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Saint Paul
Thursday, March 28, 2024

I am, therefore I am loved

Jonathan Liedl

Life can be difficult. It can be confusing. It can be painful. And sometimes — and maybe worst of all — it can be experienced as something drab and dreary; insignificant, empty and without ultimate meaning — which, in turn, makes all the various trials and tribulations we experience on a daily basis all the more difficult to bear.

Not because these difficulties, the normal, routine ones, are by some objective measure really all that difficult. Working a dull nine-to-five, for instance, does not really compare on the Richter Scale of difficulty to suffering poverty or persecution. But because the underlying crisis of meaning removes any foundation for making these little difficulties and inconveniences seem anything other than utterly pointless, it also makes them all the more intolerable. There’s a reason so many of the existentialist writers of the 20th century depicted this kind of listlessness and emptiness as most pronounced in the tedium of office work and household affairs.

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iStock-ddsign_stock

Of course, our Christian faith speaks some powerful truths into the midst of this cloud of despondency: An all-powerful, all-loving God created the universe, and everything in it — including us — is good and meaningful; Jesus’ intervention into time and space redeemed from futility and hopelessness not only our human condition, but also our human pursuits and affairs; and God has called each and every one of us to take part in a unique and meaningful mission in building his kingdom through our lives and actions.

But even as believing Christians, it can be difficult for these profound truths to register amid our daily toil. True as they are, they sometimes seem unimpactful, preserved in a realm of ideas that lie beyond how we subjectively experience life. We can look to them for inspiration as we wade through the mundane and the trivial, but how can we allow them to touch us, to transform not just our knowledge and our destiny, but also our outlook and our attitude?

Counterintuitive as it may sound, perhaps the solution is to lean more intensely into our own experiences of difficulty; and in doing so, to be aware not so much of the character of the difficulty I experience, but instead of the fact that it is happening to me. To a “me” that exists, and yet did not bring itself into existence.

We tend to take this mystery of our being for granted. But, if I am attentive to my concrete experience of existing — made all the more clear in the midst of my suffering — I cannot help but run into something else: the fact of God’s creative, sustaining, fulfilling love for me. For to say “I am” is also to say “therefore I am loved,” since I do not create myself, but am only here because God has made me for and out of love. And if I am loved by God, a God who is in control, then my entire life — including whatever trials or tribulations I face, however big or small — is inherently meaningful.

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“I am, therefore I am loved.” Enhancing our daily awareness of this concrete, tangible fact may be the foothold we need to experience and live each moment of our lives as meaningful.

Liedl, a Twin Cities resident, is the senior editor of the National Catholic Register and a graduate student in theology at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity.

 


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