Guarding our internal world

WE have to be more aware of our responsibilities toward our internal world. That’s the world of our thoughts, ideas, desires, plans, ambitions, even our imagination and memory.

We tend to take this fundamental aspect of our life for granted. Precisely because of its hidden and invisible character, we get most tempted to subject it to purely personal and individualistic manipulations.

Hardly anything else can be more dangerous than this situation. We are meant to orient ourselves outside—to others, and to God ultimately. That’s how we have been designed, wired and outfitted. We focus on ourselves, and we’d get a short-circuit.

We tend to simply go on automatic pilot, fully at the mercy of whatever fancy captures our attention at the moment. Hardly any effort to reflect is done. Hardly any running exertion to relate facts with proper values and principles is made.

Conforming our internal world to God’s law and will, a continuing task, is
ignored. The ideal to reach, for a Christian believer, is to say together with Christ:

“I cannot of myself do anything. As I hear, so I judge, and my judgment is
just, because I seek not my own will, but the will of him who sent me.” (Jn 5,30)

I wonder whether we realize this principle in our actions, especially in our internal world of thoughts and desires.

Forgetting this truth leads us to be indifferent, if not averse, to our social duties. It can easily lend itself to deceit and hypocrisy in one’s personal life. We have to be wary of these tendencies, and be active in resisting them.

We have to understand that our world of thoughts, desires, imagination and memory play a very important role in our life. That’s where ideas are hatched and developed, goals set and pursued, plans made and processed.

The humanness of our actions is born and shaped in this internal world of ours. And we have to see to it that our actions are not results of mere routine, or of blind forces. They have to be deliberate and known as thoroughly as possible.

The quality of our external world is actually a direct function of the quality of our internal world. How we are inside—in our thoughts and desires, etc.—shapes how we are outside.

We have to check our proclivity to act purely out of spontaneity, or to limit our behavior on the level of instincts only. We have to go further, deeper, wider. In fact, we have to go toward infinity, because our mind and will are oriented toward it.

Our spiritual faculties not only allow us to enter into the spiritual reality, but enable us to be lifted up to the supernatural order which, to Christian believers, is what we have been called to. Our life is not just purely natural human life. It is supernatural life, a sharing in the very life of God.

This is a point worth insisting. We tend to waste the powers of our mind and will, our most important faculties, by using them only for material, temporal, if not selfish ends. Let’s remember that they are meant for endless possibilities.

But for Christian believers, this infinity to which our mind and will are oriented is not just anything. It has a name and a face. And that’s God who has been revealed fully by Jesus Christ.

Infinity is not just an empty, open space without boundaries where we can play in any way we want. It has a certain substance and specificity. It’s not just some vague field of inexhaustible potentials and eventualities.

It’s true that as some adage puts it, life is what you make it. To a certain extent, it’s a valid affirmation. But it should not be made absolute. Life is both what you make it and a matter of conforming it to some laws.

We need to align our thoughts and desires, our imagination and memory, to God’s designs. For this we have to practice and develop the necessary skills and virtues.

This is the challenge we have today. We need to guard and develop our internal world.