Our daily patchwork

EVERYDAY we have to deal with all sorts of things, a veritable hodgepodge, a patchwork of matters that often are incongruous to each other. This can lead us to confusion, to bewilderment and then to things like skepticism, cynicism, indifference and the like.

            If we want to survive, then we should feel the responsibility of blending this mix with meaning and beauty, with a sense of purpose and direction. In that way, our daily patchwork becomes a living thing, not just a dead, inert mess that we are forced to handle. It becomes organic. That’s our daily challenge.

            Aside from the basic variety in our life, like the spiritual and the material, the natural and the supernatural, the sacred and the mundane, the temporal and the eternal, we have to deal now with the endless finer nuances that this diversity produces.

            There are things that we like and don’t like, things that we love and we hate, developments that are pleasant and unpleasant. There are successes and failures, moments that are prosaic and also sublime, times when we go into an intellectual mode as well as into a manual mode.

            We handle both absolute dogmas and relative opinions, old and traditional customs as well as new and innovative practices and trends. We have our highs and lows in our emotional and psychological life.

            Then we deal with all kinds of people. There are the good, saintly ones, and the openly devious, full of calculations and schemes. You have the rich and the poor, the simple and the sophisticated, the quick-witted and the dimwit.

            We just have to learn how to be sport and flexible before all these possibilities, and versatile as well, so we can be “all things to all men,” as St. Paul once told us. We need to be open in our attitude, and confident and competent so as not to get lost as well as to know how to integrate them together into one meaningful whole.

            The ideal to reach is to be able to reflect God’s joy at the end of each day of the creation story, where it is said that “God saw that it was good.” In fact, on the seventh day of creation, he rested and entered into communion with his creation. That is how we ought to feel and do at the end of our day and of our life.

            We, of course, can only do this if we are with God. And that’s precisely the main point we want to make here. We have to work on our unity and identification of God, whose image and likeness we are, whose children we also are. We cannot and should not be left alone, left to our own devices. We need God.

            Insofar as God is concerned, he is always with us. He intervenes in our life. His presence in us is never passive even if we are not aware of him. If we have faith, then we will realize this truth and would be led to correspond to his designs for us.

            God’s intervention in our life had led him to send his son to us, the son becoming man himself through the mystery of the incarnation. It’s good that we go through what the Catechism teaches us about the significance of the incarnation so we would know how God and us can live together and can be united.

            Point 521 says: “Christ enables us to live in him all that he himself lived, and he lives it in us. By his incarnation, he, the Son of God, has in a certain way united himself with each man. We are called only to become one with him, for he enables us as the members of his Body to share in what he lived for us in his flesh as our model.”

            In short, Christ shows us the way of how to deal with whatever we experience in life, which he identifies with.

            We need to be aware of this truth of our faith and start to act and behave accordingly. We need to deal with Christ personally through prayer, reception of the sacraments, continuing study of our faith, etc.

            This is how we can put life and purpose, order and harmony, meaning and beauty into our daily patchwork.

            We need to spread this Good News and reassure everyone of its veracity as evidenced in the lives of saints through the ages. Our times, more complicated, subtle and challenging, need modern saints who know how to cope with the growing patchworks we need to deal everyday.