"For it is better to preserve the just with the evil than to subvert the just for the good"
Anynomous, Commentary on Matthew
Over the years I've come to know many a disgruntled formerly homeschooled Catholic or Protestant Christian. Some of you will be reading this going "HOW DARE YOU AIR MY DIRTY LAUNDRY." Here's the sad part.
I'm not.
Y'all are all saying the same words, in the same tone of voice, with the same sad eyes that scream disillusionment.
And it breaks my heart.
Frankly, I'm there too. Still.
My father, while I was growing up, told me two things that have never not served me well. I added a third precept, because he implied it with the first two but never thought to say it:
- All of life is grieving.
- If you could be in someone's body like it was your own you'd go catatonic from the pain they've been passively holding onto.
- By grieving, you become open to others and can help them with their pain.
All of life is grieving. I'm sorry, folks, there is no avoiding this one. You can't not grieve. Life hurts, it just does. Anyone who says differently is lying, and that's all there is to it. Or, worse, they're selling you something to where you're distracted from your pain. You can piss and moan and bitch about how life shouldn't be painful, but honestly what's that going to get you? You're just wasting energy on pissing and moaning and bitching. Now, granted, if you don't actually want to live I suppose that's okay. But fucking hell, if you're reading this blog it's because you actually want to live. And live well. Somehow. Somewhere. You want to live. And in order to live you must grieve. You must be able to look at the world and say "THIS HURTS LIKE FUCKING HELL" and you must be uncomfortable, you must be pained, you must sorrow and shed tears over it, because the world is worth grieving over. You are worth too much to waste in refusing to do it. It is not that the pain makes you better, it is what you do because you are in pain that makes you better. You are meant to face the dragon that is the world with the sword of grief in hand, with the shield of rational thought in the other, clad from head to toe with the conviction that your life means something and is worth defending. And make no mistake, your life, the real one, is a fragile thing. It needs defending. So grieve!
Unlike many a disillusioned post-Christian, I actually saw shit go down in the Catholic Church as a teen. I was there, behind the closed doors, watching many a critical fumble or outright malfeasance occur. I got to see these politics happen, in real time. And yeah, at the time it about broke me to witness them. The road to hell is paved with the skulls of bishops and there is no sight better than the back of a bishop as he leaves. But most people, when they think of these bishops, of these malefactors who honestly need to be forcibly removed from their posts (and if they get banged up in the process c'est la vie it's better than what most of you deserve) do not have a specific picture of what these blasphemers of the Law of God are actually like. It's not that they can't get a good picture, or if they have enough empathy that they can't develop a good one, but the mind is open to fantasize about anything it wants in relation to these people.
Let me blow that up. Right now.
Those bishops, who did so much harm to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, are not mustache-twirling meglomaniacs. Oh no. We would be lucky to have that kind of evil, because that kind of evil engenders righteous anger, which summons holy fire to burn the motherfuckers out. Holy anger requires specificity, intimacy, love, to be effective. And evil meglomaniacs love, in some way, and thus the blasphemy is easy to spot, easy to get worked up over, and easy to treat.
No, we have something much worse. We don't get big bad guys, but small, mean, cowardly, fuck ups. They dissemble and hide because they know they are small. They remain nondescript, milqetoast, tepid, thoroughly mediocre men so that way you can't do more than summon a mild disgust and try to ignore them as fast as possible. They're not a virus, they're a cancer.
I saw all this going into adulthood. After a few years of witnessing it I went to the Orthodox Church in a rage. That was not the right thing to do. After barely a year I returned to the Catholic Church where my family was, confused and hurt, and finally began to grieve. When I finally opened up to my dad about what I had seen, and how the evils I had seen were worse than anything I could have imagined at the time, my dad sadly told me to remember that all burdens are in physical pain too, not just spiritual. The way a person holds their soul is the way they hold their body. If anyone could be in another's body as it was their own for even a second they'd double over from the horrific pain the other person was in, and they'd probably die from the shock of just how vicious, how truly horrific, the other person's universe was.
