Looking for the tow truck driver

A recent comment I left over at one of my regular reads, A Former Leader's Journey, got me thinking about some of the best advice I've ever received in terms of understanding God's will:


Coming from atheism, the whole concept of there being a personal God who is somehow involved in all that we do was amazing...and intimidating...and confusing. As anyone who has read my 2007 archives knows, for many months I was fascinated with the concept of knowing exactly what God's plans were for all the little details of my life. I looked everywhere for signs: did my invitation to a friend's wedding get lost in the mail because I wasn't supposed to go? Did my computer crash while writing for my blog because God didn't want me to publish that post? Did all the difficulty we had getting to church mean that we should switch parishes? I wanted all the answers NOW, and wanted the world around me to act as a sort of spiritual Ouija board in which God gave me clear Yes's and No's when I asked him questions (that way there'd be no uncertainty and I wouldn't have to mess around with that sticky "childlike trust" thing).

At some point I realized that, unless being a Christian was supposed to make you neurotic, I was probably doing it wrong. So I emailed regular commenter Steve G. and asked him for advice. The details of my question and his answer are here (I highly recommend that you read the whole thing), but the summary is this: I offered him a hypothetical situation in which my car breaks down on the way to an important meeting, and asked how to know the mind of God based on that situation. How do I know if God means the car breaking down to be a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down about the subject matter of my meeting? Or could it be that God is trying to tell me something about my relationship with the person I was planning to meet? Steve G.'s response was not what I expected, not what I was looking for, and not what I wanted. But it was a profound insight, and it changed the way I saw the world. In summary, his answer was:

Maybe it's not about you at all. Maybe it's about the tow truck driver.

He countered with a hypothetical situation in which there is a tow truck driver who is in a bad place in his life and is having a crisis of faith. He takes a call about a woman whose car is broken down on the side of the road. When he gets there he sees a Bible or something on her seat that indicates she's a Christian, strikes up a conversation about faith, and ends up being led back to God through the discussion they have. In other words: I am not the protagonist in that story. I'm just "the Christian woman whose car broke down," a bit player with a small speaking role.

It was this advice that led me to one of the biggest paradigm shifts in my entire conversion: the realization that to be a Christian is not to make God part of your story, but to realize you are part of God's story (that phrasing borrowed from this fascinating post at Purify Your Bride). Up until this point, I would have described my goal as a Christian as "to make God a big part of my story!" To understand that it's not about me, that the story was never mine to being with, was so humbling, so intimidating. What would this mean? How was I supposed to control everything if I didn't even know where God was going with all of this?!

Though Steve G. actually offered the ultimate answer in his response, it took months for it to sink in. I had to learn it on my own, the hard way (as usual), after banging my head against the wall by trying to do it my way a few more times. Eventually I realized that what it means to accept I am part of God's story is to ask in every moment not "What is God trying to tell me with this situation?" but rather, "How can I better know, love and serve God through this situation?" It is to stop reading tea leaves to see what God thinks of all my great, important plans and to realize that my plans are neither great nor important in the grand scheme of things.

Whenever I am tempted to forget this lesson (which is often), whenever I get so mired down in the frustration or difficulty of a situation that I can't imagine how this could possibly be part of God's plan, whenever I get so fixated on my own desires that I fall into thinking of all events in my life as related to them, I remind myself to "look for the tow truck driver." The tow truck driver has become a symbolic reminder for me, a call to put it all in perspective and remember that I have the great honor of being but a small player in the story that God writes. And, sure enough, nine times out of ten when I set my gaze higher and look outside of my own little bubble to see what's going on with the other players on the stage, I find that it is surprisingly obvious that the drama that I find myself in the midst of is actually not about me at all. Indeed, it's usually about the tow truck driver.

Putting our lives on hold

When I first started exploring Christianity, one of the teachings that was most surprising and counter-intuitive to me was the notion that we are called to live other-focused lives.

A product of secular culture, it seemed obvious to me that the way to find fulfillment and meaning in life was to be self-focused (not necessarily selfish, but self-focused). The way I used to see it, serving others was only one of a variety of good and worthy a person might choose to do with his or her free time. By default, you made your life goals based on pursuing personal interests and maximizing comfort; if possible, you would try to find some ways to give back to others, but to do so for any extended period of time would be to put your life on hold.

When I first heard that Christianity taught that our lives are not about ourselves and our own wants, that we are to look to serve God and others before serving ourselves, it was a radically different message than anything I'd ever heard...so radically different, in fact, that it sounded crazy. I resisted it. Wouldn't spending too much time focusing outside of ourselves lead to misery? How were we supposed to accomplish all our big goals and do all those fulfilling things we planned to do if we never optimized around our own desires and wants?

Yet, in the process of resisting this teaching, I began to take a second look at the self-focused philosophy I'd had all my life.

I began to realize that introspecting and focusing on my wants never brought me lasting peace, and that it didn't seem to work for anyone else either. I began to notice that as I started accomplishing some of those big goals that were going to bring me so much fulfillment...I didn't feel as fulfilled as I thought I would. I'd heard before that this Christian teaching about living to serve God and others was not the personal philosophy of the religion's founders, but an objective truth. I'd heard the claim that this, like all the other Christian teachings about moral law and how we are to live, was an articulation of the law that is written onto every human heart by our Creator, a statement of truth about what is best for each individual and for the world as a whole. When I first heard these claims they sounded like so much grandiose religious posturing. Yet more and more I realized that my way wasn't working, and I started to wonder if these Christians might be on to something.

I decided to give it a try. I'd make an effort to spend a whole lot less time searching for meaning and answers within myself, making all my plans for the day, the year, and the rest of my life based on what I felt like doing. Though I would set aside time for prayer and time to myself to recharge my batteries (as religious orders do in their rules of life), I would start to think of my purpose here on earth as nothing more than to serve God and others. Honestly, it kind of sounded like a recipe for misery. But I had learned over and over again that every time I thought I knew better than God and his Church...it turned out that I did not know better than God and his Church. So I gave it a shot.

Almost immediately, I began to see the power of this teaching.

