I think you are brutally honest with yourself because you know you are waging war against your addictive personality. I think you are a perfectionist who genuinely strives for the highest Christian standards for yourself, and you are immensely frustrated when you perceive that you have let yourself down. Just remember you're a good bloke fighting the good fight and you are winning but the journey is a rough one. It is all about faith that will give you the resilience you need. The work you are doing on this shines a " ray" of hope that reaches me in my little corner at the bottom of the world. I send everything you do to my person who needs it and he's started watching and commenting.
You are very welcome! That’s what close friends are here for.
Also, I have found having beautiful sacred art, a crucifix in every room of my condo, and a photo of the current Holy Father in a prominent place in my home to be powerful reminders of the beauty and goodness of the Catholic faith, as well as a powerful reminder to follow the Vicar of Christ here on earth, who I need to follow and pray for.
Also, Ray, I would encourage you to daily ask St. Augustine, St. Paul the Apostle, and The Blessed Mother to help you and intercede for you, that you will be molded by Jesus into the great saint that He created you to be.
Also, having close Catholic friends whom you can hang out with in person and who have your back in good times and hard times is critically important for seeking holiness.
I hope you will not read this as an attack. I am a retired RN with 28 years experience. To my mind what I am hearing in your posts and even in this particular piece is you have a problem with addiction and addictive behavior. This next statement is the tricky one. Please try to hear me out. Your relationship to your new found faith sounds like the latest iteration of your addictive personality…you are now addicted to the church. Hey, there are worse things to be addicted to, as you well know. I am in no way wishing to curb your enthusiasm for your Faith journey and I am not trying to invalidate your confirmation and devotion. Rather I am gently suggesting you be self aware and think about how your addiction may affect your faith in order to be successful. My limited understanding of addiction is that over time one craves more and more of the object in order to achieve the endorphin rush or dopamine release. Church, doctrine, and Faith may not be able to feed that cycle indefinitely. Be aware and be ready. God bless! Full disclosure, I am the Rev. Deacon Larry Shell (also retired) in my denomination, but I was raised RC.
You’re not ready to be honest about your addictive personality. I did not say loving God and His Church was an addiction. I said as someone who clearly has addiction issues, the vice of addiction, may ultimately interfere with your spiritual journey. That is all. Your reaction says it all. I will pray for you.
Oh I’m fully aware I have an addictive personality. It stems from my subclinical ADHD phenotype. But that’s all the more reason to lean on the Church and the sacraments and to keep my mind on God as much as possible.
It's not addiction as modernists would have it, but life and it flows from Christ.
We are children of God and life --real possibilities--discharge from that vital connectedness. As your writing demonstrates, faith is not a high like a drug but includes facing rather than evading our sufferings
Hi Ray! I'm Max, we hung out a long time ago at UCF. I've had my own history with addiction and have been sober in AA for almost 9 years now, and I wanted to share some things from my perspective that I hope will be helpful to you on your journey.
Foundational to recovery is the lived, communally-supported practice of resilience and humility. The truth and value of a recovery program comes from the sustained, mutually-recognized difference it makes in the recovering addict's life. Put another way, before you can effectively advocate for the value of your recovery, you have to walk the walk for a while.
If your recovery is indeed valuable, walking the path for a while will enact and internalize said resilience and humility, getting the addict away from the desperation and dis-integration that is the hallmark of addiction. Addiction is a desperate fight for control, living in a feeling too terrible to face and being willing to pay any price to escape it. Actions that appear to be self-centered are not actually centering the self, since the addict is soaked in a peculiar combination of grandiosity and self-hatred that prevents them from seeing themselves as the normal, lovable human that they've always been.
I share this because your writings during this period of your life have not expressed much in the way of recovery. They can't! This piece references 8 days of abstinence which, while miraculous from a one-day-at-a-time view, really have not created much in the way of sustained, deep change. Abstinence is just the first layer of recovery. It's the entry point to a deep kind of spiritual work, and ultimately becomes the expression of a success of that kind of work, but it can't get you there instantaneously.
