Why Did Peter Sink?

About Why Did Peter Sink?

A Catholic reversion story, in 16 parts. whydidpetersink.substack.com (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Why Did Peter Sink?

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

30 Jun 2021

Latest episode

12 Nov 2021

Latest episodes

16 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   12 Nov 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 (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/1corinthians/15?12&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary). 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com/p/the-empty-tomb?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary) 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 savior of the world, your messiah, rushed through an urgent kangaroo court trial and brutally executed with two murderers does not fit with any other story ever told. And no, the myth of Horus is not the same, not even close (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jesus-is-not-copied-from-pagan-mythology-zeitgeist/id1354647807?i=1000530751739&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary). Great effort among doubters is made to disable the message, but most amazing is that however many angles the attack takes to steer people away from the Gospels, it never works. The truth of these four books cannot be squashed, despite the Herculean efforts of writers and governments. The story taps into what is written in our hearts and for those who come to believe, the idea that we are both sinners and saved is shocking. That we are corrupt and don’t deserve saving, coupled with Jesus’ coming to serve us and die for us as if we were the heroes of the story, could not be invented by these writers and agreed upon so readily unless they were writing the truth. There is no myth of god of any other religion where the hero dies for the unworthy and then immediately turns around and forgives his killers. If anything, all other myths have the god turn around and wreak vengeance upon his tormentors. For anyone that reads these books without a cynical eye, with a historical context and critical study guides like those of the Navarre Bible (https://scepterpublishers.org/products/the-navarre-bible-gospels-and-acts?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary) or Word on Fire Bible (https://www.wordonfire.org/bible/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary), the reader will begin to feel the power of these words, as there is no myth or history or genre that can compare to this story. -The Gospels agree that Jesus had said multiple times that he would rise on the third day. This clearly stood out in the Apostles memory as it is recorded in multiple places. This “third day” repetition is hammered into them by Jesus as a reminder. -The “swoon theory” of Jesus not dying on the cross is beyond ridiculous, as the witnesses of the risen Christ do not see a staggering, bloody, nearly dead man in the Upper Room. They see a fully restored man, but with the wounds to prove it is Him. A “swooned” man who had been tortured and whipped and crucified and lanced wouldn’t be restored in a mere 2 days after the event. He wouldn’t be able to walk or move. Those type of injuries would have had a man on a gurney, not eating fish and walking to Emmaus. Moreover, the “swoon theory” didn’t come about until modern times when some creative academics got together and invented it. -There is more written about Jesus than any other historical figure of his time. Clearly he existed, and clearly the Romans crucified him. Matt Nelson of Word on Fire recently wrote an article (https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/the-claim-of-christianity-did-jesus-really-exist/32456/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary) on this. -Ancient people, I have come to realize, were probably less gullible than people are today (see the internet and Facebook for ample evidence). The idea that the “ancients” were morons is just modern prejudice, also known as chronological snobbery. The idea of someone rising bodily and passing through walls and ascending to heaven would have been every bit as incredulous to an ancient audience as us today with all of our gains in modern science. -The message could not be stopped. In a short time, this idea spread like wildfire. Starting with Rome and ever since, empires have attempted to stop the message of the Resurrection and failed. There is something greater at work, something beyond this world, something stunning and world-changing. There have been plenty of false messiahs whose messages go nowhere. But this one cannot be stopped, and all of the witnesses agree and will die for it and did die for it. This quote from Frank Morison (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/who-moved-the-stone-frank-morison/1111630242?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary) sums up the challenge that is put before us: If the sole evidence for this really extraordinary phenomenon lay in a single passage in the early chapters of Acts it would be possible to regard it as the rather exuberant record of a contemporary historian whose close connection with the movement had biased and colored his views. But this is precisely what no one can claim. There is a far earlier and more authoritative testimony in the letters of Paul, of Peter, and of James the Just, and in the admittedly historic network of Christian churches stretching from Jerusalem through Asia Minor to the catacombs at Rome. Only from an intensely heated center of burning zeal could this vast field of lava have been thrown out from a tiny country like Palestine to the limits of the Roman world…The phenomenon that here confronts us is one of the biggest dislodgments of events in the world's history, and it can be accounted for only by an initial impact of colossal drive and power. Yet the original material from which we have to derive this dynamic force consists of a habitual doubter like Thomas, a rather weak fisherman like Peter, a gentle dreamer like John, a practical tax gatherer like Matthew, a few seafaring men like Andrew and Nathanael, the inevitable women, and at most two or three others. I do not want to minimize the character of the historic nucleus from which Christianity sprang, but, seriously, does this rather heterogeneous body of simple folk, reeling under the shock of the Crucifixion, the utter degradation and death of their Leader, look like the driving force we require? Frankly it does not, and the more we think of it disintegrating under the crisis, the less can we imagine it rewelding into that molten focus that achieved those results. Yet the clear evidence of history is that it did. Something came into the lives of these very simple and ordinary people that transformed them… …The sequence of coincidences is too strong. When we remember the swinging around of the disciples from panic fear to absolute certitude, the singular matter of the seven weeks' gap, the extraordinarily rapid adhesion of converts in Jerusalem, the strange absence of administrative vigor on the part of the authorities, the steady growing of the church, both in authority and power, until the whole situation blew up into the frenzied attempts at suppression under Saul, we realize The Historic Crux of the Problem that we are in the presence of something far more tangible than the psychological repercussion of a fisherman's dream. If the flip happens in your brain, from disbelief to belief, where resurrection becomes a capitalized “R” - Resurrection - you are in trouble, because there is no turning back. You will be stuck with the result of being happy and having a purpose in your life like you have never experienced before. You will no longer be sinking, you will have a hand reach out for you when you look away and start to fall. The fear of being adrift will disappear when you say, “God, help me,” and Jesus will reach out and grab your hand before it goes under. He will save you first, and then with a gentle rebuke he will say to you, “Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?” Notes: Listen to Trent Horn on comparisons to other myths (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jesus-is-not-copied-from-pagan-mythology-zeitgeist/id1354647807?i=1000530751739&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary). Read Matt Nelson’s article on the existence (https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/the-claim-of-christianity-did-jesus-really-exist/32456/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary) of Jesus and 4 reasons (https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/four-reasons-to-believe-jesus-was-really-crucified/18593/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary) to believe in the crucifixion. Book: Who Moved the Stone? (https://www.amazon.com/Who-Moved-Stone-Frank-Morison/dp/0310295610?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary) 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   18 Jul 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 (https://www.biblehub.com/matthew/18-3.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor) “…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 (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/22?35&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor) rules over the rest of the Bible: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” That last sentence puts a bow on the Bible. It’s like a gift card with a tagline message. “Dear reader, in case you don’t have time or energy to read a few thousand pages of ancient texts, here’s a quick summary for you: Love God. Love and forgive others. Your life is not about you.” It seems so simple. How easy it really seems to love everyone. If I direct my positive thoughts, my heart, and my soul toward God, I will see the good in all and love everyone I encounter today and every day. I think, yes, I am capable of that love toward all. I can be like that weird guy at the retreat who plays spiritual rock music and raises his hands, eyes closed, and calls for witnesses. But I can do it my way, through caring and understanding and respect. I could love them like a normal person might love others without a creepy weirdness! Sure, yeah. I can. I surely could. Then I step outside of the house and the world attacks and I attack it back. Heck, even inside the house I have attitude some mornings. Why is it so hard? I do know that when I stay focused on God, when I spend time in the morning with the New Testament or with Christian texts, I am more oriented toward this notion of “love thy neighbor” than if I get out of bed and charge out the door. Without question, this focus helps me to love others more effectively. But I lose focus, like Peter on the water, and slip - only it takes me a while to call out “Lord, save me!” since I like to sneer and judge for a spell before I recover. Why did Peter sink? Oh right, he forgets about God. To love one another sounds so easy, but in reality is perhaps the hardest task assigned to a Christian particularly because of this: it is actually easy to love someone when it is reciprocated, such as in a family, or in a Church full of like minded people (although there can be plenty of discord in those places too). What makes the Golden Rule really difficult is when the love is not returned, not reciprocated, but instead you are either hated or you have to shove aside your own feelings of dislike, disdain, or hate to remain humble. In fact, today in what is called the “post-Christian” era, it’s less likely that others will hate you for being Christian so much as they will just roll their eyes at you - because they have all heard plenty about Christianity. Rather than being persecuted, Christians seem the persecutor due to having such an incredible run of winning for two millennia. So what does this mean? I believe that Christians, American in particular, are feeling a backlash for being too aligned with worldly power. The “love” that Christians have been pushing since faith made its unholy merger with politics around 1980 has effectively flattened and removed the effervescent bubbles from the message. Love thy neighbor became love thy Christian neighbor, and to hell with the rest. Besides, everyone loves an underdog and for some time Christians were not the underdog that they are supposed to be. Without question the media and politicians have painted this picture, and have done so successfully, making Christians the enemy as of late. As the religious are removed from the public square and an atheist society takes shape, what comes afterward will be ugly. Those opposed to faith will focus on sins that the faithful have committed and ignore the massive amounts of charity and community work that followers of Jesus do in this world. This is not to say the abuses are excused. No way. There are horrific offenses that deserve full attention and justice. But there is far more good done in this world by those with faith in God than by the few faithful who have eroded trust in religion. Having worked at homeless shelters in two states, I can tell you that 99% of groups that volunteer are religious groups. Everyone ranting online from their computers about saving the poor - you don’t see them show up in person. They care enough to tweet, but not enough to enter the fray to mop the floor and do the dishes. Most Christians that I know are like me: human. (Some are very strange and I’m not yet sure about their origins, but most appear to be human.) But the reality is that Christians suffer the same problems with loving others as non-Christians, but the point of the whole doggone faith is to try to do better. The reason people go to church, is to return to the right path. When non-believers point out that people going to church have a lot of flaws, I have to laugh because that is the purpose. “Those religious people are awful.” No kidding? That’s literally why they are praying and asking for forgiveness. They are a bunch of sinners, the only difference is that those going inside are admitting their limits and faults. There’s a response from G.K. Chesterton about why did he become a Catholic, at which we said, “To get rid of my sins.” Those flinging and slinging mud at people of faith for having stains on their life are so close, so infinitely close to understanding the “why” but sadly missing the point. They point out that Christians are not perfect, they are sinners. To which every Christian who knows about original sin just nods in agreement and goes to church. Since I am not Jesus, that is why I have to try, try harder, and try again. Knowing that I will fail still means I need to make an effort, every single day, to love my neighbor. And that love needs to have no conditions attached to it. No strings attached. No waiting for reciprocity or validation - I have to love without being loved back. I must forgive all affronts and insults and perceived flaws, because I commit errors and sins when I lose vigilance. The minute I forget about God and stop praying constantly, I am pulled back into the morass of human nature. I am owed nothing, I owe all to God. I start to sink. I start to drown. When I think of the modern Church with the struggles of keeping the faithful, where people are leaving due to modern Siren songs, and chasing shiny things on the internet, like New Age religions and alternate lifestyles, the Church must remember the greatest of all commandments which the whole depends on. Love your neighbor. This is the focus. Never can the eye be taken off the ball of the greatest commandments, or the game is over. And the order matters. First: Love God. Second: Love your neighbor. Without the first, the second one doesn’t stand a chance. Want to know a recipe for disaster? First, take a fundamentalist version of Christianity and stir it real thick with politics, and let those folks be the primary voice of Christianity for several decades. Constantly preach anti-intellectualism in a rapidly changing culture where knowledge is expanding at an exponential rate. Fold in a distrust of science, making it an enemy of religion rather than a complementary pursuit of truth. Seize on a single grave sin, abortion, as the only focus of morality, ignoring the enormous list of unrelated mortal sins that mankind can commit. Divide the family by letting fathers off the hook, forcing no one into the discomfort of responsibility. Tenderize excessive drinking and drug use until fully meshed into daily life. Glaze the eyes of men and boys with endless pornography from an early age. Let marriage cool until the sanctity gels and turns into the equivalent of a high school relationship. Finally, for the topping, drape over a sex abuse scandal, sprinkled over a century, so abhorrent, so far beyond the pale that it makes Jerry Sandusky’s escapades at Penn State look like a parking violation. For a finishing touch, quibble over liturgical format while the building burns around you. Is it any wonder the Church says people are leaving vs. joining at a rate of 6 to 1? For myself to return, it took a series of events to even want to listen or learn from a Church that had seemed conjoined to politics. The abuse scandal shattered trust in the priesthood, which is a shame since so many millions get spiritual direction from them. The sense of “us vs. them” was apparent to me as a child, as Catholics were obviously mocked in films and society, and I could see how the faithful circled the wagons in America, going into defensive mode against the secular world. All the while, flaws were festering on the inside just as much as outside. And do you know what? Aside from Jesus, the flaws were on the inside and the outside long ago in the same way. Way back in 30 A.D. the Church was as full of flawed people as it is now. We can read about what a bunch of knuckleheads the apostles were before the resurrection awakened them and the Holy Spirit invigorated and steeled them. You can read St. Augustine and see how flawed he was on practically every page of his Confessions. It is actually the flaws that make us real. You can’t hide from them. They are not going away and never will. It’s not “us vs. them” it’s “us vs. us” because we are them! And them need help as much as us. Grammar is not my strong suit. In the first century, to go against the grain and preach “love thy neighbor” would get you crucified or boiled or clubbed. Nowadays it just earns the rolling of eyes and a yawn, because the focus on the greatest commandment became something of a joke. The problem is not that anyone disagrees with “Love thy neighbor.” No, the problem is that everyone agrees with that. But everyone has forgotten the first commandment of Jesus, which is to “Love God.” Today’s Catholic and Protestant only has to suffer ennui and disdain instead of a beating, mostly because of our own faults at forgetting to remind the world what the first commandment is. Loving neighbor cannot be done without love of God. I need a daily reset, getting back to the root solution to realize that: “I am not a smart man, but I know what love is.” Again, I must come back to God like a child, or in this bad joke of an example, like Forrest Gump to Jenny. As I digress away from the subject of this article, which is about the test of loving thy neighbor, I must write a bit more on the causes of why the Christian message, which at first spread like wildfire and took hold of the world for so long, has “petered” out in recent decades. We all know the story of Jesus and the resurrection. Everyone does. Everyone on earth has heard it in some form, but many give it about the same level of credence that they give to the Marvel cinematic universe. In fact, some people are more excited about the Marvel comics because it’s not brought to them via annoying religious proselytizing. Many years ago, I recall sitting on a beach on spring break when someone came and asked me if I’d chosen Jesus as my personal savior. I said, “No,” and asked them to move on. Now, at this point in my life I was agnostic so this experience annoyed me and I simply wanted these people to leave me alone. I always felt anger at them and thought of the Grateful Dead lyric in the song “Truckin’” where Jerry Garcia sings: “They just can’t let you be.” I had spent many years turning away Mormons and family members and quite literally anyone who was selling religion or telling me about God. Why? Why did anyone coming at me in the usual format of “Jesus as personal savior” repel me so much? Because I didn’t want to be sold. In America, everyone is selling, all the time, to the point that you know even the doctor is selling you in the clinic. The saying, “If you go to see a surgeon, he will recommend surgery” is true. There is nowhere you can go in this country without being pitched. I would watch televangelists and my stomach would turn at the spectacle of salesmanship occurring which was clearly in the name of money and fame rather than God. The beach, TV, and door-to-door evangelists with their pamphlets had nothing new to share, and I wondered how their pitch worked on anyone. The questions I had were not in need of a true or false answer, but the pitchmen were trying to close the deal as if I were buying a car: “So do you want this baby in red or blue?” This sales style of evangelization reminded me of salespeople at work, some who would throw their mothers into traffic if it meant hitting their quota. Salespeople in the software world must tailor their message to whatever product or feature produced the biggest bonus or commission. In corporate America, there is so much smoke and mirrors that it’s difficult not to see snake oil in all products on the market eventually, and unfortunately it was most apparent in the religious proselytizing. The trick to all sales is to appear like you are not selling something, but that you have something the buyer wants and needs. Funny that what the beach and TV evangelists were selling was in fact what I wanted and needed, but their pitch was not working. So for saving my soul, this elevator-pitch approach actually confirmed my suspicions of that old Marxist “opiate of the masses” idea, as if believing in religion meant being a simpleton and sucker who only believed because heaven sounded like a better option than hell. Who can argue with that? Heaven does sound better than hell. But I was lost on four things that the beach and TV evangelists were skipping over. I didn’t figure out what this approach was missing until I listened to Bishop Robert Barron, who spelled it out (https://www.wordonfireshow.com/episode14/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor) in a podcast. I couldn’t articulate the problem, but he could. These four points were the problem of why I couldn’t get on board with the simple pitch: * Existence of God: Do I even believe in God? This is the first block and if you can’t get past this one then you’ll never get to the Cross. But I would never have got past this block without falling on my face and having to find the Street Light God (https://www.whydidpetersink.com/p/4-release?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor). (Thank God for that Street Light God.) I realized in the end that finding the existence of God is not really an intellectual exercise, but an act of faith. And once you believe, only then do you understand. I do believe in God, because of the First Cause and Contingency arguments. Basically, something cannot come from nothing. I’ve moved on past this, but this is where most atheists and agnostics get stuck, and rightly so. Good luck with the Resurrection if you don’t believe in God! But if intellectual arguments are needed, then I choose to take up sides with Thomas Aquinas in his 5 Ways (https://aquinasonline.com/the-five-ways/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor). * The Bible: Fundamentalism and literalism had blocked me from considering it as anything but myth. I truly didn’t understand how Catholics read it until recently. I had to start over with a non-fundamentalist reading to even get started. Until I understood how to read (https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/video/how-to-read-the-bible/186/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor) the Bible properly as a Catholic, the wall was impassable. How Catholics read the Bible has made all the difference in the world to me. * Anti-intellectualism: Catholicism appeared to be against deep thinking, against reason. But this is the picture painted by those who dislike the Church, that want us to believe that Catholicism is merely an act of ancient ritual and superstition. I was like Han Solo, doubting (https://quotegeek.com/quotes-from-movies/star-wars/1001/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor) “hokey religion” as “simple tricks and nonsense.” In reality, the Church has a deep, intellectual history, but this had been somehow hidden from me and needed to be “re-discovered” by me. Starting with Augustine, I began to see how unexposed I was to the tradition of intellectual ideas. From those early church writings, through Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics, all the way to Popes Benedict and Bishop Barron, I began to realize the vastness of Catholic thought and teaching. All of the deep questions of philosophy, art, and literature have been considered and argued over the last two thousand years by people wiser than me. I had shut myself out of two millennia of wisdom and thought because of the prior two problems regarding God and the Bible. Reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Word on Fire Bible (https://www.wordonfire.org/bible/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor) blew my socks off as I found my assumptions to be wrong time and again. Plus, there is no shortage of intellectuals among the Dominicans, Jesuits, and Franciscans. The nerds at Catholic Answers (https://www.catholic.com/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor) seem to be able to take on all comers on any topic, be it chemistry, physics, history, or theology. This is what shocked me: there is no stone unturned in the cosmology of the Church, and no question too hard for it to answer. I may not like all the answers, but there is an answer. When I think of a question, when I’m feeling clever and believe I’ve found a plot hole, I quickly learn that my question has already been mulled over long ago and answered in excruciating detail. * Science: Finally, religion and science are not enemies but different avenues to truth. Catholicism is surprisingly (https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/does-the-church-oppose-science?