Who are we really?

A STORY is said about Alexander the Great who astounded a beggar who only asked for some alms but instead was given the government of five cities. When the beggar expressed his consternation, Alexander just said: “You asked like the man you are. I give like the man I am.”

Well, that’s how the cookie crumbles in this life. Whatever we do or say is determined by the way we are. We understand, see and react to things according to the kind of person we are.

As some Latin adages would have it, “Operare sequitur esse” (our deeds are determined by our being), or “Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur” (Whatever is received is received according to the manner of the receiver).

The guests in a wedding give gifts to the newly-weds in accordance to their station in life. The millionaire may give a car or a house, while an ordinary housewife may give a set of chinaware. It can happen, though, that the latter gives it more wholeheartedly than the former.

When you just have a little money, you usually give a modest tip to the barber or the waiter. But when you have a thick wallet, you tend to give away a lot more.

Different people react to issues or tackle problems according to the way they are. The intellectual sees things differently from the way a farmer sees them. Same with how believers and unbelievers approach challenges.

This is a law of life that somehow sheds light on the importance and the need of truly enriching our identity, our humanity, because everything else in our life would depend on who we really are.

I suppose we can readily see that we are much more than just a biological creature, or a socio-cultural product, or a political animal or economic phenomenon. For sure, these aspects also go into our identity, but there must still be some deeper underlying basis that holds these aspects together.

Some ideologies have put forward their conception of our nature. The communists tend to see man simply as a material creature, subject only to social, economic, historical, political forces. There is nothing beyond our death.

Atheists and agnostics tend to limit us only to our temporal and earthly dimensions. Hardly anything spiritual and supernatural is considered. In fact, they are averse to such considerations. They claim there is no God, or that God’s existence is doubtful, and therefore we hardly have any relation with God.

We need to enrich our identity because our humanity is not a static matter determined solely by genes or legal status or some social and cultural criteria. Our identity is a dynamic affair that ultimately depends on who we believe we are.

The quest to know our real identity and to bring our humanity to its fullness cannot help but touch on our core beliefs. It has to enter into the question of whether we are created, and if we are created, then how we are related to our Creator. Is it a relation between a person and a thing, or between a person and another person?

The Christian faith tells us a wholistic vision of our humanity, one that covers not only the temporal and earthly, but also the eternal and supernatural. It gives meaning not only to the good events we have like our joys and successes, but also the bad ones like our sufferings and defeats.

The Christian faith tells us that we are persons, not things, since we have intelligence and will. We can know and love. We can enter into a relationship and are conscious of it. More than that, we are expected to keep and strengthen that relationship.

This is a very crucial point to be understood by us—in fact, by all of us as much as possible. Sad to say, we often are remiss of this duty to keep and deepen this relationship. We just let ourselves be led by some feeling or changing perceptions. We seldom go to the root of our identity.

Our Christian faith tells us that not only are we persons, created in the image and likeness of God. We are children of God who with grace are expected to participate intimately in the very life of God. We have been enabled for this dignity, and this potential is made actual by God’s grace and our correspondence to it.

This is the truth of our faith that needs to be processed thoroughly and assimilated deeply so we don’t get lost in the confusing ways of our earthly life.

Our daily patchwork

EVERYDAY we have to deal with all sorts of things, a veritable hodgepodge, a patchwork of matters that often are incongruous to each other. This can lead us to confusion, to bewilderment and then to things like skepticism, cynicism, indifference and the like.

            If we want to survive, then we should feel the responsibility of blending this mix with meaning and beauty, with a sense of purpose and direction. In that way, our daily patchwork becomes a living thing, not just a dead, inert mess that we are forced to handle. It becomes organic. That’s our daily challenge.

            Aside from the basic variety in our life, like the spiritual and the material, the natural and the supernatural, the sacred and the mundane, the temporal and the eternal, we have to deal now with the endless finer nuances that this diversity produces.

            There are things that we like and don’t like, things that we love and we hate, developments that are pleasant and unpleasant. There are successes and failures, moments that are prosaic and also sublime, times when we go into an intellectual mode as well as into a manual mode.

            We handle both absolute dogmas and relative opinions, old and traditional customs as well as new and innovative practices and trends. We have our highs and lows in our emotional and psychological life.

            Then we deal with all kinds of people. There are the good, saintly ones, and the openly devious, full of calculations and schemes. You have the rich and the poor, the simple and the sophisticated, the quick-witted and the dimwit.

            We just have to learn how to be sport and flexible before all these possibilities, and versatile as well, so we can be “all things to all men,” as St. Paul once told us. We need to be open in our attitude, and confident and competent so as not to get lost as well as to know how to integrate them together into one meaningful whole.

