[The following reflections were inspired by some of the material in Symbolon, Part I, on Formed]
I have always believed in something. That was never in question, for me. But the what that functioned as the object of that belief wasn’t always clear. Sometimes I was close (ish)… more often, I was farther than I could have imagined. And just because I wanted to believe in something doesn’t mean I had faith; just saying “I believe in…” doesn’t necessarily mean anything more than having an idea that sounds good. This was one of my biggest problems. The more my conception of God became based on my ideas, the less real faith I had. This is the biggest problem with the idea that my ideas are a suitable substitute for the Magisterium of the collective Church because they’re “personal revelation” — more on that later.
I’ve already explored why the idea that we can know something with any absolute certainty is a problem. If we want to get down to brass tacks, this knowing — this “gnosis” — is at the heart of my own pattern of sinful behavior (and, I’d venture to guess many others’). From this certainty of “knowing,” I claimed — unworthy though I am — the right to judge and condemn, to form opinion that influenced aesthetics, to declare what is ethical and just. And yet, no matter how much I wanted to think I knew these things, that knowledge was vested not in an objective truth but in my own conception.
To “believe” something in this context means that I have chosen a belief because it suits my perceptions, needs, and rationale. It has not been (and cannot be) proven so, from an epistemological perspective, it’s already incorrect to call it “knowledge” but that’s another matter. Whatever it’s appeal, I assented to it — willingly and freely — and made it mine. It became my belief but that doesn’t mean I had any faith in it. Beliefs that validate and empower the ego are particularly powerful, because as long as our ego is comfortable and doesn’t have to confront the invalidity of the belief, it has no reason to question it; if it can convince others of the belief, so that they reinforce it by corroboration (the “echo chamber” effect), it becomes even more established.
What’s more, a lot of this “gnosis” is self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing; it’s circular logic, meant to “prove” itself, protected by the assertion that it’s personal nature only makes it valid in a particular context so when it doesn’t hold water, the problem isn’t the belief — it’s the context. This is true for all Gnostic heresies: when an authority challenges them, the authority must be wrong because it doesn’t have the right context. It’s the same problem, from the opposite end of the spectrum, that materialists who use science to “prove” materialism (*cough* Richard Dawkins *cough*) fall into. But it was not even by the power of epistemological scrutiny that I came to realize my own error. Which brings me back to the difference between simply holding a belief, and having faith in that belief.
How do you differentiate between a belief and faith?
The Test of Faith
Most people, as long as they’re comfortable, will say that they have faith in their beliefs, especially if they sound good, if they appeal to others, or if they garner rewards — and I am no different. My beliefs shifted on a near daily basis because I did not have an authority to measure them up to, or to hold me accountable. And I thought this was normal; as long as I managed to justify why what I believed (or wanted to believe) was acceptable to God as I understood Him, I could validate those idea to myself. This became particularly problematic when I had to start questioning the ontology of morality.
When beliefs stop being rewarding, especially if they begin to draw ire and resentment or fail to deliver on their promises, I could abandon them, no questions asked and no strings attached. That’s not faith. I did, in fact, have faith in something, but I didn’t want to admit that for a long, long time, because that meant the things I had allowed myself to believe were inherently flawed. Yet, when life was good, I felt perfectly justified in exploring these beliefs, trying them on like clothes and keeping the ones that suited me in the moment while rejecting those that didn’t.
I fell into Gnosticism deeply for a long time, which might be the magnum opus of my heresy. I explored occultism and paganism, Buddhism and Hinduism, pantheism, and even “spiritual but not religious,” at various times. I persistently denied the faith I naturally held, always, somewhere deep within, to gratify the desires of my mind and ego. Maybe that’s Satan’s temptation at work, but I still retained agency — and I should have known better.
My faith is always strongest when I have nothing to inflate my ego, nothing to be haughty or prideful about, and no glory of my own. Every good thing, when you have nothing in the world, is a gift from God to be enjoyed in the moment, and then returned back into the world. This wasn’t something I hadn’t experienced — I had… several times. It was always at times when my pride and the world’s assessment of me would say I was “a failure.” Times when I was homeless, when I was incarcerated and institutionalized, when I was in financial ruin and drowning in debt and bill collections. Times when I didn’t have anything to be proud of. In those times, I never had a problem denying the temptations of Gnosticism, in whatever form they came.
I came so close to “getting it” in 2016-17, and I was ready to complete RCIA and pursue a monastic vocation. Temptation came, and I passed from grace again. What makes this particularly painful is that, for a long time, it felt right. I was able to disregard the goodness that I knew, for a good I thought I could do. All I had to do was figure out how to package up my faith in a box of beliefs that appealed to someone who was tragically averse to Christianity. Instead of recognizing the testing of my own faith, I saw a challenge to bring someone else to believe in something… anything. And that someone else was as egocentric as I was.
However, Christianity is only really off-putting to people who are not receptive to unconditional love and trusting others; that is, after all, what it means to have faith in God. We are not called to redefine God for people who don’t want to hear the message; we are called to love others and Jesus — the Word made Flesh — loved us. Nonetheless, I thought I knew better, so I picked different paradigms to put God in, and I set to work.
