Young Man, Do You Want My Advice?

Lots of people who used to be boys have turned into bonafide grownups. These guys have degrees, and growing families, and professional accomplishments. And they still have all their hair!

Its inspiring to see the enthusiasm and dedication of the younger generation. Its a great thing, this energy. I remember the nexus of youthful energy and budding maturity. This is a great time of life.

Thank God for this life, young man. Spend it well, engage reality, build up the good. Be full of gratitude for each day, each moment, for your wife and your little children. Be engaged, but don't get lost in mere activism. Lift up your heart to God in prayer and ask Him to shape you into the person He wills you to be.

So you are turning 27, 28, 29 or even 30, and you think you are "old"? Ah well, you have reached an important mark in your maturity, but the coming years promise to be great and constructive steps in the formation of your own personality, and your development into someone who helps to form others, to pass on the experience of your own life to your children and their generation.

The next twenty-some years, God willing, will be constructive. But that does not mean they will be successful in the sense you may now imagine. I say this not to discourage you, but to assure you that you can live and endure many difficult things and still be enriched, and remain young at heart.

I don't know if I can give you "advice," my young friend. I hope you have your aspirations, love for your wife and family, and a strong commitment to your work. Make sure to be there for your kids as they grow up. And get ready to have some twists and turns--some adventures--over the next twenty-some years.

You have to test your strength, because that's how you learn its limits. I hope you will achieve some things, but I know that you will discover that the horizon of your own life is greater than anything you can reach.

Above all, be faithful to God. Things may get downright crazy. That's one thing that I know from the last  twenty-some years that are now behind me.

My experience shows that pieces may fall into place...and then fall apart! And then come together in a different way, and then there are new challenges.... It's God's plan for your life: follow it, or hang on to it, or crawl in the dark through it, or even get frustrated and say (pray) to God: "What kind of a plan is this? What's the deal here?" Just keep going. Stay with Him. Don't give up.

I hope you enjoy the fruits of your labor, but the seasons will vary, and there will be storms. My wife and I are both academics; we got married later than you (but going on 17 years ago) and still had five kids. I prayed, worked hard and established my career as a college professor, a writer, and an editor. I accomplished many goals. And I loved my work.

Then I got sick.

No matter how we may feel in advance, none of us are ready for a train wreck. We must trust in God, and that can be difficult. Trusting in God is a life-long learning process.

Sometimes you lose the career you love most. Its humiliating. Period. You've been flattened, and its not your fault. But its gonna be along time before you stop blaming. yourself. every. single. day.

And even if, like me, you get to keep your nice fancy professorial title, it doesn't help much, because you're disabled. That's that. You can't do what you want. You have to depend on other people. Humbling.

But God really is at work in you. Even if that brings ZERO consolation, its a fact. Never give up.

And you can't go through this alone. If you suffer, she suffers. But your marriage and family can be (and are meant to be) strengthened by these difficulties. New dimensions of marriage open up, and you both need to work hard, make sacrifices and forgive each other every day for a lot. But if you are faithful, you will discover that the sacramental bond is real, it is inter-personal, it is the grace of Christ's Spirit and it keeps you together, and it is a very tough thing. The sacrament of marriage is strong; it is built to last. You have to depend on it.

Spousal love means so many things that have never even entered your dreams. It will humble you. You will find that there is no place to be selfish in marriage, and this too is a life-long learning process.

Of course, when doors close, windows can open. My wife became a Montessori teacher, she loves it, and (of course) she's really good at it. The "death" of my "established career" ended up being the "birth" of hers. Our kids go to (or have been through) the school. I am well enough right now that I go to the office and help with the students and also do my own work (I refer to myself sometimes as "writer-in-residence" and other times as "interactive media consultant").

You may even surprise yourself by what you do, and where it leads you.

When I got sick, I did was was "natural" for me; I wrote about it. Some friends circulated some of what I wrote, and it eventually landed at a publisher who said, "can you give us more of this?" It ended up being a popular book, published in 2010, that continues to sell and seems to help a lot of people.

I had written academic things, and I had (still have) projects in the works. But I never planned to write a book like Never Give Up, and I almost didn't. It was slow, one step at a time, and "not my idea." I just had the sense that it was God's will, and I just took a step and then another and then another.

The irony is that the book is perhaps the most important work I have done in my life thus far. It turns out that God doesn't believe in "disability." But we have to do things His way.

And we don't know much about that "way". We don't know what's coming. We may all get dumped off the fiscal cliff. We may be washed away by a hurricane, or caught up in a war, or just pushed in new directions by the dramas of children and adolescents becoming young adults. We still have to "plan ahead" as best we can (that's human nature and human responsibility), but the grain is never safe in the bins.

The way this plays out in our circumstances is how God teaches us to trust in Him. But my words about this are not worth much. Trust is a relationship with God that must be lived. It is a relationship that you are able to live.

So live it. Trust God in everything that comes.

Here We Go Again?

Okay, it's time to say it: I'm not feeling well.

No, this is not the usual "ups and downs" I've been going through during this remission (which has lasted two years). No, it's not the flu either.

I know this disease. We're old friends. But, is this just a little bump? Or a flare-up? Or a relapse? I don't know. And, yes, I am worried. What can I do? Not much of anything, beyond what I already do.

I know there are always new ideas out there, and for some people they can help. But I've been to the whole circus. More than once. I've been on all the rides. And we've spent all of our money! Nothing has helped. My own little regimen, developed from experience, has worked better than anything (and its cheap too!)--so I'm gonna just ride this out.

