Let’s never be just by ourselves

THAT’S how we should be. To simply be by ourselves is actually an anomaly. As persons, endowed with intelligence and will, with the capacity to know and to love, we are meant to relate ourselves with others—with God, first, and then with everybody and everything else. 

 Thus, a point in the Catechism of the Catholic Church clearly states that, “being in the image of God, the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone.” (357) 

 The Catechism explains further, shedding light on the difference between a something and a someone. 

 The human person who is a someone and not just a something is “capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons. 

 “And he is called by grace to a covenant with his Creator, to offer him a response of faith and love that no other creature can give in his stead.” 

 A person is an individual who is always in relation with others. He simply cannot be on his own. His life, his growth and maturity, his capacity to resist temptations and to handle his weaknesses well would depend on his relation with God and with others. 

 Since we are made in the image and likeness of God, we as persons must somehow reflect also the perpetual relation within the three persons in one God. We are meant to be taken up, with God's grace, in that Trinitarian relation of knowing and loving one another. 

 That's why Christ told us in no unclear terms that the greatest commandment we ought to follow is to love God with all our might, and the second greatest is to love our neighbor. 

 We need to train ourselves to be always mindful and thoughtful of the others. In this way, we avoid confining ourselves to our own world which definitely will not be the real world, because it would be a world of pure subjectivism, detached from the objective world outside of ourselves. 

 We have to be both mindful and thoughtful, because this is what is proper to us. If we fail to cultivate these traits, we actually would be harming our very own humanity, aborting our road to human maturity, not to mention, the fullness of Christian life. 

 We need to be mindful because we have to know what’s going around us. We should never be aloof and indifferent. We have to be aware not only of things and events that are taking place, whether near or far, but also and most especially of persons, starting with the one right beside us. 

 And not only should we be mindful. We also need to be thoughtful. We should think ahead of how things are developing and of what we can do to help shape their evolution. Life is always a work in progress, and there are goals, the ultimate and the subordinate, to reach. We should not get stuck with the here and now. 

 We also should learn to read the signs of the times and to prepare ourselves for whatever indications or warnings they are giving us. This way we put ourselves in condition to influence the flow of things, and to somehow already fashion the future. In this way, we extricate ourselves from our own subjective world and get to grapple with the objective reality.

Harmonizing our life’s different dimensions

IT’S obvious that we have to contend with the many aspects and dimensions of our life—the natural and the supernatural, the temporal and the eternal, the material and the spiritual, etc. We cannot deny that very often we see them competing or even in conflict with each other. 

 We, therefore, need to tackle the challenge and the complicated task of how to harmonize them in such a way that we can achieve what we may call as unity of life that pursues the proper and ultimate goal of our life. 

 Said in another way, we have to find a way of how we can live our spiritual and supernatural dimension of our life with naturalness as we go through our daily activities and concerns. The art and skills that are appropriate for this need should be learned and adopted as early as possible. 

 Definitely, this challenge and task would demand a lot of requirements from us. But to be sure, we can say that the basic requirement is for us to be fully identified with Christ, “the perfect God and the perfect man” (perfectus Deus, perfectus homo). 

 He is the very personification of how to integrate the different aspects of our life so we can achieve a certain consistency and continuity that would pursue the ultimate goal of our life. 

 In this regard, we cannot overemphasize the need for us to have regular time for prayer and avail of a plan of continuing formation so that our relation with Christ would really become alive and in a way that can effectively guide us in our daily activities. 

 With Christ, we would know how to live naturalness as we pursue our supernatural goal in the middle of the world. It has something to do with how to handle our human condition considering what we ought to be and what we are at the moment. Fact is, we have a supernatural goal, nothing less than to be united with God, which we have to pursue in the context of our human and natural world. 

 Naturalness is about how to mix the spiritual and material dimensions of our life, our personal and social aspects, and other elements in our life that, given the way we are, appear to compete with each other. How to integrate and harmonize them is the task of naturalness. 

 Naturalness is a very active affair, lived day to day, moment to moment, as we grapple with the continuous flow of our concerns. It’s the front man who does the dirty job of the bigger virtues of discretion, prudence and ultimately charity, the foot soldier who does the hand-to-hand combat, the peddler who does the door-to-door selling. 

 It has to know when to push and when to pull, what to say and show and what to be quiet about and hide. Obviously, it has to follow a game plan, with a clear goal in mind and a detailed knowledge of all the elements it has to contend with. 

 It has to know when to be active and when to be passive, when to be aggressive and when to be patient and tolerant. Of course, in our spiritual life, these elements while initially contrasting, can be blended and lived simultaneously, obviously as an effect of grace and our cleverness. 

 It also has to know how to project oneself to the future, given the data of the present and of the past. It has to learn how to relate history and current events with eternity. It should know how to connect the mundane with the sacred.

Our morality depends on our spirituality

IT’S quite clear that the way we think, speak, react and behave in general is determined by the way we are. This is somehow encapsulated in that Latin expression: “agere sequitur esse” which means that how a thing acts, functions or behaves is fundamentally determined by what it is—its nature or essence. It means that actions reveal the inner nature of a being. 

 In short, we can say that our actions reflect our character. In our case, since we are not purely material beings but more of a spiritual one—given the fact that the spirit is one that gives life, not our bodily dimension—we can conclude that the quality of our behavior depends on the quality of our spirituality. 

 Yes, our Catholic teaching affirms that our morality is intrinsically dependent on our spirituality. That’s simply because, to put it bluntly, our moral life is not merely a set of rules but a response to God’s call. It’s a moral life that is rooted in faith, grace, and that call of God for us to be his image and likeness, i.e., to be holy as God himself is holy. 

 The morality that is proper to us can only be achieved if our human acts are ordered toward God by following his will. That is why, Christ who is the fullness of the revelation of God to us and who offers us “the way, the truth and the life,” clearly told his disciples and us that if we truly love him, we should keep his commandments. (cfr. Jn 14,15) 

 The “way, truth and life” Christ offers us provides us with all the means we need to keep our true identity and dignity as children of God. These are means that can tackle whatever conditions and circumstances we can find ourselves in, that can convert all situations, including the worst sufferings we can encounter in our life, into a path to be with God, to achieve the ultimate end of our life which is our holiness and redemption. 

 In other words, God is always with us, guiding us, protecting us, helping us in all our needs. That is what God’s providence is all about. We need to be aware of this basic truth of our life so we can live our life the way proper to our true identity as God’s children. 

 We have to be wary of certain questionable theories about human morality that would reduce it to mere utility, subjective preference, empirical observation or human autonomy. These theories cut our morality from its true source who is God and his law and grace. These theories fail to account for the spiritual dimension of the person we are, and would unavoidably lead to forms of relativism and the denial of intrinsic evils. 

 Thus, we can say that to have a good moral sense is none other than having an abiding awareness that all our human acts, starting with our thoughts and desires, and then our words and deeds, should be good in the sense that they ought to be inspired and oriented toward nothing less than love for God and for others. 

 That’s why St. Paul once said in his praise of charity (love of God): “If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 

 “And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. 

 “And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profits me nothing.” (1 Cor 13,1-3)