Even with my halting, far-from-perfect efforts, things began to change. For one thing, ironically, I found that everything I sought by focusing on myself and my own needs -- peace, joy, fulfillment, direction, feelings of security about the future -- I began to find only after I stopped looking inward and started looking outward.

The biggest thing I noticed, however, was that to be other-focused is to create an economy of love. Every single time we set our gaze outside of ourselves seek to serve others, whether it's something overt like volunteering at a soup kitchen or something more subtle like simply saying a sincere, kind word to the checker at the grocery store, we add a little bit of love to the world. Through these actions there is more love in the spiritual economy than there was before. The other-focused life is, ultimately, a life of love.


I've been thinking about the power of this teaching a lot lately, noticing how differently I see the world now that I understand that serving God and others is not one of a variety of nice options we might pursue with our free time, but is actually our very purpose for existing.

All of my scattered thoughts on the subject were brought into relief the other day when I had a conversation with an immediate family member (whom I don't want to identify directly). He seemed depressed and uneasy about something, and when I asked him why he said it was about his retirement account. He's deeply distressed that he won't have enough money to afford anything other than a government-run nursing home in his old age. I reminded him that my husband and I would love for him to move in with us when it gets to the point that he doesn't feel comfortable living on his own. We weren't even talking about a situation where he might need intensive medical care, yet he flatly refused to even consider the notion.

"I would never do that to you," he said. "I would never have you put your life on hold like that."

We've had this conversation many times before, yet this time, the first since my conversion to Christianity, I was hit by just what a profoundly sad worldview this reflects. I've always wanted this family member to live with us when he can no longer live on his own, and he's always refused on the same grounds. That part is nothing new. Yet this time I saw clearly that the situation goes beyond an unfortunate refusal of help: it reflects a worldview in which well-meaning people like my relative believe that the best thing they can do for their loved-ones is to not burden them with their presence, where the very meaning of life has been twisted to suck love out of the world.

One of the logical results of the self-focused worldview that is so common in the secular world is that, if we assume that the best use of our lives is the unfettered pursuit of our personal goals and interests, we therefore don't want to get in the way of others doing the same. It creates a situation in which we're all constructing our own little self-sufficient desert islands, not wanting others to get in our way but also not wanting to get in others' way. It leads us to believe that if we were ever to lose our self-sufficiency, our presence would not just be an annoyance but would in fact prevent our loved-ones from fulfilling their very purpose in life.

When I compare my life with the self-focused worldview to my life with the other-focused worldview, the difference is striking. Not that I am anywhere near some saint-like level of always seeking to serve others before myself, but simply understanding that that is the goal, that my own life isn't about me, has changed everything. It's counter-intuitive, it requires sacrifice, and it isn't always the most comfortable path. But it is clear that, truly, this is how we were designed to live. After all these years of trying it my way, it's like I'm finally operating my life according to the instruction manual. And it is ultimately a manual for how to live a life of love, written by he who is Love itself.

Art: the secret handshake of the soul

I had a major revelation yesterday morning: I think I might finally get poetry!

Poetry, like all forms of art, is something with which I've always had a love/hate relationship. I love few things more than a moving piece of music or painting or writing; yet the whole concept of "art" has often left me frustrated. I was never sure how to define what makes good art, or even what constitutes "art" at all. I knew what I liked when I saw it, and even felt like there was some universal line in the sand between "true art" and "crap that is called 'art,'" but could never quite articulate why I liked what I liked or where to draw that line.

At some point after my conversion, I heard about the concept that true art is beautiful, in some form or another, and that in order to be beautiful it must convey truth. I didn't get it. How can art be true? Though something sounded vaguely right about it, I had more important concerns to address, so I promptly resumed being ambivalent about art. Until yesterday, when I discovered a poet.

The always-interesting ProBlogger had a great guest post by a man who happened to be a poet. On a whim I clicked through to his website and, long story short, I ended up spending most of my free time yesterday just reading poems -- something I have almost never done before (his free e-book is here). It was one of those "ah-hah" moments when it all came together. I think I finally "got" poetry, and art in general. I think I now understand what it is, why we create it, and why it matters, and what it means for it to convey truth.

Let me see if I've got this right:

All good art, by definition, conveys truth. That is its purpose. But we're not talking about truths like "the grass is green" or "the sky is blue." We're talking about the truths that lie outside the material world, the truths that you'd have to have a soul to know about. For example:

• All beauty and goodness has a living Source. In modern parlance, we call this source "God."
• The closer we get to God, the closer we get to perfect joy.
• We have a strong tendency to drift away from God. Yet further away we get, the more unsettled and miserable we are.
• When other people drift away from God it makes our lives more difficult.
• The pleasures and comforts of the material world seem like they will make us happy, but don't.
• We love other people, but not as much as we should.
• Acts of evil are shocking offenses to the way things should be.
• There is evidence of God in the material world, and our hearts soar when we see it.
  

And so on. All of these conditions are true objectively (they're not "your truths" or "my truths"), all have been known in some way or another to every person who ever lived, and none can be discerned from the material world alone. It delights us to share our experiences of these truths with our fellow human beings, because it creates a bond that surpasses our animal instincts and connects us at the level of the soul.

And that's where art comes in.

Art is the secret handshake of the children of God, the inside joke among those with souls. The spark that is ignited within us when we are touched by a work of art is a spark of recognition: the artist has brought us a souvenir from our homeland beyond the material world, the place that none of us should know about, but all of us do. To connect with a piece of art is to connect with the artist as a fellow traveler, to realize that you are both walking the same rocky road, and that he is homesick too. And it matters because true art, art that seeks a connection of souls, makes it harder to devalue and dehumanize one another. It reminds us what it means to be human.

I think I'm finally starting to get Pope Benedict's Contemplation of Beauty, the Catechism's statement on Truth, Beauty and Sacred Art. I think I now understand why the Church understands one of its jobs to be to keep art and beauty in the world.

It only took 31 years, but I think I'm starting to get the whole art thing. Am I on the right track?

Dying to self

Speaking of Christian concepts that used to baffle me, the idea of "dying to self" was high on that list.

