Intro
I had no intention of ever making this public when I wrote it. I just felt like I’d spent a lot of time reflecting lately and I wanted to put it to paper to see if it could help me organize my thoughts. As I’m asked to talk about my journey publicly more, I had the hope that articulating them here would help me know what to say for interviews and such that feels more true to myself.
I set out to talk a little about how my thoughts on philosophy and religion have developed over time, how I ended up where I did, and why, which I’ve always described as a bit more of an intellectual path at first. It certainly isn’t meant to be persuasive but just to describe my own journey, which is why this started with my writing “One Man’s Journey” at the top of a blank Apple Note.
A while after I wrote it, I shared it with my girlfriend as she had recently gone through her own conversion. Some time after that, she asked if she could share it with a friend. In time, it’s made its way around and one of the readers pleaded for me to publish it after reporting that it was impactful for her own journey and mentioning perhaps it could help someone else too.
At first I was very hesitant and figured at a minimum I would need to add some polish and structure but was told that would take away from the authenticity. So here we are, this is how I originally recorded my journey in all its stream-of-consciousness, poorly punctuated, overly wordy glory (yes, even the sections were in the original Apple Note).
Growing Up
In the beginning I was raised culturally Catholic. I attended some religion classes but didn’t find them majorly compelling and it wasn’t reinforced too much at home. I was mostly passive about it. By the time I went away to college, I was talking to God to some degree each day but mostly just asking for things and being thankful for small moments or events.
I am appreciative of the disposition toward gratitude that developed because of this but I wouldn’t say I was confident anyone was listening – I just wanted somewhere to direct energy for things that I felt I couldn’t express otherwise (e.g., asking for help in situations where I couldn’t do anything myself, or saying thank you for something undeserved). Things like attending Mass were unimportant to me so I never went and I mostly lived my life, which was an incredibly fortunate life filled with compelling courses, fun sports, and, above all, wonderful relationships and camaraderie.
I’d say I always had some interest in theology and philosophy but didn’t dedicate a ton of time toward thinking about it, esp. in my first two years of college. By my third year however, I began to date a wonderful girl who took her faith seriously and that forced me to look inward to a new level.
One pivotal conversation that year actually took place with her father and the topic of faith came up. It quickly became evident that while I said I was Catholic, I didn’t understand the core tenets behind that statement nor did I live them out. He encouraged me to explore.
He effectively said, “Look, what you believe will have major consequences for your life and will come into play for every major decision you make moving forward. I don’t really care where you end up, I just think you should be able to articulate your stance, plant your flag, and have some conviction about your belief.”
Generally speaking, I’m a very logical person and lean much more heavily on the intellectual part of my brain than I do the emotional side and I found this to be a compelling argument. I had very close friends with a wide range of views and I was starting to be challenged by them. I became disappointed that I didn’t have a clear position and wasn’t able to take a stance.
So on that note I decided to dedicate a lot more brain power to philosophy, determined to have conviction by the time I graduated. If I had to guess, I was going to come out on the other side saying religion is nice but points x y and z specifically are what I find to be illogical and why I cannot adhere to it.
I listened to plenty of debates, read books and articles, and had conversations with the priest who was the rector of my dorm. Any time I ran into a roadblock, I would talk it out. There were more of these pivotal points and questions than I could possibly recount but there were a couple that I felt were most compelling.
Morality
The first piece was morality, which is one of the places CS Lewis starts in Mere Christianity. In fact, several of the following points come from Lewis. It didn’t take me long to realize I believed in absolute morality and was not a relativist, i.e., I think that the moral code exists outside of individual humans and is neither a personal belief system nor developed by a society. If it were a personal belief, then if someone feels justified in murdering an innocent person (e.g., genocide because of race, or a baby because they are inconvenient and expensive) then they are definitionally acting in a moral way because all that matters in their own code.
Alternatively, if the majority determines what is moral and not, then the moral code moves with the masses and people who supported, say, killing babies because they had deformities, would have been acting morally in Sparta times because the majority thought it was okay. Furthermore, I didn’t love how fluid the societal stance would be – it would imply that one day when the majority switches beliefs, an immoral act could become moral and vice versa in an instant.
I believe that even if society thinks it okay, the people killing those babies were still in the wrong. Similarly, I believe there are likely things today that most of society thinks is okay but is wrong in absolute terms.
