Determining the quality of our life

IT must have been 10 years ago. A young university student approached me and confided to me that he had some intimations he was meant for the priesthood.

We talked a lot after that, spending hours just to sort things out. His parents wanted him to finish his college course first and, if possible, to work for a while. He was losing interest in his studies. And there was also that delicate affair of the heart that needed to be resolved.

Of course, these were very tricky matters. I had to act in the most prudent way I could to help him. For one, I had to make sure his wanting to enter the seminary was not a cover for his possible intellectual deficiency that could have led him to have a loss of interest in his college studies.

And many other factors had to be considered and weighed. But entering into his mind and heart, I gradually saw the elements of a priestly vocation as I managed to eliminate possible false reasons for him to want to be a priest. And so we devised a plan.

To make a long story short, he is now a priest, just newly ordained and conspicuously glowing with the joy of having his dream fulfilled, his calling answered properly. His supreme joy also became mine, and I thanked God profusely for this gift.

But I told him, his life has just begun. Or a new chapter has just been opened in which he has to write many beautiful things of love and fidelity, of heroic generosity and total self-giving even up to death, making himself a true holocaust of self-offering.

The twinkle in his eyes when he heard what I told him clearly said he was game to it, of course, with God’s grace and his efforts. Well, the fellow had already gone through some years of training and all sorts of experiences, making him confident he could hack it.

In a way, in spite of his young age, he is already a veteran in the ways of spiritual development and moral combat. He just needs to continue struggling, always to be on guard, but doing this very discreetly and naturally.

But I still felt I have to be there for him, which is actually not a special thing to do since all of us should be there for everybody else. This is the law of our life. We are meant for one another. We have to help one another in any way we can.

This time, I reminded him about the indispensable importance of prayer, of personal contact with God that has to be daily, even abiding all throughout the day, and that has to be constantly worked out, so that that prayer becomes effective, not just formalistic.

I told him that the life of priests certainly has a specific focus and purpose, but it is also open to anything. It’s in keeping one’s proper bearings in the midst of all the possibilities in life that constitutes a tough challenge to any priest. And what can guide him is when he prays.

Everyone of us should manage to pray whatever our circumstances may be. Prayer is to our soul what eating is to our body. It keeps us alive and healthy, since we would be contact with God, the food of our soul. In fact, the quality of our life boils down to the quality of our prayer.

To this new, young priest, I confided personal experiences regarding the tests and trials to be expected and the effort needed to be able to pray properly. There will be many temptations, reasons and excuses to delay and even miss prayer. These should be tackled frontally and decisively.

I even went to the extent of telling him that the first test of whether one is living sincerity and building an authentic Christian life, let alone, life as priest, is when he is sincere about his prayer. It’s the cornerstone of one’s spiritual life.

Without prayer, everything will just come out as a sham, a charade, a most pitiable one since the priesthood can be used to deceive a lot of people and can seriously corrupt the personal life a priest.

Everyone has to pray in such a way that we can echo St. Paul’s cry: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” We cannot exaggerate how important it is to really pray properly.

Everyone has to spare no effort to make his prayer real prayer.

Reengineering the priesthood?

WE are now ending the Year for Priests launched by Pope Benedict XVI
last year on the occasion of the 150th death anniversary of the patron
for priests, St. John Mary Vianney.

The year-long event was envisioned “to encourage priests in the
striving for spiritual perfection on which, above all, the
effectiveness of their ministry depends.”

And true enough, all through the year many programs of pertinent
activities were carried out in dioceses and parishes. In our country,
the highlight I think was the holding of the 5-day National Congress
for the Clergy last January.

I am sure many fruits have been reaped with this celebration, though
they may elude direct and clear accounting. It’s almost impossible to
put into words, much less into numbers, these effects that mainly are
spiritual and pastoral in character. But they certainly are there.

Even the negative events that, I must say, were made to erupt as if
to embarrass the Church and especially the Pope, were good occasions
to clarify certain issues.

Yes, issues there always will be. These are no new things that should
surprise us. They are part and parcel of our human condition that
never disappears even if one is already consecrated into a sublime
spiritual and supernatural office such as what the priesthood is.

Just look at Jesus Christ, the son of God who became man to be our
savior. He being God must be all-knowing and yet he chose among the
apostles, who were the people closest to him in his redemptive work,
Judas Iscariot who betrayed him.

God opens himself to all the possibilities contained in the freedom
of man, including its misuse and abuse. But he knows how to derive
good from evil. He is not frustrated by the sinfulness of men, even of
those supposedly very close to him.

This is how we should look at the issues regarding priests and
priesthood in general. The power, goodness and mercy of God, which we
should try to imitate, are not meant to rationalize our mistakes.
Rather, they are meant to occasion a deeper and more extensive
purification and renewal.

And so it’s not a matter of rethinking the nature of priesthood,
which is already written in stone, carved in granite. It’s more of
reengineering our attitudes and ways of living the priesthood.

