Question:

I'm about to graduate from college.  But I feel I'm not ready to.  It wasn't until this year that I realized how awesome college is and how cool people are.  I've finally been able to come out of my shell, mingle with other people, and do things like go to dances.  I've discovered an eagerness to learn new things, and I've developed new interests to pursue even after college.

But I feel as though I missed out on a lot while I was here.  I've had good times, but also hard times, because I have been working on my faith and trying to become more Christlike.  It has been hard.  Sometimes -- even right now -- I feel that Christ is so far from me.  Like He isn't with me, isn't helping me.  I try to listen to His whisper, but with all the other competing voices inside me, sometimes it's hard.  No magical realization comes over me about what He wants me to do.

I've had all sorts of dreams and plans.  Some of them I've sacrificed, believing that this would draw me closer to Christ's will.  But when I look at other Christians around me and what they're doing now -- going on mission trips, taking on leadership positions -- I feel I wasted all my years of college and spiritual life because I was so busy trying to work on my spiritual life.

I feel scared now and uncertain of the times.  I thought if I did well in college and all then I would feel content in what I had done here and go for a job like other college kids do.  But I don't.  Is something wrong with me?  Is this Jesus telling me I have screwed up again?

I really want to find peace in my life.  I want to believe that I fulfilled my years in college.  I want to look forward to a new life -- with a career, a girlfriend, more joy, and all that stuff.  I really don't want to feel the pain of regret, thinking that even though I thought I was doing my best to live each day at college like it was my last, I was missing so much.  Thanks.

Reply:

I've had afraid-to-graduate conversations, feel-like-I-missed-out conversations, and aw-shucks-just-when-college-is-getting-fun-I-have-to-leave conversations.  But your letter is different and more interesting.  The line that arrested me was "I feel I wasted all my years of college and spiritual life because I was so busy trying to work on my spiritual life."

Was it something like this? One day your friend Mary mentioned, "Hey, we're going on a mission trip.  Want to come?"  You answered, "Thanks, but I can't.  I've got to develop my sense of mission."  Another time, Zack dropped by and said, "We're starting a prayer team.  Can I get you to join?"  You answered "Sorry, Zack.  I'm too busy praying."  Then there was the day that Colin mentioned, "I'm looking for people to help think up Christian scholars to come and speak.  You'd be great at that.  How about it?"  You answered, "I wish I could, but I've had to give up that sort of thing so that I can get closer to Christ."

This year it's finally hit you that you've been going at the whole thing backward.  The discovery is such a shock that you're finding it hard to focus on everyday things, like finding a post-college job.  Is something wrong with you?  Have you wasted your time at college?  Have you screwed up "again"?  (Interesting choice of adverb, by the way.)

Taking the three questions in order: No, no and no.  By your own account, you followed Christ constantly, the best you knew how; you begged Him to change you for the better; and it looks to me as though that's just what He has been doing.  Haven't you noticed that He is answering your prayer?  No, I see that you haven't.  Shall I explain?

Consider.  Before, you hadn't discovered the thrill of discovering knowledge.  Now you have.  Before, you had no interests to pursue.  Now you do.  Before, you hadn't come out of your shell.  Now you have.  All through college, you tried to pursue your relationship with Christ more or less by yourself.  Now you know that you need fellowship with other Christians.  These are wonderful things, not bad ones; progress, not regress.

As to your fear that you "wasted" your time at college:  Certainly you wasted opportunities.  But from another point of view, nothing was wasted.  God uses everything.  We must assume that Christ brought you to this point by the shortest route He could.  The path that looks shorter to your imagination was not one that you could take.  You believe that you ought to repent; far be it from me to say you're wrong, but do you know the meaning of the word "repent"?  The Greek word is metanoia; it means to turn your mind around, to think differently.  So don't look backward:  "Woe is me that I didn't get here sooner."  You wouldn't even be tempted to look backward, if you hadn't come this far.  Repent and look forward:  "I’m truly sorry I wasted those opportunities -- but thanks be to God that He finally got me here!"  What might He plan for you now that He has brought you here?

