The speaker was cowboy-shirt-wearing billionaire Chris Sacca, who I recognized from Shark Tank. His speech lived up to the hype, for the most part. He was down-to-earth, funny, and inspiring.

But then he got to the punchline, the big takeaway for the graduates in the audience.

“So how will we know when we’ve done it right?,” he says to them.

“What is the key to success?”

“Happiness. In my experience, it all comes down to happiness.”

His words felt like a balloon deflating.

Now, in the past, in my atheist days, I wouldn’t have disagreed. Sure, happiness might have seemed a bit shallow. But I couldn’t do any better.

And it really gets to the question Sacca originally asked: “How will we know when we’ve done it right? What is success?”

When he asked that question, my mind explored the possibilities.

Is happiness the goal of life?

Happiness is fleeting. When my cousin passed away from a rare disease in her late 30s, I wasn’t happy. When my parents divorced, I cried.

You’re not supposed to be happy in those moments. You’re supposed to be sad.

And the happy moments? When I received my college acceptance letter, after my first date with Laura, when my son was born… happiness arrived. But so did other things.

“Crap, college is a lot of work.”

“I hope I don’t screw this up with Laura.”

“Can we afford a family?”

Happiness comes and goes in waves, and that’s normal. External circumstances pull us between ups and downs.

Sacca would, of course, agree with me. And he would redefine happiness as more than just an emotion. He’d say, “It’s contentment” or something like that.

But this is demanding too much of the word happiness. Happiness, as the goal of life, stretches the concept beyond its meaning.

We need another target.

What about “making an impact?”

When I was in college, man, did I want to make an impact.

I adopted clean energy as my cause and launched projects to rid the world of dirty fossil fuels. I was sure our projects would make headlines. We’d win awards and be interviewed by Oprah.

Yet I was partying, drinking, doing drugs, chasing women, and avoiding the difficult conversations I should have been having with my family.

My university’s motto was: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Which is a very Christ-like saying, and ironically, the exact opposite of the path I chose. Instead of getting my own house in order, I wanted to solve the world’s problems.

But say you do get your house in order. You fix the inside and turn outward. There's still a problem: no one can agree on what the impact should look like.

Everyone has a different answer. For some environmentalists, impact means a world with fewer humans so that nature may thrive. For some technologists, it means a world where robots eliminate all labor, giving humans ultimate comfort and abundance.

G.K. Chesterton had the right response:

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision. Instead, we are always changing the vision.”

What about achievement?

Achievement was my favorite drug, and it’s still the preferred drug of my peers.

“Get to the next level.”

“Scale your business.”

“Find success.”

I consumed a steady diet of personal development books from people like Napoleon Hill, Tony Robbins, and Grant Cardone. I joined masterminds where my worth was measured by my bank account balance and photos with gurus.

The pressure to achieve peaked when I moved to Los Angeles. The mountain was right there, and all you had to do was climb it.

But it’s a false god, and in my pursuit of it, I tripped, fell down the mountain, and left Los Angeles having hit rock bottom.

I lost my savings to a fraudulent entrepreneur I'd met through a mastermind. My fiancée and I broke up. I gave tens of thousands more to a guru whose promises proved empty.

The city of stars stripped me of everything I had. The one bright spot was that it left me vulnerable enough to finally question it all.

I had chased happiness, impact, and success, and all three had failed me.

“Have I really been pursuing the right goals?” I sat there in tears.

We’ve seen this story before

Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. He came back to depression and alcoholism. Anthony Bourdain built a life most people envied, and then he ended that life. Tim Ferriss, the king of modern personal development, recently wrote an article admitting the whole model is broken.

He figured out that self-improvement requires you to stay broken, and that the only way out is to transcend yourself. But when he went looking for what self-transcendence actually meant, he landed on a campfire scene in Montana, sitting with friends under the stars.

These stories are endless. Yet the secular world is still searching for a better answer.

I couldn’t find a better answer either, until I became a Christian.

The answer didn’t come by looking to my side. It came from looking up.

A Seat at the Divine Council

Ask a Christian the goal of life, and their answer is simple. The goal is to become holy.

As I explained in my first post, the skyscraper of reality points upward toward a destination. The Catholics call it sainthood. Eastern Orthodoxy calls it theosis. The destination is the same: a seat at God’s table. Participation in his life, reigning with Christ.

We are called to be like Jesus, which means transforming ourselves by casting away sin. This answer fills the gaps of the other three.

Happiness fails because it can’t survive suffering. It's the glass facade, not the load-bearing beam.

