A few months ago, I
was having dinner with a few catholic friends of mine of the same very old goat
age on the verge of 24. We sat, three guys and three girls, at the table, and
were talking about life. The conversation drifted onto the topic of family and
children. The conversation (to the best of my memory) when something like this:
'No, I don't want to
get married and have kids so early!'
'yea, me too'
'but, why not?' (me,
the only stupid one in the group)
'I want to live my
life! I don't want to settle down so young.'
It’s true, my friends
do deserve to live their life. They just finished slaving for a very long
degree and should have a chance too, or so we in the field lie to ourselves
once school is over. That said, this is the prevalent mentality amongst so many
of my young friends these days. If you compared this to life eighty years ago,
the young people then who couldn’t wait to get married and have kids would be
scandalized, and then they would layeth the smacketh-down as only a world war
one veteran layeth. And then it would hurt.
It seems as though
life is now all about just career and money and living my life first. So, this raises some hairy questions. Why don’t
Catholic girls (and boys) want to get married young? What is this life that
they want to live? And, how did that woman from the ‘30s knock you out with one
punch?
What is this life they want to live?
The hairy question is
really what this ‘life’ is and is it worth living? Is it the working life,
fraught with many hair-raising corporate tales, all the while sitting in a
cubicle? Nope.
Is it making more
money then you know what to do with it finally filling your bathtub with ten
dollar bills just so you can pretend you’re swimming in dough? Nope.
Is it jet setting
across the world, thus draining the metaphorical bathtub of all that
metaphorical dough? Well…still nope.
 |
| Bathing in money will give you paper cuts and will make you feel icky. Try the Blood of Christ instead, washes away even the deepest hardest to reach sin. |
Sure, all these things
are great and you will be seemingly content for a short period of time until
you go back to your empty bathtub and return to your cubicle and have to start
writing patient discharge summaries again. Then you look in the mirror at that
old greyed figure, thinking about the drudgery of life and repeat the cycle,
jaded and empty and thinking about how you lost your childhood in the
university library.
Vocation
But there is help. You
see, there is only one life worth living, and that is the life that God has
planned for you. Every single one us has a vocation in life, and the journey’s
end is the same: REACH HEAVEN. That is the only thing that will make us happy,
to be with God in heaven, it is our destiny!
So huge an epiphany
was this that in writing his Confessions,
the doctor of the Church, St Augustine of Hippo wrote, ‘
Like that fluffy new-age analogy, there is
a ‘God-shaped’ hole in your heart that only God can fill. To take that a
Catholic step further, and it will only be completely filled in heaven, but
until then, the Lord in His omniscience and great mercy decided to that He
would give us respite from this insatiable loneliness that can only be filled
by Himself by giving us the religious life and Holy Matrimony. Some very
privileged souls are called to the religious life.
The majority of us are called to be married
and then help God to make more souls and populate heaven! How much more
exciting can that get!? Like OH MY BRONTOSAURUS, do you mean almighty God lets
me, poor, wretched, sinful ME, partake in HIS creation of a new soul?! You
should be excited too. Stop rolling your eyes at the screen. Let me explain.
Yes, yes, I know, it’s big news and you’re
wondering, does this guy even know what he’s talking about?! Hello! Earth to
David, babies are hard work, they whine, and poop, and cry and puke all over
the place, then live with you for 18 to 25 years (depending on the culture) and
spend the latter of half that trying to exclude you from their lives, while
still siphoning precious greenbacks from your wallet. How is that supposed to
make you happy?!
Let me explain.
 |
| That doesn't look so hard to raise. |
True
Living.
If, you believe that 1)we are all put into
this world by God to return to God, 2) and that God has a divine plan for us,
3) and that God is all and only good and wants therefore the best for us, then
you can only draw the conclusion that to live according to God’s given plan
will bring us the most joy.
Christ has already promised, ‘My yoke is
sweet and my burden easy’ (Matt 11:30). And what more can this very yoke be for
each of us, but our very vocations? We can be sure that work will have to be
done, and while dragging the plough, we will suffer from pain and
inconvenience, but Christ right there next to us helping us. He drags us bit by
bit to heaven. But, He can only do so if we have taken up His yoke, and
together with Him, we pull the plough.
Therefore, the faster that one fully
recognises what one’s vocation is, and works toward fulfilling it, then one
will truly find true joy with all of life. Thus St Laurence while on the grill
can quip to his executors, ‘this side is done, turn me over’ and Mother Teresa
can live in abject poverty looking after the poor.
Therefore, if it was planned that you live
in a house of screaming children, so that you may lead all of their beautiful
little souls into heaven, as a means of sanctifying yourself, then you will be
happy. I jest obviously, it’s not always a house of screaming kids, sometimes
the house is silent because it’s on fire and the screaming is outside, mostly
from the fire department. I’m really not sure how to explain this to you, so
just listen to what Jennifer Fulwiler has to say about career versus children: http://youtu.be/SNX0szzmekA?t=25m57s
Trust me, ask any mother or father whether it was worth having children and they will tell you, 'yes'.
The truth is, the path to eternal happiness
is the cross. It is about suffering, and suffering isn’t a bad thing. God lets
us suffer, so we are not longer attached to this world. In a weak narcissistic
age like us, that means to facebook, twitter, camwhoring, and technology. When
we no longer want the things of this world, we will want the things of heaven.
 |
| The Path to Heaven |
No comments:
Post a Comment