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor) pro-science, far more than I suspected. The perception of a conflict between science and religion is invented, again by those who dislike religion. The idea that the Church is anti-science is not only wrong, but the complete opposite. The Catechism states that science glorifies God in helping us understand his creation. The Church’s only ask is that science should be done for good rather than evil. So figuring out atomic bombs and tweaking viruses for biological warfare are obviously bad, while curing disease and understanding the universe is good. In other words, the Church requests that science avoid advancing the opportunity for sin in the world. Not exactly controversial. Science reveals the world, but science cannot destroy or outshine God. The Catechism is quite clear on this in Faith and science (http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s1c3a1.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor#159): (http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s1c3a1.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor#159) "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are." As far as bringing myself back to the faith, I can say that Bishop Barron made more sense to me than a thousand other voices and I am grateful for his podcast and books, as that was the entry point that I needed to come back to the Church. Quitting drinking brought me to God, and Word on Fire (https://www.wordonfire.org/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor) brought me back to the Church. Alongside Robert Barron, there is another man, Timothy Keller, a Presbyterian, who made equally significant points to me about why that beach evangelism failed to work. He said, paraphrasing from a podcast (https://podcast.gospelinlife.com/e/the-gospel-and-the-outsider/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor), that there’s a gulf of difference between “religious proselytizing” and “gracious good newsing.” Jesus calls us to do gracious good newsing. No one wants the other form. Want to evangelize people? Then do the good newsing. Humility and grace will win converts, because knowing and showing that you are a sinner and not better than anyone else will catch a lot more fish. Oh, and treat everyone the same. Keller says your soul craves something, and Jesus gives it the living water that it needs. That’s the stuff - the simple stuff, without any lights or music or hand waving or virtual retreats. No psychedelics or TED talks needed. Gracious good newsing. Show me by example. I can believe that, and, heck, I can do that, because I am finally past those 4 bullet points above, which were the hurdles I couldn’t leap over for most of my adult life. Once past those blocks, I could worship God and pray to God. And then I could work toward loving others and expect nothing in return because Jesus has already died for my sins, and my salvation is through him. Because I am full of sin and mistakes, I need to love others. That is my duty as a Christian for what Jesus has done for us. In fact, if I cannot love someone, if I am struggling, I try to think of why. To love thy neighbor is not easy, and that’s why we have to double our efforts when we struggle to do so. The moment we forget the greatest commandment, we have lost the purpose, and we will keep losing because disdain or hate has stolen our gaze. God is love, and each person is a child of God, a person that deserves Christian love. Not lukewarm Christian love, but real love, just as Jesus gathered the tax collectors and lepers and all manner of sinners to him. This doesn’t mean all sins should be allowed and celebrated, because that is literally what the modern world thinks we need. We need to love the drunkard, not the fact that he’s drunk and wants to be drunk. Somehow people managed to love me through my drinking years, but it was clear that my priorities were out of order. The modern Pharisees are the ones who get lost in the dogma and lose the love. To me, Catholic teachings have the comprehensive cosmology that works and makes sense, both intellectually and spiritually. I suspect that any person who enters a church on any Sunday has about the same amount of sins on their conscience as any other person. Many of us have private sins that perhaps we only expose in silence or confession, or we fail to see altogether. Every soul in attendance at any given mass carries his or her own millstone into the pew. Everyone has a cross to bear, everyone has a vice, a tendency that weighs them down. Accepting sinners is part of the gig, especially when their flaws are not like our own flaws. This goes back to my flawed thoughts about flaws: my flaws are fine, but yours…are not ok. That doesn’t work. Now, clearly not every sin is as bad as murder, but there is a long list of grave matters that the Church defines and I wish you luck discerning God’s intention on which one is worse than the others. Last I checked they were all “grave” matters and each of us need to be constantly reconfigured and oriented toward Jesus. In reality, all of us sinners have at least one major issue to tackle and resolve through penance and faith in Jesus Christ. “…penance…must take into account the penitent's personal situation and must seek his spiritual good. It must correspond as far as possible with the gravity and nature of the sins committed. It can consist of prayer, an offering, works of mercy, service of neighbor, voluntary self-denial, sacrifices, and above all the patient acceptance of the cross we must bear. Such penances help configure us to Christ, who alone expiated our sins once for all.” This doesn’t mean sins of the modern age should just be glossed over and we pass laws enshrining and celebrating sin. There exists a Natural Law. Going out and getting drunk on purpose is against the rules. Looking at smut online is against the rules. Sex and booze both pave the road to nowhere. Drinking to drunkenness, in my experience, is the gateway to many other sins. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the multitude of social and family ills that beer and liquor unleash. Drug use and drunkenness open a floodgate to the whole garden of earthly delights. I believe that drinking gets too much of a pass in some Catholic circles. This concerns me quite a bit, as there is nearly a celebration of a drinking culture in the Church that many Protestant circles reject, and I think drinking is the plank in the eye of Catholics while they admonish others for their sins. I suspect much of the sin in the sex abuse scandal was due to drunkenness. St. Paul kind of sums up the modern world in one sentence of what we should not be doing. …let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. (Rom 13.13) (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/romans/13?13&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor) Drinking, drugs, and pointless sex are a no-go, according to St. Paul. And the “rivalry and jealousy” phrase reeks of social media. What gets thrown into the same pot by Paul? Sex and booze. Both are journeys away from God, both are false idols of this world. Both of these pursuits are searches into empty alleyways, which look like a carnival from the outside but turn into prisons. The key to “love” is not abandoning anyone who goes down those alleys to check out the carnival, but rather to wait for them to wake up and walk out, free from the bondage. Oh, and the other key is to not follow them down the alleyway and join in on the carnival of orgies and drunkenness. Take a look at the list on this page (http://www.aggiecatholicblog.org/2012/04/what-constitutes-grave-matter-what-makes-mortal-sin-mortal/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor) of mortal sins and contact me if you are free from all of them, since you might just be the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and I think I’d like to meet you. As for me, I can tell you that on any Sunday, I have, or have in the past, had one or more of these mortal sins marking me for need of forgiveness and penitential acts. I can see plenty that I know I’ve committed and on some occasions definitely should not have joined the Communion line. In fact, I just realized that gluttony happened to me this morning, when after breakfast I sort of had a second breakfast. Thus I’ve already befouled my day with a mortal sin, during Lent no less, yet no one will shame me for my error because I downed that extra Pop Tart in private. I am not the model of piety, and I know quite a few believers who are also like me. They are all like me, with human frailties and problems. In reality, even those who have remained faithful throughout the struggles of the Church commit sins every week, every day. I know that modern Christians like to draw the battle line in the sand between moral relativism and moral absolutism, where we hunker down behind a redoubt, bricked in by the absolute truths of Natural Law. But I will say the test for Christians is the same as it ever was: if I cannot love my neighbor, all of them, then I better check myself and try again, because the Golden Rule is kind of important. I mean, it’s just that little detail that Jesus said “the whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” I fail, and that’s the whole point of why I need to keep going back to Mass and asking for forgiveness during the Confiteor (http://preces-latinae.org/thesaurus/Basics/Confiteor.html?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor). If I fail to love someone that is different from me, or I spurn them because they don’t like me, then I didn’t really love them in the first place and I am at fault. First, I need to keep my own side of the street clean before I worry about someone else’s side of the street. I believe the true question for love is not a question at all, but a statement of fact from 1 John 2:9 (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/1john/2?9&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor). This is the whole test, right here: Whoever says he is in the light, yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is nothing in him to cause a fall. 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   17 Jul 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 (http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s1c3a1.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb)) 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 (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30659.Meditations?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb)) 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.”* (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/18?22&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb) 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?”* (http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2021/documents/papa-francesco_20210217_omelia-ceneri.html?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb) 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? (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/299961.Who_Moved_the_Stone_?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb) 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 fearful and had fled to hiding places during and after the crucifixion, but then become recklessly fearless and willing to suffer any amount of pain to tell the world what happened. These first Christians didn’t give their lives for a philosophical system…they died to uphold what they knew because they had seen it with their own eyes. Had it been a lie, then why die for it? … One after another these eyewitnesses gave up their lives defending the truth they had seen: Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead. (The Search (https://reallifecatholic.com/shop/the-search-book/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb), p.119) Suddenly, somehow, Peter goes from being weak and furtive to a fortress of faith. He is crucified upside down thirty years later, having preached the message his entire life, with no education beyond that of a fisherman. The other apostles fare the same. That is, badly, as they are stoned, burned, stabbed, beaten, boiled, clubbed, and crucified. All the while they are relentless in spreading this message, alone, in different areas of the known world, telling the same story. If they were up to clever tricks about the tomb or Jesus’ body, someone would have cracked and tattled. Moreover, if the authorities, Jewish or Roman, had stolen or hidden the body, they would have just produced it and ended this tall tale. Something happened, something profound, mysterious, impossible and life-changing for these people. Robert Barron says it best: “That this dejected band would spontaneously generate the faith that would send them careening around the world with the message of Resurrection strains credulity. What is undeniably clear is that something had happened to Jesus - something so strange that those who witnessed it had no category to describe it.” WOF Bible (https://www.wordonfire.org/bible/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb), p.280). With daily readings I have come to believe. My faith has come by effort and truly needs continual conversion to stay strong. I did not fall off a horse, like Paul did. The Church talks about continual conversion and the need to restore the belief, and this is true. In coaching there is a saying that you need to refill your “E-tank,” your “Emotional Tank,” from time to time. That is true of coaching, and it’s true of faith. Belief can feel like a gas tank that needs a fill-up, which is why daily prayer is so beneficial to it. Faith is also like fitness, where as soon as you stop exercising the backsliding into sloth and muscle atrophy begins. Whenever we lose focus, we start to slide, and the world has many distractions to pull that focus away. In fact, modern technology is entirely based on pulling our focus away, which is why programmers and marketers have “focus” groups and A-B advertising tests to figure out how to pull your focus away from life so that instead we will focus on their products and services. All of this drains the E-Tank of faith. As an example of losing that focus, and how quickly and easily it can happen: this morning I had spent time reading and praying and felt ready for the day, both in spirit and body. I got into my car and started driving. At the first stoplight a driver didn’t realize the light had turned green and I almost knee-jerkingly wanted to honk and call the man an idiot. I find this remarkable, as I had just spent time reading about humility, and the lack of it among the Pharisees. “For they preach but they do not practice.”* (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/23?3&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb) I’m such a Pharisee. How easy it is to be moral and righteous when alone, and how difficult in real interactions with people. So many of us today, particularly in our cars, leap to anger almost instantly, over minuscule events and perceived insults. I’ll apply that same sentiment to social media, which is the greatest poison to our peace of mind of all modern invention. At least in my car, only I can hear whatever cruel whim flits between my ears. Not so on Facebook and YouTube comments, where we are all free to spew angsty discord to the entire world. The human heart and mind so quickly drift from intentions and hopes, and so I cannot imagine the remaining eleven apostles, who were ordinary men, sticking to their wits and resolve with such commitment unless they were utterly convinced of the rising of Jesus. This accomplishment was not completed behind closed doors, by reading and writing, but by interaction in the world in the face of monstrous opposition. They did not bring the message by the sword, but rather the sword was put to them. These ordinary people did not flinch or crumble, as if their sign of the cross made their spirit, if not their bodies, impervious to the slings and arrows of this world. Now, if they had solely come up with a great idea or story that satisfied our hearts, they might have convinced only gullible people to believe. If that were the case, then the powers of the world wouldn’t have worried about them. But the apostles took this idea of the risen Jesus into the heart of the intellectual world of Jerusalem, and shockingly, won the argument. The eleven didn’t flee to the hinterlands to start proclaiming, they returned to the very location of the trial and death of Jesus, where witnesses lived and where the events occurred. [There is]…the indisputable fact that Christianity was gaining adherents at a prodigious pace. The movement was spreading beyond all reasonable expectation...The terrific persecution of Saul, involving an inquisition to places as far distant as Damascus, shows that four years later it had grown to really alarming proportions.* (https://www.gospeltruth.net/whomovedthestone.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb) Put this fact together with who first witnessed and started to tell of the risen Jesus. The women at the tomb were first, and Mary Magdalene explicitly is mentioned. The very first voice that recognizes and announces the missing body and resurrection is a woman who had “seven devils” driven out of her and was a “sinful” woman. If spinning a yarn, the Gospel writers would have posted someone of political or worldly significance. Perhaps someone like Caiaphas, the high priest, might have come to the tomb and said, “I was wrong. I can’t believe it, but it’s true,” and thrown himself into prayer. But no, the witness to the most important event in history is a “fallen” woman, who would not have clout, nor even enfranchisement among women. Yet she is the chosen witness, fitting with the “last will be first” of Jesus’ teachings. The empty tomb, as seen by the women, is undisputed. There seems to be no one arguing that the body is gone and the burial clothes were left behind. The only argument seems to be about what happened to the body, but not about the empty state of the tomb and the women being the first to discover it. The second voice is Peter’s, the fisherman, and his first proclamation starts with something funny, assuring that he and his cohort are not drunk. “These people are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.”* (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/acts/2?15&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb) That he needed to say this suggests that he knew this message sounded radical and insane. Without any education or platform to deliver knowledge, he begins by telling people, “Really, people, I’m not on drugs.” But the message is not aimed at simpletons, rather he delivers it to “devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem.”* (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/acts/2?5&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb) This implies both uneducated people and intellectuals. If this were all a charade and tale, the leader would need to be someone steeped in rhetoric and debate, to handle the rebuttals and logical criticisms that surely came immediately. But it’s a man who catches fish for a living, who somehow convinces thousands upon thousands that what he has seen is true, in the city where the event occurred. Peter is not a genius or shrewd salesman, but after Jesus’ death his character is altered dramatically. I often think of the saying, “The truth requires no rehearsal.” This is why salespeople and lawyers need to rehearse arguments, demonstrations, and pitches: because there is a roundabout angle to getting to the “truth.” Peter is able to speak plainly, from the heart, and people believe him, unrehearsed, because he’s telling the truth and wouldn’t be able to convince anyone if he were telling a contrived fiction. He doesn’t have the training and toolkit to do that. His transformation is unexplainable without the Holy Spirit filling him with grace. The same can be said for the others who became warriors of faith after having so recently been trembling and afraid at the crucifixion, hiding out, even returning to their old jobs after being devastated at the death of Jesus, thinking that he had not “redeemed Israel” after all. “It took an objective encounter with the risen Jesus to crystallize the disciples' faith in Him and cause them to proclaim His resurrection. Visions and subjective experiences would not have done it. Something had been seen. Something real.”* (https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/2004/03/who-moved-the-stone.html?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb) “Gethsemane's cowards became Pentecost's heroes. This is inexplicable without the Resurrection. Had prestige, wealth, and increased social status accrued to new believers when they professed Christ and His resurrection, their profession would be logically understandable. In fact, however, their "rewards" were of a different type, eventually involving lions, crucifixion, and every other conceivable method of stopping them from talking.”* (https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/2004/03/who-moved-the-stone.html?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb) I spent many years refuting and mocking the idea of the resurrection of Jesus. I have made many rude thoughts about it, siding with the doubters and logicians, writing off miracles as artifacts of an age where the world was haunted by demons. In reality, I guess my abandonment of Christianity was one response, because if you do not accept the resurrection, then the only answer is total abandonment of the faith. St. Paul has said the same, as have many others. Without the resurrection, what’s the point of it all? I cannot explain how resurrection can occur, nor do I need to, because I believe now that events can happen beyond our comprehension, that science does not and will never explain everything. Even if life is discovered on other planets, or our physicists take us to the depths of the quantum world, and biology cures the last disease, and psychologists can explain away and prescribe solutions for all mental ailments, nothing can replace the need for God in my heart, as I have followed it all the way down to the end of the line, and I know that the answer to all questions is through faith, by surrendering my will and intellect to belief in the resurrection of Jesus. The flaw of humanity is real, and I find nothing more convincing than the resurrection of Jesus as the cure, for the forgiveness of me and my enemies, as the only way to live in the world and hold on to one another for the promise of the next. There is only one path to removing hate, and that is forgiveness and love, and that is why the power of the Christian message never dies. Right now the world may be called “post-Christian” but it’s not, as nothing the secular world can offer will ultimately replace the message of love and forgiveness through God. The United States and Chinese empires of today will fall away like every other empire before it, like the USSR, the Third Reich, the Austro-Hungarians, the Ottomans, the Hapsburgs, the Holy Roman empire, the Romans, the Greeks, and a thousand other willed sand castles of mankind, yet the truth of faith will endure. People have in the past and will again in the future use, abuse, and twist the faith to make it a tool of worldly power, but the center will hold because love and forgiveness shine through any lies in the end. Straying from that cannot go forever because the believers are like yo-yos, who must come back to the starting point. Nothing could shake the power of the message that empowered the very first believers of Jesus, and time and again those who hold steadfast to the Golden Rule correct the errant ways of a drifting faith. To this day the power of the Word remains fully charged, and this is because of the resurrection. From a position of weakness, forgiveness, and love, we are saved from death, and the faith will carry that forward and never end. While we quibble over traffic, split our families over politics, moralize over sexuality and death, obsess with celebrities and materialism, entertain ourselves with movies and music, and distract ourselves with phones and computers, the righteousness of Jesus’ message and resurrection remains unbothered. Even if Christians go back into hiding for a thousand years, and the followers are once again hunted down, as they are today in parts of the world, the faith will never die - because there is nothing better on offer, nothing like resurrection and the forgiveness of sins, nothing above it, nothing with more truth, and nothing more satisfying to the heart. We are the inheritors of the greatest mystery of all time. We are the same as those originals, lost and found, over and over again. We may start out like Saul, but end up like Paul, unable to explain how or why it happened, just as we can’t fully explain the resurrection. Once you choose to believe it, you don’t have to explain it. I just know that it is real and that I have changed. “The phenomenon that here confronts us is one of the biggest dislodgements of events in the world's history, and it can be accounted for only by an initial impact of colossal drive and power…a habitual doubter like Thomas, a rather weak fisherman like Peter, a gentle dreamer like John, a practical tax gatherer like Matthew, a few seafaring men like Andrew and Nathanael, the inevitable women, and at most two or three others…seriously, does this rather heterogeneous body of simple folk, reeling under the shock of the Crucifixion, the utter degradation and death of their Leader, look like the driving force we require? Frankly it does not…Something came into the lives of these very simple and ordinary people that transformed them.”* (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/299961.Who_Moved_the_Stone_?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb) 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