Slowly, I cracked the hard outer shell of aversion to religion in my partner but, in the process, I also claimed more and more worldly benefit, so I relaxed my belief structure some more. By the time the affair happened, I was already on my way back to the Church, but I hadn’t yet abandoned my proclivity to “know,” so I only came back as far as the Episcopal Church. The doctrine of via media and the justification of personal revelation held by Anglicans makes this “okay,” dogmatically speaking. It didn’t matter; the fuse was lit.
When the affair came to light, and I lost the one thing I had put my trust in as my confirmation that I was “right,” everything collapsed. I tried to hold it together by rejecting religion altogether for a year or so. Then the test got harder and I began losing what little control I had over my life. Finally, I realized that if I continued to proceed in this way, it was going to start hurting the children (and cats) I adored more than anything else in this world: I could endure anything brought upon myself — that was easy for me — but they didn’t deserve to get dragged through the muck behind me. I needed help, but I had nobody and nowhere to turn towards: my determination to allow for personal gnosis to trump communal consensus meant that I had no community to depend on for support because all the people who were just like me, were just like me: alone.
Faith prevails
The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has been unable to overcome it.
John 1:5 (New Catholic Bible)
This was the real test of faith. Not of belief, not of reason, and not of “gnosis,” but faith in all of them. I failed the test. I had no faith in the things I was concluding and rationalizing; how could I? I had reduced everything to myths and stories, philosophy, and “poetic wisdom,” but all of that only applied subjectively to me. I did the only thing I could think of: I prayed. I finally gave up, and I prayed — not for what I wanted; not for my marriage to be repaired, or for the worldly means to resolve my problems, and not for God to just make it all okay. Instead, I prayed for direction and guidance, for courage and wisdom to face my demise, and for the path to redemption to be made available for me afterward.
God answered. Very clearly, in fact, with an immediate direction to reconcile myself with the Catholic Church. Now, when I say “answered” and “direction,” I need to be explicit. This wasn’t a “hallucination” of some sort — I didn’t hear or see anything outwardly, nor was it some kind of wild inference from a collection of “signs” and “omens” that I could read any number of meanings into and that just happened to be convenient. Oh, no. I’m sure God was well aware of the hardness of my heart and mind, and made sure this was something I could not reject or misinterpret in any way. Instead, what I got was an immediate and overwhelming sense of calm and peace, coupled with an onslaught of specific memories surfacing all at once that made sure the right dots would connect to put the story of my life in place. Remember, I have been all over the map of religion and philosophy; as devoted to God as I have always been, the boxes I have tried to put Him in at various times have been very contradictory and weren’t always hallmarked by “memorable” experiences: the last thing I wanted, at the time, was something to tell me I was wrong about it and, yet, that is exactly what I got. Once he had my attention, the thought surfaced as if it was my own, despite being nothing remotely close to what I wanted or expected: “home to Rome.”
I wrote briefly about that experience in my About page; the effect of that experience was my first experience with true conversion. I had faith, and even though I ran away from it, it was still there when I was ready to give in. God didn’t abandon me; I abandoned Him — and His love, being unconditional as it is, proved to me just how human I was.
In the days and weeks that followed, a series of “revelatory epiphanies” took place — my own mystical conversion. First, I understood how Christ’s Church was already the epitome of an anarcho-mutualist society; shortly thereafter, the problem of schisms — and why things like the Protestant reformation were detrimental to that mission — was made obvious through my own experience of a broken marriage. Then came the understanding that the Fall was (at least in part) a problem of epistemological ontology — the misconception that we can “know” anything for certain that isn’t ours to know — and how that gives birth to dichotomies of sin, such as the sins of vanity (Abel) and pride and jealousy (Cain); the resolution being not the complete rejection of one at the expense of the other, but a median (think Aristotle’s virtues on a cosmic scale)
This seems incongruent, but it was a necessary foundation for both God to penetrate my arrogance and ego, and eventually to draw my assent to its the Church’s Magisterium. Around that time, I discovered that Dorothy Day had been submitted for canonization (and her case is progressing!) and, immediately thereafter, global politics drove Pope Leo XIV to become the dominant opposition to institutional corruption and the proliferation of AI. That got my attention enough to break through my ego and I started listening to God and praying regularly again. Not the God I wanted to know nor the doctrines I wanted to believe, but the God I needed and an institutional religion that I could have real faith in.
It seems like something small, but it was sufficient for me surrender my own agenda completely at that point. As soon as I let go of the need I had to “know” anything, I was able to proceed without knowing. I was able to have faith in something. And it was the same thing I had run away from 10 years earlier. And, more importantly, I realized that it was a faith I always had, no matter how much I denied it for the world in a thousand and one ways — or I would not have intuitively resorted to praying.
O, the humility. The only thing humility injures is pride, and that happens to be the only thing you can protect when you choose your own will over God’s.
It hurt a lot to have to admit that I was the one who made my life so difficult, but it hurt more to know that the God I was trying so hard to know and understand had already made Himself known and understandable, and I rejected that because it wasn’t what I wanted. In my quest to deviate because I thought I knew something, I proved to myself that I knew nothing, and God proved to me that He had it under control, all along. That whole process took a few months — most of Lent, 2026 — and by Easter, I was back in the pews. Where else was I going to go, anyway?
But I also had something else I didn’t have before: I now had conviction. The element that had been missing a decade previous.