When I wrote The Wilderness in 2022, I was going though my time in the dark night of the soul, with no end in sight. Each song was a way of processing my lostness, praying through it, and trying to find God in the midst of that miserable stage of my life.
I wish I could say that period of time led to a happy ending, but it didn’t. In fact, my lostness only increased. But, it did lead me back to church, and it provided me with a source of comfort as I made peace with God, my past, and the pain that inspired me to leave the faith in the first place.
Coming back enabled me to take a fresh, deep look at the faith through the lens of a full-grown adult. It also challenged me to evaluate my own relationship with the Church. I changed a lot since I hit the pause button on my walk with the Mystical Body of Christ.
I love the Catholic faith. It’s a beautiful thing when I look at it holistically. My favorite things involve the Eucharist, communion of saints, sacraments and lineage that takes us all the way back to Jesus and the Apostles. Heck, technically, that lineage extends all the way back to Adam, which takes us right to the beginning of creation. Let that percolate in your brain for a little bit.
The Church has been around since the beginning of time, and it existed before time was invented. It is eternal. Anyone who is a Christian is connected to this in a very special way.
Heaven hurts when her children are hurting, and the Church does too. It’s important to remember that. For every person who unleashes pain and suffering in the Church, there are thousands who don’t.
I’m not trying to say that the Church is perfect. It isn’t. I’m not saying that the Church is without evil- it’s full of evil. The Church is a tangle of goodness mixed with evil, freedom vs control, faith vs the absence of it.
So are all of us, and we need to remember that.
I’m not making excuses for the Church’s behavior. I’ve been victimized in spectacular ways by some of the more-unsavory characters who have graced the hierarchy with their presence. Some people accuse me of drinking the Kool-aid, I haven’t. I don’t yet agree with some of the more-outrageous claims the Church makes for herself, and I’m not one who remains silent in the face of injustice and evil that is heaped upon innocent souls.
I don’t have to be.
I haven’t made vows to be submissive and obedient yet. I made a commitment to Jesus to live the gospel, to proclaim the gospel, and to lead people to the good news that we are loved, redeemed and owned by God almighty, the absolute perfect manifestation of pure love. Jesus himself clashed with religious authorities but didn’t abandon the faith- he perfected it by his willingness to suffer through it in order to make it holy. That benefited all of us, and He calls all of us to do that for the benefit of others.
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Americans in particular, and Westerners in general, have this notion of “voting with their feet” when it comes to walking away from things that we don’t like or agree with. We protest, we boycott, we quit, we go elsewhere, we rage against the machine and we cancel things.
Yet, Jesus never cancelled things. Jesus never taught us to give up, to walk away or to abandon ship when things happen to us that we struggle with or don’t like. Sometimes Jesus left a particular town or community behind if he was rejected, but he never gave up entirely. He could have. He certainly could have said “screw it, you all get what you deserve” before going back to the perfection of heaven. But he didn’t. He stuck it out until the bitter end, and then he created a new beginning out of that. He taught the disciples to do the same. They taught their disciples to continue the tradition, and that’s the way it’s been ever since.
I don’t understand why it has to be that way, but we all live in a broken world that requires the collective sinful nature of humanity to run its course before it can be purged once and for all. It is what it is. No one escapes from the struggle of living this life. No one. Our responsibility is to invite God into that struggle and make it holy. God is God, and God will turn that suffering into whatever it needs to be for God’s purposes.
That’s what it means to trust and walk with God. To trust is to surrender to God, which means we accept the struggles as much as we enjoy the rainbows.
Difficult times in our lives seem unfair and unjust. God can seem unkind. But our lives are not our own. We are slaves, which is another concept that irritates the Western brain. But, our sensibilities don’t change that reality. Christians are slaves to God, in every literal sense of the word. We were bought with a price. We are owned.
If we don’t like being owned by God, then we can be owned by sin, and then Satan becomes our master. Those are our choices. When we choose God, we are owned by pure love because God is love. When we choose sin, we submit ourselves to the evil one, and consequently, despair, death and destruction. At the end of the day, there are no other options. That’s the price we pay for being born into a broken world.
Part of that brokenness is the suffering that we endure at the hands of evil in the Church. It’s painful, it’s life-destroying, it’s despicable. Yet, Jesus also endured tremendous suffering at the hands of the precursor of the Church as we know it today too.
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Don’t cut yourself off from the presence of Jesus in the world that is found among your brothers and sisters. Run away from those who hurt you, but make sure that you run to those who will help you to heal. No good will come from leaving altogether, I promise you that. No good comes to you, your family, friends, neighbors, community, or society.
The fewer hands and feet that are available to serve Jesus through the Church limits how many people can be blessed and served by our Lord. That vacuum contributes to the degeneration of society, and it’s only going to get worse as the light of Jesus, the manifestation of pure love on earth, diminishes because of our absence.
I’m not saying that we have to accept the hurt, or to roll with the punches. Fight back. Take a stand. Speak out. Hold people accountable, be the change. But, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater in terms of leaving the faith or abandoning the Eucharist, communion of saints or the living, breathing connection to heaven through the eternal Body of Christ.
I know this is a hard pill to swallow, but it’s the remedy. Sooner or later we feel better, we grow, we have a deeper relationship with love and we pass that on in order to touch others.
Healing comes when we bring our struggles to God and allow God to walk with us through them. It doesn’t involve asking Jesus to take our problems away. Sometimes he does, most of the time he doesn’t. God works all things together for his will and purpose. Our job is to persevere and learn how to incorporate our pain, suffering and struggles into our lives properly.
The payoff comes later. That’s what we believe. That’s what we hope for. God rewards faithfulness.
I hope the music in The Wilderness can be a source of peace and comfort to you as you endure your suffering as well. Sit with it, pray with it, listen to God through it, and allow God to take your heartache and make it holy.
I also encourage you to go to mass. I’m not saying that you have to come back to everything, I’m not saying that you need to put your past behind you and go all kumbaya with the Church, no no no… Just show up at mass and be present. God will do the rest.
Take your cross and join your brothers and sisters with Jesus, and allow heaven to touch your soul and begin to heal your spirit.
God understands your suffering, your pain, your anguish, your brokenness. God also knows how to take that awful sting and turn it into peace and wholeness. All you have to do is be open and show up. God will heal your hurt, and you will be made whole again.
Really, you will.