Life Need Not be Boring

Life can be tiring and boring and the results can be seen daily in our newspapers. Obviously, this is not the way it should be. A seminary priest-professor, in the Kyeongyang magazine, comments that such a lifeless attitude frequently comes about when there is so much to do, accompanied by our inability to respond in the way we would like, leading to anger,frustration and depression--all brought about, says the professor, by a mental state that can be pathological.  

To avoid this, most cultures, he says, have built-in solutions: sporting events, festivals and holidays, art shows and literary events, and personal occasions, like birthdays and anniversaries, that encourage spending a night out dining and drinking. We attempt to overcome our tiredness and boredom by all kinds of distractions. What we really want, the professor says, is rest, but we continually take on more activity.

Our spiritual life is no different, he says. We should be concerned about our relationship with God and experience his presence in our lives, but the accompanying values and rules become discordant with the society we are in, being seen as musty with old-age and now unimportant. But even those who have been Christian for some time can feel tired and bored, wanting relief from such feelings. Prayer also can become arduous, further increasing our fatigue and feelings of being burnt out by what we believe is demanded. When we do not experience God and his grace, this is bound to be its natural outcome.

Catholics also have a great deal of habitual acts to perform as part of our faith life, and if there is no sweetness and tang to the life, we will become tired and bored.  When we lose the meaning and awareness of what we do as Christians, weariness will appear. When we are not aware of the graces we receive daily, we will be overcome with distractions and worldly thoughts.

Not only is this true for the laity but priests also have the same problem. And when obligation is the only motive for action, the same problems arise.  Mass, the Sacraments, the breviary, counseling, visits to the sick--all can be very tiring. Without joy in the life of the priest, these duties can become unbearable and lead to burn out and dereliction of duty. 

To find reasons for the boredom and fatigue, one has to look within, the professor says. Before we take an alternative route, we need the discipline to uncover the driving force for our actions, and work to purify our motivation. A small change in our thinking, we know, can bring a great change in our actions. The grace of God is always there to move us from stagnation, or something worse, to a new life of health and grace-filled living.

How One Christian Philosopher Sees Secularism

Secularism  defined briefly is the denial of the supernatural; our  greatest value is the  world we can experience. With these words a high school principal and professor of philosophy, a priest, begins  his article in the Kyeongyang Magazine headlined: Is this  world everything?

Secularism, he says, has entered the cultural life of society, changing our traditional ways of thinking, both consciously and unconsciously. The transcendent, the spiritual and holy, has been pushed to the periphery, out of our daily concerns.

What is left, he says, is a world centered on the Ego, the 'I'  becoming all important. Reason, our traditional guide to right behavior, is being overturned by a reliance on personal feelings of what is right. From a God-centered world we are moving to a human-centered world, discarding our supernatural measuring sticks, content to behave in accordance with an intuitive judgement of ourselves.

Many philosophers, he said, helped to spread this emphasis on the individual's right to determine his own behavior without regard for any other governing authority, mentioning in particular the pre-eminent German individualist anarchist Max Stirner (1806-1856). By emptying our minds of the transcendent, the supernatural, and relying solely on the personal desires of the individual to determine our behavior, we end up, the priest says, with absurdity and, very likely, using others as means in pursuing our own desires.

Enlightenment brought the ideas of individuality, rationalism, empiricism, and psychology to the culture. Mankind was now in a position, with the new knowledge and technology, to control nature. By getting rid of God and deifying both the "I ' and science, he says we have effectively diminished the relevance of everything else.

During the 18th century, secularism put on another face; it was accepted as an essential component of all scholarly work, especially in physics, history, natural science, law and art. Theology and metaphysics were dropped. There was no longer any desire to acquaint scholars with the principles handed down from the past. Reason, he says, was taken away from faith, and virtue was removed from religion, which was pushed to the periphery of the scholarly world. Repentance, grace, salvation and similar concepts were considered meaningless, as being outside the legitimate boundary of what can be known.  

