Signs of life: six ways to seek the sacred.

One of the best things about Christianity is that it loves seekers. Jesus himself remains one of the most passionate seekers of all time. By its very nature, seeking is fluid, ever-changing--an art that cannot be mastered. At least not in this lifetime. But seeking is what keeps us alive; it is what binds us together. So the quality of our lives and of our faith depends in many ways on the quality of our seeking. In my own experience the following six practices have helped me become a better seeker.

1. Embrace the journey

After countless hours of research, outlining, writing, listening, working with patients, lecturing, and discussing, the world-renowned psychiatrist M. Scott Peck boiled the essence of his mega-bestselling book The Road Less Traveled into the opening line: "Life is difficult."

Our consumer-driven pop culture has produced its own spin on such wisdom. Bumper stickers give us a range from the fatalistic--"Life's a bitch, then you die"--to the humorous--"Life's a beach, then you die"--to the commercial--"Life is short. Play hard" or "Just do it." One of the famous lines from the movie Shawshank Redemption tells us that once we realize life is hard, we can "get busy living, or get busy dying." Translated into consumer language, we can "get busy buying."

But Peck's point in telling us that life is difficult is not to prompt us to give up or divert our attention or buy our way into oblivion. Quite the contrary. His point is to teach us that once we acknowledge that life is tough, we are free to embrace life to the fullest extent. We let go of misconceptions about what life owes us and grab onto the truth that life gives us what we put into it. We move from a naive preoccupation with trying to reach the top to a mature acceptance of life as a journey filled with ups and downs and various destinations that change over time. We cease trying to control every aspect of our lives and begin opening ourselves to new possibilities and ways of seeing things.

When I was in high school, I thought there was some magic key to life that would forever unlock all the doors that lead to fulfillment and happiness. The journey part of life scared me, so, rather than embrace it, I sought to take the mystery out of it by conquering it. I naively believed that if I sifted through my education, I would find the key to life that I was looking for.

My English teacher, who was always telling us that the beauty of literature is that it is always new, always alive, helped me to make a connection between literature and life. I came to see that the beauty of life is that it is by definition alive and therefore open to change and new interpretations and meaning. So my early hope to evade the journey of life by figuring it out was transformed into embracing the journey of life by enjoying the ride.

2. Be awake, aware, and alive

The art of seeking requires us to be awake, alert, and alive. It also requires us to be open, daring, and bold enough to think outside the box. Rather than seeing through other people's eyes and accepting at face value what they seek and ultimately discover, we must train ourselves to be skilled observers who seek and find for ourselves.

I grew up in a family of Cubs fans. My dad has written several books on the Cubs and is a lifelong fan of the team. Some of my fondest childhood memories include going to parks with my dad and brother and pretending to be Cubs players as we played catch and called the play-by-play. The few times we drove to Chicago to watch the real Cubs play are burned in my memory.

Today I live down the street from Wrigley Field, which as far as I can tell is one of the truly authentic slices of heaven on Earth. A few seasons ago I was at the park in June watching the Cubs play the Arizona Diamondbacks. There were 39,000 people jammed into the 35,000-capacity park to watch our beloved Cubs play ball. True to their history, the Cubbies played poorly and lost 5-4. The fact is, the fans that night did not much care who won or lost, or even how the game was played. They were just enjoying themselves.

Looking around the park, I overheard a guy behind me, with a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other, turn to his friends and quote a line from a beer commercial, "It doesn't get any better than this." Now, I know he wasn't talking about baseball because it gets a lot better than that! And I'm sure he'd had better beer than Old Style, though it is the nectar of the gods at Wrigley Field. Somehow, watching this game and being with his friends put him in this great mood. And when the Cubs hit a homer in the next inning, he high-fived his friends and huddled them in a circle for a group hug.

Observing this guy celebrating his friendships made me feel awake, aware, and alive. And for a brief moment I made a connection between how I felt at the game that night and how I often feel at Mass. When Mass is done right, we all join together as fans of the Jesus event and the gospel message. Instead of high-fives, we join hands in the Our Father and offer each other the sign of peace. Instead of passing pretzels and beer down the row, we pass the collection basket. And instead of pouring back onto the streets with a game on our minds, we feel charged to go and "love and serve the Lord."

3. Log the experience

The art of seeking requires us to take note of where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going. I call this "logging the experience." The value of personal experience in our journeys of life and faith can never be overstated. Young adults place great emphasis on experience, which does not mean that we reject everything at face value or consider rules and eternal lessons irrelevant. We simply like to see for ourselves.

