Don't Believe in Yourself (3)

There is more backstory to tell before I get to the day that I flushed my anti-depressants.

I had never hear of Father Garrigou-Lagrange and the idea of a “predominant fault,” also called a root sin, until a few years ago. Everyone has a predominant fault, and it is one of three things: pride, vanity, or sensuality. Sensuality seems to be my taproot, because in pleasure I find the sensual escape from all struggle. A slice of pumpkin pie is not unlike a shot of whiskey for me. But pride and vanity are ever ready to take the lead as well as my predominant fault. The more I reflected on it, I came to see that I have all three of these faults. And the more I reflected on everyone else I know, I came to realize that every human being suffers from all three of these in different ways.

Pride is unavoidable. I came to reject authority, since that is the American way, and pride is the fault in every case. The problem is that we lionize pride today. Individual pride, national pride, school pride, family pride, town pride, gay pride - it’s everywhere. We have all forgotten that pride is what caused the Fall because we dropped humility long ago. Vanity too is praised. Looking fit, being cool, seeking approval, receiving honors, gaining esteem - all of these are valued today. And as for the old morality around sensuality, around sex and food, gluttony and lust? The old “prudish” ways didn’t seem to have any answers either. Pride, vanity, and sensuality were littered all over in the lyrics and scripts of American culture. After all, celebrities and singers believe in themselves, and usually in interviews when asked to give advice to aspiring fans, they say, “Never give up. Always believe in yourself.”

The messages about marriage and sex and morality in general were unanimous on the radio and TV: humans could only flourish if they were free to sleep with random partners at will, unrestrained from the old Church rules. Also, getting high was good. Also, sex was meaningless and masturbation was self-care. Also, honoring your parents was for suckers. Also, the pursuit of wealth was not a trap, but the good life. Also, Sundays were not for worshipping Jesus, honoring Mary, and communing with the Saints, they were for sleeping off a hangover, drinking Bloody Marys, and watching the New Orleans Saints play football. And as for God? Get serious - that was just an adult Santa story.

Rage Against the Machine summed up the 1990s best with their lyrics: “F*** you, I won’t do what you tell me,” screamed at high decibels. Like in the old Maxell cassette ad, this song screamed what we felt inside. It’s comical to listen to Rage Against the Machine songs now, but it’s solid evidence of what a screwed up era it was, particularly when we were living an age of wealth and privilege. Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg took care of glorifying violence, meaningless sex, and open disrespect of women. The culmination of it all came with Limp Bizkit screaming, “Give me something to break” in stadiums full of wrecked people smashing into each other like the harpies in hell. We were like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, where all the cosmetic gauges and lights in the control room looked great as the reactor core, the heart, was in the throes of violent meltdown.

The good thing was, all of this could fit in just fine with the “Believe in yourself” mantra. The important thing was that you kept up the facade of self-esteem. The first principle of “believe in yourself” is that perception is reality: Whatever I think is right, is right because…I believe in myself. I am the authority. The Sophists that Socrates argued against have been let out of their cage all over again.

Having grown up around a fair amount of lukewarm Christians of all stripes, it seemed that the call to chastity and claim to holiness was a wink. Some were living their lives as if Christ had risen from the grave, but not many. Following suit, I loosely clung to the Church for a badge of identity for a while, until the school system fully applied the wedge between belief in Self versus belief in God. I was mostly eager to let it happen. After all, most TV shows mocked the Church in one way or another. I’d seen George Carlin’s HBO-special tirades against faith that made atheism seem cool. Most of all, teachers and college professors seemed to be on a subtle crusade against all things supernatural. Here is one example (of many possible examples) of the programming I received:

In my junior year of high school, in chemistry class, the teacher showed us a video that explained what really happened at the Wedding Feast at Cana. We were told by the Bible and at Church that Jesus had miraculously turned water into wine. This was a mystery to be pondered and wondered about in awe. But my teacher shared a hypothesis that it could have been accomplished by a chemistry trick. Jesus was most likely a magician, or a scientist (Occam’s Razor, right?) - and therefore he was a charlatan. The laws of physics could never be broken, you see, because we lived in a purely material universe. The teacher showed us a video and was very pleased with it. (This really did happen in class, and there really is a video about this, although I cannot find it now.)

Jesus had just used an acid-to-base additive to cause the color of the water to change. The people in Cana were so drunk that they couldn’t tell. (Of course, this disregards the line that this was the “best wine” of all from the actual Wedding Feast at Cana story - and it is the sober host that tastes it and announces the quality of the wine - but I digress.)

To me, this event marks the logical conclusion of the long watering-down of Biblical scholarship. The wine at Cana was now just colored water. This fit well with the modern scholarly view that when Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes that the people just shared what they had been hiding. All the miracles were being explained away in purely rational, natural, material methods.

The message was clear: science was the only way of knowing; no such thing as miracles existed. A university New Testament class took it even further with mentioning a funny “swoon theory” to explain away the Resurrection. Comparative literature professors turned the Bible into the equivalent of Greek myth.