4. 

   16 Jul 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 (https://www.wordonfireshow.com/episode270/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=13-the-fall-acb) 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 (http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s2c1p7.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=13-the-fall-acb#III)) 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* (https://sacredheartshrine.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Life-of-Christ-Fulton-J.-Sheen.pdf?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=13-the-fall-acb)” 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. * (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/49398-man-has-been-accustomed-ever-since-he-was-a-boy?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=13-the-fall-acb) 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 (http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s2c1p7.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=13-the-fall-acb#III)) 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

5. 

   15 Jul 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 (https://www.catholic.com/qa/what-did-augustine-mean?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12-literalism-was-killing-me), who said some 1600 years ago: “I was being killed by the Old Testament passages when I took them literally.” (Confessions p109, p414 (https://store.wordonfire.org/products/confessions-st-augustine?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12-literalism-was-killing-me)) 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 (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/1kings/7?23&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12-literalism-was-killing-me)) 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 (https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=3443&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12-literalism-was-killing-me)" -- 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 (https://watch.formed.org/symbolon-the-catholic-faith-explained?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12-literalism-was-killing-me)” 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 (https://cathedralctk.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/symbolon_-knowing-the-faith-leader-guide.pdf?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12-literalism-was-killing-me)) 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 (https://www.wordonfire.org/bible/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12-literalism-was-killing-me), 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 (http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s2c1p7.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12-literalism-was-killing-me#I)) 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. In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking, and narrating then current. (CCC 109-110 (http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s1c2a3.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12-literalism-was-killing-me#III)) So that’s kind of embarrassing, for me anyway, when I think of my past editorials at parties and comments to tear down religion. I knew everything, but somehow didn’t know this. Weird. I wonder what else I didn’t know. That distinction of how to read the Bible really was the largest block on my ability to proceed. If I could understand the “First Cause” and know that God had to exist, and allow myself an honest and intellectual look at the Bible versus a rote-learning pill-swallowing reading, this could be the start of something great. The other four point of approaches to the Bible from Barron also knocked over some problematic things for me. Here’s the whole list of five things that demolished a wall between me and faith: * Be attentive to the genre of each book. For example, Psalms is not a history book, so don’t read it like one. * The Bible is a one book but it is a library, and it tells one story, the unfolding of a great drama. * “Any interpretation of a biblical passage that militates against the love of God and neighbor is necessarily a bad interpretation.” St. Augustine said that love of God and neighbor is “the ultimate criterion for correct biblical reading.” * Distinguish between what “is in the Bible and what the Bible teaches” for there is an “awful lot of cultural baggage from the ancient world.” Look for the overarching themes and meaning as a whole. * The ultimate purpose of all books is the dying and rising of Jesus Christ and to “draw all people into communion” with Him. The third item struck home because so often the “love” appears lost in modern arguments, especially in the online world of vitriolic commentary between those with and without faith, and even between those with different flavors of faith. In many cases the faithful seem to struggle with that point as badly or even worse than those who doubt. Once again, I wonder how many people have fallen away from faith because of bad interpretations? If you read the Bible literally instead of literarily you can get off-track and forget to take the love potion. The fact that anyone could reference the Bible for pro-slavery arguments sums up the problem of “literal” readings, because there is much talk of slavery in the Bible from the culture and setting - but the entire purpose of the overarching story is to love God and your neighbor. 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

6. 

   14 Jul 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 just 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 (http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s2c1p4.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11-stumbling-blocks-b79#I)) 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 just brain chemistry and psychology at play, just as our soul is just atoms and electricity flitting about, bonding and breaking, bonding and breaking, until we fall into nothingness. Perhaps it’s just a turning of the mind toward the divine that makes all the difference, just 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, and full of life. Tales of knights or superheroes are like candy. Stories of faith are like rocket fuel for life. Acceptance of God’s existence may have been the biggest stumbling block for me. Years ago I had “allowed” the idea of God but didn’t fully inspect the idea until I started actively asking, seeking, and knocking. Saying yes to the existence of God allowed me to punch a hole in the wall I had built around myself. I thought I had built the wall for protection from the religious nuts of the world, but by hiding from them, I had walled myself into darkness. And for once I thought: they can’t all be nuts. Through that hole I could see a little light on the other side. And it was about time for some demolition of that wall. 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

7. 

   13 Jul 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 401K and realized how much I had saved. My retirement nest egg was incubating nicely. I realized I had everything. Everything this world has to offer, I had experienced or obtained it, and still the restlessness and wandering mind scanned for something more or new or different. There was literally nothing more in the world that I wanted than what I already had. I had a family, a high-paying job, healthy children, a fine house, two reliable cars, respect from my peers, friends and neighbors that I enjoyed, an excess of energy from exercise, and I had my own health. I lived near my parents and extended family and was able to see them often, to be there in the capacity of a son, nephew, cousin, grandchild whenever needed. Even the volunteer coaching I kinda, sorta enjoyed. Still, I felt unhappy much of the time. I realized that the my worldview of goal-oriented meritocracy didn’t work in the long run. I had scribbled down a quote from an author named Chris Stefanick since it related to me. “Life is more than comfort. Life is more than a list of accomplishments and activities. While such a list might help you fill out a college or a job application, it does not fill up your heart.” The obvious truth became apparent, that I could not find fulfillment in materialism or mindfulness or knowledge or even charity work and volunteering. The journey was leading me to one place, and that was back to where I started, to God. The funny part is that this was my hidden fear, that with all my swagger and anti-God talk for years, that instead of everyone else looking like hypocrites, I was the hypocrite. I had become the cliche, leaning back into faith after trying everything else in life. If only there were a word for that, like a parable or something, for a prodigal that strays and goes wild for years only to return home to his father in supplication and in need of forgiveness. Around this time I felt the urge to return to church, and I tried a different Evangelical church, but again it just wasn’t right, just as AA was not quite right for me. Then one of my children asked to be baptized Catholic, because we had not baptized them, having been “nones” for their entire lives. We said yes. And it was then that I started to rediscover and realize just how little I actually knew about the Church, despite my many years of growing up in the faith. I started listening to and reading books from Word on Fire (https://store.wordonfire.org/collections/books?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=10-work-f11), after a tip from a friend. There was a voice in Bishop Barron that I had never heard nor expected to come from a priest, as I had written off the Church some time ago. But he cut through the AM radio noise and YouTube sowers of discord and the crazy attention seekers to get to the heart of the Christian message, which was the message of “love one another” and the deep underlying intellectual tradition that the foundation of the Catechism had been built upon. I had missed the whole point, or rather, never really took the time to see the point while I was chasing down every goal and “freedom” that I could find. I immediately quit Facebook to remove that poison from my life. I realized that I had nothing to lose in returning to the faith like a child. And I had nothing to fear, just as Bishop Barron asked in a commentary: “What are you afraid of? What do you have to lose? Does it terrify you to think that you might lose your wealth? Your social status? The affection of others? Your health? Your power or influence? Your reputation and good name? Your life?” If you’ve read all the prior writings here, you’ll know the answer to all of these at some point or another was “Yes.” In all my pursuit of knowledge, I had overlooked so many books. In the airport, on a work trip, I picked up a book by Timothy Keller called The Reason for God. When I bought it I looked over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching me, feeling like I had betrayed the “nones.” The young cashier looked at me with disdain and I saw my younger self in his expression. Apparently, I had waited so long to buy a book about God that it had become a counter-cultural punk rock kind of thing to do. Not long after that I picked up a Catechism of the Catholic Church book from a Barnes and Noble. At that point I realized, I didn’t know jack squat about Catholicism. So I had a lot of work to do to catch up. 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

8. 

