THE current financial meltdown in the US, of the kind that poses real threat not only to the American economy but also to that of the whole world, certainly has spiritual and moral causes.
We have to be clear about this. Social and economic problems have roots that go beyond the merely social and economic. The latter are just symptoms.
This point has to be said to remind everyone that to solve these raging problems, we have to look into the real culprits. It’s a sickness of the soul that causes these economic crises, not just some bad economic or technical judgments.
To be blunt about it, the trouble stems from some serious spiritual malady that’s now showing itself in many and multiplying forms. There’s greed, vanity and pride, insincerity and deception, etc., that make up the lifeblood of the vicious cycle of consumerism, materialism and hedonism.
People are spending more than they earn, they are averse to saving and are hooked to imprudent if not impulse buying, not anymore of consumables, but of much heavier items like houses and other pieces of real estate.
Banks just want to create money even if the portfolios are based more on air than on substance. They have been rediscounting financial instruments under incredibly questionable conditions. So what do you expect? Cracks will soon appear, and collapse becomes imminent.
They are throwing caution and restraint to the winds, deep-sixing due study and planning, while giving instant, almost mindless responses to what can amount to caprices. They have grown complacent, have reached the limits of safety and are falling into a kind of mass madness.
A cartoonist captured the whole situation with a caption that the US economy is running on stupidity. That may be a stretch—it’s a caricature, of course—but it conveys a lot of truth about the turmoil.
The underlying spiritual and moral anomaly has broken away from the confines of the personal and even class dimensions. It has spread like cancer, its ground zero first affecting people’s character, then their mentality and their culture.
This particular crisis has gone beyond Wall Street and is now affecting Main Street in the US . Let’s hope the bailout rescue plan works and contains its spread. The prospects are horrifying, in spite of huge efforts to soften their impact.
This is not the time to talk only of economics. We have to talk about spiritual values and virtues, of faith and morals, in a more serious way. No use staying in the denial stage. We have to explode the myth that talking religion and spiritual warfare is not politically correct in this case.
The Christian concept of poverty has to be more systematically drilled into everyone. Its aspect of responsible stewardship, its requirements of social justice and solidarity, transparency and accountability have to be appreciated better.
It seems that the American landscape is increasingly allergic to these concepts. That is the problem and the daunting challenge that has to be faced. There’s a certain dulling of conscience of a growing portion of the population that needs urgent and drastic conversion.
This disturbing development is writ large in the current electoral campaign where issues go beyond the purely economic and political, and have gone deep into the field of faith and morals.
It’s amazing how those who are against Christian faith and morals in the US appear to be growing. They are less of a minority now, and are not anymore in the fringes. They seem to be more and more into the mainstream.
Those for abortion and who are openly atheistic and agnostic are getting more strident in their views. For example, they fault the candidate Sarah Palin for praying, for not aborting her handicapped baby, for allowing her unwed teen-aged daughter to have her baby instead of aborting him.
For sure, there’s a lot of good elements still in that great country, but I’m afraid a lot of things are changing in a frightening way. Analysts may describe the parties as conservative and liberal, centrist or left-leaning. I feel that at bottom, the divide is created in the deeper recesses of people’s faith and consciences.
The US financial crisis now is just but a tip of the monstrous iceberg now drifting dangerously in the American waters and in that of the world. We need to do something about it.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Friday, September 12, 2008
Proclaiming the gospel
IF we have to get down to it, proclaiming the gospel is one central duty of every follower of Christ. After all, our Lord told his disciples just before ascending into heaven: “Go into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” (Mk 16,15)
Though addressed directly to his disciples, we have to understand that these words are meant also, in varying degrees and ways, to all of us, members of Christ’s mystical body, his Church.
We just have to feel the unfading urgency of this command, and overcome whatever prejudice or obstacle still keeping us from undertaking this important work.
