SANDRA A. HAM | OCTOBER 16, 2024
The modern world is brutal today. Although we have been trying for several hundred years to bring about the human-directed evolution of humanity for human flourishing, today, further attempts at evolving ourselves often do just the opposite. We have lost our sense of purpose for human life. Nor do we know what is real, authentic, and stable amidst the fluid, artificial, and virtual realities. It is easy to feel disillusioned, alienated from this world. This leaves many anxious, depressed, and listless. Since the sciences that give us our “evolved” state of being cannot offer an explanation for why we exist, most of us are challenged to find meaning in our lives.
This was not always the case. Christians believe that God created the entire universe, including humanity. According to the story of creation in Genesis 1, the universe was “good” until humanity was created—making the universe “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Therefore, we know that God must have intended for us to play important roles in managing our world so that it flourishes over the long term.
Christians believe that God created each person for a purpose. Well, several purposes. At the most general level, we are “to love and serve God.” More specifically, each of us is endowed with a set of gifts and talents to use for our individual purposes. Science tells us a lot about the diversity of our valuable gifts: neuro-divergences (perceiving the world differently in many ways), differences in bodies, in extroversion and introversion, in how we relate to other people, and in the degree of concern about our own growth and perfection. Unfortunately, the “world” defines an “ideal” person narrowly and challenges all of us to fit into that ideal mold. But for many, it is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Because of our great diversity of gifts, we don’t fit into the world very well. The cost is often our mental health and happiness.
As Catholics, we regard our diversity differently. Instead of trying to all be the same, we believe that God gave each of us our lives and our gifts and talents for particular purposes—thereby making the world “very good.” We are supposed to develop them through education and exercise, and use them in the world in ways that act on behalf of God, doing his will to make the world what He wants it to be. This is one historically accurate way of understanding how we are made in God's "image"—we are his agents—his hands, feet, and voices in the world. Here is our purpose for having been born at all.
This is a fundamental belief of our faith. In the Ordinariate, we might say this is a kind of our "unity in diversity"—a key value of the Ordinariates. Another way that Catholics talk about it is that we are the Body of Christ, with Christ as the head and we are his members. St. Paul gives us an example of how this works. He says that an eye and a hand are both members of this body. They have equal value, and both are needed. Further, the eye needs to be satisfied to be a good eye, rather than trying to be a hand, and the hand needs to be satisfied to be a good hand, and not want to be an eye (1 Corinthians 12). Since God knows and we know that the world needs a diversity of human gifts and mature human persons in order for it to thrive, Christians do not share the secular discomfort about the existence of the actual diversity in humanity.
Did you ever wonder why cats love boxes? Have you ever wished your life could be as easy as hanging out in a box? Well, human life was more like a cat’s in several ways before we developed the aspiration to evolve ourselves.
Cats love boxes because they provide the means for a comfortable life. First, they provide security, making cats feel sheltered, safe and protected. They also provide a place to hide when they want to be alone. Boxes provide warmth and comfort, which help cats maintain comfortable body temperature. They also are fun during playtime. Cats can play hide-and-seek in boxes, or find things to chew or attack. Boxes are also great fun when cats look for secret treasure. "Is the treasure in here?" Finally, boxes help cats to cope when something in their environment changes, supporting their recovery and adaptation to their new situation.
We can think of a healthy human life as being like a box, and we are the cats who might love our individual boxes. Let’s consider the walls of our boxes.
We each have ways in which we innately feel that we should live in the world, with all of our particular, unchangeable, ease and limits to how we use our bodies, minds, and souls. Given our knowledge of our own individual gifts and temperaments, we can identify a short list of things we want to pursue with deep interest and invest a lot of time into them. This is the foundation of our becoming mature persons that God intended us to become. But this can go wrong early on when the people around us—our parents and teachers—either do not recognize our gifts and temperaments or they do not teach us how to develop them. Or worse, they might push us to fit into the world's narrow mold when we truly don't fit. This is where we might need the freedom to identify ourselves as different from the world’s ideal person, and ask for appropriate teachers to help us develop as we were meant to be.
