Face the Fucker

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end
- Ursula K Le Guin

I don't know what I did wrong, but I sure do feel bad about it. The angst is probably just coded into the DNA of us Catholics. A business-as-usual approach would have me blogging about the recipe I just reverse-hacked for the world’s greatest $20 nut butter, the current nutrition science regarding fat metabolization and the ramifications it’s had on my ultra-training. That would be a true and marvelous story. Meanwhile, in Vatican City, the College of Cardinals would elect a couple more Bishops of Rome-- Benedict XVII and Benedict XVIII and industrial civilization would march on its merry way toward moral and political bankruptcy. However, that would be yet another tasty distraction from what my gut says I really need to do, and that is to FACE THE FUCKER. I think it could be therapeutic. 

DISCLAIMER

If you go out of your way to avoid cultural taboos, I'm just warning you that you're reading the wrong blog. I'll be talking heavily about religion in this one, so this might be your cue to check out NOW. Yes, I feel like I need to address this whole Pope quitting thing alongside my overdue X-seminarian decompression.

This is THE FUCKER I've been wrestling with for quite some time. It's festered, half-written, for over a decade now. I am encouraged by the words of Emily Dickinson, who would say, How can I know what I think, unless I see what I say? Like her, I am compelled to write something down, because there is a lot of gunk that I haven't fully processed.

On December 31, 1999, I found out I wasn't cut out to be a Catholic priest. I knew this of course, deep down, but the answer seemed to make more sense coming from higher up the chain of command-- the General Director himself, a 78 year old Mexican priest who zipped around by helicopter. He was my hero, and I broke up with my girlfriend and swore off all future girlfriends, in large part, because of him. But that's another story. 

I was a second year Novice at a seminary in Connecticut, washing dishes after night prayers, practicing poverty, chastity, and obedience, and coping with a life that was straight up KICKING MY ASS. I was fresh out of high school. My friends on the outside were traveling, doing beer bongs, sleeping with girls, and playing collegiate soccer, but I had zero contact with the outside world. I kept as busy as possible, careful not to let my mind sit for too long in the awareness of where it was and that the dress code was a black cassock and my hair had a part line like the Red Sea. 

The austerity was pretty badass too. I lived in a new cubicle every month (practicing detachment), where some nights I could see my breath it was so cold. Every morning involved cold showers at 5AM, doing 200 push ups, meditating for 3-4 hours, reading, re-reading, and memorizing entire books of the Bible. My goal was to push a pin through any random word on a page of the Gospel of John and tell you, without looking, each of the words the pin had pierced on subsequent pages.

I worked voraciously in the kitchen and pantry, learning how to cook for 200 men, to palletize donations, and to manage a crew in silence. It easily beat any leadership training my peers were paying tuition dollars for. This is how I justified it to others. But internally, the vanities of beer bongs and a career-track life reeked of phoniness.

We studied languages-- Spanish primarily, so we could read the volumes of letters from our Mexican founder, a “living saint”, but also some Latin and Greek too. On Sundays, we broke silence during recreation, usually soccer, but I rolled my ankle and got mildly-addicted to Percocet. I stopped sleeping, gained 20 pounds on a diet of Hostess pastries and pork roast, and started fainting. I began brewing a lot of inner rage, probably like a wild stallion feeling penned-in, or maybe like a 20 year old dude would feel in a cloister. 

 

It wasn’t the beer, co-eds, or soccer that I longed for most. The soccer, like the Gregorian chant, was something soothing that kept the circumstances somewhat bearable. Actually, what I missed most was investigation, curiosity, discussion, disagreement, dissonance, WILDNESS and FREEDOM. This is quite the opposite of rank-and-file discipline, order, and devotion to transmitting an immutable "Deposit of Faith" from point A to point B as a loyal middle-man.

I wrote letters to the founder, outlining my mental and physical troubles, asking for a sabbatical of any kind-- some time to spiritually regroup and focus on others. I hunched I’d be sent to the missions in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. That's what I hoped for. 

But months later, I got a letter back, denying my request, saying, it would be best if [I] left the seminary and enrolled in a university. Overnight, I was gone, without even saying goodbye to my brother seminarians.

What's strange is that I so thoroughly trusted another man’s reading comprehension, assessment of my inner life, and then judgement as my absolute authority. But that is indeed the way of every religious order, from the Franciscans to the Benedictines—obedience to your superiors. Even nonsensical commands from superiors are opportunities to outgrow the ego and grow in personal perfection as if commands coming from God Himself. That is the Catholic teaching, modeled by Jesus with his submission to his parents. It is also the danger of deference to others. It can be a slippery slope, either towards moral complacence or toward guruism, always looking outside of ourselves for our answers. But when I left the seminary, I still loved and believed the whole of it, even though my hero, the founder, would ultimately prove to be a hypocritical sexual pederast Mafioso. 

