Communion in the digital age

NOVEMBER, with its liturgical celebration of the Solemnity of All Saints and the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, reminds all of us that we are meant to live in communion with one another and with God.

This is an essential and defining element of our human nature and condition. We are not meant solely to be individual persons, but also to be social beings whose lives are by nature linked with one another not only physically, socially or politically, but also spiritually. We are meant to enter into each other´s lives.

That´s how it is, and we need to be more aware of this truth and work it out, because, frankly, this aspect is often ignored, not understood, and obviously not pursued. We would be irreversibly handicapped if the working principle of our life does not include this truth, or treats it only marginally.

As persons, our individuality is not supposed to contradict our sociability and our life of communion. While distinct from each other, they are meant to go together. They can only prosper that way, since one without the other necessarily compromises our life.

In short, we would compromise our personhood, and become something else. We would debase our human dignity, which by our nature cannot be lived passively and automatically, but rather actively and deliberatedly.

That´s why our Catechism teaches that--

¨The human person needs to live in society. Society is not for him an extraneous addition but a requirement of his nature...A society is a group of persons bound together organically by a principle of unity that goes beyond each one of them...¨ (1879-1880)

May this doctrine stir us deeply and cause us to undertake a lifelong process of completing and perfecting our personhood by assimilating and living well the social and communion aspect of our life!

In fact, we are not meant to be social only in this life, but also in our definitive, eternal life. This is where the social nature of our life goes even deeper to reach the level of communion of saints, where we enter into the lives of each one of us by overcoming the barriers of time, space and even death itself.

This is made possible only in God. Through his Spirit, we receive all the good meant for us individually and collectively. That´s why our Catechism again teaches that--

¨Since all the faithful form one body, the good of each is communicated to the others... We must therefore believe that there exists a communion of goods in the Church. But the most important member is Christ, since he is the head...

¨Therefore, the riches of Christ are communicated to all members through the sacraments. As this Church is governed by one and the same Spirit, all the goods she has received necessarily become a common fund.¨ (947)

There are many aspects of this communion of saints which we cannot tackle in this present column. But I invite everyone to study them on his own. There´s ¨communion in holy things,¨ ¨communion among holy persons,¨ ¨communion in the faith,¨ ¨communion of the sacraments,¨ etc.

These are no theories, but spiritual and supernatural truths that need to be approached by faith, and not only by reason or the senses. Let´s try use all our human resources to go deep into these realities.

Lately, for example, I was amazed to learn new things regarding the digital culture that can be useful to our social and communion life. It´s well-known that many of us get easily hooked into the computer, internet, Facebook, etc.

Someone explained to me that this is because people now fall into a new technology-generated phenomenon, the NIS or the neural inter-active simulation. In layman´s language, people now live in a virtual reality that often absorbs us that getting out from there would require tremendous will-power and effort.

Obviously, there is something dangerous in this new development, but we cannot deny that it also offers us new benefits. The challenge now is how to humanize and Christianize it, so that it can really contribute to our betterment, especially in the area of our social and communion life.

My opinion as of now is that we really need to help one another so that we can develop the appropriate guidelines and norms of prudence. This is still much of a virgin forest to be explored and made use of. The learning curve will have to be experienced. But we should go on with it because it is a good tool, if used properly, to live communion.

Let´s go radical

NOW that we are often bombarded with things that offer us a lot of conveniences but also blunt our sensitivity toward God, we really need to go radical so as not to get lost in the non-essentials in life and get a firm grip on what is absolutely necessary for us.

I remember the late Pope Paul VI saying: ¨Technological society has succeeded in multiplying the occasions of pleasure, but finds great difficulty in giving birth to happiness. For happiness has its origin elsewhere. It is a spiritual thing.

¨Money, comfort, hygiene, material security, etc. may often not be lacking but, nevertheless, despite these advantages, boredom, suffering and sadness are frequently to be found supervening in the lives of many people.¨

We should not be naïve regarding the subtle spiritual manipulations taking place in our march to development these days. It´s not that we should throw a blanket condemnation on the material advantages we are reaping now. It´s just that we have to be wary of their spiritual cost and know how to handle it.

That´s because our constituent elements of body and soul, after losing their original integrity with our sin, react not only differently but also conflictingly toward any good presented to us. Our task is to integrate them together toward the attainment of what is objectively good for us. And that is ultimately God.

We need to sit down long to assimilate this truth about ourselves. We are usually at the mercy of our bodily faculties that, while giving us tremendous powers, often distort the workings of our spiritual faculties. In the end, we find ourselves enriched in material values, but impoverished in the spiritual ones. That deal is unfair and, in fact, inhuman.

For this purpose, we need to develop our skill for praying, for reflecting and meditating, in the hope that even while immersed in earthly affairs, we still manage to be properly recollected, our heart still with God and not dislodged from him. For that is how we ought to live.