The 19th century Germans had dissected the Bible, the 20th century atheist academics then had the body drawn and quartered, and now it was scientists themselves doing the autopsy. That my public school teacher (who was really just echoing the very old Ebionite heresy) was now evangelizing kids into the “cool teacher/magician” version of Jesus illustrated how far the Word of God had fallen in Christendom.

This anti-religious intrusion into science class surprised me, although I don’t know why it did. God-talk had long been forbidden at school. Religious mockery, however, was not prohibited, even by teachers, and this was specifically true for Christianity, while Islam and Jewish talk had a hall pass. This speech code had been established in fifth and sixth grade already. God-talk had been banished from music and language arts. But now I had an authority from the science department pitching the idea that the Biblical miracles were a magic act, a facade, a sham. This was going above and beyond the typical curriculum of “believe in yourself” to openly plant doubts about the idea of a Creator, the Incarnation, miracles, and faith in general.

Besides my one hour of Mass a week as a child, with its three readings and a seven-minute Homily, I had no spiritual direction. School and TV sitcoms were the closest thing to spiritual direction. Teachers and TV dads gave the life talks.

The idea that the public school is “non-religious” has become less and less tenable, because the consistent messaging from age six onward was a dead match for the beliefs of religious humanism. And of course, there was always the obsession with shape-shifting Liberty, as liberalism has its goddess on an island off of New York City. But what the goddess of liberty means can be whatever you like, since individualism goes really well with “believe in yourself.” Unfortunately, all of this takes a very long time for a kid to figure out, and that is the point; most will never figure it out.

As for me, I was a house of cards, with no real strength in my belief. No foundation, no understanding.

Had life events not guided me to another path, I would never have uprooted what had been planted in the soil tended by my public school gardeners. Now when I think of the teachers I had, they were so clearly humanist in their approach. For three years in particular, the humanist message was like an air-horn in the classroom. I don’t think it was anything evil. These teachers had just bought a bad batch, thinking they were planting oak trees but it was just thorns and thistles. They acted as the apostles of John Dewey, not Jesus Christ.

I suppose they even thought it was working. Having been around enough sales people, a pitch becomes contagious when it appears to be working. As long as people are buying, they will use the pitch. This also happens with fishermen, where if one guy catches a big fish, everyone cuts their bait and starts using the same bait that the lucky guy was using. We just can’t help ourselves but get on the bandwagon.

But as soon as the product proves a failure and the pitch can no longer sell product, they drop it like garbage and chase the new thing. Fishermen do the same.

That is what has happened now, as the humanism of the 20th century has proven to be a failure, and new shiny pitches were taken up for testing. These too will fail within a generation. The problem is that these ideas are all coming from “The Enlightenment,” which was never the candle in the dark it claimed to be. If there was any light, it was from a dumpster fire of half-truths. It ignored the soul and God, the key things needed for sanity and mental health.

My teachers of the humanist dogma were doing what they thought was best for kids because the cult of self-esteem had been sold to them first. When you buy a bad product, it’s hard to admit. It’s embarrassing. It was like the many monorails that were sold to cities across America, or like Olympic villages with their unused, mossed-over bobsled tracks. The problem is that much time is required to pay the piper for leading people into error, and it takes generations to correct.

This is why the modern dogma of “Believe in yourself” is so lame. We are just so small in the grand scheme of all that God has created in time and space, and when we elevate our importance to the highest place of belief, it’s absurd. It’s boring. We’re so limited, but God can do anything. To quote Pink Floyd, I’d rather have a walk-on part in the war, than a lead role in a cage. (And we are living in a spiritual war.)

Thus it becomes a manner of assenting to a set of foundational ideas and the proof is in how you live. Because it’s one thing to say “I believe in one God” and then live for the sacred Self. And now I know, this is why I needed to ask my doctor about Lexapro. This division within from childhood had cleaved me apart, leaving me as only a body. Because I could say the Creed at Church but not believe it, and I certainly wasn’t living it. Around age eighteen, I started only mouthing certain lines of the Nicene Creed, if I happened to attend Mass. But in reality, I was just finally in such a state of mortal sin that I could no longer even fake the words. And this is how the devil gets you.

What must never be forgotten is that angels are pure intellect, and the devil is a fallen angel. Hence, if we assume our intelligence is high, the angels shake their virtual heads and the devils rub their virtual hands.

While I was mouthing the words of the Creed but living a humanist or agnostic life, the devil’s work was already done. Voltaire, the writer who made a living attacking the Catholic Church so long ago, once advised a person who wanted to leave the Church on how he could stop believing that the Eucharist was the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus. Voltaire told him to continue committing sins and receiving the Eucharist until it blunted his faith so badly that the Eucharist became just a wafer, just a piece of bread. As it turns out, Voltaire understood spiritual warfare extremely well, because he articulated exactly what has happened to millions of “faithful” Catholics. This is exactly how faith dies, because saying the Creed and receiving the Eucharist does nothing without Confession and conversion of the heart and kneeling and asking God for help. Once disobedience in living for God has taken root, the outward actions of faith become false. The entire idea of “believe in yourself” casts God out immediately, but of course, when we turn from God we only cast ourselves out.