There are three things you don't know yet, because you're too young.  (Since I'm getting to be such a fossil, I'm allowed to say that.)  Failures are normal; periods of self-doubt are normal; and intervals of dryness in prayer are normal.  God can use our failures, if we learn from them; He can use our self-doubts, if we don't wallow in them; and as for those intervals of dryness, just think.  If He never withdrew the feeling of His presence, how would we ever learn to trust in Him?  Instead we would trust in the feeling.  He uses all these things to train us.

And we need that training.  As your spirits lift -- trust me, they will -- your temptations and challenges won't vanish.  But they will change.  The temptations of a man who spends all his time at home aren't the same as the temptations of a man who goes to a dance now and then.  Some will be new.  That's normal too.  Don't be afraid.  Just be prepared.

I know how frustrating it is to try to hear the Triune God in the clatter and clamor of your mind.  You might pray something like this.  "Master, you wouldn't permit me to suffer this clamor unless it could somehow serve You; therefore I offer it to You.  You who charged the storm to be still, I await Your voice of command."  I don't mean that you will have a "magical realization" about what to do with your life.  He won’t show you the blueprint of His providence.  You may still feel that you’re in the dark.  But He will make clear enough to you what you really need to know.

To grasp what natural law is all about, we have to understand nature as fashioned according to certain purposes.  We have to view every kind of thing there is as an arrow directed naturally to its goal.  The way Thomas Aquinas put this was to say that the “nature” of any particular thing is “a purpose, implanted by the Divine Art, that it be moved to a determinate end.”

Provided that we haven’t been taught not to, this is the way we tend to think of things anyway.  An acorn is not essentially something small with a point at one end and a cap at the other; it is something aimed at being an oak.  A boy in my neighborhood is not essentially something with baggy pants and a foul mouth; he is something aimed at being a man.  In this way of thinking, everything in Creation is a wannabe.  We just have to recognize what it naturally wants to be.  Natural law turns out to be the developmental spec sheet, the guide for getting there.  For the acorn, nature isn’t law in the strictest sense, because law must be addressed to an intelligent being capable of choice.  For the boy, though, it is.  The acorn can’t be in conflict with itself.  He can.

But there is something missing here.  According to the old tradition of natural law, the human arrow is unlike all others because it is directed to a goal which its natural powers cannot reach.  Among all the others, we have one natural longing that nothing in nature can satisfy.  That boy on the corner is something that by nature wants to be a Man, and being a Man is hard enough.  But a Man is something that by nature wants to be in friendship with God.

To reach its target, the arrow must be shot by the Divine Archer – at Himself.

Adapted from What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide.

See also Just Like Me

Stay calm; this is merely a reflection on one of the differences between Catholic and Protestant culture, not an attempt to cast aspersions.

Protestants tend to shop around before deciding where to worship.  They keep moving until they find a place to worship that they like.  Although Catholics shop around more than they used to, they are still more likely than Protestants to worship in their neighborhood parishes, and to put up with what they don’t like there.  This difference produces both an interesting result, and an interesting illusion.

The interesting result is that Protestants are much more likely to worship with people who are similar to themselves.  For example, in the typical Protestant congregation either most people are theologically liberal, or most are theologically conservative.  In Catholic parishes, there is a much greater mix; everyone is under the same roof.  Of course, certain similarities may result just from the demographics of the neighborhood in which the parish is located -- perhaps most people in the parish speak Spanish or have Czech last names -- but the kinds of affinities that result from shopping around are less likely to be found.

The interesting illusion is that the Protestant movement contains much less spiritual variety than it really does.  Forgetting how they shopped around before settling on a congregation, Protestants tend to think that Protestantism in general is just like their own congregation, which in turn is “just like me.”   So theological liberals overestimate the liberalism of the Protestant movement, and theological conservatives overestimate its conservatism – which makes both liberals and conservatives more satisfied with the state of the Protestant movement than they might otherwise be.  It also causes them to be a little shocked when they visit a Catholic parish.

