Why Did Peter Sink?

Why Did Peter Sink?

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CHRISTIANITY
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A Catholic reversion story, in 16 parts. whydidpetersink.substack.com

12/11/2021

16. The Most Difficult, Most Necessary Step

In my slow conversion, the deadbolt that barred me from faith was always true belief in the resurrection, since the entirety of Christianity depends on it, as St. Paul himself wrote. Without it, the whole story falls apart, and none of the other miracles matter. The resurrection of a sinless human opens the door to the forgiveness of sins and new life for us all. If there is no resurrection, then Jesus is simply an insane charlatan that deserves no respect or worship. This situation of the resurrection puts everyone into a decision point about whether to believe or not, and this is exactly why Christianity is so challenging. The leap of faith all comes down to the resurrection. To me the proper response if you do not believe in the resurrection is rejection of all of the Christian faith. Literally, none of it is worth the paper it is written on if he is lying, even the teachings and parables, because to claim divinity without it being true really would be a mental disorder. There is no other response but rejection if the resurrection did not happen, as the teachings of Jesus become moot if the miracle is false. There are lots of teachers in history we can use that didn’t claim something so outlandish. Especially today with all the meditation and self-help books, we can find maxims and aphorisms to live by that do not require belief in miracles. On the other hand, if the resurrection happened, then you have no choice but to fully embrace Jesus as the savior. This is why belief is hard, because if the resurrection is true, everything is true. All of it, and yes, that includes the hard parts. The resurrection truly is an either/or selection that we have to make, and if the default is choosing doubt and ignoring the claim, the much more difficult choice is to examine and review whether or not to believe in the resurrection. This dilemma presents a fork in the road on how to live your life, one that must be chosen. This is not like being asked to believe if Athena really sprung from Zeus’s head or to believe in the tree worship of ancient tribes in The Golden Bough, this decision puts the miraculous directly in front of us. And we must choose, as even choosing not to make a choice is itself a choice. Making no choice at all is choosing to deny the miracle. That is the default position, but still it is a choice. I love mythology and trees. Really, who doesn’t? Yes, I love Lord of the Rings and giant oak trees and Ovid’s Metamorphosis and cottonwoods. In fact, I like science too and stand in awe of the everyday miracles of surgery and treatments that save lives. But this dilemma about Jesus and the resurrection cannot be avoided because the reality is that our heart knows there is something more than this world, beyond the confines of science and what is known and knowable, that God is so far beyond our ability and understanding that something supernatural, that is beyond nature, can exist and touch our world. The author of the universe cannot be understood, but you can see the wonder in the world everywhere in art and nature. We are characters in the author’s book who cannot know what is outside of our story here, but we can feel the presence of something higher than just tall tales or the periodic table of elements. He declared multiple times that he is the way to eternal life. That is a hard pill to swallow for modern rationalists who seek data and a cause for all things. “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live,” and “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” I guess this is why Jesus says we have to enter through the narrow gate, because it is hard to find and perhaps harder to decide to walk through that gate. I think it is mainly hard to squeeze my mind and ego through it. I’ve gone on in a prior post about how the scenario at the tomb on Easter Sunday sowed doubt in me. The story sounded too fantastic to be true, and lacking answers I let my doubt win rather than pursue the subject, since I didn’t get the impression that asking questions was encouraged. I’ve come to realize that Catholicism can handle any question thrown at it, especially ones surrounding the divinity of Jesus. Today I only wish I had sought a deeper understanding of faith sooner in life. I have come to realize that there is no stone left unturned in the writings of the church and the Catechism, as they have spent 2,000 years turning over stones. Specifically, for the resurrection, there are many points that tipped the scales from doubt to faith, but not without probably cause and good reason. As Frank Morison noted in his book Who Moved the Stone? about his own conversion to the truth of the resurrection: I have wrestled with that problem and found it tougher than ever I could have conceived possible. It is easy to say that you will believe nothing that will not fit into the mold of a rationalist conception of the universe. But suppose the facts won't fit into that mold? The utmost that an honest man can do is to undertake to examine the facts patiently and impartially, and to see where they lead him. The main reasons are below, but each could be a lengthy post of its own. -The fearful and defeated Apostles turns into fearless and unbreakable believers. No one dies for a lie. Not this way. People may be willing to die for a lie that gives them social standing or power or fame or honor, but the followers of Jesus got none of that. They received the opposite, becoming outcasts and rejects of society. -If the Romans or people of Jerusalem could have produced the body of Jesus, they would have done so. No one ever did. -No one disputes that the tomb was empty. This is a massive fact, even for those that accuse the Apostles of stealing the body. Clearly the tomb was empty. This is a problem for the Romans, Jews, and Apostles. Even Mary Magdalene first announces that the body has been taken. Had his body been moved to a different tomb or location, rumor and hearsay in the city would have created cause for a search, and even today pilgrimages to the “correct” tomb in Jerusalem would be occurring. This didn’t happen. The powers at the time try to convince people that the Apostles moved the body, but these men were all cowering in fear, scattered across the city or returned home. Someone in the city of Jerusalem would have known where this second burial location was at, but no one appears to even be searching for a kidnapped body. -If the Apostles had moved the body or knew of someone moving the body, one of them would have cracked under the numerous beatings and torture and martyrdom that came to them over the next thirty years. They never waver in their story, not once. None of them. Human beings cannot keep a secret, so if they had a secret of such magnitude, it would have come out. -If it was all made up, the writers of the Gospels and Acts and James would not have mentioned a 7 week gap between the death of Jesus and the beginning of the preaching the Good News. This gap only causes doubt or gives detractors an entry point to suggest that the Apostles spent these 7 weeks crafting a story. This is one of the elements of the timeline that actually creates doubt. If the early believers wanted to sell a contrived fable, they would have claimed their preaching began the moment Jesus had risen. But they don’t write that - they all agree that they were confused and fearful until 7 weeks after the death and Resurrection. -Once they do begin to tell the story of the Resurrection, after Pentecost, the Apostles manage to win over people in the same city where the trial, death, and burial happened. They convince people who were there in the city when it happened. The Apostles didn’t sneak off elsewhere, far away, and start telling people who might be duped, they stood in the city where it happened, where everyone knew it had happened and had even witnessed Jesus’ ministry. The original band of evangelists were uneducated people with no social standing who suddenly begin to convince people that the Resurrection occurred. -Over 500 people saw the risen Jesus. It’s not just a handful of people. The “hallucination” theory might work for one or two, but not 11, and certainly not 500. -Women are recorded as the first witnesses at the tomb and this is important, as culturally they were not even allowed to be witnesses in court. This would not help make the case, so it’s clear that the women were the first to witness, or the Gospel writers would have left it out. They would not have wanted to mention this since it worked against their case, but they did mention it, so why would they make it up? -Over and over in the Gospels and Acts details are included that allow for doubt, or questions about the miracles. The authors are clearly not crafting a tale because elements of the stories do not make sense unless they were true. If they were trying to build up the apostles, why tell about Peter’s denial of Jesus? Why admit Jesus wanted to escape his fate in the Garden by “passing this cup”? Why have Jesus utter the words, “My God, My God, why you have forsaken me,” on the cross? Why not make the stone at the tomb crumble like magic? Why admit that the Apostles fell asleep in the Garden? Why characterize the Apostles as bumbling rubes so frequently? These books read like no other literature ever written and the writers were not literary types or trained storytellers. These aren’t troubadours, they are fishermen and tax collectors. The reason for all of these curiosities in the Gospels is that the truth needs no rehearsal. -Crucifixion was a brutal spectacle meant to shame. The fact that the savior of the world would be shamefully executed in this way – no one would make up a story like this. It was demoralizing and devastating to the Apostles, until the Resurrection and Pentecost turned them into lions. To have your

