YES, indeed!
Only God fully knows who man is, who we
really are. Being our creator, he is the only one who can
capture our
entire essence, not only in the macro level but also in
the micro, not
only in the general aspects of our humanity but also in
the unique
individual and personal peculiarities of each one of us.
The best thing
that we can do to approximate who and what
we really are is to go to God who has revealed himself to
us through
Christ who in turn has authorized the Church magisterium
to teach us
about who we really are.
We should try
our best that we would feel the need to
refer ourselves to God through Christ and through the
Church whenever
we try to ask or to understand the ultimate questions
about ourselves,
like who and what we are, what the purpose of our life
here on earth
is, why we should pray and offer sacrifices, etc.
Given the
temper of the times that usually puts more, if
not exclusive, reliance on our human estimations of
things that can
come about in different ways—legal, political,
sociological,
ideological, etc.—we have to give special effort to
develop that sense
of our need to refer ourselves to God-Christ-Church
everytime we try
to understand who and what we really are.
This is no
laughing matter anymore. Right now, we can see
all kinds of very questionable ideas, laws, practices,
etc., and all
of them are mainly due to ignoring what God through
Christ and the
Church is showing us. Thus, we have such things as
abortion all the
way to birth, same-sex unions, euthanasia, test-tube
babies, etc.
Other than
these, the growing alienation of a big sector
of the world population from God and the Church have
occasioned deep
division among us, resulting many times in wars,
terrorism and other
forms of killings.
Of course,
there are those who would question whether it
is practicable and useful to refer and to defer to
God-Christ-Church.
Can we really know God, they would ask. Is Christ still
relevant
today? And the Church, is it not just another human
institution,
afflicted at the moment with scandals?
I believe the only
way to resolve all these questions is
to pray a lot, because more than reasoning and all kinds
of
explanations, which of course should be done, it is faith
that is
truly needed. Without faith, no amount of discussion can
be of use.
We are dealing
here not only with natural realities but
also and mainly spiritual and supernatural ones. For us
to effectively
grapple with that level of reality, we need faith and not
only our
reason and intellect and our other human powers.
Church cannot be fully understood by us, but we have
enough data, so
to speak, to enable us to enter into a meaningful
relationship of
knowing and loving God and following his will.
This condition
of our relationship with God should not
stop us from actively knowing and loving God. On the
contrary, it
should spur us to know and love him more and more, using
all the means
that God himself has made available for us. And these
means are
precisely in the Church.
Oftentimes, we
can only echo these words of Psalm 8: “What
is man that you are mindful of him, human being that you
care for him?
You have made him a little lower than the angels, and
crowned him with
glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of
your hands; you
put everything under his feet…” (4-6)
Yes, man is a
deep mystery, but that condition should help
us to get closer to God, not farther from him.
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