The first church burned down in the 1940s, prompting the Jesuit priest there at the time, Fr. William Ulrich, S.J., to call the villagers together with a plan to build a church that would last. They all eagerly agreed to help, and he organized them to take stone from old Maya ruins on the outskirts of the village to build the new church. I have not been able to find records of how the church was built, but there were no paved roads into the villages at that time. I do not believe they had machinery to help plan, dig, frame, cut, or anything of that sort. Also, the builders were the villagers themselves, no hired workers. I imagine they had simple tools, large hearts, and a generous zeal to work. The use of stone from old Maya ruins would never be allowed today, but the people wanted a church that would last, and they were determined to use the stones from ancient ancestors to build a house of faith for future generations. Emil Frei stained-glass windows from an old hospital in St. Louis, MO, were installed.2 The building was completed in 1954. The descendants of the builders proudly tell any visitor about their family’s involvement in the church’s construction. One man explained to me that Fr. Ulrich brought over French architects to help design it.3 The church is a symbol of a proud past for the villagers while also being an architectural and religious marvel.

Village feast days are elaborate affairs, and the feast of San Luis Rey is no different. After months of planning, inviting, and fundraising, they execute the plan a week or two prior to the celebration. A novena is said the nine days before the feast day, with a different family hosting the statue and the praying of the rosary. A meal is shared after the novena.

The cultural expectation is that the hosting village church feeds everyone at the feast, and much time goes into preparing the meal. They prepare caldo, a traditional Maya soup. It includes meat, such as chicken or pork, with root vegetables like cassava or yams, and herbs culantro and thyme. The day before, the men go and gather the pigs and/or chickens for the caldo. They bring them back to a group of a dozen people with stations to clean, cut, and cook the animals. The women cook poch and corn tortillas. Poch is corn masa wrapped and steamed in a banana leaf. Cacao is gathered and ground to make a drink. They work all day and all night, getting little bits of rest along the way. In years past, they have done all-night vigils in the church. The mayordomos and volunteers sweep and clean the church and adorn it with tropical flowers and greenery.

The feast day begins with prayers before Mass in the morning. Many line up to kneel with their candles and pray before the original statue of San Luis Rey from Guatemala. In previous years, I have seen around 400-500 people attend. The crowd consists of locals as well as visitors from neighboring villages. Mass in the morning is full of devotion, Mopan songs, and much burning of copal. Copal is resin that has been sacred for the Maya for centuries, filling the church with incense, symbolizing the prayers of the people going to God. After Mass, the caldo is served and the deer dance begins. The traditional deer dance would usually be danced for several days in a row, with the final day being on the feast day. It involves performers in costumes and elaborate character masks who dance to marimba music. This also takes time, sometimes a month of practice, to perform. I’ve asked several people the meaning of the deer dance, and I’ve heard several different accounts. From what I understand, the dance is a form of storytelling. Stories include the hunting of a tiger and the hunting of a deer. Another tells of a Maya man asking all of the animals of the jungle to join him in fighting against the Spanish. A major theme throughout is the relationship of the people with nature, especially with the animals. A sense of balance with nature is a value of the Maya. After the deer dance, the music continues with the Maya harp, violin, and guitar and with dancing.

The people of San Luis Rey church implore their patron to intercede on their behalf, as many of the villages do on their feast days. Southern Belize is an enchanted place where many believe in spiritual realities that have effects in the physical world. This stands in contrast to the disenchanted world of the modern West. When Louis IX died in 1270 AD, the Dominicans immediately began collecting miraculous healing stories from the French people.4 He was known for sanctity during his lifetime and his bones were treated as relics long before he was canonized. The Mopan Maya have this same innate religious sense.

The historian Christopher Dawson writes about this religion sense: “On there contrary, though social life is dependent on religion, the sphere of religion is that which lies outside of social control, and the primary religious instinct is that of dependence on superhuman powers.”5

The primacy of the divine and the dependence of the community are clearly seen during village feast day celebrations. Prayers before the statue include petitions for healing and protection from evil. This all demonstrates the innate religious sense of the Mopan Maya. They insist that the priest be present to celebrate Mass and be with them for the celebration. They have a deep devotion to the priesthood and sacraments. The priesthood, Mass, and sacraments all link with the unity of the wider church.

In regard to the particularity of the celebration, some may wonder about the compatibility of the deer dance with the feast day celebration: how does venerating San Luis Rey fit with the balance of nature and fighting the Spanish? Ad Gentes, a document from Vatican II on the missionary work of the Church, says this:

To achieve this goal, it is necessary that in each major socio - cultural area, such theological speculation should be encouraged, in the light of the universal Church’s tradition, as may submit to a new scrutiny the words and deeds which God has revealed, and which have been set down in Sacred Scripture and explained by the Fathers and by the magisterium.

Thus it will be more clearly seen in what ways faith may seek for understanding, with due regard for the philosophy and wisdom of these peoples; it will be seen in what ways their customs, views on life, and social order, can be reconciled with the manner of living taught by divine revelation. From here the way will be opened to a more profound adaptation in the whole area of Christian life.6

Vatican II encourages the study of cultures in light of the faith and to affirm what is true, good, and beautiful. Ad Gentes uses the word adaptation for the process of bringing together a culture with the single deposit of faith. Pope St. John Paul II uses the word inculturation in Catechesi Tradendae. He speaks of cultures bringing forth from their own living tradition original expressions of Christian life, celebration, and thought.7 This inculturation, from the beginning of the settlement in Belize, through Fr. Ulrich’s support, to today’s feast day, has brought about a harmony of a culture with the gospel.

The culture of the Mopan Maya, including the stories, the art, and the dancing, reveal what the people value. Handing this on to the next generation is crucial. Culture is central to understanding what it means to be human. The cultural memory of fleeing Guatemala and the statue of San Luis Rey is important history. The deer dance tells the story of colonization and about the dignity of the people. It also teaches respect for creation, an important theme for Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si’. The cultural activities on feast days teach and inform the community.

I also believe that St. Louis IX interceded for the people and I base this on the convergence that brought about the building of the stone church. The Mopan brought the devotion to San Luis Rey when they settled in Belize. The Jesuits of the Missouri Province from the U.S., especially through Fr. Ulrich, helped them build San Luis Rey Catholic Church. I think it is an intercessory sign because Toledo District in the 1950s was incredibly remote compared to the rest of Belize. The church was built without roads, with minimal machinery, and without expertise.

The affection for San Luis Rey united the people as they fled their homes, and they continue to give thanks many years later. The feast day preparations involve much work, sacrifice, and a union of minds and hearts. Dawson writes: “The unity of a culture rests not only on a community of place - the common environment, a community of work - common function and a community of blood - the common race, it springs also, and above all, from a community of thought.”8 This community of thought, or rather, belief, has maintained the Maya identity in Belize and has been strengthened through the wider Catholic community. The faith that formed them in Guatemala they brought with them to Belize and it continues to sustain them today. The U.S. Jesuits who met them in Belize supported them in faith and helped them develop their village, showing the unity of Catholicism. The Church encompasses many cultures while also being one faith. The music, dancing, and storytelling reveal a particular culture that gives meaning to the particular history of the people. The statue, stone church, and Mass show unity across space and time with the wider faith.

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Nagai was working in the college hospital when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and the building collapsed on top of him. He survived, though most of the patients and staff died. Nagasaki was completely leveled. The injured slowly struggled to the hospital, and Nagai, as one of the authorities still alive, organized the staff to treat the survivors coming to the hospital. Nagai records the scene:

The huge pines and camphor trees were torn up by the roots and all the school buildings had collapsed. As for the cathedral, about two-thirds of the building was blown down, including the fifty-meter-tall bell tower, and the remnant looked like a ruin of ancient Rome. On the stone fences, people were hanging upside down with arms and legs torn off.1

The nuclear blast destroyed Urakami, a suburb of Nagasaki and the Catholic center of Japan. Two priests, Fathers Nishida and Tamaya, were hearing confessions when the bomb was dropped. They were both killed in the explosion. It would be two long days before army doctors and nurses arrived at the hospital and Nagai could return home. His children were far away in the countryside with family and survived the bombing. However, his wife, Midori, was home in Urakami. They met when he rented a home from her family as he completed medical school. Her ancestors were the persecuted “Hidden Christians” of Japan. Soon after finishing school, he was drafted into the Imperial Army Medical Corp. Midori sent him a catechism when he was in training and said that she would pray for him. After training, Nagai was sent to Manchuria, where he was badly shaken by the brutality of war that he experienced. He continued reading the catechism during his deployment, which greatly influenced his desire to become Catholic. When he returned to Japan, he spoke with a priest, enrolled in a baptismal class, and was baptized. He married Midori several months later.

Nagai returned home to find Midori as a small pile of charred bones. Her remains were identified by the rosary she had been holding in her hand. She had been praying when the bomb fell. He gathered her remains into a pail and buried the remains on a plot they owned, “the cemetery by the red tree.”

