Being Young and Catholic

WHY SHOULD THEY STAY? | YOUNG PEOPLE

I mean, it’s not like being Catholic is cool. Yet we hope that teenagers and young adults will stay with Christ and His Church (since the two are the same thing). It surely won’t be easy. For some it will mean sacrificing pleasures their peers call “natural.” Others will lose friends altogether because of Christ. So why would a young person even want to be a Christian?

I do think, of course, it is very good for a young person to be a Catholic (and I know it’s also kind of cool, in the way that some unpopular things are). But it seems that Christ wants young people themselves to grow in their capacity to give their own reason for staying with Him. Because that process, the work of acknowledging our attraction to Christ and then striving to remain with Him, is the way God reshapes us according to our original dignity and then into something even greater, namely, beatitude.

To be a saint. This doesn’t mean being a moralizer (a person who is always condemning others for acting in unbecoming ways). It doesn’t even mean avoiding sin (although it is necessary to resist temptation and sin). The saint, rather, is the one who discovers that God actually transforms the person into something greater than he would have been if he had not cried out for grace in the first place. Does that make sense?

I love Jeremiah chapter 18. You should read it. God tells him to “go down to the potter’s house” and “watch him work at the wheel.” Jeremiah goes. Then he hears the Lord in his heart say, “See how the vessel becomes deformed sometimes? Now watch the way the potter reshapes the clay into something new.”

This is what God is doing in the souls of his saints. Each of us has been deformed by sin, but God is reshaping us into something new. And because Christ’s hands are the very hands of God, we can not help but become like Him as the Father reshapes us.

The devil wants the degradation of our humanity, the perversion of it. God is about the work of restoring it. He has ways of accomplishing this in all people who seek Him with a sincere heart, but the Catholic is being invited to know Him in a deeply personal way.

Setting out on the journey toward holiness (which is for every saint a life-long process) we come to know God intimately. And while it is true that “eye has not seen” and “ear has not heard” what God has in store for those who love Him, we do know (as Saint John says) “we shall see Him as He is” for having become like Him as those who were reshaped by Him.

So why should young people stay with Christ and His Church in this life? Well, where else should they go? He has the words of eternal life. Their eyes have not seen, nor their ears heard of, any plan for their lives as great as God’s. To be Christian, then, would be to allow Him to transform life into an adventure. How exciting to think of what He may do with this clay! +