Why I Felt Spiritually Homeless in Christianity | Divine Tension

Why are so many Christians spiritually exhausted today?

Why does modern Christianity feel increasingly divided, tribal, political, and shallow?

In this deeply personal episode of The Catholic Couple Podcast, Bobby shares the powerful conversion story behind his upcoming book, Divine Tension: Why the Catholic Church Doesn’t Choose Sides.

From partying, gambling, anxiety, and searching for meaning… to a life-changing encounter with Jesus Christ at Midnight Mass inside one of Chicago’s most beautiful Catholic churches… this episode explores the deeper tensions many Christians feel but struggle to explain.

This isn’t about choosing between:
• Truth or love
• Tradition or evangelization
• Justice or holiness
• Reverence or mission

Catholicism has always been BOTH/AND.

The word Catholic itself means “according to the whole” — the fullness of truth, the fullness of revelation, and the fullness of what Jesus Christ left His Church.

In this episode we discuss:
• Bobby’s dramatic Catholic conversion story
• Midnight Mass and encountering the Holy Spirit
• Why so many Catholics feel spiritually homeless
• The danger of tribal Christianity
• The problem with reducing faith into politics
• The beauty of the Catholic Church
• Why the Mass is both sacrifice and communion
• The tension between holiness and mission
• How Alpha and discipleship changed lives
• Why the Church was never meant to choose sides
• The deeper meaning behind Divine Tension

If you’ve ever wrestled with:
• traditional vs progressive Catholicism
• faith and reason
• truth and compassion
• religion vs relationship
• maintenance vs mission

…this conversation is for you.

