IT’S, of course, good to take care of the heart. As a vital organ, all the blood that circulates in our body passes through it to be purified and pumped back to the different parts. A body without a heart is simply dead. And with a malfunctioning heart, that body would be into pure agony.
Spiritually, the heart is absolutely necessary and its care inalienable. In this sense, the heart refers to our very core that gathers and summarizes all that we are. It’s where our true, ultimate identity can be found.
It is also where God, our Creator and Father, stays with us. He gave it to us to be his home with us. That’s because we are nothing without God. Let’s remember that God sustains everything. In our case, he does that by entering into our heart. Our true identity should always include God.
We have to learn to welcome God in our heart, and to keep him there in as best a condition as we can “afford.” Though he owns it—he made it, in the first place—we also own it, and somehow it depends on us whether to receive him or not in our heart.
Thus, our Lord’s plea: “My son, give me your heart.” And this appeal is reiterated in one of the psalms: “Keep my words in the midst of your heart, for they are life to those that find them, and health to all flesh.” (4,21-22)
I wonder whether we are doing something in this regard. What we can immediately see is carelessness and recklessness in the affairs of our heart. We allow it to go anywhere, hardly giving any attention to God and his request.
We let it welcome, almost indiscriminately, all sorts of things, including those that are clearly dangerous to us. As a result, all kinds of anomalies sprout—pride, greed, anger, lust, gluttony, avarice, laziness, etc. They make our heart sclerotic, taking away its tenderness and undermining its proper functioning.
We have to raise the level of awareness and competence in taking care of the heart as our abode with God. First, we need to be cautious and attentive to the way we use our senses.
Just like we have to be careful with our diet to protect our heart as a vital bodily organ, we need to be prudent in what we see and look at, what we hear, how we feel, what we imagine and remember, etc., to protect our heart as the seat of our spiritual life.
The story of David who peeped on the wife of another and later committed sin with her and other worse deeds to cover up his error is classic in highlighting the crucial role of our senses in our spiritual life.
From early on, even from childhood, we need to learn the tricky art of how to use our senses—where to focus them, how to protect them from danger, how to discard the dirt that unavoidably attaches to us along the way…
I think it is a grave and urgent duty to instill especially in the children this discipline, since this is going to be indispensable the rest of our life. We have to develop the appropriate curriculum and impart it as widely as possible. In this area, we cannot afford to remain in the kindergarten level.
If in the advertisement of products like cigarettes, we are quick to warn people of their bad effects, it should be much more so when we promote forms of entertainment that pose a clear and present danger to our soul.
Our current environment is unfortunately badly polluted in the spiritual and moral sense. There are many devious tricks embedded in shows produced under the name of artistic freedom and business that need to be exposed and avoided.
Of course, the effort required for this is going to be gargantuan and, given the temper of the times, thankless. But I must say, it’s all worthwhile. “Vale la pena.” The fruits that can be expected can more than make up for the costly investment made.
If a lot of resources are poured into the campaigns of such dubious issues like global warming and the reproductive health, we should be generous in giving whatever we can to promote a better spiritual and moral ecology, by giving due attention to the care we need to give to our heart as our sanctuary with God.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Fullness of time
INVITATIONS the past weeks to anniversaries and fiestas led me to visit the Christian concept of time. I thought that precisely on these occasions, this doctrine should be highlighted in the hope of rousing the people to the tremendous significance of those events.
There’s in the Letter of St. Paul to the Galatians a beautiful relevant expression worth considering. “When the fullness of time was come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons…” (4,4-5)
Now, I wonder how many of us realize there’s such a thing as “fullness of time.” This, just like any human element, has a definitely religious basis. But are we aware of it, let alone, of the practical implications and consequences it has?
For many of us, time is simply a kind of measure or record. Hardly anything else. We fail to go to the essence of time, its origin and purpose, its meaning and proper usage. Thus we neglect our duties towards it.
Especially in the celebration of time-related events such as birthdays, anniversaries, jubilees and fiestas, we get stuck with the icing—the partying, eating and feasting—while failing to go to the real cake. We miss the boat. And we do get into some boat, we arrive at the wrong port.
Time is a most precious treasure given to us. It has its distinctively tricky character, since objectively it cannot be stopped or redirected. But subjectively, of course, that is, in our mind and in our personal life, it can be multiplied or divided, saved or wasted, put in good use or bad.
As such, it first has to be acknowledged as a gift from God. It just did not come to exist spontaneously, out of the blue. It has a beginning, and it also has an end. For sure, it is imbued with great purpose.
That’s our problem now. We have taken this fundamental truth for granted and have pursued our plans and our life itself unmindful of time’s natural, not to mention, supernatural dimensions.
As a result, our every instant of our life seems unrelated to God. With such predicament, it looks like we are breathing in heavily polluted and dangerous air everyday, making us prone to fall sick of any spiritual and moral disease anytime.
In worse cases, we already have in some place a well-developed system that detaches time from any religious foundation and sets it completely at the mercy of man’s designs.
