[26] Pray On Your Determination.

An Op-Ed exploring Catholicism — from pre-firing scripture, praying for bicycles, the Book of Job, and the man without fear à la Daredevil.

1 HOW TO BE CHRISTIAN 101

I wrote about my Christian creed in my college admissions personal statement. It’s not that I felt my faith best defines me, but rather that I found that my path to piety said a lot about my character. 

Mom’s side of the family is devoutly Catholic, while Dad comes from a lineage of Buddhists, albeit he himself ended up an atheist. In retrospect, the pressure I felt during childhood to pick a religion seems as though it was self-imposed — in my defense, I sought to be certain about my religion, having been surrounded by so many others who seemed certain themselves. I suppose I could’ve been certain a whole lot quicker if I weren’t barred from being baptized or if conversations about creation stories didn’t end in stubborn “it just is”-es.

Alas, I converted to Catholicism just about three years ago. The time spent as an atheist (because I reject agnosticism), for better or for worse, contextualized my faith in a way I find to be truly unique to myself. In fact, it’s been through my tendency to reject institutionalized religion and instead to uphold this unique bond I share with God that found me in Christ. It’s this nature of how my Christianity was catalyzed that I seek to be solitary in practicing my piety. 

Yet fellowship defines the tenants of Christ, and so I felt it an injustice to myself (and Christ) if I didn’t at least try to contextualize my faith further by virtue of my brethren in Christ. A bible worship getaway camp thingamajig seemed opportune, as anyone who’d willingly go from butt fuck nowhere Ithaca, New York to spend a weekend in butt-er fuck-er nowhere-r North-Pennsylvania would certainly be a whole lot more devout than I. 

The thingamajig was pleasant. There was a whole lotta (unconditional) love that went around — but it wasn’t necessarily comfortable. I value my depth (it’s why I write these articles, musing about my thoughts to share with you), and I believe I am lovable primarily due to this depth. It was jarring to see people so willing to unconditionally love me when all they knew about me was my name and that I was Christian. They’d defend their unconditional love by telling me that I had nothing to prove to them — but, no, because if the love I afford myself is conditional, how could a stranger be capable of loving me unconditionally? I suppose it’d be freeing to live amongst those who’d love you regardless of who you are (and how much they know of you), but would that necessarily be better? Earned love still tastes a bit sweeter for now. 

2 A BIT OF BLASPHEMY 

Further perplexing to me was that this excursion to North-Pennsylvania neither strengthened nor softened my faith in the Lord — still, it’s done well to have deepened my engagement with what I believe in. 

A collective communion can come to a consensus of what they choose to be canon in their common creed — it prepares you. In a spiritual standoff, I quickdraw a take that non-Christians would be granted entry through them pearly gates. My opinion gets shot down via an off-the-dome textual evidence-loaded Tommy gun. Man, straight receipts from the Bible — yeah, when your opponent stats talm bout some John 14:6, they’ve clocked and cooked you to a crisp. Dawg, at that point, you should’ve packed it up before he even had a chance to spew that scripture on your blasphemous ass. 

But, on second thought (or perhaps it’s a second dose of copium), there’s a missed opportunity in heeding an interpretation of the Bible that isn’t your own. Because my dueling opponent was fed this ammunition by the church he’d been attending since he was a goo goo ga ga. While there exists some solution to every dilemma as determined by God, no human will ever conclusively be able to decipher what God has determined. Oh, and is it not your duty as a child of God to make an effort to understand his words through the context of your life? — to challenge what you’ve been taught, not as to denounce your faith, but to deepen it. 

At the end of the day, whether or not a non-Christian goes to heaven shouldn’t affect you— you’re Christian, you’ll be fine! Look, I’m just of the opinion that our God, our merciful God, will enact his mercy onto the good-willed men and women who have sacrificed themselves for the betterment of humanity by granting them passage into paradise if he’d grant me that privilege despite my sin. 

This transitions quite tastefully into the notion of permissible sins. Unlike any other religious doctrine, Christianity stands alone in asserting that you need not prove your worth to God, but that you’ve already been accepted by Him because Jesus deemed it so — and he deemed it through the forgiveness nailed onto a cross. This very forgiveness cleanses us of our sins. We become absolved from those things the Bible explicitly warns us not to commit. 

So, why then does it become a call of contention to push back on a handful of do-nots carved into our scripture? To those who trend dissident-oriented, they choose to condemn select sins (you know, your homosexualities, your premarital sexes, your euthanasias, your divorces) because they’ve found it easy themselves to avoid such sins — and if it’s easy for them, shiii, then you simply must not be trying enough not to be a sinner. 

I contest this notion! These dissidents of select sins would not permit God’s raped daughters who spare through abortion (what would’ve become) her daughter from (what would’ve become) a parent who wanted not to bear the burden of parenthood, but then turn a blind eye to the generational lust (deadly sin of the seven-count sort, mind you) that sexaulized this woman and would’ve then sexualized her daughter. 

No, here I do not intend to pinpoint the conception of life. Here, I merely make note of the abhorrent absence of empathy that some of my brethren in Christ have afforded to their neighbors. Shame, since it’s their pride that blinds them — they do not consider that, on judgment day, God may not see their sins as any more (or any less) forgettable, favorable, or forgivable than the select sins they targeted to dissent. 

3 GOD IS 

Then again (and I compel you to interpret this knowing I mean no blasphemy), perhaps God is not as merciful as I’ve made Him out to be — or at least perhaps His mercy is enacted in a way incomprehensible to my mortal mind. 

