THE season of
Lent is meant for sharpening our skills in
spiritual warfare. This should be foremost in our mind as
we go
through the highly recommended acts of penance and
mortification
during these days of Lent.
We cannot deny
that our life here on earth is an endless
struggle between good and evil, between obeying God’s
will and
following our own will, etc. Our freedom is such that we
can choose to
be God-like, as God our Creator wants us to be and has
endowed us with
all the means, or we can prefer to be by ourselves,
whichever way our
will tilts.
This 40-day
period that leads to the commemoration of
Christ’s supreme act of loving us by saving us through
his passion,
death and resurrection is the best occasion to learn and
improve in
our skills in dealing with our weaknesses, temptations
and sins.
As we pass
through another year of trying to be faithful
to God, we must have gained more insights, lessons and
experiences
regarding our weaknesses and failures. We should consider
them in
God’s presence and see what we can do to tackle them more
effectively.
One thing for
certain is that all this need for spiritual
struggle is first of all a matter of growing in our love
for God and
for others. Our spiritual health, strength and
invincibility will
depend mainly on this requirement. Everything else that
we need to do
to protect ourselves from all forms of evil should begin
with a
vibrating love for God and for others. Without this, we
make ourselves
easy prey to the enemies of our soul.
And this love
for God and others can be nourished every
time we pray or we make acts of faith, hope and charity,
or when we
carry out the duties of our state in life, our profession
and other
positions we have in society, with gusto.
We need to see
to it that at any given time, we are at
least conscious that all we are doing is really out of
love for God
and for others. We should not take this point for
granted. When this
motivation for our thoughts, words and deed is not clear
and strong,
then we are giving an opening for our enemies—our own
flesh, the
alienated world and the devil himself—to take advantage
of us.
is to pause from time to time during the day to recover
our proper
spiritual and supernatural bearing, seeing to it that it
is real love
that motivates and drives us into action.
Having said
that, we should do the consequences and
implications of such love. We have to discipline our
wounded flesh
that is so inclined to concupiscence. This concupiscence
can be in the
form of the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh and
the pride of
life. We have to realize that this will be a lifelong
struggle. We
should banish the myth that there can be a time or a
state where we
can be exempted from all these.
Then we have to
learn how to deal with the world and the
devil himself. With the world, we have to be most prudent
by learning
to distinguish between what is inherently good in it and
what is
already corrupted by sin and therefore can be dangerous.
We have to
make the appropriate plans and strategies for this.
With the devil,
Pope Francis recently advised us not to
argue with him, since he is much more clever than
us. We just have to
avoid him, cutting any dialogue with him as soon as
possible. Truth is
we hardly have any good resistance to his apparently
convincing
sophistries.
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