, or to personal prayer, which is often different from the particular straw man we might bring to work, or family gatherings, or various friendships, etc.
4. God cannot save the straw man or have relationship with the straw man we offer, because it has no ultimate existence, no correspondence with that name on the white stone that John speaks of in Revelation. God can save a scoundrel if that is what we are, but not a straw man.
5. In wrestling with the question of hell, this strikes me as insightful. Effigies are burned. The straw man is made of chaff. It can only end in fire or non-existence. I don't have a problem conceiving of hell as a place where we cling to our effigy and refuse to trade it for that stone, which would force us to see ourselves as we really are and bear our shame; great and terrible, so beautiful and tragic. In this light I can see the great sorting of goats and sheep as a sorting of living bodies from dummies
6. To my mind, wrestling with ourselves, casting off effigies--even the good Christian boy effigy; the one that holds all the right opinions-- and bearing the shame of our own reflection is the purpose of the Christian life. That's how we climb out of the grave, or the pig pen, and come to ourselves. We have to start where we are and actually learn to both identify the good and then to desire it. Parroting it won't do. Parroting it is easy. In this piece, you wrote, "I can’t get out of my head long enough to write something truly objective and universal." What you were doing before, I think, was more in your head than what you are doing now. Your effigy could pound out content to its straw heart's content. Now you are casting the effigies off, which is strangely perhaps more objective and universal--and more personal. The effigy can be propped up, kneeling in the pew and yet it is never really able to draw close or hold the sacred fire without bursting into flame. It can never be a burning bush. It may call out "lord", and yet it can never be known.
Daniel, I think you're onto something at the end here, but I struggle with the larger set of concepts because I feel as though so much of our thought on how relationship with God works is predicated upon pure speculation. When I see "We offer God what we think He wants" I think, "Of course, because he refuses to actually tell us what he wants." Yes, we know what we shouldn't do, and yes, we have rather imprecise glimpses of a God who, if I'm being honest, doesn't come across as very loving in the Scriptures (and why do we trust the Church that the Scriptures are the real deal, when they can't be trusted about anything else?), but we don't know how to have a relationship with God because, frankly, he's just not around.
I think of him like a father who leaves before his child is born. He doesn't write & he doesn't call. The child is given up for adoption in the father's absence, and grows up at an orphanage. Those who work at the orphanage are a really mixed lot. Some are kind, some are cruel, some are horrifically abusive. But all convey to the child that his father placed them in authority over him and he must do what they say. They demand that he trust that his father loves him very much, despite his absence, but also that his father expects that he make very significant sacrifices and worshipfully attend to his own growth in love of this man who gave him life, but whose voice he has never heard, whose embrace he has never felt, whose personal wisdom and guidance and consolation he has never known. And if he fails to do so, he will be tortured for the rest of his existence.
In human terms, if that boy were to meet his father decades later, what really could the father expect? Love and admiration? Or resentment and fear? I cannot fathom why, in our relationship with an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being, all the work of making the relationship good is expected of us. We are told again and again that God will not bridge this gap. That we have to come to him. But some of us can't perceive him at all. Some of us don't know why we should want to love a father whose idea of care for his children is not just to hide, but to curse them with a propensity to do the very things he commands them not to under pain of torment, and to leave them to wonder if he's even alive as they live out their lives in programmed love and gratitude -- which, I think it's fair to say, are often more of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome than anything approaching sincere emotions -- all underpinned by immense fear of displeasing him because of how dire the consequences will be.
We seem to perpetually excuse behavior in God that we would call psychotic in humans. Any such father would have custody rights stripped away, if he ever showed up to seek them. It's a bizarre sort of mythology, once we peel back the confirmation bias that tells us it's all true and good.
Steve, I come at all these questions with my own set of baggage. I did not grow up going to church or believing in Virgin Birth's, a God Man, Resurrections, or all the rest. In that sense, I can relate very much to your struggle with the unknowability of things pertaining to God and to Christian claims particularly. Citing scripture to convince me of anything would have been utterly ineffectual. I struggled with the unknowability of these things for years. But my lack of Christian formation also leaves me free from the fear and psychological weight that you relay to us as an outgrowth of your Catholic upbringing.
