Longing for Life

I'm Zoe. My name means "life." My life goal is to be a saint. Whew...I said it. Every time I want to say that, or explain how much I desire God, I feel inexplicably shy. It makes me think of the bit from The Weight of Glory where C.S. Lewis says,

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.

 This is something I have related to since before I even read The Weight of Glory. We have this yearning for God, for heaven, to respond to our creator, but when we come to speak of it to others, to try to let them in to this secret of our lives, we find it hard to say it. We somehow know that we should long for this, but we cannot explain why or what this looks like. After all, how you explain something you yourself do not fully understand?

I think especially as an Orthodox Christian, the icon of the saints lets me know that I am not crazy. What they did, what I want, is possible. They lived out the fullness of the Christian faith, they laid down all for the sake of Christ. But the example of the saints is something we have lost. Peter Kreeft, a Catholic philosophy and apologist, pointed out that the only way we will win the culture war is with saints. We must all be saints. If this is what we must be, and even if we recognize this, why are we still shy to explain our calling. We feel that perhaps the person we are talking to doesn't feel that way, that they haven't quite come to that point yet. I am anxious to put myself out there because I cannot explain it. As Peter Kreeft said, there is no method, no button to push for sanctity. It is something that must be grasped, and then just done.

This goes against everything in American culture. I want to live fully for Christ. But when I say this, I find myself shy because I don't know if anyone else feels this way, because this desire goes against everything our culture tells us to want, because I have no idea what this looks like in a modern world. After all, we go to school so that we can get good jobs, right? But how do I explain that I don't care about career success that way in a college entrance essay? This is about dying, and some days, I'll be quite honest, it terrifies me. Most days I have no idea what to do with Christ's words. But the thing is that we simply have to do it. I have to simply be a follower of Christ. I have to simply do it. Simply pray, fast, give alms, do the work that I know has been given to me. This is the life that I long for. This is the life and love that Christ offers. There is no button push for sanctity. We must just do it.