Spirituality for our troubled times

IN the face of a crescendoing barrage of negative and depressing news, especially in the economic sphere, we need to be above water by cultivating a spirituality that can meet the demands and take on all the troubles of our times.

Global financial meltdown, mass lay-offs, rising suicides and criminality, etc.—these should spur us to action rather than grind us to a halt.

Let’s take advantage of the current favorable dispositions of many people who are forced to seek solace in some spiritual exercises due to our problems. It should be a spirituality that offers not refuge only, but also a positive, active and effective attitude toward the present difficulties.

Going beyond but never neglecting our praying, offering sacrifices, frequenting the sacraments, we need to attune our most fervent appeals to God with the objective requirements of the challenges these days.

Today’s holiness should possess the distinctive character of our times. It should offer us a way to tackle the problems effectively, rather than to flee from them.

We need to go beyond pious generics and try to come to grips with the specifics. We need to go past holy platitudes and get down to operationalizing the true demands of sanctity in our work places. We need to outrange a purely personal mentality to adapt a more social spirituality.

I think these are the goals to pursue today insofar as our spirituality is concerned. Repeat, it’s not to do away with the basic and traditional means, but rather to let them go some notches higher, deeper and wider.

It should be a radical spirituality as our times demand. It should be at home with the things of God and with the things of this world. It should know how to blend the spiritual and material together, the sacred and the mundane, as well. A truly demanding spirituality, not comme ci comme ça.

In fact, it greatly helps that one already observes a working program of acts of piety, like mental prayer, Holy Mass and Communion, spiritual reading, examination of conscience, rosary, etc.

I’d say that those with this stable program are lucky, since they already have a structure to work on. They’re not lost at sea, not knowing where exactly they’re heading. What’s needed now is how to make these pious acts grapple with the actual problems we now have.

While these acts of piety have a dimension that goes beyond our temporal concerns, I don’t think they are meant to ignore these affairs either. I believe they are meant to leaven these matters with the Christian spirit and message, which always has something to say about our present conditions.

This is often the hard part of this spirituality. It is how to recognize the will and designs of God in the maze of events, made trickier because of the human elements involved.

These acts of piety should make us more aware of the situation around us, more eager to look for solutions, more adept in establishing tighter bonds of solidarity among ourselves.

They should help us to assume a positive outlook toward the present challenges, fuelling our enterprising instincts, and giving teeth to the fact that as social beings, we are supposed to be responsible for one another.

We have to stay away from spirituality caricatures, common in the past and even up to now, that restrict our prayers and asceticism to dimensions purely personal and spiritual. These are anomalies considering that our nature is also material with strong social character.

Thus, we need to be more aware that any spirituality by definition also involves the duty to do apostolate. Sanctity without apostolate is false sanctity, just as apostolate without sanctity is also fake.

This is terribly required these days. People seem to pursue even the loftiest goal of holiness without giving due regard to the duty to do apostolate with those around them. This has to be corrected. We need to remove the blinders that make people self-absorbed.

We need to help one another not only in tackling the present crisis, already a tough job, but also in attaining true sanctity, the ultimate goal and the only thing absolutely necessary in life.

Let’s pray that while everyone has to develop this kind of spirituality, our leaders—Church, civil, political, economic, etc.—precisely take the lead, and refrain from unnecessary politicking and intrigue-sowing.

Media savvy

THANKS to the wonders of the Internet, we now have easy access to many things, among them, newspapers and magazines. We don’t have to subscribe to local and foreign papers to be able to read them.

At the moment, for example, I’m very happy to get almost daily dosage of news, opinion columns, articles on arts, business, sports, etc. from Google News, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Economist, CNN, Fox News, Drudge Report, and an endless etcetera, not to mention the local ones.

With this exposure, I’m certain we are also forming many views and opinions, and we slowly discern the various underpinnings, political, ideological, religious, and otherwise, that the media outfits have.

I personally find it very interesting to compare opinions, styles, approaches, and see how they play out. There’s thrill always in observing the flashes of genius as different writers argue and often clash.

Also I want to fish, even if only tentatively, the different trends and biases the different papers can have. These considerations always shed some light that makes things more understandable.

Almost automatically, several categories emerge in the mind as I instinctively try to sort out, classify, brand and label the different positions. Among these categories are the conservative/liberal, right/left, open-minded/close-minded, serious/commercialized.

I know there can be many other categories, in fact, endless ones, as we go along and discover further nuances in the growing array of pieces of media information. This only proves that we are involved in a very dynamic world where seemingly infinite events take place.

But there’s one aspect that seems to be neglected. The effort to find spiritual and religious significance to secular events appears to be absent. This aspect is still a virgin forest, waiting to be explored. This can be a fruitful niche for some enterprising writers with the proper attitude and skills.

Not that there had been no attempts in this direction. There had been. But so far, they can be characterized as either too shallow and abstract, a bit distant and off-the-mark, or too politicized, partisan and downright wildly ballistic.

