IN biblical literature, the world can elicit two opposing
reactions.
One is hating it or at least be cautious of it, as in, “What
shall it
profit a man, if he gains the whole world, and suffer the
loss of his
soul?” (Mk 8,36)
Church Fathers have enlarged that line as typified by some
words of
St. Ignatius of Antioch: “No earthly pleasures, no kingdoms
of this
world can benefit me in any way. I prefer death in Christ
Jesus to
power over the farthest limits of the earth. He who died in
place of
us is the one object of my quest. He who rose for our sakes
is my one
desire. Do not talk about Jesus Christ as long as you love
this
world.”
The other reaction is loving it, because God himself loves
it, as in,
“For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten
Son; that
whosoever believes in him, may not perish, but may have life
everlasting.” (Jn 3,16)
I am sure that after stirring our mind a bit, we can see
that both
reactions can be made compatible if we consider the contexts
in which
they are mentioned. We have to hate the world insofar as it
has
absorbed our own sinfulness and has become a source of
temptation and
sin itself.
But we also have to love it because in the first place it is
also a
creation of God like ourselves, and therefore is good, at
least in its
original state until we have corrupted it. The world is also
where God
has placed us to work out our free choice of whether we want
to be
God’s image and likeness and children as he wants us to be,
or not.
It’s important that we don’t get confused and lost in this
very
nuanced attitude we ought to have toward the world. We have
to outgrow
the simplistic all-or-nothing mindset that forces us to
choose whether
we are for the world or against it.
That mentality has produced a distorted culture that divides
people
into either worldly or other-worldly, without making the
effort to
relate this world and the ‘other world.’
We need to love the world the way God loves it. We just have
to learn
to purify it because of the anomalies it has acquired due to
our sins.
But we need to understand that the world has an inherent
objective
relation to God and to us that we need to discover,
appreciate and
enhance.
This is still a point hardly known and understood by many of
us. The
common attitude is that one is simply on his own as to what
to make
out of the world. While it’s true that we can discover some
natural
laws governing the world, we fail to see how these laws come
from God
and are supposed to be oriented toward God.
And so we feel quite free, in a licentious way, to do with
it in any
way that suits our purposes, but hardly connecting it with
God’s plans
and providence. This is the mentality that is quite embedded
in us but
which we have to reform drastically, since it does not
conform to how
we in our relation with the world should be.
We need to learn to see God in the world and to act the way
God wants
us to act in the world. Otherwise, we would just be at the
mercy of
the blind forces of the world, and vulnerable to the
maneuverings of
the more clever and powerful people around.
We have to start by reminding ourselves that everything that
we see,
touch, handle, and use comes from God. The very least thing
that we
can do is to thank God for all these things, and then try to
discern
what God wants us to do with them.
We can always presume that God has something grand for us to
do every
day. He is love himself. His ways, his plans, his
interventions in our
life are of love. And love is always about being generous,
heroic,
making big things even out of small things.
This is something we need to be clear and be strongly
convinced about.
Otherwise, we would think our life is just a matter of
coasting along
and waiting for something big, in human terms, to happen.
If we have the right understanding of the world, we can
always make
beautiful music out of the humdrum routine of our daily
life, for we
would know how to discover God who is love there.
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