Naturalness

WE have to be more aware of this virtue. We need it. And as our world becomes more complicated, we simply have to know how to live this virtue so that we would know how to flow with the changing and multiplying things in our life without get lost.

First, of course, we have to know what it is and why it has to be lived, as well as what are involved in developing it. The time has come, given current world conditions, for us to deliberately live this virtue and to be knowledgeable about how to grow in it.

Gone now are the days when we could afford to take this virtue for granted, since things in general were quite clear and simple, and people more or less lived a more homogeneous way of life and culture. Everyone somehow knew what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was evil.

Not so, these days. There’s a lot of confusion, ignorance and errors of all sorts floating around. And this predicament is sustained, even nurtured, by the emerging mentality of complete relativism, where the line between good and evil is blurred if not vanished, and everyone is free to hold on to any view at all.

Naturalness has something to do with how to handle our human condition considering what we ought to be and what we are at the moment. Fact is, we have a supernatural goal, nothing less than to be united with God, which we have to pursue in the context of our human and natural world.

Naturalness is about how to mix the spiritual and material dimensions of our life, our personal and social aspects, and other elements in our life that, given the way we are, appear to compete with each other. How to integrate and harmonize them is the task of naturalness.

Naturalness is a very active affair, lived day to day, moment to moment, as we grapple with the continuous flow of our concerns. It’s the front man who does the dirty job of the bigger virtues of discretion, prudence and ultimately charity, the foot soldier who does the hand-to-hand combat, the peddler who does the door-to-door selling.

It has to know when to push and when to pull, what to say and show and what to be quiet about and hide. Obviously, it has to follow a game plan, with a clear goal in mind and a detailed knowledge of all the elements it has to contend with.

It has to know when to be active and when to be passive, when to be aggressive and when to be patient and tolerant. Of course, in our spiritual life, these elements while initially contrasting, can be blended and lived simultaneously, obviously an effect of grace and our cleverness.

It also has to know how to project oneself to the future, given the data of the present and of the past. It has to learn how to relate history and current events with eternity. It should know how to connect the mundane with the sacred.

Naturalness is strengthened when we deepen in our convictions about our ultimate goal as well as in our continuing observations and growing wealth of experience of passing things.

In short, it knows how to blend what is necessary in our life with what is contingent, what has absolute value with what is relative, what is of faith with what is cultural. It knows what to draw and learn from experience, what to keep and what to discard along the way.

Nowadays, there’s great need to educate people about naturalness. This is actually a big battle now, since there are now many organized groups pushing all sorts of ideas about how naturalness ought to be.

We have to be wary of the lulling mantra on false freedom and deceptive democracy sung by different groups that confine the understanding of naturalness in what they call as “neutral and politically correct tones.”

These are clever tactics to dampen any earnest effort, always done in charity, to know the whole truth about this virtue. Alas, this is what we are seeing these days.

While it’s true that we have to respect one another in spite of our differences, we also have to understand that there’s a need to really know the truth, and not just opinions about a virtue that’s supposed to be intrinsic to us, given our human condition.