In my tunnel vision of life, for some strange reason, I choose to learn by my own mistakes. Rather than learn from what others have taught and told to me, I prefer to get tossed around and beaten up before coming to see the light. But in that path I have much company, as today there is the idea of finding your own “truth,” which is kind of funny, as if there are seven or eight billion versions of truth in the world. In essence, finding your own truth implies that there is no truth, and what that really means is that there is no God, there is no First Cause of the universe, and that we are just unhappy results of chemistry and physics. I do not accept that since at the bottom of that is nihilism and meaninglessness. I do, however, think it is extremely important to let people find that out, as I needed to do. Despite ample opportunity to follow the path back to the heart, I became stuck and lost in so many oxygen-starved capillaries of the world.
As for getting lost in the worldly things, I should be grateful for it, to be honest. My life suffered no major hardships to correct me back to awareness of my powerlessness. I was under the impression that I had control, which allowed me to pursue paths of learning and ideas that elevated the self. I know others who came to faith much earlier, some who came to see after a tragic event. Others apparently just have the gift to believe and stick to it from a young age, which is the key, as Jesus says “…unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” What’s funny is that people that take the long route (like me) end up coming back like a child, or more aptly…a prodigal.
Of course, as a returned prodigal, that means I have committed many, many sins for which I need forgiveness. In my two decade absence from church, I made a laundry list of mortal sins - or grave matters. I needed absolution of those to get myself righted, and fully oriented toward God. To me, my weaknesses and frailties of the past give me insight into the Golden Rule, the most important commandment. Because of my flaws, I understand others’ flaws. But it depends on the flaw. You see, I seem to have accepted my flaws as valid, while judging certain other flaws as greater or worse. Yes, I have a snobbery about specific flaws, it seems, which Jesus didn’t mention anything about. So as to that Golden Rule, the greatest commandment, I like to imagine that I’m capable of living true to it, but I’m not. This one paragraph rules over the rest of the Bible:
“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
That last sentence puts a bow on the Bible. It’s like a gift card with a tagline message. “Dear reader, in case you don’t have time or energy to read a few thousand pages of ancient texts, here’s a quick summary for you: Love God. Love and forgive others. Your life is not about you.”
It seems so simple. How easy it really seems to love everyone. If I direct my positive thoughts, my heart, and my soul toward God, I will see the good in all and love everyone I encounter today and every day. I think, yes, I am capable of that love toward all. I can be like that weird guy at the retreat who plays spiritual rock music and raises his hands, eyes closed, and calls for witnesses. But I can do it my way, through caring and understanding and respect. I could love them like a normal person might love others without a creepy weirdness!
Sure, yeah. I can. I surely could. Then I step outside of the house and the world attacks and I attack it back. Heck, even inside the house I have attitude some mornings.
Why is it so hard? I do know that when I stay focused on God, when I spend time in the morning with the New Testament or with Christian texts, I am more oriented toward this notion of “love thy neighbor” than if I get out of bed and charge out the door. Without question, this focus helps me to love others more effectively. But I lose focus, like Peter on the water, and slip - only it takes me a while to call out “Lord, save me!” since I like to sneer and judge for a spell before I recover. Why did Peter sink? Oh right, he forgets about God.
To love one another sounds so easy, but in reality is perhaps the hardest task assigned to a Christian particularly because of this: it is actually easy to love someone when it is reciprocated, such as in a family, or in a Church full of like minded people (although there can be plenty of discord in those places too). What makes the Golden Rule really difficult is when the love is not returned, not reciprocated, but instead you are either hated or you have to shove aside your own feelings of dislike, disdain, or hate to remain humble. In fact, today in what is called the “post-Christian” era, it’s less likely that others will hate you for being Christian so much as they will just roll their eyes at you - because they have all heard plenty about Christianity. Rather than being persecuted, Christians seem the persecutor due to having such an incredible run of winning for two millennia. So what does this mean?
I believe that Christians, American in particular, are feeling a backlash for being too aligned with worldly power. The “love” that Christians have been pushing since faith made its unholy merger with politics around 1980 has effectively flattened and removed the effervescent bubbles from the message. Love thy neighbor became love thy Christian neighbor, and to hell with the rest. Besides, everyone loves an underdog and for some time Christians were not the underdog that they are supposed to be.
