Cultivating an abiding unity of life

THIS is a big challenge for us. We are always prone to fall into inconsistency and disunity in our life, and thus into all forms of hypocrisy, deception, formalisms, legalisms, etc. that try to show goodness without the proper substance. 

 In the gospel, Christ lamented about this predicament of ours. To the leading Jews of his time, he expressed this disgust that can still applicable to us now: 

 “Woe to you Pharisees! You pay tithes of mint and of rue and of every garden herb, but you pay no attention to judgment and to love for God. These you should have done, without overlooking the others. 

 “Woe to you Pharisees! You love the seat of honor in synagogues and greetings in marketplaces. Woe to you! You are like unseen graves over which people unknowingly walk.” (Lk 11,42-44) 

 We have to understand that our unity and consistency in our life can only be achieved if we have Christ as the animating spirit for this responsibility. If we only rely on our own ideas and powers regarding this duty, there is no way we can truly achieve unity of life. We can give some appearances of unity and consistency, but it would not stay long. Sooner or later, the ugly truth will come out. 

 Developing this consistency and unity of life should be an abiding concern for all of us. Truth is even if we have to contend with many aspects and dimensions of our life, and some of them competing with each other, it is only one life that each of us has, not two or three. And thus, to build and keep our unity of life is a daily task of ours. We can neglect it only to our own serious risk and damage. 

 Our life is not only biological that relies simply on our biological functions. Neither is it just purely physical or material that requires merely material nourishment. Our life has many more important aspects and dimensions that need to be integrated into one whole consistent thing. There’s the manual and intellectual, the active and contemplative, personal and social, the material and spiritual, the temporal and eternal, etc. 

 We therefore must do everything to have Christ always as the foundation of our life. He is after all the pattern of our humanity. We have been given intelligence and will, plus God’s grace, so that we can know, love and identify ourselves with Christ, for he is the proper object of our human powers. We should be wary when we are more interested in pursuing as our main object anything other than Christ. 

 For this, we truly need to learn how to pray, for that is how we can basically get in touch with Christ. But for us to learn how to pray, a whole lot of discipline and training is needed. We need to have the proper attitudes, like being humble so that we would always feel the need for God. Our problem is that many times we feel that we can simply be on our own, relying only on our human powers, etc. 

 We have to learn how to refer everything to God, and to discern his abiding interventions in our life. We should always have presence of God, aware of the unfolding providence he does together with us. Obviously, for this to happen we need to have a working life of faith and piety. And so, we have to realize that we need certain practices that would keep our faith and piety alive and functioning all the time.