new church life: november/december 2015
gratification: “Like so many other young people in various parts of the world,
you will be taught that changes must be made, that you must have more
freedom, that you should be different from your parents and that decisions
about your lives depend on you and you alone. You will hear people tell you
that your religious practices are hopelessly out of date, that they hamper your
style or your future, that with everything that social and scientific progress has
to offer, you will be able to organize your own lives and that God has played
out His role.”
He pleaded with them to shun the lures that draw them away from devotion
to their God, and not to look for the easy way out when they encounter failure
– that the only real peace and happiness comes with faith and a life according
to it.
It is easy to hold up the ideal, of course, but it quickly loses its appeal back
on the street, where the pressures of the world are often oppressive and it is so
much easier to escape than to fight. But escape is as transitory and as hopeless
as a heroin high. You have to come down. You can never really get away.
The pope offered an antidote: “Faced with problems and disappointments,
many people will try to escape from their responsibility: escape in selfishness,
escape in sexual pleasure, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical
attitudes. I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.”
Escapism is often self-justified as the exercise of freedom, when it is just
the opposite. Here too the pope offered a keen insight: “Everybody wants full
freedom in all areas of human behavior and new models of morality are being
proposed in the name of would-be freedom. When the moral fiber of a nation
is weakened, when the sense of personal responsibility is diminished, then the
door is open for the justification of injustices, for violence in all its forms, and
for the manipulation of the many by the few. The challenge that is already with
us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new
form of slavery.”
Our culture too blithely dismisses the distinction between freedom and
license, in spite of the inevitable unhappiness that license reaps. Freedom is a
paradox to those who do not understand it. It implies responsibility, charity to
the neighbor, and obedience to law – whether the natural laws of the highway,
or the spiritual laws of our choices and behavior. Those who attempt to live
by the Ten Commandments, to honor their faith and follow their God, are
essentially more free than those who confuse liberty with license and assume
it has no constrictions beyond personal whim.
Our freedom – as individuals, as a nation, and as a world – depends on
self-restraint rooted in principle, but that conviction is easily and increasingly
overlooked in our secular world. Our survival rests on foundations built more
on sand these days than upon a rock, so that the spiritual leadership of the
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