Conference #ITO2016. Deacon Sorin Mihalache: “Happiness is not defined by having, but rather by sharing”

Dear young people,

I consider that youth, the age that you have, can be characterised by three aspects connected to spiritual life: a fervent pursuit for the sense of life, an incentive to tie new friendships, and a desire to make progress. I want to share some sincere thoughts with you on these aspects.

When I was your age, I felt these incentives too, in different forms. At an early age I was reading science fiction literature about aliens and imaginary worlds, I was drawing robots and spaceships, and I was publishing small science fiction stories. For a while, I practiced martial arts and yoga, and for several years, in my high school and faculty life, I have been guided by a strong endeavour to understand the world, the beauty of the universe, and the mysteries of the human depths.

Because of these repeated feats, and the struggle to find my own place, I do feel quite close to the young people who are looking nowadays for their own way. Judging from the perspective of those pursuits during my adolescence, seeing you here present at a meeting of Christian young people, I rejoice in you, and I can say that you truly are in the place that is most useful for you to be, the best soil where you can grow better, namely in the Church.

Regarding the three aspects, I urge you to understand today that the life of the Church is the most proper environment that one can find in this world in order to develop him or herself harmoniously. I want you to be convinced that the Church is the most uplifting place where we could ever be.

The first thought that I want to share with you is about pursuing the sense; it is connected to the life you live, the repeated trials of adolescence or youth. I urge you to observe your own life for a day or even an hour! You will find out that you become what you do; you become what you experience. The way we think, what we feel, the way we choose to react to everyday life, all these together and each of them separately can build us up or harm us.

Why is this important? Because you are at the age of I want, I can or I want to be capable. It is the age when people dream of important things, the age of great energy, which is ready to be sacrificed in a battle.

Of course, as you have already noticed, the society we live in does not lack offers and we are invited to live for them. However, as you have probably understood, “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not helpful.” (1 Corinthians 6:12). Through the exigent eye of spirituality, enlightened by entire generations of saints, we can see clearly through the welter of proposals the world makes the following:

  • Happiness is not defined by having, but rather by sharing;
  • Becoming is not limited to achieving a brilliant career (If we intend to edify ourselves, we must move beyond the professional horizon, we must cultivate mercy and kindness towards our neighbours. These can embellish our character in some inner aspects that the struggle for a career can never cover);
  • Growing up cannot be achieved by experiencing more new things than others, but rather through fair choices, through wise decisions discerning the proposals of the world, avoiding the experiences that stir up passions and choosing those that build us spiritually;
  • In a world with an excessive interest to increase revenue and profit from games and entertainment, it is vital to guard our senses, to take care of our purity of mind and heart. (You have already verified until now in many life circumstances that our hands can be more easily washed than our mind can be purged. I can get rid of the dirt off my hands in a few seconds. Sometimes I cannot get rid of the memory of an indecent image in my mind for years. And I cannot discover a miraculous detergent that can wash out the informational dirt in my mind, nor some other bandage to heal the wound of my heart, except the tears of repentance. I am convinced that, if you examine yourselves for a moment, you will find that you have experienced this each fasting day or period, each Wednesday or Friday, when you experience the quickness of the soul being freed from the material world and its passions.)

Therefore, if you are convinced that we become what we do, or become what we experience, you will soon understand that every moment of your life has a different value. This way we can understand that the purposes we live for can be higher, that life is very precious, because we can do much more good deeds for ourselves, and for others, by the help of others, every day.

If sometime in your life, you felt the need of a meaning, then you would know that the sense we are looking for, the one we want to live for, is not comprised only of knowledge but also of life. This sense that I am living for must include myself, my family, my great-grandparents, their life, my love for them, and even their death. Such an extensive sense cannot be available from what the world offers. Many thinkers of the ancient and the modern times observed that the world could not fulfil our pursuits for a sense of life.  In fact, the world receives its meanings from us. And the meaning that we are looking for is fulfilled in an ever closer tie between life and our neighbours, in communion with God. And this is the life of the Church, experienced in the parish community where we can find all those dear to us, the living and the deceased, those who have passed away into the Lord.

If you have deepened the texts of the Holy Gospel on the life and words of Christ, and if you have read the lives of some of the saints, you have experienced in your own life that no sense can encompass everything as the Person of Christ does through His life and sacrifice, through the Holy Sacraments that are performed in His Church. He is “the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6). In Him was life; and the life was the light of men (John 1:4), a light that cannot be overcome by darkness.

