Make the holidays more meaningful

HOLIDAYS are special, usually happy days, because they are occasions for some celebration that are either civil or religious in character. They afford us to take a pause, and together with it, a chance to reflect on the significance of the event celebrated.

They are necessary to us because as persons with multiple aspects, we need to nurture our sense of personal individuality that should be blended with our sense of being members of the family, society, the country, the Church and the world.

Otherwise, we can just become automatons, pushed here and there by merely shallow, unprocessed instincts and impulses, let alone, external factors and other social conditionings. We have to be more aware of this danger, because it is actually menacing us today, often without us knowing it.

We have to remember that holidays let us savor the deeper, wider and higher levels of our life that often are taken for granted in the ordinary flow of our daily concerns.

More specifically, they enable us to find more meaning in life, to develop a more wholistic and global outlook, and to form stronger and surer convictions. In short, they make us touch base again with God. We need to do these things, for they comprise our own perfection, our own maturity as persons.

That is why we have to take extreme care of how we spend our holidays. We just cannot go through them in a thoughtless way, plunging into random interests, and opening ourselves to all sorts of anomalies like frivolity, laziness, complacency, or just pure waste of time.

In fact, Pope Benedict warned us recently of the dangers of holidays that are not planned properly. To a gathering of families in Milan, Italy, he said:

“In our day, unfortunately, the conception of a holiday as an opportunity to escape and to consume commodities, contributes to dispersing the family and the community and spreading an individualistic lifestyle.”

He proposed the promotion of reflection and commitment aimed a recovering the true meaning of celebration, especially on Sundays, which in his words are “the day of the Lord and the day of man, the day of the family, of the community and of solidarity.”

These are words pregnant with meaning that we have to learn to appreciate, love and live. Holidays and celebrations just cannot be held captive by a culture of just having fun and nice food, having free time that can be spent in any way we want, but usually in pure self-seeking.

That kind of mentality deforms our humanity by feeding our senses with the wrong food while starving our spirit. It makes us to lose touch with our ultimate principle of life who is God. It creates a false world for us, a fantasy. We become alive only to the material world, but dead to the spiritual one.

Besides, it fosters disunity in us as individual persons, then in our families, in our communities, often in a beguiling, entertaining or fun way. It’s actually a sweet poison that we have to learn to wean ourselves from.

What we have to do is to make use of holidays to have more time with God, more time with our own selves, then with our family, before we launch out to spend time with the community and the rest of the world.

Holidays should help us recoup our energies, or go through a process of rest and renewal so as to go back to the daily routine with a clearer vision and sense of meaning and purpose. They should not just be some escape mechanism that breaks the unity between work and rest.

The way we spend our holidays should reflect that blessed rest God had at the end of the creation of the world and man. They should enable us to enjoy the fruits of our work by entering into the purpose of our work that should conform to God’s plan.

This is what it means by entering into communion with others and the world in general. It is making ourselves become more as a person and as the people and the family of God.

In the terminology used by Pope John Paul II, holidays should make us gain in being more than in having. That means we have to become better persons since we would could enter into closer, more intimate and meaningful relations with others and with God especially.

In practical terms, it means fewer things but more presence with others, less isolation but more encounter with others, less haste and more dialogue, etc.

Truth = Charity

 WE need to make adjustments in our common understanding of truth. For many of us, truth is a matter of what we see or witness, how we feel, what we know and understand. Truth in this sense is some cold data perceived by the senses and processed by our intellect and will.

            So, we come out with a variety of man-made truths—scientific truth, legal truth, social, economic or political truth, etc.—with varying degrees of precision depending on whether the truth is empirically observed and gathered, and can be measured, etc.

            The problem with this conception of truth is that it mainly focuses on the material aspects of world, or at best, on the natural and human phenomena of our life. It ignores the spiritual aspects, let alone, the need to refer everything to God who is, after all, the Author of all reality.

            It’s a truth that depends mainly on our perceptions, discernments, judgments and reasoning. In short, in the way we are. It tends to be self-established and developed. It’s a truth that is often held captive by one’s subjective ways, and averse to anything pertaining to the truth that can go against how we are.

            It cannot be denied that truth sometimes, and in fact also many times, hurts. That’s simply because it can go against our own liking. It can also go beyond our own capabilities as when we talk about mysteries which are truths that surpass our power to understand. Before mysteries, we simply believe, though we can always try to understand them.

            And so, with this subjective kind of understanding of truth, we tend to have at best only a partial grasp of reality, or a tentative one, if not a distorted one, that is most vulnerable to be used by the many ulterior motives we can have.

            The reality, however, is that truth cannot be other than what God, our creator and father, has willed and designed for us and the world. There should therefore be a deliberate effort to refer our perceptions, discernments, judgments and reasoning to him before we dare to make any declaration.

