Month: August 2013

What Is Youth?

Anyone who knows me can acknowledge that I enjoy working with young people. I love them, and am very concerned about their well being. I love working with them because I enjoy their vigor for life, their tireless search for meaning in life, and their enthusiasm about discovering what the next day, week, month or year holds. The desire to look for meaning in life is analogous to the attempt to look for the meaning of a text; just as we want to know the meaning of a text through the author’s view, we refuse to accept life’s meaning without God in it. God is the author of life, and we want to know life’s meaning through His own eyes; that is a sign that we bear the stamp of God, His seal. I want to be part of your life, my dear young friends, because I want to accompany you in this exciting journey of finding that meaning.
With that being said, I want to dedicate the next few posts to them in the hope of addressing some of the issues they face daily in life. I hope these posts prove useful to their needs and help answer some of their questions.
Youth is not only a period of life that corresponds to a certain numbers of years, it is a time given by Providence to every person and given to him as a responsibility. During this time, every youth searches, like the young man in the gospel (Mark 10, 17-31), for answers to basic questions. No youth want to be like Ivan Ilych in Leo Tolstoy story who thought he could live life as if it has no meaning. No one wants to approach life as having no meaning like Meursault in A. Camus’ The Stranger to only face the cruelty of his mindset later. Youth is when we look for answers to our questions, and the meaning of life. It is when we look for God with our whole being. It is when we ask whether we can experience God’s existence. It is when we want to know why there is evil, or why people do bad things. It is a period where we have time to question why food, video games, time with friends, TV shows don’t satisfy our deepest longings. My dear fellow young friends, the fact you are asking these questions means that you are looking for something deeper. It means that you don’t want to settle for something shallow. You want answers and you want truth. Youth not only searches for the meaning of life but also for concrete way to go about living it. You want to try things and are very adventurous. It is my conviction that every mentor, parents, and pastors must be aware of these characteristics. They must learn how to identify them in young people.
Are these questions simply empty dreams that fade away as we become older? No! We were created for something great, for infinity. That fact does not erase with old age. As I have quoted multiple times from my favorite Saint Augustine, “our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you”. Because human beings are made in the image of God, we do this in a unique and special way. We reach out for love, joy and peace. So we can see how absurd it is to think that we can truly live by removing God from the picture! God is the source of life. To set God aside is to separate yourselves from that source and, inevitably, to deprive yourselves of fulfillment and joy. Without the Creator, the creature fades into nothingness. In the very asking of questions lie the search for God. Don’t settle for anything other than the truth.
If at every age of this life people desires to be his own person, to find love, during his youth he desires it even stronger. However, the desire to be one’s own person must not be understood as license to be anything without exception. It is the time to engage in discussion and learning to discover what it really means to be free. I guarantee that rationality and the grace of God are sufficient to lead you, dear young friends, to see that there is no freedom outside the Gospels. Unlike what many have said about you, my dear friend, I know that you are willing to be corrected. You want to be told yes or no and be explained the reasons behind it. You need guides, and you need it close at hand. That’s why you turn to authority figures as a search for human warmth and a willingness to walk along the right path. Listen to those wiser than you.
So, if there is a problem of youth as many have argued, it is profoundly personal. In life, youth is when we come to know ourselves. It’s a time we are deeply hunger for communion. It’s a time we come to realize that life has meaning only when we come to freely give ourselves as a gift. That is the origin of all vocation— priesthood, married life or a career. However, many young people are not seeing that today. Utilitarianism ad hedonism are in the forefront of all newspapers and every internet page. They have very few good examples to live by. So the deeper problem is an adult problem rather a youth problem. It is time when adults need to step up to build a better future generation.

For this reason, dear young friends, I encourage you to strengthen your faith in God. You are the future of society! During this beautiful period of your life, I urge you to study hard and be passionate about the truth. Christ is the ultimate answer to the questions you are asking. He is the true love you are so much in love with. Make him the background of your search. Make Him your point of reference. Many people have no stable points of reference on which to build their lives, and so they end up deeply insecure. You don’t want to be one of them. There is a growing mentality of relativism, which holds that everything is equally valid, that truth and absolute points of reference do not exist. But this way of thinking does not lead to true freedom, but rather to instability, confusion and blind conformity to the fads of the moment. As young people, you need a solid point of reference to help you to make choices and upon which to build your lives. you need direction like a young plant that needs solid support until it can sink deep roots and become a sturdy tree capable of bearing fruit. Christ is that support. Don’t be afraid to entrust yourself to Christ. An important day in your young life, dear young friends, is the day on which you become convinced that Christ is the only friend who not disappoint you and on whom you can always count.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Dear Woman