This concept was one of the first things I got from reading the New Testament and books by Christian authors, and, honestly, it sounded kind of depressing. There were surely some good things about me, and it seemed a shame to have to get rid of it all. I eventually understood that it is only by dying to self that we show Christ to others, which did make it sound more appealing. But even then I pictured that if all Christians were to completely die to themselves and be perfectly Christ-like, that we'd all basically be identical drones. I thought of all the different talents and personality types out there -- poets, artists, engineers, comedians, etc. -- and it seemed sad to whitewash all those unique characteristics.

I thought this instruction was so odd, in fact, that I would sometimes wonder what kind of weird religion this was that I was exploring here. "How could a good religion tell people that they're bad, that they need to die a death of sorts in order to grow closer to God?" I'd wonder. It was only because I had an overwhelming amount of evidence in favor of this belief system being the box top to life that I was willing to move forward and set aside my concerns for the time being. It was probably one of my first leaps of faith.

Slowly, I began to understand that to die to self was to die to the willful, selfish, sinful parts of ourselves; to let go of our plans and what we want to do based on comfort and convenience. Even this, though, sounded dangerous. The skeptic in me had to wonder: if I attempt to empty myself of all these lifelong tendencies that are supposedly sinful, if I set aside my to-do lists and goals spreadsheets and make no plans for the future, what will be left? Isn't that a recipe for ruin?

I was surprised to find that it was not.

As I slowly began to empty myself of so many of the things that composed life as I knew it -- my plans, my goals, many of my habits, (what I thought were) ingrained personality traits -- I found that I was not left empty. Rather, there was immediately Something there to fill me up, Something whose presence increased as life as I knew it decreased. But there was something else there as well, something that had been lost that I'd never tried to find:

Me.

I've mentioned that in the past I sometimes thought of "finding myself," but I thought of it in terms of finding what I should do with my life, what I should accomplish. It never even occurred to me that there was some other, more pure version of myself than the one I already knew. Perhaps because I never used to believe in the soul, I always figured that the chemical reactions that fired in my brain at any given moment were "me," that there was no one set of chemical reactions that represented my true self more than any other. It's been with some amount of surprise, then, that I've begun to see that the process of dying to self is a process of stripping away layers of sin encrusted with selfishness, and that glowing underneath all those layers is the true, complete version of who I was designed to be -- the real me. That's probably another reason I feel younger these days: the closer I get to God, the closer I get to the original version of myself.

I now see "dying to self" not as something a person does because he thinks he's bad; it's something he does because he knows he's good, and wants to find the Source of all that is good. It's not a whitewashing of unique characteristics, but the shining of Light through them to make them more beautiful and true. Dying to self, I think, is a purging of all that is not love; it's a process of breaking down the walls that block out Love himself; it's a way -- the only way -- of truly finding ourselves.

God and computer problems, Part II

Back in this post I talked about how some technical issues were about to drive me insane. To summarize, I thought I would make a simple change to my blog (getting a custom domain name), and it ended up causing all sorts of errors because of a technical glitch on Blogger's end. After researching the issue and talking to other people in the Blogger help forums, I came to the realization that there was not a single thing I could do about it -- nothing -- and I didn't even have a way to directly contact Blogger technical support to let them know the problem was happening. Most people were getting an error page when trying to access my site, and I didn't know what the problem was or whether it would be fixed in an hour or a day or a year (or never).

After informing my husband of my plan to resolve the situation by throwing my laptop through the window and stomping on it for a while, he asked an interesting question: "Why are you so mad about this?" When the only answer I could give was something along the lines of, "Because...just BECAUSE!" it occurred to me that perhaps I should think a bit more about what had me so bothered by this situation.

As I alluded to in my last post on the subject, it came down to trusting God. As my husband pointed out, I should trust God with the technical problems on the blog where I write about trusting God. And that should be easy, right? After all, I've made a lot of progress in terms of letting go of my white-knuckle grip on the major areas of my life, so it should be no big thing to let go of my anxiety about this. Yet when I tried to do just that, when I tried to cultivate a peaceful state of mind in which I rested in the knowledge that the only thing I needed to do was listen for God's will and it would all work out according to his plan...I couldn't.

But why?

It's not that I thought that the fabric of the universe was going to fall apart if people couldn't read my little blog. It's not that I felt that the errors were inexcusable -- my background is in the tech industry so I'm sympathetic to the fact that those things happen sometimes. It's not even that I thought it would have any noticeable impact on my or anyone else's life. So what was the problem?

Lack of control: I was completely, totally powerless.

As a modern American, I realized, there are very few things in my life over which I have no control. I've never experienced food shortage or crop failure; I've never had a well dry up; none of my children have ever had illnesses that couldn't be at least partially treated with medicine; when I'm in pain there are drugs to make it go away; and thanks to air conditioning and central heating, I can even have a sense of controlling the weather by keeping my house and car at temperatures that are comfortable to me. I. Am. In. Control. All. The. Time.

I decided to brainstorm to come up with a list of situations I might experience over which I have zero control, where there is not one thing I can do to change the outcomes. Some of the few things I could come up with are:

• Computer problems where technical support is not available
• Getting stuck in traffic
• Turbulence on airplanes
• When I need to get in touch with my husband while he's out and he forgot his cell phone at home
• When I've lost something irreplaceable and can't find it anywhere
  

When I looked at the list, I was amazed: sure enough, these are the times when I am most anxious and/or angry. I am more discontent in those types of situations than I have been when I've faced life-altering events like, say, when I got a life-threatening blood clot during pregnancy and found out I had a serious clotting disorder. Even though the latter situation was far more important, I had more control: I could research the best medicines to take for the blood clot, switch doctors to get better treatment, modify my activity to lower the risk of a pulmonary embolism, read up on the best diet for people with my disorder, make sure to stay at a healthy weight, etc. I could say that I trusted God with the outcome, and I really did...yet I still had some amount of control.

As I mentioned in one of my last posts, I've made a lot of progress in terms of trusting God with the long-term plan for my life. Interestingly, it all started last year during Lent. The day I wrote this post was a turning point in my life. It was the moment that the concept of "trusting God" finally clicked for me, that I finally understood what it was all about.

