3. - ESTRANGEMENT FROM GOD - Alienation from self and from one's neighbors has its roots in separation from God. Once the hub of the wheel, which is God, is lost, the spokes which are human beings, fall apart. God seems very far away from modern man: This is due, to a great extent, to humanity's own God-less behavior. Goodness always appears as a reproach to those who are not living right and this reproach on the part of the sinner expresses itself in hatred and persecution. There is rarely a disrupted, frustrated soul, critical and envious of his neighbor, who is not at the same time an anti-religious individual. Organized atheism is thus a projection of self-hatred; no one hates God without first hating himself.

Persecution of religion is a sign of the in-defensibility of the anti-religious or atheistic attitude, for by the violence of hate it hopes to escape the irrationality of Godlessness. The final form of this hatred of religion is a wish to defy God and to maintain one's own evil in the face of His Goodness and Power. Revolting against the whole of existence, such as a soul thinks that it has disproved it; it begins to admire its own torment as a protest against life. Such a soul will not hear about religion, lest the comfort become a condemnation of its arrogance and so it defies it instead. Never able to make sense of its own life, it universalizes its own inner discord and sees the world as a kind of chaos in the face of which it develops the philosophy of "living dangerously." "He functions as a distracted atom in a growing chaos made poor by his wealth, made empty by his fullness, reduced to monotony by his very opportunities for variety."

Does such a confused soul exist in the Gospel? Is modern psychology studying a different type of person from the one our Divine Lord came to redeem? If we turn to Saint Mark, we find that a young man in the land of the Gerasene is described as having exactly the same three frustrations as the modern soul.

He was self-estranged, for when Our Lord asked, "What is thy name?" - Mark 5:9 - Notice the personality conflict and the confusion between "my" and "we are many." It is obvious that he is a problem to himself, a bewildered backwash of a thousand and one conflicting anxieties. For that reason he called himself "Legion." No divided personality is happy. The Gospel describes this unhappiness by saying that the young man was "crying and cutting himself with stones." - Mark 5:5 - The confused person is always sad; he is his own worst enemy, as he abuses the purpose of nature for his own destruction.

The young man was also separated from his fellow men, for the Gospel describes him thus: :And he was always day and night in the monuments and in the mountains." - Mark 5:5 - He was a menace to others. "For having been often bound with fetters in pieces and no one could tame him." - Mark 5:4 - Isolation is a peculiar of Godlessness, whose natural habitat is away from other human beings, among the tombs, in the region of death. There is no cement in sin, its nature being centrifugal, divisive and disruptive.

He was separated from God, for when he saw the Divine Savior, he shouted, "What have I do with Thee, Jesus the Son of the most high God? I adjure Thee by God that Thou torment me not." - Mark 5:7 - That is to say, "What have we in common? Your presence is my destruction." It is an interesting psychological fact that the frustrated soul hates goodness and wants to be separated from it. Every sinner hides from God. The very first murderer said, "And I shall be hidden from thy face, and I shall be a vagabond and a fugitive on the earth." - Gen. 4:14 -

It appears that the modern soul is not so modern, after all. Like the Gerasene youth he is estranged from himself, others, and God. But there is a difference, nonetheless, and it is this: The Gerasene youth was pre-Christian, the modern soul is post-Christian. Fundamental as the distinction is, it still leaves the problem: How to deal with the person today?

One thing is certain: The modern soul is not going to find peace so long as he remains locked up inside himself, mulling around in the scum and sediment of his unconscious mind, a prey of unconscious forces whose nature and existence he glorifies. It is interesting that Sigmund Freud, who thought such a self-centered solution the right one, took as the motto for one of his earlier works. "If I cannot bend the gods on high, I will set all hell in an uproar." His is not the answer! In dethroning the conscious values of the world, one does, indeed, set hell in an uproar and end in neuroses worse confounded.

The true answer is that humanity must be released from its inner prison. A person will go mad if he must be content to chase the tail of his own mind, being both seekers and sought, rabbit and hound. Peace of soul cannot come from the person, any more than the person can lift himself by his own ears. Help must come from without; and it must be not merely human help, but Divine help. Nothing short of a Divine invasion that restores humans to ethical reality can make them happy when they are alone and in the dark.

The frustrated youth of the Gerasenes was cured only when Our Lord restored him to himself, others, and God. He then recovered the purpose of life. No longer calling himself "Legion," the Gospel describes him as "sitting, clothed and well in his wits." - Mark 5:15 - In our language, he was feeling "like his own self." Instead of being isolated from community life, we find him restored to fellowship by Our Lord, Who told him, "Go into thy house to thy friends." - Mark 5:19 - Finally, instead of hating God, we find that he begins to "publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him and all men wondered." - Mark 5:20 - It is similar with people today. If the modern soul is too harassed with fears and anxieties to come to God through the loveliness of a star, then it can come to Him through the loneliness of a heart saying with the Psalmist, "out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord." - Ps. 130 - If it cannot find God through the argument of motion, it can reach Him by way of its own disgusts - even through the handle of its sins.

The important question is not, What will become of us, but What will we be? It will always be true today that how one gets out of time is not so important as how one is in eternity. A bomb in the hands of a Francis of Assisi would be less harmful than a pistol in the hand of a thug; what makes the bomb dangerous is not the energy it contains, but the person who uses it, Therefore, it is modern humanity who has to be remade. Unless one can stop the explosions inside one's own mind, one will probably - armed in some fashion - do harm to the planet itself. Modern man has locked himself in the prison of his own mind; only God can let him out, as He let Peter out of his dungeon. All that a person must do is contribute the desire to get out. God will not fail; it is only human desire that is weak. There is no reason for discouragement. It was the bleating lamb in the thickens, more than the flock in the peaceful pastures, that attracted the Savior's heart and helping hand. But the recovery of peace through His grace implies an understanding of anxiety, the grave complaint of imprisoned modern humanity.


BY ARCHBISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN (1895 - 1979)

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