Читать книгу There are no Right Answers to Wrong Questions - Peter C. Wilcox - Страница 7

“We do not err because the truth is difficult. It is visible at a glance. We err because it is more comfortable to avoid it.”

—Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Famous author and holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel describes a very poignant conversation in his book Night. One day when he was twelve years old, Elie asked his father to find him a master who could guide him in his studies of the Kabbala. His father told Elie that he was much too young to be studying the Kabbala. So Elie found his own master—Moche the Beadle, an old man who lived humbly and was very poor. One day, when Moche saw Elie praying, he asked him, “why do you pray?” Elie responded, “I don’t really know why.” After that day, Elie and Moche would often get together to talk about their Jewish faith. During their conversations, Moche explained with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer. “Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him,” Moche was fond of saying. “This is true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don’t understand His answers. We can’t understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself.” Then Elie asked Moche, “and why do you pray?” He replied, “I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.”1

Although I read this statement over thirty-five years ago, it is still something that I have never forgotten. Moreover, I have often used it in many talks and retreat conferences. Moche prayed so that God would give him the strength to ask the right questions about life. He wasn’t praying for an answer to any particular question, he wasn’t praying for any particular need or person, but only for the strength to ask the right questions. Moche knew that if Elie did this, he would find his own answers within himself. His response was almost identical to Rilke who told his friend Kappus that there is only one way forward to find answers to your questions and that is to go into yourself.

For each of us, it is so important to ask the right questions in life. It’s something we all need to learn how to do, and for most of us, it doesn’t come easily. In fact, in our Western society, we pride ourselves on discovering answers, not on having questions. Moreover, many of us rarely reflect on the questions we ask about life. However, so often in life, it is our choice of questions that leads us on a path of discovery toward answers that often have a significant impact on our lives.

A. Personal Challenges

One reason why there is so much confusion in life—including the life of the Church—is because we are trying to find answers to wrong questions. For example, in the debate about abortion, you will inevitably come up with very different answers depending on whether you begin the discussion with the question, does a woman have a right to choose or to make decisions for herself, or the question, when does human life begin? Or take the example of two people thinking about getting married. If they are concerned about their compatibility, they might ask themselves, and each other, shouldn’t we live together first so that we have more time together to see if we are compatible? This obviously leads to a different answer from asking themselves how they can grow and mature in their relationship within the context of Christian moral principles. Again, it’s the underlying question that leads to a very different answer.

So, why do people ask the wrong questions? And, why is it so difficult to learn how to ask the right questions about life? Because each of us is unique in so many ways, there can be many factors. Here are three reasons that affect many of us.

1. It’s difficult to be honest with ourselves and with our motives for doing things

Being truly honest with ourselves is very challenging. For example, some people already have the answer they want and then they formulate a question that leads them to their preconceived answer. In over thirty years as a psychotherapist, I have seen this happen many times. For example, someone who is having an affair, might look for reasons why he or she should become separated or divorce. Or, in business, someone who wants to make more money, might ask the question, isn’t everyone earning some money and not reporting it to the government? Or a high school student who wants to go to college, and knows how competitive it is, might think about cheating in order to get better grades. He or she might ask, everyone else is doing it. Why shouldn’t I?

2. Challenge of “the more”

A second reason why it is difficult to ask the right questions in life is because of what the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner called the more. He believed that the Lord is always inviting us to grow in a life of generosity, to give the more. But the more for each of us can mean many different things. In fact, it will certainly change in many ways as we journey through life. For the rich young man in the Gospels, the more was to give up his riches and come follow Jesus. We know from his response that he wasn’t ready to do this and so, he walked away sad (Luke 18:18–23). However, Jesus didn’t go after him trying to convince him to come back. He knew this person wasn’t ready for this challenge at this point in his life. And what about the poor widow in Mark’s Gospel (12: 41–44)? The more for her was to give the little that she had. When we see the response of Jesus, it was almost as though he was saying to his disciples—come over here and see what generosity is all about. It is not a matter of giving a lot of anything. Rather, “truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on” (Mark 12: 41–44). Generosity is not measured in terms of quantity.

If we believe that the Lord is always inviting us to a life of generosity in some way, then we will watch for the right question to emerge within ourselves. And like the poor widow, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean a lot of anything.