Nagai prayed as he collected the remains of his wife and buried them: “Dearest God, thank you for allowing her to die praying. Mother of Sorrows, thank you for being with faithful Midori at the hour of her death. Gracious Jesus our Savior, you once sweat blood and bore the heavy Cross to your crucifixion. And now you have shed peaceful light on the mystery of suffering and death, on Midori’s and my own.”2

It slowly dawned on Nagai that he had lost everything: his medical research, his home, the cathedral that he loved, and his wife, Midori. He collapsed in the ashes of his home from loss of blood, lack of rest, and leukemia. When he became conscious several hours later, he caught sight of Venus, and his mind turned to the Blessed Virgin: “Morning Star, pray for us.” He prayed the Litany of Loreto and slowly recited the Rosary. He felt refreshed enough to get up and continue rebuilding his life.

A Requiem Mass was held the following November in the ruins of the cathedral and Nagai was allowed to speak to the congregation. He began by noting the significance of the cathedral’s dedication to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and of the Japanese surrender on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption. He found a profound relationship between the annihilation of Nagasaki and the end of the war, and he considered the Catholic population of Nagasaki to be a chosen sacrificial victim to end the war. He writes:

How noble, how splendid was that holocaust of August 9, when flames soared up from the cathedral, dispelling the darkness of war and bringing the light of peace! In the very depth of our grief we reverently saw here something beautiful, something pure, something sublime. Eight thousand people, together with their priests, burning with pure smoke, entered into eternal life.3

Many became infuriated by his words. Nagai then turned to the Beatitudes: “Happy are those who weep; they shall be comforted.... Let us be thankful that through this sacrifice, peace was granted to the world and religious freedom to Japan.” The people were silent when he finished and sat down.

Nagai continued to rebuild his home and community, finding moments of hope along the way. He helped a group recover one of the cathedral bells that was buried under the rubble. Miraculously, it had no cracks, and they hung it on a tripod of cypress logs. They rang it at six o’clock on Christmas day for the Angelus. The bell became a symbol that the atomic bomb had not triumphed over faith:

The bell is ringing! This is the bell of the Angelus ringing out from the ruined cathedral, echoing across the atomic wilderness and telling us that dawn has come.4

That morning of hope gave Nagai’s firsthand account of the atomic bombing its title, The Bells of Nagasaki. He died on May 1, 1951 at the age of forty-three, with his final words: “Inotte kudasai. Pray, please pray.”5 His funeral was celebrated on May 3 in the Urakami Cathedral by Archbishop Yamaguchi. Nagai’s ashes were buried next to his wife’s remains.

In an important passage, Nagai describes the spiritual indifference of his later life:

I could be cured miraculously of leukemia, and that would be good. If I’m not cured, that’s good too, and it won’t bother me a scrap. All that I am concerned about is what His plans are for me; the only life that interests me is one lived for him... one day at a time, supported by prayer.6

Nagai had been suffering from leukemia before the bombing due to his work as a radiologist. He learned that all things in this life, even his leukemia, allowed him to praise, reverence, and serve God. Ignatius expressed similar sentiments in the Spiritual Exercises:

Therefore, we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things, as far as we are allowed free choice and are not under any prohibition. Consequently, as far as we are concerned, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short life. The same holds for all other things.7

True freedom lies in this indifference to all created things and accepting what is most conducive for God’s will, and such indifference also trusts that God will draw good even from the most profound evil. Suffering is salvific based on the response to offer it to God.

Nagai’s Requiem Mass remarks stirred up heated debate in Japan that has continued to today. Critics have interpreted his remarks as justifying the bombing of Nagasaki. In recent times, Archbishop Takami, who lost family in the bombing, argues that Nagai was not justifying the bombing:

[Nagai] was inspired by the Christian hope for reconciliation found in Jesus’ sacrifice... Nagai did not want to condemn Americans, not because the bombing was justifiable (in Archbishop Takami’s view, it was not), but out of the spirit of Jesus’ forgiveness of humans on the cross.8

John Paul II, when visiting Hiroshima in 1981, made a strong appeal for peace: “War is the work of man. War is destruction of human life. War is death.”9 The pope was forceful that war is not the work of God, which some in Japan have interpreted as a corrective to Nagai’s remarks.

The profound tragedy and dramatic end of the war revealed the deep faith of Takashi Nagai. He suffered much from the aftermath of the bomb, the loss of his wife and friends, and the slow decay of his health. In spite of these things, he never gave in to despair but gave himself completely to God’s will. He became a source of hope and consolation for his fellow survivors as they rebuilt Japan. The Mother of Sorrows was his constant companion; he kept a statue of Mary in his simple home. Pope Pius XII gave him a rosary that he held as he was dying. Both he and his wife’s causes for beautification were opened in 2021. The Luke 17:10 epitaph on his gravestone sums up the life he lived: “We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.”

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Current Ignatian spirituality places great emphasis on the experience of the individual. We see this in the text The Practice of Spiritual Direction by Fr. William Barry, SJ and Fr. William Connolly, SJ, printed in the early 1980s and revised since. The book has continued forming Jesuits in how to do spiritual direction. It gives good, practical advice, yet the general arguments they give for spiritual direction have always bothered me.2

They begin with our current culture: We live in a skeptical, suspicious society toward the divine, thanks in part to the social and hard sciences. The only firm grounding for having a connection with God is found in our personal experience:

In the following pages we shall endeavor to demonstrate that it is possible to find such a rock and help others to find that rock. The rock is not any other human being, but the mystery we call God, as that mystery is experienced in each person’s own heart and mind and spirit… In the present sociological conditions of a pluralistic society in which belief is only one option among others, the rock upon which we stand cannot ultimately be anyone' else’s experience; it has to be our own.

Spiritual direction is about noticing how one personally experiences God and to help facilitate development in this relationship. The director should not do more than that:

But spiritual directors have as their central task the facilitation of the relationship between directees and God. They offer direct help with that relationship. Teaching, preaching, and moral guidance are not the proper task of spiritual directors. Their task is to help people experience God’s action and respond to him. Fostering discovery rather than teaching doctrine is their purpose.

The astute reader will notice that here are tensions in these passages, and more tensions are found throughout the whole text. Barry and Connolly are holding many things together that conflict, and I have questions:

1. How can anyone understand or assess my experience of God if my experience is the only rule for me? How is spiritual direction possible?

2. What is the role of Scripture, Tradition, Church doctrine, a local community, in regards to my personal religious experience if only my experience is the rock? What is the role of faith?

3. How can a relationship with God be possible if belief is just one option among many? Does God exist or not?

4. How can God be transcendent if God only communicates through the immanence of my affections?

5. The heart may have a main role in understanding religious experience, but what about the mind? Is the human person fully alive all feeling and not thinking?

My bigger issue is when we talk about experience, there needs to be a careful philosophical and theological explanation by what we mean by this. This is especially important in regards with how things like creeds, sacraments, and morality foster the believer’s relationship with the divine.3

I will not attempt to make an argument to define religious experience philosophically or theologically today.4 Though, I will make this claim:

The religious experience of the saints offer us ways of understanding our own religious experience.

On the feast of St. Ignatius, I propose that his life shows us how God works. The saints not only show us what is possible, but they also inflame our desires to do great things. Ignatius is the saint of magnanimity, having great desires. The Exercises help in learning about those desires. His experience aids us in learning what our deepest desires are. What inflamed his desires?

Three texts greatly influenced him: The Life of Christ, The Golden Legend, and The Imitation of Christ.5 These were popular in the early 16th century. Ignatius included stories in the Exercises from The Life of Christ by Ludoph of Saxony. The most notable is the scene of Christ visiting his mother after the Resurrection. The Golden Legend filled Ignatius’ imagination with the great feats of the saints. Though Ignatius was not a scholar, the text gave him an understanding of Christian tradition through the lens of Augustine’s theology of history.6 Together, these works aided Ignatius to understand the spiritual movements within him. Rahner writes:

We must therefore firmly hold to the view that these first spiritual experiences were produced in him, not solely and exclusively by scrutiny of the interior movements in his soul, but also, and accompanying it, by the reading of these two, so to say, “conversion” works.7

Ignatius copied excerpts from both texts by hand. From the Life, he wrote Christ’s words in red ink and Mary’s words with blue ink. He would memorize the words, giving him a deep grounding in the tradition.

The third text, The Imitation of Christ, it is well known that it was one of the few things that he kept in his room in Rome until he died, leaving a lasting impression on him.

The life of Ignatius demonstrates that we need words, images, and stories to fill our minds that help us understand our prayer. Ignatius had the gift of being spiritual perceptiveness, and these texts greatly aided him in understanding how God was at work in his life after being hit by the cannonball in Pamplona. They inflamed him to be more faithful, more hopeful and more loving. The Life and The Golden Legend may be more hagiographical than historical, but there is still value in reading them and being edified. The Imitation of Christ continues to be popular today, influencing including spiritual giants like Therese of Lisieux and Mother Teresa. Pope Benedict XVI called it a “golden text of spirituality.”

As Ignatius was inspired by the saints before, so has been the case for me. When I was discerning with the Society, the life of Walter Cizsek, S.J. took hold of me. His book, He Leadeth Me, accompanied me on my first three day silent retreat. Reading about his life in Siberia, working in the prison camps as a priest for the Catholics being persecuted by the Communist regime, shook me and wouldn’t let me go. His description of doing Mass in the prison camps and giving the Eucharist to his fellow prisoners moved me to desire the Eucharist more. The Spirit was working through his life to guide me to the Society.