This reengineering, being subjective and set for Christ’s infinite
ways, will always require continuing improvement. This duty will be
endless, coterminous with nothing less than life itself. May we never
say ‘enough’ in exerting the suitable effort.

As of the moment, I am happy that the Holy Father not only went
through a rigorous review of the nature and ministry of the
priesthood, but also pointed out concrete problematic areas that still
beset the world of priests and bishops.

This he did most especially when he had to explain and ask for mercy
and understanding, on behalf of those concerned, for the many scandals
involving some clerics. Think of the cases in Ireland and Germany and
the States.

He was forthright in admitting the mistakes of Church personalities
as well as the defects in Church life and structure, including certain
aspects of the priestly culture. This is a welcome development, since
many Church officials are rather evasive about these issues, perhaps
also because of some good reasons.

To me, another enriching data that came as a result of these scandals
springs from the area of psychology. I am quite familiar with the
spiritual and theological underpinnings of the issues, but certainly
these issues also have a strong psychological aspect that urgently
needs to be addressed.

I recently read two articles by psychologists with some exposure to
priestly problems and these introduced me to the concept of “emotion
deficit.” This may not be a major issue, but I believe it can hold a
crucial role in the way the priestly problems evolve.

If left ignored and unattended, it can be the small stone, mentioned
in the Bible, which can crash the magnificent image made of precious
metals except for the feet that were made of clay, an image of our
human condition.

I think it’s time we give due attention to this aspect, even if in
the over-all scheme of priestly life and ministry, it only plays a
minor role. The continuing formation for priests should include this
as an integral part that should not be lightly considered.

Besides, the structure and culture of the priestly environment should
reinforce the need to satisfy this requirement for normal, let alone,
priestly, life.

Education in a state of emergency

THAT’S what Pope Benedict is sounding off these days, addressing more directly to the Italian situation and that of the developed Western world in general.

In our case, when we talk about some problems in education, we refer more to lack of classrooms and the need to attune and synch our educational programs such that they solve our headaches in poverty and literacy.

Thanks to God, our difficulty is mainly in that level which, I admit, is already big, urgent and really crying for immediate solutions and relief. Still, if compared to those of the West, our worries are mere chicken feed.

Our predicament is more in the material dimension of life. That of the West is already undermining the more important spiritual dimension of life. Many times I have seen people, materially poor but full of faith in God, who cope better in life than those materially rich but with weak faith.

We are, of course, a unity of body and spiritual soul. They cannot be separated in life. Only in death, and in a temporary way since Christian faith teaches us that both body and soul reunite at the end of time.

Our education, for sure, has to take care of the needs of both our constitutive elements of body and soul, but always giving special attention to those of the soul. We may have to make the proper priorities in tackling these needs of our education, but it’s not right to put them in conflict with each other.

Just the same, we should not be complacent with our apparent luck. We need to give serious attention to the root causes of the educational crisis that the Pope talks about, because even in our country we can see traces and symptoms of these Western anomalies emerging and developing.

The Pope points a finger at two culprits responsible for the emergency situation in the educational system in the West. These are, first, the false notion of human autonomy that confines us to ourselves, and, second, the spreading mentalities of relativism and skepticism.

These things may sound abstruse to many, but I’m afraid they now need to be understood by as many people as possible, since these factors affect all of us. We may have to explain a little about these disturbing phenomena so we can get a handle on the situation

The first cause mentioned by the Pope, which is about a false idea on human autonomy, refers to the exaggerated understanding of our freedom and autonomy such that we think education is simply our development purely by and for ourselves.

We make ourselves the be-all and end-all of everything. We think we are not meant for something greater than ourselves now. We make ourselves our own God. Everything else is just used for our self-development.

This attitude is basically wrong since we by nature and as persons need to be in relation with others and ultimately with God. In short, we become more human and better persons the more we relate ourselves to God and the others.

Sad to say, the educational thrust in many places in the world today, including ours, appears to go in this direction of being selfish and of tending to self-absorption, detached from the immediate and ultimate sources of our life and our wisdom.

This first cause of the education crisis, as the Pope warns us now, leads to the second which are the dangerous attitudes of relativism and skepticism. With faith ignored, divine revelation blocked and the understanding of human nature twisted, we now create our own world devoid of absolute truths.

Everything is now held relative to whatever criteria we may want to consider as our truths and values. This will lead to skepticism and a host of kindred anomalies. In the end, what would rule will just be the law of pragmatism and eventually the law of the jungle, of brute force, etc.

These considerations of the Holy Father, I believe, should not be taken lightly, thinking that they are not quite relevant to our present condition. They are always relevant. And the sooner we include these warnings into our educational system, making the necessary adjustments, the better for us.

We should not regard these caveats as something abstract. They have direct impact on our lives and on our society. We have to overcome that tendency to get stuck with the material and temporal purpose of education and give priority attention to its spiritual and supernatural objective.