First day of Lent and I am already facing some interesting ghosts. I am engaging in 4 different Lenten practices this season. I am working with Hallow’s LentPray40, Word on Fire’s Lenten Retreat, Ascension’s Crux, and Bishop Barrens Lenten Gospel Reflections book. Through these resources and the blessings of the Lord I have realized that I am suffering under a great burden of a deep belief in the idea that I am ruined.
I have had dreams since I was a child. One of the biggest was the idea of being a husband and father. My parents were divorced when I was eight and I grew up for much of my life with little or no input from my father. My non-Catholic first marriage had lots of problems and ended with my ex coming home one day and saying that she had enough and she was moving in with her sister. That was all the warning I received. Having made a promise to myself that no matter what, I would never get a divorce like my parents, the failure of my marriage crushed me.
In response to this deep pain, I decided to go down some dangerous roads. I tried promiscuity, but the short relationship was a miserable failure. Instead, I turned to the ever more available world of online pornography. I had flirted with this content while the marriage was in the process of disintegrating, after the perceived failure the addiction became progressively worse.
At the same time, my feelings of failure and depression led to self-sabotage. I survived and lived but never thrived. I could not focus on a career and become truly successful because I would always self-sabotage the process. To cope with this failure, I became more dependent on video games to fill up my spare time. I also became incredibly jealous of what I considered “my” free time.
So last year I found myself at a crossroads. I decided to investigate changing my life and started exploring Catholicism to accomplish this. I chose Catholicism because the sin and degradation I had invited onto myself didn’t seem to be a problem in the eyes of most Protestant faiths. I needed a church that would examine the gunk of my life and work with me to fix it, not give me reasons it wasn’t really gunk. I needed confession, absolution, and a priesthood that still was willing to call my bad choices sins.
I started RCIA at Lent in 2025. This Lent I am preparing for my full first Sacraments at Easter Vigil. In talking with the father at my parish, I learned the ability of baptism and later indulgences to help reset the damage sin has caused. Now I am desiring to use this Lent to drill down as much as possible in preparation. I want a reset. I want back the childlike viewpoint I had in my college and high school years. I want to look at women and see them as the beautiful creations of God they are, not the objects of desire the world has made them. I want to be shocked at vulgarity again. I want to not understand the innuendo and be considered naïve. I want back my faith in the goodness of mankind in general. I want a Godly reset.
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