Sainthood promises something more durable than happiness. When my cousin died, when my parents divorced... those weren’t obstacles to the goal. Because in the Christian frame, suffering is where we find meaning. I wouldn’t be the man I am today without that suffering.

Making an impact fails because no one can agree on the vision. Mother Teresa had the answer to that:

“I am not called to be successful. I am called to be faithful.”

She didn’t set out to change the world. She set out to be faithful, caring for the sick and poor in Calcutta. Changing the world was a side effect.

Achievement fails because it’s a false god. You can always tell which god someone worships by what they sacrifice for.

I’m watching a TV show right now, Your Friends and Neighbors. Jon Hamm plays a rich hedge fund manager who comes home to his mansion and finds his best friend sleeping with his wife. The divorce follows, then the bills, and then a life of crime just to keep up with the life he built.

His wife later tells him that he had disappeared from them long before any of it happened. He sacrificed his family on the altar of achievement.

It’s a trope because it’s true.

Happiness, impact, and achievement share the same problem: the self is at the center.

• Happiness asks, “What makes me feel good?”

• Impact points outward, but you still choose the cause and define the vision.

• Achievement asks, “How high can I climb?”

In all three, the self is setting the terms.

Sainthood asks you to step down from the throne. It gives you something worth sacrificing for that doesn’t take everything else with it.

As Jesus says in Matthew 16:25

“For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

That's the goal of life.

And for the first time, I had a foundation I didn't build myself.

Now, since becoming an Eastern-leaning Catholic, I realize, “She is the Chiefs.”

How I Got Here

I was baptized Catholic and attended Catholic school through 4th grade. Then we moved to Virginia and my parents asked me which school I wanted, public or private. My cousin was the only person I knew in our new town, and he attended the public school, so the answer was easy: public.

Statistically, I would have fallen away from the church at some point anyway. It happened earlier, and I was an atheist until my mid-30s.

Today, although I’m back in the Catholic Church, when I’m sitting in the pew, I often look East.

I credit the Eastern Orthodox Church and its teachings with much of my return to Christianity. It speaks a language the Western Church wasn’t speaking to me.

A Quick History of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Split

The Catholic and the Orthodox Church were once one. The Church formed around a long line of apostles beginning with Peter, whom Christ tasked with building his Church.

“And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
— Matthew 16:18

In the 11th century, for various reasons, the Undivided Church split. It was a great tragedy, and many pray that it one day reunites.

The Pattern, Hiding in Plain Sight

The East speaks in more of a visual, pattern-based language. This is the language my ears, or more accurately, my eyes, are attuned to.

It works by recognizing categories. And one of the primary categories is a pair: the head and the body. For me, the head/body relationship became a new way of understanding everything: God, the story of Jesus, and the church.

It’s a fairly simple pattern. But it’s deceptively simple because it’s fractal, meaning it appears at every scale of reality. Let me give you an everyday example.

Think about the phrase “head of the household.” You instantly know what that means. In the Western world and certainly in the Christian tradition, that role is typically filled by a man, but I want you to see the distinction between the role and the specific person. They are separate, and it’s the role that’s the key part of the pattern.

What does the head of the household do? He protects, provides for, and has the final say.

The other half of the pattern is the body. The body is the rest of the family: the members (spouse, kids), and more than that... the house, the morning routine, the handprint mold on the mantel, the yearly Christmas tree lighting.

Now let’s jump down a fractal level...

Your body has a head, and it is your heart. You might say, wait a minute, the heart is inside the body, how can it be a head?

That’s the fractal move. Like Russian dolls, you’ll find the head/body pattern nested within itself. Within every body, you’ll find a new head and body.

In your physical body, your heart is the head at this inner level. The Eastern tradition calls it the center of your being. What you receive there transforms you, and the transformation radiates outward into the rest of your life.

“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
— Proverbs 4:23

Our language reflects this understanding of the heart. Pascal, a mathematician and scientist, wrote: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” When we say “trust your heart, not your head,” we’re not talking about your organs. Rather, it’s a difference in fractal levels. We’re essentially saying: step down from the head/body pattern into the heart/body pattern.

That’s what I mean by jumping a fractal level.

So, at one level you have your physical head and body.
Step down, and you have your heart and the rest of your body.
Step down again, and we find your cells.

Zoom in on your heart and we’ll find cells. Each cell has a head: the nucleus. And a body: the organelles, each with its own roles and rituals.

I hope you’re noticing that this is not just a metaphor. It’s structural; it’s real. This is what I meant in my very first article about Christianity being not merely a religion, but an explanation of reality.

Let’s keep going, but reverse our direction...

We went down to the cell. Now let’s travel up past the heart, past the whole person, and further still, to the level of an organization—a sports team.

