How To Drive Back Doubt And DarknessThoughts For Christians Who Are Struggling With Scandal And Defeat
Another weekend post from me! I have some things I want to say that I don’t want to get lost in the more news-oriented posts I make during the week. Thanks for your indulgence. I just returned from church, where I spent some time praying for friends and others who are scandalized by the failure of churches and Christian institutions. The big news in Hungary this weekend is that a 38-year-old Catholic priest who made a name for himself as a right-wing culture warrior, and who had even been invited to bless Prime Minister Orban’s office, was suspended by his bishop. Why? It is reported that he had multiple gay lovers, and even that gay porn videos featuring him performing are available online. This priest had even in the past denounced homosexuality and liberalism. If the charges are true, then it’s hard to imagine a more thorough hypocrite. Naturally Orban’s political enemies are seizing on this to attack him, but it’s hard to see how the government should have known this about the priest, when his own bishop apparently did not. But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is that at a time when Christianity is fast-shrinking in Hungary, the churches are often their own enemy. The country’s president, a Calvinist, was forced to resign earlier this year because she pardoned a well-connected Calvinist imprisoned for aiding and abetting a pedophile. She pardoned him at the request of the country’s Reformed bishop, who also suffered disgrace from it. And now this big Catholic scandal.
I passed on the gay porn priest news to a devoutly Catholic friend here yesterday. Her response: “Our church is a corpse.” She explained that she meant in Hungary, and in much of Europe. I prayed for her this morning at liturgy, and for brothers and sisters in Christ like her. And I prayed for a close Orthodox friend who has ceased attending the liturgy out of anger at certain gross and undeniable failures of the Orthodox clergy in his life. When this guy told me that this summer, he found he couldn’t bring himself to go to liturgy anymore, I responded with the usual arguments about how the sins of the priests do not negate the truths proclaimed by the Church. And then I realized that these were exactly the same things that Catholics trying to keep me from leaving the Catholic Church said in my great crisis almost twenty years ago. I realized in that moment that these logical arguments are as useless to my Orthodox friend in his suffering as they had been to me as a Catholic in crisis. This is a matter of the heart, not the head. The rage and the pain I suffered those many years ago from the corruption in the Catholic institution made it emotionally and psychologically impossible even to deal with those arguments. Though the failures of the priests in my friend’s case are objectively speaking not nearly as serious as the sins of the Catholic hierarchy and clergy that drove me from Catholicism, that’s not how it feels to him. I know a lot about what he’s been through in recent years, and the idea of saying, “Cheer up! At least our priests aren’t molesting kids!” is insulting. My friend really was failed in a very, very painful way, and tells me that he simply can’t bear standing in church on Sunday with all this weighing on him. So I pray, and listen, and help as much as he will let me. What else can I do, or any of us do? I did tell him that I came out of the crisis of faith that cost me my Catholicism with the conviction that I should never, ever put the institutional Church and its clergy on a pedestal. What that has meant in practice is that I have learned not to expect anything from the Orthodox clergy, or any clergy. I hate it. It should not be that way. But having been severely burned once by my trust, I can’t let that happen again. So when I hear of corruption in the Orthodox Church — in the news, or in the lives of individual believers — of course I hate it, but it does not shake my faith. I learned that the sins of the priests don’t negate the truths of the faith, just like my Catholic friends back in the day said. What changed in me? Aside from having thrown down the idolization of the institutional church, that is? Simply this: I had to learn to be enchanted as a Christian. I wouldn’t have put it that way before this morning, but that is the secret to keeping the faith in a time of radical disillusionment with our religious institutions. (I bold printed it) I don’t bring that angle into my forthcoming book Living In Wonder, because frankly, it hadn’t really occurred to me. But boy, did it make itself clear today in prayer. I had been thinking this morning, as I stood in church praying, that the Benedict Option is looking better and better as a strategy for coping amid the collapse of church authority. That is, if we Christians, whatever our confession, are going to keep the faith through this long dark winter, we are going to have to take more responsibility in our personal lives, our family lives, and in our local church community. When church leaders fail, we have to disciple ourselves. For that matter, when they succeed, we still have to disciple ourselves, because the pressures from post-Christian, even anti-Christian, culture