Recollected amid the hustle and bustle

WE have to learn this skill. It’s actually a fundamental

and indispensable skill. Without it, there’s no other way but for us

to get confused and lost in our worldly and temporal affairs. And

instead of reaching our final and proper destination, we end up

somewhere else.

            We have to learn to gather all our powers and faculties

together so they can be engaged with their proper and ultimate objects

which, ultimately, are God and others. We have to see to it that

everything we do and get involved in, somehow get into the lifelong

dynamic of loving God and others.

            What we have to avoid is to have our powers and faculties

scattered and often in conflict with one another, entangled with

objects that, though having some validity, are not the proper and

ultimate objects we should try to pursue.

            This need for recollection simply indicates that our life

consists of different aspects and levels that we have to orchestrate

to be able to reach our final end. We just cannot go about reacting

spontaneously to things, depending solely on instincts and feelings.

We are meant for something much, much more than these.

            Our tendency, given our fallen nature and the effects of

our personal sins, is to get dispersed in our attention and to plunge

into activism. In the process, we lose our interior serenity and

eventually our true way.

            The loss of serenity can lead us to bad consequences—loss

of self-control and dominion over things, proneness to temptations,

vices and sins, disorder in our sense of priority, etc.

            For Christian believers, the source and end of their

consciousness should be God. This is simply because the Christian

faith teaches that God is the creator of the whole universe, including

us, and continues to govern us intimately in our hearts. There should

therefore be a living relationship between God and the believer.

            We need to be focused always on him. Straying from him

would be to stray from reality. It would lead us to make our own

reality and our own world, with consequences that sooner or later will

always be bad for us.

            For Christian believers, reality is not simply the items

that we see or hear or even feel. Reality is a given, not made by us.

It has to be discovered, not invented by us. But it has to enter deep

into our being, since we have a subjective mode of existence.

            And ultimately the one who gives the reality to us is God,

since things just don’t break into existence on their own. There is an

ultimate cause—God. God is the foundation of everything.

            This human need for recollection will always bring us to

the realization of the existence of God, with the corresponding rights

and duties towards him. We should therefore see that everything in our

life has God in it, or at least traces of God in it. We just have to

learn how to discover God in these things.

            If we have the proper spirit of recollection, everything

in our life, whether good or bad, big or small, can be an occasion to

know, love and serve God and others.

            We have to work this skill out, helping one another, being

patient and understanding with one another, since the road to it,

aside from being narrow, is strewn with difficulties, traps and

snares.

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