We should echo St. Paul ’s sentiments: “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel.” (1 Cor 9,16) Like St. Paul , we need to relish the full weight with which Christ commissioned him to fulfill this task.
As in, nothing less than the plenitude of Christ’s redemptive work should be made to bear on our sense of duty and mission. We are not just doing some simple job. It’s the whole work of human salvation that is involved.
Thus, ever since Christ’s command, the apostles started to preach the gospel. And from then on, the task has never ceased even up to now. Of course, the process is not just a human effort. The Holy Spirit, in a mysterious way, always oversees it.
Still, this indication needs to be understood better. Several reasons come to mind. For one, our human condition tends to easily fall to routine, to oversimplify and reduce, and to miss many essential parts of this mission.
Like, we have to understand that this business of proclaiming the gospel is not just some mechanical work of spreading God’s word, in itself already a very important task, given our increasingly secularized culture. It goes much more than that.
The gospel is not just a body of conceptual truths that need to be given out in lectures or classes. It is presenting the mystery of the living Christ as he grapples with every human situation that we can find ourselves in.
Proclaiming it is not just an intellectual affair. It involves our whole being, and it requires nothing less than our conversion, and not just our attaining knowledge and familiarization of Christ’s words.
In other words, proclaiming the gospel requires our living it, that is, living the very life of Christ who said: “For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting.” (Jn 3,16)
Proclaiming the gospel requires assimilating it, identifying ourselves with it, making it the flesh of our flesh. It should not just be a possession, a property that we can have and then dispose. It has to be our very own life.
We have to understand that it is Christ’s gospel that brings us to eternal life, not our human knowledge alone, or our sciences, no matter how developed and useful they are to us. Christ’s gospel has the full resources to bring us to our supernatural goal of communion with God and with everybody else.
The challenge we have in this regard is, indeed, enormous! Proclaiming the gospel demands everything from us. Unless we understand this well, I don’t think we can go far in carrying out Christ’s command for us to preach the gospel to every creature.
The consoling part is that Christ himself is eternally patient with us. He can wait until we slowly and hopefully effectively realize what is involved in this business.
At the moment, the big task to do is to relate the gospel to our growing body of human knowledge that seems to develop independently of the gospel, that is, of any relation to God.
Ideally, the gospel should inspire our pursuit of knowledge. Our sciences, for example, should also affirm the gospel. The big problem now is that while the gospel and our knowledge go in different levels, any relationship between them appears to be vanishing.
To effectively proclaim the gospel, there’s need to show how it is relevant and crucial in every human situation and knowledge we may have, including the very mundane realities of our life
It may transcend our human condition, but it has to immerse itself in our life and grapple with every aspect of that life. Otherwise, it’s as if Christ himself failed in his redemptive work.
Though addressed directly to his disciples, we have to understand that these words are meant also, in varying degrees and ways, to all of us, members of Christ’s mystical body, his Church.
We just have to feel the unfading urgency of this command, and overcome whatever prejudice or obstacle still keeping us from undertaking this important work.
We should echo St. Paul ’s sentiments: “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel.” (1 Cor 9,16) Like St. Paul , we need to relish the full weight with which Christ commissioned him to fulfill this task.
As in, nothing less than the plenitude of Christ’s redemptive work should be made to bear on our sense of duty and mission. We are not just doing some simple job. It’s the whole work of human salvation that is involved.
Thus, ever since Christ’s command, the apostles started to preach the gospel. And from then on, the task has never ceased even up to now. Of course, the process is not just a human effort. The Holy Spirit, in a mysterious way, always oversees it.
Still, this indication needs to be understood better. Several reasons come to mind. For one, our human condition tends to easily fall to routine, to oversimplify and reduce, and to miss many essential parts of this mission.
Like, we have to understand that this business of proclaiming the gospel is not just some mechanical work of spreading God’s word, in itself already a very important task, given our increasingly secularized culture. It goes much more than that.