The head of a sports team is its spirit. The logo embodies that spirit best. When you wear the logo, you’re saying, “I belong to this particular body.”

Knights wore the colors of the lord they served. My cousins bought “The Broas Family” sweatshirts for our family reunion. The woman at the park? Her jersey declared, “I am part of this body. I am the Chiefs.”

Because without fans, there is no Chiefs.

Seeing this pattern changed me. Whether I was talking about a cell, a person, a sports team, or a city—I was seeing the same thing. This is the world the Eastern Orthodox tradition opened my eyes to. It’s a pattern of reality I can’t unsee. And it’s one I trust, as much as I trust the sky is blue or that I love my kids.

(When it comes to seeing this pattern, I largely credit Matthieu Pageau and his book The Language of Creation. As well as his brother, Jonathan, who applies the pattern to everyday life through his publishing company, The Symbolic World. Both draw on the Eastern Church Fathers, like Saint Maximus the Confessor. I’ll put together a reading list at some point, but the point is, this is an ancient way of seeing, not a modern one.)

So, Where Is Christ’s Body?

I couldn’t find a reason why the same rules that apply at the level of a cell, a person, or a sports team wouldn’t apply to a church.

Scripture tells us Christ is the head.

“He is the head of the body, the church.”
— Colossians 1:18

So, where is His body?

“So in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”
— Romans 12:5

“Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.”
— 1 Corinthians 12:27

His body is the church. And just like a cell, a person, or a sports team, you can’t reduce the body to one thing. The same fractal logic applies to every head/body.

The Bible is part of the body, and so are the sacraments, the liturgy, the parishioners, the bishops, and the saints.

If the head/body pattern is real, the body isn’t a metaphor. It has to actually exist, somewhere in history, right now.

The obvious question became, “Who is claiming to be the body of Christ’s church?”

That narrowed it down immediately. Both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church do. They claimed it as one unified church for 1,000 years, then split, and now both still claim to be the body. That’s why I see them as two strands of the same rope, held together by the Nicene Creed.

Referring to the Christian East and West as the Church’s “two lungs,” Pope John Paul II wrote:

“The Church must breathe with her two lungs”
— Pope John Paul II

Back in the pew

Every Sunday, I sit in the pew and see the same pattern I saw at the park, except now I’m the one wearing the jersey.

The priest is the shepherd of the flock, the head of this particular body. Our parish is part of the Diocese of San Diego, which has a bishop at its head. And our parish is one member of the universal church. During Mass, every Catholic on earth is reading the same readings as me.

The same pattern, at every level.

The West gave me the arguments, the sacraments, and the home I already had. The East gave me the patterns, the icons, and the mystery.

That’s why I call myself an Eastern-leaning Catholic. Will I one day convert to Orthodox? Maybe. But my prayer is that I won’t have to choose, and that the two strands become one rope again.

The website clearly said confession was Saturday at 3 pm.

“I’m rusty at this.”

It’d been a while.

“Ah, they do it in the parish hall.”

I stood in line behind an older woman and patiently waited.

When it was my time, fortunately, my muscle memory returned. I made the sign of the cross and sat.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been 30 years since my last confession.”

“What!?” cried the priest.

He was an older Filipino man who looked in need of sleep. My comment changed that.

“It’s been HOW long since your last confession?”

“30 years,” I said, a small smile on my face.

As I confessed my sins, which took a while, the priest stopped me no fewer than three times to confirm just how long it’d been.

“30 years,” I kept replying.

At the very end, after he gave me my prayers to say, he told me:

“Welcome home, my son.”

“God’s been waiting for you.”

That quote is usually credited to C.S. Lewis, and while he would approve, the attribution is uncertain.

Truth. I love that word.

Right now, I’m looking at the philosophy textbook on my bookshelf and its subtitle reads The Pursuit of Truth. That phrase sums up this new adventure with Fractal Faith.

Truth is a North Star. It reorients us when we’re overwhelmed by confusion, doubt, or deception. Back in Latin class, vocabulary was never my strength, but I remember the word veritas.

I was once an atheist, but today, I see Christianity as the truth.

Veritas.

I’m launching Fractal Faith to recount that journey and share how I now see the world. If you’re like me, you had an incorrect understanding of what Christianity is, how it works, and what it claims.

This opening essay will begin with that last bit: What does Christianity claim?

It goes deeper than “Jesus died for our sins” or “If you repent, you’ll be saved.”

The big “aha” for me was when I realized Christianity wasn’t just a religion, but an explanation of reality. Let me share an analogy that may help.