https://linktr.ee/bobbyfred85

Purposelycatholic.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I think a lot of Christians are tired, tired of outrage, tired of division, tired of politics, basically invading everything, and they're tired of feeling like somebody has to pick a side all the time. Not just in this world, but even within Christianity itself. Either you're traditional or progressive, either you got to embrace truth or love, either reverence or evangelization or beauty or outreach, justice or holiness, doctrine or compassion, the many of the choices that we face. And honestly, for a while, I was caught in the middle of that as well. But the deeper that I went into Catholicism, the more I started realizing that something completely changed the way that I saw the church. And holding truths together without reducing them into some kind of shallow slogan or political tribes or these false binaries. And honestly, the realization didn't come from some kind of theology classroom or even a book, but it came from my own conversion story. It came from confusion, came from me searching for the truth, came from a lot of wrestling and seeing parts of the church that felt, well, basically incomplete and asking over and over again, where is Jesus in all of this? And if you would have met me before my conversion, I was a completely different person, living for myself. I was partying constantly, gambling every single day, playing poker every night, smoking weed, selling drugs, getting into bar fights, chasing women, chasing anything and everything, and looking for love in all the wrong places. And I think underneath it all, if I'm being honest, I was pretty angry. I was definitely deeply insecure. I was anxious. I was restless. And I was searching for meaning. Well, I guess maybe pretending that I had everything under control. But eventually my life wasn't in control. It fell all apart. I lost my job. I lost my house. I lost my hair. And relationships became broken. And everything that I thought was giving me freedom was actually enslaving me. And for the first time in my life, I realized that I couldn't fix myself. And honestly, looking back now, that was probably the greatest grace that God had ever given me. Suffering and this humble confession that I had to make was finally that I needed something other than myself. I needed to reach the rock bottom so that I would look up. But I finally remember getting to that point where I said, God, if you're real, just show me. And not long after that, I walked into midnight mass at the beautiful St. Andrew the Apostle Church in Cal City. And I said that same exact phrase, Lord, if you're real, let me know. And I still struggle to fully explain what happened that night 17 years ago. I lived in that town my entire life. And somehow I had never stepped foot into this church. And to be honest, it's one of the most beautiful churches in the Chicagoline area. And it's been sitting there my whole entire life. And honestly, when I walked inside, I felt like I was robbed. I remember thinking, how did nobody ever bring me here? All the marble and the candles and the choir just echoing throughout the whole entire church, the smells and the bells, the incense, and the silence before the mass started, and then the choir singing in the Christmas carols. I just remember looking up at the stained glass windows, like, how could somebody make those? The beauty was overwhelming. It felt sacred. I felt like it was heaven breaking into earth, literally. And during that mass, something happened to me that I can only describe as a miracle. I call it a divine invasion. I was overwhelmed by the whole Holy Spirit. And if you would ask me then what it was, I wouldn't have been able to put those words in calling it the Holy Spirit, but that's what I know it to be. For once, it wasn't about the guilt or the shame, but about love. For the first time in my life, I felt like God was real. He was there. I felt like he wanted me, like he loved me. Not because of what I had done or failed to do, or because I earned it, or because I had everything together. It was the opposite, but simply because I was a child of God. I was one of his sons. And that realization, I think, really shattered everything. I walked into that church one way and I walked out a totally different way. I was one way when I walked in and I literally walked out a totally different person. I remember telling my girlfriend at the time, my now wife, Katie, that like, hey, I think I really want to start coming every Sunday. And from that moment on, I became obsessed with the Catholic faith. Anybody who knows me, I get easily obsessed. I'm like a type A personality. I get easily into something and then I go all in. But not necessarily obsessed intellectually at first. I was obsessed more because I encountered somebody. I encountered Jesus. And the deeper that I went into the church, the more that I realized that there was something so much deeper here than I had ever even imagined. The church wasn't just rules, it wasn't just rituals, it wasn't just these beautiful traditions. There was mystery here. There was transcendence. There was beauty, there was truth, there was something ancient, totally alive. And I had encountered it. And I was going to want to share it with every single person from that moment on. And honestly, if conversations like this resonate with you, if you're searching for something deeper than the shallow culture war that Christianity is even embroiled in, then make sure you subscribe to this channel because exactly this conversation I'm going to keep having throughout the year. Because what I started to realize is that a lot of people feel spiritually homeless right now. And honestly, I started feeling that tension as well. The first church I encountered was St. Andrew the Apostle, the church that my wife grew up in, the church where I eventually received my first communion and confirmation and first confession and where we got married and where both my kids were baptized. Very traditional, beautiful. Everybody is usually very reverent. And the place when you walk in, you could just tell that the presence of God is there. They built this church knowing that this was going to be a house for God. You could just literally feel how sacred it was. I mean, the architecture, the liturgy, the reverence, everything pointed beyond itself and pointed towards God. But at the same time, there were struggles there as well. The church physically needed repairs. The boilers needed replacing. The neighborhood was changing. We had abandoned buildings. The demographics were changing. There were conversations about survival and persevering and preserving the actual building of the church. And then during Renew My Church in the Archdiocese of Chicago, I got involved with the process and I started encountering the church in a very different way. One church especially confused me as a convert. In Cal City, there were three churches that was going to go down to one church with two worship sites. And one of the churches was St. Victor's. And I remember walking in there and immediately felt confused. In the center of the sanctuary where I expected the tabernacle to be, there was a statue of St. Victor. And as a convert, I remember honestly not even knowing who St. Victor was yet. And I just remember looking around, thinking, like, wait, where's Jesus? And I learned that the red candle, we know that that's where Jesus is present. So I knew that, but I was still just struck by how strange it was. Because that moment there was something bigger, I guess, I was starting to notice. So many of the conversations around parish life seemed to be focusing on everything else other than an encounter with Jesus. It was about the school that used to be there. It was about the festivals that we've always had, or the bingo, or the culture, or the buildings, or the memories, the history, the committees, the clubs, all those things. But almost never did we ever talk about people becoming disciples, how lives are being transformed, how people were encountering Christ, how the Holy Spirit was moving. Those conversations weren't happening at all. And as a convert, that confused me deeply because I'd entered the church, not because of I grew up or obligation, but I came because Jesus changed my life. And as a convert, you have this different approach to the faith. But all around me, I'm seeing people who aren't experiencing