I can't help but wonder about the timing, then, that another piece of the puzzle fell into place for me during Lent this year, almost a year to the day after my first lesson on the subject. Last year I began to understand that I needed to work on trusting God with the big picture. This year I am beginning to understand that there's a lot more to it than that; that to really put my life in God's hands means to trust him with everything -- everything. I'm realizing that even if I can prayerfully turn to that famous line from Matthew 26:39 when facing major crossroads, I will only have truly abandoned my life to God when I can find myself stuck in traffic or staring at an error message on my computer and calmly say, "Not my will, but Yours."

Comments closed until Easter

Love and conversion

Growing up in the Bible Belt, I was frequently exposed to the expression "God is Love." I saw it on t-shirts, bumper stickers and the occasional Precious Moments figurine, and figured that I pretty much knew what it meant: it was a shorthand way of describing one of God's characteristics, i.e. "God (that Guy we believe in who's kind of like a dad, only nicer) is love (meaning he's really, really, really loving)." Right?

It is only recently that I realized that I had it wrong. One of the biggest lessons I learned in the conversion process, maybe the biggest lesson I learned in my life, was that the phrase "God is Love" is meant to be taken literally: God is love. God = Love. It's not just some characteristic, but his essence. To paraphrase the Cynical Christian's recent post on a similar subject, when we say "God is love," we're not describing what God is, we're describing what love is -- love is God.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, how this understanding of God and love played such a key role in my conversion. It brings light to three issues in particular that would sometimes perplex me as I walked the long path from atheism to belief:


1. It explains the importance of humility.

When I first began to explore the possibility of God's existence, I approached the endeavor the way one might approach proving that something in the material world exists: I put God under the microscope, so to speak, waiting with arms folded across my chest until proof of his existence was presented to me. Occasionally I would read something about the importance of humility, which I took to mean that one should be open to new data. So I'd make a mental note to make sure that I wasn't closing my mind to any sort of proof God might offer me, and promptly return to sitting and waiting with my arms folded across my chest.

This approach made sense since I thought I was seeking an abstract theoretical concept called "God," and saw myself as involved in a process that should require nothing on my part other than observation of data. Yet I couldn't seem to escape this concept of humility -- and the more I read, the more I realized that all these great Christian thinkers were talking about something much more than just admitting that you don't have all the answers. They were talking about embracing radical, self-abandoning humility. I didn't get it. Did these people have hang-ups or something? Why were they so determined to believe that you had to be humble yourself before you could seek God?

Now that I realize that I was seeking not an impersonal theoretical concept but love, Love itself, it makes sense. I won't get in over my head by trying to fully explain the Christian virtue of humility and get into all the reasons it's important; suffice it to say that I came to see a close connection between love and humility. Even in human relationships, I realized, one does not find love by starting with an overly skeptical, "prove it!" sort of attitude. Love is not something that can be dissected under a microscope; to find it requires emotional involvement on the part of the seeker, a willingness to investigate with the heart in addition to the coldly rational part of the mind. It requires a questioning mind, and a humble heart.

Which brings me to the next thing I realized...


2. It explains why it took me so long to "feel" God's presence.

As anyone who's glanced through the archives to this blog knows, I never used to "feel" God's presence. I eventually came to believe in his existence on an intellectual level, but was disappointed that I didn't feel much on an emotional level. It always seemed like I was talking to myself in prayer, and I often felt a bit jealous that other people seemed to "know" God in a way that I did not.

Part of that might have been due to the normal spiritual dryness that most people experience at some point or another, and part is surely because I'm not a very "touchy feely" type of person. But there was another factor as well, possibly the biggest factor: I didn't understand that God is Love. Once I realized that you could replace the word "God" with the word "Love" in almost any instance, the problem behind a lot of my spiritual struggles became clear. For example:

"I'm seeking God" = "I'm seeking Love"

"I want to experience God" = "I want to experience Love"

"I want to know God" = "I want to know Love"

When I considered the statements on the left side of the equations, each sounded like a nebulous, intellectually difficult endeavor that would require lots of passive contemplation from an armchair; but when I considered the statements on the right side, each sounded like an exciting, intriguing endeavor that would require the active participation of my mind, heart and soul. I might not have felt like I knew much about experiencing God, but I did know a thing or two about experiencing love: I knew that you don't fall in love by reading about it in books. You don't increase the amount of love in your life by sitting back and waiting for others to make the first move.

It was when I stopped asking "How does one experience God?" and started asking "How does one experience Love?" that I began to really feel God working in my life.


3. It explains why I now believe in God with all my heart.

In his conversion story, former atheist John C. Wright likened coming to know God to falling in love. He writes: "It was like falling in love. If you have not been in love, I cannot explain it. If you have, you will raise a glass with me in toast." I can't think of a better summary of what I've experienced.

Back when I wrote my original conversion story I talked a lot about how much more sense the world made to me after seeing it through the lens of Christian teaching. The profound changes I saw based on that understanding alone were enough to convince me that Christianity spoke the truth about God and the world. But in the year and a half since I typed that up, something else has happened as well: my life has been infiltrated by Love. A real, external, palpable force of love has entered my life, a distinct presence that wasn't there before. I don't mean that I just feel happy more often or that I try to be more loving towards others or that I think nice thoughts more than I used to (though all that is true), but that the very Source of those things is now involved, and it's not coming from within me.

I used to think I'd always have doubts about God's existence. I'd been too atheistic in my beliefs for too long, so it would be too much of a change to think in terms of the supernatural. What I didn't anticipate when I made that prediction, however, is that I would find Love. This Love that has ever so slowly become the center of my life is more powerful than anything I've ever known, and to doubt its existence would be to doubt reality.

I could have probably come to deep, unhesitating belief in God much sooner if I'd understood from the beginning that by seeking God, I was ultimately seeking Love.

Comments closed for Lent

Lent starts now

The other day I was reflecting upon this season of Lent, as it is only the third time I've observed traditional Catholic Lenten practices, and my first since becoming Catholic. I thought about how I find this to be a season with its own simple beauty, how I actually enjoy the opportunity to deny myself worldly comforts in order to focus solely on spiritual nourishment...For about twenty days. And then I'm over it.

