Loving The Crooked Old Tree
Can you have faith without trust? How does the weight of fallenness twist you?
Man, what a last 24 hours my family had. There was the burst pipe that covered the back of the house in an inch of water before we found out what was happening. And then there was all the alarms in the house going off at 4:30 am, for no apparent reason. Today I recalled that on Saturday, someone gave me a little book related to an occult theme that had belonged to one of my deceased relatives. I intended to get rid of the thing, but wanted to thumb through it first to try to understand why my relative had been interested in that stuff. After the crazy business started happening in the house, I chucked the book in the storm drain.
Superstitious? Sure. Sue me. I can’t forget that I’ve been in two different houses in my life — one on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and one in Washington, DC — in which things like that happened until the residents destroyed objects on their bookshelves which had been used in occult-ish ceremonies. None of the residents were religious people, by the way. I believe that what happened in my house was explainable by natural causes. But I’m not certain of it. Anyway, I didn’t want that occult book in my house for a moment longer.
That ever happened to you? Having objects in your house to which poltergeisty things were connected, I mean. What did you do? E-mail me about it: roddreher — at — substack — dot — com. In the two cases I know about personally, the objects were fetishes used in religious ceremonies in, respectively, Indonesia and Africa. The homeowners took them as art objects. But they didn’t know peace until they destroyed the things.
Christians — well, Catholics and Orthodox, and some high-church Protestants — believe that objects blessed by a cleric have special spiritual energy. Catholic exorcists take the ability of a supposedly possessed person to detect hidden blessed objects as a sign of demonic presence. If blessed objects can retain in some mysterious sense divine energy, why couldn’t cursed objects retain demonic energy?
A man I knew back in the 1990s converted to Christianity (or rather, returned to the Evangelicalism in which he had been raised, but discarded) following a life-after-death experience in which he found himself in Hell tormented by demons, but was saved by Christ. After the experience, he discovered that he had unusual powers of discernment. He could sense the presence of evil. He told me several stories about this. Once, he started a new job, and said he could visually see an aura of darkness surrounding one of his co-workers, a young woman. It turned out that she practiced some form of black magic. She told him, prompted by nothing in particular, that she could see around him an aura of darkness. He believed her — but also believed that his Christian faith must have appeared as darkness to her.
I need to write more about sacred places and cursed places. Maybe tomorrow — not tonight. I have been awake since 4:30, and am about to crash.
Steve Skojec’s Catholic Cult
I want to share with you an extraordinary personal essay by a man named Steve Skojec, a very conservative Catholic writer — strictly speaking, a Catholic Traditionalist, meaning (among other things) a lover of the Latin mass. I’ve never met Steve, but we have corresponded off and on over the past few years. He gets in trouble with some of his followers for being so critical of his own team. Skojec is hard on Pope Francis and liberal Catholics, but he doesn’t turn a blind eye to the faults of conservatives and Trads either. He particularly despises the habit some Trads have of meeting serious questions about the Church with pious platitudes, ideological nostrums, or accusations of disloyalty.
Skojec cited a letter that a reader of my blog sent me, which I titled “A Cautionary Tale.” The author, now a Catholic, speaks of spending years in a Hindu cult, and warns about how cultish thinking can take over one’s mind. Skojec writes that the same thing happened to him — but the cult was the Legionaries of Christ, the ultraconservative Catholic religious order founded by the late Marcial Maciel. Maciel was a priest of rigid piety, who demanded the same from priests of his Legion. Maciel was dogged for years by accusations of sexual abuse, which the Legion strenuously denied. The Legion was quite rich, and spread the wealth among the Roman curia.
But after Pope John Paul II, a staunch supporter of Maciel, died, the new pope, Benedict XVI, forced Maciel into retirement. It turned out that all the accusations against Maciel were true — and there was more. Maciel was a drug addict who had mistresses, fathered children, and molested some of them. It came out last year that the Vatican had had evidence since the 1940s that Maciel was dirty.
All of his is very personal to Steve Skojec. As a young man, he was in formation with the Legion, studying to be a priest. In his essay, he quotes the essay of the former Hindu cultist, saying the same manipulative techniques were used on him by the Legion. Skojec:
I was lied to and manipulated by priests, not just in general, but within the confines of spiritual direction. I’ve been unable to find a true spiritual director ever since. I cannot allow myself to be vulnerable in that way. I cannot allow a man to ever again tell me he knows the will of God for my life, knowing that he may only be feeding me convenient deceptions. I cannot cede that much control. I was a fool to do it then.
When I left the Legion, I thought what had gone wrong was my fault. When I saw what they did to my relationships and reputation after I left, when I saw how they turned on me and excluded me after treating me for years like an MVP, I came to realize that yes, I was dealing with a cult. (This did little to mitigate my own religious guilt, unfortunately.) The more time I spent looking at this organization I had come to trust, the more I saw the corruption within. I had overlooked it, I had rejected it when it was presented to me by those more observant than I was, because it was something I simply did not want to see.
