A Prodigal Son Returns

How the Catholic Faith Saved Me from Depravity

My Journey to Catholicism and Why St. Augustine Is My Confirmation Saint

If you’ve been following me lately, you know I’m in the process of converting to Catholicism. Right now, I’m going through what’s called the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults, or OCIA. It’s the official process to get confirmed and become a full member of the Catholic Church—a sacramental process, not just a formality. As part of that, I had to pick a confirmation saint, and I chose St. Augustine. In this essay, I want to dive into why I picked him, how his story ties into my own, and why I see so much of myself in the Prodigal Son parable. It’s all connected to my conversion, and I think Augustine exemplifies that journey better than any other saint.

St. Augustine and the Prodigal Son: A Mirror to My Life

If you don’t know the Prodigal Son story, it’s about a son who asks for his inheritance from his father, leaves his father’s house, travels to a distant country, blows it all on a wild life, and ends up broke and desperate. Starving, living amongst swine, and desperate, he comes back home, humbled, and his father runs out to embrace and kiss him, welcoming him back into the family, rejoicing that his son who is dead is now alive, his sin who has been lost has now been found.

That’s St. Augustine’s life in a nutshell. He spent most of his adult years struggling with sin—especially lust, hedonism, and worldly ambition. His mom, St. Monica, was a Christian who prayed for him his whole life, hoping he’d turn to God.

When he was struggling with his faith, Augustine famously said, “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.” The phrase captures a moment of candid human weakness: he recognized the moral ideal of chastity, prayed for it, but simultaneously delayed it, reluctant to abandon his sensual lifestyle immediately. This tension reflects a broader theme in Augustine’s theology—the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, and the process of gradual transformation through divine grace.

Eventually, Augustine’s conversion came after a profound spiritual experience in a garden in Milan, where he heard a child’s voice saying, "Take up and read," prompting him to open the Bible to Romans 13:13–14, which urged him to abandon debauchery and embrace Christ. This marked his decisive turn toward a life of celibacy and devotion.

I relate to Augustine on so many levels, especially the struggle between flesh and spirit, and a sudden spiritual experience that urged me to abandon my carnal depravity.

I grew up in a Christian household too, and I’m pretty sure my parents were praying for me during what I call my “lost years.” Like the Prodigal Son, I veered off the path quite a ways. I spent over a decade as an atheist, skeptic, and hater of Christianity. I spent years exploring the occult and New Age esotericism on a spiritual quest that always left me restless and directionless.

That’s not even getting into the mess of my personal life—trying to find joy in transgenderism, transitioning for eight years in order to chase the euphoria of autogynephilia, thinking it would fix my problems and bring permanent happiness. I spent years chasing pleasure through pornography, fetishistic crossdressing, cannabis addiction—I was enslaved to the flesh, always seeking novel stimuli and pleasure as a way to sooth the existential angst I felt in moments of boredom. They were escape mechanisms, ways to get outside myself. Looking back, I think I was seeking God even then, just didn’t know it.

A Lifelong Search for the Transcendental

Even when I was at my most hardcore atheist phase, I was still drawn to the spiritual world. I studied Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism—I meditated, took psychedelics, and was also seeking to alter my consciousness in a quest for the transcendent. I just framed it in a naturalistic worldview, believing my religious drive was just a random product of evolutionary adaption.

But there was always something missing, this longing for the transcendental I couldn’t shake. I tried to fill it with things like pursuing “gender euphoria” and the sexual highs of autogynephilia which drove me into transgenderism, a lot of it driven by pornography and some really dark sexual stuff. I won’t go too deep into it here, but it was depravity of the highest order.

I got caught up in gender ideology—this idea that finding my “true self,” my “authentic gender identity,” would solve everything. I ran away from my God-given masculinity, thinking that was the problem. It was all tied to these sexual issues, these paraphilias that escalated over time because I was enslaved to a philosophy of hedonism. My whole philosophy back then was that of Nietzschean nihilism: there’s no intrinsic value to the universe, so the only meaning is what we project onto it from the individuality of being organic desiring machines.

That justified everything—the pursuit of pleasure, the hedonism. It was all about satisfying my individual desires, no matter how depraved they got. I’m talking the worst kinds of fetishism you can imagine, using masturbatory self-abuse as a way to escape, to find some higher purpose in pleasure, to transcend myself and lose myself in the heigh of erotic ecstasy.

