WE have to be more aware of this. And more importantly, we have to learn how to tackle this problem. It’s actually now a hairy epidemic worldwide, but no one seems to be bothered.
I’m referring to an attitude that is so pervasive it looks like it’s the normal thing to have. This is the virus of pride, of selfishness, greed and vanity. It’s considering what puffs the ego as the ultimate fulfillment of one’s life.
This is the me-first attitude of the I-me-mine generation, a growing sector in the world, whose outlook is notoriously individualistic and blatantly self-interested, self-indulgent and intemperate.
You sadly see the syndrome at every turn now: in homes, among friends, in
malls, internet cafes, in sports, fashion and entertainment, in the media. Read the papers, listen to the radio, watch TV, see a movie, and this poison is there corroding hearts and minds with impunity.
What a painful thing to see people, especially the young, rotting away in laziness, disorder, aimless meandering especially during weekends, spoiled by modern gadgets, excess time and money, and, worst, parental neglect!
How jarring to hear people hopelessly gossiping away, indulging in empty talk, and engaging in activities that from any angle are clearly a waste of time! Everyone seems to want only what is good for him here and now, never mind if it is not truly good for him.
The objective reason to seek rest and recreation, to pursue knowledge, power, influence, popularity, etc., their ticket to social acceptability, is so abused that these human activities now become pathological.
There’s also that phenomenon where those who do many important things so fail to appreciate the true value of these things and thus fall to a sickly build-up of psychological repression that once they have leisure, they become prone to harmful and sinful compensations.
This runs in direct conflict to what we are supposed to be and behave. We
are meant to love, we are wired to give ourselves to others, to share. What goes against this law works against us.
Let’s always remember what our Lord said when asked what the greatest commandment was. It was to love God with all our heart and might, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
We always have to be keenly aware of this natural law that governs our life. Once we realize we are deviating from this law, we have to rectify immediately. We have to help one another to be able to follow this law always.
When we sense we don’t have God and the others in our minds and hearts, when they do not motivate us to do something for them, we should realize that we are heading for trouble, and therefore should react properly.
What is unfortunately being fostered is the opposite. We are lured and hooked to egoism, good time and easy life, to comfort and pleasure seeking. And there seems to be hardly any serious effort to counter this trend.
Instead of being thoughtful, anticipative of others’ needs, eager to work and serve, we now see so much self-seeking, wasting of time, and fuss and ado only to satisfy one’s urges and passions.
The value of virtues, like order, industry, prudence, is disintegrated. The need for sacrifice, mortification and forms of self-denials is completely ignored if not ridiculed. The link between these virtues and our true joy is missed.
The families should see to it that the children are taught as early as they are able to understand very deeply this fundamental law of our life and to develop the corresponding attitudes and practices.
Parents in particular, since they know their children’s strengths and weaknesses, should come up with the appropriate plans and strategies to impart the proper attitudes and develop the proper habits.
They have to know how to use both the gentle and hard methods, how to be
patient and impatient, tolerant and strict. They have to use the full range of possibilities to help their children grow to maturity.
That’s why they have to spend quality time with their children. Away with remote or surrogate parenting!
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Families must form consciences
THAT’S what the Pope suggests to the head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, indicating the theme of the 2009 World Meeting of Families in Mexico.
To be more precise, the Pope calls on parents to dutifully discharge the indispensable and delicate responsibility of forming their children’s consciences.
“In these times,” he said, “in which it is notable that there is a frequent contradiction between what is professed as belief and concrete ways of living and acting, the next World Meeting of Families proposes to encourage Christian households in the formation of a right moral conscience.”
I consider this papal concern very relevant. Sadly, the awareness of our duty to take care of forming our consciences is vanishing.
Many parents seem afraid to form the consciences of their children, taking care only of their physical and other immediate needs, and leaving them practically out in the cold.
Many parents fail to realize that forming their children’s consciences constitutes the noblest part of their duty to educate their children. It perfects their parenthood.
At best, any awareness of such duty now often comes with a lot of distortions. Like, conscience is just a matter of how one feels or understands things at the moment. One’s feelings and frame of mind become the ultimate guide for his actions.
Aggravating this is the fact that there’s hardly anything done to counter the bad effects of the mainly materialistic and sensual approaches to today’s questions and issues, prevalent everywhere and especially in the media.
Even the news have spins that highlight these values at the expense of the spiritual and supernatural values. You can just imagine what happens in the lifestyle and entertainment sections!
As a consequence, the difference between good and evil, between freedom and licentiousness gets blurred. The sense of sin evaporates.
Children and the young are the most vulnerable, since they are still without the proper criteria to guide them, nor the proper skills and virtues that should accompany them in their growth and development.
We have to understand that our conscience is the most critical aspect of our life. It’s our judgment, like a voice within, enabling us to recognize the moral quality of a concrete act, past, present or future.