26 min
18/07/2021

15. Love My Neighbor...?

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 d

34 min
17/07/2021

14. The Empty Tomb

The most difficult part of faith to me, is the part where you have to actually have faith. Consider this definition, and think of the implications of it against the backdrop of our world today: By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. (CCC 143) Think about what is being requested here. If I completely give my intellect and will to anything, wouldn’t that just make me an automaton or a robot? How gullible do you think I am? You know, blind faith is how cults get started! The definition above always seemed too extreme. I could not subscribe to without a very compelling reason to do so, with ample evidence and reason behind why I would ever submit wholly to anything. First, to even bring me to the table to consider this deal, the product or service needs to offer an amazing deal, a prize that cannot be gotten anywhere else through any other vendor. I have already written about the efforts I’ve given toward things of this world, such as alcohol, knowledge, work, and exercise, but in those pursuits I didn’t give complete power over myself. You might say I divided up my intellect and will between a few pursuits at a time, but never fully to any single thing. While drinking I never reached anywhere near the point of alcoholic nihilism like that of Leaving Las Vegas. I certainly never won my age group in any marathons or foot races, proving that I could have trained harder. At work, I may throw myself into tasks but eventually I slack off or burnout. I don’t know that I’ve ever given myself completely to anything. While I pursued those things, I imagined that I could still be good, or more specifically, virtuous. Obviously I was more virtuous with exercise as my highest priority rather than alcohol, but what I want and desire to be is to be vigilant in staying virtuous. From the self-help books of today, to Stoicism and Epicureanism, to Confucianism, to Buddhism, a code of ethics can be found in a thousand flavors. Each can be applied for living virtuously and righteously, to a high degree of success. For a time I was enamored with Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. In fact, I still am. He recorded an amazing list of thoughts on living righteously, as he simultaneously tried to halt the rise of a rival Christian ethics that was catching fire among citizens of the empire. Today, a modern Stoic movement’s rise is gathering steam among the secular world, as its core teachings fit into a inward looking self-reliance, meditation, and “mindfulness” (which seems to be the secular term for prayer that we use today). To this day, I refer back to certain passages in my dog-eared copy of Marcus Aurelius’s thoughts. For instance, this passage is powerful to me: Whatever anyone does or says, I must be a good man. It is as if an emerald, or gold or purple, were always saying: ‘Whatever anyone does or says, I must be an emerald and keep my colour.’ (VII.15) The book contains an amazing set of ideas for living, many of which you can find strong parallels in the Gospels in the words of Jesus. Verses on forgiveness, kindness, strength, and the fleeting nature of life jump off the page. Marcus Aurelius’s writing contains a remarkable worldview that works well, but, in my opinion, there is one crack in the Stoic concrete that the ice of life wedges apart: the Stoic looks for help from within, while the Christian looks for help outside, from God. The inward vs. outward gaze makes all the difference. I have already learned the hard way that my willpower alone does not work, or does not work for long whenever I have tried. Willpower and discipline come from the self, but without connecting the mind and body to the external God, we cannot overcome our own built-in flaws. I have character flaws that cannot be unwound from inside because they are written on my bones and brain. The power to overcome these flaws cannot start from within me, because the power doesn’t live in me. The power is outside of me, and I need to let it in to be there. If I don’t let it in, I can’t find it. Once I let the Holy Spirit in, then I can create a “little chapel in the heart” where I can go for strength and trust, to remove anxiety and fear. In addition, the Stoic method works best for the strong, not the weak, ill, or elderly. It approaches life’s problems from a position of strength. Emotionless love and shades of forgiveness exist in Marcus Aurelius, but nothing like the forgiveness that Jesus commands. The best example is when Peter asks Jesus how many times we should forgive someone, and he throws out a number, seven. Is seven times enough? I can hear the wheels turning in Peter’s head: “Hey, Jesus, about the whole forgiveness thing, what’s the actual maximum before we can hate or discard the person again without feeling bad?” I can almost hear him thinking about someone that he’s irritated with as he’s asking, probably his brother Andrew or one of the other apostles. Jesus delivers one of his greatest one-liners on forgiveness, shooting down Peter’s question. “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.”* Probably not what Peter was looking for in the answer but the one he needed. Again, I can imagine him nodding and thinking, “Wow, I was almost to seven times forgiving Andrew. I mean, I was thinking that in basketball after seven fouls you get the bonus and free throws, but I’m not even close. He gets to commit seventy more fouls and I have to keep forgiving him.” I don’t think anyone is as relatable as Peter, since his weaknesses and eye for shortcuts do not seem that far off from my own. If anything makes the Christian message stand out from all others, it’s the approach. Rather than coming from a position of strength, the message of Jesus comes from a position of vulnerability and humbleness. Jesus comes to serve the weak, not the strong. This unexpected twist on power flips the script on all deities. We do not gain God’s favor by our ability, but by our need for God. And God gives the grace if we only ask for it. We used to joke, “What is the best kind of beer?” The answer was “Free beer.” This grace from God is free and it really is much better than free beer, because there is no headache. I just have to ask for help and God fortifies me against anything. I need to be weak, and need help, to be strong. Admitting this is hard, asking for help goes against much of our worldly instincts. This message reverberates through the entire Christian era, even in a recent homily from Pope Francis. “Be reconciled: the journey is not based on our own strength. No one can be reconciled to God on his or her own…What enables us to return to him is not our own ability or merit, but his offer of grace…The beginning of the return to God is the recognition of our need for him and his mercy, our need for his grace. This is the right path, the path of humility. Do I feel in need, or do I feel self-sufficient?”* If a code of ethics is all we want or need, then Christianity would never have got off the ground. Even the ancient world had plenty of self-help philosophies. What sets Jesus apart from others is the claim that he is God, but he serves everyone, forgives everyone, and suffers. All of this from a position of weakness rather than strength. This is a wild claim to make and either puts him into one of two categories: he is either telling the truth, or he’s insane. If he is insane, then he’s lying about being the son of God. If he is lying, the resurrection is bogus. If the resurrection does not occur, then all of the New Testament can be thrown out. St. Paul said this very clearly, that all is in vain without the resurrection. Even the ethics and morals are moot because the ancient world already had plenty of moral teachers, ones that were not insane. If virtue is the sole goal, then options already existed. Thus, it all comes down to the resurrection. All of it: every miracle and parable, every clever comeback and turning of the cheek. If the resurrection does not occur, then the whole New Testament is a tale like any other mythology. As I mentioned earlier, one of the turning points in my loss of faith came from asking questions about the empty tomb and that it seemed easy to remove a body and claim resurrection. Not only that, but the different Gospel accounts of the empty tomb still conjure up those old doubts in me. Were there guards posted at the tomb or not? Who did the women see there? Was it one man, or two men? Or an angel? Exactly how many women came to the tomb and can we get the names please? Was the stone still in place or already rolled back? How heavy was the stone? How were the women going to roll back the stone for anointing if it was sealed? Were they at the wrong tomb? Did Mark add the resurrection paragraph after his first writing, and if so, did he think the empty tomb spoke for itself or did he add it to “fix” his story later on? Where is this tomb? This can go on and on. It has gone on among scholars, for a long time. I am not going to go any further into my former doubts on the tomb, because I stumbled across a used book in a Goodwill thrift store called Who Moved the Stone? which addresses all of these questions. I’m glad someone else already did the heavy lifting. I just needed to read this short book in a single sitting to soak up the answers I was longing for regarding the tomb. I’m also not going to go further on the tomb because of one other major reason that I cannot explain away: I cannot fathom the immense drive and spirit of the apostles, who tended to waffle, quibble, and argue. The flaws and frailties of these men make them clearly human, not fiction. And they went from cardboard to steel alloy in conviction, strength, and boldness. Their message never wavered in the aftermath. The only explanation to me is that they did indeed experience and confirm the resurrection of Jesus. All of the apostles were