A new group of philosophers, in the 19th century, with the appearance of atheism as a school of thought, made man into a God. Our knowledge became more specialized and individualistic, but when metaphysics, the root of our philosophical knowledge, was discarded, he maintains that it is now impossible to rid ourselves of conflict, and the result is a secularism without a center. We have lost, he says, our identity and have become skeptical and  disillusioned.
 
Nobody denies, he points out, that knowledge and technology have brought a great deal of material comfort into our lives. But knowledge and technology alone cannot solve all our problems. To solve our problems, he believes we must take on the secularist culture with a contrary and corrective culture. Not an easy task but that, he says, is the project of religion.

For a Christian, Jesus is the object of our faith. He is the source of our hope and the way we can overcome the crisis of our civilization. When Jesus is the foundation of our efforts, humanity, our neighbor, nature and natural law become the means by which we can overcome individualism and materialism, and begin to make real a civilization of love--because the God we believe in is a God of love.

Life is Full of Encounters and Departures

Life is full of encounters and departures, of hellos and goodbyes. A priest writing in the With Bible magazine reflects on his own departure from his first parish. Though eagerly looking forward to what the future will bring, he recalls those five years that went by so quickly with its joyful and sorrowful moments.

During the farewell Mass he cried, he said, surprised by his tears. Isn't the life of a priest full of encounters and departures? he asked himself. What had built up this emotion? He was leaving without any mishaps; there should be a feeling of relief from the responsibilities of parish life. After all, he will be living under the same heaven as his parishioners, though he feels he will not meet them again.
One of the phrases often heard is that none of our meetings is forever. God does not want us to have encounters that do not end in this world. The vehicle we travel in repeatedly picks up and drops off its travelers as we journey through life.

The writer reflects on the many people he has met and separated from daily. Names and faces he doesn't remember, much like the wind that comes and goes. Or like those who came into his life like a violent storm and shook it completely. Sadly, there have been some, he admits, who came into his life to leave scars but many have been a great blessing to him. With these plentiful encounters and departures, seemingly relating together harmoniously, he has become, he believes, the person he is today.

What is it that lasts forever? Shusaku Endo (1923-19996), in his novel The World around the Dead Sea, has Pilate ask this question of Jesus. Jesus answers: "Those in life who have been touched by me, even if only fleetingly, will forever be encountering me." This is true of us also, says the priest; every person we have touched in any encounter will remain forever with us. It's also important to remember that every one of our actions and words can be either helpful or hurtful to that person.

What traces are left behind after the encounter and departure? This is what is most important, he says. Buddhism says that even touching the garment of another is destiny. But more than with encounters, in farewells everything seemingly comes to mind: the folly and the mistakes, the good and the bad, the love received and given, the care, the friendship, the acts of forgiveness. It is, he says, very much like separating from your first love. The priest loved  his first parishioners and hopes only the good traces will remain now that he has bid his farewells. He is certain that the meetings and farewells of our lives, even when they have long ago slipped into the past, will remain an important part of our lives.

Honesty and Ideological Positions

Writing in the Peace Weekly, a member of the Bishops Pastoral Research Committee begins her article by referring to a visit, while a student overseas, to the Dachau concentration camp where many Jews were slaughtered, some being used for medical experiments before being killed. In the camp many reminders of the past, she said, could be seen: the railway that brought the prisoners to the camp, the guard posts, the water moat, the barbed wire, the high-voltage instruments, and the incinerators. Also on display were pictures of various areas of the concentration camp, and posters the Nazi government had disseminated to popularize and defend their brutal activities. 

Outside the camp, on a stone slab are the words, "Never Again," which left her, she says, with an unforgettable memory of the trip. But during her time in the camp, she said not once did she notice any words critical of Hitler or the Nazi government. She surmises that such information would have been unnecessary, that a deliberate decision had been made to allow visitors to the camp to see firsthand the horror that took place there, and to judge for themselves the meaning of it all. And the facts, she agreed, spoke more loudly than any official commentary could.

And what are the facts, she asks, that will be included in the textbooks now being prepared, presenting the history of Korea. There has been, she says, a lot of infighting between liberals and conservatives on what to include. Efforts are being made to correct the mistakes in previous textbooks, but it is a problem not easily solved; those who have the job of checking on the revised history do not have the trust of many critics.

