Hope Beyond the How’s and What’s of Life

In a day and age when religion and faith no longer play an important role in life, many of our young people have been taught to only trust and turn to mental healthcare when they are struggling with life. Nonetheless, with the overwhelming demands for mental wellness and lack of availability of properly-trained, personally-invested, and truly caring professionals who want to treat their clients with proper dignity, respect, and honor, we have seen so many caregivers end up rubber-stamping typical routes, suggestions, and/or prescriptions. I am not here to dismiss the value of mental health and its proper place, but we, as holistic human beings, need to understand a bigger picture than just the usual, typical, and blanket approach to how to properly care, guide, and instill hope for those who are struggling.

First, there is a difference between true faith and superstition, true belief versus religiosity. Our faith is genuine, real, tested, and tried with time. We have many intellectual powerhouses over the centuries who beautifully tied faith with reason. Our belief is not fanatical or superstitious, simply looking for irrational, sentimental, or emotional satisfaction by doing certain actions, things, rites, or movements, thinking that we somehow will incur a desirable result. Our hope is much more than shallow, superstitious religiosity that acts like witchcraft, so that we can get what we want or desire!

As Catholics, we are taught that faith and reason — fides et ratio — do not contradict or stand at odds with each other as our (false) extreme religious or secularistic world would like to present. Of course, some things cannot be understood by science or human reason alone, but we, who are made in the image and likeness of God, is able to use our reason and intellect to understand the real and holistic matters of this world. Our intellect helps us to enrich our very understanding of His own beautiful creation, its mysteries, and how He has providentially cared for us beyond our imagination. When we are able to see how grand this universe is and how small we are in comparison to this ever-changing and expanding creation, we should be in awe of God‘s own love for such a small part of the overall creation.

In our very humanistic and feeble understanding, we tend to think that things have to go our way, able to be calculated and understood according to our limited, sensual, quantifiable, or gratifying measurements. However, if we can understand everything that God has planned for us, we would have to be God Himself, and that is impossible! Even with our best intentions and desires, our intellect will fall short, and that is where personal, faith-centered, intimate, and loving trust in His love for us is so important. Even though our human and physical senses cannot comprehend or compute what it means to be loved by Him, we can allow our spirit and soul to teach us that intimate and personal knowledge of Him who has loved us into being. Our intellect can help us see and understand many things, especially how we can know and be able to comprehend so much in light of how little we are, but it cannot be arrogant in thinking that everything has to fit in its limited and finite capacity. Faith seeks deeper and selfless understanding, and our intellect strengthens our personal and intimate faith if we do not make ourselves our own little gods, centers of the universe, and criteria of all judgments.

This is where, I believe, mental health and well-being, if not focused on God and the proper understanding of who we are and our relationship with Him, can become very dangerous. If we begin and end with ourselves, we are sure to make ourselves into futile and hopeless standards of judgment and criteria of what seems to be true or real. If that is the case, we run the risk of treating everyone and everything as means to our self-centered ends and unrealistic happiness. No one likes to admit this reality, but there is a sober reminder that the pursuit of sentimental, emotional, hedonistic, or euphoric happiness is vainly hopeless. We can never truly be happy at all times… We can only be content and at ease with our lives and all that we have. Hence, that contentment requires us to go beyond ourselves and seek what is eternal, everlasting, and transcendental.

In a day and age of false and egocentric self-empowerment, if anything and everything we do is only to help us, I believe, then, is not a good, legitimate, sustainable, genuine, or life-giving approach. If what we do is only to serve or help us to feel better about ourselves, I believe that, well-intended reason will fail because we will never be happy with ourselves. Mental health focuses on the how’s and what’s of life in order to empower the person to be or seek better means. Nonetheless, it cannot help if that person has no spiritual foundation or has nothing to grasp and believe beyond themselves. At times, mental health providers try to help the clients look for hope in something or someone beyond their current mood, feeling, or state of life, but to no avail, because too many people have nothing beyond themselves.

As a religious caregiver and spiritual guide, my focus is not on telling people what to do and how to achieve their life’s deepest desires, or to be the best version of themselves. My scope and “expertise” are not on the technical side of things. My sole focus is to help the person understand his or her identity as a son or daughter of God, in general and in relation to other people, as well as the higher purpose of living, self-worth, and end goals of life beyond the immediate, quantifiable, or mundaneness of this world. If we fail to have deep roots, we will get swept away by the currents, rough waters, and storms of life. If we cannot lift up our hearts beyond the banality of shallow and egocentric redundancies, we will end up being resentfully bitter, negative, angry at the world, and others.

As a chaplain, I have to tell myself not to give up at times when I try to help people who have nothing more than their little self-centered and pitiful world. It hurts my heart to see so many people who are hopeless and do not have anything to live for except what can be seen, felt, or satisfied by their emotions, sentiments, or mental comprehension. So many people have defined their lives according to vain and hedonistic desires, but refuse to accept the futility of that false assumption and remain unhappy. They end up being so unhappy and bitter, envious, jealous, and resentful of others because they refuse to really believe or desire anything that is substantial, transcendental, or more than themselves. If we do not have any greater understanding and reality beyond ourselves, we will easily get pulled down and get sidetracked by the things of this world.

Too many times, as human beings, we often struggle to understand how a particular matter or situation fits into the grander part of life and our faith journey. It is very easy to see what is going on as a failure, isolated, unfortunate, challenging, or meaningless incident that often makes a person question God‘s goodness and providential care. Nevertheless, we can allow Him to teach us from what is hard at the moment because He can draw a straight line from crookedness, transforming the evil result or action to a greater good for the souls who love and seek Him. It is often the responsibility of the priests to connect the dots and create the bridge for the person who is struggling to see the greater horizon instead of a dead end. In a simple conversation, one’s heart can be expanded and lifted to heaven and connected with others. When the priests choose to be present, they are able to help the person to see what he or she did not see or think as possible due to the present crisis or situation. Even if there is no perfect answer, priests can ask the person to not give up and continue to open up to the people he or she trusts, seeks help, and allows God to be in the struggle.

To be present and provide pastoral guidance and care requires much patience, offering of one’s expectations, constant abandonment to the will of God, and allowing the Almighty to work in His time. It is frustrating at times because we desire things to turn out as we would have liked or hoped, but many times, the work is only to gather the materials or initially pave the way and allow the person to really take what is offered as he or she is able to accept, receive, or process in the present moment. It takes a lot of humility to trust and allow things to be imperfect, unresolved, or not turn out as we would have hoped. Sometimes, the bridges will not be nice-looking or completed in due time either. At those moments, patience and trust are important so the Lord can bring into completion at His own time and as the person is willing to receive and conform their life to His will.