Shaping the future

If we want to see the future now, what we have to do is to
look at our youth today. Yes, the youth indeed hold the key to what is
to come. How they are now determines to a certain extent the character
of the world in the next generation. And so we need to see to it that
our young ones receive the proper formation now.

            This is the challenge we, the elders, have. Preparing the
youth for the future is a task that is becoming more exciting, more
daunting, precisely because of the complicated issues that practically
wrap the world today.

            As recent Popes have been saying for some time now, the
world ethos today seems to be saturated with what is more technically
known as moral relativism. It’s an attitude, a mentality, and even a
lifestyle and culture that banishes any moral absolutes, while making
tolerance an absolute law to follow.

            It ultimately boils down to denying the existence of God,
and to the belief that things just depend completely on us. So,
morality or what is to be considered good or bad would just be a
matter of opinions, consensus, and would just be based on such
criteria as practicality, popularity, convenience, and the like.

            In the end, we are making ourselves our own God. We deny
that we are creatures, that our existence is something given and
received, not self-generated. We deny that we need to be with God
always, to put our mind and heart on him.

            With this mindset, a good part of the world, especially
the more developed Western part, has gone to the extent of legalizing
abortion, mercy-killing, same-sex marriage, etc.

            If we are not careful, this scourge is going to enter our
own country also. There are already clear signs. The RH Law, touted
Divorce bill that some groups are pushing, the same-sex marriage buzz
that we hear around—these are symptoms of an emerging moral confusion
that threatens to be made part of our law and culture.

            We have to give due attention to our youth today,
equipping them with the means that would help them tackle the great
responsibility before them. I was happy to learn that a big group of
young people went to a UN conference sometime ago and made their
voices heard. They were complaining about a document, still in the
making, that contained precisely questionable moral positions. That's
a good sign.

            In fact, we need to reclaim the original meaning of
morality, human sexuality, marriage, etc., in order to help the youth
extricate themselves from the elaborate spin used by those with the
mindset of moral relativism.

            Caring for the youth is no easy task at all. My own
experience with dealing with young college students for many years
indicates that they need abiding attention, a lot of patience and
understanding, a good amount of flexibility and creativity, and at the
same time, an unwavering hold on the faith and the doctrines that go
with it.

            Each one has to be handled in a very personal way. Away
with putting them in boxes and branding and stereotyping them. Once
this personal relationship is established, then things can be expected
to go far.

            The young people need constant encouragement. They
sometimes strike me as toddlers who are still learning to walk
properly—in the moral and spiritual life. They can be up one moment,
and down the next moment. But they have a lot of energy to go on.

            We just have to make sure that they are given the solid
dose of formation in all its aspects—human, spiritual, doctrinal,
apostolic and professional. We have to make sure that these aspects
are properly integrated through the impulse of a genuine love for God
and for others, because only then can they acquire a life and
creativity of their own.

            Caring for the youth actually never stops. It's not just
one stage in a life-long process. We just have to make it clear to
them that our life requires continuing formation, continuing
conversions and renewals.

            In their weak moments or when they are down, we have to be
quick to re-motivate them, showing them new horizons and strong
reasons to hope. We have to show them the way, getting practical
ourselves and not just remaining in the theories.

            We should try to adapt ourselves to them, and if possible
to speak their language, without abdicating our role as elders and
teachers. In the end, we can only help them properly if we ourselves
take care of own spiritual and moral lives. We can't give what we
don't have.

God and leadership

AS social beings, we will always need leaders to bring us
to our common good. We therefore need to choose leaders with the
proper qualities. And this means that they have the proper
understanding of what our common good is in all its aspects—from the
temporal to the eternal, from the material to the spiritual, from the
immediate to the ultimate, etc.

            We should stay away from the way of choosing our leaders
simply on the basis of popularity, wealth or technical skills. While
these have their objective value and should be given their due
consideration, we have to understand that they cannot be the beginning
and end of leadership. We need to go beyond them.

            We have to say this now since our current world culture
seems to be practically at the mercy of these criteria that at best
are only secondary and instrumental. We have to outgrow this kind of
mindset.

            Leadership has God not only in its center and core, but
also, in a manner of speaking, in every pore of its being. Without
God, or ignoring him, or simply giving him token consideration would
make any idea of leadership hollow. It may manage to make a lot of
sound and fury, but it would be inherently infirm, certainly doomed to
failure sooner or later.

            Its bravery would simply be bravado, its wisdom and
prudence cunning, its victories pyrrhic. Its vision can never be total
and with the right hierarchy of values. It will be biased, distorted,
deceitful. It will not be able to tell everything that we need to know
and do.

            It will shun away from sacrifice or anything that would
need some amount of pain that would be necessary. And when the
unavoidable problems and troubles come due to our fragile human
condition, it hardly would have any resource to tackle them.

            We need to explode the myth that giving God the primary
role in the pursuit of leadership would simply be a drag, an
unnecessary element, or that it is impractical, irrelevant, undoable.
Or that it would just confine us to the spiritual and supernatural and
desensitize us from the mundane, etc.