I also found Christ in the context of the Orthodox Church, which as I have mentioned before, I think accurately has a self-conception as truly feminine in character. The church is not the source, the master, the institution nearly so much as it is the body, the vessel, the ark. Whatever power and authority she has are only valid insomuch as she is the faithful subject and storehouse. In a real sense, my devotion to truth is and has always been greater than my devotion to the church, though I no longer see those devotions as being at odds.
If I were to accept your analogy of a father who disappears, leaving his children in the custody of this orphanage, making his various demands and threats, I would have nothing to do with it. Whether such an analogy accurately depicts Catholic theology, I cannot say with certainty, but I can say that it depicts an absurd theology. And I can say, as a secular person, this was very close to my perception of Christian theology in the broadest terms.
If God is this impersonal and distant figure, if life is only a test waiting to be graded at the final judgement, and if failure means an eternal punishment in searing hellfire, unless we love and obey him, it sounds like heaven might be closer to hell than hell. The Stockholm Syndrome analogy seems apt. If God is God and loves us, something is clearly wrong with this conception.
Maybe a big part of the problem is how much of our "knowledge" of God is, as you put it, "predicated upon pure speculation". I spent many many years as basically a deist. Having proclaimed myself an atheist as a child, I was later convinced by the logical conclusions of atheism (meaninglessness, nihilism, the impossibility of free will, etc.) that there must be a God if anything mattered--at least a Prime Moving, Clock Making God--who remained obscure and distant and allowed us to make of our lives and of His world whatever we wanted. If so, the goal of life was essentially to be worthy of the gift of existence, of beauty, offered us without our having done anything to deserve it. That was more or less my personal theology for almost 2 decades. I always allowed room to acknowledged that this may not be the case. Perhaps life really was mechanistic and meaningless. but, if life had meaning, it was logically impossible that there was not a God. Similarly, I had to acknowledge the possibility that this God was somehow malevolent or less than good, but this only kicked the can down the road and also led to the same inevitability. If God wasn't Good, there really couldn't even be such a thing as good, or malevolence, etc etc and we are back at the abyss. As far as I'm concerned, these are the limits of where reason and speculation can get us with God.
I was a catechumen for five years. I had a wonderful and patient priest. I pressed him for five years to help me see how I could believe the fundamental Christian claims, to offer better evidence, to offer proof, to validate scripture and virgin birth and all the rest, or to give me some way around having to accept such things which were simply not in evidence if he wanted me to join the church. I never stopped being devoted to the Truth as best I could perceive. One day he responded to one of my attempts to get him to prove Christianity to me with the simple statement, that trying to prove the validity of Christianity to me was not his job. He knew I was sincere in my search for Truth, and told me that given that, he was confident I would encounter Christ. When I did, I knew that God was personal, and near at hand.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 31, 2022Liked by Steve Skojec
Hi Steve, I have only been reading your articles for the past several months, but I went back and read quite a few to understand the chronology of your story and the circumstances that led up to your present mindset. We may have taken different paths to get to today but my mindset is in quite the same place. I am 56 years old, a cradle Catholic, wife, mother of 3 grown women, and an attorney. Now that my kids are grown, I finally have, and am taking, the time to delve into all of the questions and doubts about my faith that I have had since I was little but was quickly told to suppress. And frankly, I was too busy, too tired, and too afraid to investigate. If the answers uprooted me, I knew I was not in a place mentally or circumstantially to deal with it. Nor did I have the wonderful world of the Internet in my younger years so I really had nowhere to start. My priests were certainly not going to recommend any books or literature that provided any contrary answers to my questions. So at the time, I suppressed it all with “spiritual” reading…
Then now, along comes someone like you who so perfectly articulates not only my questions and criticisms but my inner turmoil. I have been moved by your raw honesty and candor about your struggles…it is so refreshing to hear my struggle have a voice that has let me know I’m not crazy. So I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
My fascination has always been with the apostles and the beginning of the Church and how “this whole Christianity thing” got started. So that is what consumes me at present, interspersed with research into the Catholic church’s teaching and dogmas. So much I never knew and so much I didn’t know I didn’t know. I am trying to insure I have reputable sources for the history and the actual text of the Church documents for the content of the teachings. It is the uprooting I was never ready for.
I would love the opportunity to chat with you sometime but don’t know if that’s possible. So let me just say, regardless of faith, it is always good to help others, and while some may not see it as so, you are truly helping folks you don’t even know. I am one.
