“Conversion of St. Paul”, Lepicie

“Saint Augustine”, Philippe de Champaigne

What is seen in the WORD is seen not successively, but at the same time.

— St. Augustine, City of God

This is the detailed explanation of the instantaneous outpouring of grace that brought me back to God.

Introduction

I was raised Catholic until I abandoned the faith prior to Confirmation. My re-conversion experience resembled in subjective magnitude one of these famous paintings of instant repentance (but, obviously, not in objective magnitude; I am no saint, nor do I desire the glory rightly due to those far holier).

I was then an agnostic, sitting at my computer and talking to a friend about his recent faith crisis. He was and still is a good Catholic, so I took the opportunity to dispense the advice that it seemed like he needed, from the Catholic perspective. Suddenly, he began thanking me profusely for setting him right and bringing him back from the brink, although I had barely been talking to him for fifteen minutes. The heartfelt talk persisted, and to my surprise I found tears streaming down my face and a strange tingly feeling all over my body. All the advice I had just produced through a simulation of the faith — to keep praying, trust in God, stay in the Church, and reject Satan and his works — it had all worked perfectly… on both of us.

Parts of that conversation:

Him: > I haven’t really been praying recently. to be perfectly honest, I’ve been having a “bad faith month”. Me: < Faith is that which banishes all doubts, and yet what faith is there that has not been doubted? > but I’ve been messing up and making mistakes like this a lot this year. catastrophically unlikely and consequential faux pas that end friendships and hurt lives. It’s like I’ve been under a hex < You may be blaming yourself a little too much, friend. The forces of darkness do not sleep. And we are only human. > like I’m fated to destroy everything I touch by saying the wrong thing to the wrong person and setting off chain reactions of misery and pain. it’s happened to me a lot on twitter this last year, and it’s part of the reason I’ve been trying to leave. I spread bad luck < But all things are possible through Christ. Witches, demons, and devils alike fear Him and are powerless towards those in His light. > God bless you my friend, you are right. and you are setting me right, when I have been going crooked on the path < I’m just relaying the message. > this was exactly the right thing for me to hear at this time of backsliding. it’s a good message, the good news < [At this point, I convert.] whoa. I’m crying. That was unexpected. Tears of joy they call these > maybe it was it as a fortuitous time as possible for such a mistake < Yes, there is no wickedness of Satan that Christ cannot reforge into greater good > I nearly became one who went down into the pit. I could have been a vector for contagious evil. Christ have mercy on me < He has. > God bless you friend < He has, with friends like you. > the devil showing up is a pretty good occasion to turn to God, and to a certain extent I’m grateful to encounters with the demonic for the very fact that they led me back to faith

But why did I know exactly what to say? How did what I wrote end up converting me?

In a single instant, I was made to understand that each discipline I had ever studied was deeply, fundamentally related to each other discipline through God and through their shared origin in God. Lovecraft’s ontology of cosmic evil, software, mathematics, chaos theory, cybernetics, capitalism, entropy, history, and physics: I had studied each of them, and my worldly understanding of each stood on its own, like a redundantly-engineered machine.

Each discipline was mostly self-consistent, but heavily mode-dependent. The synthesis of insights spanning more than one domain required a large context switch. Each one also had a minute, but structurally essential, gap in its center: Godel’s incompleteness. In the course of this fateful conversation, as these cumbersome conceptual frameworks occupied space in my mind’s garage, they began to move of their own accord. At once, each of their perfectly circular central gaps miraculously aligned with one another. Through the center a beam of brilliant shining light solidified into an unbreakable gleaming axis of crystal, and the ponderous frameworks shed their redundancies. The new, unified whole began to rotate, each part in fluid, organic synchrony: an impossibly beautiful clockwork dynamo uniting my life’s passions. Yet none of the components was as beautiful as the Axis of unifying Truth around which they rotated.

