DO we know our ultimate fount of life? Are we aware of our responsibility
toward this ultimate and abiding source of our life? Do we even care to ask
these questions?
We have to ask these questions, since for all their extreme importance and
relevance to our life, they continue to be ignored and even ridiculed.
It’s part of the secularized mentality that has dominated in practically all
parts of the world to refrain from asking these questions. With that
mind-frame, it seems it’s enough to realize that we are alive physically,
economically, professionally, socially, politically, etc. Why go any further?
It’s a mentality that gives blinding importance and restrictive attention to
the here and now, to the physical and material, the mundane and natural, while
bypassing the eternal, spiritual and supernatural dimension of our life.
We seem to refuse to acknowledge that there is still a more original source of
our life that actually serves as the foundation, root and heart of all the
other aspects we have in our life.
And this ultimate fount of our life can be no other than God, who is our
Creator, and more than a Creator, he is our Father. As Creator, he does not
only bring us to existence and leave us to be on our own. He is always with us,
for he is the very core of our existence. He cannot withdraw from us, since
withdrawing is like taking away our existence, is like reverting us to nothing.
As Father, he is with us and in us through love, a love that knows no bounds,
such that even if we go against him, he will do everything to bring us back to
him, even to the point of becoming man and saving us by assuming all our sins
and faults through death and then to resurrect later on.
We have to arrive at the abiding awareness that more than needing food, money,
social acceptance, etc., we need God first, last and always. And for this to
happen, we have to sharpen our spiritual faculties such that they become the
leading elements in our life, rather than the things of the flesh and the
world.
“It is the spirit that quickens (that is, that gives life). The flesh profits
nothing,” Christ himself said (Jn 6,63) And he also told us to watch and pray,
that is, to engage ourselves through our spiritual faculties with God, because
“the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Mt 26,41)
There is indeed a great need for us to be very spiritually alive and vibrant,
which does not mean that we pay little attention to the needs and workings of
the flesh and of the world. We have to be as spiritually healthy as possible,
because it is our spirit, our soul, that gives life, meaning and direction to
all the other aspects of our life.
This is a basic truth about ourselves that we need to understand very well.
It’s a truth that may not be immediately felt by us, like a baby who does not
understand yet many important things precisely because he is still a baby, but
we need to realize it as we grow toward maturity.
Our problem is that, like some people who grow improperly and are entangled
with their childish or adolescent and unstable ways, we also tend to get snared
and trapped in the immediate, bodily, material and temporal aspects of our
life. We fail to go all the way with respect to the over-all human nature and
dignity.
Many reasons can explain why that is so. We can be dominated by laziness, or by
an excessive love for comfort and easy life, and by some vices that blind us
from seeing beyond the here and now and desensitize us to the spiritual nature
of our life and the supernatural goal that our life cannot help but be
oriented.
That is why we need to go through a process of purification and conversion, and
a continuing need for renewal. That’s because there is need for us to go from
the carnal and worldly man to the spiritual man, from the old man to the new
man.
The ideal is that we are conscious that we are generating and maintaining our
life, nourishing it and making it grow through a vital union with God, that our
life is not just dependent on the food we eat, the money we earn, the work we
do, the fame we enjoy, etc. Our life has to develop with God as the animating
principle and end.
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