‘Without you’

MANY love songs today are entitled or at least have in

their lyrics the phrase, ‘Without you.’ They paint dark pictures of

sadness, emptiness, meaninglessness, etc., when the lover would miss

or even lose his beloved.

            They are filled with burning emotions or gnawing sorrow

that can swing the lover either to hope or to depression, not to

mention the wild and violent reactions that some songs also express.

            They obviously have to be taken with a grain of salt. They

drip more with sentiments than with reason. Exaggerations abound,

objectivity and balance go AWOL. But not everything is lost.

            These love songs articulate the language of the heart, the

seat of our basic humanity. As such they can be useful even to do our

prayer, as long as they are purified and elevated to another level.

            When I, for example, am too tired to think when doing my

prayer or would just want to try something different, I resort to the

love songs which with their soothing melody and prepared lyrics

facilitate the meditation and can make the mind and heart, the memory

and the imagination to soar and fly.

            That’s when I meet the phrase ‘Without you’ frequently. I

use it to imagine how life would be without God. And so, instead of

saying, ‘without you, babe,’ I say, ‘without you, God.’ And all kinds

of thoughts and scenarios come to mind.

            Without God, we would be left to our own devices. They

might be powerful, but we also would know that they can only go so far

and cannot fully cope with all the challenges in life. Failure, as in

death, will just be a matter of time. Nothing positive would be

derived from it.

            Without God, we would make our own selves as our own god.

Or we can craft a god according to our own designs. This is when we

start to build our own world, our own reality. We get locked in by our

own subjectivism, cocooned in our own fantasy.

            Our capacity to think, judge and reason out properly would

be compromised. It would be easy for us to fall into sophistries, rash

judgments, biases and unfair estimations of things.

            Without God, we could not help but plunge into fears,

doubts and despair as sooner or later the powers at our hands start to

fail to contend with the objective realities of life. We would not

have any reason to hope, nor to see brighter possibilities beyond our

failures.

            We would be helpless in the face of temptations and our

weaknesses. To resist or to tackle them, we would simply be left, as

our defenses, with our own bodily constitution, or some medical,

psychological, or social means that can only do so much.

            That’s why we can easily fall into lust, greed, envy,

sloth, gluttony, anger, etc. We would be at the mercy of our hormones

and the erratic play of many conditionings, be they social, cultural,

political, etc.

            And whatever success or advantage we enjoy in life can

easily occasion pride, arrogance, vanity and conceit. Without God, we

would not know the relation between humility and greatness, between

sacrifice and redemption in the intoxicating air of our good fortune.

            Without God, we cannot help but be prone to cheat and to

play games with our own selves and with others. We can resort to all

kinds of rationalizations and false reasoning, all the way to the

ridiculous, to justify our actuations or to cover up our own

anomalies.

            If all these things can happen in our personal lives, you

can just imagine what would happen in our collective life as a

society, as a country, as a church community. Without God, there would

be a lot of envies, jealousies, conflicts, wars.

            Our politics would be endlessly marred by bitter

partisanship and lust for power. Governance would be full of deceit

and corruption. Business can hardly go beyond working simply for

profit and would practically forget the common good.

            Media would be hard put to resist the temptation of

sensationalism. Sports would play the game of domination at all costs.

The entertainment and celebrity world can only dance to the tune of

frivolity and inanity.

            We need God more than we need air. This is something that

we have to learn well. Our need for God is not like our need for air

which is something instinctive. It requires grace which is actually

given in abundance. But it also requires our correspondence.

            Our behavior should be more theological than biological,

ruled more by faith than by hormones, etc.

Our daily resurrections

OUR Christian faith teaches us that there will be the

resurrection of the dead at the end of time. That’s what we profess in

the Creed: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church,

the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, and life

everlasting. Amen.”

            This truth of our faith is supposed to be the consequence

of the resurrection of Christ which signifies the completion of his

redemptive work on our behalf. We too are supposed to take part of

this resurrection, as long as we also take part of Christ’s death.

            St. Paul teaches that to us very clearly: “If we be dead

with Christ, we believe that we shall live also together with Christ.”

(Rom 6,8)

            This truth is not meant to take place only at the end of

time. What is implied is that we need to live it in a daily basis. We

can make use of our usual drama in life as a way to live out the very

passion, death and resurrection of Christ.

            In other words, our earthly day-to-day life becomes the

precious time of rehearsal for the final and crucial moment of our

death. Our death should be a dying with Christ so that we too can rise

with him.

            We need to be aware of this very important significance

and purpose of our life here on earth, and to act on it accordingly.

Everything that happens in our life can and should be related to this

significance and purpose of our life. Nothing in our life, whether

humanly good or bad, right or wrong, is irrelevant to our life’s

purpose.

            We should be wary of our tendency to degrade our life’s

true and ultimate meaning and purpose. That happens when our

understanding of our life’s purpose and our reactions to the different

events of our life are derived simply from our human estimations of

things, as from our senses and emotions alone, or from some sciences

or philosophies or ideologies or superstitions.

