Title: The Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil
Okay, so
I’ve come up with a new theory of how the world works. Sort of.
At the very
least, I was thinking about grace, and wondering how (and why) some people seem
to readily accept the Gospel message, while others really never internalize it
and leave it at a very shallow level. Why is it that some people truly have a
conversion, a real experience of God, and pursue Him profoundly, while others
(who often have the same circumstances, upbringing, etc) seem to stay on the
fence and not take their faith to that next level, living a lukewarm,
Sundays-only faith?
I think
part of the key might be encountering, and profoundly understanding, evil.
Here’s what
I mean: when a soul truly encounters evil, or at least realizes the utter
futility, vanity, and absurdity of this world as a nihilist would understand
it, they are forced to make a choice. They could embrace the evil, embrace the
chaos, or reject it all and cling to and pursue God as the One Who makes sense
out of this messy world.
This is
something that I had to go through during my “conversion”, when I finally awoke
to the reality of my faith. As a sixteen-year-old kid, I had a chance to go to
community college and get a job, which was quite an eye-opening experience for
a homeschooled kid like me. And it through me into a funk. I became, for a
time, quite cynical about this world, seeing my friends and my peers only
concerned about selfish gain and pursuit of money; seeing the many injustices
in this world and feeling powerless to cure them; seeing how miserable I and my
friends were because of an existential loneliness; understanding how many
people deny that truth exists at all. I finally realized that this cynicism of
mine was an invitation to seek hope, and the only hope and only truth that I
could find was in the Lord.
I thought
of this experience of mine over this past weekend. I’ve been working with a
young man named Matt, a freshman in public school, in a faith-formation program
since this past summer began. I had known him before this, though, because he
was in my Confirmation class last year. He seemed, in the Confirmation class,
to be just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill kid who didn’t take his faith seriously
at all.
But since
this summer, as I got to know him more and more, he started to share with me
his pessimism and cynicism about the world. He is fed up with the falsity and
duplicity that he sees in himself and his friends; he sees how stupid his
friends are when all they care about is popularity, sex, and money. We’ve
talked at length about his cynicism with the world.
Last month,
though, he threw me for a loop when he asked me for a Rosary. I gave him one,
along with the instructions on how to pray it. He began to pray it daily.
This
weekend, we had a deep conversation, where I marveled at how faithful he had
been in praying the Rosary daily for a whole month. He said something to me in
the course of our talk that I’ll never forget. He said, “I feel like for my
whole life, I’ve been living life half-asleep, and now I’m finally awake.”
Why is it
that some people, like Matt, suddenly understand what it’s all about, while
others live their whole lives as Christians and never really know what it means
to be alive in Christ Jesus? I think it’s because most people never have a true
knowledge, a true experience, of the evil and vanity that we find in our world.
Most people don’t see this world as
a fundamental dichotomy between the emptiness of the spirit of this world and
the richness of the Lord. They seem to think that the world is a very nice
place, a good home for eighty or so years of fun. This leaves their faith in a
juvenile state because they are never forced to choose between God and Satan, between
eternity and the futility of this world.
I think about some of the youth
with whom I work. Some of the young people who are the holiest are precisely
those who aren’t innocent but who know what evil is out there in the world, but
who have chosen to follow Christ instead. Had they never considered the evil
and the vanity of the world, they would never have been forced to choose the
Lord.
Maybe this is going out on a limb,
but I think that’s why God allows as much evil and futility as He does in the
world – because without it, there would be no need to choose goodness instead.
I don’t know if this theory is all
entirely one-hundred-percent accurate, but it has been helping me to understand
the world a little better. God is the only cure for our hunger, the only
antidote to a random and meaningless world. Let’s choose to pursue Him in the
midst of an often-evil and chaotic world.
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