Prayer and fasting

THIS might seem to be too religious or spiritual a topic

to be taken up in the secular press. But I however believe that we
should dismantle that mistaken attitude, because prayer and fasting,
especially nowadays when our spiritual and moral conditions have
worsened, have actually become most urgently relevant.

            We have to understand that prayer and fasting are always
necessary to us. They are not optional activities reserved only to
some people or to some special occasions. They are duties that involve
everyone.

            And as duties, they have to be done freely, voluntarily,
with love and devotion even, because otherwise they would cease to do
good to us as they are meant to do. Duties done out of coercion or
heavy pressure poison their objective goodness and thwart the purpose
for which they have been designed.

            I believe this is an issue that is literally begging to be
given due public attention. It has been restricted for too long
already in the confines of churches, the academe, etc. It needs to be
brought out to the open, into the fields of business and politics,
sciences, arts and technologies, etc.

            Yes, we have to find a way to bring God, without let-up
and without shame, to the very center of every human activity. And
vice-versa: we also need to find a way to link all our human
activities, no matter how mundane, with God, his will and his ways.

            God has the primary right to be in the middle of our
activities, since everything and everyone comes from him and belongs
to him. This is not an imposition, but a mere recognition of a basic
reality of our life.

            Prayer and fasting are necessary because Christ himself,
who is the very pattern of our humanity, the way, truth and life for
us, and the redeemer of our fallen state, practically showed it to be
so.

            Right after his baptism in the Jordan and just before
beginning his public life, he went to the wilderness for forty days
and forty nights praying and fasting, after which the devil gave him
three temptations that ranged from the material to the moral and
spiritual aspects of human life. (cfr Mt 4,1ff.)

            In this way, Christ somehow teaches us how to handle the
many temptations we can encounter in our earthly sojourn. He is
teaching us that we need to enter into deep if not prolonged prayer
and fasting if only to be ready to counter the temptations in life.
Without these, there’s no way we can tackle temptations that nowadays
have become most subtle and tricky.

            At the moment, we are bombarded with many good things that
also have great potentials of doing us a lot of harm. I am referring
to the new technologies that indeed can give us a lot of benefits, but
can also inflict graver havoc in our spiritual and moral life.

            This is not to instill fear with respect to the new
technologies, but rather to learn how to master and dominate them for
love of God and for the common good. We should not be enslaved by
them. To do this, we have to realize that we need to pray and fast—and
fasting not only in the sense of fasting from food, but also of
fasting from the use of these new technologies.

            Fasting together with prayer somehow conforms our bodily
impulses to the requirements of faith, hope and charity, the
fundamental virtues that assure us of the life proper to us, that is,
life together with God, our Father and creator. It disciplines and
purifies our wounded flesh and all its powers.

            Let’s remember that, by themselves, our bodily impulses,
especially in our  human condition, are only guided and driven by
material and earthly values of sensual pleasure, comfort, convenience,
efficiency, etc. They are quite blind to spiritual and supernatural
values primarily meant for us.

            If our use of the new technologies is not motivated by
love of God and for the common good, if it does not lead us to a
greater intimacy with God and with others, then it is clear that we
are using them in a dangerous way.

            Sooner or later, we will get into trouble, since the
earthly values can easily occasion in us pride, vanity, greed, lust,
envy and laziness. We will generate division and conflict among
ourselves. We don’t have to look far to see the abundant pieces of
evidence.

            We need to find ways of discovering and promoting the
skills and practices that would put God in the center of our human
activities.

Tuning in to God

THIS, as much as possible, should be the first thing we do
once we wake up in the morning. We need to tune in to God for the
simple reason that God is everything to us. Without him or detached
from him, we are actually nothing and can do nothing of real value
even if we do many so-called brilliant actions. Let’s avoid getting
self-deluded.

            God is our Creator, the author of all reality. It is
through him that we go beyond what we merely see and feel, or what we
can understand. With him, we get in touch with reality in all its
entirety. Our world would then not just be our own world, quite
subjective, but the world as God created it. We get to become
objective and global in our perception of things.

            Yes, it may take some time before we can actually tune in
to him since we have to contend with a lot of static, like our
laziness and lethargy, our lack of understanding of the role of God in
our life, if not worse things like religious indifference, agnosticism
and atheism.

            But once we can overcome these, which is actually a
lifetime struggle for us, we should try our best to hook up with him,
no matter how tentative and tenuous, as soon as possible. The
difficulties involved in connecting ourselves with him should not
discourage. Rather they should spur us to find the means to achieve
this goal.

            This is no pipe dream. We are not inventing things,
engaging in fiction. In the first place, because God is always around.
And he is not present in us and in the world in a passive way. He is
eternally active, full of love and desire to be with us. He is
actually intervening in our lives through his abiding providence.

            Besides he has given us everything we need to get in touch
with him, and even to be intimate with him. He has given us his own
Son who became man and who revealed to us all we need to know and to
be with God.