Without question the media and politicians have painted this picture, and have done so successfully, making Christians the enemy as of late. As the religious are removed from the public square and an atheist society takes shape, what comes afterward will be ugly. Those opposed to faith will focus on sins that the faithful have committed and ignore the massive amounts of charity and community work that followers of Jesus do in this world. This is not to say the abuses are excused. No way. There are horrific offenses that deserve full attention and justice. But there is far more good done in this world by those with faith in God than by the few faithful who have eroded trust in religion. Having worked at homeless shelters in two states, I can tell you that 99% of groups that volunteer are religious groups. Everyone ranting online from their computers about saving the poor - you don’t see them show up in person. They care enough to tweet, but not enough to enter the fray to mop the floor and do the dishes.
Most Christians that I know are like me: human. (Some are very strange and I’m not yet sure about their origins, but most appear to be human.) But the reality is that Christians suffer the same problems with loving others as non-Christians, but the point of the whole doggone faith is to try to do better. The reason people go to church, is to return to the right path. When non-believers point out that people going to church have a lot of flaws, I have to laugh because that is the purpose. “Those religious people are awful.” No kidding? That’s literally why they are praying and asking for forgiveness. They are a bunch of sinners, the only difference is that those going inside are admitting their limits and faults. There’s a response from G.K. Chesterton about why did he become a Catholic, at which we said, “To get rid of my sins.” Those flinging and slinging mud at people of faith for having stains on their life are so close, so infinitely close to understanding the “why” but sadly missing the point. They point out that Christians are not perfect, they are sinners. To which every Christian who knows about original sin just nods in agreement and goes to church.
Since I am not Jesus, that is why I have to try, try harder, and try again. Knowing that I will fail still means I need to make an effort, every single day, to love my neighbor. And that love needs to have no conditions attached to it. No strings attached. No waiting for reciprocity or validation - I have to love without being loved back. I must forgive all affronts and insults and perceived flaws, because I commit errors and sins when I lose vigilance. The minute I forget about God and stop praying constantly, I am pulled back into the morass of human nature. I am owed nothing, I owe all to God. I start to sink. I start to drown.
When I think of the modern Church with the struggles of keeping the faithful, where people are leaving due to modern Siren songs, and chasing shiny things on the internet, like New Age religions and alternate lifestyles, the Church must remember the greatest of all commandments which the whole depends on. Love your neighbor. This is the focus. Never can the eye be taken off the ball of the greatest commandments, or the game is over. And the order matters. First: Love God. Second: Love your neighbor. Without the first, the second one doesn’t stand a chance.
Want to know a recipe for disaster? First, take a fundamentalist version of Christianity and stir it real thick with politics, and let those folks be the primary voice of Christianity for several decades. Constantly preach anti-intellectualism in a rapidly changing culture where knowledge is expanding at an exponential rate. Fold in a distrust of science, making it an enemy of religion rather than a complementary pursuit of truth. Seize on a single grave sin, abortion, as the only focus of morality, ignoring the enormous list of unrelated mortal sins that mankind can commit. Divide the family by letting fathers off the hook, forcing no one into the discomfort of responsibility. Tenderize excessive drinking and drug use until fully meshed into daily life. Glaze the eyes of men and boys with endless pornography from an early age. Let marriage cool until the sanctity gels and turns into the equivalent of a high school relationship. Finally, for the topping, drape over a sex abuse scandal, sprinkled over a century, so abhorrent, so far beyond the pale that it makes Jerry Sandusky’s escapades at Penn State look like a parking violation. For a finishing touch, quibble over liturgical format while the building burns around you.
Is it any wonder the Church says people are leaving vs. joining at a rate of 6 to 1?
For myself to return, it took a series of events to even want to listen or learn from a Church that had seemed conjoined to politics. The abuse scandal shattered trust in the priesthood, which is a shame since so many millions get spiritual direction from them.
The sense of “us vs. them” was apparent to me as a child, as Catholics were obviously mocked in films and society, and I could see how the faithful circled the wagons in America, going into defensive mode against the secular world. All the while, flaws were festering on the inside just as much as outside. And do you know what? Aside from Jesus, the flaws were on the inside and the outside long ago in the same way. Way back in 30 A.D. the Church was as full of flawed people as it is now. We can read about what a bunch of knuckleheads the apostles were before the resurrection awakened them and the Holy Spirit invigorated and steeled them. You can read St. Augustine and see how flawed he was on practically every page of his Confessions. It is actually the flaws that make us real. You can’t hide from them. They are not going away and never will. It’s not “us vs. them” it’s “us vs. us” because we are them! And them need help as much as us.
