A Crisis of Meaning: Why am I here?

We are journeying through Lent on this path leading to the Cross and the Resurrection, that leads us to that union with God we call holiness. Speaking about Ash Wednesday and Lent, Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles wrote:

“We are living in times when many people have lost their ‘why.’ They no longer know the answer to basic questions. Why do we get up in the morning? What purpose are we living for?”

There is a crisis of meaning that has been spreading slowly over many years across our society. It expresses itself in many unlikely waysfrom rising suicide rates to epidemics of drug addiction to the growing numbers of people who say they feel alone and isolated.

This is the sad irony that lies at the heart of our secular, technological society. People are thirsting for God even as our thought leaderspoliticians and judges, scientists, entertainers, artists and educatorsall insist that we can build a progressive and prosperous society by living as if God does not exist and as if the human soul does not desire things that transcend material entertainments.

For me, the question of whycomes down to a question of who.We cannot answer why we are here or what we are living for unless we know who we are and what we are made for.

That is the one answer that our science, technology, and politicsall those things in our society that substitute for religioncannot give.

Of course, God is the great whoand holiness is the great why.

We need to recover this awareness that we are created by the holy and living God and that he creates us to be holy as he is holy and to love as he loves.

And this begins with understanding that holiness is the ordinary measure of what it means to follow Jesus.

In the Trappist monk Thomas Mertons conversion story, he tells of how when he decided to become a Catholic he told a friend, I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic.His friend responded, What you should say is that you want to be a saint.

The point is that holiness, to be a saint, is what God created us for.

This simple, beautiful fact, should be at the center of everything in the Churchour preaching, our Catholic schools and religious education, our work for justice, our sharing of the gospel with our neighbors.

This is the good news that we are called to proclaim in our timesthat we are made to be saints. That is the same thing as saying we were made for love.

[Venerable Madeleine Delbrêl, an atheist convert to the Faith who served the poor in 20th century Paris] described her conversion as falling in love with the living God. By reading and reflecting, I found God,she said. But by praying, I believed that God found me and that he is a living reality, and that we can love him in the same way we love a person.

Delbrêl discovered that holiness is our missiona message we deliver without words, that by our personal holiness we bring others to follow Jesus with us.

This is a discovery all of us need to renew, as we continue to follow Jesus, making our ordinary lives our place of holiness.

And let us ask God for the grace to make real progress on our path of holiness during these 40 days of Lent.

Holiness is not our work but Gods work in us. So, this Lent, let us allow him to do his work, by opening our hearts to him through our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving asking him to create in us a new heart, and a new desire to want only what he wants.

May our Blessed Mother Mary go with us and help us to follow the living God with living faith and to know that we are called to be saints. (Angelus News, “Our Place of Holiness,February 06, 2018).

Father John Waiss is the pastor of St. Mary of the Angels Church in Chicago, Illinois. He is also a member of Opus Dei, the prelature founded by St. Josemaria Escriva.