Either a Creator made the world, or it has always existed. This was the presented options from Church and from public school. Today, for me, it takes far less faith to believe that time and space came from a Creator God who made it “out of nothing” than for time and space to have been created by…nothing. How much faith you need to believe that the universe is “self-existing”?! Far more than I can muster. But the public schooling and media propped up this absurdity for a long time simply by repeating this first principle of humanism in subtle and sundry ways.

Is it any wonder people today are scattered and confused? If you have two opposed worldviews battling and rattling around in your head for power and control, chaos and disorder are the result. How could it not be? If I told you that up is down one minute, and down is up the next, it would be confusing. As Jesus said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Humanism, it turns out, is a crusade against standard Christian ideas like God, sin, the Fall, the need for redemption, eternal life, and so on. The summary statement of the humanist manifesto says something very old, in a kind of triumphant reiteration of the sophist Protagoras who said, “Man is the measure of all things” but with more words. The humanists even sum up their own manifesto with a flourish arguing that the fruit from the tree of Knowledge tastes better than that from the tree of Life:

Though we consider the religious forms and ideas of our fathers no longer adequate, the quest for the good life is still the central task for mankind. Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement. He must set intelligence and will to the task.

Ah, the good life! Sounds good. And yes, “he alone” will bring the dream, the utopia! God need not apply. But really, all of this could be summed up more concisely, had they just said what my second-grade teacher had said, which was: “Believe in yourself.”

This is what the architects of the public school system believed. Is it any wonder then that I became a humanist, when I had to sit in rooms for forty hours a week through the late 1980s and entire 1990s and early 2000s and listen to humanist sermons from humanist teachers?

When you are feeling strong…and when it comes to an end

While I was spinning in motion, on fast-forward all through the public school years, I could keep up the energy to believe in myself, so long as I achieved, believed, and had plenty of strength.

This was a period of strength and motion, such that I could keep the illusion alive that I could will my destiny. I could have a good-looking girlfriend, win the game, ease the pain with a gallon of beer, work like a dog, get the grades, and fudge my way through life with a smile while my flaws were excused. Because one thing was clear: outside of the Church, the idea of sin only existed in getting caught. If all the right things were done, self-actualization would come.

This is a lie.

In Leo Tolstoy’s short story, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” the dying man has lived a successful life. He’s done all the right things. He’s punched his ticket at every proper stop on the secular journey of life. But in his last days, nearing the edge, he peers into the nothingness. Looking back on his life of “right” choices that made him a respected person with a good career, he wonders about the point of his life and career. The gaping mouth of the Big Empty is looking at Ivan when he muses:

"Then what does it mean? Why? It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!

"Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done," it suddenly occurred to him. "But how could that be, when I did everything properly?" he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.

Oh, it’s unfair, cries Ivan! Like a Pharisee, he had done all the external actions needed to be whole, to be self-actualized, and to be at peace. Yet he is not at peace in his heart - he is at terror. Why?

Because he didn’t choose the right things. He chose the wrong things. Career and success are good things, but they are lesser things. Ivan Ilyich is at a loss because he chose the things that the culture valued, not what his heart and God value. A life of fear chases things, and I know it well. But Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

When I was living like Ivan Ilyich, as all body, achievement, and reputation, I had no concern for the soul or God. Then the illusion of strength and accomplishment painted me into a corner. Ivan’s second chance comes in the weeks of his death, when he is weak.

I was feeling strong, most of the time, and in those days I could indeed “Believe in myself.” But when the down periods came and the tank was empty, the great sadness came with it. A lesson in life was being taught that, when I am feeling strong, I have grand ideas about life, justice, and mercy. But when I am weak, those feelings change. Weakness is never far away either, as a simple cold or flu can collapse the whole facade. Any crack in the armor can cause the rust to begin, and we become brittle. Aging is a great teacher, as Ivan Ilyich learned.

On some of the darkest days, even after winning a game, or getting a grade, or getting a raise at work, I could not hold back the swell of emotion that made me think of ending my life. This glorious, gifted, unique, special, life - where I “believed in myself” and “followed my heart” and “was perfect just the way I was” - I could not explain why I was so lost. On those days I thought of veering into a semi-truck. And even if a girlfriend or my mom asked me, “What’s wrong?” I had no words. None whatsoever. There was nothing that I could tell them, because I myself had no idea what was wrong. For someone to have everything, and yet be utterly empty, made no sense to me. This is why for a long time I assumed I needed anti-depression medication. I needed a button to push, a technique, a material solution. I didn’t understand that the entire problem was spiritual.

When the booze stopped working, the pills took main stage. And when the pills stopped working, I knew that I’d been trying to turn on a light using the wrong switch. The pyramid of self-actualization was not wired to anything but myself, and I had lost the ability to believe in myself any longer.