   12 Jul 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 acquaintances online commented and validated my pursuit as worthy. For a few days I basked in that glory of achievement. Who am I kidding, I still think of that day as a highlight because the experience was unique and powerful to me. But within a week I started inspecting my bike and shopping for new shoes. I started looking up race schedules, to find the next challenge. After a week, the euphoria faded and flat-lined, and once again I was wondering: Now what? 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

9. 

   11 Jul 2021

   8. Ultra

   Within days, I signed up for another marathon and started a cycle of planning events, with each marathon being about four to six months apart. This schedule allowed me to always have a target on the calendar that I would be preparing for, to remain in shape, to be ready mentally and physical for races, and most importantly, to remain sober. This also allowed me to tell people about my plans at the gym and bask in my pride of accomplishment. I was eager to let people know that I had quit drinking and found this “new” untapped motivation and ability. This need for attention and pride didn’t seem negative to me, because I felt like I could impact people positively through stories of effort instead of stories of partying or cynical humor. I didn’t share much on Facebook but I was pleased when someone shared something about me, or perhaps snapped a picture of me after a race. The number of Likes on one of those posts did boost my mood, or alternatively flattened my mood based on the lack of Likes. I wanted approval, just as I always had, ever since childhood. From my friends, from my parents, from my peers - I wanted to know that I was good and sought validation. By the time I had done three more marathons, I began to notice a pattern of anticipation leading up to the event and then afterward a kind of bottoming-out. The race prep held excitement and wonder, and the race itself felt like a purging of pent up time and energy. But then the day after a race, perhaps partially from soreness or from the depletion of nutrients, an ennui toward life took hold. A dysphoria swung back after the euphoria of the race and I finally realized that this low feeling prompted me to start searching for the next race to run so that I could get back to where I wanted to be. In essence, the races were like being drunk. The highs and the lows still followed my life like a vice whether I was in shape or fat, sober or drunk. The restlessness and anxiety could re-enter the stage at any time and the worst days, those “black dog days” of dysfunction and hopelessness, could arrive without so much as a stubbed toe to blame. I considered how I had started taking medications like Lexapro and Wellbutrin, so long ago, going to the doctor to get something to address my malady and yet the symptoms still returned. Tweaking dosages could help, but then I had been taking those pills for years. Depression is a disease, I was assured. Depression happens due to an imbalance of chemistry in the brain…but wait! Haven’t we heard this before in the form of the bodily humors? Maybe Lexapro helped to reduce my black bile and make me more sanguine. The old was new again and the new was old. Perhaps the Stoics were correct after all and time is a flat circle. I started to doubt the efficacy of pharmaceuticals for this infinite loop of highs and lows. There was something else at work. Those difficult days of moodiness I dealt with in one of two ways. One way was acceptance and realizing that life imposed hard days for no reason, and that I should stop whining and deal with it like a grownup. The other way involved acting more like a baby. In the latter experience, little things set me off, not with anger toward others, but negatively toward myself, and no amount of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or positive self-talk could re-orient my mind on those days. I wanted to complain and find fault. In fact, the easiest way for me to tell that I was in a bad state would be to monitor my thoughts about my wife, my neighbors, immigrants, racial issues, politics, and various religions and world views. When I was in a foul mood, some scapegoat outside of my tribe of one person would receive my ire, for no reason other than I was upset with myself in some way. Rather than take this ride to the bottom again, I signed up for more races. A marathon no longer thrilled me so I bumped up to a 50K race. That was enough to put the carrot out further on the stick. A book by ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes had a great quote that led me to believe I needed to go farther, that I wasn’t yet in the zone of knowledge in regard to body pain and mental commitment. If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon. If you want to talk to God, run an ultra. The first two I had already confirmed. Running a marathon had changed my life. So naturally I wanted to the know the third part and talk to God. This was reminiscent of my younger self wanting to experience love, poverty, and war because that’s what O. Henry said a person needed to experience a full life. I wanted experiences. I had lived in Europe, worked on farms, been in the Army, worked at a homeless shelter, skydived, tried drugs, pursued sex, experienced the highs and lows of sports, fallen in love, had my heart broke, tried exotic foods, gone camping, canoeing, fishing, hunting - but I hadn’t done an ultramarathon or triathlon yet. The fat and happy life had not provided any deep insight to me, even as I settled into my comfortable bed and read books at night. I still needed to find a struggle, one of my own choosing. The comfort of modernity was driving me to seek hardships like an ultramarathon because my membership in the privileged class had satisfied all wants and desires. So I signed up for the 50K and ran it. It wasn’t enough mileage. So I signed up for a 50 mile race and a full Ironman for the coming summer. I started trained all winter in the snow, like in Rocky IV but without the abs of a ‘roided up Stallone. I began swimming at the lap pool, having no idea how to swim a proper freestyle stroke. I received the kindest insult from a veteran swimmer who, before giving me some critical tips, said, “You look like a person who came to the sport of swimming late in life.” He was right. Forcing myself to learn swimming came with that click of a mouse button, when I signed up for the Ironman without really having any hope of completing a 2.4 mile swim. Paying the fee for a race somehow has the power to steel my determination. Though I came to swimming late in life, I was still hell-bent on developing enough stamina to finish the race. Surely the Ironman would cure me. This was the thing. And if it did not cure me, there were 100 mile races out there waiting in the hinterlands of Death Valley and Leadville, Colorado. Training in snow still seems somewhat mad to me, since I recall hobbling along snowmobile trails and waving at the riders. Surely they thought I was insane. But I was sober and still pouring my heart into family, coaching, training, and my job. Perhaps it was insane but it was working. Except for one thing: I had found a new path to isolation. Again, like every hobby before, the fitness craze aligned perfectly to a solitary person like me. Yes, I could have joined running groups or Crossfit organizations, but I liked the quiet and the silence of the long runs. Even at the gym, I wore headphones. Everyone at the gym seemed to be working out together, but alone. Only if we saw a familiar face would we pause the music for a minute and chat before returning to isolation in the earbuds. I always had myself to talk to. Learning to swim and training for endurance offered plenty to ponder. Someone asked me what I thought about while running for hours, and I said, “The same things I think about in bed at night staring at the ceiling.” Exercise didn’t remove the brooding mind from me. No I carried my brain with me, but as the body exhausted itself the mind became less prone to brooding. In fact, after several hours of running I found doing even basic math problems in my head difficult, because I had a hard time calculating my pace and mileage despite it being simple math. Running seemed to pull the blood out of the brain and into the legs, which can be nice for someone with a tendency toward rumination. My workout schedule of preparing for the Ironman started nine months in advance. Most days required two workouts, yet I always wanted to pound miles. To pound miles - I wanted to run myself to exhaustion or wreck myself on the bike so that when I arrived home I collapsed into the arms of a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Being wasted from exhaustion on a bike or on a run made me feel more alive. I recall a hot day when I set out for a 20 mile run and I brought only a liter of water. The heat exceeded my expectations and after three hours of running I was not yet close to home. The last four miles felt like a desert and I suffered greatly for my lack of foresight on water. Normally I was careful about water, recalling military obsessions about carrying enough water. The hour it took me to walk to the house seemed like a day. Now I was never in any real danger, as I wasn’t verging on death, but this was an experience that I learned a lesson from and took a strange enjoyment from due to the test of my body. This wasn’t like Jesus in the desert for 40 days, it was just me in the sun without water for a few hours. Yet the devil could have bartered my soul for a cup of ice water that day. (I just hope the devil doesn’t know about my love of breakfast cereal, too.) Here’s the odd thing that I started to notice. Suffering by useless tasks like marathons does test a body and mind, but the real tests in life are those things that are not glamorous or prideful, like doing the laundry and dishes. Cleaning the bathroom floors, toilets, and mirrors for forty years and raising children and dealing with people - that is the real test of endurance. Yet I don’t feel the need to write about the last time I cleaned the bathroom, unless I were to tell you about the clog of hair in the shower drain that looked like a dead squirrel when yanked out. The actual test of endurance is in the small daily things and the ups and downs of family and community life. Endurance sports appear as virtuous through the persistence and training that are required to finish them, but if looked at closer they could be seen as personal pursuits performed in isolation for recognition from others. I don’t want to discount all goals, but the the wetsuits, bikes and running shoes all adorn the athlete with a shine to make the pursuit appear glamorous and worthy of respect. In the end, the accomplishment is itself a purchased product. These achievements allowed me to wear a persona of success, not very different from purchasing a luxury car, and basically to brag about my ability. The marketing won me over. I had paid quite a bit for those marathon t-shirts and medals. I realize that I could inspect every single action I take to find similar motives, and pick apart everything I do until there is nothing left but the dry bones of criticism. But as I spent the summer taking long solo bike rides, rushing to the pool for laps, and running out the door for 10K training runs I had to consider my rationale for this goal. Because at some point, the need to test my physical endurance had started to unhitch from inspirational and slid toward selfishness. Luckily my family gave encouragement, but if they had objected to the amount of time I spent alone in this pursuit, I’m certain that I wouldn’t have stopped training because I wanted to be known as someone who had completed the Ironman, because then I would be special. Or something like that. 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

10. 

    10 Jul 2021

    7. Marathon

    By elevating fitness to one of my highest priorities, I assured a daily dose of endorphins to my brain. As long as I remained healthy and avoided injury, this appeared a viable path to permanent sobriety. No matter what my work schedule looked like, I carved out time for exercise and would leap out the door to get to the gym. Soon I realized that the gym had some similarities to a civic organization because the same members showed up day after day. After seeing the same people for a few months, the interactions of sharing weights and spotting one another led to acquaintance and eventually casual friendships. This was a thin connection, since only the pursuit of our own self image bound us together, but there was the common interest. When someone asked me what I was working on today, with the expected answer being “legs” or “back” I would joke, “Mostly my insecurities.” More truth than a joke, the pursuit of fitness did have elements of vanity laced within it, such as desiring to feel good and be attractive increased confidence in my personal life. The personal progress of fitness asserts a notion of accomplishment and a strange kind of righteousness. One good habit leads to another, and soon I was snacking on celery and reading motivational books. Interestingly, being in shape alone holds no moral value, but somehow the positivity that I felt seemed to make me believe I was increasing in morality. However, I found more vanity seeping into my appearance, such as selecting tighter t-shirts to wear. Once again feeling the same yearn that drives all social media: “Look at me! Notice me!” Fitness easily slips toward lust and envy if any allowance is made for those feelings, since the gym is akin to an emporium for showing off. But I know that my reasons for fitness remained solid, since quitting drinking remained paramount and I was literally replacing the urge to drink with the urge to work out. Within a short time, I could not go a single day without exercise just as I had so often required a beer at the end of a workday before my commitment to sobriety. A flip had occurred in my brain regarding how and when I received my happy chemicals. The boost from alcohol came with a follow-up nadir of depression, whereas the runner’s high only came with fatigue and a solid night of sleep. If anything, the only negative side-effect of running was an increase in appetite. I mentioned that snacking on celery became a regular thing, but so did unexpected food binges as my body sought to maintain a certain caloric intake, and going from no exercise to regular exercise proved difficult for me in balancing my diet. If I succeeded for two days with a good diet, I crashed on the third and engorged myself on carbs to an embarrassing degree. This pattern continues to this day where I can eat well for a while and then the day of reckoning comes when sugar and starch becomes under attack in my kitchen. When I realized I could run 13 miles, the next goal became the full marathon and I signed up and began to train. Once I committed to the plan and started logging more miles, I became more hungry and it seemed that every time I did a run and hour or two, the remainder of the time I spent thinking about Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. As the miles used up the glucose and sugar in my body, my mind turned to food and specifically the most sugary cereals I could find. At some point I had to stop buying it because if I had Cinnamon Toast Crunch in the house, a shameless devouring would ensue until the box was gone. Once again, the tendency toward excess ruled me. Even with the fitness and running, I pursued it excessively, just as I had drank alcohol. And apparently I had this same vice breaking out into the world of breakfast cereals as well. I was a carb monster. The effect of all the exercise did improve my relationships as I had a purpose and they saw this change happening. Without question, replacing alcohol with exercise created a rising tide in the house that lifted all boats. Like other people at the gym, I concurred that getting my daily exercise meant sanity could win the day, and I was a better citizen of the world with exercise than without it. Over the last thirty years, the “good” of exercise seems to have become a platitude among many Americans, as if there really is something inherently correct in the habit or act of body movement. But I suspect this is a Western or American idea mostly, since we love to celebrate goals and the will to succeed. I recall my grandmother asking me why I was running and exercising so much and it dawned on me that no one of the old farming generations would have bothered to run or lift anything, because their entire lives were a struggle of lifting and moving from sunrise to sunset. I recall her weeding a massive garden every day, carrying pails to feed animals, picking and peeling apples, canning, jarring, cleaning, feeding. My job in a software company required almost no movement, no effort other than thinking. Then I realized that the only people I interacted with at the gym were those with sedentary jobs, who lacked movement. Carpenters or construction workers did not need to burn some extra calories after a day of labor. The gym then almost seemed a kind of privileged place just like in ancient Greece, where the rich and aristocratic could wile away the day. As I approached my first marathon, I injured my calf, pulling my soleus muscle, bad enough that I had to rest for a few weeks. Likewise, I began to feel stronger with weights and heaved my shoulder into an injury by grabbing larger weights than necessary. When these downtimes occurred, I realized that in replacing alcohol with exercise, if my body failed due to injury, I would be once again back to square one and searching for a hobby or purpose to fill the void. Rather than dwell on that awful idea, of emptiness underneath the muscle, I planned to be more careful in my exercise and not let my aging body suffer the vanity of my mind. I would stifle the urge to run too fast or lift too much weight, since that could destroy my ability to exercise and steal my joy away. I ran through snow, sun, and rain. I didn’t miss days, avoided excuses, and pushed onward. The book Born to Run had a large impact on me as I realized that endurance sports held a spiritual secret that I wanted to unlock. This quote struck me as profound and it powered me through some long runs on the trail. “We've got a motto here-you're tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.” This kept me believing that my old knees could carry be through that first marathon. When the day arrived, I had done a 20 mile test run in preparation and had cramped terribly through the last two miles. The day of the race started with perfect weather. My soleus muscle appeared healed. I was ready. In the third mile of that race I pulled my soleus muscle again and I started limping and walking, but the pain was tolerable and I had already decided that I would finish that race even if I destroyed my body in the process. This marathon marked a rite of passage from drunken slob to tempered strength. This was a victory of the will and I pushed past the pain for the rest of the morning. Someone said that a marathon starts at mile 20 and I discovered the reason. In the last six miles, the muscles start to misfire. I could see my calves vibrating, bubbling like the blood was boiling inside, or aliens were about to emerge from my skin. Every step becomes painful as the shortage of salt and water punishes the nerves and muscle fibers. I found a fellow suffering runner to cajole along with me who could barely move his thighs while I bemoaned by calves and hamstrings. Eventually he told me to go ahead without him as he needed to walk, so I departed from him and continued. My family popped out at various points and cheered, making me grateful to the point of watery eyes, as I didn’t deserve their love for simply running a race that I needed to prove to myself was possible. My kids carried signs with funny sayings and banged the cowbells. In the last few miles the crowd thinned and I was alone for a stretch where I could review my year. The date of the race was one year after my arrest. I had remained sober for a year and changed my body and mind. The suffering of the last miles in the first marathon was a graduation from the past year, from a past life, as if I had turned the page on the chapter of life known as young adulthood, or the drinking years. As I saw the finish line and heard the music, I began to get emotional in realizing what this meant to me and I thanked God for that policeman who pulled me over and arrested me. This was the journey of life and hope and faith. I was nowhere near the end of the journey but this marked a milestone, just as running across the Golden Gate bridge had struck me as a priceless moment. There was something to endurance. To keep going, always, always keep going - this would carry me through the marathon and life. I could endure. With God’s help, who was always with me, for that strength and direction that I needed and could never muster by myself. My kids ran with me to the finish line. While I was not perfect, I was improving. I finished the race in just under four hours. 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

11. 

