‘Without you’

MANY love songs today are entitled or at least have in

their lyrics the phrase, ‘Without you.’ They paint dark pictures of

sadness, emptiness, meaninglessness, etc., when the lover would miss

or even lose his beloved.

            They are filled with burning emotions or gnawing sorrow

that can swing the lover either to hope or to depression, not to

mention the wild and violent reactions that some songs also express.

            They obviously have to be taken with a grain of salt. They

drip more with sentiments than with reason. Exaggerations abound,

objectivity and balance go AWOL. But not everything is lost.

            These love songs articulate the language of the heart, the

seat of our basic humanity. As such they can be useful even to do our

prayer, as long as they are purified and elevated to another level.

            When I, for example, am too tired to think when doing my

prayer or would just want to try something different, I resort to the

love songs which with their soothing melody and prepared lyrics

facilitate the meditation and can make the mind and heart, the memory

and the imagination to soar and fly.

            That’s when I meet the phrase ‘Without you’ frequently. I

use it to imagine how life would be without God. And so, instead of

saying, ‘without you, babe,’ I say, ‘without you, God.’ And all kinds

of thoughts and scenarios come to mind.

            Without God, we would be left to our own devices. They

might be powerful, but we also would know that they can only go so far

and cannot fully cope with all the challenges in life. Failure, as in

death, will just be a matter of time. Nothing positive would be

derived from it.

            Without God, we would make our own selves as our own god.

Or we can craft a god according to our own designs. This is when we

start to build our own world, our own reality. We get locked in by our

own subjectivism, cocooned in our own fantasy.

            Our capacity to think, judge and reason out properly would

be compromised. It would be easy for us to fall into sophistries, rash

judgments, biases and unfair estimations of things.

            Without God, we could not help but plunge into fears,

doubts and despair as sooner or later the powers at our hands start to

fail to contend with the objective realities of life. We would not

have any reason to hope, nor to see brighter possibilities beyond our

failures.

            We would be helpless in the face of temptations and our

weaknesses. To resist or to tackle them, we would simply be left, as

our defenses, with our own bodily constitution, or some medical,

psychological, or social means that can only do so much.

            That’s why we can easily fall into lust, greed, envy,

sloth, gluttony, anger, etc. We would be at the mercy of our hormones

and the erratic play of many conditionings, be they social, cultural,

political, etc.

            And whatever success or advantage we enjoy in life can

easily occasion pride, arrogance, vanity and conceit. Without God, we

would not know the relation between humility and greatness, between

sacrifice and redemption in the intoxicating air of our good fortune.

            Without God, we cannot help but be prone to cheat and to

play games with our own selves and with others. We can resort to all

kinds of rationalizations and false reasoning, all the way to the

ridiculous, to justify our actuations or to cover up our own

anomalies.

            If all these things can happen in our personal lives, you

can just imagine what would happen in our collective life as a

society, as a country, as a church community. Without God, there would

be a lot of envies, jealousies, conflicts, wars.

            Our politics would be endlessly marred by bitter

partisanship and lust for power. Governance would be full of deceit

and corruption. Business can hardly go beyond working simply for

profit and would practically forget the common good.

            Media would be hard put to resist the temptation of

sensationalism. Sports would play the game of domination at all costs.

The entertainment and celebrity world can only dance to the tune of

frivolity and inanity.

            We need God more than we need air. This is something that

we have to learn well. Our need for God is not like our need for air

which is something instinctive. It requires grace which is actually

given in abundance. But it also requires our correspondence.

            Our behavior should be more theological than biological,

ruled more by faith than by hormones, etc.