Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Feb 6

Are you restless?

I know I am. In many ways, if we look to the world around us, at our own community, within our own families, and in our own hearts, I suspect we will see there a restlessness which is a sort of characteristic of our society and time.

Because our life is noisy, it’s messy, and it’s often painful.

Yet, deep within each of us, deep below the noise, and the mess, and the pain, we all still have this desire for happiness, and that is true even especially during those times in life when happiness seems pretty far away. In fact, this is not merely a Christian notion, either. The Ancient Pagan Philosophers knew it too, even if their foundations are different from ours, because it’s a human reality. Aristotle, for example, begins his writings on Ethics by saying that “All people desire happiness.”

And, as we see from our first reading, happiness was a desire of the early Jewish people, too. Around the same century that Aristotle was writing our search for happiness, Job was lamenting that he will never see happiness again.

The restlessness and brokenheartedness which we often feel is just the same as the restlessness and brokenheartedness that was felt those millennia ago, because what we are looking for is the same.

So, if we all want to be happy, if we all have this desire for happiness and fulfillment, then what’s stopping us from finding it?

Well here again, we can look to Job. Though his circumstances are quite a bit more extreme, I hope, than ours, still his story does help to demonstrate what kinds of suffering we might experience. He loses his home, his livelihood, his possessions, his comfort, and, as a final blow, his family. His life is complete darkness, or so it seems. No one would claim that his reasons are not real, or not sufficiently important. Even to lose a fraction of what he did would be cause for pain.

But even if we haven’t lost what Job lost, surely we have lost something. Perhaps we have lost a joy in life, our wonder at living, like Job, maybe our lives are. A ‘drudgery?’ Or, maybe, the loss of self-worth. The loss, in the end, of meaning.

This is a struggle because meaning and happiness go together. We know there is supposed to be meaning in all of this, and as Christians, maybe we’ve heard time and again about suffering having meaning, about ‘offering it up,’ or about carrying our Cross, but without understanding properly what it’s all for those things can become cynical, and unhelpful. They can become burdens of their own.

And maybe we find ourselves saying, with Job, ‘I am filled with restlessness…my days come and end without hope.’ The world around us wants us to be restless, because in that state of searching the constant noise and stimulation can propose anything to us as the way to find happiness, or at least to dull the pain. The noise wants us to be brokenhearted, because when our hearts are broken, we will try anything to fix them.

But, as we find, time and time again, no matter what we try, the things the world offers never heal. The things that are sold to us constantly, whether pleasure, money, success, esteem.

Whatever the substance, whatever the substitute, they only lead us further from happiness. They widen the wounds.

Because, as St. Augustine once cried out to the Lord, “Our hearts are restless, until they rest in you!” We are made for relationship with the Creator, and so our hearts cannot rest in any other thing. So we go through life searching for the thing which we seek, the healing we need, the happiness which will finally fulfill us.

And isn’t that the basic reality which Simon Peter states in the Gospel today.

“Everyone is looking for you” He says to Jesus.

And whether or not everyone realizes it, they are.

Now, this is not to say that difficulties of the mind or heart are signs of failure. In our contemporary language, we might replace restlessness and brokenheartedness with the words anxiety and depression, but whatever we call them, when we experience their coldness, whether from our circumstances and environment, or from an illness or affliction of the mind, it is all too easy to begin thinking that that these are signs of a loss of God’s love, or not trying hard enough. These are both lies, because just the opposite is true. When we feel anxious, when our minds and hearts are clouded by grief, or by sin, by sadness or self-hatred, the answer is not to busy ourselves with more distractions, or to fill our hours with activity to avoid the things we wish to avoid. God has not abandoned us, and we cannot work harder to reach Him. No, it is then instead that we must run to the Cross of Jesus, to sit at the foot of His sacrifice, not in some morbid obsession with death, but to rest in the love which saved us from darkness.

To quote the great Pope Saint John Paul II, “It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives…”