When you’re stuck in that atheistic mindset—where there’s no ultimate meaning, no ultimate purpose, and morality is just whatever we make it—life becomes about chasing dopamine highs. For me, that was cannabis addiction, cross-dressing, pornography—all these dopamine hits. I thought I needed them to enhance my life, because normal life felt boring, unstimulating. I was always after novelty, always chasing the next high. But none of it worked. It was never enough. It left me empty, unsatisfied, and honestly, enslaved. As Jesus said in John 8:34, ““Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.”

The Wake-Up Call: Grace and Repentance

Then I had my own wake-up call, my crisis of conscience. It was like St. Paul getting knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus—a sudden, clarifying vision that I needed to get right with God. I’d been like the Prodigal Son, off in this foreign land of the flesh, spending everything I had on humanism and hedonism. I realized I had to put this degeneracy behind me, break free from the addictions that had me trapped. St. Paul talks about sin as a kind of enslavement, an addiction of the body. The more you give in to vice, the more it becomes a habit, locking you into these disordered desires—whether it’s food, drugs, gambling, shopping, career success, video games, social media, Twitter, attention, whatever. It’s all driven by dopamine, cementing these patterns of addiction.

That’s why I think addiction is the best way to understand sin. The spirit wants to do what’s right, but the body is weak. As St. Paul says in Romans,

¹⁸ And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. ¹⁹ I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.

We’re born into this fallen world, and the more we sin, the more we’re enslaved to it. For me, that was decades of paraphilias, fetishistic cross-dressing, cannabis, and self-abuse—objectifying myself and others. I couldn’t break free on my own. I tried to quit weed for years, knowing it was the right thing to do, but doing it anyway, like an automaton programmed to sin.

I tried to just white-knuckle it with the power of my own will and rationality but always fails. It took God’s grace, but it also took me cooperating with that grace, choosing to repent. In the Prodigal Son story, the father sees his son from far away, still looking out for him even before he’s back. That’s God—the Good Shepherd searching for His lost sheep. He wants us to come back, but we have to choose it. We have to listen to that moral law written on our hearts and respond, freely choosing to repent and turn away from our sinful lifestyles.

Why St. Augustine Resonates With Me

That’s why St. Augustine means so much to me. His redemption story resonates with mine. He spent years veering off the path God wanted for him—struggling with the flesh, with lust, with all of it—but God’s mercy brought him back. It wasn’t just God doing it all; God was calling him but Augustine had to participate, to cooperate with that grace. Same with me. I was spiritually lost for so long—atheism, the occult, transgenderism, chasing pleasure—and it was only by God’s grace that I had this wake-up call. But I had to choose it too. I had to repent, turn away from the paraphilias, the cannabis, the self-abuse, all of it. It’s taken both God’s grace and my free will working together to get here.

The Eucharistic Connection and Catholicism’s Beauty

When I was studying the Prodigal Son, I noticed all these Eucharistic metaphors. The son’s dying of hunger, and he realizes his father has food to spare. That’s spiritual hunger, and the Eucharist—the Bread of Life—is what satisfies it. Jesus set it up as the New Testament Passover meal, a sacrificial celebration we partake in to become adopted sons of God, to join in that divinization process. That’s the most beautiful part of Christianity to me: God calls us to be like Him, to sanctify ourselves, to commune with Him, to offer our own sacrifices. Jesus didn’t have to die for us—God didn’t force Him. It was a freely given, self-sacrificial act of love.

That’s why I’m so drawn to Catholicism—Jesus gave the Mother Church these sacraments to give us grace in a real, tangible way. I just had my first confession through the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Repenting my sins and getting absolution from the priest—it cleansed me, opened me up to more grace so I can grow in virtue and become more like Christ. That’s the goal, right? Jesus didn’t just call us to believe in Him; He called us to be like Him. For me, that means fighting my struggles—pornography, masturbation, fetishism, hedonism, gluttony, drugs, altering my consciousness, boredom, etc. I’ve wrestled with this stuff my whole life, but it’s through Christ’s power that I’m finding any freedom at all.

