How to live?
October 26, 2023 - Thursday, 29th Week in Ordinary Time
Psalm 1:1-2, 3, 4 and 6
The Alpha Course begins with a question: “Is there more to life than this?” By “this”, the authors of the course mean the failure of life without God to satisfy the longings of the human heart. At the beginning of the Psalter, Psalm 1 raises a similar question: how to live in this world? The authors of the Alpha course compare our lives filled with boredom, emptiness, and dissatisfaction with the abundance of life promised by Jesus to those who follow Him (see John 10:10b). The psalmist compares a life of someone centred on the Bible with a lifestyle of the wicked.
In recent years, there has been a growing awareness that most people live as if God did not exist. Paradoxically, according to Pope Benedict XVI, this includes many Christians. During the General Audience on Wednesday, November 14, 2012, the Pope spoke about “practical atheism”. It is a phenomenon “in which the truths of faith or religious rites are not denied but are merely deemed irrelevant to daily life, detached from life, pointless”. This creates a situation where people claim to believe in God but their lives contradict that claim.
The psalmist speaks about three types of people to be avoided: the wicked, the sinners, and the scoffers. The wicked are those who sin on purpose, the sinners are those who sin unintentionally, and the scoffers are people who laugh at God’s law. The psalmist compares them to “chaff which the wind drives away” (Ps 1:4) and indicates that their way of life has no future. The group of people that Pope Benedict XVI was concerned with were those who “believe in God in a superficial manner, and live “as though God did not exist” (etsi Deus non daretur)”. The Pontiff concluded that “in the end, however, this way of life proves even more destructive because it leads to indifference to faith and the question of God”. So how should we live?
For the psalmist, only a lifestyle centred on meditating on the Torah of the Lord has a future and leads to true happiness. The authors of the New Testament speak about a life centred on believing and following Jesus which brings abundance of life. Pope Benedict at the beginning of his Pontificate said that “only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is”. And then, in the following sentences, he explained what he meant by that. “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary”.
The deepest longing of the human heart is love. We want to be loved and we want to love. And that is the message we find on the pages of the Bible - God loves us, Jesus died for us because we are precious in his eyes. So how should we live? Fall in love with Jesus and He will lead you to the fulness of life.