Think about the field of quantum mechanics. When people talk about that field, they use language like “we’re examining the fabric of reality.” Scientists at the CERN particle collider smash atoms together and discover subatomic particles that make up our universe.

Christianity operates at this level, but far beyond.

The Skyscraper Metaphor

Imagine you’re in New York City and you see a skyscraper being built. Workers raise the steel skeleton floor by floor. There are no windows, walls, or paint yet.

You look up and see a steel triangle pointing to the sky. The spire. A fitting image would be the Empire State Building.

That image is a good way to understand how Christianity explains reality.

The steel skeleton represents an ontological structure. Ontology is the study of reality, focusing on the truth of what exists. Going back to this article’s opening sentence, if you only want to believe in what’s true, you’ll want to know about ontology.

Back to our skyscraper, it both exists and its structure speaks to us. It really speaks to engineers. An engineer can look at a building and gauge how much weight each beam can hold, which joints are strongest, and what happens if you remove a screw.

The skyscraper exists ontologically. And its existence speaks to us.

Reality also has a structure that speaks to us. Reality gives us information about how it’s made. How it works.

Here’s one thing we learn by observing reality: things that freely give to each other while remaining distinct tend toward life.

Just think of the cells in your body…

Your cells contribute to your body's health. Right now, cells are providing the energy you need to read this article. At the same time, those cells have walls. They enjoy their privacy. They stay themselves.

Remove the cell wall and the cell dies, dissolving into its surroundings.

Going in the opposite direction, if the cell never gives and only takes, stealing from its neighboring cells, hoarding, extracting, well... that’s what a cancer cell does.

The ideal situation is the body’s cells check two boxes: they give freely, and maintain their distinct identities.

Marriage works the same way. Some husbands and wives lose themselves, giving so much that they dissolve into the family. Some men and women only take, extracting whatever they want. In either situation, dissolving or extracting, the marriage falls apart.

It can only hold when both husband and wife are giving freely while remaining themselves.

Economies, too. When both sides of a transaction give and receive freely, wealth grows. When one side just takes—like in a monopoly, exploitation, or fraud—the system hollows out.

We find examples everywhere because it’s a fundamental pattern of reality, like the mold that made the muffins.

When you have unity with distinction, life flourishes. You see it at every scale: the cell, the family, and the society.

Things that align with that pattern tend toward life and communion. Things that violate it tend toward fragmentation and death.

The beams support the skyscraper, carrying loads and transferring weight. The beams also remain distinct. Can you imagine a beam going floppy or saggy, like a Salvador Dalí clock?

The building tells you how it wants to be treated. The pattern we’ve observed, giving freely while remaining distinct, tells us how to treat anything. Including people.

Take morality. When humans take actions that align with this two-part pattern of reality, we tend toward flourishing. Actions that violate reality tend toward fragmentation and death.

The building doesn’t punish you for removing its load-bearing beam. It just falls. Reality doesn’t punish you for violating the moral law. It just breaks.

The triangle at the top of the building points to the destination. The Eastern tradition has a word for it: theosis. The Western tradition prefers the term sainthood. It’s a complete transformation of who you are, in full communion with God.

I’ll explain more of this goal in a moment.

When you participate with reality, when you give freely while remaining yourself, when you join this divine dance, you are moving toward the top.

You are moving toward God.

The Shape Already Cut Out

The shape of the building cutout tells you exactly what belongs there. You see the size and the shape and think, “That’s calling for a round window.”

If you install a square window, you’re violating a structure.

That’s how the moral law works. Reality already has the shapes cut out. A sin is using the wrong shape.

When I commit a sin, when I lie, cheat, or steal, I am trying to force in the wrong piece. And if I continue to sin, spiraling deeper down, I’ll encounter addiction, isolation, and eventually death.

Nobody forces this cycle on me as a punishment. It’s simply what happens when I violate the structure of reality. I chose it freely, even if it’s against my best interest.

I used to think that when I sinned, God sent down a disapproving lightning bolt. He does hate sin, but now I see sin more like an action that removes a load-bearing beam.

A building will hold for a while, but each violation weakens the joint. Find me the happy and healthy 80-year old who spent his life cheating, drinking, and chasing money. He doesn’t exist.

The reverse is also true. Sainthood is when a person has aligned with the pattern their entire lives, and their structure has become visibly strong.

You see it in everyday people. We’ve all had the experience of meeting the Christian who's doing it correctly. The one the town adores and calls a “good Christian man” or “good Christian woman.”

Those people are on their way to theosis. They’re becoming saints.

Sainthood is where our lives are pointing. Literally, it’s the “point” of our lives.

Our purpose.

Every beam, every load, every moral requirement... all of them orient us upward toward that point, toward sainthood, and full communion with God.

