"Who am I? Where do I come from? What do I do with my life? Where am I going?" These are the same old human questions that neither humanism, nor science, nor technology are able to answer. In every age, thinkers put them before us again and they always sound the same. As far as these thinkers have been able to go, with different accents, they propose that we should be human, that we should be what we are; in short, that we should find ourselves.
However, these answers from philosophers and thinkers continue to leave us, deep down, empty and new generations continue to ask: "Who am I? What is the meaning of my being in the world? Where am I going?"
These are questions that deeply disturb the human being; they are very serious questions; they are questions that commit us to the core. However, this seriousness and commitment, instead of attracting us in search of the ultimate truth of our being, it seems as if we want to avoid them, dodge them or hide them, we do not know where.
Perhaps what most distinguishes our times is superficiality, the desire to forget or to render useless the critical spirit, the lack of willpower to face these questions, to let ourselves fall into nihilism, the unwillingness to listen to our conscience; in short, the lack of strength to face the spiritual and moral dimension of our being people.
There are impressive videos of some city streets in the United States -but not only-, in which people appear as zombies, morally and physically destroyed by drugs and prostitution.
Could it be that we have built an entire civilization based, not on what we are, but on what we possess? Could it be that success and social prestige come before everything else and leave us in a disturbing existential void? Some authors have defined our times as "a spiritual wasteland". It is urgent to appeal to every human person to cultivate the "contemplative" dimension of his being, to be "truly free".
The "superficial" person, who does not think for himself, but allows himself to be carried away by apparently dominant ideologies, will have great difficulty in asking himself these questions, on the correct answers to which his happiness depends. Let us not forget that culturally we are children of the Enlightenment, which, with positive aspects and successes, has cultivated, however, a rationalism disconnected from the transcendent reality of the human person, leading us in the end to a great spiritual emptiness.
Those luminous words of Jesus still stand: "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (Jn 8:31).
Jesus assures us that the truth exists; he confirms what we already perceive clearly within ourselves, that is, that the truth can only be one, even if there are many lies or "half-truths"; he confirms that his Word is the truth.
There it is, for those who humbly ask for it, the answer to these permanent questions of the human being.