I'll give you an example from my weekly grocery store trip. I always go to the store hungry, and sharing a cookie with the kids while we shop is a little pleasure that I really enjoy. For some reason, every single time I have gone to the store during Lent I have forgotten about giving up wheat until I actually had a piece of the crunchy, sugar-crusted cookie in my hand. And each time, I had to make a painful choice. Here's a comparison of my thought process at the beginning of Lent, and then yesterday:

February 12: Mmmmm, this cookie looks delicious! Oh, wait, I gave up wheat for Lent and this has flour in it. Well, as I watch the kids eat it the tiny amount of suffering I experience will be a great opportunity to meditate on Christ's sufferings, not to mention the fact that I could use a little exercise in the willpower department. Indeed, what a wonderful opportunity we have in these sorts of sacrifices to keep the big picture in mind, to detach ourselves from the hollow pleasures of the world.

March 4: Mmmmm, this cookie looks delicious! Wait...oh no...is it STILL Lent?! You have got to be kidding me. Does this never end? I WANT THE HOLLOW PLEASURES OF THE WORLD BACK!

In other words, sometime around the half-way point of Lent, I stopped getting anything out of it. When Ash Wednesday first rolls around, fasting and penance actually sound good to me. First of all, change is always invigorating. It's fun to enter a different season of the year, to break out of the routine and do something new. Also, I often feel mentally and physically bloated after the decadence of the Christmas season, and for selfish reasons alone I look forward to simplifying my eating habits and my life in general. After letting the pendulum swing too far in the direction of gluttony and indulgence during the holidays, it actually sounds refreshing to let the pendulum swing back the other way during Lent.

But then, a few weeks in, the Christmas season long forgotten, nothing about it sounds good for selfish reasons. Concepts like penance and detachment aren't some new and different challenge, they no longer offer an energizing change of pace. I miss the things I've given up, and the rush that comes with doing something new no longer acts as a counterbalance to the discomfort that my little acts of penance cause me.

In some ways, I think of Lent as just now getting started.

Starting this week, I realized that I was at a crossroads: now that the newness of Lent had worn off, I could continue dragging my feet through the season to hold on by my fingernails until Easter when I could finally do the things I want to do again; or I could realize that it is only now that I have an opportunity to fully understand this season. Only now that my opportunities for selfishness are gone can this be a time of lasting conversion, of true detachment and repentance. I can muddle through the next couple of weeks, or I can stop turning away from the discomfort and push through it to see what I find on the other side.

This wouldn't be something I know from personal experience, but I am guessing that when people find Lent to be a truly fruitful time that takes their relationship with God to the next level, it is in the second half of the season that the changes occur. For me, in terms of its potential as a time of deep conversion, Lent starts now.

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And to dust you shall return

We had a great time on Fat Tuesday. To do some feasting before the start of our first Lent as Catholics, my husband and I went to the house of some good friends. When I first arrived I felt the wind pick up and looked to see some threatening clouds on the horizon, so I hurried to get inside before the rain started. We watched the Super Tuesday election results and talked some smack about politics with our friends as we enjoyed good food, good company and good wine in the warm glow of their home. In the midst of our merrymaking the window screens would occasionally rattle as the wind whipped around outside.

I woke up the next day, Ash Wednesday, feeling a whole lot less merry from having stayed up too late. As I got ready to go to my first ever Ash Wednesday prayer service, I heard the horrible news that tornadoes had ripped through five southern states the night before and that the death toll was at 44 and climbing. That same front that had done nothing more than blow leaves around our city had in other states leveled homes, killed entire families, and utterly devastated large regions of the country. As I drove to the church I thought of how surreal, how horribly impossible it all seemed.

When I got to the church I was initially distracted by making sure I didn't do anything stupid since I didn't know what to expect from this service. But I was quickly reminded of the tragedy that had played out on Tuesday night as the distribution of ashes began. We prayed, we listened to Scripture readings, and then we all got in line. And when it came my turn the deacon smeared ashes on my forehead in the shape of a cross, looked at me, and said:

"You are dust, and to dust you shall return."

Those words from Genesis 3:19 are probably the one thing on which all humans from every place and time can agree. The modern parlance might be, "You are chemical reactions, and one day those reactions will cease," or maybe "Your body is matter, made of atoms like all the other lifeless stuff in the universe, and one day it will return to being lifeless matter like everything else," but regardless of how it is phrased it is nevertheless something we all know to be true. It is probably simultaneously the most important, most agreed upon and most ignored fact of life.

The truth of this statement seemed all the more real this day. It occurred to me that as I sat in the pew with black ashes on my face, listening to beautiful yet somber sound of Attende Domine coming from the chant schola, watching men, women, and children walk through the line to receive ashes, that at this very moment thousands of people were walking through the ashes of what was once their homes. Probably some of the bodies in the funeral homes in Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky and Alabama at that moment were yesterday people who were chatting about whether to give up chocolate or coffee for Lent. As the long line moved forward, I heard "You are dust, and to dust you shall return...You are dust, and to dust you shall return...You are dust, and to dust you shall return," over and over again. I thought of how casually I'd glanced at the darkening sky the night before, how I'd taken it for granted that my own death is far off as I heard the wind pick up outside.

You are dust.

I never intended to take Lent lightly, but I had fallen into the mode of thinking of it in abstract terms like "a time for spiritual growth" or "an opportunity to grow closer to God." But in the ashes ritual I was starkly reminded that that the storm clouds are on the horizon for us all; that to build your life around earthly comfort and pleasure is to build a house of cards.

And to dust you shall return.

The announcement of this most inconvenient, inevitable fact of life begs the question: what are we going to do with this information? And that, I now realize, is what Lent is all about.

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From atheism to Christianity: a conversion story through books

Back in this post I was talking about how I strongly encourage Christians to ask the tough questions about their faith. To summarize what I said there, occasionally I meet Christians who seem hesitant to delve too deeply into their faith for fear of what they might find. It's a shame because, in the opinion of this former atheist, by asking challenging questions and seeking answers Christians have absolutely nothing to fear, and everything to gain.