It is the awareness of the proper properties of time that we should exert an effort to develop, infusing it in our mind, attitudes and habits. It’s about time that we take this concern out of the world of abstract theories, and bring it to bear on the real world of our day-to-day activities.
It will not be an easy task. But neither will it be impossible. We just need to be patient and determined in carrying it out, knowing how to present the doctrine with gift of tongue, so people can easily understand and appreciate it.
We need to be pro-active in this business. We are losing the battle of the minds and the hearts of the people, as all sorts of isms and ideologies in their unrelenting and endless campaigns to sell their doctrines are all over the mainstream media nowadays.
Time can only be made full when we allow God to enter into it. This is when our time gets reunited with the eternity of God and goes in step with the will and designs of God.
Otherwise, it will just be spinning in its erratic, unreliable course and orbit, purely relying on our cleverness that is at its best finite and limited. That’s what we are having now, and thus the endless troubles we are having.
A sense of the sacredness of time has to be cultivated, showing us how to use it and how to sanctify it. With this proper sense of time, you can just imagine what tremendous good it will produce, and what evil it can avoid.
All of this, of course, should be done following our natural state of life, without making strange behavior. This is precisely the responsibility of the virtue of naturalness, a most dynamic concern since we have to know how to ply our spiritual and supernatural business within our natural setting, and a wounded one at that.
There’s in the Letter of St. Paul to the Galatians a beautiful relevant expression worth considering. “When the fullness of time was come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons…” (4,4-5)
Now, I wonder how many of us realize there’s such a thing as “fullness of time.” This, just like any human element, has a definitely religious basis. But are we aware of it, let alone, of the practical implications and consequences it has?
For many of us, time is simply a kind of measure or record. Hardly anything else. We fail to go to the essence of time, its origin and purpose, its meaning and proper usage. Thus we neglect our duties towards it.
Especially in the celebration of time-related events such as birthdays, anniversaries, jubilees and fiestas, we get stuck with the icing—the partying, eating and feasting—while failing to go to the real cake. We miss the boat. And we do get into some boat, we arrive at the wrong port.
Time is a most precious treasure given to us. It has its distinctively tricky character, since objectively it cannot be stopped or redirected. But subjectively, of course, that is, in our mind and in our personal life, it can be multiplied or divided, saved or wasted, put in good use or bad.
As such, it first has to be acknowledged as a gift from God. It just did not come to exist spontaneously, out of the blue. It has a beginning, and it also has an end. For sure, it is imbued with great purpose.
That’s our problem now. We have taken this fundamental truth for granted and have pursued our plans and our life itself unmindful of time’s natural, not to mention, supernatural dimensions.
As a result, our every instant of our life seems unrelated to God. With such predicament, it looks like we are breathing in heavily polluted and dangerous air everyday, making us prone to fall sick of any spiritual and moral disease anytime.
In worse cases, we already have in some place a well-developed system that detaches time from any religious foundation and sets it completely at the mercy of man’s designs.
It is the awareness of the proper properties of time that we should exert an effort to develop, infusing it in our mind, attitudes and habits. It’s about time that we take this concern out of the world of abstract theories, and bring it to bear on the real world of our day-to-day activities.
It will not be an easy task. But neither will it be impossible. We just need to be patient and determined in carrying it out, knowing how to present the doctrine with gift of tongue, so people can easily understand and appreciate it.
We need to be pro-active in this business. We are losing the battle of the minds and the hearts of the people, as all sorts of isms and ideologies in their unrelenting and endless campaigns to sell their doctrines are all over the mainstream media nowadays.
Time can only be made full when we allow God to enter into it. This is when our time gets reunited with the eternity of God and goes in step with the will and designs of God.
Otherwise, it will just be spinning in its erratic, unreliable course and orbit, purely relying on our cleverness that is at its best finite and limited. That’s what we are having now, and thus the endless troubles we are having.
A sense of the sacredness of time has to be cultivated, showing us how to use it and how to sanctify it. With this proper sense of time, you can just imagine what tremendous good it will produce, and what evil it can avoid.
All of this, of course, should be done following our natural state of life, without making strange behavior. This is precisely the responsibility of the virtue of naturalness, a most dynamic concern since we have to know how to ply our spiritual and supernatural business within our natural setting, and a wounded one at that.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Sacrifice central to our life
THE spirit of sacrifice is indispensable in our life. It’s what keeps us from losing our proper way and direction in life. Without it, we can’t help but to get spoiled and to get lost.
Sacrifice checks and corrects our tendency to go off-the-track in our life. Our problem since Adam and Eve is that we tend to misuse and abuse the wonderful endowments we have—our intelligence and will, our power to know and to be free and all the other things that we have and enjoy.
These powers that precisely make us the image and likeness of God, as our faith teaches us, and that enable us to become God’s children with his grace, need to get engaged with God and not just with anything we happen to like.
The problem with these powers is that they can be so intoxicating that we tend to easily lose sight of their proper purpose and their proper usage. Our first parents, still in their state of original justice, could not resist the intoxication. Imagine us!
These powers need to be offered to God, and through them our entire selves. That’s how we have been designed at our creation. We need to know how to offer back to God what he has given us. Unless we don’t believe in God, that’s just how the cookie crumbles here.
