Monday, February 2, 2015

To get in touch with reality

IN the course of a conversation, a friend asked me these
questions: “What then is reality? How do we get in touch with it? You
mean, we are not yet fully in touch with reality?”

            Difficult questions, of course. To answer them would
require a lot of explanation. These were raised because we were
talking about faith and the creative will of God, full of love and
wisdom, mercy and compassion, that in the end contains the whole scope
of reality in all its objectivity and complexity.

            It’s in that will that everything is known at once. This
is the case of God himself.  But in our case, it would be that faith
and the creative will of God that would enable to know the part of
reality that we ought to know at the moment, or as it should be known.

            And most important is that it is in that faith and in that
divine will that we get to know things in relation to their ultimate
and absolute end, which is what in the end matters. Our real concern
is how to engage and relate ourselves to that divine will.

            This engaging and relating ourselves to that divine will
is actually easy to do, since God, for his part, will always
facilitate things for us. If God has given us his Son who had to offer
his life for us on the cross, then everything is already given to us.
If we do our part, knowing the divine will should not be hard.

            In that conversation, I told my friend him that our
contact with reality that is based simply on our senses, feelings, and
other worldly things like our sociology, politics, economics, and the
whole gamut of our sciences, arts and technology, can at best be only
partial, instrumental, provisional.

            Our senses can only capture the sensible reality. Our
feelings are highly subjective. The sciences, arts and technologies
can only parcel reality according to their formal objects. All of
these still miss out a lot of things.

            This is not to mention that precisely because of their
partiality, instrumentality and provisionality, our contact with
reality is prone to be distorted, biased, and to be manipulated
according to one’s subjective motives.

            Such understanding of getting in touch with reality can
hardly escape from the grip of subjectivism. It would be a fertile
breeding place for anomalies like bigotry and self-righteousness.

            My understanding of reality is one whose radical
foundation is God’s creative will itself that God shares with us
through the gift of faith. Everything is contained there: the material
and spiritual, the natural and supernatural, the temporal and eternal,
etc.

            God’s creative will would even know how to handle the
highly fragile nature of our human freedom, which can turn in every
which way. That’s why we need to do everything to know and to get in
touch with God’s will.

            This we can do if we pray, develop an intimate
relationship with him, become a real contemplative right in the middle
of the world, study the doctrine of our faith that articulates his
divine revelation that has its fullness in Christ and is perpetuated
in the Church.

            This we can do if we have recourse to the sacraments which
are the usual channels of God’s grace, undertake a continuing
ascetical struggle to develop virtues and to do battle with the
enemies of God and our soul.

            This we can do if we continue to immerse ourselves in the
lives of others and in the things of the world, since God speaks to us
through them, showing us what he wants us to do in a given moment. In
short, getting in touch with God is the key to getting in touch with
reality.

            But we also have to understand that while the business of
getting in touch with God starts with our proper disposition of faith,
shown in prayer, recourse to the sacraments, etc., we also need to get
immersed in the lives of others and in the world itself and relate
them to God.

            It’s always a two-way affair—immersing ourselves in God as
well as immersing ourselves in others and the world. That’s why
Christ, when asked what the greatest commandment was or, in other
words, what God really wants us to do, said: to love God with all our
might and the second greatest commandment is to love our neighbour

            To get in touch with reality is a matter of getting in

to get in touch with reality

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