Handling anonymity

WHEN to pass unnoticed, to hide and disappear, and when to assert our identity and even publicize our credentials and bona fides is a skill we need to learn rather urgently. With our confusing times, this art assures us we are on the right track without compromising our ultimate goal.

For sure, there are many situations when we should just do what we have to do without attracting attention. In fact, this is usually the case. Very seldom are the times when our actions would have some public audience.

But even when we do some public action, we should try our best to remain anonymous, unless circumstances demand otherwise. Anonymity guarantees our being grounded, and not easily blown off by merely circumstantial things in life.

Anonymity helps us to work efficiently, with our powers focused on the tasks at hand and with little distractions. With it, we avoid the tricks of pride and vanity, and feed our humility and simplicity, so essential for us to continue doing things.

Yes, humility is the oil that facilitates our going deeper and farther into things. Many people testify to this basic truth. They see more things and work better with humility.

Pride and arrogance, as everyone knows, lead us to self-satisfaction and tend to restrain our efforts and to blind us. They are notorious for not knowing what to do when difficulties and especially failures happen.

Anonymity also aids us in our rectitude of intention, since working in a hidden and quiet way creates the proper air of intimacy with the purpose and intentions of our work. Let’s remember that our work is never a solitary affair. By its nature, it connects us with others, even if it is confined to a private place or an internal activity.

Anonymity enhances naturalness, tact, discretion and prudence, especially when we are under pressure. The show-off only attracts more trouble. The conceited only makes his own web of destruction.

With anonymity our work then easily becomes a living extension of what is in our heart, and builds us up as persons and not as robots. It’s not just a mechanical appendage that we are somehow forced to do and thereby degrading us.

The ultimate value of anonymity in our work is that it leads us to precisely lose that anonymity in our relation with God who is the beginning and end of everything we are and do. It sounds like a contradiction, but our humanity simply works that way. It will look for the first cause and the last end of things.

In these moments, we would be eager to go face to face with God. It’s in this kind of mind frame that we would realize how God is ever present everywhere, how his greatness, his wisdom and goodness, his love and mercy get vitally interwoven in the small and ordinary events and circumstances of our daily life.

He has not left orphans who now try to make do with whatever we can. He is always with us, and in fact ever solicitous of our needs and changing conditions. This is what divine providence is all about.

Yes, even while we are busy at work, immersed in the things of the world, with all its concerns, problems, challenges and pressures, we practically become contemplatives, since we can be truly united to him, and our work becomes his also, and all that we feel and think become his as well and not just ours.

It’s in this mindset also that we become aware of what God wants from us. There’s that existential union—a communion, better termed—with him. And that’s what our Christian faith tells us to pursue.

We need to go after this goal of attaining that communion with God, of becoming a real contemplative even in the middle of the world. This is not only for a few people, but for all, with all of us helping one another to achieve it.

As of now, this truth of our faith may still look like a quixotic dream. But if we put all our mind and heart into it, there’s no doubt that it can be done. It’s God’s will, in the first place, and he would be the first one to give us what is necessary to reach it. But we just have to have faith, and let that faith run its full course in our life.

We can do it. “Possumus.”