I think maintaining that there is an absolute unmovable moral code is at odds with that code being created by humans. In my mind, there are only two likely explanations.
The first option is that it was created by a higher power – some power that was connected to the origin of humanity on a fundamental level and ingrained the sense of morality in us.
The second option is that it’s an illusion and there actually is no moral code at all – thinking it is right or wrong to do something is just how evolution tricked our brains into acting for the betterment of humanity as a whole. I think this is the only alternative that really holds any weight. It’s possible this is true but I also think that having a moral code at an individual level in a time when those around you don’t is disadvantageous to your survival. I believe people who mutated to have a gene of compassion and before others would have been killed off pretty quickly but natural selection is based on the opposite, evolving traits that help you survive. Nevertheless, it’s still within the realm of possibility, just to me personally felt less likely based on my own experience.
Now one of the big sticking points for me in the morality exploration was how God could be all-loving and all-powerful and for there to be so much evil in the world.
In short, the answer that I found to be satisfactory boils down to free will. Humans were given free will because without free will, there’s no meaning. If you have a world full of robots that just do as they are programmed and cannot make choices, there’s no actual purpose in that. If you cannot choose to do bad, there is nothing meaningful about choosing to do good. While the immense amount of suffering in the world is a huge price to pay, it’s still worth it when the alternative is a pointless existence. Then you get into permissive will vs perfect will stuff but I didn’t dive into that until a little later (In short, what God prefers to happen vs what He allows to happen).
Best life
One of the claims of Christianity that I found most salient was that God has a plan for you and if you follow it then that’s basically the most sure way to live the best life possible. Reason being, the Power that created you did so for a reason and so He would know best how to live out your life oriented toward that purpose, which in theory would lead to fulfillment and meaning which is what we’re all after in the end.
I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this to the point where I believed if I had solid ground to stand on and say “my life is definitively worse when living within the constraints of this religion”, then that would be a reasonable argument to eschew it altogether. For this phase of my exploration, I essentially took the stance of “even if God turned out not to be real, would my life be better with religion in it?” Of course, even if life as a Christian comparatively sucks on Earth, it’d still be worth the end state (an eternity of joy and fulfillment in heaven) if it were correct. But it was fascinating to me that while there was a claim that you were supposed to follow God for His sake, there was a related but separate claim that you yourself would live a better life by following Him by virtue of the fact that this would mean you are living out the purpose for which you were created.
Even prior to my deep dive into Christianity I had already become a little obsessed with the idea of my best life – I’m not sure from where the concept of doing the most possible good in my life originated, but it was something I had always dreamt about chasing. I had recently read The Most Good You Can Do by Peter Singer and was introduced to the concept of effective altruism. I had also watched plenty of debates and articulations from Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape. I wanted some way to expand the amount of love in the world. So exploring religion as a way to do more “good” was intriguing to me.
At first, it seemed like religion was a bit restricting. But as time has gone on, I’ve witnessed firsthand how it has been beneficial in my own life. There’s a lot to talk about here but I’ll just name the biggest ones that come to mind first. For one, we have an ideal to shoot for that is pretty well-defined: it’s all the virtues / “fruits of the Spirit” that Christians tend to talk about. Among these are humility, patience, compassion, fortitude, kindness, and more. and rather than just vaguely shooting for these in life, religion provides a structure & processes through which you can develop them. One of these is an Examen – basically, at the end of each day, you can ask yourself where you fell short in living up to the values that you’re striving for so that you can try to do better next time. You can even do it immediately after falling short. On top of that, confession provides a place to actually voice these shortcomings out loud to another person.
These two practices in particular I think everyone could benefit from. Even if God is not real, anyone can do this. Take some time and meditate on what you believe is the best version of yourself and the virtues that you’d display if you’re living life as well as you can, say, 5-10 years from now. Or perhaps imagine when you die what qualities you would want someone to describe in your eulogy. Now personally I think this list for the majority of people in the world is pretty similar to the list of Christian values anyway but that won’t be true for everyone (certainly there are some folks who would add anti-Christian things like power, control, and wealth as ideals but I do truly believe, as a lot of research backs up, that they’ll find those things to be less than satisfactory once if they do obtain them).