The bottom line: we need the lives of holy people to understand ourselves, especially our experience in prayer. The saints (and servants of God, such as, Walter Cizsek) show us the way and help us grow in great desires. We need them to grow in holiness and to challenge our myopic fixation on our own limited experience and small desires. Through reading about their lives and imitating them, we can grow in having a deeper relationship with God. God wants great things for us and we can learn from those who have gone before us how to accomplish these things. On the feast of St. Ignatius, the great saint of magnanimity, he shows us how to desire more.

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They did a parade through PG, visited homes, and prayed with people. They also invited people to events at the parish, including a healing Mass and three nights of preached retreats. I was amazed at what I saw: the church was full of people I had never seen before. These students were going places where I (or any priest) could not reach. This is the true power of the lay vocation.

The group of missionaries were here when Rome responded to the German bishops on the issue of lay preaching during Mass. The Germans requested that an indult be given “to permit, in exceptional circumstances, a duly commissioned lay member of the faithful to preach in place of the homily during the celebration of the Eucharist.”

The Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments denied the petition:

In the text, the Dicastery reiterated that the homily, which forms an integral part of the Liturgy of the Word, is intrinsically linked to the proclamation of the Gospel and constitutes an exercise of the munus docendi entrusted to ordained ministers through the Sacrament of Holy Orders.

Rome has spoken: preaching the homily at Mass is reserved for the ordained. I thought about this announcement while I observed what the lay missionaries were doing: there are things that they are able to do that I, as a priest, am not.

The number of missionaries allowed them to visit many homes in a short amount of time. They were very well organized with neighborhoods mapped out. When missionaries were welcomed into a home, this allowed for a real encounter that led to a sharing of what is essential in life. The missionaries heard stories of hopes and joy but also pain and suffering. There were doubts and feelings of loneliness, and a grappling with faith and what it means to be a Christian. The missionaries, in turn, shared how Christ had transformed their lives, especially through prayer, liturgies, and sacraments.

The sharing of what is essential in life generally happens to a priest in formal settings, such as in the sacrament of confession or in spiritual direction. (Though, the priest is not the one sharing in these spaces.) Outside of these formal settings, I’ve learned that it takes time to build trust and relationship before someone starts to share about their faith life. The missionaries, going into homes as laity and as strangers, were able to make immediate connections and have deep conversations. The relationship and sharing that happens between laity is different, where the defenses and the guard are down. The people show a different side of themselves compared with what they show the parish priest. There is pressure to perform for Father when he visits and to be on one’s best behavior, especially among Catholics. Whereas with the missionaries, there is no pressure to perform, and people can be more authentic. It becomes a space to share doubts, wounds, and frustrations about faith.

This encounter in the home led to an invitation to go to Church. I was not present at the healing Mass, but I heard that it was very powerful for people. (And some shared with me that they experienced healing.) The retreat nights were charismatic in feeling. The night began with upbeat music and clapping, transitioned to a skit, then a talk given by one of the St. John Society religious, and then testimony from a lay missionary. The testimonials witnessed to the power of the Gospel that transformed their own lives from brokenness, addiction, and sin to freedom in Christ. It was lay preaching at its finest.

I was most struck by the second retreat night, which had a reconciliation service after the testimonials. There were four of us priests hearing confessions. We had reconciliation services in the past at St. Peter Claver with only a handful of people attending. However, on that retreat night, the church was full, and we were there for over an hour and a half hearing confessions. It had been years since the last confession for many; they often were carrying heavy sins with feelings of guilt and shame. It was a powerful night.

This reveals the influence that laity possess. The students were able to go where the priests were not. The first encounter in the home led to an invitation to come back to Church. The Catholics who had been away for a long time came and continued the encounter with Christ through the word preached, in the sacraments, and the ecclesial sense of one community worshipping one God. Non-Catholics came also, praying and being prayed over. Several asked about how to be received into the Church.

The work of the missionaries, through the lay vocation, was a strong and credible witness to the Gospel for the people in Punta Gorda.

The work of missionaries is the fruit of theological development of the last century on the lay vocation. Hans Urs Von Balthasar wrote in 1952 that now is the time of the laity:

The future of the Church (and today she has the greatest opportunities) depends on whether laymen can be found who live out of the unbroken power of the Gospel and are willing to shape the world. It is obvious to everyone who sees clearly that the clergy and the Orders can no longer suffice for this.1

He argued that laity being active in the life of the Church is the future. Vatican II began ten years after Balthasar wrote the above. Lumen Gentium, the dogmatic constitution on the Church that clarified how the Church, bishops, priests, and laity relate to each other, would expand on what Balthasar gestures toward. The laity have an essential vocation in the Church through shared baptism and confirmation:

The lay apostolate, however, is a participation in the salvific mission of the Church itself. Through their baptism and confirmation all are commissioned to that apostolate by the Lord Himself. Moreover, by the sacraments, especially holy Eucharist, that charity toward God and man which is the soul of the apostolate is communicated and nourished. Now the laity are called in a special way to make the Church present and operative in those places and circumstances where only through them can it become the salt of the earth. Thus every layman, in virtue of the very gifts bestowed upon him, is at the same time a witness and a living instrument of the mission of the Church itself “according to the measure of Christ’s bestowal.”

In virtue of being baptized into the Church, and being sustained by the sacraments, the laity have an active role in evangelization. The missionaries offered an encounter to the people here in Belize that a priest would have difficulty initiating. Past missionaries were religious who would go out to those who were difficult to reach. These include figures such as Augustine of Canterbury and Benedictine monks who evangelized the Anglo-Saxons during the Middle Ages, or the Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans who evangelized during the age of exploration. They lived out the Great Commission where Christ commanded them to go out and make disciples of all nations. Today, the laity live out the Great Commission, too. Now they are bringing the Gospel to the difficult-to-reach places. They make the Church present in the homes of those far removed and invite them to make a spiritual home in the Church. The Church is richer for the distinctiveness of the lay vocation.

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In Dialogue with Aristotle

On her podcast “The Happiness Lab,” Santos says that Aristotle is “the father of positive psychology, the science of well-being.” She continues on this theme in her interview with the New York Times. In The Interview, Santos starts with Aristotle and the ancient Greeks (where all sane and scholarly discourse should begin). She describes hedonic vs. eudaimonic happiness. Hedonic happiness consists of basic pleasures, such as the feeling of eating good food. Eudaimonic happiness is larger than hedonic happiness:

It’s about living a good life. Happiness that comes not just from your own success, your own pleasure, but from other people and from building character. If you look back at the ancient folks like Aristotle, they knew about both, but when push came to shove they were like, go for the eudaimonic.

A clarification is needed here: the hedonic/eudaimonic framework Santos uses is more modern than ancient. Aristotle does not use the term “hedonic happiness.” His Nicomachean Ethics examines eudaimonia, the “flourishing of the person,” and concludes that it consists in the life of virtue. Aristotle does argue that a life of simply pursuing pleasure to fulfill bodily appetites, a life of hedonism, is a life fitting for an animal but not for a person. The human person is a rational animal, meaning that the flourishing life goes beyond simple pleasures. We will return to this point in the section on contemplation.

Santos prefers Aristotle as an interlocutor for her happiness project over other philosophers. Who does she not engage? Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, or any of the important thinkers in modern ethics. Why? I will venture a guess that modern philosophers do not make good interlocutors for the question of what makes for a happy life. Kant, for example, makes a sharp distinction between ethics and happiness that Aristotle does not. Instead, ethics can only be argued by examining the will, duty, and obligations. Beginning with duty and obligations does not inspire a quest for a happy life. Bentham, by contrast, is interested in maximizing aggregate pleasures, placing him squarely within the hedonic happiness framework above. The questions Aristotle poses, such as his considerations on habit, emotions, desire, and the formation of character, are questions cognitive scientists can work with. Aristotle also has much to offer on the person’s need for both social connection and solitude, as we will see in the next section.

Santos seems pragmatic about the relationship between philosophy and her scientific research. Her approach assumes that the ancient Greeks were intuitive about how to live a happy life, while empirical research can test and validate those intuitions. Her willingness to bring Aristotle into dialogue with modern empirical findings is notable, and I will return to its significance in the third section.

So, Santos and Aristotle agree that a happy life includes more than hedonic pleasures, which means building character and habit formation. Another large piece they agree on is the sociability of the human person.

Social Connection and Solitude

Santos claims that the person needs both social connection and time to be alone. The pandemic tested and affirmed the importance of social connection. Santos claims that “we are built to be social.” Modern philosophy generally does not make this claim and in fact argues against it. The foundations of modern liberal society, going back to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, hold that society is artificial and not part of human nature. The person is not naturally social but independent and autonomous; it is all about the individual. Aristotle argues the opposite: the human person is zoon politikon, naturally social and political. This is another reason why ancient philosophy is a more congenial dialogue partner for Santos than modern philosophy. Santos also notes the threats to relationships posed by phones and AI, and how these interrupt our socializing with friends, family, and neighbors, undermining our happiness. The flourishing of the person is dependent on social relationships.

Along with needing relationships, Santos says that a happy life involves time to be alone:

...let’s jump back to Aristotle, Buddhist texts, and so on. Those folks were into contemplation. They were into solitude. They were into the benefits of having the time and the bandwidth to notice what’s going on with yourself, to think, to be bored. They knew that there were some benefits to alone time.