Besides, we need to go through a lifelong program of ascetical struggle, developing virtues and realizing the necessity for sacrifice and mortification, since our spiritual life cannot prosper without the appropriate check we need to give to our bodily organism.

This is the great challenge we are facing these days. And many of us do not realize it. Around us—whether in the media, malls and other places—there´s hardly any serious and sustained effort to remind us of this challenge, let alone, the appropriate means to meet it.

There´s still that prevailing sense of fear and shame to tackle this issue head-on. This is actually the core problem we have at hand. Many of us still feel that being spiritual and getting deep into the supernatural realities of our life is unnatural, is not politically or socially correct.

Or that such concern belongs only to some people, but not to all. It affects only those with so-called special vocations or who just happen to want that kind of lifestyle. This is obviously a misconception of long standing that now needs drastic correction.

Especially now that we seem to be charmed and mesmerized by modern technologies, let´s remember what the Book of Ecclesiastes says about them. Let´s take time to savor what divine wisdom is telling us:

¨Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. / What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? / A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever. /

¨The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. / The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north, round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. /

¨All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. / All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; / the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing./

¨What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun...¨

Let´s also remember Job´s ¨Naked came I out of my mother´s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away...¨

Let´s go radical and ask ourselves: Do we spend time to pray, to develop a feel for divine mysteries that should shape our thoughts, words and deeds?

Deriving life from death

I JUST said a Holy Mass at the funeral of high school classmate. Events like this are usually overloaded with emotions. That´s understandable. But we also need to put things in the proper perspective, so that we avoid getting completely held captive by blind and unreasonably persistent grief.

Again, death can come to anyone of us anytime. This classmate of mine was the big guy in the batch, he was the corps commander of our military training. He was not only physically well endowed, but intellectually as well. The last time I saw him, two years back, he was oozing with true manly vigor. Who would have suspected his time was ending?

Our Lord can call us to his presence at the time willed by his ever mysterious wisdom, love and mercy. St. Josemaria Escriva used to say that God is no hunter of souls who hunts us down. He rather is more of a gardener who takes care of roses in the garden. When they are already abloom, he cuts them to put them inside the house, making it more beautiful.

We have to look at death from the point of view of faith. This gives us the ultimate measure of reality. Objectivity is not only matter of the senses or the intellect. We cannot simply rely on our feelings, our hunches, our reasoning. We have to use our faith, which our Lord in the first place gives us abundantly.

That faith tells us that we actually do not die, because even if our bodily organism dies and disintegrates, there is something in us, our spiritual soul, that simply cannot die. That´s the very nature of things spiritual. They are beyond the wear and tear of this life.

But it can suffer the so-called spiritual death, or the second death, when it fails to get sustained by its ultimate proper source of life who is God. The life of our soul is not just made up of our ideas, plans and desires. These hardly survive the physical death. Its real life-source is God.

This is a point we need to be clear about. Our soul is not the vegetative or the animal type that animates the living plants and animals. Such life-giving soul dies and disappears together with the death and decay of the plants and animals.

Not so with our human soul. Ours is a spiritual soul that, while distinct from the Spirit of God, nonetheless participates in that Spirit. It is meant to be with the Spirit. And it´s the separation from the Spirit, which we can freely do, that spells its death or at least puts it in jeopardy.

That is why our soul somehow feels a longing for God, as expressed beautifully by St. Augustine once when he said: ¨My Lord, my soul is restless until it rests in you.¨ There is a nostalgia for God and things spiritual and supernatural, which we can also misinterpret and misdirect, ending in some superstition. That´s because our soul has God as its true home.

We need to know the true nature and purpose of our soul. While a lot of theories, ideologies and creeds can offer a variety of ideas about this topic, we need to attend to this issue, because it´s basic, it is what gives over-all meaning and direction to our life.

We just have to wade through the many aspects involved in this process. But it´s all worthwhile. And while we are at this stage, we should not forget that a great source of enlightenment in this regard is our Christian faith.

There we are told that the very substance of our soul´s life is love, the one that defines God himself (Deus caritas est, St. John says in his letter) and fully manifested, made available and freely given to us by Christ. For us who claim to be Christians, we should not ignore the relevant doctrine and praxis taught by Christ and now handed down by the Church.

We have to bridge the gap between the faith we officially profess and the life we actually live. It´s amazing that at this age of supposedly dramatic progress in technology and knowledge, this anomaly between faith and life not only continues but is actually worsening.

We have to take our faith more seriously, and discover the many happy, liberating truths about ourselves that can help us derive good from the evil in this world, and eternal life with God from our death. We have to free ourselves from the confinement of a sense-and-reason-based worldview.