It links our actions to our dignity as persons and ultimately as children of God. It integrates the workings of all our faculties to make sure our actions conform to our innate sense of goodness. In short, it conforms our actions to God.
The Christian understanding of man teaches that God is our last end, our supreme good who reveals himself to us in many ways and in his fullness in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man.
The complete and ultimate truth of man is known through Christ who entrusted it to the Church. Our conscience has to apply what it finds in our heart, checking it with the Church’s teaching, before it makes its judgments.
This is because God’s law for us in our actions, the natural moral law, is both written in our hearts and revealed by Christ and now taught by the Church.
Given our natural limitations, plus the effects of our sins, the formation of conscience has to be undertaken continuously by everyone in all levels and aspects of our life.
We need to study the moral law to be on the offensive against ignorance, confusion and error. We also need to develop the virtues to facilitate our inclination to our true good.
These virtues, like humility and prudence, help us to navigate through the antipodes of indifference and rashness, to which we are prone.
The family, the basic unit of society and our first school, should be the first to fulfill this duty. When it is found wanting, higher entities like schools, government, community, Church, etc., should directly pitch in.
Very fundamental in forming consciences within the family is to teach children to use their reason, guiding their emotions and passions. Then children should be taught to reason with faith, so their consciences could make judgments that relate their actions to God.
To be more precise, the Pope calls on parents to dutifully discharge the indispensable and delicate responsibility of forming their children’s consciences.
“In these times,” he said, “in which it is notable that there is a frequent contradiction between what is professed as belief and concrete ways of living and acting, the next World Meeting of Families proposes to encourage Christian households in the formation of a right moral conscience.”
I consider this papal concern very relevant. Sadly, the awareness of our duty to take care of forming our consciences is vanishing.
Many parents seem afraid to form the consciences of their children, taking care only of their physical and other immediate needs, and leaving them practically out in the cold.
Many parents fail to realize that forming their children’s consciences constitutes the noblest part of their duty to educate their children. It perfects their parenthood.
At best, any awareness of such duty now often comes with a lot of distortions. Like, conscience is just a matter of how one feels or understands things at the moment. One’s feelings and frame of mind become the ultimate guide for his actions.
Aggravating this is the fact that there’s hardly anything done to counter the bad effects of the mainly materialistic and sensual approaches to today’s questions and issues, prevalent everywhere and especially in the media.
Even the news have spins that highlight these values at the expense of the spiritual and supernatural values. You can just imagine what happens in the lifestyle and entertainment sections!
As a consequence, the difference between good and evil, between freedom and licentiousness gets blurred. The sense of sin evaporates.
Children and the young are the most vulnerable, since they are still without the proper criteria to guide them, nor the proper skills and virtues that should accompany them in their growth and development.
We have to understand that our conscience is the most critical aspect of our life. It’s our judgment, like a voice within, enabling us to recognize the moral quality of a concrete act, past, present or future.
It links our actions to our dignity as persons and ultimately as children of God. It integrates the workings of all our faculties to make sure our actions conform to our innate sense of goodness. In short, it conforms our actions to God.
The Christian understanding of man teaches that God is our last end, our supreme good who reveals himself to us in many ways and in his fullness in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man.
The complete and ultimate truth of man is known through Christ who entrusted it to the Church. Our conscience has to apply what it finds in our heart, checking it with the Church’s teaching, before it makes its judgments.
This is because God’s law for us in our actions, the natural moral law, is both written in our hearts and revealed by Christ and now taught by the Church.
Given our natural limitations, plus the effects of our sins, the formation of conscience has to be undertaken continuously by everyone in all levels and aspects of our life.
We need to study the moral law to be on the offensive against ignorance, confusion and error. We also need to develop the virtues to facilitate our inclination to our true good.
These virtues, like humility and prudence, help us to navigate through the antipodes of indifference and rashness, to which we are prone.
The family, the basic unit of society and our first school, should be the first to fulfill this duty. When it is found wanting, higher entities like schools, government, community, Church, etc., should directly pitch in.
Very fundamental in forming consciences within the family is to teach children to use their reason, guiding their emotions and passions. Then children should be taught to reason with faith, so their consciences could make judgments that relate their actions to God.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Sports
WE just went gaga over the latest win of Manny Pacquiao. Then our excitement reaches another level with the opening of the latest season of the PBA (Philippine Basketball Association). And there are more to come.
Sports understandably gets our instant attention. It strongly invites us to play it out. And so we see a growing number of people, young and not so young, doing some sports. That’s good!
Sports can do a lot of wonders to us, because it corresponds to an objective human need. Not only does it develop our body. It also occasions growth in the many virtues we require, both personal and social, like a good sense of discipline and team work.
With proper management, sports can be expected to strengthen our moral and spiritual life. In fact, we have to see to it that the effects of our sports reach that point. Otherwise, it would not be worthwhile.
As a form of rest, sports is meant to give us a healthy diversion from our work routine. But it is not supposed to make us forget our work, but rather to recover our strength to return to our work and main concerns with greater vigor.
