From unbelief to belief

ST. Thomas, one the apostles. Yes, the doubting Thomas. Relish his words, “My Lord and my God!” They portray that dramatic, very sharp turn from unbelief to belief. May these words be also on our lips, always, and shot from a heart burning with faith and love, ever fresh and dripping with desire.

     

      We need to take care of our faith. We cannot take this duty for granted, especially now when the world is sinking in confusion and error as it distances itself farther from God.

     

      In many places in the world today, people are now legalizing and inculturating outright immoralities and perversions, rationalizing them as part of their human rights, their freedom, or as a gesture of tolerance on a multiplicity of preferences, etc.

     

      This is a big challenge for all Christian believers who want to be all-the-way consistent with their faith and with humanity itself, for the issues at hand are not just a matter of a particular religion but rather that of our common humanity.

     

      And the Christian faith is not meant only for a few. It is for all, though it obviously is not meant to be imposed on everyone. It has to be accepted knowingly, freely, lovingly.

     

      Its specificity precisely defines what is to be human, what is to be a real person, a creature and child of God. Its specificity goes beyond merely material categories as happens with our human sciences that measure things according to atoms, cells, tissues, wavelengths, or in social, economic or political terms.

      

      It enters the spiritual, comparing and distinguishing, as St. Paul once said, spiritual with spiritual (cfr 1 Cor 2,13), for in the spiritual world there are also good and true spirits, and the bad and fake ones. This is an aspect of reality that is still hardly known by most people.

     

      It’s a faith that is not invented by any man, but rather one revealed in its fullness by the Son of God who became man, Jesus Christ. It’s not just an accumulation of human or popular wisdom gathered through the ages. It is from above, from God. It is supernatural adapted to our nature that has been created in God’s image and likeness.

     

      The truths of faith go beyond natural effectiveness. They go beyond our concern for practicality, convenience, and other worldly and passing goals. They are what bring us to eternity, a yearning we have at the bottom of our heart.

     

      Faith also contains mysteries that are truths that go beyond our capacity to understand. They simply have to be believed, more than understood, even as they invite and stimulate us to study and understand them further, without ever fully comprehending them.

     

We need to have the proper attitude toward faith. We cannot treat it the way we handle the sciences and the arts. It requires humility, docility and trust. It requires an underlying belief, even if this belief is not very strong, that there is a supreme being who is over and above all of us and who is in control of everything in our life.

            From there we can start to study the doctrine of our faith, now carefully and authoritatively articulated by the Church’s teaching office that in turn is endowed with appropriate power by God himself through Christ.

            We have to realize that the doctrine of our faith is not just a set of words or theories, nor a system of ideas, an ideology made up of different principles, but rather and organic and life-giving set of truths that have to be accepted not only intellectually, but rather by the whole man. It’s meant to transform us radically, at our heart.

            It’s important that we get to have a good global picture of the nature and character of faith so we would also know how to receive, keep and develop it. Our usual problem is that we have a painfully reductive understanding of it, and so we tend to correspond inadequately to its demands and requirements.

            We also need to understand that for our faith to grow, it also has to be nourished by the other two theological virtues of hope and charity. These three—faith, hope and charity—actually always go together. The growth of each one of them can be caused by an impulse of the other two. Growing in the other virtues should come as a consequence.

            Lastly, we have to realize that faith grows through the sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist, because it’s through them that we receive Christ who precisely comes to redeem us. 

Daily with Christ

HOW to deal with Christ realistically in a day-to-day basis, or even moment-to-moment, is a challenge we have to face if we truly want to be consistent with our identity as Christian believers out to seek sanctity in the middle of the world.

We already know enough theory and doctrine about this aspect of Christian life. And now is the time to see how this ideal can be made real, how this truth of faith can be turned into life itself.

Of course, we cannot deny that we still need to catechize and evangelize about this truth of faith. This need can never be fully overcome. Let’s hope that more and more people can take up the duty to catechize and evangelize wherever their situations and circumstances can take them.

But together with that enormous task is the even more formidable effort to bring the doctrine into functioning reality. And we should never take this for granted. Much of the failure in evangelization actually stems from the scandal of the disparity between our words and our actions. We need to close, or at least, narrow the gap.

Far be it from us to be good only in words and intentions, but lagging way behind in deeds and behavior! Far be it from us to be Christian only in name or de iure, but not in concrete life or de facto!

We, first of all, have to remind ourselves that following Christ everyday, dealing with him moment to moment requires nothing less than real sacrifice, self-denial, carrying the cross. Christ himself already told us so, and he has shown it in deeds with his very own crucifixion and death.

We need to look for him, doing this earnestly and continually. It’s only when we look for him in the first place that we can aspire to find him, and once finding him, we can start to love and serve him.

We have to sharpen our sense of this need to look for him. We have to overcome our tendency to get contented with our own selves, our own ideas, our own goals. We should be wary of our tendency to be guided in life solely by our thoughts, if not simply by feelings, and then by the fads and trends around.