If in a totally secular context you then do your own version of an Examen and think each day about how you failed to live up to those ideals, it’ll help you strive toward it more the next day. Plus, along the way, you’ll learn discipline which I think is a trait for which everyone should strive. Other aspects of faith like dedicating time in prayer, prioritizing Church, and fasting go a long way for growing in discipline too. And if you take it a step further and tell another human being how exactly you fell short but that you’re committed to changing this, I think you’ll be that much more successful in living out your eulogy.
This orientation also helps tremendously with resilience and going with the flow. These days when I am being impatient in a very long grocery line, I can often take a step back and say to myself “this is a great opportunity to grow in patience.” It may sound a little ridiculous but that thought alone helps a ton to remove some of my impatience. The little setbacks and sufferings that we go through regularly then can help shape us toward displaying the characteristics that we hope to embody by the end of our lives. I think it’s pretty clear if someone is sheltered and handed everything in life then that person won’t have as much room to grow in these areas as someone who goes through adversity regularly. You can take this to the bigger events in life as well, it’s certainly easier to accept any trying situation when you believe it’s part of a larger plan to make you who you are. That’s a disposition I’ve had since before I was particularly religious, my senior quote in high school was “Whether or not it is clear to you, the universe is unfolding exactly as it should.” – a more generally spiritual take on a similar concept. This goes a long way in giving me peace in my day-to-day.
The last thing I’ll mention on this suffering piece is that more meaning is given to it through the concept of redemptive suffering (that my suffering can directly contribute to someone else’s salvation) but that was admittedly not something I learned about until later so it wasn’t really part of this early journey for me. It’s this whole concept of picking up your cross and carrying it.
The act of praying is another activity that I found to be helpful for living a better life. When I pray, sometimes I feel like I’m not alone and someone is actually listening. Occasionally even guiding my thoughts when they head places that I never would’ve expected them to. But again the point at this stage in the journey for me was about exploring what if that wasn’t the case and, for argument’s sake, assuming no one was listening. And I found that even if that’s just a trick of my mind, it’s a practice that I believe most people would find value in. Certainly meditation is along the same lines and brings people great benefit as well – it allows you to take a step back from the world and think about the big things like whether or not your life is heading in the direction that you want and if you’re proud of who you are. But prayer is a step further, and I would argue better, because it directs your attention away from yourself and forces you to look outward which I think cultivates a healthier disposition.
Often included in prayer is the process of discernment. Before making any major decisions, Christians take a lot of time to stop and discern which route God is asking them to take. Again even if we remove God from the equation, that’s a practice through which anyone could benefit. It seems to me a lot of people in the world either don’t think through decisions carefully enough, or (as is more often my case personally) enter paralysis analysis and try to logically arrive at an answer without taking the time to take a step back and see how you feel about each path, and assess how your decision might take you toward or away from who you want to be.
General Spirituality
In the section above I mentioned the universe unfolding thing. This is perhaps the least logical part of this early journey but I do think it’s worth mentioning. Alongside that quote, there are many other ways that I felt spiritual even sans religion. I totally get the rapidly growing “spiritual but not religious” segment of the world. I mentioned that I feel like I’m not totally alone when it appears that I am. I also feel like there’s some bigger part of the universe that I can’t see – something beyond the material world. The whole angel on the shoulder vs devil on the shoulder thing checks out for me as well. Not exactly in the sense of how it’s portrayed in animated films – I didn’t really care whether there’s an actual spiritual being called a demon or not – but what I do know is that I am somewhat regularly tempted toward things that I feel are immoral. Like random thoughts to be unkind to someone, or to do something that’s totally selfish at the expense of someone else’s joy, or even against someone else’s rights.
The general feeling / concept of love overall also feels like not just a physical thing but a very spiritual one. I even feel connected to my fellow human beings in a way that doesn’t make sense in the physical world – being able to truly connect with people who you don’t know particularly well or just met recently. I have always bought the whole “we’re all connected” thing that people on psychedelics seem convicted of. It also feels like love and connection are “above” everything else for lack of a better way of describing it. It feels like the ultimate thing to strive for and so God and love being equivalent felt right to me.
For sure it’s possible for a spiritual world to exist without a god but I feel like it’s at least a point in favor of it. If there’s this whole spiritual world that we haven’t been able to map out yet, it becomes a lot more believable that there are a ton of different aspects to it. Almost like the “upside-down” in Stranger Things in its parallelism to our physical reality. The majority of values / virtues that people strive for in the major religions around the world are pretty similar, and this fact, too, in my mind is actually a point in favor of a god and not against it. If most religions are focused on love and other related virtues, I feel like that happened because they are all reflecting some element of the truth / reality.