32 min
16/07/2021

13. The Fall

I can only imagine that a true scholar would be rolling their eyes at much of this, given my amateur and immature understanding of theology, philosophy and the history of the Catholic Church. Likewise, I don’t expect that I’ve stumbled onto anything new and that this may read as a typical recovery story. It’s unlikely that someone will say, “Stop the presses: Here’s a leftover that found God after trying everything else. Wow, and an ex-drinker too?!” How unoriginal, I know. Still, I’ll continue in case one person out in the ether finds any of this pertinent to their own life situation. The major events that drove me to this spot in life where I’m writing this at all are as follows: the faith of my childhood, the discovery of drinking, the pursuit of knowledge, my varied and failed attempts to quit drinking, the arrest for drunk driving, my subsequent search for meaning, and the eventual return to faith. Which takes me to my next stumbling block, “The Fall of Man” and original sin. These loaded terms were always a sticky point, and I would guess might be for other religious “nones.” I thought this took a negative view of humanity, and that we actually had more goodness inside than evil. Back in college I felt this smacked of an “opiate of the masses” argument. Then I spent 20 years trying to behave myself and failed miserably. The tree of knowledge of good and evil, when taken literally, does seem a bit simplistic, but when taken literarily becomes genius. As I mentioned in one of my prior takes on drinking, the apple on the tree of knowledge could have been a bottle of Jack Daniels, or Coors Light, or a fancy cocktail. As Jim Gaffigan said, “An apple? Have you ever been tempted by an apple? I would have been like ‘put some caramel on it and come back to me.’” Strange, but it seems familiar to me, this path of innocence, temptation, knowledge, suffering, separation from God, focusing on self, and wandering in search of meaning…and…wait a minute. I have heard this before. It’s the summarized version of my entire life! Obviously the author of Genesis didn’t need as many words as I do to make a point. Using only a tree, serpent, and apple, the whole tale of “What’s wrong with me?” was told in a few pages. Yet I need many thousands of words and asides to get to the same point. Apparently I write much like I swim, zig-zagging instead of aiming directly for the buoy. The apple is not an apple. The apple is the source of temptation and the vices we cannot give up. The apple is drink, drugs, porn, news, possessions, fame, fortune, jealousy, hate. It’s one or more of these, or additional items not included on that list, but in summary it’s something other than God. G.K. Chesterton said “…the only dogma for which we have empirical evidence is the dogma of original sin.” Watch the 11 o’clock news at night, or even better, watch what’s going on inside of you. You’ll see the evidence…of original sin there. This deep level dysfunction that we can’t solve on our own. And that is an enormously important door into Christianity. (WOF Episode 270 at 11 minutes in) St. Augustine famously said, “Lord let me be pure - but not yet!” There is a yearning for goodness, somewhere, inside everyone, but we want to cling to our will and vice because it’s fun or we believe that these sideshows represents freedom. I didn’t want to let go of drinking even though I knew that drinking continually disabled me from living the life I wanted to live. With alcohol in my life, I could never live up to the morals that I pretended to hold. I could not stick to an exercise program, could not be honest with people. Every regret in my life came from a night of drinking. Without exception, every hurt I caused in this world could be drawn directly back to drinking. Removing my “freedom” to drink gave me all of the good things that I wanted and I became more free precisely because of self-denial. Unfortunately, vices and sin can be like a game of whack-a-mole, where you knock one vice down and another pops up. Pride, vanity, lust, anger, the urge to dominate others - knock any of these down and they will re-emerge in another form, shape shifting, always looking for cracks to crawl back into. Like a house, the slightest of gaps in windows or doors allows the outside air to seep inside and you never notice the draft, until suddenly you are shivering on a bitterly cold night. Only then you will notice the source of the problem, but it’s been there the whole time, even during the days of fair weather. There is much chatter in the past two decades about being “Good without God.” Sure you can be good without God, but the hollowness of that state crumbles under duress. I recall the time I saw Richard Dawkins speak at a bookstore. At the time I thought he was cool. I liked how he was undermining the faithful Pharisees of the modern age and sowing discord among the Christian hypocrites. But in watching and listening to Dawkins it dawned on me after only about ten minutes how miserable he seemed, even in his arguments. The smugness filled the room. In contrast I thought of my grandmother with her rosary and the never-ending joy in her that she brought to her family. I thought of the billions of people who found hope in faith. His uninspiring message made me leave that talk feeling empty, the opposite of how I felt around my grandmother and other Christians. I entered as a Dawkins fan, only to leave repulsed by his message. This put me in a no-man’s land because I couldn’t accept God, nor could I reject God. If the “selfish gene” was the driver of all motivation, then we are selfish, and therefore sinners anyway. Worse, without redemption we are hopelessly evil. If there is only the rule of law to constrain our actions, put on your seatbelts, things will continue to get bumpy. Some people may be good without God, but not for long, and not when times get hard. Yes, plenty of people pretend to be Good with God, too, and I know some atheists and agnostics that have a stronger moral compass than some Christians I know. But without God, in the end, it’s every man for himself. What Revelation makes known to us is confirmed by our own experience. For when man looks into his own heart he finds that he is drawn towards what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from his good creator. (CCC 401) By my own experience, I am cognizant of this problem. If and when I remove my focus from God, I will soon start to scowl and stew, and distrust people and hate them for their foibles. When I keep prayer and hope alive, when I turn toward God, I can love my neighbor and expect nothing in return. My story is like that of Peter being invited out of the boat to walk on the water. “Courageous in the boat, but timid on the waters*” I too will sink when faced with fear and uncertainty if I lose focus. I take my eyes off of Jesus and fall, letting doubt discourage me, and I will quickly turn my back on the one place from which I can draw strength. The dysfunction takes over, the creature within rises, and I look for my apples, the ones I like to eat when I think God is not there. My favorite apple is knowledge. It’s like a HoneyCrisp apple to me. And I can only think of the Screwtape Letters, # 1, as the method of distraction to pull me away from what is good, back toward sin. To wind me up with doubt, I only need to apply racing thoughts: Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about. * I already know that I will lose focus and return to negative thinking and trip myself up over political, theological, or personal diversions. It’s inevitable. Other Christians will likely be the ones that push me away, but instead of letting that happen I need to hold the focus. Because after spending two decades searching for God, it would be a shame to do it all over again, when I already know the answer. Maybe Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings said it best, summing up the condition: “the hearts of men are easily corrupted.” The Catholic Church and Pat Benatar agree: Love is a battlefield. Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield, man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God's grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity. (CCC 409) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

