The June 4 enthronement of Metropolitan Archbishop Borys Gudziak at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral in Philadelphia spotlighted three women. The first, young and disabled, was wheeled to the center of the congregation by the second, her mother. One could find more than one message here – a reminder of our own brokenness and need for healing (whether mental, physical, or spiritual), and an example of the value of a life spent caring for another. The third woman, roughly the same age as the first, was a nun. The message here seemed to be that even in today’s “secularized” America, a young, educated person can freely choose a life of devotion to God. In a culture obsessed with health, hedonism and the self, and laced with skepticism about the divine, these are contrarian messages.
Many of us, it is true, seek healing, transcendence and meaning – as long as it doesn’t involve religion. Some seek them in meditation and yoga (salutary disciplines which, incidentally, can be harmonized with the spirituality and prayer practice of Byzantine Christianity). But they do not answer the question of the meaning of life. Seeking to free themselves of materialism, others look to a minimalist lifestyle. But this does not empower us to renounce our wealth – only to manage it; we still remain focused on material things. (Harma-Mae Smit, “Purpose-Driven Purging,” Touchstone, September-October 2019, pp. 42-45.) Minimalism can be an aspect of environmentalism – another well-intentioned but insufficient response to materialism, even in its more philosophical or pseudo-religious forms. Some seek a purpose for their lives in social activism – though this, again, does not really address the question of meaning. Many seek fulfillment in politics. But with the major parties committed to the same liberal capitalist world order and tied to moneyed elites, party politics is too superficial to confront the hard issues, and too timid to face the fundamental philosophical and lifestyle choices that alone can solve our problems.
Yet does the Church offer a true alternative? What kind of life path does it envision?
Like other major religions, Christianity defies popular trends. It teaches young people to focus on others, not themselves. It asks them to be realistic and responsible (for example, to face the obvious if inconvenient fact that sex is inseparable from its purpose of begetting children, and to take the responsibility to provide those future children with a family). It encourages adults to organize their lives around cycles of prayer, measured work and creative leisure rather than the frantic “work hard, play hard” lifestyle required to perpetuate a consumerist economy. It teaches us to accept the realities of old age, suffering and death rather than seeking blindly and vainly to avoid or deny them.
But could it be that this contrarian attitude belongs to an ethos that has become history? Will our successors have an entirely different world view? Will religious believers someday be treated as delusional, and confined in mental hospitals, as in the “progressive” USSR? We can already identify the people of tomorrow in America and Europe: only seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, and lacking a firmly based ethics and morality, unwavering loyalties, and ethnic or religious commitments.
But as some artificial intelligence experts predict, the people of tomorrow may not be people at all. What if robots outsmart us and rule? Will Christianity again become a subversive religion of the downtrodden and enslaved? Or will the machines’ superior logical power lead them to confirm its truth? (But no, robo-priests won’t solve our vocations problem.)
Today, in any case, we face a choice both simple and difficult: How shall we live? The symbolism of Metropolitan Borys’s enthronement provides some clues. Perhaps because we tend to think in terms of politics, the question appears at its starkest when posed in political form. How shall Americans – or Ukrainians – base their political life?
Now some will object that religious and philosophical questions should have nothing to do with politics. The Church, they remind us, must be kept separate from the state. But every state, in addition to its laws and constitution, has a philosophical foundation, explicit or implicit. If we should propose the “Judaeo-Christian tradition” or the “Abrahamic heritage” as the conceptual basis for the state, there would be cries of “theocracy.” But no one outside the Taliban would suggest that lawmakers, judges and civil servants be replaced by clerics (which is what theocracy means).
If the notion of a state rooted philosophically in the world’s chief religions seems offensive, especially to those who do not adhere to any of them, try this thought experiment:
Imagine that you are an atheist or agnostic. You face a choice between two societies. In the first, you will be governed by people who believe that truth, ethics and morality are relative; who accept the principle that power and money are the determinants of human affairs, operating through cut-throat competition and the “survival of the fittest”; who accept war as a normal and inevitable feature of international life; and who are convinced that if they are sufficiently clever and ruthless, they can get away with anything. In this society, there is no notion of love, mercy, compassion, or forgiveness (readers of The Weekly can easily think of two 20th century societies where such values were categorically rejected). In the other society, both governors and governed believe that love and truth are paramount values, that they must love both God and neighbor, that they must respect and protect the natural order, and that at the end of time they will be held eternally accountable for all their thoughts and actions. Which society would you rather live in?
Of course, these two societies are theoretical constructs. But as we gravitate towards the first, our vestigial moral capital running low, it is becoming increasingly evident that there is no third. We must choose. And that choice will determine how we shall live.
Andrew Sorokowski can be reached at [email protected].