Another wall of our box is the talent or set of talents that God intended us to develop during our lifetimes, usually as teenagers and young adults so that we can use them for the rest of our adult lives. Our talents and skills are appropriate for our individual capacity as a person. To be sure, we might need to stretch ourselves along the way in order to develop them, but God knows what we are capable of, even better than we ourselves do. Once we have discovered God’s intended talents and skills, we have our box to live within for the rest of our lives. We do not need to follow the world’s trends, which sometimes feels like being carried in a hurricane wind with no rest to hope for.
For thousands of years, it has been known that an essential characteristic of human nature is that we all want to do good with our lives. Problems arise because although there is one overarching desire, there are as many specific definitions of “good” as there are people. The world today does not help us resolve this problem. For example, a person might desire to do good, but since each person defines “the good” for themselves, there is always a question about whether my good is truly good? Or, am I gravely mistaken, living a lie, and actually doing bad things with my life? Instead of setting us up for a purposeful, satisfying life, living with this uncertainty can be maddening!
Christians, including Catholics, view it differently. In general, we can resolve the problem by classifying “the good” as, on the one hand, that which God desires and is according to God’s plan, and on the other hand, that which follows human desires is apart from God’s will is bad or evil. One aspect of this solution that God’s Grand Plan can always be trusted to be Good. However, we know from experience at St. Alban’s, that God’s Good is not always comfortable for us. Nevertheless, we often see in hindsight traces of God’s Grand Plan, and agree that it was good for us. We know that growth through life requires times of pain and suffering, even for the faithful. If we are never tested as silver is purified by fire, we know that we do not grow. And so we patiently accept our trials from God because we trust that they are somehow in God’s Grand Plan, which we absolutely want to support!
Another aspect of our resolution for the problem of “the good” is to be found in Christianity’s set of virtues that we know are always good. With exercise of these virtues, our minds and our moral characters are transformed. We eventually become what we practice. As we exercise the virtues in our lives over decades of living, we become virtuous by nature, and we know that we are truly good. We know the risk of being bad or evil. Faith works the same way, and is one of the Christian virtues. Thus, the Christian moral guidelines are another wall of our box.
When we think of human life as a sequence of stages that we progress through from birth to death, we gain more certainty about whether our lives are important or not, and whether we are living our lives well or not. The essential stages are birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, maturity, old age, and the afterlife. Another set of life stages is youth (time for education), adulthood (time for work and raising family), and old age (time for wisdom and giving back to next generations).
The sacraments mark the most important stages through Catholic life: baptism to start our lives on a trajectory for a good life in Christ, First Communion to be introduced to adult spiritual food that we can use for nourishment for the rest of our lives. Confirmation occurs as a passage to adulthood. Holy Matrimony is a passage from childhood into the new committed family that two people create for themselves and their heritage and communities. Holy Orders are the passage from secular life to a life lived wholly in the service of God as a priest, deacon, or in a religious order. Anointing of the sick helps us ask God for extra care and comfort in our times of greatest need. As Roman Catholics, we mark the times of our lives by the sacraments.
When we are just human bodies or social media avatars who exist in a river that flows with continual disruption or perpetual revolution toward some open-ended Utopia—gosh, it is so oppressive! So is living with technology that gives us all knowledge at our fingertips, but does not permit anyone to gain real expertise in anything. In contrast with the dehumanizing forces of the modern world, all of these parts of our box are given to us by God, intending that they are well within our capacity to learn, conquer, and master during our lifetimes. Yes, anyone, with some effort, can learn about themselves to understand their gifts, temperaments, talents, and develop and master the skills for doing God’s work throughout their adult lives. Anyone can learn the Christian virtues and exercise them over a lifetime to master being virtuous by one’s own nature. The Christian sacraments mark time for us, helping us to understand where we are in our life course and what we ought to be prioritizing and mastering. In this way, we can live in boxes that are perfectly suited for us, providing what we need when security, defenses, warmth, and comfort when they are needed. Our Christian boxes also provide places to play, things to be curious about and investigate, and skills for adaptation, especially for dealing with God-given changes in our lives. When we have total control over our small part of the world from mastering the relatively small set of tasks that God gives us to do, we can feel satisfied and fulfilled, knowing and succeeding in our purpose in life.
