“If you don’t know where you’re going you’ll probably end up somewhere else.” (David P. Campbell)
What do you want to be when you grow up? Ask this to many young adults, and you’d be surprised by the vagueness and lack of clarity in most responses. Truth be told, many have no clue what they would like to be. Others simply don’t want to grow up.
In times of upheaval and anxiety, the last thing we dare do is to dream. So many of us are at times caught up in spaces marked by the loss of meaning, purpose and vision for life.
Collectively sometimes, the feeling is more generic. A sense of deep loss, a foreboding that all is not well with us. The anecdotal evidence of increased anxiety levels, of waiting lists for psychotherapy, counselling and psychiatric referrals, together with increased reports of self-harming behaviour, depression and anxiety, indicate that all is not well with many of us.
Add to this the gradual erosion of trust in our institutions, and people are left without goalposts, points of reference or sense of security. We navigate social media voices whose only authority comes from the number of hits, rather than any level of expertise or real authority.
Who do we turn to in times like this? Who can we trust? Where can our souls find peace? The cavernous silence that answers these questions is in itself indicative of the deep emptiness many people feel so keenly.
In this crisis marked by the loss of meaning, the Christian message offers a genuine path for growth and hope. This makes of the present moment an opportunity to seek a new relevance for faith amid the quagmire of self-appointed gurus, self-help experts, and pop psychology clichés to personal growth.
In this crisis marked by the loss of meaning, the Christian message offers a genuine path for growth and hope
Christianity, freshly stated, calls us to deeper places of relationship, connection and community. It starts first with a deep rediscovery of what the message of Jesus is all about… the journey that takes us deep into our heart, and there discover not only our warts and sins but also the awaiting mercy of a patient God.
In a culture that lives without memory and without hope, focusing only on the immediate and the tangible, Christianity, with its biblical stories of journeying, from home to desert, from slavery to freedom, from crucifixion to resurrection, and from betrayal to forgiveness, speaks to a much deeper place than contemporary narratives that are here today and dissipate by the end of the day as new narratives uproot them.
Christians are not aimless: we do not travel as nomads, wandering in the desert landscapes of our times, eking out little titbits of happiness. We journey as pilgrims, acknowledging the sacred ground on which we tread daily and finding places of worship in every twist on the road.
It is this imagination we need to recapture: a fire of passion for life and joy that will rekindle in our culture the one thing we seem to lack most: Hope.