Luceat!

Aristotle claimed there is one thing that all human beings have in common, regardless of who they are, where they are from, or what century they live in: they desire to be happy. Our experience confirms Aristotle’s proposition, or at least mine does. I certainly want to be happy, and I’ve never met someone who didn’t desire the same for themselves.

This truth does not surprise us, but it leaves us with another question - a bigger question: how do I achieve happiness? College students in the United States ask this question with great intensity. We live in the wealthiest, most powerful country in all of human history. We have access to better nutrition, better health care, better education, and better opportunities than any other generation before us. By the world’s standards, the young leaders who are being formed on today’s college and university campuses seem to have it all at their fingertips. And yet so many of them are unhappy. After birth control, anti-depressants are the number one medication prescribed to young women. Suicide rates among young adults and teens have increased 5,000% in the last five decades. Alcohol and drug abuse are rampant, more and more young people battle eating and other emotional disorders*. What in the world has gone wrong? If our iPods, new cars, and expensive educations can’t make us happy, what can? Even though the world has changed in the last three dozen centuries or so, human nature has not. Though our generation doesn’t like to admit this, we are not all that original! We can try to fill up the longing we sense in our hearts with possessions and achievements, or we can distract ourselves from the restlessness we feel by mindlessly absorbing another episode of Grey’s Anatomy (or worse…), but ultimately there is only one thing that can make us happy. In the words of John Paul II:

“It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness, he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”** In sum, college students, like the rest of humanity, long for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. As St. Augustine famously stated, “Lord, our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” and this maxim is as true today as it was when first he wrote them. The truth is that whether we realize it or not, we are caught up in a story that God has been writing in the lives of humanity since before the beginning of time.

Until we embrace our role in this great drama, we can only hope to grasp at happiness. If you are reading this, chances are that you are somehow involved with FOCUS, and I don’t have to work too hard to convince you that having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is central to our existence. The real challenge is to discover how we might convince our brothers and sisters outside of the Christian family that Jesus Christ is relevant to their lives today. To draw from John Paul II once again, in order to be effective evangelists we must know two things: first, we must know Christ Jesus; second, we must know and understand modern man – what he thinks, feels, fears, and desires – what inspires him, what terrifies him, what motivates him, and what frustrates him. We must understand modern ways of thinking, modern ways of communicating, and modern ways of living so that we might articulate the gospel in a way that will resonate within a modern worldview.

Truly, Jesus Christ is the answer to every question ever asked by the human heart. Led by the Holy Spirit, it is my prayer that our conversations within this online community will equip us with the knowledge and instill in us the zeal to share the Gospel in way that is relevant to modern lives, and introduce our generation to a Christ who is a blazing reality.

*Statistics from Matthew Kelly Foundation

**JP II Quote from World Youth Day 2000 in Rome.