I want to remind you that we are living in a time of crisis. I want to you to look at the family and see how broken it is. Each one of you knows a broken family due to divorce, infidelity, immaturity, lack of faith, and failure to dream.
Dear woman, you are my mother, sister, niece, god daughter, god mother, cousin, and friend. I love you and need you. When I am around you, you brighten my smile. You inspire me to dream big. I become a man because of you. You make me live my manhood more completely. You have educated me, raised me, carried me, inspired me, and wiped my tears. Thank you. The moon, the sun, and all the stars in all their surpassing beauty do not come close to your beauty. You are the most beautiful phenomena that God has ever created. You know how to console better than any other creature. You know what soothes and satiates my deepest anger and hunger. Of your own, you are a wonder. I want you to know how important you are in my life. In my sorrows, the kindness and sweetness of your voice change my sadness into joy. To you I turn for love, friendship, companionship, motivation, faith, and wisdom. I hope this gives you a glimpse into what you mean to me.
Dear woman, the world needs you right now. Just as God turned to a woman after the Fall to bring about redemption, the world needs you to put its train back on the right track. I must admit that due to a lack of focus on your value, you have taken your eyes off the right path. The world needs you right now. The world needs you to show its daughters how to grow to become women respected by all. The world needs you to educate its boys how to treat and look at women. The world needs your deep motherly love for family and desire to build a world founded on love, truth, peace, and justice to fix our broken society. The world needs your concern for values to teach its young women what it means to be mother. The world needs you to tell its young men how to be a man. The world needs your genius. Please come back; we are perishing in this valley of tears. If we ever did something that hurt you, we want to pay four times more. All we want is you. We will do whatever it takes to have you back. We cannot afford continuing on this path without you.
Dear woman, you are the only who has the power to rebuild my broken life. Even if a man has everything he needs, without you he is like broken Frigidaire. These and many other concerns tell me that you have the solution to my problem.
Dear woman, do I have to make an argument to convince you? If arguments ever mean, yes I will make one. When humanity was standing at the threshold of life and death, when humankind was galloping toward its bitter destiny, when the world was facing the greatest crisis it had ever known, it was to you that God turned to save us and you have not failed us. Though Pilate, Annas and Caiaphas found no reason to condemn Jesus, they did not have the courage to go against the current. However, veronica did not fear the soldiers to wipe the face of the world’s savior. Pilate’s wife did not fear the fury of court officials to tell her husband that the man is innocent, so have nothing to do with his death. Was it not to a woman the greatest news in history has been announced? We need your genius because we have failed. You have the secret of this dark hour. So to you, we want to entrust it. We, man, have been governing the world, but it keeps on collapsing. Our strongest qualities are evaporating. Reason is gradually being abdicated. As philosophy no longer seeks truth, as psychology is concerned more and more with cavernous instincts of the subterranean libido, as right and wrong are decided by pool numbers, as democracy is no more about arithmocracy, we need your genius to stop this train wreck.
Dear woman, do you see how much I need you? Thank you for listening.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

What It Means to Be Human

The human being is the most complex and fascinating phenomenon ever created. All people of knowledge from philosophers, to scientists, sociologists etc. have attempted to come up with propositions capable of summarizing the human being. Some have provided propositions that destroy the very dignity of the human person. Others have come up with more or less acceptable view. I call their view acceptable because they have sustained the test of time and debates in the philosophical arena.
Here, I want to consider Aristotle’s view of the human person, which deals with basics of what a human being is, but lacks what makes us great; and I want to express one of the elements that make us stand apart from all other beings.
In the De Anima, Aristotle argues that the human person is a composite of body and soul. For him, the body cannot be separated from the soul in the same way form cannot be separated from matter. The soul, as he conceives it, is the substantial form of the body; by this, he means that it needs the body for its subsistence, but it is not a body. It is what makes a human being a human being in the same way the ability to cut is what makes an axe an axe, sight is what makes an eye an eye, so the soul is makes a human being what he/she is.
It is noteworthy to mention that the telos of Aristotle in studying the soul is not because he believes that it has some value beyond this life; he is studying it because he believes that it is something fascinating as any philosophical concept. Knowing what something is tells us what it can do. As a result, he defines it as the first actuality of a natural body that potentially has life.
Due to this understanding, he maintains that anything that has life has also a soul. So plants have nutritive soul- meaning the can take in food and so grow; animals have perceptive/sensitive soul, which means that they can do what plants do, and they can also sense and reproduce. Human beings, according to his view, have a rational/intellective soul which is unique to them. Humans have the capacity to do what both plants and animals do, but more importantly, he/she has the capacity to reason. Due to that capacity, human can strive toward a higher telos (end).
How does the body communicate with each other as we observe it? Unlike most thinkers, Aristotle differs between the mind and the soul. The mind is part of the body and so is a physical thing while the soul is an immaterial, non spatial thing that acts in a physical thing (the mind). So the soul interacts with the body by means of the mind. The soul acts on the mind which acts on the body, but it is unaffected by it and has nothing in common with the body. So when the body is deteriorated, the soul remains intact. The soul never gets tired doing what it does. If the mind can be weary thinking, if the body gets tired daily, the soul can never be tired exercising its activity.
A concept that Aristotle was probably never interested in, but which interests me greatly, is that the human person originates from love, by means of love, to become love, and ultimately return to love. As such, he is the only being capable of selflessly giving himself as a gift of love. Actually, love is the only requirement that a person asks of others. We are just to a person if we love him/her. This is true for God as well as human. Love, for a person, excludes the idea that he/she is being treated as object of pleasure. Here, I think Kant would strongly agree with me since he maintains that a person must always be treated as an end in his Categorical Imperative.
Thus, the way we manifest our humanity, the way we echo our identity is when we let love blossom selflessly. It’s in selfless love that we become fully human. As a consequence of this behavior and understanding, before we do anything, we must always question whether or not that elevates the human person to love more deeply and so allows him/her to flourish as a person of dignity. Moreover, the capacity to offer ourselves as a gift of love when we fully know what that involves is a testimony that we are unique and was intentionally given that capacity. It is a witness that we were created as an intrinsic end for a particular purpose. As a result, we must live in a way that bears witness to that. We are truly human when we avoid engaging in what compromises the purpose for which we were made.
So to be human means to be constantly giving ourselves as a selfless gift. In fact, every move we make in life, our cravings, restless effort to succeed, search for friendship, bonding, conviviality, and striving to know the truth and the good are done for the sake of love. Entrust your self to selfless love so we can attain the depth of human existence. Know this. That love you are seeking, the love you have a right to enjoy and should selflessly die for has a name and a face— Jesus of Nazareth who died on the cross to give meaning to your life and purpose to your endeavors.

2 CommentsLeave a comment