To the Skeptics: This Might Sound Crazy

If you’re not Christian, I know this probably sounds wild. A God who sacrifices Himself for our sins, the Eucharist as a literal ingestion of God—it might seem like metaphysical mumbo jumbo. I get it. I’ve been the skeptic most of my life. I’m sure some of you watching or reading this don’t like Christianity, think the idea of God requiring sacrifice is morally abhorrent. But hear me out: you’ve got to see the whole story, from the Old Testament to the New. You have to develop an appreciation for Judaism, the Passover lamb, the old covenants—all fulfilled in Christ’s New Covenant through the Eucharist. Zoom out to the big picture, and it’s a beautiful theological narrative.

I don’t really care if people think I’m crazy. The Catholic faith is beautiful, it’s true, it’s got deep wisdom, and it’s transformed my life. Since my wake-up call, I’ve seen the fruits. I’m not struggling with those addictions like I used to. Yeah, there are temptations, but it’s not the same. I’ve replaced that enslavement to the flesh with prayer, Scripture, going to Mass, being part of a parish—a community, the Body of Christ. I’m called to live like Jesus now, and it’s changed me. I feel more peace, more gentleness, more love in my heart. I feel purer—my lustfulness and carnal desires are fading. I’m more motivated, clearer-headed, more disciplined at work. I even feel called to get involved in charity, helping the poor and needy. That’s God’s grace, the Holy Spirit working in me.

The Proof Is in the Pudding

The proof’s in the pudding, you know? Intellectually, it makes sense too—I’ve been studying Catholic apologetics, arguments for God’s existence, Christian defenses of the faith. It’s not going to convince every atheist, and that’s fine. God doesn’t overwhelm us with evidence to force belief. He offers grace, but it’s up to us to choose it. It’s a matter of willfulness—you have to want to love God, to repent, to turn your life around. You’ve got to recognize sin as a real thing, as living out of alignment with God’s eternal law. A lot of skeptics don’t take sin seriously—they think it’s no big deal, or don’t even recognize it as a genuine ontological category of reality. But I’ve lived that life, and I know it’s a big deal. Addiction’s the best model for it—pornography, drugs, social media, etc. It eats you up, destroys your life, holds you back from being your best self, the self that is filled with Christ’s love.

You’ve got to want to break free, to never do it again, to ask for forgiveness. God’s infinite love grants that forgiveness through Christ’s sacrifice. If we follow Him, have faith in what He did, repent, and live according to His will, there’s a path to salvation, to peace, to eternal life. The world’s addictions—chasing dopamine—leave you craving more. Jesus said the bread and water of the world will always leave you hungry and thirsty, but the Bread of Life, the Water of Life—they satisfy you on a deeper, transcendental level.

The Hedonic Treadmill and Our Spiritual Nature

There’s a concept in psychology called the hedonic treadmill. You chase dopamine—money, pleasure, drugs—and you’re happy for a bit, but then you adjust, and you’re back to being depressed or anxious. It’s why lottery winners aren’t happy long-term. They ride a euphoric high for a few months but eventually go back to their baseline level of happiness. I lived that treadmill for years—cannabis, cross-dressing, porn, always needing a bigger hit. It never satisfied me. Humans are religious creatures by nature, even atheists. We long for transcendental purpose, for meaning, for contentedness. I tried to find it in the world—humanism, pleasure, self-invention—but it’s only outside ourselves, in the spiritual, that we meet God. The flesh keeps us trapped; the spirit sets us free.

Why Augustine and the Prodigal Son Matter

That’s why St. Augustine and the Prodigal Son are so important to me. I spent 38 years enslaved to the flesh, and now I’m waking up to Christ, coming into the fullness of faith through the Catholic Church and her sacraments. We’re all called to be saints—not to live mediocre, lukewarm lives, but to dedicate ourselves to holiness, to pick up our crosses and follow Him. Augustine shows that path. He lived in the world for so long, then woke up to God’s reality. I’m doing the same.

A Light on the Hill: Why I’m Sharing This

I know some of you think I’m crazy, that this is a phase. Some think I’ve ruined my YouTube channel by alienating secular folks and talking about Christianity. But Jesus said not to hide your light, to be a light on the hill. I’m not ashamed of the Gospel—the good news that Christ died for our sins, rose again, conquered death and sin, and offers us a way out of enslavement to the flesh. His grace brings peace, love, charity, self-control, kindness, joy—all these gifts that help us live as He wants us to. It’s beautiful.