As for your question about the audio recordings, I personally prefer to read because sometimes I re-read within the article and that’s too hard to do when listening. So my vote is nah, don’t bother with it.
Thanks so much for your comment, Lana. I hope you'll continue to share what you find with us here when the opportunity arises. I would certainly benefit from hearing from others what they've found, and I'm glad to know that what I'm doing here isn't merely destructive, but is of some help to others, too.
I read 1P5 closely as I found the New Mass perfunctory and hollow. I discovered TLM several years ago and thought I had found the piece that was missing. If I became more immersed in the experience then the True Spirit™ would be served. As the New Coke Pope continually added sugar to the naturally sweetened Church, the farcicalness of it all unveiled that it wasn't the New Mass or the Old Mass, it wasn't the drums and guitars or the Gregorian chant, it was the old men behind the curtain. They were actually making this all up as they went! And I could hear the old, pompous, red-robed, pedophile, homosexual Cardinals and Bishops sing "what's good for thee is not for me" as they concocted more ways the moral would be doomed to hell and those who could care less had their path to "heaven" made more accessible. I can't abide by this any more. It's all theater and they can keep it - the purgatory, the judgement, the absolution, all of it. The game is up. Walking away from decades of indoctrination isn't easy, but it is the path to salvation.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by Steve Skojec
The Fall was probably the first, big theological problem I could never find an answer to independent of what nonsense is transpiring in the Catholic Church at the moment.
Why would God create us knowing we would immediately rebel, subsequently God would then have to descend and and die to redeem a creation that rejected Him pretty much immediately? Beyond some allegory, it never made sense as a concept. I appreciated those who told me they didn't have an answer more than those who tried to contrive one.
I don't believe Catholics have the most intellectually consistent answers to questions of divine foreknowledge. I eventually become forced to believe either God remains incredibly distant from us and rarely if ever intervenes in the affairs of men (i.e., He'll intervene selectively in big moments through history and revelation but won't, for example, help you on a test), or would have to adopt the Calvinist idea of total divine sovereignty. In the end, neither won me over.
Anyways, I still appreciate you being able to say you don't know the answers.
Yeah, I really can't make sense of it. We were, essentially, pre-destined to fall, since he knew it would happen and made no alteration. And he also deemed, so the story goes, that only death could pay the price, and not the death of any human being. And it had to be a torturous death, either because as a God he was that cruel, or because it was made up for psychological leverage. "After everything I did for you" is a known manipulation technique of abusive parents. It certainly seems to be put to good effect with the crucifix, and once you see the possibility that it could be just that, it's hard to unsee it.
To make matters worse, he let a tempter into the garden, which no father would do. "Hey kids, watch out for the rabid wolves I just let in through the gate! Have fun playing!" And then he cursed us with a propensity to sin after we fell, so we'd be even LESS likely to be saved.
As a closet Universalist, I never had the heart to tell people that eternal torture was a possibility for them if they did not accept a particular religion with its set of dogmas. Somehow I remain a Catholic, and I hold on to the hope that God's mercy is beyond anything we could dream of. Anyway, wherever you land I will always look forward to your thoughts and maybe dare I say hopes.
By the way, I hope your G-Men can stay healthy this preseason, they have a promising year ahead of them in my opinion. Take care, hope you and your family are well.
Another homerun.
It’s funny. I don’t know if you remember but I kept telling you about a letter I was writing you. It started a couple of years ago and I would noodle away at it sometimes. In the end I deleted it because the man I was writing to didn’t exist anymore.
I’m really proud of you brother. I really am. I hope you don’t read that as insensitivity to your pain, not at all. It’s more a recognition of the beauty that’s going to come to full bloom in you in a short amount of time.
As always, I hold you and your family in my heart and prayers.
@$£# you and God bless
Jesus_Rainbow_Amen.gif
One of the reasons I eagerly dive into every new post here is that you *don't* act like you've got it all figured out. You're humble, honest, and unafraid to ask questions you don't know the answers to. I can only speak for myself, but I'm all in on riding shotgun for whatever parts of this journey you care to share with us. It's practically an adventure story—and who doesn't love one of those?
As for your novel, please share the prologue with us! Religion meets UFOs? Sign me up.