Solitude is a part of a happy life. Time alone can be restorative, such as after a bad day at work, you “might need a night alone.” On this account, contemplation is a time to rest, recover, and attend to one’s interior life. Aristotle, however, makes a stronger and more demanding claim about why contemplation matters. For Aristotle, contemplation is not primarily a recovery strategy but an activity desirable entirely in itself — in fact, the highest activity a person can perform. His argument runs as follows: happiness consists in virtuous activity sought for its own sake; the completion of virtuous activity is accompanied by pleasure; reason is the highest part of the person; therefore the virtuous activity of reason is contemplation. This is the most genuinely pleasurable activity. Contemplation is the highest activity not only because it is the most pleasurable, but because it is the most continuous, the most self-sufficient, and the most fully pursued for its own sake. Where Santos treats contemplation as a useful tool for wellbeing, Aristotle treats it as the fullest realization of who we are as rational animals.

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The Happiness Project Has Limits

The alignment between Santos’s modern psychological approach and Aristotle’s ancient philosophical one is interesting in its own right. But the differences between them are equally significant. The philosopher Jennifer Frey engages these differences directly. Frey visited Yale, dialogued with Santos on what makes for a happy life, and wrote about the experience in 2018. Her concerns are pointed:

Regardless of what one thinks of the classical view, I would hope that my fellow philosophers could agree that a course on ‘the good life’ that presented no unified vision of the good and its demands will at best yield nothing more than shopworn platitudes covered with a thin veneer of scientific authority; at worst, it will mislead and corrupt them by imposing a questionable and contested soul-picture as if it were indisputable, scientific fact.

The scientific approach of Santos reduces the complexity of the human person. Without a unified account of what the good life actually is, it can offer only a patchwork of empirically supported tips; useful perhaps, but philosophically shallow. Frey identifies the deeper issue underlying the whole happiness project:

Although I was brought to Yale as a foil to Santos, I certainly do not oppose psychologists who study happiness or any other topic that has traditionally been understood as a matter for philosophical or theological reflection. What I oppose is the pretense that psychology is the principal or best source of insight with respect to it... It goes wrong not in seeking this truth, but in failing to register the limits of its own methods and forms of inquiry.

Philosophy and theology have been reflecting on human flourishing for over 2,500 years. The approach Aristotle leaves us is a robust metaphysical account of the nature of reality and of the human person within it. Any errors at the level of metaphysics will produce serious distortions in ethics. Modern cognitive science brackets metaphysical concerns entirely and interprets its data within a framework it does not itself examine. This uncritical self-restriction is precisely what prevents it from engaging deeply with what truly leads to human flourishing.

Another major issue is the reduction of happiness to purely subjective feelings. Frey provides a definition of happiness she believes Santos is operating by: “Happiness is about feeling good, which means experiencing more positive than negative psychological states over a period of time.” The limitations of this definition are exposed by a famous thought experiment Frey put to Santos directly: if given the choice of being hooked up to a machine that produces a virtual reality of happiness over the messiness of human life, would you choose it? Santos’s immediate answer was yes, absolutely. This response reveals the subjectivist core of her framework. On her account, happiness consists in feeling states, and it does not matter whether those feelings are grounded in real objects or genuine goodness. Aristotle would refuse the machine without hesitation. A machine-produced life is passive, not actively virtuous; it is untethered from truth and from genuine human engagement with the world. Such a life, for Aristotle, is not a truly human life and therefore not a genuinely happy one.

That said, we can entertain the thought that Santos’s views have developed over the years from her answer to Frey about the machine thought experiment. Frey’s essay appeared in 2018. Santos’s podcast episode on Aristotle came out in 2023, and The Interview happened more recently still, suggesting a deepening engagement with Aristotle’s thought that may have moved her beyond her earlier position. I wonder if Santos would affirm that relationships in real life have more meaning than relationships within virtual reality.

Conclusion

The dialogue between Aristotle and Professor Santos on what makes a happy life reveals surprising overlaps. Though they arrive at similar conclusions by different routes, both agree that the happy life involves more than bodily pleasures and that flourishing includes virtue, human connection, and contemplation. Santos arrives at Aristotle’s insights through scientific research, but she cannot account for why his ideas are true. As Frey points out, the claim that science has the final word on what is happiness fails to acknowledge its own limitations. This leaves Santos open to her project being simple rules of thumb for well-being or focused purely on subjective happiness. The limits of the scientific approach coincide with its suppression of metaphysical reflection which ultimately constrains its ability to say what is truly a flourishing human life. Scientific conclusions that coincide with Aristotle’s insights suggest that his philosophical account of human nature is not merely speculative or outdated but has meaning for us today. The happiness project may instead need Aristotle to help in providing a full account of human flourishing.

At the turn of the century, Pope Leo XIII consecrated the world to the Sacred Heart on June 11, 1899. The consecration to the Sacred Heart involves a total surrender to Christ in thanksgiving for past blessings and a pledge of faithfulness in the future. The devotion of the Sacred Heart is a response of the faithful to the objective fact of Christ’s love, divine and human, symbolized by his physical Heart. Ultimately, this act recognized Jesus Christ as the Supreme Lord of the human race.

Why did Leo XIII choose to consecrate the world? The 19^th century was a time of violent revolutions in Europe that gave rise to secular states seeking to subordinate all parts of society to themselves. The Church’s role in the public sphere was greatly reduced by the time of Leo’s pontificate. In response, he wrote prolifically, knowing that the Church still had much to say about politics and the economy. The encyclical Rerum Novarum became the first of many writings on Catholic social teaching. Annum Sacrum, Leo XIII’s encyclical on the Sacred Heart, continues this development:

In the constitution and administration of States the authority of sacred and divine law is utterly disregarded, with a view to the exclusion of religion from having any constant part in public life. This policy almost tends to the removal of the Christian faith from our midst, and, if that were possible, of the banishment of God Himself from the earth. When men’s minds are raised to such a height of insolent pride, what wonder is it that the greater part of the human race should have fallen into such disquiet of mind and be buffeted by waves so rough that no one is suffered to be free from anxiety and peril?

Leo XIII was concerned about the proper order of things: if society forgets about God, society suffers. The state taking all power to itself and removing God from the public sphere distorts the understanding of the human person, undermining truth and the common good. Through the consecration of the world to the Sacred Heart, Leo shows that all power belongs to Christ the King.

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Leo’s response was directed not only toward the forces of secularism, but also toward Catholics who wanted to bring back the political rule of the Church. Russell Hittinger, renowned thinker on Catholic social teaching, writes:

In Annum Sacrum, the Jubilee encyclical on Christological kingship, Leo taught the pilgrims that the divine sign would not be a new Constantine but the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The Roman Emperor Constantine was a powerful symbol of church-state union. He legalized Christianity in 312 AD and single-handedly reversed the fortunes of the early church from being persecuted to having a privileged place in political affairs. When the Empire collapsed, it was the Church that held society together in the Middle Ages. The time of the Enlightenment put the Church in a defensive position, culminating with the French Revolution in 1789 and the revolutions that followed. A new political order swept through Europe with the Church forcibly divorced from the state. Leo alludes to this grand historical narrative on the union of church and state, but he points in a different direction. The way forward lies not in political restoration, but in the primacy of the spiritual:

And since there is in the Sacred Heart a symbol and a sensible image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love one another, therefore is it fit and proper that we should consecrate ourselves to His most Sacred Heart – an act which is nothing else than an offering and a binding of oneself to Jesus Christ, seeing that whatever honor, veneration and love is given to this divine Heart is really and truly given to Christ Himself.

The cure for modern society’s ills is Christ’s wounded heart. The way forward is for all Christians to be changed by this heart and freely witness to this divine love. Pope Pius XI continued this in 1925 with the formal Act of Consecration of the Human Race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus to be recited each year on the feast of Christ the King.

The U.S. bishops consecrating the United States is a continuation of what Leo XIII began. The bishops voted back in November 2025 to move the consecration from the actual feast day of Friday, June 12 to Thursday, June 11, 127 years to the day after Leo XIII consecrated the world in 1899. Archbishop Thomas Wenski writes that the bishops invite us to do two things: the first is to give thanks for the many blessings God has given to the U.S, the second is to ask that the devotion to the Sacred Heart might “foster truth, justice and charity in American life.” The Sacred Heart can transform both individuals and society. The love which Jesus offers us isexcessive, ineffable, and incomprehensible. It is through him that we can experience true liberty, joy, and peace of heart. In the Gospel reading for the Sacred Heart, Jesus says:

Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.

After 250 years of existence, the citizens of the U.S. still carry many burdens. The future is unknown, but hope remains. Society needs a revolution of the heart and the consecration of the U.S. calls for this. The spiritual can heal the political, as long as we do not forget the lesson that Leo XIII sought to teach: true liberty and tranquility of order is found in recognizing Jesus Christ as King of the world.

“How could God allow my father to die?”

A senior in my all boys theology class shared about the loss of his parent. It was a raw and deeply personal confession that became, for him, the reason he no longer believed in God. The class was stunned and quiet. As he shared, I listened anxiously, unsure how to respond.

When he finished, he concluded: “That’s why I don’t believe in God.”

