Beware of our ingratitude

IT all started with our first parents. After being created
in the divine image and likeness and endowed with the best of things,
they eventually disobeyed God’s law and strayed away.

            It’s a sad fact of life that continues to take place even
up to now. We seem to get easily spoiled by whatever goodness,
blessing or privilege is given to us. We need to be more prepared to
cope with this proneness, cultivating the relevant attitude, skills
and virtues.

            The basic problem we have is that we tend to forget God
and fail to thank him for whatever good we have and enjoy in life. As
a result, we tend to make our own world, creating a bubble of life
that sooner or later will just burst to nothingness.

            Let’s remember that all goodness comes from him even if
it’s also true that that goodness could also be a result of our own
efforts. Nothing actually is truly good unless it somehow comes from
God.

            Our sense of gratitude is what keeps us always in touch
with our Creator and the indispensable maintainer of our existence and
source of whatever good we enjoy in life. We should do everything to
sharpen that sense as we go along. It’s what reminds us of the basic
relationship we have with him whom we tend to forget or take for
granted.

            Our greatest passion should be to be thankful to God
always. If there’s some passion we have that is greater than this,
then we can be sure that we would be treading on a dangerous path in
life.

            Let’s always remember what Christ told us about what God’s
greatest commandment is for us. We should “love God with all our might
and strength.” That love has to involve our whole being, not only our
spiritual and intellectual part, but also and all the way to our
feelings, emotions and passions.

            And that’s simply because if our strongest passion is not
love for God expressed in part by always being thankful to him, then
it would be something else. And most likely it would be something that
is not proper to us, but rather one that may offer us some human good
that will eventually separate us from God.

            This is what is happening these days with all the
advantages and privileges afforded us by the new technologies. They
offer us a lot of good, but if not related to God, they can become a
competitor of God. They can become our god.

            And the most subtle of this danger is when it is done in
the field of religion itself. During the time of Christ, this was a
rampant problem. The leading men got so stuck with their own religious
laws and practices that they failed to recognize the God who became
man. They were so convinced with the goodness of their laws and
practices that they absolutized them, and made them their god, instead
of God who became man.

            Nowadays, we see a lot of self-righteous people who have
their own version of what is true, good and beautiful, without
referring it to the one who is all true, good and beautiful. They are
now redefining things and building their own tower of Babel.

            We should try our best to always keep God the center and
focus of our life. We need to remind ourselves of this fundamental
truth, because like toddlers who can go on with their childish ways
unmindful of the people around, we too can go on with our many
temporal affairs and concerns unmindful of God.

            We should never forget that we cannot outgrow our
dependence on God, and that the more mature and more accomplished we
become, the more dependent we ought to be on God. We need to remind
ourselves of this truth constantly, making many deliberate acts of
faith and thanksgiving during the day.

            That’s why there is always a need also to cultivate the
sense of spiritual childhood, that awareness that in the eyes of God
we will always be children in need of his help and guidance.

            Even if we are totally free and responsible for our life
and actions, such freedom is no excuse for declaring independence from
God who is the author, law and pattern, as well as goal of our
freedom.

            We need to educate ourselves to make many acts of
thanksgiving all throughout the day, and feel in our flesh our
complete dependence on God. Let’s not be ingrates who arrogate to
ourselves what actually belongs to God.

Our human dignity and megalomania

OF all the creatures on earth, we are the greatest with
the highest dignity. And that’s simply because we have been created
“in the image and likeness” of God. To our nature that is rational,
i.e., with intelligence and will, and not merely biological, is added
the potency to enter into the supernatural life of God that is made
possible with God’s grace that he himself gives, or at least makes
available to us in abundance.

            This identity and dignity of ours is, of course, given to
us by our Creator. It is not something that we give to ourselves,
although we have the duty to uphold and defend it, protecting it from
anything that can deform or degrade it.

            This truth about ourselves is not anymore a merely natural
truth, but a truth of faith that can only be accepted by faith.
Nonetheless, it is a truth that our nature, even if wounded, would
have a natural longing.

            We always want to believe in something or someone, more
than simply relying on our reason that can only take so much at a
time. That’s why we can rightly describe ourselves as creatures of
faith more than as merely rational creatures. The history of the
different cultures somehow lends credence to that.

            That is why it is important that we exert effort to know
and understand very well this truth of faith, and from there conform
our life, from our thinking, attitudes to our desires, words and
behavior, to this wonderful reality presented to us.

            It is a dignity that merges all the good qualities we can
find in God who, in fact, is all goodness. We may feel awkward to
realize this truth, but that simply is how we are supposed to be. We
should just persist in our effort of relishing and incarnating this
truth little by little but consistently. For sure, this is not a
gratuitous, baseless aspiration.

            Yes, with this dignity, we are supposed to adopt the very
mind of God himself, to share in his wisdom and power, and to
cooperate, with utmost freedom, with his ways and providence. We need
to feel at home with this reality and do our best to fulfill the
duties involved in it.