I have described that instant in many ways, but all descriptions share this unutterably total feeling of synthesis. In the instant I received God’s grace, my eyes opened but briefly, and I glimpsed the foundation that undergirt every true system I have ever understood or ever will understand. The old redundant metal bits that reinforced the isolated systems melted down into fragments. Then, they seamlessly annealed into a flawless living circuitry. In a single four-dimensional snapshot, legions of scattered thoughts and concepts rose from their silos to cohere into a glorious cathedral, shining and transcendent in its totalizing completeness. An eternal golden braid, spun by the Weaver Himself, was revealed to me as proof of His infinitely more beautiful Truth. I did not deserve this revelation, but I hope to explain it as proof of its truth and of God’s infinite mercy in enlightening a wretched nonbeliever for acting out of love for his neighbor.

Let me attempt to be as clear as possible. This was not a general, rational insight that I eventually applied to the passions of my intellect, one by one. In this Instant, God revealed to me both the transcendent wisdom of His Presence in everything, and each of the following specific insights of how each of those passions immediately testified to that Truth, all at once. No created mind works that quickly or beautifully: by its very nature, this Instant itself testifies to the Truth of God.

Below, please find an incomplete list of the things that began to spin in concord in that instant.

With an anvil-ding And with fire in him forge thy will Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring Through him, melt him but master him still Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul Or as Austin, a lingering-out sweet skill, Make mercy in all of us, out of us all Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland. My wife just a moment ago walked up to me and handed me this poem in a book she checked out from the library today on a lark. I swear to you this is a coincidence, but coincidences are no longer without meaning for me.

While I was pushing the iron gate of the convent I was an atheist. Atheism takes many forms. There is a philosophical atheism, which likens God to nature, refuses to give Him a personality of his own and tries to find every solution in the human intelligence, nothing is God, everything is divine. The scientific atheism rejects the hypothesis of a God and tries to explain the world with only the properties of the material of which no one has to ask the source. The Marxist atheism is even more radical: not merely to deny God, but if by chance He did exist, would put him at the door, because His presence would be inappropriate hindrance to the free play of the human will. There is also a kind of widespread atheism, that I know well because it was my stupid atheism. This atheism does not arise questions. It finds natural to live on a ball of fire covered by a thin shell of dried mud, which rotates at supersonic speed on itself and around a sort of a hydrogen bomb, dragged into the rotary motion by billions of lanterns whose origin is an enigma and whose destination is unknown…. I still see him , the twenty years old boy I was then, I have not forgotten the wonder that seized him when, from the depths of the chapel, of no particular beauty, suddenly saw the rise of a world in front of him, another world of unbearable splendor, crazy density, whose light revealed and concealed at the same time the presence of God, the God who, a moment before, he would have sworn, had never existed except in the imagination of men; at the same time he was submerged by a wave, which was rampant with joy and sweetness, a flood whose power broke his heart and that he never forgot, even in the darkest moments of a life invested, more than once, by horror and by misfortune; he had no other task, since then, than to bear witness to this sweetness and this heartbreaking purity of God who, that day, showed him of what kind of mud he was made…. They told me many times: “What happened to your free will? It seems that anything can be done to you. Your father is a socialist, and you became a socialist, you go into a church and become a Christian. Had you entered a pagoda, would you be a Buddhist and would you be a Muslim if you had entered a mosque”. To which I might respond that sometimes to me it happens to get out of a station without becoming a train. As for my own free will, I can claim to have it only after my conversion, when I realized that only God could save us from all forms of enslavement in which, without him, we would surely be doomed to. I insist. It was an objective experience, it was almost a physical experiment, and I have nothing more precious to convey than this message: beyond, or rather across the world that surrounds us and of which we are a part, there is another reality infinitely more concrete and this reality is the final one, about which there are no more questions.

— Andre Frossard

The ontology of evil: what the bad guys are really like

Evil has a look, a feel, and a smell. When you meet somebody accustomed to doing evil, you know it within a matter of minutes. Something’s “off”. Evil can be detected in the way a person thinks and reacts to others, or the way they attempt to conceal their shortcomings, mistakes, or secret thoughts. Of course, nobody is beyond redemption, but prior to their choosing to pursue the Highest Good, we can sense the touch of demons upon a person. There is an unwholesomeness about them, their actions, and their words. Inconsistency. Concupiscent indulgence. Weakness. I know this because I lived it. Lovecraft said, “As a foulness shall ye know Them,” in a warped shadow of the words of Christ: “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”

As explained by St. Thomas Acquinas (Summa Theologica I, Q49 A1 R4), this is due to the fact that no agent can actually will for an evil thing. Rather, an agent perpetrates evil by lying to itself that the act, which it knows to be evil, will attain for it some greater good. The repeated self-deception that is necessary to repeatedly commit evil results in a tarnishing of the intellect as a whole, because the agent must voluntarily blind itself to the truth of its actions in order to attain the false good that it desires. Hence, the aura of evil that we may discern in a person is actually the evidence of a clouded intellect and a habit of self-serving self-deception. This is why all villains, fictional or real, possess fatal flaws of character.