"So where do I start?" is a frequent response I get to that statement. I've finally had a chance to put together a list of books that I found helpful when I was first asking the tough questions of Christianity. I think it would be a good jumping-off point for lifelong Christians (especially Catholics) who don't feel like they have a lot of knowledge of the how's and why's behind why we believe what we believe. This would also be a good list for people who are not Christian but are curious about the religion.

These are by no means the only sources of information I used -- the conversion process was a long road that involved lots of thinking and reading (and eventually praying) and gathering data from tons of different sources. These books alone were not enough to convince me to convert; all the information in the world would not have been enough had my heart not been open to it (as I talked about here). But they are, I believe, good places to start.

One of the reasons it's taken so long to put this together is because I don't want to present this as any sort of definitive list or hold myself out as an authority on the subject: I offer this as a humble account of my personal story, detailing some books that I found compelling in my search for truth about God, the world and the human experience.

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The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel

My conversion to Christianity had a very clear beginning: the day I walked into a bookstore and saw this book. In my vague search for religion up to that point, I had been planning to explore Buddhism and other Eastern belief systems first (then Judaism, then Islam, then Baha'i, then that Wicca/"earth goddess" stuff that my friend from college was into...anything but Christianity!) It had never once occurred to me that there was even the most remote possibility that the Christian claims about Jesus could be true, so I was planning to skip over all that. But one day back in July of 2005 I walked into a bookstore, saw this book from way across the room, and knew I wanted to read it. I had no idea what it was, just that I was oddly drawn to it and had to go see it.

As it turns out, the book was exactly what I needed to read. Former atheist Lee Strobel lays out the data that convinced him that the Christian claims about Jesus' life, death and resurrection are true. It's not that the book was perfect, or even that I instantly believed after reading it (I didn't). But it did open my eyes to the fact that Christians had a much better defense for their beliefs than I'd expected. I wrote about it at the time here.


Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

I read Mere Christianity shortly after I finished The Case for Christ, and it added fuel to the growing fire of my interest in Christianity. It was the first book I read where a Christian looked at Christianity from a rational, questioning point of view. One of the reasons this book was probably so helpful to me is that Lewis was himself a former atheist, so he knew how to explain his faith in a way that made sense to nonbelievers.


By What Authority? by Mark Shea

At some point along the way I bought a Bible and started reading it, which left me with more questions than answers (as I talked about here). Around that time someone suggested I read By What Authority, saying that Shea (a convert to Catholicism) provided a good, readable explanation of the concept of Sacred Tradition. I would love to spice up the story with tales of how I wrestled with accepting the notion that God gives us doctrine through the Catholic Church...but, honestly, it was a slam-dunk. This was the missing piece of the puzzle. I had been leaning towards Catholicism for a lot of other reasons, but understanding the concept of Sacred Tradition was what finally made all of Christianity make sense to me.

I still had questions, though. What about the bad popes? What about the Crusades? And, most pressingly, what about those teachings that were just obviously antiquated and oppressive (e.g. their stance on contraception)? I figured that a lot of those crazy teachings must be optional, that perhaps they were categorized under "suggestions" rather than official teachings. I decided to keep reading to see what I'd find...


Catholicism for Dummies by John Trigilio and Kenneth Brighenti

I admit I was a bit embarrassed to buy a "Dummies" book on such a serious topic, but after multiple people recommended it I sucked it up and got Catholicism for Dummies, thinking that maybe I could slip on a fake Summa Theologica cover if I were to read it in public. :) Indeed it was very helpful -- not, of course, for gaining deep knowledge of any one area of Catholicism, but for answering some of my basic questions and pointing me in the right direction for further explanation. For the first time, I started to think that a lot of that Catholic stuff that I had written off as oppressive or old-fashioned might actually have a whole lot of wisdom to it.


The Catechism of the Catholic Church (version by Fr. John Hardon)

At this point I decided to hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak, and get a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the official exposition of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Though you can read the full text online for free on the Vatican's site here, I decided to get this version since a) I didn't want to read that much text online, and b) I heard that this arrangement by Fr. John Hardon was more readable. Reading it was amazing. It was so...not what I expected. Here's one excerpt (chosen quickly from the copy sitting here on my desk) that is the type of thing I found interesting:

[W]ith his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God's existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the "seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material", can have its origin only in God.

The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality "that everyone calls God".

The more I read, the more I became enthralled. As I've said before, when I read the Catholic Church's official teachings on God and what they claim is God's one true church, I felt overwhelmed with the peace of certainty that I had found truth.


Making Senses Out of Scripture: Reading the Bible As the First Christians Did by Mark Shea

Now I felt ready to deepen my knowledge of the Bible -- I'd previously read through most of the New Testament, but didn't know where to go from there. We didn't own a Bible in my house growing up, so I had almost zero familiarity with it. I'd flip through some of the Old Testament books and think, "What on earth is going on here?"

I read a few books on the topic of getting a basic understanding of the Bible, and this one was my favorite. Mark Shea walks the reader through an understanding of the Scripture as seen through the eyes of the Apostles themselves. The Bible, especially the Old Testament, was a lot more understandable once I understood that different books were intended to convey their truths in different "senses": literal, moral, allegorical or anagogical. This book really illuminated the Bible for me.


The Good News About Sex and Marriage by Christopher West

Back on the topic of Catholicism, the one thing I couldn't quite understand was the issue of contraception. I'd been living in this cycle of "Jen thinks she knows better than the 2,000-year-old Catholic Church" --> research and reading --> "Jen does not know better than 2,000-year-old Catholic Church" for a few months, so I was at least open to hearing the Church's point of view on this one. And, on a gut level, something was starting to ring vaguely true about the notion that contraception might not be the best thing for individuals or society. But I still had a lot of serious reservations.

That's where Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body came in. Unfortunately, I was too sleep deprived at that time to get through the massive tome, amazing as it was. So that's where Christopher West came in: he's made his career making the wisdom of the Theology of the Body accessible to everyone. The Good News About Sex and Marriage explained a lot of the questions and concerns I had about Catholic teaching on the relations between the sexes. Reading this book helped my husband and me familiarize ourselves with the basics so that we could move on to other sources which explained them in more detail. To our shock, we found ourselves agreeing -- even though we had some serious issues going on at the time that would make following these teachings very difficult -- after finding what we had found in our research and conversations (and prayers), we knew that we would have been lying to say that we didn't think this was true.

