Validation of Existance
What Do You Delight In
Joy is the God-given passion or emotion that prompts us to rest in the good. After I climb the mountain, I want to rest on the summit and take in the beauty of 360-degree view that, makes me realize life is bigger and better than all my projects and problems. This allows me to celebrate reality. Then I can peacefully walk back down the mountain and say, “Life is good.” What do you like to do that makes you realize life is bigger and better than your projects problems, that thing from which you walk away you say, “Life is good?” What do you delight in and how often do you partake of that activity?
It is Good to Exist
If we refuse to rest, or if we’re incapable of it, joy or delight will be frustrated. If when I got to the top of the mountain I did not sit down and take in the view but immediately trudged off back down the mountain, never raising my eyes to see the glorious vistas but set off to find another summit – then I’ve missed the whole point – the goal, which is to delight to have joy in the good, to rest in the good. Where did we get this attachment to busyness and work? Why the incapacity, the almost pathological fear of rest and the insensitivity to the joys of existential celebration? Joseph Pieper suggests celebrating being entails a celebration of one’s own being. But, you can’t rest in the goodness of existence unless you’re convinced that it’s good that you exist, that you are good.
How Wonderful that You Are Here
The need for someway to affirm our goodness, our existential validation is universal. Again from Pieper: “What matters to us, beyond mere existence, is the explicit confirmation: It is good that you exist; how wonderful that you are!”[1] One way or another, everyone needs to be convinced that it’s good that they exist. If they think the goodness of their being is in doubt, they will attempt to compensate by the goodness of what they do. But when self-validation is based on doing, not being, the only way to justify oneself is by ceaseless activity.
If you’re standing on the solid ground of existential goodness, you can simply rest there. But for a lot of folks the only thing between them and the bottomless void of worthlessness is the net woven of their own achievements. And those cords keep fraying and snapping, their achievements keep getting obsolete and wearing out, which means they must be constantly tending to that net, fixing up the old ropes and adding new ones. They have to make themselves matter, all the time. The most arrogant, self-promoting person you know is desperately trying to save his own existence from slipping into the dark night of irrelevance. That person can’t rest. That person can’t celebrate being.
Love Based on Being
And self-validation doesn’t work anyway. We don’t know enough about a) our own character and b) the grand scheme of things to know whether, in the big picture, in the long run, it’s good that we exist. Only God knows enough about us and about everything else to give us that assurance. Only the one who gave us existence can validate our existence. This is where the doctrine of God’s Fatherhood becomes so consoling. Our Lord’s joy is the model for all Christian joy, and it is based totally on the relationship with the Father: “If Jesus radiates such assurance, such happiness, such availability, it is by reason of the inexpressible love by which He knows that He is loved by His Father.”[2]
And a Father’s love isn’t based on doing, but on being. It’s not dependent on performance, but on existence. I don’t love my sons or daughters because they are high-performance kids, I love them because they are my kids. I take joy in them not because of what they does, but because of what they are. My delight in them doesn’t depend on their productivity (good thing too, since the only thing they produced early on was vomit and excrement (what comes out of his body)).
Surprise of Love
God’s love for us is the same way. It is not earned. That’s why we call it gratuitous. Baptism, the sacrament that makes us children of God (and remember, He wants to adopt everyone), isn’t based on merit. That’s why we baptize infants, because the only prerequisite to being loved by God is existence: “the sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant baptism.”[3] Even if you act badly, you’re still loved by God, still valued by Him: “God proves His love for us in this, that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
No one earns God’s love. No one can achieve a justification for their own existence. To try is to deny the fundamental generosity of God which gave us our existence and validates it. After saying that Jesus’ joy is based on being loved by His Father, St. Paul VI goes on to say that Jesus died precisely “in order to eradicate from man’s heart the sins of self-sufficiency.”[4] To accept God’s love, to value and delight in our own being and the being of all things, we have to first accept the truth that none of it is based fundamentally on anything any of us can do. God loves us because He created and redeemed us. He looks at us and says, “It is good that you exist, how wonderful you are!” And that is what we should say to all those around us!
[1] Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love trans. Richard and Clara Winston (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1997), 174.
[2] Paul VI, Gaudete in Domino, 3.
[3] Catechism of the Catholic Church, #1250.
[4] Gaudete in Domino, #3.