3. Fear of the unknown

The unknown in our lives is always difficult to handle constructively. And for some of us, fear of the unknown can keep us from asking the right questions in our lives. Most of us are more comfortable with what we know. Sometimes, it might be difficult to deal with the known in our lives but at least it doesn’t generate the same kind of anxiety that dealing with the unknown does. As the eminent family therapist Virginia Satir said, “most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.”2

Sometimes, this fear of the unknown can make us reluctant to even try and ask the right questions in our lives. We are not sure what the Lord might ask of us and there can be a part of us that doesn’t really want to know. Why? Because if we knew, we might be afraid that we would respond like the rich young man did—and walk away sad or simply say no. So, there can be a real tension, a real battle going on inside of us over asking our right question. Take, for example, a young person trying to figure out his or her vocation. A young man wants to live a life of generosity, of giving the more to the Lord. Part of him feels drawn to the priesthood or religious life, and part of him wants to continue his college life, dating his girlfriend, and preparing for a career. Like the rich young man, he would have to give up many things if he responded to the call to at least investigate the priesthood. So, because this question stirs up a lot of anxiety, he might decide to try and put it out of his mind and not think about it anymore. There is a real tension and struggle going on inside of him.

B. Cultural Challenges

Every generation needs to understand what is going on in its own culture. Why? Because every person is greatly influenced by the culture they live in, probably more than they realize. And this is so true in our own Western culture today. The major trends in our contemporary culture have a huge impact on the kinds of questions we ask about life that will allow us to grow spiritually and psychologically.

Jesuit spiritual writer and scientist, Teilhard de Chardin, was asked one time why so many sincere, good people did not believe in God. He answered in a very sympathetic, non- judgmental way. He felt that they must not have heard about God in the correct way. Maybe we also struggle with this idea today.

Many good, sincere people struggle today with finding God attractive. It’s not necessarily that He is unattractive. It’s just that today, in our culture, He is competing with so many other distractions that appear to be more attractive than God. Jesus knew this was important. One time, in Matthew’s Gospel, He said, “wherever your treasure is, that is where your heart will be” (Matt 6: 21). Jesus realized that wherever our treasure is, wherever our heart is, that is what is important to us. That is what we will give our time and energy to. That is what will give direction to our lives. That is what will form the basis of the questions we ask about life and eventually, the choices we make in life.

Besides the struggle to find God attractive, many people also struggle with their faith in general, as well as their churches. A number of factors contribute to this: the pluralism of our age which doesn’t want to be confined to any one belief system; the individualism of a culture which makes family and community life difficult; an anti-church sentiment within both popular culture and the intellectual world; an ever growing tension between those who see religion in terms of private prayer and piety and those who see it as the quest for equality and justice.

We also live in an age in which people find it difficult to make choices. Many of us like to keep our options open. Medieval philosophy said that every choice is a renunciation. In fact, every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one’s back on many other things. To marry one person is to not marry all the others. To have a child means to give up certain other things. To pray might mean to miss watching television or going out with friends. This makes choosing difficult. No wonder we struggle so much with commitment. It’s not that we don’t want certain things, it is just that we know that if we choose them, we close off so many other options.

The problem is we want so many things. For example, we might want to be a saint, but we also want to feel every sensation experienced by sinners; we want to be innocent and pure, but we also want to be experienced and taste all of life’s pleasures; we want to serve the poor and have a simple lifestyle, but we also want all the comforts of the wealthy; we want to have the depth afforded by solitude, but we also do not want to miss anything; we want to pray, but we also want to watch television, read, talk to friends, and go out. Small wonder we are often tired and feel overextended. In this milieu, it is difficult to ask the right questions.

Perhaps this is why we often find it difficult to discover a healthy balance in life. I suppose in some way, that no matter what we do, some questions in life will always haunt us. However, in light of these factors, how can we ask the right questions in our culture that lead to spiritual and psychological growth? Am I being too hard or too easy on myself? Am I unhappy because I am missing out on life or am I unhappy because I’m selfish? What is real growth and what is simply my ego making its demands? Where do I find that fine line between discipline and enjoyment? Consequently, it is rare, in our culture, to find the person who has found the right balance between self-assertion and self-effacement, between egoism and altruism, between self-development and commitment, between creativity and sacrifice, between being too hard on oneself or too easy, or between clinging dependence and unhealthy independence. In some ways, growth is all about finding the right balance.