When we actually started to apply these teachings to our lives, everything changed -- our relationship to each other, to God, to our vocations, to our children -- everything. We found ourselves standing in wonder at how our life had done a 180-degree spin and been turned on its head by what we once assumed to be oppressive rules, and it was then that something that we'd come to believe intellectually about Church teaching became something we knew in our hearts: this stuff doesn't come from people.


The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton

I read The Everlasting Man shortly after I came to truly believe in God, and found myself wanting to shout, "Yes! Exactly!" all throughout this book. In this classic work, Chesterton makes the case that Christianity is something that rings true both to the mind and the heart. It takes what we know of the world through science and what we know of our souls through human experience and brings it all together. Though he doesn't use this exact analogy, I found that this book helped me articulate why I came to believe that Christianity is the box top to the puzzle of life.

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So there it is: a very abbreviated version my my conversion story as told through the books I read along the way. As I said above, none of these books will convert anyone since that is not something a books alone can do. I think they will, however, provide great starting points for believers who are eager to ask the tough questions of their faith, or for nonbelievers who are starting to think that there might be something more to this whole God thing than meets the eye.

The bottom line is this: if you are seeking God with humility and an open heart, you will find him. And asking tough questions will only speed up the process.


Feel free to use the comments to share your favorite books on these topics as well.

The pursuit of happiness

In the process of sending out Christmas cards I always think about the people whose names are in my address book. I wonder what they're up to, how they're doing, and hope all is well for them. As I did this a few weeks ago, I noticed as I came across the names of our parents' friends that so many of them have had a rough time in the past decade or so. Divorce, mid-life crises and general restlessness seem to be epidemic among the baby boomers and those born around the same time. It seems that so many people we know from that generation express a vague dissatisfaction with their lives, a feeling that somehow things should be different, should be better, and they don't know where it all went wrong.

Recently I noticed in some forwarded email chains that more than one of our parents' friends have the same signature on their email. As I read it, I thought that it was a good summary of the baby boomer outlook on life. And I think it's a good summary of what's gone wrong. It said:

Life is short: Break the rules. Kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably. And never regret anything that made you smile.

This motto of sorts seems to be based on the view that it's healthy and good -- if not the very meaning of life -- to pursue happiness. Our culture takes it for granted that the pursuit of happiness is a worthy and important goal. I always believed that too. But having observed the fruits of that worldview in my parents' generation, and having lived most of my life that way myself, I've come to believe that it ultimately leads to misery.

That last line, "never regret anything that made you smile," brings to mind so many examples of just where this worldview leads us astray. Sure, I smiled when I held my newborn baby or when I got married. But I also smiled that time I told a joke at another person's expense that got big laughs; I smiled when a dangerously unhealthy diet plan allowed me to be considered attractive by society's standards but left me at a weight that was clinically anorexic; I smiled when I heard that something bad happened to someone I really disliked. All of these things made me happy. None of them brought me peace.

I've come to believe that when we chase happiness, what we really want is peace.

It's interesting to observe how the pursuit of happiness is lauded more and more as our society becomes less and less religious. From my experience, I think that that's because it's impossible to be at peace while denying the soul, so pursuing happiness is the only choice we have. Peace does not -- cannot -- come from what is found in the material world alone. From a viewpoint in which the observable material world is all there is, humans should be mentally tranquil, in a state of harmonious equilibrium, at things like the deaths of those whose genes are less than perfect, or the demise of others and their resource-consuming offspring. Yet, oddly, what lead people to inner harmony, to peace, are counterintuitive things like self-sacrifice, detachment from our appetites, and trust that there is something more to life than what meets the eye.

Inner peace requires acknowledgment that there is something transcendent about human life -- not necessarily Christianity, but some sort of tapping into the rule system from wherever it is that our souls originate. It requires religion. Which is why I think that as we've cast off religion we've had to also cast off the pursuit of peace, of inner tranquility, and settle for the cheaper substitute, the pursuit of happiness.

And when we follow only that which makes us happy, it can so easily lead us astray, leaving us chasing fleeting pleasures and hollow passions that lead to anything but happiness in the long term. From my experience, ironically, when we give up trying to find happiness and start trying to find peace is when we actually achieve true happiness. From the little saying above, things like kissing, loving, laughing can be wonderful things -- but without those mysterious rules of the soul to reign them in -- without the litmus test of whether or not they put the soul at peace -- we can find ourselves looking back on our lives and finding that where it all went wrong started with something that originally made us happy.

Finding Narnia

I keep getting stopped in my tracks as I'm out and about this month. I'll be scrambling around trying to check items off my Christmas shopping list, putting eggnog in my cart at the grocery store, walking through a department store while trying to keep the kids from pulling things off the racks, and I'll hear some familiar old Christmas tune begin. And I'll stop, forget everything else, and listen intensely for just a second. Even as I go back to what I was doing, I'm acutely aware of the music in the background.

This is only the second Christmas since I've believed in God. And it's the first Christmas that it ever occurred to me that the songs about the birth of Christ are distinctly, vastly different than the songs about reindeer and Santa. It's the first time it ever occurred to me that they're religious. These songs were not written to be light little ditties about imaginary characters; they were written by Christians about one of the central events to their faith: the birth of Jesus Christ. The event that humanity had awaited for so long, that people from many different times and places had whispered about throughout the ages, when Someone from the other world would come and somehow make everything right. It finally happened. And in our Christmas songs, we proclaim this great event.

All my life I made no distinction between Santa Clause is Coming to Town and The First Noel. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman were fairy tale songs about mythical characters, as were Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and Silent Night. It never once occurred to me that it could be otherwise. Not even as a child, not even for a moment.

So it's really impossible to describe how those songs sound to me now. I wish I could, because it's one of the most thrilling, amazing feelings in the world. The closest I can come is to offer this analogy:

When I was a kid I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (we didn't know C.S. Lewis was a Christian, otherwise I probably wouldn't have read it). I was so enchanted by the idea of these children discovering that a dusty old wardrobe was a secret portal to another realm full of wonder. I wanted so much to experience something like that, to stumble across some other world different from the one in which I lived, a place of great thrills, adventure and mystery. Once or twice when visiting my grandparents I would be looking for something in one of their cluttered old closets, and I would reach back through the clothes...just in case. Though I was never surprised, my heart always sank a little bit when I felt the wall.

