“I don’t treat religion as a set of propositions which are true and false. Instead, a religion is a language. It gives you a vocabulary, but not in the sense of a collection of words. It gives you a collection of images or symbols. … And there’s also a grammar — rules for deployment of these images and symbols. There’s no such thing as a true or false language. That’s a category error. There are true and false sentences. I don’t care what language somebody’s speaking when they talk about our ultimate moral responsibilities. What I care about is what they’re saying.” — Michael Sugrue
“We encounter on the Sacred Page (Matthew 5): ‘Be therefore perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.’” — Fr. Gregory Pine
Beyond “Distress Tolerance”
The psychotherapy term is “distress tolerance”—the ability to sit with uncomfortable emotions without needing them to be different. It’s a useful skill. I’ve practiced it for years, and still practice it daily.
But in a life without meaning, “tolerance” just seems like delaying death by getting by with suffering. Without the why, the how is unbearable. I needed something that had symbolical resonance, that placed me as a participant agent within a cosmos that, if it didn’t make sense, still had value and Beauty.
What I needed was to recognize a simple truth: my life doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to God.
Not passivity. Not quitting. The opposite—a radical reorientation that made simple existence not only tolerable, but meaningful. The humility to accept what I cannot control. The co-creation to actively shape what I can. Both movements together, daily, moment by moment, flowing from this single recognition.
This is what saved my life.
Our Holy Mother
In order to grow beyond “distress tolerance,” I had to learn to love and trust.
Beyond romantic love and naive hope, I needed a baseline where the world held cohesion. A center. Ο Ω Ν—He who is. In English: “God.”
Like Coleridge, I don’t think there’s a perfect way to define this linguistically. But it can be arrived at via the Imagination.
Coleridge speaks of a poetic achievement as being “an absolute unity of form and essence, subject and object, having the ground of reality within himself and possessing simultaneously all of his ideas and attributes in a state of undifferentiated, all-inclusive unity in divine consciousness.”
Aquinas called it Ipsum Esse Subsistens—Being Itself, not a being among beings, but the self-subsisting ground of all existence. My existence. Your existence. The distinction between what is and the Being beyond being culminates into the One.
I became, roughly, “Catholic.” The word Catholic comes from the Greek katholikos—kata (according to) holos (the whole). According to the whole. Universal. Integrative. But more than that: it means the Church gathering all of it. The whole of human experience. The whole of beauty. The whole of reason and imagination married together. Restoration.
This is where reason yields to imagination without surrendering itself. Where philosophy becomes liberated by poetry. Where the mind bows before mystery and finds that bowing is itself a kind of knowing.
The Church—the Mystical Body of Christ—is the living vessel where this synthesis happens. Not an idea about unity, but a lived communion. Each member necessary. Each person a note in a music that only sounds when all are present and, in that presence, harmonizes. And the Mother—Our Holy Mother, the Church herself, and Mary in her—receives us, births us into faith, not through doctrine alone but through the beauty of her embrace, the poetry of her liturgy, the way her language creates space for the soul to recognize herself as beloved.
The Sacrifice
Part of giving my life to God meant giving up on needing to figure out what “God” means before I could act. I had to let go of the intellectual demand for perfect definition as precondition for practice. The paradox: my training taught me to analyze, to understand, to define precisely. But here, that very need for precision was the obstacle.
I couldn’t surrender to God until I first stopped needing God to make sense on my terms.
This doesn’t mean abandoning intellectual rigor. Even as I allow myself to personify God, to pray to God, to give my life over to God’s will—I don’t stop asking questions. I don’t stop venturing into theological territory when it’s appropriate.
The glory and beauty of the Ortho-Catholic Church is precisely that it embraces both the symbolical and the analytical. (The Orthodox Liturgy is almost entirely sung.) It is Poesophic—it breathes in the semantic territory that depends upon propositions while also transcending them. The Church holds mystery and theology together. Apophatic silence and cataphatic speech. What we cannot say and what we must say. Poetry and proposition married, not divorced.
I can pray “Our Father” while also reading Aquinas on divine simplicity. I can give my life to God while also wrestling with how to speak about what that means. The surrender isn’t intellectual abdication. It’s making space for both movements—the humility of not-knowing and the co-creation of serious theological inquiry.
New Life
Things got better when I stopped thinking my life belonged to me. When I started giving it back to God to whom it belongs. Not to a concept. To Being Itself, the source from which I continuously emerge.
One of the Dominicans calls this “failing forward in grace.” Not passive resignation. The humility: I cannot do this alone. The co-creation: I move forward anyway. Throughout the day, when I’m struggling, I practice this. I give myself over, asking for mercy, forgiveness, grace. Substance forth. Moving in the dark, not knowing the path, not even knowing how to move, but nevertheless moving toward Him. He meets me there.
In short: I offer Love to an essence existing far beyond my reason. And this Love brings meaning and peace.
