Self-pity

WE have been warned amply in the Gospel about this anomaly. The story of the master who came home and expected his servant to serve him even if the servant was working the whole day, had the following conclusion that drives home the point—

“When you have done all you have been commanded to do, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants. We have done no more than what we ought to do.’” (Lk 17,10)

We should be repeating these lines often to keep us from playing into the hands of self-pity!

Truth is our tendency to fall into self-pity because of reasons like tiredness, big and heavy load of work, persistent problems and miseries personal and otherwise, etc., is quite deep and pronounced. We need to be very aware of this weakness and do all to avoid succumbing into it.

Self-pity comes about when we make ourselves, not God and the others in God, as the ultimate arbiter of what we are supposed to do. It’s this basic mistake that curtails and truncates our sense of duty.

With it, our knowledge of our duties can easily be held hostage by our personal weaknesses, without mentioning the other consequences of our sins that can greatly impair it. It becomes shallow, narrow-minded and Pavlovian in its behavior.

We would not know the real reasons for our actions and obligations. We become prone to improper motives that ultimately zero in on ourselves—our advantage, comfort, pride and vanity, etc.

Of course, we can also go to the other extreme, as in exaggerating our capabilities to the point that we can think we have no limits in our powers. Many politicians have this kind of sickness. They can be so soaked with ambition that they can fail to acknowledge their limitations. But this is another story.

Self-pity is a more common disease, especially when in a poor society beset with all sorts of problems, like ours and many others, there is also inadequate and improper human and Christian formation.

Situations like this can make people’s attitude towards their problems and difficulties to become very negative, steeped in easy discouragement, despair, sadness and depression, finding no value in them.

Self-pity can also be a cover for laziness, complacency, envy, greed, self-centeredness, and a number of psychological aberrations like low self-esteem, etc. It can also trigger a slippery slope toward graver disorders like insanity.

As Shakespeare would say, “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” St. Josemaria Escriva used to call sadness the ally of the enemy, the devil.

Self-pity isolates people from others, leading them to build their own worlds and hampering their capacity to work with others in solidarity. It shrinks their sense of the common good. It detaches them from reality. One can be in a crowd, yet he would still feel lonely.

It simply lends credence to the poetic insight, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone.”

We should develop the knack to detect the beginnings of self-pity in ourselves and in others. Better still, we should do all to protect ourselves from it, by developing the proper attitudes and virtues.

First, we should always trust in God and enliven our relation with him. This can always be done, and in fact should be done, since this is fundamental. Without this, other human resources and measures, no matter how brilliant and impressive, will just come to grief.

We need to refer everything we do to God, offering it to him and trying to figure out how it fits in God’s plan, a difficult but not impossible task. Let’s remember that Christ gives meaning to everything in our life, including our pains, sufferings, problems, difficulties, failures and tragedies, and even death itself.

We have to develop the relevant virtues: patience, fortitude, joy, prudence, optimism, openness to anything, since in life, anything can happen to us, but God would still be in control.

For this, we have to be familiar with his doctrine and start to assimilate them into our life. Our life, let’s remember, is always a life with him. It’s not simply one by ourselves completely. It’s a participation in his, but we need to do our part to cooperate with him.

Let’s not forget what he said: “Come to me, all you that labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take up my yoke upon you and learn of me, because I am meek and humble of heart, and you shall find rest to your souls.” (Mt 11,28-29)

Preaching from the heart

PREACHING the Word of God is a task entrusted to his apostles and shared by all of us in different ways. The clergy take a leading role in this affair. It’s a serious business that involves our whole being, and not just our talents and powers.

First we need to examine our understanding and attitude toward God’s word, especially the Gospel. On this basic understanding depend what we do with the Gospel and how we handle it.

Do we really know the true nature of the Gospel? Or do we take it as one more book, perhaps with certain importance, but definitely not as the living word of God, in spite of its human dimensions?

The Gospel is actually the proclamation of Christ as the Emmanuel, that is, God with us. This is an on-going affair that did not stop with the death of Christ. Christ lives with us up to now, and continues to do things with us.

All these affirmations are captured in the last lines of the Gospel of St. Matthew where our Lord said:

“Go, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them…. And behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” (28,19-20)

Our Catechism tells us that “We must continue to accomplish in ourselves the stages of Jesus’ life and his mysteries and often to beg him to perfect and realize them in us and in his whole Church” (521)

Obviously, to carry out this mission, we need to know our Lord and his teachings. We have to go to him and read the Gospel. Reading and meditating on it should be regular practice for us, a habit meant to keep us in touch with him.

Thus, every time we read the Gospel, we have to understand by our faith that we are engaging with our Lord in an actual and living way. We are listening to him, and somehow seeing him. We can use our imagination to make ourselves as one more character in any scene depicted by the Gospel.