I also found it be a point in favor of a higher power the more I thought about the fact that the universe is comprehensible at all. Some people take the opposite approach and say the fact that we can use science to see the atoms / molecules that make everything up and we can go back in time and determine how planets are formed etc is a point in favor of there being no God, but I personally see no reason for all of this to be comprehensible whatsoever. The fact that we have intelligence at all is a crazy thing and the ability to explain more and more of the universe is truly insane. There’s no reason for the laws of physics to exist and much less for us to be able to decipher them and understand them unless we are somehow in some small way related to the Power that brought it all to be in the first place. Otherwise I find it more likely that we’d be like chimps or dogs trying to understand science – we wouldn’t get anywhere (or perhaps more accurately, wouldn’t bother to ask the question in the first place).
Bit of a side tangent from this but since I find it related to science…people often tell me I have to do a ton of “mental gymnastics” to make sense of pieces of the Bible and of religion etc. I actually used to find that argument reasonably compelling for why the Bible probably doesn’t check out, but then I realized the mental gymnastics I was doing to follow along with a theologian’s work was nothing compared to the gymnastics I needed to do in order to understand proven facts about the universe. Things like how incomprehensibly small we are, how time is a relative thing that doesn’t always move at the same pace (and is connected in some direct way to space), that black holes can have literally infinite density – I could go on and on about how much more difficult it is (for me) to understand these things than theology but once again the fact that it’s understandable at all is truly a miracle.
Ok last thing that probably falls under this general spirituality piece is the most famous line from St. Augustine’s Confessions: “our hearts are restless O God until they rest in thee.” I certainly think there’s truth to the fact that we as humans need to be striving for something and everything in this world starts to feel meaningless at some point. Chasing pleasure or money are two classic examples that everyone knows eventually fails to bring joy. But even things like best friends and family etc will fail you eventually as well – they’ll let you down in some way if you have too much dependence on them for your joy or they’ll pass away and if you lived your life just for them then what are you left with?
In line with St. Augustine’s quote above, C.S. Lewis builds on the idea beautifully when he says, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” He likens this spiritual longing to how we have physical hunger and it implies the existence of food to satisfy us and how we have thirst and there’s water to satisfy and so if there is another longing for us, there is likely something that can satisfy it. Anyway that’s a more personal piece that some may find more convicting than others but for me at least it resonated because even when my life felt full and I was happiest, I always felt like there was probably more to it.
What do I think about this Jesus guy
So between absolute morality and my belief in general spirituality, I said okay there’s probably a higher power. Then I figured it would be worth determining what I believed about this Jesus guy since he has the largest number of people in the world claiming he is that higher power. Basically all historians, religious or otherwise, believe that Jesus was a real person who lived around 2000 years ago and that the Gospels are at least a somewhat accurate representation of his life. So if he was a real person, I figured I should decide what I think about him at least. I started on the more historical side of things.
It seemed that basically everything people thought a Messiah would be, Jesus was pretty close to the opposite. And even with that, he was still able to garner the following that he did – the biggest following of all time. It’s pretty remarkable. Lots of people claimed to be divine in the past, but their followers died off quickly. Not only could Jesus get a ton of people to follow him, but he’s gotten thousands and thousands of people to believe in him to the point where they’d give up their own life for him for millennia following his death. His people seemed to really really believe in him. Before I even took a second to truly consider his beliefs and whether or not I believed in them as well, I was taking a step back and saying at a minimum you have to admit that however this guy lived his life, it was one of the most inspirational lives of all time considering where it has ended up. The fact that over 2 billion people on this planet, 2000 years after his death, still believe he can bring salvation, when he lived in a time where there was no video, internet, or any easy way to disseminate stories and information, is the most incredible human legacy in the history of the world which to me, while far from proving it true, does lend it some credibility in my eyes.