If this sounds abstract, here’s the Third Step:
“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”
The first draft just said “God.” But certain members pushed back, and insisted on opening it up for more people. (Now I personally struggle with the “Him.”) An entire chapter of the “Big Book” (Alcoholics Anonymous) is called “To the Agnostic,” devoted to how reason itself might allow the mind to surrender. The point: intellectual integrity and spiritual submission aren’t enemies. They’re the same movement seen from different angles. While I don’t love that chapter, don’t even love the book, if I’m honest, I can appreciate what they were trying to do. That is what’s called a “charitable reading.” Which is, in my estimation, the only way to truly, deeply read.
Love and Truth
Michael Sugrue, a serious Catholic, framed it in a way that worked for me: “It is not clear to me that love is a lesser value than truth—I like them both.”
This is the synthesis. Not truth or love. Not analysis or surrender. Both. The mind bowing before what it cannot fully grasp, yet grasping nonetheless. Philosophy and poetry breathing the same air.
A friend once told me: “Man, you’ve got to lower the stakes.”
I’d been demanding perfection. But I’m not perfect. It’s in this imperfect uniqueness that I embrace Beauty for what it is. And that is Beauty.
My perfectionism was ironically coming from a place of ridiculous egotism. I thought that I could control myself so well that my environment was also supposed to conform to my ideal. And when I saw that it, too, wasn’t perfect — it was all or nothing.
I got fired from/quit that job. That was the kind of totalitarian thinking I was working with. I couldn’t stand the idea of that degree of discomfort.
Discomfort that didn’t have to be there. If I just could have accepted that life is about so much more than appearing like some kind of pro, instead just being the person I am, the person they hired, for the job I was hired to do.
I could’ve been so much more effective by just enjoying the experience of doing that job, regardless of what was happening around me. But I thought “This is my life, these are my terms.”
Fair enough to aspire with principles. But what matters more is being able to comport yourself. And I was failing hardcore with that. In a couple of months, I’d be in the hospital again.
The commandment to be perfect seemed like it was mocking me. How could I be perfect when I couldn’t even hold down a job without collapsing into totalitarian thinking?
But then I heard Father Gregory Pine explain it differently:
“Therefore [be] perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect. Then there must be a perfector, and that perfector must look at least benignly upon those whom he intends to be perfected, perhaps even generously. But then the question is: when I compare my life to the lives of those who seem to have much more abundant and manifest graces, is it that God is skimping out on me, or is it that God is doing some kind of detail work? God is doing something subtle and nuanced, which requires of me patience and perseverance, a kind of attentiveness to his artistic hand, so that I can address it and that I can thank him for it, and so that it can be therefore more abundant and more manifest in due course (albeit sometimes in hidden ways).”
You don’t perfect yourself. You let yourself be perfected. Patience, perseverance, attentiveness to the detail work God is doing—that’s the practice. Not demanding control, but surrendering into grace. The work of cultivating virtue is the will choosing to act in accordance with a power much greater than myself.
In letting go of my life, I got it back.
Here’s something I recently wrote as a comment here on Substack:
Lisa, I thought of you at Mass today, and I wanted to share a sliver of my story. I have been completely transformed by a simple realization — that my Life does not belong to me, but to God. That has helped me shake off suicidal ideation as so much negative mental energy, and learn to live with the experience of the world as an opportunity for Grace, Awe, and Wonder, especially when it’s difficult. This is something that I have a hard time articulating to people who want to treat a reverence for God (even a belief and faith in God’s very existence) as so much superstition or fancy. How does one communicate how powerful this change of mind, this metanoia, truly is? The simple truth is that I’m not taken “seriously,” but here’s the thing—in letting go of my Life I’ve gotten it back. It’s as simple as that. And that deserves recognition because it’s literally the most effective mental health treatment modality I’ve ever experienced after 30 years of therapy.
Recognizing that my life doesn’t belong to me—that it belongs to God—isn’t passivity. It’s both movements at once. The humility: accepting what I cannot control—when suicidal thoughts arise, when perfectionism demands the impossible, when the world refuses to conform to my terms. The co-creation: actively choosing to give myself over, to move forward anyway, to practice attention to the detail work God is doing.
Not once. Every day. Throughout the day. When I’m struggling, I practice this. I give myself over, asking for mercy, forgiveness, grace.
Grace into each next step.
This is what distress tolerance couldn’t quite entirely offer: not just the ability to sit with pain, but the transformation of that pain into participation. Not managing difficulty, but being shaped by it. Not controlling my life, but receiving it back—fuller, stranger, more real than I imagined.
After thirty years of therapy, this simple recognition—that my life belongs to God, not to me—has done what nothing else could. I offer Love to an essence existing far beyond my reason. And this Love brings meaning and peace.
Not perfect peace. Not the peace I demanded when I thought my life belonged to me. But real peace. The kind that holds even when things fall apart. The kind that grows through difficulty rather than despite it.
The kind that meets you in the dark, when you’re moving without knowing the path, without knowing how to move, but moving anyway toward God.
God meets you there.