C. Major Tensions in Our Culture Today

Theologian Jan Walgrave once commented that our age constitutes a virtual conspiracy against the interior life. What he meant is not that there is somewhere a conscious conspiracy against important values or churches or true spirituality as some like to believe. Rather, he meant that today a number of historical circumstances are flowing together and conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever. The air we breathe today is generally not conducive to interiority and depth.

In Mitch Albom’s book, Tuesday’s with Morrie, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, reflected on the importance of interiority and asking the right questions in life as he was dying. He told the author, Mitch Albom: “the culture doesn’t encourage you to think about such things until you are about to die. We’re so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks—we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?”3

If this is true that our culture makes it difficult for a person to develop a reflective, interior life, how then do we allow our right questions to emerge? In past generations, questions of meaning and morality were generally answered within a framework that included God, religion, and church. In many ways, past societies were more overtly religious than we. They simply had less trouble believing in God and in connecting basic human desire to the quest for God. They understood life and asked important questions in their lives from a more overtly religious perspective. In some ways, that gave them a religious advantage over us, but they had their own, serious, religious problems. They believed in God easily, but then struggled with superstition, slavery, sexism, excessive fears of eternal punishment, and legalism. They also, at different times, burned witches, waged religious wars, and killed innocent people while thinking they were doing the will of God by waging a crusade for Christ. Every generation has struggled with their own questions. There has been no golden age.

So, what about our generation, our culture, our society? What are the major forces going on that significantly impact the kinds of questions we ask today as well as our ability to ask the right questions? There are many, and here are three that pose major challenges.

1. Narcissism

Ancient Greece crystallized much of its religious and psychological wisdom into a series of myths. One of these myths was that of Narcissus, who was overcome with the sense of his own beauty to the point where he fell in love with himself and became obsessed with his own beauty. Freudian psychology picked up this name and uses it as a technical term within psychoanalysis. Simply defined, narcissism means excessive preoccupation with oneself.

Few images are as able to describe our culture’s contemporary mindset as that of narcissism. We are a generation in love with itself. We tend to be self-absorbed, preoccupied with our own agendas. We can see this narcissism, first of all, in our propensity for individualism and our corresponding inability to be aware of and concerned about anyone or anything beyond our private lives. A friend gave me a good example of this recently when he told me that he was involved in giving a marriage preparation course in his church. Attending this course is a requirement in order to be married in their church. However, many who attended are not there because they want to be. My friend said that in their sessions the teachers are often battling the participants’ many objections. Interestingly enough, these objections rarely deal with the substance of what is being discussed, the nature of marriage. Rather, and this is what is revealing, the primary objective, which is often pretty hostile, is always about the idea of the course itself. In this milieu, these are the kinds of questions that are raised: “why do we have to take this course? Why is the church and society so concerned about my marriage? My marriage is nobody’s business. This is my life, my love, my sex, my honeymoon, my future, my concern.”

These kinds of questions and objections are revealing because they betray a rugged individualism that lacks a sense of community, and a lack of a sense of a reality outside our private concerns. In a sense, this kind of preoccupation with oneself finds its roots in the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650). When he was searching for an individual starting point for his philosophy, he doubted the reality of everything he could until he came to a reality that he could not doubt: “I think, therefore, I am.” In Descartes’ mind, what we can be sure of, what we know is real, is ourselves. Everything else is suspect!

So many voices today in our culture echo this kind of thinking where people doubt the reality of and the importance of everything beyond the private world of ourselves. This type of self-centeredness is not surprising, not unique to our age. But today, it can lead to the point where we are obsessed with ourselves in a very unhealthy way and are often times trapped within ourselves.

Ours has been called the me generation. The dominant question that people ask in our culture is: what’s in it for me? Not—what can I do for others? What can I get out of this? Not—how can I become more generous to others? We can easily see this today when we look around us. What motivates people today is success, moving up the ladder, being rich, having a beautiful body, being well dressed, having prestige, possessing material comforts, and achieving everything that is potentially attainable within our limits.