            With these attitudes and frame of mind, we put ourselves

vulnerable to despair and helplessness, since we would not be able to

cope with all the trials and challenges of life. We would be tying the

hands of God who knows how to resolve even our most unsolvable

predicaments.

            We have to strengthen our faith, deepen it such that it is

gives shape and direction to our thoughts, desires, words and deeds.

Our faith is the beginning of God being with us, sharing what he knows

and what he has with us, like the power to suffer all the consequences

of sin including death, and to rise from the dead.

            This great gift would be useless if we do not make use of

it. Let’s be aware of it, study it and start to make use of it.

            Our daily resurrections can be in the form of making many

acts of contrition, of atonement and reparation. That is a way of

dying to our sin in Christ, and therefore setting us to participate in

the resurrection of Christ also. This cycle of dying and rising should

be a permanent feature of our life.

            It can also take the form of that attitude of simply

having to begin and begin again in life, knowing that falls and

failures are inevitable in life in spite of our best intentions and

efforts. We should just have that holy stubbornness that would enable

us to move on despite some persistent misery that can afflict us.

            We should have the conviction that God is giving himself

completely to us. There is nothing in our life that God in his

all-powerful and merciful providence cannot make use of to attain his

divine will for us, which is to bring us back to him.

            All that we need to do is to open ourselves to God’s

abiding interventions in our life and to cooperate with his work as

best as we can. We may still have our limitations, we may still commit

errors, but if everything is done in good faith, God our Father, ever

loving and merciful to us, would know how to bring us back to him.

            We therefore have every reason to be hopeful, to be at

peace and to be cheerful. When we find ourselves sad and seemingly

lifeless, it could mean that we have no faith in God, or nor living

that faith to the full. It could mean we are not willing to die with

Christ daily so as to rise with him also daily.

Attracted by sin

YES, in a sense we need to be attracted by sin. But not in

the sense of committing it nor of approving or enjoying the perks that

it gives. As much as possible, we should avoid sin like the Ebola

plague. And if there’s anything that gives us a good reason to

practice hatred, sin is it!

            Better said, we have to be attracted by sin not because of

it, but rather because of the sinner, who is still a child of God, a

brother or sister of ours, who always deserves to be loved, pardoned,

served, rescued.

            Sin, together with all the forms of evil that it produces,

should simply be the occasion to love others more, to be more

thoughtful and concerned of them. It should not be the cause and

object of our attraction.

            We have to love the sinner but hate the sin. And since the

two are together, at least for the time being, we need to be prudent,

discreet and discerning so as not to get confused and carried away by

the forces of evil rather than of the good.

            To be sure, this is the attitude of Christ himself whom we

should follow. All his teachings which he practiced all the way to the

cross consistently point to this truth. He was merciful of the

sinners, and gave special attention to them. And that’s practically

all of us since we are all sinners.

            We need to be clear about this point and skilled in

handling this situation among ourselves. Sin, because of the sinner,

should attract us if only to arouse in us desires to help, and to

trigger the appropriate action. It should not turn us off.

            In this context should we lose the fear of sin. That’s why

we have to be strong and resistant to temptations and scandal, and

properly inoculated, so to speak, so as not to be unduly affected by

sin. We have to learn how to bear all the suffering and inconveniences

involved here.

            We have to willing to get wet and dirty in our effort to

help others without compromising our spiritual life. If we have to

follow the example of Christ, then we should be willing to go to the

very gates of hell to save a soul. For this, we have to willing also

to be ‘crucified.’

            We have to see if we are developing the proper attitude,

understanding and skill in attending to this need. It can happen that

instead of growing in our concern for the others, especially in their

great moment of need as when they are in sin, we run away.

            We can rationalize that by getting involved in the

problems of others, we would unduly complicate our life. This is a

false reasoning. Complicating our life for the sake of saving a soul

would actually unleash the merciful power of God through our hands. We

would become instruments of divine mercy and at the same time would

benefit greatly from it personally.

            We just have to have faith in the all-powerful mercy of

God, and play the little part Christ would be asking us to do. We have

to keep that faith from being contaminated by the mere human

estimations of things. Let’s always remember that what is impossible

with us is always possible with God, who is also very respectful of

our freedom.

            Let’s see to it that we don’t get trapped by our initial,

spontaneous reaction of anger, repulsion and complaint whenever we see

or, worse, are affected by the sins of the others. We should try as

quickly as possible to replicate Christ’s attitude of patience,

compassion and mercy.

            For this we need to practice magnanimity, a bigness of

heart that not only can take on anything but also would motivate us to

willingly suffer for the others. For this, we have to go beyond the

limits of justice which, in the first place, cannot be perfect in our

life here on earth. It will always be in need of charity and mercy.

            All this can easily be done if we abandon ourselves

completely in the hands of God, just as Christ abandoned himself to

the will of his Father and faced his passion and death on the Cross

with equanimity. This is how to think, reason and act with faith as

primary principle, and not just with our human estimations of things.

            Whenever we see sin and evil around, and unless prudence

dictates otherwise, we should not run away, but rather face them for

the sake of the souls involved.