Thanks! Perhaps I'll do a fiction Friday. I need to force myself to write this book - I'm afraid of it, and so, I resist it. Steven Pressfield-style.
Great post!
You don’t need to apologize to anyone for writing about yourself. We are all selves and your discussion of your thoughts and experiences is interesting and valuable to all of us.
I think as Catholics, when we begin to share our inner, personal struggles, we’re often bludgeoned with “die to yourself” and “offer it up” and other forms of self-negation. Thinking about yourself and your own thoughts is not selfish or corrupt, it’s quite normal and basically how anyone processes anything!
Catholicism encourages people to essentially disown themselves, in my experience. They demand this self-betrayal as though you can indefinitely deny and shut down your true feelings and authentic thoughts in favor of how you’re told you must feel and think, on pain of sin. We often end up with broken, fractured, false selves because of this.
No one has all the answers, and frankly, it’s far more interesting to ask meaningful questions in a good faith pursuit of truth.
"Catholicism encourages people to essentially disown themselves, in my experience. They demand this self-betrayal as though you can indefinitely deny and shut down your true feelings and authentic thoughts in favor of how you’re told you must feel and think, on pain of sin. We often end up with broken, fractured, false selves because of this."
I know this is a part of my neuroticism. My constant negative self-talk. It's amazingly hard to escape this mentality, or at least, the guilt that goes with it if you don't beat yourself up enough.
Have no fear in continuing to do what you've been doing with the substack. You represent more people than you perhaps realize: thoughtful, intelligent and morally sensitive believers/former believers who wrestle with these questions. Your thinking certainly resonates with me, and it would appear with a multitude of others.
Hart is brilliant. I've been reading the same book off and on as well as lots of Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Syria, Macarius and Dionysus the Areopagite. You might want to give the site "Ecclectic Orthodoxy" a try. Lots of good smart people (including Hart) write for it and address many of the issues that concern you.
A friend of mine who is a priest of the Eastern Church said to me once "You Latins want to understand everything and often imagine that you do. It's an exercise in futility. It doesn't work that way. You have to come to a place of contentment with not knowing or understanding." Or as Baronnes Kathryn Doherty, a Greek Catholic and the founders of Madonna House once said "Western Christian, fold the wings of your intellect and bring your mind down into your heart. That's where you'll meet God."
Perhaps Father Thomas Hopko of happy memory was correct when he stated "Western man has been traumatized by his image of God. This is the main reason he has lost faith."
I have seen zig zaging UAPs twice in my life and their images left in my memory can't be erased. Whatever or whoever they are, their resemblance to the fairies, djinn, sylphs, elementals and gods of old is hard to ignore. It would seem that "they" have been here for a very long time. Many Christians dismiss all these phenomena as demonic, but I wonder whether that's too easy. No less a light than St. Anthony of Egypt encountered a centaur and a satyr. The latter told him that he and his kind were neither demons nor men and asked for his intercession.
Not to blow sunshine at your ego but I have no doubt you could write a brilliant book dealing with these themes. You will definitely want to read the work of Dr. Jacque Valle and John Keel.
You and your family are in my prayers.
Thanks as always for your comments!
I had a weird experience with a Hart acolyte on the internet about a year ago.
OK, so I'm not sold in the idea of Universalism. I am sold on the idea of an immense mercy, which considers all kinds of extenuating circumstances and conditions. I can also imagine a human perversity that rejects such mercy for various reasons. I therefore find myself just a shade less optimistic than Bp. Robert Barron. I don't think I need Universalism to function happily.
So, just to try to work Hart out in my head, I engaged with an online debate with a Hart follower. I did it with the academic idea "Let's see if there is a weakness here, somewhere". Well guess what? The Hart follower not only thought I was wrong to even ask the question, but only a creature of Hell could do so! Yes, you read that correctly: this Hart follower told me - when I added up his disparate posts - that the need to ensure no one was in hell required that I be consigned to it!
Once again we see, here, the utter mystery of this subject, and how we will always tie ourselves in knots unless we keep our faith as simple as possible.
God bless you Steve! Praying for you and yours!
Good thing we don't judge purely human leaders by their followers. It'd be a rough day in court for most of us if we were in that situation.
Steve, I thought of you several times while reading a little book I picked up recently.