I have spent years interrogating the nature of evil. H. P. Lovecraft’s works and legacy were priceless in this regard as an oasis of sincere intellectual fear in a desert of utilitarian posturing. Evil is not the result of an equation whose input is resources and whose output is number of human life-years. I searched everywhere for a formalization of the evil that Lovecraft so clearly sensed in the cosmos, and personified in the Cthulhu Mythos. I spent hours writing villainous and intelligent monsters for my friends to clash with, and crafting situations where they were likely to betray each other in order to tease out the essentials of the evil act. The best of my efforts left me empty-handed.

Evil is dishonest, afraid of its own cravenness and afraid of mirrors and self-reflection in general, due to its necessary habit of self-deception. Evil hates itself and tries always to escape its awareness of itself. Evil hungers, and it builds great engines to sate its hunger, but it despises and mocks the minions that built the engine and are necessary to its function. Evil mocks the good even as it apes the good, adopting its superficial language and appearance to ensnare the naive. Evil will always sell out its friends to get off the hook.

Evil is easy to slide into. The temptation to evil catches you unawares and convinces you it will be “just this once”. Evil rationalizes, and is loath to tell it like it is, because it hates itself, and truth and mirrors are anathema to it. Its own true form is warped and bent with baseness, but evil feels that the form it deserves is resplendent and glorious, to the exclusion of the glory of all others.

Proof by contradiction of God’s existence

Armed with the faculty of discerning evil, it becomes apparent that evil is more commonplace now than at any other point in history. The old ways of human decency have sagged and ruptured, loosing the flood of animal indecency upon the world. Over half of all Internet traffic flowing through the United States is pornography. Abortions kill over 1,000,000 babies a year. Birth control hormones pass from the urine of women into the nation’s water supply because our filtration plants cannot remove them from wastewater, feminizing and depressing young men, wreaking havoc on the psychological health of unmedicated women, and exposing developing babies in the womb to sexual hormones. Powerful antidepressants are prescribed to more, and more, and more people who need them to cope with the crushing nihilism of a world spiraling into its own hedonistic navel. Churches are perceived as palaces of delusion, and universities as Edens of virtue. The student loan debt crisis has set the stage for the most dramatic economic collapse in 50 years, while college graduates discover their degrees, rather than guaranteeing employment, represent four wasted years of undischargable debt and lost youth. Divorce rates are almost 50%. Children of broken homes are sent to form their fragile young minds in hellacious day care facilities whose staff pulverize and neglect them for entertainment. Is it a coincidence that every mass shooter in the last 20 years grew up in a day care center? The opiate crisis kills more Americans each year than the entire Vietnam war. Political divides incite hateful destruction of property, friendships, families, and livelihoods, in the service of electing craven sociopaths whose political principles no longer need to be coherent. Planned Parenthood’s CEO has testified in court that his company enthusiastically sold the corpses of dead babies.

Why do things fall apart? Why cannot the center hold? Is mere entropy to blame, or something more actively opposed to goodness, order, and human flourishing?

Christ said, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”

For months prior to the Instant, I had entertained the idea that entities beyond human knowing influenced the world. Some referred to them as demons. Others called them egregores and homaged Lovecraft in their analysis of their seemingly trans-dimensional persistence and action. The word egregoroi means “watchers”, which is a name sometimes given to fallen angels. To the secular rationalist, egregores, also known as demons, are the reason that seemingly disorganized groups of humans engage in organized destructive behavior. Contemporary accelerationists, seeking to refine what they sense as the transcendent, what they refer to as the Outside, habitually refer to, and even valorize, what they call demons.