After a pause, I responded with the only words that came to me: “I’m sorry to hear all of that, that is incredibly sad. Evil is a mystery. But I believe Jesus freely entered into our suffering because he loves us. He wants to offer us something new through it.”

Even as I spoke, I wondered if I had failed. I wanted to be compassionate with the student in the face of raw, emotional vulnerability. I also wanted to defend the existence of God in a way that could be heard. The student remained unconvinced and I have thought about better responses. Later, I remembered what Aquinas wrote: “what is received into something is received according to the condition of the receiver.” In that moment, nothing I said could have convinced him.

However, the problem of evil remains: How can a good and loving God allow so much evil in the world? Most of us carry that question within us. It surfaces sharply when we face trauma, loss, or injustice.

After my time teaching at our Jesuit high school in Denver, I continued Jesuit formation in theology studies at Berkeley, CA. A fellow student shared an encounter from her ministerial work. A woman she accompanied had survived a violent assault and could not stop asking:

“Where was God when this assault happened to me?’”

She was angry at God for allowing this evil to happen. She struggled with all the traditional attributes we ascribe to God. “If God is all good, all knowing, and strong, how could God allow bad things to happen to innocent people like me?” My classmate tried to comfort her by reshaping the idea of God. “Maybe God is not omnipotent,” she said. “Maybe God couldn’t stop it. And maybe God isn’t omniscient - maybe God is surprised by our strength.” She counseled the woman by saying God must have been surprised by her virtue in enduring such suffering. Like a cheerleader on the sidelines, God supports us in the events of our lives.

I told her I had reservations about this: How can we say that is “God” if we remove key attributes from this God? Why even worship or believe in a God that is not all powerful? Didn’t Jesus save us from sin and death? We debated respectfully but did not come to a resolution.

Over the years, I’ve seen both responses: Some people, like my student, reject God’s existence because of suffering. Others, like my classmate, will re-evaluate the traditional qualities of God. The disenchanted, modern world has reframed a sense of God. It either detaches God from the whole world or changes the conditions of belief. Belief has a sense of fragility, but the longing for a relationship with the divine is still present. However, now as an ordained priest at a parish in Belize, I see a different response to evil.

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The Mayan villages are enchanted places. Evil is not just about moral failings, it is a felt reality that calls for prayer, blessing, and protection.

A catechist in a village called me one day; his grandson committed suicide and he asked me to bless the place where they found the body.

I asked: “How are you doing?”

He responded: “I feel like I lost an arm and a foot. My grandson was a part of me.”

I went to his home to bless the spot while he gathered his family. Two of his grandsons, 7 years old and 9 years old, pointed to the place where they found the body:

“Father, we found him right there!”

It was a bright sunny day but interiorly I was feeling overwhelmed by the darkness of it all. The anxiety I felt during the senior theology class also came back to me: What am I going to say in this situation?

I did an opening prayer, read Matthew 11:25-30, and gave a brief reflection on God being merciful and for us to pray for the repose of the soul of their loved one. I blessed the spot with holy water and did a concluding prayer. Afterward, the family prepared some snacks and I visited with them. Despite the heavy feeling at the prayer service, the mood was light as we sat in hammocks and I even joked with the kids. The darkness lifted a little. Prayer and connection heal.

In Belize, the Catholics I have met do not question God’s omnipotence. When tragic circumstances happen, they pray. When they suffer, they see the Cross not as contradiction but companionship. Many people tell me: “Jesus suffered and died for us. We must pick up our Cross and follow him.”

It is a strong faith, rooted in love for our Lord. The popularity of the Feast of Esquipulas at our parish highlights how people identify with our crucified Lord. I see people touch the crucifix, seek healing, and unite their pain with Christ’s. The Cross transforms the pain into something new. This is a stark contrast with the disenchanted West, where suffering often leads people to doubt God’s goodness or existence. In Belize’s enchanted landscape, suffering tends instead to deepen faith. Evil is real, but God is more real still.

In theology school, a guest lecturer once complained that people love the Cross too much and we need to teach people how to rejoice in the Resurrection. He demonstrated this by highlighting the high attendance at Ash Wednesday Masses compared to other Masses during the year. He felt we ought to encourage people to go beyond the Cross. In one sense, I agree. Easter is fifty days of the liturgical year and Lent is forty, showing that the Church encourages us to celebrate. Yet, in my experience with living close to those in poverty, the Cross is present nearly everyday. Christ crucified is their companion. Perhaps, it’s not that people love the Cross too much, but that they have discovered the heart of the divine itself: the place where divine love enters human suffering and transforms it from the inside.

I’m painting with broad strokes when comparing the responses to evil between the U.S. and Belize. There are those in the U.S. that are brought to a deeper faith through trails. I also imagine there are Belizeans that feel the conditions of belief have changed and are more doubtful. Regardless, at the foot of Cross, we can find love that transforms the suffering we all endure and we can be renewed.

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This time last year in Toledo District, Belize, we lived through a crisis. The dry season was unusually dry and numerous fires started all across the district. What was once green farmland had turned to ash. Places that were full of life became places of death with smoke encompassing the whole district. Hundreds of families lost their farms due to the fires.

“Father, I lost my farm,” an older man told me after Mass one day.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m going to keep planting, that’s all I can do.”

There was grief in his voice and I felt incredibly sad for him. The Mayans depend on the land to support themselves, and with their farms wiped out, there was despair about the future. We doubled our parish food pantry support for families affected by the fires, but the needs were still great.

During the Feast of the Visitation, I asked a principal at one of the parish primary schools to organize a May Crowning in the village church. I arrived that morning while the students were praying the rosary. We started the May Crowning prayer service and I preached about the seven dolors of Mary. The service culminated with a student placing a crown on the statue of the Blessed Virgin while we sang a Marian hymn (I wish I could remember the song). She placed the crown on the statue as we sang, and I heard sounds on the roof of the church. I looked out the window and was in disbelief.

It began gently raining after the crown was placed on the statue. We hadn’t seen rain for almost two months as the whole district was engulfed in fires that threatened to turn everything into a desert.

The song came to an end and everyone, students and teachers, started clapping and cheering.

“Mary is our mother and she hears our prayers. She won’t abandon us.” I said. The rain stopped after several moments that morning. Strong storms came a few days later signaling the end of the dry season. I firmly believe that the rain during the May Crowning was a sign of Mary listening to our prayers. The timing of it right after the actual crowning was too perfect to just happen by chance. The length of the dry spell since the last rain was also too strange for it to randomly occur at the exact moment of our prayer service. The strangeness of it all points to a sign from heaven.

The little sign on the Feast of the Visitation in 2024 confirmed my devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Just as she went to help her cousin, Elizabeth, in her time of need, Mary comes to help us with alacrity and joy. We also see at the wedding of Cana how Mary identifies our problems and brings them to Jesus to resolve. I pray a rosary everyday and feel that Mary always accompanies me. She has never let me down and my devotion to her increases each day. I did the Marian Consecration promoted by St. Louis de Montfort back in 2016 and it has completely changed how I live the faith. I would be very lost without Our Lady. She can attain miracles from her Son for us, we just need to ask.

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This past weekend, I celebrated a wedding Mass for friends and met a couple from Kentucky. The husband is an anthropologist who had worked in Sri Lanka and knew the Jesuits there. I mentioned that Jesuits from my province, (what was then the New Orleans Province) had sent men there years ago.

In Grand Coteau, LA, there is a gravestone in memory for Fr. Eugene John Hebert, S.J., who had disappeared in Sri Lanka in 1990. I remember seeing the gravestone when I was a Jesuit novice and wondered what had happened to him. Fr. Hebert had been working for peace between the Tamil and Muslim communities and was last seen alive on a motorcycle with a Tamil boy, Betram Francis. That is all I knew of his story. The anthropologist told me more; he had visited Sri Lanka soon after the priest disappeared and spoke with people who knew him. They say that Fr. Hebert and young Betram were stopped by an armed man. The man wanted to take Betram, but Fr. Hebert wouldn’t allow it, and put himself between Betram and the man. The man then shot both of them. A horrible event. However, God still works through evil. This revealed the character of Fr. Hebert: he was selfless and sought to protect the people he served, even offering his life. His memory stills serves as an inspiration for many to continue the work for human rights. He also reveals to us how to live out what Jesus taught us: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13). Grace is shown through tragedy and it is captivating for me.

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When I hear these stories, I often wonder: “Would I choose to be as selfless in these situations?” I hope that I would choose this; I want to emulate the virtue and gifts that Fr. Hebert lived. It was the legacy of the saints in the Society that drew me to discern a vocation. Holy people, such as Fr. Hebert, show us what is possible if we truly believe and follow Jesus Christ. It is possible to freely choose to lay down one’s life for a friend. Holy Week invites us to be in this mystery of grace. When it seems that evil holds sway, God shows us that love is stronger. Christ conquered death and invites us to participate in his mission. It is a personal invitation for each of us.

Please know of my prayers for you all this Holy Week.

Fr. Aric

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Toledo District is predominantly Christian; there are some non-religious identifying people, but the majority are Catholic, with evangelicals the next largest group. This mix is a recent phenomenon. The Jesuits started the mission in the 1880s when Catholicism was the only Christian denomination in Toledo. That changed when roads were made in the 1980s to the remote villages. Evangelical Protestants from the U.S. started missions around the time roads were introduced and have been coming ever since. Today, St. Peter Claver Parish in Punta Gorda serves 33 village churches throughout Toledo.

