The older I get, the more I realize my questions, my problems, and my bad mindsets are not all that unique. Many people have them and, at the risk of sounding like misery loves company, it’s a comforting thing. It means there’s a solution to be found and hēl is doing a swell job at putting those answers in one place.
For the past few years, a growing sense of uncertainty has seeped into my life. Like what most people face at some point or another, it felt like I woke up one day in the unknown. Life was far from what I had expected it would be, and the reality I was confronting had a strange landscape and seemingly empty horizon.
Toss in the added difficulty of spiritual dryness, and I couldn’t help but feel that God left me to my own devices. Torn between wondering if my expectations were disillusionment, or if they were a test of faith and hope in God, I was stuck in a whirlpool of confusion, with the sole prayer intention of clarity.
And I must confess, the cloud of ambivalence has stuck around in the atmosphere. My favorite movie gave me that word. In “Girl, Interrupted,” a psychologist points out to the protagonist that despite her use of ambivalence to denote indifference (as is the vernacular), its etymology reveals a deeper meaning. From the Latin “ambi” meaning “both” and “valere” meaning “to be strong,” ambivalence shows a strong pull in two directions, rather than just mixed feelings resulting in a weak attraction.
I spent quite some time trying to pinpoint where the pulls were coming from and where they were pulling me to, but any answer I found in the abstract seemed to have no bearing in reality. So eventually, I gave up. If there were already forces at play pulling in opposite directions, I’d stop being one of them.
Life was feeling like my high school physics class, and it turns out I didn’t need to be a scientist to find its practical use in my adult life. When it comes to pulling, you either have friction or tension. Tension is caused by a pull in one direction. Think gravity. Friction, on the other hand, is caused by a pull in opposing directions, and like a tug-of-war rope, I broke.
Since I couldn’t live in a state of friction anymore, I embraced the tension. I’d be calm, live in the present day, and be zen. If God wanted to pull me somewhere then I’d let Him and stop making more of a mess by throwing in my own force. That’s when I got yanked over to hēl.
All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy
Before I was ambivalent, I knew exactly what I was supposed to do.
A few years ago, I was teaching grade school and I loved every minute of the happy exhaustion. Expectations, rules, and direction were all built into the nature of the job, leaving me with no uncertainties as to what my responsibilities were. Even when the going got tough, I could always fall back to an overarching sense of purpose: I was teaching kids about God and His Creation. I was doing something meaningful.
Lesson prep took over my social life and I gladly tossed aside weekends for a greater good. My alarm was set for 4am, except for Saturdays when I slept in till the luxurious hour of 6am. I got every sickness under the sun and managed to make it through a whole year without calling out. Between my hour-long commute and bad luck, teaching cost me three cars. I said then and will still say now that the physical and emotional toll was worth every minute.
But eventually, it was too much. What ended up being my last year teaching gave me the most miserable case of burnout and depression I’ve yet experienced, and I could barely get myself out of bed, much less sign on for another year. Burnout because I was spreading myself too thin for too long. Depression because I loved my job and if I left, what would I do? How could I find something as fulfilling as teaching?
I began questioning how I got there. How did I hit such a state of burnout? What do I have to do to get out of it? And what should I do to never feel like that again? While I cried at home saying that God never answers me, I began getting hit with clues and hints to those very questions. Everywhere I looked, I seemed to find people talking about the importance of play.
So I started implementing that in my life. Shifting from a highly routined schedule to a lot of self-employment, part-time gigs, and flexibility was a challenge but a good change. Leaving the classroom and all its fulfillment gave me breathing room, but it also left me with a sense of aimlessness, and an old struggle of work pre-teaching returned.
I had always taken a mindset that work is a means to an end. I work only insofar as to pay my bills and support my life. No plans of climbing the corporate ladder or dedicating my life to a large salary. At the time that mindset seemed wise, prudent, and effective. I was desperate to not let mundanity dominate my day and I strove to never become Edward Norton in “Fight Club.” What I didn’t realize was that my mindset was doing exactly that, and I couldn’t help but say, “I am Jack’s wasted life.”
Now I’m reassessing my view of work and its role in my life. Teaching showed me how work can be beautiful, meaningful, and enjoyable. Is that possible for other jobs as well? My instinct is to return to my old perspective and chalk up teaching to be a uniquely meaningful field. That I won’t find another job that brings me the same sense of purpose, and I need to resign myself to a certain, palatable amount of pointlessness.
But hēl has begun to show me something else.
Hēl is the first time I’ve stopped fighting monotony with spontaneity. It’s helping me see how that’s always been a band-aid fix and not a long-term solution. Hēl shows the root of monotony as inattentiveness, rather than it being an integral default in the system of life.
Just since reflecting on that and putting it into my day, I’ve noticed a difference. Each week goes smoother, I’m less overwhelmed, I show up for recreation, and I complete most of my to-dos. But even on the days where the unforeseen has occurred, like towing my car or a long confession line, I’m not carrying the old frustration I used to. Moving the unfinished to the next day doesn’t irritate or bog me down in the same way, because even for the interruptions, I’ve been making an effort to be attentive.