    9 Jul 2021

    6. Psych

    Amidst this swelling of excitement and pride surrounding fitness, I experienced a setback, as the system of law and order pumped the brakes on my accelerating plans. The clear path to victory over my flaws, of drinking and sloth, could be obtained through the Church of Iron: free weights, squat racks, and my trusty old aluminum bike. I felt empowered, emboldened to tackle my problems and defeat them. I had the illusion of control. However, the court proceeding directed me to alcohol counseling and probation, which did not concern me at first. I needed to make an appointment with a substance abuse counselor and get things sorted out. Clearly, I could show the drug and alcohol counselor my progress, and sell them on my new zest for life, then be on my way. I contacted someone that I knew from my initial recovery who had righted herself and become a drug and alcohol counselor, and I thought surely she could rubber stamp my progress chart so that I could send a report to the state for verification and maybe a back rub. Instead, she made an appointment for me with another counselor, probably realizing that I wanted an immediate approval to continue on my own path of recovery and self-discovery. In my meeting with the counselor, I answered all questions honestly, giving scores between 1 and 5 for how I was feeling, including honesty about my bouts of depression. The interview seemed to go well, with much banter and chatter, and were I applying for a job it seemed I would have received an offer. To my surprise, the next day I received an order to do a 28 day inpatient program. My heart sunk, thinking this would derail my coaching, fitness, work, and family life that was just beginning to mend. The first stitches of repair would be ripped apart again. With small children, I believed that I could not leave for a month to dry out because that would be out of the household, and I had already been dry for a month while waiting for instructions from the government. I sought a second opinion, from a more formal organization, this time from an esteemed medical center, not a strip-mall rehab clinic. The motivations of the rehab center, I surmised, was to get clients in the door to make money. AA meetings only took donations, and didn’t send invoices like 28 day inpatient and outpatient programs. As the saying goes in AA, “Some of us are sicker than others” and I was less sick. My resolve to quit raged within and I wanted to get back on the bike. During this time my attendance at AA meetings surged because I needed to show the world that I meant what I said, even though no one was watching or listening but me and my immediate family. On several occasions I joined the AA group at the detox center. To get there I needed to hitch a ride with another AA member. Each time my “taxi” arrived I spoke with the person in recovery and realized how lucky I was. My family remained intact, while theirs were separated. My house payments were on time while they struggled to make rent. My job paid well, and they bounced between multiple jobs trying to make ends meet. Returning to the detox center felt strange after waking up stupefied in there a short while ago. I still saw the Coors Light billboard out the window and had to laugh at its ironic placement. By then I had a sponsor who I didn’t particularly like. The dogma of AA lived loudly in him. He knew the Big Book verbatim and had an absolutist approach, with five years of sobriety under his belt. He wielded those five years like military rank over my month of sobriety, which irritated me, particularly because he was younger than I was, as well as unmarried and without children. I found it difficult to relate to him beyond the desire to stop drinking, which is of course the entire point of AA. I tried to recall the saying: “Principles over personalities,” which meant to ignore our differences and focus on the common intention to be sober and thereby virtuous. He too had issues with religion but could allow for God’s existence, so long as it wasn’t the Christian kind. That we shared, but his anti-Christian stance exceeded mine. Simultaneously, I was trying to allow a bit more of the Triune God back into my life, for a little while anyway. That was the period when I attempted to find a home in an Evangelical church, accepting the invitation of some willing neighbors who wanted to save my soul. Their good intentions brought me into their fold but as soon as the people started raising their hands and closing their eyes, I felt a disturbance in the force. Then after a few weeks, the pastor’s sola fide and sola scriptura sermons seemed odd to me, and the concert style of service turned me away. I attended a Celebrate Recovery meeting, which was a Christian AA group, but felt it was a more emotional copycat of what AA was already doing, just with an Evangelical angle. Why would that bother me? Why would I care? Because I didn’t like the idea of Christians taking and making everything into their own image. The 12 steps of AA had been moved into the Church and the word Jesus was added to the steps, along with obligatory Bible study. This seemed to me the way that the whole Christian religion had spread from the start, by taking other things, like pagan holidays and rituals, and experimenting until they found the malleable way to hammer them into Gospel-fitting shapes. I felt like Lieutenant Dan on Forrest Gump, railing against the constancy of “Jesus this and Jesus that, have I found Jesus yet?” Hence my attempt at finding God through the Evangelical path did not last long, since my high sensitivity to so many things averted my attention. I had all these hangups about Christianity that reared up almost as soon as I entered an Evangelical church. These same concerns and misgivings, these doubts and disdain, came up whenever I entered a Catholic church, too. I could start the day with a clear mind and heart oriented toward belief and within thirty minutes of Mass all of the old reasons I had stopped believing were back in full force. Even by tuning the radio dial and accidentally landing on a Catholic radio station I would roll my eyes since the unspoken motto seemed to be All abortion, all the time. The only issue that seemed important to Catholics and Evangelicals was abortion, with a side dish of gay marriage to gnaw on. The noise of the world continued and since I could find no message of love in the Christians, and the love seemed hermetically sealed inside the Church walls to a homogeneous set of believers. Love your neighbor meant love your Christian neighbor and forget the rest. The pursuit of money and power among the faithful appeared as egregious as among the faithless, with new vehicles and pools and hot tubs and RVs and ATVs frequenting nearly every driveway and backyard. The Prosperity Gospel made a mockery of it all. I abandoned my attempt to be re-born a Christian. I gravitated back toward progressive politics and typically landed somewhere in the middle, since I found both extremes of the right and left to be indefensible. The battle cry of moral relativism from the faithful rang out against the leftists for allowing all manner of sin to be validated, with an abstraction of Aristotle vs. Rousseau occurring in a daily title fight for the winning worldview on the internet. Whenever I entered the real world armed with ideas and opinions, usually from a book I’ve read, the world quickly disarmed me with its mayhem. I would abandon my soft convictions and retreat to a “live and let live” mentality because that was a safe space, to use the modern term for cowardice. If I could avoid offending anyone, I could then be left alone to find my own truth. This is what I pursued in getting a second opinion on the state of my alcohol abuse. In my next visit, I decided to not answer any of the questions factually and instead paint the rosiest picture of my life imaginable. I was on two anti-depression medications and exercising seven days a week. I was attending AA meetings and not just sitting there, but speaking and contributing. I made all of this known in the meeting with the two counselors. These claims were not lies, but I exaggerated the joy I was feeling so they would not recommend a 28 day inpatient program again. At one point in the interview, I said, “I spoke with a friend last week who was hungover from a weekend of partying, and I told him that I was feeling great. I wish I’d made this change long ago.” My salesmanship failed because at the end both counselors left the room and came back recommending a 28 day inpatient program. As soon as those words left the senior counselor’s lips, I felt shock. The words struck me so hard that I felt dizzy and thought I might fall out of my chair. I could hardly hear anything that followed and it seemed that perhaps this was some kind of panic attack, which I had never experienced. Stranger still, I felt outside of my own body for a moment, like I was somehow in the air around myself but not with myself. This floating experience felt drug-induced, but I was sober. Again I felt the presence of a soul or essence departing me and returning. I suspect my face must have dropped like a stone, because once I collected my spirit and body together again the bearded professorial counselor said, “I gather you are not pleased to hear the recommendation.” I was not pleased. And I told him so, saying that I was making the change and working hard toward something solid and positive. My children and wife needed to see this in action, hear the mea culpas, and witness the work-in-progress. I could not leave for a month to explore my addiction which I had already accepted. The counselor recounted my anecdote about the conversation with my friend, who had been hungover from partying. To my surprise, the counselor implied that I was missing the nightlife and my old habits. I could not believe my ears, as in my attempt to convey how I did not miss drinking, he construed the message to mean that I wanted to be drinking. At that point I realized what being inside “the system” meant, grokking it entirely, as if Franz Kafka was sitting in the room and nodding, saying, “Now do you get it? See what I meant in all those stories?” Again, I immediately assumed that this was about money rather than helping people. The counselor needed to collect bodies in seats for his programs and I was fresh meat delivered by the state unto him. And if he recommended inpatient rehab, I would have to partake and pay for inpatient rehab. Long ago, from a surgeon, I had heard the phrase, “When you go see a surgeon, you will be recommended surgery.” That held true for surgeons and just about every profession I’d ever encountered, from car dealers to lawn care to Pampered Chef agents to New Age religions to organized religion. This premise certainly held true with my own company’s salespeople who would go to great lengths to tailor any message that could complete a sale. What you need, is what they are selling. When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or at least that was my position, when in reality the protocols in both of my assessments likely recommended rehab for someone who had driven drunk while twice over the allowed blood-alcohol content and had a history of excessive drinking. I mean, there was my own behavior to inspect as well, but my will and ego wanted to drive this bus myself. My reaction to the recommendation may not have been fair to the counselor, but I argued them down to an outpatient program before they signed off on the report, which would go to my probation officer. And I never did join an outpatient program, having dragged my feet for two years on it, claiming AA as my program, and eventually even dropping out of that in order to focus on my family, my coaching, and all manner of intense exercise that I felt purged the toxins and animus from my body, in a kind of self-flagellating way. The miles lengthened and goals ossified into must-have experiences on my calendar. This focus on exercise replaced books, travel, woodworking, writing, reading, as the centerpiece of my life. The hierarchy of my life was sobriety by whatever means followed by fitness, family, marriage, and career. This seemed the right ordering at the time. I did find one book to fly solo with during that time, which was Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind. That little book contains great arguments against drinking in a modern way that is totally non-religious in nature. She has made a little gift to the world in this book to shatter the illusions about why we drink, such as to have a better social or sex life and how for the most part, drinking does more to tear down your life than to improve it in any way. Without a doubt, drinking has destroyed more families and careers than anything else in my social circles. Nothing even comes close. As Homer Simpson once said, “Drinking is the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.” Except in reality, the solution part is just escapism, and burying one’s head in the sand. The hardest part about quitting drinking in our society is the ubiquity of the message to drink. If you have never tried to stop, I would dare you to try it for 3 months and see how much you notice the billboards, ads, and commercials that steer you toward it. Then there is events that are fully geared toward drinking - sports, concerts, backyard barbecues, dinners, tours, neighborhood fires, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, going away parties - nearly all social gatherings have an element at play. And the funny thing is, if you’ve been playing along in that world for a while, you are brainwashed into thinking that refusing a drink will be rude, or look awkward. Once you start saying “No” you will soon realize that no one cares, and if anyone does care that you aren’t drinking then they are likely a problem boozer who hasn’t realized it yet. Furthermore, you suddenly meet the many people who don’t drink at all and find a new kind of bond over abstinence. It’s amazing how people open up if you say, “No thanks, I quit drinking. It wasn’t doing me any good, so I had to make a choice to cut it out.” Rather than it throwing a wet blanket on people and parties, in my experience people open up and share stories of their own struggle or a family member that has also quit. In five years of non-drinking, the most pathetic ad I’ve seen from the beer industry to promote drinking as a way of life was from Michelob Ultra, where a robot is exercising like mad (https://thevideosuite.com/michelob-ultras-super-bowl-ad-makes-fun-of-the-fact-robots-cant-drink-beer/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6-psych-8a7) among normal people. The robot is freakish to the normies, as its muscular metal body outperforms them all, but the obvious point is that the robot has no personality. Then at the end of the commercial, the robot is jogging past a pub where everyone is laughing and enjoying life while having tall glasses of Michelob Ultra (which is comical in itself, as the beer is 99.9% water and has no flavor). A caption appears on the pub window saying, “It’s only worth it, if you can enjoy it.” This is a very subtle and cruel insult at people who are trying to quit drinking or have taken up exercise to help them stop drinking. I was a bit shocked as it even struck me as, “Wow, I’m just a robot, exercising all the time now instead of drinking with friends.” When you are in sales, the goal is to sell. I’ve known that from the working environments I’ve been in and around. But the lengths that the beer and liquor industry goes to in order to make alcohol “cool” is unparalleled. This Michelob Ultra ad is just another derivative of the great South Park commercial that mocked the (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_n5nbx0Z9s&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6-psych-8a7)beer industry’s constant push to marry fun with drinking. The South Park ad shows image after image of sex, cars, women, fun, vodka, expensive things, bikinis, posh hotels, money, tuxedos, threesomes, Vegas, more sex, and then at the end comes the platitude of “Please Drink Responsibly,” which is in direct contradiction to everything that was in the ad. I even think back to the indoctrination of beer ads in the 1980s where the humor in the commercials made us kids talk about the ads at school, with Joe Piscopo, Spuds Mackenzie, Bud Bowl, Bob Uecker, John Madden, and Old Milwaukee’s Swedish Bikini team. That was all long before “The Most Interesting Man in the World” came along showing how you could only be interesting with alcohol. The deck is stacked heavily against those who want to stop. In fact, I recall the backlash against the Joe Camel ads and people saying it was government overreach to stop that campaign for cigarette companies targeting kids. But I can tell you this: in 4th grade, my friends and I at school liked to cut out and tape up pictures of Joe Camel in our lockers at school, because we thought he was cool. We didn’t admire the Marlboro Man for his ruggedness, we admired Joe Camel for his cars and ladies and overall playboy lifestyle, and I’m not even sure we knew why at that age. Whatever it was, the marketing worked and by age sixteen we were all smoking Camel Lights. I’ve heard the argument that “you can just ignore the ads.” If you are a drinker, I dare you to stop for 3 months and let me know how ignoring the ads went for you. Good luck on that. 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

12. 