First of all, I have to bring all of it, including my hopes, frustrations, fears, and even the anger and bitterness to Jesus, and give it to Him, and say "Jesus I trust in You. Have mercy on me!" I have to abandon myself to wherever He wants to lead me. Sometimes (really, most of the time) I have to pray, "Lord, give me the grace to want what you will for me."

Sometimes I don't want to pray. I don't feel like it. What I feel is something like, "Why did You create a universe, and then let the human race fall, and then throw me into this life with a brain and a body that don't work, and then just allow me to fail, fail, fail? What kind of a deal is this?"

I know, of course, that it's all about the mystery of the redemption, and the love of Jesus for the Father from the Cross which is greater than every sin, and is the deep truth about my own being and my suffering. There is a mystery here. It's transforming my life. But I am not always going to feel warm and fuzzy about it!

This is not a reason to get discouraged. Never give up! I must take this "feeling," this whole drag on my consciousness, and offer it to God. Somehow. Even if it's nothing more than the struggle to refuse to let discouragement take hold of my will. There is a mysterious kind of choice we can make in the midst of the most crushing desperation, which (I'm trying to describe it, but no terms are adequate) is to allow our being to keep praying. It's the choice not to snuff out that radical hope. Sometimes people (especially people with mental problems, which can make it impossible to think properly about anything) need to grab that place and just hold on.

Meanwhile, I can still write about these things, right here, for you. At a certain point, I wrote a book about all this (see the link on this blog). It's been going on for a long time, and it has drastically changed the life of my family, although I believe we have grown from it. But it's not easy. I'm sure your life is not easy either.

I think it builds solidarity when we share our sufferings with one another. One of the hardest things is that all suffering bears the taste of loneliness, of being misunderstood, abandoned, unloved. Jesus knows that "place" and He is with us there. He calls us to be there for one another.

I've Been a Christian For Years, But I'm Still So Selfish!!!

These days (when I'm not just goofing off and enjoying the summer with Eileen and the kids), I am working on the task of shaping certain themes from the reflections that have appeared on this site into into a more substantial and editorially polished presentation (i.e. a "book"). I am getting a good sense of the topics that I have developed consistently here over the past year and a half, and I have outlined various possible projects.

One theme that appears frequently in my meditations, and that manifests itself again and again in so many anecdotes from ordinary life, is the fundamental Christian vocation to charity.

I've written quite a bit about my experience of the struggle to love in a true, Christian way. It is the experience of being "converted" (slowly) from the tendency of selfishness to the cultivated dispositions of sincere self-giving. I feel very strongly my own need to be converted more fully, to be healed from a way of "loving" that is stunted by the ambivalence of my wounded humanity, by the reduction of persons to things, by the craving to amplify and assert my distorted perceptions of myself and others.

As I reflect on my own life, I discover many areas that are still formed by this kind of disoriented self-love, this selfish, grasping appetite that strives to subject reality and persons to my urges and impulses. But Christian life is a path of conversion from an egocentric posture to an ever deepening habit of authentic charity--an attitude of mind and heart that truly loves other persons for who they are, and for how Jesus makes Himself present to me through their own personal uniqueness.

I am working on developing this theme into a book.

Titles always develop and change, but my working title for this book is something like Learning to Love, or perhaps something eye-grabbing (?) like Why Am I Still So Selfish? The book is drawing together my reflections on life as a process of learning to give myself truly in love. The foundation of this life is the conviction and the ever deepening awareness that I am loved by Jesus. This awareness begins to free me from self-absorption and immaturity, and empowers me to give myself more and more profoundly to Jesus.

My Christian vocation takes concrete shape in Christ's call of love, addressed to me in daily life, in my family, in work and social environments, and on the internet too. And Jesus shapes my life in such a way as to draw me along the path of loving Him and loving others. My sufferings, too, are part of this particular plan of healing and transforming love that Jesus has for me as a unique person, whom He embraces in His infinite wisdom.

This book, however, is not meant to be an academic exercise. I am illustrating this theme with reflections on my own experience (many of which have been drafted on this blog), and also anecdotes from ordinary life, especially family life. In these circumstances the need to grow in love is especially evident.

In answering the call of the vocation to charity, we must have great trust in Jesus, for without Him we can do nothing. But He is with us, working in our lives and teaching us through His Spirit how to grow in genuine self-giving love. We must not become discouraged by our persistent imperfections and selfishness, but continue to work toward cooperating with God's grace and growing in love.

Blessed John Paul II speaks of the Christian life as an ongoing conversion, a work-in-progress through which God's love is integrated into every aspect of our lives, bringing personal and social healing and transformation:

"What is needed is a continuous, permanent conversion which, while requiring an interior detachment from every evil and an adherence to good in its fullness, is brought about concretely in steps which lead us ever forward. Thus a dynamic process develops, one which advances gradually with the progressive integration of the gifts of God and the demands of His definitive and absolute love in the entire personal and social life of man. Therefore an educational growth process is necessary, in order that individual believers, families and peoples, even civilization itself, by beginning from what they have already received of the mystery of Christ, may patiently be led forward, arriving at a richer understanding and a fuller integration of this mystery in their lives" (Familiaris Consortio, 9).

I hope to finish drafting a book proposal soon, and I'll keep everyone posted on how this project develops.