Adaptable, flexible, versatile

THESE are qualities to have these days. With our increasingly complex times, we need to learn how to flow with the tide without losing our identity and real purpose in life. For this, we need to look closely at our Lord.

We just celebrated the Solemnity of the Annunciation of our Lord, when the Son of God becomes man in the virginal womb of Mary. Out of sheer love, God reaches out to man by becoming like him, and thus shows us how to be adaptable, flexible and versatile in any situation.

Not only has the Son of God become man. He also assumes the sinfulness of man without committing any sin, and as consequence, takes on the human condition of being weakened and wounded by sin, including being subjected to temptation and finally death.

In his preaching, he used parables to make his lessons more accessible to the people. He was always compassionate, quick to forgive, slow to anger. He was always thinking of his Father and of the people. Remember him saying, “The one who sent me is true and what I heard from him I tell the world.” (Jn 8,26)

He gave preferential treatment to the children, the weak, the handicapped, the sick, the sinners. He was only allergic to the proud and self-righteous whose sense of right and wrong did not come from God, but rather from their own selves in their great variety of human consensus and other subtle forms of self-assertion. But on the cross, he asked forgiveness for everyone.

He was always adapting himself to the people, being flexible to everyone, and yet managed to accomplish his mission, whatever the situation was. He was not only passively adapting himself to the environment. He was also actively pursuing his goal in different ways. That’s versatility for you.

Eventually, he rounded off all these expressions of adaptability, flexibility and versatility by offering his life on the cross. There he made as his own all the sins of men, died to them and rose from the dead. He turned the cross from being a tree of sin and death into a tree of life. His death conquered sin and death, and opened the door to eternal life.

There can be no greater expression of adaptability, flexibility and versatility than what our Lord Jesus Christ has shown us. These qualities are a direct consequence of his love that is the very essence of God, and the essence also meant for us.

We can interpret the passage, “Greater love than this no man has, that a man lays down his life for his friends,” (Jn 15,13) as “Greater expression of adaptability, flexibility and versatility than this no man has, that a man lays down his life for his friends.”

We have to understand that the true standard and measure, the source and purpose of our adaptability, flexibility and versatility can only in Christ. We have to be wary when we reduce our sense of these qualities to some human criteria, like sheer practicality, publicity, or worse when we make them a tool for hypocrisy and deception.

Thus, we have to be careful with a current and popular trend that equates adaptability, flexibility and versatility with a relativistic, anything-goes type of mentality. We now often hear about being democratic, being tolerant and all that, but if all these claims of democracy and tolerance are not hinged on God, then we are in for disaster.

That’s what happening behind the worldwide move to legalize abortion, same-sex unions, euthanasia, etc. There’s always an appeal for so-called democratic rights and being tolerant with those who have different ideas.

While we have to uphold and defend the ideals of democracy and social tolerance, what we cannot do is to make these ideals absolute, basing them only on one’s personal opinions and preferences or on some human consensus alone. That would be an abuse of freedom. That would unhinge our democracy and sense of tolerance from their proper source.

We need to consistently refer ourselves to God and others always in our life—in our thoughts and desires, words and deeds. That is the reason why our Lord, when asked what the greatest commandment was, replied that the greatest is to love God with all our might, and the second is to love our neighbour as ourselves.

Love of God and love of others always go together. It is this love, always supported by the proper doctrine and virtues and empowered by God’s grace through the sacraments that make us effectively adaptable, flexible and versatile.