Pilgrims gather in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican. Photo: CNS The perceived key to happiness today is to change the world, but in reality the solution is to be transformed yourself writes Jason Osborne
St Maximus the Confessor held that the world is a reflection of man, and man is a reflection of the world, and that has certainly been my experience. As the world goes through convulsive changes at the hands of the pandemic, social change and unrest, I’ve often felt the same currents at work within myself. Being confined to five kilometres from one’s home for much of the year does wonders for stoking restlessness and a desire for radical change in a young heart.
Human history
While I realise that for much of human history people didn’t travel to the extent that we do today, and were generally more content with less entertainment, this is the world we’ve grown up in. Emblematic of my generation, the slower, more sedentary lifestyle 2020 offered to me proved very difficult, and I longed for physical freedom more often than ever before. As such, I can understand well where the burning desire for change at all costs came from, and it seems as though young people today are being offered only one outlet for that radical impulse: activism.
While the changes sweeping across societies throughout the world this year were certainly not delivered by the hands of young people, I think it is fair to say that the youth of today have largely bought into many of the movements being foisted upon them, and are changing the face of the world by so doing. What characterises many of these movements is an emphasis on equality and freedom, and the appeal of this is obvious: if the world can be changed for the better, we’ll all have better lives.
The only trouble with this is that it’s not the answer, at least not fully, and it took me a long time in my own life to realise that. The perceived key to happiness today is to change the world, but in reality, the solution is to be transformed yourself. While our Faith informs us that in the end, heaven is indeed a physical reality, the real way to “get to heaven” is by becoming a different person; namely, Christ himself. Perfect happiness is achieved by becoming alter Christus, ipse Christus – another Christ, Christ himself.
I’m a 24-year-old man living in Dublin, Ireland in 2020. Because of these simple facts, it’s probably stating the obvious to say that I didn’t always think this way. In fact, if you were to go back a mere handful of years, you’d find many of my views and opinions 180 degrees to the contrary. I’d been baptised, received my first Holy Communion, and been confirmed, but there’s only so much the sacraments can do if you don’t consciously give yourself to God. Looking back, I don’t doubt I, and everyone who made these steps alongside me, received all the grace we needed from the sacraments, but it wasn’t to obviously manifest itself for a time.
The stage was perfectly set for a total disregard of religion as anything other than a relic of Ireland’s past, and disregard it I did”
Everyone is in a relationship with God, whether they know it or not. By virtue of existing we’re already relating to the one who created us, but it’s entirely possible not to be aware of this, and that’s the situation in which I found myself for much of my school-life. Without knowledge of this relationship, it’s impossible to orient yourself properly in the world, and a functional atheism often ensues. That’s exactly what happened to myself, my friends, and is currently happening to thousands upon thousands of people in Ireland today, although I was a little more strident in my support of atheism than others.
A voracious reader, I prided myself on being well-informed and open-minded on a range of issues, while at the same time being neither. I did read extensively, but I only read in one direction, and this was only reinforced and confirmed by my schooling and social setting. To be fair to both myself and others who were and are struggling to get a glimpse at alternative perspectives, it was not made easy for us. Religion was a half-forgotten addition at the end of the curriculum; a class during which we did homework for other classes, debated the moral issues of the day such as same-sex marriage, abortion and euthanasia without ever leaving agreement on the topics, or meditated with the ‘help’ of a thoroughly-modern CD as we fell asleep on cushions in the oratory.
Religion
The stage was perfectly set for a total disregard of religion as anything other than a relic of Ireland’s past, and disregard it I did. Again, I was more expressive in my contempt for religion than many of my friends, but functionally, we were living in the same world – one in which we believed there to be no God and no reason not to live however you wanted.
I realise that my experience of religion in Ireland is not representative of everyone’s, but it certainly is typical of the view many get of it today. Disagreements over how religion is viewed may seem completely academic, but ideas have practical consequences, and we’re currently seeing the playing out of these consequences. Depression, anxiety, a sense of meaninglessness and suicides continue to climb amongst millennials, while things that were once taken for granted, such as the reality of the biological sexes, are being opened up for debate, unmooring us from the world entirely. Goodness, truth and beauty are held to be matters of personal opinion, rather than a universal reality.
The awakening of my faith coincided with the death of my grandfather at the beginning of 2016”
A world without God has no defence against these ideas, because if God doesn’t exist, then it is cruel to arbitrarily deny how a person feels. If God doesn’t exist, we have no reason not to prioritise the feelings of others at the expense of ‘truth’ because there is no fundamental truth. Having lived, or having thought I lived, in a world without truth, I feel compelled to say that it is possible to return to faith in God in today’s world. And not only is it possible, its necessary and desirable too.
The awakening of my faith coincided with the death of my grandfather at the beginning of 2016. While there is much that could be said about that, what struck me most profoundly was the spiritual nature of being present at someone’s death, although I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it as such at the time. Living in a world where death spelled the end, I wasn’t prepared for what felt like someone simply leaving the room. It certainly wasn’t the ‘ending’ I’d been anticipating, more like a transition.