The book is 'Courage to Pray'. Seeing the cover in a used book store, it leapt out to me, because as a thoroughly secular person for about 80 percent of my life, I mightily struggle with prayer. I'm reading through it very slowly, but here's what I've got so far.
1. "In the Book of Revelation there is a marvelous passage where John says that those who go into the Kingdom are given a white stone with a name written on it which only they and God know. This name is not the label we are given and called by in this world. Our true name, our eternal name exactly fits us, our whole being...it defines and expresses us perfectly." In short, there is a true version of us.
2. This is the only version of us that can offer sincere prayer, the only version of us that can have relationship, and the only version of us that has ultimate existence, but the difficulty is we don't know ourselves perfectly or even--to the extent that we do--we don't manifest what we know of ourselves perfectly.
3. As a result, we typically come to God in prayer as effigy. We offer God what we think He wants, the particular straw man of ourselves which we bring to church, or to personal prayer, which is often different from the particular straw man we might bring to work, or family gatherings, or various friendships, etc.
4. God cannot save the straw man or have relationship with the straw man we offer, because it has no ultimate existence, no correspondence with that name on the white stone that John speaks of in Revelation. God can save a scoundrel if that is what we are, but not a straw man.
5. In wrestling with the question of hell, this strikes me as insightful. Effigies are burned. The straw man is made of chaff. It can only end in fire or non-existence. I don't have a problem conceiving of hell as a place where we cling to our effigy and refuse to trade it for that stone, which would force us to see ourselves as we really are and bear our shame; great and terrible, so beautiful and tragic. In this light I can see the great sorting of goats and sheep as a sorting of living bodies from dummies
6. To my mind, wrestling with ourselves, casting off effigies--even the good Christian boy effigy; the one that holds all the right opinions-- and bearing the shame of our own reflection is the purpose of the Christian life. That's how we climb out of the grave, or the pig pen, and come to ourselves. We have to start where we are and actually learn to both identify the good and then to desire it. Parroting it won't do. Parroting it is easy. In this piece, you wrote, "I can’t get out of my head long enough to write something truly objective and universal." What you were doing before, I think, was more in your head than what you are doing now. Your effigy could pound out content to its straw heart's content. Now you are casting the effigies off, which is strangely perhaps more objective and universal--and more personal. The effigy can be propped up, kneeling in the pew and yet it is never really able to draw close or hold the sacred fire without bursting into flame. It can never be a burning bush. It may call out "lord", and yet it can never be known.
Daniel, I think you're onto something at the end here, but I struggle with the larger set of concepts because I feel as though so much of our thought on how relationship with God works is predicated upon pure speculation. When I see "We offer God what we think He wants" I think, "Of course, because he refuses to actually tell us what he wants." Yes, we know what we shouldn't do, and yes, we have rather imprecise glimpses of a God who, if I'm being honest, doesn't come across as very loving in the Scriptures (and why do we trust the Church that the Scriptures are the real deal, when they can't be trusted about anything else?), but we don't know how to have a relationship with God because, frankly, he's just not around.
I think of him like a father who leaves before his child is born. He doesn't write & he doesn't call. The child is given up for adoption in the father's absence, and grows up at an orphanage. Those who work at the orphanage are a really mixed lot. Some are kind, some are cruel, some are horrifically abusive. But all convey to the child that his father placed them in authority over him and he must do what they say. They demand that he trust that his father loves him very much, despite his absence, but also that his father expects that he make very significant sacrifices and worshipfully attend to his own growth in love of this man who gave him life, but whose voice he has never heard, whose embrace he has never felt, whose personal wisdom and guidance and consolation he has never known. And if he fails to do so, he will be tortured for the rest of his existence.
In human terms, if that boy were to meet his father decades later, what really could the father expect? Love and admiration? Or resentment and fear? I cannot fathom why, in our relationship with an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being, all the work of making the relationship good is expected of us. We are told again and again that God will not bridge this gap. That we have to come to him. But some of us can't perceive him at all. Some of us don't know why we should want to love a father whose idea of care for his children is not just to hide, but to curse them with a propensity to do the very things he commands them not to under pain of torment, and to leave them to wonder if he's even alive as they live out their lives in programmed love and gratitude -- which, I think it's fair to say, are often more of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome than anything approaching sincere emotions -- all underpinned by immense fear of displeasing him because of how dire the consequences will be.
