Needed: villains and rebels

I DON’T know whether it’s a mark of the so-called post-modernism that we now seem to have a reversal of roles and values. Those considered before as heroes are now regarded as villains or aliens from space.

Topics considered before as taboos can now be talked about quite openly.
While those routinely brought up before to keep the atmosphere of goodness are now seen to be politically incorrect, or a social blunder.

Thus, it would appear that it is not good nowadays to talk about prayer, holiness, discipline and things of that sort. Even the most educated and most open-minded among us today refuse to talk about these matters.

You’re being conservative if you talk that way, rigid, narrow-minded; a traditionalist still trapped in the Stone Age when you’re supposed to flow with the times; a passé, a has-been, an anachronism.

Worse, you’re an absolutist when now what is politically correct is to be open to anything and not to consider anything as intrinsically good or bad. No such thing, they claim.

If you ask me, what we have here is a society sinking in the quicksands of
relativism. That’s the mentality that considers everything to be relative. Nothing is absolute, including this statement, which is already a contradiction.

Someone mentioned that post-modernism, a.k.a. relativism, is precisely just
having any opinion in the present, cut off from the past and from the future, orphaned from any other consideration than what one understands as practical here and now.

Post-modernism or relativism wants to live and work alone, not accountable to anyone nor to anything. It’s simply unique, unrepeatable, unclassifiable. It’s quite homeless and rootless. It has no higher principle than what is useful or popular now.

It just flies with any wind, and rides on any fashion. It’s quite capricious and promiscuous. It hardly knows anything about fidelity and loyalty. It doesn’t want to be disciplined, nor to be burdened by having to obey any authority. It’s its own authority. Everything starts and ends with it.

Sorry if I sound going a bit ballistic here. But talking recently to some teenaged children and parents strongly leads me to tell them to be villains and rebels in their present circumstances, filled with elements of relativism and post-modernism.

Teenaged children need to be liberated from their proneness to laziness, frivolity, disorder, spur-of-the-moment and inconsiderate decisions, unchastity, changing moods, inconsistent behavior, and a long etcetera of objectively dangerous if not irregular conduct.

They have to be helped to discipline themselves, acting as villains and rebels to themselves first, and to anything and anybody in their environment that keeps them in their unstable adolescent ways.

In this regard, parents play an important role. As primary educators of their children, they have to be active in forming their children properly. In this regard, I call on fathers especially to exercise their fatherhood decisively.

The problem we often have is that fathers now seem to be increasingly averse to exert forcefulness in bringing up their children precisely in the latter’s most tricky stage of growing up.

Many times I get the impression that there are two mothers, instead of a father and a mother. Fathers fail to play their role properly of leading and managing the family, of seeing to it that children follow rules, keep certain standards, pursue clearly set-out goals.

They are afraid to play villains to their children. Sometimes, many times, this is a necessity. We have to understand that fatherly forcefulness is always a function of real love to children.

“What son is there whom the father does not correct,” the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us. (12,7)

We have to remember that everyone needs both hard and gentle elements to
mature. The mothers usually supply the soft elements, always accommodating, full of understanding and affection, finding excuses, etc.

But the fathers have to be the source of discipline. And for this they should be villains to their children at crucial times. And they have to talk about God, the commandments and what are truly good for the children. Otherwise, we’ll have a mess.

Dark Night of the Soul

THAT’S the title of a lyrical poem by the old Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross. There he describes a soul’s progress toward union with God through Christ’s cross.

The expression now largely means any spiritual dryness and ascetical difficulty, to the point that one may feel abandoned by God. It has resurrected lately because of some writings of Mother Teresa, who confessed she did not feel God’s presence for a long time in spite of her efforts.

People are asking how someone close to God can fail to feel God’s presence? Some others have used this development to discredit Mother Teresa, the
Church, if not the whole Christian faith.

This phenomenon is actually quite common among saints and holy men and women. It can happen to anyone of us. The quintessence of this experience is Christ himself on the cross.

In spite of his permanent union with his Father—there is no greater union than that between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit—he said: “Eloi, Eloi, lamma sabacthani? Which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” (Mk 15,34)

Christ is both God and man, one divine person with two natures, human and divine. It is the inadequacy of the human nature to fully correspond to the divine that this tension and conflict can be felt. And man, called to a supernatural end, is not exempt from this.

But God actually never abandons anyone. In spite of our wretchedness, we cannot be totally separated from Him. Only in hell can we have that “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed,” as the Catechism teaches us. (1033)

That is the objective reality about the matter. The problem arises when we consider its subjective aspect, or how one person feels in his spiritual life.

