Love in an Age of Loneliness

     A while back, I realized/decided that the dogmas and doctrines and traditions professed by the Catholic Church indeed held the fullness of truth they’ve claimed to have for the past two thousand years, and, imbued with what could be nothing less than the grace of God, I took a leap of faith into the metaphorical darkness beyond the light of reason*. Fast forward to now, where all the evidence would say, would scream, that this was the stupidest decision I ever could have made (although it’s not like there were, other, equally valid choices), because on top of all the confusion and uncertainty and hormones of the life of an 18 year old, I don’t think I have ever been more lonely. 

I am lonely.

     Which isn’t to say that I’m alone, because I’m not. I think I’m just beginning to appreciate the irreplaceable value of true, authentic friendship; over the last six months I’ve had the thrilling experience of forging friendships that will stand the test of time, for no other reason than they find root in Christ, the everlasting man himself. I know I am not alone because faith by its very nature is plural; I can only say “I believe” at Mass because I am part of a we; and because I am part of this Body, I can never be alone. We are one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. And yet...

I am lonely. 

     And this isn’t to accuse and slander a situation that comes as a natural part in the cycle of having faith. As many of our greatest saints have shown us, spiritual desolation is a part, sometimes seemingly, in Blessed Mother Theresa’s case, the only part, of our journey towards God. As C. S. Lewis points out, these are the fires that forge us into Satan’s most fearsome opponents. “Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” Yet I do not feel as though God has abandoned me, so my loneliness must stem from some other source.

I am lonely.

     It’s because I have faith that I am lonely, because to have faith means to believe, it means that I “substituted ‘credo’ for ‘cogito’ in the time honored Cartesian maxim (cogito ergo sum/I think therefore I am).” I believe therefore I am. It isn’t the act of thinking alone anymore that can satiate the proof of my existence, it is only through belief that I can continue to exist. I think the converse makes what I am trying to say more clear; without belief I would cease to exist. I am, in a very literal sense, a man of faith. And as a man of faith,

I am lonely

      A man whose faith defines his very being “looks upon himself as a stranger in modern society which is technically minded, self-centered, and self-loving, almost in a sickly narcissistic fashion, scoring honor upon honor, piling up victory upon victory, reaching for the distant galaxies, and seeing in the here-and-now sensible world the only manifestation of being.” I am lonely because suddenly it seems as though I can find no home in the communities that I live in and am a part of. My faith presents to me a complete history of the universe and a comprehensive portrait of the human person, the work he produces, the relationships he builds, and yet in academia I am banished, forbidden from offering my claims as a valid form of systematic knowledge. It places upon my shoulders a beautifully intricate and threefold mission of worship, service, and evangelization, and yet on the square I am chained to rigid ideologies that reduce complexity of my beliefs to labels that long ago lost any semblance of substantive meaning. The lenses it provides show me an enchanted world where the beauty of the divine becomes visibly tangible in all things and yet the scope of my questions is circumscribed to one much narrower than my Catholic range of wonder. 

     It would be so easy, given the situation, to climb to the top of my ivory pillar and join the ranks of the many others who proclaim to the uncaring masses that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. As if that would do anything to cure the loneliness, because it won’t. And here I’ve gotten to the point where I admit that there is most likely no cure. Because if faith causes loneliness and to relinquish my faith is nothing short of suicidal, then indeed there is no escaping it. So the question then becomes do I have the character and the stamina to continue like this for the rest of my life?

I certainly hope so, and I plan to hold on to that hope with all I have. 

     In becoming a man of faith, I changed. I became acutely aware of my own loneliness, but at the same time, I became, I had to become, in the words of Pope Francis “radically open to a love that precedes [me], a love that transforms [me] from within, acting in [me] and through [me]." God is many things, He is beauty and truth, goodness and reason, and perhaps above all (in an all encompassing way, I think) God is love. 

     “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair,” and once one accepts Catholicism, they have no choice but to fall in love, because that is the very core of Catholicism. It's the centrality of what God has revealed to from the beginning of humanity to the point that he sent his only son so that we might not perish but have eternal life. That was John 3:16, arguably the most important verse of the entire Bible, for reasons that are enormous enough to turn my loathsome weight existential angst into nought but a single hair on the back of a lion. 

     This verse can be said in another way, in a quote from St. Athanasius: "The Son of God became man so that we might become God" (or like God, to avoid sounding heretical, but that's unimportant). So what does that mean? First one must acknowledge that humanity is wracked by sin and in desperate need of saving, which, given the readership of this blog, I don’t think I need to convince you of. We need saving, and that has happened through Christ becoming man and dying on the cross, and it is this “option” that God used that makes His love so perfect. God is all powerful, omnipotent, and He could have very easily just willed humanity to be saved. 

     But He didn’t, the fortunate fall, the necessary sin of Adam, merited not a single willing from God, but a glorious Redeemer, and this is why the implications of John 3:16 are so, in a word, awesome.

     “If God, the great ‘I AM’; he who is love, reason, beauty, Truth, and goodness himself, became human, then what it means to be human has been transformed forever. God has entered into what it means to be human, and thus transfigures humanity itself into divinity; his radical action effects a radical transfiguration that can have no parallel.

     If God suffered, then it means that suffering is not meaningless. If God himself died, then he transforms what death is. Christ's passion means that love itself has entered into the innermost sphere of our humanity, and that thus when we suffer, when we cry, when we are victimized, and when we are alone, it is not in vain; God is with us in the depth and profundity of our suffering and in the senselessness of death, and by entering into the innermost sphere of our human condition transfigures the human experience into something divine.

     Christ's death expresses nothing less than the following sentiment: ‘I am with you, I am here for you, and I love you.’ There could have been no better way for God to express his love to us than entering into solidarity with the great miseries of the human condition and thus rendering our lives, even at their most senseless moments, intelligible and meaningful. God could have saved us another way, but by saving us in the way he did demonstrated the totality of his love and revealed to us his very nature.”

Love; it will not betray you
Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be

There is a design, an alignment to cry
Of my heart to see,
The beauty of love as it was made to be

     Perhaps I am lonely, but who the hell cares because I’m at the receiving end of the greatest force in the all of existence itself! God loves me so what does anything else matter! Rejoice and be glad, sing all ye choirs of angels and go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere because today, a greater Christmas present than you could even think of has been delivered to the world! I can’t think of any other way to express how happy I am right now other than singing every single song I know at once, so instead, I’ll just wish you a very Merry Christmas.

Now why don’t we go change the world.

P.S. I didn’t write the stuff in quotes

*The interplay between faith and reason is one that I don't fell fully qualified to talk about. I think the simultaneous ability to know God through reason and to never be able to understand Him is one of the great paradoxes of Catholicism, so I just want to establish the delicacy and strangeness of this situation.