I was in a state known as “fallen away” for about 15 years, because I had never experienced what is known as interior conversion. I was going through the motions and so the purpose of religion and church felt like fishing with no hook and no bait. I wasn’t catching anything, and wasn’t learning how or why, and I didn’t know how it was supposed to work. So I stopped fishing and moved on, which I’ve come to realize was the best and worst thing that ever happened to me.
I fell away for similar reasons to most people. I felt it was a lot of rules, and I saw bad representatives around me with a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude. With that, it became easier to deny the idea of sin, which is precisely how I came to reject God. This is where I stayed for a long time, because once you turn away it takes a “compelling event” to be re-awakened to turn back. And from my experience, you cannot get to the resurrection unless you get to belief in God first. That has to be restored before you start asking for God’s help. To me the proofs for God must be shown or come to a person that has turned away before you can dive into the mysteries like the incarnation, resurrection, and ascension. Fortunately, an addiction provided the “compelling event” for me where I wake up in jail and did rehab and turned back to God. But not everyone is as lucky as me.
The gaze of our culture is toward earth, not heaven. There is an ambivalence and uncertainty about whether we have souls at all. We are conditioned that way now. A lack of depth in religious education and exposure for young people, at least where I grew up, didn’t help. Public school seemed to make an effort to steer around any idea of a spiritual life. I recall campaigns in school to build up our dignity and self-worth, but it was all body and mind, but certainly not soul-oriented. My idea around the soul was dead on arrival in high-school, indoctrinated to the public school’s dance around the spiritual. All things were taught as materialism.
Worse, I felt that I couldn’t ask questions about faith as a child, whereas in school I was encouraged to dig into every topic. Religious teachers from middle-school through college, take note: students want depth, not coloring books. They want a challenge, not busy work. It took me a very long time to realize the intellectual depth of Christianity. I had never come across or been introduced to St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas. Reading Augustine’s Confessions blasted at my assumptions, as did Word on Fire materials, from the podcast to the books. The wall of earthbound explanations became like Plato’s cave, where I was only seeing shadows on the wall while the real story, or the other half of the story, was in the spiritual life. But someone who is turned away from God has that wall up and they will not be receiving messages that are transmitted to them, because they have scrambler for anything that hints at God. That is why you have to get to reasons to believe in God first.
Misunderstanding how to read the Bible is an enormous blocker, and I don’t think the “Catholic” way to read the Bible is that well known. “How to Read the Bible” from the WOF Bible was eye-opening, as I’d lumped Catholics with Fundamentalist readings, which ruined how I understood it. I hated reading Genesis when I was in the scientism and literalism mindset. I could only read it like Carl Sagan on one hand, or like Ken Ham on the other hand. You can’t read Scripture like a science book, because it’s not a science book. It’s about the soul, not cells. Moreover, you can’t go deep in science classes and then come back and try to read it like a fundamentalist. That doesn’t work for people who take advanced science classes. You can’t tell someone who took literature classes that there is no figurative elements, because we know how to read. This isn’t elementary school where you could convince a child that Aesop’s fable of the “Ant and the Grasshopper” is just about insect life. We know there is allegory, we know there is interpretation. So we can’t read it literally or scientifically, but we need to use our whole mind to read it. Any one-dimensional reading of the Bible will fail, but you can read it in each dimension and then see how they relate. It’s not like other books. Most interesting to me now, is that I’ve realized that you can go very deep on science and read the Bible like Catholics do. You can learn about evolution and still find that Genesis makes complete sense. In fact, I think the deeper you go on science, the more that Genesis and the Gospels make sense, but I’m biased the other way now.
Once you start looking for the historical, allegorical, moral, and religious truth of what the Bible teaches, that is a game changer. But again you have to want to believe in God first. If you approach the Bible as fiction from the start, you will read it as fiction. If you start with doubt, you will be scoffing by the third day of creation and wonder how God said, “Let there be light” before he created the sun. I know because I scoffed. I didn’t understand that the “light” was faith, or the idea to create, or the power of God to make something out of nothing. Once you allow that light in, however, you can read the Bible and not get stalled on difficult passages. The catechism teaches that Genesis uses figurative language in places, and I came to realize that how Catholics read the Bible is deep, not shallow. Eventually you get to the point that you can read Genesis literally, figuratively, allegorically, morally, and how it relates to Jesus and the end of time. Even historically. Heck, even scientifically and it still works. I’m not kidding. If you think it’s just some old myth, you aren’t reading it deep enough.
