After writing 2 of his 9 symphonies and 17 of his 32 piano sonatas, Beethoven started to go deaf — to lose his instrument of instruments, the sense by which he had built his life’s work.

This could have been the end. But despising (i.e., scorning) his disability, he chose to keep composing.

The result was an elevation of his soul; an artistic white martyrdom.

It’s one thing to become a great x.

It’s another to become a great x, completely lose the means by which one became a great x, and then become a great x again. (or a great y.)

You might call it an unconditional triumph; one shown not to be dependent on the conditions by which the original triumph was won (such as being able to hear, in Beethoven’s case).

This seems to be something we all must conquer at some point. We all must learn to metabolize our own destruction — to “overcome death.”

So…

• Do you feel like the very roots your life grew out of have been severed?

• Do you feel subject to a profound cosmic “injustice,” one that seems tailor-made to destroy you?

Then…

• Is there a triumph in your past that God might be inviting you to make unconditional?

• Have you been given an opportunity to metabolize your own destruction?

Take it.

I’m using the same printing service I used for Ideamarket’s official T-Shirt, so if you liked those you’ll like these. In my experience, they’re very comfortable and durable — my favorite shirts based on material alone.

Here are the first 3 designs. You can buy them at https://thepearlclutchers.com

1

St. Benedict of Nursia invented Western monasticism around 500 AD. He was a hermit living alone, but became so holy he kept attracting followers, so he set up monasteries and instituted the first monastic “rule of life” to govern them. Demons hate St. Benedict so much that the circular emblems seen on the sleeves and back of this shirt are often pressed into medals and worn for protection.

Thus, this may be as close to a demon-proof shirt as one can get.

Buy it here.

(Credit: Saint Benedict. Engraving by F.L. Schmitner. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark)

2

This scene of the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin Mary (blue) is painted on the ceiling of a German church. Buy it here.

(Credit: Simon Benedikt Faistenberger, 1739. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

3

Buonaccorso’s Coronation of the Virgin. The black angels in the back row are seraphim, the “biblically accurate angels” from the meme about how they have a ton of wings and eyes. Buy it here.

(Credit: Niccolò di Buonaccorso, The Coronation of the Virgin. Public Domain.)

Requests welcome

Do you have a favorite saint, or favorite scene from the Bible you’d like me to make into a shirt? Let me know!

Cheers,
—Mike

Instead of thinking about whatever interests us in life, we think “I’m mad at Bob, he really did me wrong and such and such…”

Anger produces angry thoughts, and they continue as long as we’re angry.

When we calm down or get distracted, our thoughts change back to non-angry ones.

The same happens with desire.

When we desire something, that desire creates an endless loop of thoughts about it. If we pray with our words only, we may never run out of words, as long as we still have desire. That desire might simply produce an infinite amount of words to pray, in the same way an angry mood produces an infinite amount of angry thoughts.

But if we offer that desire itself to God, perhaps it’s as if we’d prayed that entire infinity of verbal prayers produced by the desire. By offering the desire as the prayer, it seems we pray an infinity of words in a finite amount of time.

Here’s what “praying the desire” feels like to me:

Instead of fighting the desire or trying to make it go away, refrain from resisting its presence within you. Remain open to the sensation of desiring, holding the intention of offering it to God, and you may feel the desire leave your body — a gently flowing current, like steam rising from a hot dish. If you let the full amount of the desire leave your body in this way, you’ll be left feeling peaceful about it, with an intuition of “completeness,” a sense that you’ve prayed all that you need to about this issue.

Um, what?

Let me explain.

I’ve been trying to answer the question “Who truly deserves my trust?”

1. We must trust someone in order to decide what’s true, because nobody can know everything themselves.

2. Some deserve trust more than others.

So, who deserves trust?

Ideamarket asked that question collectively, for matters of public knowledge — but I’ve also been asking it personally.

I trust Jesus, so one night last year, I prayed something like this:

“Jesus, I will believe whatever you want me to believe. I don’t need to know everything about UFOs, aliens, etc. I don’t need to reinvent all of philosophy from first principles. I am tired of my self-congratulatory intellectual ambitions. I only need the knowledge you say I need. So please just tell me what to believe, and I’ll believe it.”

Over the next few months, I just happened to fall in love with the Catholic Church, which has been the “Supreme Court” for scripture interpretation from the time of Jesus.

How to be a sheep

Regarding Catholic doctrine, when I dare to say “This doesn’t make sense, but I’ll believe it anyway and see what happens,” I’m repeatedly rewarded.

Yes — at first there is a feeling of suppressing my natural sense of reason. And like most modern intellectuals, I’d always expected suppressing my natural sense of reason would be soul-killing.

But something else has been happening instead. My natural reason is replaced by a transcendent reason, a clarity that emerges only in the hindsight of the trust-fall. Eventually the issue not only makes sense intellectually, but fits in with such perfection that it unburdens me emotionally.

Reduces cognitive load, you might say.

It’s fascinating to watch “deciding to believe something that doesn’t make sense” — which had always seemed to be the quintessential dimwit move — bring more clarity and peace to my intellectual life than all my Ideamarkety risk-reward calculations ever have.

