Those who find their way to the Farm at Galong, the residential program for women recovering from alcohol and other drug misuse, provide a great lesson to Catholics on the godless condition of the modern world.
Their spiritual poverty is so great as well as the resulting many practical needs, that the days of Catholic theorists, therapists and commentators seem well and truly over. To the trenches and the field hospitals we must go.
Neither the church nor the world has been able to provide for the people who come to our door.
They come without the capacity to be aware of God, having learned from an early age to flee from the depths of their being through the narcotic of some pleasure or another. No teacher or parent or authority figure has ever explained to them the notion of delayed gratification, or the freedom of will which marks the dignity of the person, or the capacity of the person for endurance and achievement.
They have grown up in a fog of sense-satisfaction with no idea of or inclination towards a higher way of being. As they are born for this higher way, it is no surprise they seek it out in some perverted form.
In 1988 the then-Cardinal Jospeh Ratzinger delivered a paper to the annual Fisher conference in England in which he noted that the two signs we are living through one of the darkest times in the world’s history are terrorism and drug addiction – both perversions of man’s desire for God.
Of drug addiction he notes:
The grand ‘trip’ which people look for in drugs is a perversion of mysticism, the warping of the human desire for immortality, the ‘no’ to the impossibility of overcoming the immanent, and the attempt to enfold the limits of one’s own being in the eternal. The patient and humble adventure of asceticism, which, step by step, climbs nearer to the God who is coming down to meet man, finds itself replaced by the power of magic – that is, the magic key of drugs – the moral and religious path is set aside for that of technology. Drugs are the pseudo- mysticism of a world which no longer believes but which cannot for all that shake off the yearning of the soul for paradise. Drugs are therefore a warning signal with deep reverberations: they not only reveal the vacuum in our society which its instruments cannot remedy; they point to an interior longing in man which breaks out in perverted form if it does not find its true satisfaction.*
Here Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, as ever, accurately reads the signs of the times. And it is increasingly the case that technology, including the rapidly developing technology of artificial intelligence, is replacing God as the ‘go to’ for personal satisfaction.
The church must recognise its competitors if it is to reach out meaningfully to people in search of God. Any evangelisation worthy of its name must read the signs of the times so that it can meet people where they are.
At the Farm this is what we attempt to do. We remove the magic of technology in its various forms, especially of course, recourse to drugs, but also mobile phones and internet access, and replace it with the exploration of the self.
Our clients embark on the adventure of asceticism, of early mornings, hard work, self-examination and honest interaction with one another, with nothing to numb the feelings. They can no longer avoid themselves.
In this quiet encounter with themselves they invariably encounter the God who made them. Their internal monologue becomes a dialogue with someone they sense knows and loves them better than anyone.
No amount of technology or therapy can do what God can do alone with the individual. But the modern age doesn’t give him the room to do his work. The individual is now so scattered that she cannot hear God. She lacks the interior harmony that points him out to her. She often lacks that harbinger of such harmony – the model of a family of individuals with a common goal to look after each other.
The experience of violence and breakdown in the home has resulted in fear and fragility – people become a threat and not a source of comfort. There is no model of selfless love in their experience.
It is well and truly time for Catholics to become this model.
We must probe deeply the needs of our brothers and sisters, we must move beyond the slogans of the day and our own internicene feuds, we must learn to see more than others see, to see what God sees, and to provide for the poor in the modern age from the church’s bountiful stock of wisdom and love.
Details at thefarmingalong.com.au