            That means that we have to be continually be in the
presence of God, and exert a continuing effort to know and love him,
spending time in prayer, in spiritual reading, going to the
sacraments, especially of confession and the Holy Eucharist, etc. The
ideal situation would be that our very consciousness is filled with
God’s presence and not simply with our own thoughts.

            We have to be wary of our tendency also to distort this
very fundamental truth about ourselves. Since we are free, we can tend
to misuse our freedom and dare to be on our own, if not, to be our own
God.

            This was what happened to Lucifer who became Satan, and to
our first parents who were tempted by the devil to eat the forbidden
fruit so that they can become god. This was what happened to those who
dared to build the tower of Babel, and to the long chain of human
rebellions against God that continue up to now.

            In all of these episodes, the rotten core is pride that
detaches our great dignity from its true source. This is where we
plunge into an intoxicating condition of megalomania, falling into an
illusion of grandeur that has no basis.

            Pride that leads to megalomania is a very sweet poison, a
very brilliant if blinding light that is actually false. With it, we
get convinced we are doing ok when in fact we are not. And sometimes,
it can be so invincible that there would be practically no more way
for us to get out of that miserable condition.

            Obviously, we should never lose hope. In spite of the
enormity of the problem, the grace of God, his mercy and compassion
can always undo evil. “Where sin has abounded, the grace of God has
abounded even more.”

            At the moment, we have to be wary of the drift toward
megalomania in the area of our new technologies. These give us
tremendous power such that we may think we are already all-powerful,
and can afford to forget that all power actually comes from God.

            Submitting the power of the new technologies to God and
his will and ways will enhance our dignity, not undermine it. This is
what we should consciously do if only to avoid the slippery slope to
megalomania.

As long as we struggle...

YES, as long as we struggle interiorly, there is spiritual life, the
very wellspring that produces the living water for our river of life.
As long as we struggle interiorly, we can be assured of our fidelity
to whatever commitment we have entered into. Interior struggle is
essential and indispensable in our life.

Our life is very dynamic, with all sorts of challenges to face,
problems to solve, issues to be clarified. We need to see to it that
our interior life, our spiritual life, our thoughts, desires and
intentions are firmly rooted on God, their proper foundation.

We need not only to purify our thoughts and intentions from any stain
of pride, vanity, lust, envy, sloth, gluttony, anger, etc. We need to
also fill them and rev them up with true love and wisdom. These are
the reasons why we have to engage in a lifelong interior or spiritual
struggle.

The ideal situation should be that we are always in awe at the
presence of God in our life, making him the principle and objective of
all our thoughts, words and deeds. We have to be spiritually fit
before we can be fit anywhere else—family-wise, professionally,
socially, politically, etc.

Let’s never be deceived that our life is mainly physical, and its
development is just a matter of struggling externally—that we manage
to eat, to work, to earn, to stay away from physical danger, etc. The
real battle is in our internal selves—in our thoughts and desires, our
will and plans.

The struggle in life cannot just be a matter of economics or politics.
The battle always starts and ends in our mind and heart, in the
spiritual aspect of our life. This is where things start to happen,
and where things also get resolved.

Even if there are still things to be fixed externally, we can still
manage to fix them internally, because that’s where we get in touch
directly with God, and with him, nothing is impossible. Let’s disabuse
ourselves from the thought that we get our ultimate peace and joy
somewhere else.

That’s why we have to see to it that our thoughts and desires are
properly engaged with God who is their true foundation and end, for
outside of him, we will just expose ourselves to all sorts of random
and usually dangerous possibilities.

And God is not a figment of our imagination, a product of our desire
to believe, a mere psychological crutch. He is the most real being—in
fact, the fullness of subsistent being whose essence we can somehow
know but can never fathom. He is the very author of reality itself.

This task of conforming our thoughts and desires to him is getting to
be very exciting, because these days many are the earthly
things—attitudes, philosophies, ideologies, cultures, together with
their lifestyles—that dare to be alternatives to God.

Today’s world is so immersed in worldly values that any reference to
God is at best a mere formalism, a decorative item, a lip service to
tradition that is already emptied of its true substance.

And this is because in the first place many people are not praying
anymore, are not exercising and living by faith. They prefer to follow
by the rule of “following what comes naturally.” And that’s usually
just obeying one’s feelings and passions, or the many flipping fads
around.

Thus you have ad slogans like, “Obey your thirst,” “I don’t wanna grow
up….. I’m a Toys R Us kid,” “It’s fun to tickle your tongue with…” If
you’re constantly bombarded with messages like this, chances are you
will believe them, and start abdicating the use of your spiritual
faculties.

We have to wage an abiding interior struggle if only to keep our
sanity, our humanity. We need to do it to avoid becoming mainly
conditioned by earthly values that are blind to the spiritual and
supernatural realities of our life.

We need to see to it that our mind and heart are truly
engaged with God, with the living God, and not just an idea or theory
of God. This is not only possible, but also highly practicable,
because in the first place, God himself wants it that way.

The reason many people find it hard to get in contact with
God is because they have lost the art of prayer and contemplation, and
have assumed a dominantly worldly outlook that makes them
self-centered, complacent, agnostic, if not atheistic.

This is where interior struggle is most needed.