{"id":102746,"date":"2018-03-07T00:56:58","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T07:56:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=102746"},"modified":"2018-03-06T20:02:13","modified_gmt":"2018-03-07T03:02:13","slug":"sacrament-two-english-muffins-floor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2018\/03\/sacrament-two-english-muffins-floor.html","title":{"rendered":"The Sacrament of Two English Muffins on the Floor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

My latest at the Catholic Weekly<\/em><\/a>, recalling the strange fears of my youth and my gratitude to God for healing them:<\/p>\n

When I was a new convert, I was filled with a lot of weird anxieties about things.\u00a0 Notions would take me and I could not shake them, often deeply fearful notions.<\/p>\n

One time (and I feel silly talking about this, but I bet other people have had similar experiences) I was watching an episode of the\u00a0Twilight Zone<\/em>. You might remember it.\u00a0 It was the story of man who is afraid to sleep because when he does, he dreams about dying and is afraid he will die in his sleep.<\/p>\n

What struck me about the episode was the thought that it planted in my mind: \u201cWhat if you are asleep right now?\u00a0 Or what if nothing is real except you?\u201d<\/p>\n

I know that sounds stupid, but it really bothered me.\u00a0 I mean like,\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0bothered me.\u00a0 Like, I couldn\u2019t think of anything else.\u00a0 It haunted me.\u00a0 I had no answer to this nagging thought.\u00a0 What if everything I think I know is a lie and unreal?<\/p>\n

A more emotionally mature person can probably look at that young man that I was and detect not-very-deeply buried wells of anxiety and insecurity behind such a fear, but none of that was visible to me at the time.\u00a0 What was visible was simply the fact that I had no good answer to the question, \u201cAre you really sure there is anything but you?\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Twilight Zone<\/em>\u00a0posed such questions repeatedly.\u00a0 In one episode, a guy wanders a town where there is just nobody else around.\u00a0 The title of the episode, if memory serves, was \u201cWhere Is Everybody?\u201d (It turns out he is hallucinating because he has been locked in an isolation chamber in preparation for a space mission.) My feeling of isolation was like that, but even more so because not only was the fear that there was nobody<\/em>\u00a0around, but that there was nothing<\/em>\u00a0around me: no other being in all of existence.\u00a0 Just me, isolated inside my own consciousness, projecting out onto the void things that I only imagined were there.<\/p>\n

Crazy, I know.\u00a0 But terrifying when you are in the grip of it \u2013 like a fever.\u00a0 I feared I might be going mad.\u00a0 And precisely because it was such a crazy thing to think, I got more isolated because I didn\u2019t want to tell anybody I was thinking this crazy thing.\u00a0 When I told myself it was a crazy thing, a little voice from hell whispered, \u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s not true!\u00a0 How.\u00a0 Do.\u00a0 You.\u00a0 Know?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you are a fellow solipsist, or even if you are the only solipsist there is, imagine reading the rest here\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My latest at the Catholic Weekly, recalling the strange fears of my youth and my gratitude to God for healing them: When I was a new convert, I was filled with a lot of weird anxieties about things.\u00a0 Notions would take me and I could not shake them, often deeply fearful notions. One time (and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[836],"class_list":["post-102746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-catholic-weekly-stuff"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Sacrament of Two English Muffins on the Floor<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"My latest at the Catholic Weekly, recalling the strange fears of my youth and my gratitude to God for healing them: When I was a new convert, I was filled\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2018\/03\/sacrament-two-english-muffins-floor.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" 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