We have to dash that attitude by the simple realization that we are nothing without God, since God as our Creator is the very giver and keeper of our existence and everything else in it.

As giver and keeper of our existence, he is always in us and in everything. Not only that, he is also the maker of the nature of all things. Whenever we learn or discover something, we always have immediate reason to go to God, at least to thank him for what we have learned or discovered, and then later to figure out with him the purpose of our new knowledge and discovery.

This is how we can deal with Christ, the son of God who became man to reveal everything to us about God and about ourselves, in a day-to-day or even moment-to-moment basis. We have to be wary of cutting Christ out of

We have to be careful not to allow our mere feelings of joy and sense of purpose to dominate and lead us whenever we get to learn or discover something. This is the usual predicament we tend to fall into.

Instead of referring things to God, we make ourselves as the ultimate subject of any knowledge and discovery we make. This is ridiculous, since we would be distorting the reality of things, we would be making our own world.

If this goes uncorrected, the distortion can become systemic as it becomes part of our culture and can be articulated in various structures and institutions, social, political, economic, legal, etc.

We need to foster an abiding sense of recollection to be able to maintain the proper attitude and awareness of God and his will and ways even as we get immersed in our daily affairs.

And just like anything else that we like to accomplish, a certain plan, program or system is needed for us to be able to live in this way everyday. We need a time for serious prayer, we need to cultivate the art of presence of God, rectitude of intention, sanctification of our work.

We need to study the doctrine of our faith more thoroughly, develop virtues and avail of the sacraments. We have to learn how to use our time, organizing it in a way attuned to our need to deal with Christ daily.

Development and decadence

THESE two events seem to be pairing off more often than not these days. We can see the obvious and almost quantum leap in technological advances all over and the many amenities and advantages they bring, and yet we also see sizable areas afflicted and sinking in poverty.

That’s not all. Technological progress may bring some economic boom, but this latter growth many times is not evenly distributed. Aside from poverty, there is inequality and social injustice, the gap between the rich and poor widening, and worse, there is ignorance and confusion as well, in kinds and levels unknown before.

These is such thing now as an ignorance and confusion that pride themselves as an expression of enlightenment, liberation, and an affirmation of human rights and all that. In fact, it would appear that the line between truth and falsehood, good and evil, fair and unfair, etc., is all but erased.

That’s why we now have such thing as contraception, sterilization, abortion as part of women’s rights, and infidelity and the modern forms of promiscuity, now euphemistically termed as polyamory, as expressions of human freedom.

And this abnormality is affecting practically all levels of society. It’s not only the poor that are disadvantaged. The rich are too. Not only the uneducated, but also those with stratospheric academic credentials.

The world seems to be thrown into an ocean of theories, opinions, ideologies that are not anymore anchored on some absolute standards but rather on relativistic and highly changeable human preferences and consensus.

It’s now more a numbers game or who have the guns and the gold that would determine how we ought to develop. It’s now more a matter of who enjoys some clout over the others because he is smarter, more talented, more persuasive, etc.

It’s this ignorance and confusion that allows decadence to go with development, alerting us to be more careful about how to pursue our human progress, both individually and collectively.

We need to be more wary of this drift in world development, since our tendency is to give not only more attention but rather absolute reliance on the merely external and popular aspects, leaving behind the spiritual and supernatural dimensions of our life.

The trend seems to be that the determination of what is right and wrong, good and evil, true and false is not anymore a matter of consulting the very author and creator of the world. We just make them out ourselves.

Let’s try to remember what Christ said very clearly. “What does it a profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his own soul?” (Mt 16,26) Let’s never forget that the more important and the absolutely indispensable aspect of human progress and development is the salvation and perfection of our soul.

It’s in our spiritual soul, it’s in the way we think and aspire, it’s in what we really love and hold most dear, where the true state of our life is determined. It’s there where love, justice, genuine concern for one another, and their opposites, spring and flourish, and where their effects remain forever, either in heaven or hell.

The material, physical and external things only play a secondary and subsidiary role. They are mere means, occasions and manifestations of what we have inside. They come and go. They are not expected to last. We cannot bring them to heaven, nor to hell.

Our spiritual soul is what gives life to us. It’s the principle of life. The material cannot have life unless infused with a spiritual soul. And we need to remember that the life of our spiritual soul, which is a created soul, comes from God and needs to remain in God.

Otherwise, our soul will have a life simply of its own, one that is not meant for it, since it will just nourish itself with transient principles, not the eternal one in whose image and likeness we have been created.

For sure, these transient sources can offer many elements of good that can mesmerize us, and we may get contented with them. But they don’t last. They don’t actually satisfy the deepest yearning of our soul. But to realize this, we need faith, which is abundantly given to us but which we need to receive and act on.

In short, to have a genuine, integral human development and progress, all of us, leaders and followers, need to be more sensitive to our true spiritual needs—our need for God and everything he tells us through his doctrine and sacraments now entrusted to the Church. Otherwise, decadence will corrupt our development.