God the Father has a Grand Plan for the universe, ordering and governing the universe providentially for the greatest good for all. Although we cannot fathom God's knowledge and wisdom, we do not need to. He knows us more deeply than we know ourselves, giving each of us life so that we can participate in his Grand Plan for the greatest Good. As our perfect Father, he works through Divine Providence towards what he knows is the greatest good for all.
Roman Catholics enjoy easy access to thousands of spiritual helpers we can call upon any time through prayer. Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) modeled for us an important truth about our lives. Life is a paradox. He said that we must be transformed during our lifetimes: "For he that will save his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it" (Matthew 16:25). From this we know to expect life to include periods of providential pain and suffering because these are sometimes needed in order for us to grow into the complete, mature persons that God intends us to become.
Besides Christ, we have additional helpers. The Holy Spirit gives us life, communicating with us and guiding us providentially according to God’s Will and Wisdom for us. Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is in heaven, able to spiritually comfort us in times of difficulty as our most perfect mother. She can intercede for us with prayers to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Besides these four, there are thousands of Apostles, Saints, and Martyrs who lived holy lives over the past 2,000 years and died for God. They are available for conversation and intercession through prayers to them.
We know that “the world” does not like people to desire boxes to live in, but rather, to be radically free of all constraints and open to all kinds of change, no matter how unnatural. Today, however, civilization suffers from a pandemic of souls being unmoored and homeless—the consequences of the failure of the modern utopian project to make human life better. Rather, we suffer from epidemics of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and suicide, along with widespread senses of alienation and fatalism. For many, it is difficult to know why we were born at all, and what we ought to do with our lives. We see that the consequences of the human project of evolving ourselves are an unacceptably high cost. To push back and help ourselves, it is time to recognize that most humans really do, by human nature, need boxes just as cats do.
The Roman Catholic Church and its traditions offer boxes that we can hide and play in like cats. Our boxes are:
Box bottom: Our individual gifts and temperaments
Wall: Our talents, skills, and discoverable knowledge of our God-given purpose in life
Wall: Desire to do good
Wall: Faith and virtues
Wall: Life stages
Inside: Mastery of what is yours in life
Top: A heavenly host of spiritual helpers and Divine Providence.
When we are surrounded by these six sides of our Christian box, we can do all the same things that cats do in their boxes. We can feel sheltered, safe, and protected, and hide. We can be comfortable. We can play with and be entertained by what we find in the box with us (art, music, and literature). We can find plenty of things in the box to be curious about (mysteries, Scripture, faith, history, and theology). And, we can find strength and wisdom to help us recover from misfortunes and adapt to change. We call this box “God’s created order” because he intended for us to order our lives in these ways so that, by conforming our souls to our most basic created human nature, we can flourish during the life that God gives us.
Cats don’t spend all of their time in boxes and neither do we. Since our box is both spiritual and material, it works differently.
We can certainly spend time entirely in our box during prayer. Prayer is a fantastic time to reflect on all that God has wrought in us and what we have chosen to do with those gifts.
We can also take time to learn more about ourselves through self-reflection and journaling. Our knowledge of ourselves is not innate, but needs to develop over time as we grow, try new things, succeeding at some, failing at others. We also learn who we are by observing what we repeatedly return to, especially if there are no strong influences in our families, friends, and schools that push us in that direction.