are immense. If you read The Benedict Option, you will see that it’s about building resilience where you are, not escaping; I say in the opening chapter that there is no escape anymore. We are simply going to have to get through this. We cannot wait to be rescued. We have to build the arks, and start rowing. Standing in church this morning in prayer, I reflected on how much I had learned over the years of living as an Orthodox Christian, about enchantment. By “enchantment,” I mean becoming aware, not just as a matter of an idea in your head, but in your heart and in your bones, that God is, as we Orthodox pray, “everywhere present, and filling all things.” Here we are all standing around in this hot, humid church this morning in prayer, while all around us, angels have gathered — really and truly gathered. That awareness changes everything. It’s not just an Orthodox thing. You longtime readers might recall my story about going to Catholic mass in Dallas when my son Lucas was a young toddler. He hadn’t yet learned how to talk. He was being squirmy, so I took him into the church foyer, separated from the nave by large panes of glass. I held Lucas while mass was going on. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in my arms, pointed his right finger at a space to the side of the altar, and said, “Angel!” His finger tracked whatever he was seeing, and he kept saying, “Angel! Angel!” Then he put his head back on my shoulder, and tried to sleep. I believe that little boy saw an angel. I also believe now that if I had spent more time cultivating my awareness of angels (which I used as a symbol for the general mystical awareness of the presence of God), my faith would have been stronger as a Catholic. But I didn’t: I thought it was sufficient to have mastered the propositional arguments for the faith. I’m not sure why my Orthodox friend is having the crisis that he is, given how much Orthodoxy stresses conversion of the heart, and mystical awareness, but I suspect it’s because his faith is mostly a cerebral thing for him (he is very intellectual, and has more of an engineer’s mindset than an artist’s). As I try to bring him back to liturgical worship, I’m going to need to think and pray hard about how to reach him where he is. After church, I met a new friend, an American who just moved to Budapest with her family for a temporary job assignment. She is a churchgoing Catholic and a conservative, younger than I am (but aren’t they all these days?), and we got to talking about the situation in our home country, and in the world. As we traded stories about our lives, and shared our deep concerns about the civilizational crisis of the West — it always does me good to meet new people and to be able to say, “You see it too, huh?” — I told her about The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies. She hadn’t heard about the books or their arguments, but as I laid them out briefly, she nodded along, and added occasions when she had seen the same things I talk about in the books. She also said that she is only a Catholic now by the grace of God, because her parents had been so demoralized by church scandals that they didn’t raise her in the Church. She had a strong re-conversion in adulthood. We talked about the complacency among American Christians. She said, “I think a lot of us don’t understand how fast everything can change.” I told her the story of Father Kolakovic, and how he had to battle the same thing among Slovak Catholics in the 1940s. So many of the older ones did not want to see what was coming, and were not prepared for the advent of Communism, and its persecution of the Church. Walking home a few minutes ago from our conversation, thinking about it and about my experience in church this morning, I felt more convinced than ever that Living In Wonder, though I didn’t intend it as the final part of a trilogy on how to be faithfully Christian in this post-Christian world, that’s exactly what it is. In the end, re-enchanting ourselves as Christians — that is, adopting the mindset and the practices that help us to see and feel the presence of God, his saints, and his angels — is the bottom line of holding on through hard times. Even when the clergy and the institutions fail, and fail badly, if we not only know in our heads, but feel in our bones, the truths of our faith, we can hold on. But if not, well, it’s going to be very hard. In my own life, I have lived this out, and I hope that I can convey that in the book to readers. Yesterday I listened to an episode of The Exorcist Files, the excellent podcast featuring Father Carlos Martins, an American Catholic exorcist. It’s pretty scary, but what I like about it is that Father Carlos uses these real-life stories from his experiences to educate listeners about the realities of spiritual warfare. One thing he talked about in the episode I listened to is why the demons have special hatred for the Virgin Mary. This is something my own confessor, Father Nectarios, an Orthodox exorcist, has discussed with me as well. There is something about Mary (sorry) that riles the demons up. It seems clear that because she, in her humility and purity, is the absolute opposite of the demons, in their filth and their pride. Plus, she is not a goddess, but was and is one of