My Long Search for Christ

"You have made us for Yourself, O Lord."

I grew up Southern Baptist Young Earth Creationist. Became a New Atheist. Did every psychedelic under the sun. Read Alan Watts and Timothy Leary. Studied Zen Buddhism and became a devoted practitioner of Zazen meditation. Studied Taoism. Became a committed philosophical naturalist and hardcore eliminative materialist. Smoked a ton of pot. Became a “nice nihilist” in the Nietzschean sense. Practiced hedonism and sought out the rush of euphoria in crossdressing fantasies, leading to the development of gender dysphoria and living as a transgender woman for 8 years. Experimented with BDSM. Got into New Age occultism and Western esotericism. Explored Tarot cards, astrology, Thelema, theosophy, Hindu Advaita Vedanta, paganism, satanism, gnosticism, “esoteric Christian mysticism,” flirted with conservative evangelical fundamentalism, tried to make progressive Christianity work in the Episcopal Church, detransitioned, tried to make sense of my sexuality, and ultimately, by the grace of God, was convicted of my degenerate lifestyle and found my way into the One True Religion, the Catholic Church, where I am now thriving spiritually, mentally, and physically.

The most famous line of St. Augustine is, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” And O how my heart was restless! I experimented with every spiritual philosophy under the planet. I sought happiness in drugs, sexual hedonism, esoteric spirituality, progressive ideologies, career, hobbies, etc., etc. I have always been “flighty” in the sense of getting hyperfixated on some particular interest for awhile only to get bored and discover some new obsession 3-6 months later.

And when I converted to Catholicism, many people told me this was just another “hyperfixation,” another pit stop on my endless, restless search for meaning and happiness. That ultimately Catholicism was just another crutch like all my other obsessions, and eventually I’d get bored and move on to some new fangled ideology.

Recently, I have been learning about a theological debate that was all the rage in the early 20th century on the relationship between Nature and Grace between Neo-Thomists like Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (and more recently, Dr. Lawrence Feingold) and Henri de Lubac (and more recently, David Bentley Hart.)

I will admit fully I have only barely stepped my toes into this debate but from my understanding the question concerns the relationship between Nature and Grace and the anthropology of man and whether man by nature has a teleological ordering towards a supernatural end (i.e. God) or whether by nature man only has a teleological ordering towards the created order (i.e. Creation) and it is only by means of a supernaturally gratuitous grace that our human nature becomes elevated so as to be ordered towards the supernatural.

The Neo-Thomist position is quite logical: if man by nature is ordered teleologically towards the supernatural, transcendent reality of God, then it stands to reason that God would thereby owe humanity supernatural grace because of the general intuition that it’d be unjust for God to create man ordered towards grace but then fully deprive him of the grace necessary to satisfy his teleological ordering.

For example, if God created man with a desire for water, it would be quite cruel for God to put man in a world without water and without any way to possibly satisfy that desire.

Similarly, if God created man with a desire for supernatural grace, then it seems God owes every human being grace, ultimately, and this would thereby conflict with the fact that God’s grace is purely unmerited and gratuitous.

Why is this a problem? Because it’s Catholic dogma that “there is no salvation outside the Church.” So if the Hindu has a desire for God inside his heart of hearts, then it seems like if that Hindu dies outside of the Catholic Church, it would be cruel for God to deny him supernatural grace, and thereby salvation in the beatific vision of God, just like it’d be cruel for God to create a man who desires water without any way to ever satisfy his thirst.

So the Thomists are worried that the de Lubacian position threatens to collapse into religious indifferentism wherein humanity is already “saturated with grace” naturally and there’s no especially urgent need for the Catholic Church to evangelize and try to bring people specifically within the sacramental system of the Catholic Church because, after all, if God owes everyone participation in the beatific vision in virtue of how He designed man, then everyone is destined to receive that grace regardless of whether they find themselves within the sacramental system of the Catholic Church.

Because of my own long spiritual quest for meaning and purpose, my natural instincts are towards the Augustinian/de Lubacian position whereby man is created by nature with a deep restlessness that can only be satisfied by a transcendental God.

And furthermore, it’s not just some generic sense of transcendence; it’s very specifically that man has a deep restlessness for Jesus Christ, the God-Man, who is “The Way, The Truth, and the Life.”

In all my spiritual seeking, it wasn’t until I finally had a deep, personal encounter with Christ, the God-Man, mediated through the sacraments of the Catholic Church, that I found true peace and true restfulness in my heart.

So I am inclined to lean towards de Lubac and think that within the heart of every man we are Christologically oriented as part of the deepest teleological structuring of human nature.

But what about the atheist or the Hindu or the uncontacted Sentinelese tribesmen who have never heard the Gospel message? If they are by nature oriented towards Christ, does that mean they are by nature already infused with Christ’s salvific grace, and the purpose of evangelization is thereby merely to proclaim the message that “Good news! You’re already saved!”

I don’t think that follows, and I don’t think that the de Lubacian position implies a kind of indifferentism, nor does it imply that there is actually salvation outside the Catholic Church.

Because what is the “Catholic Church”? It is ultimately the Body of Christ. And all grace flows from Calvary. So if there is any grace at all in this universe, it comes from Christ, and Christ alone. And Christ, in His mercy, established a visible Church and gave us sacraments to receive his grace, especially baptism, confession, and the Eucharist.

These are indeed the ordinary means by which Christ desires people to receive His grace and thereby satisfy the restlessness in our hearts that can only be satisfied by Christ.

But that does not thereby mean God, in His omnipotence, is necessarily restricted to only give grace through the ordinary means of the sacraments of the Catholic Church.

Suppose the uncontacted Sentinelese pagan dies without ever hearing the Gospel. St. Thomas actually addresses this hypothetical:

“If someone were brought up in the forest or among wolves and followed the natural law by seeking good and avoiding evil, we must most certainly hold that God would either reveal to him what is necessary for salvation by interior inspiration, or would send him a preacher.” ~ De Veritate

But what’s key is that this possibility of God intervening at the moment of death via interior inspiration or some angelic preacher does not thereby imply universalism. Because it still remains a possibility that even if given the chance to know what’s necessary for salvation, the Sentinelese could still use his free will to reject God’s grace out of the hardness of his own heart.

So just because humanity has an inner teleological ordering towards Christ, and just because it’s possible that God might give everyone a chance to accept or reject Christ, that does not thereby entail that everyone would freely accept Christ as their Savior.

There are probably some stubborn and prideful Sentinelese, Hindus, or atheists, who, even given every chance to accept Christ, would still willfully reject Christ and thereby secure their eternal fate of separation from Christ, and therefore separation from God, which is by definition what Hell is. For indeed, as C.S. Lewis famously said, the doors of Hell are locked from the inside: God does not send people to Hell, He simply allows people to eternally “lock in” the inclinations of their own free will; that is, He gives people exactly what they desire deep in their hearts.

And that’s exactly why it’s important to evangelize to the pagan world the necessity of coming into the Catholic Church: because it is precisely the sacraments Christ gave us that have the most efficacious healing power to soften our hardened hearts, therefore making it more likely for us to freely accept Christ’s free gift of grace. Why deprive yourself of the most powerful healing method in the known universe, the Eucharist? If you truly understood the healing power of the Eucharist, you’d be shouting from the rooftops trying to get every pagan in the world to become Catholic.

And thank God for that! Because after a lifetime of searching for the Truth, I am so happy that Jesus Christ has given Himself to me, a wretched sinner, out of His Infinite Divine Mercy so that my deepest, inward desire for Christ can finally rest content in His loving embrace.