Pacifica Stories

We live in a fractured age. Division, isolation, and self-focus seem to grow with each passing year. Mental illness is rising at alarming rates, our politics grow more polarized by the day, and even our most basic human-to-human interactions are diminishing. The very structures that once held life together—family, community, faith—feel increasingly fragile.

This is not just a social problem or a political one. It is also spiritual. Over centuries of intellectual, cultural, and technological revolutions, our world has become disenchanted. Transcendence has been stripped away. The internet, social media, and biotechnology have accelerated this trend, reshaping even our relationships with our own bodies and with nature itself.

In trying to explain the depth of this disorder, words like “sickness” and even “evil” have surfaced more frequently. These are not exaggerations. If there is a spiritual reality, and I believe there is, then alongside goodness and light we must also recognize the reality of darkness and distortion. What we are seeing in culture today cannot be explained by material outcomes alone.

At the root of this crisis is radical self-focus. The self, though important, was never meant to be ultimate. When we place ourselves at the center, we collapse inward. Human beings flourish not when the self is supreme, but when our loves are rightly ordered. As Augustine argued, God must come first, with neighbor and self following in their proper place. Misordered love produces chaos; rightly ordered love produces health.

The way forward is both simple and profound. The great commandment says: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And love your neighbor as yourself. This order is not a restriction but a liberation. It directs us toward joy, peace, and purpose.

And here lies the paradox: values that seem to bind us, such as consistency, order, unity, humility, God, are the very values that set us free. In modern culture, freedom is often imagined as the removal of all limits and obligations. But true freedom is not found in endless autonomy. It is found in rightly ordered connection: to God, to family, to community.

In my own life, freedom has not come from detaching myself from others, but from attaching myself to something greater. The humility to receive advice from a friend, the discipline to order my desires under God, the unity of belonging to a community—these are not chains, but wings. Alone, I tend toward disorder. Connected, I flourish.

This truth runs against the grain of our age. Radical individualism promises fulfillment, yet often delivers loneliness. Unchecked desire promises pleasure, yet often produces bondage. Real freedom requires humility: the willingness to submit to an order greater than ourselves.

The challenge before us is clear. We must pursue stability over chaos, order over fracture, God over self, goodness over evil. We must recover unity in a world increasingly polarized, and rediscover that freedom is not self-made but given, not seized but received.

It is hard, and it is counterintuitive. In a disenchanted, fragmented world, this is the radical way forward. If we have the courage to embrace God, consistency, order, unity, and humility, we will discover not a diminished humanity but an enlarged one. We will find that the very values our culture has abandoned are the ones that lead us to freedom.

Let us, then, commit ourselves to this vision. Let us think and live well, with hope as our anchor, as we look forward to what lies ahead.