By Sarah Mendus
Each individual has a unique relationship with God, influenced by personality and life experiences. With each generation comes a new set of cultural perspectives that add to a person’s individuality and faith. As part of Gen Z, my relationship with God has been influenced by bizarre and unprecedented change in countless areas of life, and that has influenced my particular experience of Catholicism.
Growing up, my relationship with God was heavily informed by my parents and their generation’s perspectives. Religion was very casual for us, not much more than Sunday Mass and praying before dinner. It was simply something I participated in because it was expected of me — an experience familiar to many of my peers. There was beauty in this, but it was very impersonal. Faith was something my family and I left at the door of the church before going on with our daily lives.
I thought that was all religion could be until I got to college, where I was surrounded by Catholics my age for the first time. They showed me a whole new side of the Church. To them, religion wasn’t just checking boxes; it was falling in love with God.
Gen Z shows an amazing passion for God and for their faith. Despite the countless ways that the world and culture try to pull my generation away from Catholicism, those who have managed to stay live an intense and passionate love for God. Love, not obligation, motivates every part of their faith.
When I discovered a living faith among my peers, it drew me to the Church in an entirely new way. I wanted to know more about God, and as I began searching, I began learning who he really is and how he cherishes me so uniquely. It was like rediscovering the faith. I felt incredible joy and wonder at the fact that it was real, and I began to fall in love with God.
While this beautiful reversion was happening on one end of my life, on the other end, I was being drawn by the culture into the classic college party scene where sin and immorality were aggressively normalized. They were complete opposites, and being pulled in both directions caused a bizarre split in my life. I could see the division, but I still wanted community, so I began hiding my true identity and filtering myself to fit in.
I felt like I wasn’t Catholic enough to fit in at church but still too Catholic to fit in with my secular friends, and I was afraid that I would lose people on either side if I were completely myself.
Unfortunately, this feeling of having to change to be accepted is a common experience in Gen Z. On the internet and social media, we see a million different opinions, expectations and illusions, all trying to tell us the “correct” way to act. For me, this led to intense confusion about who I actually am, rattling my sense of identity as a beloved daughter of God.
Despite this anxiety and by the grace of God, I persisted in prayer. It wasn’t the perfect, consistent, well-articulated prayer I wanted. It was messy, consisting mainly of getting distracted, complaining and falling asleep. I found prayer incredibly frustrating. Even when I could do it, it felt like I wasn’t saying the words correctly enough for God to hear me.
In the depths of that frustration, I learned a pivotal fact: that God is not a feeling. Sometimes, in prayer, you can feel things, big emotions or spiritual experiences, but the absence of that feeling is not the absence of God. No matter how simple, every moment of prayer pushes open the door for God to enter your heart, even if we don’t perceive it. That lesson was enough to help me keep praying, and through a million ordinary moments, God gently moved and healed me.
He taught me that the feeling of being split and alone didn’t come from being broken; it came from comparing myself to others. Trying to conform to the world’s ideal person made me hide my Catholic identity, and trying to conform to what I thought was the “correct” Catholic drowned out the unique identity God crafted for me.
I thought the “correct” Catholic wore floor-length skirts and didn’t know what alcohol tasted like, and I thought God wanted me to become perfect by squashing the parts of myself that didn’t match that definition. This is not the case.
There is no one way to be Catholic, and trying to act like others only draws me away from the unique person he created me to be. If he needed another Mother Theresa in my shoes, he would have put one there, but he didn’t. He intentionally created me with all of my interests, skills, flaws, and experiences.
God wants me and you to become fully ourselves, fully alive. That’s how he can use us to change the world.
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