For many people, the fullness of life is found in the quest for convenience, comfort, and success. This makes sense as long as these three wants are not the sum of all desires. Who deliberately wants to be uncomfortable or end up as a perceived failure? Contemporary human beings participate in this quest by engaging in a wide range of pursuits with the hope that these pursuits will offer a way out of the dulling drudgery that characterizes daily life for probably most people on earth, about three out of every four persons. Profit-minded people who maintain their probity engage in many different kinds of enterprise hoping that these pursuits will deliver an improved quality of life for themselves and perhaps their families and others. Those people without character, however, simply amass personal success while living for themselves only, even at the expense of family and friends.

This great disconnect between the world of faith as lived and the common understanding of that faith first caught my attention more than 50 years ago. This is about the time I first observed that the lived worlds of people often contradicted their understanding of their own spiritual realities. Through her apparitions in Medjugorje, reports of the Blessed Mother sparked my interest in the current problem of global chaos and the spiritual confusion that accompanies it. As one writer put it:

It was fitting for Divine Wisdom, which created itself a home in the Church, to use the intervention of the Most Blessed Mary in guarding the law, purifying the mind, giving an example of humility, and providing a spiritual sacrifice.