Whatever illusions Catholics may have, to make imagine that everyone is “just like me” is much more difficult.  The ones who adhere to the Magisterium and who reject it, the ones who understand the Church’s teachings and who don’t, the ones who are serious about their faith and who aren’t -- they are all there together.  This, I gather, is the situation which confronted the Apostles in the first century.  And it is the situation which confronts the Catholic pastor today.

It’s messy, but it has always been messy, and Catholics don’t expect it to be neat.

For breaking the natural law, there are natural penalties.  Those who live by knives die by them. Those who betray their friends lose them.  Those who abandon their children never know the sweetness of their kiss.  Those who travel from bed to bed lose the capacity for trust.  Those who torture their consciences are tortured by them in return.  Those who refuse the one in whose image they are made live as strangers to themselves.

This principle of natural consequences is woven into the fabric of our nature.  Not all our defiance can unravel a single stitch.  Some penalties show up within the lifetime of the individual; others may tarry until several generations have persisted in the same wrongdoing.  But the penalties are cumulative, and eventually they can no longer be ignored.

A good example of such further penalties can be found in the consequences of breaking the precept of chastity.  One immediate consequence is injury to the procreative good: one might get pregnant but have nobody to help raise the child.  Another is injury to the unitive good: one misses the chance for that total self-giving which can develop only in a secure and exclusive relationship of true self-giving.  And there are long-term consequences too, among them poverty, because single women must provide for their children by themselves; adolescent violence, because male children grow up without a father’s influence; venereal disease, because formerly rare infections spread rapidly through sexual contact; child abuse, because live-in boyfriends tend to resent their girlfriends’ babies and girlfriends may resent babies that their boyfriends did not father; and abortion, because children are increasingly regarded as a burden rather than a joy.

But the most terrible consequence of doing what we know to be wrong -- the most dreadful penalty of suppressing our moral knowledge -- is that our lies metastasize.  The universe is so tightly constructed that in order to cover up one lie, we must usually tell another, and this applies with just as much force to the lies we tell ourselves as to the lies we tell to other people.  One could imagine a universe so loosely jointed that lies did not require the support of more lies, but the one we live in is not like that. In this one, deception begets deception, and self-deception begets more self-deception; the greater the lie, the greater its metastatic tendency.  This tendency is strongest precisely in the case of the greatest self-deception, pretending not to know that God is real, because there are so many things one must not think of in order not to think of the reality of God.  But it also kicks in when we pretend not to know the foundational principles of natural law.

The downward spiral explains the remark of G. K. Chesterton:  ‘Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.  That road goes down and down.’  Pursued by the Five Furies of conscience, a man becomes both more wicked and more stupid: more wicked because his behavior becomes worse, more stupid because he tells himself more lies.

Then is the design of conscience defective?  Shouldn’t it drive us up, not down?   Not necessarily.  As Dante found, for some of us the road up goes down for a long time first.  The system of conscience has not broken; it has merely advanced to the next phase.  This is fully compatible with its mission.  After all, the greater purpose of conscience is not to inform us of moral truth, but to motivate us to live by it.  For most of us at some times, for some of us at most times, guilty knowledge is not exhortation enough.  Drastic measures become necessary.  Driving life out of kilter is, so to speak, the exhortation of last resort.  The offender becomes stupider and wickeder—but then he had intended to become stupider and wickeder; that is what obstinacy and denial are all about.  His only hope is to become even stupider and wickeder than he had planned.

If all goes well he may finally be so wretched that he comes “to himself”—or to God.  Apparently, for the chance to soften a heart, the Designer is even willing that it become more rocklike still.  In this life, what has been called ‘the left hand of God’ may be, in reality, the left hand of His mercy.

This is a staggering reflection for those who think of God as a tooth fairy.  Less drastic means of turning a soul around can certainly be imagined.  Probably, though, no less drastic means of turning a soul around are compatible with free will, which seems to be one of His design criteria.  We may find the price too high, because in order to escape the Furies a man may inflict terrible damage on other people.  What this suggests is that the Designer thinks scarcely any price too high to save a soul.  Even souls may be risked to save a soul.  Yet other souls may be risked to save those.