Speaking of dimwit moves, it might be helpful to define the difference:

• Scared sheep cling to an old belief out of fear of being wrong, and rationalize it to avoid acknowledging doubts

• Trusting sheep accept a new belief out of trust that it’s safe, despite acknowledged doubts

The former is what intellectuals rightly frown upon, the latter is what I’m advocating with respect to Catholic doctrine (I don’t believe anything else deserves this level of trust. More on that later).

Here’s how the process feels:

• I consider a traditional Catholic belief that grates on me, that makes me want to object against it.

• I say to myself, “God, I trust you, I’ll believe it and set aside my objections and complaints.”

• Then the belief percolates for a while. Maybe a few minutes, maybe a few weeks. When I look at it again, I find it has snapped into place — it has become part of a harmonious architecture, where it not only makes sense by itself, but also supports and corroborates a network of other Catholic tenets. And something inside me relaxes from the sheer orderliness and restfulness of this. It feels like being held up by my intellect, instead of having to exert my intellect to contrive coherence from all the paradoxes of the world.

After building a career around independent thinking, I’m finding the best use of my intellect is to re-assume sheephood, for the kingdom of God.

At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.”

—Matthew 11:25

I’ve created a new section of my Substack called Catholic Experiments, where I’ll share ideas for turning theology into practice. (You’re able to unsubscribe from that section if you don’t want to hear about it, but still want everything else.)

So, why Catholicism?

A few things initially attracted me:

1. The Catholic tradition really wants you to become a saint. It cares immensely that everyone stop sinning and practice holiness. This makes the most sense to me in terms of what Jesus said: “Not all who call me ‘Lord’ will get into heaven” / “Seek to enter by the narrow path” / “Only those who do the will of my father will enter the kingdom of heaven” / etc.

2. Catholicism has a very strong mystical tradition, which appeals to me as someone who discovered God first and foremost through meditation and inner experience.

3. I learned long ago to prioritize advice given by people who have actually achieved what I want to achieve. Who better to learn from than the thousands of saints who achieved the heights of spiritual perfection?

4. I love Catholic art and architecture. Gothic cathedrals. Polyphonic choirs. Giant pipe organs. It’s all just so awesome, full of the reverence God deserves. Catholic culture seems to say “God deserves the best of human attention and beauty and gravity.”

5. The redemptive value of suffering. What I fell in love with about Gandhi is at the core of Catholic teaching about Jesus, and about what Jesus commands Christians to do. Will write more on this later.

6. A near-miracle happened. It wasn’t quite a miracle because it has a natural explanation, but its huge unlikeliness, precise timing, and huge personal benefit were miracle-like. Will tell that story soon — it’s the story of the first time I ever prayed to the Virgin Mary.

Our lives are a series of actions.

We can picture our actions as dice — lower numbers are worse actions, and high numbers are better ones.

An action is like a dice, in that:

• it’s a finite object, but

• you can look at it from many different angles.

When we look back on our “life story,” we’re really looking at the sum of our interpretations of our actions — what our actions ultimately mean to us about ourselves. The story they tell us about who we are.

If we believe we’ve done all bad things, we look at all the 1’s facing up and say

“Oy, I did many bad things, I failed to contribute anything good, and my life was meaningless.”

Without redemption, a life of bad actions literally doesn’t add up to much.

I’d guess most people feel more moderately:

“I’ve done some good things, and some bad things, and my life has been kind of meaningful — but not profoundly so.”

The effect of Redemption

When we are Redeemed, God does something specific.

He doesn’t let us go back in time and change what we literally did.

He doesn’t swap out old dice (actions) for new ones.

Instead, he takes those same actions and rotates them — he alters their meaning, so that they add up to the most that they possibly could.

Without changing what we literally did in the past — our life story ends up meaning what it would if we had done the absolute most we could possibly have done, all along.

God wraps our lives in a new frame. When we look back at our redeemed life through God’s eyes, we see “what could have been,” made manifest in what already is.

Personal experience

If you’ve read my spiritual life story, you know my life has been punctuated by profound regret.

Little by little, God is showing me that such regret isn’t necessary, or even accurate — He makes my life such that I don’t need to worry about what could have been. The meaning God gives my life now, makes my past regrets meaningful instead of wasteful.

I’m not saying there’s no need to repent and grieve over our sins — quite the opposite.

But if meanwhile we let God show us their redeemed meaning, perhaps that holy grief need not lapse into human despair.

I’m far from perfect here — to form this theory, I’m extrapolating from brief glimpses at my new Redeemed story. It seems to reveal itself in proportion to my trust in God. Right now, my life story appears to me sort of like this:

Let God do it

Our actions are infinity-sided dice.

We can’t possibly discern all the possible meanings of all our past actions, and then arrange them into a better story without either deceiving ourselves, or aiming too low.

Only God has the wisdom to reinterpret your life for you properly, so don’t try to homebrew this. Let him do it for you.

(Get started here, then do this when you’re ready.)