As Little Children

“Unless we mature in Christ (that is, until we become as little children) we are like troubled adolescents who want to be 'independent', who reject authority and restraints of any kind, thinking this makes them more 'free.' In the worst case it becomes a way of life that leads to ever-deeper blindness and grave malformations of one's perceptions and one's acts. The modern person without faith is, in a sense, adrift in a cosmos without orientation. He lives in a flattened world, though it is filled with powerful stimuli and much noise.

He does not know himself, and thus he seeks to fill his hunger for identity through the immediacy of the physical senses, or through power and manipulative control over others, or the drug of social-revolutionary ideology, or false 'spiritualities' to fill the void that opens within himself, or by making idols of various things. As a result, regardless of how relentlessly he seeks love, if he does not develop the genuine responsibility of love, he becomes less able to authentically offer the gift of himself as a unique person. I know this dynamic very well, since this was my life during part of my youth. I was extremely blind--and worse, for I did not know I was blind and believed that my blindness was superior vision.”
~Michael O’Brien