            This kind of reasoning can only reflect a certain lack of
faith and a lazy thinking. These actually are the basic problems we
have at hand. We need to do something about this predicament by
showing that we as persons need some amount of faith and that we
should try our best to go all the way in our thinking and reasoning.

            We should avoid being led simply by what our senses
perceive, nor even what our intelligence can discern. Again, while
these are always necessary, they are in need of a higher source of
knowledge and stimulus that can only come from faith.

            Our act of faith, which we do one way or another, should
get engaged with an objective faith that comes from God himself, our
Creator and Father, who continues to govern us through his providence.
Our act of faith should not just be a matter of what is empirical,
convenient, intellectually stimulating and the like.

            This objective faith is not a fantasy that can be made up
by anyone depending on how a person is. It’s something that can be
known because even if God is so supernatural that we he will always be
a mystery to us, he is also very close to us. In fact, he is in the
most intimate part of our existence as well as being all around us.

            Besides, he has revealed himself to us in full by sending
his Son to us, Jesus Christ, who left us with his word, his
sacraments, his Church. He has left us with his real presence in the
Eucharist.

            If we would just have the proper disposition of faith that
comes together with hope and charity, we can always connect ourselves
with him, and somehow get to know his will and ways not only in a
generic way, but also in a concrete and specific way.

            Thus, leaders should be men and women of faith, of genuine
piety, who know how to cruise in the material and spiritual world, in
the temporal and the eternal, in the mundane and the sacred.

            True leaders should be able to lead everyone ultimately to
God making use of our natural conditions. They should be able to go
beyond our many human conditionings, not by avoiding or nullifying
them which would be quixotic, but by making use of them by the power
of God.


            God and leadership should be together!

The cultural battleground

WE need to be aware of this human need. We have to take
care of our culture. If we want to grow and develop as authentic human
beings, culture is both unavoidable and indispensable in our life.

            Can we really say that we are conscious of our duties and
responsibilities toward our culture? Do we know what are involved in
this task? In our life's continuing struggle for meaning, culture is
one of the main fronts to attend to.

            A cursory look around would indicate that there's hardly
any deliberate effort to take care of our culture. It is somehow
presumed that we have a culture, but we are quite ignorant of how
caring for it has to be carried out.

            First of all, we need to understand its nature and
character. It has both objective and subjective dimensions, spiritual
and material aspects, global and local scope, etc. More importantly,
it has both passive and active parts, and we need to know how to
handle its many requirements.

            We cannot be totally passive in our attitude toward it,
though we cannot help but be receptive to it in our daily life. That's
because culture is like the air we breathe. This time, though, we need
to realize that we also have a role to play in creating that air, or
at least in purifying it and putting it in conditions proper to us.

            We just cannot allow culture to grow on its own. It needs
our intervention. We have to understand that culture, like everything
else in our life, is both a gift we receive and a project we have to
do and develop.

            Especially these days when the pace of development is
getting faster and more complex, there's now a greater need for us to
take fuller responsibility over it. We have to do things in such a way
that we can say we make our own culture, even if culture also to a
certain extent makes us.

            Our problem now is that we seem to be falling for a
mindless lifestyle of activism, guided mainly by values that are not
deeply rooted enough on our true human dignity. In fact, this
reference of what our true human dignity is has become impertinent to
many people.

            For many of us, the main principle that shapes our
lifestyle seems to be pragmatism, and all its cohorts—popularity or
fame, wealth and power, vanity and pride, etc. The inputs of faith and
religion, so indispensable in figuring out who we really are, that's
supposed to be basis of our culture, are hardly considered.

            We need to correct this anomaly. We have to dismantle the
so-called tyranny of relativism that a priori disposes anything that
has to do with religion. That's unfair. That's completely
undemocratic.

            With this defective attitude, we cannot help but generate
a thoroughly secularized culture that is allergic to spiritual and
supernatural realities. That would compromise the flowering of a
culture that is proper to us.

            That is why these days, many people find it hard to relate
what they are doing professionally, socially, politically, etc., to
God. Their activities do not bring them closer to God. In fact, the
reverse is true. Their activities bring them farther away from God.

            There ensues a growing awkwardness in our relation with
God. Religion becomes frozen in some formalistic rituals and customs,
emptied of its vital substance.

            With that predicament, what can we expect? For sure, the
temptations to deception, injustice, etc., cannot be avoided. The
stronger ones in worldly terms simply dominate the others. Our
weaknesses, like our laziness and our concupiscence, cannot be
properly addressed and healed. They tend to fester.

            We need to create a culture that is proper to us as
persons and ultimately as children of God. It is a culture that
embraces both the spiritual and material dimensions of our life, our
temporal affairs and eternal goal. Nothing less is needed.

            For this, we need to help one another. The creation and
development of culture is a universal concern. It has to involve all
of us. Thus, we need to be more aware of what we call here as the
cultural front of our life's struggles. We should avoid being
indifferent to it.

            At the moment, we can ask for example if we know how to
place this new phenomenon of the Internet technology in the pursuit of
developing a culture proper to us. Has our fascination for it led us
closer to God and to the others? Has it built up more solidarity,
justice, and charity?