YOU’RE IN LOVE, BUT IT FEELS LIKE PAIN: Fantastic comments thread sparked by Amy Welborn. I have three thoughts:

1) I am so glad someone had the honesty to talk about his problems with faith here. And I’m also hugely grateful that someone responded with what I think is the essential insight: “Most people confuse strength, hope and courage with feeling strong, hopeful, and unafraid.”

A lot of people will try to help you find The Answer to your struggle with the Christian faith. You know, ultimately all of them are probably right! But the only thing that has ever helped me has been to acknowledge that maybe the struggle is the answer.

2) I don’t have any supercool stories of the aroma of roses or the apparition of the Virgin.

At one point I kind of sat up, and realized that it had been months since I had been tormented by a sinful temptation that had beset me DAILY (do you know what that’s like? literally every day? do you know what it’s like to hate–when it’s way down deep inside…? God, death is preferable) since I was, I kid you not, four or five.

But you know, it did eventually return. I still struggle with that same old temptation, and with all the varied demons that have taken its place. I have no gentle answers. I’m amazed that I spend any day of my life without the temptation I mentioned above–something that shapes my self-image and my life to this day, and likely always will–but you know, sin finds its way in. No remission is permanent, at least not for me.

3) But if you caught me and made me tell you why I am a Catholic, after all, I think I would say something kind of like this:

You know the thing Stephen Fry says, in his amazing novel The Liar? The thing about how everyone is afraid that he will be found out? How you are not merely wrong in certain particulars, but somehow horribly wrong and wrong-footed from the start?

God has found you out. He knows; and He forgives; and He will make you change; and He will make it possible for you to change.

That’s all, really. What else can there be?