Consistency and adaptability

WE need to strike a healthy balance between consistency and adaptability in our behaviour, especially as we go about reclaiming our life, now warped here and there by so many confusing elements, for God.

            Again, the ultimate model for this is Christ who did nothing other than to carry out the will of his Father and yet was game to all the possibilities that human freedom would take him, including dying on the cross.

            I am sure that even in our ordinary affairs, we need to do some kind of balancing. Our life is filled with many things, often with competing values that objectively are good in varying degrees, not to mention the constant clash between good and evil. We have no other alternative but to find that balance that would give due consideration to all these elements of our life.

            Yes, we need to have consistency in our life, in our identity, in our mission. But we should not understand this consistency as rigidity, inflexibility, hardness. Christian consistency is very much compatible with adaptability. In fact, Christian consistency requires an adaptability that goes all the way till death, like what Christ did.

            Neither should we understand adaptability as a lawless attitude toward life. We always need to acknowledge the law that comes from God, as well as to acknowledge when that law is followed and when it is violated. We have to avoid the thinking that everything will just have the same value. That’s an adaptability gone haywire.

            The secret to all this is to imitate Christ. He ceaselessly preached the truth about God, about ourselves and everything else. He persisted in it regardless of whether he was understood or not, believed or not.

            In spite of all difficulties and contradictions, including being betrayed and denied by those close to him, he continued with his redemptive work. He kept this determination alive by spending time in prayer—he would spend nights talking with his Father. He was not afraid of making all kinds of sacrifices.

            And he did everything to make himself understood and accessible to people. He, first of all, being God became man so he can truly be not only with us but also bear in his humanity all the wounded condition of man.

            This truth was vividly described by St. Paul when he talked about the self-emptying of Christ. “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant...” (Phil 2,5ff)

            In his preaching, he used parables to make his messages more understandable to the people. He was extremely patient with everyone, even if on occasion he had to make corrections.

            He may have done a good number of miracles, but they were made not to impress the people, but rather to show them genuine compassion and to help them build up their fledgling faith.

            Then he allowed himself to go through all the suffering and all the way to death on the cross, in obedience to his Father, to take up all the sins of men, to die to them only to resurrect. This is the ultimate of how Christ lived both consistency and adaptability.

            The crux of the secret is to imitate Christ in his obedience to his Father’s will. “Father, not my will but yours be done,” he said. It is this obedience that would show the full extent of our faith, hope and charity in God through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

            It is in imitating Christ in this obedience to his Father’s will that would indicate how willing we are to be with God even if we would already run out of reasons to follow him. Faith and reason should go together, but faith can outrun reason.

            We need to process this truth of our faith slowly and deeply, so we could relish the many implications and consequences, theoretical and practical, of how we can live both consistency and adaptability in our Christian life and mission.

            Some of these implications are that we really need to commit ourselves to a certain plan of life, made up of certain practices of piety and continuing formation. This way, we nourish our spiritual life, we keep ourselves spiritually healthy and morally active both in good times and in bad.

            In short, we have to think of spending time in serious personal and intimate prayer, study of the doctrine of our faith, recourse to the sacraments, etc.