“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Reading JD Vance’s new book “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” I couldn’t help but think of my own return journey.
Though our stories are quite different, there is much we share. As millennial men, we both adore “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Chronicles of Narnia.” We both read too much Ayn Rand, Tucker Max, and Neil Strauss. I personally relate to Vance in how we were and continue to be shaped by strong maternal figures, for him his Mamaw, for me my mother.
Most importantly, we have both ended up nestled in the bosom of the Catholic Church receiving the same communion.
Yet where Vance is a convert to Catholicism, I am a revert.
Where Vance became an overachiever for achievement’s sake in reaction to the poverty and chaos of his upbringing, I became an inebriated and self-medicated student of the philosophy “Don’t Try” in reaction to the charmed chaos of my upper middle-class childhood.
Where Vance clung too tightly to the brittle interpretations of his evangelical faith only to watch them break apart in his hands, I grasped too loosely the traditions of my Catholic faith, letting the world lead me by the hand into sin.
But that is where our similarities begin again – sin.
Though Vance offers many plausible and convincing secular explanations for why so many have fallen away from faith – from all the worldly distractions of contemporary technology and culture to the instability and fleeting nature of modern family and institutions – I suspect the vice president wouldn’t disagree with what I am about to say. For all the scientific, psychological, sociological, and political explanations that attempt to make sense of why faith in God is fading in America, the best explanation is as old as the faith of the Church – sin.
Why have so many Americans fallen away from faith?
Sin.
Why have so many fallen into this or that worldly lifestyle?
Sin.
Why have so many Protestant, Evangelical and Catholic churches lost an entire generation of women and men?
Sin.
And sin comes in many forms. Sometimes it’s truly scandalous, like the child abuse scandals of the Catholic Church. Yet sometimes sin’s as mundane as water to a fish.
Yes, we are swayed by the familial and cultural currents in which we swim. Our traumas and trespasses haunt us across generations, but we also have use of our own fins. So, rather than merely playing the victim of circumstance or pretending individualism can set us free – the recognition of sin liberates us to see we are not alone in community yet must also take personal responsibility for our own and other’s suffering through humility to the Word.
Indeed, humility is what both Vance and I needed to journey home to our shared Catholic faith, especially regarding our relation to the Word Incarnate. Both of us regarded Holy Scripture and tradition with pride, though our pride manifested quite differently.
For Vance, it was a meditation from St. Augustine on Genesis that first loosed the firm grip of his pride:
In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Sacred Scripture.
“I couldn't stop thinking about how I would have reacted to this passage when I was a teenager,” Vance writes in his book.
If someone had made the same argument to me when I was seventeen, I would have called them a heretic. The text represented a partial surrender, the kind of accommodation to science that made a person's faith incomplete. You couldn't be a cafeteria Christian, taking and leaving what you wanted. You had to believe the whole thing. Yet here was Saint Augustine, a person with far more authority and far less interest in surrendering to any secular authority than I, telling us sixteen hundred years ago that my own approach to Genesis was one of arrogance—the kind that might turn a person from his faith.
Yet, when I read that passage from St. Augustine, I am reminded of my own teenage pride for inverse reasons. At too young an age, I understood humility in interpreting the Word of God almost too well – and I twisted it to my own ends.
One day while attending Auburn University, I left the Haley Center and noticed a sizable crowd gathered around a street preacher at the threshold of the upper quad. The preacher was quite skilled, deploying a deft mix of crass provocations and studied understanding of scripture. Many students engaged with him and left flustered, if not downright offended by his swift and cocksure retorts. The preacher seemed quite fond of deploying the word “whore” for effect. Annoyed with him and the students arguing with him, I stepped up to ask a question.
“Sir, does that Bible you hold in your hand contain the full power and might of God?” I asked him, “and more to the point: does your understanding of that Bible contain the full power and might of God? Is the power of God Almighty limited to the text on those pages and your interpretation?”
For the first time in the 20 minutes I had been watching the street preacher, he didn’t immediately respond with some proof-text or crude counterattack.
Instead, he actually stopped and thought for a moment.
“No,” he said calmly and carefully, “God is greater than any text or my understanding.”
“Thanks!” I said.
Tickled by my own cleverness, I walked away with a smug sense that I had humbled the preacher and the whole crowd all at once.
Yet I wasn’t humbled. Though I had just trumpeted humility before God in public, I considered that humble pose my very own – as my very own thoughts and ways.
Though I could feign humility with great ability, I never once fell on my knees to pray that day or surrender my heart to Him for nearly 20 years to come.
Now I’m back. I confess I pray like I’m making up for lost time. Why? In short, I started to read and let the Word lead me rather than pretend my own thoughts should lead the Word.
I suppose that’s the first and last thing Vance and I have in common beyond all the words and clever arguments for faith.
Through humble surrender to the Word, the Church feels like home for the both us – a familiar place, a stable place, a beautiful ancient place, a place of promise and peace, a place to listen and learn, a place to raise and join a family, a place for the thirsty and the hungry, a place to share in true communion, a place to drink and eat.
Joey Clark is a native Alabamian and is currently the host of the radio program News and Views on News Talk 93.1 FM WACV out of Montgomery, AL, M-F 12 p.m. - 3 p.m. His column appears every Tuesday in 1819 News. To contact Joey for media or speaking appearances, as well as any feedback, please email [email protected]. Follow him on X @TheJoeyClark or watch the radio show livestream.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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