Open-minded but focused

IN today’s world, we need to have this combination of traits. We need to be tolerant to the ever growing variety and plurality of ideas, lifestyles and cultures. At the same time, we should avoid getting lost and be clear of where we are heading.

Our usual problem is that we tend toward the opposite—we are intolerant and inflexible to the different elements cropping up in our society, as well as vague and clueless as to what our goals are. The result can only be disaster.

This predicament is part of our human condition that is now writ large, stretched to dramatic proportions, because of the continuing breaking into new frontiers of human knowledge and experience driven by our powerful technologies.

We are at once spiritual and corporeal, individual and social, in time and in eternity, local and global, with our own human nature but also with a supernatural goal. We need to be aware of these dimensions, know their implications and learn to be skilled in handling and integrating them together.

The very first thing to do is to be anchored on God, our Creator and Father, who is the source of all the good things we ought to have. This is a serious statement, not just a pious one, meant to decorate or deodorize our condition. God is what stabilizes us, gives us the right focus even as we get exposed to all sorts of predicaments.

God gives us the absolute truths about our existence as well as the guide in cruising the tricky waters of our modern world.

We have to overcome that childish attitude many of us have toward God, consisting of regarding God mainly in a sentimental, emotional way, quite hollow and not supported by doctrine and truth of our faith, and much less, by virtues and a vibrant spiritual and moral life.

We have to understand that without this indispensable condition, we would just be launching ourselves into empty space, perhaps regaled by the many alluring things we can meet there, but obviously lost. Worse, we can be taken advantage of by the lawless forces there.

It is actually with God that we can manage to be both open-minded and focused, know how to dance with the different tunes along the way without losing the ultimate song of our life.

Remember some words of St. Paul that show how with God he can do all things and how he can adapt himself to all kinds of conditions such that he can be all things to all men. Here they are:

¨I know both how to be brought low and how to abound, both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all these things in him who strengthens me.¨ (Phil 4,12-13)

“To the weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak. I became all things to all men, that I might save all.¨ (1 Cor 9,22)

It´s when we are with God and involved in the concerns of God over us that we can easily adapt to any situation and can actually do all things. This is obviously no easy thing to achieve, but neither is it impossible.

We just have to learn to have a vital contact with God by praying, offering sacrifices, learning the doctrine of our faith, developing virtues and waging an abiding ascetical struggle, availing of the sacraments, etc. All these comprise the way to be with God.

Again, our usual problem is that all our affirmations of our faith largely remain the level of intentions. They are not translated into action, into a lifelong program that assures us that we can be with God whatever the situation we find ourselves in.

If we are truly with God, then we would know how to take on any situation without getting lost or distracted, able to live the requirements of truth and charity. We would know how to be flexible, creative and inventive to reach our true goal.

We can have the 7 gifts of the Holy Spirit, for example, that at these times are keenly felt to be necessary. These, as our Catechism tells us, are ¨permanent dispositions which make man docile in following the promptings of the Holy Spirit.¨ (1830)

These gifts are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. These are what enable us to know when to be patient and impatient, to be tolerant and intolerant, to move and to stop, etc.