On Shiny Things

One can look around for little more than a moment and discover that humankind is looking for the good, and it is a quality of those good things that they radiate forth goodness. We are looking for those precious items or virtues that themselves shine in beauty, of which at the very mention of their name we can recognize the glory that they flaunt. You could call these goods friendship, success, romance, parenthood, all of which are some form of love. That is humanity, nothing else but a quest for love which man is made for. This quest has been repeated again and again throughout history in new and fresh adventures, some men have failed to find the shiny thing while some have succeeded at the noble task. What we find every single time in every single instance is that those few heroes who can attain this virtue themselves radiate the very same goodness. They become bright themselves, and the light that they caught is amplified by their very existence. It is not great speeches that inspire loyalty and fertilize peace, it is the grandness of a man's soul, and the bright contents of his heart that allow him to be truly bright himself.

This great bright thing does not make other things more dark, on the contrary, it reveals the other things more perfectly and makes them brighter. When a man possesses this good in one form or another, the other goods that he has are not diminished nor altered, but they are seen with a brighter clarity and are more able to be adored. If one were to lose a best friend, the whole of the man's world would be startled to find itself a bit darker and wonder where all the light has gone, because a great and shining love was (or at least seemed to be) taken from him, even if before it was taken from him everything seemed just business as usual. What a soul needs to struggle for, what a soul needs to honestly try his hardest to find is what makes life brighter. When something good and wholly beautiful enters our lives, what we might not realize is that everything becomes a little bit brighter. In contrary to the stars which seem to become dim whenever the moon flaunts her light in a particularly selfish way, good things in our lives selflessly offer to make all the other things brighter. Love is not jealous, nor proud. Instead, love becomes like a torch, a bright sky of fire that hangs over all the other things in our lives and makes them shine.

But where does this light come from? From what sun do these beautiful rays emit? It is not within themselves that they find the sources of their light, it is from one source and one source only. It comes from what is true and objective, it comes from God, the Eternal Wellspring of Light. Without this source? There is only darkness. Romance, friendship, parenthood, all straw without God. Without God love and romance have their origin in humanity, and therefore they are just chemicals. They hardly rise to any nobility greater than hunger. When we are given and freely accept, however, the Agape provided by the sacrifice of Christ and the nature of the Trinity the love that we have becomes real. It transcends physical boundaries, it transcends reason itself, it becomes a reality beyond our comprehension that shines brighter than anything else we can possess- but not brighter than God. That is why we should all put God first. When we live for Christ alone, Christ does not make our romances or our friendships darker. He seems to make them burn with overwhelming light. He makes everything brighter, not only brighter, but more real than we could have imagined. When we allow the Agape of Christ to come first in our lives, we look back to see that the light provided by this Divine Love makes everything seem more incredibly beautiful. Without the light of God we see how dreadfully dull everything is, but when the blinding illumination of Christ floods over creation what is revealed is the poetry of the crevices that were hidden in shadow, the sweetness of the details that the eye could not see. To live for anything else? Madness.

And that is why there is always hope. 

It is an unfortunate tendency of our human condition which causes us to be negative, and this tendency is the prejudice of being old. Children will never hesitate to celebrate the arrival of a new toy with a vigor that, if we are living the best life, we never have to lose. Like Peter Pan, we never have to grow up. The things that the child may be scolded for, however, are when he loses the toy or when he spills his milk. When he loses that small good, the mourning resembles that of Old Testament figures who cover themselves in sackcloth and ash and cry for days over the loss of some loved one. The true man who has come to truly love mourns over the loss of good, but he does not forget the Eternal Light that Christ provides. I have silly doubts. Sometimes I look out onto the grass and see the beautiful green, and I think to myself, "what if it is blue. What if my eyes are defective." Sometimes I look at a mirror and I honestly believe for a fraction of a second that my reflection is an entirely different person living in a whole new world imagined by Lewis Carroll. I never doubt, however, that God will work all things good for those who love him, and it is in this fact that I find my greatest hopes, not only my greatest hopes, but my only hopes. It is in this fact, that to love God is the source of all brightness, that all men should cling to desperately and ferociously.

And this reveals an extremely important part of the spiritual life. To live a bright life that is abundant in goodness and love, it does not rely on our own merits. It revolves and is contingent on the love of God. Therefore it is not from our own origins that the abundant life is reached, but it is through Christ that we achieve it. The spiritual life, then, does not have its origin in man loving God, it is in man opening himself up to the gift of God's love so that we may have love, a love that makes everything else shimmer. It is only by the love of God that we can love God. Seek not, then, to love God so as to be worthy of the Sacraments or to love God to be worthy of praying. Come in prayer, depend on the Sacraments, open yourself to the very gift of God Himself, and you will find that soon you will love God and others more perfectly, and you will wake to find all the love in your life a different shade of reality that you never could have expected.

 Peace,
- The Boy Pilgrim