12 min
15/07/2021

12. Literalism was Killing Me

The problem with the Bible is in the beginning. Genesis: that masterful piece of writing, that somehow causes so much confusion. Throughout college and young adulthood, my interactions with Christians that read the Bible literally caused me to turn away. Typically the extreme views of the inerrant word bothered me, and here I’m referring to ostrich-head-in-the-sand type of claims like that of the Universe being only 6,000 years old or people co-existing with dinosaurs. Unfortunately, at that time I deemed those extreme views as default positions of religion, as I spun further away from any and all religion. I felt exactly like St. Augustine, who said some 1600 years ago: “I was being killed by the Old Testament passages when I took them literally.” (Confessions p109, p414) This ability of ancient writers, from Augustine to St. Paul to Homer, to nail the exact feeling I have often surprises me, although it shouldn’t. There is a massive trove of wisdom from our ancestors, from all cultures. In college I had taken New Testament and Old Testament classes, thumbing over much of the Bible. What I found enjoyable as a child were the stories, such as the Creation, the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, the fascinating stories of the lineage of Jacob and Joseph. But in college I began to read closer and find the discrepancies with modernity, such as the rainbow being a sign of a covenant with Noah as opposed to refracted light exposing the spectrum to our eyes. Another example that had me laughing was the reference to mathematical Pi in First Kings. This error of Pi = 3 instead of Pi = 3.14… blew my mind, as the infallible book had mistaken one of the most common facts that every school child knows. Then he made the molten sea; it was made with a circular rim, and measured ten cubits across, five in height, and thirty in circumference. (1 Kings 7:23) Pi equals 3? No, no, stop right there: Rainbows and Pi had known answers, they were not signs and approximations. The teacher explained away the difference, the glaring error, but I could see the wizard behind the curtain now, nobody was fooling me any longer! About the same time the movement surrounding the “Historical Jesus” became known to me and I fortified my doubt with books and materials from the “Jesus Seminar” effort, which I now find to be aptly described as"Hot-Tub Religion" -- a Christanity with all of the pleasures and none of the pains -- the theological equivalent of Diet Coke. Thus, in college and for years afterward, I read the Bible literally and drained it of magic and miracle, much like Thomas Jefferson did with his Bible using a razor to carve out all miracles. The funny thing was that I had become the literalist. Fundamentalists and atheists read the Bible literally in every book. As time has passed and I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed that extremists, religious or non-religious, from the political left or the political right - these people are almost identical mirrors of each other. Well, my teacher attempted to explain the problem of Biblical literalism to me, but I had no interest in listening by that time. Both professors that I had on religious topics, I rejected, despite their knowledge far exceeding my own on the subject. On my term papers, the teacher would mark up my smart-ass comments and suggest that the rainbow could be a symbol, or that Pi need not be precise to the decimal in order to get the basic shape of a circle. Sometimes you have to read a book three times to get the point. Actually, reading a book at different phases of the journey can provide new takeaways, as I know this from reading and re-reading Moby Dick and 1984 and The Brothers Karamazov and other masterpieces as I cruise through the five acts of my own life’s play. The problem with reading the Bible literally as a fundamentalist does is that it becomes robotic and feels spoon-fed. The problem with reading the Bible literally from the modern scientific view, as if the books were peer-reviewed academic papers, is that the context of the culture and the genre becomes lost in minor details that miss the entire purpose. The change and awareness about literalism happened for me through a video, not a book. A short moment of teaching, of hearing something that I had heard many years before, shattered my cynicism in a moment. I caught a video series called “Symbolon” that spelled out the difference between “literally” and “literarily.” One syllable. A few letters. It makes all the difference in the world to me. The Catholic approach to Scripture is different from the fundamentalist view, which reads Scripture in a literalistic way. To discern the truth God put in Scripture, we must interpret the Bible literarily, remembering that God speaks to us in a human way, through the human writers of Scripture. That means that we examine the context and intent of the author for any given passage. -From Symbolon (session 3) The power of one syllable is stunning. Literally vs literarily makes a world of difference, and was a huge stepping stone to faith. In fact, as far as the power of one syllable goes, consider this: superlative and superlaxative are also only one syllable of difference, but what a difference in meaning. I guess the problem was always this: I felt gullible and stupid swallowing the “literal” pill. Honestly, I think that was always the problem, from when an adult first told me to “Just believe and not ask questions,” that response knocked me back so far that I couldn’t get over it. Alongside that, I failed to remember and realize that the people from two thousand and three thousand years ago also were not stupid. They survived and withstood hardships that my generation could not fathom. Their grasp of knowledge had a depth far beyond our own in seeing the world without the knowledge that has been revealed through science over the past two hundred years. I suspect if you threw the people from today back into the era of Moses, we would have gladly remained in Egypt unless he would have promised Netflix and porn on the other side of the Red Sea. Furthermore, the average person today, who so cleverly knows how to use appliances and technology, would be utterly useless in the ancient times and have no clue how to teach and apply any modern knowledge to their world, since we are all specialized and sharpened to very specific tasks today. The difference between literally and literarily is but a single syllable, but the alteration in understanding leaps forward. I feel that this point of Catholic teaching has been buried for a long time and should be trumpeted from the Pope himself. Of course, it has been, I just wasn’t listening. If I could be so turned off by the literal readers turning the Bible into a square peg for a round hole, surely many others also felt that way. I think that’s why books like Moby Dick became so fascinating to me, because those were meant to be read for the deeper meaning, not the superficial “whiteness of the whale” that Ahab was so angry about. Reading Moby Dick literally would ruin the story. The book would be complete garbage if read literally instead of literarily. I love books and literature, and I do believe that the many years of literal, fundamentalist voices claiming Biblical authority led to the demise of many individual faiths like mine. I could be wrong, and I often am, but I don’t think I’m alone. I mentioned Bishop Barron earlier, because he is articulating the thoughts that I failed to muster. Seeds of ideas about faith that I had, he has brought to full bloom. In the Word on Fire Bible, an introduction discusses how to approach to the Bible. I used to laugh about this question, as I recall a college professor talking about “How should we approach William Blake?” As I can’t resist crudeness, I always thought this sounded like we might be going to kidnap him. I guess we should approach William Blake from behind, at night, with a dark van. Sorry, another digression. Brevity is the soul of wit, and vigorous writing is concise. I’ll try to remember that. Barron discusses in “How to approach the Bible” the solution to my inability to appreciate the book with five strategies. In my post-college years I did pick up the Bible once and decide that I would just read the whole thing again, as a piece of literature rather than revelation, as I had wanted it to be literature, but felt that dogma disallowed that type of reading. Well, reading Genesis is fun, and Exodus, but once I reached the laws of Leviticus I stopped. I couldn’t do it. I moved on to some science fiction and stayed there for a few years. My approach to the Bible as a single book does not work. The idea that the Bible should be taken literally is a pointless question, because every book is a different genre. The Bible is not one book, but many books, and you have to read each book wearing the proper hat. Is it poetry or history? Is it a prophet speaking or a third-person narrator? When Genesis is read literarily, it truly is a magnificent piece of literature and speaks with great meaning, the deepest thoughts, and answers the questions of the hungry heart. Too bad I didn’t know this long ago, but the Catechism spells it out pretty plainly, that Catholics do not read the Bible literally. The account of the fall in Genesis uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents. (CCC 390) In addition to that, the Catechism points this out rather bluntly, I just never bothered to read it. In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words