But I consoled myself with the understanding that the Legion, though it was fast-growing and powerful, was a religious order, not THE Church. The Legion was non-essential. The Church herself was not.
And so it disturbs me to realize that when I look at the Catholic Church these days, I feel much the same way I came to feel about the Legion. When I take in the big picture view, almost all I can see is corruption. When I examine my relationship with Catholicism — this cause which I have been devoted to my entire life — I feel similarly betrayed.
Read it all. It’s quite raw. To be clear, Skojec is not saying “Catholicism is a cult.” And I should add that I’ve known Protestants who have been caught in similar destructive religious groups. His point, as I see it, is that any religion can turn to cultishness. (By the way, so can politics — which is why the former Hindu cultist wrote me, inspired by the insanity of wokeness today. I read a great book earlier this fall, Days Of Rage by Bryan Burrough, about how the SDS went from being a radical leftist student group into being a full-blown violent political cult called Weatherman.)
I never had an experience like Skojec’s, thank God. I do suffer, though, from an inability to trust authority, especially religious authority — a difficult thing indeed when you believe in a hierarchical religion. All the things I saw in covering the Catholic abuse scandal, and my personal experiences (especially my wife and I being seduced, in a manner of speaking, by a charismatic priest who I found out only by accident was a con man), left me largely incapacitated. I know that this is just me, that most priests are trustworthy. But oh boy, how deeply I had once believed.
Once you’ve done that, and been burned as badly as I was — and it was nowhere near as intensely as Steve Skojec — you find it difficult not only to trust clergy, but you find it difficult to trust yourself. After I became Orthodox in 2006, I privately vowed not to get involved in church politics again. But in 2010, I allowed myself to be drawn back in, in defense of a bishop I thought was being maligned and mistreated. I put my job at risk to help him. I was working for a private foundation then, and I knew the president would not want me involving myself in religious controversy. But I felt that it would be dishonorable to stand by and do nothing while this innocent bishop was savaged by the wolves. So I wrote on a group blog under a pseudonym. I wrote nothing that I wouldn’t have been willing to sign my name to, but I did it falsely to protect my job.
I was outed by a different bishop, who read a priest’s private e-mails. Isn’t church life grand? I had to beg for my job, and was able to keep it. I was embarrassed by what I had done — not the words I wrote (which I would have stood by), but by the fact that I hid. In the end, it turned out that I and others who risked so much to defend the bishop had been mistaken. The case was not nearly as clear-cut as we thought. He wasn’t a bad man, this bishop, but neither were his accusers all villains. Years later, when I got a fuller picture, I knew I had made a mistake, and had allowed my passion for justice and loyalty to a friend mislead me. For that I was sorry.
It’s very weird to be a man of faith but to find it so difficult to trust, even trust yourself. What is the difference between faith and trust? Can you have the first without the second? How would that work? I’m living it out now, but I’m not really sure how I reconcile these things.
If you had a marriage that went bad, and a painful divorce, and you fell in love again, but withheld part of yourself from your new spouse, out of fear of making yourself vulnerable, how serious are you about marriage? Isn’t it fair to ask the same thing of me in my relationship to the institutional church? I don’t feel that I’ve been fair to the church, and yet, I also feel paralyzed to move closer.
When I was much younger, in my late teens and early twenties, I used to fantasize sometimes about being a monk. I had read Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, and seen myself in him. Could I too become a Trappist? Or a Benedictine? It seemed so beautiful to be dedicated so deeply to God, and to live in a brotherhood of prayer. It seemed that way in part because I was so worldly and undisciplined. I admired monks. I still do, greatly. At 53, I have far less passion for the world than I once did, but have never been less able to fathom the courage it takes to surrender to a monastic vocation. To be able to trust God and the Church so wholly! I can’t fathom it. I used to think it was mostly a discipline, but I see now that it is also a gift.
I hope I can find some portion of that gift again someday. The truth is, this world is all there is. God does not show himself to us through perfect people, of whom the only one who ever lived ascended into heaven after his resurrection. He shows himself mostly through us, and the things we do, and make. Said Auden, You shall love your crooked neighbor/With your crooked heart.
“Crooked” means “scheming” and “criminal.” But it also has a less wicked meaning. It can mean “bent”. Neither my neighbors nor I am crooked in the sense of prone to exploit and rob from others. But all of us are bent, because we are people. I wonder: was I actually more bent when I was young, and thought I was a straight arrow, and the path forward was clear? Was young Steve Skojec, trusting so completely in the ramrod-straightness of the Legionaries, actually more bent spiritually than he is now, with his painfully achieved wisdom?
If that’s true of us, what does that mean for the way we ought to live now, with regard to our respective churches — and with regard to ourselves?
You please tell me what you think. This is something I struggle with. Has it happened to you too? How did you resolve it? If you haven’t resolved it, what do you think you lack? I think that this might be something worth talking about among ourselves for a few days. Don’t forget: roddreher — at — substack — dot — com.
Before you right, scroll up and look again at that beautiful old tree, so crooked, and so gloriously alive: growing ever towards heaven, but its ancient arms pulled down by earth, forming something like an embrace.