Dear Norbert, You are truly honest. What haven't you suffered in your 17 years? How can you revile your self so much, and praise other members of your family? Why don't you admit that in the final analysis you want to be something other than what you are, and to be able to live differentlỵ Just admit it! You want a change, yet you persevere in your life-style with a remarkable obstinacy.
Is the tiny bit of happiness that might come from a more “normal” life-style, that of your parents and brothers and sisters, really nothing in the depth of your mind? You demand too much happiness. What you are demanding, you will not find in a normal bourgeois lifẹ If I ask you to give up this exaggerated demand for happiness, you would say why should I?
You say you believe in God. But do you really? If God is really the last and ineffable, all-fulfilling happiness toward which one, forgetful of self, ought to strain during one's journey along life road in order to arrive at true happiness - why do you want to squeeze it here and now into the puny moment in which you are living today? Why can you wait until it comes at the consummation of life, at the moment of death? Why can't you soberly take upon yourself the commonplace duty, the service of others even though you can't get “high” on it as you can on drugs or other things? A conversion, a total change of life is difficult. Unless you perceive that the acceptance of the sober, the daily grind is your real duty, you can't start a new life.
You ask me, where is happiness? I could answer: I don't know or: for me God is the Incomprehensible, the Mysterỵ And I could confess that this God alone can be the all-encompassing and eternal happiness for mẹ How should I know what my happiness looks like concretely? No, I have not attained it, but I have an ineffable mysterious presentiment of it and therefore I have no need to deify and idolize the trifling states of happiness of this life. I can simply disregard them and forego them.
The performance of my duties is simply the courage to go beyond the idols of a bogus happiness of the moment. To go forward toward that happiness that alone deserves the name. (Karl Rahner)
Mai Thư