This is the simple language of love. God, who is love, made us in love and for love. He expects us to repay his love for us with our love for him.
This offering and loving God now assumes the character of sacrifice, because it has to contend with the consequences of sin. It now involves an element of pain and self-denial, where originally it came as pure delight.
That’s why, since the fall of our first parents, God has been tutoring us, all throughout the history of mankind, to learn the language of sacrifice.
From Abel and Cain, to Noah, down to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and to the prophets and other holy men and women, this divine pedagogy in sacrifice has been done step by step.
First, they—we—were asked to offer some burnt offerings out of the fruits of the earth and of their labor. Thus, plants and animals were burned as offerings.
Then some laws were given for us to be able to give God not only things but also an integral part of us, if not our mind and heart. These divine commandments are a way to form our minds and hearts to receive a greater gift.
Then came the perfect sacrifice, the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. This makes our loving and self-giving most pleasing to God, since it is done for us and with us by Christ himself, the Son of God who became man.
On this point, the Letter to the Hebrews has these relevant words attributed to Christ, addressed to his Father, to describe how his sacrifice supersedes the previous forms of sacrifice:
“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me. In burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, Lo, I have come to do your will, O God.” (10,8-9)
And this economy of sacrifice continues to work up to now. Christ’s sacrifice invites, not exempts, all of us to participate, as can be gleaned in the words of St. Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians:
“We always bear about in our body the mortification of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodies.” (4,10)
There’s no doubt that in the Christian understanding of the meaning of our life, the spirit of sacrifice plays a central role. Sacrifice is not only an ingredient, much less a seasoning in our life. It has to be the very essence of our life.
This spirit of sacrifice meets all the requirements of love, for which we have been created. We have to learn how to develop that spirit in our day-to-day affairs.
In fact, nothing should be done without this spirit of sacrifice permeating it. We have to check if indeed our every deed is primarily motivated by this spirit of sacrifice.
Otherwise, we can go through life on the wrong footing, badly if not fatally handicapped. This spirit of sacrifice keeps us always in the frontiers of love, avoiding complacency and lukewarmness that has been described as the tomb of love.
Sacrifice checks and corrects our tendency to go off-the-track in our life. Our problem since Adam and Eve is that we tend to misuse and abuse the wonderful endowments we have—our intelligence and will, our power to know and to be free and all the other things that we have and enjoy.
These powers that precisely make us the image and likeness of God, as our faith teaches us, and that enable us to become God’s children with his grace, need to get engaged with God and not just with anything we happen to like.
The problem with these powers is that they can be so intoxicating that we tend to easily lose sight of their proper purpose and their proper usage. Our first parents, still in their state of original justice, could not resist the intoxication. Imagine us!
These powers need to be offered to God, and through them our entire selves. That’s how we have been designed at our creation. We need to know how to offer back to God what he has given us. Unless we don’t believe in God, that’s just how the cookie crumbles here.
This is the simple language of love. God, who is love, made us in love and for love. He expects us to repay his love for us with our love for him.
This offering and loving God now assumes the character of sacrifice, because it has to contend with the consequences of sin. It now involves an element of pain and self-denial, where originally it came as pure delight.
That’s why, since the fall of our first parents, God has been tutoring us, all throughout the history of mankind, to learn the language of sacrifice.
From Abel and Cain, to Noah, down to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and to the prophets and other holy men and women, this divine pedagogy in sacrifice has been done step by step.
First, they—we—were asked to offer some burnt offerings out of the fruits of the earth and of their labor. Thus, plants and animals were burned as offerings.
Then some laws were given for us to be able to give God not only things but also an integral part of us, if not our mind and heart. These divine commandments are a way to form our minds and hearts to receive a greater gift.
Then came the perfect sacrifice, the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. This makes our loving and self-giving most pleasing to God, since it is done for us and with us by Christ himself, the Son of God who became man.
On this point, the Letter to the Hebrews has these relevant words attributed to Christ, addressed to his Father, to describe how his sacrifice supersedes the previous forms of sacrifice:
“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me. In burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, Lo, I have come to do your will, O God.” (10,8-9)
And this economy of sacrifice continues to work up to now. Christ’s sacrifice invites, not exempts, all of us to participate, as can be gleaned in the words of St. Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians:
“We always bear about in our body the mortification of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodies.” (4,10)
There’s no doubt that in the Christian understanding of the meaning of our life, the spirit of sacrifice plays a central role. Sacrifice is not only an ingredient, much less a seasoning in our life. It has to be the very essence of our life.
This spirit of sacrifice meets all the requirements of love, for which we have been created. We have to learn how to develop that spirit in our day-to-day affairs.
In fact, nothing should be done without this spirit of sacrifice permeating it. We have to check if indeed our every deed is primarily motivated by this spirit of sacrifice.
Otherwise, we can go through life on the wrong footing, badly if not fatally handicapped. This spirit of sacrifice keeps us always in the frontiers of love, avoiding complacency and lukewarmness that has been described as the tomb of love.
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