When I asked what the point was, my father told me that what I was witnessing that was draining my soul so was that I had seen what happened when someone let that pain get the better of them, at the large scale. The bishops weren't bad, they were simply ignoring their own pain and thus ignoring everyone's pain. And we were doing the same thing back. The key was to accept that you were already in horrific agony, had blocked almost all of it out, and needed to get to where you could feel the pain and process it.
The third point is mine own. My father was not at a point where he could teach me this one, but I learned it from repeated experience and confirmed it with my parents later, after more than a decade of slogging away at the garbage the world had handed me. Many of you will read the above and go "That's nice, but the world is a horrible place and I need to fix it now. I must help take control over the systems of control and reform them" and other Marxist platitudes that are just such utter bullshit.
Systems cannot enable justice.
Only people can.
And they need systems in place to be able to do that. But in order to be a person who can take advantage of the dark and terrible sword known as System you must have conquered your own darkness first. You must be worthy, and it is not impossible that you be in such a state.
Don't roll your eyes. I mean it.
Look, the years from 2016-2022, six years, were spent suffering from horrifying flashbacks. Almost hallucinatory level memories of rape, torture, and other things that are so fucking bad I'd rather write about my rapes than write about them went through my head. I'd wake up, go to work, do my best to not wreck my family, and then spend the evenings they went to bed suffering. Years of nights spent practically pulling my own hair out, sobbing until I was hoarse, almost checking myself into a mental ward multiple times because I just didn't want to be a human anymore, and almost throwing up sponatenously because I'd had a flashback and the pure disgust of what I was feeling were normal occurences. I hated every moment of it. But my wife told me it was worth going through. She never wavered on this one fact:it was all worth grieving over. I was not wasting my time by using it to grieve. I was not abandoning them by being in pain. Without her support and constant reminder that I was not a waste of a human being for sitting alone at night and crying my eyes out while I tried to keep my dinner down I wouldn't be here. As far as I was concerned that was my real job.
Because of this, I 've never really done anything about my professional life, nor do I really care to. I work at a government helpdesk. It's not my favorite job, and frankly there's months I dearly wish I had something a bit more fulfilling to do than arguing with end users about their tier ones screwing them over, but it's a job. Money comes in. The fact that I am making money from an entity that I regard as a globalist empire is very secondary to the fact that it's feeding my wife and kids. I don't have the luxury of being idealistic about it, because of that whole recovery thing we were talking about above. I just don't. I go to work, do the job to the best of my cantankerous ability, and go home. Hi, I'm the government, and I'm here to help.
I wrote about my experience of the evacuation of Afghanistan on this blog before, practically while it was happening. But I left something out. While I was in the backrooms, watching things going down y'all simply couldn't freaking comprehend because you're just not here to see it, I was involved in the saving of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of lives. Yeah, I failed to do more. That legit haunts me. But I was in the right place, at the right time, and said a few words to the right ears... and more than a few people made it out that otherwise wouldn't have. I didn't even do that much. But simply by being available and open to helping and paying attention, no matter what it cost me, paid off. I really hope I get to meet these people at the Last Judgment and find out what happened to them afterwards. I hope to meet the people I couldn't get out and beg their forgiveness for not being able to do more.
Anyone here sitting around just bitching about the state of the world or yourself able to claim that?
No?
It's not like I went out to look for that. It fell right into my lap, I chose to pay attention, and that was that. It was a small, quiet, very quick moment. If I hadn't been so focused on healing, on restoring, and doing only what I could do for years before I couldn't have done it then. And y'know what? I've been able to do it more often since then. There's more than a few people out there who are alive because of my direct action. It's a good feeling.
But they weren't something I chased.
I focused on cultivating life, starting with mine, and found that it inevitably spilled over to others.