What you're doing now - writing publicly from where you're at in your journey - is not going to help you, and it is not going to promote the success of what you see as good in the world. Your writing reads as an expression of addiction, not of recovery. It reads as a tormented, desperate person spraying assertions and judgements around in an flailing attempt to assert control over how they feel. It reads as someone who is passionately attached to their self-loathing, a self-loathing which proves that there is evil in the world and that you are superior to that evil. It reads as someone convinced that the only path to redemption is cruelty, cruelty to ones past self, cruelty towards everything that made you what you are.
You are a great writer, Ray - a great mind and a great human being. It can be hard to push pause on the practice that gives you an identity and sense of value, but that's exactly what I'm inviting you to do. Take a break from all of this for your first year of abstinence. Try on the practice of a quiet, private life. Walk the walk for a while. You are vulnerable, and putting yourself out there right now leaves you at risk of being taken advantage of. Don't try to leverage your story for money or status. Maybe someday you can, but it can only happen after you realize that you destroyed yourself for nothing, and that God loves you anyway.
Hi Max, I definitely remember our days from Campus Freethought Alliance and appreciate you sharing your advice. I'm sure there's wisdom in what you say. But with all due respect, I have more confidence in Jesus Christ and the healing power of the Sacraments than the secular concept of recovery and AA. You say my writing "is not going to promote the success of what you see as good in the world" but I must disagree: the aim of my writing is to share my testimony so that people may be brought closer to Christ and His Church. If you think my writing is somehow detracting from the message of Christ or leading people away from His Church, I'd gladly retract everything I've written. But that is the only metric by which I judge the success or failure of my writing.
Consider an AGP man who does not believe in God. Do you have any argument to make to him? Or do all your arguments rest on the premise that God exists (and, indeed, that Catholic theology is correct about Him)?
I would appeal to his own conscience about whether sexual degeneracy makes him feel good or whether it makes him feel shame, and tell him to listen to those feelings. I would point out the objective fact that acting on AGP makes healthy relationships with normal hetero women almost impossible. It’d point to the absurd lies of gender ideology and how transition leads to neuroticism.
Beautiful piece of work.
I think you are brutally honest with yourself because you know you are waging war against your addictive personality. I think you are a perfectionist who genuinely strives for the highest Christian standards for yourself, and you are immensely frustrated when you perceive that you have let yourself down. Just remember you're a good bloke fighting the good fight and you are winning but the journey is a rough one. It is all about faith that will give you the resilience you need. The work you are doing on this shines a " ray" of hope that reaches me in my little corner at the bottom of the world. I send everything you do to my person who needs it and he's started watching and commenting.
Oh that’s so wonderful to hear about my work being helpful to your person!That makes it all worth it!! ❤️🙏❤️ thank you for your support heather
I’m proud of you and grateful for you, brother! Keep fighting the good fight! 🙂🙏✝️🇻🇦
Thank you friend! Grateful for your brotherly support 🙏❤️
You are very welcome! That’s what close friends are here for.
Also, I have found having beautiful sacred art, a crucifix in every room of my condo, and a photo of the current Holy Father in a prominent place in my home to be powerful reminders of the beauty and goodness of the Catholic faith, as well as a powerful reminder to follow the Vicar of Christ here on earth, who I need to follow and pray for.
Also, Ray, I would encourage you to daily ask St. Augustine, St. Paul the Apostle, and The Blessed Mother to help you and intercede for you, that you will be molded by Jesus into the great saint that He created you to be.
Also, having close Catholic friends whom you can hang out with in person and who have your back in good times and hard times is critically important for seeking holiness.
I hope you will not read this as an attack. I am a retired RN with 28 years experience. To my mind what I am hearing in your posts and even in this particular piece is you have a problem with addiction and addictive behavior. This next statement is the tricky one. Please try to hear me out. Your relationship to your new found faith sounds like the latest iteration of your addictive personality…you are now addicted to the church. Hey, there are worse things to be addicted to, as you well know. I am in no way wishing to curb your enthusiasm for your Faith journey and I am not trying to invalidate your confirmation and devotion. Rather I am gently suggesting you be self aware and think about how your addiction may affect your faith in order to be successful. My limited understanding of addiction is that over time one craves more and more of the object in order to achieve the endorphin rush or dopamine release. Church, doctrine, and Faith may not be able to feed that cycle indefinitely. Be aware and be ready. God bless! Full disclosure, I am the Rev. Deacon Larry Shell (also retired) in my denomination, but I was raised RC.