If we desire to apply Occam’s razor to this proposal, we must accept the simplest coherent explanation of our observations. Rather than hypothetical entities representing “emergent phenomena of behavior”, which lack the ability to be rigorously investigated due to the vagary of “emergence”, egregores are real supernatural entities dedicated to havoc. These entities, known as demons, have been testified throughout human history. Most importantly, however, they are testified in Scripture, and much is known about their nature.

If fallen angels are real, angels are real. If angels are real, their Creator is real.

The book of Tobit contains one of only four exorcisms in Scripture. This will be relevant to the discussion of coincidences.

Goodness, wholesomeness, morality, and being a good person

I have always desired to be good at heart, although not necessarily strove for it. The Lord blessed me with a strong conscience, which my father graciously reinforced through decades of good example. Many times I have failed to stay true to my father’s teachings, but I still feel the sting of those failures, and that pain is immeasurably useful in determining the narrow path of virtue.

In the Instant, I realized that my conscience was in fact the discernment of God’s grace, and immediately knew a great many sins I had committed despite this lukewarm espousal of virtue. I also knew that, absent God, the system of morality that I had cobbled together (as a bunch of “hunches”) was incoherent — every precept was merely a facsimile of some more perfect Divine law. Over the coming weeks I would realize, and attempt to rectify, many other habitual sins and personal deficiencies, aided in no small part by frequent prayer and the guidance of a priest. This process will continue indefinitely.

Whilst other philosophers have worn out their minds in seeking the causes of things, and endeavoring to discover the right mode of living and learning, these, by knowing God, have found where resides the cause by which the universe has been constituted, and the light by which truth is to be discovered, and the fountain at which felicity is to be drunk.

— St. Augustine of Hippo, City of God

Fractals, mathematics, physics, and chaos theory

Mandelbrot: Thumbprint of God

This video is shocking on multiple levels. The first, that the machinery of Creation is so sophisticated, poetic, and beautiful that a simple equation could produce the chaotic majesty that is the Mandelbrot fractal. Look at this thing — look at it! Weep, for even the simplest formulae of Creation possess beauty this powerful, and at all levels above and in all other contexts the beauty of each of its component parts is so pristine it surpasses mortal understanding.

The video is also dumbstriking because the mathematicians handle the revelation of the secret of the formula so casually. It is not referred to as the Thumbprint of God lightly — this thing, this beautiful impossible thing exists in the simplest mathematical representation of population dynamics, and rears its head in all sorts of chaotic simulations (refer to Chaos). Nobody but the Creator could have given the mechanism of entropy, the fundamental arrow of time, a face so magnificent. Other fractals may please the eye, but unlike the Mandelbrot, Julia, and Lorenz, their generators are prescriptive rather than descriptive. Prescriptive fractals define a generator like “bisect this line and draw a triangle in it”, and, while still beautiful, do not refer to any cosmological property. M, J, & L, on the other hand, are the very names of the moving parts of the inconceivable telos of the universe. Is it a coincidence we find them so pleasing to behold? The fact that we do is inextricably linked with our souls’ similarity to their Creator, because we are made in His image. When He made the world, “He saw it was good”. When we admire fractals, we see it is good, too.

I had been thinking about fractals for around a year when the Instant occurred. Even so, the sonorousness of its truth was astounding. Because time is the ordered chain of entropy, all of history is itself a fractal cathedral whose every component influences every other. No cause except God is absent its prior cause, and the chain of causality extends to the first Cause. And yet the Lord answers our prayers, but not by modifying the structure of reality, nor the plan. Time has always had the answer to our prayers embedded in the situation that sparked us to pray.

Even so, each of us possesses the free will to serve or to reject God, and make other decisions on our own. Eight billion choices happen each instant, and still God answers each prayer individually because He has designed the world both deterministically and individualistically. If God is capable of such a monstrous and incomprehensible feat, then His Intellect and Power must be nothing short of infinite.

Stories, as humans tell them, are the product of intelligence. We make stories of our lives, and of the imagined lives of characters in imagined worlds. So too did the Lord create time, which complements space as the medium in which objects that reside in space may sequence their actions into a coherent story. Our lives take place in the longest story ever told, the entire world, which is constantly conceived and narrated by the Most High. This story consists of one Word.