As a kid, "너 그러면 벌받는다“ was sprinkled rather generously in my day-to-day vernacular. Roughly translating to, “that’ll get you punished” (hinting at some form of divine intervention), it was a (relatively) lighthearted call for retribution in an instant of indignation. It’d be something my parents would berate me for. I think they feared what punishment from a merciful God would entail — because, given that God usually operates based on forgiveness, what would it mean for Him to deem that punishment must substitute for the usual? Wrath has always been the sin I’ve sinned the least — and thank God, because if wrath came just a tad more conveniently, my belief that the world works as per parity might’ve made me seek to enact punishment on my own accord. 

That notion of parity encapsulates how sins act as rubrics during reflection — I am able to welcome strife because it’s revealed to me how sinful I’ve been throughout my life. It’s amidst this justice (per parity) enacted onto me by God that I’ve conversed with Him more than I ever have before — to at least thank him for the trinkets of glad amidst the gloom he insists I must endure. Grandma once told me (I’m paraphrasing) God won’t listen to a prayer for a bike to appear on your doorstep, but He would listen to the prayer that asks for the courage to do what’s necessary to earn that bike yourself. Though my parents ended up buying that bike for me, Grandma’s poignant point still stands. In conjunction with gratitude, my prayers are bookended with the call for the courage to overcome challenge — and I know He will grant me that courage, because God has never given me a challenge He didn’t think I could overcome. 

4 LOWKEY JUST LISTEN TO “ULTRALIGHT BEAM,” PLEASE?

But I must confess, sometimes I question God in my prayer — to ask if I was so sinful that I deserved such suffering so strong for so long. I’ve turned to the Book of Job, wherein the God-fearing Job has his faith in the Lord tested through trial and torturous tribulation.

The questions I’ve asked God mimic those that Job inquires, except Job does so upon his executed livestock, plagued skin, and lost children (whereas I do so in the comfort of a six-figure tuition). 2:10 “Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?”  reminded me of the length for which my penance has lasted — a recent email headlining with a “congratulations” felt so foreign. My fear is that the opportunities this email entails don’t signal that my penance nears an end, but rather that it acts as just another moment of glad in a looming sea of impending gloom. Thus, 10:3 “What do you gain by oppressing me? Why do you reject me, the work of your own hands, while smiling on the schemes of the wicked?” accuses God that the punishment does not fit the crime. Accusation turns to plea in 7:21 “Why not just forgive my sin and take away my guilt?” in hopes of reasoning with God that I’ve sufficiently paid for my sin of pride via more or less of being socially ostracized, rebuilding my physique, finding a love for academics once more, or thwarting my ardorous impulses. And when the tribulations keep on coming, 31:35 “Let the Almighty answer me. Let my accuser write out the charges against me” asks God to offer proof that the punishment I’ve reaped for the sin I’d sown has not yet met its quota. 

In the Book of Job, Job’s colleagues try to rationalize Job’s suffering. They accuse him of having sinned — that there must exist some sin which Job commits that made him deserving of such punishment, since God must uphold parity, no? But mankind is inherently limited in their comprehension of the world — we couldn’t possibly begin to understand why God does what God does, as per 38:4 “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much.” 

These colleagues go so far as to claim 5:7 “People are born for trouble as readily as sparks fly up from a fire” in their justification of God’s actions. But this I reject! Humans are made in God’s image, and God is good, thus I truly believe that humans are inherently good. But our inherent goodness doesn’t exclude that our instinct can’t be, at times, mean-spirited — if anything, I know I am at my most sinful when I act on impulse. The inherent goodness of it all is found in the restraint I have in committing sin. 

Here, God reveals His gift to mankind — our free will. Fate, to me, is the full potential that is promised to me if I do everything God seeks from me. Mankind is given the free will to be good as God intended, or to reject God as per the statutes of their free will. But perhaps this perception of fate is one of privilege — because it’d be false to argue that a terminally ill child’s full potential was to die, or that they didn’t try hard enough to reach their full potential. To that, I have no answer. I can turn a blind eye to what I cannot understand about God’s decision-making for now because it has yet to affect me — yet I fear that, if such a tragedy befell me, my faith wouldn’t manage to endure. 

5 WELCOME TO SUNDAY SERVICE, IF YOU HOPE TO SOMEDAY SERVE US

For now, faith prevails. It prevails because the love I found for God was not the result of it being insisted upon me, but because I cautiously revisited God over the span of a decade until I was convinced He was real. It’s probably the residues of atheism that speak when I say I believe all religions (and I would be damned if I denounced any of them, given I take from their teachings, namely karma) to be different interpretations of the same, singular God — I merely perceive the Catholic God as the most accurate interpretation of said god. 

And it’s silly, but the genesis of my piety was media. Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam. Charlie Cox’s Daredevil. Instead of a hard-to-swallow preach for undying faith, these bits of media managed to portray faith as something that manages to survive only if you tackle it ruthlessly. And it didn’t hurt religion’s case that such beautiful art (seeing the Sistine Chapel with my own eyes before my eyesight went to shit was life-changing) was birthed through the followers of Christ who had something to say about what they followed. 

My piety has now bolstered itself via the bond I’ve cultivated with God. I’ve stuck with religion because it serves as a reminder of everything I’m not and, thus, should strive to become. And I will (most likely) stick with religion because it’s been a proxy of self-belief — my faith in God becomes faith in myself as I welcome adversity before addressing it with the utmost optimism attainable only through God-given courage. 

Hallowed be thy name. In nomine patri, et filii, et spiritus sancti. Amen.