            The ideal to reach is to be able to reflect God’s joy at the end of each day of the creation story, where it is said that “God saw that it was good.” In fact, on the seventh day of creation, he rested and entered into communion with his creation. That is how we ought to feel and do at the end of our day and of our life.

            We, of course, can only do this if we are with God. And that’s precisely the main point we want to make here. We have to work on our unity and identification of God, whose image and likeness we are, whose children we also are. We cannot and should not be left alone, left to our own devices. We need God.

            Insofar as God is concerned, he is always with us. He intervenes in our life. His presence in us is never passive even if we are not aware of him. If we have faith, then we will realize this truth and would be led to correspond to his designs for us.

            God’s intervention in our life had led him to send his son to us, the son becoming man himself through the mystery of the incarnation. It’s good that we go through what the Catechism teaches us about the significance of the incarnation so we would know how God and us can live together and can be united.

            Point 521 says: “Christ enables us to live in him all that he himself lived, and he lives it in us. By his incarnation, he, the Son of God, has in a certain way united himself with each man. We are called only to become one with him, for he enables us as the members of his Body to share in what he lived for us in his flesh as our model.”

            In short, Christ shows us the way of how to deal with whatever we experience in life, which he identifies with.

            We need to be aware of this truth of our faith and start to act and behave accordingly. We need to deal with Christ personally through prayer, reception of the sacraments, continuing study of our faith, etc.

            This is how we can put life and purpose, order and harmony, meaning and beauty into our daily patchwork.

            We need to spread this Good News and reassure everyone of its veracity as evidenced in the lives of saints through the ages. Our times, more complicated, subtle and challenging, need modern saints who know how to cope with the growing patchworks we need to deal everyday.

The greatness of little things

OF course, big things come from small things. The former is made of the latter. No building will rise if no sand, gravel, cement, wood, bars, etc. are put all together. As an ancient Greek writer said: “From base things we devise things noble.” No orchestra will play great music if its many members will not play their part properly.

            We need to see the organic connection between the little things and the big things, the here-and-now and the beyond, the means and the end, the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural. We need to see that connection and be fascinated by it always.

            Our usual problem is to get stuck with one or the other term of the equation. Our usual problem is we either get too focused on the little things without relating them to the big things, or we have the bias of considering only the goal or the result without giving due attention to the often tedious means and processes.

            Without seeing and living this connection, we become vulnerable to miss our goals, or we can fail to burn and grow in our love—for God and for others. We cannot persevere in our pursuits. Our initial enthusiasm fizzles out easily. The gloss and sheen of our appearance and behavior evaporate in no time.

            The Book of Sirach says: “He who despises small things will fail little by little.” (19,1) We have to be most careful because the neglect of little things can easily lull us to complacency, or to think that nothing is wrong and that everything is just fine.

            In short, we fail to develop a unity of life. Not only would we be unable to link the present with the future, the means with the end, the internal with the external, we would also fail to relate the mundane with the sacred, the fleeting character of the prosaic elements in our daily life with the permanent value in our life beyond death.

            We obviously have to contend with many obstacles along the way. We can tend to be narrow-minded and short-sighted, full of improper biases and attachments. We easily make rash judgments and are often at the mercy of our emotions and passions, putting our reason and faith to sleep.

            We can also get tired, or rather, we can cover laziness as tiredness. The general environment, the prevailing culture can be insensitive to the value of little things. It only gives attention to the big things, not the little ones, the desired success, not the necessary effort.

            This is where we fail to realize the greatness of the little things, taking them for granted, and to miss the fact that while it’s true that the devil can be in the details to show the falsity of the apparently impressive things we do, God is also in the details, since it’s the little things where we can see God and engage him in a relation of love.

            As the spiritual writer Cassian once said, the most subtle trick, the most insidious snare the devil can make on us is to suggest that progress can only be achieved in the big things and not in the little things.

            It’s in the little things, it’s in the care we give to the small, ordinary, prosaic activities and concerns of the day that proves whether we are really true to our good intentions and to our fervent affirmations of love and care for the others.

            We need to train ourselves to see God in the little things. The objective reality is that God is everywhere. He’s not only in the extraordinary events in our life. He is always with us.

            Thus, we need to learn to be contemplative even in the middle of the world, able to see God in all the good, the bad, and the ugly that the world contains. We need to learn how to be recollected so that even as we engage our senses and faculties with the many immediate things in life, we don’t lose sight of the ultimate end.

            We need to exercise our faith. We cannot depend solely on what we see, hear or feel. Neither would it be enough that we move only when we understand things. We have to follow closely what our faith tells us, even if there are mysteries involved.

            God’s providence is such that not only is he present in everything. He is also actively intervening in our life, especially in the little things, drawing us and everything else to himself.