The Hundredfold and the Restless Heart
In 1954, the Italian priest Luigi Giussani was teaching in a public high school in Milan. He saw that, while his students knew the “right answers” of the Catholic faith that was so much a part of Italian culture, it had nothing to do with their lives. He began meeting with some of these students to help them discover “the relevance of faith to daily life.” Giussani used to relate to his students an episode in the Gospels when Jesus says, “Whoever follows me will have eternal life and the hundredfold here below.” (Mt. 19:29) And he would say to them, “If you do not desire eternal life, I understand you, because you have little imagination; but if you do not desire the hundredfold here below, then you are fools.”
I teach at a small Classical Christian school in Portland, Oregon. Once, several years ago, I was giving a talk to the boys at the school, and I started with a related question: “Do you want to be happy?” I had perceived a budding cynicism in a few of these boys, and wanted to try to help them recognize it. This turned out to be a mistake, because one of those cynical boys realized he could completely derail me if he blurted out “No!” I asked him later why he had done it, and he told me that he didn’t care about happiness; he just wanted to have fun. The conversation went nowhere, but I think his desire to have fun was simply a facet of this boy’s need to be happy.