The cultural groups in Toledo are predominantly Mayan on the interior; Kekchi being the largest group and then a few villages of Mopan. The Garifuna make up mostly the coast, and you will meet Creole and Mestizo. Modernity is here in Toledo, and people can choose what church they want to be baptized in: Seventh Day Adventist, Baptist, Pentecostal, House of Prayer, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Methodist, Anglican, are just a few of the choices available. The mix of faiths and peoples have influenced how people view the sacrament. Below, I reflect on the cultural, evangelical, and Catholic understandings I’ve encountered on baptism.

Let me start with a cultural understanding. One day, after Mass in a village, a mother came directly to me with her baby. She had a request: “Father, I would like to have baptism for my child. She is very sick and I want her to get better.” I hear this often in the villages. My course of action now is to pray over the baby and then tell her what she can do to have her child baptized.

Health care is lacking in Toledo District because of the poverty and remoteness of the area. People go to the hospital here in the main town, Punta Gorda. Though, there is a skepticism about modern health care. Besides the hospital, people will see the bush doctor and, if Catholic, the priest. A plus is that both bush doctor and priest do house visits. The bush doctor offers herbs and prayers; the priest offers anointing of the sick and communion. They believe sickness can be caused by curses (from other bush doctors) and the bush doctor and/or priest can help with lifting the curse and bring health. Baptism for a child means that she will be protected from curses and illness.

The evangelical view also influences the understanding of baptism. A concern I hear from non-Catholics in Toledo is that you must be baptized in a river. I think this stems from the argument for baptism to be done only by immersion. The reasoning is Jesus was baptized in a river, thus, we need to do what Jesus did. Another point is the baptismal formula, with some groups saying that you must be baptized “in the name of Jesus.” This contradicts the Catholic formula (and what Jesus says in Matthew 28) of “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Evangelicals are also against infant baptism, arguing that a person needs to choose to have faith in Jesus and an infant isn’t able to choose. The earliest age many churches here allow for baptism is around twelve years old. Some Catholics believe this and wait for their child to choose to be baptized.

The baptism classes that we teach at the parish are about the basics of the sacrament. I start the session with a reflection question: “Why do you want your child to be baptized?” Parents give various answers to this question. Besides the point about health and illness, families say they want to hand on the Catholic faith to their children because it is important to them. They say baptism is the foundation for being a follower of Jesus, and hope their child will follow Jesus. Also, they want the child to be an official member of the Catholic Church.

Catholics generally know that baptism washes away sins, particularly, original sin. When I teach the baptism sessions, I bring in other important points: baptism gives life of the Spirit in the soul and it makes us a part of a faith community, the Church. I read relevant Scripture passages and give little apologetic exhortations. The evangelicals are aggressively anti-Catholic so apologetics, or a “defense,” are an important part of the sessions. I defend infant baptism and the Trinitarian baptismal formula. I also talk about why Jesus’ baptism by John is different from our baptism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church has become much more valuable for me in preaching and teaching here in the missions and I continually consult it.

Non-Catholics come to classes occasionally. Often, they themselves are not baptized. They tend to be women who were in relationships with men who were Catholic. When they separate, the women will still go to the Catholic Church in the village. They still go because it’s their community. They eventually ask for a Catholic baptism for their child, citing many of the reasons above. If the village catechist supports their request, they can go through the process at the parish. I always ask “When are you going to be baptized?” and encourage them to do RCIA when it is offered.

Sacraments take on many subjective and cultural meanings for people that is outside of what is officially taught by the Catholic Church. A surprise for me is how much evangelical thought has influenced life here in Toledo for everyone, even Catholics. Some of these ideas contradict Catholic teaching, so, I spend a lot of my time doing apologetics against evangelical theology and practice. Baptism is a foundational sacrament and we try to do our best to catechize the people. My favorite thing (well, one thing of many) to do as a priest are baptisms. There is joy in celebrating the sacrament, and I have even more joy when I return to a village for Mass and see the family all together. Signs like that inspire my faith.

The word “simple” has a negative connotation when describing a person. I state this based on conversations I’ve had. In a conversation with friends, I said: “That person is simple.” I said this in admiration, though, it was treated as a put-down. Maybe I need to find better friends, but I think this is a sentiment in wider society. Hardly anyone wants to be called “simple.”

The image of Forrest Gump comes to mind. A simple person may stumble through life and succeed through innocence and goodness, but he is ultimately unaware of the larger forces at work in the world or within himself. Forrest Gump was a product of the optimistic 1990s, as the simple, yet, good, were seen as able to navigate the cultural and political forces of previous decades. Now, however, the “end of history” is anything but, as we’ve grappled with 9/11, the 2008 financial meltdown, climate change, and continuous wars. Democracies are under threat. The hopes and fears of the world have changed in the last thirty years.

Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche have supposedly diagnosed the issues plaguing us and helped us all tear the mask off of society to gaze on bare reality: the desire for power and control inside of each person and which extends throughout society. The world of tech, neoliberalism, and social media abhors simplicity, but seeks to capture the attention of the simple. The simple are ignorant of the powers that be and end up being ruled by the powerful. Education and protest seem to be the answer. Our world is complex, so we need to be knowledgable of the complexity. “Get woke” is to be aware of the powers that be and to act appropriately. Knowledge is power and simplicity is a vice.

Sed contra: Christ, sending his apostles out into the world, tells them to “be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.” (Matt 10:16). Simplicity is a habit of being unassuming and unpretentious. When simplicity concerns things divine, Fr. John Hardon, SJ, defines it as a supernatural virtue: simplicity seeks only to do the will of God without regard to self-sacrifice or self-advantage. A person who is simple will be honest and straightforward. The figures of Martha and Mary in the Gospel represent simplicity and its inverse. Martha is active and caring for practical things but is also distracted with her attention dispersed. Whereas Mary, through her sole focus on Christ, has chosen the better part. The priority is to focus on the Lord, and then take care of the practical things of life.

Simplicity ought to be linked with the cardinal virtue of prudence. Prudence is an intellectual virtue; it is having the correct knowledge of what ought to be done and what ought to be avoided. The simple person who does not have prudence lacks knowledge of how to act and is the unassuming fool. The simple who lack prudence may be taken advantage of by others. The virtues of prudence and simplicity work together.

The perfection of these virtues, through helping the person grow in goodness, allows the person to be perfected in truth.1 This perfection in truth allows the person to speak truth. To see this exemplified, we turn now to the figure of Cordelia in the novel, Brideshead Revisited.

Brideshead Revisited is a beautiful story of paradoxes and contradictions. Charles Ryder, while at Oxford in the 1920s, befriends Sebastian Flyte and his family. Sebastian comes from English Catholic aristocracy. Charles (a product of modern, bourgeois culture) doesn’t think too much about religion. Yet, he is bewildered by both the Flytes staunch faith and their moral failings. Charles is most confused by the devotion and simplicity of the youngest Flyte sibling, Cordelia:

When we were alone [Cordelia] said: “Are you really an agnostic?”

“Does your family always talk about religion all the time?”

“Not all the time. It’s a subject that just comes up naturally, doesn’t it?”

“Does it? It never has with me before.”

“Then perhaps you are an agnostic. I’ll pray for you.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

“I can’t spare you a whole rosary you know. Just a decade. I’ve got such a long list of people. I take them in order and they get a decade about once a week.”

“I’m sure it’s more than I deserve.”

—

“Cordelia has promised to pray for me,” I said.

“She made a novena for her pig,” said Sebastian.

“You know all this is very puzzling to me,” I said.

“I think we’re causing scandal,” said Brideshead.

Cordelia is full of energy, zeal and devotion. She structures her life around her faith, demonstrating her simplicity of soul. At the same time, her simplicity is also shown through her straightforwardness. She is not afraid to speak her mind to the nuns at her school:

“Charles,” said Cordelia, “Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?”

“Great bosh.”

“Oh, I’m so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said we shouldn’t try and criticize what we didn’t understand. Now I shall tell her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her.”

In one scene, Charles takes Cordelia out to dinner. There, she reveals her desire to be a nun. Charles has no time for such talk:

“You’ll fall in love,” I said.

“Oh, pray not. I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?”

The Cordelia that Charles first meets is a child; she lives simplicity through single minded devotion to the Lord in prayer and plainly speaking her mind. Experience in the world will help Cordelia grow in the virtue of prudence.

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Charles and Cordelia cross paths again twelve years later. Cordelia had joined a group of religious sisters and worked in an ambulance during the Spanish Civil War. She returns home to Brideshead, diminished in Charles eyes. He found her appearance and demeanor appalling:

It hurt to think of Cordelia growing up “quite plain;” to think of all that burning love spending itself on serum-injections and delousing powder. When she arrived, tired from her journey, rather shabby, moving in the manner of one who has no interest in pleasing, I thought her an ugly woman. It was odd, I thought, how the same ingredients, differently dispensed, could produce Brideshead, Sebastian, Julia and her. She was unmistakably their sister, without any of Julia’s or Sebastian’s grace, without Brideshead’s gravity. She seemed brisk and matter-of-fact, steeped in the atmosphere of camp and dressing-station, so accustomed to gross suffering as to lose the finer shades of pleasure. She looked more than her twenty-six years; hard living had roughened her; constant intercourse in a foreign tongue had worn away the nuances of speech; she straddled a little as she sat by the fire, and when she said, “It’s wonderful to be home,” it sounded to my ears like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket.

