Mountain retreatBy

I JUST had the very precious privilege to spend a few days in a mountain retreat somewhere in the elevated fastness of Bukidnon. It was a very cool place, windy, often wet and shrouded in mist and fog.

But when the air cleared up, it showed a breath-taking view of green rolling hills, valleys, trees swaying, clouds forming and chasing, with the hint of the sea in the horizon. It was as if God himself painted and was showing his work in all its splendor.

Beautiful flowers abounded. Cows, sheep and horses kept me company, and colorful birds simply decorated the pines and sky. For sounds, there was the murmur of the brook, the chorus of the insects, the fluttering of leaves. This must be paradise, I imagined.

Obviously, my heart was exploding in gratitude to God and to all, even as I ventured into that very delicate task of recollecting, reflecting, studying and praying. I strongly believe that we need to have a time for silence.Silence enables us to go deep into ourselves. We’ll be surprised that in spite of our age and experience, there still are uncharted waters and unmapped territories to be discovered. Truly, our human condition is soaked in mysteries.

The hubbub of the city, with all its comings and goings, has a way of paralyzing our spiritual faculties, of disorienting and even of alienating us from our own selves, not to the mention, from the others.

Imperceptibly, we build walls around us, separating us from the others, and establish our own mechanisms to complete our own make-believe world where God and the others become mere props, decors and tools.

With silence and the help of untouched nature, we can readily see the tricks played on us even by our own senses and reasonings. These powers, supposed to bring us to God and to reality, often hijack us to another world, if we are not careful.

Reality for us, of course, is a malleable thing. With our intelligence and will, with our freedom and creativity, even if there’s an objective reality established by God, we are capable of bending, molding and making it also according to our own designs.

The reality we live in is never rigid, fixed and inert. It’s constantly flowing and morphing. We have to understand that our subjective reality is supposed to coincide with God’s objective reality for us.

For this, a very dynamic process is involved. There’s always in our life an interplay between God’s will and ours, between God’s laws and our intelligence and freedom. We have to train ourselves rigorously to do our part well in this lifetime dance.

We have to frequently check what and how we are thinking, how we are using our will and freedom, to see whether we are truly in love and whether we are loving properly, that is, in the truth.

Silence helps us to see the basic structure of our mind and heart, and the objects to which they get oriented. This is where we see whether these human powers are in their proper condition and are properly used.

They are supposed to be locked on God always, immersed in him even as we grapple with our earthly affairs. But if we don’t take pains, they can dare to detach themselves from God and be and work on their own, an anomaly gripping many of us.

That’s when we start constructing our own world and reality. True, we are intelligent and free, and in fact we need to be so as best as we can. We just have to remember that our proper and constant object is God, and not just some earthly, sensible or intelligible matter.

We have to develop the proper skills and virtues to spend our whole life in God’s presence, driven with rectitude of intention, even as we handle mundane things. Thus, we need to continually renew and enrich our routine and lifestyle to fit this need.

Silence also facilitates internalizing things, attuning our senses and faculties to their proper object. It also merges us with time, allowing us to run from the present to the past and then to the future, rectifying and refocusing things along the way, until we reach the doorsteps of eternity and infinity itself.

I’d like to thank the owners of Mountain Pines Place in Kalubmanan, Manolo Fortich town for giving me this privilege.