It is precisely because of this inherent goodness of sports that everything has to be done to protect it from deteriorating into something harmful to us. It’s part of our human condition that good things come always with some spoilers.
It might sound trite, but that Gospel story of the cockles growing with the
wheat because of some evil men, remains applicable now, and especially in relation to sports. Given its nature, sports is quite susceptible to viruses.
This concern is not meant to be a wet blanket, but rather to insure that our sports be always consistent to our dignity. We should not be naïve and complacent.
Many more things happen than just having some excitement when we play
sports. Sports is not just a purely physical thing. By necessity, it affects our whole being. Thus, it affects not only the body but also our soul.
We have to be mindful of this basic truth about sports. Especially when it
is played big time, every effort has to be made to foster and reinforce this truth. We have to realize that sports has a tremendous social impact.
We just cannot play out our sports activities in any level in a purely random and designless way, guided only by what is most convenient at the moment, what is practical, popular or pleasurable.
We have to have a certain plan, a certain purpose and strategy. Competition
in sports is not just about winning a game, because winning has many other forms including a certain sense of victory even when one loses a game.
We have to see to it that sports competitions are infused with a healthy spirit of friendship and mutual help so that everybody reaches our common good. We defeat the purpose of competition when it leaves in its wake the remains of envy, hatred and bitterness.
We have to be wary when sports becomes an obsession, dominating our life
such that it ostracizes other more important activities, like our prayers, family duties, and even our professional work.
We have to see to it that sports should not deaden our proper sense of the value of time, our sense of priorities, the awareness of our duties and responsibilities, whether personal, family, social, or religious, professional, etc.
We have to be careful when sports becomes too commercialized that it fosters all sorts of aberrations: vanity, pride, arrogance, body worship. There’s also its proneness to succumb to selfishness, greed and deceit.
We need to help one another in fostering the proper dispositions towards sports. The leading men in the sports industry should give more attention to the ethical and spiritual aspects.
Sportsmen should be the first to show the proper conduct in which the different sports are played. They truly become champions when they manage to relate their sports to our ultimate end, converting sports into a prototype of our ascetical struggle and scoring the right points.
Sports understandably gets our instant attention. It strongly invites us to play it out. And so we see a growing number of people, young and not so young, doing some sports. That’s good!
Sports can do a lot of wonders to us, because it corresponds to an objective human need. Not only does it develop our body. It also occasions growth in the many virtues we require, both personal and social, like a good sense of discipline and team work.
With proper management, sports can be expected to strengthen our moral and spiritual life. In fact, we have to see to it that the effects of our sports reach that point. Otherwise, it would not be worthwhile.
As a form of rest, sports is meant to give us a healthy diversion from our work routine. But it is not supposed to make us forget our work, but rather to recover our strength to return to our work and main concerns with greater vigor.
It is precisely because of this inherent goodness of sports that everything has to be done to protect it from deteriorating into something harmful to us. It’s part of our human condition that good things come always with some spoilers.
It might sound trite, but that Gospel story of the cockles growing with the
wheat because of some evil men, remains applicable now, and especially in relation to sports. Given its nature, sports is quite susceptible to viruses.
This concern is not meant to be a wet blanket, but rather to insure that our sports be always consistent to our dignity. We should not be naïve and complacent.
Many more things happen than just having some excitement when we play
sports. Sports is not just a purely physical thing. By necessity, it affects our whole being. Thus, it affects not only the body but also our soul.
We have to be mindful of this basic truth about sports. Especially when it
is played big time, every effort has to be made to foster and reinforce this truth. We have to realize that sports has a tremendous social impact.
We just cannot play out our sports activities in any level in a purely random and designless way, guided only by what is most convenient at the moment, what is practical, popular or pleasurable.
We have to have a certain plan, a certain purpose and strategy. Competition
in sports is not just about winning a game, because winning has many other forms including a certain sense of victory even when one loses a game.
We have to see to it that sports competitions are infused with a healthy spirit of friendship and mutual help so that everybody reaches our common good. We defeat the purpose of competition when it leaves in its wake the remains of envy, hatred and bitterness.
We have to be wary when sports becomes an obsession, dominating our life
such that it ostracizes other more important activities, like our prayers, family duties, and even our professional work.
We have to see to it that sports should not deaden our proper sense of the value of time, our sense of priorities, the awareness of our duties and responsibilities, whether personal, family, social, or religious, professional, etc.
We have to be careful when sports becomes too commercialized that it fosters all sorts of aberrations: vanity, pride, arrogance, body worship. There’s also its proneness to succumb to selfishness, greed and deceit.
We need to help one another in fostering the proper dispositions towards sports. The leading men in the sports industry should give more attention to the ethical and spiritual aspects.
Sportsmen should be the first to show the proper conduct in which the different sports are played. They truly become champions when they manage to relate their sports to our ultimate end, converting sports into a prototype of our ascetical struggle and scoring the right points.
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