The latter kind is particularly jarring, as they can bristle with a righteousness that’s more self-generated than inspired by God and the common good. Along the way, we can notice traces of narrow-mindedness, exaggerated attachment to ancient views and all sorts of one-sidedness.

In the end, they at best only preach to the choir. They fail to catch the attention of a sober audience. Worse, they alienate many people. Truly sad!

For sure, it is not an easy thing to do, but I believe that if we have to be consistent to our Christian faith, then there must be some relation between these events and our religion. We have to be wary of just allowing the discussion of issues to flow in strictly human and natural terms.

This effort to link and connect is, I believe, a worthwhile enterprise and one that is crying to be made, if only to correct an anomaly that temporal events have no spiritual or supernatural dimension at all. I think the time is ripe to highlight this angle.

This should not mean that the events can only have one meaning or interpretation. Christian spirit does not allow a monolithic view of things. There can be many, and they can even be conflicting, but at least, they should have some spiritual or religious character. This is what is lacking in the present trend.

Some training in this area is, of course, necessary. And I believe we already have enough materials to support writers and thinkers who can contribute in this direction. The Church already has the Compendium of Social Doctrine and a constellation of literature that can truly be of help.

Besides, there are now schools that try to blend theology with the secular sciences and our temporal affairs. This is also another good development. Ecclesiastical sciences are trying to pace with world developments.

Obviously prudence and discernment should be strictly practiced. But this requirement should not be taken to mean that we hardly move or always keep a distant attitude to events. The spiritual and supernatural character of religion should, in fact, take a leading role in them.

This, I believe, is what constitutes a true media savvy which everyone should aspire. It may need a large war chest to attain this goal, but I think it’s all worthwhile.

Our psychosomatic unity

I THINK that from time to time, we need to jolt ourselves to get acquainted with certain concepts that actually are basic and very important to us, especially in our times of rapid changes and extreme pressures.

In our general culture and knowledge, we cannot remain in the level of the previous generations. Many things have changed. Many things also have been discovered. Objective knowledge has expanded exponentially. Don’t you think our subjective knowledge should keep in step with it?
We cannot remain indifferent to these developments, although it’s also true that we have to be more discerning and selective. The chances of our getting drowned and lost in the welter of info these days are increasing. We need to be discriminating.

And I don’t mean just the technical data. There also are quantum leaps of newly unearthed things in the world of the speculative sciences like philosophy, theology, and in other sciences that previously were considered kind of restricted areas that are meant only for some experts and specialists.

Well, these days, these specialized fields are getting to be more and more of common interest. While it’s true that the focus of specialization has tightened, the range and scope of general culture also has widened and deepened.

We seem to have waken up to the realization that these two aspects of knowledge, the specialized and the general, are meant to complement more than conflict with each other. And I think that’s a very welcome development.

And so I was happy to recently get into the field of Christian anthropology, or the study of man using scientific data but inspired by Christian faith. This was because I had to give a class to our school staff who are given continuous formation to be effective tutors of our students.

The ambitious goal of our technical school is to have a universal coverage of tutors for all the students. And so there I was, making a foray into the allied field of psychology, which I, as a priest, previously regarded as taboo. But truth to tell, I enjoyed and got tremendously enlightened while studying it.

For example, I was truly fascinated when I studied the part on what was termed as our psychosomatic unity. I used to associate that p-word with self-induced illness.

Now I realize it is a natural aspect of our life that, in fact, plays a crucial role. I believe it should be learned thoroughly especially by teachers and counselors.

As an amateur trying to understand that concept, I learned that since we are made up of body and soul, something material and something spiritual, it would be necessary to know how the contact and relationship between these two constituent components take place and work.

This, in a nutshell, is what our psychosomatic unity is all about. It’s a very interesting study that can give light to why we behave and react to things in a certain manner, or why we have a definite character and temperament. It can tell us what is healthy and not, what is ideal and is not quite so.

The soul is supposed to be the essence of our life. It gives us our nature. It integrates all the parts and levels of life, and determines how we act.

But while the soul is spiritual and oriented toward the universal and the infinite, it is united to the body, like the form cannot be separated from the substance. And the body individuates the soul, because of its materiality.

It should be very interesting to catalogue and classify the possible combinations, in general terms, of the ways the spiritual is individuated by the material. Actually, there are more interesting, even endless things that can be discovered.

This study on our psychosomatic unity surely makes us understand ourselves better, and helps us to know what to do to grow and improve our life in all its aspects. It can be a wonderful tool to help those with special problems. And these days, cases with special problems are proliferating.
I feel this is one important reason why the Vatican, for example, has recently issued a document on the use of psychology in the formation and selection of seminarians and priests.

As a priest who gives spiritual direction to students, I consider this knowledge indispensable. May we all develop an earnest interest in pursuing this knowledge!