The Saddest Thing I've Ever Heard

Have you ever been at a dinner party when someone casually says something that stops you mid-bite? Not something offensive exactly, but something so quietly devastating that you don't even know how to respond? You just nod, maybe smile politely, and then later, driving home in the dark, you realize the weight of what was said and it sits on your chest like a stone.

That happened to me recently. Not at a dinner party, but in the form of a two-star review on my new book Offensive Grace. The reviewer's chief complaint was simple and stated without any apparent anguish: "I'm not a religious person."

Now, setting aside the obvious absurdity of picking up a book about grace and then being surprised to find God in it (that's a bit like walking into the ocean and leaving a bad review because you got wet... or leaving a negative review at a Steakhouse because they served you steak, and you don't like steak), what struck me was not the review itself.

It was that phrase. Five words. Spoken, or in this case typed, as though they were as unremarkable as saying, "I'm not a morning person," or "I'm not really into jazz."

I'm not a religious person.

I've heard it before. You probably have too.

And I want to suggest to you that it might be one of the saddest sentences anyone can say.

Not because it represents a disagreement about doctrine, or because it signals that someone has chosen the wrong team in some cosmic culture war. It's sadder than that, and deeper.

It's one thing to be misguided, but still seeking ultimate Truth.

It's another thing to have resigned oneself to the malaise of a meaningless existence, a short life that passes like the wind, a material world without any meaning at all.

When I hear someone say those words, I feel daggers in my heart. Almost literally. Not because the words are aggressive, they aren't an attack. They mean no harm when they say them, and I don't hold anything against them for it.

Those words pain my soul precisely because I have come to know the heart of our Lord, and His heart wants nothing more than to draw every person, every miracle, into His embrace, into His heart.

To see people reject it, to not even care, isn't easy. It might be expected, but that doesn't make it "easier" to hear. It aches every time.

Still, if feeling the pain they've chosen to ignore can be offered up as a prayer for their souls... I'd suffer the pain, and more, a thousand times. If I could suffer the anguish they've numbed away, if I could hear them reject their deepest longing a hundred times, and feel it all, I'd do it. Gladly, willingly, joyfully. If only in hearing it I could take this "malaise" this "numbness" from them, and give them the eyes to see. 

Because I know where to take that pain, that anxiety, that fear, that malaise. I know the way to the Cross.

If only I could endure the anxiety they refuse to face, the fear they face, I'd bear it a thousand times a day if it meant a single person who says, "I'm not religions" would open their eyes and see the truth that they are loved with an infinite love.

Because nothing breaks my heart like a numb heart.

"I'm not a religious person." 

It is the sound of a human soul declaring that it has no interest in the very thing it was made for.

 

The Hunger We Pretend We Don't Have

There is a moment in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus, after fasting forty days in the wilderness, is tempted by the devil to turn stones into bread. His response is one of the most quoted lines in all of Scripture: "One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4, NRSV).

We love this verse. We stitch it onto pillows and print it on coffee mugs. But I wonder if we've ever really let it unsettle us the way it should. Because what Jesus is saying is not merely that spiritual things are important in addition to physical things. He is making a claim about the fundamental architecture of what it means to be human.

He is saying that we are creatures built for more than matter.

That a life fed only by what can be seen, touched, tasted, and measured is a life that is, in the most literal sense, starving.

The ancient Hebrew word for "soul," nephesh, doesn't refer to some ghostly thing floating around inside your ribcage. It refers to the whole living self, the breathing, desiring, aching totality of a person. When God breathed into Adam in Genesis 2:7, the text says he became a "living nephesh," a living being animated by divine breath. The implication is staggering. You are your body, but you're more than your body. You are an ensouled body. You were made for more than matter. Your soul was made for relationship. It was oriented, from its very first breath, toward the One who breathed it into existence.

So when someone says, "I'm not a religious person," what I hear, underneath the casual confidence of the statement, is something like: I have decided that the deepest hunger inside me is not real. I have chosen to ignore it.

And that is not freedom. That is a kind of famine.

It is a kind of walking deadness... and in today's world, I suspect we're dealing with a lot more "zombies" than we realize. Walking dead people, pacifying their anxieties with the anesthetic of simply pretending nothing matters.

 

The Malaise of the Material

We live in a culture that is extraordinarily good at feeding every appetite except the one that matters most. We can order anything to our door in twenty-four hours. We can stream endless entertainment. We can curate our lives into gorgeous, envy-inducing images. And yet study after study tells us that anxiety, depression, loneliness, and despair are rising at rates that should alarm us all.

This is not a coincidence. It is a diagnosis.

The philosopher Blaise Pascal, writing in the seventeenth century, observed that all of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

He was pointing to something that the mystics and saints had known for centuries: that we are restless creatures, and our restlessness is not a flaw. It is a homing signal. It is the soul's way of saying, This is not enough. I was made for more.

If you've been reading me for a while, you've heard this quote before. St. Augustine of Hippo, writing his Confessions in the fourth century, famously addressed God with these words: "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you" (Augustine, Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1).

That line has echoed through sixteen centuries because it names something every honest person recognizes.

There is a restlessness in us that no career, no relationship, no achievement, no pleasure can finally quiet. Not because those things are bad, but because they are not big enough for what we are.

To say "I'm not a religious person" is to say, in effect, "I have made peace with the restlessness. I have decided it means nothing." But the restlessness does not go away simply because we refuse to name it. It just metastasizes. It becomes chronic dissatisfaction, vague anxiety, a nagging sense that something is missing that we cannot identify. It becomes what I can only describe as a malaise, a grayness that settles over everything, not dramatic enough to be called suffering, but persistent enough to drain the color from even the best days.

