WHILE it’s true that we have to
take care of the little
things in our life, we should not forget
that we are not meant to get
detained there. We should always relate
the little ordinary things in
our life to the big and ultimate purpose
of our life.
Christ himself somehow referred to
this point when he
said, “Whoever is faithful with very
little will also be faithful with
much, and whoever is dishonest with very
little will also be dishonest
with much.” (Lk 16,10)
With those words, Christ somehow
was relating and
connecting the little with the big
things in life. That is what we
should always do. We should avoid
getting entangled and lost in the
little things and forgetting the big and
more important things in our
life.
More specifically, we should not
mistake the means for the
end. Otherwise, we would also receive
the accusation Christ addressed
to the Pharisees and some leading Jews
of his time, who were entangled
with their own ideas of what is right
and wrong without referring them
to God.
“Woe to you, scribes and
Pharisees,” he said, “you pay
tithes of mint, dill and cumin, but you
have disregarded the weightier
matters of the law: justice, mercy, and
faithfulness. You should have
practiced the latter, without neglecting
the former. You blind guides!
You strain out a gnat but swallow a
camel.” (Mt 23,23-24)
This anomaly can happen to us when
in our confessions, for
example, we accuse ourselves only of our
failures to do our prayers,
to offer sacrifices, to attend some
daily Masses, etc., without
mentioning how we have fared in our
graver duty to do apostolate, to
Christianize our work and society in
general, to reach out to the poor
and the needy, to be forgiving of others
who may have wronged us, etc.
This is not to say that our
prayers, sacrifices, recourse
to the sacraments, etc., are not
important. They are, and they should
not be regarded as optional, as a matter
of fact. They are
indispensable too.
But if our failures in this
department do not have the
corresponding effects on the more
important aspects of Christian life,
there is reason to think that we are
just mistaking the means for the
end, the material for the spiritual, the
temporal for the eternal, the
natural for the supernatural.
We need to wake up from this
anomaly, because like the
Pharisees and the scribes of old, we
could justly be accused by Christ
to be hypocrites. And actually, many
people today can also see that.
We would simply be caring of the
externals without the internal, the
form and appearance without the
substance.
The example we can give to others
would show a certain
hollowness and artificiality. And many
people can detect that quite
easily, because this phenomenon, sad to
say, is getting common. Thus,
we can expect people to be turned off by
what they see in us.
They are now more familiar with how
hypocrisy and
artificiality look, how they sound, how
they smell. They are now more
skilled in sifting our words from our
deeds, the image from the real
McCoy. They can easily verify the
authenticity of our words and
actions.
To be able to connect the little
things to the big,
important things in our life is, of
course, no easy task. It requires
training, effort, self-discipline. It
will always need God’s grace
which we should always ask.
And given our human condition where
our development
involves different stages, let us hope
that we do not remain in the
kindergarten level in this respect, in
the amateur and dilettante
level. We have to aim at nothing less
than the mature and professional
level, where a certain consistency or
unity of life that is rooted on
God’s grace and on our constant effort,
is achieved.
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