The Flytes were known for their charm and grace. Cordelia fled from that and is transformed by the suffering of the war. Charles does not understand her, as he is a sophisticated aesthete living a pleasurable life. By this time, Charles had divorced his wife and entered into a relationship with Cordelia’s sister, Julia. Julia also had left an unhappy marriage. In light of all of this, Charles considers Cordelia a brute. She has lost out on the pleasures that make life delightful.

Rather than pursue a comfortable life, Cordelia spent her “burning love” in the discomfort of serving others. She demonstrates simplicity by her single-minded devotion to following the Lord without self-advantage. She cares for the suffering of others and sacrifices her youth to do it. Cordelia pursued the “one thing necessary.”

As they converse with one another, Charles’ view of Cordelia begins to change, though he’s still confused. Cordelia tells Charles the conditions that she found her brother, Sebastian, in Morocco. Sebastian still suffers from alcoholism after all these years:

No one is ever holy without suffering. It’s taken that form with him,… I’ve seen so much suffering in the last few years; there’s so much coming for everybody soon. It’s the spring of love…”

Cordelia’s simplicity along with the prudence she gained during the war allows her to see something beautiful about the suffering that Sebastian endures. This confounds Charles.

Cordelia continues:

“When you met me last night did you think, ‘Poor Cordelia, such an engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works’? Did you think ‘thwarted’?”

It was no time for prevarication. “Yes,” I said, “I did; I don’t now, so much.”

“It’s funny,” she said, “that’s exactly the word I thought of for you and Julia. When we were up in the nursery with nanny. ‘Thwarted passion,’ I thought.”

Again, Cordelia’s experience of war allows her to grow in prudence. The simplicity she cultivated as a child carries her to Spain, which is then purified and allied with prudence. This perfection in truth gives her a clarity of vision regarding the relationship of Charles and Julia. She can name the frustration they feel in spite of their circumstances. They both left their spouses for each other and live comfortable, unmarried lives. Their lives are free from any sort of religious or moral attachments. Yet, there is something unfulfilled in their relationship.

Later in the evening, as Charles reflects on Cordelia’s words, he notices a renewed sadness in Julia:

…I realized that she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, ‘Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?”

That night I woke in the darkness and lay awake turning over in my mind the conversation with Cordelia.

Charles and Julia both are looking for something definite and permanent. They thought they found it in each other, but something is still missing. They both seek to fully possess each other in complete happiness, but happiness remains elusive. The fulfillment of their desires are “thwarted.” Cordelia sees clearly their situation that they are unable (or unwilling) to see. Grace slowly unfolds in their lives towards the end of the novel.

Simplicity is a virtue to be cultivated. What does it mean for us today? Simplicity is single-mindedly focusing on the Lord. This must be allied with prudence to navigate the forces that are in the world. The growth in these virtues perfects the person and allows her to see truth. Growing in truth allows her to see the real foundations of the world. At the foundation is not power, contra Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. At the foundation of being is the Supreme Good that sustains all things. Through simplicity and prudence, Cordelia sees the truth of suffering and love, and speaks to this. This is when simplicity is dangerous. It threatens to peel back the masks we wear and expose us to grace. This is what truly transforms.

Bodily health and Spiritual health: Where we are as a culture

Where we spend money reveals what we value. The amount of currency spent on personal health and wellness shows that Americans want to feel well. In the U.S., the spirituality/mindfulness market produced one billion dollars in 2017. The global health and wellness industry is projected to be worth $1.8 trillion in 2024. Corporate retreats and mindful venture capital are on the rise. Gen Z and millennial purchasing habits drive much of this, as they currently spend more on health and wellness than older generations.

We all want to feel good in body and spirit. In The Gospel of Wellness, journalist Rina Raphael documents the many ways that American women seek to be well. Driven by her own experience in seeking wholeness, she articulates the desires behind wellness trends:

Wellness said it could fix me, like a toy that was not so much broken as in need of new batteries. And I wanted to believe it.1

The trends present themselves as “good news” in the fallen world. This gospel offers a way for women to give meaning and structure to their lives in light of the near impossible demands of work, family, and modern society.

Raphael describes the circumstances we find ourselves in:

Too much feels out of control: a poorly constructed medical system, tech overload, a tumultuous news cycle, lack of community, you name it. We live lives that demand too much of us. Wellness, which spans both real, groundbreaking solutions and total bunk, is the direct response to genuine complaints in this country.2

The wellness industry developed because of the unhappiness that many experience. Raphael focuses on the ways that the wellness industry has impacted women. Though, I would argue that men are effected in parallel ways.

We can ask more questions along similar lines: Why are our lives demanding too much from us? What would being in control look and feel like? What does it mean to be well? Implicit in these questions is the idea that the “I” at the individual level ought to change in order to thrive. (Though, it also begs the question: Does society need to change for me to thrive?)

Why am I writing about the health and wellness industry in a substack about spirituality? In today’s world, bodily concerns overlap with spiritual concerns. Charles Taylor describes the spirituality of our times:

The stress is on unity, integrity, holism, individuality; their language often invokes ‘harmony, balance, flow, integrations, being at one, centred.’ Because of this, the search for spiritual wholeness is often closely related to the search for health.3

The search for flourishing has become a synthesis of desiring spiritual health along with bodily health. The explicit linking of the two is a relatively recent phenomenon. Cultural trends related to spiritual and bodily health also tend to parallel one another. Soulcycle and CrossFit are good examples of this. Both of these focus on exercise and physical wellbeing. At the same time, there is an emphasis on community and rituals, making them something like secular religions (Here’s a study from researchers at Harvard Divinity School). Raphael writes on Peloton’s founder comparing the riding classes to a liturgy:

Foley went on to say that people want fitness and they want something else, before pausing for dramatic effect. The heralded solution? “Enter instructor-led group fitness classes. Replete with the candles on the altar and somebody talking to you from a pulpit for 45 minutes.” He goes so far as to liken a Star of David or a crucifix draped around one’s neck to a branded fitness tank top. “That’s your identity. That’s your community. That’s your religion.”4

Religions are now equated with brands that sell us values. We pay for the community, the rituals, and the meaning it brings us. These fitness programs reflect this shift, and are only one piece in the large (and growing) economy of health and wellness.

Optimization as the goal: Does it fulfill?

A part of the wellness trend I want to examine is the influence of capitalism, science, and technology in what goods we desire and how we achieve those goods. Tara Isabella Burton describes an aspect of this as the culture of techno-utopianism:

The cult of wellness becomes, in techno-utopianism, a capitalist drive toward maximum efficiency. We optimize our bodies, handing over biological data to fitness tracker apps and menstrual tracking apps and caloric intake apps and meditation apps and sleep-cycle apps, at once desperate to use these seemingly rational metrics to become our best selves and willing to pay for it: sometimes in cold hard cash, sometimes in the transformation of our personal information, preferences, identities, biological makeup, or even our genes into a currency.5

The use of measurements and data can be a good thing. Numbers can force us to be honest in confronting our self image and habits. Though, is the body a machine that operates through inputs and outputs? Is it worth the sacrifice of privacy for the self knowledge that tech provides? Is the telos of optimization helping us flourish? (Freddie deBoer has more thoughts on the Modern Curse of Overoptimization)

I am sorting my thoughts on all of this as I write, but I want to make big claims:

I argue that the goods on offer in the cult of wellness do not fulfill the person. A person flourishes not when the final end is controlling the immanent through efficiency and optimization. Rather, properly ordered desires allow us to flourish, when the higher goods we seek are most proper to the human person. We live in a material world, but its in pursuing what is properly spiritual that we find fulfillment.

These are big claims, ones I will not definitively defend in one Substack post. In this first post, I hope to outline the issues in trusting in tech and markets for the health of the whole person. In follow-up posts, I hope to reflect on what Catholic spirituality has to offer.

Some Observations

Optimization is a value within society’s spiritual space demonstrated by apps and wearable electronics. Spirituality has been optimized for both work and home life. In the corporate world, money is spent on the well-being of employees. Mindfulness training and retreats are provided to help with focusing on tasks, reducing anxiety, and helping with sleep. These are good things, though, these services are offered because employee mental health and wellness is tied to productivity. The well being of the person is maximized in order to maximize profits. All of this is bound up in the economics of health and wellness.

Not only do businesses form and are formed in this culture, but individual entrepreneurs also contribute to the cult of wellness. Bryan Johnson invests in life longevity, hoping to never die. He lives a meticulously detailed daily schedule that is constantly monitored by a team of researchers. (For $40,000 a month, anyone can join this gym with similar tests). Another is Dr. Andrew Huberman, who has become one of the most popular podcasters and public intellectuals about how to maximize the self through neuroscience and health research. (I will have more to say about him below).

A term that helps describe this cultural movement is self-hacking: the person collects data on the self and studies it to notice patterns and then work to make changes to better the self. Emphasis is on individual autonomy and making informed decisions. Now, having information and making informed decisions is all well and good. We have material bodies that need proper care and attention in order to function well. Though, to reduce the whole human person to tangible numbers and algorithms loses the sense of “what is a person.” The person is more than just a body, but body and soul.