 

Religion Is Not What You Think It Is

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that we have allowed the word "religious" to be domesticated into something it was never meant to be. When people say they are not religious, they usually mean they are not interested in institutions, rituals, rules, or the culture wars that seem to swirl around organized faith. And honestly? I understand that. Some of what passes for religion in our world is enough to make anyone walk away.

But the word "religion" comes from the Latin religio, which is related to the concept of binding or connecting.

To be religious, in its deepest sense, is simply to be connected, bound to something greater than yourself, tethered to a reality that transcends the flat, horizontal plane of mere material existence.

Many today say things like, "I'm spiritual but not religious."

I understand what they're getting at, but it reflects a a fundamental misunderstanding of the terms.

To claim one can be spiritual without being religious is like saying, "I want to be born, but I don't want a mother; I don't want an umbilical cord; I just want to float around in the womb absorbing what I can." You cannot have the life of the spirit without the "binding" that connects you to the source of that life.

Albert Einstein once remarked that "the most unintelligible thing about the universe is that it is intelligible."

The very fact that things "make sense" in the material world—that there are laws of physics and patterns of logic—should connect us to an underlying intelligence. There is no intelligibility without an intelligence. There is no "contingency"—things that rely on something else to exist—without one who is non-contingent. This Source is not merely "a being" among other beings, but Being itself.

The Christian revelation is the only "religion" that takes seriously this Being who is Being Himself. A lot of religions have a "supreme being," something that exists the way we exist, but is just way more powerful. Only Christianity, and to a certain degree, Judaism, affirm a God who doesn't "merely exist" but who is Existence itself, who creates out of nothing, because He's not "made" of the same stuff of the universe we inhabit.

Only Christianity posits God not as a distant object, but as the one who connects us (religio) to Himself through the Incarnation and love. It is the act of living as though the universe is not a cold accident but a love letter written in a language that's written into our very fabric, the architecture of our existence. Because every existence, every thing that "exists," is an emanation of He who is existence itself, and who out of an overflow of his nature (which is love) created everything that is.

The Psalmist understood this. "As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God" (Psalm 42:1-2). Notice that the Psalmist does not say, "My intellect has concluded that God exists." This is not a philosophical argument. It is a cry of desire. It is the voice of a creature who knows, in the marrow of its bones, that it was made for something it has not yet fully found.

And this is the great irony of saying "I'm not a religious person."

The very longing that drives someone to pick up a book, to search for meaning, to wonder if there is something more, that longing is the religious impulse. It is the soul doing what it was designed to do. Denying it doesn't make it disappear. It just makes it harder to satisfy.

 

The Open Door

Jesus said something remarkable in the book of Revelation, words addressed not to the already convinced but to the lukewarm, the indifferent, the ones who had settled for less: "Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me" (Revelation 3:20).

I love the gentleness of this image. He does not break the door down. He does not shout. He knocks. And the promise attached to the knocking is not a list of rules or a theological exam. It is a meal. It is communion. It is the most basic human act of intimacy: sitting down at a table together, sharing bread, being known.

This is what is on offer for the person who says, "I'm not a religious person."

Not a system. Not an institution. Not a set of beliefs to be swallowed whole. Those things have their place, but they're secondary, like how learning your father's "genealogy" and blood-type, facts about his life, might be important: but only if you love and have a relationship with your father.

The "religion" we're all called to is a connection, a relationship with the living God who made you, who sustains you, who has been knocking on the door of your life with a patience that would embarrass the most devoted lover.

 

What You Can Do Today

So here is my challenge, both for those who would never say "I'm not a religious person" and for those who might.

First, pay attention to your restlessness. The next time you feel that vague dissatisfaction, that nameless ache, that sense that something is missing, do not immediately reach for your phone, your drink, your distraction of choice. Sit with it. Let it speak. Ask it what it wants. You may be surprised to find that it is not pointing you toward something you lack in the material world. It is pointing you upward.

Second, resist the temptation to reduce your life to what can be measured. You are not your productivity. You are not your net worth. You are not your follower count. You are a living nephesh, a breathing, aching, beautiful creature made in the image of the infinite God. Live like it. Make space in your day, even five minutes, to be still and acknowledge that there is a dimension of reality that your senses cannot access but your soul already knows.

Third, if you are someone who has settled into the gray comfort of "I'm not a religious person," I want to gently ask you: What if you're wrong? What if the longing you've been dismissing is the truest thing about you? What if the door you've been ignoring has someone standing on the other side, someone who has been waiting for you with a patience that spans your entire life?

And has the "numbness" of pretending "this is all there is" really worked for you?  Are you really, truly, fulfilled?  Or, have you just "convinced" yourself you're happy, when deep down you know something is missing.  

What if you've been sitting dehydrated in front of a glass of water all this time, and the answer to your thirst is right there, and has always been there? Will you take a drink, or distract yourself from your thirst with things that never quench it?

You don't have to have it all figured out. You don't have to sign up for anything or agree to a creed you don't yet understand. That's not how any of this begins. Start with the milk. Solid foods come later, and that's okay. We all have to start with milk. Taking a bite out of a steak too soon will only make you choke.

So start there. Be honest about the hunger. Stop pretending that bread alone is enough.

Because it isn't. It never was. And the One who said so is still knocking. A child knows his mother's heart before he learns her history, or anything at all about her. That's where everything begins. It's by resting in the heart of your Maker, a Maker who loved you so much He became like you, who walked this world, and who confronted every injustice, sorrow, pain, and evil that the world could throw at him. And he overcame it all, because He was always beyond the world, He was before the world, and He wanted to show us the way to become who we were created to be: we were created for more; we were created for Divine Love.

 

God Bless,

Judah