Regular maintenance

JUST as we need to daily eat, drink and rest to keep us going for the day, we also need to daily nourish our spiritual life to keep us alive and effective in the many spiritual and moral challenges we have everyday.

As we all know, our life is not just a series of physical activities, or merely social, economic, political affairs, etc. Underlying all these things is the spiritual and moral dimensions that spring from our own very nature as man, as persons, as children of God.

Just as we need to regularly recharge our new gadgets to keep them functioning for a period of time, we also need to recharge ourselves spiritually to keep ourselves fit for the many tasks we need to do our whole life through.

We have to be more aware of this need to pray, offer sacrifices, avail of the sacraments, develop virtues and the skill to tackle our weaknesses and repel the temptations, since these are the means to keep ourselves spiritually and morally capable, strong, resistant.

At the moment, I feel that we need to issue a kind of general alert regarding this crying need, because it has been for too long neglected. As a consequence, we now have a great majority of the populace all over the world starving, emaciated and weak spiritually and morally, even as they may appear to be physically strong, and socially and professionally well-placed and successful.

Let’s start with prayer. We have to spend some time everyday doing serious prayer, which is an effort to consciously connect ourselves with God. This is what gives us an eminently spiritual and supernatural tone to our thoughts and desires. Otherwise our outlook will mainly be worldly and temporal.

Prayer enlarges and deepens our vision of things, since being a conversation with God, prayer would make us tend to see things the way God, the creator and ultimate lawgiver of the universe, sees them.

Daily periods of serious prayer would therefore ground us firmly on our true nature and dignity which is often swept and carried away by all sorts of currents of conditioning we have in the world, be they social, economic, political, cultural, etc.

Let’s remember that our life always has to contend with several conditionings. We cannot avoid them. They are part of our human situation, what with all the limitations we have.

These conditionings are actually meant to facilitate the attainment of our true end. But we need to be careful with them, since if indiscriminately used, they can compromise even our very nature.

Daily periods of serious prayer give us a sense of purpose, meaning and direction and a sense of unity in our daily activities. Otherwise, we tend to be “torn between two lovers,” as a song would have it, or even a multiplicity of lovers, such that we become promiscuous and fidelity would have no attraction to us anymore.

The general problem we have right now is precisely about this lack of sense of purpose and unity, this lack of commitment and fidelity, and at the same time, a surge of promiscuity, etc. We tend to be short-sighted and narrow-minded, perhaps fit only in some aspects of our life, but not in all, and especially in what is most important about us.

At best, many of us simply rely on our common sense, on our knowledge of the sciences and arts, and on other resources, privileges and advantages that we may enjoy at the moment. But we fail to rely on the one who is the source of everything.

We have to spread the good news about prayer more widely, more systematically, more effectively. We have to explain a lot about it, to draw out its sublime beauty and our extreme need for it.

More importantly, we need to be practicing models of prayerful souls, by whom the others can get inspired and moved to pray. Especially in the context of the family and homes, the parents should lead their children by example on how to pray.

In the schools, the same thing should happen. Teachers should teach children how to pray both in words and in action. In the offices too and other places of work, the role of prayer should be given its due emphasis. To be sure, prayer enhances rather than impedes our work.

We just have to learn how to organize ourselves better to be able to integrate all our concerns, both spiritual and material, in their proper hierarchy. Our daily prayer should help us find ways of how to sanctify every part of our day.