A Rebellion of Lies

This may or may not come as a surprise to some of you, but I never received the sacrament of Confirmation.  I will be receiving it next Tuesday at St. John the Baptist in Costa Mesa, CA.

When I was a teenager, I rebelled violently against God. The root of my rebellion, and I believe this is the case for many others – whether they choose to admit it or not – was that I perceived a world of hypocrisy all around me. What we learned in the classroom (I went to Catholic school) and during the sermons at Mass never conformed to reality.

I am not speaking of supernatural miracles or other events that materialist science dismisses, at least not at the early stage. I am speaking of the moral code by which we are supposed to live as Christians. In the world of my youth, hardly anyone, if anyone at all, followed it. Among the adults I knew, perhaps a few made token efforts to live a Christian life. Among my peers, almost none.

Perhaps this is problem unique to Catholic schools, in that in an environment in which everyone is nominally Catholic, no one makes a special effort to stand out as such. At a public school, there may be visible prayer groups, for instance, that stand in sharp contrast to the secular surroundings. That conflict is missing in the Catholic school, and especially the liberal school, or the lax conservative school (which is what I think mine was).

What I saw in my youth was nothing but a hedonistic desire for endless revelry, the pursuit of pleasure. No one was immune. What we were taught had no bearing on our lives; it was heard and forgotten, it vanished in alcoholic vapors and marijuana smoke on the weekends. It wasn’t there as girls got pregnant and fools like me were vomiting in public.

The difference between me (and some of my friends) and those around us, though, was this: whereas they saw no conflict between their nominal Christianity/Catholicism and their appalling behavior on the weekends, I did. In my mind, logic demanded that if I was not going to live a Christian life, I would not call myself a Christian, and I would not pretend to believe in a God who wanted to stop me from doing all of the things I enjoyed.

Of course what followed were my own investigations of science, history, etc. – all tainted with the original prideful rebellion, of course – that reinforce the decision to reject God and live life only for one’s self. By the time my classmates were being confirmed (most of them with no desire in their hearts to live a Christian life, but rather going through the motions of social expectation), I had already cursed and blasphemed and rejected God from a wounded heart.

The root of my error was that I believed that if no one around me was living according to the rules that all of the priests, teachers, and parents said we were “supposed to” live by, that these rules must be false, they must be contrary to the authentic human experience. Rather than make any attempt to hold those around me to a higher standard, I gave into the desire to be accepted among my peers and to go even further than most of them would in my rationalizations. This is a trap into which many young people fall, I think.

The other great lie is that rejecting God is a path to liberation. It is true that as a young person, I felt exhilaration upon rejecting God, because it was a liberation from guilt. I could indulge in what I chose, physically and intellectually, and I was accountable only to myself. It was a Satanic philosophy, and I quite consciously became, for a brief time, a Satanist.

The utter emptiness of this life, however, cannot satisfy an ensouled being. This is why I believe I became attracted to communism; having rejected God, I needed a cause to which to devote myself. This is a very spiritual yearning, it is a testament to the existence of the very soul that communism rejects. But I had no conception of that at the time, because I had no conception of what “I” really was.

What I believed was that even though I did not believe in God, I believed in man. Human suffering was all around me, and the empathy I felt for others was incompatible with the individualistic and ruthless ethos of Satanism. If one is a materialist and one cares about others, then Marxism becomes an attractive option. Though I had never heard of Moses Hess, it was he who told Marx that the aim of communism was to “bring heaven down to Earth” – it was, in other words, a complete rejection of any hope or faith in the transformative power of God and its total transfer to “man” as such.

But the emptiness of Marxism is revealed when we come into contact with forms of suffering that are almost entirely unrelated to material problems, and which are almost entirely spiritual in nature. An aching soul cries out for meaning and purpose, not for higher wages and a secure job. What is missing in America, and indeed in any place where there is suffering related to injustice, is a willingness to obey the simple commands of Christ: to love God above all things, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

I say suffering related to injustice, because another great failure of Marxism and other materialist ideologies is a complete blindness to redemptive forms of suffering that strengthen the body, mind and soul. Marxism, though it preaches class conflict, envisions a world in which there are no further conflicts. It is a world of consensus, a world in which every last nook and cranny has been converted more or less to the same doctrine. To the extent that it recognizes “evil” (that which is not itself), it envisions a world in which it has been abolished. Only the “good”, so conceived by the Marxists, will exist. Heaven on earth.

This is not a world worth living in. Perhaps for the people who create it, the attainment of  heaven on earth, such as they conceive it at any rate, will have great meaning – for they had to struggle for it. It satisfied a spiritual need, which is real regardless of one’s opinion on the spirit.

What of the generations born into it? We can’t know, because no communist society has yet created a material utopia, for various reasons. Assuming it was possible, though, eventually generations would be born that knew nothing of struggle and sacrifice, of suffering and triumph. We are seeing this to some extent with the current generations, which are materially better off than all others in history in Western society. We are seeing, ironically in a capitalist society, what the result of the Marxist dream of conquering nature and abolishing scarcity looks like among the Western middle class youth – and it is a horrifying, soulless picture, it is a landscape of hollow men and women whose sole motivation is the pursuit of pleasure to the point of ruin. It is a society in which adulthood, responsibilities, self-confidence, independence, and all of the things that marked the great achievements of previous generations are being smothered. It is a society in which the value of human beings is reduced to the extent to which they help or hinder the pursuit of pleasure.

Only in a world with purpose and meaning can these tendencies be fought and overcome; only a world in which God is acknowledged as Creator and King can provide this purpose and meaning. The “death of God” has meant the death of man, whether we look at the birth rates of Western society (or for that matter, Eastern Europe and the former USSR), or whether we look at the popular culture. Everywhere is sterility, selfishness, ignorance, and death. The command to be fruitful and multiply has been abandoned for the cheap and elusive promises of instant gratification, and the result is that the vine of life is whithering and passing away.

As I receive the sacrament of Confirmation next Tuesday, among other things, I renew my commitment as a soldier in the army of the Lord, as one who is and not of the world, as one who believes not in the transformative power of man alone, but in that of men and women cooperating with God’s grace. My hope is that I will be more fully able to confess Christ before men, hopefully in a manner that is as truthful and uncompromising as it is effective. We cannot “save the world” from itself, but we can show people Christ, who is literally “the way.”

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