I had been wrong about something fundamental.

Not a peripheral element of my world view, not a position I could revise while keeping the structure intact, but something loadbearing, the thing that everything else had been built on.

Over the days that followed, we remained in the Cisi for one more day and then returned to Rome.

I began to locate what had been loadbearing.

I had believed as a foundational position that the human need for the transcendent was a psychological phenomenon real as an experience generated by neurological and social mechanisms pointing to nothing outside the human mind and body.

Religion in this framework was the organized expression of this need.

the elaborate cultural structure that a species builds around a genuine psychological hunger to manage it and give it socially productive expression.

Faith was in this account not knowledge of anything external.

It was the experience of one’s own deepest needs given a name and a face.

This position had served me for 34 years.

It was intellectually sophisticated.

It was consistent with a large body of psychological and anthropological research.

It was within its own terms coherent.

What I had experienced at Carlo’s tomb could not be contained within it because what I had experienced was not the experience of my own psychological need.

It was the encounter with something that was not me.

Something specific.

Specific in the way that persons are specific.

specific in the way that Carlo Acutis had been specific.

His particular intelligence, his particular joy, his particular orientation toward truth and evidence and the reality of God in ordinary life.

I had not felt my own hunger.

I had encountered his presence.

The distinction is not subtle.

The experience of your own hunger feels like you.

your textures, your familiar landscape, your well-known territory of need and aspiration.

The encounter with a presence that is not you has the quality of otherness, of surprise, of something arriving that you did not generate.

I had encountered something I did not generate, and the framework that had organized 34 years of my intellectual life had no account for this.

I resigned from my Masonic positions in July 2024, 2 months after a CC.

The resignation was not impulsive.

I spent those two months doing what I had been trained to do, systematic research, this time genuinely open in a way my previous research had not been.

I read the Catholic intellectual tradition that I had spent decades dismissing.

Augustine, Aquinus, Newman, Rat Singer.

Without the prior conclusion that I was looking for the reputation, I read it the way Carlo had built his catalog, looking for what was actually there.

What I found was embarrassing from a professional perspective.

I had built a significant portion of my Masonic reputation on the claim that Catholic intellectual tradition was intellectually unsophisticated.

A collection of medieval arguments dressed in modern language incapable of engaging seriously with contemporary philosophy and science.

This claim was simply wrong.

Not debatable.

Not a matter of perspective.

Wrong.

The Catholic intellectual tradition is extensive, rigorous, and engages with exactly the questions I had considered it incapable of addressing.

The arguments I had used against it in 30 years of lodge education were in significant part based on selective reading misrepresentation and the specific blind spots that develop when you only read the critics of a tradition rather than the tradition itself.

I had been in the technical sense a propagandist.

Not deliberately or I had not known I was misrepresenting the material, but the effect was the same.

This was difficult to absorb.

Not the discovery that I had been wrong.

I had been wrong before about smaller things and had corrected my positions without significant distress.

The difficulty was the scale.

34 years, hundreds of people I had educated, published papers that circulated in lodge libraries.

The entire structure of my professional identity within the Masonic community rested on positions I could no longer defend.

I spoke to a priest, Father Emmanuel, recommended by a friend who knew I was in what she diplomatically called a spiritual transition.

Father Emmanuel had the specific quality that I needed.

He was an intellectual trained in philosophy, unintimidated by the arguments I brought, and patient in the way that people are patient when they understand that the journey takes as long as it takes.

He asked me in our second meeting what I had felt at Carlo’s tomb.

I described it as accurately as I could, the grief, the shame, the awareness of Carlo’s life.

the encounter with something that was not my own psychology.

Father Emmanuel listened.

Then he said, “Javanni, what you are describing is called the experience of holiness, the specific variety of it that belongs to the saints.

” The church has a theological account of why proximity to genuine holiness produces exactly this response in people who have been avoiding it.

Not because the holiness attacks them, but because it illuminates.

It shows things that were there but were not being seen.

He paused.

What it illuminated in you was the emptiness.

Not because you are especially empty cuz you are honest enough at the deepest level to recognize emptiness when you encounter its contrast.

I thought about this for a long time.

Carlo was that contrast.

I said Carlo was that contrast.

Father Emmanuel agreed.

The reception into the Catholic Church occurred in April 2025, 11 months after a Cisi during the Easter Vigil.

I want to describe this simply without claiming more than I can honestly claim.

I was not transformed into someone certain.

I was not given resolution for all the questions I had spent decades refusing to honestly ask.

I was given something different and in some respects harder.

The beginning of a relationship with a tradition that takes those questions seriously, that has been living with them for 2,000 years and that holds them not as problems to be solved but as the ongoing territory of a genuine encounter with what is real.

Carlo Acutis prepared me for this not by answering my questions.

His life does not function as an argument.

It functions as an example, an example of what it looks like when a person inhabits faith the way I had been trained to inhabit reason completely, rigorously, honestly, with the willingness to follow the evidence wherever it goes, and the courage to record what you find, even when what you find does not fit your prior expectations.

I had admired this quality in principle for 34 years, and refused it in practice.

Carlo had lived it from the age of three.

If you are someone who has mistaken the defense of a system for the pursuit of truth, if you have ever confused rigor with certainty or investigation with confirmation, I want to offer you what 2 years of genuine inquiry after a has given me.