Grammar is not my strong suit.
In the first century, to go against the grain and preach “love thy neighbor” would get you crucified or boiled or clubbed. Nowadays it just earns the rolling of eyes and a yawn, because the focus on the greatest commandment became something of a joke. The problem is not that anyone disagrees with “Love thy neighbor.” No, the problem is that everyone agrees with that. But everyone has forgotten the first commandment of Jesus, which is to “Love God.” Today’s Catholic and Protestant only has to suffer ennui and disdain instead of a beating, mostly because of our own faults at forgetting to remind the world what the first commandment is. Loving neighbor cannot be done without love of God. I need a daily reset, getting back to the root solution to realize that: “I am not a smart man, but I know what love is.” Again, I must come back to God like a child, or in this bad joke of an example, like Forrest Gump to Jenny.
As I digress away from the subject of this article, which is about the test of loving thy neighbor, I must write a bit more on the causes of why the Christian message, which at first spread like wildfire and took hold of the world for so long, has “petered” out in recent decades. We all know the story of Jesus and the resurrection. Everyone does. Everyone on earth has heard it in some form, but many give it about the same level of credence that they give to the Marvel cinematic universe. In fact, some people are more excited about the Marvel comics because it’s not brought to them via annoying religious proselytizing.
Many years ago, I recall sitting on a beach on spring break when someone came and asked me if I’d chosen Jesus as my personal savior. I said, “No,” and asked them to move on. Now, at this point in my life I was agnostic so this experience annoyed me and I simply wanted these people to leave me alone. I always felt anger at them and thought of the Grateful Dead lyric in the song “Truckin’” where Jerry Garcia sings: “They just can’t let you be.” I had spent many years turning away Mormons and family members and quite literally anyone who was selling religion or telling me about God.
Why?
Why did anyone coming at me in the usual format of “Jesus as personal savior” repel me so much?
Because I didn’t want to be sold.
In America, everyone is selling, all the time, to the point that you know even the doctor is selling you in the clinic. The saying, “If you go to see a surgeon, he will recommend surgery” is true. There is nowhere you can go in this country without being pitched. I would watch televangelists and my stomach would turn at the spectacle of salesmanship occurring which was clearly in the name of money and fame rather than God. The beach, TV, and door-to-door evangelists with their pamphlets had nothing new to share, and I wondered how their pitch worked on anyone. The questions I had were not in need of a true or false answer, but the pitchmen were trying to close the deal as if I were buying a car: “So do you want this baby in red or blue?”
This sales style of evangelization reminded me of salespeople at work, some who would throw their mothers into traffic if it meant hitting their quota. Salespeople in the software world must tailor their message to whatever product or feature produced the biggest bonus or commission. In corporate America, there is so much smoke and mirrors that it’s difficult not to see snake oil in all products on the market eventually, and unfortunately it was most apparent in the religious proselytizing. The trick to all sales is to appear like you are not selling something, but that you have something the buyer wants and needs. Funny that what the beach and TV evangelists were selling was in fact what I wanted and needed, but their pitch was not working.
So for saving my soul, this elevator-pitch approach actually confirmed my suspicions of that old Marxist “opiate of the masses” idea, as if believing in religion meant being a simpleton and sucker who only believed because heaven sounded like a better option than hell.
Who can argue with that? Heaven does sound better than hell. But I was lost on four things that the beach and TV evangelists were skipping over. I didn’t figure out what this approach was missing until I listened to Bishop Robert Barron, who spelled it out in a podcast. I couldn’t articulate the problem, but he could. These four points were the problem of why I couldn’t get on board with the simple pitch:
Existence of God: Do I even believe in God? This is the first block and if you can’t get past this one then you’ll never get to the Cross. But I would never have got past this block without falling on my face and having to find the Street Light God. (Thank God for that Street Light God.) I realized in the end that finding the existence of God is not really an intellectual exercise, but an act of faith. And once you believe, only then do you understand. I do believe in God, because of the First Cause and Contingency arguments. Basically, something cannot come from nothing. I’ve moved on past this, but this is where most atheists and agnostics get stuck, and rightly so. Good luck with the Resurrection if you don’t believe in God! But if intellectual arguments are needed, then I choose to take up sides with Thomas Aquinas in his 5 Ways.