17 min
14/07/2021

11. Stumbling Blocks

I did not become a believer overnight. However, I began to ask, seek, and knock on the door, and found that if I kept doing those three things I gained understanding in the areas where I had struggled. Following the “What do I have to lose?” argument, I started to discard pieces of my doubt and chose to believe. I would avoid nit-picking and scoffing at every bit of the Old Testament that didn’t make perfect sense in the 21st century, and instead look for an overarching meaning, with a greater focus on the New Testament. This intention of mine lacked originality, as I recalled Chapter 4 of the AA Big Book describing my exact condition: We used to amuse ourselves by cynically dissecting spiritual beliefs and practices when we might have observed that many spiritually-minded persons of all races, colors, and creeds were demonstrating a degree of stability, happiness and usefulness which we should have sought ourselves. Instead, we looked at the human defects of these people, and sometimes used their shortcomings as a basis of wholesale condemnation. We talked of intolerance, while we were intolerant ourselves. We missed the reality and the beauty of the forest because we were diverted by the ugliness of some its trees. We never gave the spiritual side of life a fair hearing. All true. In the margins of my confirmation Bible from high school, I had scribbled in cynical comments alongside Genesis verses, as I had read the book literally to point out the contradictions. From the start I had issues, from the first pages, since not one but two creation stories occurred. In college I had read Native American creation stories, Hawaiian myths, Greek and other stories, and so I had tossed in the Hebrew book of Genesis with the lot, discounting it as nothing more than another myth. Rather, I considered it the dominant myth of creation, but no more correct than stories of Greek Zeus or Hawaiian Pele. However, whenever I read any of those creation stories I marveled at how over space and time, separated groups of humans came up with similar ideas about the beginning, as if there were an intrinsic knowledge or capability of understanding the world we lived in. Primitive or not, we all have stories to explain the world around us. What struck me is that all of these peoples found an origin story, because they needed the spiritual presence in their life to explain why there is something rather than nothing. Why does anything exist? Just as all kids do, I remember thinking of the universe and how it could not go on forever, that a meteor could not continue on to infinity, because I could not fathom infinity. Somewhere there must be a place where it ends, like where the vacuum of empty space turns into a fuzzy TV screen. I often thought of a “backstop,” as on a baseball field, where if the ball gets past the catcher, it doesn’t roll forever. There’s a backstop to halt the ball. The universe had to have a backstop or fence, or some kind of ending and beginning. Furthermore, something had to be first, as something could not come from nothing. The one thing that kept me from ever truly abandoning Catholicism, even as an atheist or agnostic, was the pursuit of science among its clergy. The Church has a lot of nerds in it who ponder these questions. As science had become my new religion, I considered the Big Bang the answer to the origin of the universe. When I first learned that it was a Christian scientist that came up with the theory, I felt a bit shocked, maybe even upset, because here religion somehow mingled with science without either being cheapened. Evolution, of course, was the other elephant in the room, and most of the time I heard about Christians trying to remove it from the schoolbooks. From the Scopes trial to Intelligent Design to the latest Texas textbook controversies, there seemed to be a continuous goal to sweep the idea of evolution under a rug. Because of stories in the media over the last 25 years focusing on this fundamentalist view, I had forgotten that Catholics do not object to the idea of evolution. They teach evolution in Catholic schools and hold that evolution doesn’t conflict with Church teachings, because it doesn’t conflict with God as the “First Cause” of the universe, nor does it discount the spiritual soul, the ghost in the machine that transcends the atoms that form the body. The soul is touched by the sublime. This same idea can be found in all creation stories across the world, that deep in our hearts and minds we know that something cannot come from nothing and that the soul goes beyond the material world. Far from being anti-science, the Catholic Church seemed to be one of the few pro-science religions and this didn’t get any attention in the press. From the Church’s rulebook itself, the Catechism states it quite clearly: The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers. (CCC 283) Creation and evolution do not sit in permanent opposition to one another as both sides of the fundamentalist secular and religious folks would have us believe. Science and faith are not in a battle to the death. One thing that has amazed me is the number of practicing Christian and Jewish scientists in the world. I formerly considered these people to be mad, since holding both scientism and religious dogma could not be done simultaneously, or so I thought. These people had volumes more knowledge than myself on science, yet somehow they maintained their faith. How? Did they fail to take notes in college? Were they dense? I think that I was a bit dense, and I realized that science has as many radical fundamentalists as any religion. While I strived to deny God, I could never remove the notion of the “First Cause.” Accepting this idea alone, rather than fighting it, reminds me a bit of the Ironman endurance race where I was trying to defeat the water rather than relaxing and letting it lift me up. Fortunately there is ample readings from the Church to discuss all of these things in detail, and far from running away from science, the Church’s embrace of knowledge means that truth can be sought in both lab coats and vestments. Then there is art. Yes, art, the un-scientific pursuer of truth that spills forth from emotion and feeling, edging upon the spiritual realm beyond ours by its very attempt. We praise science for its march of progress, while art stands the test of time regardless of our knowledge of biology and chemistry and physics. Dante and Shakespeare do not diminish as we learn more about the world. The great epics and fables from all corners of the world are no less today than they were on first utterance. They were deep in meaning before technology allowed them to be presented on paper or phones, and their depth exceeds the tangible things of this world. If I think of a song that animates my heart, oldies like the heavenly praise of Ave Maria, or rage music like Smells like Teen Spirit, or tear jerkers such as Sunday Morning Coming Down by Johnny Cash and Fade into You by Mazzy Star - there is a paralyzing miracle to music that we all fall in love with, all of which brings us to a transcendent escape whether we want to admit it or not. For an atheist this is brain chemistry and psychology at play; our soul is merely atoms and electricity flitting about, bonding and breaking, bonding and breaking, until we fall into nothingness. Perhaps it’s a turning of the mind toward the divine that makes all the difference, allowing it be possible. Admitting that maybe there is more than just science made all the difference for me in appreciating nature and art. When God is real, and faith is pursued rather than eschewed, everything changes. Having walled myself off from God, I had actually walled myself in, to an isolation, and total loss of wonder. This is why people who have “found” faith are so annoying to those without it - because it changes everything, such that their former life seems like wasted time spent by a stubborn fool who refused to turn around and give belief a chance. This is why born-again people irritate us so much: they are happy. I used to say, “They are just using God as a crutch,” and now I think, “Wow, this is such a terrific crutch, I should have been using this crutch all along instead of those others ones.” Much better than the crutches of TV, beer, sex, celebrities, and constant seeking of approval of others. I mean, you could say that anything is a crutch. Someone on reddit once mentioned how desperate and lost I must have been to need Jesus to save me, and I thought, “That is so true.” It was meant as an insult, but I realized that he was like an Irish Setter pointing at the truth. The atheist made a great insight about me. I was desperate and lost. I’m so glad I found faith. Because in the end it’s not the person of faith who is crazy or boring or adrift, it’s actually the person without faith who doesn’t realize their own desperation and loss. If I consider the boredom and restlessness I had as an agnostic or atheist, and the joy I see at Sunday mass on people’s faces, there is no comparison. Laying on the couch watching Netflix empties me, while receiving Communion at church with the other faithful invigorates me and re-charges my life. This reminds me of Ignatius of Loyola, when after being wounded by the cannonball he laid in his hospital bed reading adventure stories about knights, and the excitement faded into disappointment after he finished those books. Then he read the lives of the saints and felt joyful, motivated, an