Now, obviously, not all of this is bad, nor novel. People have always wanted these things and in past generations what we heard was the importance of moving from rags to riches, pulling oneself up by your bootstraps, work hard and get ahead because no one is going to give you anything. Moreover, there is nothing inherently immoral in these things nor is it simply a matter of challenging people who work hard and want to get ahead in life. But what is novel, less moral, and needs to be challenged in this attitude is the idea that the pursuit of excellence and quality of life are tied to an explicit philosophy of life within which rugged individualism and preoccupation with self are held up as virtues. Everything—marriage, family, community, justice, church, morality, service to others, sacrifice—makes sense and has value only in so far as it enhances myself. It used to be that self-development was pursued with a sense of duty and asceticism that were formerly reserved for religion. However, for many people today, self-development is salvation, it is the religious goal.

Again, Morrie Schwartz, in Tuesday’s with Morrie, thought that our culture had a way of brainwashing people in a very insidious way:

We’ve got a form of brainwashing going on in our country. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that’s what we do in this country. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it—and have it repeated to us—over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.

Wherever I went in my life, I met people wanting to gobble up something new. Gobble up a new car. Gobble up a new piece of property. Gobble up the latest toy. And then they wanted to tell you about it. ‘Guess what I got? Guess what I got?’

You know how I always interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.

Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I’m sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you’re looking for, no matter how much of them you have.4

How deeply we are influenced by this way of thinking is evident in a variety of ways. Among other things, we see it by looking at what we read and what we admire. When we survey the best seller lists for non-fiction books in recent years, we see that virtually every one of these books has to do with achievement, how to become more successful, the quality of lifestyle, and the pursuit of excellence. We also see this in the proclivity we have for the rich and famous. Pop stars, actors and actresses, as well as sport figures—these are the people that our culture holds up for admiration and emulation. If this is our criteria, imagine the kinds of questions that people would be asking.

Given all of this, one question we might ask would be: how does this adversely affect our interior life, our prayer and our belief in God? The effect of narcissism on prayer can be simply stated. When we stand before reality preoccupied with self, what we see will be distorted and shaped by self-interest. When we are excessively pre-occupied with self, we tend to see nothing beyond our own difficulties and struggles.

2. Pragmatism

Pragmatism may be the best single word that best describes our Western way of life and its mindset. For many people, the word itself is synonymous with Western life, especially American life.

The term pragmatism comes from the Greek word pragma, which means business, but it also holds connotations of efficiency, sensibleness, and practicality. Simply defined, pragmatism is a philosophy and way of life that asserts that the truth of an idea lies in its practical usefulness. What is true, is what works. What is important is whether an idea has some concrete usefulness and practical consequences. What this means is that our worth lies in achievement. Things are good if they work, and what works is considered good. These ideals of pragmatism lie at the very heart of the Western mind and undergird our technological society. We are impatient with anything or anybody that is not immediately practical, useful, and efficient. In the Western world, what is good and true is what works! Value lies in being practical.

Sometimes, pragmatism is good. There can be no doubt that many things within our modern world which have helped to make life better—i.e. medicine, travel, technological advances, and communications—are largely the result of pragmatism. However, it is also important to understand that pragmatism brings with it some debilitating side effects.

If we take the pragmatic principle of what is good is what works, it can also become true in reverse: you are only good if you work and you are only as good as the work you do. Both of these ideas can affect people very negatively.

Psychologists assure us that happiness depends largely on having a healthy self-image. We tend to be happy when we feel good about ourselves and unhappy when we don’t. However, in a pragmatic society, unfortunately, we feel good about ourselves only when we are achieving, producing, and contributing in a pragmatic way. What this means is that we feel good and important when we do things that society values as good and important and we feel useless and unimportant when we do things that society does not value in the same way. We give admiration and respect, both to ourselves and others, on the basis of pragmatic achievement rather than for any moral virtue or personal qualities. In a pragmatic society, doing and achieving count for everything. Being counts for very little.

The effects of this approach to life in our Western culture make themselves felt in a number of ways. For example, the achievement of professional goals often takes precedence over family life, leisure time and personal virtue. People who are retired, unemployed, or at home with children, can often feel unfulfilled and useless. Very often, we have no place for people who are handicapped, or for the aged and sick. In the end, we become part of the rat race, with no time, very little leisure and a diminished sense of enjoyment.