Logging our experiences can be done in many ways. Some people compose music or paint or write poetry or call a friend or take photographs or dance or sing. There is no right or wrong way to log experience. The point is simply to do it. Taking time out of each day to reflect on life as it is happening is crucial for making continuity out of discontinuity and for seeing the larger tapestry of our lives.

Keeping a journal has always helped me log my own experiences. Ever since I can remember I have written down my thoughts. Sometimes I have written daily, other times only when I felt the urge. The effect has been that, from my earliest childhood scribbles to my adult entries typed on the computer, I have kept track of the threads that hold my life together.

By logging the experience, we claim it, mine it for its riches, come to understand it better, and record it for those days when life seems empty and devoid of meaning. In his poem, "The Dry Salvages," T. S. Eliot says it best:

   We had the experience but missed the meaning And approach to the meaning
   restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning We can
   assign to happiness.

As we get into the habit of logging the experience, we become better at stringing our experiences together and seeing the meaning in them, what Henry David Thoreau called "sucking the marrow out of life."

4. Seek out kindred seekers

The first day of college was as scary as it was exhilarating. As an incoming freshman at Notre Dame, I was eager to meet my roommate and the other guys in my dorm. As we all descended on the campus and gathered for freshman orientation, we had the chance to size each other up. Then, as we moved our stuff into our rooms, we got the chance to talk and get to know each other.

One of the first people I met was Andy Pauline, and we became instant friends. Two of Andy's high school pals--Tom Gerth and Jay Kelly--were also assigned to Sorin. It did not take long for me to build friendships with Tom and Jay, and throughout freshman year the four of us were pretty much inseparable.

Late freshman year Jay developed a severe pain in his right leg. It got so bad that he limped with each step and eventually had to go to the doctor. He was told that it was either a pulled muscle or a pinched nerve. The pain did not subside by the end of the semester, so we all prayed that Jay would get better over the summer. By the middle of summer the worst came true: Jay was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. The pain in his leg was caused by a tumor along his side and back.

Jay was well into chemotherapy when school started up again, so he wasn't able to make it back to Notre Dame for the first semester. We all wanted to be there for Jay as often as possible, but it was Andy who took the lead. He organized road trips and made sure that Jay's friends all over campus stayed in touch. During fall break, Jay had radical surgery to remove the tumor. Andy, Tom, and I went to Boston for a day visit with Jay. It was very tough to see him in such bad shape, but his faith, humor, and strength gave us all courage enough to be there and hang out with him, just like old times.

Later on, Jay made a few visits to campus, but he was not able to enroll in classes. Instead, he went to a local college in his hometown and worked at rehab with a determination I had never seen before. Throughout that summer, Jay held onto the hope that he would be able to come back to campus for junior year and continue his education. But he enrolled in classes only for a brief while before having to withdraw for more tests and treatment.

I once asked him, "Jay, are you mad at God?" With a look of calm understanding, he said, "Jer, there have been times throughout this whole thing when I've gotten mad, even at God. But I always come back to God. What upsets me most is that I have so much I want to give. But things happen for a reason, and in the end God is all we've really got."

When Jay died on July 15, 1991, I tried to remember his words. But my anger and sadness overcame me, and I think I genuinely hated God. It was only with the help of each other that Andy, Tom, and I were able to make any sense of Jay's death and understand what he had said about not being mad at God. It was not God I was angry with. It was loss itself. Jay's death represented a terrible beauty that is the very heart of loss itself. For loss is not loss unless something was gained to begin with.

5. Live into your questions

When faced with the "big" questions of life--Where do we come from? Why are we here? Is there a God? Why do we suffer?--we have many options as to how we will respond. We can avoid such questions or, worse yet, be paralyzed by them. Or we can dive headfirst into them. The first two reactions are the easiest and therefore are perhaps the most natural. In today's culture of quick bits of information and instant gratification, there seems to be no room for tough questions that require our time, that frustrate us, that seem to have no empirical answer. We want to dominate information, put it at our disposal, use it for power. Anything else is for the philosophers and theologians to ponder.

But in our quest to quiet questions, we really only bury them in shallow graves that still allow them air. And as they lie just beneath the surface, they infect us with an unease that keeps us restless until we dig them up and face them head-on.

It takes a certain combination of courage, patience, and humility to face the big and tough questions of life. Often, the answers are slow to come, if they ever do. And we are left with more questions than we began with. The other side of that coin, however, is the fact that our questions can empower us. Free from fear, we can, as the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke says, "live into our questions" as a way of embracing their energy.

