First, you must be willing to lose it all
I’ve received a lot of feedback in response to my post called Finding God in 5 Steps. Of all the interesting and insightful things that people shared, there was one email that hit me right between the eyes, and made me realize something that I’ve hardly gone a day without thinking about. It was from a young man who fell away from faith for many years and had only recently returned to a close relationship with God. He said that he agreed with what I wrote in that post, but thought that I missed one thing:
There was one thing that was essential to my reversion that you do not mention. One must be willing to give up everything for God…I believe that the biggest problem people have with finding God is that they are not willing to give up earthly desires to find Him. People want the best of both worlds. They want a relationship with God and be able to hang on to worldly desires. I think this is all to often overlooked.
Wow. Yes.
Until I received his email, I don’t think it had ever occurred to me what a key aspect of the conversion process this is; I hadn’t even realized that I went through this step myself. But when I look back, I see that before I could accept the truth, I first had to be in a place of willingness to lose it all.
One of the things that’s different about seeking the truth about God as opposed to, say, seeking the truth about a mathematical equation is that the truth about God is personal and transformative. If you’re seeking the truth about mass-energy equivalence and you discover that e=mc², it doesn’t mean anything for you personally. You don’t need to live your life any differently just because you now know that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. But not so with God. Because God is the source of all that is good, to know what God is is to know what Good is. Religion has almost always been understood to be about moral codes because a moral code defines what is good and what is not, therefore it defines what God is and what he’s not.
That’s why the search for the truth about God is always personal. It’s always going to bring in all your insecurities, issues and attachments, because your life will be forever shaped by whatever truth you encounter.
Here’s a rough analogy: Let’s say that a woman was seeking God, and she came across a belief system that taught that it’s morally wrong to own a car; something about car ownership, they said, was contrary to God’s nature, and therefore objectively wrong. Naturally, her first reaction was, “That’s absurd!” But then she found a lot of other reasonable stuff in the belief system, so she took another look at that crazy car teaching. To her surprise, it ended up being not as unreasonable as she’d initially thought; in fact, she had to admit that some of the defenses she read really got her thinking.
But in the back of her mind there was always this voice that said, I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT A CAR! There was no way. She even thought through it a couple of times: She needed it to run errands, her husband needed his car for work. And she couldn’t just take the kids out of all their activities. Nope. The life that she had carefully crafted would completely fall apart if she gave up having a car.
As you can imagine, this line of thinking would bring her investigation into the anti-car belief system to an end. There’s this idea out there we can will ourselves into automaton mode and make evaluations about any kind of subject with perfect objectivity. But it’s not true (except maybe in matters of math or science, and even then I think our biases come into play more than we’d like to admit). To use the example of the woman in the car, there is no way that she is going to accept the belief system that includes the teaching against cars, even if her rational mind believes that it’s true…unless she’s willing to let go of her car, and therefore her entire lifestyle.
Again, the analogy is rough, but I think it conveys the process that many of us experience on the road to conversion. When I was first researching religion, for example, some of the Catholic Church’s teachings sounded just as crazy to me as the idea of not owning a car. At first I dismissed them as absurd. But even when I came to see that the arguments in their defense were incredibly compelling, I was still not that close to admitting that they were true, because, deep down inside, I knew that they would turn my life upside down if they were.
Around that time, everything fell apart: We faced major financial problems, then medical problems which compounded the financial problems. We had to move in with my mom, which meant that I lost touch with many of my friends because I was in a different part of town. With my health, finances, and social life all a big hot mess, I discovered the freedom of having nothing left to lose. Of course I did still have plenty of great stuff like a supportive family and a first-world existence, but I’d lost so much so quickly that I’d received a crash course in detachment. And that’s when I could finally allow myself to see the truth about God.
And so I whole-heartedly agree that that Finding God in 5 Steps post is missing a step, one that is perhaps the most important: First, you must be willing to lose lose it all.
Video: My conversion story interview
For those of you who missed my EWTN appearance but wanted to check it out, here’s the full episode:
To see more episodes featuring other guests, check out the Renewal Ministries website!
How I learned to love housework
I am not a naturally tidy person. To put it bluntly: I’m kind of a slob. It’s hard to say whether this is due more to my laziness or to my lack of attention to detail, but I’m the type of person who can step over piles of dirty laundry without noticing them, who forgets to sweep the kitchen floor until there’s an audible crunch when I walk across it.