    8 Jul 2021

    5. On the Bike

    Riding a bike with plastic bags full of groceries dangling from each handlebar can be dangerous, since turning and stopping can sway the balance of the bike. A wipeout at an intersection is surely hilarious to people in their cars, and I have provided that laugh a few times. In America, cars equal freedom. For the first time I had lost the privilege to drive. This proved a humbling experience having to ride my bike to the grocery store, to recovery meetings, and to appointments. I needed to arrange rides to events and ask for help more often than I liked. On work trips, I had to explain away why I didn’t have a rental car. By pedal I propelled my way around the city, using the bike lanes and trails. Having witnessed many cyclists ignore the rules of the road, I tried my best to obey proper traffic behavior, but I will admit running a few stop signs when no cars are around. Stopping and starting a bike again by pedaling takes a lot more energy than pressing a foot on a car’s brake pedal. Now I know why bicyclists don’t stop unless they must. Initially I found commuting by bike to be an embarrassment, as my neighbors all knew what had happened. But within a few weeks I discovered that I could bike fifteen miles a day and not feel sore afterward. This startled me since I had generally avoided riding a bike since childhood. My old Wal-Mart bike needed a tune-up, but for a few months I squeaked along, not really understanding what a quality bike felt like, but then I didn’t much care as the enjoyment increased, all thanks to this loss of my freedom to drive. To get to AA meetings, I needed to ride about seven miles each way and in the summer heat I would show up dripping with perspiration. The fatigue and sweat reduced my ability to pay attention in the meetings, but my goal (another goal) was to attend 90 meetings in 90 days, a staple prescription for those starting or resuming AA, since regular attendance forms a solid habit and forces a person to get to know people in the program. With family and work obligations, I biked frantically to and from the meetings, determined to commit to the change and strike drinking from my life completely, once and for all. Occasionally I frequented an evening meeting, meaning I had to cycle back at dusk. As summer days shortened, I found myself on a paved trail in the dark as the chill of night settled into the trees around me. These night rides became exciting as I hoped no sticks or surprises lay on the trail waiting to flip my bike over. On several nights, thousands of fireflies lit up the trail with natural fireworks that I never knew existed in the city. It was glorious. I began to enjoy the bike rides more than the meetings and started to yearn for longer rides. Suddenly I could understand why cyclists, in their strange spandex attire, became committed to their hobby. Getting out of a car and onto a bike actually allowed you to be in the world. A car wrapped me like an envelope and I experienced very little. Traveling by bike through the city made me much happier than driving, likely because of the exercise but I also suspect because of the lack of media. No radio, no phones, no touchscreen: just the open air and whatever the weather brought that day. As my legs began to get in shape, I wondered about distances and my ability to ride nonstop for thirty miles, and soon forty miles. Likewise, I started to run, realizing that my body felt better than ever, like it once did in high school before I started drinking. In my late thirties, I realized that I had wasted twenty years thinking that my knees were shot due to surgeries, when in reality I had let them rot and get weak by lack of usage. Instead of coddling them, I improved them by applying pressure to the joints and bones via exercise. I started to do squats with weight. The truth became readily apparent that alcohol had not only been a crutch for me but had also been the thing that had crippled me from the start. In reviewing my history, most of what I had held as important faded once drinking became a part of my life and my sense of depression started then as well, around the age of sixteen. My sense of right and wrong dwindled into a vague sense of truth over the drinking years because my vice required a loose allowance toward mistakes. I could forgive others for their mistakes somewhat easily because I needed to allow my own errors to happen and be excused. This morass of circular logic permitted anything and celebrated my errors, making me the decider of all that was good or bad in the world. The main rule I adhered to could be summed up as a philosophy of “Leave me alone, I have my own rules.” Of course, the rules could change whenever I wanted them to be different. That was how I liked it. Being powerless bothered me most of all. To be told what to do disturbed me, and even enraged me. Yet I had just experienced a loss of power where I began to appreciate biking more by having lost the right to drive. At the time I didn’t recognize this as significant. Instead I seized upon the point that I was able to exercise more and my will and ego enjoyed that a great deal. No longer did I cry the blues about my bad knees, but rather I heard the call of endurance sports. Fitness became a moral good by itself and I began signing up for longer distance races. I recall the day when I realized that I no longer had to stop on the bike. Energy surged in me, as it was almost a spiritual experience, when I knew that I could bike for hours and hours now and my legs felt like pistons. On another occasion I decided to go for an eleven mile run across the Golden Gate bridge while in San Francisco on a work trip. The weather was foggy and misty that day. The red towers peeked out of the fog as I ran beneath them and the runner’s high struck me so profoundly that tears came to my eyes and again I felt as if I never needed to stop running. The notion arrived of running a half-marathon. Three months after my arrest I completed that half-marathon. This seemed an impossibility for over twenty years and by simply removing alcohol and my driver’s license from my life, I discovered something amazing about myself. I would say that the scales fell from my eyes, but I had more than one set of scales to go through. As I embraced fitness, I began to back away from AA once again. Like the first time, I reached the 9th step of recovery, then retreated again and said goodbye to my sponsor. My new sponsor was my bike, my gym, and my running shoes. I kept a small space for a Higher Power, for God in my mind and heart, but the goal had shifted toward feats of fitness, and once again, goals willed to fruition. 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

13. 

    7 Jul 2021

    4. Release

    Upon release from jail, after posting a hefty bail, I had a frantic sense of urgency to tie up loose ends. The timing of this event seems nearly providential in hindsight, as I had just volunteered to coach my first youth sports team, and the first practice was that same night. I had not eagerly signed up for this coaching job, but as I waited in jail the importance of this position swelled into a symbol of my responsibility and thus the need to fix my behavior. The vanity of my reputation needed a fresh coat of paint and here was an opportunity. Suddenly, I wanted to be there for my kids, more than anything, and my grumbling about volunteering turned into a must-have, because I wanted to save face and give the appearance of a good father. Aside from my drinking I did give all to my children, but now the shine was off the penny. Redemption was my real motive, not goodwill. For my children had never seen me stumble so publicly and spectacularly. Knowing that my image had fallen dramatically stabbed me, as I thought of the children’s disappointment and confusion. I felt as if I had taken a pin to a beloved balloon and popped it right in front of them. Actually, the metaphor of me as a balloon full of air sounds about right. With only a few days left with a valid driver’s license, I scrambled about the city taking care of errands, one of which included purchasing gear for the team I was to coach. Preparing for coaching became a focus, because it was something positive amid the guilt of returning home. Five years later, I am beyond grateful for these events. Without this arrest and turning point, no progress would ever have been made. The experience of “hitting bottom,” which I thought had happened many times before, finally and truly slammed into me. In prior fiascos, I must have only scraped the bottom because somehow I always forgave myself and returned to old behaviors. I typically scoffed at the cliche stories of people who quit drinking, considering them hypocrites, especially those who became moralizing holy rollers and “Bible Beaters.” Wouldn’t I be like any other hypocrite after spending twenty years partying only to become a teetotaler? So I was careful to quiet my resolve to quit drinking without becoming a denier of others, always thinking of this Kahlil Gibran line in The Prophet regarding hypocrites: …who comes early to the wedding-feast, and when over-fed and tired goes his way saying that all feasts are violation and all feasters law-breakers? I needed to clean up my side of street and let others worry about themselves. So I started coaching with fervor and attending AA meetings once again. I attended an Evangelical church several times only to find the hand-raising and concert-style service too foreign to my senses. I couldn’t embrace the Evangelical way even though I appreciated the people. I sought books on Eastern philosophy, but AA became the refuge for a time again. Through AA, once again, I had allowed God to exist, but without belief in miracles. That was a bridge too far. But in accepting God I at least had a handlebar for life, something to hold onto in this struggle of re-learning how to live. That’s truly what it is. For anyone who is replacing the substance or being at the center of their life, an entire re-training must be undertaken in learning how to live. While this process took place, doubt was never far off, often creeping in, challenging every step toward change. I remember one of the first times that prayer proved to me that it worked. Yes, I said prayer - that action that elderly people partake in, and sometimes those crazy young adults that you try to avoid. Yes, actual prayer, as in folded hands and looking up to the heavens and feeling a surge of the heart - that kind of thing. A friend asked me to go see a movie, Transformers 2, and since I had enjoyed the toy as a kid, I agreed, thinking that a night out would be fun. But the Transformers movie proved so horrible, and so unnecessarily long, that I felt like would writhe out of my skin. The non-drinking and stress of trying to keep my depression under control came to a climax in the movie theater, spurred on by the absurdity of the movie. So bad was the movie that I said the Our Father about ten times to outlast the cinematic torture and to avoid insulting my friend, who loved the movie. I realize this is a ridiculous anecdote about the power of prayer. Watching a movie is not any kind of hardship, but in the moments when we discover things about ourselves, it’s not always poetic. And in all seriousness, all Transformers movies should be destroyed. By then I had learned to pray a simple way, and I use it to this day. When struggling, I was taught to ask God for strength and direction. Besides rote memorized prayer, I didn’t know how to pray, and maybe I still don’t, but I do know how to ask for strength and direction. This always helps, and I can repeat it over and over if needed. Along with that I can ask God what is the “next right action” and direct my energy toward that, whatever it may be. The third thing that I learned to try and try again was to pray for the “willingness to be willing” to believe. I’m sure these sound silly, as they definitely did to me at first. Then there is the quote that changed many things for me: “Surrender to win.” “Surrender to Win” is more powerful than I ever imagined and despite the words sounding like giving up, the reality is that you rarely ever need to win. Most arguments and wants have a pointless foundation. Look at social media or comments sections on websites: do you see anyone winning there? What a mess of egos gone wild. But this saying goes way beyond helping extricate oneself from internet conversations. This touches real life, which is where the surrender to win mantra performs a strange magic that softens, heals, and can even build a fortress of strength. Once I could see that I personally did not need to win all the time, I started to win in a different way. Surrendering removes desire for the need to be right. Surrendering lessens my ego’s need to be special. The things worth surrendering for are as follows: to allow my belief in God, to elevate my marriage above myself, and to worry less about my wants. There is a fourth idea that I picked up regarding my struggle with belief in a Higher Power, and that was to start small in terms of a deity. I still remember after attending a meeting, standing outside of a Greek church, a man told me to make the street light my Higher Power. “For now, just give thanks to that Street Light for everything in your life.” “Seems a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it?” “Ask the Street Light for help every day when you get on your knees. Right now, that Street Light is greater than you are. That’s your Higher Power.” “Uh, ok.” Stupid as that sounds, this was a place to start, and I am quite certain there is no organized religion in the world that would suggest this, but I know from myself and various other doubters that choosing something simple works, like a stapler or a plant or lawnmower - or a street light. If you play this game and allow some object to be your Higher Power, and really pray toward it for strength and direction, that street light will amaze. Comical and ridiculous? Absolutely. But so are human beings and sometimes laughing helps kickstart ideas and change. I recall praying, “Street Light, please help me today. Help me to not drink and to be nice to people and not be the ass that I usually am. Keep me from acting like a moron. Help to be a better father and husband and son and co-worker instead of my typical narcissistic self. And maybe I can try to swear less, too. Thank you, Street Light. Amen.” If it sounds like I’m making light of establishing a Higher Power or finding God, I am not. Not all people can easily return to believing in God once they have fallen away or become agnostic or atheist. As I lost my faith during my teenage years, I lost the ability to believe or even find a reason to pray. Devoted religious people seem to be unwavering in their faith to the point that they cannot even fathom how someone has doubt. Therefore, those people always seemed unapproachable to the unfaithful like me. If anything I felt this gulf between believers and non-believers pushed doubters away rather than invited us to try, because to have doubt felt like a weakness or a character flaw. Those with faith don’t seem to struggle, or at least don’t give the impression that they struggle, although I know now that’s not the case. Everyone struggles. Faith is usually portrayed as something you either have or you do not. I suspect doubt finds harbor in every mind and heart, even among regular church-goers. This explains why the Street Light faith worked for me - it allowed for the possibility of faith. What I see happening with addicts and alcoholics is that the best path back to faith is through this wide gate at first, not the narrow gate. The Street Light God works because it doesn’t make one go from preschool to graduate school in a single leap. The idea that someone who has completely rejected God or Christianity could jump back in immediately to religion, to “change and become like children” is not likely or even reasonable to expect. There is an education and processing that needs to happen, and the main reason this education and process needs to take place is because many of these people, like me, never learned why we were really going to church in the first place. Sure, we learned why on the surface: to save our souls, to be forgiven our sins, and bring us to everlasting life. Ok, great. Now what does that all mean? I had no idea. But surely I cannot be alone in the experience that growing up, I learned all the things to say at the right time in church, but beyond the procedural there was a lack of knowing why all the hubbub, vestments, and stained glass. I spent years attending Wednesday night religion classes, never missed a Sunday, and was an altar boy for six years. I even read my Children’s Bible with fascination, and felt that being Catholic was a real part of my identity. I just didn’t know why. While I saw the inside of a church often, I was simultaneously learning a great deal of science and math as the years progressed. Moreover, the teaching of “questioning everything” became a prominent point in education. To search and explore questions about the natural world was a moral good. Science was slowly undermining my faith, not by its own fault, because science is a search for truth, just like faith and philosophy but in a different domain. The problem was this: while I was learning to excel at school and question everything, the Mass and Church was a static part of my life that did not seem to accept questioning. A major fork in life happened when I asked an adult about the stone being rolled back at Jesus’s tomb. Surely, if someone rolled the rock in front of the tomb to close it, then a person or persons also could have rolled the rock away from the tomb. Even if the tomb was sealed, metal tools could have unsealed it just as easily. And the answer I heard back from a respected elder person was: “Don’t ask questions, just believe it.” This comment caused an earthquake in me because as science seemed to question and correct itself, religion appeared to not want any arguments. Science, even in its wild tangents throughout history, did seem to right the ship, given enough time, if the findings changed. The response of “Don’t ask questions” shook me because prior to that day I had been coming to faith like a child, because I was a child. In school, having been in “gifted” programs (still not sure how I was selected into these programs) we read books critically. The same notions of reading seemed applicable to the weekly readings at church, but being rebuffed I started to doubt and even secretly laugh at some of the stories. Along with the rock at the tomb, I found many other questions, and if they could not be discussed or took a long time for myself to explore, I didn’t have interest enough for the pursuit. I was of a generation that got a “lite” version of understanding faith, hence the major drift of unaffiliated people today. With a lack of deep understanding, other things took the place of religion. Sports more than anything became a kind of replacement religion. School and parties filled the other spaces. When I began to observe political Christians behaving badly, I conflated them all into one homogenous group of hypocrites. Obviously, I should have found a second opinion for my questions about the rock at the tomb. All of my doubting would have found the right answers if I had met the right mentor. But in a small town there isn’t a surplus of intellectuals running around quoting Augustine and Aquinas, ready to respond with the words needed to address such things. If Karol Wojtyla or Joseph Ratzinger could have been cloned in the 1980s and 1990s and sent to each parish worldwide, I have no doubt myself and millions of other kids would have remained within the faith. To be fair, the person who told me not to ask questions wasn’t equipped to answer my questions and I should have asked others, but the river of culture carried me away. Life became exceedingly busy in the teen years, with sports and homework and jobs and friends and girlfriends and trying to secure beer for the weekend. Church faded into a Sunday event before NFL football. Wednesday night religion class became less relevant as I was so often tired from sports practice and slogging through math problems that I was checked out in religion class, just there to punch my ticket by memorizing Hail, Holy Queen or some other prayer. A sense of the meritocracy in the world started to become clear to me. It was no longer “by the sweat of your face you will get your bread” it was rather “by the firing of your neurons you will get a job.” A second major event occurred that altered my thoughts on what it meant to be Catholic. Sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s, each week after church there would be “Bush for President” flyers on our car’s windshield after church. The pro-Life movement took off and without anyone telling me or saying so, it became clear that to be Catholic meant to be Republican. Yet in a farming community, the political choice and leanings of the early 80s trended toward the Democrats. In any case, my point here is not either political party being right or wrong. My point here is that the Church appeared to have aligned with one party, and I became confused as to the purpose of religion if elections were now invading the space carved out for God. In fact, I could not tell if the Church was part of the Republican party or if the Republican party had joined the Church. Conversations around politics became awkward, as clearly the people had split somewhere down the middle, since America was pretty much 50/50 on the two-party system then just as it is today. Even then I saw no way that either party fulfilled what I thought the Catholic faith was all about, and today I know that neither party fulfills Catholic Social Teaching, as each side has different takes that do not exactly fit. Actually, I don’t see how either party can work for any Christian. I guess you just pick the one that seems the lesser of two evils for how you see the world. These windshield flyers changed the way I saw Church. Such lowly, earthly things as elections seemed irrelevant to the Mass, but now various people in the local parish were stirring up the flock. I knew people that did a lot of charity work but they were not pro-Life. I knew pro-Life people that volunteered and prayed often, and lived holy lives. The divisions made no sense to me, since I knew that not a soul inside that Church on any given Sunday was without sin. Yet some people who seemed to be good, certainly holier than me, were dropping out of the pews. I didn’t realize it at the time but these events began to shape later thoughts on how I viewed the Church, especially once the abuse scandals started seeping out. In hindsight I can review my history and see my own psychological quirks and problems, but I can also see the starting blocks where the rise of the “nones” or New Atheists began running. By the time I graduated high school, faith became a minor aspect of my life, unless you count my faith in Dionysus, the God of liquor and partying. Still, a flicker of belief remained and I wasn’t ready to let faith go yet, even though in the post-Confirmation years I just thought of myself as Catholic, despite living zero of the values. Prudence flew out the window. Temperance? No, are you kidding me? Faith, Hope, and Charity? I would have thought you were referring to exotic dancers’ names. 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

