Countering the desensitizing trend

I SUPPOSE everyone is familiar with this phenomenon. In the face of something new, our immediate reaction hovers first in the level of our senses and emotions. Then it goes to our intelligence. Only with some conscious effort can we start reacting in a spiritual and theological way.

We need to give more thought to this event so we can have a more appropriate response to it, especially when it involves something important in our life. We have to learn how to relate things to God, and to avoid getting stuck in the purely human and natural level.

Very often, what we see are people materially aroused or enriched but spiritually made numb as they make the quest for progress and development. We should not be surprised by this turn of events. That’s just how our earthly affairs are.

But neither should just stand by, doing nothing about it. We need to handle things in a manner truly commensurate to our real dignity.

We are not only persons, already a big thing. We are children of God. We have to learn to react to our daily concerns such that it becomes an expression of our relationship with God.

My experience with students confirms this observation. While they are still in school, relatively simple and innocent, and subject to a more controlled environment, they can behave very well.

It’s when they get exposed to the industry, when they start doing their on-the-job training, and they experience new things, that they start behaving erratically in the spiritual and moral sense.

Many find themselves unprepared, with their pants down, highly vulnerable in their new but confusing milieu. They find themselves facing many crossroads, and they don’t know exactly which path to take.

This is obviously a great challenge for any chaplain who tries to be serious with his task of helping students sustain their spiritual life as they move on in life. But it’s one that carries its own rewards too. It’s worth all the sweat and blood involved.

For certain, the first thing to be done is to keep the communication lines open. Everything has to be done, like cultivating real friendship with them, in order to maintain contact with the students and to facilitate transparency.

When the idea of spiritual direction is explained well, then appreciated by the students and then implemented, the battle is already half-won. It’s in an atmosphere of confidence and loyalty that the laborious and meticulous task of sorting out things can take place effectively.

This point is, I think, crucial, precisely because one characteristic of the present scramble for new things is to make people lose confidence and trust in others. The relationship hardly goes any deeper than mutual exploitation of one another. People are reduced to objects. They lose their personhood.

When the delicate part of clarifying things comes, the spiritual director, acting more as friend, always has to be reassuring, encouraging and positive. While he should call a spade a spade, he should always inspire the confidence that everything will turn out all right in the end.

A lot of patience and understanding is needed. But even more important is the skill to give practical pieces of advice. One should not limit himself to condemning errors. He should offer solutions to problems.

One basic advice, for example, is to tell the students to always thank God for everything, no matter how small, that happens to him during the day. This attitude will keep him in contact with God and set the proper tone of the relationship.

From here, he can start to decipher the role the events of his day play in the over-all plan or will of God for him. This is a very tricky subject, requiring great intimacy with God.

Of course, one has to lead by example. The counsels should be a result not only of an intellectual exercise, but also of a lived experience. It’s only in this way, where we can be sure of consistency and effectiveness.

This is the way of the saints. Many of them were ordinary mortals, whose intelligence was average. But their truly holy lives, their living relationship with God, produced nothing less than divine wisdom that shed true light to the world.

Inter-generational

WE have to be more sensitive to this aspect of our life these days. With the current pace and widening diversity of development, we need to be truly skilful in handling the intricate and more felt requirements of inter-generational integration.

We cannot help but deepen our respective generational specializations of interest, in all their social and cultural varieties. I suppose this is how things go. We even have to foster the legitimate differences. But we need to learn how to form one organic whole, since in the end we all are one human family.

For example, in any diocesan clergy gathering that I attend, I can’t fail to notice the spontaneous groupings that appear, formed more by generational factors than by any other element. The young congregate among themselves, the seniors keep to themselves.

There are exceptions, of course. But they are more amusing than anything. Like, I met a retired Monsignor, approaching 80, so techie he could shame many younger ones with his knowledge and skill of the modern gadgets. He even used some technical lingo not yet in my vocabulary.

Where there is more unity and harmony in one group, say in a parish, there’s a lot of good that can be done. In contrast, where there is an infestation of envy and quarreling, many things get wasted.

In the place where I’m staying at present, we are just 10 residents—3 priests and 7 lay professionals—but I readily see the differences and feel the normal tension that goes with them, something that needs to be managed well.

At 57, I’m the eldest of the group, followed by a 55-year-old priest who was a former engineer. The rest are in their thirties. And our director is the youngest at 24 years of age. One is a university professor, the others are almost all engineers and architects, working in different schools and offices.

In our daily get-togethers, especially the ones after dinner, I can’t help but feel at the same time happy, excited and challenged by the rich mix of topics that get into our conversations.

I learn a lot from them, especially when they talk about new developments in their profession, people they meet and do business with, and the plans and projects they handle.