Every year in the dead cold of winter, 80 young adults make their way from Chicago and suburbs to the Cenacle Retreat House in Warrenville, Illinois. Having signed up months in advance, these twenty- and thirty-somethings eagerly await the weekend of the annual retreat sponsored by the archdiocesan Young Adult Ministry Office.

As a leader on one of these retreats, I met a young architect who shared that he was mired in questions and felt trapped. He said he enjoyed being an architect but that as he sat at work designing windows and bathrooms, he felt there was something else he wanted to do with his life. During his work breaks and over lunch he researched Catholic Web sites. He was feeling overwhelmed by his duties at work, his parents' hopes, and the questions and new information his research of Catholicism was yielding.

I immediately loved this guy's questions and passion. But I also perceived a very real lostness that caused him frustration, anxiety, confusion, and heartache. He wanted truth, he wanted answers, he wanted clarity, and he wanted them now. I knew some of what was going on inside him--we all do--because I had been there at his age and am often still there six years down the road. So, after talking with him about his questions, what he was reading, and what he was learning about the Catholic path, I invited him to get excited by his questioning.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

I explained that asking questions is what makes us human. And the more we ask, the more we find; likewise, the more we find, the more we ask. Asking questions keeps us alive, engaged, interested.

He liked the idea of being excited by his questions but wanted to ponder this notion a little more. All I could think to say was Rilke's line: "Live into your questions." Face them, grapple with them, share them with others, write them down, put them away for another day. Whatever you do, do not let them sap your energy. Rather, harness their energy and know that you are alive because you question. The answers will come. They will even change. But the asking always remains.

6. Have fun!

He danced in the aisles. He couldn't help it. The joyful music, the tone of the homily, the expressions on the faces of those in the pews around him, and the love he felt sent lightning through his legs and he just had to dance.

I'd been watching him the whole Mass, this little special-needs boy bobbing from side to side in the row in front of me. I'd also been watching the reactions of his parents and siblings as they tried to keep him quiet and still so as not to disrupt those of us trying to pray. His sister laughed at him, lovingly but with a tinge of embarrassment. His brother ignored him. His mother tenderly ran her fingers through his hair and stroked his face to calm him down. And his dad steeled his facial expression, trying not to show how much he wished that his son could just be "normal."

But in spite of their efforts, the little boy whispered loudly to his family, "Dance!" and tugged on their shirts to join him until he finally bolted into the aisle and got his groove on. As the music filled the church, the little boy laughed and danced and waved at the band and singers. They waved back and played right to him, pointing their instruments and faces in his direction.

Just before the mother went to retrieve her son, the boy's father put his arm around her as if to say, "Let him go, he's having a blast." His hard face had melted into pure love. When the boy finally made his way back into the pew, his dad hugged him and looked proud, for in that moment, his son had taught him the power of faith and joy.

Religion and spirituality often get a bad rap as being heavy stuff for serious, somber people. Pondering ultimate meaning, struggling to find God or to help God find us, nurturing hope in the face of suffering, denying ourselves boundless pleasures, going to church, reading the Bible, and living according to values and codes sound like all work and no play. And no matter how hard we work, it seems there is always more than enough cause for us to feel guilty and fear being condemned to hell.

So why bother building a faith life, let alone one rooted in scripture and religion? Quite simply, because faith is fun. In fact, in religious language, it is joyful.

The Bible is filled with stories of people whose faith not only saved them from utter despair but led them to sheer joy. Think of the joy of Abraham and Sarah when they learned that in their 90s they would bear a son named Isaac, whose name means "may God laugh," and become the ancestors of all nations. Think of the joy of the Israelites when, after 40 years in the wilderness with Moses, they were able to reclaim their homeland. Recall the joy of those who were healed by Jesus and ran to share the good news. Imagine the joy of those, especially the marginalized, who ate, drank, and laughed with Jesus.

The Catholic tradition is all about joy. Saint Therese of Lisieux--the French Carmelite nun sometimes known as the Little Flower--wrote, "Joy is found in the inner recesses of the soul. One can possess joy in a prison cell as well as in a palace." In many ways, Therese's cloistered life in the convent was akin to life in a prison. But in the silence and solitude she soared as an artist, writer, and master of the soul.

What Therese and people like her see so clearly is that faith is not only joyful but fun. As we seek to understand why we are here, to find community, to love and be loved, and to spread justice, faith begs us to enjoy our lives, to be joyful people, to have fun in our solitary moments and with each other.

By JEREMY LANGFORD, copublisher of Sheed & Ward. This article is excerpted from God Moments: Why Faith Really Matters to a New Generation (2001), published by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, [phone].