14. 

    6 Jul 2021

    3. Jail

    To my surprise, while being assigned a cell, the jailer made me watch a video on how to deal with sexual assault during my stay. This hotel was definitely a one-star rating. I asked the jailer if rape was an actual possibility on my first stay and she laughed and said, “Not likely.” Not exactly reassuring. When I entered my cell, I met my roommate, a man with a face full of tattoos. He moved aside and let me pass, then stayed near the doorway so he could watch the TV in the distance through the sliver of a window on the door. I settled in with my bundle of items, a towel, some soap, my spork for meals, and an ample sense of displacement. I recognized immediately that my feeling as a first timer in jail differed greatly from my roommate who was doing 90 days for repeat drug and other convictions. Clearly to him, the cell and surroundings had a normalcy that I did not yet share, and with luck I wouldn’t have to learn. I settled on the top bunk (on another plastic coated mattress) without even unfolding my blanket and I stared at the ceiling. In my pursuits and hobbies, I often sought isolation and privacy so that I could think and not be bothered, always choosing hobbies and activities solitary in nature, such as reading, drinking, woodworking, writing. Even with people present, drinking seemed more of a solitary pursuit since myself and my fellow drinkers were after the escape more than camaraderie, or perhaps through camaraderie we sought the desired escape. Now I had full isolation. Mission accomplished? What bothered me most was the tarnish of the crime against my otherwise good reputation, dubious as it was. My fake humility could really only be described as damaged vanity. Through years of misbehavior while drinking I had otherwise behaved and kept up appearances. I believed I was a good person, sometimes, while also hating myself. A kind of motto that I told myself was: “Self-hatred is my greatest motivator.” The meaning intended by this awful idea was that I was a capable person who could will or force tasks to completion, primarily because I believed I was not deserving of anything. Nothing in this world was owed to me, and I was no different from an ant on the sidewalk that gets his work done without expecting a reward. At the same time, I could be a real diva if anyone disrupted my personal time or bothered my sensibilities. And I wanted the attention and praise of others, kind of like can be seen in every post on social media where the implicit cry from the poster is, “Look at me! Notice me! Please, validate my existence! I want approval because I’m craving to be loved!” I’m not sure how these notions came to be in my mind, but now I know that it was flawed, and for some time I blamed a Catholic upbringing for sourcing this lament. I knew this wasn’t entirely fair because I had spent ten years listening daily to albums like Nirvana’s Nevermind and Sublime’s 40oz. to Freedom, and assorted 90s rejectionist music. As a case in point, the song “Breed” by Nirvana, which I still love to this day, starts out with these lyrics: “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care, Care if it’s old. I don’t mind, I don’t mind, I don’t mind, I don’t mind, Mind, don’t have a mind.” Likewise, to reference Sublime (a band I also still love), I think of the accumulated impact of listening to “What Happened?” some ten thousand times and how this band might have altered my worldview: “Threw a bottle at the bouncerDidn't think that he was coolPissed in someone's drinkAnd threw a bike into a pool” I would add some of my favorite Ice Cube and Tupac lyrics as well but surely the idea is established. Partying recklessly is what I’m hinting at here. More likely than my church-going youth causing my self-destructive tendencies, rather, I suspect that it kept me from going full anarchist and torching the streets. The rage of youth burned fierce and I wanted to rebel. Self-destruction was so metal, so gritty and real. In reality, it was just like riding on a rollercoaster where you want the thrill of near-death adventures while buckled in with a seatbelt and shoulder harness. Rock and Rap music just presented the rebellion I was after. They were my cheerleaders. But the fire of youth can be difficult to manage and outlets will be found, on purpose or by accident. I believe that avoiding feelings, not talking about feelings, allowed internal brooding to swell into self-loathing and self-destructive behaviors. All of that touchy-feely stuff was not part of my life. Rather, I deemed it a ridiculous outgrowth of modernity, a kind of New Age, California-way that deserved no review. Today I know better: talking is good…and California is still, well, California. I held too many contradictions in my mind. On the one hand, modernity had the answers, on the other hand I felt its efficiencies were wearing away meaningful work. It certainly hollowed out the farms and factory jobs in my corner of the world as consolidations and outsourcing crushed the local economy. I ended up becoming a software engineer but I could never truly love my line of work since I saw blue-collar and agricultural work as more real and the people in those vocations far more interesting. The software and IT business world of sterile screens never did excite me. There exists a kind of affluent boredom in the modern office that lacks heart, because the occupations themselves only require our head. In those college and early adulthood days, I pretty much sought moral anarchy. Yet I also wanted order and rules, with a yearning to do the right thing. On one hand I wanted education and on the other I thought ignorance was bliss. Basically, let me try to be honest, since that’s the point of writing this: I just wanted it my way depending on how I felt at the time. I felt that truth was malleable to my current state. My worldview morphed constantly and made no sense to me, and eventually I threw up my hands and found drinking and disdain to be a good corner to hide in while I progressed through time on this planet. I had all the answers, but no conviction. I could not articulate anything and therefore thrashed about like Ahab, wanting the answer to surface next to me so I could name it, kill it, and mount it on the wall. This drifting way of life, eventually, brought me to my weekend in jail, for which I am now most grateful. When I woke up in jail, I was flushed out of my cell to breakfast, I realized how much like a fish tank the common area was, where people watch the new person, where furtive eyes peek constantly. Sitting at a table by myself I suddenly had three men join me and start asking questions about why I was there, how long I was staying, and finally, to the point, if they could have any of my food, my leftover soap, and any extra phone card minutes when I departed the jail. Remaining quiet for the most part, I observed the comfort with which the regulars roamed the jail versus the corners where others sat quietly. As I was being brought before the judge, they strung five of us together in conjoined handcuffs and led us to a holding cell. In the cell we conversed and I learned that two of those with me were booked on heroin charges, and to my surprise, they were discussing how to get one of their mothers to post bail in order to be released…so that they could go buy more heroin right away and get high again. The poor woman, I thought. Addiction this strong seemed impossible to overcome, yet I heard them scheming a plan that would likely financially obliterate this mother. Another man had a drunk driving charge, too, but he had been driving with a child in his car. He looked wounded and I could see his pain because he had a face bearing misfortune. He just looked unlucky, and I began to realize how lucky and fortunate I had been, always, always, in my trip through this world. But one thing seemed certain - none of them in there but me seemed to be thriving in life, at least not in what our culture deems as success. I didn’t get the impression that they had grown up in houses that took pride in good grades and ate home cooked meals every night. Honestly, I thought of them mostly as knuckleheads and wanted to get away from them. I did not love them as neighbors or equals. The experience reminded me of days spent in a military barracks, where many of the same character types seemed present. Imagining that jail to be an Army barracks did not seem much of a stretch. After all, we all wore the same uniforms. I felt I was made of better stuff than most of them, that I was morally better in some way. Yet alongside this notion, I also saw myself as this lowly blight on society. Again my thoughts made no sense in their contradictions. Was I good or bad? My measurement of worth came only by achievements rather than something intrinsic. The “work hard, play hard” principal: I imagined achievements like money and honor was the purpose, with pleasure and escape as the reward. The movement toward a goal was righteous, and missing the mark was bad. And clearly these people in jail, I thought, had failed in life, worse than I had. My notions of altruism and equality, I realized, were shadows and projections from my reading and my books. My empathy and caring was best kept fresh in isolation, not in interacting with actual people with real flaws. For if I really believed in people and saw the good, I would have applied it here in jail, but I only saw the shortcomings and wanted to flee from these ne’er-do-wells, even though I simultaneously considered myself one of these screw-ups, but to a lesser degree. Somehow I flip-flopped between seeing myself as a good person and a degenerate, as if I had all three of Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov brothers, Dmitri and Alyosha and Ivan, all rolled into me. I was a good intellectual degenerate jerk. A drunken idiot atheist with a heart of gold. In a way, I was right. From that list of attributes, I carried some with me daily, and set others down, and picked up different ones to play with. In talking with the other jailbirds, they too played with these toys of personality and behavior in making their way each day. In fact, I could see that their flaws and mine mirrored one another, depending on the hour. Yet I still thought I was not like them. All of them. My aim exceeded theirs, my thoughts went deeper, my personhood was somehow imbued with specialness. My life meant more and they were fools. Yet I was in the same place as all of them. 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

15. 