Zooming out from the day-to-day, hēl’s approach has been helping me make peace with my old attitude toward work. I’m not Edward Norton from Fight Club. Of course, I still avoid cubicles like the plague, but even if I couldn’t, I’m not doomed to cracking and making bombs out of soap.
In fact, I’ve had plenty of office jobs and the only time I came close to cracking was after teaching. The weight of work isn’t monotony, it’s imbalance. Born from a severe tunnel-vision, imbalance blinds you, making it harder to be attentive and easier to drown yourself in work without rest. But you can only be a tyrant of efficiency for so long before something combusts.
Recently, I read a hēl essay which quoted Pope St. Leo XIII: “Even if man had not fallen, he would not have remained totally idle.” The more I was learning about hēl, the more I was able to see work as a good thing, natural to man, and now sanctified. Which is why, in hēl, work is more than just having to get things done, more than just planner or calendar management. Work is not an unnecessary evil we simply have to deal with.
Hēl confirmed my suspicion that productively pounding down to-do lists isn’t because I’m great at working, it’s because I suck at resting. It was a full circle moment, one of those synchronous radio antennas that tuned in to the right frequency, and makes you feel like the Holy Spirit is adjusting you to the correct channel.
Pope St. Leo’s words were echoing in my mind when I had to order an idle air control valve for my car. Idle. There was that word again. My car couldn’t run because it couldn’t idle. Seeing the combustion quite literally play out in a machine drove home the truth of it, and emphasized for me again the importance of balancing both. The relationship of work and play is symbiotic, even necessary. They need each other for either to be done well. Work shouldn’t dominate your life any more than leisure should.
Sadly, the concept of work as intrinsically good is long gone in our culture. That work ethic should be strong, principled, and consistent, regardless of supervision or consequence. That there’s meaning to it. No, people want to get rich so they never have to work another day in their life. Or they want to be rich so they have reason to let work become their life.
Today, if you ask any kid on the street what they want to be when they grow up, most of their answers will be a YouTuber or an influencer. To answer why that it is could bring into the picture a plethora of factors, but I think they could all get reduced to two very simple reasons: it makes you rich and it makes you famous.
Those desires are not just worldly, superficial, or vapid. It’s indicative of a far deeper issue: a misunderstanding of what work really is. I know firsthand how easy it is to fall into it, even when you mistakenly considered yourself in the world but not of it.
Work is either seen as a curse or as your life’s purpose. But to take that mindset would be like considering walking a curse because you must move from point A to point B, or elevating it to the reason your life has meaning. Work, like walking, is something natural to us as humans, and our blindness to this is a disconnection from our humanity.
Hēl is not just challenging the status quo, it’s trying to connect us back to nature. It’s actually delivering on the work-life balance everyone seems to be desperately searching for. Hēl is the countercultural revolution we need because it returns to Catholic tradition and presents it in the light of today without losing any of the ancient meaning. Work can be redemptive, relational, and reviving, but at its root, it’s human, and that’s a message not often given in today’s world.
The Unspeakable Self
Leading up to hēl, I’ve bumped into many quandaries surrounding the self. Why do I do what I do? What does “I” mean? What is the self in relation to others? A self in the face of God? Am I good? Bad? Neutral? But if I were to compile all into a single question, I’d have to quote the writer, Walker Percy: “Why is it that in your entire lifetime you will never be able to size yourself up as you can size up somebody else — or size up Saturn — in a ten-second look?”
I think that in asking why, you get part of the answer. There’s a glimpse of infinity within us that makes summary difficult and completion impossible. The self is not static. It can’t fit in a box, neatly compartmentalized or perfectly curated in a profile. But to even begin finding an answer, you need to be able to look at the thing in question, and you can’t see objectively if you wear a lens of hatred, or of idolization.
Years ago I had the epiphany that I really didn’t love myself. In fact, I didn’t like myself at all and had become pretty self-destructive. Self-destructive behavior isn’t always as extreme as a heroin addiction or abusive relationships. It can be in the type of people you date or the way you drink, but sometimes it’s in the impossible standards you hold yourself to, or the harsh inner voice telling you that you’ll never be good enough, to work harder, do better, be better, and for Pete’s sake, you’re pathetic.
Many particulars can land someone in self-destruction. Temperament, broken expectations, self-doubt, insecurity, or a bad choice snowballing into an avalanche. I had plenty of factors, but one was deeper and more powerful than the rest. A fundamental misconception I had built my house on.
As a cradle Catholic, I’ve been raised on the message that God loves humanity and so He died for our sins. But also the self is bad. Very fallen, very foul and sinful. Maybe the words are simply archaic, but the language is hard to not interpret literally: despise oneself, abase oneself, hate oneself, and empty oneself.
If we’re so horrible, why does God love us? Well, His grace changes you. Oh. Then without His grace I’m bad? Yes, you need grace to be saved… but also, there’s an existential goodness to everything God created. Back and forth, back and forth. I got different answers from different people, probably unknowingly dabbled in several heresies, and I still couldn’t find a way to resolve the discrepancy between two vital Catholic doctrines: God’s love and man’s sinfulness. Eventually, I must have come to the subconscious, half-baked conclusion that God loves everyone, but there was something unlovable about me as an individual and it ought to be hated.