My first day home, I called another hero-- my favorite gradeschool teacher, Mr. K, and asked him how he became the man I aspired to be. He told me he was majoring in physics and tutoring the Xavier men's basketball team when he realized he liked teaching, science, and sports. So, within the week, I was a full-time college student, majoring in physics and education, and trying to walk-on with the soccer team whom I also tutored. 

Only slowly and intermittently did I find peace with my new path. I tripped my way through a clumsy transitional period, I call my 20s, intent on preserving my old sense of meaning. I tried to marinade the natural content of the physical sciences with all of my supernatural and metaphysical juices, careful to give preeminance to the spiritual overlay.

Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin,

Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 

-Luke 12:27

Through my 20s, the rancor within me felt like I was constantly chewing a mouthful of sand while breathing through a nostril lined with shit. I spent sleepless nights in the physics lab, tracking subatomic particles and running virtual simulations of chaotic systems, while my inner nature felt truly chaotic and atomistic. I eventually did become a teacher, but I felt a growing isolation and disconnection from the very natural world I wanted to experience, learn about, preserve, and share with others.

There was absolutely no separating my image of God from some of the passive aggression of my closest relatives, from the zealots of religious fundamentalism, from the environmental strip-miners, or from the infinite growth paradigm of the debt collection agencies that I could neither do battle against nor keep pace with. A depression weighed on me that I feared would end my most important relationships, if not my life. I gripped tightly to the life vest of my spiritual heritage, even as its bouyancy frayed from under me. I began to feel like I was actually drowning in an ocean of life vests themselves, smothered by the poisons of the high priests of the technocratic world.

Then March 2010 happened. I met a Russian woman named Anastasia, who showed me some extraordinary things. My wife and I planted a tiny seed together and are now co-creating a space of love that will last forever. It's fucking exhausting, but the harvest is bountiful and nourishing and it saved my life.

To this day, I continue to work through some version of survivor's guilt about abandoning my brothers and students. I have weekly nightmares that I'm stuck in a situation where I have to choose between being with the woman I love, co-creating the world I dream is possible, or else imprisoned in a typecasted role shackled by "shoulds." I wrestle with God...or rather, with my image of God. I'm pissed that there's cancer. I'm pissed that there's a war on cancer. And I'm pissed that there's a war on the war on cancer. So, I'm DEEPLY suspicious of my conception of God or an old book's conception of God, or a pedophile priest's conception of God, or any other person's conception of God. And that's why I decline Bible group invitations. (I don't hate you.)

So, when the Pope DNF's, I don’t blame him for being a quitter any more than I blame myself for what some have called “abandoning the vocation.” In fact, I’m damn proud of myself and the Pope for our revocations. To "revoke" something, literally means to "re-call"...as in, election results can be re-called when they're botched, quarterbacks can re-call an audible when the game's momentum demands new tactics, and girlfriends can be re-called and dated again with newer and hotter romance.

The process has been painfully slow for me, but sometimes relentless evolution trumps revolution. I hope Ratzinger takes up permaculture and yoga in a revolutionary new way, in his spare time, but he too can do whatever the hell he wants. I hear he likes piano, so I would imagine we'd all be better off with him doing what he loves.


For the sake of our humanity, I sure hope we are never defined by the worst thing we've ever done. We are merely human, ever in search of giving and receiving love and coping with suffering. Even if Michael Jackson committed horrible atrocities, I love his music and his message, and we probably don't understand his inner workings. Even if my hero, Fr. Maciel, siphoned millions in donations to pay off mistresses and his molestation victims, it's always an opportunity to look in a mature way beyond simply blaming one person. No man is an island. We are the sum total of our relationships. Each person is also an organelle of a larger system that feeds us with both poisons and nutrients, with a net output we can only hope to harvest as kindness.

I’m not sure what religious or spiritual label I’m attached to at the moment—the religion of gardening holds promise, so I'll continue to journey in that direction. The best spiritual practice I’ve found so far involves hanging out with my loved ones, riding my bike, and running through the woods. Sometimes I’m fueled up hills by anger at the state of cancer-prevention or geopolitics, but mostly I’m slowly learning how to live in the spirit of the gift. 

We are born creators, here to achieve the exuberant expression of our gifts. The underlying connection between beauty and function suggests a parallel harmony between survival and the expression of our gifts. The old divide between making a living and being an artist will crumble, is already crumbling. So many of us, more and more of us, are refusing that divide. No object will be too insignificant to merit our care, our reverence, and our effort to make it right. We will seek—are already seeking—to embed all things in wholeness. All of the movements I have described in this book are carrying us toward a world that beautiful. The social dividend, the internalization of costs, degrowth, abundance and the gift economy, all take us away from the mentality of struggle, of survival, and therefore of utilitarian efficiency, and toward our true state of gratitude: of reverence for what we have received and of desire to give equally, or better, from our endowment. We wish to leave the world more beautiful than we entered it. 

-Charles Eisenstein