Adapted from What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide

Mondays are usually for letters from students.  Some are philosophical or theological; others, like this one, more practical.

Question:

Since coming to my Christian college, I've become much more serious about actually living my life for Jesus and to reflect Jesus.  My problem is that my college friends don't seem to be doing that.  I know we all sin, but it seems like they are missing the point of knowing Christ.  Salvation shouldn't be a "license to sin"!

These friends are spiritual leaders on campus -- chapel planning committee members, for example -- but they use foul language when angry, say horrible things about people they don't like, watch filthy television shows, and don't practice purity in their relationships.

What I am asking is how to handle myself around them.  I'm trying to be an example, but they pass it off by saying that I've been "sheltered.”  I'm afraid that if I talk to them about what I think, they'll think I'm saying I am a better Christian than they are, and that, of course, isn't true.  Am I being too judgmental? 

Reply:

Are you too judgmental?  Interesting question.  Let me challenge the way you frame it.  Asking whether you are too judgmental implies that there is such a thing as a right amount of judgment -- neither too much nor too little, but just right.  I would put it differently.  There isn't a right amount of judgment, but there is a right kind of judgment.  So a better question for you is:  Are you I practicing the right kind or the wrong kind?

Actually there are several wrong kinds.  One wrong kind takes the attitude, "You're a sinner, but I'm not.”  We all have sinful tendencies.  I don't agree with you that everyone is equally afflicted by sinful tendencies, but it's certainly a bad idea to dwell on where we stand in the rankings.  Another wrong kind of judgment takes the attitude, "You're beyond repentance and you're going to hell.”  Our gaze can't penetrate deeply enough into the heart to know things like that.  I suppose many pious people would have said that Mary Magdalene was beyond repentance and going to hell, but her change of life was profound.

Scripture roundly condemns the wrong kinds of judgment.  On the other hand, there are several right kinds too.  We ought to be able to discern that certain lines of thinking are erroneous, and we ought to be able to discern that certain lines of conduct are sinful.  Otherwise, how could we direct our lives along the right path?  Similarly, we ought to be see the danger when people we know fall into these sins or these errors -- danger not only for them, but even, sometimes, for us or for others.

If you're practicing only the right kinds of judgment, and if you're practicing it not with self-righteousness but with a genuine desire for your friends' own good, and if you're not being catty, gossipy, or priggish, then you're not being judgmental in the bad sense.

Now let me suggest some other questions for you to think about.  Here's one:  Have you chosen good companions?  Frankly, the ones you have sound pretty tedious.

Another important question:  Have you been acting "holier than thou"?  I'm not saying that you are -- I'm only saying that you should make sure you're not.  For example, if your friends are be annoyed with you simply because you don't use filthy language, it's not your fault.  But if they're annoyed with you because you make snide remarks about the fact that they do, it is your fault.  Be sure you stay on the right side of the line.

Last.  I don't know exactly what you mean when you say that your friends don't practice purity in their relationships.  Do you mean that they've been sleeping with each other?  And do you know this for sure?  If you know it, then probably everyone on campus knows about it.  Considering that your friends are considered Christian leaders, their acts are not only grave sin but grave scandal -- not just in the modern sense of the term, "something that causes a fuss,” but in the ancient sense, "something that causes others to stumble.”  What this means is that you have something else to do besides being a good example.  It's dealing with their bad example.

For that reason, even if no other, I do think you should speak with your friends.  Explain to them "Look, this isn't only bad, it's harming others.”  Don't do it in public, don't talk with all of them at once, and don't get drawn into argument; speak with each one briefly, calmly, privately, as friend to friend, in love.  If they don't listen, take another friend with you and try again.  If they still don't listen, ask the minister of your college chapel for a confidential appointment, and explain the situation to him.  Leave it in his hands.  Then -- except for your prayer time -- put it out of your mind.

Be at peace.  It's okay.  That wouldn't be priggish, catty, gossipy, or "holier than thou.”  It would be loving and responsible.