When I say defective I really mean it. There is something wrong with a person who prays daily, begs God to enter into her life, has raised her thoughts to God every day since childhood, follows catholic doctrine… and so one.
I I was really hoping someone could tell me what was wrong with me. Is so easy to say it must be something wrong that I am doing or not doing.
I mean something wrong with a person who who does all of this but cant feel a connection.
I wouldn’t be so quick to latch onto the term “defective”.
The thing is, we’re all different, aren’t we? That’s a banal truism, to be sure, but what I mean to say is that faith does not always express itself through emotion.
The reason for this may not lie in our “soul”, but merely in our brain. The billions of neurons connected in trillions of ways have trillions upon trillions of permutations. The levels of neurotransmitters floating around, the rate at which they are or are not reabsorbed across the synapes – all of these are different for different people.
The result – some people are quiet, some are loud, some are patient, some are impatient, some are manic, some are depressive, some have high stimulus thresholds, some have low stimulus thresholds, some are “thinkers”, some are “feelers” – we’re all different.
I could take you to Mass and inject you with a chemical that would cause to “feel” all the various ephiphanies, “religious experiences”, ecstacies, etc. that you’ve been “missing”. Those who’ve tried LSD or other hallucanigenics often swear they’ve “plugged into” the spiritual world.
And I could leave you in a room by yourself with the same chemical and you’d feel the same things. We could cut open your head and electrically stimulate a part of your brain and you’d swear you’d had a “vision”.
God doesn’t care if you flail about with religious fervor, or if you quetly pray and study sacred writings, icons, statues, etc. like a scholar. It doesn’t make your “religious experience” any more or less authentic. I think it was Mother Theresa who complained, in her autobiography, that she just didn’t “feel” God. To the secular press, this was astonishing, but God “speaks” to us all in different ways.
If you want to take an antidepressant, a stimulant, a narcotic, or a hallucinogen to help your prayer life, that’s up to you, and you may well “feel” more religous, but existentially and ontologically, you are not changed.
You’ll do all right.
] God is not a magic cure all that you put money into a vending machine and push a button and get what you need.
), you do care about Him and about knowing Him? Are you perhaps like some of us (me 
), too analytical about things, maybe even too harsh on yourself? Because if you were a rabid atheist, you wouldn’t give a fig about not “feeling” anything. Some of us are more cerebral than others.*