‘Are you there yet?’ app Ellis. “We’re at the gate.” Ellis is the tour guide of a small group from Nijmegen that travels to the canonization of Titus Brandsma in Rome. The mayor, members of the Titus Brandsma Institute, a few deans, the rector and I can also join in my role as chairman of the supervisory board of Radboud University, where priest Titus Brandsma was professor and rector.
“I’m almost there,” I text back. “Just a quick trip to the bookstore.” I quickly scan the tables with recently published books and bestsellers. Master your mindset – Live Your Best Life, Now or Never, The Power of Choice. Towering stacks of brightly colored books promise the recipe for a more beautiful and meaningful life for just 21.95 euros.
What does the ever-growing popularity of self-help books, meaning magazines and spiritual apps that serve as guides for the errant man say? Why is it that stories about life choices or turning things around are so popular? Whether it’s a 60-year-old police officer who retrains to become a train driver, or a musician who chooses a life as a sheep herder, a lawyer who becomes a farmer or a former AFM chairman who chooses the classroom. Newspapers are full of it, we just can’t get enough of it. I also notice it in my mailbox, which is filled daily with questions from people who are looking for advice in their search for a life with more meaning.
According to the Social and Cultural Planning Office, this is a result of increasing individualization and secularisation. Where the church and religion used to provide guidance, meaningful living is now increasingly a private matter. The search for the meaning of life has shifted to meaning in this life. By the meaning of life nasty the meaning in life†
That this is not the case everywhere in the world and that faith is still a self-evident beacon for many, I experience the next day on the crowded St. Peter’s Square where fifty thousand Catholic pilgrims from all over the world have gathered for the canonization of ten aspiring saints.
Next to me is a group of Carmelite nuns, sisters of the order to which Brandsma also belonged. What possesses them to opt for celibate, strict monastic life at this time? Sister Madeline, a beautiful woman from Zimbabwe, dressed in a dark brown habit with a lavender headscarf, tells how she chose monastic life when she was 16. “It was my calling.”
Even now – thirty years later – her jet-black eyes are shining again. She is now superior of the order and leads sixty sisters. But soon her term will come to an end and then she wants to teach at a primary school. Preferably for children with disabilities. But she doubts. ‘Learning a whole new trade, am I not too old for that?’
‘Too old?’, I smile. “I was 51!” A smile appears on her face and before I know it I find myself in a close embrace. Suddenly I am reminded of what the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote in The Reflections, the very first self-help book ever: ‘What does it matter whether a person lives short or long? Everyone has only one life and all lives are alike.’