In Korea, it is said that a person who acts according to principles is like a textbook. A textbook should follow fundamental rules: be accurate, fair, universal. A textbook, she emphasizes, should not be a place for personal convictions, values and philosophy. When what is said conforms to the beliefs of those in authority, and they fabricate laws and systems for their own benefit, change untruths to truths and beautify what is not, this becomes a great embarrassment to all. When the ideological disputes among our adult generation, she says, affect the way textbooks are written, we are blinding our children to the past and preventing them from entering a more secure and predictable future.

No one questions, publicly at least, that history books should be written solely with the intent of presenting the facts of the past as accurately as possible. Judging the accuracy of these facts will however have to be made, she points out, by those viewing the facts and will depend not only on their knowledge of history but on the qualities of heart that often inform what is known. And it is precisely in this area that the Church has spoken out clearly (in discussing the transformation of humanity, in Evangelization in the Modern World #19): "For the Church, it is a question not only of preaching the Gospel in ever wider geographic areas or to ever greater numbers of people, but also of affecting and, as it were, upsetting, through the power of the Gospel, mankind's criteria of judgment, determining values, points of interest, lines of thought, sources of inspiration, and models of life, which are in contrast with the Word of God and the plan of salvation."

We as Christians look at history through the eyes of the Gospel. We evaluate what has happened in the past and analyze it with our understanding of Gospel values, in order to contribute to a better world. Since the Church is interested in evangelizing the culture, we can't help but be interested in the factual writing of history, and concerned that the forthcoming revisions of the textbooks on Korean history be done accurately.
 

 

Professional baseball in Korea, as in other parts of the world, is coming to the end of the season, playoff time, when the best teams square off to see who is the best of the best, a time when fan interest peaks.  It also helped a writer, in the Taegu Bulletin, to reflect on the prowess of two outstanding hitters--one even considered the home run champion of Asia--and what their experiences might teach us about the challenges we all must face when confronted with change, and the difficult choices we must make at that time. 
 

When these baseball players were students they were pitchers, but when they were called up to the major leagues, both were advised to  quit pitching and concentrate on hitting.  The writer believes that this change required a great deal of thought and worry, but however difficult it must have been for them, they made the change and today have become outstanding hitters. They both must be thankful, he says, that they made the change. 

What would have happened, the writer asks, if they hadn't made the change? He feels that both would have been extraordinary pitchers, if they had continued as pitchers. The strength of their conviction of becoming great hitters, after making the change, would have similarly empowered them, he believes, to succeed at  pitching if they had not made the change. Choosing to change is not enough to successfully change, he reminds us. If we want to change as successfully as our two baseball players, our choices must be accompanied by strong belief that we will succeed.

We are all, he says, like these two athletes who were faced with making a difficult decision, a choice that would change the direction of their lives. And like all choices, our chances of making that choice successful is often dependent on the strength of our convictions.

Our decisions in life are not like winning the lottery, he says. The choices we make are not  going to determine our success or failure, happiness or sadness. What is important is how much effort we will devote to meeting the challenges those choices inevitably bring.

"If only I didn't take that road." "If only I had chosen another field, another way of life," are unproductive thoughts, he says. Those who have such thoughts, he maintains, would very likely have shown the same regret if other choices had been made. The choice for those searching for the best things life has to offer will be successfully achieved, he says, depending on the conviction and passion behind the choice. Even when this empowered choice may result in failure, as seen by others, he says that the person who gives himself to what he believes is his calling in life will be filled with happiness.

"Grace perfects nature" is a phrase often heard. Though we try to develop the natural to the best of our ability, to maximize what has been received--the mind, body and spirit--we know that with  conviction and passion on our part, God will surprise us by what we are able to achieve.

