The fundamental attitude to serve

            IT’S amazing that even as Christ was already talking about
his impending passion, death and resurrection, two of his apostles,
James and John, were more interested in occupying special places in
heaven—that they may sit “one at your right and the other at your
left.” (cfr. Mk 10,32-45)

            This elicited a sharp rebuke from Christ and the
clarification that “whoever wishes to be first among you will be the
slave of all. For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to
serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

            Before saying those words, he told them: “You know that
those who are recognized as rulers over the Gentiles lord it over
them, and their great ones make their authority over them felt. But it
shall not be so among you.”

            These words are a timely reminder for all of us, and
especially our newly elected public officials, who wield a certain
authority over others due to our position and status in life. They
clearly spell out how our attitude should be with respect to power and
authority that we can have.

            Power and authority is meant for serving. To serve is the
language and the expression of love. It authenticates any affirmation
of love we do, converting it from intention to tangible reality.

            This is the attitude meant for us, with God himself as the
exemplar. Imagine, Christ served us by dying on the cross. Before
that, he shocked his apostles when he insisted that he be allowed to
wash their feet. That was to give an example to them, and us, so that
what he did we would also do to one another.

            The angels too, superior to us in nature, are made to
serve us, following a divine law articulated by Christ himself when he
said: “Let him who is greatest among you become as the youngest, and
him who is the chief as the servant.” (Lk 22,26)

            We need to be more keenly aware of this law. This is truly
what is good for us, providing us with the basic source of strength
and consistency we need as we grapple with life’s endless challenges.

            Before we worry about the big and destructive enemies of
our soul, we have to realize that our most insidious foe is right
within us, when this attitude of serving others is not firmly
established in our mind and heart.

            That it was James and John who made that questionable
request only shows how easy it is for us who try to be close to God to
fall for the tricks of our soul’s enemies.

            They most likely were motivated by the best intentions.
Still, those intentions were wrong. Like them, we could be
subjectively loving, but objectively not so. Thus, the need to
constantly rectify our intentions.

            It is this missing attitude of wanting to serve in each
one of us that sooner or later grows into social and cultural
proportions, then into something global with ideological supporting
structures, that offers the seed, sun and water for the big enemies we
have against our spiritual life.

            The absence of this attitude nullifies whatever big and
ardent professions of love we may have toward God and others. Our
desire to love could not soar into the flight of authentic love when
this eagerness to serve is absent.

            Any attempt to love with this attitude not in place would
be plain mimickry. It would attract many problems and anomalies. It
will drown in the quicksands of pride, vanity, envy, jealousy, and the
other subtle forms of egoism. It cannot survive the mere tests of
differences of characters and opinions, for example.

            This eagerness to serve really has to be worked out,
because with our fallen and wounded nature, every pore of our being
tends to go against the law of love expressed in service that God
meant for us.

            We need to pause and reflect to get a clear view of our
predicament, then beg and pray for God’s grace for we can do nothing
without it, and then little by little, day by day, start to develop
the mind and the skills to bring us always ready and happy to serve.

            Let us remember that the fall of the angels started when
one of them said, “I will not serve.” Our first parents fell because
they too chose to serve themselves instead of God.

            Every sin and moral evil has in its core the virus of not
wanting to serve. And so, perhaps as a motto that we can repeat often,
we should say to ourselves, and to God and all: “Serviam” I will
serve!

Willing to suffer

 “EVERYONE will be salted with fire.” That’s what Christ
said, as recorded in the gospel of St. Mark. (9,49) We have to be
prepared for this unavoidable eventuality. And that simply means that
we have to learn how to suffer, and be willing to suffer, in fact.

            Salt, of course, is used for food seasoning and
preservation. For our life to be properly seasoned and preserved all
the way to its definitive eternal life in heaven, we need to be
salted, except that in this case, we have to be salted with fire, and
not just the material salt.

            Fire obviously has its proper uses and benefits, but it
can also be harmful and destructive. It definitely causes pain when we
get into direct contact with it. And that seems to be what is meant by
the above-mentioned gospel passage, since we need to be salted with
it. Nothing is salted without being directly touched by salt, and this
time, it is the salt of fire.

            Fire here means not only anything that causes physical
pain, but also moral anguish and spiritual suffering. We should learn
how to take all this with faith and trust in God’s mercy that will
always be available no matter how gravely we fall.

            We need to learn how to suffer. The massive problem we
have now is precisely that many of us do not know how to suffer. We
complain and cry even at the slightest touch of suffering. We become
sad and fall into a hard case of depression. Self-pity and idle
passivity can dominate us, sinking us into a spiral of problems and
predicaments.

            Or we can grasp at straws, going to all sorts of useless
defense mechanisms and deceptive forms of escapism like sex, drugs,
extreme forms of sports and activism, frivolous entertainment,
rationalizing philosophies, ideologies, lifestyles, etc. We can in
vain try to erase or ignore subjectively what objectively will always
be with us in our life.

            We have to learn how to suffer. It’s an art and skill that
is available if we only care to notice. It’s all there as clear as
noonday, its cause and meaning precisely defined, its antidote and
vaccine abundantly provided. Our Christian faith sheds tremendous
light on this mystery of our life. Christ is showing us the way.

