It is a truth universally acknowledged that a college
student in the face of looming deadlines must be in possession of an
existential crisis. (Or at least, I hope it isn’t just me.) It occurred to me
the other day how my panic attacks and general existential crises had been
accumulating in frequency more and more since I returned to Law school for the
second semester of my first year- that “life had not mirrored her spirit back
to her with its old, perfect, sparkling clearness” (Anne of the Island). And there is no set way to get this clarity of
mind back. I guess the image I had in my head was that of a rubber ball, and
wondering why I wasn’t bouncing back as quickly as I used to be able to, until
I realized that a more appropriate image would be a bunch of rubber bands that
had gotten so tied up together that they couldn’t bounce back unless they were
untangled. I needed to untangle the many worries I had in my mind, before I
could set my mind at rest and move on.
It usually helps to look at the bigger picture, and
that’s when I got my first epiphany. Being someone who very much looks to books
and movies for life advice and kind of charting the way my life is going, it
took me a while to realize this, but somewhere along the way it stopped being
me looking ahead to fiction to see how things were supposed to pan out, but
rather me looking sideways to fiction. Fiction began to run parallel to my
life, instead of the runner in front of you whose number tag you focus on to
keep your feet steady. I was so used to the groove of holding fiction as an
ideal for my own life; I held its characters on pedestals, and felt like
adulthood could only be achieved through stepping over a magical,
indeterminable, inextricable threshold of age. I couldn’t see it coming, but I
would definitely know when I had crossed it, and I definitely hadn’t.
But I suddenly realized that when my life started to
echo the questions I saw in books and movies, when fiction wasn’t so fictitious
anymore, when I started having my own questions that didn’t have so direct an
answer –or any at all- I realized that all these struggles- all this thinking-
is a sign that we are at that magical age betwixt youth and old age. Taylor
Swift got it right when she said “we’re happy, free, confused, and lonely at
the same time/ it’s miserable and magical”. This is what songs are written
about. This is what books are written about. This is what films are made about.
We’ve reached. We’re here.
And what do we do now?
It takes a lot to find liberation in this confusion. A
couple of days ago, I was telling my mum quite frankly that I didn’t like who I
was becoming in Law school. I felt like I was losing the discipline, and the
generosity, to love. I felt like, when given “the choice between what is right,
and what is easy” (Harry Potter and the
Goblet of Fire), I had, too many times, chosen what was easy. And that was
to give in to a life that was mediocre and ordinary, which was only scratching
the surface in terms of the depth and wealth of significance that life has to
offer. I felt like I had failed the little girl in me, who at 7 thought that 20
was just such a magical grown-up number at which I would of course have my life
figured out. At 7, I probably did not imagine that it was possible 20-year-old
me would be stumbling.
To this colossal sense of failure, my mum smiled (and
possibly laughed internally, though more out of commiseration than scorn). “That’s
growing up,” she said.
But what does growing up mean? I always thought there
was just one step between being a kid and being an adult, but now it seems it’s
more of an ocean. More importantly, what does growing up in God mean?
I think our sense of failure is based on that mind-set
of viewing life on rigid scales instead of as a very indeterminate ocean, but
once we let go of that mind-set, it becomes a lot easier to live in Christ.
During one of his Lenten addresses, Pope Francis said something that really stuck
with me: “The Lord never tires of forgiving. We are the ones who tire of asking
forgiveness.” Past redefining the word ‘failure’, it’s time to chuck it out of
our vocabulary. I think it’s very dangerous when we scale life down to a kind
of list where we just check in the
boxes. God’s view of our life is so much more than that. “Perhaps this is the
moment for which you have been created” (Esther 4:14), and God is not waiting
for you to reach a certain checkbox on the list. He is with you every uncertain
step of the way.
Therefore, I think it’s time to think of life more as
a long journey in which we constantly strive for God’s image. Failure implies that
one day, we are going to succeed. But it’s just like that earlier image of
growing up, that one day we’re not and one day we just magically are. There
is never going to be a day in which we wake up magically perfect in God’s
image. The whole point of Lent, as this rather illuminating article suggests,
is that we are never enough. The point of making sacrifices in our lives is not
so much that after we are done, we’re on the next level (and therefore, if we
somehow tripped up in our Lenten sacrifices, it’s not so much a fatal step
backwards to Hell and doom). The whole point of Lent is that we will only be
enough with God, when we recognize that we are smaller than Him, and can only
be made whole with His hand. Our only greatness is in His greatness. As Mother
Teresa said, “He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that
you believe much more in His love than in your own weakness.”
It is quite easy to acknowledge that it’s “the end of
the day” that matters. When we are caught up in results and deadlines, it is
easy to escape stress by consoling yourself that it’s God who matters. But that
can sometimes fall into the trap of creating a dichotomy, between following the
rat race and following God. It’s a bit like that “Sunday Catholic” phenomenon-
you’re only a Catholic when you go to Mass on Sundays. But once you leave the
Church physically, you snap back into your “other” identity. Grace, Law
student; or Grace, ballet dancer. We need to translate this acknowledgment into
our daily lives. Our identity as a child of God can and should be assimilated
wholly into our “other”, secular identities as students, workers, siblings,
daughters, and friends. After all, it is for this that you were created.
“How on earth do those people make the time to love?”
one of my friends said today. ‘Those people’ refer to the same people this article referenced: those incandescently good people who seem to have life
figured out, and life, for them, is radiating that joy and that goodness.
Again, there’s that sense of the step dichotomy: that one day you’re just
ordinary, and the next day you climb a step and you’re there. But I think the
answer is that love is not something you make time for. Love –and the
generosity of love- is a habit.
Part of my moral crisis was the sense that as I grow
up, love becomes more of a choice than an instinct. It pains me to have to make
the choice. There are people who are going to frustrate you, hurt you, but as
the Lord’s Prayer goes, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” While it is true that the
childlike mind chooses love so easily it’s not even like a choice, it is not
necessarily fatal to our identity as a child of God if we recognize how
difficult this choice really is. Rather, it reinforces the strength of our
eventual decision to love as He loved us. Someone wise (I forget who) said that
we don’t have to like people, we just have to love them.
Shailene Woodley in her acceptance speech for Best Female Performance at the recently concluded 2015 MTV Movie Awards thanked the
author John Green for “wearing integrity and compassion on your sleeve”. And
while this shouldn’t be such a novel thing (pardon the pun) as to warrant
mention in an awards acceptance speech, it is. Being kind and loving does take courage, because it’s not what
everyone does. It’s not what is commonly prioritized today. It’s not easy.
Going back to how to concretely translate the concept
of “glorifying the Lord by your life” into your daily life, I think the answer
is in how you measure the success of a day. Again, the idea of success (and,
therefore, failure)! But again, this is not a yes-no dichotomy. The ocean of
love is an infinite scale. And I think the best measure of how a day has gone
is in how you have reflected God in your dealings with others, and in your
life. How happy have you made others? How much love have you given- and given
freely? One of my favourite hymns (and I have many) goes, “Freely, freely you
have received- freely, freely give/ Go in my name, and because you believe,
others will know that I live.”
God lives. God has arisen. And it is up to us to reflect that joy in our everyday choices. “Rejoice always. Pray constantly.
Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus
for you.” (1 Thess 5: 16-18) There is so much we don’t know. There is a
plethora of uncertainty. But the liberation in our confusion is the knowledge
that God has planned for it all. You are
so small in His sure and wondrous hand- rejoice, and trust!
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