7 days with Carlo is in the description below.

Not as apologetics, as practice.

The specific daily practices of a young man who inhabited intellectual honesty and spiritual openness as a single orientation who never experienced them as contradictory.

7 days, one practice at a time.

Let me tell you what I do now.

I am 59 years old and I am beginning.

This is I want to be honest, uncomfortable.

The experience of being a beginner at 59 in something that many of the people around you have been practicing since childhood in a tradition you spent 34 years opposing in a community where your history is known by some and unknown by others.

This is not comfortable.

I do not recommend beginning this late if the alternative is available.

But it is what I have and it is vastly preferable to the alternative of continuing in the position I occupied before May 3rd 2024.

I speak occasionally at the invitation of Catholic communities about what happened in Aisi not as a conversion story of the triumphalist variety the dramatic sinner reclaimed the opponent defeated the institutional Catholic narrative validated by the defection of an enemy.

I try to tell it more honestly than that.

What I tell is this.

A man who had built a sophisticated intellectual structure in place of genuine inquiry encountered something his structure could not account for and was forced slowly and uncomfortably and at significant personal cost to revise.

The revision is not complete.

I do not expect it to be complete in the time remaining to me.

What I have is not certainty.

It is direction, a genuine orientation toward truth rather than the management of a conclusion.

Marco, my oldest lodge friend, who stood beside me in the second hour of my weeping and said nothing, called me 8 months after a CC.

He wanted to understand what had happened.

We spoke for 3 hours.

I told him everything I have told you as honestly as I could.

At the end of the conversation, he was quiet for a long moment.

Then he said, “Javanni, I have been in the lodge for 35 years.

I have never once experienced what you are describing, not at a Catholic site, not anywhere.

Does that not suggest that what you experienced was specific to you, psychological, personal?” I thought about this carefully.

possibly.

I said, “I cannot rule it out, but here is what I notice.

I spent 34 years specifically training myself not to be affected by religious environments.

I was by my own training the least likely person in that sanctuary to have the experience I had.

If my prior conditioning should have protected me from anything, it should have protected me from exactly this.

” The fact that it did not suggests that whatever was present there was stronger than my protection against it.

Marco said nothing for a moment.

Then that is either the best argument or the worst argument I have ever heard.

I know I said I haven’t decided which yet.

He called me again 6 weeks later.

He is not yet on the path I am on.

But he is asking questions he was not asking before.

And questions Carlo taught me are where everything begins.

I want to say something directly to the people in this story who are not me.

to the fellow Masons and the professional skeptics and the enlightened rationalists and the people who have built sophisticated intellectual systems specifically designed to protect them from the thing they most need.

I was you.

I was more thoroughly you than most of you are.

34 degrees 34 years published work international reputation.

The system did not hold.

Not because the system was stupid.

It was not stupid.

Not because I was weak.

I was not weak.

Because there is something present at Carlo’s tomb that is simply more real than the system.

More real than any system.

And the system when it encounters what is more real than itself is simply insufficient.

Carlo Acutis was born on May 3rd, 1991.

He died on October 12th, 2006 at 15 years old.

He spent his short life doing what I had trained myself to prevent, following the evidence of the supernatural honestly and recording what he found.

He did not argue.

He documented.

He did not persuade.

He demonstrated.

He did not appeal to emotion.

He appealed to evidence and let the evidence work.

He is in this sense a better empiricist than I was, better than most of us are.

Because true empiricism requires not just methodological rigor, but the willingness to follow the evidence wherever it goes, including to conclusions that disrupt the framework you used to generate the investigation.

I was not willing.

I am working toward being willing.

Carlo was entirely willing at 12 years old building a miracle database at his desk in Milan, letting the evidence accumulate toward whatever conclusion it reached.

If you have been protecting yourself from something that keeps presenting itself as real.

If you have the system and the arguments and the sophisticated alternative explanations and underneath them very quietly the awareness that the system is working harder than it should have to.

I want to tell you that the thing you are protecting yourself from is not what you think it is.

It is not obscurantism.

It is not the surrender of reason.

It is not the abdication of intellectual honesty for the comfort of belief.

It is an encounter with what is more real than any framework you have built.

And encounters of that kind are not comfortable, but they are what we were made for.

Leave me a comment.

If you are in the lodge or outside it, if you are a skeptic or a believer or something more complicated than either, leave me something.

Tell me where you are.

I have been in a great many places in 59 years and I can follow a map.

Share this with the person in your life who is using their intelligence against their own searching.

The one who is very good at argument and who uses that goodness to keep arriving back at the position they started from.

It is possible to be very intelligent and very wrong for a very long time.

I am the evidence for this.

Carlo Autis broke me in 3 hours after 34 years.

He was not trying to break me.

He was simply present.

That was sufficient.

St.Carlo Acutis who documented what you found and let the evidence speak.

who built the strongest possible case for what you believed by refusing to build anything except the honest case who was present at your tomb on the morning of your birthday in a way that was stronger than three decades of protection against you.

Uh pray for us.

Pray for the systems and the frameworks and the people who inhabit them honestly but not quite honestly enough.

Break through gently or not gently if gently is not sufficient.

You know the right dose.

And pray for Giovani Rossini who is 59 years old and beginning.

Amen.

« Prev