In essence God is present in everything, and especially in every person who is created in his image and likeness. He is actually everywhere. Of course, his presence in us takes place in different ways.

On our part, we have something that enables us to have God in us in a way most proper to us as his creatures, as persons and as his children. It is our heart in grace. The Catechism teaches:

“The heart is the place of encounter, because as image of God we live in relation: it is the place of covenant.” (2563)

In the “dark night of the soul,” in spite of the objective presence of God in us as well as our objective capacity to have him in our heart, we get the sensation, even the conviction, that we don’t have him.

This is due to many reasons. First, there are the limitations and the weaknesses of our human nature to cope with the “requirements,” so to speak, of the supernatural life to which we are called.

If we do not know how to handle these natural limitations because of pride or vanity, we will get the sensation that we are without God.

This is made worse by our sins, defects and mistakes, which can become stable vices, blinding us further to God’s presence in us. When we do not seek divine mercy, not only do we feel lost and separated. We can even hate God.

Besides, God allows this experience to happen for many reasons—to test if we really believe and love him, to purify and strengthen us, to conform us increasingly to him by way of spiritualizing and supernaturalizing our faculties.

Our tendency is to tie our faith with material and sensible factors, with the initial thrill of novelty. One way of maturing our faith and of detaching it from mainly human and natural considerations is to experience the “dark night of the soul.”

Many saints who experienced this had to do things with greater faith and love for God, often going against the grain of their personal preferences, immersed in all sorts of suffering, that become the touchstones of faith and love.

The “dark night of the soul”? We should not be afraid of it. We should welcome it.

Lay spirituality

THERE are yet many obstacles to be hurdled, yet many things to be done before we in general can have a good understanding, let alone live the very important role the laity plays in the Church and in the world.

At the moment, we don’t have to look far to see how gravely misunderstood the lay people are. They are largely seen as second-rate citizens if
not pariahs in the Church, unavoidably immersed in the dirty mundane things of
the world.

They are also regarded as some kind of accessories to the clergy. It would
seem that their status only acquires a whiff of dignity when they act as assistants and servers to bishops and priests.

For them to have some semblance of goodness and holiness, they are expected to keep distance from the world as much as possible, if not to hate it. They are pressured to fit into a certain religious mentality, doing churchy chores, that tends to suffocate their true lay and secular character.

Whatever may be the causes of this sad phenomenon, the fact is crystal clear that we are still light-years away from the ideal insofar as the role of the laity in the Church and in the world is concerned.

The laity is supposed to be an integral and essential part of the Church. As such, they, like the bishops, priests, religious men and women, have the same calling to sanctity and to the apostolate in ways proper to their condition.

They should not feel nor should they be treated as if they are just a baggage in the Church, or merely a resource to be taken advantage of, as in being used as source for money, or treated as the clergy’s long arm.

They are as much the Church as bishops, priests and the religious are. They
are not merely in the Church, but the Church herself together with the clergy and the religious, lifted to her supernatural nature and intrinsically involved in her mission.

Another thing that should be made clear is that the Church is not just some
human social structure. The Church is the people of God, the mystical body of Christ, communion with Christ and everybody else in Christ.

This sublime nature of the Church has to be understood and consciously and freely lived by all of us, depending on what role we play, whether as clergy, religious or lay.

In this tricky matter, we with God’s grace have to help one another. We should not reduce the Church as a social phenomenon, though it certainly has social manifestations. Its supernatural character should always be upheld and defended.

Though everyone has different duties, everyone should also realize, whether clergy, religious or lay, that he forms an indivisibly organic unity with everybody else with Christ as head in the Holy Spirit.

We just have to learn to relate with one another properly, knowing how to
keep the mutual need for one another, while avoiding confusion as in clericalizing the laity or laicizing the clergy.

There unfortunately are indications these irregularities are taking place in some areas. The Popes and the Vatican in general have issued guidelines in this regard. These should be religiously followed to avoid perverting the Church.

But what is most important is to vigorously promote what may be called as
lay spirituality. This is the authentic lay empowerment many people are talking about. This equips lay people with the correct knowledge and appropriate ways to live their role in the Church and the world properly.

This lay spirituality can mean many things. For one it can mean having a
right theology about the world in general, a right understanding of freedom and respect for the autonomy of temporal affairs, etc.

The link from the earthly to the sublime, the material to the spiritual, the temporal to the eternal, should be shown to be very practicable. Everyone, especially the lay people, should be assured of this reality.

The Church’s social doctrine and the more basic Christian anthropology are
indispensable in developing a true lay spirituality. There has to be massive and continuing catechesis about these truths.