Pragmatism clearly affects our contemplative awareness in a negative way. Spiritual writer and Cistercian monk Thomas Merton was asked one time by a journalist what he considered to be the leading spiritual disease of our time. His answer surprised the interviewer. Of all the things he might have suggested like the lack of prayer, lack of community, greed, poor morals, or lack of concern for justice and the poor, he answered instead with one word, efficiency. Why? Because he said that from the monastery to the Pentagon, the plant has to run and there is little time or energy left over after that to do anything else. What Merton was pointing out here, is that, regarding God and religion, our problem is not so much badness as it is busyness. Simply put, we are not very contemplative because the demands of our lives absorb all of our energies and time.

Some years ago, Time Magazine published a cover story which read “The Rat Race, How America is Running Itself Ragged.”5 This article pointed out how time has become the most precious commodity in today’s world. In our society, sometimes parents have to make appointments in order to spend time with their children. Technology has exploded and significantly impacts the way people spend their time. The demands of one’s career to get ahead and stay on top drains the energy out of people. The article suggests that the most overt symptoms of all this hustle and pressure are not the most insidious effects. Rather, all this pressure is causing people to grow more restless, less patient, and unable to concentrate on anything for very long. Because we are so busy and exhausted that when we do have some time for leisure, we can only spend it doing something mindless and distracting. There is very little energy left for anything else. In this milieu, it becomes very difficult to be reflective and ask the right questions about life. Listen once again to the wisdom of Morrie. “Part of the problem, Mitch, is that everyone is in such a hurry. People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running.”6

The effect of all this on the interior life is obvious. There is simply no time or energy to pray or to be contemplative. The expression, caught in the rat race pretty much says it all. Beyond this obvious effect on contemplation, one can perceive a more subtle manner in which pragmatism works against contemplation. When our self worth depends on achievement, then very few people are going to spend much time in prayer or contemplation because these are by definition non-utilitarian, pragmatically useless, a waste of time because nothing is achieved, nothing is accomplished. One of the major reasons why people are not more contemplative and why we don’t pray more, is because these activities don’t accomplish anything, produce anything, or practically add anything to life. We feel good about ourselves when we are doing useful things. Contemplative activity, by definition, is pragmatically useless.

Because we are caught up by the demands of our pragmatic culture, we can end up like the people in Luke’s Gospel who refused the invitation to come to the wedding banquet in Christ’s parable (Luke 14: 14–21). The people who were excluded did not turn down the invitation because they were impious, irreligious or morally lax. They simply never showed up because they were so busy buying oxen, getting married, and measuring their land. In pragmatism, contemplation dies, not through badness, but because of busyness.

3. Restlessness

We are a restless people. Perhaps no one word better captures the dominant feature and feeling of our culture than this word—restlessness.

Restlessness is not difficult to define and understand. It is the opposite of being restful. Restfulness is one of the most primal of all cravings inside of us. But today, as our lives grow more pressured, as we become more tired, and as we begin to talk more about burnout, we fantasize more about restfulness. We imagine it as a peaceful, quiet place, like walking by a lake, watching a peaceful sunset, or sitting by the fireplace in the winter.

However, restfulness is more a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is being in ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.

Thomas Merton, journaling during an extended period of solitude, once wrote:

It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying, I live as my fathers have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially so about it as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else’s. I must learn gradually to forget program and artifice.7

Today, nothing ever seems to be enough for us. The simple joys of living, as Merton describes, are mostly lost as we grow ever more restless, driven, hyper, and compulsive. Within our lives there is less ease, and more activity; less peacefulness and more obsessive activity; less enjoyment and more excess.

Some restlessness is normal. However, it is like body temperature; beyond a point it becomes an unhealthy fever. Today, our psychic temperature has risen to become a fever. Our restlessness is excessive. When that happens, what does it do to us?

First of all, when restlessness becomes excessive, it is no longer possible to be satisfied with just being a human being. As Merton said, to just be “with one’s own hunger and sleep, cold and warmth, making coffee and drinking it.” What is simple—“the feel of one’s own body and the taste of one’s own coffee,” is lost in an obsessive greed for experience.

