St. Irenaeus wrote in the second century that the glory of God is man fully alive. How can we aspire to that kind of living, when humanity is drowning in an ocean of mediocrity?

It’s a terrible waste of the gift of freedom to spend life on idle and self-centered pursuits. It’s not that comfort or taking it easy is wrong in and of itself; even God rested. It’s that idleness is the enemy of virtue. It destroys our potential, steals our time, and deprives our friends, family, and neighbors of the good things we could do for each other. It hollows out quality relationships, substituting at every turn authentic things for counterfeit ones.

The orthodoxy of self-centeredness is the existentialism of Sartre and the relativism of Nietzsche, a toxic cocktail all but assuring personal misery and restlessness. It’s the effete worldview that nothing matters except oneself and one’s own opinions. These two great philosophical losers condemned themselves to history as prosaic thinkers who, lacking in moral courage, dared not indulge any sense of curiosity as to what God, the author of life, had planned for them.

What Sartre and Nietzsche lacked in imagination, Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati made up for in spades. The calling card of the saint is heroic virtue, not just a generalized “goodness,” but a person activated in the original vision of life: man fully alive.

Pier Giorgio was an avid Italian mountaineer who used the phrase “verso l’alto” as his personal motto. “Toward the heights” is not only the objective of the mountain climber, but the authentic call of the Christian life to always aspire to greater things. In our prayer life, in our virtue, in our love, and in our relationships with others, we never accept things as they are, but pull them higher toward the way they ought to be.

The Christian life is difficult because we must give our fiat, no matter the social and personal cost, to participate in God’s plan for our lives. It’s not just a surrender, but a decision to open ourselves to the great things God can accomplish by our active participation. What darkness will be dispelled when we allow God’s blinding light to shine through us?

Mediocre is easy; verso l’alto.