Where are you going, where have you been?

2009 is the year I turn thirty years old. Such milestones contain a foreboding magnetism: they tend to draw all memories toward it, recasting them and judging them from a new perspective. So many illusions have failed this past year; for myself, this last year (although I admit, I still tend to think in academic years), a few may have deflated as well. If thirty is the onset of adulthood for many of us today, its vantage point allows the look past at one's twenties, a dissolute time if there is one. Although I still suspect that a lot of other people get it figured out by the time their twenties are over: many of my friends are married, have several children, have established career paths. This may be a peculiar characteristic of the conservative Catholic subculture. I have the impression that some of our peers in the world are not so settled.

That doesn't help me of course, knowing what I know. I don't mean to sound pompous--I mean that in the truest sense, and even more, in the sense of ignorance being bliss. When you know, indubitably, that we are called to sainthood, to love God above all for his own sake, who alone satisfies; that this requires in all us earthly sinful souls a long commitment to detachment; that most of what the world proposes as blessed and worthy is the opposite of what is in fact the case, and that real life, real blessedness is only found in mercy, poverty, purity, meekness, humility, persecution; that death will soon enough come, and surely will equalize all our vanities and accomplishments, for this earthly life is only a moment compared to eternity with, or without, God; finally, that what is most real and worthwhile, is love, not power, the gift of self, not acquisition for the self, peace, not violence.

Far from a collection of abstractions, these truths of the faith, if you will, are revealed in the concrete events and vicissitudes of real life--and especially, it seems, the failures--year in and year out. This collapse of the stock market and economic recession probably allowed many a chance to glimpse the ephemeral nature of stuff, money, the security of wealth. For myself though, I've never had much money. I've been in a great bit of debt since college (compared to most people I presume), but no matter what my occupation or state, I've been able to spend a good bit and enjoy many leisurely activities and pursuits. I'm not talking Gstaad or Ibiza, yachting or four star restaurants, but things like road trips, eating out, living as a student in Europe, taking vacations to national parks, having books, a computer, clothes, other nice things. The last year and a half I had a kind of financial epiphany, realized my profligate ways, and have since assiduously applied myself to saving, building my credit, investing, planning, what have you. It probably sounds unbelievable, but I think I saw a lot of the downturn coming, and watched it all with a kind of detached, amused interest. I don't have much, so I didn't suffer much. Time is on my side, and I have a secure job, cheap rent, and a paid used car, and only my largish student loan payment, so I don't sweat too much.

What I have anguished about is more my inability to put in practice those truths mentioned above. As I draw closer to my thirtieth birthday, increasingly I find myself looking back on my twenties with sadness, regret, even disgust. That may sound harsh, but again, when you know what I know, the only possible conclusion is the latter.

Instead of growing in holiness, I seemed to peak, spiritually speaking, at college, and have managed to do most of the things I swore I would never do in the years hence. In fact, I distinctly remember being at college and thinking, I don't want to be struggling with this or that in ten years, I want to be this person having accomplished all these great things by this time. And what happened? Evil got easier and easier. Good became harder and harder. And instead of a progressive ascent up the mystical mountain, at times I find myself, almost thirty, wondering where God went, starting to forget even what he sounded like, what intimacy with him felt like. Some have told me this experience is not all that uncommon for people my age, precipitating a kind of second conversion, a conversion to grace. I remain dubious (or perhaps just jaded).

Many have learned hard financial lessons from this past year, and perhaps many have been hurt and had to suffer big time for their ignorance and failures. The reduction in demand for so many commodities (especially, oil) seems to point to the fact that many are saving, or spending more discriminately, again, like our grandparents once had to. I think of what I've lost spiritually these past several years, how turning down worldly and evil roads leads to misery--but what have I learned? Am I really changing? Idiocy, I've heard, is doing the same thing a hundred times and expecting a different result.

A little over seven years ago I entered seminary after a summer spent traveling the country by car with my best friend. Over six weeks and 11,000 miles we went from national park to national park, praying the liturgy of the hours along the way, listening to Joshua Tree over and over, hiking and camping in the most remote places we could find. I remember driving across South Dakota on the second day of the trip: I was trying to make the Badlands before dawn. My best friend slept next to me, as two days prior he had driven around 18 hours from Steubenville, Ohio to Spirit Lake, Iowa. The moon was full and clear, and the Dakota sky captured its luminescence in a ghostly, quiet way. In those night hours I spoke to God and I heard him speak back: I spoke to him about my life, my fears, about vocation, sacrifice, joy. I ended the prayer with a rosary, and I was given small tears down my face (which is a big deal for me). I remember feeling so certain that God had spoke to me, and I drove into dawn over the Missouri against the coming Badlands with conviction and (seemingly) irrefutable hope. Throughout the course of that trip, we talked a good deal about vocation. A couple years later my friend entered the Dominicans; he will be ordained a priest this May in Washington D.C. I on the other hand would prove inconstant.

