I was in a rough place a few years ago around this time of year. Halfway through my senior year of college at Xavier University, I ended a messy relationship and started questioning my chosen career path. The relationship should have ended much much earlier than it did, but we both held on because sometimes the bad patterns we know are preferable to the patterns we don’t. Also, I think questioning your direction in life is always a good idea, but doing so halfway through your last year of college produces a fair bit of anxiety in everyone.
I went to the last student Mass of the semester with quite a bit of personal trepidation. Fear of being single. Fear of my chosen path. Fear of unchosen paths. Sadness over lost time and opportunities associated with my recently failed relationship. Just an all around uneasiness concerning life, not to mention a looming graduation with uncertain job opportunities ahead.
Fr. Graham, Xavier’s President who celebrated the Mass, gave his homily and, of course, talked about Christmas and why we celebrate and what it means worldwide. But then, as Jesuits often do, he asked us to reflect on the message from a personal standpoint. What would it mean to let Jesus be born within us this holiday season? How would we be different? I wish I could say something exploded inside of me, that I jumped up from the pew and realized everything there was to realize, but, of course, that didn’t happen. It definitely gave me something to think about, though, as I walked to Dana’s to grab a post-Mass beer with friends, but I pushed it to the back of my mind to get through finals, travel home and weather normal family madness associated with the holidays.
My family is small, so Christmas day consisted of me and my parents opening presents and then settling in for a day of watching holiday movies and reading new books. I have this distinct memory of sitting in an old brown recliner, surrounded by wadded piles of torn wrapping paper and opening a new book, The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. One of his main theories in the book is happiness vs. pleasure, which are two different things our society often confuses. He, not surprisingly, believes that happiness leads to greater personal joy than the addictive nature of pleasure.
Sitting in the chair, book in my lap, I thought about happiness, pleasure and Fr. Graham’s message of a personal Christmas. My ex-girlfriend certainly provided me with pleasure on many different levels, but our lack of real happiness had become more and more apparent. The same with my chosen career path. I had wanted to write for newspapers my entire life, it seemed glamorous and exciting, but the high divorce rate I saw for journalists, endless story chasing and disposable nature of print media left me feeling empty at the end of most work days. In both cases, I constantly chased things for pleasurable reasons with no regard for greater happiness.
This greater happiness, not just fleeting pleasures, is what God calls for me. My wife, my home, my job all fill me with a peaceful joy I feel in my bones. This bone-deep happiness gets me through good and bad days, easy and difficult times. God meets me in these places and walks with me along our path.
I know this means a lot of different things for different people, but Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and good luck. I hope this is a rejuvenating time for you, and I’ll see you next year.
No comments:
Post a Comment