Boils down to holiness

“NO man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one, and love the other, or he will sustain the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” (Mt 6,24)

            That’s quite clear. If we still have some traces of Christian faith left in us, we know that we have to choose God over any other god or idol that may catch our fancy, be it fame, lucre or worldly power.

            That’s why as to the current burning question of how to resolve our screaming national scandal of corruption in the high places of our government, there’s only one answer. And that is, that everything boils down to holiness.

            Without God, there can never be integrity and honesty, whether in one’s personal affairs or in the different levels of our collective life. Lies, deception, envy will fester when God is marginalized or, worse, ignored.

            That’s why, at the moment, what we can do is to pray hard and to appeal to everyone, especially those who are holding public office, that they be truly men and women of God, of prayer and sacrifice, whose desire to serve the people and the common good is undergirded by an abiding pursuit for holiness.

            It cannot be any other way. Reliance on our own will to be good and honest would be nice and, in fact, indispensable, but it will never be enough. All of us are weak, in spite of our strengths and assets in other areas. We all have feet of clay.

            Our resolve to be honest and fair, while fervent in the beginning, cannot be expected to remain so if not continually reinforced and renewed. This is a fact of life that is proven true over and over again all throughout the course of history.

            We need to engage our mind, will and heart actively with God, especially when we are dealing with our unavoidable and necessary mundane affairs like business and politics.

            Even those engaged officially in sacred duties, like bishops, priests and nuns, have to exert much effort to stay put with God because everyone knows that even if the office is already very holy, the temptations to play around with God can actually be greater, and the ways to fall into them, both overt and covert, are also plenty.

            We all have to sharpen our need for God, our hunger for his presence and the urge to follow his will and commandments to the last detail. This is actually everyone’s bounden duty. It’s never optional, though, obviously, we have to choose it freely. We should never dare to carry out any other duty unless this one is fixed first.

            We have to learn how to relate our temporal affairs to God, and even to see God in them. The relation between God, us and our worldly activities should develop through the dynamics of love. No other language can fit that role. Unless it’s love that drives us, we can never expect to remain sincere in our desire to serve the common good.

            The underlying problem we have is precisely this—that we don’t see God in our business and politics, that most often these activities are considered purely human affairs with God hardly having anything to do with them.

            Thus, one item that needs to be clarified urgently is the truth that the world and everything in it, minus its sins and its structures, both come and belong to God. God has placed us there to find, love and serve him. God is actually testing us to see if we also choose to correspond to his love for us, repaying love with love.

            It’s always a question of love which is the essence of holiness and of God himself. We need to develop a healthy love for the world too. That love would obviously include hatred for sin. Thus, this healthy love for the world involves the duty of purifying the world of its sins.

            If we only would have this attitude, then money need not be a Mammon with a whopping evil influence on us. Money can in fact be a very effective instrument for our love for God and for others. We would rescue money from the clutches of the evil one.

            We have to pray for deep and thorough conversion for everyone, and especially for our public officials, even as we try to sort out the mess to see how best we can be prudent in the use of public fund, given our wounded and weakened nature, prone to greed and corruption.