A healthy superiority complex

WE, of course, should be simple and humble, meek and with
fondness to pass unnoticed. We are in fact told, if we care to follow
Christ, to deny ourselves and carry the cross. We should not seek
self-assertion and self-glorification.

            As St. Paul would put it: “We have become, and are now,
the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things.” (1 Cor 4,13)
That’s how we have to look at ourselves if we want to be true to
Christ. We may just be a bundle of ciphers in the many departments of
life, but if we have Christ before all them, the more zeroes we have,
the greater we would become in dignity and stature.

            Yet, despite all these Christian indications, we have to
learn to be bold to know the truth, as well as to spread it as widely
and as persistently as possible, and especially to defend it, when
attacked, which seems to be the trend these days, and when charity
demands we do.

            In this, we should not be afraid and hesitating, but
rather willing to take on the challenge, together with all
inconveniences or sufferings that may be involved, convinced that such
sufferings would be a suffering with Christ and in Christ. Besides,
Christ clearly told us to be as clever as serpents while remaining as
innocent as doves.

            True, we may be the refuse and the offscouring of the
world, but we have the truth from God, and we have the duty to
proclaim, spread and defend it. We have to learn to carry out that
duty always with charity that has its own elegance and eloquence,
naturalness and forcefulness.

            This boldness and fearlessness with and in Christ is the
healthy superiority complex we are talking about here. And this is no
gratuitous claim since there’s solid basis for this. First of all,
because God always gives us the grace for this purpose and he gives it
to us in abundance.

            In this, St. Paul reassures us: “God is able to provide
you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have
enough of everything and may provide in abundance for every good
work.” (2 Cor 9,8)

            The life and missionary work of St. Paul himself lend
credence to these words. We need to engrave this Pauline assurance
into our mind and hearts, making it a guiding conviction in our
thoughts, words and deeds. If we have to have an attitude, I believe
this has to be it.

            Especially these days when we are faced with many
hot-button issues that deftly mix truths and lies, good and evil, not
to mention, bear an openly hostile attitude toward the Christian
faith, we need men and women who can expose and explode the many
subtle sophistries involved in the arguments.

            I was just amazed that in a recent interview of a US
presidential candidate, for example, the interviewer had the temerity
to tell the candidate, a Catholic who tried to be consistent with his
faith, that he should go beyond his faith and stick to what science
would indicate with respect to when human life begins.

            I was happy to learn that the candidate told his
interviewer that he makes his faith the basis of his politics and
everything else in his life, and that science has borne out his
belief. That is the boldness that is needed these days.

            After all, if we would really analyze the whole argument,
it is the faith that has the first and last word of what is real and
not real, what is true and false, what is good and evil, moral and
immoral.

            It’s not our man-made sciences, though they can obviously
reinforce the faith and help us to discover more things about our
faith. Our sciences can only be the handmaid of our faith, not the
other way around.

            Today’s generation is what may be described by Christ
himself as a “perverse generation,” sunk in a lot of rationalized
errors and immoralities that are sustained by cleverly crafted
ideologies, sanitized soundbites and blinding and deafening rhetoric,
plus a lot of money and political clout.

            We need leaders and men and women who have that healthy
superiority complex to show and convey the truth in season and out of
season, who can drown evil with an abundance of good, without being
cowed by the tremendous difficulties, resistance, insults and mockery.

            If we pray, offer sacrifices, study our doctrine well,
develop the virtues, have recourse to the sacraments, wage interior
struggle, etc., we can have this healthy superiority complex so much
needed these days.

A working spirituality needed

YES, indeed! We need to have a functioning spirituality,
not just a theoretical one, an armchair type of religiosity that´s
rich only with words and ideas, but very poor in action. Regardless of
our condition in the world, we should have a genuine spirituality that
consistently nourishes our spiritual life whatever the circumstances
in our life may be.

            Our problem is that even among those who are supposed to
be ¨spiritual¨ already because of their status in life—like priests
and others supposedly active in Church affairs—there is so much
ignorance, confusion, error, incompetence, inconsistency, pretension,
hypocrisy, laziness, complacency in this regard.

            Part of a working spirituality should be a kind of
mechanism, embedded into our personal system, that continually
addresses these dangers all of us are exposed to and even prone to.

            To achieve this spirituality, we have to devise a
realistic plan of spiritual life, consisting of practices of piety,
well-defined yet flexible to varying circumstances, that would help us
at least to stay in touch with God even as we get immersed in the
things of the world.

            We should already outgrow any doubt, fear or allergy to
this possibility of us living with God. It´s amazing that even among
those expected to lead the way in spiritual life, these doubts and
fears still hold sway, thereby spreading an atmosphere of uncertainty
and a sense of impracticability insofar as spiritual life is
concerned.

            First, we have to be clarified about why there´s a need
for spirituality. There are many people who are not clear about this
reality of our life. They think we are just entirely or mainly
material beings, or simply cultural ones subject to certain
conditionings, and nothing more.

            We can get some ideas from St. Paul who once said, ¨May
the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly, and may your spirit and
soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ.¨ (1 Thes 5,23)

            In this Pauline description, man is pictured as composed
of ¨body¨ which is our corporeal and earthly condition, ¨soul¨ which
is our capacity to feel and know, and ¨spirit¨ which is what makes us
attracted and united to God and vivified by him.