The Bible: Fundamentalism and literalism had blocked me from considering it as anything but myth. I truly didn’t understand how Catholics read it until recently. I had to start over with a non-fundamentalist reading to even get started. Until I understood how to read the Bible properly as a Catholic, the wall was impassable. How Catholics read the Bible has made all the difference in the world to me.
Anti-intellectualism: Catholicism appeared to be against deep thinking, against reason. But this is the picture painted by those who dislike the Church, that want us to believe that Catholicism is merely an act of ancient ritual and superstition. I was like Han Solo, doubting “hokey religion” as “simple tricks and nonsense.” In reality, the Church has a deep, intellectual history, but this had been somehow hidden from me and needed to be “re-discovered” by me. Starting with Augustine, I began to see how unexposed I was to the tradition of intellectual ideas. From those early church writings, through Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics, all the way to Popes Benedict and Bishop Barron, I began to realize the vastness of Catholic thought and teaching. All of the deep questions of philosophy, art, and literature have been considered and argued over the last two thousand years by people wiser than me. I had shut myself out of two millennia of wisdom and thought because of the prior two problems regarding God and the Bible. Reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Word on Fire Bible blew my socks off as I found my assumptions to be wrong time and again. Plus, there is no shortage of intellectuals among the Dominicans, Jesuits, and Franciscans. The nerds at Catholic Answers seem to be able to take on all comers on any topic, be it chemistry, physics, history, or theology. This is what shocked me: there is no stone unturned in the cosmology of the Church, and no question too hard for it to answer. I may not like all the answers, but there is an answer. When I think of a question, when I’m feeling clever and believe I’ve found a plot hole, I quickly learn that my question has already been mulled over long ago and answered in excruciating detail.
Science: Finally, religion and science are not enemies but different avenues to truth. Catholicism is surprisingly pro-science, far more than I suspected. The perception of a conflict between science and religion is invented, again by those who dislike religion. The idea that the Church is anti-science is not only wrong, but the complete opposite. The Catechism states that science glorifies God in helping us understand his creation. The Church’s only ask is that science should be done for good rather than evil. So figuring out atomic bombs and tweaking viruses for biological warfare are obviously bad, while curing disease and understanding the universe is good. In other words, the Church requests that science avoid advancing the opportunity for sin in the world. Not exactly controversial. Science reveals the world, but science cannot destroy or outshine God. The Catechism is quite clear on this in Faith and science: "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are."
As far as bringing myself back to the faith, I can say that Bishop Barron made more sense to me than a thousand other voices and I am grateful for his podcast and books, as that was the entry point that I needed to come back to the Church. Quitting drinking brought me to God, and Word on Fire brought me back to the Church.
Alongside Robert Barron, there is another man, Timothy Keller, a Presbyterian, who made equally significant points to me about why that beach evangelism failed to work. He said, paraphrasing from a podcast, that there’s a gulf of difference between “religious proselytizing” and “gracious good newsing.” Jesus calls us to do gracious good newsing. No one wants the other form. Want to evangelize people? Then do the good newsing. Humility and grace will win converts, because knowing and showing that you are a sinner and not better than anyone else will catch a lot more fish. Oh, and treat everyone the same. Keller says your soul craves something, and Jesus gives it the living water that it needs.
That’s the stuff - the simple stuff, without any lights or music or hand waving or virtual retreats. No psychedelics or TED talks needed. Gracious good newsing. Show me by example. I can believe that, and, heck, I can do that, because I am finally past those 4 bullet points above, which were the hurdles I couldn’t leap over for most of my adult life.
Once past those blocks, I could worship God and pray to God. And then I could work toward loving others and expect nothing in return because Jesus has already died for my sins, and my salvation is through him. Because I am full of sin and mistakes, I need to love others. That is my duty as a Christian for what Jesus has done for us. In fact, if I cannot love someone, if I am struggling, I try to think of why. To love thy neighbor is not easy, and that’s why we have to double our efforts when we struggle to do so. The moment we forget the greatest commandment, we have lost the purpose, and we will keep losing because disdain or hate has stolen our gaze. God is love, and each person is a child of God, a person that deserves Christian love. Not lukewarm Christian love, but real love, just as Jesus gathered the tax collectors and lepers and all manner of sinners to him. This doesn’t mean all sins should be allowed and celebrated, because that is literally what the modern world thinks we need. We need to love the drunkard, not the fact that he’s drunk and wants to be drunk. Somehow people managed to love me through my drinking years, but it was clear that my priorities were out of order. The modern Pharisees are the ones who get lost in the dogma and lose the love. To me, Catholic teachings have the comprehensive cosmology that works and makes sense, both intellectually and spiritually.