Addiction is a vice. It is absolutely NOT a vice to love God and His Church. Quite opposite: that is the highest possible virtue.
You’re not ready to be honest about your addictive personality. I did not say loving God and His Church was an addiction. I said as someone who clearly has addiction issues, the vice of addiction, may ultimately interfere with your spiritual journey. That is all. Your reaction says it all. I will pray for you.
Oh I’m fully aware I have an addictive personality. It stems from my subclinical ADHD phenotype. But that’s all the more reason to lean on the Church and the sacraments and to keep my mind on God as much as possible.
Your response reminds me of John 15
we can abide in and thus remain in Christ
It's not addiction as modernists would have it, but life and it flows from Christ.
We are children of God and life --real possibilities--discharge from that vital connectedness. As your writing demonstrates, faith is not a high like a drug but includes facing rather than evading our sufferings
Well said!
Hi Ray! I'm Max, we hung out a long time ago at UCF. I've had my own history with addiction and have been sober in AA for almost 9 years now, and I wanted to share some things from my perspective that I hope will be helpful to you on your journey.
Foundational to recovery is the lived, communally-supported practice of resilience and humility. The truth and value of a recovery program comes from the sustained, mutually-recognized difference it makes in the recovering addict's life. Put another way, before you can effectively advocate for the value of your recovery, you have to walk the walk for a while.
If your recovery is indeed valuable, walking the path for a while will enact and internalize said resilience and humility, getting the addict away from the desperation and dis-integration that is the hallmark of addiction. Addiction is a desperate fight for control, living in a feeling too terrible to face and being willing to pay any price to escape it. Actions that appear to be self-centered are not actually centering the self, since the addict is soaked in a peculiar combination of grandiosity and self-hatred that prevents them from seeing themselves as the normal, lovable human that they've always been.
I share this because your writings during this period of your life have not expressed much in the way of recovery. They can't! This piece references 8 days of abstinence which, while miraculous from a one-day-at-a-time view, really have not created much in the way of sustained, deep change. Abstinence is just the first layer of recovery. It's the entry point to a deep kind of spiritual work, and ultimately becomes the expression of a success of that kind of work, but it can't get you there instantaneously.
What you're doing now - writing publicly from where you're at in your journey - is not going to help you, and it is not going to promote the success of what you see as good in the world. Your writing reads as an expression of addiction, not of recovery. It reads as a tormented, desperate person spraying assertions and judgements around in an flailing attempt to assert control over how they feel. It reads as someone who is passionately attached to their self-loathing, a self-loathing which proves that there is evil in the world and that you are superior to that evil. It reads as someone convinced that the only path to redemption is cruelty, cruelty to ones past self, cruelty towards everything that made you what you are.
You are a great writer, Ray - a great mind and a great human being. It can be hard to push pause on the practice that gives you an identity and sense of value, but that's exactly what I'm inviting you to do. Take a break from all of this for your first year of abstinence. Try on the practice of a quiet, private life. Walk the walk for a while. You are vulnerable, and putting yourself out there right now leaves you at risk of being taken advantage of. Don't try to leverage your story for money or status. Maybe someday you can, but it can only happen after you realize that you destroyed yourself for nothing, and that God loves you anyway.
I wish you way more than luck
Hi Max, I definitely remember our days from Campus Freethought Alliance and appreciate you sharing your advice. I'm sure there's wisdom in what you say. But with all due respect, I have more confidence in Jesus Christ and the healing power of the Sacraments than the secular concept of recovery and AA. You say my writing "is not going to promote the success of what you see as good in the world" but I must disagree: the aim of my writing is to share my testimony so that people may be brought closer to Christ and His Church. If you think my writing is somehow detracting from the message of Christ or leading people away from His Church, I'd gladly retract everything I've written. But that is the only metric by which I judge the success or failure of my writing.
Consider an AGP man who does not believe in God. Do you have any argument to make to him? Or do all your arguments rest on the premise that God exists (and, indeed, that Catholic theology is correct about Him)?
I would appeal to his own conscience about whether sexual degeneracy makes him feel good or whether it makes him feel shame, and tell him to listen to those feelings. I would point out the objective fact that acting on AGP makes healthy relationships with normal hetero women almost impossible. It’d point to the absurd lies of gender ideology and how transition leads to neuroticism.