            There may be a variety of other descriptions about the
structure and constituent composition of our being, but what should
not be ignored is that we have a spiritual ¨component,¨ so to speak,
that is integral and essential to our being. Yes, there can be
diversity in our ideas of spirituality, but in the end we have to
acknowledge its basic unity.

            And just as we have to take care of our body, of our
emotional, psychological and mental well-being, we also need to take
care—in fact, even greater care—of our spiritual life, since that is
what brings us to our human and Christian perfection. We have to put a
stop to the ignorance and indifference that commonly besets our
attitude toward our spiritual life.

            Using our Christian faith, we need to know the nature of
this spiritual life, what its important elements are, its
characteristics, its foundations and purpose, its functionings, etc.
Then we need to know how to develop it toward its full perfection.

            Again, for this, we already have in the course of
Christian history a vast array of spiritualities that can be useful to
us. We just have to mine this thick vein and rich ore of information.
With our new technologies, we have less reason not to know. What
simply is needed is the so-called ¨political¨ will, putting all our
faculties into the act.

            Imagine the wealth contained in the age of the Church
Fathers, to the monastic period, to the period of the mendicant orders
of St. Francis and St. Dominic, the post-Tridentine period dominated
by the Jesuits, and the post-Vatican II period up to the present!

            It´s a shame that in spite of this great wealth, the
general literacy of people on spirituality is way below the passing
grade. If ever there is some stirring of spirituality, it´s usually
found in confined and highly-localized places. It´s not yet
globalized. No wonder we are vulnerable to the many temptations of the
world that now are becoming systemic.

            We should realize the importance of some practices of
piety essential in any plan of spiritual life: mental prayer, Holy
Mass, communion, visit to the Blessed Sacrament, spiritual reading,
examination of conscience, holy rosary, confession, etc.

            Perhaps with the help of a spiritual director, we should
devise one fit for us, given our personal circumstances.

Our affective life

WE have to be more aware of this world of affectivity—its
nature, its workings, its need for management and development, etc. In
fact, it should be in the cross-hair, since we are now living in
hyper-emotional times. There’s a great need to educate our emotions,
affections and passions.

            We have to be wary of taking this concern for granted,
stuck in denial. The ballistic advances of our technologies have
super-stirred our feelings, emotions, hormones, urges, etc., such that
we are seeing more disturbing phenomena these days.

            The cases of extreme sadness and depression,
obsessions-compulsions, stress, and other aberrant forms of behavior,
if not vices and perversions, have increased. We are seeing a lot more
of drug addictions, dysfunctional and broken families, and mental
illnesses.

            Even in my normal run of hearing confessions and giving
spiritual direction to what I consider as regular people, I notice a
proliferation of emotional wounds, some deep and grave. I consider
these as fertile ground for worse things to develop.

            Frankly, it’s getting harder for me not to get affected
and to remain dry-eyed when I see even children and young boys and
girls manifesting signs of deep emotional anguish and torture due to a
variety of reasons and causes. They are not spared.

            This is not to mention that those who seem to have a
healthy affective life, humanly speaking, have it but without or with
hardly any relation to God and to things of God. Piety is often stiff,
because the proper feelings are absent.

            I think we have to understand that there is an
architectonic shift taking place in our world today. The great value
added in the area of technology has, sadly, not been matched by a
corresponding value added in the area of attitudes.

            Put bluntly, we seem to be getting sophisticated in our
technologies, but still quite primitive in our mentalities. In
biblical terms, it’s like putting “new wine into old wineskins.” New
wine should go with new wineskins.

            While before, it was enough to have a very general and
shallow knowledge of our affective world, now it would seem such
knowledge could be very dangerous.

            There’s a need, especially to parents, teachers, and to
people like me, priests, to know more about the affective life. There
are tricky, even treacherous areas when we start touching the
affective lives of people, and we need to master them.

            In the classical system, feelings rank low in importance,
rating far below that of our spiritual faculties—our intelligence and
will. Doubtless, there’s good reason for that. The problem is that
such system often tends to ignore our emotions completely. And that’s
criminal.

            Feelings and emotions, the world of our senses and
passions, are an integral part of our personhood, because we cannot be
without them. We have been designed by God to have them.

            Our Catechism teaches us that: “The passions are natural
components of the human psyche. They form the passageway and ensure
the connection between the life of the senses and the life of the
mind.” (1764)

            We should never forget this truth, not even to disparage
it, since as our Catechism again tells us: “Moral perfection consists
in man’s being moved to the good not by his will alone, but also by
his sensitive appetite, as in the words of the Psalm: ‘My heart and
flesh sing for joy to the living God.’” (1770)

            Our relation with God and with others should always
include our emotions. We just cannot leave them alone, letting them
evolve by themselves in any which way.

            We just have to learn how to attune and conform our
emotions to the ideals and standards of our Christian life. We have to
have a good understanding of what is healthy affective life and what
is not, and what causes and reinforces them.

            Besides, we need to know certain skills that are adapted
to the growing needs of how to effectively handle our feelings and
emotions so they keep in the proper orbit.

            It’s nice to know that some serious studies are being made
in this regard. Many of them are inspired and built upon the Christian
concept of man. This is a good development that needs to be fostered.
Their more certain findings should be widely spread out.

            We cannot deny the fact that there are also schools of
thought in this area that are not quite compatible with our Christian
faith. We have to be careful with them, and engage them in a
continuing dialogue to seek clarifications and focus on the objective
truths about our affective life.