Finding One's Way to Freedom

We have a strong desire for the 'real' but are captivated by 'show', says a religious sister writing in the Kyeongyang magazine. She often lectures and conducts retreats, bringing up the topic of Truman, the protagonist of the film The Truman Show. Truman was imprisoned on a stage set for 30 years and didn't know it. All his movements, 24 hours a day, were being telecast live to a world audience of millions. The desire for reality the public seems to want to experience was offered to them in Truman, but it was only a virtual reality, and yet the audience was enthralled.
 
He was living in a large dome on an island, and everyone he met--neighbors, friends, postmen, police, and so forth--were actors. Every scene or happening he encountered from birth onward--including the death of his father, another actor, by drowning when Truman was  a teenager--was scripted by the director of the Show. The only person who didn't know that the events and people around Truman were not real as he imagined them to be was Truman.

Are we autonomous human beings? the sister asks, or have we accepted what is presented to us by others? Are we, like Truman, living a phoney life because it has been scripted by others? This is the world of the variety show in Korea, she says.  We are being manipulated like Truman was and, like him, most of the time we don't know it.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger said the lion in the zoo is not a lion, only in the jungle is he a lion. When we look at a monitor of a TV set and see the movements the camera show us, we are dealing with staging, editing and make-up. Though what we see cannot be said to be fake, they are artificially managed. Truman didn't know the truth about what was happening around him, though it was real enough for him. But can it be said, in any sense, she asks, that what Truman experienced was real.  Those who are behind the manipulation are trying to make what is presented to the audience more real than reality.

Living in the digital world, we see the real and the virtual real, often feeling the virtual attempt is more real than the real. We  leave our own reality and seek the manipulated reality of the digital world for vicarious satisfaction and pleasure. Why are we seeking the real and our  healing from the TV screen? she asks. Instead of going to TV programs dealing with children and their world, why don't we go into the world of the children we know?  Why give more attention to the situations and characters we see on TV than we give to those that surround us?

Are we not like the audience in the movie The Truman Show? she asks. Are we not being used in our modern digital world, as Truman was used, as a pawn for the ultimate satisfaction of commercial interests? The bottom line being higher viewer ratings and increased profits. Though the virtual reality we are given frequently gives pleasure to its intended audience, she wonders if it also makes our daily reality boring and uninteresting.

Truman did finally realize what was happening to him and, despite all the blocks put in his way to keep him from realizing he was being used,  did find his way out of the virtual world and to freedom.

Senior Citizens Within the Church

The Catholic Church of Korea needs to establish a Sunday dedicated to the elders, says a professor who has made a study of the problems of the aged. In an interview with the Peace Weekly she claimed that "The Church has no interest in the old," shaking her head repeatedly as she spoke, according to the interviewer, and noted that we will have to prepare for a society, in 2026, with 20 percent of its citizens over 65.

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The Peace Weekly mentioned that in the year 2000 the percentage of those over 65 was 7 percent. In the year 2050 over 37 percent, one of the highest in the world. Some dioceses don't have an apostolate for the aged, most of the concern limited to providing educational programs for senior citizens. And yet many of them, unlike seniors in the past, are in extremely good health and should not be seen, she said, primarily as needy elders requiring help, but as contributing members of society, using their talents in the service of others.

We have Sundays for the young, for the military, for the sanctification of  families, she pointed out, but no concern for those who mostly attend our Sunday Masses, the aged. There is no diocese, she says, with a department set aside for the aged, though subdivisions of departments are set aside for this apostolate.

The Seoul diocese, she says, with its bureau for the aged, has done the most to work with the elderly, and she hopes they will raise it to a department to better focus on the needs of this apostolate. Which she says, can develop along three areas of need: Education, Culture and Service. Education, to develop the capabilities of the aged; the cultural aspects, to strengthen their sense of self worth; and service, to enable them to be of service to others.  There are few parishes, she says, with classes set aside for the aged to instruct them in meeting the challenges to the faith that come as we age. And this is becoming more urgent, she reminds us, as the number of seniors within the Church is increasing faster than within the larger society.

Even those who are not well can be motivated to develop their spiritual lives and pray for the community and others. When we consider the great wealth of talent that is present in the community of senior citizens, it becomes our duty, she says, to use this talent for the benefit of all.