Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Prayer is basic in our life of piety

IT’S, of course, a given. Prayer is basic in our life of piety because that is our personal effort to get in touch with God. All other acts of piety would be of no value if they are not done as prayer or, at least, accompanied by prayer. 

 We need to learn how to really pray. It should not just be some exercise done out of compliance of a certain expectation. It should truly be a personal encounter with God who, in the first place, is always with us, ever solicitous of our needs and conditions, and eager to lead us along the right path toward our eternal destination. 

 With faith, hope and charity which, in the first place, God gives us, we can discern God’s presence in our mind and heart, and start to hear his voice that would surely tell us what to think, say and do. Let’s remember that, more than us, it’s God who is actually directing our life here on earth. What a pity it would be if we would just rely on our own estimation of things to guide us in our earthly sojourn! 

 For this, we need to learn how to be recollected all the time even while we immerse ourselves in our earthly and temporal affairs. This spirit of recollection would not in any way undermine our human activities, as many people somehow think. On the contrary, it purifies our human ways of doing things, and puts them on the right track. 

 This spirit of recollection may control our tendency to be simply spontaneous in our actuations, a tendency that is spurred and guided by our animal instincts and our temporal rationality that is not proper to our real human and Christian identity and dignity. But this spirit of recollection is what would truly help us in our activities. 

 This, of course, would require some effort on our part. We should just develop the discipline of spending time familiarizing ourselves with this truth of our faith, getting to know God more and more by meditating on his word that is available in many sources. And from there, let’s start to savor the words and deeds of Christ which show his great and infinite love for us, and develop an intimate relationship with him. 

 Let’s hope that out of our prayer, our direct encounter with God, we get filled with holy desires to do a lot of good, unafraid of whatever sacrifices may be involved. We should be men of desires to see God. 

 St. Augustine said that since we don’t see God now and yet we long for it, we need to keep on desiring it to prepare ourselves for it. That desire not only has to be maintained. It also has to increase as time passes. The time of our life, the time of waiting to see our ultimate end, God, is a time to cultivate our holy desire to the max. 

 His argument for this is beautiful. “Suppose you are going to fill some container and you know you will be given a large amount. Then you set about stretching your container.” It is to make room for the tremendous amount we will receive—God himself. 

 The idea of stretching or enlarging the container to receive a tremendous amount that we expect can be translated into not only keeping but also increasing our desire of God whom we expect to come to us in overwhelming abundance. In short, we have to make that desire fervent! We need to constantly feed it to keep it burning.

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

“Let charity with ardor blaze”

I SAW that phrase in one of the daily prayers for priests, the Liturgy of the Hours, or the Breviary. It struck me immediately since it reminded me of how charity should be. It should be ardent, never cold, and blazing, never like a dying ember. 

 Indeed, charity which is none other than a vital participation and the very expression of the love that is the very essence of God as shown in full by Christ, cannot be other than that. Despite our weaknesses, we should just try to develop such kind of charity since that would identify us with God as we should, his image and likeness as we are. 

 Remember the description of charity made by St. Paul: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” (1 Cor 13,4-7) 

 And in the Song of Solomon, we have this description of charity: “For love is as strong as death, and ardor is as relentless as the netherworld.” (8,6) 

 We have to realize more deeply that we are made for charity and we should try our best to develop that charity in ourselves, if we want to be consistent to our basic identity and dignity as God’s image and likeness, sharers of his divine life and nature. 

 We, of course, have to continually ask for God’s grace to enable us to develop and grow in charity. But what can help us also is to develop that attitude of being pro-active in loving everyone, irrespective of how they are to us. Whether they are friendly to us or not, helpful to us or not, etc., we should take the initiative to love them, not only in terms of intentions and sweet words, but most importantly in terms of deeds, of service that should be done gratuitously. 

 We have to be wary of our tendency to judge others based only on what we know so far of them. Again, let’s remember what St. Paul said in this regard: “Love never fails,” he said. “But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.” (1 Cor 13,8-11) 

 Our judgment on others, based only our limited knowledge of them, can at best be only tentative. What should always abide in our relationship with others should be charity. That is why Christ even went to the extent of commanding us to “love our enemies.” 

 It’s when we have this pro-active attitude of charity that we can manage to be always in good spirit, full of desire to do a lot of good, to understand everyone, to find excuses for whatever faults and failures we see in others and in ourselves. It’s when our charity would indeed be with blazing ardor. 

 Obviously, for this to happen, we should be willing to make sacrifices and to suffer, because we cannot deny that we all have our weaknesses and mistakes. But then, if we have the proper understanding of these conditions, we know that they give us the chance to grow more in charity.

Monday, February 24, 2025

The Beatitudes define what a true Christian is

CHRIST himself made such description and definition of a true Christian. They strike us as something strange from a purely human point of view. But given our wounded condition and our ideal status as children of God whose essence is pure love, the Beatitudes give us the proper frame of mind as to how to handle our life here on earth which will always be marked with all sorts of contradictions and negative things. 

 The Beatitudes convert what we usually consider as human disasters or clear disadvantages and inconveniences according to worldly standards into a source of joy, a means of our redemption, a path to heaven, narrow and difficult though it may be. 
 
 They expand our understanding of what would comprise as our true happiness by including those situations which we normally regard as unsavory and therefore to be avoided as much as possible, and even hated. 

 But, my friends, at these times, these situations are hardly unavoidable. In fact, they are inescapable, what with all the growing differences and conflicts we are having among ourselves nowadays. If we have to be realistic about our life here, we better take the beatitudes seriously. 

 Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are they who mourn, blessed are the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness or justice, those who are merciful, the clean of heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, those who are insulted…There can hardly be any worse predicament than all these! 

 Yet Christ reassures us that it would just be fine, and in fact he promises us a great reward, if not now then certainly in the life hereafter. And he is not bluffing because he himself underwent all those disasters and yet he conquered everything with his resurrection. In short, he has proven the veracity of this teaching with his own experience. 

 The beatitudes are so articulated by Christ in order to serve as a profound and most effective antidote to our strong, almost invincibly strong tendency to self-love, to self-indulgence. They are meant to extricate us from our own prison, our own world which is the antithesis of what true love is. 

They are meant to expand our heart to save it from being trapped by our own worldly and bodily desires. They are meant to teach us how to give ourselves to God and to everybody else, irrespective of how they are, which is what true love is. 

Love is always a matter of total self-giving, be it in good times or bad times, in favorable conditions or not. Love has a universal scope. It is supposed to be given without measure, without counting the cost nor expecting any reward. It can be very discriminating without ever being discriminatory. 

 In short, the beatitudes detach us from our own selves so that we can truly identify ourselves with Christ who is the very pattern of our humanity and the savior of our sin-damaged humanity. They are actually a way to our liberation from our own self-inflicted bondage to merely earthly and bodily urges. They purify us from any stain caused by our worldly attachments. 

 The great task we have at hand with respect to the Beatitudes is how to incarnate them in our life. We all know that we have a natural aversion to any kind of suffering, and that we hardly go beyond the natural or the infranatural aspects of our sufferings. We fail to see their purifying and redemptive potentials. 

 That is why we really need to discipline our mind and heart, our understanding and feelings, so as to align them to the saving ways of Christ. And one way of doing this is to develop in a proactive way a spirit of sacrifice, a spirit of self-denial and mortification. And this done and lived on a daily basis.