Okay so then after establishing this appreciation for his legacy, I decided to read about what he said. I found the Gospels to be compelling. To me it felt like he was speaking some deep truths that were previously unheard of and that still resonate 2000 years later. Things like love being the most important thing, or that we should strive for virtues like humility and patience over things like power and wealth. It’s not too radical to think those things today, but it was a pretty big deal back then. Especially because all the Jews believed a Messiah would come and that when he did, he would free them from the Romans basically by being some big general leader and destroying all their enemies. Instead, he came and said love your enemies and that he came for all mankind and not just one race. He said everyone has intrinsic value for simply being alive and human, which was actually a pretty radical concept. Historically, people were still leaving babies to die if they were handicapped in some way – the value and dignity that all humans deserve was not a widely believed concept until Jesus talked about it.
In addition to his teachings, I generally just admired the way he went about his life. He reached out to the marginalized and didn’t become too attached to things in the material world. He was disciplined and he did hard things. But most of all, he really showed compassion and mercy for everyone. I still remember the first time I heard about him dying on the cross and saying “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” I was mind-blown. I would imagine he has to be the first person in all of history to pray for forgiveness for his executioners while they are torturing him and killing him in one of the most brutal ways imaginable. I’m not sure I would’ve thought that level of mercy to be within the range human capabilities until that happened and it made me want to be like him (which is a little odd in itself that my instinct was a desire to emulate this while at the same thinking it was so far-fetched as to be almost insane).
Now I had basically gotten to the point where I said ok I think this is someone I should see as a role model, but do I think he’s actually God because that sounds pretty crazy and hard to believe. It was then that CS Lewis came back into my life and his argument from Mere Christianity resonated with me quite a bit. He said you either have to believe Jesus is a lunatic, a liar, or Lord. JC pretty explicitly said that he was divine and that people could only come to God through him. So if that statement isn’t true, then he’s either crazy or at least a liar / con man. and if he’s one of those two things, well then he certainly isn’t worth emulating or following to the point of death. Now while that argument logically made sense to me, I’ll say it still felt a little crazy to fully believe it, esp because 90% of my friends didn’t buy into it.
But honestly the other explanations also just didn’t really make sense to me. Like if he were truly a lunatic / delusional then I feel like that would’ve turned up in several other ways and really gotten people to question him. Plus while there are many people in the Bible who wanted to kill Jesus, I found it interesting that no one seemed to outright dismiss him as insane, they tended to think either he was dangerous and heretical, or he was speaking the truth. No one was like yo this person is mentally ill. Not to mention, his words still really resonated with me and seemed to contain some profound moral truths. It would be very hard for me to believe someone who is so delusional about such a big thing (that they are divine) would be so seemingly wise about all other things that they say. Lastly on this front, if he were delusional then obviously he wouldn’t have risen from the dead which means the resurrection would have needed to be planned by one of his followers or someone else (not JC himself, bc he would have truly believed he was God anyway so he wouldn’t plan to fake something).
Then on the liar side of things, that would imply he was saying he was divine but didn’t actually believe in it himself, he just wanted to convince people that was the case. While possible, I too found this explanation to be unfitting to the story. Such a person would likely be motivated by wanting influence or to gain followers simply to feel like they made something of themselves. If he simply wanted to spread morality, no need to lie about the divinity part, he could’ve just preached on his own. But if he did want influence, then I find it hard to believe he would’ve taken the route he did. First of all, he was saying some pretty countercultural stuff so it’s shocking that it worked to gain followers in the first place (unless it is indicative of some deeper truth which doesn’t really align with the liar thing). Secondly, it would imply the compassion and mercy he showed during his life was all part of a con. I struggle to believe a con man would take his con so far as to forgive his torturers when he was just moments away from his death, esp because he would internally know that he wasn’t God and so once his life was over, it was really over. Voluntarily going to your death after just 3 years of a public ministry and faking virtues all the way through just for a legacy that you wouldn’t be around to witness feels really hard to believe.
Alright so that left me with Lewis’s last option: that Jesus was telling the truth. I guess at that point I confirmed myself as a Christian though I would’ve been much more likely to dive into the full story / debate rather than just outright saying that because I frankly still didn’t love the connotations behind it.
From Christian to Catholic
Alright so then I’m a Christian and I had to decide which one since there are different denominations with different beliefs. My default was nondenominational because I liked the fact that it seemed to stay more surface-level. It was like hey here are the general beliefs and it’s enough to guide our lives but we don’t have to get too nitpicky about what all else this means. But I figured I should look at the people who lived closest to the time of Jesus to see what they believed. My thinking was these are the people who knew him best without the extra years for things to get muddled so they were probably the people to trust.
