IN ascetical life, the meditation on the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is always recommended. In fact, it is given pride of place among the spiritual exercises, since the events comprise the culminating and summarizing act of the whole redemptive work of Christ.
That’s why everyone has to be reminded of how important it is to nourish the mind and heart with the details of our Lord’s passion, death and resurrection. That he was scourged and buffeted, crowned with thorns, insulted, spat upon, nailed to the cross, etc., are details that would bring us to the vivid reality of our sinfulness.
This activity is no extra option that can easily be set aside for just any reason. It is quite needed. It gives us the true and complete picture of what our life here on earth is all about.
There one sees the sharpest contrast between God’s love and man’s hatred, innocence and malice, life and death. It’s a gripping reminder of what we can expect in life, for which we should be ready, relying on God’s grace and our all-out effort.
The passion, death and resurrection of our Lord continue to play out in the hearts of all even up to now. That’s because the human heart is the constant arena of the lifelong struggle between good and evil. We have to remember that whatever we are doing—at home, at work, etc.—the forces of good and evil are always in play.
The problem is that we often ignore the relevance of this activity. We think it’s too religious, meaning, it hardly has any relation to our daily concerns. This thinking is wrong and dangerous. Religion can never be put in brackets in some parts of our day. It ought to be an ongoing thing.
With that mentality we can easily fall into religious indifference, that is, God is banished from the world, since he is already absent in our minds and hearts. We find it hard to believe God is and should be involved in our daily affairs.
From there, all sorts of anomalies arise. We can start doubting the faith until such point when we think that faith is not real, that it is meant to be no more than an opiate.
From there, we can make our own ideologies to guide our life, all of which shaped after what we like rather than what life ought to be as God designed it to be. Thus, we hear St. Paul saying:
“There will come a time when they will not endure sound doctrine, but having itching ears, will heap up to themselves teachers according to their own lusts, and they will turn away their hearing from the truth and turn aside rather to fables.” (2 Tim 4,3)
This is what is happening these days. The voice of faith is ridiculed. People make all sorts of rationalizations to silence that voice. Some may say they still believe in Christ, but they don’t have to follow the Church. Others, that faith is a personal, private affair, and therefore has no place in business, politics and in public life in general.
The rage of all kinds of irregularities involving faith is even fanned into a flame. Atheism, agnosticism, relativism, deism, scientism, pragmatism are now all over the place, perhaps with most of the people concerned not even aware of them. Many people even do not know what these isms are.
The ignorance and confusion are thickening, and anyone who attempts to dissipate that dark cloud is instantly shot down with a variety of impertinence and insolence. Worse, those who are supposed to be guides and teachers are giving erroneous or at least dangerously unclear indications.
This is how the passion of Christ is played out at the moment. Our country is now going through a drastic and major shift in its character. The spiritual and supernatural tone is slowly taken away. Piety, both personal and social, seems to be dying down. In its place is the rise of a more aggressive, more articulate secularism.
No doubt, we are in the middle of a global crisis involving faith and morals. Powerful and leading countries are exporting their secularized way of life to the weaker ones like ours. And we seem to keep ourselves vulnerable with the kind of leaders we have at present, who do not know the role of faith in our life.
It’s clear there is a need for another, more comprehensive evangelization, a deeper one capable of tackling today’s challenges.
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