One thing that helped me return is the example of faithful Christians I know – Catholic, Protestant – I saw their lives, lived in devotion and that probably did more for me than anything. It made me want to have what they have, because when you turn away you live in a restlessness. Experience is a pre-requisite for some of us to realize that “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” You may not know you are restless until one night you become fully aware of how lost you became in all that searching in wrong places. But when we are looking earthward instead of the heavens, we think the world has the answers instead of God who created the world. Somehow the flip has to happen, to turn your head upward. Refusing to pray or ask for help is rejection of God. But like the Bible says, we are stiff-necked, which I learned was an idiom about oxen that would not turn when poked by the farmer. The thing is we have to want to turn in the end, we have to want to receive God’s grace. Desiring God is where the flip happens but like St. Paul and St. Augustine, it’s often not a voluntary thing, it’s a gift. For Paul it happened all at once. For Augustine it was a slow-burning eight season HBO adult series. Either way, the result was the same because they ended up on fire for God. They were never the same again.
What you can do for someone who has fallen away? You can call. Send a text. Be a friend. Listen. But have faith and keep building yours up. I think those actions alone can be the compelling event, because seeing someone pass through life with faith is a powerful argument even without words. Praying a 54 day Rosary novena won’t hurt either. I’m not even kidding, since both of you will benefit. You have to love them and just pray for God’s will and recall that we need God, he doesn’t need us. He loves us and wants us to return, but only we are harmed in turning away. Prayer is powerful, more than I ever realized.
For me it took arguments for God, experience, the silent witness of others, and my own foolishness to want to know God. I suspect a few people were praying for me. In the end, you have to realize that you can’t save yourself. When you feel strong, there’s no need for a savior. Realizing how weak and helpless I was gave me the nudge I needed, and a life of worshipping the self and the world is depressing. Wealth, pleasure, honor, and power become boring. My generation grew up dreaming about rocking out with Snoop Dogg and the Victoria’s Secret angels on our own private yachts after winning the Superbowl. We wanted all the world had to offer, all these fruits and experiences that seemed to be liberating, but they ended up bringing spiritual death. None of that brings true happiness. Spiritual things come back to life once you become willing to ask for help. While science may have some cures, it doesn’t have THE cure. Pills and therapy can go part of the way, but not all the way, because the last part of the journey doesn’t come from a pharmacy or from a technique. The last leap has to come by faith.
People who turn away from God (which is everyone, unless you are Jesus, who is God, and if you are him, please contact me I’d like to meet for coffee ASAP)…let’s start this sentence over. People who turn away from God imagine they have found freedom because they only see the rules of religion as oppressive, but that’s because they don’t understand the interior conversion of the heart is what transforms. That’s the whole point of cathedrals and hymnals and candles and long Saturday night Easter Vigil Mass and stations of the cross and ashes on our foreheads and all the kneeling and standing. To give glory to God, once turned, makes total sense, because that’s all we can do to even try to give thanks for what God has done for us. Seeking humility before God means offering up our prayers, our money, our songs, our hearts - all of those things. If you haven’t turned back, it won’t make sense because it cannot make sense. You’ll see religion as a modern kind of Pharisee, all justice and no mercy and full of hypocrisy. You’ll see the sinners fall and point out that we are hypocrites, which is true. But we are trying. That’s the goal, to love God, to love others, and to keep his commandments. To do God’s will and give him glory is the game. What you have to show someone who is turned away is that the “rules” are not the endgame. The interior conversion is why everyone who comes to drink from this vine never leaves the party. If it were only about rules, Napoleon or Julius Caesar or Genghis Kahn would be the object of our worship, because they were very good about enforcing the law. Love of God goes way, way beyond the rules, but because of that love, the rules must be followed. People who turn away do not like those rules, because they think what the rules outlaw are what is enjoyable. Unfortunately, it will never make sense to them when you try to explain that getting drunk and having sex is not what they really want. That message is scrambled because they can’t get first to God, and second to the interior conversion. There is a joy that the fallen away are oblivious to. They have no idea it exists and think those who claim it’s true are liars. They think it’s boring and enslaving but it’s the ultimate liberation. And if you like excitement, if you like a good fight, spiritual combat is a sport that never stops.
How to read the Bible: https://www.wordonfire.org/videos/bishop-barrons-commentaries/how-to-read-the-bible/