The gospel is not just a body of conceptual truths that need to be given out in lectures or classes. It is presenting the mystery of the living Christ as he grapples with every human situation that we can find ourselves in.
Proclaiming it is not just an intellectual affair. It involves our whole being, and it requires nothing less than our conversion, and not just our attaining knowledge and familiarization of Christ’s words.
In other words, proclaiming the gospel requires our living it, that is, living the very life of Christ who said: “For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting.” (Jn 3,16)
Proclaiming the gospel requires assimilating it, identifying ourselves with it, making it the flesh of our flesh. It should not just be a possession, a property that we can have and then dispose. It has to be our very own life.
We have to understand that it is Christ’s gospel that brings us to eternal life, not our human knowledge alone, or our sciences, no matter how developed and useful they are to us. Christ’s gospel has the full resources to bring us to our supernatural goal of communion with God and with everybody else.
The challenge we have in this regard is, indeed, enormous! Proclaiming the gospel demands everything from us. Unless we understand this well, I don’t think we can go far in carrying out Christ’s command for us to preach the gospel to every creature.
The consoling part is that Christ himself is eternally patient with us. He can wait until we slowly and hopefully effectively realize what is involved in this business.
At the moment, the big task to do is to relate the gospel to our growing body of human knowledge that seems to develop independently of the gospel, that is, of any relation to God.
Ideally, the gospel should inspire our pursuit of knowledge. Our sciences, for example, should also affirm the gospel. The big problem now is that while the gospel and our knowledge go in different levels, any relationship between them appears to be vanishing.
To effectively proclaim the gospel, there’s need to show how it is relevant and crucial in every human situation and knowledge we may have, including the very mundane realities of our life
It may transcend our human condition, but it has to immerse itself in our life and grapple with every aspect of that life. Otherwise, it’s as if Christ himself failed in his redemptive work.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Providence and us
THE American culture war, whose battlefield now is the current electoral campaign in the US, has led me to dig up this topic. I feel it has become suddenly relevant. I feel many people need to know more about divine providence and the role we play in it.
The trigger of this interest is the choice of the now American sensation Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential candidate for the Republicans. Many good things are said of her—that she is pro-life, a hockey mom who distinguishes herself from the pit bull just by the lipstick, a game-changer, a reformer, etc.
But what immediately caught my attention was the claim that she believes in creationism. Creationism is the belief that the world and us have been created by God. That’s one of the core doctrines, to which I agree. There may be other theories spun around it made by ideologues and these I may not agree.
What’s clear is that we did not come about merely by spontaneous generation, and our development is not all due to the evolution process. There’s a lot of evolution involved, of course, but that alone does not explain everything.
Our creation, our life and existence, our nature involve a supernatural or divine intervention. We did not come to exist just on our own, and by merely natural processes.
At first, I thought, what’s the big deal about this? I have taken this doctrine for granted as a given. For me, it’s a no-question-no-debate matter. Not even when in my university years, I became aware of a group that took a different tack in this topic.
Later, I realized that this topic is a big issue in the US. Many are afraid of this doctrine. One writer even came out with a wild accusation that with this belief of candidate Palin, the US could have its biggest threat, since creationism, said he, is squarely opposed to scientific development.
How that writer arrived at that conclusion, I don’t know. But I thought the fear was completely baseless and entirely irrational. It’s reacting to a phantom, not a real thing.
Even if for the moment we skip discussing the origin of the world and life, since this can involve mysteries and faith, and many people are allergic to these topics, I don’t understand how a person who believes that God created us and the world stands as a threat to science and progress.
In fact, if we are to closely follow Catholic teaching in this matter, we will realize that the doctrine that God created us favors, rather than threatens, science and progress. This is because Catholic faith teaches that God continues his creation through his providence.
God involves us in his continuing work of governing the world, meaning, his providence. He does this without diminishing our freedom. On the contrary, he enhances it as long as we understand that the freedom we have comes from him who also made laws governing our freedom. That’s the moral law.
