Friday, February 9, 2018

Learning to be contemplative


EVERYONE should learn to be contemplative. We are actually
meant for it. Equipped and wired for it, we reach our ideal situation
when we manage to become contemplatives even in the middle of the
world. We have to start with ourselves before we can dare to teach the
others, especially the young ones, how to be so.
  
            To be a contemplative is to see Christ in everyone and in
everything. It is to see God in every situation, in every
circumstance, convinced that God is everywhere, and his presence is
not just passive but is rather full of love and solicitude.
   
            Remember Christ saying, “I am with you always, to the very
end of the age.” (Mt 28,20) He did not say he will be with us in such
and such a situation, or in such and such a person or thing. He just
said, “I am with you always...”

            Besides, God as the Creator can never be absent from his
creatures, because the creatures’ existence completely depends on the
Creator who precisely gives and keeps the existence of his creatures.
Without him, the creature reverts to nothing.
  
            Now, in our case, as man endowed with intelligence and
will, that is, enabled to know and to love, we are meant at least to
be aware of God and to try our best to correspond to his will and
ways. God as Creator continues to shape us in our whole life until our
creation is completed.
   
            The completion of our creation is when we are finally
formed according to God’s image and likeness, which is how God wants
us to be. “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God
he created them; male and female he created them.” (Gen 1,27)
  
            And that means, until we become “alter Christus,” another
Christ, who as the Son of God is God’s perfect image of himself and
thus, the pattern of our humanity, and who as God who became man, is
the redeemer of our humanity that is damaged by our sin.
  
            That is why St. Paul said: “He who began a good work in
you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
(Phil 1,6)
  
            As a corollary to this truth of faith is that God or
Christ is always with us. There is no time, no situation, no
circumstance, no matter how considered it is in human terms, where God
or Christ is not there.
  
            When we are in the heights of our successes and
accomplishments, or in the depths of our defeats and all forms of
human misery, God is there. We need to learn to correspond to that
reality because that is the most important and indispensable part of
our life, of our world, of our reality.
   
            That God became man means that God adapts himself to our
condition, whatever it is. He has even made himself like sin without
committing sin, as St. Paul said, so that we can become the very
righteousness of God! (cfr 2 Cor 5,21)
  
            Let’s hope that we can warm ourselves up to this truth of
our faith, and start behaving according to it. We should not worry too
much about the initial awkwardness, because if we know the full
character of what it is to be contemplative, we would realize that we
can be so whether we are in the church or in the farm or in our
bedroom, or whether we are doing some intellectual or manual work,
etc.
  
            Christ adapts himself completely to us even in our worst
situation when we would be in a state of grave sin! God will always
love us. He will never reject us. It is us who are capable of
rejecting him.
  
            To be a real contemplative is to give our heart to him.


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