14 min
13/07/2021

10. Work

Having made the grade on my test of physical endurance, I felt compelled to focus more on my work, since the nine months of training did stretch my dedication to the corporation that employs and pays me. I have long enjoyed the products and culture of the company, often being a cheerleader and one who “drinks the kool-aid” to be a good soldier of the rank and file. The willingness to put in long hours or do extra on the weekend came naturally since the game of global competition ensured that there are the quick and the dead when it comes to the modern market, especially in the technology arena. Now, with that declaration of my work-ethic, I also enjoy slacking off at work and I burnout frequently. But I like to speak of my undying work ethic to feel like a good American, since we tend to equate work with a person’s value. My own father imbued a strong sense of work for work’s sake in his children, as did his father before him. Work defined a person’s character and worth. A lazy person was “a worthless thing.” Money was fine, but to be known as a hard worker garnered more respect and honor. You’ll notice that I sometimes desire honor over other worldly things, and that is my vanity. However, I’ve noticed that change over the past thirty years in American culture. Money has come to be viewed a measurement of a person’s goodness more so than the work he or she does. This placement of money over character has surely been around forever, but I have observed a change in opinion surrounding these desires just among the people in my circle of life. Surely by now a clear psychological profile could be pulled from these writings and I’m aware that various notions of my goal-seeking and work-aggrandizing ways may be damaged to various degrees. I know some strange notions of morality hover over me and I have confusion in my own thoughts and words. However, in a place of hard winters and farm life, I believe this culture against sloth took form out of necessity, since lack of preparation and unwillingness to complete tasks could result in disaster. A work-oriented lifestyle made sense until the hard winter problem was solved with forced air furnaces, gas fireplaces, and whole-house humidifiers. The chores of farm life no longer apply to most people because there are few farms left today. Larger factory farms is all that is left, which employ low-paid immigrant labor, and large farm families no longer make sense given the costs of raising children. Those of us that left these millions of defunct small farms found work in cities, as we have since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Part of the restlessness of myself seems to be an American problem at large, since when I lived in Europe the locals complained that we Americans “did not know how to have lunch.” True enough. Even today, I often eat lunch at my desk, not wanting to waste time on a meal. The sense of business and needing to do something all the time emanated from old values toward work, but modern technology seems to have increased our fear of missing out. In fact, farm people did stop for lunch and took afternoon breaks, and in the evening found time to be still. Time is money, and we want not only to be successful in money but also experience everything. Most interesting is that in our drive for efficiency in everything, we forget how to relax, to the point that the work itself becomes a hamster wheel that we actually want to spin upon. I have often confused sitting at a computer with being the equivalent of being productive, when most of the time I could shut the laptop and get the same amount of “work” done. Even when not working we rush about “experiencing” everything that we can squeeze into the hours, to feed our senses of touching, tasting, seeing, hearing, and doing. Leisure becomes like work when chasing experiences. The intangible work that I do with software causes an internal struggle in me since I have nothing to show for my many years of work. Being someone who apparently needs feedback and approval, a sense of honor, this ethereal production of code never felt meaningful. I was urged into the technical fields in order to “make money” so that I could live a “good life.” That pairing of money and goodness did not match the teachings of my youth, particularly in the Church, but the message of what mattered in this worldly life became clear, as perhaps it did to many in the 1980s when greed accelerated as an American virtue. Simultaneously we were taught the fear of retiring poor, as we had to “pack our own parachute” lest we strike the ground at retirement at the terminal velocity for poverty. Greed and fear are twins that grow together. With the sedentary nature of my work, I missed the physical labor and bloodflow of life. I spent so many years turning to drinking instead of exercise to get my mood lift for the day, which of course is a false lift, since drinking takes you up a ladder to nowhere with the buzz, and at night during sleep you slide down a bit further to a lower point on the ladder for the next day. There had been efforts toward exercise, but nothing sustained until I finally quit drinking and then, as I’ve covered in too much detail, the obsession to exercise replaced drinking. Exercise did give me a proper lift of spirits, however, and allowed me to look past the empty feeling that software and IT work deliver. For a case study on how the IT world feels to me, see the movie Office Space. Over the years of work I’ve had periods of dedication and burnout, like a cycle of its own. The weekly sprints and quarterly releases of software tend toward frantic states of activity and then in between there are many break-fix troubleshooting days that can extend late into the evenings. Solving little problems keeps work interesting, and in another path of life I might have been an appliance repairman or mechanic and enjoyed that. Much of my work has been in troubleshooting and I’ve developed a knack for finding the source of problems and making corrections. I realize that all work becomes monotonous and can feel soul-crushing if a person allows it to. I had allowed my own soul-crush to happen. Really, I chose that option. In an earlier post I mentioned that career lived at the bottom of my list of priorities, but at times it hovered near or at the top. Like so many others today, I found my meaning in my work, even my identity, and I reveled in my commitment. Like my one night in jail, I felt superior to my co-workers. Why? Because I was a producer, not a feeder. In fact, I could have been Shylock from The Merchant of Venice as I spoke about co-workers in the same manner: …a huge feeder, Snail-slow in profit, and he sleeps by day More than the wildcat. Drones hive not with me, Therefore I part with him… So much for being a team player. I disdained the “worthless” but still enjoyed their praise when I completed a task or showed the way. Interestingly, I enjoyed working with first or second generation immigrants to America most of all because I found them usually hungry to make their mark, which meant working hard, working extra, and going to great lengths to complete their tasks. I judged my fellow extended-stay Americans as less valuable since they often checked out at 5 o’clock and worked a mere 40 hour week. Given this observation, I understood why IT jobs were fleeing to offshore hubs. Truth be told, I had periods of time where I did little, often after I built up a lot of reputation capital for some fix or solution that earned me a lot of back slaps and attention. In reality, I played the “feeder” when I could because I wanted to pursue my own side projects and goals, including running, biking, and swimming. During my training, I would sneak away from work and cancel dubious meetings in order to exercise. Upon completion of the Ironman, I threw myself into work again as I could finally back off from training. The product, the glorious product, needed to be better and I would be its champion. As for why it needed to be better, I didn’t care so much about market share or money, I just didn’t like the overall quality and every bug I filed or fixed caused an embolism in my head. When I focused on the product, I became agitated. In fact, the product often irritated me, just like co-workers often irritated me. In fact, my phone irritated me, the news on the phone irritated me, Facebook irritated me, YouTube comments irritated me, anything Twitter related really irritated me, and even LinkedIn had a similar effect of…irritation. I was always irritated about something in the online domain. Unless I was exercising or hanging out with my family, I was probably irritated. I felt bothered and bitter much of the time, and it tied directly back to the wonders of software and the internet. Oh, on the exterior I held it together and showed the happy face, the peaceful and calm dude, at your command, delivering that white-glove service. I realized that I hadn’t been to any AA meetings for quite some time and according to AA, that meant I had been “white knuckling” my sobriety, a term I disliked since I felt that they used it to impress people back into AA. But this term fit my state, I had been gripping things too hard like exercise and goals as my guide for life. Even if I did pray for help, strength, and direction, I usually did so semi-seriously as my limited faith had already slipped. I was still at the point of acceptance of a Higher Power, much further along than the Street Light God, but still occasionally blocked. The great scissors of the Serenity Prayer, for cutting through life’s irritations, I had forgotten. The restless spirit lived on and the hungry heart gnawed at me. Approaching and passing four years of sobriety, I knew that I could never go back to drinking because I’d wasted too many years in that morass already. One day I checked on my savings and 4