During that journey, there are a lot of things that come up that point people to being Catholic. I won’t be able to get into them all but I am now of the belief that anyone who truly looks into Church history with the intent of understanding more about their faith is likely to come away Catholic. I’ll touch on some of the bigger pieces.
The first is that the first pope was Peter and he was assigned by Jesus directly (when he said “on this rock I will build my church”) and all popes since then can be traced back to Jesus himself. It’s the only Christian church that was founded by Jesus himself, perhaps with the exception of the Orthodox churches which are closest to Catholicism out of all the denominations anyway. Basically all the others can be traced back to some human founder centuries after Jesus died. Even Martin Luther himself, who started the Protestant Reformation, didn’t want it to go nearly as far as it did and actually wrote a letter to the Pope clarifying his goal was to reform the Catholic church, not to start a new one.
The other big thing was belief in the Eucharist, which is probably the single largest factor that separates Catholics from most other Christian churches these days anyway. Catholics believe it’s actually the blood and body of Jesus whereas Protestants generally do not. From a purely emotional standpoint, I really think it’d be possible for someone to convince themselves a symbol is more than just a symbol so I won’t argue that route here, but I did find out that basically all Christians for the first 1500 years after Jesus’s death believed in the so-called “true presence” of the Eucharist and that historical fact alone was pretty much enough for me. Very early writings make it clear what they believed, e.g., church fathers like Irenaeus referring to it as “flesh.”
But just for good measure, I tried to look to Jesus’ words himself and came upon John Chapter 6. I won’t put it all here, but Jesus basically says you must eat my body and drink my blood and all the disciples say that’s a really hard teaching. Then he doubles down, and his followers say I don’t think I can accept that. Then he triples down and they say they’re gonna leave and so he says “go ahead and leave then” and then they leave, except for his main entourage who say “where else would we go?”. When I read this, he really had every opportunity in the world to say “guys, chill, I just mean this symbolically” but he didn’t, he just let everyone leave (which btw is like the last thing a preacher would want while trying to grow their following).
Last big one was the point on authority. One reason why 70,000 denominations exist is because as soon as someone disagrees with one minor piece of doctrine of another denomination, they figure they should start their own. My issue with “sola scriptura” and people who believe the Bible is all you need and you can interpret it yourself is that there are often multiple ways to interpret it that can be at odds with each other and definitionally, only one can be correct and is the truth. So then how do you know what’s right for the points that Jesus didn’t directly address? There must be a point of authority to defer to. Even in the Bible itself, in Acts, they put this on display bc Jesus didn’t talk about whether or not circumcision was still needed. So Peter (the pope) decided and everyone went with it. Heck, even which writings classified as the New Testament or not was determined by the authority of the Church. So deference to some authority on the gray areas is necessary and is most defined in Catholicism.
Ok so in addition to a bunch of other points and watching debates between Protestants and Catholics online, I realized logically I would probably have to end up Catholic which was a bummer because it’s more strict and seen as a bit crazier but c’est la vie. It’s a very wild idea that a piece of bread could become God. But it’s pretty easy for me to accept that if an all-powerful being wants to be close to us, He may choose a method involving one of the most widely accessible things on the planet (bread) to reach us, so logically I can understand why this path could be chosen over other seemingly arbitrary methods.
As a final confirmation for me, I talked to plenty of converts along the way and, in my experience, all the Catholics I know who converted to Protestantism did so because they liked the church experience more and liked that it was a little more in-line with today’s culture. Meanwhile, the Protestants I know who converted to Catholicism did so because they took a lot of time to explore it and felt it was the one true Church, which seemed like a better reason to me. That’s not trying to come down on anyone at all and I’m not trying to say that statement applies to everyone, it’s just simply my personal experience when talking to folks that I’ve met.
Where I landed
So that’s kind of how I dove more into the Catholic Church. Since then I’ve spent more time in prayer trying to talk to God and I’ve found it to be beneficial and feel like I’m growing spiritually. Most of this rambling talks about the intellectual journey and the personal relationship side didn’t come later until Hallow. And even now it’s not like I’ve heard God say anything to me directly, but sometimes I’ll have thoughts while praying that seem to come from nowhere and add a lot of clarity to my thinking, e.g., my decision to pursue Hallow full-time. Perhaps that’s just an example of how meditation can be fruitful but I do think it’s more. Even that decision itself boiled more down to my belief that the app would help people grow in virtue and bring more love into the world, even if God wasn’t real, more than it was about helping them find God directly. As time has gone on, it’s certainly grown into more of both but I’ve never lost sight of that original goal.