            The problem sometimes is that some people invoke their freedom and independence to make their own judgments without referring them to God. To them, their conscience is not where they hear the voice of God, but rather where they hear their own voice in its clearest form.

            Lost to the them is the truth that our freedom and independence are God-given qualities and properties that need to be lived and used according to God’s will, which for us is summarized and perfected in charity, charity being the essence of God of whom we are the image and likeness.

            Our freedom and independence are not of our own making. They come from God. They are precisely what make us the image and likeness of God. They can only be lived and exercised with him and in him.

            No wonder that when Christ was asked what the greatest commandment was, he simply said, to love God with all your might, etc., and the second greatest, to love your neighbour as yourself. Later on, he perfected these two commandments by giving us a new commandment: to love one another as he has loved us.

            We are meant for loving. And the whole truth of our existence is contained in this loving. In other words, for truth to be truth, it has to go all the way to knowing and living it in love.

            Truth therefore just cannot be reduced to a cold data, or to mere personal perceptions and understanding, no matter how scientific it is, or politically and socially popular its consensus is achieved. We really cannot have the truth unless that truth is held also in charity.

            This is where we have to make some drastic adjustments in our understanding of truth. It’s when truth equates with charity that we can achieve true justice and equality among us. That’s when we can truly be brothers and sisters to one another, without anyone higher or lower than the rest of us.

            It’s when truth equates with charity that we can live genuine prudence and discretion, avoiding the stupidities of gossips and mindless chatter. We would know what and when to think, speak and act, and when not.

            It’s when truth equals charity when we, all of us, can achieve our authentic and ultimate dignity as persons who are image and likeness of God and children of his, meant to participate in the very life of God.

Talking about God

THIS may sound stratospheric, but I think it stands to reason that from time to time we take ourselves to some altitude to be able to see a kind of global picture below.

            Our problem is that our knowledge of God is left to the minimum as we would rather study the things around us. It’s a knowledge often shrouded in strange, vague feelings and moods, and prone to superstitions. If not that, then it goes to the other extreme of denying God exists.

            At the moment, people find it awkward to talk about God. It’s like it’s not cool to talk about him. Some venture to say, only fools do, not realizing that many saints, like St. Paul, precisely consider themselves like fools—of course, from a completely different reason.

            And yet many people cannot deny they somehow cling to an idea of God in their view of life. This is because man, no matter how impious he may be, is always at heart a religious being. He will always find a way to have a God in his life, if not the real God, then a false one.

            It is precisely this predicament that should push to talk more seriously about God, trying to know more about him and the consequential implications, both theoretical and practical, that should affect if not define our life here on earth. This predicament should not freeze us into inaction or disinterest.

            What we know about him is that when that voice in the burning bush was asked by Moses who he was, the answer was, “I am who am” (Yahweh). It’s obviously a very mysterious answer that has fired philosophers, theologians and thinkers to decipher its meaning.

            What can come close to explaining it, at least at the start without ever explaining completely, is that by saying so, that mysterious voice describes himself as the very source and principle of being, on whom all other beings depend.

            In philosophical terms, he is the fullness of subsistent being who is not limited or defined by a particular essence, since his very essence is simply to be.

            While we and every other creature are defined and determined by our essence—as man or animal or plant or inanimate object, etc.—God is not defined by any essence, for he simply is God. In God’s own words, he simply is—“I am who am.” He is not this nor that. He simply is!

            Our mind, though unable to penetrate, fathom and comprehend this completely, can at least sense and know this. This situation should put us into a state of suspense therefore, a situation that we should try to resolve somehow by continually digging into its mystery instead of being indifferent to it.

            This is how our life ought to be characterized. It should be in constant pursuit of God, because short of it, our life would just go in circles, perhaps with periods of worldly fascination and excitement, but rather limited and disoriented.

            The lives of saints reflect this kind of lifestyle. They go beyond earthly dimensions, willing to suffer earthly difficulties or not to give too much importance to earthly joys and successes, because they are sure of the real and ultimate life that is meant for them and, actually, for all of us also.

An old Italian love song somehow illustrates the kind of attitude we ought to have toward God: “Al di là del bene più prezioso / ci sei tu. / Al di là del sogno più ambizioso / ci sei tu. / Al di là delle cose più belle / Al di là delle stelle, ci sei tu. /Al di là, ci sei tu per me, per me, soltanto per me.”

(Beyond the most precious, that's where you are. Beyond the most ambitious, that's where you are. Beyond the most beautiful, Beyond the stars, that's where you are. Beyond everything, that's where you are for me, for me, just for me.)

In a way, to be able to talk about God we need to fall in love with God, just like in this Italian song. And it is in this love that we can forever grow in our knowledge of God that will become increasingly exquisite and sublime.

It would be knowledge that will make us realize deeply and abidingly that we are nothing without him, and that what we need to do is in fact to always go to him. We can never be just by ourselves, since that would take us away from the very source and keeper of our life.