Discernment is the most difficult task we are often faced with and not for those trying to decide between the priesthood and marriage. Discernment in your everyday life that will guide you in applying your deepest convictions to the decisions you must make both big and small. The uncomfortable is not picking up your phone in a moment of awkward silence or boredom. The uncomfortable is picking up a book rather than the remote. The uncomfortable is making eye contact and seeing the person next to rather than simply looking. The uncomfortable is walking in a world full of cars etc, etc. It seems to me the job of the Christian or the individual who desires a life worth living is to find the uncomfortable in a world that equates purpose to being content.
This idea of death to the world means to detach from all that is not Truth Himself. “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” When we lack the vantage point in our lives that is the Cross, we often find ourselves doing and trying all of that which is most attainable, forgetting that “the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many.” See because no matter how much we try to squeeze all of the juice out of this world, it will never quench the thirst we seek. “Life cannot be imbued with meaning simply by attempting to live it intensely.” The grasp at the easily attainable is a grasp at living the radical way we are all called to. The easily attainable isn’t always intense desires of the flesh but is in the way we see, walk, acknowledge, drive, purchase, consume, watch, listen, etc. Oftentimes as Christians we get to hide behind some of these quotes, philosophies and scripture passages thinking that we are never the Pharisees Jesus is rebuking. Understand that death to the world is death to comfort, death to ourselves, death to the easily attainable, death to the wide road. If you want to experience a life worth living there is no other option than doing so radically different from those around you. “Christ is the only exit from this world. All other exits - sexual rapture, political utopia, economic independence - are but blind alleys in which rot the corpses of the many who have tried them...”
November 30, 2023