Going in to the Altar of God

Do you believe that you can be truly happy? When I was 5 years old, I memorized this line from the Baltimore Catechism in response to the question “Why did God make you?”: God made me to know, love, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next. At the time, I did not understand a truth implicit in that statement of faith: that to know, love, and serve God in this world was a guarantee of a happy life even here and now, before death. In the prayers at the foot of the altar, we pray: “I will go unto the altar of God, to God the joy of my youth.” Indeed, He has been the joy of my youth, and my youth will last all my life if I continue to choose Him.

And yet, caught between childhood and adulthood, I experienced an acute anxiety in that “young adult” period of life which is increasingly long, confused, and intense for many young people who are trying to live rightly. I am still sorting through this period, and while parts of it are very beautiful and good, other parts are painful. Man is, throughout life, in a state of traversing—one hopes in the right direction—the path that lies between the shores of being and nothingness, to paraphrase an idea of Josef Pieper’s. To be human is always to want more, never being satisfied with what one has.

But that period of early adulthood in which one asks what life is for—and whether he will ever be happy and perhaps increasingly suspecting that life is a state of chronic loneliness, pain, and mute, isolated, gradual despair—can be a very difficult time. And I think we can so easily forget that God is a Father and not an angry judge. He must be grieved that we do not bring to Him that painful plea so many of us hold close to our hearts, allowing it to trouble us: tell me who I am! Tell me that this rigmarole of a life matters! I think there is a lot of shame attached to that question because young people do not want to be needy, or dependent, or admit that something is wrong with them and that they need saving. I need saving. 

I can only speak from my experience of the Catholic communities of which I am a part, but it seems to me that many young people, and people entering their thirties (no longer young adults, sorry), are too anxious to make life choices grounded in practicalities, natural desires, and the normal flow of life. This is specifically true with marriage. What happened to simply living your life and meeting people along the way, so that marrying a particular friend eventually made sense?

The increasingly unhelpful advice on the Internet offers formulas promising a quick fix to the terrifying yet necessary venture of finding a good spouse. But normal people in happy marriages have interests outside of the Internet and outside of themselves. They like each other, don’t think about it too hard, and end up the happiest. People have been getting married since the beginning of time. The odds are in our favor if we stop overthinking it!

Instead, men and women have a hard time interacting with one another. In one evening, I can talk to a guy who works in an amorphous AI data proofreading job, another who tutors and plays video games in his free time, and another who is a youth missionary and committed to “singleness” for the duration of his two-year mission—and clearly a little anxious to be talking to a girl because of that. I have been on a couple of dates with men who send confusing signals of both wanting to get to know me better yet showing no initiative. But they are not the only problem: I also struggle to relax in social situations and talk easily with boys because all of us are putting too much pressure on ourselves to do everything “right.” Because of all this, there is a danger of growing bitter over the difficulty of finding other young people dynamic, interesting, or simply pleasant to be around.

I think, in Catholic circles, too many young people see the world as black-and-white, have stringent dating rules that they check off a step-by-step list, and evaluate the person they go out with as though he or she were interviewing for a job. They treat marriage as a partnership and forget that it must also be a friendship. They leave no room for Providence—because trusting God with such a big decision as marriage is simply not an option in a world of confused, iPhone-addicted, lonely people who are incapable of treating each other well. Grasping for anything solid, we make lists of rules; and we think if we follow the rules and everything looks good on paper, even if the resulting marriages aren’t grounded in anything natural or real, that is the better option.

Either way, we retreat into apparently pious practices that give us a sense of control over our lives, like how often we pray in a day and how many good works we are involved in. I have seen this devolve into obsessive confessions, manic forms of piety, and chronic indecision in discernment. A lot of youth are gravitating toward traditional Catholicism, and this is very good. Yet the outward signs of holiness can only carry one so far. Eventually, we realize that there is still a sense of quiet desperation growing within the Church, as though life has already been drained of anything wonderful to delight in.

Many people in Catholic communities try to be happy and busy but would really like to be in love, married, and settled. We are suffering acutely in loneliness, often operating socially from a place of sadness and lack. That operation turns into anguished boredom as we begin to doubt whether we matter, if we have a place in the world, and if we will ever be happy.

This fear stems from pride and a refusal to acknowledge that we cannot control every aspect of our lives. We become obsessively scrupulous, thinking we must perfect our love before we can even think of receiving God’s or another’s love in return. We follow advice from online influencers and then despair when it doesn’t give us the real-life results it promised. And we hanker after the fullness of being but allow that desire to devolve into doubt when we are suffering. We begin to think that God might be holding out on us; then we feel guilty about that and cling to the fear instead of asking Him for help.

So what happened to God being the joy of our youth? What happened to that innocent, childlike conviction that of course we can be happy, even in this life—because God our Father promised it would be so? And what happened to developing a close relationship with Him and asking Him what He wants? For He must surely answer us. He promised.

We need to face the fear that God will not fulfill us. It has no place in a truly Christian life or outlook, and it is destroying our chances of finding happiness through loving each other. No matter what we have in our lives, no matter what we lack, Christ alone remains the same yesterday, today, and forever. And to face that fear, then, we need to address the mess on the inside of the cisterns, the vessels of our souls.

The only way out is to look up from the tangled mess that we can only make more tangled by our own efforts, however well-intentioned, and seek the arms of Love that wait to embrace us, fill us with holy joy, and defeat any sway that the fear of pain, of whatever sort, may hold over us. We need to forsake our interior mumblings and doubts and acknowledge our anxieties over discernment, love, and purpose. We need to admit that we want to be happy, and then we need to ask God to meet that need and enrich our poverty. I think that when we do not over-spiritualize every decision, trust is allowed to bloom in the soul.

That is a hard thing to do—because it means receiving, in humility, the love we so desperately seek from God instead of constantly grasping at it from another source. This hard thing is a wonderful beginning of the work of grace that this life is all about. In time, it will transform the broken, corroded cisterns of our souls so that they can hold the water of life and joy and eternal youth, the water Christ promised the woman at the well.

Man’s desire for the aqua vita is not an idle dream or the foolish wish of an untrained mind too weak to accept the cynical meaninglessness of reality. It is the natural orientation of his not-yet-fulfilled being toward that which fulfills it. For God alone is Being, and God alone fulfills. God gave us our good desires, and He is not cruel. He will fulfill them. He is just waiting for us to ask.