The problem starts when we think our freedom is solely our own, to be lived strictly according to our own desires, if not whims and caprices.
God creating us is very different from us making things. In the latter, the things we make acquire an existence independent of us. In the former, the creatures keep their existence and their development with God always sustaining and governing them.
God never withdraws from his creatures, because if that ever happens, the creatures revert to nothing. God rules the very existence of things. We, on the other hand, with respect to the things we make, have nothing to do with their continuing existence. We’re only responsible for assembling them.
The issue again brings up the old faith-vs.-science debate, which to my mind is unfairly framed. I believe that the larger picture of this issue is that these two elements actually work together, mutually helping each other, because in the end both come from God.
There may be moments of apparent conflict between the two, and these are more because of our limitations, if not outright confusion and errors in knowledge and judgments about certain aspects of the issue.
But these conflicts are not invincible. They can be overcome as long as with patience we seek to resolve the problems and work out the details of the conflict objectively.
The trigger of this interest is the choice of the now American sensation Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential candidate for the Republicans. Many good things are said of her—that she is pro-life, a hockey mom who distinguishes herself from the pit bull just by the lipstick, a game-changer, a reformer, etc.
But what immediately caught my attention was the claim that she believes in creationism. Creationism is the belief that the world and us have been created by God. That’s one of the core doctrines, to which I agree. There may be other theories spun around it made by ideologues and these I may not agree.
What’s clear is that we did not come about merely by spontaneous generation, and our development is not all due to the evolution process. There’s a lot of evolution involved, of course, but that alone does not explain everything.
Our creation, our life and existence, our nature involve a supernatural or divine intervention. We did not come to exist just on our own, and by merely natural processes.
At first, I thought, what’s the big deal about this? I have taken this doctrine for granted as a given. For me, it’s a no-question-no-debate matter. Not even when in my university years, I became aware of a group that took a different tack in this topic.
Later, I realized that this topic is a big issue in the US. Many are afraid of this doctrine. One writer even came out with a wild accusation that with this belief of candidate Palin, the US could have its biggest threat, since creationism, said he, is squarely opposed to scientific development.
How that writer arrived at that conclusion, I don’t know. But I thought the fear was completely baseless and entirely irrational. It’s reacting to a phantom, not a real thing.
Even if for the moment we skip discussing the origin of the world and life, since this can involve mysteries and faith, and many people are allergic to these topics, I don’t understand how a person who believes that God created us and the world stands as a threat to science and progress.
In fact, if we are to closely follow Catholic teaching in this matter, we will realize that the doctrine that God created us favors, rather than threatens, science and progress. This is because Catholic faith teaches that God continues his creation through his providence.
God involves us in his continuing work of governing the world, meaning, his providence. He does this without diminishing our freedom. On the contrary, he enhances it as long as we understand that the freedom we have comes from him who also made laws governing our freedom. That’s the moral law.
The problem starts when we think our freedom is solely our own, to be lived strictly according to our own desires, if not whims and caprices.
God creating us is very different from us making things. In the latter, the things we make acquire an existence independent of us. In the former, the creatures keep their existence and their development with God always sustaining and governing them.
God never withdraws from his creatures, because if that ever happens, the creatures revert to nothing. God rules the very existence of things. We, on the other hand, with respect to the things we make, have nothing to do with their continuing existence. We’re only responsible for assembling them.
The issue again brings up the old faith-vs.-science debate, which to my mind is unfairly framed. I believe that the larger picture of this issue is that these two elements actually work together, mutually helping each other, because in the end both come from God.
There may be moments of apparent conflict between the two, and these are more because of our limitations, if not outright confusion and errors in knowledge and judgments about certain aspects of the issue.
But these conflicts are not invincible. They can be overcome as long as with patience we seek to resolve the problems and work out the details of the conflict objectively.
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