IN the face of a crescendoing barrage of negative and depressing news, especially in the economic sphere, we need to be above water by cultivating a spirituality that can meet the demands and take on all the troubles of our times.
Global financial meltdown, mass lay-offs, rising suicides and criminality, etc.—these should spur us to action rather than grind us to a halt.
Let’s take advantage of the current favorable dispositions of many people who are forced to seek solace in some spiritual exercises due to our problems. It should be a spirituality that offers not refuge only, but also a positive, active and effective attitude toward the present difficulties.
Going beyond but never neglecting our praying, offering sacrifices, frequenting the sacraments, we need to attune our most fervent appeals to God with the objective requirements of the challenges these days.
Today’s holiness should possess the distinctive character of our times. It should offer us a way to tackle the problems effectively, rather than to flee from them.
We need to go beyond pious generics and try to come to grips with the specifics. We need to go past holy platitudes and get down to operationalizing the true demands of sanctity in our work places. We need to outrange a purely personal mentality to adapt a more social spirituality.
I think these are the goals to pursue today insofar as our spirituality is concerned. Repeat, it’s not to do away with the basic and traditional means, but rather to let them go some notches higher, deeper and wider.
It should be a radical spirituality as our times demand. It should be at home with the things of God and with the things of this world. It should know how to blend the spiritual and material together, the sacred and the mundane, as well. A truly demanding spirituality, not comme ci comme ça.
In fact, it greatly helps that one already observes a working program of acts of piety, like mental prayer, Holy Mass and Communion, spiritual reading, examination of conscience, rosary, etc.
I’d say that those with this stable program are lucky, since they already have a structure to work on. They’re not lost at sea, not knowing where exactly they’re heading. What’s needed now is how to make these pious acts grapple with the actual problems we now have.
While these acts of piety have a dimension that goes beyond our temporal concerns, I don’t think they are meant to ignore these affairs either. I believe they are meant to leaven these matters with the Christian spirit and message, which always has something to say about our present conditions.
This is often the hard part of this spirituality. It is how to recognize the will and designs of God in the maze of events, made trickier because of the human elements involved.
These acts of piety should make us more aware of the situation around us, more eager to look for solutions, more adept in establishing tighter bonds of solidarity among ourselves.
They should help us to assume a positive outlook toward the present challenges, fuelling our enterprising instincts, and giving teeth to the fact that as social beings, we are supposed to be responsible for one another.
We have to stay away from spirituality caricatures, common in the past and even up to now, that restrict our prayers and asceticism to dimensions purely personal and spiritual. These are anomalies considering that our nature is also material with strong social character.
Thus, we need to be more aware that any spirituality by definition also involves the duty to do apostolate. Sanctity without apostolate is false sanctity, just as apostolate without sanctity is also fake.
This is terribly required these days. People seem to pursue even the loftiest goal of holiness without giving due regard to the duty to do apostolate with those around them. This has to be corrected. We need to remove the blinders that make people self-absorbed.
We need to help one another not only in tackling the present crisis, already a tough job, but also in attaining true sanctity, the ultimate goal and the only thing absolutely necessary in life.
Let’s pray that while everyone has to develop this kind of spirituality, our leaders—Church, civil, political, economic, etc.—precisely take the lead, and refrain from unnecessary politicking and intrigue-sowing.
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