We seem to perpetually excuse behavior in God that we would call psychotic in humans. Any such father would have custody rights stripped away, if he ever showed up to seek them. It's a bizarre sort of mythology, once we peel back the confirmation bias that tells us it's all true and good.
Steve, I come at all these questions with my own set of baggage. I did not grow up going to church or believing in Virgin Birth's, a God Man, Resurrections, or all the rest. In that sense, I can relate very much to your struggle with the unknowability of things pertaining to God and to Christian claims particularly. Citing scripture to convince me of anything would have been utterly ineffectual. I struggled with the unknowability of these things for years. But my lack of Christian formation also leaves me free from the fear and psychological weight that you relay to us as an outgrowth of your Catholic upbringing.
I also found Christ in the context of the Orthodox Church, which as I have mentioned before, I think accurately has a self-conception as truly feminine in character. The church is not the source, the master, the institution nearly so much as it is the body, the vessel, the ark. Whatever power and authority she has are only valid insomuch as she is the faithful subject and storehouse. In a real sense, my devotion to truth is and has always been greater than my devotion to the church, though I no longer see those devotions as being at odds.
If I were to accept your analogy of a father who disappears, leaving his children in the custody of this orphanage, making his various demands and threats, I would have nothing to do with it. Whether such an analogy accurately depicts Catholic theology, I cannot say with certainty, but I can say that it depicts an absurd theology. And I can say, as a secular person, this was very close to my perception of Christian theology in the broadest terms.
If God is this impersonal and distant figure, if life is only a test waiting to be graded at the final judgement, and if failure means an eternal punishment in searing hellfire, unless we love and obey him, it sounds like heaven might be closer to hell than hell. The Stockholm Syndrome analogy seems apt. If God is God and loves us, something is clearly wrong with this conception.
Maybe a big part of the problem is how much of our "knowledge" of God is, as you put it, "predicated upon pure speculation". I spent many many years as basically a deist. Having proclaimed myself an atheist as a child, I was later convinced by the logical conclusions of atheism (meaninglessness, nihilism, the impossibility of free will, etc.) that there must be a God if anything mattered--at least a Prime Moving, Clock Making God--who remained obscure and distant and allowed us to make of our lives and of His world whatever we wanted. If so, the goal of life was essentially to be worthy of the gift of existence, of beauty, offered us without our having done anything to deserve it. That was more or less my personal theology for almost 2 decades. I always allowed room to acknowledged that this may not be the case. Perhaps life really was mechanistic and meaningless. but, if life had meaning, it was logically impossible that there was not a God. Similarly, I had to acknowledge the possibility that this God was somehow malevolent or less than good, but this only kicked the can down the road and also led to the same inevitability. If God wasn't Good, there really couldn't even be such a thing as good, or malevolence, etc etc and we are back at the abyss. As far as I'm concerned, these are the limits of where reason and speculation can get us with God.
I was a catechumen for five years. I had a wonderful and patient priest. I pressed him for five years to help me see how I could believe the fundamental Christian claims, to offer better evidence, to offer proof, to validate scripture and virgin birth and all the rest, or to give me some way around having to accept such things which were simply not in evidence if he wanted me to join the church. I never stopped being devoted to the Truth as best I could perceive. One day he responded to one of my attempts to get him to prove Christianity to me with the simple statement, that trying to prove the validity of Christianity to me was not his job. He knew I was sincere in my search for Truth, and told me that given that, he was confident I would encounter Christ. When I did, I knew that God was personal, and near at hand.
I keep trying to "like" your comment, but it won't let me for some reason. So here's me telling you that I like it!