So you can imagine that when I first left the career world to become a housewife after my son was born, things didn’t go smoothly. I found keeping house frustrating, since the ratio of effort to payoff just wasn’t there for me. A spotless kitchen wasn’t that different to me than a kitchen with dishes stacked next to the sink and a mystery sticky substance coating the floor in front of the fridge, so the work of getting it clean seemed like a waste of time. Sometimes my husband would come home from work and gently mention that he might clean up a bit, and I’d be baffled. What was there to clean? The house seemed fine to me. Then I’d watch him pick up a dirty sock off the living room floor, vacuum some crushed Cheerios from the rug, remove some empty sippy cups and crumb-covered plates from the side table. With each item I’d say, “Oh, that? That bothers you?”
I had settled into a sort of routine of shuffling around the house and doing the bare minimum, occasionally stopping to sigh and ask myself what other arbitrary things might need to be done. I didn’t resent the work, but I did think it was mostly pointless, and I never did it because I wanted to; I’d just put myself in the mindset of imagining what a neat freak would do, and mimic that.
And then I found God, and everything changed.
One of the most surprising results of my conversion has been that I’ve developed a love of housework. I’ve seen a complete reversal in my old attitudes about the tasks involved with keeping the house in order. This doesn’t mean that my house is super clean all the time — I still have that lack of attention to detail and the whole five kids under seven thing that means that my house is messy a lot of the time, but the difference is that I now value a clean house, and I almost always enjoy doing what it takes to get it that way.
How did God change that? Part of it is probably due to the Christian emphasis on service and selflessness, that I’ve come to understand that the path to joy is a path that involves work and personal sacrifice. Some of it might be that it’s easier to manage the craziness of having a bunch of little kids when things are clean. But the biggest thing that changed for me was when I came to understand that order is of God, and that the fight against chaos is a fight for good.
When I was first reading books about theology, the idea of God bringing order from chaos deeply resonated with me. I’d always had a love of astronomy and physics, and when I thought of clouds of scattered dust coalescing into planets, smatterings of planets organizing themselves around a sun in a dance carefully orchestrated by the laws of gravity, I could see the hand of a great Organizer at work. I delved into books that talked about how so much of good and evil falls along the lines of order and chaos: life brings order out of random elements, death returns it to chaos. Peaceful societies are orderly, war is chaotic. What separates beautiful music from annoying noises is the harmonious organization of the notes. And so on. When you take a look at the big picture of the battle of good and evil, you see that so much of what the devil does simply involves destroying order.
At first all of these thoughts were confined to my head and the pages of books, but then I began to see these themes in my daily life. One day I was standing at the sink, rinsing soggy cereal out of bowls and placing them in the dishwasher, and it hit me: I was bringing order out of chaos. Suddenly, the value of this mundane task was no longer subjective. This wasn’t pointless drudgery; it was God’s work! It was a small-scale version of what God did when he created the planets, the galaxies, and life itself. I shut the dishwasher door, wiped down the counters, rinsed the sink clean, and swept the floor. When I stood back to behold the order I had brought to this place, I knew — could feel – that I had won a little battle against evil.
I’m still lazy and will never be one of those women who just can’t sit down because she’s always cleaning something, but I can honeslty say that once I understood the spirituality of housework, I have mostly enjoyed it. The more I’ve meditated on my work as a cooperation with God in the timeless fight against the forces of chaos, the more it has become satisfying to me on a deep level. In fact, some of the best moments in my spiritual life in the past couple of years have been when I was standing in my house after a good cleaning session, looking around at the triumph over the disarray that once reigned, knowing that I just won a victory for God.
And the truth shall make you free
Photo by Ansel Adams
So, umm, Father Corapi. Yeah. Wow.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the situation, here’s a summary. Long story short, the ministry of the great Fr. John Corapi as we know it has come to an end. He says he will continue to serve under the name “The Black Sheepdog” for now, and of course there’s always the possibility that he could one day return to his role as a priest in good standing with his religious society (as unlikely as that may seem at this point, nothing is impossible with God!) But I think it’s safe to say things won’t ever be the way they were again. The golden age of his priestly evangelization has likely passed.
It’s hard to overstate what an impact this has had on those of us who were heavily influenced by his preaching. When I think back on my initial conversion from atheism to Catholicism, Fr. Corapi is there at almost every turn. Shortly after I made the intellectual decision to become Catholic, I faced a serious medical diagnosis which I was told meant that I absolutely had to use artificial contraception. I was thrown into a battle I wasn’t prepared to fight, forced to stand up for principles I had only barely come to understand. I had to go to countless doctor appointments where I was looked at as crazy, backwards, or (worst of all) a religious fundamentalist nut — which was especially painful since my ego had been wrapped up in my identity as an atheist my whole life. And yet when I think back on that time, one of my strongest memories is a pleasant one: driving in my car, listening to the voice of Fr. John Corapi.
