It's a brand new year and I'm back in what I hope will be my fifth and final year of diaconate formation. We started the year with a bang. Right from the get-go we have reading assignments from six books before the next class. One of the reading assignments from my Christian Anthropology class caught my attention.

In the book City of God, Book XI, Chapter 26, St. Augustine addressed arguments from some Academicians about human existence, truth, and love and the potential to be deceived by all three. He ended the chapter with "as there is no one who does not wish to be happy, so there is no one who does not wish to be. For how can he be happy, if he is nothing?"  

It got me thinking about the human need for happiness. It seems to me we do all sorts of things in pursuit of happiness. When it comes down to it, our happiness is closely linked to being loved. The saddest person is one whom no one seems to love or care about. So we go to great lengths to be noticed, for someone to care, to be RELEVANT.
    
Explosions of such social media tools such as Facebook and YouTube are in no small part due to our need to be noticed, to know that someone cares -- that we exist. Hence, my extended reflection on St. Augustine's esoteric point -- we have an innate need to be loved, to be somebody to someone, to "not be nothing," to be RELEVANT. Unfortunately in this age of Facebook and YouTube, we work so hard being relevant for the sake of being relevant. We stopped asking the bigger question: Relevant to whom?

Fr. Hamilton said it best in an article written over 15 years ago (Shepherds of Christ - Spirituality Newsletters):

"That which is relevant is appropriate or germane, fitting for the matter at hand. We see, then, that Jesus lived the perfectly relevant life, since he always did the perfectly appropriate thing according to His Father's will. We see a paradox, then. Many reject Jesus as being irrelevant, and yet He is the supremely relevant One. The relevancy of His life and message is perennial."

 

This year we are taking a leap of faith. While we are in the midst of helping build a clinic in Ghana, we will direct our precious few resources to support the work of our priests and missionaries around the world to build churches, minister to the sick and poor and bring the Love of Christ to worlds beyond our own. We have been told it will be a losing proposition on our part. Many have told us people are not going to give to this appeal. We believe otherwise. We believe supporting evangelistic missions around the world is important. Christ must be relevant to others around the world. Catholic World Mission is relevant only to the extent we make Christ relevant in our hearts and to the least of our brothers and sisters around the world.