Young people leaving the networks 

In a matter of a few months, I have lived very closely the entrance of a 20 year old boy into the Seminary and the weddings of two 26 year old girls. Different paths for the same call to leave the nets and follow God where He wants.

In the days leading up to the celebration of the Seminar Day (March 22), we are invited to reflect on the Christian vocation, the one against which a famous Spanish comedian the other day directed a furious attack, not so much, I believe, out of true hatred for Christianity but because «she doesn't know what she is doing».

It is impossible to understand, for those who live in an exclusively material key, that a young man or woman chooses to stop living for himself or herself in order to live for others, whether in a Christian marriage or in a priestly or religious vocation. «They must have eaten his brain,» think those who do not realize that they have theirs like a gruyere cheese because of ideologies, authentic political religions that not only leave their followers empty, but, under the promise of making them freer, enslave them.

Other gods

The call to leave the nets that Jesus made to his disciples takes on full relevance in a world as entangled as the one humanity is facing in this second quarter of the 21st century. Our young people live tied by the fine thread of the god of money, by the transparent line of the god of aesthetics, by the thin wire of the god of professional careers, by the invisible cable of the god of affections, by the light filament of the digital world....

Like those phantom rigs that drift through the seas entangling the sea creatures that come across them, exhausting them to death, many boys and girls live hooked, without realizing it, to a huge ball of fine threads that prevents them from swimming free. The data make it clear: youth is no longer the golden age, but quite the opposite. The younger generations are much unhappier than the older ones and the mental deterioration they suffer is becoming pandemic.

Invitation to love

What has happened so that, in spite of having almost everything, they cannot cope with their lives? Could it be that the human being is something more than matter and that he/she becomes scattered if he/she does not discover that he/she is something more? Jesus« call to his disciples to leave their nets was not a command from authority, but an invitation, from freedom, to untie themselves and discover that »something more", the secret of authentic happiness: to love. Because living only for oneself impoverishes us and limits our spirit, which is made to go out to meet others, to love and serve.

How much joy is transmitted by those people who live by and for others! Mothers and parents who go out of their way for their spouses and children, priests dedicated to their parishes, religious men and women who care for their brothers and sisters in community and live their contemplative or active charism to the full, or volunteers who do their bit to build a better world. All of them show that life, when given, is received, and when we try to hold on to it, it is lost.

The testimony of the youth

Seeing young people swimming against the tide saying yes to the Lord despite all the difficulties that this entails today, denounces my lack of faith and hope. Lack of faith because I forget that God is a Father who takes care of his own and lack of hope because I am afraid of the future, which does not depend on me, nor on the latest Donald Trump's latest idea, but only on God.

The testimony of the seminarians, the experience of the boys and girls who decide to embrace religious life, the example of the young couples of bride and groom, They are an enormous prophetic cry that should awaken from their lethargy a society lulled to sleep by the new opiates of the people. The young people who leave their nets and begin to walk following Jesus show the way to the fearful and make us see that the future is not as black as the newscasts show us. 

As St. Peter recalled in the book of Acts, «your sons and daughters will prophesy and your young men will see visions». And so it is.