Secondly, when restlessness becomes excessive, then greed for experience begins to drive us outward so that our actions do not come from a free center within ourselves, but from compulsion. Our lives become consumed with the idea that unless we somehow experience everything, travel everywhere, see everything, and are part of a large number of other people’s experience, then our lives are small and meaningless. We become impatient with every hunger and every non-consummated area within our lives. Eventually, we become convinced that unless every pleasure we yearn for is tasted, we will be unhappy.

In this posture of restlessness, we stand before life too greedy, too full of expectations that cannot be realized. We become unable to accept that, here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished. When this happens, we are unable to rest or be satisfied because we are convinced that all tension and unfulfilled yearning is tragic. Therefore, it becomes tragic to be alone; to be unmarried; to be married, but not completely fulfilled romantically and sexually; to not be good looking; or, to be unhealthy, aged or handicapped. It becomes tragic to be caught up in duties and commitments which limit our freedom, tragic to be poor, tragic to go through life and not be able to taste every pleasure on earth. When we are obsessed in this way, it is hard to be contemplative. We are too focused on our own struggles and difficulties to be very open and receptive.

Thirdly, when restlessness becomes excessive, we lose our sense of interiority. We lose our ability to be reflective which then doesn’t allow us to ask the right questions about life. Socrates once said the “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In our society, because of our restlessness, we tend to examine our lives less and less.

Within our culture, distraction is normal; contemplativeness, solitude and prayer are not. Why is this? We are not, either by choice or ideology, a culture set against the interior life. Nor are we more afraid of the interior life than past ages. Where we differ from past ages, as we saw when we examined pragmatism, is not in our badness but our busyness. Where we differ from them too is in the degree of our restlessness.

Henri Nouwen describes the restlessness of our contemporary lives in an insightful way:

One of the most obvious characteristics of our daily lives is that we are busy. We experience our days as filled with things to do, people to meet, projects to finish, letters to write, calls to make, and appointments to keep. Our lives often seem like over-packed suitcases bursting at the seams. In fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations . . . .

Beneath our worrying lives, however, something else is going on. While our minds and hearts are filled with many things, and we wonder how we can live up to the expectations imposed upon us by ourselves and others, we have a deep sense of un-fulfillment. While busy and worried about many things, we seldom feel truly satisfied, at peace, at home. A gnawing sense of being unfulfilled underlies our filled lives . . . . The great paradox of our time is that many of us are busy and bored at the same time. While running from one event to the next, we wonder in our innermost selves if anything is really happening. While we can hardly keep up with our many tasks and obligations, we are not so sure that it would make any difference if we did nothing at all. While people keep pushing us in all directions, we doubt if anyone really cares. In short, while our lives are full, we are unfulfilled.8

Being filled, yet unfulfilled, comes from being without deep interiority. When there is never time or space to stand behind our own lives and look reflectively at them, then the pressures and distractions of life simply consume us to the point where we lose control over our lives.

When we are unreflective, it is because our restlessness propels us into a flurry of activity which keeps us preoccupied and consumed with the surface of life, with the business of making a living, with doing things, with distractions, and with entertainment. It is then that our actions no longer issue from a center within us, but, instead, are products of compulsion. We do things and we no longer know why. We feel chronically pressured, victimized, and driven. We overwork, but are bored; socialize excessively, but are lonely; and work to the point of exhaustion, but feel our lives are unfulfilled.

This is the unexamined life as Socrates described it. It is also an image of the fruits of a non-contemplative life. Restlessness, without proper reflection, destroys contemplation and, with it, the sense of God within ordinary life. Why? Because when we operate out of restlessness, rather than out of our true center, then, in the famous phrase of St. Augustine, God is within us, but we are outside of ourselves.

1. Wiesel, Night, 13–14.

2. Quoted in The Family Networker, 13, 30.

3. Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, 64–65.

4. Ibid., 124–25.

5. Michaels and Willwerth, “How America Has Run Out of Time,” 48–56.

6. Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie, 136.

7. Quoted by Griffin, Follow the Ecstasy, 37–38.

8. Nouwen, Making All Things New, 23–24.