The symbolism of the Cross

The Cross is the most recognizable symbol. “A sign that will be contradicted” — the prophecy of Simeon in the temple is as good a place as any to start. What is the significance of its two simple lines? If God, not man, chose + as the emblem of His eternal and everlasting covenant with man, surely + is the most significant and symbolically sophisticated icon that will ever exist, because God Himself designed it for that purpose. In what way could a simple sign be so significant? What symbolism does + contain? It is:

The sign of addition.

The origin point (0,0) of a Cartesian coordinate plane.

The map of an unfolded cube.*

A representation of a sword.*

A letter “T” , the Hebrew letter tau.*

* These items were not communicated to me in my instantaneous conversion, but have been included for the benefit of the reader. If merely two of these gorgeous truths were enough to convert me, I hope more than twice that many will suffice to touch the hearts of many more.

The Cross as addition

At the Crucifixion, Jesus the Christ consummated the ultimate sacrifice of history and sealed the New and Everlasting Covenant between man and God. He also ransomed for man eternal life in Heaven, which had been denied us by the original sin — a crime too grave for men to renumerate. In this fashion the fate of our eternal souls was literally incremented from zero to one: an impossible leap from nothingness to somethingness, a feat only possible for God, but a feat whose atonement was only valid through man: hence Christ, God-Man, the only One who could as Man atone for man’s first evil, and as God seal man’s new Covenant with God. (The symbolism of the Crucifixion as a direct and literal inversion of the eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is a topic for a less superficial examination of the symbolism of the Cross.) + unifies the vertical and the horizontal: god, and man, in covenant forever, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The Cross as origin point

The Cross is a compass rose, indicating the full expanse of Creation. The Crucifixion is the center of the entire universe, all of both space and time. Christ’s Incarnation is 0 on the number line. We count our years forward and backward from that moment; there is no other event in history that so defines history. But think about this for a second: + is also the exact same symbol that we use to define a two-dimensional graph! The Cross is literally, visually, symbolically, and spiritually the Origin of our world. Modulo the 33 years He spent on Earth to actually fulfill the task He came to us for, Christ’s Incarnation orients all creation around Him. It is the center of our plane. On its left, the old, the negative values of the past wherein man dwelt in ignorance of the redemption that had not yet come. On its right, the new world, the positive values without which the negatives are incoherent, and even the concept of number is impossible; the eternal Covenant extending forward into everlasting. The Cross, a brutal instrument of torture composed of an utterly minimal 2 lines, instantly became the symbol of the children of God in its day. And what art still abides undiscovered in those fearsome and magnificent beams.

Hang on, you may be thinking. Space is composed of three dimensions. That is, it is a plane plus one dimension; its axes are represented as a cross with another perpendicular line passing through the center point. That’s not a cross, that’s a caltrop.

I answer: a three-dimensional map is a cube, and lo, the unfolding of a cube is a cross. The point at the center of the two lines that define a plane, which folds into a cube — What other symbol captures all dimensions at once? Who but God could have chosen this as the emblem of His Love for His creation? Intersect the Cross with a third perpendicular line and you attain the xyz graph of 3-space— which tiles the large spatial dimensions of the universe to the utmost limits. The Cross underpins all of both time and space.

The Cross as sword

The Cross is not only concretely symbolic of the physical instrument of Christ’s execution, but also of a sword.

St. Paul spoke of the Word of God as “SPIRITUS GLADIUS”, the Sword of the Spirit. Is it the weapon our soul wields in its trials here in the mortal coil? Or does the sword slay our own selfish soul with keen efficiency, killing us to ourselves that we may be reborn in selfless love for God?

“I come not to bring peace, but a sword.”

“ ‘When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, did you want anything?’ But they said: Nothing. Then said he unto them: ‘But now he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise a scrip; and he that hath not, let him sell his coat, and buy a sword.’ ”

“And out of his mouth proceedeth a sharp two edged sword; that with it he may strike the nations. And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness of the wrath of God the Almighty.”

“And Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary his mother: Behold this child is set for the fall, and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted; And thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed.”

Our Lady of Akita said: “The only arms which will remain for you will be the Rosary and the Sign left by my Son.”