            Our faith, the ultimate source of truth about ourselves,
tells us that suffering is due to sin, to the misuse of our freedom,
to our disobedience to the will of God who created us to be his image
and likeness, to be children of his, sharing in his very own life.

            Let’s remember that if God allows us to suffer some
deformities or to experience some mistakes and commit sins, it is
because he can derive a greater good from them. He wants us to learn a
virtue or to grow more in our faith, hope and love for him and for
everybody else.

            We should try our best, with God’s grace which he actually
gives us in abundance, to go beyond the level of the sensible and the
intelligible, and enter into the all-beautiful world of our faith
where the humanly ugly things are converted into divinely beautiful
realities.

            Let’s not be afraid of suffering then. We just have to
learn to suffer the way Christ himself suffered. Not only has he given
us the way to do it, but also the very power to suffer with him.

            I remember Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI  one time saying
that while God is good and cannot will evil, he sometimes allows his
children to be tried through suffering to lead them to a greater good.

            This truth should be at the core of our beliefs. With it,
everything will be beautiful. Nothing would be ugly, and could take
away our peace. Our joy and optimism would become stable. And we would
be more empowered to do good things.

            Suffering has to be viewed from the perspective of faith.
It should be taken out from an overly human outlook that restricts it
to its purely negative, painful and destructive character. There’s a
lot more to our suffering than what our senses and our reasoning
unaided by faith can cope and discover.

            First, we have to understand that our suffering was not
meant for us in the beginning of our existence. Nor is it meant for
our end. It came about as consequence of our mishandling our freedom,
that supreme gift God our Father and Creator endowed us with at our
first creation in Adam and Eve.

            But with Christ’s passion, death and resurrection, our
suffering has been converted into something redemptive for us!

About fear

FEAR is, of course, an emotion that can either be good or

bad, depending on how it is experienced, who or what the object is,

what motive, reason or cause produces it.

            One good fear is the gift of the Holy Spirit called fear

of the Lord. It’s a filial fear of offending God who is our Creator

and Father. The bad one is what is behind the words of Christ when he

said, “Be not afraid,” on a number of occasions.

            It’s clear that we have to know when to fear, and when

not. In the Bible, some studies claim that there are 365 passages that

speak of ‘fear not,’ while a little more than 100 passages only call

for a healthy sense of fear.

            That seems to indicate that we should live our life more

without fear than with fear. We should be fearless without

compromising those occasions when we should fear.

            In other words, to fear and not to fear can and should be

together. They need not be mutually exclusive to each other as long as

we know the reasons for each of them. They can even happen at the same

time, but obviously for their respective reasons that can arise also

at the same time.

            We need to fear because that is what is proper of a child

to his father. There’s always a healthy kind of fear involved in any

relationship that is based on love and respect. It is the fear of not

offending the other party. And this is much more so if the other party

is superior to us. If the other party is God himself, then this filial

fear is absolutely needed.

            Besides, such fear can trigger a series of good effects. A

passage from the Book of Proverbs affirms this. “The fear of the Lord

is the beginning of wisdom.” (9,10) Pope St. Gregory the Great, in

explaining the dynamism of this filial fear, says:

            “Through the fear of the Lord, we rise to piety, from

piety then to knowledge, from knowledge we derive strength, from

strength counsel, with counsel we move toward understanding, and with

intelligence toward wisdom and thus, by the sevenfold grace of the

Spirit, there opens to us at the end of the ascent the entrance to the

life of Heaven.”

            With this fear of the Lord, we acknowledge we are

creatures who are always dependent on God. This is what is called the

‘poverty of spirit’ that figures in one of the beatitudes, “Blessed

are the poor in the spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

            We therefore would not want to be separated from God. It

is the fear of losing God. Thus, this fear arouses in us as a keen

desire to be with God, a vibrant sense of adoration and reverence for

God and a sense of horror and sorrow for sin.

            I would say that this filial fear of the Lord is what

would lead us also not to be afraid of God when we are before his

overwhelming majesty, power and wisdom, just as what Christ told his

disciples when they saw him walking on the water (cfr Mt 14,27) and

when he appeared to them after his resurrection. (cfr Mt 28,10)

            There is obviously an organic link between this filial

fear of the Lord and the fearlessness of one who is truly with God. We

have to be wary of the possibility of reversing these two modes.

            This can happen because instead of having the healthy fear

of the Lord, we lose it instead, thinking we can be sufficient just by

ourselves, and we are not anymore to sin. Sad to say, this scenario is

now quite widespread.

            And on the other hand, instead of not being afraid of God

who is always a Father to us, ever understanding and forgiving, we

choose to be afraid of him because we allow ourselves to be

overwhelmed by his infinite powers, or because we are ashamed to

return to him to ask for forgiveness after we have fallen.

            This is a dangerous situation for us to be in. That’s

because when we are afraid of God and prefer to stay away from him, we

make ourselves an easy prey to the temptations of the devil, the

allurements of the world, and the tricks of our own personal

weaknesses.

            It’s clear that we need to know how to handle fear. Yes,

it is an emotion, but like any emotion, it has to be enlightened,

trained and directed by our right reason, and ultimately by the

theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.