Angelus News | March 25, 2022 | Vol. 7 No. 6

WITH GRACE
DR. GRAZIE POZO CHRISTIE
Starving for meaning
Zach Blomberg holds
up a cross as students
and others take part
in the Stations of the
Cross on the campus
of Arizona State
University in Tempe,
Arizona, in this 2016
file photo. | CNS/
NANCY WIECHEC
One of the most worrying features of modern times is
the falling away of young people from the ways of
faith.
The sad fact is that we Catholics seem to be struggling
to fill young hearts with the joy of the gospel — with the
certainty that each has an indispensable role in salvation
history. Our secular world insists that anything transcendent
is an illusion. As a result, we’ve gotten used to the dark
ways life becomes disordered and weary when meaning
and purpose are absent from our lives.
It’s a surprise, then, that the person who seems to have a
key to the great puzzle of how to reach young people on a
spiritual level isn’t very religious.
Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has
arguably become the West’s most prominent cultural and
intellectual influencer of late. His videos and best-selling
books have attracted millions of young followers.
I went to hear him speak last month in Miami to better
understand him. Some 3,000 people, most of them under
35, sat in rapt attention as he spoke about the human need
for a philosophy rooted in the transcendent. The discourse
was university level, a compliment to the audience that
knew it wasn’t being condescended to.
In digging into some of his writings, talking to young
people who follow him (among them my two young adult
sons), I’ve come to appreciate his attempts to teach them a
way out of the blankness and despair of skepticism and into
the easement of moral certainty.
As a professed agnostic, I’m sure Peterson is out of step
with the Church on several crucial subjects of social teaching.
But after checking him out for myself, I’ve come to
believe we Catholics can learn a valuable lesson from him.
At the heart of Peterson’s ideas is this: First, life is difficult
and filled with suffering. There are afflictions we can’t
control, like illness, the loss of loved ones, war, and natural
disaster. Even worse is what he calls “malevolence”: the
dark parts of our nature that hurt others, and the malevolence
of those around us that wounds us.
That is the baseline condition of life, and to young people
who suffer it comes as a relief to learn that it is everyone’s
experience.
The good news, according to Peterson, is that we can still
prevail. We can “take up arms against the sea of troubles,
and by opposing, end them.” Or if we cannot end them, we
can courageously confront them. We are not victims but
protagonists, and able ones, at that.
Second, Peterson proposes that the first step toward a life
of meaning is the adoption of responsibility, starting with
our own actions and moving out to our families and then to
the community. In cultivating this sense of responsibility,
our lives acquire meaning and purpose, shaping us into
the kind of men and women that shine like lights in a dark
world that others rely on.
Both ideas are familiar to people of faith. The Scriptures
remind us that we are pilgrim wanderers traversing a “vale
of tears.” And the malevolence that adds the horror of
purposeful injury to the accidental cruelties of our days is
26 • ANGELUS • March 25, 2022