When I hear Christmas songs now, I feel the way I would have felt if one of those times that I reached to the back of the closet against all odds, I felt cool air and a snowflake fall on my hand. It was supposed to be a fairy tale. This story of a loving God who created these creatures who scorn and reject him over and over, yet made himself one of them to suffer for them, to die for them, to save them...it's the best story ever told. And, to my astonishment, I discovered that it is true.

When I hear the first few bars of What Child Is This? or Joy to the World! waft above the clanking of shopping cards or the ring of cash registers, I feel like grabbing everyone around me and hugging them, jumping for joy while yelling, "It's true! Can you imagine anything so wonderful? The stuff that this song is talking about -- it's true!" I imagine that most stores have policies against that sort of thing, so I refrain. But I always smile, and I always feel overjoyed to have these reminders to rejoice, for a Savior has been born.

Why I'm a better person now that I'm a Christian

A reader writes in response to this post:

How sad to see that you abandoned reason for faith. would it not be even better if you started living your life as if it mattered in it's own right and not just so that you could get into a special heavenly club. I think doing good for no other reason then such a selfish desire is despicable.

The Atheocracy had a similar take in response to this post, and various commenters have made statements along these lines throughout the history of this blog.

I see where they're coming from. I too used to level those claims at Christians: when I heard people say things like, "I'm a better person since I found God," it struck me as selfish. Why not be a good person either way? Why does it take some "God" and perhaps the carrot stick of an eternal payoff to motivate you to do good things?

But now that I'm one of those people who bores others with my own talk of being a better person since becoming a Christian, I see statements like that in a different light. I have a new perspective that resulted from the conversion of heart that accompanied my intellectual conversion.

I think that I am a much better wife, mother, friend, daughter, and person than I used to be before I was religious (and word on the street is that my friends and family would agree). The reason for that isn't as simple as wanting to go to heaven and avoid hell. In case anyone's interested, I'll explain what I think is responsible for the changes in my life, my actions, and my heart. I don't speak for all Christians (or atheists) here, this is just my personal perspective:


What's right and wrong is very clear now
I tried to be a good person when I was an atheist. I generally attempted to do what was right and not to do what was wrong. The problem was, there was a lot of gray area there. For example, I believed that it was right to be kind to others. It seemed like a pretty clear, straightforward rule. It only took a few spats with friends or disagreements with classmates, however, for "be kind to others" to sort of drift into "be kind to others unless they're total schmucks." There was a fine, blurry line between justifiable and unjustifiable rudeness, and it tended to move depending on the extent to which my pride had been wounded.

That's just one example, but there are countless matters on which the distinction between right and wrong was not clear in all circumstances, and the discernment of where to draw the line was clouded by my unparalleled selfishness and laziness. As I wrote about in more detail here, some deep instinct told me that such a thing is true right and true wrong did exist -- independent of each person's subjective experience and opinions -- and when I read about what God supposedly is and what he supposedly wants from us as laid out in the Catholic Catechism, it smacked of truth. I believed that the details of what's right and what's wrong as laid out Catholic doctrine were an articulation of the natural law that's written on the human heart, that comes from a source outside of the material world.

So, even early on in the conversion process when I didn't "feel" God or have super strong beliefs, simply having such a clear description of what's right and what's wrong really aided my efforts to "do the right thing", and helped me keep myself in check when I was tempted to tell myself a story about why some bad thing I was doing was not actually bad at all.


It is about heaven...sort of
I do want to go to heaven. Unfortunately, I am not spiritually mature enough to really conceive of what exactly heaven is. I know that to be "in heaven" is to be with God in some way, and that God is the source of perfectly pure love, joy, and goodness. I know that to be "in hell" is to be separated from God for eternity. One certainly sounds better than the other. But these concepts -- "heaven," "hell," "eternity" -- are still vague enough in my mind that they don't motivate me on a gut level. So while I know on an intellectual level that I want to go to heaven and stay out of hell, I have never avoided doing something bad because of the thought, "If I do that I might go to hell!"

There is a very big motivator, however, that is related to the concept of heaven: I don't want to reject God. In the past few years I have slowly (very slowly) begun to recognize and feel God's love more and more in my soul. I've come to believe the Christian claim that God not only loves each of us, but is the ultimate source of love. When I turn away from him by doing something unkind or selfish -- even a relatively small act or thought -- I realize now that it is a tragic rejection of love itself.


Something within me has fundamentally changed
Back in college a professor asked us to come up our personal motto, a short phrase that summarized our outlook on life. With a smirk I realized that the best I could come up with was, "People suck."

Even going back to early childhood, a salient characteristic of my personality was the ease with which I became irritated with the people around me. Though I was usually empathetic to people in difficult situations and was mostly nice to friends and family members, I did not have any kind of fundamental love for "other people" as a general concept -- and I certainly did not feel (or show) love for my enemies. I once counseled a friend who'd been hurt that "forgiveness is for suckers," I firmly held on to grudges, openly criticized anyone and everyone who I found annoying, and amused myself with thoughts of getting revenge on people who had wronged me.

But then, a funny thing happened on the way to becoming a Christian: ever so slowly, I stopped being so irritated with the people around me. In fact, I started to feel love for them.

As I wrote about here, I never intended for this to happen. Once I thought that God might exist and Christianity might be true I started going through the motions of praying and occasionally going to church, just to see if anything would happen. I was kind of hoping that maybe God would give me some cool sign like he did with Constantine or that I'd have some awesome vision that explained all the mysteries of life or something. To my slight disappointment, none of that happened.

What I didn't see at the time, however, is that something much bigger was happening. A blazing symbol in the sky or a mysterious vision I could have written off as perhaps having to do with that second glass of wine or just not getting enough sleep at night. But what God did instead, though a much slower process, is far more convincing, and far more powerful: he fundamentally changed my heart.

I don't know exactly when it happened, but one day I woke up and realized that I had a love f