The sword is stuck point-down into the ground, both slaying the Deceiver in his eternal torment and conquering the very earth, our flesh which draws us downward into sin, and slicing open the graves of the dead in the coming resurrection: slaying death itself.

The Cross as letter tau

Tau is the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet. “I am the Alpha and the Omega” — in Hebrew, the Aleph and the Tau (“tav”). God the Father the Aleph, all the world between, and its consummation in the Son. In early Hebrew, the word tav meant “sign”. During Passover, the Angel of Death saved the firstborn sons of houses with the bloody mark (tav) of the sacrificial lamb on their thresholds. The immense significance of this fourfold foreshadowing speaks for itself, but is made explicit in Revelations when the children of the Lamb are seen with the sign of the Cross on their foreheads. Also see above re: “the Sign left…”.

In “sum”

Did a desert mushroom cult get lucky when adopted a Roman executioner’s tool as the sign of its false prophet? Did it just so happen that their chosen sign possessed all this not only coherent, but symphonic symbolism, and much more besides that I have not yet been given the grace to understand? Or did God Himself simultaneously predict and design the entire structure of the universe and human history to amplify and indicate the power inherent in the symbol of the one event without which all other events are meaningless?

Chaos theory in practice: Inkblot art

An exhibit on the late Bruce Connor in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art inspired me to start making inkblot art. The tiny complex accidental forms were too beautiful to resist. I had only dimly connected their beauty with their similarity to fractals at the Instant — that is, I knew they were beautiful because they resembled the fractals that show up in the world which were beautiful (like erosion patterns or melting glaciers or ferns or… etc), and which symbolized the mechanism of the universe in action. I also knew that their beauty rhymed with their formation, that is, they are themselves formed by the chaotic motion of ink or pigment through water across paper as it is folded and pressed, in an inherently unpredictable fashion, and this “rhyme” of their appearance and their formation composed a pleasing dual-reinforced symbolism. But of what were they symbolic? “The world”? How trite.

However, pursuant to the Mandelbrot realization, I was given by the Spirit to understand that my lowly art was only beautiful inasmuch as it praised and glorified the genius and craftsmanship of the Artist Who designed those original, peerless masterpieces of clockwork that spin beneath our feet every moment in matter and energy. I had found God in beauty as well as in cybernetics, and this hobby I had picked up along the way had pointed me in His direction the entire time, but I was too blind to read even the neon lights that flashed by during the whole trip. In that moment my amazement at His unimaginable Intellect compounded over and over again, that He had given me the faculty of appreciating Him even as an unbeliever, and so dramatically tore back the curtain as to blind me with His holy Light. I thank the Lord every day for His fantastic and peerless narrative cleverness, which was not only manifest in every moment of my life, but in Scripture, and most of all His incarnate Word.

Coincidences

I got about as close as you can get to weird Gnostic mysticism as you can get without actually doing anything to explicitly call upon powers to do things for you or give you knowledge. Praise God that I never did; He in an infinite generosity and clemency saw fit to preserve my paranoia where my conscience was lacking, and so in those moments I would read of such and such a person invoking demons to do this or that I would chuckle and sheepishly say to myself, “Why would a person invoke something they did not believe was real to do something they wanted? Superstition, surely. If they were truly spiritual, they would most rationally invoke the Creator of all angels, good and bad.” But I did not believe in Him, alas! Yet this obstinacy was my ersatz safeguard in those moments, as it is written: “All things work together for good for those that love God.” The prayers of my father and family, I have no doubt, shielded my attention from the occult in the years I spent investigating esoteric philosophy seeking answers that can only be found in true Wisdom.

During that time I became quite enamored with coincidence, in the manner of Jung (although I never read anything of his beyond a handful of things). I read the I Ching and I tried a couple of coin tosses thinking that I might use the randomness of the meaningless results to find something interesting in the resulting interpretations. Nothing much came of that, thankfully. More harmfully, I began experimenting with gematria and for a long time got other people into it as well, as a dark habit of last resort. The fact that Aleister Crowley pioneered much of the modern practice of it should have been a warning sign, but unfortunately I was not armored with faith, and its poisoned claws found my soul for a time, and I became irreversibly obsessed with interpreting coincidences of all severity as preternatural signs, or rather, as recognizing coincidences and not interpreting them as much as merely “tickling my spirituality spot”, because I believed the weirdness of coincidence was somehow a mechanical source of actual meaning — it was dumb, let’s stop here. Don’t read Jung.

