Consistency and adaptability

WE need to strike a healthy balance between consistency and adaptability in our behaviour, especially as we go about reclaiming our life, now warped here and there by so many confusing elements, for God.

            Again, the ultimate model for this is Christ who did nothing other than to carry out the will of his Father and yet was game to all the possibilities that human freedom would take him, including dying on the cross.

            I am sure that even in our ordinary affairs, we need to do some kind of balancing. Our life is filled with many things, often with competing values that objectively are good in varying degrees, not to mention the constant clash between good and evil. We have no other alternative but to find that balance that would give due consideration to all these elements of our life.

            Yes, we need to have consistency in our life, in our identity, in our mission. But we should not understand this consistency as rigidity, inflexibility, hardness. Christian consistency is very much compatible with adaptability. In fact, Christian consistency requires an adaptability that goes all the way till death, like what Christ did.

            Neither should we understand adaptability as a lawless attitude toward life. We always need to acknowledge the law that comes from God, as well as to acknowledge when that law is followed and when it is violated. We have to avoid the thinking that everything will just have the same value. That’s an adaptability gone haywire.

            The secret to all this is to imitate Christ. He ceaselessly preached the truth about God, about ourselves and everything else. He persisted in it regardless of whether he was understood or not, believed or not.

            In spite of all difficulties and contradictions, including being betrayed and denied by those close to him, he continued with his redemptive work. He kept this determination alive by spending time in prayer—he would spend nights talking with his Father. He was not afraid of making all kinds of sacrifices.

            And he did everything to make himself understood and accessible to people. He, first of all, being God became man so he can truly be not only with us but also bear in his humanity all the wounded condition of man.

            This truth was vividly described by St. Paul when he talked about the self-emptying of Christ. “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant...” (Phil 2,5ff)

            In his preaching, he used parables to make his messages more understandable to the people. He was extremely patient with everyone, even if on occasion he had to make corrections.

            He may have done a good number of miracles, but they were made not to impress the people, but rather to show them genuine compassion and to help them build up their fledgling faith.

            Then he allowed himself to go through all the suffering and all the way to death on the cross, in obedience to his Father, to take up all the sins of men, to die to them only to resurrect. This is the ultimate of how Christ lived both consistency and adaptability.

            The crux of the secret is to imitate Christ in his obedience to his Father’s will. “Father, not my will but yours be done,” he said. It is this obedience that would show the full extent of our faith, hope and charity in God through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

            It is in imitating Christ in this obedience to his Father’s will that would indicate how willing we are to be with God even if we would already run out of reasons to follow him. Faith and reason should go together, but faith can outrun reason.

            We need to process this truth of our faith slowly and deeply, so we could relish the many implications and consequences, theoretical and practical, of how we can live both consistency and adaptability in our Christian life and mission.

            Some of these implications are that we really need to commit ourselves to a certain plan of life, made up of certain practices of piety and continuing formation. This way, we nourish our spiritual life, we keep ourselves spiritually healthy and morally active both in good times and in bad.

            In short, we have to think of spending time in serious personal and intimate prayer, study of the doctrine of our faith, recourse to the sacraments, etc.

Glorifying the body

YES, there is such a thing as glorifying the body. St. Paul said it clearly in one of his epistles. To those who, like the Manicheans and the Puritans, think that the body is bad, an object of shame, or that it should be disciplined, if not suppressed in some way, some clarification is definitely in order.

            Obviously, glorifying the body does not mean either that we, like the libertarians, pamper it out of vanity, pride and their ilk. That certainly is glorifying the body the wrong, if sweet, way. That, sadly, is also a rampant phenomenon that urgently needs correction.

            We glorify the body properly when we glorify God in our body. St. Paul explains it this way:

            “Your bodies are the shrines of the Holy Spirit, who dwells in you. Ad he is God’s gift to you, so that you are no longer your own masters. A great price was paid to ransom you. Glorify God by making your bodies the shrines of his presence.” (1 Cor 6,19-20)

            Still in another part of the same epistle, St. Paul teaches: “Your bodies are not meant for debauchery. They are meant for the Lord, and the Lord claims your bodies...Have you never been told that your bodies belong to the body of Christ?” (6,13)

            This is, of course, a truth of faith that we need to process well so that it becomes an incarnated part of our life, an operative principle in our thoughts, words and deeds. Our body is as constitutive of our being a human person as our soul. That is why we really have to take care of our body as much as we take care of our soul.

            We have to be most wary of the current world trend—in fact, the dominant, mainstream culture—that considers the body simply as an object, subject mainly if not exclusively to physical and biological laws, and other natural and worldly conditionings, without relating it to its most radical foundation who is God.

            That kind of mindset divorces the body from our personhood. The body becomes a mere object, and not anymore a constitutive part of our being a person. That understanding of the body detaches the body from its proper orbit that is made up of its intrinsic relationship with God, with our soul, and with everybody else.

