Sense of beginning

WE need to develop a strong and correct sense of beginning. At the moment, many of us seem oblivious to this need. We appear to live only for the present. The past and the future are merely given a lick and a promise, that is, a shallow and fleeting consideration.

It could be because contemporary conditions often lead us to act only for the moment. The problems and pressures of modern life badger us to mind only what is at hand at present. They tend to erode our sense of time. They seem to keep us narrow-minded, short-sighted and Pavlovian in our reactions.

It's one of the urgent challenges nowadays to develop this abiding sense of beginning. It's what gives us a greater perspective and depth in life, a guide to help us assess things properly as we go on and encounter all sorts of situations.

In fact, I would say that this sense of beginning should be a crucial element in everyone's character. All of us should have a permanent, abiding sense of where we came from, for that would tell us who and what we are, what our proper end is, how we ought to behave.

In short, it's important that we always have an accompanying sense of the ideal goals we need to pursue. We just can't have an anything-goes, free-for-all attitude in life. Peculiar to our human condition is the effort to conform our life to an ideal, no matter how puzzling and difficult to get that ideal may be.

We are not just what we are at the moment, as-is-where-is. While there is something permanent in us, we also have something dynamic that needs to be always worked out, defended, renewed, etc. The sense of beginning imbues our life with meaning and direction.

For Christian believers, this sense of beginning is anchored on our faith that we come from God and we also belong to him. We spring from God's most loving and merciful will that is eternal. It's paramount that we are always aware of God's will.

No matter how mysterious it is and how tricky it is to follow, it is worthwhile to exert the effort to know and follow God's will. That's because it would be much funnier, if not absurd to think that we just came to exist spontaneously on our own, without any cause, or to behave in any way we want.

It's also important that we understand well the very basic lessons we can derive at our beginning, that is, at our creation through our first parents, Adam and Eve.

In their state of original justice, that is, before their fall, they enjoyed many things--they were in a state of sanctifying grace, they enjoyed what are known as the preternatural gifts of integrity, exemption from tiredness, immortality, etc.

This state is actually meant for all of us. But we lost it because of sin, our first parents' and ours, but we are given a way to recover it or even something better than it. This is through Jesus' work of redemption.

God already gave them some knowledge of good and evil by telling them what they can do and eat in the garden of Eden. The only prohibition was to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Why? Because that tree signifies the pursuit of knowledge of good and evil independently of God. With it, we ultimately make ourselves, not God, as the author of what is good and evil. This is a sure formula to separate us from God.

This truth of faith is important because it shows us what the basic attitude we should have in the exercise of our most fundamental power: to know and to choose and to love.

It's the attitude of always depending on God's will, and never to set on our own alone, depending on our own will and estimation of things. We need to be humble and to have faith and trust in God in everything, even as we use the full potentials of our intelligence and freedom.

The neglect of this fundamental truth about ourselves in our relationship with God is at the center of all the troubles we have in this world. Because of that neglect, sin came in and its consequences cannot be avoided.

That's why we need to have an abiding sense of beginning, one that is clear and attuned to this fundamental truth of our Christian faith.