Epilogue

The collapse of being, and the existential wound it inflicted, have left the modern world wounded and wandering. Justice has collapsed into power struggles. Identity has dissolved into performance. Love itself has been reduced to competition and suspicion.

Yet the path back remains open.

By recovering our ability to encounter reality as it is, by recovering our own nature as beings created out of love and for love, we can begin to heal the wounds inflicted by confusion and denial.

True freedom, true justice, and true love can only be built on the foundation of truth. Not a truth we invent, but a truth we receive. Not a love we manufacture, but a love that calls us, shapes us, and fulfills us according to our nature.

In rediscovering reality, we rediscover ourselves. And in rediscovering the human person, we rediscover the path to joy.

As John Paul II wrote in Theology of the Body,

"Man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself."

Only by embracing the truth of our created nature —only by learning again to see, to wonder, and to love —can we heal the existential wound and restore the human heart to its rightful home.

Before we can rebuild a culture of truth and love, we must once again become people who wonder, who see, who love rightly —people who recognize reality as gift, and who respond with the gift of ourselves.

There is no other way. There never was.