I used to think sainthood was a gold star for following the rules.

“You’ve been a good boy. Here’s your prize.”

I used to think of Moses coming down the mountain with the Ten Commandments and think, “He’s carrying arbitrary rules. Those are just God’s personal preferences.”

Today, I see the Ten Commandments as necessary. Their shape is demanded by reality’s structure. God doesn’t need to dictate them because we can read their requirements directly from the ontological fact.

Does Reality Have a Right Answer?

Back to that first sentence: “The only reason to believe something is because it’s true.”

Do you see what that assumes?

It assumes an objective reality, a singular truth. And that’s actually a good question to ask right now.

“Do I believe there is only one truth?”

People engage in all these debates about where the universe came from... did it come from the Big Bang, has it always been here, did it come from God...

But whatever the answer, do you personally believe that there is an answer? And only one answer?

Christians do. If you do, too, then you believe in objective truth.

(I do.)

Objective truth says I cannot be both myself and my brother at the same time. I cannot be both here and in Sri Lanka at the same time. It cannot be both day and night at the same time.

1 plus 1 cannot equal 3.

This is Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction, and it’s not a religious claim. It’s perhaps the most fundamental claim anyone can make about reality.

And if there is an objective reality, then there is a singular truth about where the universe came from, about what we are, and our purpose as human beings.

Once I understood this idea of objective truth, I asked, “What about morality? Is morality objective?”

For example, was what the Nazis did objectively wrong? Or just something I disagree with?

If there’s no transcendent standard, no unbending yardstick, then who’s to say what they did was actually wrong rather than just something we felt was wrong?

That’s an extreme example, but it applies to our day-to-day.

I once did something I now regret: I returned an item to Target that we hadn’t purchased there.

My justification was simple. “You won’t get in trouble. A big company doesn’t care.”

I felt in my gut it was wrong, but I won’t argue this on moral grounds. Let’s take a look at the Target situation through our skyscraper metaphor.

Remember that at every scale of reality, from the cell to the relationship to the society, you find the same generative pattern: things that give freely to each other and remain distinct tend to flourish. The Christian word for that is love.

Things that extract for themselves—or dissolve into everything else—tend toward collapse. And what keeps the whole structure alive is love.

(The romantic idea of love is a subset of the much larger Christian idea of love.)

Target is an entity like a cell, a marriage, or the economy. And the interaction between a person and that entity is a real relationship with a real structure.

The moral rule about honesty in financial exchanges is not a preference that sits atop the relationship. Like the steel beam, the moral rule is load-bearing. It describes what the relationship requires.

When I returned the item we hadn’t purchased there, I treated this entity as raw material and used the relationship for extraction. It wasn’t a fair exchange.

It was like me treating a steel beam as decorative, foolishly believing its load could be diverted. But the beam doesn’t care how you read the situation—it simply breaks. The structural damage is the real punishment.

I violated that structure when I extracted from Target. It doesn’t matter whether Target ever notices.

If you plant a peace lily in your walkway and want it to grow, you wouldn’t water it with bleach. No one needs to tell you that because the plant’s structure tells you.

The plant cells scream, “We can’t handle bleach!”

This is why Christian morality is almost self-evident once you see it clearly. The commandments help us, but you don’t need to start with them. Start with the question: Does this lead to life, or does it lead to fragmentation?

Ask it honestly about gossip, betrayal, or a Target return. Think about the last time someone you trusted lied. You could feel the fabric of your relationship tear.

The proper answer to “How should I behave in life?” is already there in the structure. Early Christians recognized it and wrote it down.

Once I understood Christianity as an explanation of reality, as a complete view of objective truth, my objections to it collapsed one by one.

“But the church is corrupt!”
That doesn’t mean Christianity isn’t true.

“But believing in God is nothing more than wish fulfillment!”
That doesn’t mean Christianity isn’t true.

“But suffering exists!”
That doesn’t mean Christianity isn’t true.

These are all legitimate concerns, and I’ll address them eventually, but they have nothing to do with whether or not Christianity is true.

And if the Christian worldview is true, if the Christian God exists, and if he became man in the person of Jesus, then it’s our world’s most important event.

The Pattern of Fractal Faith

The patterns I’ve shared are just a taste. You find them everywhere. In literature, theories, architecture, the human body, and marriage.

This is fractal faith.

Nothing really made sense until I understood it, and now I’m sharing it with you.

The real competitors to Christianity aren’t so much other religions. All of them share shades of truth. The real competitors are materialism, nihilism, and the idea that the universe just exists for no reason.

Thanks for joining me on the adventure.