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Magdalene J. Taylor succinctly describes the issue of optimization in connection with a recent scandal concerning Huberman. Optimization does not fulfill the person:

Regardless, the point remains that optimization will not necessarily fulfill us in the way we’re looking for. It will not stop [us] from behaving in self-destructive ways (which, I think, Huberman ultimately was), nor will it fill in the emotional gaps that have led us searching for solutions in the first place. It probably will help us sleep a little better, help us feel a little better, help us look a little better, and that all absolutely is worth something. All of that does count toward our broader happiness. But to treat it as our guiding philosophy leaves us empty. There is no telos to it beyond productivity and conspicuous spending.

Optimization as a final end leaves the person unfulfilled. What it does fulfill is a neoliberal, capitalist philosophy of production and consumption. Optimization serves immanent concerns: efficiency, self-reliance, and maximizing the potential of personal health and wealth through “evidence-based practices.” In a (hyper)capitalist society that fosters hustle culture and entrepreneurial pursuits, the things of health, wellness, and spirituality serve the quantified self.

Now, Andrew Huberman makes for an interesting case study. He appears to be a prophet for the optimization of the immanent. Yet, he has spoken about the mystery of transcendence.

Huberman is a scientist affiliated with Stanford, so, one would think that he would choose a clear side in the science vs. religion debate. He is also based in Silicon Valley, the heart of tech culture, where one would doubly expect that he would have no time for religion or spirituality. Half of tech workers are atheist, compared to 7% of the population.

On the contrary, Huberman has publicly stated that he meditates and explicitly prays in the morning. Though reluctant at first to talk about it, he describes his prayer on Lex Fridman’s podcast:

It really came about that there are certain aspects of myself that I just couldn’t resolve on my own. No matter how much therapy… plant medicine or other forms of medicine, or podcasting, or science, or friendship or any of that, I was just not going to resolve.

Huberman started praying based on the advice of a friend, believing that prayer is powerful and that God works through us. He asks for help in removing his character defects, recognizing that he has flaws and that he cannot remove them on his own. To a Christian, this sounds like he recognizes the need for grace to live a fulfilling life. Without grace, we destroy ourselves. Huberman continues in the interview:

If we don’t believe in something bigger than ourselves, at some level, we will self-destruct… You can’t control everything.

Does this make Huberman a model of human flourishing? I would ask questions related to what he believes about God. I would also ask what kind of character is he working towards? What is the definition of a character defect?

Also, Huberman’s integrity has recently been subjected to the court of public opinion. New York Magazine published a piece detailing his toxic relationships with women and colleagues. Notably, he is accused of covertly manipulating and dating six women at the same time.

Lying and deception are wrong, period. I’m not defending Huberman’s moral character. Though, going back to his interview on Fridman’s podcast, I think Huberman’s comments about his prayer reveals something worth thinking about. Here is a person who makes life decisions with all of the science, data, and tech available, and yet, there is still a part of his being that is unsatisfied.

The cult of wellness and techno-optimism promises fullness of life. However, it cannot fulfill this. This cult is ultimately rooted in making money. All decisions made in this business are based on the logic of production and consumption. The materialist reduction of the person to the quantified self also fundamentally misunderstands the person. The flourishing of the person does need the proper care of the body, but also, the proper care of the soul. More to come in Part II.

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Religious alternatives surround us in the United States. If we become tired, bored, or indignant towards the religious group we were born into or chose later in life, we can leave and search for something that feels right. Options exist and the dominant culture encourages each person to follow their intuition.

Tara Isabella Burton documents this rise of new forms of religious experience in Strange Rites. She describes how more Americans are choosing and combining eclectic practices to form meaning, community, and rituals. Numerous examples are given, such as: Harry Potter fan fiction clubs, the cult surrounding Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, and polyamory/kink culture. Burton describes the religious experiences within these groups and calls them the Remixed: 

Today’s Remixed reject authority, institution, creed, and moral universalism. They value intuition, personal feeling, and experiences... They want to choose- and, more often than not, purchase – the spiritual path that feels more authentic, more meaningful, to them. They prioritize intuitional spirituality over institutional religion. And they want, when available institutional options fail to suit their needs, the freedom to mix and match, to create their own daily rituals and practices and belief systems.1

In all of these forms of religiosity, people strive to be their authentic selves in the age of consumerism and content creation. They engage with practices that make sense to them and further their sense of spiritual development. The Remixed go their own way in meeting their spiritual needs, often far away from institutional religion.

I am a Millennial, I’ve grown-up amid these cultural shifts and have many friends who are Remixed. Am I a member of the Remixed? It’s hard to say, as I claim to be a member of the Catholic Church, a place many would say promotes “authority, institution, creed, and moral universalism.” I did not write the beliefs of the Church.

However, I have freely chosen to believe them.

When it was public that I was discerning to join the Jesuits in college, I was asked more than once: “Why are you throwing your life away?” I had many conversations with my peers about wanting to be a priest; some were Catholic, many were not. Choosing to be a Catholic priest seemed to be the worst decision someone could do with their life. This led to questions I asked myself: Why would I give up the rich experiences of sex and self-determination for something seemingly cold and constraining? Am I being manipulated? Am I afraid of taking control of my own destiny? Am I running away from myself? I didn’t have any concrete answers. There seemed to be many reasons against wanting to be a Catholic priest.

Charles Taylor describes the fragilization that happens when someone encounters another person who holds alternative beliefs. It causes them to rethink their own beliefs. I certainly felt fragile in college with the constant questioning and I questioned my own desires. Why did I want to be a Catholic priest? All I had was a delicate thought and feeling that Jesus Christ was calling me to be a priest and that I could be fulfilled living that life. Clarity was gained through meeting Jesuits, learning about them, and going to discernment retreats. I learned about Ignatian Spirituality and spent time in silent prayer. Prayer transformed how I approached existential questions. I came to believe that the fullness of freedom and authenticity is in following after Christ. I always had an implicit belief in this, but it became very explicit for me by engaging in spiritual practices. I felt that Christ was calling me to a particular way of following him as a member of the Society of Jesus.

Catholic spirituality is why I remain Catholic in the age of the Remixed. Spirituality values personal experience, feeling, and desire. At the same time, Catholic tradition offers the personal experience, feelings, and desires of the saints that have lived through the centuries as guides. We learn how to be authentically spiritual by their example. For instance, Ignatius of Loyola provides a way (which has only recently been called Ignatian Spirituality). Jacques Servais, SJ, describes von Balthasar’s encounter with Ignatius:

He was struck deep from the outset by an image that quickly seemed to him a “motif of his life”: Ignatius’ broken leg from the battle at Pamplona. A mysterious symbol: God breaks our existence in order to heal it and make of it a necessary tool for his work. Letting oneself be placed, like Ignatius, with Christ Crucified and letting oneself become his companion, in accordance with the Father’s will: this is what Balthasar discovered as his personal vocation.2

The lives of the saints make real the structured beliefs of Catholic theology. At the foundation of Catholic theology is Scripture and the tradition. These two form the single deposit of faith and becomes real through people’s lives. Adolphe Tanqueray in his classic treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Spirituality writes: “Spirituality is a science that is lived.”3 Science here is understood in the pre-modern sense: an organized body of knowledge that is broader than what is today considered modern science. The pre-modern definition of science includes philosophy and theology that is animated by a “love of wisdom.”

This living for the divine makes the human heart bigger to encompass all human experiences: the joys and the sorrows, the gains and the losses. There is meaning to be found in the good and the bad, as both can draw us closer to God. The experience of a broken leg opened Ignatius up to something new and began his conversion. When a Jesuit says “finding God in all things,” this is what he means. God is in the failures and injuries that occur in our lives, showing that we are never abandoned, and that even the bad can bring us closer to the divine. As the Exultet says at the Easter Vigil: “O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!”

Scripture, tradition, the lives of the saints, all of this is rooted in the experience of the early disciples with Jesus Christ: of having hearts set aflame through friendship with God. The disciples on the road to Emmaus felt a change when encountering the risen Lord: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32) Catholic spirituality shows the way to having this encounter. Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est describes what it means to be a Christian:

Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.

The sacraments, the prayers, the Bible, the stories of holy people, participating in a local church community, all of these things foster encountering God as revealed by Jesus Christ. These things communicate grace, an undeserved gift from God that gives us access to the inner life of the Trinity. The times I’ve tasted this leaves me craving more and keeps me rooted in the Christian life. It’s transformed what I desire and how I see the world.

In the end, I am partly Remixed. I have freely chosen to be Catholic in light of my intuition, feelings, and personal experiences. Authenticity has been granted to me each day through grace. It hasn’t been something that I have had to fight or struggle for, but is something I feel I continually receive as a gift. No amount of capital can purchase this. At the same time, this authenticity and freedom do not necessarily conflict with the authority and institution that is the Catholic Church. I hope to say more about this in the coming months.

I’m starting this Substack to write about spirituality. Despite our culture providing us countless alternatives in a constant flux of vibe shifts, authenticity can still be found in creeds and tradition. In the age of the Remixed, I think Catholic spirituality still has relevant things to say to our culture about the self, the good, the divine, and all things in between.