God
This alone wasn’t enough to sway me back into the arms of God, but it did a lot to knock my youthful, naïve certainty. In witnessing something I couldn’t explain, or at least felt I couldn’t explain, I was driven back to the books in search of answers, where I encountered the shadowy uncertainties at the edge of science, as well as the great philosophies and religions of the world, east and west. Without my knowing it, Catholic teaching was fulfilled: a crisis was used to open me up to God, as God allows them to do.
It was a while before I found my way back to the Church, but along the way, God used my love of reading to help me see that there was great truth to be found in many of the world’s religions and philosophies, if not the fullness of truth. It was only when I encountered the writings of C.S. Lewis and read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time that I came to see that beneath it all, this is a Christian world we’re living in.
To move from the ways of the world to the ways of faith requires community, as it’s too difficult a road to walk alone”
To my understanding, at least one of the functions of art is to bring beauty, truth and goodness together in a particularly clear picture, and this is what I found in reading The Lord of the Rings. Both the books and the films are universally loved, and I have come to suspect that that is because they speak to genuine longings of the human heart. The themes of good’s triumph over evil, adventure, friendship and perseverance have pulled at people from many different cultures over many years because it’s in our composition to desire these spiritual goods. While Tolkien was adamant that it was not to be read as an allegory of Catholicism, Catholicism was nevertheless deeply applicable to it.
Art often reminds us of what it is that we ought to be desiring, distracted as we so often are by the many mundanities of day to day living. It was only in encountering this beautiful picture in conjunction with C.S. Lewis’ writings that I came to see how the desires of our heart were not childish fantasies, but signposts orienting us heavenwards.
Lewis famously wrote, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world”. No matter the art we encounter or the experiences we have on this earth, our desire for fulfilment remains unquenched. Rather than dismiss this as fantasy as once I did, Lewis helped me to see that Christianity is a compelling explanation for why those desires exist. What’s more, he did so in an entirely intellectually rigorous way, with his books Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy and Miracles composed by a man at the height of his academic prowess.
I had opened up to religion and philosophy considerably in the previous years, but I still held out on Christianity until I encountered his writings. I found it very difficult to believe that the answer to the quest for total meaning and ultimate purpose was to be found right under my nose, in the church down the road. I still associated Christianity with the past, and it wasn’t until I stumbled into the company of young, engaged Catholics in college that I realised the Church was alive and moving in the world.
Atheism
It’s easy to get over atheism intellectually – as Lewis wrote in his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading”. It’s another thing altogether to get over it in practice. To move from the ways of the world to the ways of faith requires community, as it’s too difficult a road to walk alone. Having read and thought for the past number of years, I consciously returned to God, but it wasn’t until I met others doing the same that I practiced what had been preached to me.
A relationship with God is not a superfluous element to be added onto a comfortable life – he is the only foundation upon which life can be built”
My entry to the Catholic community was a baptism by fire, returning to Mass as the 2018 referendum campaign groaned to life properly. On the one hand, I was continuously plied by the internet, by the TV and radio, by print, and by society to understand that there was only one compassionate choice: to vote yes to repeal the 8th amendment. On the other hand, I saw the joyful and hopeful faces of the young Catholics canvassing on behalf of the unborn, even as they received insults and abuse on Grafton Street from every quarter. It was in the example of those around me that I first experienced the “peace of God, which passes all understanding”. Christ said, “not as the world gives, do I give to you”, and so it was. Through the reading, I found that Christianity was intellectually solid; through the community, I found that it was real.
Since then, I have continued to be amazed at the difference between life in communion with God and life without. Again, as Lewis said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else”. A relationship with God is not a superfluous element to be added onto a comfortable life – he is the only foundation upon which life can be built.
The English poet, theologian and religious writer Thomas Traherne said: “You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.” This is what God offers to each of us, and it’s little wonder we’re satisfied with nothing less.
Most of the Faithful, myself included, have few practical answers to give to the question of how to right many of the wrongs ravaging the world at the moment, or how to ameliorate the discontent that seems to multiply with each recent generation. The solution is not necessarily, as some claim today, a simple return to tradition: much of that was abandoned for a reason, whether rightly or wrongly. The clamour for change heard around the world today and always is really a search for happiness, and the fact that recent history is so reviled should guide the answers we give.
Meister Eckhart
The German theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart understood that what often appears like a backwards step in the spiritual life, whether on the global or the individual stage, can often be a prelude to the shattering of an idol. If a person appears dissatisfied with God or the teachings of the Church, it’s generally because they haven’t truly met him, as I hadn’t. My voice was once the part of the chorus that decried the Church as backwards and stunted, but I came to realise I had it wrong and my faith is stronger for it. If that happened for me, it can happen for another, and there’s no reason why their road will look as mine did.
Having done a year and a half of missionary work with the Catholic group, Pure in Heart, and now happily engaged, I see great cause for optimism regarding the Church’s prospects in Ireland. Just as I underwent some form of adolescent rebellion against God, so too is Ireland. I hope and pray that we can have the wisdom to avoid the easy tendency towards judgmentalism and condescension, without yielding on Christ or his Church, and bring the country home as lovingly as God did with me.