WITH the trend to go increasingly technological that brings with it the increasingly esoteric jargon, I wonder if we can also go increasingly theological that brings it with its own load of increasingly special concepts and language.
I feel that both aspects of our life deserve our attention, since they are actually important, relevant and even crucial. We just have to undertake the appropriate plan of sharing the intricacies of these fields more widely.
This current rapid flow of developments is breeding so many changes in people that it is now said that we are altering our understanding of what generation is. Today, generation is not anymore a matter of one’s age, because even in the same age group, there could be many generations of people.
Besides, given this technology-determining trend of our society today, a generation can include very disparate variety of people in terms of age, background and orientation. Thus, one time I was amused to see a very techie 80-year-old priest feeling at home with teeners with spiked hair, and even speaking in jejemon.
A generation is now any group of people more or less made homogeneous by the level of technological access and knowledge that they possess. It’s a phenomenon that has its good aspects, but definitely also has negative and dangerous tendencies.
In the first place, we still do not know how this phenomenon will develop. There are now many things to consider and learn—the technologies continually pour out new programs--before we can make any intelligent projection of how things will be.
Still, we should not forget that even if we are experiencing a warp-speed kind of changes and developments, we as men continue to be the same, our human nature has a core that does not change.
We need to strengthen that core, or to keep it intact, since as men we, with our intelligence and freedom, are also capable of deforming our own nature. So we need to constantly remind ourselves about basic, indispensable truths about us that we have to promote and protect.
Among these fundamental truths are that we have been created by God in his image and likeness and that with his grace we are made to participate in his very own life.
We are not meant to live by ourselves alone. The purpose and meaning of our life lies in God, not in our own selves. And so we have to see to it that we don’t get detached from God even as we immerse ourselves in the exhilarating world of our own creativity.
Since the life of God is Trinitarian, we need to know how to deal even while here on earth, even while pursuing our exciting earthly affairs, with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This will guarantee that whatever we do here would redound to our authentic good, that they are done with God and for God, and not just for ourselves.
In fact, our life should somehow reflect the Trinitarian character of divine life. God, though absolutely simple and one, is triune. That’s because even though he is one, he is not alone nor idle.
With his eternal dynamic life of knowing and loving, he generates within himself an eternal kind of spiral of relationship of Father, he who knows, the Son, the self-knowledge of God, and the Holy Spirit, the love between the Father and the Son.
These are persons who are consubstantial with each other, that is, each one of them is the fullness of God, and not just a part of God. They cannot be separated from one another. In the very one God, there’s one person who knows, another one who is known, and a third one who is the love. All these acting in eternity, and all at once.
For our life to reflect this Trinitarian life, we need to follow the teaching and example of Christ, the Son of God who became man who revealed to us this mystery of the Blessed Trinity.
Like him, we have to do no other than the will of the Father, and to do it in the Holy Spirit for it to acquire its ultimate eternal value proper to us. This is how our life and all our activities and concerns should be developed.
Perhaps as a guiding formula, we can use the expression: “By the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.” Such motto would also give us ideas of how to deal with each person of the Blessed Trinity, and really live Trinitarian daily, as we ought.
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