An essay I wrote about faith and youth.
going? These questions are particularly reflected on during the time of Youth. A teen will soon
become an adult and must now decide how he is going to live the rest of his life. The responses
to these questions will certainly affect this decision, but they can only be found by a trusting
faith. This essay will study the time of adolescence as a leap of faith from the visible world into
the loving arms of God.
Children are supplied many of their needs by others and do not have to work for themselves.
This causes children to feel as if they are the center of their own world, and everyone must serve
them. As children grow, they are given more responsibilities and required to work to satisfy
their own desires. They slowly realize that others are not going to look out for them all their
lives. This causes a young adult to admit to himself that he is not in control of his own life, and
must now find who is.
As a child moves to adulthood, he is faced with another realization. He realizes that he is
mortal and will one day die. Now that he knows life is limited, he starts to prioritize. He now
seeks to find the best way to spend his life, and if possible, achieve an afterlife. The questions
he asks will no longer be satisfied by physical answers. He is now searching for an eternal
answer.
The youth now begins a serious search, for the answers to these questions. He will analyze
the ideology and religion of his family, yet will no longer accept God as he once did Santa
Claus. He is very skeptical, and must make this discovery on his own. This search will usually
begin, and too often end, by finding comfort in a material form of happiness. This is something
he can see, touch and experience with his senses. This is why many teens can become greedy
and experiment with sex, drugs and alcohol. After spending some time in material enjoyment,
man realizes that this type of satisfaction is only temporal and will die just like he will, and
cannot satisfy his longing for an eternal answer.
Man realizes that he cannot find the answers using his intellect alone. It's beyond his human
senses and knowledge. Now he comes to a crossroad in life: either I'm only another "thing" in
this world which will spend life struggling for survival until he eventually dies, or I'm a creature
created by a sovereign spiritual being who has some form of plan for my life.
When man comes to the latter conclusion, he is faced with another question: "How can I
know a God who's spiritual when I am physical?" This question is best answered by St. John of
the Cross: "To attain that which you know not you must pass through that which you know not."
Man therefore must make a jump from what is physical and "known" to what is "unknown".
This leap means for man to accept that: "What cannot be seen....is not unreal; on the contrary [it]
in fact represents true reality, the element that supports and makes possible all the rest of reality"
(Ratzinger 24)
Now an even greater question arises, the same one Christ asked Peter, "Who do you say I
am?" (Mt 16:15) Man must now decide before jumping, what or who, he is jumping into. He
must define the unseen, and answer the question: "What is God?" or "Who is God?", in a world
of religious diversity. Now man must trust that the true God reveals himself, for as man has
found out previously, he cannot find the answers on his own. This involves asking God to come
down from the heavens and reveal himself.
This desperate cry to God is forever answered in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Through
Jesus, God has come to be with man, as a man, that man can learn who he really is. The God of
the universe has come so close that we can speak of him as: "What we have heard, what we have
seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon and touched with our hands."(1 Jn 1:1) Now we
can hear God's voice, see his face, and know his love. This was a love that allowed us, the
creature, to kill the creator.
This one event in history, closes the gap between God and man, and makes the leap something
doable; man is no longer putting his faith in a God who is far, mighty and unknown, but a God
who is also a man. This man is one who can relate to our weakness and knows that "the spirit is
willing, but the flesh is weak"(Mt 26:41).
Now man can make the leap. To move from the seen world to the unseen God who made
himself visible for us to see & touch. We can now answer Jesus' question as to who we think He
is with the answer: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God"(Mt 16:16) This leap is no
longer a jump of blind faith into a sea of nothingness, but rather it is a surrender into the arms of
a loving savior. This is not trusting in something completely unseen, for He has made his love
known to us. Instead, it is trusting that love everyday to be the motivation for our lives. Daily
this is the leap we must make, to jump out of our own wills and desires and to do the will of
others and most importantly, God. This is a leap that may not be quite as far, but seemingly just
as foolish. This daily action, not resolved once in a man's life but repeated everyday, can only be
described as a leap of faith.
Therefore, during man's youth and throughout his entire life he must search the earth for the
answers. He will find that these answers are not found in the physical world, but only from a
journey into the unknown, a "leap of faith", A leap from our own comfort zone into the arms of
Jesus Christ. This necessary and important moment in a youth's life is best described by our
Holy Father: "It is necessary that the young know the Church, that they perceive Christ in the
Church, Christ who walks through the centuries, alongside each generation, alongside every
person. He walks alongside each person as a friend. An important day in a young person's life is
the day on which he becomes convinced that this is the only friend who will not disappoint him,
on whom he can always count."(John Paul II 126)
Works Cited
The Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. The New American Bible. Copyright 1970 Revised Psalms Copyright 1991. Revised New Testament Copyright 1986. Grand Rapids: Word
Publishing.
John Paul II. Crossing the Threshold of Hope. Translated by Jenny McPhee and Martha McPhee.
Canada: Alfred A. Knopf , 1994.
Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph. Introduction to Christianity. Translated by J. R. Foster. San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990.
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