In good weather, the house I was building was sturdy enough. I looked perfectly fine from the outside. Good job, active social and spiritual life, productive, and content. So when storms came and the shoddy foundation crumbled, it blindsided me. I was shattered and even more confused as to how. What was the integral flaw in what I thought had been a good building? How could I have mistaken such fragility for stability? Was I that clueless? Or was this some grandiose self-deception I didn’t know I was capable of?
In the wreckage of the aftermath, I searched interiorly for an explanation and surmised that my house was either haunted or the foundation was rotting, or maybe both. But instead of ghost hunters, I was sent a handyman in the form of a Catholic essay.
Written by a traditional priest, the essay explained how God loves each individual so profoundly, so personally, that even if I were alone on the earth, Christ would’ve suffered His Passion and Death just to save me. Love like that for mankind? For sure. For other people I know? Absolutely. But for me, and me alone? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.
Once I saw it, though, I couldn’t unsee it, and I surrendered to the fact that I was loved. I felt liberated. Free from shackles I thought I had to wear. At that point, I had come to understand the seed of self-loathing lodged in my heart as an inherent part of me, but also as something to be kept and nurtured because I’m sinful.
Maybe it’s the curse of the cradle Catholic to clutch to our creeds without really seeing them as a reality we live in, to instead see it as rules by which to live. Or maybe it was just me blind to the fact the mysteries of my faith are more than just pretty moral doctrines, that they are the active threads by which reality is composed, playing out in the same and different ways today as 2,000 years ago.
When I started learning about hēl, I was excited by the approach to the self. Unwavering in its worth, dignity, and goodness, the self is explained in the light of Catholicism where mercy, love and kindness are expected without turning the self into an ego. The message that I had lacked for so long, and now hold so dearly, was here and being unabashedly proclaimed.
To say this is sorely needed is an understatement. The secular world idolizes the self, and in the attempt to knock over false idols, many Catholics lose sight of the personal love our God offers. Loving the sinner, hating the sin is only comprehensible when the self is properly understood and not many people do. A faith can move mountains, but without love – no evangelization is possible. Largely because it’ll attract no one.
But hēl doesn’t stop there. As I delved deeper, I discovered it went far beyond self-love and that I had only just gotten started. Self-love was a belief to be applied to my life, a stagnant principle that existed and trickled out indirectly into my activity. In hēl I began to understand it as a launchpad. A starting point from which life becomes richer and love becomes more effusive. The positives I had already seen in conceiving myself as good could be amplified and here was someone teaching how.
The “how” involves a lot that I’m still learning. Reconnection to my senses, getting comfortable with the flow of messy activity, and slowing down to let knowledge simmer are all things I’m trying to understand and practice. Hēl is making me realize that a true conception of the self by definition bears new life. It’s not an idea to be written down, it’s a story to be told. It’s growth.
But more than the “what” of the self and the “how” of loving it well, hēl explains the “why” of self-love. Not to turn inward and exist in a vacuum, but to join St. Paul in saying, “Now, not I but Christ liveth in me.”
Here, too, we get part of the answer to Walker Percy’s question. The vagary of the self exists in subjecthood, and the self is primarily a subject. We are an “I,” not just an object: a “me.” I have free will, me doesn’t. I act, me is acted upon. Today we live in a culture of objects because we’ve lost a clear vision of the self. Everyone wants to be famous, everyone exports their daily moments into videos to be viewed, romance has been reduced to objectification, and even most platonic relationships have too.
This is what happens, when we don’t have a direct line to God. It’s easier to project your “I” out into the world as a “me” than confront the complexity that never seems to have a satisfying answer. How much more comfortable it is to compartmentalize yourself in a tidy, controlled box. Why would you risk all the uncertainty and demand of perceiving your self as a subject? A subject that requires action, decisions, failures, successes, depth and the unknown?
Well, as hēl puts it: divinization. The “I” is called to be assimilated into Christ. Bridging the gap between the question and the answers involves taking the Incarnation seriously and hēl does.
Just as Christ was the Word became Flesh, the Logos spoken into the world, so we are all called to be too. Not in some vague future when high levels of virtue have been achieved, but now. We are all, as selves, a word, unspeakable until we have been spoken to. But to hear what is being spoken to us, we must be able to listen; and to speak, we must be able to talk.
Hēl is offering a way to discover, just as little children do, the wonder and beauty of our senses. God works in the tension of a moment, the reality of an experience, in movement, in activity, and hēl aims to help others hone deeper into the present. To organize one’s self in a way that is holistic and connected. When we do, we’re able to speak ourselves out into the world like a light upon a mountain. And we’re able to hear the words of grace which help give us something to say.
In a day and age where God is forgotten but deeply desired, the self is misunderstood but psychoanalyzed, and most everyone is just going through the motions without any further thought, hēl is striking at the root of the problems. Hēl is the new evangelization, unique in that it’s helping Catholics get their house in order so that they can in turn, go out to the ends of the earth.
Want to learn more about hēl, the organizational system for being a Saint? Read, Be Organized, Be a Saint: An Introduction to Hēl.