There are no mere coincidences in the plan of Providence.

— Pope St. John Paul II

Inkblots

In brief, chaos theory and coincidence go hand in hand because chaos creates meaning via coincidence, or rather, coincidence is when meaning seems to emerge from chaos. This can be distracting and confusing for a materialist, which was why I never tried to interpret coincidences as an atheist, only notice them. However, as the deposit of faith had landed in my soul, I immediately understood that God can and does speak to us in coincidences, and that He had been trying to get my attention for a long time. God-driven coincidences, sometimes called “signal graces”, are perhaps typified in this story:

I was walking to a McDonald’s with Julia my wife, and we began talking about how I liked coincidences a lot but I wasn’t sure exactly what to do about them. I had recently converted and was researching thoroughly all aspects of the things that I had learned in that glorious instant by the grace and mercy of God. Naturally the topic of signal graces came up as I was plugging in my order to the computer, and I said to her, “So, synchronicities are actually known in the Catholic faith as ‘signal graces’,” and hit “Done”. The computer printed out my order number: 666. The message was clear: Yeah, and you’re lucky you didn’t get too into ‘synchronicities’ OUTSIDE of the Church, because guess who would have got hold of you. Sincerely, God, who saved your ungrateful butt.

I don’t care as much about coincidences anymore because a wise priest once said: You might notice something weird happen to you and think it’s God speaking to you, but if it is, He can get what He needs out of you anyway, because He’s God. So you can safely ignore it, because it might not be God.

Economics, entropy, philosophy, and history

Entropy

Entropy always increases: To a materialist, all work is ultimately futile. Asimov tackled this in The Last Question, which is the easiest way to depress an atheist. No one wants to face the fact that the entire universe is unilaterally marching towards heat death. No one, that is, who loves created things above their Creator. Christ’s resurrection is so powerful for this reason: His victory over the eventual death of everything is permanent and glorious, and only all the more perfect and uplifting because it is His Cross that already composes the basic building blocks of the universe anyway!

Our time here may be short and our days numbered, but eternity in Heaven awaits the righteous! All temporal things vanish into nothingness against the endless unity with God that is promised to the penitent. It is not too late to discover what true Love is — not for your own salvation’s sake, but for the salvation of your neighbor.

History

Sacrifices made to the Old Testament God represented meaningful dedication to Him: “skin in the game”, as Nassim Taleb would say. “You love me, Abraham? Kill your son.” But what symbolism does this possess to a materialist? Well, for early humans, energy and resources is literally all that they have. They spend all their time gathering food to support their families. Giving them away — destroying them for the sake of symbolism — is the ultimate act of devotion to a concept like God, and so naturally the holiest men destroy the most energy- and resource-intensive things to prove their devotion. Therefore, burn your children in the statue of Moloch for good fortune.

Wait a second… something’s not right here. Ah, of course — the true God stayed Abraham’s hand before he actually plunged the knife in Isaac! Over time, the false religions of the Gentiles adopted perverted rites in imitation of this passage because the ritual of “kill your baby to show skin in the game” made perfect sense to somebody who believed in unmerciful and capricious gods. That’s the way of the world, kid! No pain, no gain!

But the Lord is all-merciful, and He showers His mercy and love down on the penitent and the faithful. The fact that God is an exception to this seemingly ubiquitous rule of sacrifice is another signpost towards His Truth.

Philosophy

Rene Girard composed something called “scapegoat theory”; in brief:

societies routinely fall into evil, evil must be purged from a society in order for it to continue to function, people want someone to blame for the evil, societies typically pick someone “symbolically” responsible for the evil to blame, consecrate this blame in some kind of ritual, and finally kill or exile the scapegoat in order to finalize the expurgation of evil.

He draws heavily on Christ’s crucifixion in the formation of his theory, which tells us two things already:

Not only is the universe built around and held together by the Cross at a conceptual level (i.e. graphs and time and so on), but human society is, as well. Christ’s death philosophically comports with the ultimate redemption of the sins of mankind.