Now we're here, to my point. Yup, took awhile, but without the previous context it's hard to comprehend exactly what I'm saying. But now you have the context. Now, most formerly homeschooled adults are (at best if they're honest) heavily disillusioned about what they were taught as kids. That's normal, as befits those who were (at best) misled. They're more than vaguely aware that what they were taught wasn't actually Christianity, but some Satanist faux-Christian parody that should, in fact, make them sick. But they're stuck in a conundrum: they know there's a God; they've felt the Light, they know He's real, even if they'd quibble over my use of the word know, since they haven't caught on that knowing something very rarely involves that fallible thing called the mind. But the things that have been taught to them are clearly cruel, clearly awful, and don't add up with this experience. But now these well-meaning folks are in a damned if you do, damned if you don't, situation. They either choose to stay loyal to the light they know to be real, or they accept the doctrine they were only half-taught as true.
It's an awful choice. No one can make it and feel good about themselves, forevever.
But there is a third path. It's not as painful in the long run, but it is more complicated, and it is, in some ways, much harder than sticking to the two choices above: to take seriously the following words of the Master Himself:
2 The scribes and Pharisees, he said, have established themselves in the place from which Moses used to teach;3 do what they tell you, then, continue to observe what they tell you, but do not imitate their actions, for they tell you one thing and do another.4 They fasten up packs too heavy to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; they themselves will not stir a finger to lift them.5 They act, always, so as to be a mark for men’s eyes. Boldly written are the texts they carry, and deep is the hem of their garments;6 their heart is set on taking the chief places at table and the first seats in the synagogue,7 and having their hands kissed in the market-place, and being called Rabbi among their fellow men.8 You are not to claim the title of Rabbi; you have but one Master, and you are all brethren alike.9 Nor are you to call any man on earth your father; you have but one Father, and he is in heaven.10 Nor are you to be called teachers; you have one teacher, Christ.11 Among you, the greatest of all is to be the servant of all;12 the man who exalts himself will be humbled, and the man who humbles himself will be exalted.13 Woe upon you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces; you will neither enter yourselves, nor let others enter when they would.14 Woe upon you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that swallow up the property of widows, under cover of your long prayers; your sentence will be all the heavier for that.15 Woe upon you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that encompass sea and land to gain a single proselyte, and then make the proselyte twice as worthy of damnation as yourselves.Matthew 28: 2-15
Most of the New Testament is the apostles writing letters to the churches and telling them how they'd fucked this up. Out of the 27 books in the New Testament, TWENTY-TWO directly address heresies and frankly really scandalous sexual shit going on in the Early Church. The New Testament is not some lovey-dovey "Oh God is love" namby pamby horseshit, it's the apostles, who had met Christ and been total idiots while they were with him (or in the case of Paul after actively killing Christians for years) going "YOU IDIOTS NEED TO STOP BEING IDIOTS KTHX"... which is exactly in line with how the prophets talked to Israel in the Old Testament. And how we view the churches now.
An objective reading of the Bible, where you go along with the assumption that God is the good guy as the texts intend, show a humanity that is almost irrevocably broken. Virtues turn to stumbling blocks in the blink of an eye, the evil always seem to win out, and if the just live too long they become the bad guys.There's only one this didn't happen to, and He was killed because the rest of us couldn't stand to have something that good and pure live.
But for, whatever reason, God chose to give direct life, life itself, through very broken and stained hands. Sometimes He even uses their otherwise irredeemably awful words too. But He didn't leave. Now, either He is actively going through those stained channels (and dont' think you're less stained than them) or He isn't. Either we accept what the text says, which is that God openly allows the unworthy access to His life and you're one of them, or we don't. And if you don't you have to somehow come up with how you're better than the assholes you don't like.
Good luck with that one.
I'd prefer to just forgive them and myself for not being good enough to fail at their level. That actually has seemed to do some good for me and those around me.
And that is a lot better than most. I mean, we're wanting cold hard results here, right?
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