    1 Jul 2021

    2. Detox

    I awoke facing the wall. My mouth like cotton, I sensed something amiss and an old familiar feeling. When you wake up from a wild night where memories are sparse, or non-existent, a moment of panic can grip you due to the uncertainty of place and time. The drab detox dorm room had two beds in it, with waterproof mattresses. I rolled over to sunlight blasting through a window and the first thing I saw outside was a Coors Light billboard near a highway. The irony was striking. I had been drinking that watered-down slop the day before, along with whatever else I could funnel into my face. An old familiar panic gripped my forearms and shoulders, and stirred in my gut. I had noticed this many years before, even during my first mornings after drinking. If humans had souls, or a root essence, I thought, you could experience it via its absence in shaky morning-afters when the five senses lay crippled by the hangover. As the saying goes, “Faith will tell me God is present when my human senses fail.” Except it was kind of opposite of that, because with my failed human senses, I felt the horrific emptiness because I had wholly rejected faith. The notion filled me with dread that some part was missing, or had departed, or was still downtown at the bar, and I needed that essence to return to me. I needed that part to put the rest of the senses and self together again. Whenever I had awoke in a house full of responsible people, my typical response to this lost feeling was to show artificial health and vigor, to get up and appear normal and recovered, despite wanting to sleep, or disappear, or die. I’ve noticed the same in others, often at business conferences, when a drinker clearly had a rough night or did something foolish, but they rise and pretend that all is well. The lengths a hungover person goes to in pretending stuns me, from my own experiences and from watching others. To my horror, a clock on the wall showed 4 o’clock…in the afternoon. Having slept all day and not yet called home, this clock signified my betrayal of my wife and children. The mistake I had made this time could not be ignored or charmed over. This error in judgment and prudence leapt past the usual cause of grievances in our household. Worst of all I had been drunk driving while I had a responsibility for my children and should have woke up at home, not in detox. I knew immediately that this would be a scar upon all of my relationships. All of them. Everyone important in my life suffered because of my choice the night before. Over the coming hours I cycled through the process of denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Then came the shame and the guilt. I had learned about the difference between shame and guilt in a prior attempt to stop drinking. Guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done, whereas shame is feeling bad about who you are and that you don’t deserve love. Since I like to hold pity parties for myself, I tended to choose a la carte from both of those classifications. Several years before the arrest, I had tried earnestly, voluntarily, to quit drinking, doing a 28-day outpatient program, to fix myself and address the question of “What is wrong with me?” The propensity to drink and make a mess of life ate at me enough that I had decided to get help. In this circle of misfits, I nearly walked out on the first day when I read the 12 steps on the wall. The second step required capitulation to a “…Power greater than myself.” That verbiage really, really bothered me. But I stayed. I stayed in that program and did the 28 days, learning a great deal about addiction and how my “lizard brain” works. Indeed, I still know to this day that it is my lizard brain that wants Cinnamon Toast Crunch at 3 AM. At the urging of counselors, I attended AA meetings, and even tried to believe in a Higher Power. At the time I was atheist or agnostic, depending on the hour, and I leaned left politically, mostly only to lean away from the religious right. My position was not for specific issue, but merely against all things religious, which I felt poisoned the world. At that point in my life I subscribed to the sermons of Hitchens and Dawkins. The deconstruction of my belief in the Christian faith is a long story. More on that later. Of the many, many things I learned in that 28-day recovery group was that rich or poor, left or right, educated or uneducated - alcohol and drugs do not discriminate. These substances will overpower the strongest will and beguile the most cunning mind. They will feed a person’s vanity and shape an ego into whatever form desired. They will lift you up or bring you down, whichever you want or think you prefer. For me, drinking was the “tree of knowledge.” I suppose that makes Captain Morgan the serpent. Replace the symbolism in Genesis with whatever your vice and I suspect that the same story can be told. Whatever entices and mesmerizes and steals goodness away from you, and replaces love in your heart with negativity is probably your own apple on the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Unfortunately for me, even if I avoid one tree, sometimes I find a second tree, or a third. Detox is a primarily a waiting area, where you dry out until you can be taken to jail. Hence, each drunkard is allotted ample time to think and commiserate with others in the same state of limbo. What frustrated me most was that a month before the arrest I thought I had made the life changes I needed. I had quit tobacco and started exercising, and I was learning to drink socially, controllably. For a month I had done well. So what happened? The same thing that always happened. In hindsight, the spur to action a month earlier had been from drinking too much on a work trip and regretting the outcome. Thus, like every cycle before this cataclysm, I trod the same path: drinking lightly for a time, then back to drinking heavily, onto regret and shame, followed by abstaining and declaring a life change, and lastly looping back to the beginning. The same cycle repeated for twenty years. A drinker will always forgive himself in order to drink again. The only difference this time was legal consequences, which apparently is what it took (after all, the system is called the “Department of Corrections”). I needed a correction. Until the arrest I wasn’t unscrambling the obvious message to wake up. An AA group visited to the detox facility to hold a meeting. I joined their meeting, almost eager to share that I needed to join AA and get on track, as the disturbance in my family and home life was quaking in me. I had tried AA before, for a while. But rather than 12-stepping I did 9 steps and then dumped my sponsor. He had urged me to unhitch from the past and latch onto AA, full-time, but the group felt cultish and separated from the world that I had to live in. Too much God, I thought. I wanted something more scientific, like SMART Recovery or psychological explanations or pharmaceutical solutions. I had read the Big Book and other AA materials and found them fascinating at first, but it didn’t stick. Reading and re-reading the Big Book struck me as pseudo-scriptural and the writing didn’t feel profound enough to merit such continual attention. The chapter titled “We Agnostics” made me realize what an unoriginal thinker I was, as I was like the chapter’s archetype: “…so touchy that even a casual reference to spiritual things made us bristle with antagonism.” It always stings when I find out how predictable and regular I am. My tendencies, I felt, did not need the full treatment of AA, as “some of us are sicker than others.” Truly, some people have a much worse struggle with alcohol than I did, and I listened in pity to those people. Surely those people needed the whole program. But I had issues with parts of the Big Book and felt that AA took an anti-intellectual turn in saying that problem drinkers tend to “…read wordy books and indulge in windy arguments, thinking this universe needs no God to explain it.” To me those were fightin’ words, since books and knowledge sustained me. I saw science and progress as the ultimate good, and spiritualism and religion as backward-facing fanaticism and wizardry. In my half-hearted AA attempt, I reached the “Pink Cloud” stage where everything was wonderful, where quitting drinking was easy, and life was grand. Call it my Pollyanna phase. Then, as the AA members and alcohol counselors warned me, the Pink Cloud passed me by and regular cold fronts came around with blustering sleet and negative windchill. I lasted about a year sober, got my one-year chip as evidence, but never fully bought into the program. I said the prayers and joined hands and even (kinda, sorta) liked saying the Our Father with the others. I almost always left an AA meeting feeling lifted up (although my sponsor warned me that feeling good wasn’t the point of meetings, but it was a nice side effect). I can only praise AA, despite not attending any more. So many people slam it for not being the answer, that there is “too much God” in it. But it gave me a toolkit for dealing with life that was far better than the portrayal of AA in TV and movies. TV’s portrayal of the organization is absurd and disconnected from reality. The numerous proverbs I learned in those rooms still help me in the grind of days. At a meeting, people drop these one-liners into conversation that seem backwards at first, but then become profound upon inspection. I would marvel at the phrases after hearing them the first time. Sometimes they don’t make sense until a day or week later. “Surrender to win.” “Wear the world like a loose shirt.” “Don’t trust your feelings.” “There’s nothing so bad happening in your life that a drink can’t make worse.” “Principles over personalities.” “One day at a time.” “Progress, not perfection.” “Don’t quit before the miracle happens.” “Do the next right action.” “Thy will, not mine, be done.” “Perfection kills.” “An expectation is a planned resentment.” Hundreds of these sayings exist and I mutter them still today, and probably always will. I could write much about each of those sayings and how each has helped me interpret my predicaments. They also summon a memory of a person or a face from a meeting. But above and beyond all of those sayings, in usefulness and practical application to life, is the one prayer that is said at every meeting. The Serenity Prayer. Yes, the corny Serenity Prayer. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Trite or not…this sentence acted as a gateway for me to even consider, to even deign or lower my high and mighty self, to accept that there might be a Higher Power or God over me. It also taught me that whenever I use the words “trite” or “corny” or “cliche” in a sentence, I expose my cynicism toward anything wholesome or time-tested. Those words are like my tell in a poker game. I liked to apply those labels to anything old-fashioned or traditional. Those trite and cliche things were tired and expired, and I was so modern and smart. It’s funny now, with hindsight, my way of life was what had become tired and expired, and certainly cliche. In the beginning, I would not say the first word - “God” - because I wanted to secularize the prayer, and I felt that the prayer still worked without the first word. However, without the first word, the rest still implies that you are speaking to some Higher Power, some “thing” that can grant the serenity. Otherwise, to what are you asking for Serenity if not the spirit of the universe, or Gaia, or Zeus, or…God? So much of life can be cut to the chase with this little prayer, yet it is so simple. The Serenity Prayer in its plainness is like a razor that can cut through hard problems like butter. If I were to successfully apply the principles of that prayer alone to my daily decisions, with no other rules or aphorisms or moral guidance, I could quickly separate the meaningful from the useless. You take the problem, thought, or decision and ask yourself: “Can I change this?” If not, then you drop the subject because it’s beyond your power. If you can change it, then you decide if you are willing to take up the challenge to change it, and if you are willing, you do the work. If you are not willing, then you don’t, and again you drop it. Surely the wisdom part is the tricky thing, especially for someone who is all too human, like myself. The prayer provides a little Venn diagram for your problems, where you can place life’s issues into one of two circles: Accept or Change. Wisdom is knowing into which circle to push each problem. By the time I had attended the AA meeting in detox, I had met many of the other people in residence with me, and found jailhouse lawyer types, hard alcoholics in denial, and drug addicts who had somehow even found a way to get drugs into detox, which baffled me. Like a field trip, detox feels like a tour, or a museum of people that are captured from their natural habitat and paused for a time of reflection. After 36 hours of sobering up, after some tears and anxiety, the arresting police officer returned and picked me up for my next stop, the county jail. Cuffed again and back in the police car, I discussed what would happen next with the police officer, who told me I was one of his favorite arrests due to the interesting conversations that we had during booking, none of which I remembered, other than a snapshot or two captured in my mind during the blackout. An awareness of my powerlessness had set in through the hours of detox, and the handcuffs were the physical reminder of my lack of control while I rode in the car. No choices could be made. No media, no snacks, no smart phone. Possibly, for the first time, I understood what freedom actually meant, since in taking these things away, I only then realized what unbridled freedom my entire life had been as an American in the late 20th century and early 21st century. I had been born in the most “free” time in history, with the least personal struggles - no war, no disease, no death - and yet I had invented my own struggles and even felt depressed most of the time. In fact, I had even been taking depression medication for years, all during the easiest and least challenging period in history. I kept thinking about the AA saying that drinkers suffer from a “spiritual malady” and suffer from their own will. This sense of powerlessness did a ride-along as the police car entered the county jail intake door. 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

16. 

    30 Jun 2021

    1. Blue Light (Start here!)

    Midway through my life’s journey, I saw the lights of a police car in my rearview mirror. In a blackout, only snapshots come back to you, providing subtle hints of a night gone sideways. Usually these memories are of the worst scenes of the night. Once the mind has already checked out, certain still-shot images still register in the wetware. I managed to get to the side of the road and go through a proper arrest. I recall refusing the sobriety test not because I wanted to contest the policeman’s assessment in court, but because I could barely stand up. I had been driving 35 miles-per-hour on a 65 mile-per-hour highway, at 4 AM, with no shirt and no shoes. The mistake of that day had been made many hours prior to the sirens, when someone offered me a shot of liquor. I stayed strong and said no. Actually, I only said no once, then I gladly took the shot, and then another, and another. I liked claiming that “If I just stick to beer” nothing could go wrong. Light beer keeps the madness away, I believed, since you can’t drink it fast enough to get really stupid. This is not actually true, but it lengthens the process of getting wasted. That I even needed to consider this possibility speaks for itself. This propensity I considered a normal feature of people, fortifying my bias with a remembered passage from the novel Winesburg, Ohio about the men from the country coming to town for a rowdy night: Under the influence of drink the naturally strong lusts of their natures, kept suppressed by the heroic labor of breaking up new ground, were released. A kind of crude and animal-like poetic fervor took possession of them. On the road home they stood up on the wagon seats and shouted at the stars. Sometimes they fought long and bitterly and at other times they broke forth into songs. To drink was to relax and let loose, and let go of the frustrations and struggles of the day or week. I suspect that is true for many people. But there’s a problem in this notion for some of us that like to shout at the stars. There is a saying among AA meetings: “One is too many, and twenty is not enough.” I had known for a long time, since the first time I ever drank alcohol, that I was prone to excess. Not only prone, but I yearned to overdo it. In high school and college the slogan was: “A day is not wasted if I am.” Escapism was a way of life. I found others with the same reason for existence, as we like to do for our vices. We all need our cheerleaders for enablement, whether it’s online or in person. We found camaraderie in drinking hard and finding oblivion. Together but apart in our stupors, we were modern Lotus-eaters. Thus the way of life I subscribed to in high school and college became a continuation into adulthood, even into parenthood, and though I could keep the worst of nights to a minimum, sooner or later, the urge to go off the deep end with drinking returned, just as it always had for all the drunks through the ages. The illusion of control plays the repeatable trick upon those of us who like to escape. In so many ways the drug finds a path into our nervous system so that it can again reign over us. I recall making the booking officer laugh while sitting in a bright office. Even then, under arrest, I had the need to please people, or try to charm as best I could, to avoid confrontation and evade difficult conversations. As a middle sibling I seemed to have found the way to walk the line. And how to lie, too. Lying allowed me to isolate and avoid people, life, and the small burdens of my easy life. I didn’t much care to be yelled at or made to feel dumb. Those two insecurities, well, I’ll come back to those, plus a few others. The drunk driving charge would have taken me to jail immediately, but being so stinking drunk, I was dropped at an overnight detox center first. The night was a blur and I neglected to use my phone call to contact my wife for fear of waking her, only to leave her searching frantically for me the next day. There is much more to that part of this irresponsible story that I could go into, but suffice it to say that a general mode of selfishness ruled me. My arrest was past due. Drunken driving charges should have been pinned on me years before, but somehow I had slipped through the net. Buzzed driving on the weekend was normal, and more than a few times in college I woke up without knowing how I had got home, until I looked outside to see my car. So the day of being arrested loomed over me for two decades, and finally, like many of my friends who were arrested before me, it was my turn. We had a sense of humor about getting in trouble. Screwing up gave us a story, as if we were still rebelling against a teacher from middle school. We shared a fake apathy as a core value, even while we worked hard to further our professional lives. The reality is that my life lacked any difficulty. I didn’t grown up wealthy, but I was from the 80s and 90s and I had faced no real hardships. I wanted to get wasted, just like the metal and rap and country music glorified. To smoke and drink at every opportunity, to blackout, to wake up in strange places - that’s what I enjoyed, or not so much enjoyed, as sought for escape. There was something to the Chuck Klosterman “killing ourselves to live” mentality with Nirvana’s nihilism, Snoop Dogg’s love of weed and disrespect of women, and outlaw country music’s unapologetic glorification of drunkenness. Add to that Fight Club and Rage Against the Machine and Smashing Pumpkins - the 90s really hated authority of all kinds. Of course it was cool, because the music and idols broke all the rules. Same as every generation, we scoffed at the proper society our parents tried to emulate, or at least pretend toward. Add in the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the internet to this mix, and a vacuum had been flipped on in that “end of history” period. The good people, the adults of the community that cared, they could not contend with the surrounding influences of the world. That battle was lost instantly when the internet made every possible idea, good or bad, suddenly available to all. Before I had ever heard of a religious “none,” I had arrived to that desolate place through culture, aided by the internet, and accelerated by my discovery and love of alcohol. Alongside drinking, I added a second drug of books. Knowledge was the additive, and together I learned that booze and books can act like mortar and bricks to build a powerful wall to hide inside. I was rather obsessed with reading everything I could get my hands on for about fifteen years, and as any seeker knows, one book leads to another, and the more you learn, the more you become convinced that you know almost nothing at all. This is nothing that I discovered myself, as Socrates said, “I know that I know nothing,” and Protagoras’ Paradox added “the more you learn, the less you know,” both of which today have been appropriated into the fancier sounding Dunning-Kruger Effect. Truly the more I read the more unstable my convictions became, but I had to read, and read more, trying to make up for lost time as a drifting youth and cram in as much knowledge as possible to find the truth, the elusive truth. But the depths and nuances of knowledge slip away like eels as you can read one argument today and the counterpoint tomorrow, only to feel yesterday’s seemingly solid worldview vanish from beneath you like sand under your feet on the beach when the wave retreats. The tales of my Bible could no longer keep up with science, literature, and technology, as I was awash in many subjects and following ideas wherever they might lead me. But there was too much information. Just too much to take in. So I would drink from the books and then drink from the bottle, and just as soon as I thought I knew everything, another subject could be found to upend the prior subject. Through it all I held a sense of righteousness and morality, thinking that I was right all the time (and surely, I felt that most people were more ignorant than my well-read self. This pursuit of knowledge was one of my chief insecurities). I drank, yes, but it was because I didn’t need the crutch of religion, of faith in the sky-fairy. That nonsense was an empty cup, and my cup was full. Actually, I often had a cup in each hand. With science as a sword and the history of religious violence as my shield, I scoffed at faith as the appendix of history, a vestige of ancient society concocted by fearful goat herders. I had bet the house against Pascal’s wager, that indeed it was better to rule in hell than serve in heaven if that’s what it took to declare reason as the preferred path, as the road less travelled. With my cosmology of materialism hammered down, come what may, I was a good person with some flaws, who just needed to take an occasional break from drinking to get back under control. Everyone has their vice, right? In fact, isn’t it always those who pretend to have no vices where the sickness is worst, where the most heinous acts tend to flourish? My vice, often a public drunken one, allowed an open door to the skeletons in my closet. The only difference between me and a priest or rabbi or a guru was that I knew how to have fun. And it was fun. Until it wasn’t. Because the motivation for all of the reading and the drinking wasn’t knowledge and escape. The urge came from the void, the pit of emptiness, which I thought could be filled with words and buried with a buzz. I came to call this gnawing feeling as the “Big Empty,” after a song title by Stone Temple Pilots. When I was arrested, the snapshot of that dazzling blue light splash in the rearview mirror is almost a work of art in my mind, since that image marks my arrest and about-face from that void. It was the best day of my life. 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 (https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)