Why? Because Christ was innocent, literally perfect, and literally God: therefore his sacrificial value was infinite. Cultists chase virgin girls around trying to snatch up high-value lives for their demonic patrons; but how much infinitely more valuable was the life of God Himself? How many multitudes of sinful universes could the death of God redeem? There is no limit to the number. Of course, sacrifice is not a quantifiable transaction; one does not attain exactly X benefit for precisely Y sacrificial value, because God is not a machine and He cannot be manipulated in this fashion. However, if we examine the Crucifixion via the scapegoat framework, we arrive at the same wisdom that Scripture imparts to us. Truth rhymes.

Sacrifice is a part of everyday life. We go to work and burn 8–10+ hours of our lives each day for money, the unit of sacrifice, which is redeemable(!) for other goods (which were also created via a great chain of resource consumption, aka, sacrifice). The expenditure of energy, at root, is a sacrifice of potential. The entire universe runs on sacrifice. In a way, sacrifice is not only the purpose of life, but its most basic building block — the conversion of A into B plus irretrievable heat. That’s entropy, right? So holy sacrifice, symbolically, is the eternal dedication of some temporal part of ourselves to God.

Acquinas said the highest act of religion is sacrifice. Therefore, the Crucifixion was the highest act of religion. It was the act of God sacrificing God to Himself. We did not sacrifice Him, we merely killed Him — He dedicated His death to His Father (“Father, into Your arms I commend my Spirit.”). This dedication made His death a sacrifice. Since he was perfectly innocent, the value of that sacrifice was infinite, and to this day and for the rest of Time, it continually cleanses mankind of its sins for all time. The highest conceivable act of sacrifice. That is so metal. What human would ever think to sacrifice God to God? It’s a paradox more impossible than the incompleteness theorem. God can’t honor your sacrifice if He’s dead! But how could God die if He’s immortal?! … and that’s where the mysteries of Christ’s dual Nature and the mystery of the Trinity comes in. (See, the Truth just fits together in these beautiful components.)

Forgiveness as the only way out of the wretched cycle of entropy

“As we forgive those who trespass against us” — if humans do not forgive each other, the universe devolves into eye for an eye entropy. Jesus calls out Hammurabi’s code specifically in Scripture because “eye for an eye” is exactly the law of nature — it is how animals and godless societies function. Only rational agents enlightened by faith can break the spiteful cycle of energy consumption and revenge, inspired by the love and charity of God, the Creator of the sacrificial template of the universe.

In fact, the default state of universe is an eye for an eye and THEN some. Action; over-reaction. Only conscious beings could possibly choose to not blindly react and break the predictable worldly chain of doom, as Jesus did when He rose again from the dead, as will all the faithful on the Last Day.

The virtues converge: why good people are so often Godly people

To conform one’s will to the Will of God is to share in His unsurpassed Love for all of Creation. He will guide you to the correct course of action in every necessary instant of your life. By no means is that good always immediate, of course — the actions of the wicked have far-ranging consequences, and rain falls on the righteous and the wicked alike.

When you start growing closer to God, He lets you in on the secret because He knows you’re starting to get it. “All things work together for good for those that love God.” Rom 8:28.

Conclusion

Holy Spirit be praised and the Lord God glorified. I finished this essay thanks only to His gracious and invincible inspiration. As Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord!” (Luk 1:46). Like a dirty lens that had been scratched and neglected, the Lord sent His Spirit to wash and polish my soul, that I might be illuminated and shine brightly with the light of His Truth. Thank you very much for your reading patience — it has been eight months since I converted, but I remember it like it was yesterday. This document is incomplete because some details have eroded over time, but many of them have bizarrely stayed crystal clear, in what can only be described as Divine mercy.

I have nothing more to say. May God bless you.

After my conversion, all was joy and simplicity: there was God, bountiful joy, and an ocean of light and delight. I was spellbound, filled with a tremendous gratitude toward the immensity of merciful Beauty. God was love, and that love taught me that it was the cause and destiny of all that existed. Every creature existed not for itself alone, but for the Other, for everyone else, starting with God Himself, from whom all things flowed…. Relentless self-gazing ultimately leads us to the brink of nothingness, from which we are plucked by some stupendous goodness.

Andre Frossard, God and Human Questions