When I entered seminary, a classmate and I had taken an old Ford Ranger with a missing gear across from Seattle to Chicago. Upon arrival we immediately stopped and went to the chapel and knelt before the tabernacle. We asked the Lord to bless and strengthen our vocations, and we spent time simply resting in his presence. How simple things were then, how pure! Not that I was perfectly pure for that matter, but the hope and the lack of hesitation, they strike me as strange and alien, like a painting tucked away in an exhibit that obviously does not belong. Perhaps it is a great work, but the contrast can only now come across as dissonant. Four months later I left, upset with myself for becoming (I thought) a mediocre seminarian, upset over my sins, empty of desire and zeal, instead lonely and frustrated. I did not visit the tabernacle when leaving.

Another memory comes to mind. Years later I fell in love (one of several times) briefly with a girl. What stays with me now are two events: the first, kneeling in a chapel (again!) with her after going to Mass, she having flown down to Dallas to visit me; I remember, wanting so much, imploring the Lord, let this time be different, let this be good, and pure, and holy. Then, several months later, after breaking up rather modestly, inauspiciously, discovering through hints and even tones of voice, from friends, how in fact I had hurt her deeply, and the story and fact of my injury toward her unraveling as a secret does, soon pressing upon me, shattering a past I myself did not want to look at. So many hopeful starts; so many miserable endings! Truth be told, the starts are seldom so hopeful now; they even begin sad, expecting the same, not hoping for much.

Still amidst these years, my twenties, the many falls from grace (literally), I never outright ceased trying again, trying to make things right and begin as if for the first time. These beginnings are less frequent now, and do not last so long. Oddly, I still seek the same pride of life, lust of my eyes, lust of the flesh--you'd think I'd have learned by now how none of those things bring peace. On the contrary, how incredible is the capacity of the human heart for self-deception!

The world cannot satisfy. As Walker Percy would say, the rotation of aesthetic means of transcendence can only prepare a terrible re-entry into the immanent world of the everyday. Soon enough, the rotation wears thin, or happens less often, or eventually fails. Percy's friend, Thomas Merton, commenting on Pascal's insight that distraction, while being the only thing that consoles us in our state, is itself the source of our greatest miseries, noted:

Why? Because it diverts us, turns us aside from the one thing that can help us to begin our ascent to truth. That one thing is the sense of our own emptiness, our poverty, our limitations, and of the inability of created things to satisfy our profound need for reality and for truth.

What is the conclusion of all this? We imprison ourselves in falsity by our love for the feeble, flickering light of illusion and desire. We cannot find the true light unless this false light be darkened. We cannot find true happiness unless we deprive ourselves of the ersatz happiness of empty diversion. Peace, true peace, is only to be found through suffering, and we must seek the light in darkness.

But oh how I want to see, how I pine for light, for an illuminating glimpse of the end of the journey, for the certain knowledge that this truth is real! Oh how I pray, I wish that God would simply heal me of my vices, my sins I so lovingly return to time and again! How I dearly wish that God would end my suffering, caused by my sins.

If only it were a matter of simply looking back on these years, like I can with the economy, to see and know my mistakes, and possessing that knowledge, turn toward better paths. Unfortunately, knowledge is not virtue, nor is man an angelic spirit, but a creature driven by his past, his habits. Is it too late? Have I used up my chances, has the bus passed me by, standing alone without transport?

Yet: begin again, poor jackself! If not now, would you have it later, when death arrives? It only takes a decision of the will, and several more; but surely it cannot happen by mere wishing. Nor does it ever happen by means of knowledge, understanding, introspection, insight. To conclude, Merton:

If he does not know for sure whether he has the grace to accept the faith, let him start accepting it anyway, and he will soon find out that he has been given not only sufficient but efficacious grace to do so. Let him make the act of will which he thinks is impossible: he will find out, after he has done it, that it was possible....

In the order of faith, light is only procured by the mediation of the will. The intellect cannot find the way alone because in this particular case it is determined by the will. Only after it has been led over the path by the will can it reflect back on its experience and realize what has happened.

The same law applies all the way from the first act of faith to the highest degree of mystical contemplation. The whole road is ordinarily traveled in darkness. We receive enlightenment only in proportion as we give ourselves more and more completely to God by humble submission and love. We do not first see, than act: we act, then see. It is only by the free submission of our judgment in dark faith that we can advance to the light of understanding: credo ut intelligam. And that is why the man who waits to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.