My appointments tended to coincide with Relevant Radio’s broadcast of his sermons, and I recall how my body would physically relax when I heard the first hopeful, soothing notes of the French horn piece that introduced his show. All my frantic worrying and confusion would fade away as I listened to his words, imminently reasonable, strong and unapologetic, as he explained each aspect of Catholic teaching. It was during one of those balmy summer mornings in the car, with Fr. Corapi’s words drifting out of the speaker, that I felt the overwhelming peace of knowing that I had found truth, and that my life was about change forever.
My husband and I entered the Church, the months went on, and, naturally, things were sometimes difficult. After an outpouring of great consolation after I first began to receive Communion, I faced my first spiritual dry spell. I was let down by fellow Catholics. I had the unsettling experience of spiritual attack. Through it all, Fr. Corapi was there. His face would be on my television, occasionally obscured by stacks of laundry or a gaggle of toddlers, or his voice on the radio, each time guiding me away from irrelevant distractions and toward the only thing that matters — the truth of Jesus Christ.
Much of what I know about Christianity I originally learned through Fr. Corapi. I’ve since expanded my knowledge from many other sources, but his way of distilling complicated, vague, and/or controversial ideas into crystal clear messages allowed me to quickly understand concepts that otherwise would have been daunting. And I know I’m not alone — countless people cite him as a key influence in their decisions to convert or “revert” to orthodox Catholicism. His body of work is priceless. If you were to create a pie chart of “modern speakers who explain the true Catholic faith in a clear and palatable way,” the portion with his name on it would take up a sizable chunk.
And so this turn of events is upsetting to the thousands of us who were led home, at least in part, by this particular shepherd. As I thought about it and followed the commentary all weekend, I felt distress at the news. But I also sensed something else, something surprising, something good:
Freedom.
The truth that Fr. Corapi led me and so many others to did not originate with him, or from any man. The Catholic Church isn’t a bunch of guys who sit around and come up with brilliant insights about Jesus; its doctrines don’t come from the pope, the bishops, the priests, Fr. Corapi, or anyone else – they come from God himself. The men who make up the Magisterium are simply the tools God uses to convey his message.
I don’t know if I had ever fully appreciated what a gift this system is until now. It’s ironic that the Church is sometimes accused of making its followers “go through people to get to God.” In fact, it’s the one religious institution that is entirely set up so that nobody is beholden to another human being to know God’s truths. When people have questions about the correct interpretation of something in the Bible, or want to know what the Christian answer is to a brand new ethical dilemma the world has never seen before — even if they’re illiterate and can’t read the Bible at all — they can find everything God has chosen to reveal to us in the body of wisdom of the Church that Jesus founded and continues to guide to this day. They don’t have to depend on anyone’s personal opinions; by looking at the Church’s Magisterial teaching, they can go straight to God.
As the news continues to break about the situation and the blog posts continue to pile up one after another, I feel free. Because the truths that Fr. Corapi led me to are separate from Fr. Corapi himself, I’m freed of the need to know whether the accusations against him are true or false. I’m freed of the need to speculate about all the how‘s and why‘s and what if‘s behind all the decisions that have been made by the various parties in this situation. I’m free simply to pray for him, for everyone else involved, and to leave it at that.
An analogy I keep thinking of is that of the great photographer Ansel Adams. On a much smaller scale, he was also a big influence in my life. His breathtaking black and white images of the Grand Tetons and other mountain ranges awakened me to the grandeur of nature, and stirred something within me that had never been there before. Though I wouldn’t have thought of it this way at the time, the moments I spent gazing at his photos were some of my first experiences of God. If Adams had ever been involved in a professional or personal situation I found unsettling, I would have been similarly free not to let it trouble me, other than out of concern for him as a person. Because while he had an incredible talent for conveying the majesty of the mountains, he did not create them. Though the way he captured them led me to a startling awakening to their beauty, it was not he who made them beautiful.
And so it is with Fr. Corapi. No matter what happens, I will always respect his talent for capturing the truth, and will eternally owe him a debt of gratitude for highlighting its beauty so well. I will think back fondly of those days when his voice guided me during those drives to my doctor appointments, when his televised image was a natural part of our family living room. My love of the doctrines of the Faith will remain unscathed, even if the one who originally conveyed them to me does not. And I pray that Fr. Corapi feels similarly liberated to take whatever time he needs to pray, pause, and seek the still, small voice of God, knowing that it is not his burden alone to pass on the Faith. God has given us the truth through a system that is outside of and above any one man. And because of that, we are all free.