EVERY year, for three weeks straight, I hie off to a far-away place, and together with some priests and laymen, undertake a program of resting, studying and praying.
It’s a cool practice that I highly recommend to everyone, because I believe we all need such a break. It’s also a concrete way of pursuing what is called as ongoing formation that is a necessity to all of us.
Yes, rest and formation can and, in fact, should go together. Human as we are, these aspects of our condition should adequately be attended to. Otherwise, we stunt or distort our development. Our rest should always be formative also.
With a lot of sports and excursions, the body recovers its youthfulness. But it is in those long, quiet and undisturbed hours of study and meditation that I get my high.
I’m simply amazed at the endless possibilities intellectual work and spiritual activities can achieve. We need to develop and strengthen certain skills like intuiting, reasoning, arguing, relating, memorizing, expressing, etc.
These are what make us distinguish between the essential and the accidental in our life. These enable us to penetrate well beyond what we simply see and hear. Mind you, it’s a far richer and brighter world out there.
We need to check our tendency to drift to mindless activism, now made easier because of the many things that tease us everyday. If not that, then our tendency to get stuck with our laziness or disorder.
The mind and our spiritual faculties have to recover their proper places in our life, so that we can regain objectivity and proper dominion over our life and activities. That way, we enhance our humanity.
What usually happens is that these are made to sleep while our bodily senses are made to sing and dance endlessly. What do you think can we expect from that kind of life style?
This year, I was assigned to give a 25-hour class on Church history, from the ancient times to the medieval. After poring over a thousand pages of books and notes, I am now convinced we should all have a strong historical sense.
It’s what makes us more a lord of our own life and our own history, saving us from the fate of the pompous know-it-all guy. It frees us from the onfines of the present to acquaint ourselves with the things of the past, and somehow to prepare us for the future.
It provides us greater perspective and deeper insights into the workings of
the human mind in its different levels of functioning. It’s a tremendous teacher of vital lessons.
A person with a historical mind believes time in general has a certain life and continuity, a certain direction and meaning. While much of what happens remains a mystery, one can easily discern a pattern.
For a Christian believer, history even means a lot more. The Christian historical sense believes that history is both a product of God’s almighty providence—God is always leading us to him—and our use of freedom.
It believes that history is not just a flow of blind forces and events. It’s a fruit both of a constant albeit often ignored divine intervention and man’s effort to shape his life not only on the personal level but also in the global.
A Christian believer studies history always from the point of view of faith. While he uses all the human means—those scientific and historical methods used in serious scholarship—the faith remains his spirit and stimulus.
Rather than inflicting on him a certain bias and narrow-mindedness, his faith opens him to the world of endless human possibilities that our history can take, while also being convinced that God is in full control of things.
His faith provides him with certain criteria to guide him to identify what to learn, what to follow and what to discard in our history. Yes, his faith gives him an open-mindedness, one that does not lead to total disorder.
It’s with this sense that we get to know what things can change and what
cannot and should not change. Pope Benedict, for example, now warns us of certain fashionable ideas that are actually dangerous. This is where the Christian historical sense becomes relevant.
Also, it is with this sense that Pope John Paul II asked forgiveness for the sins of men of the Church in the past that led to some real mess in our history. It’s what he called the purification of the memory so we can go ahead to the future with more ease and conviction.
Yes, we need this Christian sense of history!
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