21 min
12/07/2021

9. Ironman

Before dawn, I stood at the starting line of the swim, among a horde of people in black wetsuits. A mist of the morning shrouded the water. I could see the slight chop on the surface, as the wind pressed on the dark lake. I hardly slept an hour the night before the Ironman, not due to nerves, but because my old college roommate, who offered to stay with me at the hotel for moral support, had snored the entire night. Fatigue already had a hold of me and I hadn’t yet started the race that would take the entire day. The size of the crowd of triathletes surprised me, as there were so many people willing to partake in the same challenge. The swimmers lined up by ability, so I move to the back of the pack, knowing that I would not impede those who actually knew how to swim. The line crept forward as the race started. To reach the water it took nearly forty minutes as only a few people entered every few seconds, staggering the swimmers to minimize the inevitable collisions that happen in the water. The sun peeked over the horizon. Suddenly I was in the water and stroking at the water with my head down, breathing from side to side every three strokes as I had practiced. The lack of sleep I could feel in my arms and legs, the muscles and tendons felt acidic and brittle. But that was a secondary concern as the waves exceeded my ability. The chop in the water slapped at my face whenever I turned into a wave and I began swallowing water and sputtering, gagging and nearly choking several times. My training had been done in placid pools and lakes, not ocean-like conditions. Only once or twice on a vacation had I swam in the surf and I lasted only a short time where the waves were breaking. Other swimmers ran into me and I ran into them and control of the day quickly slipped away from me. I panicked. Within two minutes I felt spent. Earlier that year I recalled reading about several drownings at races. I wanted to get out of the water as fear of drowning reached up from the bottom of the lake like seaweed on my feet. But I could not tuck tail and run now, not after all the training, not after telling people about my goal. The reason why those people had drowned flashed through my mind as I thought about my intention to continue. Had they experienced a moment where they should have stopped, where their instinct had warned them? I bobbed in the waves for a bit and then swam forward. Again the waves struck my open mouth when I turned for air and I swallowed a mouthful, again gagging and nearly vomiting. From the pool I had learned how to take a mouthful and keep going, since that is part of swimming (and the joke is to think of it as hydration). Getting water in the belly wouldn’t kill me. But getting water in my lungs would kill me and the amount I seemed to be taking in worried me. A frantic desperation came over me as I thrashed against the water, kicking and pulling, kicking and pulling, fighting the entire lake, like Achilles fighting the river God, Scamandros, in the Iliad. “And in his confusion a dangerous wave rose up and beat against his shield.” Except Achilles survived that fight with the help of Athena, who was definitely not coming to my aid in this wine-dark lake. The fatigue and fear struck me hard and I swam over to a kayak that floated near the swim course. The man in the kayak, my version of Athena, was a mortal spotter for swimmers in need of help. I asked him if I could put my hand on his kayak for a moment to gather myself, and he nodded and said, “Just don’t pull too hard or we’ll both be in trouble.” For thirty seconds I gently held onto this little life raft, collecting myself and watching the chaos around me. From there I could see swimmers running into one another. Swimmers turned up like a pod of belugas catching mouthfuls of air. The colorful swim caps dipped under and re-appeared. The sound of continual splashing and thrashing filled the air along with the slap of the waves against the bodies. I told myself to relax, remembering that water cannot be controlled or defeated. To let myself float and flow with the water would spare my strength and allow me to rudder myself toward the first buoy. Watching the swimmers and the directions of the waves I suddenly realized why I was drinking so much water. The slap of the waves came from the left, therefore I needed to breath on the right. Upon resuming I stopped kicking and dragged my legs behind me, letting them float like logs. The water lifted and dropped me on the waves. No longer fighting it, I pulled myself through the water and breathed every fourth stroke, on the correct side, where no waves could surprise my face. In true amateur form I swam way off course several times, being way off track and not aligned with the buoy. The rookies like me formed an enormous gaggle in the water, spread wide in all directions, clueless to direction. But I didn’t let it discourage me and I swam back to the thrashing flock to get in line, only to get off course again minutes later. At least once a minute I ran into another person, or someone ran