Article December 17, 1984 Issue

Youth, and finding what life is all about

GEOFFREY J. BARRATT

Anytime is a good time to find out what life is all about. But why not start when we're young? Healing and blossoming touch our immediate circumstances and our future as we look beneath the surface—the seeming that life is organic—and realize that true existence is the outflow of divine Life, God. Every moment our real self in the image of God is actually inseparable from Life and all that expresses Life.

How can youth, or any of us, relate to that spiritual reality? We do best not by simply trying to push our experience into a better shape ourselves. We should strive to see it take on the outline prescribed by the Christ, that which reveals God as the one Life, and which brings out evidence of Life in our more loving, vivid, contributive, active living—until our human sense of being gives place entirely to the divine.

Because Life is God, and God is good, genuine living is always associated with goodness. "Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live"^{Amos 5:14.} is ancient wisdom. What about that load, a pressing dilemma about a relationship, perhaps, that's resting on our shoulders? In the measure of our goodness and sinlessness we are less weighted down by life, or less afraid of it. No one, of any age, who has a dark, selfish, warring, amoral, merely hedonistic attitude—a very ungood sense of things—is authentically alive. Evil proclivities, unresisted, lead to a denser sense of mortality along with its heaviness. (Might not the fatigue of an overcrowded schedule, then, ease as we prune some self-indulgent items? And perhaps add more unselfish ones?) Whichever camp we may be in—either trying to cram as much as we can into a finite number of years or, contrariwise, trying to make our life less hectic by thinning out our commitments—we can bring balance by putting our affairs under the law of God.