us: a non-divine human being who epitomizes the pinnacle of what human beings who surrender radically to God can become. Listening to these stories, in both the podcast and in conversations with my confessor, teaches me something about the realities of the world of the spirit. I gained some new insights into why Catholics and Orthodox regard Mary with such honor. Even the demons, who hate God, know that she is special among God’s creatures. See, this is the kind of everyday knowledge that we Christians, whatever our confession, need to be building into our faith. You might not be able, because of your Protestant convictions, to regard Mary as we from the older traditions do, but it is still valuable to ponder why exorcists report that demons despise her with special hatred. What does that tell us about the role of humility and purity in the Christian life? We have so much to learn, and so many opportunities to learn. But we cannot be deceived by thinking that this is a matter of mastering our catechism. We have to open ourselves up to the power of God in everyday life. In Living In Wonder, I end by talking about how, the day before Palm Sunday in 2022, on the eve of traveling from Budapest to Jerusalem for Orthodox Holy Week, I learned via an email from my wife that she had filed for divorce, bringing the ten-year painful struggle to keep our marriage together to an end. We had never spoken of divorce before. I got on the plane for Jerusalem the next morning a total wreck. Arriving in the Old City, I dropped my bags in my hotel, made my way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and up the stairs into the chapel built over Golgotha (really), fell on my face, and begged Jesus for His mercy. That’s how the most extraordinary week of my life began — a week full of signs and wonders. That photo up above was taken at the ceremony of the miracle of the Holy Fire, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Holy Saturday afternoon. I went to it skeptical that the miracle was real. I found out it was! That joy you see on my face is the joy of a man who only one week earlier had learned that life as he knew it had been destroyed — but he had literally just put his hand through the fire, over and over, and had not been burned. Our God is an awesome God! He would take care of me, and see me through this. I returned to Budapest so filled with joy, even though the worst was yet to come. Here’s where the Living In Wonder narrative picks up from that point:
That is a summary of Living In Wonder, but the whole book is full of stories and details and practical advice for how to do this. I needed today — praying for my scandalized friends in church, and that conversation over coffee — to get myself into the headspace of talking about Christian re-enchantment as a survival skill for believers trying to hold on through this civilizational crisis. I’m going to be giving a speech on this topic at the upcoming Touchstone conference in Chicago later this month. But you’d better believe that when the book comes out on October 22, I’m going to be preaching this gospel of joy. I told my coffee conversation partner this morning the amazing story of how the Lord sent angels to revive the flagging faith of prisoner Alexander Ogorodnikov. God is doing things like this for us all the time, but often we don’t have eyes to see it. I look at that image of my face above, filled with grace and awe at the goodness of the Lord, and I realize that the darkness of the loss of my marriage could not extinguish the holy fire in my hand, and the light that Holy Week had rekindled in my heart. The miserable failures of the clergy cannot touch you if you are enchanted, in a Christian way. Let’s go! Christ has overcome the world! I’m making this post free to the whole list today. Please share it with anyone you know who is struggling in the faith, and who needs encouragement. I can barely wait for the book to come out, so we can talk more in depth in this space about signs, wonders, miracles, and the light that cannot be comprehended or snuffed out by the darkness visible. In the book, I tell a story about a New York Catholic businessman whose wife was possessed; an ancestor had made a pact with the devil, which brought the evil onto her. She was eventually delivered after much prayer, thanks to the help of an exorcist. The struggle brought both of them much closer to God. The businessman told me that he and his wife had been ordinary mass-going conservative Catholics prior to this horrific experience, but this taught them both that there is another dimension of reality. He said that now when he walks down the streets of Manhattan, he realizes that there are intense spiritual battles going on unseen all around him. But he also knows how to achieve victory. That’s what I want to share with readers in this new book. We are like the great French general Marshal Foch in World War I. He sent this message back to headquarters: “My center is giving way, my right flank is retreating, situation excellent, I attack!” Don’t forget to pre-order the book; the new Living In Wonder website Zondervan has created for the book has lots of links to book dealers. If you would like to pre-order a copy signed by me, you can do so exclusively through Eighth Day Books. |