            The body degenerates its dignity into a mere instrument or tool for purely pragmatic purposes or toy to play with, an ornament to show off. It loses its significance as the very expression of our love for God and for others, especially the love proper between man and woman, husband and wife.

            The body, seen this way, is vulnerable to the stirrings of pride and vanity, greed and envy, lust and sensuality. It follows a lawless path that would surely lead it to go pffft sooner or later. It loses its potential for an eternal life of bliss, exchanging it with a poor puddle of earthly and temporal pleasure.

            This culture is expressed in many ways. When, for example, we consider the body only or mainly in its physical attributes, and basing our ideas or criteria of bodily beauty and health in these terms only or mainly, then we are considering the body simply as an object.

            When what strikes us more is the physical beauty or strength of the body rather than its spiritual beauty as expressed in its capacity for love, fidelity, kindness, patience, mercy, etc., then we are surely treating the body as an object only.

            We have to purify and overcome this culture. We should not succumb to the rationalization that to be realistic, we have to avoid making too many theological considerations about the body and just do with it whatever comes more or less naturally, which actually means surrendering to our passions and to merely worldly conditionings.

            Glorifying the body by glorifying God in it is a very gratifying thing to do. It may require some sacrifices and self-denial, but these are meant to make the satisfaction of having glorified body surer, purer and lasting.    

            We have to see to it that we don’t subject the body only to the natural and physical laws. It has to be thoroughly infused with the spirit that is the Spirit of God, the source and end of all things.

            The body so infused will simply be glowing with goodness, love, generosity, etc., in spite of the imperfections it may have in its physical and natural dimensions.

            These are truths we should consider when thinking of what to do with our body.

Separate the wheat from the chaff

WE all need to cultivate this skill, and polish it to perfection as we go through our very exciting, if complicated, life. There are glitters and sparkles that are false and deceiving. There are also those that are genuine, but our problem is that we get stuck with them, completely mesmerized, and fail to get to the real thing.

            On this we are amply warned in the gospel. “Not by bread alone does man live but by every word of God,” (Lk 4,4) Christ tells us, practically saying where our true nourishment for life is. We have to be wary of being blinded by merely material things and the world’s allurements, and fail to consider the more important spiritual realities.

            On another occasion, we are told not to judge by appearances alone. We should learn to enter and read the mind and heart of people, where their real identity is found. We have to learn to discern the essence of things and the spirit behind every event in our life and every development in our ongoing stream of history.

            All these indications have many implications and consequences. We have to learn how to judge and assess things properly, ever discerning and discriminating, able to distinguish between the wheat and the chaff, the essential and the accidental.

            In our daily life, for example, we have to be wary of commercials that intensify their hype about certain products, titillating our senses, curiosities and our other vulnerabilities, so we would buy them, never mind if we don’t need them.

            Same with glib speakers usually in the person of politicians, publicists and yes, why not, preachers. We have to be most judicious of the substance of their messages rather than be easily taken by their brilliant rhetorical tricks and devices. It’s not a matter of being sceptical or cynical. Just discerning and discriminating with God’s grace.

            What is indispensable in all this is to be truly a man of God, since only then can we be in the truth, whether we are delivering it or receiving it. So, prayer, meditation of God’s word, deepening in the knowledge of the doctrine of our faith are a basic necessity. Otherwise, we would cruise the ocean of life rudderless.

            In fact, we are asked to be born again in the Spirit. We have to put on Christ, bury the old man and the carnal man in ourselves, so we can be alive to a far deeper and richer reality etched out by our faith and God himself.

            Obviously, these spiritual moorings should be translated into tangible practices. We have to know how to organize our day, seeing to it that we have ample time for prayer, reflection and study. We just can’t go on flowing with the tide of life without making vital contact with our true foundation.

            Better still, we have to learn how to detect God’s presence and abiding intervention in the very things that we handle or get involved. Yes, we need to be contemplatives right in the middle of the world.

            This concern, mind you, is not of the medieval era, anachronistic at our modern, fast-moving, highly technological world. This should always be the ‘in’ thing, never allowed to fade into obsolescence. It’s a basic necessity for us, for which God also has given us all we need to achieve it.

            We also have to develop virtues—the good, old ones that never fail to serve us well. They actually facilitate our comprehension of things, no matter how complicated they are, as well as develop our capacity to cope with whatever situation or predicament we get into.

            Yes, a certain sobriety and temperance are also needed. These virtues are not meant to take away our fun in life, throwing us a wet blanket. Neither are they meant simply to be restrainers.

            They serve to give us a certain distance from things so we can see them better, and space so we can sort out things well. They assure us that we are on a right, or at least on a safe path, and not just going about wildly, led by aroused but often blind emotions and passions.

           

            Hopefully, these practices would make us persons of good criteria and judgment, properly guided to the point that prudence and discernment become instinctive in us. Let’s encourage everyone to learn the art of separating the wheat from the chaff in our daily affairs.

            In a culture marked by selfies and unmitigated self-seeking, let’s do our part in reminding everyone of our need for God, for spiritual exercises, and the virtues.