“The spiritual poverty of the Western World is much greater than the physical poverty of our people. You, in the West, have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and
emptiness. They feel unloved and unwanted. These people are not hungry in the
physical sense, but they are in another way. They know they need something more than money, yet they don’t know what it is. What they are missing, really, is a living relationship with God.”
– Mother Teresa of Calcutta, in a 1975 interview
This quote was 43 years ago. I am 41 years old, and my earliest memories come from the early 1980’s. My, how the world has changed since then. And if Mother Teresa observed this back then, how much poorer are we now, in this age?
It’s 2018 – and we are starving to death. Look around, you know it to be true. In a society where there is such a surplus of wealth, those words by now Saint Mother Teresa ring with truth more than ever. Everyone has a smartphone and the internet at their fingertips, technology is supposed to bring us together, but we are lonelier now than ever before. And we’ve isolated ourselves from the One True God that can help us.
We seek happiness, peace, and fulfilment – but all too often we search for that in all the wrong things. We busy ourselves to death with activities, work, and everything in between, all with hopes that somehow, at some point, that which we strive to attain will eventually pay off and fulfill us. But all that does is tear us away from our families, from each other, and most importantly – from God.
Just look around any airport when you travel. You can see the loneliness and sadness in people’s eyes, as they flip through their smartphones waiting for a flight, or perhaps at the airport bar, wondering if this is all there is, if the hours and time away are worth it. Or next time you go out to dinner, notice the families who are together, but not together as they focus in on their respective devices. Or just observe they eyes of people walking up and down any given street, lost in their worlds, not noticing the world around them.
I see this all the time, I’ve been there. And so, in this age of connectedness, we’ve never been more alone. So many people, so many of our youth – people all around us – are in a deep spiritual emptiness and are yearning for love, for relationships, for not being lonely.
Deep down, underneath, the thing that is missing, as Mother Teresa so simply stated,is a living relationship with God.
If I could give a gift to everyone in the world, it would be that – a deep, living relationship with God. And the thing is, it’s free! We all can have this. Thousands of years ago, God gave the Israelites bread in the desert, so that they would not starve. Two thousand years ago, He came Himself, to be living bread for us, to save us spiritually from our own eternal demise.
And He comes to us every day in the Eucharist, freely, there is no cost. We can receive Him every day to nourish our souls, but the churches are sparsely populated.
We can have a living relationship with Christ through the Eucharist, through the Sacraments, and through His Word, but how many of us take the time to do so?
We work long hours earning money in our society so we can buy the things that make us happy. We miss out on so much in our daily lives, in our family lives doing so. But all the money in the world, all the material things in the world will never provide the happiness and fulfillment that we seek deep down.
The only One that will provide what we seek and sustain us in the long term through the peaks and valleys of life is a living relationship with Christ. Pure and simple.
I’m not saying that money and things and activities are bad things – quite the contrary. But they are just tools. Tools to be used, not idolized. And if we seek a living relationship with Christ, and make that a priority, then all those other things become tools where we can encounter Christ through others and be Christ to others.
God has provided us with this gift, His Son Jesus, this living bread in our lives that sustains and strengthens and transforms us, who we can have a living relationship with. And it’s through this relationship, where we can make the little communities where we live and work richer and more prosperous spiritually. That affects everything, and our world needs it more than ever.