Hi Steve, I have only been reading your articles for the past several months, but I went back and read quite a few to understand the chronology of your story and the circumstances that led up to your present mindset. We may have taken different paths to get to today but my mindset is in quite the same place. I am 56 years old, a cradle Catholic, wife, mother of 3 grown women, and an attorney. Now that my kids are grown, I finally have, and am taking, the time to delve into all of the questions and doubts about my faith that I have had since I was little but was quickly told to suppress. And frankly, I was too busy, too tired, and too afraid to investigate. If the answers uprooted me, I knew I was not in a place mentally or circumstantially to deal with it. Nor did I have the wonderful world of the Internet in my younger years so I really had nowhere to start. My priests were certainly not going to recommend any books or literature that provided any contrary answers to my questions. So at the time, I suppressed it all with “spiritual” reading…
Then now, along comes someone like you who so perfectly articulates not only my questions and criticisms but my inner turmoil. I have been moved by your raw honesty and candor about your struggles…it is so refreshing to hear my struggle have a voice that has let me know I’m not crazy. So I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
My fascination has always been with the apostles and the beginning of the Church and how “this whole Christianity thing” got started. So that is what consumes me at present, interspersed with research into the Catholic church’s teaching and dogmas. So much I never knew and so much I didn’t know I didn’t know. I am trying to insure I have reputable sources for the history and the actual text of the Church documents for the content of the teachings. It is the uprooting I was never ready for.
I would love the opportunity to chat with you sometime but don’t know if that’s possible. So let me just say, regardless of faith, it is always good to help others, and while some may not see it as so, you are truly helping folks you don’t even know. I am one.
As for your question about the audio recordings, I personally prefer to read because sometimes I re-read within the article and that’s too hard to do when listening. So my vote is nah, don’t bother with it.
Thank you,
Lana
Thanks so much for your comment, Lana. I hope you'll continue to share what you find with us here when the opportunity arises. I would certainly benefit from hearing from others what they've found, and I'm glad to know that what I'm doing here isn't merely destructive, but is of some help to others, too.
I read 1P5 closely as I found the New Mass perfunctory and hollow. I discovered TLM several years ago and thought I had found the piece that was missing. If I became more immersed in the experience then the True Spirit™ would be served. As the New Coke Pope continually added sugar to the naturally sweetened Church, the farcicalness of it all unveiled that it wasn't the New Mass or the Old Mass, it wasn't the drums and guitars or the Gregorian chant, it was the old men behind the curtain. They were actually making this all up as they went! And I could hear the old, pompous, red-robed, pedophile, homosexual Cardinals and Bishops sing "what's good for thee is not for me" as they concocted more ways the moral would be doomed to hell and those who could care less had their path to "heaven" made more accessible. I can't abide by this any more. It's all theater and they can keep it - the purgatory, the judgement, the absolution, all of it. The game is up. Walking away from decades of indoctrination isn't easy, but it is the path to salvation.
The Fall was probably the first, big theological problem I could never find an answer to independent of what nonsense is transpiring in the Catholic Church at the moment.
Why would God create us knowing we would immediately rebel, subsequently God would then have to descend and and die to redeem a creation that rejected Him pretty much immediately? Beyond some allegory, it never made sense as a concept. I appreciated those who told me they didn't have an answer more than those who tried to contrive one.
I don't believe Catholics have the most intellectually consistent answers to questions of divine foreknowledge. I eventually become forced to believe either God remains incredibly distant from us and rarely if ever intervenes in the affairs of men (i.e., He'll intervene selectively in big moments through history and revelation but won't, for example, help you on a test), or would have to adopt the Calvinist idea of total divine sovereignty. In the end, neither won me over.
Anyways, I still appreciate you being able to say you don't know the answers.
Yeah, I really can't make sense of it. We were, essentially, pre-destined to fall, since he knew it would happen and made no alteration. And he also deemed, so the story goes, that only death could pay the price, and not the death of any human being. And it had to be a torturous death, either because as a God he was that cruel, or because it was made up for psychological leverage. "After everything I did for you" is a known manipulation technique of abusive parents. It certainly seems to be put to good effect with the crucifix, and once you see the possibility that it could be just that, it's hard to unsee it.
To make matters worse, he let a tempter into the garden, which no father would do. "Hey kids, watch out for the rabid wolves I just let in through the gate! Have fun playing!" And then he cursed us with a propensity to sin after we fell, so we'd be even LESS likely to be saved.
And this is what we call perfect love?
As a closet Universalist, I never had the heart to tell people that eternal torture was a possibility for them if they did not accept a particular religion with its set of dogmas. Somehow I remain a Catholic, and I hold on to the hope that God's mercy is beyond anything we could dream of. Anyway, wherever you land I will always look forward to your thoughts and maybe dare I say hopes.
By the way, I hope your G-Men can stay healthy this preseason, they have a promising year ahead of them in my opinion. Take care, hope you and your family are well.
They've only lost about 20 guys to injury in the preseason!