Day after day, we see that dismay, unfaithfulness, and crisis wait for us around every corner.
The way of faith has always been rough and difficult; in our day, the difficulties have increased. The more our mind gets rid of those divine explanations, the more our conscious life is gradually emptied of God’s presence.
Immediacy, efficiency, and speed are accepted as the criteria for life in our society. Today, under the influence of the psychological and sociological sciences, the criterion of subjectivity predominates. Those things that were “objective” ó truths of faith, moral norms, or ideals, for example ó have lost their reality and value, freely opening the doors to subjective and instinctive values. What is popular today is the emotional, the affective, and the spontaneous.
We don’t know what to do with silence. Consumer society has created a variety of industries to provide distraction and entertainment in order to save people from “loneliness” and their fear of emptiness.
Today’s man is in danger of falling into the existential void, the greatest misfortune, which often results in addiction to drugs and hallucinogens, as well as alcoholism.
Basically, any of these addictions is nothing more than an escape attempt, a prelude on a few occasions to suicide. Leakage from one vacuum to another vacuum.
This explains why this toxic dependence occurs preferentially among youth, because it is they, the young people, who experience the crumbling of traditional values more acutely, and remain in the open, without knowing in which direction to walk and what to do with their life.
The human being is a coherent mass of complementary powers: intellectual, instinctive, visual, auditory, affective, sexual, neurovegetative, endocrine power … together they manage to perform their specific function and all together they are satisfied… and you, however, you are dissatisfied, restless. You are an infinite well that infinite infinites can never fill. Only an infinite can fill an infinite pit. God.
In the manner of an artist who stamps his signature at the foot of an oil, so God, on the morning of creation, left his face marked in the intimate and ultimate depths of the human being.
God is not an abstract idea, a theory, not even theology. God is Someone, a person, and he is “known” with personal treatment, in Faith, in Love, in an intimacy in which words are not exchanged but interiorities.
We need peace to pacify the soul, calm nervousness and inner unity (overcome distractions, dryness, aridity …)
When the heart adjusts in God, the depth of man is populated with balance, order and stability.
God-is-Father. If God is all-powerful, He is also all-loving. By night, He watches over my sleep and, by day, He accompanies me wherever I go. When people complain saying “I am alone in the world,” the Father responds “Do not be afraid, for I am with you” (Is 41:10). When individuals lament, saying “No one loves me,” the Father answers “I love you” (Is 43:4). He is closer to me than my own shadow. He takes better care of me than the most loving mother. There is nowhere I can become lost, for wherever I go, He goes with me.
Excerpts from the books “Sensing your hidden presence” and “The Meaning of Life” by Fr. Ignacio Larrañaga.
