THESE are two different realities. Itś good to know each of them—their nature and properties—and how they are related to each other. Thereś a lot to gain from this knowledge, especially the light we need to cruise through our increasingly complicated times.
Morality is the objective quality of our human acts, starting with the internal ones like our thoughts and intentions, insofar as these bring us or not to our proper end. Thus, our human acts can be either morally good or bad.
Morality covers everything that can be called as a human act, one that is done knowingly and freely, and thus one for which we are responsible. The morality of our actions, good or bad, is most clear to the extent that our knowledge, consent and responsibility for such actions are also at their fullest.
Thatś in theory and in principle. In practice and in real life, things are a lot messier, since assessing oneś knowledge, consent and responsibility for his actions is a very dynamic affair, often shrouded in mystery and beset by ignorance and confusion by the persons concerned.
In the end, morality depends on oneś self-knowledge and on God, who is the Creator of all things and continues to govern everything with his Providence. Thus, we can readily see how important it is to have good self-knowledge and clear and deep convictions about religion, our relation to God.
Weak and vague in this fundamental aspect, we may as well set off a course that later will turn to pure chaos and anarchy.
Thus, morality is based on our nature and dignity as persons and ultimately as children of God. It depends on our core ideas and beliefs about who and what we really are. These will ultimately define what our nature and dignity is, who we really are.
Legality, on the other hand, is a human construct made to promulgate and determine the content of morality. Its purpose is to regulate our life in society so that we can attain our common good.
Since our common good always include not only the material, social and political, but also the spiritual and personal, legality cannot get away from morality.
Legality can only have a very limited scope compared to the one of morality It cannot promulgate, determine and regulate everything in the moral law. But it cannot stay away from morality. It has to be the moon to morality’s sun. It can only reflect and work for morality, never against.
Thus, we can have the following principle to follow: no act morally bad can be sanctioned by civil law, and no act morally necessary can be prohibited. But not all morally good acts can be regulated civilly, nor can all morally bad acts be coercively prohibited, Only the morally bad relevant to our social or political common good can be prohibited.
It’s this gap between morality and legality that we have to most cautious about these days. At the moment, many pieces of evidence all over the world point to how this gap is cleverly manipulated to pursue questionable objectives.
A case in point is the Reproductive Health Bill. Its good intentions are patent, but its means are immoral. Our local version may not yet include the clearly immoral abortion, but it promotes contraception and other things that are also clearly immoral, though not in the same category as abortion.
This is an example of how legality is made to go against morality. Of course, many justifications and rationalizations are now made, including rewriting Christian morality by those who claim to be Catholics but do not follow Christian moral doctrine. They look like mongrel Christians.
Of course, those who are not Christians or Catholics, not to mention, the professed atheists and non-believers, make their own version of morality derived from their own understanding of the natural moral law that highly favors what they want: contraception, sterilization, etc.
Fortunately, there are also many non-Christian people who follow the correct morality based on their own religion and their own efforts to know the contents of the natural moral law. This only shows that the natural moral can transcend religious differences.
Whatever the situation may be, we need to raise everyone’s awareness to work for an increasingly harmonious relation between morality and legality. Our leaders, especially Church and civil leaders and politicians and other people of influence, should be in the forefront of this effort.
How we behave in this gap will show the kind of persons we are!
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
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)
“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)
Monday, November 9, 2009
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!
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!
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