The men of our era face a spiritual struggle of seemingly impossible proportions. We have been born into a strange epoch, an unprecedented time, in which the very concept of spirituality has been called into question. Every supposed truth that we have been weened on since birth, every foundational myth about the nature of reality, is utterly hostile to a Christian mentality. The poison of atheistic materialism is spoonfed to us in the crib, and throughout our adolescence, a hydra of visual and verbal reference points reify the prism of carnal reality, obfuscating the truths once universally held by our forefathers. The higher and lower planes of existence, that which cannot be immediately seen with the naked eye, were once commonly agreed to be more real than the mundane shadows that accompany waking existence. Now the heavens and her angelic powers are nothing more than medieval flights of fancy, hypertrophied thought forms that primitive man required to stay in line.
And yet, a few lucky souls of this wicked generation have stumbled upon the great secret. By the Grace of God we glimpsed the truth, a truth once universally accepted by the world at large, a truth that is so hostile to the lies of our age. We have caught a glimpse of the Pearl of Great Price, we saw it shimmer for a moment in the fields of dung, as our contemporaries wallow around it blindly. And so we approach this forgotten treasure, we make the first movement towards its splendor. But due to the blindness that we have been raised in, the luminous vectors of its majesty seem to flicker, as our ignorance darkens our vision like cataracts. And so it slips from our fingers when we hold it to the light, as we question its value all together. How can a merchant sell everything he owns to acquire a treasure, if he is not sure of its authenticity?
Our minds have been warped, our souls are perverted. And so the ball of light wanes and darkens. Our mission now is to undo the conditioning, to escape the matrix of nihilism that eats at the corners of our minds like moths. We must first see clearly so that we can truly sell everything we own to purchase the pearl.
45 Again the kingdom of heaven is like to a merchant seeking good pearls.
46 Who when he had found one pearl of great price, went his way, and sold all that he had, and bought it.
As much as I think I have undone the conditioning, I still find certain compromised sections of my soul when I retreat into myself and take a look. Dark spots of doubt that are holdovers of a lifetime of societal instruction. It is time to clean house. I will offer some reflections to you today that may assist you in your own spiritual spring cleaning.
Last week I experienced a fairly profound epiphany in regard to the Eucharist. In the days preceding this revelation, I had been struggling with my own belief in the real presence. Now, do not misunderstand, I had no conscious doubts in transubstantiation, my anxiety was over if I truly believed it enough. I had seen a video of (if I recall correctly) a priest explaining something he had heard from a Muslim. A Muslim who had attended a catholic mass out of curiosity, and afterward resolutely proclaimed that Catholics do not truly believe in the Real Presence. “Why do you say that?” The priest inquired. “Because if Catholics truly believed that God was in that cracker, then they would conduct themselves with far more reverence and fear when consuming him.” This sentiment stuck with me. Did I not believe enough? I then attempted to analyze my own thoughts the next time I was at mass, being mindful of my own disposition and emotions when the priest raised the eucharistic wafer. I found myself discouraged. I believed Christ was present, but did I truly? How could I truly believe that something so immediately in front of me was the creator of heaven and earth?
As I left the church that late afternoon, I looked up into the foggy sky and gazed upon the sun, which was just dim enough to examine directly. And the solar disk appeared as a perfect circle. As visible, as immediate, as physical as the eucharistic wafer. How could the naked eye know that the disk that flickered in the sky was an unfathomable mass of energy and power? A scorching and glorious ball of plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, exponentially larger than our earth. How could the naked eye know that its rays sustained all life on earth, that all of known life is contingent on its existence? And then I understood, so too is it with the eucharist. I never struggle with belief in the power and nature behind the bright circle in the sky, I simply trust in what I have been told about it, acknowledging that my insignificant retinas cannot see it for what it is. And in that instant, my faith was fortified.
I had another realization yesterday, in regard to a stumbling block that had been inserted in its place during my childhood education. A hunk of spiritual lumber that I continued to trip over without noticing. One of the most difficult facets of faith to truly accept for us moderns is the efficacy of prayer. Our entire lives we are told that thoughts are a private affair. That the ephemeral images and sentiments firing through the synapses of brain matter are just that. Mechanistic and internal movements, data transfers, and information processes confined to the fleshy hardware in our skulls. We are instructed to conceive of our minds as identical to that of a computer. There is nothing very spiritual about a laptop. No miracles manifest from keystrokes. And yet not a single human being before this last century would have ever conceived of themselves in such a banal and nightmarish way. We have been hoodwinked into a new form of common sense. A brutal and absurd conception of ourselves and our thoughts. And so we become like that which we think we are. From such a backdrop, nothing could be as absurd as prayer.
If our thoughts are confined to our skulls, worth nothing and only serving as an internal set of logical instructions that send signals to our mechanistic appendages, a binary assortment of commands- “eat, shit, fuck, remember to breathe,” that sometimes veers into flights of imagination and leisure, then, of course, such strange ideas as prayer are absurd. In the modern paradigm, a thought is on its own devoid of value. All that matters is which thought is acted upon. There is nothing inherently evil in perverted fantasies of violence and rape, thoughts of envy and malice, as long as they stay confined to your cranium. Above all, thoughts are a private affair. Nobody can possibly know what you are thinking but you. What a terrible lie we have been fed. How many will be damned for it?
Christianity is radically opposed to such a theory of mind. In the eyes of God, we are judged eternally for our thoughts. And our thoughts are open to him and his ministers entirely. There is an abject terror in accepting such a fact, when you have spent your entire life under a far different assumption. When you realize that thoughts have ontological value, and that every thought is known by God, you begin to alter your mind and soul. It is the first step towards any spiritual progression. It is the first step in becoming a human once more- and not a bastardized laptop. When you finally undo the conditioning of this theory of mind, you see the profound importance and utility of prayer. It is then you can start speaking to God.