I suspect that any person who enters a church on any Sunday has about the same amount of sins on their conscience as any other person. Many of us have private sins that perhaps we only expose in silence or confession, or we fail to see altogether. Every soul in attendance at any given mass carries his or her own millstone into the pew. Everyone has a cross to bear, everyone has a vice, a tendency that weighs them down. Accepting sinners is part of the gig, especially when their flaws are not like our own flaws. This goes back to my flawed thoughts about flaws: my flaws are fine, but yours…are not ok. That doesn’t work. Now, clearly not every sin is as bad as murder, but there is a long list of grave matters that the Church defines and I wish you luck discerning God’s intention on which one is worse than the others. Last I checked they were all “grave” matters and each of us need to be constantly reconfigured and oriented toward Jesus. In reality, all of us sinners have at least one major issue to tackle and resolve through penance and faith in Jesus Christ.
“…penance…must take into account the penitent's personal situation and must seek his spiritual good. It must correspond as far as possible with the gravity and nature of the sins committed. It can consist of prayer, an offering, works of mercy, service of neighbor, voluntary self-denial, sacrifices, and above all the patient acceptance of the cross we must bear. Such penances help configure us to Christ, who alone expiated our sins once for all.”
This doesn’t mean sins of the modern age should just be glossed over and we pass laws enshrining and celebrating sin. There exists a Natural Law. Going out and getting drunk on purpose is against the rules. Looking at smut online is against the rules. Sex and booze both pave the road to nowhere. Drinking to drunkenness, in my experience, is the gateway to many other sins. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the multitude of social and family ills that beer and liquor unleash. Drug use and drunkenness open a floodgate to the whole garden of earthly delights. I believe that drinking gets too much of a pass in some Catholic circles. This concerns me quite a bit, as there is nearly a celebration of a drinking culture in the Church that many Protestant circles reject, and I think drinking is the plank in the eye of Catholics while they admonish others for their sins. I suspect much of the sin in the sex abuse scandal was due to drunkenness.
St. Paul kind of sums up the modern world in one sentence of what we should not be doing.
…let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. (Rom 13.13)
Drinking, drugs, and pointless sex are a no-go, according to St. Paul. And the “rivalry and jealousy” phrase reeks of social media.
What gets thrown into the same pot by Paul? Sex and booze. Both are journeys away from God, both are false idols of this world. Both of these pursuits are searches into empty alleyways, which look like a carnival from the outside but turn into prisons. The key to “love” is not abandoning anyone who goes down those alleys to check out the carnival, but rather to wait for them to wake up and walk out, free from the bondage. Oh, and the other key is to not follow them down the alleyway and join in on the carnival of orgies and drunkenness.
Take a look at the list on this page of mortal sins and contact me if you are free from all of them, since you might just be the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and I think I’d like to meet you. As for me, I can tell you that on any Sunday, I have, or have in the past, had one or more of these mortal sins marking me for need of forgiveness and penitential acts. I can see plenty that I know I’ve committed and on some occasions definitely should not have joined the Communion line.
In fact, I just realized that gluttony happened to me this morning, when after breakfast I sort of had a second breakfast. Thus I’ve already befouled my day with a mortal sin, during Lent no less, yet no one will shame me for my error because I downed that extra Pop Tart in private.
I am not the model of piety, and I know quite a few believers who are also like me. They are all like me, with human frailties and problems. In reality, even those who have remained faithful throughout the struggles of the Church commit sins every week, every day. I know that modern Christians like to draw the battle line in the sand between moral relativism and moral absolutism, where we hunker down behind a redoubt, bricked in by the absolute truths of Natural Law. But I will say the test for Christians is the same as it ever was: if I cannot love my neighbor, all of them, then I better check myself and try again, because the Golden Rule is kind of important. I mean, it’s just that little detail that Jesus said “the whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
I fail, and that’s the whole point of why I need to keep going back to Mass and asking for forgiveness during the Confiteor. If I fail to love someone that is different from me, or I spurn them because they don’t like me, then I didn’t really love them in the first place and I am at fault. First, I need to keep my own side of the street clean before I worry about someone else’s side of the street.
I believe the true question for love is not a question at all, but a statement of fact from 1 John 2:9. This is the whole test, right here:
Whoever says he is in the light, yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is nothing in him to cause a fall.