into me. Typically we would both stop and say “Sorry,” and then continue on. I suspect among the elite swimmers there is a less forgiving spirit, but in the back of the pack most people seemed to understand that mistakes happened…a lot. When I passed the first buoy I felt like my body had called up some reserve energy forces, most likely summoned by the adrenaline and fear felt in the first few minutes. I had done 2.4 miles in the pool a few times so I knew I could slog this out, and “Just keep swimming” like Dori, the fish in Finding Nemo. An old shoulder injury tended to come back when I swam and I felt the joint crunching with each stroke, but I kept throwing out that arm, over the top, over the top, until I came to the next inflatable buoy, which I ran into with my head. I laughed at my navigational skills and continued onward, zig-zagging through the lake. Turning at the last buoy a sense of elation came over me. Exhaustion neared in my arms from pulling and pushing. But with merely a third of a mile to go I knew that this milestone in endurance would be met and passed. The shore neared, slowly, as I kept peeking up every few strokes. Some kayakers and paddle boarders shouted encouragement. When I reached the shore I lifted myself out of the water and a sense of joy struck me. The “peelers” told me to lay down and they stripped off the wetsuit, and I ran, nearly naked, through a gauntlet of people to the transition area, smiling the entire way, ready to get on the bike and continue on. After the swim, the bike ride seemed almost peaceful as much of the ride was a cruise through country roads. I had upgraded my Wal-Mart bike to something better, though still going cheap compared to many of my fellow riders. The 112 mile bike ride is the fun part because of the scenery and speed. The only worrisome part of the ride is descents of steep hills, where I watched my speedometer hit 45 miles per hour. On skinny road bike tires, one slip or over-correction in steering can lead to an ambulance ride. With cycling, I tend to find that another mile can always be “gutted” out, or achieved by grit alone. The marathon at the end marks the beginning of the pain. As I mentioned that in a normal marathon, the race starts at mile 20. In a full Ironman, this is still true, but the pain arrives around mile 13. Or sooner. The first half of the marathon felt like a joyful hurt as I exceeded my target pace, only to find that my steps began to feel like hurdles in the second half. A kind person tipped me off before the race to find the chicken broth in the late hours for a restoration of the body. He said, “The chicken broth has pulled many triathletes back from dark places where they wanted to quit.” To my amazement, people lined much of the race, yelling encouragement, drinking and partying while we passed by, giving us a laugh or a reason to smile. The event is inspiring to others and I realized that selfishness in the pursuit does have something to do with it, but at the same time these events, while useless, can inspire and bring joy to this world. Rain started to fall in the last hour of my race and my shoes squirted water out the sides with each step. Several times I had to walk to allow the pain to settle out of the muscles and to let a cramp fade away, but I resumed as soon as possible. My wife appeared on the side of the road, supporting me, giving me hope. My best friend in the whole world, always, through the years, through my drinking, my arrest, my recovery, my moodiness, and my searching. And I am embarrassed to know that I have neglected to put marriage into its proper placement in the order of priority - and its place must be at the top. As I came toward the finish line and crossed under the large digital timer, onto the red carpet, I heard the iconic saying, “You are an Ironman” coming from the announcer, Mike Reilly. The mission was complete. I now had over three years of sobriety under my belt, a multitude of marathons for proof of change, and now the label of Ironman to boot. I had proven I could change my life. Real change, not just temporary modifications. The emotions came up again, not as strongly as the first marathon that I completed, but the fleeting contentment of accomplishment landed on me for a while. Another goal crossed off the list of things to do, with adversity faced and overcame, where I might have tapped out in the lake earlier in the day I continued, to the end, into the rainy night. I had everything in life and now proof that I could set and accomplish just about any goal. I fell asleep that night wearing my “Finisher” t-shirt and woke up feeling semi-normal, not nearly as sore as I expected. A new day in the post-race glow began and I posted this victory over self to Facebook, and I felt the power of the Likes gathering in me, as my friends and acquainta

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A Catholic reversion story, in 16 parts. whydidpetersink.substack.com

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Why Did Peter Sink?
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