Augustine

You seek a happy life in the land of death, but it is not there. How can you find a happy life where there is no life? -Saint Augustine

I’ve been thinking alot recently about how contemporary America is a wasteland. This seems like such a bizarre conclusion to many, and an obvious truism to some. The people who agree that America is a wasteland do so for the wrong reasons. They think that because the politics of this nation don’t correspond to their ideas about what makes for a good person means we are a people deserted by God.

The right is having much the same problem. They think that if certain policies were in place we’d all be happy. But that’s basically progressive thinking. Policies can’t fix what’s wrong with us. Solzhenitsyn knew what was wrong with us and it really pissed everybody off when he pointed it out. The problem with the west is that we’ve forgotten God.

Jesus has nothing good to say about money, yet the following lyric from one of my favorite songs is also true:

I hate those people who love to tell you
Money is the root of all that kills
They have never been poor
No, they've never known the joy of a welfare Christmas
Oh, I know we will never look back

Capitalism has alleviated poverty. Capitalism has improved material standards of life. But Solzhenitsyn saw that we weren’t happy. And I see we aren’t happy. We are looking for happiness in things, instead of the one who created all things. Why is this so hard? Why is it so hard to see God? To find his love in this modern concrete mess we’ve made of the world.

The truth is the world is significantly better than it’s ever been in so many ways, yet we feel the struggle of existence more acutely than ever. Something is deeply wrong with us, something is just not right. We are dissatisfied. We are broken. We need God.

But what does that mean exactly? Well I think it means the Nicene Creed, the scriptures, and the church. But it also means God. Yeah, the actual being all that stuff is about. His presence needs to be palpable in our lives.

Immanuel means God with us. Jesus said he would be with us till the end of the age. So why are we so unhappy? Why can’t we find the joy he provides? There’s no one answer, but the big answer, the real answer, has never changed. It’s still God. We aren’t finding him because we aren’t seeking him. Our standards are too low.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. -CS Lewis

We are unhappy because we think happiness is much too small. We think happiness is houses, but if we got those houses we’d fill them with crap we don’t need. We’re still super wealthy and yet we can’t be happy because we aren’t searching for deep meaning, for true meaning.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, life will have to change in order not to perish on its own. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?

If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era. -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. -John 1:3-5