If you have friends who have not yet felt the incentive to look for a meaning, many philosophers, scientists, cosmologists, physicians, artists, poets stand as witnesses through an overwhelming diversity of experiences, that in his pursuit, man cannot live without a sense.

My second thought: At this beautiful age, you express your desire to tie new friendships and the easiness to come close to those of your own age. You are easily noticed by naturalness, by frankness. I am sure that those concretely involved in parish life have already learned that they can become grateful in a wonderful manner. Being a member of a parish, every one of you is already a member of a great fellowship, of a great family. As brothers and sisters through the same Baptism in the Lord, partaking of the same Body and Blood of the Lord, we are all already united with Him, in the same faith and in Him, in a large family including both the close ones and those from afar, and even those who have departed from this world. This fellowship includes both the Romanian society, its history and spirituality, and the larger Christian family, connecting itself with the great saints of the world, with those who during harsh or luminous times have hallowed and illumined the world sometimes with their blood, some other times with their teachings, their kindness or their mercifulness.

By participating in this immense family of faith in Christ, we acknowledge that we are bearers of an ancient root and that we are the springs of a Christian people, having the responsibility to honour the saints, the heroes, and our ancestors, each Sunday, and each Feast day. Only by such a religious experience, we can grasp the entire world in a holistic way, feeling responsible for every fellow person, offering room for every human in our souls. Within the parish community, we cultivate a new spiritual state of our conscience, which cannot be practiced anywhere else: an open awareness to the life of our fellows, created in the image of God; the possibility to take care of every human; the generosity to wish them good; the availability to support everyone.

If you have friends who have never felt this joy, who have never experienced this luminous enlargement of their souls, pray for them.

Tell them that today’s scientific world has many experimental evidence that within a community of faith, man is stronger against depression and anxiety, man is healthier in medical terms, and cultivates easier his spiritual intelligence.

It is true that we can be united by ideas, ideals or values, but nothing unites us more and more enduring than Christ our Lord. In some manner, a book can unite us, and even a work of art, or the life of a man we admire together for his accomplishments.  However, not all of these are necessarily forms of unity that can prepare us for my love and sacrifice for the other. Christ does not bring us together, one next to each other, in a common idea or belief, the same way a work of art or a good book does. Christ vouchsafes us to live one for another and together for Him, in the light of His words and deeds, guided by the divine grace and strengthened by His sacrifice. Only together with Him, and by the friendship shown to us by the Son of God, can we become friends with the others, embracing them with His embrace. Only in Him, our unity can go beyond time and death.

My third thought refers to the desire to make progress, to advance on the path of becoming. Young people always feel this desire and want to follow it in the most concrete way. If you have participated together with your friends in volunteering or in a common service in your parish, you have surely already found that every faithful can have a continuous experience within the parish life. The parish community, with its friends and acquaintances, creates the most extensive spiritual training camp for everyone eager to become involved in helping others. It is the place where one can practice most virtues, can cultivate his or her character, can develop generosity.

Arriving from different parts of Romania and other countries, and meeting one another, you have been able to notice that young people who love Christian life resemble with each other in a wonderful way and quickly befriend. Although looking different, and having different concerns, young people collaborate naturally; they experience the joy to help and the diligence to do good.

In the Church of Christ, by helping people, we understand that it is not sufficient to know, and even more, it is not enough to have. It is more important to be, to place everything you know and have in the service of our neighbours and to the glory of God, the Source of eternal joy.

Nevertheless, if some of your friends think that this way of living is not desirable, many medical research of today can determine them to ponder on it. New areas of medical research have already revealed for several decades that mutual aid, compassion and generosity are much healthier both for the person who receives them, and for those who offer them. It is proven today that having high values to believe in we are stronger in the face of suffering, more resistant to the temptations of pleasure and consumption; we are stronger in the face of death. The higher the values we believe in are, the stronger our self-control, and our will are.

Indeed, many findings show today that without a spiritual experience coming from faith, man cannot set an order in his desires, so as to save himself from a wrong lifestyle. Without a genuine spiritual life orientation, the world cannot be saved from waste and pollution, from conflicts and indifference, from selfish consumption to which we brought it by giving a priority to our own selfish pleasures. We cannot establish moderation and compassion as a lifestyle worldwide and in our communities by legal regulation, by law of this world, rather than by the spiritual law of human interiority.

All these are possible in religious life and par excellence in the Church, because she belongs to Christ: the Man Who loved and loves God in a perfect way, and the God Who showed us the love of the Holy Trinity towards us in the clearest way. Christ offered Himself as a light for life, uniting us all mysteriously in His Church, in this vast family of faith in Him, as a place of our becoming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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