Questing For Our Holy Grails

Questing For Our Holy Grails. 

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” (Helen Keller).

To Quest (a very active verb): To engage in a long, difficult and adventurous journey that requires hard work in order to achieve a worthwhile goal or a valuable possession; to give oneself to a focused search, a single-minded pursuit, that frequently involves challenges, exploration, and personal growth; to invest personally in a prolonged endeavor in which the process is just as important as the product; to engage in a mission or expedition in an extensive search to discover something important.

“Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep seeking and you will find. Keep knocking and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who continues to ask receives, and the one who continues to seek finds, and to the one who keeps knocking the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8).

ALERT! ADVENTURERS WANTED: Questers are desperately needed to participate in the adventures of a lifetime. These soul-searchings will go far in fulfilling one’s personal calling and at the same time help develop a world worthy of Creator God. Quests like these for our personal Holy Grails are not only demanding but are well able to provide purpose and meaning that will otherwise be impossible to experience:

(1.) The Holy Grail of our True Self: On God’s Image as Our True Identity.

• Fleshing It Out… Draw a big wheel that has many spokes meeting at the center hub circle. On each spoke write out one of the many identities suggested in modern society that could be embraced by an individual, such as racial identity, sexual identity, political identity, gender identity, national identity, religious identity, educational identity, career identity. social class identity, physical identity, etc. In the midst of society’s identity crisis, is there one in particular that can be written into the hub of the wheel, an identity that is the basis for whatever other identity we might choose? Is there one specific identity we can embrace that overshadows all the other identities?

(2.) The Holy Grail of Absolute Truth: Solid Ground for Reality.

• Fleshing It Out… Buy a little bag of ‘Quick-Concrete’, and then frame out a simple little form into which you pour some of that concrete mix with water. Let the cement harden and then remove the wooden form. After that, pour some water into a bucket of that concrete mix and then just our it out randomly on the ground before hardening. Which version of hardened concrete will be usable, helpful, stable enough to stand on? Might it be worthwhile to discover solid, permanent facts of reality that we can stand on?

(3.) The Holy Grail of Eternal Paradise: Bringing Heaven to Earth. 

• Fleshing It Out… Imagine what your perfect world would look like and express it artistically. Draw or paint your ideal paradise; write a poem about your personal utopia. Sing a song about nirvana. Write a short story about heaven on earth. How did we get this idea of an ideal world in the first place? Were we somehow given a strong desire that was meant to be fulfilled somewhere, somehow? Is there a dream of paradise that perhaps is so good it has to be true?

(4.) The Holy Grail of Goodness and Virtue: Fruit from the Garden of the Heart. 

• Fleshing It Out… Collect your favorite fresh fruit into a big bowl and place it on your dining table. After admiring the beauty of it all and breathing in the delicious fragrances, go ahead and taste the luscious orange, the juicy strawberry, the crisp apple, the sweet grape. Now fill the bowl with colorful wax fruit that look interesting but obviously are not the real thing. Just to make sure the wax fruit is fake, pick some of it up and smell it, and if you’re brave take a lick. Now ask yourself… Is there genuine goodness like that fresh fruit somewhere in the world? Could I find authentic virtue in someone else? In me? Might there be nutritious, delicious, fragrant fruit that could grow in the garden of our heart? Could we discover within ourselves a moral character that is not only beautiful and life-giving but also able to reproduce itself in the lives of others?

(5.) The Holy Grail of Sacred Heroism: Becoming a Saint.

• Fleshing It Out… On your birthday bring your flashlight into the darkest part of your cellar after turning all the lights out. You know your birthday presents are all there, but you can’t see them. Great stuff is waiting for you if only you could find it all. Now turn on your flashlight and enjoy your discoveries of what has been there all long. Are there people walking around that simply live like flashlights in dark spaces, who bring to our awareness the wonders of God’s world without shining their light on themselves?

(6.) The Holy Grail of Genuine Neighbor-Love: Let’s Get Physical.

• Fleshing It Out… Off the top of your head, simply make a running list of all the counterfeits in our world: artificial light; robotic nurses; canned laughter on TV; AI counselors; doctored voice messages; photoshopped pictures; edited video clips; manufactured soundbites; fake musicians; virtual foods; online conversations; computerized teachers; special effects on video games; machines that do all your thinking for you. After making your list, forget all that and go out of your way to have a personal conversation, some flesh and blood interaction, embracing a community of people who care for each other, engaging in a ministry of touching the untouchables of our world, participating in the Sacraments. Quite a difference, right?

(7.) The Holy Grail of a Worthy God: Exploring the Final Frontier. 

• Fleshing It Out… Sit on your porch and carefully observe a back-yard squirrel scampering up the trunk of a giant beech tree. Watch how it joyfully leaps from one branch to another, exploring new branches, discovering countless aspects of the tree it hadn’t noticed before. This squirrel is simply enjoying what it was created to do, exploring its own final frontier. Might a loving, personal God be our Final Frontier, our ultimate mission into uncharted territory? God’s Personhood is the Greatest Wonder of the World waiting to be discovered. God’s character is unimaginably immense and is a playground for all questers who never want to get to the end of their exploration. And while being our Final Frontier, God is able to remain intimately personal. How can that be? Might heaven be eternal so as to allow us sufficient time to explore the Person of God and engage in our ultimate quest?

The Enemy of an Adventuresome Life: Spiritual Sloth: (Greek, “Acedia”); spiritual laziness; indifference and apathy at the deeper levels; lack of spiritual ambition; joyless in sacred pleasures; spiritual ennui; careless attitude toward spiritual matters; a dispassionate lack of mindfulness and soul-care; a listless ignorance of what is eternally important; empty of the energy to escape self-centeredness; a lack of motivation to follow through on spiritual duties and activities; a spiritual sluggard; a sickness of the soul that results in boredom with God; a vague sense of dissatisfaction with anything spiritual; a cold sin of omission that drifts away from any hope of locating life’s true purpose and meaning; the unwillingness to be a diligent seeker of God and His Kingdom; a strong temptation from the evil one to remain spiritually empty and unfulfilled. A spiritual sloth is content to, spiritually speaking, follow the pace of the real sloth by moving at ten feet per minute, 1/9th of a mile per hour, and sleep twenty hours a day.

Descriptions of Spiritual Sloth: 

1. “It is like dying in advance.” (Pope Francis);
2. “It is a deflation of the soul that hinders spiritual resolve.” (anonymous);
3. “It renders a person idle and useless for every spiritual work.” (John Cassian);
4. “It is a sort of heavy, oppressive sadness that presses down on a person’s mind in such a way that he wants to do nothing and no activity pleases him.”  (Thomas Aquinas);
5. “It is a joylessness when faced with God as our supreme joy.” (Peter Kreeft);
6. “It is a supernatural torpor that doesn’t want to take the trouble at asking the great spiritual questions.”  (Blaise Pascal);
7. “It is the sin that is so dead that it doesn’t even seem to rise to the level of sin; a sin so sinful that it isn’t even sin.” (Peter Kreeft).

“Seek first and foremost the Kingdom of God and His righteousness… For everyone who continues to seek will find. Be a seeker!” (Matthew 6:33, 7:7-8).