Going passionate

TO move toward our human and Christian perfection, not only should we be spiritual, but also we need to go passionate. That’s simply because man is both spiritual and carnal, intellectual and emotional, with passion as the strongest expression of our feelings.

We have to overcome that partial understanding of our humanity that highlights our spiritual aspect at the expense of our bodily dimension. Of course, it is also wrong to go the other way around, to stress the emotional at the expense of our spiritual development.

We have to have both taken care of to the highest degree possible. And in a certain sense, this reminder is urgent, since many so-called pious or religious people who try hard to effect some good transformation in individuals and society often concentrate on the spiritual and neglects the corporeal component of life.

The result is often dismal failure, wasting a lot of energy on an apostolic approach that perhaps can achieve some good effects that often do not last. These apostolic fruits fail to tackle the finer demands of our real life in the world.

Passions have to be properly cultivated. First of all, they have to be given due attention. They have often been considered, wrongly, as a drag in our human and Christian growth. They are left in the margins, at best.

They are never a hindrance. They are a necessary component, because love which is our perfection, while mainly an act of the will, a spiritual operation, cannot do away with our bodily dimension where love too has to be expressed.

I remember one point in the book, The Way, of St. Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, that gives a relevant insight.

“You tell me, yes, that you want to. Very good. But do you want to as a miser longs for gold, as a mother loves her child, as a worldling craves for honors, or as a wretched sensualist seeks his pleasure? No? Then, you don’t want to.” (316)

If love has to be true love, it should not be confined only in the will and in the intellect. It has be go passionate, marshalling all the powers of our body—imagination, memory, feelings, the very use of our body, etc.—to its employment.

Human and Christian love first has to be human before it can be spiritual and supernatural. It cannot be any other way. We would do violence to the nature of things if we understand it differently.

That’s why, especially when dealing with kids and the young ones who often develop love first through feelings and the bodily aspects, we have to understand them and know how to make these feelings or passions conform to right reason and the requirements of faith and charity.

It’s not a matter of repressing those feelings. It’s a matter of educating these feelings, revving them up, in fact, to become passions and not just wimpy elements we are ashamed to show and express.

That the Son of God became man, and continues to both God and man in heaven, means that our humanity is good. In fact, it is supposed to be—that’s the original design—to be God’s image and likeness, sharers in the very own life of God.

Obviously, with our sin, our humanity has been wounded and deformed. But precisely the Son of God became man, Christ, to show us the way how to heal and re-create our defaced humanity.

That’s the reason for the Cross, and the need for us to go through suffering to purify us. But that purification does not mean our feelings and passions and other bodily elements are in themselves bad.

When I see some elders calling the attention of kids because the kids want to sing and dance and to be abreast with the latest in fashion, thinking that the kids are going the way of frivolity, I feel like telling them, No, Don’t. Let the kids get what they want. We just have to know how to purify them.

We should not repress the emotions and passions just like that. But, yes, we have to channel them properly, purifying them of the bad, sinful elements that got mixed up.

For this, of course, we need to teach the kids the value of sacrifice and mortification, making it clear that the Cross is not the ultimate end of our life. It’s our resurrection with Christ through the Cross. It’s joy and bliss, both in our body and soul, that comprise the goal of our life.