Complicate to simplify

THIS is a common enough phenomenon in our life. We should not be surprised by it anymore. To fix things, for example, we may have to disassemble them first and look closely at the different parts. To solve a problem, we have to go through different operations and may have to undertake a trial-and-error process. Yes, we complicate our life in order to simplify it. 

 And this is also what happens in our spiritual life, where the most complicated process takes place if only to achieve our most ideal state of life where happiness and the most sublime form of simplicity reign. We need to struggle and suffer to gain eternal joy. 

 This happens when we allow Christ to enter into our life. Though he always comes to us in peace, reassuring us not to be afraid, he definitely will complicate our life for a number of reasons. 

 First, he has to fix our sinfulness, our woundedness. We cannot help but suffer as he shows us how to do it. With him, we have to take up our cross and go through the process of continuing self-denial. 

 There we can and should already expect a lot of sacrifice to be made that goes all the way to offering our life in death. But let’s never forget that with him too, we can expect our own resurrection into life eternal with him. 

 Second, he has to teach us how to enter into the very life of God as we are meant to be, we being created in God’s image and likeness. We have to go beyond our natural self to get elevated to the supernatural life of God. And this will definitely involve a lot of effort and sacrifice. In other words, it will be a very complicated affair for us. 

 And that is because we would be taught, even commanded, to love the way Christ has loved us. It is a love that is not purely human. It is a divine love that goes beyond our usual idea of what love is. 

 It is a love that covers everyone and everything. It involves loving our enemies. It involves not only loving those who are right in something, but also those who are wrong, or who may even have offended us. It’s a love that no human power, exercised by its lonesome, can ever achieve. It’s only possible when it’s a love that is a sharing of the divine love of Christ. 

 Again, we complicate our life because we have to adapt ourselves to the supernatural ways of God, something that is possible because we also have a spiritual nature that enables us through our intelligence and to receive the grace of God, and thus enter the supernatural life of God. 

 We need to remember that the completion and perfection of our human nature would always involve hitching it to the divine nature of Christ who is both God and man and who is the pattern of our humanity and savior of our damaged humanity. 

 We are not meant to only have a purely human nature where the divine nature of God is not involved. We would be incomplete that way and be headed only to our own perdition, regardless of whether we may possess excellent natural endowments, like our intelligence and talents. We have to be willing to complicate our life to simplify it and gain our own perfection.

Loyalty proves your fidelity

SOME people have asked me what the difference is between loyalty and fidelity. And my ready answer has always been that there is hardly any difference between the two. They are allied to each other. One cannot be without the other if both have to be real virtues. 

 Fidelity is when one makes a promise to commit himself to something for a period of time or for the whole lifetime. It’s what one assumes when he enters into marriage, for example, or answers a special vocation. 

 It’s something to be taken seriously, with thorough study and reflection to see if indeed such commitments can be fulfilled with a significant degree of certainty. It banks itself on one’s faith and trust in God’s providence and is surely an expression of love. 

 Loyalty, on the other hand, simply walks what fidelity promises. It lives out the details, and especially the finer points, involved in fidelity. When one is loyal, he is being true to his commitments on a day-to-day basis. 

 Loyalty makes one’s fidelity steadfast under any condition and weather. It keeps one’s commitments intact whatever life involves and wherever life leads him. It shows its true colors when those commitments are heavily tested in life. 

 But we need to understand that for both loyalty and fidelity to work, care should be given to the small things in life. That is to say, that the impulse of love should always be given in the small, ordinary things of our day, since that would help us to keep on going in love when the big things, the big challenges and difficulties in life come. 

 More importantly, we need to understand that the love that would keep us faithful and loyal whatever the situation is, can only come and should be a sharing, a reflection of God’s love. This is the only kind of love that can keep us faithful and loyal all the way. 

 Let’s always keep in mind that our life has a lot more to offer, a lot more to challenge us than what we can manage to cope. We would always be in need of the power of love that can only come from God who actually wants to share it with us. 

 For this, we have to follow the example of Christ who fulfilled the Father’s will to save mankind all the way to the cross. That is the kind of love that we ought to have to guarantee our fidelity and loyalty to our commitments. 

 It’s a love that is forged and made strong through suffering and all kinds of trials in our life. But we should neither forget that if we have this kind of love, our suffering and crosses would not really be as heavy as they seem, because we know that more than us, it would be Christ himself who would suffer all of them first before we suffer them. Yes, he suffers for us and with us. 

 And so, we can manage to remain calm, confident, faithful and loyal whatever the situation may be, whatever trials and difficulties we may encounter in life. Thus, if our faith and love for Christ is strong and deep, we would not be afraid to assume commitments. We somehow would feel reassured that we can manage to be faithful and loyal whatever happens!

Meant to go beyond ourselves

THERE’S a stanza in that Josh Groban song, You raise me up, that, I think, is worthwhile giving some more serious consideration. It’s when it says, “You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains / You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas / I am strong, when I am on your shoulders / You raise up to MORE THAN I CAN BE.” (Emphasis, mine) 

 That Christ can raise us up to more that we can be is a basic truth about ourselves that, sadly, we often take for granted. As a consequence, we would not know how to properly deal with such reality, since we would neither know what practical implications such truth would bring about. We would not know how to live with it. 

 This basic truth is about us being meant to be raised to the supernatural order of God, to live in the very divine life of God. That’s how God wants us to be. He created us in his image and likeness, endowed with the capacity to know with our intelligence and to love with our will. 

 With such endowments, we have the capacity to know and love God and also everybody else. As such, we have the capacity to enter into the life of God himself, to somehow be divinized ourselves. And this capacity is made actual because God himself gives us his grace. In fact, he gives us Christ himself, the son of God who became man to redeem us. 

 We have to understand then that we are not meant to live a purely natural life that is based on our biological constitution alone that can define us physically, emotionally, psychologically, socially, and in the other aspects that our nature can lend itself to. Neither are we meant to live a purely rational life only that can lead us to make big accomplishments in philosophy, the sciences, arts and technology. 

 We are meant to live a supernatural life with God, to share in the very divine life of God. Yes, we are meant to be divine ourselves, not just naturally human. And this is made possible because aside from endowing us with those spiritual faculties that would enable us to know and love God, God has given us Christ himself who wants to be in and with us, so we can share in his own divinity even as he shares our own humanity. 

 This is a truth about ourselves that we have to process slowly and as thoroughly as possible in our mind and heart, so we would know what we have to do, what we can expect, what other implications there are from it, etc. 

 One very clear corollary we can derive from this truth is that we truly need to go along with Christ as best that we can because it would be he who will do what we cannot do anymore by our human powers. As St. Paul would put it, “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Phil 1,6) 

 We have to understand then that the fullness of our humanity can only take place when it is hitched to the divinity of Christ. As such, we can expect some awkwardness in the beginning due to the difference between the natural and the supernatural. 

 But Christ somehow reassures us, because he always comes to us with greetings of peace, even if he will somehow complicate our lives.