I just hope they also learn from me, since I too give a generous share of my views. But it gratifies me no end to see how everyone tries to go out of their own selves to engage everybody else in hearty exchanges, with refined efforts to adapt and please others manifest in a discreet and natural way.

I could see the mutual complementation taking place among ourselves, in an atmosphere of cheerful family life. Each one contributes something, everyone listens. Many times, I say a quiet prayer of thanksgiving for all this, a real blessing.

I suppose this is part of the secret to achieving a kind of inter-generational integration among all of us in society. We need to forget ourselves more and just think of the others, eager to serve and to please others.

And this can always be done, because it always starts with small, normal and ordinary things we are supposed to do with one another. We have to be nice, even affectionate, develop a keen, sincere interest in the others, in what they do and even in their concerns.

With little goodwill that we try to nurture and grow, a lot of good is produced, benefiting everyone. We have to learn to go beyond our natural differences, our understandable likes and dislikes, to be able to enter smoothly into the lives of others.

We need to learn to disregard irritating details, and to keep rectifying our intentions and purifying our memory, since anything can dirty them anytime even within a span of a minute.

We are all human, it’s understood, but we too are capable of rising high above our purely human conditions to meet the standards of real charity. We have to be quick to understand and forgive. We have to be very careful with our tendency to judge.

In my years of talking with people, I accomplish more by listening and understanding and encouraging than by making suggestions. Often the people themselves discover what they need to do.

I find this an effective way to handle inter-generational differences.

Divine filiation

I FIRST met this expression, sounding Greek to me at that time, when I read a book of homilies by Opus Dei founder St. Josemaria Escriva. That was many years ago, when I was still in college.

I remember how deeply moved I was when I understood what it meant. I felt as if a whole new world was suddenly opened to me, and I luxuriated in savoring the million and one considerations that instantaneously came to mind.

It simply means that we are children of God. I know that to many, this expression, though sounding beautiful and worthy of brandishing around, can mean hardly anything and give no practical consequences. It’s about time, I think, that some changes be made.

The basis is that first of all we have been created by God, we come from him and have been endowed by him with such richness that we rightfully can be called the masterpiece of his creation.

The heartwarming conclusion I derived was that God who is all goodness and all loving wants to share what he has with each one of us. We have been made in his image and likeness, and with his grace we also have been made to participate in his life and nature.

And even if we bungled all this divine goodness, God continues to be madly in love with us by saving us, going through the most complicated plan to reach us and to bring us back to him. His divine mercy completes his love for us, his patience is forever.

The reality of our divine filiation is at the root and center of our being. Sadly, though, we manage to ignore and misuse this happy truth. A real pity!

When we don’t develop this spirit of divine filiation, we place ourselves at the mercy of our human devices—some of them admittedly can be impressive—that can prop us, to be frank, only for a while at best. Our integrity would be compromised. We could not go the distance.

Have you seen a bear lying flat on the belly after a hearty meal? That’s what can happen to people without this sense of divine filiation. It’s as if life has gone away in spite of their impressive human qualities.

They can have brains and brawn, money, power, fame, etc., but if they don’t have this spirit of divine filiation, their doom will just be a matter of time. They can’t go beyond earthly dimensions, they can’t fly to eternity, to life without end. Sin and temptation sooner or later will capture their heart.

We need to develop this spirit of divine filiation. While it’s a result of divine grace, it’s also something we have to work out. We need to load ourselves, to borrow a mobile-phone term, with a boosting awareness that we are God’s children.

We can go to the extent of psychologizing ourselves into it, repeating the expression until it becomes our breath and heartbeat and drives our stream of consciousness, enabling us to go deeper into its meaning, to instill its character into our thoughts, will, feelings and deeds.

This certainly would not just be a psychological exercise, for it is based on something real, not invented, though it’s a reality that can be accessed not so much by our senses and our reason alone as by our faith.

This point, I believe, is worth reiterating. It is what truly grounds us to the foundation of our life and nature, giving us the meaning and purpose of our existence. It’s a source of joy, confidence and serenity. It tells us what our filial rights and duties are.

More importantly, it tells us who we are and gives us an abiding sense that we are never alone, or worse, just on our own. It fills us with the conviction that we are children of God, that no matter what happens God will always be with us unless we reject him.

It’s heartbreaking to see that because they don’t have this sense of divine filiation, many souls fall into what we may call as Dickensian Great-Expectations syndrome, where one feels he is succeeding and prospering in life when in reality he is being impoverished and corrupted inside.

But I must also confess that I’ve met a good number who, precisely because of their faith and simplicity, enjoy the true blessings of this spirit of divine filiation.