Recently, I spent time with a group of Catholic teenagers. Almost without exception, they had smartphones, and their attention often flowed to short-form videos, text messages, games, music, or social media. Even surrounded by peers, much of their focus was captured by their devices. I noticed how these tools can fill the silence and redirect our attention, keeping us from reflecting on our values, our goals, and the presence of God. Observing this reminded me of the challenges I faced as a teenager in learning to turn my heart back to the Father.
My Way Back to the Father
I have been a teenager, gone through college, married and raised a family, and now have both teenagers and adult children. Along the way, I encountered light and shadow, highs and lows, and gradually — though not without difficulty — I began to find my way back to God. It was not easy. The world is full of distractions, and temptations are real. But when I finally desired to seek him, it required effort and intentional practices: prayer, silence, self-denial and surrender. These were the ways I learned to open my heart fully to the Father.
Prayer and Silence
I didn’t even know how to pray. Doesn’t God already know everything? What am I supposed to say to him? I learned from a priest some tips about using Scripture, about meditating on what I read and about silence. I had to confess that my silence usually led to a nap but following his advice, my prayer improved. I started to learn to quiet down, though fully quieting my mind would come years later. I started to appreciate rather than abhor silence. I started to understand that prayer is about me connecting with God — he is already connected to me in so many ways. I started to discover the silence in my own prayer, the silence after meditating on scripture, the silence after the “Let us pray” at Mass, the silence of a car when the radio is off, the silence of Eucharistic Adoration. I learned to pray, little by little, and I learned to welcome the silence, to look forward to it.
Denying Myself
Denying myself things I knew were wrong, but the world accepted as good or “harmless” was a trial on par with the epic quests of myth and legend. I was truly conquering giants. I recognized that not all movies are good for my soul, not all songs are good for my soul, not all activities are good for my soul and I had to learn to deny myself these things over and over again. The world pushed them on me, billboards and commercials bombarded me with them. I fought back, I diverted my eyes, I switched the channel, I fast-forwarded the song.
At first it was hard, voices in my head would tell me “it’s ok, everyone’s doing it” or “there’s no commandment against listening to music” or “it’s harmless;” so many half-truths all aimed at getting me to not deny myself those things that my conscience and the Church told me were not good for my soul. But I had a priority to get to know God, to grow closer to him and I knew these things would get in the way, so I made these my battle lines. The first week was torture, the first month was difficult, and after that, it was not so hard. The result was freedom. Freedom from these things that I was ashamed of, freedom from the things that kept me going back to confession, freedom to be me, now unashamed, before God. That freedom made me stronger.
Self-Surrender
The fruit of prayer, silence and self-denial was the willingness and the fortitude to give back to God what he had given me. He gave me life, intelligence, understanding, health, talents and time. I had learned enough about God during this process, reading the Scriptures, reading about theology, reading the writings of the saints, to know that God wanted my heart; He wanted all of me. “Thus says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart.” (Joel 2:12) This, of course, is a lifelong task. We surrender ourselves a little at a time. As we give of ourselves, we receive grace to see a little bit more, like a candle in the darkness. We can see more clearly that there are areas we have not yet surrendered. We make the effort, for as long as it takes, to surrender that aspect of our life — that pride, that purely human aspiration — so that the light grows in us and his light shines all the more through us.
We Were Born to Do This
All of this takes time: purging from our lives what doesn’t please God, learning to pray, to meditate, to appreciate silence, and learning to surrender different aspects of our lives. All of this takes focus and attention, it takes effort. Our modern times have intensified the competition for our senses, for our time, for our priorities. The challenges are greater than ever, more powerful, more subtle, more engaging, more psychological, more carefully engineered to captivate us. But this is the battlefield into which we have been born. These are the victories that God wants to help us win.
A great role model for us is St. Joan of Arc, who God called to do difficult things. She defended herself against those who questioned why she did so many things against the grain of the culture. Why was she fighting the culture of her time? Why not just accept society the way it was? Why not just go home to her farm and her family? Why did she fight? She simply stated, “I was born to do this.” Our priority has never changed. Jesus tells us clearly that the greatest commandment is “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” And the Catechism says, “God put us in the world to know, to love, and to serve him, and so to come to paradise.” (CCC 1721) The goal has never changed, what has changed are the challenges we face.
We were born to do this. God, in all his wisdom, saw fit that we would be born into the world now, not 2,000 years ago in the time of the apostles, not 1,000 years ago in the Middle Ages of knights and castles. He saw our times, our challenges and thought it would be good for us to be born now, to be the light in the modern darkness and to be the salt of the earth. Therefore, we are not born to give into the modern challenges, we are born into this time to bring the light of Christ to the challenges. We are made for more than distractions, noise, isolation, comfort and consumption. We are made to conquer. “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Phil 4:13)
Do Not Be Afraid
Do not be afraid that you cannot resist. Do not be afraid that if you don’t immerse yourself in everything offered by the culture, you will be missing out on something. Do not be afraid that you are too small or too poor or too young or too old. With Christ, you are enough! “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor 12:9) We can assuredly vanquish the foes that attack us through Christ who gives us strength. We can assuredly face the evils of this day with the wisdom that comes from God. We have the strength, we have the wisdom, we have the courage, it comes from Christ and his Holy Spirit!
Our principal task is to so deeply unite ourselves with Christ that when people look at us, when people speak to us, when people observe our actions, they see Christ. This is the sublime calling of all those who bear his name, Christians. This task is an honor and a challenge. This is a serious task, this is a life-changing task, it is worth putting our phones down, it will require everything we have, and it will be worth all of the effort. Pope Benedict XVI said, “Man was created for greatness — for God himself; he was created to be filled by God.” And he also said, “Christ did not promise an easy life. Those who desire comforts have dialed the wrong number. Rather, he shows us the way to great things, the good, towards an authentic human life.”