            Christ has left us with his word and teaching, his
sacraments, and the Church itself, all of which perpetuate till the
end of time and beyond his living presence and redemptive action for
our own sake. In fact, Christ remains with us in the real sense of the
word. We are not left only with some symbols and signs.

            We just have to dispose ourselves to capture this
fundamental reality of our life by exercising our faith, hope and love
as fully as possible. This is actually the most fundamental duty we
need to carry out. All other duties and responsibilities would depend
on this.

            As Christ himself said, he is the way, the truth and the
life. No one goes to the Father except through him. In another
instance, he described himself as the vine and we the branches. We
need to be with him if we want to live the life proper to us.

            We can start tuning ourselves in to him by developing the
practice of morning offering, that is, once we wake up, the first
thought that we should try to make is to address God, saying whatever
comes to mind first, as in, “Lord, thank you for another day,” or “I
love you, Lord, and I want to serve you,” or words to that effect.

            That way, we already dispose ourselves to be with him, and
from there, let’s continue to deal with him by carrying our ordinary
daily duties, which are a vital part of God’s will for us, and by
having recourse to a variety of acts of piety, like mental prayer,
spiritual reading, going to Mass and receiving Holy Communion, etc.

            These acts of piety will keep our intimacy with God even
as we get immersed with the things of the world. And far from
desensitizing us from world affairs, they actually would sharpen our
perception of things, and would give us the proper impulses and
motives for our involvement in these mundane concerns. Let’s disabuse
ourselves from the fear that piety undermines our responsibilities in
the world.

            Of course, God will always be a mystery. But instead of
being restrained and turned off by it, his mysteriousness and
ineffability should, in fact, draw us more to him. It’s only in
heaven, our final abode, that we can see him face to face. But now, we
have to be led by faith, hope and charity that will always have their
share of lights and shadows.

Faithful but always innovative

THIS is what we have to follow in life, a kind of law to
guide us in our earthly sojourn. We have to make it an attitude that
should take root in our system and that later on would grow the
appropriate skills and habits.

            We need to be faithful because there ultimately can be
only one purpose in our life. And that is nothing other than to know,
love and serve God, as our catechism tells us so clearly, and to love
everyone else, regardless. We are made for loving. That’s the design
our Creator has given us. We should not alter that design. We have to
be faithful to it.

            But we also need to be innovative, constantly innovative,
in fact. And that’s simply because we have the notorious tendency to
fall into routine, complacency and lukewarmness, which is the silent,
steady and treacherous process of dying of the spirit, our true life
principle.

            If the spirit dies, we would be at best a living dead, a
most radical contradiction we can have. And our spirit dies when it
separates itself from its origin who is God. This is a truth that we
need to be reminded of very often, since we always tend to take it for
granted. Put bluntly, we cannot live as we ought without God.

            That is why Christ gave us this indication: “Every scribe
who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder
who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” (Mt
13,52)

            We need to know how to blend the traditional and the
innovative, the old and the new, the absolute and the relative, the
more or less stable culture and the appropriate passing fads.

            In a higher level, we need to know how to put into an
organic whole the sacred and the mundane, the faith and the sciences,
arts and the technologies, the eternal and the temporal aspects of our
life, etc.

            Given the naked reality on the ground, we need to examine
and question the status quo of our life many times, since we tend to
do well at the beginning of any endeavor, then start to deteriorate as
we go along, until we end up badly.

            This has always been our lot and we should not be
surprised by it anymore. And much less should we feel helpless about
it, since there are many things we can do to renew ourselves
continually, neutralizing the bad effects of our complacency, if not
taking advantage of it to produce a greater virtue.

            This latter case can happen if we have the proper faith
and attitude. As St. Paul would put it, “For when I am weak, then I am
strong.” (2 Cor 12,10) With Christ, death itself can give rise to our
resurrection to eternal life, our final victory.

            Among the things that we can do to counter our tendency to
get accustomed to things and to fall victim to the desensitizing
effect of complacency, routine and lukewarmness are the daily effort
to make a good examination of conscience, a monthly recourse to a day
of recollection, and a yearly spiritual exercise called a closed
retreat.

            These are good occasions to look more closely into how our
spiritual and moral life has been faring, and to see, in a manner of
speaking, what parts of our spiritual and moral life need to be
cleaned up, oiled, or perhaps changed, revised or reengineered to
adapt to changing circumstances.

            We need to hone up our desire to do these things because
given again our weaknesses, we usually do not like to them. We should
not forget that we like to enjoy more than to exert effort. Laziness
and comfort-seeking is a legacy of our fallen nature.

            These exercises can actually bring us to an indescribable
sense of adventure, since we will realize sooner or later that we
there are many new things that are truly helpful to us and are waiting
for us to discover. These new things would give us the sensation that
we are flowing with the times, not stuck at a certain corner of time
or a certain mould of culture.

            We will soon discover that we have many more potentials
that are just waiting to be tapped. These exercises help us in
unleashing these potentials and putting them to optimal use and
effectiveness for our own good and the good of all, and all for the
glory of God.

            Yes, we have to discover our personal formula to follow
this law of how to be faithful and at the same time innovative.