I found I personally believe in a higher power for many of the reasons above, and I do believe that the Christian God is the most accurate description of what that higher power is like though I think it’s likely our understanding of him (even for the holiest of people) is lacking in quite a few ways. I believe I am speaking to this God while I pray and that He can hear me and has ways of making His presence and preferred path known. I believe others can get to know that higher power in their own way and not directly through the Church but that the Church is a great institution to facilitate that relationship and is indeed the best way to do so which is why Jesus established it. I think it’s likely that there’s a spiritual world in addition to a physical world and that the two are pretty intertwined and I think it’s pretty likely our spirit will live onward even after our body dies. Even after all this, I didn’t think getting into heaven necessarily depends upon our attending Church and doing all of the rituals but I think it’s more about how we live our life, aiming for those virtues and bringing more love into the world.
I think it’s possible that some agnostic people in this world are living lives more in accordance with God’s will than a lot of the Christians out there. I also think people of other religions may very well be interacting with the same higher power when they pray, though we may differ in what we believe some of the characteristics of that higher power may be. I think the means of how we get there and why we do it are important but our end actions are very important to the equation as well.
Given the logic that helped me arrive at the Catholic Church, I set out to try my best to live in accordance with it. I figured if we’re to believe that Jesus knew what he was doing when he started the Church, then it’s probably the best way to live our lives while we’re here. I’ve also come to see firsthand the depth and the beauty of it. There’s something pretty special about the Mass, Eucharist, prayer, the smell of incense, beautiful churches that’s hard to describe. Though the Church is obviously filled with a bunch of fallible humans so it’s far from perfect as things like the sex abuse crisis have proven. The humans that make up the Church have been wrong about things in the past and could be wrong about some things now too, so I do still primarily see my faith as between this higher power and me, but with the Church as the authority to bring me deeper into it and clarify things when it’s hard to discern.
The Bible itself was a bit of a tough one for me on the journey as it was written by fallible humans and so I had thought it’s possible that it’s not perfect and even if it was, it’s possible that we are misinterpreting pieces of it. So whether the fallibility is in the writing process or only in our interpretation thereafter or a little bit of both was mostly irrelevant but the point stood that it’s an incredibly insightful book full of wisdom that is very important for anyone trying to learn a little more about God and how to live their life. Worth mentioning though that I hadn’t ruled out the possibility of infallibility altogether because, in some ways, Jesus / God Himself set into motion the events that would ultimately lead to the creation of the Bible and the authority that deemed them infallible. Moreover, while people have been wrong about some theological things in history, there’s almost nothing more important than getting the text right that we base the whole religion on so in that way higher stakes could imply a heavier hand in setting it. So in the end, I thought it at least plausible if not probable that it’s truly God’s Word but that piece took longer to come around to. (I’ve since grown greatly in my conviction of this but just trying to honestly lay out where I was at this stage of my intellectual journey).
I still knew of course there is no way to prove whether God is real or not otherwise I believe it would have happened already. Perhaps in the future we’ll learn more about it directly in the same way that we’ve proven and disproven some scientific theories in the past. Until then it’s just a matter of planting your flag somewhere, trying to live in accordance with it, and living out the best life you can as a result.
I think it’s very helpful to have discussions around these things and we should be willing to share them and engage as we are all on the journey together and can help each other live our lives in a better way when there’s open dialogue. I pray that my kids (should I have some in the future, God-willing) will open-mindedly consider all the possibilities in this world and how to connect with it. I’ll be eager to share how I landed where I did while making it clear that other people believe different things and they’ll have to decide for themselves one day. I do admittedly hope they land in the same or a similar place as me and build a strong foundation from it but I know it won’t be theirs until they grapple with it on their own. I think it’ll be a lifelong journey for us all and that makes me excited. It’s had a tremendous impact on my own life and I think it would have a tremendous impact on the life of anyone who truly tries to live it out.
Erich Kerekes is Hallow’s CTO and co-founder