Jesus the same way I was. And I was saying, what am I seeing that they're not seeing? And around the same time, I started help lead alpha with my wife, which was to help evangelize and get people outside the church to get inside the church and to help those who are already within the church to grow in their relationship with Jesus. And for the first time, I started people, started watching people honestly wrestle with what they believed and why did they believe it? And at first, people would say, well, you know, I was I was raised Catholic, and you know, this is just what we do. Even my wife would always say that this was a box that we had to check, or my parents made me go, or, you know, this is just what we do. But over time, I started to see those walls starting to come down. People started opening up more about addictions that they were struggling with, problems in their marriages, loneliness, the fear, the anxiety, the brokenness, like their purpose in their life, right? And then where the all the change would happen was halfway through Alpha, there was always a Holy Spirit retreat. And what happened through these weeks as you started to spend time with people is that they started to let their guard down, that they started to get to know other people and build that trust. And people were really starting to expand and to explore why they believe what they believe and making it own and verbalizing it, probably some of these people for the first time to understand why they believe in Jesus. And at this Holy Spirit retreat, I started to see incredible things happening. People were encountering God personally, not just intellectually, like they knew it, but in their hearts. I watched people that never would have thought came alive. I watched people experience the love of the Father in a new and extraordinary way. I watched people suddenly start to pray more deeply, to go to confession more. I seen people actually start a soup kitchen to want to serve and want to share. And everywhere they went, they were talking about Jesus and sharing about what Jesus had done in their lives. I saw Bible studies start, people focusing on becoming disciples, not just people who just show up to Sunday Mass. And that helped change me as well, because I started realizing that the church isn't supposed to just maintain itself physically or spiritually. We are called to mission. The mass literally ends with us being sent. Mass literally means you are sent. But at the same time, I also realized something else. In my own zeal as a convert, I started swinging too far in another direction. At first, my faith became almost entirely vertical. It was just me and God, prayer, adoration, theology, truth, reading as much as I could possibly do, trying to figure out all the head knowledge. Wow, all the matter, I started realizing that the cross itself is revealing that tension, right? The cross has that vertical beam, me and God, the way to me and God, but it also had that horizontal of how we are connected to the other Christians that in the center is where Jesus is. Is yes, we are to have to know God, but we're also to know others. We are to be in communion with God and with each other, to have holiness and mission, to have truth and love, to have Mass be at the foot of Calvary and also the wedding supper of the Lamb. You know, the Mass is a sacrifice, but it's also a sacred meal where the true presence of Christ actually presides. Ever ancient, ever new, St. Augustine said. And when I started studying the saints, I realized that the saints had lived this tension beautifully. They were deeply mystical while at the same time radically serving the world around them. They defended truth while holding loving people tenderly, right? They didn't divorce truth from love. They weren't willing to compromise the truth in order to love people. They held both together in tension without reducing the faith or trying to water it down. And honestly, the more I looked around online Christianity and even parts of Catholicism, the more I started to realize many people were collapsing into one side of the tension or rejecting the other. Some wanted the reverence without the obligation of the mission to go out. Others wanted mission without reverence. Some wanted truth without compassion. Others wanted that compassion without truth. Some wanted tradition without having to worry about evangelization. And others just wanted outreach without the transcendence of God. And somewhere along the way, Christianity started to become tribal instead of whole. Everything was becoming an either-or. And I think that's deeply damaging, not just physically, but spiritually as well. Because Catholicism isn't some kind of just watered-down compromise in the middle. It's not some gray mush between the black and white or some kind of fake compromise. It is the fullness. It's what the word Catholic actually means. It means according to the whole, the fullness, not just the parts that we like, but the fullness of truth, the fullness of the revelation, the fullness of the body of Christ, and the fullness of what Jesus has left us in his church. Catholicism doesn't reduce truth. It doesn't make it easier either, but it holds truth together fully, that Jesus is fully God and fully man, that the Mass is a sacrifice and communion. It is Calvary and the wedding feast, that the church is ever ancient and ever new, that we are saved by grace, but we are also called to cooperate with that grace. That the Christian life is personal, but it's also communal, that we are called into deep prayer and bold mission, that we are called to be fishers of men and tend to the sheep by working on holiness and reaching outside to evangelize, to be people who are willing to contemplate and be part of action, to not be either Martha or Mary, but to be both. And that's what the church always has said. The church refuses to reduce reality down into these sides, to the either-or. And honestly, I think we're living in a culture that is addicted to reducing everything to easy categories. Everything can easily get flattened into our different tribes or what we prefer. And algorithms really, they love the outrage. They want us going back and forth. They want politics to be a dividing force. They want people to argue back and forth. That helps drive their algorithms. And I'm thinking that politics today is discipling people more than what the actual gospel is doing today. And even Christians start viewing the faith primarily through these political categories instead of seeing it through the fullness of Catholicism. But the church was never meant to fit neatly into modern categories because Jesus himself refused reduction. He is both lion and the lamb. He embraced justice and mercy. He didn't just forgive us. He went to the cross to fulfill that justice. He showed us what truth and love look like on the cross, not some either or that feels good because the tension is tough of both and. It doesn't mean peace in the way of there is no, uh, there's no conflict, but peace in the same way of the word Catholic means as whole, have fullness, to be complete. And that's the more I started to wrestle with that over these years, that I started to realize that this conversation became too important not to write about. So that's why for the last six years, I've been writing a book called by the same title, Divine Tension, Why the Catholic Church Doesn't Choose Sides, which is the working title. And honestly, this book isn't about me. I weave my personal stories through it. But I think this is a conversation that the church desperately needs to have right now, especially in the world in the United States we're living in where everything is so divided. Because living intention doesn't mean compromising truth. Living intention is going to be part of our lives for eternity. So we have to learn how to live in that tension without refusing to reduce truth or love. It means trying to embrace the fullness of Catholicism. You know, it's that God loves us the way we are, but he loves us so much that he doesn't want to leave us there. That we are saved, but we're made to be saints, that we are the already and the not yet. That there is this tension between coming and going. The mass, we are called to come, but then we are to go and bring more people back. This tension between two sides. They're not in competition. We need both. Not some either or, not because it feels better, but both and.