For this, we need to look for the appropriate time and place. We have to be wary of our tendency to be dominated by a lifestyle of activism and pragmatism that take away our need for recollection and immersion in the life of Christ.

The drama of Christ’s life here on earth has to continue in our own life. Thus, we need to continually conform our mind and heart to the Gospel, an affair that demands everything from us.

Our problem is that the Gospel has ceased to be what it ought to be to many people. It has been downgraded as one more book among many others that we have. And worse, since it does not give us immediate practical knowledge, many of us give it low priority.

For us priests, especially, we need to internalize it, not in the way an actor internalizes his script. We internalize it by making it the very life of our mind and heart, the very impulse of our emotion and passions. It should be the soul of our whole life.

Thus, when we preach we cannot help but somehow showcase the drama inside our heart, giving others a glimpse of how our heart is actually taking, handling and delivering the word of God.

Preaching should reflect the condition of our heart as it grapples with the living word of God. It should not just be a matter of declaiming or orating, reduced to the art of speaking and stage performing, a mere play of our talents.

Neither should it be just a display of our intellectual prowess or our cultural wealth. It should manage to show the actual living faith and love our heart has for God’s word, how our heart is receiving it and reacting to it.

Thus, preaching is a matter of how effectively we manage to show and teach Christ to the others. It’s never about us, the preachers. Rather, it can be about us in our effort to bring Christ to the others. Its success or failure depends solely on this.

St. John Mary Vianney, patron for priests, is an example of an excellent preacher. Though not very gifted intellectually and humanly, he managed to preach well because his heart burned with great love for Christ.

That love led him to an amazing eloquence, full of common and supernatural sense, that attracted all kinds of people, even the most sophisticated and complicated ones.

We need to learn to preach from a heart immersed in Christ!

Banning God in public places

THERE seems to emerge in places like the US a certain strain of religious freedom thatś highly controversial, to say the least.

Instead of promoting religion—any kind as long as the minimum requirements for peaceful common living are met—they are banning any mention and references to God and his images in public places, because according to them, these already go against the rights and freedom of some people. As if there can ever be a totally religion-free society!

I know that we have different, and even conflicting ideas and views, but I could not figure out how praying in public schools, putting religious images in office buildings, making the sign of the cross, etc., especially if a good number of the parties involved so desire it, could already be held as an infraction of freedom.

In Europe, for example, they are now prohibiting the display of crucifixes in public places.

If some people do not like these, they can always ignore them and do something else, just as those who believe in some religion have to respect the ways of those of who do not believe in any. But what we cannot do is to prevent people from expressing their beliefs in public. That in itself is already against freedom.

This new unfortunate development is putting God in the same category as smoking in confined public places and some forms of public display of affection if not of indecency in public places. God has become a strictly private and personal affair should not be given public expression.

I also learned the other day that in Australia recently, they held a festival of dangerous ideas, and together with the different ideologies, the Catholic faith was also included, represented by a Cardinal who tried to defend the Church.

Things are now getting exciting in the world! We have to know how to handle these problems and challenges well. We have to continue to clarify and engage different parties in a dialogue that hopefully will always be conducted in charity and understanding and with eagerness to know the truth.

I don´t think it would do us well if we choose to disregard this question.

At the moment, what seems relevant is to define religious freedom. What does it really mean? What does it entail?

To me, religious freedom is the most basic of our freedoms. I would even dare to say itś the mother freedom. All other aspects of freedom flow from it.

Itś where the fundamental exercise of our conscience is made, the one that tries to give us an over-all picture of who we are, where we come from and where we are supposed to head. In short, it gives us our origin and end, defines us and gives meaning to all the happen in our life.

Different people, of course, have varying understanding of this religious freedom. Even the professed atheist has, in a way, his own idea of religious freedom, since regardless of his allergy to anything religious, he maintains some core beliefs and convictions that comprise his religion.

Thus, we have to distinguish between the subjective religious freedom and the objective religious freedom that can only come about after so much study, insights, experience, etc., among ourselves. We should do nothing to hamper this process.

Our whole life here on earth, in a way, can be described as an effort to discover the authentic religious freedom meant for all. Its ultimate purpose, seen from a different angle, can be that. This religious freedom is like a hunt for the true God, whatever and whoever he may be.

Already in history and in the different cultures, several religions have arisen with their own systems of beliefs and doctrine. Let there be a way to coexist among themselves and to engage in a healthy exchange that would help all to be enlightened without compromising oneś freedom.

Thus, we need to be respectful of one another and be endlessly patient. But the dialogue has to continue, and ought not to be stopped by some arbitrary rules. Making those laws forbidding the harmless public expression of religion should be avoided.

Obviously, proselytism and apostolate cannot be avoided, since it is in the very nature of oneś religion, whatever it may be, to share what one has. But all this should follow certain basic rules to keep peace and harmony in our dynamic and fast-changing world.